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That Awkward Moment When 'Apple Mocked Good Hardware and Poor People' (dailydot.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a DailyDot article: Phil Schiller, Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, took the stage in Cupertino, California, earlier this week to explain some of the new features and specs on the new iPad Pro. Between showing off a new display and camera, Schiller also took some digs at Windows and PC users, specifically calling out those users who are on computers more than five years old. Schiller said that 600 million people are using PCs that are over five years old. 'This is really sad,' he said.
C. Custer, reporter for Tech in Asia also didn't like Schiller's remarks. He writes: If Apple's really targeting those 600 million old PC users, it seems to have done a pretty poor job. It's been more than five years since I saw the need to upgrade my primary computer, and nothing about the iPad Pro presentation made me rethink my position at all. But of course, Apple isn't really targeting those people. That was mostly just a cheap shot, a jibe at all of us poor fools who haven't yet seen the light. That's why the audience laughed knowingly, and even applauded. "Using the same machine for five years? How barbaric! Thank god we live in civilized society, where everyone throws their gadgets out and buys new ones every two years."
C. Custer, reporter for Tech in Asia also didn't like Schiller's remarks. He writes: If Apple's really targeting those 600 million old PC users, it seems to have done a pretty poor job. It's been more than five years since I saw the need to upgrade my primary computer, and nothing about the iPad Pro presentation made me rethink my position at all. But of course, Apple isn't really targeting those people. That was mostly just a cheap shot, a jibe at all of us poor fools who haven't yet seen the light. That's why the audience laughed knowingly, and even applauded. "Using the same machine for five years? How barbaric! Thank god we live in civilized society, where everyone throws their gadgets out and buys new ones every two years."
...The coworker sitting next to me us using a 5.5 year old macbook pro and defending it as "still as good as anything new."
What a barbarian.
Modern app appers know that only apps can app apps, and if 600 million LUDDITES are still using LUDDITE software, that ruins it for the rest of us app appers! Apple wants to destroy LUDDITE software and replace it with good wholesome appy app apps!
Apps!
What about all the poor SOB's who can't afford to upgrade their broken Apple shite because it's ridiculously fragile & over priced
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
The Apple Marketing really are targeting the shallow and vacuous assholes who want to feel smug about the latest shiny?
My last PC was over 6 years old before it keeled over, and I hope this one lasts about the same.
Know what I still don't have? My first gen iPad that Apple updated until they made it useless. Know what I do have? A 3.5 year old Android tablet.
Huge amounts of people are running older machines ... and, once again, people in marketing are shallow idiots.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No way!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
My iMac is almost 7 years old and it's mostly fine. It was, though, top of the line. Are those 600 million PCs core2 duos, i3s, or what?
An offhand joke? During the launch of a new product? Disparaging older and/or competing products? I am outraged!
Check where they show up on any current benchmark. This is just more Apply reality distortion field. Moore's law has landed and Apple hasn't figured it out yet.
It was a dumb comment for sure, but turning this into a matter of class warfare or social justice is orders of magnitude dumber.
Strange how my old crap still outperforms their new tech. When it's not on full load it even draws less wattage than the LED monitor it uses.
My favourite type of people are those that try to replace desktops for tablets, their forthcoming pain males me warm inside.
Apple is a predatory company exploiting slave labor in china.
Without looking it up list five other companies doing the same thing.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
If he was serious about targeting people with 5 year old PCs he would have included mouse support for iOS, but he didn't.
Have you seen the size of Phil Schiller's hands?
Has anyone else noticed it is "cool to be outraged" lately? Every perceived slight requires some lengthy rant from a "victim" about hurt or traumatized they are after coming across some article they do not agree with. I chuckled as I read the responses on my 5+ year old Nehalem i5 based desktop. We'll get a few days of twitter and tumblr wars calling for Tim Cook's head on a pike and Apple needs to be fined out of existence. A new "outrage" will pop up and everything will be forgotten. Rinse, lather, repeat.
apple (and all non generic hardware pushers) needs consumers to continuously discard their old and buy its newest overpriced products with their much hyped latest features ( however unsubstantial ) in order to make profit.
this can only be achieved by social conditioning. a herd mentality is created where members of the herd feel fulfilled and happy, and be in a satisfactory social status, only when they have the latest.
so of course, they must laugh and mock at those outside the herd, make members of the herd join in laughing and mocking, more publicly the better.
BE A homesexual asshole, ok you can be hetero too, but the asshole perk is mandatory
My bike is 15 years old, my Commodore 64 is probably 30 years old, my oscilloscope is closer to 50 years old, and my best scotch is 21 years old.
I earn less than I did 15 years ago in equivalen dollars, and my expenses have gone way up.
So go fuck youself with your sanctimonious bullshit.
mean while, my 5 year old rig will stuff crush any mac workstation on any game you throw at it...
Not to defend the other guys but they have razor thin margins on most of their products. Apple could double the wages of the Chinese workers and still make tons of money.
Tablet w/ LTE + Keyboard + Pencil = $1000 - and that's the small version with less memory than most flagship smartphones. But, hey, if you can sell as many as you can make, why the fuck not, right?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
8 GB memory
1 TB SSD
Still good to go...
On it's 3rd battery & second touch pad
Oh - and the disk isn't soldered in and doesn't have a proprietary connector.
I'm typing this on a laptop I bought for work, a 2014 MBP Retina. I suppose this is my daily driver but it's a toss up if I work at home (2 monitors have their advantages). When I worked exclusively from home, my work computers were a 2008 MBP and an Optiplex 740 (2013-2014). Hell even now I "upgraded" my gaming computer to a Optiplex 780 with a nicer GPU (2010 for both). I won't need a new desktop for a long time.
Three years ago, I had to call up Apple Support over a Configurator issue managing the iPads for a school district. They asked me what machine I was using to run Configurator. I gave them the model number of the MacBook laptop, which at the time was close to six years old. The support agent gave a very audible "Woah!," then followed with the comment, "That's a dinosaur!" I proceeded to tell him somewhat tersely that it was a good laptop, was still working fine for what we needed it to do, and that I didn't see the reason why I needed to upgrade. But he wasn't convinced. It was only when I told him that we were running the latest version of OSX, iTunes, and Configurator that he said, "Well, I guess that'll work."
Ever since the first G3 iMacs came out back in '99, Apple has always designed new devices to make the old devices look and feel obsolete. It's always been a part of their culture. Why does this comment surprise anyone?
Apple has been playing the class warfare/have vs have-not/status symbol card for a while now. It plays to exactly what we (the general masses) intrinsically fear -- being singled out, not being "in", not fashionable, looking like a dork, etc.... It's also one of the reasons why the 99% hate the 1% -- because the 1% flaunt their wealth in front of others. Do you want to be flaunted to? Or do you want to do the flaunting to those plebeian Android/Windows/BB/feature phone users?
We have to realize that Apple is a fashion company first, a tech company second. Blue bubbles, anyone? Or are you "green with envy"?
It is vaguely unusual for someone to say it so plainly; but I'm not sure why this position would be even slightly surprising. Apple mostly sells hardware. If you sell hardware, people who are using 5+ year old PCs are lousy customers(regardless of cause: maybe they are too poor to buy the new and shiny stuff that they do want, maybe their needs just haven't changed enough to make an upgrade worth it, though they could afford whatever new and shiny stuff they felt like, the effect is the same). Why wouldn't your marketing message be anything other than encouragement to the people who do buy new stuff frequently; with a secondary focus on encouraging people with old stuff to feel that they are missing out?
My MacBook is from 2006 and the last major rebuilt of my gaming PC is from 2007. I'm looking for replacements in the near future.
>> 600 million people are using PCs that are over five years old. 'This is really sad,' he said.
No it really isn't. Most people just use PCs to write emails and surf the net. Heck even 5 year old hardware is overpowered just for that.
For your profit margins im sure, but for the rest of us we're doing just fine.
we can still access facebook, google, instagram, twitter, and a host of other top level sites to complete the tasks we see fit to complete on the internet. And as for Linux users, many slackware and gentoo afficionados routinely run nearly 10 year old hardware without concern.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Their router management software only works with relatively recent base stations. If you've got older versions, it won't work. You'd need to keep old versions of the software around to manage the new ones.
Always buy routers that use HTTP webpages for management. Then you can use anything with a web browser to manage it. (If Apple routers were cheap, this design would be okay, but they are some of the expensive home routers on the market.)
Anyway, I recently got a 15-inch, quad-core i7 laptop for $650. It only has 10/100 LAN, but it's a damn sight better than what Apple offers and for a better price.
So I gotta pay for disposing of electronics. You gonna help me out, Phil? Is Apple the green economy company that can tell people to throw out their old shit because I don't have to worry about throwing these things away? How very generous of you -- I may buy a Mac! Just let me know where to send the bill.
There is nothing quite as wonderful as money,
There is nothing quite as beautiful as cash,
Some people say it's folly
But I'd rather have the lolly
With money you can make a smash.
When your PC is self-built and maintained with upgrades as needed, it's hard to tell the age of it. I got one part in it that's only like a year old, but I got a secondary HDD in there that's from the last decade.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Most PCs use integrated graphics, only to the /. crowd or college students who don't fully comprehend the debt they're taking on is anything greater close to normal. Ergo, as most MacBooks themselves use integrated graphics; so the new PC beats the old MacBook and the new MacBook beats the old PC.
What the hell man?
Interesting coming from a company that will sell you a 3y9m old machine today (http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MD101LL/A&step=config#). Reports are that they still sell rather a lot of them, because they're upgradable, repairable, and work just fine.
As for me, my 2010 MBP literally came out of a garbage skip. Found it with a bulging/burst lithium battery (far from an Apple-only issue). $50 worth of eBay grey market battery later, and I have a pretty solid machine for XCode and Mac testing. If it weren't for that, I just wouldn't test or dev anything for Macs. Couldn't afford to.
The rich boys and their expensive toys, about which they understand a fraction.
It's tough to show off your new Porsche to the Marketing chippies around the watercooler, so your new Apple-thing will have to suffice...
I'm semi-convinced that the "have a take, and don't suck" mantra that requires you go all holier-than-thou on someone or something has elevated this an art form.
Apple Computer and its followers are snobs and are really unfriendly toward earth. Keep buying new stuff and help up make the soil toxic. You can't even change the battery in it's new laptops unless you take it apart; That is real friendly toward the environment. My current PC is 4 years old and my laptop is 5 years old, they do what i need them to do. Why should I upgrade? The difference between people like me and the typical Apple user is my Phone and computer are for work, not a status symbol. What worse of all is the conditions in the factories that make Apple products are work houses like you read about in Oliver Twist where people live and die without ever truly living. Apple did not care about humans until the press outed them. The factories are marginally better, but are still workhouses. Apple does not care about sustainability by making it's products reusable by making the battery replaceable; I can give someone else my Dell laptop and they or I can buy them a battery so that they can use my old computer to educate themselves or work.Most Apple users are smug, entitled people who just don't care about the environment, their fellow man, or anything but their status.
To err is to be human, to really screw up takes a computer and a human.
Apple makes money selling hardware. That's their business model. So, they will do whatever it takes to encourage selling new shinies, including encouraging their customers to "trade up" to a newer model via hype, minor upgrades or "social engineering" to get their customers ready to buy.
Companies selling "durable goods" love to have their customers buy their products more often than necessary. They all use these sorts of tactics to make that happen to improve their bottom line. Apple is no different.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
Apple did get raised wages and and improved working conditions for the workers in China. But since the principle was "we hate Apple" as opposed to "protect the workers", only Apple felt pressure and only the workers on Apple products got improvements. A year or two after everybody stopped grumbling about Apple they were busted exploiting workers again.
If you actually do care about those workers then their exploitation should be the issue regardless of Apple's involvement.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/tech-talk-iphone-5/n27749
Not to defend the other guys but they have razor thin margins on most of their products. Apple could double the wages of the Chinese workers and still make tons of money.
Apple doesn't set the wages of the companies that make it's products. They don't OWN foxconn or Samsung, they contract out all the manufacturing and rake in the profits.
The last thing I want to see is Apple demanding the companies they hire to make their products increase their wages because it's the Right Thing (TM). The precedent that would set would cause a fallout beyond belief in the manufacturing sector.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
I've replaced every part in it many times though.
The business model of modern corporations require you to consume their products as fast as you can, whether you need it or not. I could see needing to upgrade to a new computer every few years twenty years ago, but not anymore. I recently retired my 10 year old PC, and I can't tell much of a difference between it and my new PC I built. Unless you need the latest processor power for some special application, a new PC every five years in this day and age is just overkill.
Posting this from a 5 year old iMac that runs everything I need just fine, including El Capitan and the Windows 10 VM I just installed. Of course, I upgraded the RAM, which is damn near impossible to do on a new model. Now that is sad.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
When Apple starts making PCs that a) don't cost an arm and a leg b) can be upgraded with things other than Apple's special, overly expensive parts and c) are not useless garbage completely unsuitable for gaming, then mabye I'll care what they think about how old my computer is.
I'd greatly appreciate him providing me with a welfare Mac, Mac Mini, Mac book or iPad. I don't want him to give me an iPhone, that would just be usury.
I have:
- 2011 MacBook Air i5 13.3" - still runs well on OS X 10.11. Works well casting video to Chromecast.
- 2011 iMac i7 27" - has gotten slower and slower with each OS update, upgrading to SSD a year or so ago fixed that. Now runs very well with OS X 10.11.
- 2012 iPad mini - deceased due to digitizer problems. Got slower and slower with each OS update, also, could not keep more than one webpage tab stored in RAM at once. Was planning to upgrade it anyway due to the performance, but the "ghost touch" on the digitizer made it unusable. I will probably get a refurbished iPad mini 2 to replace it (it has twice the RAM and shouldn't have as many problems keeping webpages cached).
- 2015 iPhone 6S - this replaced a Nexus 4 with a dying battery. Still works well, obviously.
The desktop and laptop seem to have better longevity than the mobile devices. I will replace the mobile devices when they break or when running the current OS makes them too slow. The desktop and laptop still perform very well and look like they will have several more years of usage left. Similar newer Apple desktops and laptops seem to benchmark about 50% higher than the ones I have, which is not enough for me to consider an upgrade. Honestly, when the time comes, I could see replacing both the iMac and the MacBook Air with a midrange 15" Dell laptop. At that point, I might upgrade to a 10" size iPad, since I would no longer have an ultraportable laptop to travel with.
Sent from my iPhone
Writing this on my 5+ year old corporate Dell laptop, which I use for Solidworks. I'd like to think Philips could afford a new laptop if I complained, but it still works great. Bottom line: PCs passed the point of diminishing returns years ago where speed is concerned for most users. Companies like Apple and Microsoft are trying very hard to find ways to compel people to upgrade, but it's mostly falling on deaf ears. If I can do most things I need on my $35 Raspberry Pi, exactly why do I need a $1000 (or more) laptop? A brushed aluminum case isn't enough. The Mac Pro is sexy and innovative, but at 100X the price of a Raspberry Pi, that's a bit difficult to justify, especially when I can buy a used Dell Xeon workstation for $200, and I think a lot of people are looking at the value equation the same way.
Have you seen the performance of the new i3-6100TE??
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10127/overclockable-core-i3-supermicro-c7h170-m-intel-core-i3-6100te-review/12
Every generation has been getting faster. Intel just doesn't have a competitor to force it to sell faster parts cheaply.
Way back when, Apple was claiming that its computers lasted longer, and retained their usefulness longer, than other computers. Suddenly, this is supposed to be a problem?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You know one of those computers with a nice aluminum style exterior. (ignore the environmental impact of buying apple's rubbish).
Buy it quicker faster and become dumber.
So glad im electronics literate and looking at the construction/design of the motherboards / power supplies apple gets you nothing special for 40% higher price to put it in the bin quicker.
So you can get off your "me so offended horse" - every freakin' technology companies makes fun of people who aren't using the latest and greatest. Microsoft EVEN claimed that if you upgrade the process in your computer you will need to be using the latest version of Windows or else it won't work properly.
Seriously, people with short attention spans.
Gaaahh. My MacBook Pro is 6 years old. Still does a great job. That comment is from a throw-away viewpoint, which seems to feel that everyone has lots of money to give Apple, and no need to spend it on anything else. Let's see: I have a house to pay for, a sick wife, a son in college, a dog, 2 cars to pay for, insurance for everybody, all the associated bills needed to pay for a house, etc. Left over is a few dollars I try to put towards retirement. I don't need to waste my money on useless Apple crap. Before all the Apple fanboys start getting on their high horse, be warned that I am (used to be) a long time Apple customer, starting with the original Apple ][, Apple ///, Apple Lisa, original 128K Apple Macintosh. More recently, (back in 2010) I got a Macbook Pro 17" laptop, my wife has an iPad Air 2.
So I'm speaking from experience: Apple stuff is overpriced. Yes, it is usually reliable, although we just had to replace the 6 month old iPad, and the apple cables leave a lot to be desired. But my father got an Asus laptop for $300, and he was very happy with it until he died of cancer.
Got a Phenom X4 chugging happily since 2009. Got a Sandy Bridge i5 2500K purring along since 2010. Even my Macbook Pro is a 2010 model, doing great since I swapped out the drive for a Samsung SSD, and my iPad is from 2012, the first to use retina and the last to use the wide (non-lightning) connector.
Sorry, Apple marketing guy. Got nothing against Apple products... they're pretty and work well. But my shit's working just fine, thank you very much, and I'll take no compulsion to trade up before I'm damn good and ready. Don't piss on me just because I know how to source reliable equipment and maintain it well.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Those are kind of old.
Maybe fanboi at Apple should stick it where the sun don't shine.
I'll buy an iPhone 5E because it's not a huge monstrosity like the iPhone 6 is, not because you grok the Internet we built in the 70s, fanboi.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No, it's not disparaging the products, it's disparaging the people who own and use those products. Big difference.
And, uh, being a dickhead in a marketing launch does not magically excuse him being a dickhead.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
How about the Mac Pro? The last time they did an update on that machine was in 2013! All of the hardware in that product line is at least three years old, and a good portion of it was about a year out of date when it came out in 2013. For a machine that costs upwards of four grand, you are certainly not getting your money's worth!
You can get a significantly more powerful machine today for half the cost.
Let's face it, most of us who use laptops use them for business work. Upgrades are pretty pointless as the slowest part is the user.
Performance is not really a key criteria for a laptop user.
Performance is for media and games, perhaps niches like 3D modelling. Much of this is now phones, games consoles and desktop PCs.
How do you market new laptops to this market segment when the most performance hungry applications they have is Word, Excel or some LOB application???
You don't. They use this tech until it dies.
This is nothing new at all. This has been Apple user attitude since the Macintosh came out. The attitude was to look down on those poor pitiable IBM users because they didn't have the best, and had to bow down before the silicon gods to receive their next batch of poorly engineered hardware. This was back in 1985. Nothing has changed.
This wouldn't even be an article other than some journalist seized an angle and went with it. I bet the spokeslady never saw it coming, because she's so into it that it's completely normal for her and everyone she ever talks to in her life. But these days, one part of the mainstream media hivemind can take something out of context like this, signal to the rest of the hivemind, and bam it's a huge story.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Expected the tablet bubble to burst years earlier than it has.
1720 running a SSD and Mint XFCE!!! Why didn't I realize using my finger on a track pad is soooo passe these days vs touching a beautiful piece of glass with that same finger.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
My last Mac is 10 years old now. MacBook Pro Core 2 Duel. I still use it to watch some stuff on iTunes with it.
My Current laptop a ThinkPad is approaching 5 years now. Compared to the new tech, it still is very fast and I have no needs for an upgrade.
My desktop is seven years old, albeit with a few updates. My laptop (a Dell E4300) I picked up off ebay for a hundred bucks and added an SSD. The desktop does almost anything I ask of it (I think XCOM2 was the only game it had a problem with, and it would probably run that with a new video card). The laptop doesn't do gaming but handles standard work tasks (web browsing, word processing) and Netflix without a problem. Most of the world doesn't need more than that.
If you're running a lot of massive builds on your local machine, running highly processor-intensive tasks, processing a massive amount of data, or are unable to run modern programs you need, it can absolutely make sense to shell out for a new machine. But otherwise (in most cases), it's just unnecessary spending on a luxury. It pollutes the environment, it's a slap in the face to *any* poorer relations or friends you might have, if you don't have trusts set up for your kids already it's kind of a slap in the face to them, and it's far from a socially responsible way to spend your money because almost the entire nonprofit world out there is trying to serve millions of people on budgets that would make you live on rice and ramen.
There are a few exceptions--maybe you are an engineer who designs hardware for the new system or needs to understand the customer experience better--but for most people, it's just a waste.
No, it's not disparaging the products, it's disparaging the people who own and use those products. Big difference.
Was he, though? I'm asking. The article was pretty light on actual quotes. All I found was:
Schiller said that 600 million people are using PCs that are over five years old. "This is really sad," he said.
Which seems kind of ambiguous to me.
And, uh, being a dickhead in a marketing launch does not magically excuse him being a dickhead.
I suppose not. But based on my personal experience with marketing people, not being a dickhead might well get him magically excused from his job as a marketeer.
I have the first "Unibody" macbookpro model 8rs old with an intel SSD. If I run OS X v178.12.9753 whatever on it with 928364 more features, then it will be slow as hell... if i run the OS it came with (Mac OS 10.6) it's fast and light but insecure... pretty much all of the open source OS i've used on it run very fast. The only way to keep perfectly good old Apple hardware working is to not use their OS - They sell expensive hardware, and it's important to them that the subscription model continues even if the hardware is not substantially better any more. AKA planed obsolescence.
The tech culture in general today has this arrogant assumption that newness for newness' sake is always better. It goes along with software, worker age, etc. and so forth.
This is just one example.
Would love to see Apple put their money where their mouths are - how about they get all their staff to swap out their desktops, and let's see the entire company run on iPads.
My computer is x years old !
How does this lend itself to the larger considerations at hand? Admittedly this post by manishs is flame bait, but there is some ethical/moral meat to digest. For example we may ask if this statement by Schiller representative of all the company's attitude. Or is it representative of the thinking of the entire computer industry, or the electronic industry, or the entire world industry controlled by the 'one percent'...
Actually it seems to be an offhand comment by one person who has likely come to regret it.
It isn't worthy of slashdot consideration.
...omphaloskepsis often...
..is that Apple execs thinks we should have to upgrade perfectly working hardware every year. I put a new video card in my intel i7 920 and it still performs pretty damn good for all the tasks I use it for. This is just more proof of how far out of touch Apple is with the real world.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Hey fuck Apple already. Yeah, all my computers are older than 5 years. You know why ? Because for under 1000 bucks I can pick up a used supercomputer: 8 cores, 32GB mem plenty of diskspace and upgradable when I'm ready.
Also, I can run Linux and Windows. And you know what Apple? Windows still has the most software. So fuck you!
For example: The MacPro. What the fuck is that? Totally proprietary. Fuck Apple.
Hardware should be like all other consumables. After a certain number of years, or a certain number of files read/written, or a certain number of cpu cycles, the hardware has been consumed fully, and must be replaced.
Consumers drive the economy.
Want to know why you are being downsized? You don't consume enough. You reduce, reuse and recycle your components, like an irresponsible consumer.
Replacing memory? should not be possible, memory should be soldered in.
Replacing a cpu? should not be possible.
the computer should be a sealed unit, Apple has it right, everyone else has it wrong, and thats why PC manufacturers are in dire straights.
Software will help with the upgrade lock-in. Want this new feature? Purchase new hardware.
We have pushed down PC's into sub $300 territory. People spend more on their 2 year phones on contract. We need to sell PC's on a contract. Microsoft Windows 10 is helping this along.
Illegal OSs like Linux, and open-sores software should be illegal, or run in a highly crippled mode, possibly in some soft of virtualized sandbox, so they don't try and extend the life of the hardware.
Until recently I still had my old flip-phone. Why? Because it wasn't broke.
If it ain't broke, don't replace it. Pretty simple.
I'd be pretty happy if my computer lasted more than 5 years. Saves me money.
May Apple burn in hell.
Most people just use PCs to write emails and surf the net.
Have you seen the net lately? Because modern browsing is requiring decent specs to perform well for the web, specs that older PC's tends to not have and older macs do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The last thing I want to see is Apple demanding the companies they hire to make their products increase their wages because it's the Right Thing (TM). The precedent that would set would cause a fallout beyond belief in the manufacturing sector.
Yes, it would be disasterous if very large companies insist on ethical sourcing. /sarcasm
SJW n. One who posts facts.
My newest Apple computer is a 2011 MacBook Pro. I've upgraded the memory from 8GB to 16GB and the 500GB HD to a 1TB SSD. It also has a 1680 x 1050 NON-glossy display. Back then Apple used to make computers with options and upgrade paths. Both upgrading and non-glossy displays are no longer available, so I keep hanging on to what I like. At home it gets no better. My 2008 Mac Pro is still going strong, and no way I'm buying one of those stupid Mac Cans. I even still run a G4 Mac Cube as a web server. I forgot how old that is. So Apple, either make computers that die faster, or start making computers that I would want to own.
The Apple Marketing really are targeting the shallow and vacuous assholes who want to feel smug about the latest shiny? My last PC was over 6 years old before it keeled over, and I hope this one lasts about the same.
My PC is at 6 and doing just fine, admittedly its on its 2nd video card upgrade so that current games are still playable. My current MacBookPro is at 4 and in no need of replacement any time soon, my previous one only had 4 years of full-time use because it did not make the cutoff for 64-bit. When I build my own PCs or order Macs I am generous with RAM, that helps performance and longevity.
PC/Mac performance has so outpaced user needs, except for gamers, that 5+ years for a PC/Mac is quite normal. Having an "older" machine has nothing to do with being wealthy or not. Those trying to misrepresent the comment as an attack on the non-wealthy are trying to manufacture a controversy for whatever reason they will benefit, most likely visits to their site.
I am quite content with my ancient ThnkPad running the latest Fedora Linux. The only reason I even own an iPhone is so I can Facetime with my wife to see my children when I'm on the road. Nothing is more convenient.
I prefer using Linux/BSD over OS X, so will never own a MacBook or Apple computer. I realize I can run *nix on these machines, but why pay the HW premium when older ThinkPads are plentiful and cheap. If they die after a couple of years, I don't feel bad.
Yeah, yeah. Let Schiller sniff about how I'm such a poor deprived second class citizen for using my 5 year old dell Precision dual multicore Xeon with 32 Gig of memory, SSD os drive, 8 TB of normal hard drive, and a Quadro 4000 video card.
Yep. Ancient. Hopeless. Useless. And will still leave most of what Schiller's company makes in the dust when it comes to number crunching.
My 7 years old PC (with a few upgrades along the way) is more powerful and extensible than most new Macs. You'd give me one for free, I'd just sell it.
When people talk about outrage culture, this is it in action. Don't unwittingly become an advert for an agenda.
Some hardware upgrades are easy and affordable, others not so much. My desktop, as Steam's VR performance test put it so charitably, is "GPU bound." Which also means "PSU bound," problems not so easily solved with this board and case.
... calling out those users who are on computers more than five years old....
Not everyone can afford to get on the Apple hardware upgrade treadmill with the prices that Apple charges for its hardware.
.
$500 for the underpowered low-end Macmini, and all you get are the Macmini and a power cord.
And it will still destroy the iPad Pro in almost every performance benchmark imaginable.
Besides, most people still using PC's that can afford an iPad Pro probably have a specific use case or software that isn't available on iOS. I'm sure as hell not going to through out my old developer workstation and use an iPad Pro for coding, anyway.
If Maslow's hierarchy of needs was modified for gamers a good video card would probably fall between Safety and Love/Belonging. Well maybe Video Card could be lumped together with caffeine source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Whoops. It looks like he's not familiar with the brick wall that CPU single-thread performance hit a few years ago.
If you compare the single-thread benchmarks on Sandy Bridge (2011) versus Haswell (2013) versus Skylake (2015), you'll see that performance has gone up only modestly each time.
There's no point in upgrading if I'm only going to get a 20% increase in speed on single-thread performance. (A vast majority of the software I run is bound by single-thread performance.)
I need to see at least a doubling in single-thread speed before I would consider upgrading. At this rate, I'll probably be upgrading my Ivy Bridge machine about 2022 at the earliest, and more realistically about 2025.
I bought my MacBook Pro in 2007, and it's still going strong. It's running El Capitan, and it's faster than the 2-year-old Windows laptop I have to use at work.
I was using my 2008 MacBook at least five years after I bought it, and it still generally worked well for me. At a trade show I was doing booth duty and noticed that all the others had silver laptops out. At a security conference, most of the people in the room had silver apple gear in front of them. It seemed that I "needed" a new laptop so that I wouldn't stand out as much as the poor "white mac" guy. I'm still using my MBRP-RD 15" bought in 2013, and expect to do so until 2018 unless something horrible happens.
If anything, it shows that the Mac ecosystem is under less pressure to upgrade, and that their hardware is of higher quality. There is a higher percentage of 5-year-old Mac hardware users than 5-year-old PC users.
Thunderbolt port? USB3? OMG, you still don't use USB-C? You poor barbarian!
The people who buy new gadgets every two years remind me of the people who buy new cars every 2. But god bless these idiots, they make used cars and phones cheaper for the rest of US! But I'd also hope that they have enough money for both splurging on re-upping everything and retirement. Because for me it's buying these two year old phones and even older cars and retiring with money or buying new all the time and not being able to retire.
I've had it with your bickering! Go to your safe place and time out! ... and don't come back.
have razor thin margins on most of their products.
yeaaaaah... no. They have a fairly hefty margin.
I can buy the parts they put in say an iphone for ~200 bucks. They sell for 600. You do the math.
Yeah, it could even bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.
My laptop is over 5 years old at this point. While it's still working fine for the most part, it *is* getting to the point now where I'd at least start to think about upgrading (usually that choice is made for me - this is actually the longest a laptop has lasted me). But I *hate* 16:9, so I'm holding on as long as I possibly can, because the market is no longer willing to sell me the laptop I want to buy (i.e. one with a 16:10 screen).
... Or maybe I'm too rough on them.
My MacBook Pros don't seem to last more than a couple of years these days. Perhaps that is the nature of a portable device that is tossed about. My old 2008 Mac Tower is STILL faster than my brand new MacBook Pro with force touch. Having 8 cores helps.
Joseph Elwell.
(Cr)apple is about cheap crappy hardware and software made in Chinese sweat shops, which is then vastly overpriced, and sold to iDiots who think because it costs more it must be better! No tablet so far can replace a desktop or laptop computer. The only people who might think otherwise are those who only surf the web and play games on their tablets.
The new iShiney will still lag far beyond Android devices in build quality and capabilities just like every iPad, iPhone, and any other iDevice ever made!
I di far more with my computers than the average person, and my refurbished Lenovo desktop and 11 year old IBM T43 laptops are still fast enough and work well enough that I see no reason to replace them. Especially as I don't by the hype that the cheaper and shorter "wide screens" are better! I will stick with my 4:3 aspect ratio monitors and laptop screens as long as possible!
See, I can't afford new computers all the time because my development job was off-shored.
Schiller said that 600 million people are using PCs that are over five years old. 'This is really sad,' he said.
It sure is sad. How about bringing some of those jobs you people off-shored back home? Maybe then we can afford to buy your crap.
I'm curious as to which laptop you have that takes a "$300 Discrete GPU upgrade". Or are you trying to compare laptop apples to desktop oranges?
An executive from a company that sells trendy computer hardware wanting people to buy new computer hardware more often than every 5 years...
Who would ever think that??????
Sure, it could have been phrased in a more PC way, but it's what EVERY computer hardware company is thinking.
My main rig is one that I built in 2012. Biostar TZ77B, i5 3570k, 16gb of ram. The only thing I did was put in a gtx980 in it a few months ago, aside from that, I see no reason to upgrade period. I expect this system to last till at least 2022. Hell with a bit of luck (barring any insane tech breakthroughs) I see it lasting a bit longer then that while staying fully relevant and useful.
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
I was going to say something snarky about the head of a trendy boutique brand pushing unnecessary obsolescence as a way to finance his second yacht, but C. Custer has already said what needed to be said.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
7 years old rig, the only parts that were replaced over these years are HDDs (bought bigger ones/SSD) and GPU.
CPU: i5 750 (4 cores, 45nm (!!!))
RAM: 8Gb of RAM
GPU: AMD R9 380
Have no problems playing modern games at 1080p.
My 6 hear old Macbook pro is still running fine:
Processor Name: Intel Core i7 Running @ 2.66 GHz
Upgraded the memory from 4GB to 8GB, upgraded the hard drive from 512GB to 1TB.
And it has a matte display which is regrettably no longer available from Apple.
WARNING: If you're "still" using a computer that's more than 2 years old because its good enough, this post may male you feel like you made the right decision.
Sad? No, this is sad. I would love to buy a new Apple (I need a laptop, and I need to stick with Apple because of various constraints). Unfortunately, they won't sell me a new one that's much better than my "sad" old one.
I started looking for a replacement for my 2012 MacBook Pro a few months ago, fully expecting to buy myself a performance boost. I couldn't believe that Apple simply doesn't make a laptop that's significantly faster than my four year old computer.
Here's the benchmark for my 2012 MacBook Pro: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/4933459
Compare that with the results from recent MBPs: http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks
Wow. It's four years later and I still can't buy a significant performance boost from Apple. The best I can do is an almost unnoticeable bump in speed.
Maybe more people would stop using "sad" old computers if Apple gave them a compelling reason to upgrade.
Building Better Software
The rate of revolutionary change really has slowed in the past decade or so. To me, the oldest laptops worth servicing and putting back into service are Merom-based machines from early-to-mid-2007. With two decent cores, a 4GB DDR2 RAM limit, and SATA (even if SATA I), they are hardly barn-burners (lap burners they are, though), but they still run fast enough, and have Aero-capable integrated graphics Windows 10 accepts without complaint (and displays on par with what's available today). For anything older than that, I generally would advise someone to transfer data and move on if it breaks. Even those older machines are still useful as movie players and such, though. They're just not worth patching up as they fall apart.
Part of this is not just the rate of change in the hardware, it's the type of change. Hardware has trended toward light and cool rather than fast and hot over the last decade, and software has been forced to accommodate the lack of net performance increase. Accordingly, a nine year old laptop may be bulky, hot, and short on battery life, but it still works. It may not be hip and trendy, but it gets the job done, fuck you very much.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Learn to read genius. It's not Sore that have razor thin margins, it's the companies making $100 tablets.
Sore? Apple is what I meant to type.
Well Moores law caught up.
Shoot. I am an IT guy who bought an i7 haswell 4770k because I could and for bragging rights :-)
I can run 8 or 9 vm's at once with 2 domains, 2 dhcp servers, a freebsd based router running pfsense, and other things and the cpu never hits more than 15 to 20% when booted all at once?!
So what does Joe Plumber need a more powerful pc for? Quickbooks, excel and his facebook on IE work very well on an i5 quadcore with 4 gigs of ram and an SSD. Shoot an i3 with a mechanical disk would work for him but boot slower too with Windows 7.
If we all thought and were amazed at XP's longevity with suzie sues refusing to leave her Pentium IV with 1 gig orf ram imagine Windows 7 pcs with i5's and ssds?
Why change for the sake of change? Sad as a techno geek who still upgrades to remain current in skillsets I like progress. But I guess like cars they are mature technology that change little now compared to the early days like the 1990's were.
http://saveie6.com/
I'm writing this on a 12 year-old power mac G5, I've upgraded the HD's a couple of times, because of space issues, not failure and the power supply died about 6 years ago and was replaced. I remember about the time I brought it there was a piece of research saying that a new pc would "last" 3 years, whereas a mac lasted 5 on average, I'm going to replace it this year, because it's so old and slow, and it won't run skype anymore, but it still does most things fine. I wish apple would release a machine like it today, I'd buy it tomorrow. As it is my next mac will probably be a hackintosh.
And yet they still use child/slave labor.
Apple - gouging people from day one.
Yeah, its unbreakable, unhackable, better hardware. Every lie in the book. In the end it's just a PC with an Apple on it.
I'm pretty sure the point was not to validate the people who already buy every year. It's because they want to make the 5-year-old-computer users feel like they aren't part of the "in" crowd, because it's easier to make you want to be part of the group than to make a product that's sufficiently different from 5 year old technology to convince people to upgrade.
See.. I have a pdp-11/83 with 4mb RAM. (no PMI).
This puppy is early 80's. I still compute with it. Do assembler. Still do C. Still do C++ (new!). Runs 2.11BSD (still supported!!). Runs RSX-11M.
I must be a "poor person". You can keep your fancy Apple junk :) I'll stick with my pdp-11 and keep running Ol'Girl for another 30 years kthx.
3 3 Here's to you old lass!
>The precedent that would set would cause a fallout beyond belief in the manufacturing sector.
Dafuq are you on? That doesn't make any sense.
It was smug, yes. All us (confession: rabid) anti-Microsoft old-timers are. That said, it was not a mocking of "good hardware" as the comment was specific to Windows users, which Apple hopes to upgrade to the new 9.7" iPad pro. That is all.
If Apple hardware wasn't crap, people wouldn't need to replace it every two years.
Apple doesn't set the wages of the companies that make it's products.
LOL, that doesn't ring hollow...
Not really.
I am typing this on a 17'' unibody early 2009 MacBook.
Bought it off ebay and never had an issue with it. Love the display size, really don't see why I should trade it in for 4K resolution on a smaller screen.
If anything I may purchase a 17'' mobile Dell workstation.
Our 2nd generation iPad is also still in use, despite a crack in the screen. The kids still get plenty of fun time out of it.
They make their money by encouraging people to toss-out perfectly good hardware and buy shiny new hardware nearly every year, so it's no surprise they are smack-talking people who are not on-board with that evil, wasteful, polluting business model. The fact is that most people reached a level of hardware capability the met or exceeded their needs years ago. The avg user adding another gig of RAM or running a few hundred MHz faster is not going to actually have any better experience. I am constantly amazed by the liberals who rage against things like plastic grocery bags, and demand we should all use hemp products and solar panels etc to "save the planet" but who insist on endlessly upgrading from iThis to iThat and using more power every year on their iPhones (and the server farms that support them) than many people spend on actual important things like refrigerators.
Then, of course, there's the issue that when you toss the old hardware, you cannot get the old software for the new platform, so you must move up to the newest software whose big new features are nothing you needed, just more spying on you.
Isn't apple still selling the MacBook Air that was last upgraded over 5 years ago?
My 5 year old PC is still faster than the latest MAC and costs a quarter of the cost.
When did we have to start looking for reasons to be all butt-hurt about things. Here's an update for all you whining twats out there: You don't have a right NOT to be offended. There are over 7 Billion people in the world and at any point in time, most of them will not agree with you. Get over it.
My personal desktop computer is a decade old. I bought it within months of the Core 2 Duo 6300 coming out as it was the best price to performance CPU out at the time from Intel. I've had HD failures, Video Card failures, but the core of my system is still humming along fine a decade after I first assembled it. I've also ran it pretty much 24/7 for the majority of that decade. I've gone from hardcore gaming and music production to spur of the moment gaming (think flash) and toying around with development. I still prefer web browsing on my desktop since I can effortlessly run multiple tabs across multiple monitors. No single screen tablet comes close to being that productive.
To think that I would replace this trusty steed with something as useless as an iPad with designed obsolescence is preposterous. Sorry, I don't need to pay Apple $300 per year to feel like I'm cool. I'm way cooler for having a rock solid reliable desktop PC.
Full Disclosure, I've been shopping Newegg to replace my desktop, but only because I am once again thinking about music production and No Mans Sky is coming out. I'll take a $1000 gaming PC once per decade over a $300 tablet every year.
After so much conclusive evidence of burning mountains of discarded electronics and depleting scarce resources, and despite efforts by so many to educate the world about the folly of poisoning the planet this idiot is actually promoting excessive e-waste.
Screw him.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
It occurs to me that there's a parallel with the sellers of the high end of the high end of audio gear. The differences in sound quality are minimal or in many cases not perceivable compared to just sorta high end. The difference in price is, however, often staggering. The marketing sounds pretty much the same as AppleSpeak; berate and belittle the impoverished or ignorant lowlifes who cannot or will not buy into our club.....
Don't step on the baby.
My Mac Pro is 9 years old.. because the new Mac Pro's are complete shit.
Misinterpret much? That isn't a chip on your shoulder, it's a brick. Must be very heavy to carry around all the time.
I run Linux, so I don't need to upgrade every time some CEO needs a new jet....
my computer's over 12 years old. it's not out of date because i have updated many parts of it over the years.
what's really sad is that Apple users can't upgrade ANYTHING on their shiny new computers.
I have nothing against the poor or struggling out there, and I like to think that often I'm a charitable person, and give, etc.
But man, do you seriously base your purchases on how it might be perceived by others in your family or friends...or even strangers???
I mean, do you and those people actually look at what kind of computer as a sort of status symbol?
No, and you're missing the point. It's not about the status symbol (at least, not for me--obviously there are people for whom it is about that, and they are mostly people who are overspending). It's not about how it might be perceived by others. It's about the fact that there are probably people in your life, perhaps just very tangentially, where $100 would make a massive difference in a month of their life. (In some cases it utterly destroys someone's life and affects whether they get their kids medical care, etc..., but let's keep it broader than that because I'll assume your peers are mostly pretty well-off.) In making a choice to purchase a luxury good rather than to gift that person even a fraction of your money, you are making a choice to leave that person in misery when it would cost you hardly anything to help. That problem can be something as simple as getting in a car accident--frequently that can lead to large medical costs, bankruptcy, job loss, etc...
And buying things..."socially responsible"?? Wow..that's a foreign concept to me....if I see something I want or need, I buy it. I've never heard of anyone giving more thought to a purchase than that. What does "socially responsible" purchasing mean and look like???
Then you haven't met a lot of people, or at least you haven't paid attention. Socially responsible purchasing means purchasing that takes into account the effect your purchase has on the rest of the world. Obviously you can't know all of the effect, but it's more obvious with some purchases than others. Yes, there are organizations that work hard on making sure supply chains are free of child labor and other abuses, and some people are very careful about what they buy for that reason. And some people buy antibiotic-free meat because they are concerned about the evolution of antibiotic-resistance bacteria that is threatening the medical system of the entire industrialized world. And some people choose to buy a used car instead of a new one because they want to save the extra money for their kids--for someone other than them. People care about something more than their own needs and devices.
I mean the world is the world. There always have been and always will be...haves and have nots. That's just they way life is.
And blacks will never go to school with whites, women will never vote or be able to work as anything other than a teacher, and Jews have always been mistreated.
Only then that changed.
You're years on earth are limited and you don't need to waste time on crap that doesn't matter. Get and do what makes you happy, and while at it..try to make others happy.
But at the same time, realize you can't save the world, and life it too short to waste trying to....
You can't save the world. But you can change it, a little.
It's really sad to the people who want their money and see money spent five years ago as ancient history.
A bit of a non-story though, a marketer being a prick - who would have thought?
So, is this a hint of things to come...burner iPads?
Use them for a week---and just throw it away.
Check out or upcoming line of burner iPhones...
Fuck Apple. That is all.
Phil Schiller, the VP of Apple makes fun of Windows computers over five years old - well fucking DOH! ref
Enough said.
Perhaps if they would give us a real reason to upgrade within that 5 or 6 year window we would, but as it is, there's nothing worth upgrading over. The consumers aren't the problem, but he can't see that from his position so high up in executive lala-land.
Because most of the Macs I encounter are over 5 years old. I have a Mac G4 file server... it would be at least 15 years old. The only people I know with iPads are 1st Gen (as nobody seems to want to upgrade) and most people I know don't own an iPhone older than a 4 (which came out over 6 years ago) as they stopped buying them when they realized that phones made of glass on both sides have almost no static friction co-eff so they are designed to slide away and smash themselves. Also, the proprietary attachments are constantly requiring replacements.
Hell, the only people I know that own new iPhones are all terrorists according to the US government.
The other thing is, MS just released a new OS that can be applied to computers over 5 years old, giving them new life.
Should I mention that a brand new Apple computer can't compete with even a PC from a few years ago in terms of graphics rendering and the way Apple are being publicly called out for this?
To be fair, my Mother was recently told to buy a new Apple Macbook for a photography course. Unfortunately, as I pointed out to her after she bought it, its technically not as capable as her PC notebook. The out-of-box set up takes about 4 hours to complete, and thats with Apple support guiding the whole way, and thats because no body who works on OS X has ever run the OOBE to see how broken it is if you don't want cloud integration (because, really, who on the planet would trust Apple's cloud services after their porno leak?)
Is it just me, or do these kind of statements not really make sense coming from Apple?
Apple products have lasted longer than any PC products in my use. I'm a small business and unfortunately responsible for every one else's computers in the extended family. Apple is more expensive to buy, but you usually (till recently) get good quality parts. It might not be ideal for Gaming, but for everyone else it is adequate. I just retired a 4.1 iMac because it was "Core Duo", not " Core 2 Duo", and wasn't fully 64 bit so was stuck at 10.7. This blew out itunes, but at least there was a technical reason. El Capitan runs on a MBP at college, four years old, with a 1 TB SSD and maxed memory...on second set of batteries. This machine took more abuse than I can even relate. There is an older Mini in use as well, again updated with El Capitan, an SSD, and maxed memory. I can't complain even thought they obsoleted a ten year old iMac. Oh, it still works fine, other than that itunes thing. Even paying the Apple tax, I don't have crappy hardware failures, less viral stupidity and redirects, and the time not spent "fixing" problems. 10.11 runs fine on an office computer built in 2009. OK, I "open" "save" and "print", along with "web" but it still works fine, rarely peaking the CPU meters...and only if scanning and printing at the same time. My kid games, and of course, he doesn't have an Apple...but if you don't care about FPS, then it is a no brainer. The higher costs, at least in my experience, are outweighed by the longevity. I am concerned, however, with the "no upgrades" the current models have. I bought a new iMac, but knew there was NO upgrade path...this is disturbing and I hope not the future.
Can the video chip on the new ipad actually beat an 7 year old Geforce 9800GT?
As I look around at several Windows PCs we've got in the house here -- I think I tend to agree with Apple's comments.
For example, the "gaming PC" my kid was using is based on an AMD processor using an AM3 compatible motherboard. It's not even 5 years old yet, but AMD has moved on to the AM3+ series boards and CPUs already, so there's really no upgrade path for this thing and it feels really sluggish with Windows 8.1 or 10, despite having 8GB of RAM and an SSD. The 3 year old 3D video card is too dated, too -- but putting one of the better performers in requires a bigger power supply, making that a prohibitively expensive upgrade -- at least to put in a system that has no upgrade path for the rest of it.
The 5-6 year old Dell laptop I've got here is literally a beater. Sure, you can still use it to flash upgrade various pieces of hardware (like portable GPS's or my police scanner), but it's a miserable machine to do much else with for more than 10 minutes at a time. Old, slow, and physically falling apart (loose display hinge, letters wearing off of keyboard keys, etc.).
I know a *lot* of people with 5+ year old machines (usually laptops) in a pretty sad state. They *try* to surf the web with them and use business apps like Office, but the experience sucks. If it wasn't for a lack of money, or simple apathy (don't care enough about all this "computer stuff" to buy anything better) - they'd definitely have trashed or donated the things. These really are often people who could use something like an iPad Pro and actually get a big boost in productivity/efficiency over what they've been plodding along with.
I think the Slashdot crowd is naturally going to be biased against these thoughts, because truthfully, that's one of the big benefits of Linux or BSD as your OS. They make older/dated hardware usable again because you don't have an OS bloated with all of the user-friendly extras and eye-candy (unless you configure it that way or choose a distro that leans that way). But Apple's comments really aren't directed towards the computer-savvy geeks who know how to wring every last bit of usefulness out of aging machines or budget hardware.
I was one of those people hanging on to the older Mac Pro design too, but I bought the new "trash can" model by April or May of 2014 and haven't regretted it a bit. The new design is much more centered around the assumption that your storage is going to be external, not internal -- but so what? I bought a thunderbolt RAID 5 drive cabinet and it holds more storage than the older Mac Pros let you put in them (only 4 drive trays in those). Hardware RAID doesn't require some multi-hundred dollar PCIe card in the machine to do it, either. And a failed drive gives me a red light on the front of the cabinet I can see right away, and a hot-swap can be done without taking the side cover off the computer to get to the drive.
The video card in the "trash can" way outperforms anything you can buy that works properly in the older style tower (except a few niche cases where someone absolutely needs nVidia hardware).
It uses a lot less power, and it's nice and quiet. (None of the stuff I had with my older Mac Pro where the GPU fans would spin up to a fairly loud whine under load, even if the computer itself kept quiet.)
They even make a nice rack mount kit for the new Mac Pro where the cylinder slides into an opening in a rectangular rack case. I've seen that done in a couple of recording studios already.
How, then, is it "complete shit"?
Think about how much shitty code you have seen in your day.
Now think about the same code running on older, underpowered machines.
Now imagine every idiot is coding to such poor standards.
I'll take an upgrade, as that I can control. I can't act as QC for every software product though.
Please read
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2014/feb/27/agbogbloshie-worlds-largest-e-waste-dump-in-pictures
If Apple could technically (and could get away with it legally), they'd probably put some sort of expiry on their hardware ... after all, what self-respecting Apple-fanboy/girl would use any of their Macs once it's older than 2 years, or any of their phones older than 1 year? Heck, how are you going to be proud of paying for the overpriced hardware Apple is selling, if you use it as long as it still works?
Fuck you Phil, I'm poor!
And this coming from the people constantly babbling about SJWs?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I understand that you like to pretend there's no difference but brands with thin margins actually depend on cheap labor to be competitive...
Can't say the same of Apple and there's no way you can spin that fact in a way that Apple don't come as greedy mofos.
My old desktop PC is faster and more capable than the newest mac. It has by far more capacity, a real graphics card which is pretty much non-existent in modern macs, and an aging, but decent CPU that does the job required, I also have double the RAM any mac is likely to have...
So why again should I as a poor PC user go run out and buy a new mac? Because it is shiny and hip? Who is the sad one here?
If they want to make that argument that OS X is better than Windows X well that is something else, which I'll leave for someone else to comment on. However if we are talking about hardware, well one shouldn't throw stones when one lives in a glass house...
Have a good friend with a last-generation 17" MBP, and it's awesome. A little big and heavy (however thin considering how wide it is), but it's glory becomes apparent when you open it up on the desk and the display fills your field of vision. Not everybody needs something this big, but for those who do, there's just nothing like it. With an SSD upgrade, it's pure goodness.
I think Apple retired the 17" model because they were going retina, and a large retina display would have been pricey for a model that was already pricey. The 17" would always have a price premium anyway simply due to its size and because, well, you know marketers, they just have to charge more because it's bigger than the others. I think this doomed the 17" into a death spiral because the higher price scared people off who might have considered it, which led to fewer and fewer sales compared to smaller models, until it wound up on the chopping block.
But some professionals, like musicians, really benefit from that extra screen space and don't worry about an extra pound or two. I'd be curious how the re-sale value of the 17-incher holds up. As long as it can still run the latest OS X, I think the machine will be in-demand for people who benefit from the screen space. And seriously, if they bring it back, and don't charge a ridiculous price for it, I'd give it a real serious look.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
I understand that you like to pretend there's no difference but brands with thin margins actually depend on cheap labor to be competitive...
If you're going to complain about 'slave labor' then 'profit margins' is not a rebuttal you can credibly make.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
All my PCs are over 5 years old; all run Linux, and do all I need to do.
However, I'm not against apples in general; just ate one for lunch.
adjective, smugger, smuggest. 1. contentedly confident of one's ability, superiority, or correctness; complacent. I have a Windows HP Media Center PC that is coming up on year 5 in July and it works great. I take care of it, run scans every week, and know where everything is. In the past few years, I replaced the speakers from 2001 (finally), a new keyboard, and a new widescreen monitor. No intention of replacing it. Sorry Phil, take your roadshow somewhere else. The days of frantically upgrading every two years are over.
I bought a Dell computer this year and the HHD failed 6 months after first boot.I was force to use my XP SystemMax system that is eight years old with its original parts Apple outsource my job back in 2004, I do not buy Apple products
Apple execs are elitist, spoiled rich, pompous twats. Never had a clue before today.
The day Apple supplements my paycheque to needlessly buy new machines will be the day I needlessly buy new machines. Meanwhile, I'll keep running my 5 year old E520, equipped with an i5-2540M, 8gigs of ram and 512gig SSD, and be happy with it until it dies. It's good enough and not brutally slow for my needs.
mine is 10yrs old running fine with Linux Mint 17 and I ain't binning it yet. Typical arrogant Apple
Installing El Capitan on an early 2011 Mac mini as I am reading this.
If Apple doesn't like me using older machines, they can buy me a new one.
I mean, it's not like they're paying taxes or anything.
And the iPad is about as useful as tits on a boar in an enterprise environment.
Look, if Apple computers were really that great, why hasn't the corporate world embraced them wholeheartedly?
Because they're crap in that environment.
Unfortunately for Apple, most people who do real work need a machine that does more than make pretty pictures, edit videos and play music.
I love Apple... I also like my 900MHz Celeron desktop that's 12 years old.. I have Linux on it and can do everything I want to do... Send emails, type stuff, look at pron, and program VHF/UHF HTs. Don't need anything else. No thanks Apple. Everyone laughed at my iPhone 4S saying its tiny and small. Now phones are getting small again? Whaaaaat?
...for free and I will dispose of one of my five year old PCs. Probably not, because despite their age they still do a fine job and run rock solid. I doubt I can say that from an iPad that is in use 24x7 for five years...not that I know for sure, because iPads are just ridiculously overpriced.
Just because we keep a computer for longer than a few years doesn't make us poor. Many of us are just frugal. "Poor" is a poor word.