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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to go all "640k RAM" on this, but I think people's hardware needs have plateaued in recent years. The average person mostly uses a laptop for the web browser and a handful of other simple programs. Even gaming, many users' most hardware intensive task, has shifted in recent years to be less demanding.

So the question is why should Apple update their hardware more frequently? The HN reader, the software developer, or the content creator are simply not big enough audiences to motivate Apple anymore. A MacBook with 2-3 year old hardware does everything that your average Mac user would want.

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It's an interesting question.

I'd be happy if Apple could just get back to more-or-less annual hardware upgrades, really. While I agreed with Rogue Amoeba in a previous comment, it's worth noting that nearly everything we're kvetching about -- iMacs, MacBook Pros, even the weirdo one-port MacBook -- tends to go, well, about a year between updates. It's possible that this is really kind of overblown, and people are (still) feeling salty over the current generation of the MBP. (Which, for the record, I own one of and have used two others at two different jobs, and which I really don't think is at all the trash fire it's made out to be -- which isn't to say I wouldn't have preferred one using higher-travel key switches or that I have any particular use for the Touch Bar. But that new MBP is also a pretty clear signal that Apple isn't just ignoring the Mac: there is a whole lot of new engineering work here. That it's new engineering work a lot of people apparently hate doesn't make it not new engineering work.)

I think your last point hits on another reason why we might be seeing less of those regular tech spec bumps. The amount of engineering that goes into something like the current MacBook or the trashcan MacPro seems to be growing with every redesign. The complexity of those designs makes upgrades more difficult than the old days in which they might simply swap one off the shelf component for the newer and faster version.

Apple kind of said this about the trash can Mac Pro. They designed themselves into the wrong limitations which prevented them from releasing spec upgrades (physical and thermal limitations). The annoying thing is that they have seemed to have done this on multiple fronts and the compromises were never for the things people were clamoring for.

One of the disappointing things personally, and why I complain instead of switching to PC hardware, is that on the PC side the laptops just aren't as good, either.

Creatives have always been a large target audience for mac hardware. Trust me, video editors and mograph people will always need more RAM. As long as people keep buying higher definition TVs and monitors. Hell, I've maxed out 128 gigs of RAM on a Xeon machine even when I wasn't working in 4k or 8k.

Mac's new laptop offerings cap at 16 gigs. There's a rumor about a 32 gig version, but even that is inadequate. Everyone on the design side of the office is still drinking the kool-aid and using their overpriced hardware because that is workable for their job, but on the video and animation side it's just not tenable. At all. All of us started on macs and switched to upgradeable hardware running windows or linux when it was revealed that apple just wasn't taking care of that demographic. There's a hard division down the middle of the room; macs on that side for photoshop and illustrator, PCs on this side for video editing, tracking, 3d effects, and rendering.

There's one exception: a mac pro "wastebasket" gathering dust in the corner of that office. That was a fucking slap in the face of a computer. All form and no function. Instantly obsolete. Not even remotely upgradeable. No resale value. And my god was it expensive. Jesus christ, you just can't rationalize that expense in good faith and of sound mind.

And I swear I'm not a mac hater. I grew up on them, have some great memories. But the math just doesn't add up anymore. They've become computer sculpture, not usable workstations.

I really don't think hardware will plateau. People have claimed since the eighties that new, vastly powerful computers are as much as the average user will ever need. Well, new uses are suddenly made possible which inevitably put that new potential to work, and gradually those applications become mainstream. If a new computer has fulfilled everyone's needs and more, it's only a matter of time before somebody finds a way to use that extra power for the average person.

It's happened before and it will happen again. In the coming years we're going to marvel at all the useful things we can do with terabytes of cheap RAM on a consumer PC, and we are going to wonder how people in the olden days got by with only gigabytes. Just like we do with the days of megabyte-scale RAM. It will happen.

My gf uses her mid-2012 Mac mostly for Photoshop. We have recently upgraded it to 16GB RAM, max supported, and while it made it much better, it's still way too little. She's now working on high resolution, hand-drawn game assets and 16GB RAM + SSD upgrade was a prerequisite to be able to just barely function.

You should see the ridiculous 'laptop' I've made for work. It's a bunch of desktop hardware shoved inside a 23-inch pelican case with two fold-out 4k displays integrated into the lid. With a 3d-printed casing built around the keyboard, which sits atop the mobo and a sideways GPU. It has a couple fold-out whip antennas for wifi like something from the 1980s, but it gets great gain. I got CUDA for crunching renders, 5gHz CPU, and more ram than you can swing a dead cat at. It is a VFX beast.

It's by no means a proper laptop, but people in video build very strange workstations. I think it's definitely a niche market which is ripe for exploitation. Somebody please, fill this hole!

I would love to see a picture of that if you have any. No worries if not. It sounds pretty awesome though.

Here's some shots from various stages of completion. Since then I've polished it up a bit and added a grille over the CPU fan.

https://imgur.com/a/5TkN58M

Hardware requirements probably have plateaued for the 85th percentile of users. I think you've touched on something important, but I'd say it actually goes in reverse.

One of the deprecated pieces of hardware in Mohave is the 2011 27" iMac which ought to be more than capable of handling Mohave. Sure it doesn't support handoff, night shift, or some other minor features but I can accept that. It's frustrating to buy a piece of hardware and having it deprecated by the software less than a decade later when the chipset is more than capable of handling said software. Mohave will presumably run on the 2016 12" MacBook which is far, far less powerful than my iMac.

Let me choose to live without minor features but continue to be able to use contemporary software if it can run on the hardware.

My Plex server is running on a 2009 era Dell Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz with 4 GB of RAM running Windows 10. It’s actually not slow and the 15 inch 1920x1200 display is one of the last great non 1080p non Retina displays.

Hehe, mine runs on a 900MHz (x4) Raspberry Pi 2 Model B with 1 GB of RAM...

Can it handle transcoding? When my current plex server meets its maker, I was thinking about replacing it with an Nvidia Shield since it can handle transcoding. The only thing stopping me is the ability to run Plex Connect[1] that lets me run a Plex app on my 3rd gen AppleTVs.

But a Rasberry Pi should allow me to run the Python based PlexConnect server.

[1] https://github.com/iBaa/PlexConnect

Maybe it's just laziness on my part, but I do tend to find that that Firefox running with 20-30 tabs, plus Docker plus a bunch of other apps (inc. Electron based ones...) eats up my 16GB of RAM quite easily.

I really could do with a laptop with 32GB of RAM.

Meanwhile, PC laptops are now available with 128GB of RAM.

Talk to me about the battery life. Life is about tradeoffs.

But then you have to use a PC.

It's easy for me to get Firefox to 200-300 tabs territory, and not that hard to get it to 2000-3000. I really wish my 8GB RAM wasn't soldered in :(

Thankfully, Firefox somewhat manages to work despite that. Chromium dies very quickly.

How on earth would you do that, and... why? How do you even remember what all those tabs are for?

With tabs of the left side, awesomebar and no ridiculous Chrome-style tab shrinking, it's not that hard. Why? It just happens, especially when researching and opening lots of tabs in the background. It's a workflow that works well for me.

I have a maxed-out, 2016 13-in MacBook pro. Works great as a laptop, but when I plug it into my 27-in 4K display, the computer's integrated Intel Iris Graphics 540 struggles, and there are visible stutters and hiccups in the OS UI. Is being able to power a single external 27-in monitor really such a crazy use case? IMHO, at the price I paid for this laptop, an external monitor should be Mickey Mouse shit.

If I've plugged in my drawing tablet and have AutoDesk Sketchbook open...all bets are off. The lag is 3 to 4 seconds behind the pen. Even with no monitor, any typical 3D game from the past 5 years would struggle to have a good framerate.

My 2015 MBP had a discrete graphics card and doesn't have any problems with the monitor or drawing tablet.

Who on earth is paying just under $3k for a laptop to use web browsers and "simple programs"?

Yes, I agree - I think their approach is perfectly practical.

A four-year-old laptop (2014) doesn't feel wildly different from a current one. An eight-year-old laptop (2010) is a somewhat different proposition: you're 64-bit if you're lucky, but even with a decent CPU you'll have a low-resolution screen and relatively little RAM. A twelve-year-old laptop (2006) will be painfully slow now.

The part I do find problematic is that the latest macOS is dropping support for machines that are otherwise very usable by this scale. Support back to mid-2012 sounds pretty good, except that mid-2012 Macs are still fine hardware.

Agree 100%. Mine is a mid-2009 (MBP 15" x64 Core 2 Duo), but with an SSD and 8GB, it still runs perfectly fine. It's not a Retina screen, but it's good enough that I don't notice pixelation.

It's still my daily driver for dev work, email & browsing, but El Capitan is the furthest I can take the OS, and I'm already running into some software that requires the newer OSes.

I've just been hanging onto the hope that a suitable MBP replacement with proper ports will be available by the time I need to upgrade, which will be 1st quarter 2019.

They don't seem to be arguing a lot about performance in the article. The main complaint seems to be that the hardware released in the past few years has had significant flaws that haven't been addressed and the rest of their lineup hasn't been updated at all. When a 4 year old computer breaks they're either paying full price for hardware that's years old or buying into flawed hardware.

A lot of these big changes have v1 compromises (higher failure rate in keyboards, fewer USB-C ports, etc). The expectation is that these are fixed in v2. Years later USB-C is still quite hard to find, way more expensive, and many of their laptops only have 1 port that has to be used for charging (and wireless tech hasn't reduced the need enough). The keyboards still have problems and a high failure rate. Apple seems to either be dragging out v2 for too many years or just skipping it and coming out with a new v1 (like the Mac Pro).

because increasingly more and more software demands better hardware. and... they should because otherwise someone else will take that share from them. and that could be sad for both apple and customers like me who like their macbooks (older models at least). as pointed out in the article, it's not about innovation anymore, just simple upgrades, with minimum effort.

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