7 ms·

More than a single event, it is the string of events which create the disappointment. While Apple is indeed bound by Intels schedule for CPU upgrades, this woul

by _ph_ 10y ago

More than a single event, it is the string of events which create the disappointment. While Apple is indeed bound by Intels schedule for CPU upgrades, this would not prevent Apple from regular other components in their devices. A computer like the Mini should get yearly updates - and there is no good reason to solder in the memory. While it kept the very same design, it went from a quad-core i7 to a dual-core, with fixed memory. Which then stopped to be upgraded. The versatile Mac Pro got replaced with the current can-like design, limiting the choices and then never got upgraded. If you make a machine which cannot be user-upgraded, please upgrade it every year. There is no good reason, there is no option for the current NVidia or AMD cards available. The iMac is still one of the better offerings - I got the 5k after the last refresh. However, while this gives you the fastest CPU, it only offers mobile graphics performance. There is no good reason why its internals, especially the drive bay are not user-accessible. While having a gorgeous display, why for all its expensiveness does it not offer any kind of video-in? If it had the ability to accept HDMI or DisplayPort input and display them in a special application window, that would be just great. Especially, if Apple does not focus on the desktop, why are they so reluctant to sell a more traditional desktop machine? Where the user can change the hardware, if Apple cannot be bothered to do it? All of this just adds up - and while power users in the pre-can age had at least an expensive but powerful alternative, this does not longer exist. And the other choices also get more and more limited. So it should not come as a surprise, when even the most faithful supporters get frustrated.

weaksauce 10y ago
The lack of affordable storage in the retina and up laptops and even desktops has been a deal breaker for me. I am on a five year old mbp and am seriously considering a hackintosh to be a daily driver. That's a whole big can of worms though.
- _ph_ 10y ago
  Yes, the lack of storage is really bad - the Mac Pro is the most ridiculous one, being limited to 1T of SSD in a pro machine. Fortunately for me, I was able to order the iMac with the basic HD and my Mac dealer (authorized) replaced it with a 2T Samsung SSD, though for a fee. Still, I got this for roughly the same price as the Apple 1T had cost. Otherwise I probably would not have invested into the iMac. (And what a nice machine it would be, if it had 2 bays of user accessible SSD drives...)
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Can you identify specifically the critical features of OS X that aren't replicable with a reasonable amount of effort on other systems? I've spent considerable time using all 3 major OSes as daily drivers and while each platform has perks, I've never felt a strong commitment to OS X for daily use. I'm curious what many people feel is so crucial about it that they'd consider switching to the massively unstable Hackintosh over a customized Windows or Linux installation (or some hybrid of the two, which is what I run).
  - eropple 10y ago
    Anything with audio. ASIO on Windows is a mess of exclusive application usage and without it you're looking at latency so bad that I can't real-time monitor and talk at the same time because the echo effect kills me (and it's worse if you want to aggregate multiple audio devices). Linux--there's nothing worthwhile in terms of audio software and JACK is a disaster. Even if I switch everything else I do to Windows and Linux, and I'm considering it, I'll end up keeping a Mac around for the foreseeable future.
  - kristofferR 10y ago
    macOS is great because it combines a flawless UNIX system (with homebrew, the only package manager I've been satisfied with) and a nice GUI with apps that work/look great by default. Linux has a massive lack of good apps. Simple things like a decent calendar app on Linux doesn't seem to exist.
    - uabstraction 10y ago
      Homebrew is a children's toy compared to APT or Portage. There's no argument about general polish or calendar apps in particular though. It's a trade off. You can have rough edges but community control and 100+ backup plans, or you can have sleek, polished, but at the mercy of next year's soldered RAM and SSD pricing guidelines. I personally love breaking things to figure out how they work, but some people have a job to do and can't deal with distractions.
      - 10y ago
- xenihn 10y ago
  I just built a Mini-ITX Hackintosh (dual-booting Windows 10 and Sierra) that is running great if you have any questions or interest concerning the parts I used. They're way better now than they were a few years ago thanks to UEFI installations. No more having to do a complete backup prior to updates and having to fix all your kexts/drivers, or a complete reinstall for upgrading to the next OSX/MacOS major release. The biggest problem I have is needing to use a $6 USB adapter for sound, but it's so trivial compared to past headaches. I was originally looking into buying a Mac Pro. I spent less than $1000 on this build, and got something much, much better than a $4k+ maxed-out Mac Pro or 2016 MBP, plus with the ability to upgrade storage, GPU, and RAM.
  - weaksauce 10y ago
    I'd be interested to see your part list and share any experiences you have with it. email is in profile if you don't want to share it here.
    - xenihn 10y ago
      https://pcpartpicker.com/user/pcparts45/saved/#view=YfcHxr https://pcpartpicker.com/user/pcparts45/saved/#view=YfcHxr
      - weaksauce 10y ago
        Thanks! Wow that's a hd monitor. I have a 30" 2560x1600 and I thought that was nice. how do you like it?
        xenihn 10y ago
        It's really nice, but text can be hard to read without scaling or enlarging it. I haven't looked at any other 4k or 5k displays, but I think a 30" 4k would be much better. Sadly those are really expensive at the moment. The P2715Q is the best IPS 4k monitor in the price range, plus I got a great deal on a used one. Even with the text issue, I think that it's still a significant upgrade over the Thunderbolt displays I was using before (I was using 2). Not quite as huge as going from my previous non-IPS 1920x1200 monitor to 2560x1440, though.
dashundchen 10y ago
The most insane part of this to me, is the inability to upgrade or repair any of the desktop Macs by making them locked down, soldered machines. These are machines meant to sit on a desk. Who cares about shaving off few centimeters of desk space if means you can't replace your RAM or hard disk or video card with off the shelf parts? I find this both anti-user and environmentally unfriendly.
- badsock 10y ago
  Seriously, if anyone has a technical answer to this I'd love to know what it is. Right now I can't intepret the soldered-on ram in desktops as anything other than a user-hostile cash grab.
  - elliotec 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure it is exactly just a user-hostile cash grab.
  - curun1r 10y ago
    I'm not saying that I prefer the soldered-in versions, but back when I had a Mac with user-replaceable memory, the RAM would get unseated from time to time as my machine got jostled around in my bag and I'd have to open it up to fix it. I imagine that the Genius Bar saw a non-zero number of people bringing in computers that wouldn't boot because of this. Also, soldered-in saves space and thus helps with their pathological need to make MBPs thinner. It's hostile to users who want to upgrade RAM, but pretty friendly to everyone else. It gets into the point of this article...when Apple looks at both demographics, the group that doesn't upgrade is much larger. Apple used to make decisions that would cater to the more non-mainstream use cases of their pro users. Now, they're focused almost entirely on the mainstream users.
    - pas 10y ago
      Huh? I'm using a Dell Latitude E7440, it's about 3 years old, and I carry it everywhere. It has a few dents here and there. I've gone to the pub with it a few times and only God (and Google location services) know how I got back, luckily with the notebook still in my backpack, and the backpack somehow inside my place. The RAM never dislodged. http://17c4dcd7f91259d8cc66-f5932f6db0039e8c02f89a70c334ff0e.r2.cf1.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2-E7440-internals.jpg http://17c4dcd7f91259d8cc66-f5932f6db0039e8c02f89a70c334ff0e... But of course, soldering them in is not surprising. It cuts costs. A lot I guess. You need less connectors, you need less time assembling the laptop, less time supporting the very rare cases when there's a problem with the RAM.
rz2k 10y ago
I suppose the era of PowerPCs was a little different, with Apple far ahead of PCs for a while, then well behind. Apple could have released Skylake 13" class laptops a long time ago. Possibly they thought there would be suitable Kaby Lake processors with Iris by now. These MacBook Pros are expensive, but they really are not more expensive than similar machine with matching specs. Given that, here's what I think would have worked a lot better: Release these MacBook Pros 3-6 months ago, but each model a couple hundred dollars more expensive. In the box for free include an adapter with power pass through, HDMI and a USB-A 3.1, another with mini DisplayPort, and one USB-C to Lighting cable. Make the power cable fully capable for 3.1 data transfer, rather than a potential source of confusion. Sell adapters in the store for close to cost. They should also have released the iPhone 8 and future iOS devices with USB-C rather than Lighting. And to complete the line, maybe a premium-priced dock, that doesn't crowd out other hardware innovators, but proves the market viable. Presumably the cost of the OS is built into the computers, why not some of the add-ons that facilitate the transition to USB-C? USB-C is superior, but the transition with short-sighted nickle-and-diming seems like it is needlessly aggravating people.
- smacktoward 10y ago
  I don't know that PPC Macs were ever far ahead of PCs, performance-wise at least. At best there was a relatively big leap from "much slower than what you can get in a PC" in the tail end of the 68040 era to "pretty close to what you can get in a PC" in the early PPC days. But then PPC performance stagnated and left Apple in the lurch again, which helped drive the eventual jump to Intel.
  - Volt 10y ago
    G3/G4/G5 Especially in the Pentium 4 era.

by _ph_ 10y ago

weaksauce 10y ago

The lack of affordable storage in the retina and up laptops and even desktops has been a deal breaker for me. I am on a five year old mbp and am seriously considering a hackintosh to be a daily driver. That's a whole big can of worms though.

_ph_ 10y ago
Yes, the lack of storage is really bad - the Mac Pro is the most ridiculous one, being limited to 1T of SSD in a pro machine. Fortunately for me, I was able to order the iMac with the basic HD and my Mac dealer (authorized) replaced it with a 2T Samsung SSD, though for a fee. Still, I got this for roughly the same price as the Apple 1T had cost. Otherwise I probably would not have invested into the iMac. (And what a nice machine it would be, if it had 2 bays of user accessible SSD drives...)
cookiecaper 10y ago
Can you identify specifically the critical features of OS X that aren't replicable with a reasonable amount of effort on other systems? I've spent considerable time using all 3 major OSes as daily drivers and while each platform has perks, I've never felt a strong commitment to OS X for daily use. I'm curious what many people feel is so crucial about it that they'd consider switching to the massively unstable Hackintosh over a customized Windows or Linux installation (or some hybrid of the two, which is what I run).
- eropple 10y ago
  Anything with audio. ASIO on Windows is a mess of exclusive application usage and without it you're looking at latency so bad that I can't real-time monitor and talk at the same time because the echo effect kills me (and it's worse if you want to aggregate multiple audio devices). Linux--there's nothing worthwhile in terms of audio software and JACK is a disaster. Even if I switch everything else I do to Windows and Linux, and I'm considering it, I'll end up keeping a Mac around for the foreseeable future.
- kristofferR 10y ago
  macOS is great because it combines a flawless UNIX system (with homebrew, the only package manager I've been satisfied with) and a nice GUI with apps that work/look great by default. Linux has a massive lack of good apps. Simple things like a decent calendar app on Linux doesn't seem to exist.
  - uabstraction 10y ago
    Homebrew is a children's toy compared to APT or Portage. There's no argument about general polish or calendar apps in particular though. It's a trade off. You can have rough edges but community control and 100+ backup plans, or you can have sleek, polished, but at the mercy of next year's soldered RAM and SSD pricing guidelines. I personally love breaking things to figure out how they work, but some people have a job to do and can't deal with distractions.
    - 10y ago
xenihn 10y ago
I just built a Mini-ITX Hackintosh (dual-booting Windows 10 and Sierra) that is running great if you have any questions or interest concerning the parts I used. They're way better now than they were a few years ago thanks to UEFI installations. No more having to do a complete backup prior to updates and having to fix all your kexts/drivers, or a complete reinstall for upgrading to the next OSX/MacOS major release. The biggest problem I have is needing to use a $6 USB adapter for sound, but it's so trivial compared to past headaches. I was originally looking into buying a Mac Pro. I spent less than $1000 on this build, and got something much, much better than a $4k+ maxed-out Mac Pro or 2016 MBP, plus with the ability to upgrade storage, GPU, and RAM.
- weaksauce 10y ago
  I'd be interested to see your part list and share any experiences you have with it. email is in profile if you don't want to share it here.
  - xenihn 10y ago
    https://pcpartpicker.com/user/pcparts45/saved/#view=YfcHxr https://pcpartpicker.com/user/pcparts45/saved/#view=YfcHxr
    - weaksauce 10y ago
      Thanks! Wow that's a hd monitor. I have a 30" 2560x1600 and I thought that was nice. how do you like it?
      - xenihn 10y ago
        It's really nice, but text can be hard to read without scaling or enlarging it. I haven't looked at any other 4k or 5k displays, but I think a 30" 4k would be much better. Sadly those are really expensive at the moment. The P2715Q is the best IPS 4k monitor in the price range, plus I got a great deal on a used one. Even with the text issue, I think that it's still a significant upgrade over the Thunderbolt displays I was using before (I was using 2). Not quite as huge as going from my previous non-IPS 1920x1200 monitor to 2560x1440, though.

dashundchen 10y ago

The most insane part of this to me, is the inability to upgrade or repair any of the desktop Macs by making them locked down, soldered machines. These are machines meant to sit on a desk. Who cares about shaving off few centimeters of desk space if means you can't replace your RAM or hard disk or video card with off the shelf parts? I find this both anti-user and environmentally unfriendly.

badsock 10y ago
Seriously, if anyone has a technical answer to this I'd love to know what it is. Right now I can't intepret the soldered-on ram in desktops as anything other than a user-hostile cash grab.
- elliotec 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure it is exactly just a user-hostile cash grab.
- curun1r 10y ago
  I'm not saying that I prefer the soldered-in versions, but back when I had a Mac with user-replaceable memory, the RAM would get unseated from time to time as my machine got jostled around in my bag and I'd have to open it up to fix it. I imagine that the Genius Bar saw a non-zero number of people bringing in computers that wouldn't boot because of this. Also, soldered-in saves space and thus helps with their pathological need to make MBPs thinner. It's hostile to users who want to upgrade RAM, but pretty friendly to everyone else. It gets into the point of this article...when Apple looks at both demographics, the group that doesn't upgrade is much larger. Apple used to make decisions that would cater to the more non-mainstream use cases of their pro users. Now, they're focused almost entirely on the mainstream users.
  - pas 10y ago
    Huh? I'm using a Dell Latitude E7440, it's about 3 years old, and I carry it everywhere. It has a few dents here and there. I've gone to the pub with it a few times and only God (and Google location services) know how I got back, luckily with the notebook still in my backpack, and the backpack somehow inside my place. The RAM never dislodged. http://17c4dcd7f91259d8cc66-f5932f6db0039e8c02f89a70c334ff0e.r2.cf1.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2-E7440-internals.jpg http://17c4dcd7f91259d8cc66-f5932f6db0039e8c02f89a70c334ff0e... But of course, soldering them in is not surprising. It cuts costs. A lot I guess. You need less connectors, you need less time assembling the laptop, less time supporting the very rare cases when there's a problem with the RAM.

rz2k 10y ago

I suppose the era of PowerPCs was a little different, with Apple far ahead of PCs for a while, then well behind. Apple could have released Skylake 13" class laptops a long time ago. Possibly they thought there would be suitable Kaby Lake processors with Iris by now. These MacBook Pros are expensive, but they really are not more expensive than similar machine with matching specs. Given that, here's what I think would have worked a lot better: Release these MacBook Pros 3-6 months ago, but each model a couple hundred dollars more expensive. In the box for free include an adapter with power pass through, HDMI and a USB-A 3.1, another with mini DisplayPort, and one USB-C to Lighting cable. Make the power cable fully capable for 3.1 data transfer, rather than a potential source of confusion. Sell adapters in the store for close to cost. They should also have released the iPhone 8 and future iOS devices with USB-C rather than Lighting. And to complete the line, maybe a premium-priced dock, that doesn't crowd out other hardware innovators, but proves the market viable. Presumably the cost of the OS is built into the computers, why not some of the add-ons that facilitate the transition to USB-C? USB-C is superior, but the transition with short-sighted nickle-and-diming seems like it is needlessly aggravating people.

smacktoward 10y ago
I don't know that PPC Macs were ever far ahead of PCs, performance-wise at least. At best there was a relatively big leap from "much slower than what you can get in a PC" in the tail end of the 68040 era to "pretty close to what you can get in a PC" in the early PPC days. But then PPC performance stagnated and left Apple in the lurch again, which helped drive the eventual jump to Intel.
- Volt 10y ago
  G3/G4/G5 Especially in the Pentium 4 era.