Apple Steps Back from Its iAd Advertising Business
buzzfeed.com
buzzfeed.com
It was an annoying conflict of interest.
Apparently it doesn't mean less ads. Apple is just outsourcing.
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202924
EDIT: The flop must have been demand, not inventory.
Buzzfeed started with fluff and then grew a news operation. Most newspapers are now having to grow their fluff operations in order to attract enough traffic to survive (see: WashingtonPost.com).
My dad still uses my old 4S without a problem while he had constant issues with my old HTC phone
Another way how Apple pushes planned obsolescence is by not giving certain features to older devices. Adblocking and the new colour temperature setting for instance are only available on 64 bit devices while older devices would be perfectly capable to also have them.
I wasn't that keen on Apple abandoning upgradeable RAM/SSD for laptops but to be honest neither has been an issue for the last few years. There isn't any applications that are driving the need for more RAM and the SSDs are upgradeable anyway.
As for mobiles does any company allow RAM to be upgraded ?
It's important to note how the retina macbook pro and 12 inch macbook are the most expensive - 70$ more than all other macbooks in the 11"-15" range. Probably because of their glued in battery that needs to be replaced as a whole together with parts of the case.
There probably also still would be enough space for one ram slot, it's not thicker than the ssd which also sits on top of the main board.
But that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about the physical measures of the slot and the form factor of the card. They always have been proprietary although standards that are just as good existed.
I agree that the support time was too short, but this is not the complete picture. OS X Lion was the last version that runs on the 2008 MacBook and received security updates until October 2014, so the model was supported for 6 years.
In the end, her LCD started to short out anyway -- a common issue with Macbooks of that era -- so we got her a basic Toshiba laptop for about 1/2 the price of a Mac. It's still humming along nicely and I just dropped an SSD in it to give it a huge speed bump.
You are doing it wrong ;). The resale value of MacBooks is very high. My wife usually gets my current MacBook after 1.5 years and we sell her old MacBook. We usually get 600-700 Euro. 400 Euro for using a MacBook for three years in total is not bad...
The resale value for Windows laptops is typically bad. There is a company across the street where they sell 3-4 year old ThinkPads for 300 Euro.
Windows vs Mac resale value plays a lot into the way Windows folks use their laptops. The reason is that they generally use a given laptop until they no longer need it. My girlfriend's laptop will be 5 years old this year and was purchased for about the same amount of money it cost you to use your Macbook for 3 years. I spent another ~US$100 to upgrade to an SSD recently which will give it quite a bit more life. And it can be upgraded to Windows 10 for free if we want to at some point. Granted, it's only used for web browsing, office suite stuff, watching videos, recording and editing voice-over work etc, so it doesn't need to be the latest and greatest. So, it's really more a different use case.
Your typical pattern of buy and sell is kind of fascinating to me as a Windows user, but makes complete sense given the comparable markets and models. The wider array of Windows laptop choices in different budgets accounts for the lower resale value of higher end Windows laptops. Most users are fine spending $400 or less on a Windows laptop for the basic browsing, email, photos, videos, etc needs. High end Windows laptop users want a new machine, not a used one. So, there's not much interest in $500 used Windows laptops... they don't serve either market segment well. In Mac-land, there is no $400-500 Mac laptop option, so anyone with only that budget has to look at used models. Thus, the demand keeps the cost for a used Macbook high compared to Windows laptops.
In the end, I think we're both doing it right for our needs :)
Either way getting 5+ years out a laptop is outstanding. I went through a few Sony Vaios in that amount of time during their hayday plus a brand new computer that had the monitor go out completely. Plus I was stuck on windows which is a big pain point for me.
Looking forward to replacing the '11 MBP once another refresh happens this year.
For most people who do a bit of emailing, some light www browsing, a bit of word processing and spreadsheeting, some messaging, and some very light gaming (solitaire): it's profoundly depressing that the needs of the bloated OS and the modern WWW[1] drive the need for ridiculous amounts of RAM and processor power.
[1] Not talking about app delivery here, but about a newspaper website delivering mostly text and images with a bit of CSS, which they manage to turn into megabytes of text. Like, I have no idea how a recipee for daal turns into 5 megabytes.
Some of it ages better than others.
Those old plastic MacBooks (the original 2006 MacBook 1,1 and newer) can all run Windows 10 via Boot Camp. Installing Windows 10 will give those machines a new lease on life - various apps like Kindle & Chrome 32-bit are no longer supported / updated on those old Macs, but they'll run perfectly fine under Windows 10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iwh3lDeCME
Apple are a high-margin accessories and hardware merchant, the software quality days are over.
Ask them how their user experience with those devices is. I know people who are still running 4s', and it's bad. Why can't my older iPad use ad-blocking? It says it's performance related, but isn't the ad-blocking supposed to improve performance? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to older devices? Nope, if I want it, get a new device.
I have and use many Apple devices. But a computer is a computer; let's not pretend that Apple has avoided hardware becoming outdated. I'm sure people hold onto their old devices because they're expensive a maintain some social cachet.
Even with native code generation, which Apple would have to do extra work for 32-bit CPUs, it would add seconds to each page load on those old phones.
Where does it say that? Lack of ad-blocking on older (pre-iPad Air, I think) iPads isn't performance related, it's because they're 32bit. A lot of Apple's new OS features are 64bit only.
Planned obsolescence in these ways is not the same as "let's build it crappy / with known weaknesses so it breaks and people have to buy a new one". Mobile is super competitive, and part of Apple's brand is their [perceived] high[er than the competition] quality.
What does cause the performance of the spinning disk to degrade noticeably over time is fragmentation of data. Especially in laptops, the increase of fragmentation and the correlated decrease in the performance of basically everything can be easily identified by the increased clicking and whirring noises coming from the disk (you may have noticed this on yours) - this is the heads thrashing around trying to read all that fragmented data spread around all over the disk.
Especially on older laptops, if the HDD has never been de-fragmented, it's almost certain that this is your problem and is the performance bottleneck which has been getting tighter over time. In that sense yes, HDDs do degrade over time, but not in an irreversible manner, until of course they physically crash due to parts failure.
Funnily enough SSDs are not affected by data fragmentation, because the speed with which the data is accessed is not affected by its physical location in nearly the same way (distances over the disk which are massive to motor-driver heads are irrelevant to electrons), but they do degrade physically with writes in a way which degrades performance continuously over time. The difference is though, you'd very likely never notice this on a home laptop with an SSD unless it was extremely old, generally with modern SSDs you'd have to be doing data-centre server levels of daily reads/writes to start to really worry about wearing the thing out in any noticeable way, over any sensible time period.
Or, will there still be this split where if you want unrestricted ads you need to make a native app instead of a web page/web app which coincidentally helps lock-in and potential makes Apple money if the app charges for anything
If web ads had followed these guidelines, maybe content blockers would not be so compelling.
[1] PDF: https://developer.apple.com/iad/content-guidelines/iAd_Conte...
Also, I notice they forbid 'messaging that identifies the particular target for the campaign—for example, “Single men, 18–24, who live in Washington State, click here!”.' Presumably because if customers knew just how much Apple were helping advertisers target them, it'd spoil their whole we're-better-than-Google line.