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 But that doesn't mean it isn't unconscionable for Apple to continue to sell outdated products to people who may not know any better.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.

Comments

Re:Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

[drinkypoo]

Congrats, the consumer-level notebook now has a modern CPU. Now, where is a modern MBP? You know, the one nerds buy?

Re:Old price is the problem.

[ledow]

You think the machines weren't horrendously overpriced on day one either?

I have 10 Macs in the next room (I work in schools).

I guarantee you that they get one-hundredth of the usage of any other PC on site. And yet they cost nearly 8 times as much. And we give the kids free-reign, a lot of the staff use Mac at home, our systems are mostly online so support either setup, they are tied into our AD and file storage, they are connected to the same network, etc.

He have several hundred iPads. Those get use. But the Macs? Even the children barely bother to touch them, even when given free time in the room they are in. I've seen the same at many other schools.

The irony is that the only piece of software we regularly use them for used to be Mac-only and is now dual-platform. So they are literally lame ducks. And, no, our volume licensing doesn't allow us to use them via Boot Camp as they were NOT originally purchased with a copy of a Pro or Enterprise version of Windows. Even if it did, why would we do that rather than just sell them off, buy three or four equivalent PC's for each, and then just use those instead?

Mac's aren't anything very special at all. Their hardware is lacklustre, and pretty fixed, and over-priced, and their management is much more complicated than necessary for such "user-friendly" machines.

Honestly, two were stolen on an open day one year. I could have literally bought - there and then - six PC's for the price of the replacement new Macs that the insurance company forced us to have. Do I honestly get three times the functionality out of the Macs than the PCs? Nope. Not even in a school with music, drama (theatre shows, movie recording, etc), etc. departments using the facilities all day every day.

Last time I received a helpdesk ticket for them for something not working, we found out that the machine in question hadn't been switched on for three months (and, no, it wasn't a holiday). Timetabled classes of 20, 10 Macs in the room, you work that out.

I've even run Mac OS in a VM, and I honestly don't get the fuss at all. In fact, it run faster as a resource-limited VM on my Windows-based laptop that was also running over VM's than it did on the original hardware itself.

Don't even get me started on stupid proprietary cables that add nothing but cost, obstructions to centralised management of the machines, and - honestly - if I hear the word keychain one more time I will scream (it tends to be new users, but still, it drives us insane).

Three times I have submitted plans to remove the entire room and replace it with an IT suite with twice the machines and each time the only justification for refusal is how much it had cost to install them originally. I even factored into one of the proposals the ridiculous second-hand price they attract as a way of funding the change entirely.

But, still, they get 1/10th the usage of any other machine I manage. And one of those is in a cupboard.

Re:Don't buy a Mac for Specs.

[TechyImmigrant]

Ahh, now we are getting somewhere, that's atleast a CPU right? But you still failed because Broadwell is from 2014. It's 2016 and everyone else is shipping skylake.

So... it's a two year-old computer, not a four year-old computer. An every-other-year update cycle seems pretty reasonable, given the pace at which processor performance is changing these days (slower than it used to). As for GPUs, meh, these aren't gaming rigs.

I got my 2 year old retina 13" MBP about 2 years ago. It's still a better laptop than the two 'high end' Lenovos my employer foisted on me in the interim.

A) It's unixy under the hood. I can bring up a bash shell and work on the command line.
B) It's case is good. It doesn't fall apart over time.
C) The retina screen makes working on text better than on a lower resolution screen
D) It's neither too big nor too heavy
E) It isn't running Windows
F) The battery lasts long enough for my needs.
G) The RAM and SSD are maxed out.

I'm happy to have missed the haptic touchpad.