I suspect it's more a problem of focus. Yes, Intel has slowed in the release of new processor architectures, but there are lines Apple has ignored and many other components (e.g., graphics cards) have continued advancing. I feel they're consciously choosing to allocate their hardware engineering resources to mobile instead.
Apple would certainly pause the production of new computers (or at least the announcement of such) if doing otherwise meant triggering the Osborne effect. Maybe they're waiting until the USB-C/Thunderbolt 3.1 accessory market stabilizes, and then moving everything over to being more MacBook-like (where the rMB is the only thing they were confident enough in their continued support of to continue releasing it in the interim.)
They are simply exploiting the fact that their brand identity plus retail presence generates plenty of sales....plus most consumers don't care what is under the hood.
It doesn't make money. Even though they have a crap ton of cash because of their mobile business, they don't seem willing to invest in their desktop os or their PC business.
Its surprising because the mac + ios system is such a powerful combination. With MS at least trying lately with their pen enabled devices, bash on windows, and general lack of complete disdain for customers, they may be getting ready to eat Apple's lunch.
Compare that with 4 year old laptops, little real innovation in mac os (the latest I can recall is implementing Windows 8's window system for full screen and making dev's lives harder with all the security changes in el cap) and it starts to make you wonder.
Not saying Windows is better than Mac, just wish Apple would stop pulling an MS and actually try with their OS.
I had been waiting for a hardware update from Apple for months. Recently, I broke down and just built a custom PC for exactly the reasons you're saying.
Yes, the iPhone delivers the lion's share of revenue, but the Mac is still an important product category.
To me, the problem seems to be one of focus. The extreme centralisation that Apple inherited from the Jobs era means that, when the leadership is focussed on a particular product or product category, be it the iPhone, the Apple Watch, or a new service like Apple Music, then progress in all other areas grinds to a halt.
I can understand that Apple wants to avoid the Microsoft problem of having multiple, independent business units that end up distrusting and working against one another, but the complete opposite situation isn't healthy either. A company of Apple's size and means should be able to do more than one thing at once.
A few years ago, Apple had a perfect opportunity to finally break the Mac out of its 5-10% niche of the PC market. Windows 8 was a dud, while Apple's brand and reputation were at their zenith, and their hardware had a huge edge in terms of quality and aesthetics over anything other PC vendors were putting out. The time was right for a huge push of the Mac. But they didn't do it.
Perhaps it was absent mindedness. Perhaps it was a lingering fear of taking on Microsoft in their own territory. Perhaps they genuinely believed the PC/laptop market was going to be disappear and be replaced by tablet computers. But for whatever reason, they blew their chance. And if I was an Apple shareholder, I'd be pissed about it.
Perhaps they already have most of the customers that want to spend the money a Mac costs AND want to buy from Apple. There is no way for Apple to swap market share with Windows unless they sell a Mac for $300 and I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't want to sell at such a low margin.
That might be true if the only segment of the PC market left was the low-end, but that's just not the case. There's still masses of high-end PCs sold to software developers, video and graphics creatives, and gamers. And there's still masses of mid-range PCs sold to businesses, government, and schools.
It's not that Apple doesn't play in these markets. The Mac mini is their offering for the mid-range, for example, and the iMac and Mac Pro are for the high-end desktop market. But as the article points out, they have left these products without updates for years, at precisely the moment they should have been capitalising on their brand momentum and the rest of the industry's problems.
One area that deserves more attention is the office. Not every company wants to buy both an iMac AND a MacBook for each employee, so they end up with a mess of cables that has to be connected to a MacBook every morning.
Why haven't Apple made a decent docking solution yet?
It happens that companies buy from Apple but Apple's primary market is consumers. I think Apple really doesn't have interest in that kind of specialized enterprise products. Maybe a third party could work on it as they do on connectors.
Except for the whole Windows 10 malware fiasco. They just couldn't help themselves it seems..
Would have probably upgraded all the computers I manage if they hadn't been such dicks about it. I'm sure they'll find new and interesting ways to break Windows 7 out of spite now but it is what it is.
Windows seems to suffer from a Law of Conservation of Awesomeness. It's like they can't improve Windows in one area without making something else significantly worse.
It doesn't make money. Even though they have a crap ton of cash because of their mobile business, they don't seem willing to invest in their desktop os or their PC business.
Its surprising because the mac + ios system is such a powerful combination. With MS at least trying lately with their pen enabled devices, bash on windows, and general lack of complete disdain for customers, they may be getting ready to eat Apple's lunch.
Compare that with 4 year old laptops, little real innovation in mac os (the latest I can recall is implementing Windows 8's window system for full screen and making dev's lives harder with all the security changes in el cap) and it starts to make you wonder.
Not saying Windows is better than Mac, just wish Apple would stop pulling an MS and actually try with their OS.
They have not stopped. The new Macbook came out last year. A leisurely schedule of new releases perhaps. They are not doing bad in terms of market share. 7.5% Q4 15 vs 6.7% a year earlier global share. I think that's probably their best ever?
Just looking at the latest figures can be dangerous. Sales are certainly going well, but there seems be some annoyance groving among the users and competitors are improving (for example Dell XPS 15" and Windows 10 with Ubuntu).
If they just updated the CPU, people would complain about such things such as the amount of on-board memory (which often cannot be upgraded in recent Apple hardware), the video card, external ports, etc.
So, my guess would be that their replacement hardware isn't ready. Follow-up question is: why is the hardware not ready?
Possible answers (with varying degrees of realism) include:
- they don't think they need it yet.
- they wanted to have it ready, but hit some snag designing or producing it.
- they are designing their own ARM CPUs, and want some more room to ensure that they will be faster than the old hardware.
- they are designing their own ARM CPUs, and hit snags doing so.
I would think it is one of the first two, but it would be more interesting if it were one of the last two.
The power savings from including a newer Intel processor seem pretty massive in and of themselves. It doesn't seem like they'd have to do a massive overhaul to make an update worthwhile.
Processor speed isn't a limiting factor for me, but the 16 GB max RAM really is and it's definitely becoming a problem for daily work as a programmer working with compilers and VMs. I just wish they'd fix that.
I know you are joking, but the iPad Pro is my work horse now unless I need multiple side by side SSH shells, or an IDE for programming. It is great for writing, doing research, etc.
Well, I was merely talking about the keyboard. Writing a book is hard work because of other factors which would remain the same no matter the choice of device.
For you, yeah, RAM might be to limited, but for the most of us it's fine.
The quote from the article is bogus:
>People that buy Apple products do so because they want the best; in hardware terms, at least
No, people buy them for the brand/perceived lifestyle/design/MacOS. Only the professionals by it for the "best hardware", the majority of their customers doesn't care, they just assume that the hardware is fine.
The majority of Apples customer will NEVER use their laptop for other than browsing, email and light word processing and for that purpose it's absolutely fine. In fact it's overkill.
Even for a person like me that do Python/Django development, it's still a fine laptop and it will continue to be fine for a long time.
It's a little expensive though. It seems like the price should have come down a little by now.
Honestly there's nothing wrong with the current line of Apple hardware, in terms of performance (and excluding the Mac Pro, which doesn't make any sense at all, given it's target audience)
People who buy the top of the line mac are almost certainly professionals, not average joe's reading emails and visiting facebook. The 16GB limitation is a problem, as is having outdated hardware.
Apple is failing the professional market significantly, and not just in hardware. They've also been killing off their pro software offerings. It's making a lot of us very uneasy.
The professional market has absolutely been part of their target audience. Do you really think the Mac Pro and Macbook Pro is aimed at casual users?
Hell, when it first came out the Mac Pro was aimed almost above most professionals needs. A solid desktop with 32gb ram and a top end GPU would more than suffice for most professionals in graphics, development, and data analysis.
Besides, even if they were not targeting professionals, they would still be failing that market. Targeting a market is not a prerequisite for being judged suitable for a market.
It's been sad to see them neglecting their pro software and making poor decisions in those departments (see Final Cut Pro community). I've started to look to other companies that are wholly focused on creating software for creative industries where I know they will continue to grow and nurture their products.
The bigger issue I have is with the lack of attention to hardware and core OS issues. I'm not sure if they are just distracted building the new iCar or what, but all I want for them to do is to ship a reliable version of OS X (like they have historically) and to ship solid hardware that isn't 3+ years old. The other options (PC, Linux) are not viable alternatives yet for creative industries (in my opinion).
Lenovo p50 allows 64GB of ECC memory with Xeon (i7 and non-ECC supported too at substantially lower price). I badly need this configuration, and really hope the next MBPs support it.
It would be great if it wasn't the same machine they released 3 years ago. I've wanted to upgrade my desktop Mac to a machine that can support 4K output at 60Hz, but my options are currently to downgrade from quad to dual core and get a Mac Mini, spend a lot of money on an outdated Mac Pro, or repurpose on of their laptops into a desktop, which I'm not terribly interested in doing (and also only dual core).
If you're considering the Mini, then no, not at all. Core for core, they're quite similar, with only a mild speed bump. The 2012 had a 4-core option, but does not support 4K. The 2014 models (current generation) are dual core only, but have a graphics system that's able to handle 4K @ 60Hz. (Not sure how well it does it, but it can actually output it.)
My 2011 Mac Pro (the beastly meta crate model) supports that. I had to upgrade the video card of course (and run power from the extra SATA connector for the secondary CD), but it works great. If you'd like photos and/or instructions, happy to share.
I probably should - but it's a shame because I know it's very possible to put 64 GB in a laptop, and I'd be willing to pay more than the market rate for the RAM.
Mac Pro is probably a worse purchase than the old MacBook—much much more expensive for three year old tech. It's way more expensive than the old Mac Pro with the awesome steel case or whatever. I'm still sorta mad about the trash can look.
"...that doesn’t mean it isn’t unconscionable for Apple to continue to sell outdated products to people who may not know any better"
I may suffer from a lack of nannying instincts that make these sort of hyperbolic assertions hard to swallow. Is it a common impulse to want to save all those poor people from themselves for no particular reason? If they "don't know any better", it's pretty clear they don't have a personal reason to care, and this entire sentiment becomes rather condescending in that light.
It's not about nannying, it's about Apple doing damage to their brand. They are the largest publicly held corporation in the world, yet a lot of their important brands are languishing and have become terrible values for the money because they haven't been updated in four years. I know very few people who have bought Apple PCs recently.
I'm using a Macbook Pro Retina that I got in the 2013 refresh cycle, and if it were to get stolen tomorrow I'd buy a Windows PC to replace it because buying essentially the same laptop three years later for the same price makes no sense when the rest of the industry has moved on a lot more. As the "tech guy" in my extended family and friends group, a lot of people come to me for laptop-buying advice, and I haven't been able to recommend anything Apple in over a year.
Do you really think a new Mac is like a 20 year old graphing calculator? How about an iPhone or iPad? Nokia phone? Am radio? Is a Tesla different from a Ford model T?
Why should Apple stop selling anything that people want to buy?
For most people, buying a new computer is something you do when your old one breaks. I know Apple cultivates itself as a "professional's brand" but that's not really the case anymore. Every 18 year old with a pocket full of graduation money next to her iPhone grabs a new Mac, and any Mac she grabs will perform a vast majority of the tasks she needs.
The real question is not "why does Apple still sell.." It's "why do people still buy ...?"
Because the computers get slower with each OS upgrade. At some point this catches up and the machine feels slow. CPU's might not be improving at the same rate but GPU's are. iMacs, for example, use a mobile gpu on the desktop. i've goto a 2010 iMac and it's slow because i didn't opt for an ssd at the time and got a painfully slow 5400 rpm drive.
People buy because they don't know any better. Wait until every new Mac in the fall has USB C connectors.
El Capitan improves performance compared to Yosemite, just as Snow leopard improved on Leopard, but if you look into more than two generations of the OS the trend goes the other way.
I currently have two apple laptops, an old macbook that came with Tiger and use it to test beta versions of OSX. It's running El Capitan right now but is almost unusable.
My main computer is a rMBP that came with Lion. It worked better (faster, snappier) with Mountain Lion than it does with El Capitan.
I used an old 12" PowerBook G4 running Tiger for years past end of support. I just loved the size and the keyboard. It was also user-maintainable. Battery, memory, hard drive all easily accessed. I still have it and it still works. I tried running OpenBSD on it and while that worked, performance was a lot worse than Tiger.
My main computer is the original 2012 rMBP, and it's way faster on El Cap than the original OS it came with. Throughout the first couple versions, I was hankering for a new laptop due to the graphics chipset not keeping up with the HiDPI display. But somewhere along the way Apple really nailed the graphics performance to the point I never even think about it.
There was just one dud of an OS in there (Mavericks? I think) where the machine would just bog down over the week and I had to reboot it every 2 weeks just to regain performance. That was improved with the next release, and now on El Cap I only ever reboot for security updates (two months or so of uptime)
OS X does tend to get more RAM-hungry with each version though, so I recommend everyone to max out the RAM when they can.
> Because the computers get slower with each OS upgrade.
It seemed was a time in the history of OS X (up through Snow Leopard) where the reverse was true, and it's certainly not true that the OS must become less efficient with each iteration.
It's not a necessity that the machine must slow down with each OS update. Boot an XFCE on Linux image to establish a baseline level of performance. Make that your OS and you can _buy_ from guys selling 2012 computers.
No one said that it was a necessity. The fact is that Apple software needs more performance over time so they shouldn't skimp on the hardware, or sell "old" hardware.
Why are you introducing an irrelevant tangent into the conversation? I have an old Dell in my closest that has Linux on it. But once again, that's irrelevant to this conversation.
That you are knowledgeable about hard drive speeds, solid state technology, and the virtues (or pitfalls) of OS upgrades means your needs far outstrip the average consumer.
The computer you're running is 6 years old. Apple doesn't sell it anymore. It's also possible to replace the HDD with a new SSD.
No one wants to wait 60 seconds for Safari to launch. Apple sells high-end computers. People expect high-end performance. They should never have sold computers with 5400 rpm drives, for example.
Oculus won't support any Macs because the hardware isn't that good:
>Oculus won't support any Macs because the hardware isn't that good
Apple sells expensive computers. Customers are not buying cutting edge hardware, they're buying middling hardware that is designed to work with the specific operating system.
The GPUs in Apple computers may not be to Palmer Luckey's liking, but you can't deny that Macs have a high quality construction. For most people, this is what matters over the graphics performance: form factor, weight, battery life, screen brightness and color reproduction, quality of the keyboard and trackpad.
I dual boot Windows 10 even Windows 8/8.1 my 17 inch Macbook Pro 8,3 even with 2.3GHz i7 CPU 8GB RAM and 512 SSD is like a hair dryer fans on constantly never stopping but not when using OS X.
It's fine with Yosemite 10.10.5 but I am hesitant to upgrade to El Capitan 10.11.6 anytime soon. I may even downgrade to Win 7 if I can but I hear MS is insistent on people using Win 10 even if they will not push it out you can still get it.
I think that is the real question, "Why do people still buy ..." and it speaks to that percentage of Apple's base that want a machine with an optical drive. So for that segment they will pay for the drive and sub-par display performance.
If you look at Apple's product releases over the years, and with overlapping products, you can really see Apple market research at work. iPad Pro 9.7 vs iPad Pro vs iPad 9.7. How many people want pro/not-pro, how many people want pencil/not-pencil, how many people want big/little. One of the Apple product managers said "I survey customers by counting how much money they will give me for a feature." His point was that customer surveys of people who aren't buying are aspirational, but what people actually pay for, that is actionable.
The question is no doubt being pondered, "If we offered a retina MBP with a built in optical drive, how many people might buy it?" The tooling of the body cavity its clearly an investment that you don't make for less than a million or so machines.
But I agree that the fundamental question is flawed, there is no reason to "upgrade" a product that is meeting all of its customer requirements. But customers asking the question suggests that requirements may have shifted.
A "percentage of Apple's base that want a machine with an optical drive"
I'm happy to pay a little extra if it prevents any new machine being sold with an optical drive. A little bit of me dies every time someone asks for things on CD/DVD.
> Every 18 year old with a pocket full of graduation money next to her iPhone grabs a new Mac, and any Mac she grabs will perform a vast majority of the tasks she needs.
As a recent high school grad (Class of 2015), this resonates with me. A bunch of my classmates (Classes of 2014-16) bought Macbooks/MBA/MBP for college. For the vast majority of them, their Mac was a non-essential splurge. Their use cases corresponded with Chromebooks (available for < 1/2 the price of their purchased Mac) quite well.
A major reason why so many of my classmates bought Macs is because my high school handed out the lowest-end, 11" MBA to every student. We all got indoctrinated into the Mac world.
The main reason to keep selling old models is a logistical one: what Apple actually wants is to get rid of all their pipelined stock. That doesn't mean that they produced too many 2012 MBPs; but rather, they have a bunch of last-gen components they've already irrevocably taken receipt of, and are now stuck integrating, manufacturing, and warehousing; and those components can go together to make (among other things) a 2012-MBP. Which still sells. So making and selling those is one strategy for getting rid of those components.
Adding a channel for using up last-gen stock has, after all, been stated as the main reason for the existence of the iPod Touch.
Do you really think they have pipelined stock that is over four years old? Wouldn't that represent a massive failure in many regards? It'd be interesting to see a disassembly of a Macbook purchased new today to find out when the components inside it were actually assembled.
The non-Retina 2012 MBP is their institutional laptop product. If it was a consumer oriented product, they would have gotten rid of it, but they keep selling thousands at a discount to universities and high schools. They haven't dragged in an update as the specs and prices are good enough for what those customers need, and they are pushing a move to iPad for them anyway.
Their other products should have been updated by now. Especially the Mac Pro and Mac Mini. And they've been skimping on the graphics card for lower end models. The price/performance has been very frustrating as you can get a good (e.g. Alienware) desktop with the same high end graphics as the high end iMac but for the same price as the low end model now.
Their laptops are still good even at the price, but the rest of the line could be much better.
Anyone who buys a Macbook Pro today, before they're updated in the fall, will be able to use it for the next 3 years without issue. My Macbook Air was purchased in 2012 and is still fast enough that I probably won't replace it for another 2 years. People keep their computers longer now because they're fast enough. This has been true for the PC industry for at least 5 years now and it's why sales have been declining since they peaked in 2011 [1]. The year over year changes from Intel/AMD are incremental and I suspect Apple has decided they're not going to buy every iteration. It's even less important to get every chip now that Intel has stretched their development cycle from Tick-Tock to Process-Architecture-Optimization [2].
Whether it "works fine" (and my Pro works fine) is not the point. When you can now buy more powerful laptops with longer battery life for less money than current Macs, it becomes hard to justify the premium price for a Mac.
It seems like Apple is hoping the consumer won't notice and still buy the brand as though it's a designer item and not electronics. I suspect that this is not the primary motivation for their current lack of new tech. I think that the largest part for this regression from the cutting edge is a consequence of no longer having Steve Jobs pushing every part of the company for its utmost.
Apple, when you anthropomorphize the actions of the company as a whole, comes off as arrogant. They had earned this by actually delivering the best you could buy. The best laptops, the best phones, the best music players, the best tablets. With the exception of tablets, this is no longer true, in any category (not even phones). And that is the issue.
Not whether the device is still good enough. It ought to be the best, because that was what we came to expect from Apple. The premium ought to be a no-brainer because you get what you pay for. It isn't like that anymore and if you're a fan of Apple (and I have been since the Apple IIe) then you really wish it were.
2011 Air here. Audio hardware is all dead (speakers + mic + headphone jack), but it works for development.
If I can only expect to get 3 years of use from a laptop, that's pretty disappointing. Especially one that starts at $1300. Or $1550 if you want the warranty to actually cover it for that period.
Yes, that is completely unreasonable. I expect hardware to last atleast 10 years. Nobody wants to be on some kind of constant upgrade treadmill. Not to mention the enormous environmental impact of un-repairable computers that you have to trash every X years.
If it were the only computer in existence, probably not. But it gets measured relative to all of its competitors, which get updated more than every two years and have their prices go down when they're old.
Also it's not my primary work tool. If your company wants to buy you one, great, but spending my personal hobby budget on outdated gear is a harder sell.
And yes, $43/month over 3 years is a lot of money. $1550, in fact. Breaking it down like that to make it feel like a smaller number is a shitty trick that only works because we have bad instincts at math.
I've still got my 2010 17 inch. Upgrading to an SSD removed all of the performance issues I was experiencing and personally I'm not buying another Mac until they have a new 17 option.
If this thing ever dies on me I'm just going to switch to Ubuntu.
I don't think anyone is expecting them to ever release a 17" laptop again. Looks like you'll be putting Ubuntu on a Windows laptop whenever this one dies.
Hey, I'm on my 17 inch right now! I've just about given up on Apple releasing another laptop in this size. I'll probably upgrade in the next release cycle -- I love this machine but it just can't run the number of Docker instances I need for work.
> I'm not buying another Mac until they have a new 17 option.
You are in for a long wait. I can't imagine they'll ever release that size again. Apple's definitely shifting quickly to the 2 or 3 options that cover 95% of the market.
Why do you want the 17? I switched to a 15 retina which has more pixels than my 17 did. What mattered to me was how many characters I could get on the screen so I simply run it in non-retina mode. And it's a lot lighter.
If you want the absolute screen size: indeed, I doubt there will be another. But if it's all about the pixels, you can already do better than the 17.
I'm not the GP, but I imagine I'll be in that situation in a few years. Well, except for that I'd never buy anything from Apple anyway.
No matter how good your eyes are, you can only go so small without stuff becoming blurry. Personally 15"/1080p is about as small as I can go without text becoming unreadable without HiDPI scaling, and some of my friends complain about reading text on my laptop as it is.
So, for me, switching to a higher-DPI screen is not an option since it just means a higher cost, awful blur for the many applications that don't support DPI scaling, and somewhere between no and very diminished benefits. At the same time I'd never want to give up on all the extra screen real estate so 17" (or bigger!) would inevitably be the only option for me.
Because I keep a monitor on my desk as a primary when I'm home with my laptop on a stand to the side. If it's smaller than a 17 it's harder to use the laptop screen as a second monitor without blowing increasing the resolution enough that I can't fit anything useful on it.
Also, preference and I'm not a huge fan of being so loyal to one company that they dictate my preferences. Been s pretty loyal Apple customer for laptop, phone, wife's computer, parents and iMac for since about 2005-2006. Between things like reducing their product line, not updating machines, not letting me set my own DNS on my phone and making political statements via their software the luster has worn off quite a bit.
You might want to consider individual levels of tolerance for dpi's as an explanation for upsizing the screen.
For example, my tolerance for small text at 1:1 is about 160 dpi (4K on a 27" monitor), which is much lower than the 220 dpi of your Retina 15. Having said that, my eyes would have a better chance of tolerating the same 2880x1800 resolution on a 17" monitor at 200dpi.
At some point, that extra resolution is going to get wasted on a small screen if you're more interested in real estate over crispy retina text. I have a 4K 15.6" laptop, and there's no way in hell I could tolerate it at 1:1 with my aging eyes.
The 13" can do pretend to have 1680x1050, which is the native resolution of the MBP17, and the 15" can pack the same content as a 1920x1200 screen, which is what we got from the 24" iMac.
That's a if they're updated in the Fall. Rumour had it several lines would have been updated this past spring.
Anyone who buys a MacBook Pro today, before whenever it is the line gets updated, will be happy with it, which is of course a good thing. (Outside of being hit by hardware issues or something)
When the line is updated, you probably won't notice a performance difference between the current model and whatever the next one is. The time of huge improvements with every processor upgrade has long since past, the RAM speed will not be that much different and it will be using solid state storage at again about the same speed as the current model. This is why people will keep their hardware longer.
A lot of hardware upgrades are now coming from when the hardware no longer supports the latest OS. Sierra will work with MacBooks going back to 2009, and they had upgradable RAM and storage so even those laptops will be able to run the latest OS with performance that is acceptable to most people.
All of this means that Apple is going to have a slower cycle for hardware bumps since the cost of a rapid cycle probably doesn't bring the revenue spike it used to.
Laptops are still getting a little faster, because TDP issues are less pronounced on newer, less power-thirsty models. And of course, battery life expectancy may get better.
But the real upgrade would be to models that either already had integrated graphics (and now will have much faster integrated graphics), or that had GPUs (and with the new pascal/polaris generations, will likely have much faster and less power hungry GPUs).
You might also notice improvements in SSDs, though I'm skeptical that despite large relative improvements most workloads really benefit much - after all, any semi decent SSD will have largely moved most bottlenecks out of the I/O subsystem, and then it really won't matter much if you reduce those last few milliseconds of latency even further. Some people will notice, however, and what you will notice is that you don't need to choose between fast or large as much anymore - a 1TB ssd is pretty affordable, and smaller SSDs might even be classified as "cheap" by macbook standards.
Still, I last updated (my non-mac laptop) just after haswell was released, and discounting SSD size and GPU, modern laptops seem very unattractive. Due to the glass screen fetish nowadays; most are heavier and more fragile to boot - my 13-inch, more than 3-year old laptop weighs 929g, and the battery still lasts many hours. It's fallen a few times and has a few nasty scratches and one nicked corner, but... upgrades still seem kind of pointless. Are you really going to upgrade for a crappy-but-less crappy iGFX or a larger SSD?
You forget how much Apple likes to nickel & dime people on storage and memory, it's where a lot of margin comes from. Expect to pay a few times market rate for 1TB SSD.
Incidentally, the MBA 2012 is a great Linux machine. It was used by Linus himself for pretty long. Near flawless support, except for a somewhat unstable wireless probably due to a bad quality antenna and/or Broadcom driver.
So when software support gets phased out, you might be able to get a few extra years on Linux if you wish to do so.
IIRC I has some issues with Lion around when it came out, so just kept it at Snow Leopard. I've also been put off by the general sense that newer versions of OS X are progressively worse, but I haven't bothered to find out for myself.
Mainly, I mostly use it as an Ubuntu machine at this point.
Well, sort of. The 13" got Broadwell in 2015; the 15" rMBP didn't-- its 2015 update retained the Haswell 4[7/8/9]80HQ from the previous year's model, since Broadwell quad-core parts were late coming out and the ones that did come out weren't really an upgrade.
A mid-2015 15" rMBP purchased today is running a two-year-old processor from a three-year-old architecture. And the GPU, should you get the discrete GPU option, is from a four-year-old architecture (it's a GCN 1.0 part).
Although if the Broadwell parts weren't really an upgrade, then it does not matter. The old ATI part would be more annoying.
I also kind of understand why Apple didn't go with Skylake yet. Seeing all the problems with power management states in Linux and Windows land, it looks like they decided to skip this generation until that gets fixed.
Tech enthusiasts (as I assume most people on this forum are) want different things out of their computers than the average person. Today's MBP can be used for three years by tech enthusiasts, which is indeed impressive.
It can probably last over ten years for the average person, if good care is taken.
My main machine is a 10 year old IBM thinkpad, and it's still doing fine. Likewise for my 8 year old 'phone.
Tech enthusiasts are the ones who can see through the marketing and upgrade-treadmill BS; the "average person" can end up buying a new machine when they fill up their hard drive.
Impressive. likewise my five years old Thinkpad still runs like new (with Windows 10 startup improvement over 7 it felt even faster, but even faster is Ubuntu. it runs incredibly fast).
For tech enthusiast who enjoy smartphones unfortunately a 8 year old phone won't cut it. I have 4 year old Nokia Lumia that still runs fine and with an average 1.5 days of battery life (it used to live 2 days, it's aging). It works well for me because I care about basic apps, GPS, internet browser, and email. But for more apps heavy users most apps won't work if the phone isn't on the latest OS version, and most old phones can't upgrade to the latest OS version. For instance if Facebook stops maintaining messenger on windows phone 8.1, I'd loose my most used app. Fortunately the market share for 8.1 in emerging markets is still important enough for fb to keep a quality app.
I had probably about the same Thinkpad, and I was amazed at how much faster Windows 8.1 and 10 were. Granted, I was also making a huge upgrade because some tech-illiterate person bought us 32-bit Windows licenses and 4GB RAM (2.9 usable.)
I've much more often been frustrated by my phones. My last phone was at the point where I'd expect ~1 second delay for any interaction, whether that was opening an app or scrolling in a webpage. I think as the current one ages I'm going to start eliminating apps and wiping the phone more frequently than I do now, because I'd rather have all that money going toward my desktop and laptops.
Devices like lower end tablets often have 2 gigs of ram and 32 gigs of flash, which would be problematic because a 64 bit version of Windows uses 3-4 gigabytes more disk space, which would be further amplified by needing that much more space for the recovery partition. These devices are useful, if limited purpose, so putting a 64 bit OS on it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Buying licenses and having 4GB of memory (and being disappointed about it) implies a desktop PC, and even a $80 refurb on eBay has at least an 80 GB hard drive.
Heh, I use Linux (NixOS) with XMonad, st and Emacs, so it's always pretty responsive. Not used Windows in over a decade, so I can't comment on its speed.
> But for more apps heavy users most apps won't work if the phone isn't on the latest OS version, and most old phones can't upgrade to the latest OS version.
My phone runs Debian, so I haven't had any problems keeping up to date :)
Same here, typing this on a Thinkpad T42p 'maxed out' with 2 GB. OK, it does contain an SSD (connected using a PATA-SATA converter which just fits between the drive and the connector, no external modification necessary) so it has seen some updates since being hatched but the thing is about 12 years old and still going strong. Not that I'd mind a bit more memory or CPU every now and then, mostly when confronted with 'modern' web pages... fortunately NoScript comes to the rescue there. Running Debian/Xmonad on the thing, works fine.
I use a 5 yo phone (Motorola Defy+). It runs Android 4.4.4, thus far I've not seen a valid reason for wanting something newer. It still runs for about 4 days on a single charge, using the original battery.
Things start looking bad for the tech industry when people start showing off with 'old' stuff instead of brand-spanking new.
> It runs Android 4.4.4, thus far I've not seen a valid reason for wanting something newer.
I have an Android 4.4 phone, and while it has worked acceptably for me right now as I am self-employed, if I were working for a company that required me to have access to sensitive customer data, having a phone that still received security updates would be a hard requirement.
Working at such an employer, they'd also likely require remote-wipe capability on the phone. That was the case for my job. I opted to carry two phones, instead (one completely provided and paid for by my employer).
Well, yes, security updates can be important. However, since I run a home-built Android distribution on the thing I can keep it up to date with the most egregious bugs (SurfaceFlinger bug etc.). This leads to the odd situation where my oldish phone is more secure than my wife's much newer Xperia C3 running a stock 4.4.4 distribution.
I understand that we talk about this sort of thing quite a bit, but I can't imagine actually doing it myself. My phone is just supposed to work for me so I can get my real work done and have time to enjoy outside of it. I'm not supposed to work for it.
I'd guess you have to really enjoy working on that sort of thing, but then again you called it "work to do", so I'm not sure.
Yes, I partly merge them myself, sometimes it is done by others. The results are shared through the XDA forum where the Defy used to have a lively community. That community has mostly disappeared, but some die-hards - like me - still try to keep the thing up to date, if only to show the futility of planned obsolescence and locked bootloaders...
What sata-pata converter did you get? I have a T42 too that I don't want to give up but the HD needs upgrading. I had a look for converters but the number available is a baffling array of wares.
I have seen SSDs on ebay with the converter built in, maybe kill two birds with one stone?
I got this one: http://www.ebay.de/itm/280794425758 almost two years ago, it just fits between the drive and the connector when using a modified drive hatch. The modification I made was simple, I removed the mounting brackets and the plastic edges around them from the inside of the hatch, replacing it with a bit of foam to keep the drive in position. Put the adapter on the drive, slide the drive into the bay as if it is a PATA-drive, push the hatch into place and fasten it using the special screw. Ready.
Performance is more than acceptable, the thing boots (Linux) in a few seconds (that is, a few seconds after BIOS has done its thing of course). In other words, those 3€ for the adapter (incl. shipping) were well spent...
Posting on a 2009 iMac right now - do both web development and Unity development on it every day. Personal computers have never had longer useful lives than now.
Three years is pretty long for a laptop that sees daily use. That's just the reality of having a physical device that you bring with you everywhere -- it gets beaten up. Also, don't forget that there are basically no user-replaceable parts left, including most importantly the battery. Three years of daily use is enough to significantly degrade batteries.
Meanwhile, most of the components in my desktop are older than three years, and it's doing just fine.
> Also, don't forget that there are basically no user-replaceable parts left, including most importantly the battery.
That, to me, is the real tragedy/travesty. There should be some eco-EU-law or something against that, a bit like the micro USB charger standardisation. I say this typing from a 2008 (or was it 2009?) MacBook on which i've been able to replace the RAM (8GB), disk drive (SSD, single biggest improvement) and battery (lasts longer than when new from factory now), and all of those upgrades weren't expensive at all. Of course i run Linux and XMonad and pretty much the only graphical app is Firefox with NoScript, but still, i can't see myself forking out hard $$$ for a non-maintainable machine. The upgradability isn't even the big deal for me, because as someone else pointed out these days computers are "fast enough", it's the fact that certain components are just going to fail (especially the battery). And it absolutely sends sickly shivers down my spine that people are being forced to landfill perfectly okay hardware because of a battery becoming worn out. Seriously Apple, where have your holistic eco-friendly principles gone?
From a physical engineering perspective I don't know how you'd go about making an ultrabook's battery replaceable short of breaking the entire case open.
I realise that i'm probably in a vanishing minority, but give me a few mm's of extra thickness for replaceability of parts any day! The 13" 2009 Macbook i refer to is (for me) fine as far as weight and thickness go, while providing replaceable parts which makes me happy (and soothes my reuse-repair-recycle tendency).
I've got a Lenovo T450S, which is apparently marketed as an ultrabook. It's got a user-removable battery. I assume you had some different ultrabook in mind with your comment.
To be fair, I thought that its was all crap when I first saw the MacBook air. Then I acquired one through work for a couple of years. Its was nice going somewhere with hand luggage and being able to fit it in the top of my bag relatively easy compared to my other laptop (though the thinness didn't make a huge amount of difference).
Why, though? Lifetimes are dictated by the physical processes that govern wear, and computers wear out fast: we pump a whole lot of electrons through them, and because we want them to be faster and faster have made them less and less fault tolerant under heavy load.
Make no mistake: ever since the AT/XT days the useful lifetime of a computer has been in the three year range because of the nature of matter and the physics we exploit to make digital circuits do what they need to do. Can you still use a 20 year old computer that runs Word Perfect 5 on MS-DOS 6.22 and isn't really made to do much more? Of course. And of course, you'll still be able to run OSX Panther on a 2005 MacMini for years to come, but you can't use those things for anything new or modern, you've created a little time machine that can only do what we wanted to do in 1985, or 1995, or 2005, instead of in 2015 (or soon enough, 2025).
Most of us want to use those new programs that rely on new algorithms that require the faster hardware, or old algorithms that massively benefit from faster hardware - we want spreadsheets to take less than seconds, not more than minutes, for ever-more complex work; we want games that run smoothly, not "not at all" or at 1 or 2 frames per second; we want our internet browser to start when we tell it to, not after a period of time that is long enough to wonder whether it even started at all.
Things all have lifetimes, and for computers that lifetime's about 3 years, and has been for decades. On the upside, computers are ships of Theseus: most of the time, we can just swap out broken parts for new parts, including faster parts, so really the lifetime of a single, unadulterated, intact computer is three years, but with a few hundred bucks every three years, we can keep pulling it back into the modern age until at some point nothing of the original remains - and the lifetime of THAT computer is much, much longer.
Why 3 years? My MacBook Air 2012 runs Linux better than some brand new machines. As a browser and a ssh machine it's good enough.
My dad ran Ubuntu for a decade on my 13 year old workstation. He couldn't do anything I could do on my laptop. A Pentium IV with HT was good enough for his LaTeX and his MCMC simulations.
> Why 3 years? My MacBook Air 2012 runs Linux better than some brand new machines.
Not if you compensate for how much extra you paid for it.
> As a browser and a ssh machine it's good enough.
So you're just offloading the needed upgrades to someone else, while still ALSO needing to maintain your own computer (though to a lesser degree).
Unless you need the extra battery capacity (how often do you need to work for several hours without being close to a plug?) then it's much simpler to just run everything locally. Plus you don't need an internet connection! Plus using an IDE or anything else graphical will actually be a bearable experience!
> Not if you compensate for how much extra you paid for it.
It's not how much you pay for your computer, but how much you spend per year, on average, that counts. If a computer does its job for twice as long as the other, it's reasonable to pay up to twice as much for it.
3 years sounds too aggressive of an estimate. I would experientially expect a Macbook Pro to last 5 years. Prior to SSD's, the HDD was the most common reason for laptop failure, but nowadays Macbook Pros come with SSD options, so now I would expect a substantial portion of the most recent Macbook Pro populations to hit the 5 year mark.
In terms of software requirements, I think most people don't play heavy requirement games, and for basic personal and office tasks, the 2/4 threaded CPU's of the past few years have been up to the task of browsing, office suites (with responsive spreadsheets), and media.
Even five years seems too little. I had an old Gateway laptop that lasted for about ten years, and the only replacement I ever had to do with it was buying new chargers along the way because they kept getting worn out.
My father once had the idea of taking my shoes to a shoe smith to have the soles repaired. That would have let me get it to 2 years, although unknown to him, I had a few years worth of spares in my closet. Anyway, if you want to make something that is made well last longer than its wearable components, replace them.
I just ordered a new touchpad sticker and keyboard for my 5 year old Thinkpad. I expect to replace the batteries within the next year, but other than that, I expect it to go to 10+ years, even though my previous Dell laptops did not make it past 5 years.
If your laptop can only handle three years or normal wear and tear, either it's not very sturdy or you're unusually rough with it. I've personally never owned a MacBook so I can't say which.
Three years is also not a long time considering the price of a MacBook. The basic model starts at $1299 [1]; $400/year for computing is a lot of money.
My two year old Chromebook is definitely a piece of crap; the motherboard is warped from having dropped it on carpet (carpet!) once, and the monitor has scratches caused by the keyboard. But that's okay, because I bought a very low end model that only cost $200.
You can have a computer last far more than 3 years. If you buy a desktop PC, and you upgrade it, and do maintenance on it over the course of its life, it can last 7-10 years (I have seen some of these beasts in offices), but you usually spend as much as a new computer.
Not just desktops. I'm typing this on a 2012 Asus Zenbook, which did not have any hardware problems so far (unless you count that one screw that came loose last year). Even the battery is still going strong: `acpi -V` reports "design capacity 5871 mAh, last full capacity 5070 mAh = 86%".
Of course, chances are that any other notebook might fail sooner, and I assume that my careful handling has increased the longevity of the device.
I have a Ship of Theseus desktop built in 2001. Then I replaced some hard drives. Then I replaced the motherboard+CPU+RAM. Then I replaced the video card. Then the hard drives...etc, etc. Currently, it's got a 2008 CPU+RAM, a 2010 mobo, drives from 2006-2014, a 2012 GPU, and it's about to get a 2016 PSU, because that just blew yesterday. It's hard to say how old a computer like that is ;-)
Yeah, tell me about it. I've been using my old laptop for 6 yrs now. The battery is completely broken now, and it's always on AC power. I had to use an SSD on it, due to its HDD failure which caused the loss of all my data. But other than that, it still is working, but only for trivial tasks, like downloading and stuff. I also replaced its broken DVD drive with a Caddy to add an extra HDD later. Oh, and there's now a bright spot on the monitor (IDK why)! This is obviously so messed up, but I figured it's "electrical" and not "mechanical", so I keep using it, esp. w/ Windows 10 which refreshed it!
Although I really don't know what to do w/ the noise I hear from the motherboard (coil problem maybe.)
I'm on my 2011 laptop. Battery's pretty bad; I might get half an hour or something (last time I tested). Shortly after I bought it, I replaced the HDD with a hybrid HDD+SSD (500GB spinning, 16GB solid-state cache, or something). My kid bent something in the keyboard, so the F12 key sticks up a little bit. Everything else works like when I bought it.
I sometimes get the "new tech" itch, but I haven't convinced myself that I'd get enough benefit to retire this thing, yet.
I believe my Core Duo 2 laptop (Inspiron 1420) is the model Dell set up with Ubuntu. Got it on eBay for $800 from person who lightly used it but didn't want Linux. It's about 8 years old or something. Still handles about anything I throw at it from web servers to video to virtual machines. 1080p seems to be rough on it but I can't tell if it's it or Linux-related software. 720p looks great on it, though, so I question the necessity of 1080p anyway.
Things run a bit slower for the apps that get unnecessarily bloated over time. Including some websites. Still fast enough day to day to not really matter. I was used to it about 3-4 years ago. Thanks to software improvements, my laptop actually got better over the years. ;)
I've got a 2011 macbook pro which is now used for basic work around the house (media center, etc). It will likely last for several more years, because the needs for it won't change, and the specs it has meet the needs just fine.
For newer work - as needs change, specs change, it's advantageous to get new equipment to meet changing needs (generally faster processing in my case).
Right. I think that's the bigger point. The author says you used to pay a lot for Apple because you knew you were getting "the best computer". Now it's not so simple.
> The author says you used to pay a lot for Apple because you knew you were getting "the best computer".
Must be rose-tinted glasses. Apple has been about peddling (what would otherwise be) low-end budget computers to fashion enthusiasts for massive markups for at least a decade.
The only reason I bought an MBP is because it was the only aluminum-bodied, non-touchscreen laptop with a reasonable keyboard layout and quality touchpad that I could find on display in 2012. For the last 10 years, most laptops have been plastic, gimmicky, and loaded with dozens of pointless buttons and stickers.
This. I don't have the budget for a new Macbook, but everytime in the past couple of years I've wanted to buy a new laptop, I go off to Best Buy, take a look at the plastic, gimmicky touch-screeny windows things they have for sale and end up going to craigslist to buy an almost new Macbook even though it costs a little more (ok sometimes quite a bit more)
Did you not prove the parent comment's point? You were mostly concerned with aesthetics, the case material, keyboard layout, and stickers.
I'm personally not a fan of the vendor lock in with Apple. You can spend similar money and get something that isn't difficult to replace the ram on, with slightly better specs, more disk space, etc. As long as you're cool with a plastic case ;)
Most modern laptops are completely comparable in terms of hardware and software capabilities, so long as you aren't trying to do top-end gaming and super-computing. Administration is not significantly less painful on any one of them.
This machine feels pleasant to use. It doesn't frustrate me or get in my way. (Unless I'm using finder or other awful OS X programs, but I'm not afraid of the terminal, so I just don't use those.)
Because most people can only afford one computer, and if you need a laptop, that will be your only option for gaming. Also it makes LAN parties 1000x more convenient.
If you want a laptop for comfort and convenience, gaming has to be really important to you to justify spending at least that much again on a desktop. It's something else to find money, space, and time to maintain.
And it's not just the investment in money; there's maintenance as well. You don't boot it as often as your daily machine so every time you do, there's bound to be an update waiting.
I quite enjoy playing games on my laptop. I was worried the track pad would be terrible for fps games, but it's fine (though I always rebind right click since that doesn't work well on a Mac trackpad). Why buy a separate machine if the laptop works well?
Plus the changes are toward more battery life not more power. Except for integrated graphics (more pixels) and SSDd (bigger). Many macbook pro are left permanently plugged in.
this is a great machine! or in my case: it was a great machine, sadly there was an accident with a kid and some coke so I bought a late 2015 mac book, which is the worst computer I owned ever (see my review here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12165132 )
hope your mac book air stays with you for a long, long time, I miss mine....
From your review: "I do a lot of presentation so basically the adapter is part of the machine".
If you knew that you need extra sub port all the time - why did you purchase this model? You could have easily get the mba or the retina 13" if you need more ports and longer battery life. I have the retina MacBook and I bought it only to be used as a web dev machine during my travel since I don't need sub ports and I can get 6 hours of work in sublime text + Apache running with no problem.
I think a lot of people who have issues with MacBooks are just not using a correct tool for the work, if you need a work machine with sub ports - don't buy the MacBook in the first place, it's not meant for that.
The guy used to have an MBA, which was not exactly rich with ports either; but the new MB is so crap, that port scarcity is now unsufferable.
The MB is garbage. It's aimed at the Kardashians of this world. I'm starting to think the delay in refreshing other Mac lines is a desperate attempt to coax people into buying MBs which would otherwise go unsold.
Calling something "garbage aimed at the Kardashians" just based on a number of ports and not fitting your usage narrative making you sound like Kardashyan yourself.
My parents use MB daily, it's a perfect machine for browsing Internet and Word work on the go. I don't get the people who go buy a MB knowing that they need more ports and better performance and them starting now complaining, it's not like you expected MB to grow new ports after you purchased it.
What I like about apple laptops and computers is that each of them is aimed at specific work type environment, and when people choose a wrong tool for the job they should blame themselves not the tool.
> I don't get the people who go buy a MB knowing that they need more ports and better performance
The problem is that Apple are selling MBs as the evolution of MBAs (which will never get a Retina upgrade etc etc), when they are clearly in a different category. The MB is overall less powerful and flexible than the MBA was, so a large segment of people "upgrading" is naturally disappointed.
> it's a perfect machine for browsing Internet and Word work on the go
It's a very expensive machine for browsing and Word. The market is literally full of alternatives "for browsing and Word" with same or better specs and better price points. Where the MBA was indisputably the best "thin all-use laptop", the MB is basically an expensive Chromebook with an Apple logo.
yeah, it pretty much was the marketing as the mac book now being like the air (even probably replacing the air), just with retina, better battery lifetime (LOL) and latest generation tech...
should I have done more due diligence - YES (but you know, once your beloved air gets the kids&coke treatment you tend to panic), am I owning now a piece of chunk I can't wait to get rid of (with the hopefully coming soon mac book pro generation) - YES
> The market is literally full of alternatives "for browsing and Word" with same or better specs and better price points.
Not if "specs" includes thickness and weight. At the moment there is one laptop that's thinner, the HP Spectre, and the MacBook has a higher resolution screen, significantly less weight, and better battery life; it's up there on weight, too, excluding convertibles that have a separate keyboard.
> The MB is garbage. It's aimed at the Kardashians of this world.
Umm, YYMV. I am typing this on an MBR. I primarily use it for programming (mainly C++ and Lisp development in Emacs, but I have written two in-house iOS apps with Xcode). It has MS Office on it, though I must admit I mainly use that for docs other people have sent me, though I do use powerpoint. I am not a gamer.
The external adaptor doesn't really support the promised UHD output (it's flakey and unusable at those resolutions so I think your term "garbage" could apply to it) though it does support 1080p. In practice I mostly use it without an external display. The machine is so portable I don't think I could ever go back to a larger machine -- even my kid's MBA seems brobdignagian next to the MBR.
Xcode definitely felt a bit cramped on the small screen, but I'm not a fan of graphical IDEs (or IDEs in general) so that was the least of my concerns. I did most of the code development in Emacs anyway.
I found that in practice I almost never used ports on my MBP. I don't sync my phone to my computer any more; I used the built in MBP SD card reader but discovered I can read from my waterproof camera over wifi so don't miss that. I have a USB A port in my video adaptor but have yet to plug anything into it. I have never been much of a user of removable media.
I use my phone for presentations. I would use the computer but the "garbage" video adaptor is too flakey. Actually the phone is fine.
Oh, and I just checked with my GF who described my buttocks as "tight and cute". So I can confidently say that I do not fit the profile of a Kardashian.
(The Apple product that makes the least sense to me is the iPad...but that's a different discussion).
You should try one of the new 4K monitors that support USB-C. Having a 27" 'retina' display w/power by only plugging in one cable is quite nice. The monitor also provides enough USB3 ports that I haven't felt any lack of connectivity when at my desk.
Thanks, I think I might have to. Unfortunately there are only two (an LG and an ASUS) which are kind of expensive (I'm also...hesitant.. about an LG monitor, but that may not be fair).
USB Type C isn't really baked yet (in the supply chain) so I guess this is part of the price for being on the bleeding edge.
I think Apple would have done better to have added Type C into another MB first, alongside the existing ports. But apart from the external display problem I really do like the MBR.
Yep, it supports USB-C PD. So with the provided usb3 hub on the monitor you get a pseudo docking station and charging support both on top of a highDPI 1920x1080 (or low DPI at up to 4K) monitor in the same single cable connection.
It's bizarre my comment was downrated to 0 points. It's simply my experience, hardly an emotional topic. In fact it's far less inflammatory than the comment to which it responded.
I still use my 2008 white Macbook, running Snow Leopard. The battery is crap, but it stills runs many (older, non-supported) softwares great. I use mostly a couple of Linux machines now. The only thing that keeps me popping the thing open now and again is Ableton Live, but I've been meaning to give Bitwig a shot. So, it might get retired for good soon.
Mine has been relegated to the bin of forgotten hardware at my house. The plastic where your wrists rest keep breaking off and stabbing me. Battery doesn't hold a charge even after being replaced. Slow as a dog and can't get the latest OS updates.
Mid-2007 white MacBook here, 2GB RAM, SSD, on it's third or fourth battery. Running Lion. DVD drive died long ago, plastic on the front split after a couple of years but has been stable ever since. Been used every day of it's life by me and my kids (who were 3 and 1 YO when I bought it). Although now I am the only one who uses it. The main problem now is finding a browser that's supported and updateable - Chrome gave up ages ago, and FF48 is the last version to support Lion. Hates Flash though so I've long uninstalled that.
I still use mine as well. Mostly because SL is OS X done right. It's super stable compared to the newer versions of OS X. I never have to restart it. Of course, the caveats you mentioned are still in play. But I do most work in iTerm2 and Firefox, so it's fine for that.
I have an iMac from 2009 which is totally fine for day to day basic stuff, the kind of usage your average person requires.
I have a 2014 rMBP which is far more than enough for an average user. I use it as my primary development machine and push it pretty hard. Would I like something faster? Sure. But it's not too bad in that capacity.
I also have a 2016 rMB which is more than enough for basic usage and it's not too bad as a development machine. I prefer coding on my MBP but the difference is small enough that I've stopped bringing my work computer home with me.
Long story short: Except for a relatively small group of people with niche needs, people don't need new hardware anymore.
It's not about the need of new hardware, it's about a company selling you 4 years old computer for the price of a 2016 device.
The Iphone 5 is good enough for the job but you wouldn't you buy an Iphone 5 for $800, would you?
The thing is that if you take today a 2012 MBP the last ones that were upgradables you can, for a few hundred buck make it much more powerful than and 2016 MBP
Hmm I'm sorry but this sounds like trying to rationalise blindly the fact that Apple sells old computers. It's irrelevant if they are "fast enough" or not. What about energy savings with each generation? What about graphics performance, where Moore's law is undoubtedly still alive as well (~2x gains in the last generation of GPUs)?
And no, PC sales are not declining because of the slowing down of Moore's law, but obviously because of smartphones and tablets.
The technology is really not there yet. I have been considering changing my setup to a 13.3 light notebook with long battery life + an external GPU, but I'm still waiting on the technology to become mature.
There are no mass-market thunderbolt GPUs with fully-functional mac drivers at this point, are there? I've been looking and at best there are unsupported hacks.
An external Thunderbolt 2 GPU will only run at the equivalent of PCI x4, while Thunderbolt 3 eGPUs will do enough bandwidth to have full GPU performance. eGPU driver support was added to macOS Sierra, so hopefully the new Macbook Pros with USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 will support eGPUs nicely.
This. I regularly drive my 4K monitor at 60hz from my personal rMBP (2013 with dGPU) and work rMBP (2015 without dGPU). Interestingly the first MBP to DP cable I used didn't work, but the second did.
Ports are way too wobbly unless you use your laptop as desktop. I love ability of using 2 external displays with MacBook keyboard and trackpad just right there in the center. But move the computer a centimeter and displays disconnect. Moderately painful!
How many people do you know that don't have a computer?
It's not "obviously" declining because of smartphones and tablets, at least not to me. Pretty much everyone has a computer (in the US), as it doesn't make sense to do many things on your cellphone (like write emails). They just aren't upgrading because they don't need to.
I don't know the age range, but everyone over 40 I know has a computer, so does everyone in and a couple years out of college I know (my age group).
The only people I know who dont have computers are my friends working heavily blue collar jobs. Even most of them have laptop's, only a few don't have anything.
Couple years outta college? People are still using the PC they bought for college probably. I don't know a whole ton of people who went to college anyways.
Agree with this. I live in Australia and work in the building industry. Most of the apprentices and tradesmen I work with, and their tradie friends, don't own computers at home. They'll have a TV, a smartphone, and a maybe games console.
I was absolutely amazed when this no-home-PC thing started catching on, because I just can't image, say, booking a flight on a smartphone. But there is a large cohort that a phone is good enough. We are the minority. I will always have a desktop at home.
Well for me part of booking a flight is choosing which airport to leave from. The last 4 flights i took left from 4 different airports. There's also choosing a day to leave and come back which requires a few searches. I like to open several tabs and flip back and forth quickly to compare flights. I like having a screen where I can see more than a couple flights at a time. Having a keyboard and mouse makes all the difference in the world too.
The company I work for recently (~3 months ago) offered to send our payslips via email, I think I'm the only person on the workshop floor who has this, everyone else still receives theirs as paper copy.
Using a smartphone to do anything other than send short messages and read the web frustrates me to buggery, but for those people who find using a computer frustrating or tedious anyway a smartphone mustn't be much different or even probably a better user experience.
Funny thing about email. Chatted with some 18year old recently. She said she'd get pissed of if she had to check her email now. She probably wouldn't know how.
I have a laptop for programming but otherwise I do pretty much everything else either on my phone or occasionally my iPad. The phone has the advantage of always being in my pocket so as soon as I think of something I can take out my phone and do it, without having to wait to get back to my laptop.
I have a phone for when I don't have any option but to do something when I'm out, and to get notifications of e-mail (plus sms, voice, etc). I love that it's possible to use it for so many things, but I hate actually doing anything meaningful on it. Even on something like a 10" tablet, I feel like I'm limited by the small size and the input options. I usually pull the phone out of my pocket, think about doing something with it, make the decision that whatever needs done can wait, and put it away.
It really isn't irrelevant if a computer is fast enough for the user. Energy savings is great, and gpu performance is great too. But a lot of people just need a computer that is fast enough for what they use it for. And if the programs they use and the websites they frequent perform well on the hardware they have, then it's okay if the computer they have uses old hardware.
Having tried to use a 2012 Macbook Pro with the default spinning rust hard drive, no, it's not fast enough to run OSX. Sure, I can replace the hard drive when ordering it (for close to 5x the retail cost of that style of hard drive), but that doesn't change that the base model is not fast enough to run a modern OS.
I upgraded my friend's 2008 13" MBP from an HDD and 2GB RAM to SSD + 4GB. It went from trash to adequate for everyday use.
I think an Ivy Bridge laptop would still be OK now with some upgrades. It would be hot and have bad battery life compared to Haswell, which was a big upgrade. I still think you would be crazy to spend 1000+ on such an old computer though.
TBH my next computer won't be an Apple laptop unless the next iteration is truly something special. They have gotten too expensive here in Japan.
How's cost of alternatives? Here in Russia, similar Lenovos and others are either unavailable or like $100-200 cheaper, if at all, which is not that much for $1.5k machine.
Bloat may be part of the problem, but I don't believe it to be the whole picture.
As Apple started moving to SSD's, I believe they stopped caring about minimizing disk seeking when considering changes to their virtual memory implementation. I had a Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a spinning-rust hard drive, and was constantly getting beachballs when switching between applications (I had FREE RAM and was getting beachballs!!!).
(Apple's ~2012 virtual memory behavior was a strange beast -- it appears it would page an application's memory out to disk so that it could hang on to some disk cache. This was different than what I had become used to in Linux, which always prioritizes application memory needs above disk cache).
Disabling the pagefile solved the beachballs, but with the downside that when I did run out of RAM, the machine basically ground to a halt. I later upgraded that machine to use an SSD, re-enabled the pagefile, and was back to smooth running.
Is bloat the problem? Possibly. More likely it was shifting priorities (minimizing pagefile access probably just wasn't a priority anymore).
My experience mirrors yours on this front. I have several macs, one of which is an older mac mini with a traditional hard drive, which has become less usable as OS updates come in. However, the moment you replace the traditional drive with an SSD, the OS becomes responsive again.
"Fast enough" creates a lowest common denominator which then becomes the standard to cater to. If technology companies (Apple in this case) made an effort to push technology along, then it'd raise the standard and user experiences would be richer due to allowing programmers to increase computational complexity of their software.
Cost / Benefit ratios are a big part of economics. Historically the computer market has been a bit special because the payoffs of new technology were huge and simultaneously the cost of new technology sharply and steadily declined.
If Apple's customers are not still seeing those big payoffs from new technology then it becomes a game of costs. Changing a product mix every few years has its own costs - as demand for new PCs drops, these costs become harder to justify for an OEM.
It is totally possible that a 5- or 10- year refresh cycle keeps engineering and support costs down enough to be worthwhile if consumers accept the technology meets their needs. New technology will still make it to the end user here, but Apple is not going to do it at any cost - they are masters of profitability.
Of course it's fine to run on old hardware. But apple's brand is decidedly not "it's a few years old but it'll surf the web just fine". That's the core complaint here. Apple sells 4 year old computers in state of the art clothing.
If it's good enough, does it matter if it's old technology?
At what point the energy savings compensate recycling the computer and getting a new one? At what point does the reduced amount of materials warrant dropping a product line and scraping the tooling used to make it?
My MacBook Air is a mid-2012, and will be good for me for at least another year or two. Very likely when it dies I'll replace the Air with a big iPad Pro and be done with having a personal (rather then work) computer altogether.
I bought a mid-grade PC desktop at the beginning of 2012, and I chose every component myself. The only thing I'm missing is USB 3.0 ports at the front of the computer because that's the one thing that has gained popularity in the last 4 years.
There's nothing wrong with 4 year old computers. They are fast enough for many tasks and have some life left in them. The issue is that Apple is pricing them and marketing them as brand new computers. It's true that people are keeping computers longer than they used to, but that doesn't change the fact that Apple is asking new computer money for something that's way more than 50% of the way through its useful life. Anybody trying to sell a 2012 car for the same price as a new car would be laughed out of town, and cars still last quite a bit longer than computers.
Car companies do exactly this! Sometimes they might make slight changes to things like bumpers or lights for fashion's sense, but go down to a Mitsubishi dealership - They're still selling the Lancer that's almost 10 years old. A 2012 car isn't cheap because it's behind in technology, it's cheap because somebody else has driven it around for 4 years.
It's not quite the same with cars though - (and maybe this won't be true going forward, but) there's not really significant savings for the manufacturer in the technology getting cheaper over the years, sure it's cheaper due to scale and as they recover the initial cost of setting up for production - but a lot of the raw components in a laptop just get cheaper.
I bought a Macbook Pro when it came out and still use it today. 1025 battery cycles and counting. However, I want a new laptop, top of the line with the fastest CPU available today. Is that too much to ask? I want to throw money at Apple but they rather sit on their asses than take it.
> Anyone who buys a Macbook Pro today ... will be able to use
> it for the next 3 years without issue. My Macbook Air was
> purchased in 2012 and is still fast enough
Some people may be able to. I really don't think you can say "anyone".
I've had my Air since 2013, and it's really starting to struggle. With Docker, especially.
Uhm, some people are really doing tasks that require more computing horsepower. 4k video editing and rendering, 360 video, etc.
Even more mundanely the 8k textures for Real Solar System on Kerbal Space Program don't even load on my MBP because the GPU RAM is too low for them.
My Hackintosh has a Geforce 980 in it which is leaps and bounds above what I can buy directly from Mac and solves a lot of these problems for me, but it is occasionally finicky and doesn't like to boot up and I wouldn't recommend it to a friend of mine who has an actual dayjob that involves a lot of video editing.
Wow, that's weird -- I distinctly remember reading this in January and coming away feeling great about my 4-year-old MBP that still runs just fine. Totally stuffed the bad parts down the memory hole -- thanks for rightfully calling this out.
As a teenager, I subscribed to MacAddict from 1997-2001. It was very exciting to watch the company transform over this time. Alas, since then my relationship to Apple has evolved dramatically, to the point of more or less despising the company and its manipulations. I am grateful for this journey. It has given me a sharp sense (distaste) for manipulative marketing tactics and branding in general. When my hard drive crashed badly in 2010, I quit for good, jumping over to Ubuntu full time. (More recently I installed Arch, which makes me excited about computers again!)
Anyway, It's completely frustrating to me even my most financially disabled friends will, to this day, look to spend $1200 as much on a Mac laptop or an iPhone when they could get an equally powerful, used machine for $150. A close friend of mine just spent $300 on a used G5 iMac from 2006... I told him not to but he didn't listen. He has had to learn the hard way that the computer is slow, won't accept updates, won't run any new software or drivers, etc. because Apple's branding black magic is that powerful, that it could completely trump the well reasoned advice of someone knowledgable about the subject that you've known for years.
Why do you think it's Mac branding that makes your friends not heed your advice instead of the expectations that you would ask of them more effort than they are willing to expend? Most people are not willing to explore a lifestyle change when purchasing a computer.
It's not unlike the idea they won't learn to sew to save money on clothes, or learn to change their own oil to save car maintenance fees. Was your advice an offer of convenience for them, or an offer of lifestyle conformity?
Well, in the case of my friend who bought the iMac for $300, my advice was "don't buy that computer its not worth $300”. It was solid advice. He just hadn't gotten over the beautiful allure of the thing to see through to its desperate software and hardware situation.
The expectation of effortlessness is all tied up in the marketing. The marketing promises a kind of magic, which I feel is bullshit, a fantasy world where you don't have to think about the clothes, they just appear on your shelf, when in reality, they're actually made by a person, whether that person is your Amish grandmother, a friend, a kid in an Indonesian factory, or you yourself. And someone is going to have to wash them when they're dirty, and fix them when they have holes or do the work of recycling them...
Computers require effort and attention and energy to maintain no matter what, even Macs (especially macs...). If not up front, then somewhere down the line. It's fascinating to live in a time when it's arguably easier to install Linux on a given computer than Mac OS or even Windows. This is new. My advice to people is that learning some user friendly Linux is a good investment of technical energy. It's like buying a used car instead of a brand new one. You could spend $10000 rebuilding that used car before you made a dent in the cost of a new one. For a lot of people, the time it takes to keep a used car working well is worth the trade-off..
BTW, I've had a lot of success hooking people up with old (2011) i5 Thinkpads running Linux and/or Windows. They run great and people really like them. Mine has 16GB of ram in it goes real smooth. I use lots of tabs. Too many tabs. And Bitwig. Bitwig works great on an old thinkpad with Arch!
> more or less despising the company and its manipulations
I will never understand why perfectly normal human beings do this, whether it be against Apple or Google. I have an Apple sticker on my car because I'm proud of where I work. On four separate occasions now Google fans have come up to me after I've parked and tried to convert me to an Android fan or make fun of me for being an "Apple fan," assuming the sticker represents my status as a demagogue for one side. (One guy asked me if I felt inferior for not having root on my phone and I had to resist answering the question honestly, but it would have been really fun and confusing for him.)
My own family gets sheepish and embarrassed when they buy an Android phone because their partisan friends have trained them to think that I'd react explosively to this grievous slight instead of the truth, which is that people should buy what works for them and it's not really any of my business. I don't actively sway people toward Apple products or discourage them from buying what they want. Sometimes a Mac is the answer, and sometimes it isn't. Their purchasing choice has arguably no effect on me personally, and this applies to other things too, like cars. As you're discovering, in general, people don't listen anyway and instead quietly form a negative opinion of you.
Speaking personally, there are things I dislike and like from Apple and there are things I dislike and like from Google. I simply cannot connect with the mindset of red vs. blue, us vs. them, vim-vs-emacs, all-or-nothing that people get frothed up like this about. It's your prerogative to despise Apple and I'm fully supportive of your decision to do so. I'm just saying it strikes me as weird to invest part of your humanity in despising an inanimate entity that creates products as opposed to just not buying the products. I'd say this about people who despise Google, too, and I'm only using that example because it seems like the war of our time (and because you probably carry an Android device, given the market).
Am I the only one who feels like it's just not worth it to hate a company? I don't even hate Comcast, and they've given me plenty of reasons. I don't even hate patent trolls; they've identified a strategy that is legal and shitty and exploit it. That's capitalism. Maybe it's just me and, before you think it's partisan, I felt like this before ever being personally vested. I've just got far better things into which to invest my hatred.
(Only my personal opinion, speaking for me alone.)
Sorry, "not buying products" and otherwise being silent doesn't cut it. There are (were[1]) whole magazine categories that test and criticize consumer products.
[1] In Germany at least some of those magazines were quite good. Haven't read any recently though.
Okay, you've refuted my point, now bring it home and illustrate your point: why doesn't it cut it?
Reviewers are a totally different animal and orthogonal to my point; I'm not arguing that reviews should cease. You're talking to a guy who respects film reviewers individually and recognizes patterns and traits of certain reviewers (like Ebert or Travers or Tom Long, who I dearly miss in retirement -- if I were on the fence for any film in the last decade I read Tom), so I definitely value review as an industry. Hell, Broadway might argue review is an essential part of the industry, I reckon, since there are many people who wait for the Times to review a play before buying tickets.
You're conflating two issues: tribalism, and genuine consumer grievances.
I don't despise Apple or Google, and my general approach is "Use it if it works reliably and is useful." I'm not particularly tribal, in that sense.
However, I do despise MS, because in my experience the software is absolute crapware and full of avoidable bugs. It has literally wasted days of my life. And I know I'm hardly unique.
In the general case, people despise corporations for the same reasons they despise people: if someone lies to you, rips you off, wastes your time, or makes promises and then doesn't deliver, you'd be a fool to respect them.
Tribalism is only half the story. The rest is that corporations make an implicit - non-legal, but still heavily implied - contract when they create consumer relationships.
Apple used to be very good at this. There was an implied value proposition: "Expensive, but beautiful, original, inventive, and outstanding" and Apple did a competent job of delivering on it.
Recently Apple has become noticeably less good at it.
You can dismiss Android fanboys for tribalism, and that's a fair point.
But it's a very bad idea for a corporation to ignore customer satisfaction, and to assume that its deliverables will never change the perceived value of the social contract it makes with consumers.
I will still help my friends install Mac OS on their computer if that's what they need, or even help them get a good deal on a Mac if I can. I'm not trying to convert people to my way of life, but I do share what I know and value to anyone willing. Until recently I suggested Apple products to people as being easy to use for non techie people. I don't do this anymore because of how Apple has been abusing it's power, e.g. deleting people's music, imposing their cloud services, their development tools, censoring GPL libraries from their store, paying artists crap... At some point enough is enough. It's perfectly valid for me to feel anger towards what is essentially a techno-religious organisation gone corrupt. I'm angry and sad at the corruption of any party or religion. Having values, feeling passionately about things, these don't make me partisan, it means I'm alive, my heart is beating and my soul is kicking.
I don't "hate Apple" because I'm partisan, I'm frustrated more generally at a whole bundle of abuses and orthodoxies of the religion of mass marketing, and to put it bluntly am frightened about the perpetuation of ignorance, put forth for short term profit, suffocating the grass roots of human knowledge as we speed blindly into an era of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and genetically modified organisms.
> A close friend of mine just spent $300 on a used G5 iMac from 2006... I told him not to but he didn't listen. He has had to learn the hard way that the computer is slow, won't accept updates, won't run any new software or drivers
Ubuntu Mate 16.04 works on PowerPC Macs, and will keep the machine alive for a few years if need be. It's much slower than OS X 10.5.8, though, at least on my iMac G4.
Yup, Marco's take on this is a good one. (I bought a 2012 MBP in late 2015 for many of those reasons.)
One thing that is often overlooked is that the trackpad click is much better on the 2012 than on the Force Touch models. There is a really satisfying click, mostly because it has so much more room to travel. That was a big part of my decision to stick with the 2012 over any 2015 MBP or MacBook models. I feel about the 2012 MBP Trackpad the same way some folks feel about a Model M or Das Keyboard.
And personally, I think that we passed the point of adequate specs for most purposes 8 years ago.
I have two MBPs. One is a 2008 that is beat to hell at this point but still functions pretty darn well with an SSD and maxed out RAM. It's good enough I've been able to do most day-to-day development with it and audio production up through this summer. If it were effectively invulnerable and weren't eventually going to stop receiving OS updates (or if security/compatibility weren't a concern), I could conceive of using it indefinitely for most work.
I also have a 2012 that is still adequate (though, weirdly, sometimes worse in terms of locking up, not sure if that's the later version of OS X or no SSD). I bought it not because I needed anything newer, but because I didn't want to be stuck searching for a replacement when the 2008 fails. And perhaps interestingly, I bought it used because Apple has decided to no longer offer a 15" model with a matte screen that's upgradable anymore.
Great article, and one more point: The weight and terrible screen resolution are not show-stoppers for people like me who mostly use their Mac on a desk, with an external display. (Mine is actually a 2012 Air, but I barely move it and can absolutely relate to happy cMBP owners.)
We've been pretty loyal buying Macs, but at this point we just cannot justify it anymore. We had a brief flirtation with giving people iPads instead of PCs, and that is better from a support / update point of view. But, the desire for a "real computer" is pretty strong with the generation of people we have on staff. At this point, I'm reading up on Chrome books and Chrome boxes to see how simple IT things (e.g. network login, server storage) are managed and can we use them with local not cloud storage[1]. We might do more Win 10, but Microsoft sure isn't making it easy with their OS. I guess the Enterprise edition might be ok.
Creative arts will probably always be Mac, but we are an all Adobe institution after the Final Cut Pro X fiasco so even that is not a certainty.
1) I have to obey a couple of very un-fun local laws and will buy old machines rather than deal with problems in that area
We have a local law that talks about research data[1] and its movement. The problem is if some security issue happens in the cloud, it is likely to leak documents and I am a bit worried about the wording as it applies to liability. Storing them locally and have a data breach would be problematic, but at least defensible
1) Basically, no data may be shared unless approved by a local institution. Its legacy from other groups taking the data we generate and writing grants to get money that never benefits the local people or institutions. A long, long story that someone should write a book on.
I'm not writing it. When I finally leave, I won't be back (all my family has long moved away) and it will probably take a bit to decompress. Not as much as the first time, but I had to deal with politicians then and I really don't think it helped my mental health. I still have a box of papers from that era and revisiting that for a book would not be a good thing.
I had questions answered by a local authority. Data breach would be interesting because it would go federal pretty quick.
The software stability in the California-series of OSX / macOS is going down, and we aren't really seeing a major difference between Windows 7 and OS X. Plus, they keep changing how things work in every release and cutting support for hardware earlier relative to when they last sold it. When we upgrade in the next 6 months to Windows 10, then I might see a reverse.
or it could be the fact that you don't have to install an antivirus. I have a Dell at work and the company policy is to have mcAfee installed. It prevents a lot of stuff from working (need to use virtual box 4 for example)
I have McAfee on my work Macbook, but I don't have an opinion on whether it's "less broken". I used a Windows 7 Thinkpad before the Macbook (also with McAfee), and didn't notice McAfee at all in these 3 years. In 2 years on the Mac, I noticed one interesting UI bug where the taskbar icon says "Your Mac is Not Secure", but when you click on it to open the main UI, the window will say "Your Mac is Secure", and the taskbar icon then agrees with the main window from that point on. Just a glitch, nothing that I would consider noticably broken.
Sorry, can you elaborate on why you can't justify buying Macs anymore? It sounds like you're interested in local storage and you're okay with buying old machines if it means you don't deal with cloud, so how come Macs don't fall under this?
I cannot justify them because they are old and we keep computers for a long time. If we buy an old computer now, its useful lifetime is reduced. We want new, always. The local storage is a requirement for new computers. The only Mac we will purchase currently is the MacBook. If MacRumors says don't buy then we don't buy.
Ok, not great and definitely under protest (I guess I scream at the ceiling). At some point, we might need to go to Win 10 and a built PC for Adobe. Might be good training for a PC Hardware class.
Its one year closer to being EOL, plus Apple has been on a bit of a no software support for older models streak. The money needs to stretch as far as possible, we're not rich.
That streak of low/no support started around the time I was born. Their support of old hardware is better now than ever imho. It's a great time to own an old Mac as even the new ones are old, so you don't pay the penalty of having to upgrade which you did 5-10 years ago.
Running on the OS they shipped with or being updated? I recall hardware moving fast and machines becoming old quickly. Chuck Yager et al were the sort of software I was using at that stage, so take my memory with a grain of salt.
They want laptop or desktop form factor. "Those are real computers and I need a real computer for my work." Believe me, I was going to get the Carpentry class to build nice stands with monitors and keyboard holders. It would have been epic.
Surface might be close, and we haven't bought an iPad Pro yet.
> We had a brief flirtation with giving people iPads instead of PCs, and that is better from a support / update point of view. But, the desire for a "real computer" is pretty strong with the generation of people we have on staff.
That's an odd way to put it, as if your people are being eccentric for expecting fully-functional computers. iPads have their uses, but they're not at all comparable for many tasks. It's as if you'd tried offering people motor scooters as company cars, and were surprised when they wanted "real vehicles."
Well, when those who we gave iPads literally[1] don't use anything but Outlook, a web browser, and Word with the weekly foray into Excel for time sheets, one might be forgiven for wondering if a Honda might be more suitable than a F-350.
Try transferring information between the apps you cited on an iPad and compare that to the experience on a real computer. They are in different leagues still unfortunately.
Other than mail attachments, the group of possible iPad users did not transfer data between apps as a use case. I did do my research and we hit psychological not functional reasons.
I do agree with the general direction of your comment. For example, The business office would not be a place to even consider iPads. 27" iMacs and 34" LG 21x9 monitors are much appreciated by that crowd. Spreadsheet lovers love 21x9 displays.
I would argue that adding an attachment to an email reply is still a second or third class experience on iOS. You have to figure out how to get your app containing the file to copy the file to the clipboard, which is extremely inconsistent and undiscoverable between different apps. The problem is even worse for non-technical users that struggle to distinguish between an undocumented long-press and an undocumented double tap (don't even get me started on the wording behind "share to... Clipboard"). I really can't wait for the day when they solve this problem.
Did you find anything interesting about Chromebooks?
I was also checking on them, but the management of them always ended up on needing Google Apps for Work and getting licenses for their management. It looks like it is impossible to have them plugged into on-site software, independent of Google...
The problem with Chromebooks is not that they do not run desktop applications. That's actually an advantage from certain point of view.
The problem is that the machine and user provisioning is dependent on Google. I want to be able to load the machine with certificates, VPN profiles, Wi-Fi settings, proxy settings, IdM configuration, directory info, etc independently from Google. Imagine, if Google servers ceased to exists tomorrow: the machines and all the provisioning processes must still work, as if nothing happened. Yes, not paying per device/per month for quasi-monopoly service is also desirable.
which you could do with just about any stripped-down linux distro. Heck, in gentoo, you could build it all and deploy a pre-built/configured tarball extracted to the root directory on every client machine you controlled.
none of which you seek is exclusive to ChromeOS, except the default lack of native desktop apps.
I can do it with Windows, OSX and random Linux distribution (that's maintained by someone else than me) on PC hardware too.
Why should then I waste time with third party distributions for Chromebook, with users getting big scary warning at boot time about firmware signature? Or even worse, being forced to maintain my own distribution, with the same big scary warning? (CentOS/Fedora do pass the Secure Boot check, they are signed).
Chromebooks are a very good idea if you a) have mostly web applications (or a occasional RDP/Citrix one) and b) you don't mind being forced into Google services. Currently, even companies that are in a) situation may be better off with the classic Windows+AD+Group policies solution, if they have any reason why not go for b).
I just flash the firmware for my users. then there's nothing but a quick bootup, and no "scary warning". take a trip to johnlewis.ie to download the tiny firmware updater. you might surprise yourself on how well you do.
If you use linux in an IT environment, you are likely maintaining your own package list and configurations anyway. spending 4 minutes untarring an entire distribution to a chromebook post-firmware-flash is pretty painless. Spending 15 minutes installing GalliumOS is brain-dead simple, should you not have the sysadmin skills.
Chromebooks are a very good idea if you want a cheap computer that can run a full desktop stack. They can even run Windows, should you enjoy dark patterns in your operating system choice.
I just DJ'd a wedding on a refurbished Acer Chromebook that I got for about $130 and is several years old. Uses Google Play Music for it's activity playlists and the bride's playlist and I was good to go. Would be nice if I could cross-fade but I'm an amateur and don't have the right equipment.
I'm continually impressed how good Chromebooks are in terms of battery life, portability, and utility. Just wish it was easier to run desktop apps on it.
Most people don't have Adobe products on their desktop. We teach and use those products, but I'm not a psycho who says everyone needs the exact same machine. Hated that crap when I was doing development, and am not going to pull that stunt as a Sys Admin. We also have a lab GIS machines that are tricked out and cannot be replaced with anything else.
Would anyone care if Lenovo or Dell was selling outdated computers? Hell, they probably are. Do we have different expectations for Apple? Is it because they are more of a luxury brand? Why does Apple have an obligation to update their hardware every X years?
Also from what I have seen prices of MacBooks seem to have been going down quite a bit.
You certainly can buy an outdated Thinkpad, but the lines are refreshed often. Literally from the first Google result:
> At CES 2016, Lenovo announced a massive overhaul of its ThinkPad line. In addition to unveiling new ThinkPad X1 notebooks, tablets and convertibles, Lenovo also unveiled refreshes to its X, T and L series ThinkPad as well as a new ThinkPad 13. Except the ThinkPad 13, which comes with options for either Windows or Chrome operating systems, all the ThinkPad models unveiled come with Intel's sixth generation Skylake processor, giving them a boost in performance and battery life.
I just looked at some bargain basement Dell desktops and laptops (in the ~$400 range) because your comment made me curious. Both desktops and laptops come with Intel N3000-series processors, which were released last year.
So no, Dell isn't selling anything that is nearly as outdated as what Apple is selling, for substantially more money.
I have half a dozen desktop PCs from 2000-4 in use in my house. I had to update the graphics card, but a Core2-Dou at 3 GHz with a decent graphics card will run virtually every program in existence. Recently I went from 2.4GHz processor to 3GHz processors, 15 bucks on ebay ;-)
I don't get the obsession with notebooks. Why do I want to spend 4X the amount of money for something that last 4 years if I am lucky. For the <1% of time I am not working from my desk? In meeting I prefer people NOT to bring a notebook, this way they pay attention and I can get them out of the room and back to work faster.
I think more and more people are not working at the same desk everyday (people working at coffeeshops or traveling) or don't have space for a desktop/don't want the extra stuff that is required for a desktop if they are living in a small apartment
Also, in companies, devices are usually swapped out after a fixed period anyway (3 years at my workplace). When you manage a lot of devices, the increased failure rates near the end of the devices' life cycle can really hurt, so it makes sense to replace devices early and sell the used devices in bulk for a few bucks, hopefully after wiping the drives. ;)
And given that you swap out the employee computers well before they break down, the shorter lifetime of notebooks doesn't matter. What matters is that your employee can take her device to a meeting room, or to a customer site.
Many people who are asking or hoping for an update to the non-Retina MBP are missing an important point. Apple already has released an update to it with newer CPUs, and better screen, and thinner, it's the Retina MBP.
The non-Retina MBP is effectively discontinued because it's largely replaced by the Retina version, and has been for many years.
They still sell the non-Retina MBP (in one size only, no 15") just for few people that absolutely need a built-in optical drive in their MBP for some specific reason.
The non-Retina MBP is not meant for the general public. If you walk into an Apple Store without knowing anything, the chances of you walking out with one is less than 1%, it's hard to find and store employees will recommend something better for your needs.
> They still sell the non-Retina MBP (in one size only, no 15") just for few people that absolutely need a built-in optical drive in their MBP for some specific reason.
The key here is "built in," because Apple also sells a USB external optical drive. In fact a 13" retina MBP + USB optical drive is lighter than the 13" non-retina MBP by itself.
Actually there are a few reasons people still buy the old MBP, but price is probably the main one.
I don't think Apple care about their desktop OS and hardware anymore. It has been stagnating for a while already. I suppose recent rise of stats for global Linux usage can indicate OS X refugees who are fed up with that stagnation.
I didn't read a single technology or feature any ultra modern computer has that the 4 years old MBP doesn't have, nor about anything you can't do on it any newer computer does.
People are interpreting "PCs are extremely good and capable now" as "PC is dead".
Skylake supports HEVC (H.265) codec making it so much more battery efficient to encode and decode video [1]. Smaller battery consumption also means less heating issues, so that's what keeps me excited about "ultra modern" computers that none of the MBPs has.
> Smaller battery consumption also means less heating issues
This is the main thing for me - I'm still using a 2012 rMBP as my main machine, and I have no complaints about performance except often when you try to make the most of the performance it's capable of, it overheats and throttles down. Especially a problem in the summer.
Some people point to the limited improvements in Skylake and Broadwell as an argument why it doesn't matter that Mac updates have faltered. I respectfully disagree.
Look at the 12" Macbook. This, to me, is just too much compromise. Only one port and it's USB-C and it's the power?? Compare this to the healthy amount of ports on the HP Spectre in what is still a small form factor. Add in the terrible (IMHO) keyboard, pointless Force Touch and lack of tactile feedback on the trackpad.
Yet the Macbook Air remains with a relatively crappy display. For year it was suggested it wasn't economical/possible to add a retina display to this form factor. The Macbook is proof to the contrary.
Plus with the 12" Macbook, 13" Retina MBP and 11" and 13" Macbook Airs, it seems clear that not all these SKUs are going to survive.
I have a 2011 13" Macbook Air as my personal laptop. At the time I considered it to be about perfect in terms of portability and power.
But the design is getting pretty long in the tooth now. Crappy (relatively) display. Look at the Dell XPS 13 and 15s as inspiration. For one, they have really thin bezels.
The Mac Pro? Introduced with much fanfare 3 years ago and hasn't been updated since.
Mac mini? Coming up on 2 years without an update. And we lost the quad core options.
This all comes as Apple has pushed the iPad Pro as a laptop replacement.
My point is that with the Apple ecosystem (and many others) there's a halo effect. People buy into part of it based on the complete range, regardless of whether or ot they'll buy into the rest. They have the option.
The sense I get from Apple is they're no longer interested in the PC/laptop segments. They seem to no longer care about power users even though power users are influencers.
Also, it seems like the days of only horrible trackpads on PCs might finally be over. At least it seems like some models might have decent trackpads.
Can Apple really think tablets are the future? Maybe they aren't but we're a long way from that. The UX on an iPad Pro with a keyboard is as terrible as Steve Jobs used to say it was (Jobs famously called touchscreens with keyboards terrible).
So even if Apple does update their lineup later this year I'm not sure I'm going to buy in because the writing seems to be on the wall.
At this point a Dell XPS 13 or 15 seems like the way to go.
"Mac mini? Coming up on 2 years without an update. And we lost the quad core options."
Also, they dramatically reduced its utility by removing the optical drive.
It is stupefying that you cannot buy a mac mini with an optical drive. It's ridiculous. It takes most of the interesting use-cases off the table and makes many other use-cases a pain in the ass.
I would have kept buying mac minis, continuously, every 3-4 years, forever. Instead, I bought two of the fastest/latest ones with optical drive and that's all I'll ever have.
I bought my rMBP in late 2014. At the time, I just needed a laptop, Windows or otherwise as I mainly use Linux. Other than the rMBP, every laptop that I could physically get my hands on was flimsy junk. The keyboards flexed, that plastic around the screen flexed, the screen was not steady in the open position. Even my workstation (Lenovo w530) for work is a hunk of flimsy plastic. It's just crazy.
Maybe things are different now? Or maybe I didn't get my hands on some better ones, but how can companies sell so much junk?
It's obviously all subjective. Personally, compared to Lenovo, I find MacBookPro keyboards to be "junk". I also don't want a glossy glass-covered screen, a glued-in battery or a heavy dent-prone radio-attenuating metal case. Each to his/her own.
Can you explain "more effective"? The 2016 Thinkpad X1 Carbon is significantly lighter than any MBP and still allows a user to replace the battery using a screwdriver - they are consumables after all.
446 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadIts surprising because the mac + ios system is such a powerful combination. With MS at least trying lately with their pen enabled devices, bash on windows, and general lack of complete disdain for customers, they may be getting ready to eat Apple's lunch.
Compare that with 4 year old laptops, little real innovation in mac os (the latest I can recall is implementing Windows 8's window system for full screen and making dev's lives harder with all the security changes in el cap) and it starts to make you wonder.
Not saying Windows is better than Mac, just wish Apple would stop pulling an MS and actually try with their OS.
Yes, the iPhone delivers the lion's share of revenue, but the Mac is still an important product category.
To me, the problem seems to be one of focus. The extreme centralisation that Apple inherited from the Jobs era means that, when the leadership is focussed on a particular product or product category, be it the iPhone, the Apple Watch, or a new service like Apple Music, then progress in all other areas grinds to a halt.
I can understand that Apple wants to avoid the Microsoft problem of having multiple, independent business units that end up distrusting and working against one another, but the complete opposite situation isn't healthy either. A company of Apple's size and means should be able to do more than one thing at once.
A few years ago, Apple had a perfect opportunity to finally break the Mac out of its 5-10% niche of the PC market. Windows 8 was a dud, while Apple's brand and reputation were at their zenith, and their hardware had a huge edge in terms of quality and aesthetics over anything other PC vendors were putting out. The time was right for a huge push of the Mac. But they didn't do it.
Perhaps it was absent mindedness. Perhaps it was a lingering fear of taking on Microsoft in their own territory. Perhaps they genuinely believed the PC/laptop market was going to be disappear and be replaced by tablet computers. But for whatever reason, they blew their chance. And if I was an Apple shareholder, I'd be pissed about it.
It's not that Apple doesn't play in these markets. The Mac mini is their offering for the mid-range, for example, and the iMac and Mac Pro are for the high-end desktop market. But as the article points out, they have left these products without updates for years, at precisely the moment they should have been capitalising on their brand momentum and the rest of the industry's problems.
Why haven't Apple made a decent docking solution yet?
Except for the whole Windows 10 malware fiasco. They just couldn't help themselves it seems..
Would have probably upgraded all the computers I manage if they hadn't been such dicks about it. I'm sure they'll find new and interesting ways to break Windows 7 out of spite now but it is what it is.
Its surprising because the mac + ios system is such a powerful combination. With MS at least trying lately with their pen enabled devices, bash on windows, and general lack of complete disdain for customers, they may be getting ready to eat Apple's lunch.
Compare that with 4 year old laptops, little real innovation in mac os (the latest I can recall is implementing Windows 8's window system for full screen and making dev's lives harder with all the security changes in el cap) and it starts to make you wonder.
Not saying Windows is better than Mac, just wish Apple would stop pulling an MS and actually try with their OS.
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/01/12/4q15-pc-sales/
So, my guess would be that their replacement hardware isn't ready. Follow-up question is: why is the hardware not ready?
Possible answers (with varying degrees of realism) include:
- they don't think they need it yet.
- they wanted to have it ready, but hit some snag designing or producing it.
- they are designing their own ARM CPUs, and want some more room to ensure that they will be faster than the old hardware.
- they are designing their own ARM CPUs, and hit snags doing so.
I would think it is one of the first two, but it would be more interesting if it were one of the last two.
* They have issue getting USB-C/Thunderbolt 3.1 right, power usage wise
* They are trying to incorporate TouchID, which requires custom chip like in iPhone, such chip takes time
* They want P3 extended sRGB for the retina screen but has issue with supplier.
* They are building a new trackpad that can support Apple Pencil, and it takes time.
* They have move majority of Mac hardware people to focus on ARM chip based Mac.
* They have a brand new overhaul design, but Johnny Ive is too busy with flagship building
* They are teaching customers that you only need to buy a new Mac every 5 years.
But there is no excuse for Apple not to make an interim upgrade with whatever new generation of Intel CPU.
/s
My iPad collects dust, only modern apple products I regret buying.
Never found a decent use case for the thing. Dad loves it though.
The quote from the article is bogus:
>People that buy Apple products do so because they want the best; in hardware terms, at least
No, people buy them for the brand/perceived lifestyle/design/MacOS. Only the professionals by it for the "best hardware", the majority of their customers doesn't care, they just assume that the hardware is fine.
The majority of Apples customer will NEVER use their laptop for other than browsing, email and light word processing and for that purpose it's absolutely fine. In fact it's overkill.
Even for a person like me that do Python/Django development, it's still a fine laptop and it will continue to be fine for a long time.
It's a little expensive though. It seems like the price should have come down a little by now.
Honestly there's nothing wrong with the current line of Apple hardware, in terms of performance (and excluding the Mac Pro, which doesn't make any sense at all, given it's target audience)
Apple is failing the professional market significantly, and not just in hardware. They've also been killing off their pro software offerings. It's making a lot of us very uneasy.
They design for people who have the most money, who pay them most often and the ones there are the most.
Some bloke wanting 16gb of ram doesn't meet that criteria and never will.
Hell, when it first came out the Mac Pro was aimed almost above most professionals needs. A solid desktop with 32gb ram and a top end GPU would more than suffice for most professionals in graphics, development, and data analysis.
Besides, even if they were not targeting professionals, they would still be failing that market. Targeting a market is not a prerequisite for being judged suitable for a market.
The bigger issue I have is with the lack of attention to hardware and core OS issues. I'm not sure if they are just distracted building the new iCar or what, but all I want for them to do is to ship a reliable version of OS X (like they have historically) and to ship solid hardware that isn't 3+ years old. The other options (PC, Linux) are not viable alternatives yet for creative industries (in my opinion).
I may suffer from a lack of nannying instincts that make these sort of hyperbolic assertions hard to swallow. Is it a common impulse to want to save all those poor people from themselves for no particular reason? If they "don't know any better", it's pretty clear they don't have a personal reason to care, and this entire sentiment becomes rather condescending in that light.
I'm using a Macbook Pro Retina that I got in the 2013 refresh cycle, and if it were to get stolen tomorrow I'd buy a Windows PC to replace it because buying essentially the same laptop three years later for the same price makes no sense when the rest of the industry has moved on a lot more. As the "tech guy" in my extended family and friends group, a lot of people come to me for laptop-buying advice, and I haven't been able to recommend anything Apple in over a year.
A new pair of jeans isn't going to have some amazing new development compared to the pair you had 25 years ago. Same YKK zipper, etc.
Do you really think a new Mac is like a 20 year old graphing calculator? How about an iPhone or iPad? Nokia phone? Am radio? Is a Tesla different from a Ford model T?
For most people, buying a new computer is something you do when your old one breaks. I know Apple cultivates itself as a "professional's brand" but that's not really the case anymore. Every 18 year old with a pocket full of graduation money next to her iPhone grabs a new Mac, and any Mac she grabs will perform a vast majority of the tasks she needs.
The real question is not "why does Apple still sell.." It's "why do people still buy ...?"
Answer: because it works.
People buy because they don't know any better. Wait until every new Mac in the fall has USB C connectors.
I currently have two apple laptops, an old macbook that came with Tiger and use it to test beta versions of OSX. It's running El Capitan right now but is almost unusable.
My main computer is a rMBP that came with Lion. It worked better (faster, snappier) with Mountain Lion than it does with El Capitan.
There was just one dud of an OS in there (Mavericks? I think) where the machine would just bog down over the week and I had to reboot it every 2 weeks just to regain performance. That was improved with the next release, and now on El Cap I only ever reboot for security updates (two months or so of uptime)
OS X does tend to get more RAM-hungry with each version though, so I recommend everyone to max out the RAM when they can.
It seemed was a time in the history of OS X (up through Snow Leopard) where the reverse was true, and it's certainly not true that the OS must become less efficient with each iteration.
Why are you introducing an irrelevant tangent into the conversation? I have an old Dell in my closest that has Linux on it. But once again, that's irrelevant to this conversation.
The computer you're running is 6 years old. Apple doesn't sell it anymore. It's also possible to replace the HDD with a new SSD.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+EMC+2389+H...
Even so, most people would use your 2010 iMac with much satisfaction.
Oculus won't support any Macs because the hardware isn't that good:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/4/11159700/oculus-rift-mac-su...
Apparently not:
>Oculus won't support any Macs because the hardware isn't that good
Apple sells expensive computers. Customers are not buying cutting edge hardware, they're buying middling hardware that is designed to work with the specific operating system.
I dual boot Windows 10 even Windows 8/8.1 my 17 inch Macbook Pro 8,3 even with 2.3GHz i7 CPU 8GB RAM and 512 SSD is like a hair dryer fans on constantly never stopping but not when using OS X.
It's fine with Yosemite 10.10.5 but I am hesitant to upgrade to El Capitan 10.11.6 anytime soon. I may even downgrade to Win 7 if I can but I hear MS is insistent on people using Win 10 even if they will not push it out you can still get it.
If you look at Apple's product releases over the years, and with overlapping products, you can really see Apple market research at work. iPad Pro 9.7 vs iPad Pro vs iPad 9.7. How many people want pro/not-pro, how many people want pencil/not-pencil, how many people want big/little. One of the Apple product managers said "I survey customers by counting how much money they will give me for a feature." His point was that customer surveys of people who aren't buying are aspirational, but what people actually pay for, that is actionable.
The question is no doubt being pondered, "If we offered a retina MBP with a built in optical drive, how many people might buy it?" The tooling of the body cavity its clearly an investment that you don't make for less than a million or so machines.
But I agree that the fundamental question is flawed, there is no reason to "upgrade" a product that is meeting all of its customer requirements. But customers asking the question suggests that requirements may have shifted.
As a recent high school grad (Class of 2015), this resonates with me. A bunch of my classmates (Classes of 2014-16) bought Macbooks/MBA/MBP for college. For the vast majority of them, their Mac was a non-essential splurge. Their use cases corresponded with Chromebooks (available for < 1/2 the price of their purchased Mac) quite well.
A major reason why so many of my classmates bought Macs is because my high school handed out the lowest-end, 11" MBA to every student. We all got indoctrinated into the Mac world.
The business cycle continues!
I won't pay $2000 for a laptop from Apple that has these things already soldered in.
In the end I still couldn't justify it as I want an I7 which they no longer sell with the ability to add ram and SSD.
You can still buy the 2012 Macbook Pro with an i7. You must BTO:
13-inch MacBook Pro
http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MD101L...Cost is $1249. Bring your own RAM and SSD to upgrade as desired.
I usually look on EBay for a new one, and $700-$800 (with no tax) is a price point that I'd be willing to pay. I've never seen a new i7, though.
At $1300 (with tax), I could get a pretty nice Thinkpad or Dell Precision with quad core 6th gen Intel and still use the ram and SSD.
Adding a channel for using up last-gen stock has, after all, been stated as the main reason for the existence of the iPod Touch.
Their other products should have been updated by now. Especially the Mac Pro and Mac Mini. And they've been skimping on the graphics card for lower end models. The price/performance has been very frustrating as you can get a good (e.g. Alienware) desktop with the same high end graphics as the high end iMac but for the same price as the low end model now.
Their laptops are still good even at the price, but the rest of the line could be much better.
[1] http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/56968e64c08a80492c8...
[2] http://www.anandtech.com/show/10183/intels-tick-tock-seeming...
It seems like Apple is hoping the consumer won't notice and still buy the brand as though it's a designer item and not electronics. I suspect that this is not the primary motivation for their current lack of new tech. I think that the largest part for this regression from the cutting edge is a consequence of no longer having Steve Jobs pushing every part of the company for its utmost.
Apple, when you anthropomorphize the actions of the company as a whole, comes off as arrogant. They had earned this by actually delivering the best you could buy. The best laptops, the best phones, the best music players, the best tablets. With the exception of tablets, this is no longer true, in any category (not even phones). And that is the issue.
Not whether the device is still good enough. It ought to be the best, because that was what we came to expect from Apple. The premium ought to be a no-brainer because you get what you pay for. It isn't like that anymore and if you're a fan of Apple (and I have been since the Apple IIe) then you really wish it were.
If I can only expect to get 3 years of use from a laptop, that's pretty disappointing. Especially one that starts at $1300. Or $1550 if you want the warranty to actually cover it for that period.
Also it's not my primary work tool. If your company wants to buy you one, great, but spending my personal hobby budget on outdated gear is a harder sell.
And yes, $43/month over 3 years is a lot of money. $1550, in fact. Breaking it down like that to make it feel like a smaller number is a shitty trick that only works because we have bad instincts at math.
If this thing ever dies on me I'm just going to switch to Ubuntu.
You are in for a long wait. I can't imagine they'll ever release that size again. Apple's definitely shifting quickly to the 2 or 3 options that cover 95% of the market.
If you want the absolute screen size: indeed, I doubt there will be another. But if it's all about the pixels, you can already do better than the 17.
No matter how good your eyes are, you can only go so small without stuff becoming blurry. Personally 15"/1080p is about as small as I can go without text becoming unreadable without HiDPI scaling, and some of my friends complain about reading text on my laptop as it is.
So, for me, switching to a higher-DPI screen is not an option since it just means a higher cost, awful blur for the many applications that don't support DPI scaling, and somewhere between no and very diminished benefits. At the same time I'd never want to give up on all the extra screen real estate so 17" (or bigger!) would inevitably be the only option for me.
Also, preference and I'm not a huge fan of being so loyal to one company that they dictate my preferences. Been s pretty loyal Apple customer for laptop, phone, wife's computer, parents and iMac for since about 2005-2006. Between things like reducing their product line, not updating machines, not letting me set my own DNS on my phone and making political statements via their software the luster has worn off quite a bit.
For example, my tolerance for small text at 1:1 is about 160 dpi (4K on a 27" monitor), which is much lower than the 220 dpi of your Retina 15. Having said that, my eyes would have a better chance of tolerating the same 2880x1800 resolution on a 17" monitor at 200dpi.
At some point, that extra resolution is going to get wasted on a small screen if you're more interested in real estate over crispy retina text. I have a 4K 15.6" laptop, and there's no way in hell I could tolerate it at 1:1 with my aging eyes.
Anyone who buys a MacBook Pro today, before whenever it is the line gets updated, will be happy with it, which is of course a good thing. (Outside of being hit by hardware issues or something)
When the line is updated, you probably won't notice a performance difference between the current model and whatever the next one is. The time of huge improvements with every processor upgrade has long since past, the RAM speed will not be that much different and it will be using solid state storage at again about the same speed as the current model. This is why people will keep their hardware longer.
A lot of hardware upgrades are now coming from when the hardware no longer supports the latest OS. Sierra will work with MacBooks going back to 2009, and they had upgradable RAM and storage so even those laptops will be able to run the latest OS with performance that is acceptable to most people.
All of this means that Apple is going to have a slower cycle for hardware bumps since the cost of a rapid cycle probably doesn't bring the revenue spike it used to.
But the real upgrade would be to models that either already had integrated graphics (and now will have much faster integrated graphics), or that had GPUs (and with the new pascal/polaris generations, will likely have much faster and less power hungry GPUs).
You might also notice improvements in SSDs, though I'm skeptical that despite large relative improvements most workloads really benefit much - after all, any semi decent SSD will have largely moved most bottlenecks out of the I/O subsystem, and then it really won't matter much if you reduce those last few milliseconds of latency even further. Some people will notice, however, and what you will notice is that you don't need to choose between fast or large as much anymore - a 1TB ssd is pretty affordable, and smaller SSDs might even be classified as "cheap" by macbook standards.
Still, I last updated (my non-mac laptop) just after haswell was released, and discounting SSD size and GPU, modern laptops seem very unattractive. Due to the glass screen fetish nowadays; most are heavier and more fragile to boot - my 13-inch, more than 3-year old laptop weighs 929g, and the battery still lasts many hours. It's fallen a few times and has a few nasty scratches and one nicked corner, but... upgrades still seem kind of pointless. Are you really going to upgrade for a crappy-but-less crappy iGFX or a larger SSD?
So when software support gets phased out, you might be able to get a few extra years on Linux if you wish to do so.
Heat is an issue, but with upgraded RAM and a SSD, it's gets the job done.
Mainly, I mostly use it as an Ubuntu machine at this point.
It kind of depresses me that three years is considered a long lifetime for a computer.
The author of the article was writing about non-retina MBPs, which are still for sale.
A mid-2015 15" rMBP purchased today is running a two-year-old processor from a three-year-old architecture. And the GPU, should you get the discrete GPU option, is from a four-year-old architecture (it's a GCN 1.0 part).
Although if the Broadwell parts weren't really an upgrade, then it does not matter. The old ATI part would be more annoying.
I also kind of understand why Apple didn't go with Skylake yet. Seeing all the problems with power management states in Linux and Windows land, it looks like they decided to skip this generation until that gets fixed.
It can probably last over ten years for the average person, if good care is taken.
Tech enthusiasts are the ones who can see through the marketing and upgrade-treadmill BS; the "average person" can end up buying a new machine when they fill up their hard drive.
For tech enthusiast who enjoy smartphones unfortunately a 8 year old phone won't cut it. I have 4 year old Nokia Lumia that still runs fine and with an average 1.5 days of battery life (it used to live 2 days, it's aging). It works well for me because I care about basic apps, GPS, internet browser, and email. But for more apps heavy users most apps won't work if the phone isn't on the latest OS version, and most old phones can't upgrade to the latest OS version. For instance if Facebook stops maintaining messenger on windows phone 8.1, I'd loose my most used app. Fortunately the market share for 8.1 in emerging markets is still important enough for fb to keep a quality app.
I've much more often been frustrated by my phones. My last phone was at the point where I'd expect ~1 second delay for any interaction, whether that was opening an app or scrolling in a webpage. I think as the current one ages I'm going to start eliminating apps and wiping the phone more frequently than I do now, because I'd rather have all that money going toward my desktop and laptops.
A bit off topic topic, but is there any reason 32-bit Windows is still a thing? Every Intel processor I've seen since Atom failed is 64-bit.
Here's an Intel blog post from last year talking about it: https://blogs.intel.com/evangelists/2015/07/22/why-cheap-sys...
Heh, I use Linux (NixOS) with XMonad, st and Emacs, so it's always pretty responsive. Not used Windows in over a decade, so I can't comment on its speed.
> But for more apps heavy users most apps won't work if the phone isn't on the latest OS version, and most old phones can't upgrade to the latest OS version.
My phone runs Debian, so I haven't had any problems keeping up to date :)
I use a 5 yo phone (Motorola Defy+). It runs Android 4.4.4, thus far I've not seen a valid reason for wanting something newer. It still runs for about 4 days on a single charge, using the original battery.
Things start looking bad for the tech industry when people start showing off with 'old' stuff instead of brand-spanking new.
I have an Android 4.4 phone, and while it has worked acceptably for me right now as I am self-employed, if I were working for a company that required me to have access to sensitive customer data, having a phone that still received security updates would be a hard requirement.
..which reminds me I have some more work to do, given the recent publication of https://source.android.com/security/bulletin/2016-07-01.html
I understand that we talk about this sort of thing quite a bit, but I can't imagine actually doing it myself. My phone is just supposed to work for me so I can get my real work done and have time to enjoy outside of it. I'm not supposed to work for it.
I'd guess you have to really enjoy working on that sort of thing, but then again you called it "work to do", so I'm not sure.
I have seen SSDs on ebay with the converter built in, maybe kill two birds with one stone?
Performance is more than acceptable, the thing boots (Linux) in a few seconds (that is, a few seconds after BIOS has done its thing of course). In other words, those 3€ for the adapter (incl. shipping) were well spent...
Meanwhile, most of the components in my desktop are older than three years, and it's doing just fine.
That, to me, is the real tragedy/travesty. There should be some eco-EU-law or something against that, a bit like the micro USB charger standardisation. I say this typing from a 2008 (or was it 2009?) MacBook on which i've been able to replace the RAM (8GB), disk drive (SSD, single biggest improvement) and battery (lasts longer than when new from factory now), and all of those upgrades weren't expensive at all. Of course i run Linux and XMonad and pretty much the only graphical app is Firefox with NoScript, but still, i can't see myself forking out hard $$$ for a non-maintainable machine. The upgradability isn't even the big deal for me, because as someone else pointed out these days computers are "fast enough", it's the fact that certain components are just going to fail (especially the battery). And it absolutely sends sickly shivers down my spine that people are being forced to landfill perfectly okay hardware because of a battery becoming worn out. Seriously Apple, where have your holistic eco-friendly principles gone?
Make no mistake: ever since the AT/XT days the useful lifetime of a computer has been in the three year range because of the nature of matter and the physics we exploit to make digital circuits do what they need to do. Can you still use a 20 year old computer that runs Word Perfect 5 on MS-DOS 6.22 and isn't really made to do much more? Of course. And of course, you'll still be able to run OSX Panther on a 2005 MacMini for years to come, but you can't use those things for anything new or modern, you've created a little time machine that can only do what we wanted to do in 1985, or 1995, or 2005, instead of in 2015 (or soon enough, 2025).
Most of us want to use those new programs that rely on new algorithms that require the faster hardware, or old algorithms that massively benefit from faster hardware - we want spreadsheets to take less than seconds, not more than minutes, for ever-more complex work; we want games that run smoothly, not "not at all" or at 1 or 2 frames per second; we want our internet browser to start when we tell it to, not after a period of time that is long enough to wonder whether it even started at all.
Things all have lifetimes, and for computers that lifetime's about 3 years, and has been for decades. On the upside, computers are ships of Theseus: most of the time, we can just swap out broken parts for new parts, including faster parts, so really the lifetime of a single, unadulterated, intact computer is three years, but with a few hundred bucks every three years, we can keep pulling it back into the modern age until at some point nothing of the original remains - and the lifetime of THAT computer is much, much longer.
I usually get 5 years from my notebooks (batteries are an issue, of course)
My dad ran Ubuntu for a decade on my 13 year old workstation. He couldn't do anything I could do on my laptop. A Pentium IV with HT was good enough for his LaTeX and his MCMC simulations.
Not if you compensate for how much extra you paid for it.
> As a browser and a ssh machine it's good enough.
So you're just offloading the needed upgrades to someone else, while still ALSO needing to maintain your own computer (though to a lesser degree).
Unless you need the extra battery capacity (how often do you need to work for several hours without being close to a plug?) then it's much simpler to just run everything locally. Plus you don't need an internet connection! Plus using an IDE or anything else graphical will actually be a bearable experience!
It's not how much you pay for your computer, but how much you spend per year, on average, that counts. If a computer does its job for twice as long as the other, it's reasonable to pay up to twice as much for it.
Surely you mean "He could do everything I could do on my laptop"?
I wonder if there's a way to solve this problem that doesn't involve buying a new computer every three years.
In terms of software requirements, I think most people don't play heavy requirement games, and for basic personal and office tasks, the 2/4 threaded CPU's of the past few years have been up to the task of browsing, office suites (with responsive spreadsheets), and media.
I can't get a pair of shoes to last me 2 years. The fact that my 2013 MacBook Pro is still working is fairly surprising to me.
I just ordered a new touchpad sticker and keyboard for my 5 year old Thinkpad. I expect to replace the batteries within the next year, but other than that, I expect it to go to 10+ years, even though my previous Dell laptops did not make it past 5 years.
Three years is also not a long time considering the price of a MacBook. The basic model starts at $1299 [1]; $400/year for computing is a lot of money.
My two year old Chromebook is definitely a piece of crap; the motherboard is warped from having dropped it on carpet (carpet!) once, and the monitor has scratches caused by the keyboard. But that's okay, because I bought a very low end model that only cost $200.
[1] http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/
Of course, chances are that any other notebook might fail sooner, and I assume that my careful handling has increased the longevity of the device.
I sometimes get the "new tech" itch, but I haven't convinced myself that I'd get enough benefit to retire this thing, yet.
Things run a bit slower for the apps that get unnecessarily bloated over time. Including some websites. Still fast enough day to day to not really matter. I was used to it about 3-4 years ago. Thanks to software improvements, my laptop actually got better over the years. ;)
For newer work - as needs change, specs change, it's advantageous to get new equipment to meet changing needs (generally faster processing in my case).
I've since upgraded to whatever the latest model is, and I've donated my old MBP to my parents, who are happy to use it
Personally I'd really like to see more powerful GPUs in MacBooks...
Must be rose-tinted glasses. Apple has been about peddling (what would otherwise be) low-end budget computers to fashion enthusiasts for massive markups for at least a decade.
I'm personally not a fan of the vendor lock in with Apple. You can spend similar money and get something that isn't difficult to replace the ram on, with slightly better specs, more disk space, etc. As long as you're cool with a plastic case ;)
This machine feels pleasant to use. It doesn't frustrate me or get in my way. (Unless I'm using finder or other awful OS X programs, but I'm not afraid of the terminal, so I just don't use those.)
this is a great machine! or in my case: it was a great machine, sadly there was an accident with a kid and some coke so I bought a late 2015 mac book, which is the worst computer I owned ever (see my review here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12165132 )
hope your mac book air stays with you for a long, long time, I miss mine....
If you knew that you need extra sub port all the time - why did you purchase this model? You could have easily get the mba or the retina 13" if you need more ports and longer battery life. I have the retina MacBook and I bought it only to be used as a web dev machine during my travel since I don't need sub ports and I can get 6 hours of work in sublime text + Apache running with no problem.
I think a lot of people who have issues with MacBooks are just not using a correct tool for the work, if you need a work machine with sub ports - don't buy the MacBook in the first place, it's not meant for that.
The MB is garbage. It's aimed at the Kardashians of this world. I'm starting to think the delay in refreshing other Mac lines is a desperate attempt to coax people into buying MBs which would otherwise go unsold.
What I like about apple laptops and computers is that each of them is aimed at specific work type environment, and when people choose a wrong tool for the job they should blame themselves not the tool.
The problem is that Apple are selling MBs as the evolution of MBAs (which will never get a Retina upgrade etc etc), when they are clearly in a different category. The MB is overall less powerful and flexible than the MBA was, so a large segment of people "upgrading" is naturally disappointed.
> it's a perfect machine for browsing Internet and Word work on the go
It's a very expensive machine for browsing and Word. The market is literally full of alternatives "for browsing and Word" with same or better specs and better price points. Where the MBA was indisputably the best "thin all-use laptop", the MB is basically an expensive Chromebook with an Apple logo.
should I have done more due diligence - YES (but you know, once your beloved air gets the kids&coke treatment you tend to panic), am I owning now a piece of chunk I can't wait to get rid of (with the hopefully coming soon mac book pro generation) - YES
Not if "specs" includes thickness and weight. At the moment there is one laptop that's thinner, the HP Spectre, and the MacBook has a higher resolution screen, significantly less weight, and better battery life; it's up there on weight, too, excluding convertibles that have a separate keyboard.
Umm, YYMV. I am typing this on an MBR. I primarily use it for programming (mainly C++ and Lisp development in Emacs, but I have written two in-house iOS apps with Xcode). It has MS Office on it, though I must admit I mainly use that for docs other people have sent me, though I do use powerpoint. I am not a gamer.
The external adaptor doesn't really support the promised UHD output (it's flakey and unusable at those resolutions so I think your term "garbage" could apply to it) though it does support 1080p. In practice I mostly use it without an external display. The machine is so portable I don't think I could ever go back to a larger machine -- even my kid's MBA seems brobdignagian next to the MBR.
Xcode definitely felt a bit cramped on the small screen, but I'm not a fan of graphical IDEs (or IDEs in general) so that was the least of my concerns. I did most of the code development in Emacs anyway.
I found that in practice I almost never used ports on my MBP. I don't sync my phone to my computer any more; I used the built in MBP SD card reader but discovered I can read from my waterproof camera over wifi so don't miss that. I have a USB A port in my video adaptor but have yet to plug anything into it. I have never been much of a user of removable media.
I use my phone for presentations. I would use the computer but the "garbage" video adaptor is too flakey. Actually the phone is fine.
Oh, and I just checked with my GF who described my buttocks as "tight and cute". So I can confidently say that I do not fit the profile of a Kardashian.
(The Apple product that makes the least sense to me is the iPad...but that's a different discussion).
USB Type C isn't really baked yet (in the supply chain) so I guess this is part of the price for being on the bleeding edge.
I think Apple would have done better to have added Type C into another MB first, alongside the existing ports. But apart from the external display problem I really do like the MBR.
Amazon: http://amzn.to/2aGogRd
I have an iMac from 2009 which is totally fine for day to day basic stuff, the kind of usage your average person requires.
I have a 2014 rMBP which is far more than enough for an average user. I use it as my primary development machine and push it pretty hard. Would I like something faster? Sure. But it's not too bad in that capacity.
I also have a 2016 rMB which is more than enough for basic usage and it's not too bad as a development machine. I prefer coding on my MBP but the difference is small enough that I've stopped bringing my work computer home with me.
Long story short: Except for a relatively small group of people with niche needs, people don't need new hardware anymore.
The Iphone 5 is good enough for the job but you wouldn't you buy an Iphone 5 for $800, would you?
The thing is that if you take today a 2012 MBP the last ones that were upgradables you can, for a few hundred buck make it much more powerful than and 2016 MBP
And no, PC sales are not declining because of the slowing down of Moore's law, but obviously because of smartphones and tablets.
Good enough for a lot of people, but if it matters to you, and you really want a mac, perhaps the external GPU is the option for you.
EIT: It is actually on sale, but US-only (hence why I couldn't see it with UK settings).
Ports are way too wobbly unless you use your laptop as desktop. I love ability of using 2 external displays with MacBook keyboard and trackpad just right there in the center. But move the computer a centimeter and displays disconnect. Moderately painful!
It's not "obviously" declining because of smartphones and tablets, at least not to me. Pretty much everyone has a computer (in the US), as it doesn't make sense to do many things on your cellphone (like write emails). They just aren't upgrading because they don't need to.
The only people I know who dont have computers are my friends working heavily blue collar jobs. Even most of them have laptop's, only a few don't have anything.
Couple years outta college? People are still using the PC they bought for college probably. I don't know a whole ton of people who went to college anyways.
Hipmunk?
Using a smartphone to do anything other than send short messages and read the web frustrates me to buggery, but for those people who find using a computer frustrating or tedious anyway a smartphone mustn't be much different or even probably a better user experience.
It's all social media/chat apps for them now.
Booking flights is easy, I use Kayak.
And those who have, no upgrades, but shining new cell phones and tablets.
That's not how it works.
I think an Ivy Bridge laptop would still be OK now with some upgrades. It would be hot and have bad battery life compared to Haswell, which was a big upgrade. I still think you would be crazy to spend 1000+ on such an old computer though.
TBH my next computer won't be an Apple laptop unless the next iteration is truly something special. They have gotten too expensive here in Japan.
As Apple started moving to SSD's, I believe they stopped caring about minimizing disk seeking when considering changes to their virtual memory implementation. I had a Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a spinning-rust hard drive, and was constantly getting beachballs when switching between applications (I had FREE RAM and was getting beachballs!!!).
(Apple's ~2012 virtual memory behavior was a strange beast -- it appears it would page an application's memory out to disk so that it could hang on to some disk cache. This was different than what I had become used to in Linux, which always prioritizes application memory needs above disk cache).
Disabling the pagefile solved the beachballs, but with the downside that when I did run out of RAM, the machine basically ground to a halt. I later upgraded that machine to use an SSD, re-enabled the pagefile, and was back to smooth running.
Is bloat the problem? Possibly. More likely it was shifting priorities (minimizing pagefile access probably just wasn't a priority anymore).
But if that is true ( Which align with my own experience ) this would really annoy me. SSD or not, it should ALWAYS fill up the memory first.
If Apple's customers are not still seeing those big payoffs from new technology then it becomes a game of costs. Changing a product mix every few years has its own costs - as demand for new PCs drops, these costs become harder to justify for an OEM.
It is totally possible that a 5- or 10- year refresh cycle keeps engineering and support costs down enough to be worthwhile if consumers accept the technology meets their needs. New technology will still make it to the end user here, but Apple is not going to do it at any cost - they are masters of profitability.
At what point the energy savings compensate recycling the computer and getting a new one? At what point does the reduced amount of materials warrant dropping a product line and scraping the tooling used to make it?
Some people may be able to. I really don't think you can say "anyone".
I've had my Air since 2013, and it's really starting to struggle. With Docker, especially.
That's 2 or 3 years more than the Macbook Pro that I would have undoubtedly paid more for.
Even more mundanely the 8k textures for Real Solar System on Kerbal Space Program don't even load on my MBP because the GPU RAM is too low for them.
My Hackintosh has a Geforce 980 in it which is leaps and bounds above what I can buy directly from Mac and solves a lot of these problems for me, but it is occasionally finicky and doesn't like to boot up and I wouldn't recommend it to a friend of mine who has an actual dayjob that involves a lot of video editing.
> it’s an open secret among Apple employees that the “101” still sells surprisingly well — to a nearly tragic degree, given its age and mediocrity.
> Geeks like me often wonder why anyone would still buy such an outdated machine.
> I’m right there with everyone else who’d strongly advise against buying this machine for most people who’d ask me
Anyway, It's completely frustrating to me even my most financially disabled friends will, to this day, look to spend $1200 as much on a Mac laptop or an iPhone when they could get an equally powerful, used machine for $150. A close friend of mine just spent $300 on a used G5 iMac from 2006... I told him not to but he didn't listen. He has had to learn the hard way that the computer is slow, won't accept updates, won't run any new software or drivers, etc. because Apple's branding black magic is that powerful, that it could completely trump the well reasoned advice of someone knowledgable about the subject that you've known for years.
It's not unlike the idea they won't learn to sew to save money on clothes, or learn to change their own oil to save car maintenance fees. Was your advice an offer of convenience for them, or an offer of lifestyle conformity?
The expectation of effortlessness is all tied up in the marketing. The marketing promises a kind of magic, which I feel is bullshit, a fantasy world where you don't have to think about the clothes, they just appear on your shelf, when in reality, they're actually made by a person, whether that person is your Amish grandmother, a friend, a kid in an Indonesian factory, or you yourself. And someone is going to have to wash them when they're dirty, and fix them when they have holes or do the work of recycling them...
Computers require effort and attention and energy to maintain no matter what, even Macs (especially macs...). If not up front, then somewhere down the line. It's fascinating to live in a time when it's arguably easier to install Linux on a given computer than Mac OS or even Windows. This is new. My advice to people is that learning some user friendly Linux is a good investment of technical energy. It's like buying a used car instead of a brand new one. You could spend $10000 rebuilding that used car before you made a dent in the cost of a new one. For a lot of people, the time it takes to keep a used car working well is worth the trade-off..
BTW, I've had a lot of success hooking people up with old (2011) i5 Thinkpads running Linux and/or Windows. They run great and people really like them. Mine has 16GB of ram in it goes real smooth. I use lots of tabs. Too many tabs. And Bitwig. Bitwig works great on an old thinkpad with Arch!
I will never understand why perfectly normal human beings do this, whether it be against Apple or Google. I have an Apple sticker on my car because I'm proud of where I work. On four separate occasions now Google fans have come up to me after I've parked and tried to convert me to an Android fan or make fun of me for being an "Apple fan," assuming the sticker represents my status as a demagogue for one side. (One guy asked me if I felt inferior for not having root on my phone and I had to resist answering the question honestly, but it would have been really fun and confusing for him.)
My own family gets sheepish and embarrassed when they buy an Android phone because their partisan friends have trained them to think that I'd react explosively to this grievous slight instead of the truth, which is that people should buy what works for them and it's not really any of my business. I don't actively sway people toward Apple products or discourage them from buying what they want. Sometimes a Mac is the answer, and sometimes it isn't. Their purchasing choice has arguably no effect on me personally, and this applies to other things too, like cars. As you're discovering, in general, people don't listen anyway and instead quietly form a negative opinion of you.
Speaking personally, there are things I dislike and like from Apple and there are things I dislike and like from Google. I simply cannot connect with the mindset of red vs. blue, us vs. them, vim-vs-emacs, all-or-nothing that people get frothed up like this about. It's your prerogative to despise Apple and I'm fully supportive of your decision to do so. I'm just saying it strikes me as weird to invest part of your humanity in despising an inanimate entity that creates products as opposed to just not buying the products. I'd say this about people who despise Google, too, and I'm only using that example because it seems like the war of our time (and because you probably carry an Android device, given the market).
Am I the only one who feels like it's just not worth it to hate a company? I don't even hate Comcast, and they've given me plenty of reasons. I don't even hate patent trolls; they've identified a strategy that is legal and shitty and exploit it. That's capitalism. Maybe it's just me and, before you think it's partisan, I felt like this before ever being personally vested. I've just got far better things into which to invest my hatred.
(Only my personal opinion, speaking for me alone.)
[1] In Germany at least some of those magazines were quite good. Haven't read any recently though.
Reviewers are a totally different animal and orthogonal to my point; I'm not arguing that reviews should cease. You're talking to a guy who respects film reviewers individually and recognizes patterns and traits of certain reviewers (like Ebert or Travers or Tom Long, who I dearly miss in retirement -- if I were on the fence for any film in the last decade I read Tom), so I definitely value review as an industry. Hell, Broadway might argue review is an essential part of the industry, I reckon, since there are many people who wait for the Times to review a play before buying tickets.
I don't despise Apple or Google, and my general approach is "Use it if it works reliably and is useful." I'm not particularly tribal, in that sense.
However, I do despise MS, because in my experience the software is absolute crapware and full of avoidable bugs. It has literally wasted days of my life. And I know I'm hardly unique.
In the general case, people despise corporations for the same reasons they despise people: if someone lies to you, rips you off, wastes your time, or makes promises and then doesn't deliver, you'd be a fool to respect them.
Tribalism is only half the story. The rest is that corporations make an implicit - non-legal, but still heavily implied - contract when they create consumer relationships.
Apple used to be very good at this. There was an implied value proposition: "Expensive, but beautiful, original, inventive, and outstanding" and Apple did a competent job of delivering on it.
Recently Apple has become noticeably less good at it.
You can dismiss Android fanboys for tribalism, and that's a fair point.
But it's a very bad idea for a corporation to ignore customer satisfaction, and to assume that its deliverables will never change the perceived value of the social contract it makes with consumers.
I don't "hate Apple" because I'm partisan, I'm frustrated more generally at a whole bundle of abuses and orthodoxies of the religion of mass marketing, and to put it bluntly am frightened about the perpetuation of ignorance, put forth for short term profit, suffocating the grass roots of human knowledge as we speed blindly into an era of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and genetically modified organisms.
Ubuntu Mate 16.04 works on PowerPC Macs, and will keep the machine alive for a few years if need be. It's much slower than OS X 10.5.8, though, at least on my iMac G4.
Upgradable storage, memory, and an optical drive. It's cheap and not that outdated.
One thing that is often overlooked is that the trackpad click is much better on the 2012 than on the Force Touch models. There is a really satisfying click, mostly because it has so much more room to travel. That was a big part of my decision to stick with the 2012 over any 2015 MBP or MacBook models. I feel about the 2012 MBP Trackpad the same way some folks feel about a Model M or Das Keyboard.
I have two MBPs. One is a 2008 that is beat to hell at this point but still functions pretty darn well with an SSD and maxed out RAM. It's good enough I've been able to do most day-to-day development with it and audio production up through this summer. If it were effectively invulnerable and weren't eventually going to stop receiving OS updates (or if security/compatibility weren't a concern), I could conceive of using it indefinitely for most work.
I also have a 2012 that is still adequate (though, weirdly, sometimes worse in terms of locking up, not sure if that's the later version of OS X or no SSD). I bought it not because I needed anything newer, but because I didn't want to be stuck searching for a replacement when the 2008 fails. And perhaps interestingly, I bought it used because Apple has decided to no longer offer a 15" model with a matte screen that's upgradable anymore.
Creative arts will probably always be Mac, but we are an all Adobe institution after the Final Cut Pro X fiasco so even that is not a certainty.
1) I have to obey a couple of very un-fun local laws and will buy old machines rather than deal with problems in that area
1) Basically, no data may be shared unless approved by a local institution. Its legacy from other groups taking the data we generate and writing grants to get money that never benefits the local people or institutions. A long, long story that someone should write a book on.
A data breach should be equivalent to having paper documents stolen from a safe, unless there is negligence. Did you check with a lawyer, right?
I had questions answered by a local authority. Data breach would be interesting because it would go federal pretty quick.
Have you looked at total cost of ownership? From the ‘Every Mac we buy is making and saving IBM money’ - IBM article:
"Just 5 percent of IBM’s Mac using employees need to call the help desk; In contrast an astonishing 40 percent of PC using staff call the help desk."
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2998315/apple-mac/every...
A pretty key point to consider, since people who prefer "non-standard" technology tend to be more tech-savvy users, who require less support.
I'm sure that Chrome users also call the help desk less frequently than people who use Internet Explorer (or Safari for that matter).
Assuming that you don't find another alternative, then I assume buying old Macs would then be okay?
I'm not sure what the rationale is for not buying one year old laptops if performance is about level (Skylake was not that earth shattering).
Its one year closer to being EOL, plus Apple has been on a bit of a no software support for older models streak. The money needs to stretch as far as possible, we're not rich.
No, it was way better earlier. We had some incredibly old PowerPCs running forever. Now, I have 64-bit Xeon boxes that aren't supported.
Surface might be close, and we haven't bought an iPad Pro yet.
That's an odd way to put it, as if your people are being eccentric for expecting fully-functional computers. iPads have their uses, but they're not at all comparable for many tasks. It's as if you'd tried offering people motor scooters as company cars, and were surprised when they wanted "real vehicles."
1) in the dictionary definition sense
I do agree with the general direction of your comment. For example, The business office would not be a place to even consider iPads. 27" iMacs and 34" LG 21x9 monitors are much appreciated by that crowd. Spreadsheet lovers love 21x9 displays.
I was also checking on them, but the management of them always ended up on needing Google Apps for Work and getting licenses for their management. It looks like it is impossible to have them plugged into on-site software, independent of Google...
The problem is that the machine and user provisioning is dependent on Google. I want to be able to load the machine with certificates, VPN profiles, Wi-Fi settings, proxy settings, IdM configuration, directory info, etc independently from Google. Imagine, if Google servers ceased to exists tomorrow: the machines and all the provisioning processes must still work, as if nothing happened. Yes, not paying per device/per month for quasi-monopoly service is also desirable.
none of which you seek is exclusive to ChromeOS, except the default lack of native desktop apps.
Why should then I waste time with third party distributions for Chromebook, with users getting big scary warning at boot time about firmware signature? Or even worse, being forced to maintain my own distribution, with the same big scary warning? (CentOS/Fedora do pass the Secure Boot check, they are signed).
Chromebooks are a very good idea if you a) have mostly web applications (or a occasional RDP/Citrix one) and b) you don't mind being forced into Google services. Currently, even companies that are in a) situation may be better off with the classic Windows+AD+Group policies solution, if they have any reason why not go for b).
If you use linux in an IT environment, you are likely maintaining your own package list and configurations anyway. spending 4 minutes untarring an entire distribution to a chromebook post-firmware-flash is pretty painless. Spending 15 minutes installing GalliumOS is brain-dead simple, should you not have the sysadmin skills.
Chromebooks are a very good idea if you want a cheap computer that can run a full desktop stack. They can even run Windows, should you enjoy dark patterns in your operating system choice.
I'm continually impressed how good Chromebooks are in terms of battery life, portability, and utility. Just wish it was easier to run desktop apps on it.
Also from what I have seen prices of MacBooks seem to have been going down quite a bit.
> At CES 2016, Lenovo announced a massive overhaul of its ThinkPad line. In addition to unveiling new ThinkPad X1 notebooks, tablets and convertibles, Lenovo also unveiled refreshes to its X, T and L series ThinkPad as well as a new ThinkPad 13. Except the ThinkPad 13, which comes with options for either Windows or Chrome operating systems, all the ThinkPad models unveiled come with Intel's sixth generation Skylake processor, giving them a boost in performance and battery life.
So no, Dell isn't selling anything that is nearly as outdated as what Apple is selling, for substantially more money.
http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2016/03/21/apple-hypocritical-...
"There are over 600 million PCs in use today that are over five years old. This is really sad, it really is."
I don't get the obsession with notebooks. Why do I want to spend 4X the amount of money for something that last 4 years if I am lucky. For the <1% of time I am not working from my desk? In meeting I prefer people NOT to bring a notebook, this way they pay attention and I can get them out of the room and back to work faster.
And given that you swap out the employee computers well before they break down, the shorter lifetime of notebooks doesn't matter. What matters is that your employee can take her device to a meeting room, or to a customer site.
It turns out, many people spend much more than 1% of their time not working from their desk.
I switched to a notebook in 2006, and now spend less than 20% of my time working at a desk.
As long as you have a proper SSD (and now should be the time to get NVME models); the rest of the hardware is barely relevant.
The non-Retina MBP is effectively discontinued because it's largely replaced by the Retina version, and has been for many years.
They still sell the non-Retina MBP (in one size only, no 15") just for few people that absolutely need a built-in optical drive in their MBP for some specific reason.
The non-Retina MBP is not meant for the general public. If you walk into an Apple Store without knowing anything, the chances of you walking out with one is less than 1%, it's hard to find and store employees will recommend something better for your needs.
"The Retina MacBook Pro is 442 days into its current cycle, despite refreshes coming every 268 days on average in the past."
The key here is "built in," because Apple also sells a USB external optical drive. In fact a 13" retina MBP + USB optical drive is lighter than the 13" non-retina MBP by itself.
Actually there are a few reasons people still buy the old MBP, but price is probably the main one.
https://marco.org/2016/01/04/md101ll-a
People are interpreting "PCs are extremely good and capable now" as "PC is dead".
[1] https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2015/12/11/codecs-are...
This is the main thing for me - I'm still using a 2012 rMBP as my main machine, and I have no complaints about performance except often when you try to make the most of the performance it's capable of, it overheats and throttles down. Especially a problem in the summer.
Look at the 12" Macbook. This, to me, is just too much compromise. Only one port and it's USB-C and it's the power?? Compare this to the healthy amount of ports on the HP Spectre in what is still a small form factor. Add in the terrible (IMHO) keyboard, pointless Force Touch and lack of tactile feedback on the trackpad.
Yet the Macbook Air remains with a relatively crappy display. For year it was suggested it wasn't economical/possible to add a retina display to this form factor. The Macbook is proof to the contrary.
Plus with the 12" Macbook, 13" Retina MBP and 11" and 13" Macbook Airs, it seems clear that not all these SKUs are going to survive.
I have a 2011 13" Macbook Air as my personal laptop. At the time I considered it to be about perfect in terms of portability and power.
But the design is getting pretty long in the tooth now. Crappy (relatively) display. Look at the Dell XPS 13 and 15s as inspiration. For one, they have really thin bezels.
The Mac Pro? Introduced with much fanfare 3 years ago and hasn't been updated since.
Mac mini? Coming up on 2 years without an update. And we lost the quad core options.
This all comes as Apple has pushed the iPad Pro as a laptop replacement.
My point is that with the Apple ecosystem (and many others) there's a halo effect. People buy into part of it based on the complete range, regardless of whether or ot they'll buy into the rest. They have the option.
The sense I get from Apple is they're no longer interested in the PC/laptop segments. They seem to no longer care about power users even though power users are influencers.
Also, it seems like the days of only horrible trackpads on PCs might finally be over. At least it seems like some models might have decent trackpads.
Can Apple really think tablets are the future? Maybe they aren't but we're a long way from that. The UX on an iPad Pro with a keyboard is as terrible as Steve Jobs used to say it was (Jobs famously called touchscreens with keyboards terrible).
So even if Apple does update their lineup later this year I'm not sure I'm going to buy in because the writing seems to be on the wall.
At this point a Dell XPS 13 or 15 seems like the way to go.
Also, they dramatically reduced its utility by removing the optical drive.
It is stupefying that you cannot buy a mac mini with an optical drive. It's ridiculous. It takes most of the interesting use-cases off the table and makes many other use-cases a pain in the ass.
I would have kept buying mac minis, continuously, every 3-4 years, forever. Instead, I bought two of the fastest/latest ones with optical drive and that's all I'll ever have.
You can buy a USB DVD-RW for about $20. I am glad most laptops and small form factor PCs are doing away with the drives as default.
The mac mini is about the form factor. The form factor is broken if there's a second device hanging off of it.
That perfectly describes my problem with the tubular Mac Pro. Call me old school, but I loved the old Mac Pro chassis and its internal expandability.
Something light with a Retina display, minimum 13" and a good CPU. Basically a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with OSX.
Maybe things are different now? Or maybe I didn't get my hands on some better ones, but how can companies sell so much junk?