Some MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini Models Will Become Obsolete Next Month, Lose Apple Repair Support (9to5mac.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Apple will add certain MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini models to its list of vintage and obsolete products starting next month, which means the products will lose official Apple repair support through the company's retail stores and authorized resellers. Kicking in on December 31, 2016, the MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2011) and MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2011) will become vintage and obsolete in all markets where applicable, while the Mac mini (Early 2009) and MacBook (13-inch, Mid 2009) will become obsolete worldwide on the same date.

Comments

That's nice

[ColdWetDog]

Six years is a pretty good run an all. That said, I do wish they would actually update the 2011 17" MBP with the nifty matte screen and the upgradable memory and hard drive bays. Oh, an ports.

A professional machine.

Sigh.

Re:That's nice

[DogDude]

Six years is considered "good" by Apple customers? Really? Do y'all only wear your clothes once and buy new cars every year? Just before posting this (insightful) comment, I just purchased a bunch of refurbished mission critical equipment for our business (workstations and servers), all of which are older than 6 years old, and running OS's that are more than 6 years old (Windows 7 for the workstations). Apple's lack of support is a big reason why we don't use their hardware/software.

Re:That's nice

[UnknownSoldier]

That will never happen. :-(((

Sadly Apple no longer gives a fuck about us professionals -- you know, people who use their computers day in, day out, for creating content. They would rather everyone use iPads for consuming content.

Why?

Before Jobs passed away Tim Cook was responsible for getting Apple's supply chain down from months to days. Apple doesn't want to be holding onto millions of dollars of inventory just sitting there taking up space. This means they remove options and "dumb down" the machines so there is only 1 (or very few) parts. Tim Cook has continued this obsession that it actually has become counter-productive. You can't upgrade a MBP to more then 16 GB of RAM because the RAM is soldered onto the motherboard? WTF.

Apple also has a hard-on for wireless. My current MBP (Mid 2014) has a whopping 7 ports (2x USB, 2x Thunderbolt, 3.5 digital+analog audio, 1x HDMI, SDXC card) and I LOVE it because I use all of them. Apple TV gen 4 removed the audio port because they want everyone to use WiFi streaming. It doesn't take courage to remove an audio jack on the iPhone, they are a bunch of cowards. Gee, oh look, 2 out of 3 "solutions" are wireless.

It is a far cry from the days of Jobs when he actually cared about building not only a cosmetic computer and a functional one.

i.e. When is the Mac Pro going to updated?? It has been over 1075 days!

The only thing Apple cares about these days is making money whilst they whore our their brand. Apple would rather sell over-priced "Beats" garbage headphones to ignorant customers rather then make quality products for the power user. Those days are LONG dead.

It is hard to argue against "Oooh, Shiny!" when all they care about is profits.

Apple is Dead.
Long Live Apple.

Re: That's nice

[unixisc]

They could have trade-in programs, w/ the replacement being heavily discounted. The price premium of the obsolete boxes should more than cover the discounts

Re:That's nice

[Grishnakh]

I'd say, keep the "MacBook Pro" line, but rename it, and then produce a true "pro" line of machines designed for photographers, musicians, and others who will pay the cash for a machine that has the reasonable ports for the job, so one doesn't have to carry a backpack full of dongles and hubs with them everywhere.

Why should they bother doing this? It'll just cost them more money to have more machines in their line-up. They can just do what they're doing now, keep the number of options very small, to increase profit, because all those people you mention will just buy the port-less machines anyway, plus the overpriced adapters to go with it. Sure, they might complain, but so what? They're not going to forgo buying a Mac.

I would say the Dell XPS 13 and XPS 15 are becoming more "MacBook Pros" than what Apple offers.

Nope, because they aren't Macs, so all those Mac buyers aren't going to even look at them.

Maybe Apple could at least fix the MBPs, so if one uses by accident more than one USB-C device that charges, some e-fuse doesn't blow, preventing anything from charging the battery (as per a YouTube vid showing someone using multiple chargers... result, the MBP just stopped charging for good.)

Why should they bother fixing this? Are they losing any sales due to this? Of course not. So there's no point in lifting a finger to fix it. I really don't see the problem here. If some people manage to mess up their MBPs this way, then they'll just have to buy new MBPs (or pay $$$ to get Apple to repair them), which simply increases Apple's profits even more.

Re:That's nice

[brantondaveperson]

As much as I mourn the loss of USB-A ports, it's not quite the case that you need a bunch of dongles. USB-C is pin-compatible, and what you actually need are different leads. USB-C to USB-mini, for example.

Unsubstantiated claim of seriously broken USB-C support.... or, maybe, it's actually more like this

Re:That's nice

[brantondaveperson]

I would say the Dell XPS 13 and XPS 15 are becoming more "MacBook Pros" than what Apple offers.

People buy macs because of OSX. This is because Windows, even today, is still horrible.

Not important

[Anonymous Coward]

Tim Cook said himself that PCs are dead and people should buy iPads.

The Mac mini has not been upgraded since 2012, which is proof enough that Apple doesn't care about making computers anymore.

Obsolete?

[0100010001010011]

will become obsolete worldwide on the same date.

I have a 2006 MacMini. With iMovie '06 it's still the best front end to a Firewire camcorder I've found. The latest kdenlive dropped Firewire import.

For basic video editing it still works rather well. Transcoding is slow so I export everything in .dv and convert it on a faster machine.

Doesn't seem very obsolete to me.

Re:Obsolete?

[evilviper]

dvgrab works on Linux but you can't view the tape as it comes in.

That's not true at all. Linux has no file locking, so you can quite easily view the video file in real-time as they're being created and extended. A simple tail -F VIDEO.DV | mplayer - should work, though adjusting cache sizes might be necessary for some formats.

Re:History will repeat itself

[MachineShedFred]

To be fair, Apple had a true professional market not too long ago. Then they started acting like they knew better than the professionals and started making software and hardware that is not suited to meet the professionals' needs. So the pros went elsewhere.

At one point, the only two games in town for non-linear video edit were Apple and Avid. Then they dumbed down Final Cut Pro and made sure that it only runs it's best on inferior hardware. This has allowed Adobe Premiere back into the game, because they decided to go all-in with CUDA and Nvidia.