Apple Should Stop Selling Four-Year-Old Computers

Megalith

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Does Apple even care about their computing line anymore? The answer must be a resounding “no,” as the company is still selling years-old hardware for substantial change. Things must be really bad if pro-Mac sites proclaim that only one product out of seven is worth buying these days.

The Retina MacBook Pro is 442 days into its current cycle, despite refreshes coming every 268 days on average in the past. The Mac mini has gone 657 days since its last update, which was controversial in itself since Apple removed quad-core options and made the product harder to upgrade after purchase. And the Mac Pro, released in December 2013 following much "Can’t innovate any more, my ass"-fueled fanfare? It hasn’t received a single update since then. "This is without a doubt the future of the pro desktop," Phil Schiller said when announcing the Mac Pro on stage that year. Did he mean that this was the precise model Apple expects professional users to use literally forever?
 
Does seem kind of odd especially as Mac sales in the last couple of quarters are faring no better or even worse than the PC market.
 
Can anyone chime in on if its really needed an update? I know phones are different but my iPhone 5s is over 3 years old and it still operates new games like a champ. I have worked on Mac's that were a few years old and still ran great. Maybe they are a lot like PC's that are built really well and do not need an upgrade for a few years.
 
I'm still running a 6 year old MBP and aside from the battery it still handles everything well enough. I'd love a newer model just for a bit of a speed boost and better screen. Ivy Bridge is still within shot of more modern chips. That's the same with desktop too, there's just not nearly as much reason to upgrade as of late when it comes to CPUs. Graphics has made far more headway. I mean, even that second gen Core 2 is hardly anaemic in today's world and it was older even in 2010.

That said, sure I'd love an update to the Mac lineup especially with graphics to more modern chips.
 
When people start picking apart macOS this may not be as clear cut as you think.
Every single feature which can potentially send information to Apple in OS X has a transparent method to opt out (including crash reports, spotlight searches and the ***optional*** usage of Siri). Compared to Win10, where even if the god damn service is disabled in the OS it still communicates with MS servers (even ignoring the much more worrying shenanigans), there is no comparison.
 
Well, I'd argue that laptops have not experienced significant improvements in the past 3 years....

My current laptop from 2013 is an Alienware M17 with a Core i7 4800MQ, 16GB DDR3 and a Geforce 780M. If I go hunting on Passmark, my CPU is still within striking distance of the fastest benching (available) mobile CPU.

The counter-argument to this is newer CPUs are more energy efficient or harness better pipelining and architecture. Well, PassMark and other benchmarks should show that advantage right? And the 4th Gen Core i7s shows a TDP of 47W. The 6th Gen Core i7s show a TDP of 45W. Not seeing much of an improvement here!

The 780M and 880M are practically the same due to Nvidia trickery. The 980M is a step up - but it now appears Nvidia is skipping a 1080M entirely. I've considered upgrading to a 980M which would bring my 3 year old laptop up to par with anything available today.

Laptop LCDs haven't advanced much either. For many years resolutions were capped at 1920x1080. Think I've seen one popular 17" screen go higher, and IPS screens seem a little more available.

But the current statistics show what? 78% of laptops sold use 1366 x 768. Blegh... how can you fault Apple when 78% of shoppers are buying even older tech?
 
Every single feature which can potentially send information to Apple in OS X has a transparent method to opt out (including crash reports, spotlight searches and the ***optional*** usage of Siri). Compared to Win10, where even if the god damn service is disabled in the OS it still communicates with MS servers (even ignoring the much more worrying shenanigans), there is no comparison.

There have been numerous articles and people looking at network traffic with Windows 10 and looking at results with various settings in Windows 10. I've never seen such in depth analysis done with OS X/macOS.
 
Well, I'd argue that laptops have not experienced significant improvements in the past 3 years....

My current laptop from 2013 is an Alienware M17 with a Core i7 4800MQ, 16GB DDR3 and a Geforce 780M. If I go hunting on Passmark, my CPU is still within striking distance of the fastest benching (available) mobile CPU.

The counter-argument to this is newer CPUs are more energy efficient or harness better pipelining and architecture. Well, PassMark and other benchmarks should show that advantage right? And the 4th Gen Core i7s shows a TDP of 47W. The 6th Gen Core i7s show a TDP of 45W. Not seeing much of an improvement here!

The 780M and 880M are practically the same due to Nvidia trickery. The 980M is a step up - but it now appears Nvidia is skipping a 1080M entirely. I've considered upgrading to a 980M which would bring my 3 year old laptop up to par with anything available today.

Laptop LCDs haven't advanced much either. For many years resolutions were capped at 1920x1080. Think I've seen one popular 17" screen go higher, and IPS screens seem a little more available.

But the current statistics show what? 78% of laptops sold use 1366 x 768. Blegh... how can you fault Apple when 78% of shoppers are buying even older tech?

Yes but those laptops don't sell for $1000+.
 
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A lot of the lack of progress can be tied to delays with Iris and more importantly, Iris Pro CPUs. It's been a while since I dug into it, but there are a number of situations where Intel delays put Apple in a spot where the only newer parts available had slower iGPUs due to the delays. And I think it's pretty likely the Mac Pro will see updates when appropriate AMD GPUs are available from the recent node shrink.

I think it's pretty clear by now that the Mac Mini isn't something that Apple cares too much about, but I hope I'm wrong.
 
I'm sure Apple's line would be "our computers are so forward thinking that we don't need to update them but once every five years."
 
This is Apple's new laptop. I mean, it'll be great for Photoshop and Final Cut pro </sarcasm>

iu
 
This is Apple's new laptop. I mean, it'll be great for Photoshop and Final Cut pro </sarcasm>

iu

The big iPad Pro was certainly targeted at the pretty hot 2 in 1 space and to deal the slumping tablet market. It will be interesting to see where able goes with the their 2 in 1 efforts and if they ever bring touch to Macs.
 
I honestly think Apple is just going to become a "tech toy" company pretty soon...phones, tablets, etc. Their computer division is just not competitive anymore.
 
Considering OSx accounts for almost 10% of the OS usage in the wild again. I would say their current slower upgrade path hasn't really hurt them any in terms of sales. Perhaps part of the thinking is convincing regular users that spending a little extra on a Mac is a good idea as they don't go obsolete every year. (seeing as they have been selling the same models for so long).

Apple is a company that still isn't happy about being forced to sell specs. I think they realise as a company that specs have mostly always been irrelevant when it comes to day to day usage. As folks that frequent [H] I'm sure most of us build our PCs or at least have in the past. We all know picking up a solid MB and Ram are at least as important as having a slightly improved CPU (cause the last few generations haven't seen massive performance jumps).

Just to throw it out there as well... this may seem like a crazy theory, and I wouldn't place an actual cash bet on it happening shortly or anything. Apple has had a history of slowing hardware changes when they where planning to do something interesting. I could very much see Apple updating their desktop line across the board later this year. Removing Intels chips from all but their higher end Pro computers. Taking all their laptops and mid to low range options and swapping in Arm parts. The A10 is on deck shortly... and their are rumors TMSC is expecting a massive bump in sales from it... you wouldn't expect they would be excited about a iphone refresh at this point. There are also plenty of rumors that intel will in fact be getting some of the Fab work for the new A10. (I know most of those are likely due to Intels modem work... but who knows still might be more to it) If either or both of those are true... the OSx line might be in for a pretty big shake up. Apple filed a bunch of patents the last year or so that when I read them tell me they are readying a real time software/hardware code translation somewhat like what Transmeta was doing with "Code morphing" to run x86 on their non x86 hardware. I have a feeling if Apple does switch to A10, there isn't going to be any need to recompile anything which would make the transition smooth as silk if the performance is their. If it doesn't happen with a10 I am still thinking its part of apples long term... then I'll start saying the same thing about A11. lol ;)
 
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Does seem kind of odd especially as Mac sales in the last couple of quarters are faring no better or even worse than the PC market.

It's not odd at all. Intel is delivering Kaby Lake to OEMs. Why ship a Skylake refresh now? I agree it's odd that there aren't already Skylake Macs in the wild, though.

I honestly think Apple is just going to become a "tech toy" company pretty soon...phones, tablets, etc. Their computer division is just not competitive anymore.

This is generally a great forum, but then things like this get posted and I wonder what the hell is going on. Do you live in this universe? Apple's computer line is wiping the floor with Wintel OEMs. Apple is the only prebuilt vendor maintaining any sort of market share and profitability.

It's gotten to the point where Wintel OEMs are blatantly ripping off Apple's designs just to get some attention.
 
This is generally a great forum, but then things like this get posted and I wonder what the hell is going on. Do you live in this universe? Apple's computer line is wiping the floor with Wintel OEMs. Apple is the only prebuilt vendor maintaining any sort of market share and profitability.

What I'm saying is straight from Apple's quarterly financials: Apple iPhone sales fall 14.9% to 40.4 million in Q3 2016, iPads and Macs also down. Right now Mac sales aren't doing any better than PCs. Again, this is a fact reported by Apple, not some fanyboy speculation.
 
Yes, their sales are down as of the most recent quarter. Their sales are still well above other OEMs, and have been for years.

And Mac sales were down last quarter as well. I'm not debating Apple's margins, of course they are great. But Mac's are not faring any better than PCs right now in terms of growth. And at least part of that is probably due to the aging on their product lines.
 
This is generally a great forum, but then things like this get posted and I wonder what the hell is going on. Do you live in this universe? Apple's computer line is wiping the floor with Wintel OEMs. Apple is the only prebuilt vendor maintaining any sort of market share and profitability.

What are you talking about? HP, Dell, Lenovo, and hell even Asus have higher marketshare than Apple. They are all dropping because PC sales in general are dropping, but in no way is Apple "wiping the floor" with other OEMs in PC marketshare.

If you want to talk profitability...yeah, it's easy when you have an obsessively devoted group of followers and massive markups on everything.
 
What are you talking about? HP, Dell, Lenovo, and hell even Asus have higher marketshare than Apple. They are all dropping because PC sales in general are dropping, but in no way is Apple "wiping the floor" with other OEMs in PC marketshare.

If you want to talk profitability...yeah, it's easy when you have an obsessively devoted group of followers and massive markups on everything.

The stereotyping and intellectual laziness is real.
 
Bingo
Marketshare and profitability are 2 different things. Just because Apple has a small following of sheep does not mean they are rocking the pc world. Sure they design pretty stuff, and pretty stuff get's copied all the time. But in the end you eventually have to use it and that's where Apple falls short.
 
The stereotyping and intellectual laziness is real.

If you have some facts you'd like to share, let's see them. Here, I'll go first:

16499-13401-Screen-Shot-2016-04-11-at-115838-PM-l.jpg


16499-13396-gartnerq1-l.jpg


One graph has them down 2.1%, the other has them up 1%. Whoo! They are still nowhere near the top three OEMs.
 
Self degradation does not help support your original flawed premise.

I guess I hit a nerve somewhere. I never said that them transitioning to that type of company was a bad thing, that's just where I see them headed in the next few years. The iPad and iPhone have apparently been profitable enough, and they are pushing more products like the iPad Pro, and it seems like less of their Mac products.
 
Have never owned an Apple product. Not even an ipod. Always found the company to be too annoying to buy from. And don't get me started on their annoying fanbois... the same ones that overpay for stone age computers.
 
But in the end you eventually have to use it and that's where Apple falls short.
Thing is, for what their customers use the computers for, they don't fall short at all. Very, very few people need the latest, hottest hardware. Apple isn't targeting [H] members.
 
Thing is, for what their customers use the computers for, they don't fall short at all. Very, very few people need the latest, hottest hardware. Apple isn't targeting [H] members.

Agreed. I think the issue here isn't so much that, just why the product lines are so slow to get updates. One may not need the latest and greatest but when you're spending the kind of many Macs cost, I think most customers would appreciate more update to date tech on a new purchase.
 
I've a gaming PC and a laptop and a bunch of servers running linux. The laptop happens to be a late 2013 MacBook Pro fully decked out and a bunch of other apple products and I totally support this. I am looking forward to a new MacBook Pro with up-to-date hardware.
 
Thing is, for what their customers use the computers for, they don't fall short at all. Very, very few people need the latest, hottest hardware. Apple isn't targeting [H] members.

Interestingly, most people I know who bought Macs IRL are starting to get annoyed with them and probably won't buy another one in the future.
 
without Jobs cracking the whip, Apple gets lazy, and go into 'default corporate deuchebag' mode, IE: ONLY PUMP MONEY INTO SECTORS THAT IMMEDIATELY TURN THE MOST PROFIT. They forget that Apple only made buckets of cash from the cult 'apple environment' philosophy where people were replacing every single device in their home with a silver unibodied Apple product, and thus surrounding themselves in the brand. Apple may not have made loads of money off the individual x86 devices (not as much as the phones and tablets by a long stretch), but those devices were an investment into the brand. a grand plan of total indoctrination: and damn did it WORK. If Apple loose that "Apple Environment" mentality, their entire brand will fall apart.
 
You're missing the point, if they're selling the number of units they want to it doesn't matter at all how outdated they are. Why waste money putting out product updates if you sell the same number of systems anyway?

I kinda hope Apple just gives out on selling PCs, their market share is pretty low and I don't want to bother writings versions of apps for them anymore.


I've a gaming PC and a laptop and a bunch of servers running linux. The laptop happens to be a late 2013 MacBook Pro fully decked out and a bunch of other apple products and I totally support this. I am looking forward to a new MacBook Pro with up-to-date hardware.

I recommend the Dell XPS 15.
 
without Jobs cracking the whip, Apple gets lazy, and go into 'default corporate deuchebag' mode, IE: ONLY PUMP MONEY INTO SECTORS THAT IMMEDIATELY TURN THE MOST PROFIT. They forget that Apple only made buckets of cash from the cult 'apple environment' philosophy where people were replacing every single device in their home with a silver unibodied Apple product, and thus surrounding themselves in the brand. Apple may not have made loads of money off the individual x86 devices (not as much as the phones and tablets by a long stretch), but those devices were an investment into the brand. a grand plan of total indoctrination: and damn did it WORK. If Apple loose that "Apple Environment" mentality, their entire brand will fall apart.

They didn't get lazy, they just have a rather large reliance on Intel. Intel had supply issues at first with Haswell, causing quite a few companies to delay their products, same with Skylake. Apple had no intention of buying into Skylake with a few considerations.

1 - HDMI 2.0 was becoming a necessity and they most likely didn't want to be tied to an dGPU

2 - Skylake was a decent jump but would have cost a lot and they aren't really selling right now.

At best they could/should have been updating their stack with new GPU's for their productivity line, especially with the Mac Pro which made a pretty big splash in the "prosumer" or workstation.
 
Every single feature which can potentially send information to Apple in OS X has a transparent method to opt out (including crash reports, spotlight searches and the ***optional*** usage of Siri). Compared to Win10, where even if the god damn service is disabled in the OS it still communicates with MS servers (even ignoring the much more worrying shenanigans), there is no comparison.

In my experience to use the best Apple features across a variety of devices you end up sharing data tied to iCloud accounts, so they end up with data anyway. I'm at the point where I can answer calls + texts, use notes / calendars / photos / bookmarks across multiple devices, all because it's guided by Apple servers across iOS and MacOS. It may not be the same data MS collects, but still...
 
I recommend the Dell XPS 15.

Nope. For productivity I can't use a windows PC. When I boot my win10 box I immediately boot steam and that's it. I loathe windows and PC trackpads. But that's me.
 
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