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].
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Last week I bought a new computer. And for the first time since 2002, it wasn't a Mac. I wanted a Mac Mini, but that's a tough buy when you can get something much smaller, more flexible, and more powerful in the PC realm. I wound up buying an Intel NUC and slapping Ubuntu Gnome on it.
Most surprisingly, Gnome 3 does not feel like a compromised choice in comparison to OS X. It's not a seamless experience by any means. That said, I'm really digging some of the UI choices they've made. It's a UX that's committed to a vision of how the user should interact with the computer.
I remember a time when the Mac also felt like a strongly opinionated experience, designed by and for humans. It no longer feels so. It feels aimless and stagnant, even regressive in some ways. It feels designed by committee rather than vision or voice. The changes do not seem to serve any higher purpose than making the UI look cool in screenshots. I miss the high-contrast controls, readable fonts, always-visible functionality, personable quirks, etc.
I still use a Mac all day at work, and I still respect it as a good tool for getting shit done, but I really wonder about the point of it. If I can pick up a free alternative like Ubuntu Gnome and actually feel happy and productive quickly, what's left to recommend the Mac? If Apple doesn't care any more, why should I?
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.
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
The 2012 MBP bought new today for $1100 will serve a lot of people really well.
An $800 Dell XPS will serve them much better, last them much longer, and keep them much happier.
A $500 Chromebook might be an even better choice.
Unless you have no escape from the Apple eco system lock in, it's almost impossible to recommend a mac to anyone anymore. Even if Apple does come up with a great refresh to their lineup, their treatment of the mac over the last couple of years means they might simply do this again, which means I really cannot recommend them anymore. Apple has pretty much destroyed all teh goodwill they built up with me, and the only way I can recommend a mac anymore is if they open up OS X to all hardware makers (but then, I'd trust Windows which has been doing that for decades, over OSX which has not and Apple would almost certainly have trouble supporting OSX on non Apple devices).
And finally, because of how deliberately tied up Apple's ecosystem is, that means I cannot recommend iPhones/iPads anymore despite iOS being a superior platform anymore.
I genuinely feel Apple is trading away their past reputation in an effort to extract money from consumers who may not know better.
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 ...?"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Can Apple at least just put a Retina screen and 16GB RAM option on the 13' MacBook Air. That's all I'm waiting for. They don't even have to bump the CPU or ports or anything else.
It's not a hardware problem. My MacBook Pro's HD 4000 drives a Retina screen, the Air's current HD 6000 certainly could too. Microsoft and Dell have been shipping Retina screens and 16GB ram ultrabooks for 2 years now -- but we're forbidden from using it for iOS development.
I totally get that it's more fun to go "Scrooge McDuck" swimming through their iPhone money. But if Apple could kick out just a basic spec bump from 1-2 years ago for the Air, I'd be thrilled.
I'd be pretty happy if they fixed that weird "wake from sleep, 2 mins use, back to sleep" thing. But a retina would be nice. Also, move the damn power button away from delete.
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.
"...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.
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.
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.
At least until recently, they would have been hard-pressed to do a refresh - Broadwell had basically no non-low-power SKUs for a long while, so you wouldn't want one in your MBP.
So they'd need to refresh with Skylake, which would add lead time, particularly with how long it took to ramp up Skylake manufacturing yield.
Meanwhile, if they were going to leverage anything from Skylake for OS X features (looking at you TSX-NI), they wouldn't want to refresh the desktop until they could get it there too, which would probably mean Xeon E[57] v4, and that only came out this quarter.[1]
So I'd probably blame this current delay on refreshing on a ripple from Intel's Broadwell/Skylake timeline debacle, and Apple deciding to merge any intervening hardware upgrades into the next iteration forward.
[1] - The slight oddity with this logic is that the Xeon E[57] v3, Q2 2015, _does_ have working TSX bits, so they could have conceivably shipped that, even though it's "technically" Haswell. Maybe they got scared when Intel had to use the chicken bits to disable TSX in the first Haswell revs? [2]
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.
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.
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.
Not a single computer sold by Apple meets the minimum spec for a VR experience, nor the next crop of AAA games.
What does that mean to the creative that used to prefer Macs for their content creation?
What does that do to the brand long term?
I don't mind the release cycle as it exists... I get the newest model when they come out and the feeling of missing out on something better doesn't linger over me. There aren't a million configurations of the same laptop, there are only a few, which makes things simple on aspects of development, support, and troubleshooting.
When people on this thread compare MacBooks to "chromebooks" I don't even know what that means... It could be any number of manufacturers using any number of combinations of hardware to run a common OS. Just because it has the latest Intel doesn't mean the rest of the components aren't subpar. Even if they are higher quality, it wouldn't nearly stack up to the millions of users that have tried and tested the exact configuration of my MBP.
Most of the professional community feels the same way, even within the last year [1]
[+] [-] IBM|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/56968e64c08a80492c8...
[2] http://www.anandtech.com/show/10183/intels-tick-tock-seeming...
[+] [-] andrepd|9 years ago|reply
And no, PC sales are not declining because of the slowing down of Moore's law, but obviously because of smartphones and tablets.
[+] [-] rainsford|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinlardinois|9 years ago|reply
It kind of depresses me that three years is considered a long lifetime for a computer.
[+] [-] nextos|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brightball|9 years ago|reply
If this thing ever dies on me I'm just going to switch to Ubuntu.
[+] [-] SunShiranui|9 years ago|reply
Personally I'd really like to see more powerful GPUs in MacBooks...
[+] [-] jghn|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mhurron|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] GreaterFool|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franze|9 years ago|reply
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....
[+] [-] tim333|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lamontcg|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] op00to|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djhworld|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] chestervonwinch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pfarnsworth|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WayneBro|9 years ago|reply
That's 2 or 3 years more than the Macbook Pro that I would have undoubtedly paid more for.
[+] [-] cm2187|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] prawn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verisimilidude|9 years ago|reply
Most surprisingly, Gnome 3 does not feel like a compromised choice in comparison to OS X. It's not a seamless experience by any means. That said, I'm really digging some of the UI choices they've made. It's a UX that's committed to a vision of how the user should interact with the computer.
I remember a time when the Mac also felt like a strongly opinionated experience, designed by and for humans. It no longer feels so. It feels aimless and stagnant, even regressive in some ways. It feels designed by committee rather than vision or voice. The changes do not seem to serve any higher purpose than making the UI look cool in screenshots. I miss the high-contrast controls, readable fonts, always-visible functionality, personable quirks, etc.
I still use a Mac all day at work, and I still respect it as a good tool for getting shit done, but I really wonder about the point of it. If I can pick up a free alternative like Ubuntu Gnome and actually feel happy and productive quickly, what's left to recommend the Mac? If Apple doesn't care any more, why should I?
(Alright, now y'all can light me up.)
[+] [-] nissehulth|9 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] BatFastard|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] NKCSS|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] protomyth|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] addicted|9 years ago|reply
An $800 Dell XPS will serve them much better, last them much longer, and keep them much happier.
A $500 Chromebook might be an even better choice.
Unless you have no escape from the Apple eco system lock in, it's almost impossible to recommend a mac to anyone anymore. Even if Apple does come up with a great refresh to their lineup, their treatment of the mac over the last couple of years means they might simply do this again, which means I really cannot recommend them anymore. Apple has pretty much destroyed all teh goodwill they built up with me, and the only way I can recommend a mac anymore is if they open up OS X to all hardware makers (but then, I'd trust Windows which has been doing that for decades, over OSX which has not and Apple would almost certainly have trouble supporting OSX on non Apple devices).
And finally, because of how deliberately tied up Apple's ecosystem is, that means I cannot recommend iPhones/iPads anymore despite iOS being a superior platform anymore.
I genuinely feel Apple is trading away their past reputation in an effort to extract money from consumers who may not know better.
[+] [-] intopieces|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kevindong|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] melling|9 years ago|reply
People buy because they don't know any better. Wait until every new Mac in the fall has USB C connectors.
[+] [-] shurcooL|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kristianp|9 years ago|reply
"The Retina MacBook Pro is 442 days into its current cycle, despite refreshes coming every 268 days on average in the past."
[+] [-] snowwrestler|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] maxsilver|9 years ago|reply
It's not a hardware problem. My MacBook Pro's HD 4000 drives a Retina screen, the Air's current HD 6000 certainly could too. Microsoft and Dell have been shipping Retina screens and 16GB ram ultrabooks for 2 years now -- but we're forbidden from using it for iOS development.
I totally get that it's more fun to go "Scrooge McDuck" swimming through their iPhone money. But if Apple could kick out just a basic spec bump from 1-2 years ago for the Air, I'd be thrilled.
[+] [-] kalleboo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostlogin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pronoiac|9 years ago|reply
Upgradable storage, memory, and an optical drive. It's cheap and not that outdated.
[+] [-] oldmanjay|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] blurbleblurble|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] justin66|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rincebrain|9 years ago|reply
So they'd need to refresh with Skylake, which would add lead time, particularly with how long it took to ramp up Skylake manufacturing yield.
Meanwhile, if they were going to leverage anything from Skylake for OS X features (looking at you TSX-NI), they wouldn't want to refresh the desktop until they could get it there too, which would probably mean Xeon E[57] v4, and that only came out this quarter.[1]
So I'd probably blame this current delay on refreshing on a ripple from Intel's Broadwell/Skylake timeline debacle, and Apple deciding to merge any intervening hardware upgrades into the next iteration forward.
[1] - The slight oddity with this logic is that the Xeon E[57] v3, Q2 2015, _does_ have working TSX bits, so they could have conceivably shipped that, even though it's "technically" Haswell. Maybe they got scared when Intel had to use the chicken bits to disable TSX in the first Haswell revs? [2]
[2] - http://www.anandtech.com/show/8376/intel-disables-tsx-instru...
[+] [-] cletus|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shmerl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] applecore|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derefr|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jwatte|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r0m4n0|9 years ago|reply
When people on this thread compare MacBooks to "chromebooks" I don't even know what that means... It could be any number of manufacturers using any number of combinations of hardware to run a common OS. Just because it has the latest Intel doesn't mean the rest of the components aren't subpar. Even if they are higher quality, it wouldn't nearly stack up to the millions of users that have tried and tested the exact configuration of my MBP.
Most of the professional community feels the same way, even within the last year [1]
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech...