Apple users, you have nothing to worry about- Arc Hub is compatible with all MacOS devices. However there is one restriction. Through our testing we found that using dual displays on a Mac will result in both monitors displaying the same extended screen. This is because Apple has left out the protocol to allow two unique video outputs out of a single USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port. Until Apple decides to add this protocol to MacOS via an update, dual extended displays out of a single USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port is disabled for Mac users.
So basically you have a port that theoretically can drive multiple monitors.... but can't. Wow.
At least the Arc Hub has passthrough charging. That's critical for these port-anemic laptops. My only complaint is that it doesn't include an ethernet port.... but I'm definitely keeping an eye on this. Thanks again for the pointer.
As another datapoint to how badly Apple is pissing people off... I periodically look at the refurb lists that Apple offers. For the first time ever, almost their entire stock of refurbs is gone. Literally nothing left except for a couple of base model 11" Airs.
It isn't rocket science when people preferentially buy last years refurbs to "superior" current gen products, to conclude that the current gen products are crap.
Apple's biggest problem is that they see Ives as the second coming of Jobs and keep letting him focus on nothing but thinness and lightness. Professionals don't care if their machine has to be a little heavier and thicker if it can accomplish the job they need it to, but Apple's modus operandi is telling people what they need rather than actually fulfilling the market need.
The new MBP is evidence of this. It's thinner and lighter and had to make hardware compromises for it. Less ports. 16GB of RAM cap. Battery life that's okay but not even at the same level as the previous machine from years ago.
Further they're screwing up in the release cycle. Professionals often can't wait multiple years between upgrades, and without a proper release cadence a professional needs to guess (and potentially bet the farm) on when to upgrade. That doesn't leave them with confidence. Couple that with a bad cycle and you have a lot of very legitimately spooked people.
How can you POSSIBLY say "Bullshit" when everything the parent said is completely accurate? You're gaslighting other people to a level that would make Trump proud.
Apple HAS sacrificed functionality in order to get improved thinness. They've even fucking admitted it. The 16GB hard cap is just one of those compromises.
And Apple's release cycle *IS* messed up. Did you not notice that Apple didn't release ONE SINGLE desktop this year? I wanted to replace my aging Mac Mini for something new. Well guess what? I FUCKING CAN'T CAUSE THEY HAVEN'T MADE ONE. Don't believe me? Here you go. They have released nothing this year apart from their gimmicky new macbooks: http://www.everymac.com/system...
Apple can't even be bothered to tell people, "Yes, we are no longer making this." so that they can revise their purchasing decisions. When they discontinued the xserve, they waited literally YEARS before finally admitting that they did. They just let people stew in their own juices like assholes. I'm sorry (not sorry) but if I wanted to gamble, I'd go to Las Vegas, not to an Apple store.
Someone else already made a very thorough rebuttal to the comment you linked to if you need better details. I can't be bothered because I've had this argument with you before and I've lost patience with your gaslighting.
The fact is, Apple is run by flaming assholes. They've always been flaming assholes. But people let that slide (me being one of them) because they made damned good hardware and software that was head and shoulders above everyone else. But now, for whatever reason, they refuse to do that anymore. They've decided that they would rather take the piss out of their customer base. And the results we're all seeing is just the beginning if Tim Cook doesn't pull his head out of his ass real soon and resume making hardware that people can actually use.
Dunno if you saw, but Wine just released 2.0, and they're touting things like full Office 2013 compatibility. I'm still waiting to see how the testing pans out, but if they've managed to crack that sweet spot then Linux may become a lot more viable for general use.
I don't know if you're aware, but for you and anyone else looking at this thread, I wanted to point out that Wine just hit 2.0.
Their biggest feature is that they claim to fully support Office 2013. I haven't seen any testing reports, but if Wine 2.0 is all that, then it may make Linux a much more viable desktop alternative for those people that *have* to use office. It literally just got released a few days ago, so their compatibility lists haven't updated with new tests yet. I'm crossing my fingers that this will be the thing that makes Linux viable to me.
I'm in the same boat as you. Been a long time Apple user but they're pissing me off like no tomorrow, but at the same time I despise Windows with an even greater passion. But for me, Linux just doesn't cut it for far too many reasons. I *want* to use it, but it flat out cannot replace a Windows system in a business environment.
I resent the fact that my purchasing decisions are no longer based on, "Which does the job the best?" but rather, "Which pisses me off the least?".
That's not entirely true. During the golden 2000's, basically when Steve Jobs came back, they started putting out machines that you could actually do something with. They switched to intel. They started using standardized PC parts. And strangely enough, this is why Apple's sales started ballooning.
At home I currently have a 2011 macbook pro where I was able to upgrade the ram to 16GB. I replaced the hard drive with a 1TB SSD. With the exception of the battery now being borderline unusable, the machine itself is still chugging along fine.
But it seems that now that Cook is in charge, Apple is reverting back to the bad old days. And now they're paying the price with sales have started to go significantly negative for the first time in... what? 10 years? 15 years?
I can only hope that they pull their collective heads out and realize that they had a good thing going, go back to it.
To be honest, your arguments sound more evangelical than factual. Android has just as many strange quirky behaviours as iOS, if not more. Perfect example, the whole swipe down on your screen for notifications things *started* with Android. iOS adopted it only a couple years later. Just because you personally have intimate familiarity with an interface after years of use, does NOT equate to that interface being usable or obvious. In current versions of android, you now have three soft buttons that make no sense at all. A square, a triangle, and a circle. When I saw that, my first thought was, "I thought I was using a phone, not a playstation".
The benefit of consistency is that once you've learned how to use an OS, you don't have to worry that the next iteration of the OS will almost completely invalidate all your previous knowledge. That is a major benefit to iOS, and the reason why so many people continue to pay the Apple Tax. As I said in my previous post, I had to ask someone how to open the applications drawer on their new Pixel because the fundaments was so different from AOSP 5 that I couldn't not use my prior knowledge. And I wasn't about to muck about on someone elses phone just to figure it out.
And just to save you time, no, I am not an iOS zealot. If you look at my comment history, I have gotten into plenty of fights with religious apple fanatics. I'm just a sysadmin who no longer has the time, energy, or patience to deal with bullshit. I want something that works, works reliably, and gives me as little grief as possible. My current phone is an iPhone SE, because Android up to version 5 had way too many issues to satisfy my needs. Now that Android has better sleep and privacy controls, that makes me want to revisit whether I should switch back. We'll just have to see how well it works.
So yeah, I can't stop you from your religious devotion to android, but at least have the honesty to admit that that is what it is, and not that Android is inherently superior to iOS because of some nebulous reason that isn't even based on objective truth. Both have merits, and both have flaws, and what matters is whether a particular device does what you need it to do.
Agreed. They care more about making it thinner than giving people a product that is actually meaningful to them.
I'm in the same boat. At home I have a 2011 MBP that you can pry from my cold dead hands. The last model to have a built in ethernet port, and nearly the last that let me upgrade the ram and HD myself. I boosted it up to 16GB and added a 1TB SSD, and it's still doing well as long as I don't try to play 2016 AAA games.
The only reason I'm looking for a new MBP now is cause my current work machine is no longer able to keep up with what I'm doing (mac mini) and it's pointless to buy another one since Apple hasn't even updated it.
It may well be, but it's not because of anything Microsoft is doing.
Virtually every professional I know have all but given up on Apple thanks to the idiocy they've been pulling in recent years. At this point, it is so beyond glaringly obvious that they're now just taking the piss out of their customer base, that people no longer feel that that apple tax is worth it.
I just priced out a 13" MBP for myself. The MINIMUM viable product for my use is almost $3000. And this is minimum viable for my CURRENT needs, never mind what I might need a couple years from now. And of course, Apple forces me to plan ahead cause they solder everything onto the main board with no option for future upgrades. And this price doesn't count the bajillion dongles I'll have to buy (since the bajillion I already own are now useless), nor apple care.
The part that pisses me off the most is that they are very obviously gimping their lower priced products to force people to buy the more expensive stuff. For example, the base 13" MBP with a memory and storage bump would have been good enough for me.... EXCEPT IT ONLY HAS TWO TB3 PORTS AND ONE GETS USED FOR POWER. So you have literally ONE whole port to do *everything*.
And as of right now, there is literally NOT ONE single TB3 port replicator or hub available on the market to purchase (Yes, I've looked. Even OWC won't be available for at least a couple months from now at the soonest), so my options are to cobble together some ridiculous spaghetti mess of dongles, USB hubs and other nonsense just so I can use an external monitor and ethernet at the same time, or I spend the extra $700 to get their highest end model that graciously allows me to upgrade both ram and storage, AND has 4 TB-3 ports to use. (Their mid-range specifically does NOT give you the option to upgrade storage. You can have any size you want as long as it 256GB)
The currently generation of macbooks are flat out inexcusable.
If you notice throughout software history, developers have *always* copied each others styles, in ways no different than a fashionista would. In the 90s it was pseudo-3d buttons because people wanted buttons that looked like buttons. (Personally, I *still* do.) When the WWW got popular, people started making *everything* to look like hyperlinks. Thank god that didn't last long.
But now... I just don't even know what to say. Style has completely overrode any semblance of usability. Google started the 3 parallels bars=menu thing, and now everyone is doing it. 2D flat everything is now all the rage wherever you look, and people think they're being cool if they use obscure icons for things that may or may not have a passing resemblance to the function they're trying to perform. Intuitively has basically been thrown out the window.
Case in point: Whoever came up with the UI for snapshot should be tarred, feathered, shot, multiple times. While I eventually figured out how to use it, it took *effort* to figure it out because it made about as much sense as Trump walking into a soup kitchen.
I would beg to differ. I consider iOS to be night and day better than Android. iOS does have some annoying quirks, but at least it's overall consistent; not just within the system itself but across major versions of the OS.
Android on the other hand, not only has wildly inconsistent experience (Gee, I wonder what the back button will do THIS time?), but the UI itself changes wildly from one version to the next so that when you get a new version you need to relearn it all over again. And this doesn't include the fact that Android allows different manufacturers to slap their own completely custom UI onto the device which may be completely different from whatever phone you used before, to the point that you may as well be using a completely different OS.
Someone showed me their new Pixel phone (Android 7) the other day, and I had to ask him how to open the Applications Drawer cause the UI was completely alien to me. I've used Android devices since v1 and stopped at v5. This is why I call Google "Mobile Microsoft". They just expect people to be happy with an ever-changing interface that forces people to have to relearn how to use their device every major release.
Humble Bundle has their own store? That's pretty cool! Not that it helps me any, since I have an iPhone.
Logically, what you say makes perfect sense. My argument is that you give people's tech skills way too much credit. Also, it's not just that "some mouth-breathing idiot" did blah blah. It's "a huge portion of the population" did blah blah because they thought they could cheap out and save money.
A perfect and obvious example is batteries. Almost nobody makes devices with removable batteries anymore, because either people specifically sought out cheap batteries, or stores would procure cheap batteries and sell them as if they were the real thing, etc. So basically manufacturers en masse threw their hands up in the air and said "fuck it, we're gonna just build them in so they're not user replaceable". So thanks to the cumulative antics of a huge number of fuckwits, *I* can no longer buy a phone with a replaceable battery even though I am skilled enough to procure a good one.
The software landscape is just as bad, if not worse. Microsoft et al are so concerned about lowering the barrier to entry to maximize the number of people buying their development tools, but they don't give a fig about the end result, which is that a bunch of "developers" who shouldn't be allowed to flip burgers let alone code, write breathtakingly terrible software. The halo effect of all this incompetence ends up hurting people like you and me in completely unpredictable ways, in order to protect people from themselves.
I'm not even sure where I'm going with this. I guess I'm just venting at this point.:P
I pretty much agree with everything you're saying. I just wanted to address one thing:
Apple launched ios with one app store, and hasn't budged. That should tell you where they want to be. And the only reason OSX allows anything else is it would be rejected out of hand if they didn't... but they're gradually turning the screws... they want 30% of ever sale on the desktop, they want everyone who programs to have a registered and paid for developer account... that's there clear endgame, and they are slowly but surely taking us there.
Having a single curated app store is not necessarily a bad thing. Android has demonstrated quite well just how much of a clusterfuck alternative app stores can be. It takes work to vet all those applications, and I'm sure you know as well as I do, just how lazy people can be. The fact is, we've seen what happens when people are given freedom. It's a foregone conclusion that they can and will fuck it all up, and that's why we can't have nice things.
As annoying as it is to be at Apple's (or MS or Google) beck and call, it does enforce a minimum level of quality that ultimately is in the best interest of the consumer buying the apps. Hell, look at what Google's app store was like before they finally started turning the screws themselves. Shockingly poor quality software. Malware everywhere. It's so much better now than it was a few years ago.
I'm on a 2011 MBP myself. The last one to have an actual genuine ethernet port.
I upgraded the ram to 16GB, and the HDD to a 1TB SSD, and it's still motoring.
I was hoping to replace it last fall, but after seeing the joke of a machine Apple released, I'm just going to have to keep waiting and hoping Tim Cook pulls his head out of his ass.
It's probably legitimate. I myself have been looking to refurbs and used units when I need to buy a machine, cause the currently available products Apple sells is either outdated, overpriced, or both.
Slashdot Mirror
I literally just came across this and thought it worth mentioning...
http://blog.macsales.com/39345...
It's literally a base that attaches to a 2016 MBP that gives you everything that the MBP should have included in the first place.
Ooooh.... If you look at this update: https://www.bourgedesign.com/b...
This is VERY interesting...
Apple users, you have nothing to worry about- Arc Hub is compatible with all MacOS devices. However there is one restriction. Through our testing we found that using dual displays on a Mac will result in both monitors displaying the same extended screen. This is because Apple has left out the protocol to allow two unique video outputs out of a single USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port. Until Apple decides to add this protocol to MacOS via an update, dual extended displays out of a single USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port is disabled for Mac users.
So basically you have a port that theoretically can drive multiple monitors.... but can't. Wow.
At least the Arc Hub has passthrough charging. That's critical for these port-anemic laptops. My only complaint is that it doesn't include an ethernet port.... but I'm definitely keeping an eye on this. Thanks again for the pointer.
Says someone who juggles poop?
It is impressive. Not only that, they've even absolutely crushed ColecoVision!
They're really on a tear!
As another datapoint to how badly Apple is pissing people off... I periodically look at the refurb lists that Apple offers. For the first time ever, almost their entire stock of refurbs is gone. Literally nothing left except for a couple of base model 11" Airs.
It isn't rocket science when people preferentially buy last years refurbs to "superior" current gen products, to conclude that the current gen products are crap.
Apple's biggest problem is that they see Ives as the second coming of Jobs and keep letting him focus on nothing but thinness and lightness. Professionals don't care if their machine has to be a little heavier and thicker if it can accomplish the job they need it to, but Apple's modus operandi is telling people what they need rather than actually fulfilling the market need.
The new MBP is evidence of this. It's thinner and lighter and had to make hardware compromises for it. Less ports. 16GB of RAM cap. Battery life that's okay but not even at the same level as the previous machine from years ago.
Further they're screwing up in the release cycle. Professionals often can't wait multiple years between upgrades, and without a proper release cadence a professional needs to guess (and potentially bet the farm) on when to upgrade. That doesn't leave them with confidence. Couple that with a bad cycle and you have a lot of very legitimately spooked people.
Bullshit.
How can you POSSIBLY say "Bullshit" when everything the parent said is completely accurate? You're gaslighting other people to a level that would make Trump proud.
Apple HAS sacrificed functionality in order to get improved thinness. They've even fucking admitted it. The 16GB hard cap is just one of those compromises.
And Apple's release cycle *IS* messed up. Did you not notice that Apple didn't release ONE SINGLE desktop this year? I wanted to replace my aging Mac Mini for something new. Well guess what? I FUCKING CAN'T CAUSE THEY HAVEN'T MADE ONE. Don't believe me? Here you go. They have released nothing this year apart from their gimmicky new macbooks: http://www.everymac.com/system...
Apple can't even be bothered to tell people, "Yes, we are no longer making this." so that they can revise their purchasing decisions. When they discontinued the xserve, they waited literally YEARS before finally admitting that they did. They just let people stew in their own juices like assholes. I'm sorry (not sorry) but if I wanted to gamble, I'd go to Las Vegas, not to an Apple store.
Someone else already made a very thorough rebuttal to the comment you linked to if you need better details. I can't be bothered because I've had this argument with you before and I've lost patience with your gaslighting.
The fact is, Apple is run by flaming assholes. They've always been flaming assholes. But people let that slide (me being one of them) because they made damned good hardware and software that was head and shoulders above everyone else. But now, for whatever reason, they refuse to do that anymore. They've decided that they would rather take the piss out of their customer base. And the results we're all seeing is just the beginning if Tim Cook doesn't pull his head out of his ass real soon and resume making hardware that people can actually use.
Given how stubborn Apple is known to be, I think you're being too optimistic.
Dunno if you saw, but Wine just released 2.0, and they're touting things like full Office 2013 compatibility. I'm still waiting to see how the testing pans out, but if they've managed to crack that sweet spot then Linux may become a lot more viable for general use.
You've been marked Funny, but this is a pretty accurate summary of the situation right now.
To paraphrase Microsoft's slogan, "How do you want to get fucked over, today?"
I don't know if you're aware, but for you and anyone else looking at this thread, I wanted to point out that Wine just hit 2.0.
Their biggest feature is that they claim to fully support Office 2013. I haven't seen any testing reports, but if Wine 2.0 is all that, then it may make Linux a much more viable desktop alternative for those people that *have* to use office. It literally just got released a few days ago, so their compatibility lists haven't updated with new tests yet. I'm crossing my fingers that this will be the thing that makes Linux viable to me.
I'm in the same boat as you. Been a long time Apple user but they're pissing me off like no tomorrow, but at the same time I despise Windows with an even greater passion. But for me, Linux just doesn't cut it for far too many reasons. I *want* to use it, but it flat out cannot replace a Windows system in a business environment.
I resent the fact that my purchasing decisions are no longer based on, "Which does the job the best?" but rather, "Which pisses me off the least?".
*sigh*
That's not entirely true. During the golden 2000's, basically when Steve Jobs came back, they started putting out machines that you could actually do something with. They switched to intel. They started using standardized PC parts. And strangely enough, this is why Apple's sales started ballooning.
At home I currently have a 2011 macbook pro where I was able to upgrade the ram to 16GB. I replaced the hard drive with a 1TB SSD. With the exception of the battery now being borderline unusable, the machine itself is still chugging along fine.
But it seems that now that Cook is in charge, Apple is reverting back to the bad old days. And now they're paying the price with sales have started to go significantly negative for the first time in... what? 10 years? 15 years?
I can only hope that they pull their collective heads out and realize that they had a good thing going, go back to it.
Huh. I didn't know that.
I didn't notice the icon really gain popularity until the last few years, which is why I used it as an example.
To be honest, your arguments sound more evangelical than factual. Android has just as many strange quirky behaviours as iOS, if not more. Perfect example, the whole swipe down on your screen for notifications things *started* with Android. iOS adopted it only a couple years later. Just because you personally have intimate familiarity with an interface after years of use, does NOT equate to that interface being usable or obvious. In current versions of android, you now have three soft buttons that make no sense at all. A square, a triangle, and a circle. When I saw that, my first thought was, "I thought I was using a phone, not a playstation".
The benefit of consistency is that once you've learned how to use an OS, you don't have to worry that the next iteration of the OS will almost completely invalidate all your previous knowledge. That is a major benefit to iOS, and the reason why so many people continue to pay the Apple Tax. As I said in my previous post, I had to ask someone how to open the applications drawer on their new Pixel because the fundaments was so different from AOSP 5 that I couldn't not use my prior knowledge. And I wasn't about to muck about on someone elses phone just to figure it out.
And just to save you time, no, I am not an iOS zealot. If you look at my comment history, I have gotten into plenty of fights with religious apple fanatics. I'm just a sysadmin who no longer has the time, energy, or patience to deal with bullshit. I want something that works, works reliably, and gives me as little grief as possible. My current phone is an iPhone SE, because Android up to version 5 had way too many issues to satisfy my needs. Now that Android has better sleep and privacy controls, that makes me want to revisit whether I should switch back. We'll just have to see how well it works.
So yeah, I can't stop you from your religious devotion to android, but at least have the honesty to admit that that is what it is, and not that Android is inherently superior to iOS because of some nebulous reason that isn't even based on objective truth. Both have merits, and both have flaws, and what matters is whether a particular device does what you need it to do.
Agreed. They care more about making it thinner than giving people a product that is actually meaningful to them.
I'm in the same boat. At home I have a 2011 MBP that you can pry from my cold dead hands. The last model to have a built in ethernet port, and nearly the last that let me upgrade the ram and HD myself. I boosted it up to 16GB and added a 1TB SSD, and it's still doing well as long as I don't try to play 2016 AAA games.
The only reason I'm looking for a new MBP now is cause my current work machine is no longer able to keep up with what I'm doing (mac mini) and it's pointless to buy another one since Apple hasn't even updated it.
Thank you. I hadn't seen that particular model. However, I'll point out that it's only available for pre-order, so it too isn't shipping yet.
It may well be, but it's not because of anything Microsoft is doing.
Virtually every professional I know have all but given up on Apple thanks to the idiocy they've been pulling in recent years. At this point, it is so beyond glaringly obvious that they're now just taking the piss out of their customer base, that people no longer feel that that apple tax is worth it.
I just priced out a 13" MBP for myself. The MINIMUM viable product for my use is almost $3000. And this is minimum viable for my CURRENT needs, never mind what I might need a couple years from now. And of course, Apple forces me to plan ahead cause they solder everything onto the main board with no option for future upgrades. And this price doesn't count the bajillion dongles I'll have to buy (since the bajillion I already own are now useless), nor apple care.
The part that pisses me off the most is that they are very obviously gimping their lower priced products to force people to buy the more expensive stuff. For example, the base 13" MBP with a memory and storage bump would have been good enough for me.... EXCEPT IT ONLY HAS TWO TB3 PORTS AND ONE GETS USED FOR POWER. So you have literally ONE whole port to do *everything*.
And as of right now, there is literally NOT ONE single TB3 port replicator or hub available on the market to purchase (Yes, I've looked. Even OWC won't be available for at least a couple months from now at the soonest), so my options are to cobble together some ridiculous spaghetti mess of dongles, USB hubs and other nonsense just so I can use an external monitor and ethernet at the same time, or I spend the extra $700 to get their highest end model that graciously allows me to upgrade both ram and storage, AND has 4 TB-3 ports to use. (Their mid-range specifically does NOT give you the option to upgrade storage. You can have any size you want as long as it 256GB)
The currently generation of macbooks are flat out inexcusable.
If you notice throughout software history, developers have *always* copied each others styles, in ways no different than a fashionista would. In the 90s it was pseudo-3d buttons because people wanted buttons that looked like buttons. (Personally, I *still* do.) When the WWW got popular, people started making *everything* to look like hyperlinks. Thank god that didn't last long.
But now... I just don't even know what to say. Style has completely overrode any semblance of usability. Google started the 3 parallels bars=menu thing, and now everyone is doing it. 2D flat everything is now all the rage wherever you look, and people think they're being cool if they use obscure icons for things that may or may not have a passing resemblance to the function they're trying to perform. Intuitively has basically been thrown out the window.
Case in point: Whoever came up with the UI for snapshot should be tarred, feathered, shot, multiple times. While I eventually figured out how to use it, it took *effort* to figure it out because it made about as much sense as Trump walking into a soup kitchen.
I can only hope that sanity will return soon.
I would beg to differ. I consider iOS to be night and day better than Android. iOS does have some annoying quirks, but at least it's overall consistent; not just within the system itself but across major versions of the OS.
Android on the other hand, not only has wildly inconsistent experience (Gee, I wonder what the back button will do THIS time?), but the UI itself changes wildly from one version to the next so that when you get a new version you need to relearn it all over again. And this doesn't include the fact that Android allows different manufacturers to slap their own completely custom UI onto the device which may be completely different from whatever phone you used before, to the point that you may as well be using a completely different OS.
Someone showed me their new Pixel phone (Android 7) the other day, and I had to ask him how to open the Applications Drawer cause the UI was completely alien to me. I've used Android devices since v1 and stopped at v5. This is why I call Google "Mobile Microsoft". They just expect people to be happy with an ever-changing interface that forces people to have to relearn how to use their device every major release.
Don't you mean, uncultured bear-swine?
re: Batteries, I hadn't thought about that. That's a good point.
If I had the ability, I would have just modded you up. But since I can't, I'll just say thank you for the insightful discussion.
If todays average website wasn't a steaming shitshow, then it wouldn't be necessary.
But they are, so we do. *shrug*
Humble Bundle has their own store? That's pretty cool! Not that it helps me any, since I have an iPhone.
Logically, what you say makes perfect sense. My argument is that you give people's tech skills way too much credit. Also, it's not just that "some mouth-breathing idiot" did blah blah. It's "a huge portion of the population" did blah blah because they thought they could cheap out and save money.
A perfect and obvious example is batteries. Almost nobody makes devices with removable batteries anymore, because either people specifically sought out cheap batteries, or stores would procure cheap batteries and sell them as if they were the real thing, etc. So basically manufacturers en masse threw their hands up in the air and said "fuck it, we're gonna just build them in so they're not user replaceable". So thanks to the cumulative antics of a huge number of fuckwits, *I* can no longer buy a phone with a replaceable battery even though I am skilled enough to procure a good one.
The software landscape is just as bad, if not worse. Microsoft et al are so concerned about lowering the barrier to entry to maximize the number of people buying their development tools, but they don't give a fig about the end result, which is that a bunch of "developers" who shouldn't be allowed to flip burgers let alone code, write breathtakingly terrible software. The halo effect of all this incompetence ends up hurting people like you and me in completely unpredictable ways, in order to protect people from themselves.
I'm not even sure where I'm going with this. I guess I'm just venting at this point. :P
I pretty much agree with everything you're saying. I just wanted to address one thing:
Apple launched ios with one app store, and hasn't budged. That should tell you where they want to be. And the only reason OSX allows anything else is it would be rejected out of hand if they didn't... but they're gradually turning the screws... they want 30% of ever sale on the desktop, they want everyone who programs to have a registered and paid for developer account... that's there clear endgame, and they are slowly but surely taking us there.
Having a single curated app store is not necessarily a bad thing. Android has demonstrated quite well just how much of a clusterfuck alternative app stores can be. It takes work to vet all those applications, and I'm sure you know as well as I do, just how lazy people can be. The fact is, we've seen what happens when people are given freedom. It's a foregone conclusion that they can and will fuck it all up, and that's why we can't have nice things.
As annoying as it is to be at Apple's (or MS or Google) beck and call, it does enforce a minimum level of quality that ultimately is in the best interest of the consumer buying the apps. Hell, look at what Google's app store was like before they finally started turning the screws themselves. Shockingly poor quality software. Malware everywhere. It's so much better now than it was a few years ago.
I'm on a 2011 MBP myself. The last one to have an actual genuine ethernet port.
I upgraded the ram to 16GB, and the HDD to a 1TB SSD, and it's still motoring.
I was hoping to replace it last fall, but after seeing the joke of a machine Apple released, I'm just going to have to keep waiting and hoping Tim Cook pulls his head out of his ass.
It's probably legitimate. I myself have been looking to refurbs and used units when I need to buy a machine, cause the currently available products Apple sells is either outdated, overpriced, or both.