Dear Apple, there’s nothing ‘really sad’ about using a 5-year-old PC
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
Granted, this interpretation would make for a boring thinkpiece and would not get me to #1 on HN.
Also, if you have a 5 year old PC that's genuinely not serving your needs any more, sure, you could pay $600 for an iPad Pro that also probably won't serve your needs, or you could pay around $400 for a new PC that will serve your needs.
Compelling reason why I had to upgrade my iPhone 3G, iPhone 4 and original iPad after less than 3 years? Painfully slow and unusable.
Well if the compelling reason to upgrade is "painfully slow and unusable", then maybe a >= 5 year old PC that still works isn't a bad thing. If I'm not mistaken, my 2011 MBP's quad core i7 can still outperform the CPUs in today's Macbook Airs (the most popular Mac notebooks) in terms of pure processing power.
Exactly. Upgrading is a cost; not just money but also time. I upgraded my 1st gen iPad's OS exactly once (5 -> 6 I think) and it was a completely horrendous experience, involving PC iTunes.
The main driver of PC upgrades, apart from improved games, is bloat and the slow deterioration of Windows installations. It's not as bad as it used to be but reinstalling the OS and cleaning the fans can often substantially improve an old PC.
I still have my original iPad, but it's used for a very limited set of things as the browser is crashy and many apps aren't available for its OS.
Users want neither forced upgrades, manufactured obsolescence, nor bogus SaaS rentalware like Adobe Creative Cloud.
The saddest thing?
The iPhone 4 has only one easy job to do. Play music in my bedroom. It can't even do that reliably. My iPhone 3G (now a desk clock) is more stable than the 4.
There's a reason I left iOS for Android on the phone side and Windows on the tablet side. I've been burned enough that I don't care to be burned again. Granted, Apple's devices are probably less prone to bloat now that Federighi took over from Forstall, but there's nothing compelling for me on the iOS side right now. A Pencil-enabled Mini would be very interesting, but that's about it.
I've had a G and X Play, and update support has been pretty good.
You can argue that Google and the OEMs should be making these upgrades easier and more widely available... And they should... But at least 3rd-parties filling in is an option in many cases. You can shop around to find the combination of hardware and software support that you want.
The problem with getting locked into a walled garden - no matter how nice it is - is that you're still locked in when winter comes.
Seems kinda painful.
Eh, as SaaS goes, at least Adobe's has some compelling reasons to use it, the biggest one being cost. Sure, you'll pay more in the long run, but try telling someone trying to start out a small business that they should shell out multiple thousands of dollars for Adobe CS, or multiple hundreds of dollars per individual program if buying a la carte. That's the situation my Fiance was in, and I was finally able to move her to Adobe's SaaS offering and off of pirated Adobe CS because $40/mo is much easier to swallow than the prior cost. That they offer tech support, she can easily migrate computers, and there's no virus' bundled with the installer are all good selling points when coming from that side.
And if you're reinstalling the OS anyway, add an SSD (at least for the system files). This gives a substantial performance boost on most old PCs for under 100 $/€.
In any case, with an SSD, my boot times from cold start have been faster than coming back from hibernation were with rust disks. Plus, clean starts are less likely to leave things in a fubar state than the often-buggy hibernation
About a year ago I upgraded RAM from 3GB to 6GB, which dealt with most of my multitasking and "large files in memory" issues.
About 2 months ago I bought a Samsung Evo 250GB SSD for under €90. This solved just about every other frustration I had with the machine - slow boot times, slow program load times etc.
The only issue I really have now is maxing out one core too easily and having the fan spin up loudly. Investigations reveal a CPU upgrade is possible.[0]
I have no intention of buying another laptop for a further 12-24 months, even if the plastic case of this one is held together with super glue and tape.
[0] https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/433227-asus-x54c-bbk9...
But I have found rentalware (specifically Adobe Creative Cloud as I use it) to be a somewhat positive experience. Adobe pushes out updates frequently enough where you see positive increment in productivity without it being an annoying update. Plus it has bought the price within affordable range for people like me who can afford the software if we save up enough for a few years but not the down payment in one go. Having the payment broken down over months makes it more manageable. I have been a convert from a pirate to a legitimate paying user just because of this. Straight out licenses for adobe's software cost more than some kidney operations in my country before this SaaS model.
Jetbrains has also moved onto a SaaS model. If they continue with legitimate updates every few months, then that subscription is also worth paying for.
The only subscription I do not see any benefit in, as a individual developer, is Microsoft Office 365. That's more aimed at business's whose full life depends on the software.
If the Office 365 subscription (for businesses) only included the Office suite, then I'd agree with you, but it also includes hosted email (for your own domain) and 1TB of OneDrive storage. To put that in perspective, Google Apps is a comparable product that offers hosted email, and it costs around the same but only includes 30GB of storage.
On paper at least, the subscription provides quite a bit of value. If only OneDrive for Business wasn't a piece of crap...
Well here's my problem with that argument. The 3G, 4 and iPad 1 were quite fast until the bloated OS upgrades started coming out.
The one thing that would keep me from being bitter is if Apple offered an easy way to downgrade to the original OS version of each one.
I don't run a lot of apps. The most important apps to me are the ones that come with the phone. If that meant living without some apps and new features but being able to keep the devices in use longer, I would have surely made that trade-off.
The thing that saddens me is that, business will always do that, it's the survival gene by making profit. On the other hand we could have nice open source, legit good software layers but it just doesn't happen the right way on smartphones so we're stuck with android / ios and their tricks.
My experience after switching to Android is not that though. Most of the major releases, including the upcoming N, offer performance improvements.
Granted, I don't know what that says about the code base, whether it was already so vastly inefficient that they find tons of room for improvements or whatnot, but it's definitely a refreshing change from iOS for me.
I long ago switched away from iPhones to Android devices, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that Apple's public commitment to privacy and Android's recent security woes didn't make me think twice about what the next phone in my pocket will be. I look at the system updates page on my Moto X longingly, but it still says February 1st is the most recent update available. Not sure how long I'll have to wait but I hope I don't get exploited in the meantime.
But I also wonder what the story is behind that adoption rate discrepancy.
Apple makes their own phones, so they can push out upgrades easily. Most of the Android phones sold were made by Samsung right? And Samsung has a a wide variety of phone models and penchant for making mods that slow down updates and/or make them infeasible for other models.
Aging iPhones also tend to become less enjoyable (carefully selected words) to use on their last viable OS update, so people tend to either upgrade to the latest iPhone or switch platforms.
Speaking of Moto X'es, I just got a notification for an update right now, while my wife who has the same model on the same network got her notification over a week ago. I'm guessing they like to stagger their updates?
We often act as though the world we live in is the only way things could have possibly proceeded, but after WW2 U.S. manufacturing invented the idea of the consumer to cope with manufacturing capacity built up during war time.
We are still effectively living in a manufacturing boom time created by a war machine.
Is this slowness//clunkiness liveable for what I'm doing? When the answer is "no" more days than "yes", it's time for me to go shopping. Until then, I'm ok with typing on something you might find on the Millennium Falcon.
(My six year old PC laptop is an incredibly heavy piece of junk that crashes all the time due to the combination of corrupted hard disk and Vista, and it actually is sad that I still occasionally find a cause to use it, not least because it's still the least unreliable device for running Skype that I own)
Or maybe the PC world did so well 5 years ago that Apple hasn't provided them a compelling reason to switch to an iPad?
I understand this is sad for Apple, but I don't see how it's sad for me?
It's the shocking fact that (especially if cash strapped) you can live your life, without constantly buying more and newer things.
Of course Apple's stance is, you must buy our new products every year. But I can get on Facebook and email and whatever else on my $200 PC just fine - the value isn't there for alot of people.
> anyone who says they can't scrape up $200 if they had to, is lying to you.
CPU performance is largely "good enough" for most users. OS bloat has finally stopped: Win8.1 is just as fast as Win7 (and is more stable) and Win10 is faster and skinnier. Most users don't do anything intensive and probably wouldn't even notice if you substituted in a low-end processor. For those that do have big needs, GPU offloading has taken off in a big way.
This is kind of unfortunate in other respects. CPU performance (especially single-threaded) is extremely important for high refresh rates. At 144hz there's no margin for any weak link in the system. But I recognize that I'm kind of a niche user in that regard.
Sorry, can you elaborate on this? Is Skylake somehow performing multiple instructions per core per clock cycle somehow?
Like AES, Floating point, h.264 etc;
Basically, it's all a massive game to keep all the units of a core busy to execute the desired instruction stream as fast as possible. Over time, successive CPU architectures have gotten better at playing the game: better occupancy, more execution units, and more powerful units (SSE, AVX, etc), which translates into a greater number of instructions executed per clock cycle (IPC).
That's why a Skylake is much faster than a Pentium 4, even though the P4 might run at a higher clockrate. The Skylake has better IPC.
And as a side note: what Hyperthreading does is duplicate the part of the core that manages registers and instruction dispatch for a thread. So you have a second thread that can utilize any execution units that the first thread left unoccupied.
Bulldozer works somewhat similarly: two threads share a single core, and each core has a pair of integer execution units but they share a floating-point unit. So kinda like a Super-Hyperthreading, where they include a duplicate of (what they hope is) the most needed execution unit. Doesn't always work out in reality though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar_processor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution
What if instead a Mercedes representative had said:
> People with cheap 5 year old cars is sad
Just before presenting its new car?
Would you think the same?
Imho smart phone tech is plateauing and I get the feeling Apple is going to struggle more and more to justify the prices they charge for iPhones and other products. My iPhone 5 (4/5 years of use) broke 3 weeks ago, and after reviewing prices of phones I just couldn't bring myself to spend 3/4 times the amount on a phone when I can get one "just as good", but Android.
In fact I was chatting to a friend who recently also went from iPhone to Android, something he said that I took to heart was that spending more than R3500 (about $230) on a cellphone is an unnecessary luxury. I am willing to bet that limit could be pushed down too.
That as the technology plateaus, and the upgrade cycle becomes longer, there's much more reason to spend more on a handset because you're not going to feel like replacing it a year later?
Spending a bit more doesn't seem like an issue for something that will last 4/5 years.
Your friend may say spending more than an R3500 is an unnecessary luxury on a cellphone. I say that the cellphone is the single most important piece of technology I own and so isn't the area I want to be stingy on.
Apple isn't necessarily the best choice even with that in mind, but that's a separate argument.
iPhone = 4 stars, Android = 4 stars
If the Android is $200, and the iPhone is $400, I'm gonna go with the Android
Something I also found was during my transition I had two Android phones in the space of 3 months, (I used a friends spare while I replaced my iPhone), and transitioning from the one to the other was incredibly friction-less. I mean it actually made me pause and "wow" a bit.
I suppose my argument was more that the quality gap of iPhone to many Android phones has closed a hell of a lot over the last few years, and I am just not sure I can justify paying so much more for an iPhone anymore. Especially as the ZAR weakens against the USD.
"Based on my experience with Apple hardware newer than my laptop, I’m guessing it’s the former. Since 2011, I’ve bought a couple of iPhones (both dead), numerous connectors and power cords (all dead; I’ve switched to knockoffs), and a replacement laptop battery (currently half-dead and in need of replacement)."
[0] https://www.techinasia.com/awkward-moment-apple-mocked-good-...
He didn't mean to but this is the general reflection of the culture that permeates Apple as a company and the bubble in which they live.
I remember once one of my wealthy friends saying "I don't understand why people live in one bedroom apartments". I stared at her for a solid minute to determine if she was joking but no, she was dead serious. She genuinely did not understand. She was born and raised in a wealthy family and she just had lost track of the rest of the world.
Schiller and the Apple execs have similar blinders on and once in a while, the mask drops in a public speech because the speech writers and their proofreaders have similar blinders on and didn't realize the enormity of the implication.
That was fictional phrase written in a novel by one famous writer, and attributed to Marie Antoinette, in order to discredit her because those who did benefit from that.
You should contrast your sources.
1. "Great! Our products are so well-made, stable and backwards-compatible that users do not have to upgrade."
2. "This is terrible. We have failed so thoroughly to innovate that people are content with using five-year-old technology."
It's not like Apple is unaware of virtues of #1, but as a company they are clearly in bucket #2. In five years, if 600MM users are still using the iPhone 6, I'm certain they would also consider that "very sad". I don't think Schiller and the exec team have blinders, they are just holding the rest of the PC industry to the same standard to which they hold themselves.
Unfortunately the real problem with Apple is that they are still somewhat on track of losing the "functional high ground" as "it just works" doesn't apply as much as it used to only some years ago.
I hear that MS Surface is actually quite usable these days, I don't have first-hand experience with it though. I would be interested to know as I'm feeling more and more inclined of not recommending Apple products to that cohort anymore.
This controversy ranks right up there with the 'let's make her smile' bit from the iPad Pro announcement. Manufactured to create a story, but not impactful in any way.
I am disappointed with myself for clicking this link. Sometimes the comments are too hard to pass up.
An alternative way to read this is that Apple themselves don't believe their own products will be worth using after 5 years, and will therefore fail to support them properly in the long term. Anyone in the market for a computer to last longer than that (eg most home users, and many corporate users who don't lease) might have to look elsewhere.
This is not an offhand throwaway comment. This speaks to the absolute heart of Apple's strategy.
There's a difference between encouraging people to hang on to hardware for as long as possible and actively driving away your customers by laughing at them or suggesting that your own products will be obsolete before the customer is ready to update again.
To maximise their profit on hardware Apple should be encouraging users to stay within the Apple ecosystem, even if those customers only upgrade every 10 years. This is especially true in today's climate of very powerful computers that will easily do most things a home user wants to do even after a decade. As someone who writes web software I am acutely aware that there are users who are still using old PCs with old software.
For Apple to push their customers to abandon Apple products in favour of things that last longer is corporate suicide.
I think you got the gist of this thread! It's not actually about the poor but about competing products lasting longer than their product planned lifespan, and that's a bad thing for them.
Didn't he say Windows PC's?
Also OS X supports Core2Duo hardware, which is nearly 10 years old.
My late 2008 Aluminum Macbook is still supported on their current OS (El Capitan). That's a 7.5 year old device. This is par for the course for Apple.
The current iOS supports iPad2's - a 5+ year old device.
27" 1440P monitors are fantastic though, they strike the perfect balance between resolution, size, and price. If you're used to 22-24" monitors I really encourage you to give it a try, it's very nice for productivity. You can get a cheap Korean VA/IPS monitor for $200 on eBay or a very nice one for $300 or so (the nicer ones have DC backlights which help prevent eyestrain from PWM flickering). Definitely worth it.
I originally planned on getting a single 32" 4K IPS monitor, but got tired of waiting for it to come out in Canada.
I test drove a few smaller 28 4K screens in the local computer store and realized that I could easily live with 1:1 on a 28". I ended up getting a Dell 27" 4K monitor because I wanted an IPS panel.
I realize I'm in a very small minority of users who can use 4K with no scaling at 27" -- I use a standing desk and I have single vision computer glasses for the distance my monitors are away from my face.
When I first got the 27" 4K monitor, I was in awe of the glorious real estate it afforded me. That awe didn't last long, however, because I ended up wanting even more real estate. So I bought a second, matching 4K monitor, and it's great. It's like having 8x1080p monitors.
I would love the additional real estate from a third and fourth monitor (i.e., 8K equivalent) but things would get harder at that point because of neck movements, stand availability and the fact that I have a small form factor PC with no room for additional video cards.
All in all though I would have been better off going 1440p at 27". I need some DPI scaling that probably gets me back to 1440p anyway, and it would be easier to drive in video games.
So that's what I recommend now based on personal experience. YMMV, but the Crossover 2795QHD seems ideal for productivity work. The Acer XB270HU or XF270HU are ideal for gaming, but adaptive sync is unnecessary for productivity so you might as well get a Crossover instead.
I'm one of those people who has a bad habit of having 50 windows open at any given time. Sure I could change my habit, as I actually "only" need tiles of about 10 screens at any given time, but so far, having two 27" 4K monitors side by side has improved my productivity significantly.
I originally had them stacked vertically, but I changed the orientation to side by side landscape when I changed desks, and I found the new wide orientation works even better for me. Having needed reading glasses for the past few years also helps, because the glasses I have magnify the screens a little bit too, so it helps.
It is all personal experience, but my 21" 1080p monitors have awful pixelage that is very noticeable at standard view distances. Obviously, it has pitifully low DPI. Reasonable desktops (modern Gnome, latest KDE / Qt) now fully support DPI scaling, so there will be no problem going forward for people to use much more reasonable fidelity displays going forward because its not 2005 anymore, and we don't have to be bound by some awful fixed DPI in Windows that is incredibly low.
"The old products suck. Buy our shiny new products!"
If advertising offends you, fine. But don't watch an hour-long ad and then get irritated because they try to sell you shit.
We've gone from "Won't somebody think of the children" to "Won't somebody think of every single possible group that is possible to somehow offend in some way"
What apple is saying today is something that it has always said - but its only recently that people in america are too poor to buy american products.
I grew up around windows and linux, and whenever I tell that in a job interview - people think I am not being serious since "real developers" use mac.
In my first software job - I was told to abandon my personal cheap linux and use the company's brand new expensive apple - even though I was more productive on my cheap linux.
Apple has always been like that, its just that most people who come from money do not hear it.
Edit:
Also you will notice this in poorer countries - a strong ecosystem for recycling exists everywhere outside of the US/UK. When I brought my first bike in the UK, I wanted to repair it and was told to just ditch it and get a new one !
It was extremely odd to me since I expected that bike to last at-least 20 years.
When my 3 year old laptop stopped working - I had it repaired rather than buy a newer one - even though repairing was almost as expensive as getting a new one. It just fell really wrong ditching a laptop rather than repairing it.
Maybe you are right - western societies do worship materialism.
I'd call the US, UK poor for lacking a system of recycling. And indeed in many ways they are poorer than the most well functioning societies.
But desoldering and replacing non-SM PCB components is not the sort of repair that most people would feel comfortable doing, even if they can change the oil in their cars.
Based on the cost differential of something like an XBox mod chip versus the same mod chip plus no-hassle installation service, buying an all-new device assembled mostly by robots and low-wage Chinese people is simply more cost-effective in every country where knowing how to use a soldering iron is worth more than a few dollars per hour.
The only way around that is to teach kids how to build and repair custom electronics as part of the regular school curriculum. I don't know about you, but I learned to make sand-mold aluminum castings, silk-screened t-shirts, wooden bookends, and to spot-weld sheet metal in my 8th grade shop class. My classmates and I really would have been better off replacing the t-shirt module with custom-etched circuit boards and simple electronics soldering. That was close to the time when Heathkit stopped making hobbyist electronics kits, too.
How true is this? I have noticed the proliferation of Macs in the developer community and I was wondering how much it would hurt me professionally by not owning one. Do devs really make snap judgements based on your platform of choice and could this impact me professionally in the long term?
I think platform preference still varies widely by industry. Macs might be common in app and web development but in engineering and systems development Windows is dominant.
One of the great triumphs of computing was abstracting the algorithm away from the specifics of the hardware using compilers. We have the good fortune to be able to configure those compilers to generate several varieties of executable containers, such as ELF, a.out, COFF, EXE (MZ), EXE (PE/COFF), JAR, Mach-O, and others. As long as the OS has an installed virtual machine or ABI that can handle the executable, it will be able to run it.
If anyone got snooty with me about my hardware, I think I'd consider myself lucky to not need to work with them.
Does it have a text editor? Does it have a compiler? Yes to both means that real developers can use it.
If you have sufficient seniority, you can tell them to fuck off without worrying. But if you're new to the company, or worse, industry...
American products, like Apple?
Or like other PC manufacturers, who are quite able to sell cheaper (yes, less featured, maybe less cool) computers at more affordable pricing?
I'm pretty sure that is part of the job description of marketers.
It's that we live in a world that systemically vilifies and denigrates poor people for not lifting themselves up by their bootstraps, learning programming, and starting a company and solving income inequality on their own.
And while our culture is collectively shitting on poor people, we are lauding the great entrepreneurs and business people at apple and the likes for being objectively better.
That is why it's offensive. Not because poor people are offended, but because is SHOULD offend you at how obtuse it is.
- Intel Core i5 2500K, 3.3 GHz, quad-core (200 USD)
- 8B (2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz C9 (100 USD)
- 120GB 2.5" SSD Intel X25-M G2 (200 USD)
- GeForce GTX 460 1GB (200 USD)
It's sad that a full five years later, CPU performance/USD has barely moved at all. RAM is half the cost now, SSDs a quarter the cost. Not sure about how GPUs have developed?
(Edit: The GTX 960 which today also costs 200 USD seems to be about twice as fast as the GTX 460.)
The average person goes to Walmart/Bestbuy/BJ's/Staples and spends $475 on some shitbox laptop. The 25th percentile user (ie. millions of people) probably spent $275-325.
That average person who bought that average PC in 2011 has an aging HP/Dell/Asus laptop with a failing battery, $30 Celeron or AMD processor, 2GB memory, integrated graphics, a 500GB 5400rpm disk and integrated graphics.
I had the pre-release Win 10/64 on it for a while, and it actually ran faster than OSX did on that machine (in my experience, Windows runs faster on Mac than OSX itself, but ymmv). And keep in mind that my Macbook pretty much got left behind by OSX after Lion.
I now have his non retina Macbook pro to compile apps, and i fear the day that stops working too.
Only in the last year or two has anything better than that become remotely common.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-15-6-laptop-intel-celeron-4...
Specs claim '15.6" display, HD resolution.' with no actual screen resolution listed.
Digging around on Asus's website I see it's available with 1080p, but I'm guessing the 1336x768 base model is the common one. Since 720p is technically "HD", they can claim that in advertising and then dodge around admitting how crappy it is. If BestBuy's product listing were for the 1080p version, they'd be advertising as either 1080p or Full HD.
The only thing wrong with that computer today is that it has a 7200 RPM mechanical hard drive. Even then it's not slow, it's just noticeably slower than a SSD.
If I had to upgrade one component it would be my 22" monitor which is 6 or 7 years old but even for this there is no need.
And replacing my PC with an iPad Pro? lol, wtf? No TeX, no Python/matplotlib, no SublimeText/vim/emacs, no real filesystem, ...
btw, I think you can drop a SSD into almost any shitty PC/Laptop and make it usable again. Before SSDs I had to update my PC quite often because it always felt slow, but SSD have been an absolute game changer for me. I even revived my old trusty T61s by adding a SSD and now it is good again.
The head of marketing thinks that using a competitor's product is "sad".
In response, this article calls Apple: "Insensitive". Offensive. "Hypocritical". "Insulting". And worst of all, promoting inequality by building high quality, expensive products and forgetting the needs of the poor.
It's an article designed to produce a response.
The Apple presentation stage is not the Basilica of St Peter. These are marketing pronouncements, not moral ones and analyzing them as such is such intense naval gazing that it's actually bad for your neck. If Apple hates the poor it's for no reason other than that they're outside their customer base.
Some stories to add some color to this: Ran a very primitive file sharing server for my university on a dual P(2 or 3, don't quite remember) machine that was probably around a decade old by the time they finally ended up retiring it. My home fileserver is a ~10 TB 4U monster, running on (conveniently) 5 year old hardware and very boring FBSD. Outside of moving apartments, it has not had unplanned downtime once, I will continue using it as long as this is true and would be sad if I didn't get another good few years out of it.
I _WISH_ I could get the same lifetime out of desktop PCs but I tend to find assorted parts failing at an asymptotic rate around 3-5 years. The world in which we all use <5 year old hardware is a sad one, to be avoided, to my eyes. (To clarify, I don't mean this in any luddite sense, I don't believe tech should stop moving forward, but I long for more robust products with longer viable lifespans, such that one can make a choice to upgrade rather than waiting for the inevitable.)
You are thinking about hardware, Apple is talking about the whole computer.
My statement addressed the "whole computer" as well, although the FS example was very much a special niche tool, I'd go so far as to say 90% of novel software features that have necessitated hardware refreshes in the last... decade? I could probably live without. This may be mildly hyperbole, but I hope the spirit of my statement comes across. I want to spend less time replacing/fixing my platforms and more time with them "just working".
Not replacing something that still works is way better than replacing it even if you recycle the old unit.
I think a product designed to be repairable indefinitely is less wasteful than one that has half as much mass but needs to be completely recycled whenever any critical part fails.
I would dearly love to have a standard laptop form factor, even if means cases would be 5cm thick when closed and 2kg without its innards. If there were a laptop case standard, it would be a whole lot easier to manage repair parts and 3rd party upgrades.
Of course for web browsing in general it's pretty unusable.
providing "upgrades" to previous models incapable of truly supporting them is kind of an Apple trademark
Tinder Adds “Swipe The Vote” so you can hook up with your candidate.
You decide whether either of these are more deserving.
IMO He's catering to the audience of Apple enthusiasts (who are the ones that watch Apple events generally) and not making fun of poor people.
Its sort of analogous to when Jobs said: "It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell" -- about iTunes on Windows computers
Oh so Jobs thinks Windows users are Evil since they are in hell right?
Giving iTunes to a Windows user is more like giving a massive, ugly, wooden horse to a Trojan, and it is so incredibly unwieldy that the lintel has to be removed from the city gate to even get it inside. Then a bunch of bearded maniacs come out of it and kill everybody.
I can't even tell you how many times I have been murdered in my sleep by iTunes. Okay, well, yes I can--zero. But that doesn't stop me from thinking it might happen one day.
I use VLC for most quicktime/itunes things these days.
The glass half-full response?
The industry has delivered so much value in the past 5-8 years that not many people feel compelled to upgrade!
And in that time, I've upgraded the processor, doubled the memory, upgraded the hard drive to an SSD, switched the video card twice, upped the number of connected monitors from one to three, and upgraded the OS from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 10.
It was pretty leading edge when I built it, and it's still pretty leading edge today. What's sad is the expectation that I should throw my computer away every 18 months.
It's odd when people say "my computer is a decade old and I've only had to replace every single part multiple times over look at how green I'm being". It's the exact same thing as buying a new computer a couple times, just in smaller increments and with parts that are less likely to be recycled on their own.
I put the old drive in an external case and used it to archive old engineering projects. Kept the original monitor and added the other two.
I did have to trash my keyboard after I spilled coffee on it, though :)
I loved the Macbook Pro unibodies because they were expandable. My 2011 MBP had its memory upgraded and maxed out as prices came down, and its storage upgraded to larger and faster drives and SSDs as prices came down.
If it weren't for one thing, it would have still been my main computer and delayed my switch to Windows.
The infamous overheating problem with my model of MBP turned it into a brick a few months before Apple acknowledged the defect and announced a repair program. The replacement part was known to have the same defect (I already had my logic board replaced once), and being out of AppleCare, there was no way in hell I was paying >500 out of pocket for yet another defective board. So I just switched to a Windows machine since nothing I did was OS dependent anyways.
Granted I would have switched when the Macbook Pro got unusable (unibodies are gone and don't like the new soldered on approach), but I think that wouldn't have happened until at least 2018.
Now watch as every blog tries to scramble to see who has the most outrage and who is the largest victim.
signed, people who take offense at a off-hand remark like this.
Grow some thicker skin and stop wasting my screen real estate with irrelevant non-stories like this.
My second computer is a Chromebook. My oldest daughter uses it for school work and we couldn't be happier. It's much better then our iPad (which we don't use anymore).
There are now two articles on the HN front page about this utterly pedantic topic which boils down to marketing. Unbelievable.
As a die-hard retrocomputing enthusiast with far more old computers in my basement than new, I'm biased. But I sure think that the time has come for the compute industry to start highlighting the need for lesser computing power, but yet still more productive computing.
8-bit computers are awesome. 16-bit machines superb! Get yourself set up with these systems and you can entertain yourself for hours and hours. 8-bit is a great way to learn software development - 2 hours of 8-bit coding a week will keep you sharper than sharp when the time comes to go back to the hipstertools-de-jour. (I kid, I kid.)
Point is this, folks: old computers never die - their users do.
I sold its battery, memory and power supply to someone still using a slightly older Powerbook.
Also, there's the larger narrative of people buying tablets and putting off PC upgrades, so the PC ages. Don't worry Apple, you're still getting their money. Its just people aren't ready to replace a general purpose computer that they control and can run pretty much everything with a walled garden mobile device designed to get ad impressions and consume media.
If anything, this is Apple's frustration. They have all this success but people and businesses keep buying PCs. They'll never crack this market. They're too invested in the Jobsian "closed" ecosystem philosophy to be as agile as the PC platform. Mocking those who don't drink their kool-aid just makes them look like sore winners.
edit: I'm aware I can buy a newer chip, but from a single core vs single core perspective its not that much faster. Very little consumer software is properly multi-threaded so this is why my expensive work computer with the newest i7 doesnt feel any faster than my 5 year old desktop at home. Most things are pegged to one core and at the end of the day single core performance is what's going to matter.
> Its incredible how the x86 world really hasn't had any huge performance bumps and how a Q1 2011 CPU is still competitive.
Actually you can have twice as fast desktop CPU today than your 2500k, and not for some number crunching you'll maybe never need (even though it's the most important thing for others) but for such common tasks like compiling the code:
http://techreport.com/r.x/skylake/legacy1-qtbench.gif
Not bad at all for the times when the hardware speedups are getting harder.
But it's good that even the newest games don't expect only the latest CPU.
Alternatively, you can overclock the 2500K to absurd levels (33% or more seems the norm, even on air cooling), which negates most of the advantage of newer models.
But if they price the part hideously expensively it makes buying a new one a no-brainer. Working in a school for a few years, I was amazed how easily and inexpensively I could replace screens and memory on 2008-era white macbooks when I had access to school channels for parts priced at cost (or close enough). I think we had access to those channels as a stipulation in a state contract to buy assloads of those machines for every kid in the state.
I'll let someone else take the depreciation hit.
anyone with a computer from the last 10 years that can support an ssd and 8+gb ram, is probably fine. travel being the exception.
/rant typed on a 5 year old Asus N53SV.
I just bought a "new to me" laptop.
Refurb Thinkpad T420s from 2011.
I added 16G RAM, two Intel SSDs, an Ultrabay battery, and an 802.12ac wifi card.
Grand total: less than $325.
This will be my primary portable for at least 2-3 years, and it's already four years old.
Just because I can afford Apple doesn't mean I can justify the 2x price premium, or that "old" hardware isn't capable.
I ordered this one as 4G/128SSD but already had the RAM on hand to upgrade it to 16G.
Part sources:
(if you want to upgrade from the 128G) Intel Pro 1500 180G: $55 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pro-1500-180-GB-2-5-SSD-Intern...
(optional) Intel 310 80G mSATA SSD: $30 http://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-310-Series-80GB-mSATA-SSD-SSDM...
Ultrabay battery: $28 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Thinkpad-Battery-43-3-Cell-Ba...
Intel 7260 802.11ac MiniPCIe wifi card: $28 http://www.amazon.com/Intel-7260-HMWG-R-Wireless-AC-Bluetoot...
An external USB3 enclosure for the Ultrabay DVDRW drive will run around $30 on Amazon.
To install the Intel 7260 card, you will need to install a modified "whitelist removed" BIOS, as Lenovo restricts what MiniPCIe cards can go in their systems by default. The system comes with an 802.11n card (mine was an Intel Centrino 6205).
My only complaint about ArrowDirect is that if they have a system model that could have different screen resolutions, you have no way of specifying / requesting certain specs; you get what they pull and send.
Every system I've ordered from them (close to ten now) has arrived in near-mint condition; this t420s would be amazingly perfect if not for a scuff of the rubberized paint/coating on the top lid (which doesn't matter to me one bit).
For the uninitiated, the ebay workstations mentioned are typically these ancient x58's. Most support hex core xeons, 24gb ram (or 48gb unofficially, more on server boards and some workstations), and a pile of PCI-express lanes. As such, you can easily add in PCI-express m.2 SSDs, USB 3/3.1, and GPU's to your heart's content. The takeaway is that old pc tech can be had at a fraction the cost of new hardware with comparable performance.
I understand the marketing nonsense from Apple, the "PC does what" consortium, and hardware vendors on the whole - but there is nothing sad about owning an old pc. The reality is that the best performance for the price lies in "obsolete" platforms.
Most of the machines Apple sells are actually slower than this PC.
Because that is actually what most people buy.
I'm using a laptop from 2010 with an i7-720QM and an SSD, and it's perfectly snappy. I frequently let it do light encoding tasks while I'm using my desktop.
I use Windows 10 on in VMWare every day at 4k resolution on my retina macbook pro. It feels a bit sluggish, but I know I'm pushing the limits of VM graphics on a laptop with that resolution. But I can only imagine that a computer that's 6-7 years old would start to struggle graphically in Windows 10.
Apple didn't think it was worth making Mountain Lion running on it.
Meanwhile, I installed the newest 64 bit version of Windows 10 on it as part of the Insider program, and it generally runs faster than my Lion install.
2006 era Mac Mini Core Duo 1.66Ghz. Run Windows 7 gave it to my mom. She still uses it.
2009 era Sony Viao - Core Duo 1.66Ghz, 2Gb RAM. Windows 7. My son uses it for Office and MineCraft
2009 Dell Pentium Dusl Core 2Ghz, 4Gb of RAM. It's still my only laptop. The display is 1600x900 and is still better than many cheap laptops. The battery is crap though.
2011 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop. My wife's computer. It's still feels fast.
My workhouse is a 3Ghz I3 with 6Gb of RAM. Bought in 2012.
I am using a 2009 octo mac pro, which is now 7 years old and since that date, apple has not released a single product that is compelling enough to upgrade that system.
With PC's you can upgrade them, and make tweaks to squeeze out every bit of performance, but by and large for most people, when taking into account that mobile content consumption is on the rise, a tablet is a better upgrade than a new PC. Tasks like email, text, video, music, photography, facebook, are pretty much now done via mobile phone. For these people, PCs are anachronistic.
Phone are much better then five years ago, computers not so much. I'd much rather spend my dollars where the major improvement in computing technology is, then spending to upgrade a desktop to view thing almost the same as before.
Back in the 0s I had a policy of never rehabilitating an old PC because a new PC was better in every way.
The other day a friend brought a Macbook from 2007 to me with a busted HDD and I put an ssd I had laying around in and we got Win10 running on it with no drama and no Apple malware (iTunes, boot camp, etc.) It feel faster than a skylake machine with one of those useless hybrid hard drives and after puffing some hcfc gas through the fan it is great.
Any and or pre core 2 machine would go to the trash, I would not even donate it to the poor, but frankly broadwell and skylake are just an excuse to reduce the io slots to put manufacturers of gfx cards.
They say customers get better battery life but software screws that up if they really tried it and the most you can get is spend a lot of money on a thin and light machine that the doorman can slide under the hotel or get a 2 in 1 machine just because you need a trackpad on a touchpad machine and have a fight over if and where you stow it with the stewardess just to have another reason to get arrested at your destination.
I mean, even IBM sells 360 chips that clock over 5 that use water cooling. It is not that hard.
Most of the actual machine specs (i.e. processor and max RAM) have barely changed in 5 years. I put 16 Gb in my laptop 5 years ago and it's still the most you can squeeze into a 13" MacBook Pro.
It's sad (and somewhat telling) that Apple has not packed more power into this form factor over the past 5 years.
I don't have a compelling reason to upgrade until the launch of VR headsets.
Putting aside the hyperbole, I'm willing to bet the USB 3.0 and TB2 ports on my MBP out perform the ports on your 5-year old PC.
Talking about hyperbole, you're comparing brand new hardware vs something that was released in 1999 (so 16 years of moore's law) against the point that the hardware apple uses in it's cutting edge desktops/laptops is pretty comparable to the stuff commercially available 5 years ago, which is a valid point.
If Apple wants to shame the market for not upgrading in the last 5 years, maybe they should offer a valid reason to upgrade outside of a marketing campaign appealing to 'want' and additional software features which a recent change actually made free anyway.
The idea that I could replace my PC with an iPad pro is just plain wrong.
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/174672/Asus_Debut_First_USB_3...
My phone is more powerful than any PC[2]
I am the richest man in Seattle[3]
> The idea that I could replace my PC with an iPad pro is just plain wrong.
I'll take your word on that. But that isn't true for all PC users. I have a pretty beefy machine, not the latest and greatest, but a hex-core, 12gb, 960gtx and dual 30" monitors, which I use wholly for gaming. Youtubing, videoing, etc, have all moved to my ipad+appletv, and with my PS4, I finally feel like I have a console that provides a real crisp gaming experience. So I'm ready to no longer maintain my $2k PC, and switch to something like a SteamMachine.
[1] if you exclude the MacPro.
[2] made before the year 2000
[3] if you exclude the people that have more money than I do.
When your comparison is to bring up a 16 year hardware difference or to incorrectly comment at the lack of transfer standards available to me and also suggesting that I even needed said transfer speed or peripherals, I don't understand what impact you're trying to have on the discussion.
I excluded the mac pro because it costs ~$1k more than I spent on my computer 5 years ago. I could spend the same ~$2k and build a similar or the ~$3k and a far more powerful computer, but I realize that isn't available to everyone and so omitted it as it wasn't a fair comparison and not relevant to the conversation on an Apple exec suggesting that people don't upgrade their computers frequently enough and should instead buy the latest iPad Pro every 2-3 years.
I really don't get what point you're trying to make, other than being overly pedantic and argumentative. There isn't much reason to upgrade hardware, especially not within the Apple ecosystem and these comments from an Apple exec are very far from the mark. If you don't agree with that statement then I'm happy to discuss, but your current line of reasoning is flawed and unproductive.
> I really don't get what point you're trying to make
The point I'm making with you is the strong confirmation bias (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias) to your belief that there is no compelling reason to upgrade from an older PC to a tablet.
You are selectively fitting evidence (ignoring MacPros) to ensure your anecdotal argument is factually correct, then using that statement as the basis for invalidating the assertion that PC users with old hardware would benefit from "upgrading" to an iPad.
There is no reason for you who presumably has a very powerful, albeit "old", PC to upgrade to a tablet. That does not mean every other person with an old computer will also not benefit from replacing their machine with a tablet. The latter part being the basis for the statement from Apple.
My opinion: for folks who don't require KVM, could upgrade to a tablet. Anecdotally, my Mom no longer uses her laptop, and does her emailing, youtubing, and photo stuff wholly on a 1st gen ipad. However, her use case is clearly not yours (or mine).
First it's hyperbole, which you incorrectly applied now it's confirmation bias by 'ignoring' something which was not pertinent but I called out anyway. Make up your mind.
If you want to argue on the internet, there are plenty of other places to do that, I wish you luck in your sport. However, if you're just going to stick around and argue equivocation needlessly, that's not something I want to be a part of.
He says, after multiple replies.
* Do not suffer from avarice?
* They do not need the newest shiny toy for their ego and to win recognition?
* They don't touch a good running working system?
* They want to save CO2 emissions and noble earths?
* They have a frugal live?
* The know what Eco-sufficiency means?
* They know that consumerism does not make happy?
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/will-apple-make-icar-pr...
Reading related news is interesting. Imagine Apple applies its tactics on their cars: You probably need a new apple designed plugin other than the universal one, special tools to change flat tires and/or update the exterior slightly to market therefore driving a 5-year-old car is sad.
Or so I dream.
Shocked.
The innards have been upgraded regularly since 2012, and the CPUs and GPUs in the latest 15" models are pretty competitive to everything else on the market not counting machines for gamers.
Runs fine.
That said, it was an obviously stupid stat for Schiller to cite. But now we're going to be subjected to a long series of Apple-bashing articles that overreach in the opposite direction. By the end of today we'll see multiple "actually, I'm proud to be running 5-year-old PC" posts.
Why? Because when mining for pageviews, there are few veins as rich as bashing Apple.
Edit to add: If we want to talk about the tech industry and poor people, let's do so. How many new companies are variations of "let us bring things to your door for you for an extra fee" or "let's give you personalized service so you don't have to go shopping/ride a bus/interact with a human"?
Windows 7 was released in 2009, and all official owners of Windows 7 were offered the Windows 10 upgrade. I'd be surprised if many PCs that are 5 years old aren't running one of these 2 OSs
But I also get a little peeved at overzealous marketing that takes advantage of people's ignorance. Convincing people that their 5 year old PC no longer meets their needs (when it probably does) is pretty similar to convincing some poor sucker to switch to your super duper maximum strength 4G Long Term Evolution wireless network because you can have 20G of data per month, when you actually only use 0.5G of data per month.
Of course, they could also be running something like Ubuntu (Linux counter puts the number at 73 million, W3Counter at 2.58% of all devices, or just under half OSX's numbers in that counting method), in which case they'd also likely be running a recent OS, one which is arguably more secure than either Windows or OSX.
I don't think it's 'offensive' what Schiller says. But it does speak to Apple's mentality, where planned obsolescence and profit trumps all, and the faithful buy into it...
Windows 7 came out 7 years ago, is still reasonably supported, and you get a free upgrade to Windows 10 for it.
> And if a person wants a new computer but can't afford it, that is sad too.
And an iPad Pro for 600$-1200$ is very likely not the answer for them.
I agree, it's a lot of talk about a single stupid statement, but I think it is a really stupid statement, on multiple levels.