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Comment by masterleep | Hacker News Reader

It's sad, but Apple has completely lost it at the low end. The value proposition just isn't there any more. This goes for iOS as well as Macs.

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But they've lost it at the high-end too: the MacPro's internals are now over 3 years old with still no update in site, AV pros are switching to HP Z-series and the MBP is high-end only in price and design: perf-wise it's quite lacking.

The MacBook Air (with its low price to clear their stock) and Mac Mini are priced right for education, but spec-wise they're poor investments, especially as even web-pages now require beefy specs to display at a decent framerate (blame ads).

In regards to the air/mini, I'm not convinced they have no place as you're describing it. My 2012 MacBook Air handles stuff just fine with modern browsers and modern applications. The numbers and specs are fine for a computer that "just works". A webpage has never been the culprit to make the thing sweat (excepting bugs with flash/Java plugins). They probably could afford to bump the specs easily if they wanted to run a new line, but to suggest the user experience is bad on these machines just based on numbers is incongruent with the reality of said devices.

yet apple's stock price keeps soaring well into the 130s (!) now, despite months and months of nothing but bad news in my own distorted, self-selected information. what are we missing?

> what are we missing?

A CEO that finds fulfilment in something more than numbers on a chart?

Macbook Air is by far the best laptop, price, value, and quality wise, for 90% of users today. The hardware hasn't been updated simply because it needs no updating, there haven't been any big advances in the past few years. As long as you have quality components, any SSD/intel core processor/8GB+ RAM is sufficient for pretty much everything day to day.

I'd argue the screen resolution is poor 1440x900 in a 13" screen considering I have a 7-year-old Sony Vaio 13" with a 1920x1080 display, and the ever-increasing number of 4K Windows laptops you can buy at a similar price-point. macOS' UI is clearly optimized for retina displays now and the information-density is low, heck I find the default workspace on the 15" MacBook Pro very limiting.

I'll concede the rest of the MacBook Air's current specs are acceptable though the processor is 2 years old at this point, but I believe CPU performance has plateaued over the past 4 years, and Apple did recently bump the RAM to 8GB - but they were still selling 4GB until Q2 2016.

The only other negative is the wimpy GPU, the Intel HD Graphics 6000, which scores worse[1] than an entry-level NVIDIA GTS 250[2] - a card released 8 years ago. That's embarrassing!

[1]: Intel HD 6000, released 2014, Score of 823 - http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Intel+HD+6000&...

[2]: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250, released March 2009, Score of 898 -http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTS+25...

> It's sad, but Apple has completely lost it at the low end.

When was Apple ever targeting (or winning) the low end? Apple was never the "value proposition" for affordable devices.

The iBook was solid quality at a competitive price especially if you got their student discounts.

So over a decade ago before they even switched to Intel?

I actually don't recall them actually being competitive with Windows devices even then, but I wasn't looking very closely at them either.

The iBook was more expensive and less powerful than the 13" MacBook Air, which starts at $999 today before student discount.

I seem to remember them flooding schools with low cost grey iMacs called eMacs (though you might have some trouble googling that).

eMacs were low cost for Macs, but not necessarily compared to PCs.

The real big shift that is killing Apple in schools is the shift from "a few computers in the computer lab" to "issue every child a laptop."

When it's just a few computers for all students to share, buying nicer computers doesn't have a huge aggregate impact. When you're buying thousands at a time, even small price differences add up.

This is in part why Apple has focused on $500 iPads for education. They know they have no chance of selling $1000 MacBook Airs in lots of thousands to many school districts.

Not so hard: https://www.google.de/search?q=emac

These Apple web pages from 1998/99, just around the introduction of the original iMac, show that around the time they were making quite an effort to regain their leading position as suppliers of schools and universities.

https://web.archive.org/web/19980509035831/http://www.apple....

https://web.archive.org/web/19990826061209/http://apple.com/...

Their high end market has also shifted from professional tools to fashion objects.

Apple has never had a low end. They've always been a premium product at a premium price, going back to the Apple ][.

Well, premium price anyway. The performance has often been sub-par. They upgrade hardware late or never.

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