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Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

Why should Apple stop selling anything that people want to buy?

For most people, buying a new computer is something you do when your old one breaks. I know Apple cultivates itself as a "professional's brand" but that's not really the case anymore. Every 18 year old with a pocket full of graduation money next to her iPhone grabs a new Mac, and any Mac she grabs will perform a vast majority of the tasks she needs.

The real question is not "why does Apple still sell.." It's "why do people still buy ...?"

Answer: because it works.

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I think that is the real question, "Why do people still buy ..." and it speaks to that percentage of Apple's base that want a machine with an optical drive. So for that segment they will pay for the drive and sub-par display performance.

If you look at Apple's product releases over the years, and with overlapping products, you can really see Apple market research at work. iPad Pro 9.7 vs iPad Pro vs iPad 9.7. How many people want pro/not-pro, how many people want pencil/not-pencil, how many people want big/little. One of the Apple product managers said "I survey customers by counting how much money they will give me for a feature." His point was that customer surveys of people who aren't buying are aspirational, but what people actually pay for, that is actionable.

The question is no doubt being pondered, "If we offered a retina MBP with a built in optical drive, how many people might buy it?" The tooling of the body cavity its clearly an investment that you don't make for less than a million or so machines.

But I agree that the fundamental question is flawed, there is no reason to "upgrade" a product that is meeting all of its customer requirements. But customers asking the question suggests that requirements may have shifted.

A "percentage of Apple's base that want a machine with an optical drive" I'm happy to pay a little extra if it prevents any new machine being sold with an optical drive. A little bit of me dies every time someone asks for things on CD/DVD.

> Every 18 year old with a pocket full of graduation money next to her iPhone grabs a new Mac, and any Mac she grabs will perform a vast majority of the tasks she needs.

As a recent high school grad (Class of 2015), this resonates with me. A bunch of my classmates (Classes of 2014-16) bought Macbooks/MBA/MBP for college. For the vast majority of them, their Mac was a non-essential splurge. Their use cases corresponded with Chromebooks (available for < 1/2 the price of their purchased Mac) quite well.

A major reason why so many of my classmates bought Macs is because my high school handed out the lowest-end, 11" MBA to every student. We all got indoctrinated into the Mac world.

And the generation before you had MS Office and WIndows in every school and every workplace so they were indoctrinated into the Windows world.

The business cycle continues!

And before that everyone was locked in into pen and paper ecosystem :)

Because the computers get slower with each OS upgrade. At some point this catches up and the machine feels slow. CPU's might not be improving at the same rate but GPU's are. iMacs, for example, use a mobile gpu on the desktop. i've goto a 2010 iMac and it's slow because i didn't opt for an ssd at the time and got a painfully slow 5400 rpm drive.

People buy because they don't know any better. Wait until every new Mac in the fall has USB C connectors.

Absolutely not true. If anything, El Capitan improves performance.

El Capitan improves performance compared to Yosemite, just as Snow leopard improved on Leopard, but if you look into more than two generations of the OS the trend goes the other way.

I currently have two apple laptops, an old macbook that came with Tiger and use it to test beta versions of OSX. It's running El Capitan right now but is almost unusable.

My main computer is a rMBP that came with Lion. It worked better (faster, snappier) with Mountain Lion than it does with El Capitan.

I used an old 12" PowerBook G4 running Tiger for years past end of support. I just loved the size and the keyboard. It was also user-maintainable. Battery, memory, hard drive all easily accessed. I still have it and it still works. I tried running OpenBSD on it and while that worked, performance was a lot worse than Tiger.

My main computer is the original 2012 rMBP, and it's way faster on El Cap than the original OS it came with. Throughout the first couple versions, I was hankering for a new laptop due to the graphics chipset not keeping up with the HiDPI display. But somewhere along the way Apple really nailed the graphics performance to the point I never even think about it.

There was just one dud of an OS in there (Mavericks? I think) where the machine would just bog down over the week and I had to reboot it every 2 weeks just to regain performance. That was improved with the next release, and now on El Cap I only ever reboot for security updates (two months or so of uptime)

OS X does tend to get more RAM-hungry with each version though, so I recommend everyone to max out the RAM when they can.

> Because the computers get slower with each OS upgrade.

It seemed was a time in the history of OS X (up through Snow Leopard) where the reverse was true, and it's certainly not true that the OS must become less efficient with each iteration.

It's not a necessity that the machine must slow down with each OS update. Boot an XFCE on Linux image to establish a baseline level of performance. Make that your OS and you can _buy_ from guys selling 2012 computers.

No one said that it was a necessity. The fact is that Apple software needs more performance over time so they shouldn't skimp on the hardware, or sell "old" hardware.

Why are you introducing an irrelevant tangent into the conversation? I have an old Dell in my closest that has Linux on it. But once again, that's irrelevant to this conversation.

That you are knowledgeable about hard drive speeds, solid state technology, and the virtues (or pitfalls) of OS upgrades means your needs far outstrip the average consumer.

The computer you're running is 6 years old. Apple doesn't sell it anymore. It's also possible to replace the HDD with a new SSD.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+EMC+2389+H...

Even so, most people would use your 2010 iMac with much satisfaction.

No one wants to wait 60 seconds for Safari to launch. Apple sells high-end computers. People expect high-end performance. They should never have sold computers with 5400 rpm drives, for example.

Oculus won't support any Macs because the hardware isn't that good:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/4/11159700/oculus-rift-mac-su...

> Apple sells high-end computers.

Apparently not:

>Oculus won't support any Macs because the hardware isn't that good

Apple sells expensive computers. Customers are not buying cutting edge hardware, they're buying middling hardware that is designed to work with the specific operating system.

The GPUs in Apple computers may not be to Palmer Luckey's liking, but you can't deny that Macs have a high quality construction. For most people, this is what matters over the graphics performance: form factor, weight, battery life, screen brightness and color reproduction, quality of the keyboard and trackpad.

Especially if dual booting.

I dual boot Windows 10 even Windows 8/8.1 my 17 inch Macbook Pro 8,3 even with 2.3GHz i7 CPU 8GB RAM and 512 SSD is like a hair dryer fans on constantly never stopping but not when using OS X.

It's fine with Yosemite 10.10.5 but I am hesitant to upgrade to El Capitan 10.11.6 anytime soon. I may even downgrade to Win 7 if I can but I hear MS is insistent on people using Win 10 even if they will not push it out you can still get it.

Sounds like you should take ownership of a poor decision when spec'ing out your iMac. SSDs have been around for plenty of time to know their value.

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