For the first time in my life, I decided to sit out an upgrade cycle and buy the older model, now being sold at a discount like day-old bread.
I won’t say that the discount played no role in my decision. But in previous years, I’d have swallowed hard and handed over the money, because I am, in the laptop world, a hardcore power user. I game on my laptop. I frequently have a dozen or so applications open, two or three of which are browsers with many tabs open. Faster processors, more memory — these things are sufficiently valuable that I’m willing to pay for them, because they make me more productive.
The trouble is, the upgrade cycle is no longer delivering those things. The processors in the latest model were marginally faster than in the previous one, but you couldn’t add memory, which I needed more. Instead, Apple is focusing on things I care about a lot less, like making the laptop thin — even though that meant losing USB and SD card ports that I still use, and losing a lot of “play” from the keyboard. As a friend pointed out to me, Apple has become obsessed with thinness to the point of anorexia.
But my decision is not primarily evidence of Apple making poor design decisions. Instead, it’s a lesson in the limits of the form — and the way that’s affecting upgrade cycles, and very probably, Apple’s future revenue.
…My 4.5 years is actually on the low side for replacing a computer; the average now is nearly six years, which of course means that a substantial number of users are waiting longer than that. For replacing mobile devices, too, consumers are waiting longer, in part because phone companies are no longer subsidizing the phones to get you to invest in a contract, but also, I suspect, because devices are just not getting better as fast as they once were. We used to upgrade our phones every two years because the new operating systems ran on old phones as if they’d been given high doses of valium. Now we’ll wait until the batteries won’t hold a charge — and if it were possible to replace the batteries, we might wait even longer than that, because I’m not willing to pay hundreds of dollars to get a better camera while losing my headphone jack.
I replaced my slider Droid 2 Global a couple years ago, when it started to flake out, with a used Droid 4, because it was the newest phone in which I could still get a mechanical keyboard. The Droid 2 could do a battery swap in ten seconds; Motorola says not to replace the battery in the 4, but it was on its last legs when I bought it, and they could be purchased at Amazon, and didn’t really require any special tools other than a #5 Torx driver, so now the battery is fine. I don’t know when I’ll upgrade the phone, but then, I only use it when traveling, because I hate cell phones in general, and work at home with a land line, that they’ll take away from my cold dead fingers.
And I’ll stick to my desktop for now as well. I buy a cheap laptop for traveling, but to the degree I’m a power user, I prefer to have something easy/cheap to upgrade (I’ll probably double my RAM to 32G for Christmas). My next laptop, which may come soon, because mine is starting to have problems (occasional non-responsive keys, and lines in the display) will probably be a foldable two in one, that will be much easier to use on a plane.
As she says, it is a problem with marginal utility as we approach the end of Moore’s law, and the limits of the physical human interface.
But it’s not just that. I’ve never used Apple products, and things like this insane obsession with “thin” to the exclusion of all else is one of the reasons. My sense is that Apple’s response to consumer demand is similar to Twitter’s:
“Hey, we’re going to improve the product!”
“Great, want to know what we want?”
“Absolutely not.”
Jerry Pournelle agrees.
That’s weird. I just install an app on my iPad and it asks for a password and installs.
I’m guessing that’s because I refused to set up the two-factor authentication stuff. There’s nothing particularly important is on the iPad or iPhone because it’s far more likely to be stolen than a computer in my house.
It’s not much different on the Windows side. When my old laptop finally died recently, it was hard to find one that would a) run Linux and b) let me replace the HDD with an SSD without having to take the entire machine apart.
Then there’s the way they’re pushing touchscreens and being able to turn them into tablets (which means putting all the heavy stuff in the lid, which is precisely where it doesn’t belong). I already have tablets, and don’t need another one.
I agree with most of the quoted area. I do have an iPhone, but its a 6; and I went to it for the bigger screen. The 3D touch of the 6S seemed to go away from Job’s canon of keeping it simple. I see no reason at all to purchase the 7, so I’m starting to look for deals on a backup 6 or switching to Samsung or Motorola.
As for laptops, I did update this year and got an ASUS Zenbook 501. It’s 16GB RAM with a 512GB SSD, oh and 4K, which is nice but perhaps not as big a deal. I do like it because it is thin, but it is hefty enough to still allow modification, which is to say not the anorexic thin. I did decide what I want, and then waited about 8 months until the price is right, because my old system was sufficiently fast enough.
It’s worth noting that iPhone SE sales seem to be well ahead of pre-release estimates. It’s basically the guts of a new iPhone in the small case of an old iPhone, not a huge phone that’s trying to be a tablet.
If the trend toward larger and larger phones is reversing, the trend toward thinner and thinner laptops may do, too.
Really, though, it seems pretty clear that Jobs was Apple, and they’re desperately lacking techs who can come up with something new and get it to market.
See my comment about the Apple SoC performance. You are wrong.
Hands up all those who care about the CPU performance of their phone.
Every time I check the CPU usage on mine, it’s under 10%. I care about battery life, not performance.
Since as you say you’ve never used Apple products, you aren’t exactly in a good position to comment on them. I submit that your “sense” is not really accurate.
Take the iPhone, for example. Apple designs its own silicon for most of the iPhone, and the Apple SoC is the highest-performing ARM system out there and has been for years. Nobody else is even close. And Apple does that while maintaining best-in-class battery life and the best screens you can get on a phone, and what is generally recognized as the best build quality in the mobile phone market. But Apple is also very opinionated, for lack of a better word, so you get things like the headphone jack removal in the iPhone 7. Apple is willing to push its user base in a given direction, and usually it seems to pick good directions in which to push; time will tell if the headphone jack was a good move or not.
As far as the new MacBook Pros go, part of the perceived lack of progress is due to Intel’s CPU roadmap; there just isn’t a lot of improvement coming in the laptop power space. There are vocal users who would have been happier with a somewhat thicker laptop with more battery capacity that used non-low-power RAM so that the RAM could go to 32 GB instead of 16GB (Intel’s CPUs don’t support more than 16 GB of the low power RAM). But there are also people who want the lightest feasible laptops that still have the capacity to perform “pro” work. Apple is betting that the new laptops will satisfy enough of the latter group of people to meet their current goals, and that updates in the next year or two will solve the memory and battery situation. Again, Apple is sticking to their vision and is willing to potentially alienate some people. I have no dog in this hunt though because I despise laptops.
Ultimately, the market will decide as it always does. For the last several years, Apple has clearly been the favorite vendor of cellphones and laptops for people who aren’t buying strictly on price (they own the vast majority of the profits in these areas). We’ll see if it continues.
Last I looked, Apple’s phone sales were down substantially this year, because they’ve given people little reason to upgrade.
Meanwhile, iPhone 6 owners around the Internet are complaining that their phones keep turning off at 30-50% battery life, and iPhone 7 users are complaining that their Bluetooth doesn’t work properly with their Bluetooth headphones, and Apple removed the headphone jack to make the phone thinner, so they can’t just plug in their old wired headphones.
I submit that you haven’t asked many tech savvy people how they like their iPhones and iPads.
I will not buy another. One (of each) and done.
My tech bona fides are impeccable, as are those of my many coworkers who swear by Apple products. Get out of your bubble.
As are mine. Get your head out of your condescending ass.
We have a bunch of Apple products, and no real complaints. Pretty much every time a device has failed or been declared obsolete by the manufacturer in the last year or so, we’ve replaced it with an Apple equivalent.
But iOS seems to be becoming less reliable with every new update, and there’s very little reason for us to upgrade any device until Apple stops supporting them. There’s really not been a ‘killer feature’ or ‘killer product’ since the last of Jobs’ products were released.
Certainly I don’t install iOS updates on any device I care about until they’ve been out a week or so and other people have found the problems.
Since as you say you’ve never used Apple products, you aren’t exactly in a good position to comment on them.
I can only comment on a chorus of complaints I hear from friends who are long-time Apple fans.
Anecdata – gotta love it 🙂
Sorry, not hearing a lot of love for the devices, it’s all I’ve got. And I think that Megan is a not-insignificant example.
Nor is Pounelle, who has been doing this stuff so we don’t have to for a very long time.
I use a Mac desktop and an iPhone and like them very much, they do exactly what I need. Some time ago I purchased an iPad and likewise was very happy. In particular I found that I was able to create documents with bi-directional text very easily on the iPad.
I say “was happy” because as I updated the iOS versions over time I discovered that Apple has restricted the functionality of Safari, the web browser. It has gradually become all but unusable on my old iPad. Therefore I purchased a refurb Dell laptop and installed Linux Mint on it.
This has worked out very well as far as most functionality. Linux is a breeze and it’s a fine laptop. The price, obviously, was only a fraction of a MacBook or new iPad. However I still use the iPad for bi-directional text. Both Mac OS and Linux Mint work but are a bit convoluted. So I have ended up with 4 devices.
If one device did all I needed, or if even one less device did, I would just go that way. All the thinness, shiny stuff, and bling are just so much evanescence. What ever happened to “it just works?”
My wife and I have an iPad mini each for aviation use (flight planning and filing , moving map, weather updates etc)
Both are miserable Pos’s. I’m looking forward to the guys who do the flight app porting a full version to Android (windows 10 would be good too) and then I’ll never have to interact with another Apple product ever again.
FFS Apple your Safari browser has a horrible looking interface and is unstable and keeps crashing, as does Chrome on these miserable pieces of garbage.
I also prefer to decide where in memory (or hard drive) I want to put stuff and a human interface with delays and lack of speed is just terrible. What a horrible experience.