Expected arrival times for Apple products | Hacker News Reader

Expected arrival times for Apple products

arrival.io

178 pointsanti-pattern118 comments

Is this just scraping http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/ ?

My guess is wikipedia. And no it isn't "just scraping". The look is very different and the predicted number of days isn't on the macrumors site.

That was my first exact thought as well. The macrumors guide also provides a lot more data for your viewing pleasure.

I've looked at their data, but I believe I've dropped some things that they consider releases. The whole thing is kind of subjective as to what constitutes a release or not. But no, I didn't just scrape their site. I compiled my own data from a variety of different freely available sources.

Might I ask why you built your own, knowing there was an almost identical offering in place for years? For example, did your different choice of releases cause a statistically significant shift in arrival times? I imagine you've done analysis comparing your approach to theirs.

I built my own because their design, and I mean literally the way they visualize the data, isn't very good. Or rather, it's not as good as it could be. They even updated the design a year or two ago and all they did was give it a coat of paint, rather than rethinking how to best visualize the data.

> I built my own because their design, and I mean literally the way they visualize the data, isn't very good. Or rather, it's not as good as it could be.

I love your approach :) it's very helpful!

That's a great reason! I agree their design sucks and yours is orders of magnitude more usable.

It's just too bad that you have to re-collect the same data. N historically up-to-date data sources for N designs is just unscalable.

Indeed. Maybe I'll post the data on GitHub or something.

If any scraping was involved in the production of this site, it was viciously over-engineered. These are static values that only need to be updated manually once after each Apple announcement...

Edit: And before anyone says that everything should be automated, keep in mind that scrapers will break far more often than you'll ever have to update these numbers.

They probably meant whether or not I "took" the information from somewhere else. But yeah, actually scraping the information would have been ridiculous. It's all just in a static YAML file.

This site is a rip off of the work that macrumors has been doing for several years.

See: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

At the very least they should provide a credits link somewhere on their page.

Yes. Also, the MacRumors version shows all the data, which can be really revealing. For instance, the progression of cycle length on the Mac Pro vs other products.

Am I am missing something really "ripoffy" like stealing code, images or similar data?

If yes, sure credit should be due. If no, why should they give credit?

Actually, the entire reason I made this site was because I thought the way MacRumors visualized the data wasn't very good. If they had done a better job, I wouldn't have needed to make this.

As for credit... what should I be crediting them for? I'm just collecting a list of dates and then visualizing the data.

A simple link at the bottom saying, "inspired by macrumors.com buyers guide" would go a long way towards giving credit to the original concept. You can even even embed the url, so it's just a small font, "inspired by" to keep the page clean.

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com is helpful, too.

Yep, I've used that for a little while, but I wasn't a fan of the design, and I didn't think they visualized the information as well as they could have, so I made a new one :)

This is a great idea, and is especially pertinent to Mac fans who care about the hardware they are using.

Since Apple does not discount old hardware (even with 2-3 year old video cards, they charge the same amount as a brand new updated mac the very next week[1]), people buying a Macbook pro at the wrong end of the timeline can get totally shafted on equipment, especially from a price-per-performance view.

That feels a little dishonest to me, but most people don't seem to mind, and its not as if the hardware they are selling is ever bad, it will just be twice as good next week, and sold for the exact same price.

So it seems that it is one again one of the worst times to buy a Macbook pro.

[1] I wrote two articles in 2010, one in Feb and one in April, which detailed the times as the worst and best to buy an MBP, comparing prices and hardware. Only really interesting for posterity: http://simonsarris.com/blog/19-mac-envy http://simonsarris.com/blog/22-mac-envy-2

If you want truly awful bang-for-buck, try the Mac Pro, it's hilariously overpriced for such an old machine. The CPU had to be swapped out because Intel stopped making the original ones.

On gazelle my Mac Pro (which is basically identical to the top of the line one you can buy now), gets you about ~$550. In other words, no one should be buying this thing new.

If you have foolishly built a Mac app that does any kind of number crunching, your choices are the newest Mac Pro at whatever absurd price Apple asks or breaking the law with a hackintosh.

Apple has been making moves that look like abandoning the Mac Pro for a while now. It's been three years where the only upgrade has been a chip update forced on them because Intel stopped making the old ones.

If you're thinking of making a video processing app or scientific computing app or any other app that really likes a lot of CPU you should plan your Mac version with a generic unix back end and communicate over the network. Apple is not supporting the market, anymore.

I guess that applies to anyone who wants something other than a phone or tablet. Unfortunately all the other manufacturers have abandoned the mid-range desktop and laptop PC markets even more thoroughly than Apple. I'm still amazed no one else but Apple sold a laptop with an acceptable screen at all for four straight years until 2012.

You might actually be better off getting a Mac Mini or Macbook Pro Retina for those apps, unless they are GPU or RAM bound. If I recall correctly, both these machines outperform the Mac Pro in terms of CPU now.

Does anyone have an explanation for this puzzling neglect of the market for "high-end" Mac desktops?

Here's my theory. Apple has made its reputation in the 90s with the film/graphics/illustration market, and that's where the Power Mac/Mac Pro was a critical product. Once the switch to Intel was made and laptops started catching up in speed/GPU power, less people needed a fixed tower just for Photoshop/After Effects/Maya, they just put those apps on a laptop. Moreover, the professional market is always smaller than the consumer market, and consumers don't want desktops, so Apple just went where the money is.

They got rid of Xserve and they'll likely get rid of the Mac Pro if demand falls significantly.

A lot of that market has already defected to Windows for the price/performance improvements, except for Final Cut users. If you're running Adobe CS, you don't need a Mac, and Mac OS X has relatively few advantages over Windows 7 for pro work.

The line I hear is "I'd rather be using a Mac, but...."

It's true that Apple tends to fit high-end Core chips in notebooks, but last year's Core i7-3770K still gives you step up in performance over this year's Retina MBP. And for pro users, time is money.

Well, there's going to be a major update of the Mac Pro this year, widely presumed to be something more than a mere upgrade of the internals.

It's difficult to explain the continued use of outdated chips over the past few years, especially after they discontinued the XServe and told everyone to use the Mac Pro instead.

I suppose the Gruber-esque answer is that Apple (especially under Steve Jobs) wants to present an elegant vision of what computing should be, every product a work of art with considerable mass market appeal. The Mac Pro is basically indistinguishable from a bulky 90s tower PC, and very few people actually need it.

It's a decidedly unsexy product. Apple is not Dell or Lenovo, they make very few products and they make a very big deal out of each one of them. The Mac Pro is an unfortunate necessity that they cannot reasonably discontinue. But it's not a product that Apple really wants to make.

They just discounted the rMBP (and updated the processors mildly). I don't understand what they could possibly update it with further, given that Haswell will not be released for many more months.

Exactly. The sample size here is way too small to make good predictions for most products. Even if you thought you could rely on the yearly cadence for i* devices, bam, Apple releases a fairly substantial iPad upgrade 6 months after the first Retina model.

Haswell will launch much sooner than you expect.

They've discounted several different models, iMacs, Macbook Airs, and just recently, their line of Retina Macbook Pros. Heck, even their very competitive iPhones (once that I can recall) and iPads. So you'd be incorrect.

I tell everyone, if you want to know if a new MBP is about to come out, ask me if I've bought one in the last couple of weeks. Both MBP's I've bought were followed soon thereafter by a model refresh :|

I see you have the same power as L. Laporte.

You could also buy a refurbished mac. They tend to be about $300 cheaper than the retail version and tend not to have any problems. I just bought one and so far its been perfect.

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac

The outdated hardware often makes the savings not worth it.

I just bought a MBP 15-inch retina display with a 2.3GHz i7, 8 gigs of 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM, 256GB Flash Storage, and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. What about that is outdated?

It's not always possible in some countries

this is not a new idea. www.macrumors.com has had this for ages...

Those are rather specific predictions to have without any measure of variance. About 57 days ± 30 days would be more useful information to have (if that fits the previous distribution).

Eventually Apple will sell hardware subscriptions, where you just turn in your old gear and get new stuff every year. (Maybe they can give your old ipods to starving kids or something).

Fine! Perhaps I deserved a down-vote. Or two. But there is something to what I'm saying: all businesses seem to want to reach for the "annuity" business. MS did it. Apple does it. Adobe does it. Adobe is becoming explicit about it, too.

Companies have been doing it for decades for personal computers, servers, cars and all kind of equipement. If it’s stuff that ages quickly (either because technology advances or because it wears out) it makes a lot of sense. You pay a fee and you get new equipment every two years and usually free replacements if it breaks in the meantime.

You could say it’s not as good for the environment, and I would agree.

It's called eBay.

Are you sure the Macbook Pro release is correct? The Retina was an update.

Macbook Pro (15") was updated couple of weeks ago, why this one says 263 days? Yes the retina one, isn't retina ones are successors of a previous model? Why keep them separate, I think Macbook Pro without retina will be obsolete and won't be updated.

Reminds me of something I built years ago:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080616021707/http://www.mactact...

Oh I remember seeing that when it came out. Did you take it down?

Yeah, someone from Apple emailed me and asked me to - so I did.

Oh, interesting. Did they give a reason? Was it legal? MacRumors has been doing this for some time, I can't imagine that there's anything illegal about it.

This interface is superior to this most recent offering and MacRumors. I understand why you took it down but still too bad.

It would be helpful to turn the bar red if something becomes overdue.

Perhaps take it one step further and start filling the bar again with the overdue number of days but with red.

Yeah that's something I'll probably do in the next few days. I just wanted to get something out there. Ship ship ship :)

The Retina Macbook Pro should be it's own category as it's update cycle is quite different to the Macbook Pro at the moment.

My own personal expected arrival times:

• Apple iEyes, stylish head-worn computer: 2016

• Apple MagicMindPad, implantable universal 3D/multitouch pointer device: 2021

• Apple nuRetina, permanent replacement for your biological retina: 2028

(Impulse purchases at the fancy Apple surgical centers are going to be big business in the 2020's.)

I want all of those things.

* Apple iEyes, stylish head-worn computer: 2016

Surely it would be the iPatch: http://www.weylonsmith.com/blog/tag/ipatch

Or the Eye Pad

I am interested if there are any news when Google will refresh Nexus 7, I want to get it, but would prefer to wait for newer version.

There were already places that track release times, this page is not neccesary, http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/ comes to mind.

I see others pointed that as well... well I can't remove this post so you will have to endure it presence.

You should separate MBP and rMBP.

It's not so clear if MBP will even be a product line in the future - I'd bet that in the future Apple will want to have just two laptop lines, Air and Pro, both with Retina displays.

Right, but they have two lines right now and changing the site to reflect product consolidation in the future is trivial.

About two weeks ago, Apple did an update on the Retina MBP and some price changes the the MacBook Air. I know it is a rather small change, but I think it counts for "release", so the calculation for the Macbooks is wrong.

Yeah, Apple counts it as a release. The updated retina MBP 13" describes itself as an "Early 2013".

What I would find useful is seeing the things blocking each update. E.g. Mac Pro waiting on new Xeon CPUs from Intel, new iPad basically not enough time since last release, EOL for iPod classic, etc.

Maybe "days between processor release and Mac release" would be a useful metric, considering that Intel leaks/announces their release dates months in advance.

The languishing of iPod Classic is the saddest thing on there to me. I really think the scroll wheel is better than a touch interface. Tactile feedback makes it easier to use without looking.

I'd love it if you could convert times in days to months, or something like 'early september' if you don't want to seem to over-promise by giving a real date. I could divide by 30, but I'm lazy.

The Mac Pro bar isn't quite correct. The last update was only due to Intel not producing the old processors any more. Apple didn't even flag it as "new" on their store.

You might be right, let me look into that. There's a bit of gray area as to what technically constitutes a "release".

Seconding this. The 2012 "update" was no more than a slight rearranging of CPU and RAM within that same generation of parts. The thing still uses all 2010 era parts (radeon 5xxx graphics, westmere xeons, 3gbit SATA, PCI-E 2, no thunderbolt). It has been "due" for an update since sandy bridge xeons were released in early 2012.

Actually they did, briefly. But was probably a mistake.

Wow...the Mac rumors buying guide but prettier with less info. Is there any real insight or innovation here above and beyond that?

I guess it depends on how you quantify usefulness. There's less info, but I think I visualized the information that I do show much better than MacRumors.

Lovely execution.

Only one nit -- the MacBook Pro was updated two weeks ago: https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/02/13Apple-Updates-Pro...

It was but only because Apple had no choice. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5307169

No, you're linking to a thread about the Mac Pro, not the MacBook Pro. :-)

Whoops, you are correct. The updates to the MacBook Pro are still trivial and no site is considering it to be an major upgrade/update. The Mac Rumors tracking site separates the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Pro Retina for this reason.

Nice, really like it! Think it would be cool if you could see the expected lenght for overdue products too. Something like that maybe: http://codepen.io/stroebjo/pen/aiLtd

Nice work.

Some feedback:

- Bug: The site breaks the back button of Firefox somehow.

- Suggestion: A timeline view of the previous releases on the detail page could help to make the patterns more clear.

- Suggestion: Maybe change the color of the bar when an update is overdue.

Waiting for the iPad Mini w/ Retina display (wait, where's the iPad mini?).

This looks great and I can see this being useful, but if I just land'ed on the site I would struggle to know what it is about....but you probably have this covered anyway :)

The text is cut off on http://arrival.io/macbook-pro.

http://imgur.com/sBWlJ09

Hmm, what OS, browser, and version are you on?

Mountain Lion + Chrome on a retina MBP.

On FireFox the text is also cut off and the blue bars do not show up: http://imgur.com/CfHWnzJ

Update: Upgrading from Firefox 17 to 19 fixed the issue with the blue bars.

Most likely has to do with not having the font you are expecting (Myriad Pro), as well as different defaults in size in browsers. My sans-serif font that you are falling back to is Droid Sans at 15 font size. The fixed width of the svg you are working with is making the whole area you are trying to fit things in to be too small.

In short: Lack of responsive web design

From a statistical point of view, it seems kind of inappropriate to report something with a 100+ day standard deviation (iPhone release rate) down to the nearest day.

Firefox 19/mac, progress bars don't display.

I love Firefox, but I am encountering problems like this more and more often. It's a disaster to use with Coursera or Netflix.

"This page is best viewed with Google Explorer"

It looks like the page is doing something funny with javascript to render the bars, why not just use good old css?

The problem is that the site is using SVG paint servers to provide a gradient for the progress rect. The gradient is specified in a SVG def element with id barGradient in the HTML file. So far so good. The problem arises because the fill rule is written as "fill: url(#barGradient)" and is placed in an external CSS file. In this case the fragment should be resolved against the stylesheet URL, not the HTML document URL [1]. It appears that Gecko and Opera get this right and WebKit doesn't. However the page relies on the incorrect behaviour here. (I also note that Gecko and Presto do different things after they fail to resolve the paint server; Gecko falls back to "none", Presto to the default fill colour. My reading of SVG 1.2T is that Gecko is correct in this case [2]).

tldr; The page relies on a WebKit bug. The Gecko rendering is correct.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-values/#urls [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGTiny12/painting.html#SpecifyingPaint

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining it! This was my first time using SVG. So, what is the best solution? Defining SVG styles in a style tag?

That would work, yes.

Yeah, for some reason Firefox won't show the gradient. Not sure why. In the meantime I made it so it would fallback to a solid color.

jgraham explains it in this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5307583

It'd be a nice touch to note discontinuation based on overdueness. The classic isn't way overdue, it's discontinued.

just bought retina macbook pro 15 inch yesterday (ME665LL/A) which says "Early 2013". Isn't that an update?

Yes, it is.

Only 106 days until a new Thunderbolt Display! I really hope that it turns into an "Apple TV" announcement.

A successor to Apple's current desktop display is more likely at least 7 months out. Look at the historical data: ignoring the outlier, Apple releases a new screen every 25 months - we're 18 months in. The last update was timed so because Apple switched from Mini DisplayPort to Thunderbolt.

http://arrival.io/apple-thunderbolt-display

As for Apple releasing a TV screen, I don't see it happening for at least a couple of years, if ever. There are too many things that need to be in place for Apple to be able to really change how people watch TV. For it to really shake things up, we need fast broadband everywhere, more (live) content in iTunes, a better input method (hand gestures? voice? touch?) to control the screen, and a more reliable wireless technology than (the current) WiFi.

Right now I'm just doing a simple average, but I'll definitely starting adding weighting and other ways of influencing the estimate.

Not to mention the state of the art hasn't moved very much - that 27" IPS LCD panel is still the very same that's being used by Dell, HP, et al.

There's been a lot of development on both smaller and larger screen sizes, but the 27" form factor seems to be at a relative standstill.

I don't expect to see an update unless there is a major change to either the panel tech or the interface tech. I really do hope that Apple reopens the >= 30-inch space though.

A price drop would be enough. Surely they could sell them a lot cheaper at the high volume they would get cutting the price.

I was a bit hopeful when supplies became constrained in the non-Apple Store channels: http://www.macrumors.com/2013/01/14/apple-thunderbolt-displa...

Shortly after that, Best Buy discounted them a bit ($50), suggesting to me they wanted to empty the shelves for new models (as they surely aren't automatic sales like iPads).

However, at this point I'm not convinced it'll be too soon, as whatever momentum the "signs" pointed to seems to have worn off.

My pet theory[1] is that they'll jump to 4k/QFHD (3840x(2160,2400)) by using the same panels for a desktop Retina Display and as a stand-alone Apple TV. I think this would "shake things up" without having to sell in iPhone/iPad volumes.

A desktop Retina Display would be a great pairing with a Mac Pro replacement, which one might expect when Intel's Haswell starts shipping, which happens to be around 106 days from now. And they could retain the existing Thunderbolt Display as a lower-end model. (It also helps that Apple's current models all support outputting that resolution.)

A 4k Apple TV would allow them to differentiate from most of the TV market and soak up a fat margin in an area where only one of their major competitors (Samsung) as any position. And it wouldn't cannibalize the $99 Apple TV box in the process. There's still the chicken-and-egg problem of getting 4k content, but Apple, with iTunes and as a pipeline for Netflix, et al., seems to have a good position to get it.

[1] As a person so hip he doesn't own a TV or a Mac, yet finds the speculation irresistible.

I came by this information second-hand so I can't verify it, but I have been told that there aren't enough PCIe lanes going to each Thunderbolt port to drive a 4K panel at 60Hz. Which makes me as a rMBP owner super, super sad if it's true.

The 2011 MBP could drive two 2560x1600 displays (chained) through a single port, which requires about the same bandwidth as a single 3840x2160. So I don't think that would be an issue, though obviously the GPU is still a limitation.

I appear to be hellbanned from posting links, but I gather this from page 8 of AnandTech's review of the Thunderbolt display and the Wikipedia article for DisplayPort.

I just want the current Thunderbolt display with the current iMac's screen, which has less glare. I'm hoping that they're only waiting on that until supplies aren't constrained by iMac production.

Less glare would be nice. Maybe I'm dreaming, but after using a MBPr I think I'd want higher resolution, too.

Clean and simple, I like it. I think an about page for new visitors would be good though.

Yeah I was trying to decide whether it needed one or not. So far people seem to be getting it, but I might still add one.

Where do you get your data from?

It's all online, but there's an awesome app called Mactracker (http://www.mactracker.ca) that I got a lot of information from. MacRumors also has a buyers guide (http://buyersguide.macrumors.com), but I think mine is better :)

Doesn't work in Firefox on Mac.

Whoops, it looks like Firefox doesn't like SVG gradients. I'll look into that. Thanks!

I hope that's not right, just ordered a MBA a few days ago

This is pretty nice. Where's the iPad Mini though?

Awesome! Thank you

You're very welcome :)

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