Looks down at iPhone 7 which cannot be plugged into new MacBook Pro...
this is another announcement after the earlier announcement that they do not develop monitor anymore. They won't develop wifi anymore. They are definitively reducing the Mac line ( you may love or not the new MBP, but they are clearly settling down on a single line of laptop with 3.5 models, and at best a status quo with the rest )
So what does Apple still do ? They do iPhone, iPad and Watches with a limited cloud offering. Everything else is shrinking: Professional line of software and hardware, Mac line in general, hardware ecosystem, even the plain first party software are somewhat stable (I mean, yeah there is TV coming and the rest is same old same old)
What is such a gigantic company doing with its boatload of money that they can't even ship 1 pair of headphone on time ? Even their flagship laptop recently announced has a 4 weeks waiting period, after working on it for 2 years ? (yeah this is an exaggeration, of course there are technical difficulties, but again that's Apple, an enormous, ultra-rich company focused on an extremely tiny product line)
When an Apple loving friend came around I witnessed first hand the value of branding. She was entranced by this cool black Apple monitor and wanted to know where I had got it from. I'm pretty sure she would have paid at least $100 over the Dell price for such a cool Apple product. She was incredibly disappointed that it was a trick when she found out. The monitor no longer had any value in her eyes even though it was exactly the same as before.
Apple can charge outrageous prices for their products, and people love them despite/because of that. Can't understand why they'd stop making monitors.
"But these are considerably less than what you already had paid for a laptop!" -> "Yeah, but they're not Apple, and when people see Apple, they know you have a good laptop". That branding was literally worth almost $1k to my colleague...
Apple users seems to be the only ones that even care about "resale" of their computers, almost like they are investments rather than tools.
TL/DR - only Apple devices HAVE a resale value.
I upgrade my PC hardware by throwing away/recycling the old one and buying a new one.
I upgrade my Apple hardware by selling the old one on Craigslist and then buying a new one.
In both cases, I spend about $1000 net each time. In the PC case, that's +$0, -$1000. In the Apple case, that's +$1000, -$2000. Either way, it's -$1000 net.
If you prefer Apple products but think they're "too expensive" because they cost ~$1000 more, this is why people tend to disagree. They paid that ~$1000 once, as an "entrance fee" for their first laptop, but they don't have to pay it again.
Anyone want to buy a barely used XPS 15 (top spec)?
It wasn't about 'mental sifting', or 'flexy laptops' or any of the other excuses people will try to insert. It was about paying for the brand recognition. He'd gone 'wow' at my X1 carbon, and gone 'wow' at another colleagues XPS. But he balked on price because of brand recognition, not because "a single product line is easier to deal with than a choice, so I'm willing to pay almost 50% more".
I certainly agree that Apple's greatest asset is their brand reputation.
In other words: if you buy a $3000 gaming PC, you're a weird nerd who cares too much about computers. If you buy a $3000 MBP, you're a professional and a connoisseur. Your friend wanted a $3000 computer (probably because, to be frank, they are a "weird nerd" who can put $3000 of hardware to good use), but they didn't want to be labelled as such.
Apple products generally have a high resale value like BMWs.
My guess is that there's just not enough profit in it. Monitors last a really long time, and while people like your friend will ooh and ahh over them, that doesn't necessarily translate into sales, and since they don't need to be replaced every year, they won't have the built-in profit that their phones have. It's probably the same with their WiFi access points.
I have another Linksys "premium" home router ($200-300) but the WiFi died on that too, but it lives on as an OpenWRT home router but with WiFi disabled. The Apple WiFi routers also lived on for a while with WiFi disabled but acting as TimeMachine backups. Then the disks died and I couldn't be arsed to pry open the case with a hair drier to get at the disk inside and replace it. So for my home, the setup went from Apple all-in-one combo gear with routing, WiFi and backup disk, to specialized functions for WiFi (cheapest off the shelf), routing (openwrt), and backup disks (standard NAS hardware). (For TimeMachine.)
I hope my 15" Macbook lasts for a really long time, because when it's dead I don't know if Apple has any Macbook I want to have. But that's tomorrows sorrows..., no use worrying about that until the time comes. (I guess I can always fall back to Linux and some PC laptop.)
My work expensive Cisco access points are so reliable I've never seen some of them in 10 years (they're above the dropped ceiling)
Just beacuse you paid a bunch of money for it and flashed it with a better firmware doesn't make it good hardware, and custom firmwares often have poor support (and, on more than a few occasions, worse performance) than the default firmwares optimized by the manufacturer for the specific hardware they have.
The fact that you have to keep buying new hardware tells me that you have lousy hardware and should step up to proper hardware rather than expensive consumer-grade stuff.
What the heck are you doing with your WiFi gear to have these problems? I've used all kinds of cheap-o routers over the years, and never had problems with them overheating. Are you living in the desert without A/C or something? My current router is just a cheap TP-Link dual-band I got used on Ebay; it runs DD-WRT and has been working fine for 1.5 years hiding behind my sofa. Before that, I had a cheap Cisco/Linksys e1000 I got used and ran DD-WRT on for probably 3 years. I gave it away to someone, and last I heard it still works just fine. Before that I had some D-Link I think, which I replaced because a firmware update prevented my network print jobs from going through (obviously not a hardware problem). I've also had (about 4 years ago, for work) a Cisco/Linksys dual-band which worked great, and a Cisco enterprise AP which was very reliable though the IOS UI was the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. Honestly, your post is the first time I've heard anyone complain about WiFi routers having overheating problems.
Maybe I'm luckier because I usually run DD-WRT and set the transmit strength a bit lower, but I've only done that with the last couple of routers.
Before that i don't think most anyone outside of USA even knew Apple existed unless you were interested in media production in some sense.
And that in turn lead to a feedback loop because certain celebrities would show up with an iPod (mostly noticed because of those white wires) because they themselves walk the media circles.
Similarly Apple could get the labels and studios to agree to distribute via iTunes because of that inside track in the industry.
And that in turn was what bootstrapped iPhone beyond being a fancy screened featurephone (though whoever talked Jobs down from going "nuclear" on the gray market jailbreakers was perhaps the true genius there).
But that all this then produce the effect that if you slap a fruit logo on a object peoples interest and appreciation is still worrying. What comes to mind is the comedy caricature of an "art critic" that can deliver a spiel of big words that means crap all upon closer scrutiny.
Another interpretation might be that 'people pay outrageous prices' because Apple's products are of higher quality/last longer, which makes the long term price lower than similar products of competitors; For example, i am still using an iPhone 5 (September 2012) which runs the latest iOS version smoothly...
you know that because (i assume) you have the technical knowledge. Average people don't know which products of which brand may or may not be well built. But they do now that Apple products are generally of high quality.
Apple being of whatever quality has no bearing on the quality of anything else. Not only do other companies match, many of them exceed quality of apple.
No, it's endemic to Apple products in the past five+ years, starting with Thunderbolt so people needed to carry converters to connect DVI and VGA monitors and beamers, wired networks, etc - which are common in most workplaces still. Apple could've alleviated that by providing a universal converter with the MBP, but they decided against that.
They're repeating that step with the new Macbooks using only USB-C, although this time it's a bit more standardized.
They screwed up with the iPhone, again making their own proprietary connector instead of USB-C (which probably wasn't around at the time), and by removing the 3.5mm jack making it incompatible with all existing headphones / earplugs.
Apple could've fixed it with the iphone 7, but they didn't, sticking to their connector in which they probably invested a lot of monies. They could've fixed it with the new MBP by adding a universal converter / docking station, or even supplying an USB-C to Lightning cable, but they didn't.
It's not a glitch in the Apple matrix, because they're not making any efforts in fixing it.
Sure, having to purchase an extra cable (after buying your $2000 laptop) might be fairly user-hostile, but the claim made was incorrect - there's not much arguing that.
This is all kind of mitigated by the fact that users's just don't plug iOS devices in computers anymore to transfer stuff - Spotify (and iCloud) has eliminated most need for that. If people are plugging them in, its to charge them (which is pretty important), but you can just use the power adapter IF you have one around.
But Microsoft and Google aren't as user friendly somehow?
But it's very important not to allow your iPhone to talk to your Mac because that means iTunes will run and make everything worse.
iTunes: Hello!
It fails so frequently that it's just not able to be used.
Meh. They should just copy their photos off their idevice using USB PTP mode. That's USB config 1 when an idevice plugs into a PC. No macOS required. No iTunes required. Done. Solved. As for the crap, isn't that an argument to NOT migrate via iTunes?
Most of iPhone users have a 5Gb iCloud account where not even a whatsapp backup fits, and they still need a computer to migrate all the data
ICloud storage is super cheap, especially compared to the price of a smartphone every 2 years. If you're not using this, you're cheating yourself out of one of the biggest advantages that iOS has over other computing platforms. iCould backup is the one thing in iCloud that really just works.
Plus there's dropbox. Solved.
But it still isn't strictly necessary.
That, and the fact that you're still unable to put music inside an iPhone if you don't a) buy it from the app store or b) using iTunes
Wat? Who still does this?
I don't buy into enough of the eco system, but do Apple devices sharing an Apple ID to sync over LAN/WLAN instead of hitting icloud?
Yesterday at an airport to charge my phone! But I haven't synched via a cable in ages.
And if I'm in that situation (often: in a library, a school parking lot waiting for my kid's basketball practice to end, etc.) I'm stingy about battery power. I turn off the Mac's Wifi (which makes a big difference), and wire tether my phone.
That sounds great if you want Apple to have all your data. But why do you?
Never mind that wires will always be better and more private than wireless.
For some values of "better". For me, not plugging in and needing to carrying around wires is always better.
> and more private
Wireless can be secure and unencrypted wired transfers can be sniffed via the electromagnetic radiation they emit. This isn't as cut and dry as some like to pretend.
Ha! I don't believe it for a second. The other day my iPhone went from 100% to dead in less than an hour - in airplane mode using only the music app and strava.
Given that you were using Strava, I'd guess you killed your battery running GPS, but that doesn't mix with airplane mode.
I went to a security conference once where a presenter was telling me about a previous conf, where he was demonstrating a 'free wifi' box that snooped on all connections and pulled passwords out of them. He was demoing it on stage when the wifi went out in the other auditorium behind (also part of the sec conference). His magic little box then went berserk as huge amounts of security professionals at a security hacking conference then connected to it to try and re-establish their wifi. [1]
Compare this kind of story to the kind of setup you need to have to sniff EM radiation from a cat-5 cable.
--
[1] The point of his story was that security professionals love to lecture others on correct tech use, but in reality the sec recommendations come so thick and fast that even the sec professionals don't keep up with them. How is a mere mortal to cope?
The "better" argument was my bigger disagreement. Wired isn't "better" in any absolute terms. I'll happily use wireless rather than wired for the convenience of walking across my house with my laptop. Or, you know, actually using my cell phone.
I would not be surprised if the next iPhone came with a USB-C cable.
- they don't expect you to plug into a computer at all except in emergency
- can be plugged into the provided charger
- can be plugged into a computer you're statistically more likely to have than a new MBP with only USB-C ports
With regard to the Apple ecosystem, I think it's valid to complain that the cable included with the new iphone does not connect to the new macbook, when they were announced at the same time. Even if it's only supposed to be used in an emergency, does that mean in an emergency you should be punished for staying within the Apple ecosystem?
Next time there will be people who had a laptop but not the adapter, because you are never supposed to need it.
That's of course just an edge case, but the fact that it just happened shows that it can be important. And Apple used to be known to always deliver a great user experience, not just in 95% of the cases.
This may seem stupid, but do you use it when both devices haven't been connected to the internet recently? Seems like it works better if the laptop was recently able to access your iCloud account.
It turns out that when I plugged the phone into the laptop USB, it showed up as a USB ethernet device, which NetworkManager then happily auto-configured.
So clearly 2016 is the year of the Linux laptop.
I tether for internet access and backup the device.
That can be solved with an external battery, but using a short USB-Lightning cable has been easy and great. Now we'll just need to make sure we buy yet a different cable if we use a new-new laptop, which isn't that upsetting.
And Firewire to USB, and VGA to DVI to Displayport to HDMI, and...
I'm just surprised that apple did the thing everyone wanted: switch to a standard. And now bam, nope this is horrible. Its time for usb c, sucks now but it'll pass. Be more worried about usb c incompatibility more than usb c.
So when you buy a new macbook and the new external keyboard and mouse by apple you need an adapter additionally to be able to connect them with each other.
Obviously you're going to need at least one of these [2] in your carrying case for any number of reasons.
Equally obvious is in a couple years you won't need it, and you won't miss it.
I mean this is the classic Apple playbook, and every time it ends the same way; Apple led the pack, too early for some, but ultimately they led.