Slashdot Mirror
Apple Should Stop Selling Four-Year-Old Computers (theverge.com)
It's been a while since Apple upgraded its MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro models. Four years, one month, and twenty-four days, to be exact, in case of the MacBook Pro. Apple is inexplicably still selling the exact same models for its Mac line that it introduced in 2012. Pretty much every Windows OEM has had an Intel Skylake-powered processor in its laptops for more than a year now, but Apple's computing lineup is still shipping with the three-to-four years old processor, and graphics card. Things have gotten so bad, that MacRumors' Buying Guide, which is considered to be an "online institution" among Apple nerds, has flagged all of Apple laptops as "Don't Buy" In a column, The Verge's Sam Byford says that Apple should stop selling the old laptops. He writes: Apple iterates quickly and consistently in mobile because the rate of technological progress is so much more dramatic in that arena. The company does amazing work to keep its iPhones and iPads ahead of competitors, performance-wise. Simple Intel processor upgrades are less important to laptops these days, however, and I'm finding this 2012 MacBook Pro fine to work from right now -- faster than my 2015 MacBook, at least, which is enough for my needs. But that doesn't mean it isn't unconscionable for Apple to continue to sell outdated products to people who may not know any better. Is the company really saving that much money by using 2012 processors and 4GB of RAM as standard? Even an update to Intel's Haswell chips from 2013 would have brought huge battery life improvements. Apple is bound by the whims of its suppliers to a certain extent, and it may not always make sense for the company to upgrade its products with every single new chip or GPU that comes out. But there's a certain point at which it just starts to look like absent-mindedness, and many Mac computers are well past that point now. [...] If Apple doesn't want to keep its products reasonably current, that's its prerogative. But if that truly is the case, maybe it shouldn't sell them at all.It's also ironic, coming from a company whose executive not long ago made fun of people who had five years old computer. Folks at Accidental Tech Podcast also discussed the same recently.
Pretty much every Windows OEM has had an Intel Skylake-powered processor in its laptops for more than a year now, but Apple's computing lineup is still shipping with the three-to-four years old processor, and graphics card.
Ahem. That's a bald-faced lie. The 2016 MacBook now has a Skylake processor.
Exhibit A.
IOW, nothing but Clickbait. As usual.
The whole article summary is cookoo flamebait. First Apple does have skylake processors in it's line up. https://apple.slashdot.org/sto...
They just don't use the intel model name "skylake" on their product descriptions.
The alleged website saying "dont buy" is not complaining about this. For example the macpro they list as "don't buy" is actually "can't buy". Apple doesn't list that model in it's store. And their reasoning for not buying it is because it's not a retina version, and there's not any price difference with the retina.
Finally like every single computer maker, mac does have a range of models and guess what the lower end ones have slower procesors. But they also get an hour longer battery life than the i7 models.
Guess what? the track pads don't have two buttons! Alert commissioner gordon!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I am so sick of Slashdot posting bold-faced lies and FUD on their front page. You can buy Macbooks with Skylake, which is a CPU architecture that wasn't even released until about a year ago, and Macbook Pros with Broadwell, an architecture released in early 2015.
If you buy a 13" Macbook Pro (latest generation) on apple.com right now, it will come with a CPU and chipset released to market by Intel about a year and a half ago, not four years ago.
And if you're complaining about the physical chassis, well, maybe it's just that Apple has reached what they consider to be the optimal layout and dimensions for their chassis. I mean, IBM/Lenovo hardly ever changed their ThinkPad physical design characteristics for a number of years in the mid to late 2000s, until Lenovo started messing with a good thing, and ended up utterly ruining the ThinkPad brand and stopped providing the features that people who bought them wanted/needed.
I am not an Apple fanboy; I think the company is pretentious, greedy, anti-competitive, and significantly less visionary with the loss of Steve Jobs. The very little they do for open source is overshadowed by their aggressive litigiousness and the walled garden platform they created.
BUT -- and this is a big thing for me -- Apple can do *more* with 4 or 8 GB of RAM than Microsoft can do with 16 GB of RAM. Their software is extremely well-designed, optimized for fast, high-fidelity displays, and the font rendering is beautiful and second to none. They don't have a ton of old legacy code like Windows does; the legacy that does exist has easily been swept under the rug in favor of new designs. And being based on BSD is a huge plus for software dev.
The efficiency and responsiveness of Macbook Pro and iPhone has made me appreciate and admire these *products* that I own, even though I only started buying Apple products in 2015 after spending decades swearing I never would and preferring GNU/Linux or Windows-if-absolutely-necessary.
I'm tired of having to grossly over-spec my machines (and often end up paying even more than I paid for my Apple products) for trash software like Microsoft Windows and Android, two great examples of over-engineering plus bloat plus the worst parts of an open or semi-open platform (security vulnerabilities, malware, etc.) ... A $1800 MBP with a year-old processor and 8 gigs of RAM is faster, more enjoyable to use, lighter, and has better battery life than a $3000 13" Windows 10 "ultrabook". And my $1000 iPhone 6S Plus with 2 gigs of RAM is faster, far less buggy, completely free of bloat, and easier to use than any Android phone on the market.
Again, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I don't love the company and I have zero loyalty to them. I dare someone else to do better. For years I thought everyone else *did* do better, but it's clear to me now that I was actually deluding myself into thinking that having 4 gigs of memory wasted by background service bloat on Windows was "necessary".
I'm very satisfied with their products right now and extremely dissatisfied with their competition. I'd actually recommend to those in the market for a laptop to seriously consider the Macbook Pro. It's not ideal for gaming, of course, but it's great for anything from content creation to heavy web surfing to flash games and even does VMs extremely well in VirtualBox or VMware. And I also do some heavy C++ and Java dev on this box. It just never slows down no matter what I do. Love it.
Uh, no.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/...
On most benchmarks, the iPhone is faster. The iPhone SE, in fact, seems to be the top performer among iPhones, and it's the cheapest of the current generation.
Samsung's phones (and anything using the Qualcomm chips) tend to outperform the A-series chips when it comes to multi-threaded tasks, so you'll see physics simulations on high-end Android devices run better than iPhones. But honestly, that's not much of what most people do on their phones. On any real-world (ish) benchmark to do with browsing, IO or framerate, the iPhone is in the same ballpark or much faster.
Dollar-for-dollar, the iPhone is basically the best bet in town, even with 11-month-old silicon. Given that they're going to be announcing the next generation next month, this is only going to get better for Apple.
Look, there are lots of reasons to complain about both Apple and iPhones, and their SoCs have never been one of them. They produce power-efficient, highly integrated SoCs with great I/O throughput.