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Comment by acdanger | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather see updated Mac hardware. According to MacRumors, it's been 490 days since the last MacBook Pro Retina was released.

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We'd all like to see new Mac hardware but it's not like the OS X team is pulling engineers from the hardware team.

MacMini 705 days (2 years)

Mac Pro 1009 days (almost 3 years)

Appalling!

Yeah, it is appalling. Making Macs has truly become a tiny side business for Apple in more ways than one. It's clear that Macs don't make a dent in its profits and so aren't important. Considering how much money Apple has, it's not an issue of not having people to work on this or of lack of talent.

I'd love a new Mac as much as anyone else, but really for what they do, they do most everything well right now. Until prices favor a major upgrade or Apple favors a major change to macOS, I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to do an iterative update of the non-mobile line. A new iPhone moves products. A new Mac, not as much.

The desktop/laptop realm enjoys a great amount of freedom in that most everything works well and there just aren't a lot of features that Apple is ready to compete on. They aren't going to win with gaming, they aren't controlling enough of the market to battle for niche programs, and the major software suites they do have run pretty damn well on current hardware.

It would be a numbers update only and I just don't really see a lot of reason until Apple starts doing something to justify the numbers. Youtube and Facebook can only load so fast for their users.

I get your points, but Apple's inattention poses a few issues for certain users:

a) There are machines with better spec'd hardware from other vendors while Apple sits around doing nothing or close to nothing for a few years.

PLUS

b) At any point in time, there are people with older Macs who'd like to upgrade to the current state-of-the-art...or more importantly, to get the best bang for their buck.

PLUS

c) Apple continues selling older hardware at the same prices and does not reduce prices over time until it releases a new model, which could be several years later. This makes the hardware overpriced compared to non-Apple ones.

The above combination of factors make it quite hard to justify expenses on older hardware for a good number of Mac users (as can be seen on various forums) who're invested in the Mac/OS X platform and wouldn't want the hassle of switching to Windows or Linux. It thus creates a lot of fence-sitters who keep refreshing the Macrumors Buyer's Guide regularly and hope for something to happen.

c) resonates the strongest for me out of the arguments, as the first two are just sort of different versions of the same argument (just want bigger numbers), though I do appreciate both.

I would think though that in most cases, the persons considering a Mac are rarely looking at the specs to make the decision - Apple hasn't tried to compete with specs for a long time, and instead relied on word of mouth and OS X to carry them. Maybe a refresh would help make that a bit better, but I also feel they're stuck in a bad loop where because of how long it has been since a refresh for some devices, they need to really release something crazy good for the price to avoid the ire of purchasers.

x86 is transitioning into legacy personal computers, they're much more interested in the future.

Tell me about it! I ended up doing a protest using keynote at the Apple Store:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hgury35bsickbvu/MacProProtest.jpeg...

On the bright side, this means that I can get a half decent used Mac on eBay for a steal!

Why? Aside from 'just because' and 'gaming' I don't really see much in the way of big beneficial improvements. Intel's CPU haven't gotten that much better since the 2nd generation core series, and aside for efficiency, you're probably not going to notice anything using a non-workstation setup.

I'm just excited to switch to using USB Type-C connectors. That's literally the only reason.

I think a lot of people are waiting for new macs, not happy with the minor upgrades every year.

macrumors.com says there will probably be an update in October. They seem to usually be pretty on target with short-term predictions.

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