That article is from 2012.
I guess that proves I’m not a power user…
That big thick one is a slightly newer version of my “not quite portable” MacBookPro (Seriously, I commute by bike, and I never take my 6 lb. MBP). The new Pro is down to 3 lbs, exactly what I didn’t think they could do.
When the MacBook Air came out, I said “Wow. Well, when they get a MacBook Pro down to this weight, then I’ll think about it.”
I thought I was joking…
ETA Brilliant idea: When you build-to-Order, wouldn’t it be great to be able to add RAM, drives, AND PORTS?
"Let’s see… 16 gigs, a Syquest drive and a SCSI port…)
You had better hope you got enough storage and RAM for your needs in 8-10 years because they can’t be upgraded!
The Macbook strikes me as very much like the original Macbook Air, which was widely regarded as terribly underpowered and having sacrificed way too much usability in pursuit of thin and light. And even that one could have both a power cord and a peripheral plugged in at the same time.
Later Macbook Airs ended up being awesome computers. So hopefully they’ll release a new Macbook that has more than one port and not quite so anemic a processor before long.
Hahaha, that’s very funny! Q: What makes it “Benjamin Button”? I’m not familiar with that character.
Apple isn’t doing a job that’s impressing a lot of people these days. The new iPhones came out… was anyone excited? All I heard about was the missing headphone jack. I didn’t hear anything about an exciting new feature.
The response to the MacBook launch has been nothing short of catastrophic. Check out this awesome aggregation of quotes and links:
http://mjtsai.com/blog/2016/10/27/new-macbook-pros-and-the-state-of-the-mac/
I need a new phone right now. I got a Windows Phone in 2012, and it’s dead, Jim. Close to it. I have no interest in Android and I want to use some apps, so I guess it’s an iPhone. I might get a 6 and hope that 8 is actually something interesting next year.
I have a MacBook from 2012. Funny that Riemann posted that glowing review from 2012. The fangirl was ecstatic about this machine–and well she should have been… it was an awesome machine in 2012. Apple should be doing something at least at the level of the Surface Pro now, preferably something beyond it. The “updated” MacBook line is horseshit! My 2012 MacBook has every kind of port (well, not ethernet), and it’s as slender as I need it to be. That said, the USB-C doesn’t really bother me. It’s just overall lack of anything exciting or “advanced” that I find so depressing.
I have someone I’d like to give my MacBook to–I was hoping the new machines looked good and I would get one. Absolutely no way now. I guess I’ll wait another 5-10 years for Apple to do something interesting again.
Where I will praise Apple is in the OS department–even though they really haven’t done anything particularly good with OS X in a long time. I would not want to go back to Windows. That’s what keeps me on the Mac. I would not want to deal with Android, so iOS it is (I actually like the Windows Phone OS, but the apps just haven’t been made).
But in terms of hardware and overall product line, does anyone really think that Apple is on track these days?
He was born an old man and died a baby, essentially living his life backward.
He’s a character that ages in reverse: he’s born an elderly man and dies an infant. He doesn’t quite live in reversed time, but for the sake of a joke it’s close enough…
Ah, I see. 
Made me laugh.
Bump! I’m kinda pissed about something. I’ve started several threads in IMHO about how Apple is no longer innovating, no longer on the ball, etc. I have gotten excoriated for these views by the fanbois, even though the points I made were quite reasonable.
(I’ll note in passing that Apple recently gave up on its automobile project. Whoops! To be fair in my self-criticism, in a thread within the last year I suggested that Apple could succeed in the automobile industry making a car of its own. Looks like I was wrong.)
OK, so where are the fanbois now that Apple has really screwed the pooch with its MacBook event? You going to defend it? Are you going to defend the latest iPhones? How about a defense of Apple overall?
Or is it a tail-between-legs-hiding-in-the-bushes scenario?
I’m not trying to be a dick. I am a sometime Apple fan who has felt kinda burnt in recent years. But I do find it telling that the defenders haven’t been appearing this time.
Seems needlessly confrontational - but as I’m almost completely Apple-free now and more of an ex-fanboy, I’ll play some level of devil’s advocacy. Whilst there are drawbacks to Apple (the biggest being that everything is “their way or the highway”), the biggest benefits I perceive are:
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Apple treats privacy as a USP. For anyone who’s particularly concerned about digital privacy (still debating that one myself) this is huge, especially when compared to the competition (Google) who openly proclaim privacy is a thing of the past. Having attention paid to privacy is kind of unique now.
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There are arguments out there (example) suggesting that even though the initial purchase price is high, total cost of ownership is lower due to higher second hand resale value, different licensing (anecdotal but I do notice myself after switching back to Windows that I seem to see a lot of “per machine” licensing compared to “Family pack” or “per user” licensing on macOS, which is unfortunate for any geeky type who has multiple computers), longer periods of upgrade support etc (if that bothers you. It does bother me as an Android user that I have to fight tooth and nail to get software upgrades after just a year where iPhones still get the latest iOS after 3 or 4 years, and have to buy Nexus or Pixel to even stand a chance)
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With the exception of major design flaws that have affected large numbers of people (and Apple’s rather unfortunate victim blaming attitudes) such as antennagate, touch disease etc the overall experience of iPhones if you pick one of the models they’ve managed to avoid major design flaws on (such as 6S), is that of predictability and consistency. Where on Android I know that there will be times when it just sits and lags when I try to quickly open the camera and take a shot because something-or-other is going on in the background for example, it’s something that I never really experienced with iPhones. They just seem to get on and do the job. Presumably as they are known for having very strict controls on background activity (which is also often a negative, as one of their many “for your own good” restrictions). Android also… I don’t know, just kind of feels amateurish and “hacky” when you run into bugs, which is a little too often. For example recently push notifications stopped working in Gmail and Hangouts, and the fix was to boot into recovery mode and wipe the cache partition. As an IT techie, not a problem for me to do, but most people are going to end up taking it in somewhere, or just putting up with it which is unfortunate especially if they’ve experienced the reliability of iOS.
I don’t see their adoption of USB-C as a major problem. The whole tech industry is going all-in on that. It means you need a lot of dongles right now, but hopefully that’ll sort itself out in time. That said, I do prefer to have the *option *of a thicker machine with all the ports built-in, and it’s a shame Apple has removed that option entirely. Their obsession with thinness is pointless to me - I just switched from a MacBook Air to a Thinkpad X220 and it’s WAY thicker, but you know what? I don’t notice. Because it’s still pretty light to carry around in a reasonable bag, and most of the time I’m not squatting on the floor peering at its Z axis - it’s sat on my lap or desk and I’m looking down on X and Y. So unless it’s a total brick, I couldn’t care less how big Z is. But I don’t think it’s the end of the world, and the benchmarks suggest the performance hasn’t been sacrificed (BGR made it look like the old one is faster, but I think it’s an unfair comparison as they’ve compared the top end 2015 with the mid range 2016)
Dropping the headphone jack - a nuisance right now but I do think people have blown it out of proportion a bit (because doing so sells newspapers and blog views). I hardly think it’s a great trauma to Bluetooth or fit the bundled adapter to your favourite headphones and get on with your day. I’d bet money that in a year or two, major Android handset manufacturers will be doing exactly the same thing (except with USB type C).
As an aside, now that their laptops are USB-C they really should just do that with the iPhones too instead of insisting in proprietary connectors)
TwiSpark, good post. Basically agree, and it jibes with my praise of OS X and not wanting to have to go back to Windows. And I have never found Android attractive.
In contradistinction to what you wrote, however, which boils down to Apple’s overall competence and superiority to the competition*, the issue for me is that Apple has failed to innovate, and I don’t see anyone saying, “It isn’t so!” this time around with respect to both iPhone and Mac. And my citing them for a lack of innovation isn’t just to play bash Apple–I want to get excited about my phone and my laptop. I want to buy new shit right now that is better than what I had in the past.
As you and some others have pointed out, I think the USB-C thing vs. the proprietary iPhone cable shows Apple’s lack of strategic coherence right now. They justified the proprietary iPhone cable because it’s just better and more advanced and we’re Apple so there… to which I didn’t have any particular objection at the time (though I didn’t buy an iPhone either). But now they just have to comply with this new universal USB-C protocol and drop the MagSafe charger! Right, makin’ sense there. Again, mixing and matching those two things is not a huge crime in itself, but it’s like, “Guys, what do you really believe, and do you have an actual philosophy at this point?”
*I largely agree that Apple is superior to the competition overall in many cases, but MS has clearly eaten Apple’s hardware lunch with its latest offerings. Not that you were saying otherwise in that case. I had assumed that Apple would fight back with Macs that pwned the Surface Pro and MS’s new desktop, at least try, but nope.
That’s a fair criticism as well, and I think you’re right in that it’s hard for anyone to argue that Apple hasn’t innovated much lately. It’s an opinion that seems a bit more objective than subjective these days.
However it’s not a major issue to me, as I think there’s only so much innovation one can even do with the same concept once it’s already introduced. Apple’s biggest innovations have been when they’ve come out with their first version of something - when they’ve taken a concept, and basically rebooted it. First with the iPod when they said “what’s with all the compromises, let’s just carry your entire music library, and let’s sort out this problem of piracy being the most convenient way to get music”. Then when they introduced the iPhone and iPad. Smartphones and tablets existed, but theirs were radical leaps as they said “no, this is how you do a phone, we’ve got this new capacitive touch idea and have written an entire OS around it” and it’s spawned an entire new class of smartphone. But they’ve never been great at incremental improvements to their existing products, only at taking something they’ve never done before and thinking of a new way to do it. (It seems they’ve also tried but failed to do this with the automobile).
The touch bar is potentially pretty big though as innovation to an existing product goes. Time will tell how well it’s utilised. The main problem in my view is that in the huge delay between releases (while my 2011 Air was feeling less capable and I was waiting to replace it) I’ve had the opportunity to realise that I can get very capable hardware - if a little thicker - for a fraction of the cost, and that I don’t care about the pretty shiny sleekness of Apple stuff as much as I used to. With the price now skyrocketing, I can’t see myself returning. The touch bar is good, but it’s not 3-4 digits price difference worth of “good”.
Yes. Hence the Silence of the Fanbois.
I think you’re correct but I would say also that Apple’s laptops and desktops exhibited solid evolution during the time I was buying them (2004 to 2012, still using my 2012 MacBook Pro) and they were regularly seen as ahead of the curve on hardware. They’ve now ceded that position rather unambiguously to Microsoft. Which could be a good thing: fire under the ass and all that. But I want to see them fight back and be on top again.
With smartphones and tablets, yeah. They are arguably still on top on both, but it’s a dull mountain peak. Smartphones have become a boring commodity, and tablets have turned out to be a more or less culturally irrelevant (bigger smartphones that aren’t phones).
I like it but doesn’t a complete touch-screen package like the Surface Pro make it a bit obsolescent? I could imagine a two-part package, however: lower keyboard unit with touch bar and upper Surface-Pro like unit, separable.
Right. I want to stick with the Mac OS but since my 2012 computer remains functional for my needs, I am just going to stick with it until Apple does something truly interesting again.
I think that the framing of people as “fanbois” is not particularly constructive. It makes me think of people who call Apple users idiots who care more about branding than function.
If you look at my posting history, I often defend unpopular decisions that Apple makes. I really like most Apple products.
But I’m not a huge fan of the new Macbooks, and I’ve said so here. Around the web, so are many people who are generally happy using Apple products. So, it’s not that there’s some group of people who mindlessly support Apple and are shying away. There are individuals with likes and dislikes and different computing needs, and where in the past they disagreed with you that Apple was making bad products, now more of them agree with you that this product isn’t a great one.
On the other hand, having just tried a Dell XPS 13 laptop (widely regarded to be a great model), I was struck with how hodgepodge the experience was. The hardware I got had some glaring problems (audio and wifi both didn’t work correctly), and the OS seemed kind of half-baked. The fonts were wonky, the default size of things at the shipped screen resolution was too small for my taste (and when I changed it, I had to close some of my programs and reopen them because they got confused about where my mouse was?!). There’s apparently a Settings app in Windows 10, but there’s also the old Control Panel, and neither seems to contain all the configuration I might need. Now, I might have just gotten unlucky with the hardware, but the rest of it doesn’t exactly impress me either.
On the other hand, Apple has never managed to ship an OS that had a functional “maximize” button on windows or a sane Finder View internal state, so maybe we just choose the set of bugs we’re more comfortable with.
…for those that care, here are some of those threads.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=796281
I stopped searching after a while.
It is clear you have a strong opinion on Apple products: and calling them “fanbois” in this particular thread shows that you have a strong opinion about some of the people who choose to use and defend Apple products. Maybe these people who choose to use and defend Apple products are much more likely to post in a provocatively titled thread with a debatable premise than in one like this that is relatively benign.
Are you sure?
Maybe that has nothing to do with the topic, and everything to do with you? If you consistently post topics where you end up getting excoriated, but someone else posts a thread and they end up not getting excoriated, maybe it isn’t the topic that is the problem.
Yeah, well, this says it all.
Yes, and I’m an Apple user and a fan, but I felt in the past some people were reflexively defending Apple as it slipped.
Fairly stated, thank you.
Totally. And I place a huge premium on not having to worry about a ton of viruses and malware, so that’s one big reason I don’t want to go back to Windows for my laptop OS (haven’t used it except on my Windows Phone and others’ machines since 2004).
I would get excoriated by some people in those threads at a level of intensity I didn’t feel was justified, but I didn’t really take it personally, either. It seemed to me that people really wanted to defend Apple more than it deserved, but I get the motivation (or one motivation, at least), since I was there myself. Switching to Apple in 2004 was like joining this marvelous new club, and Apple really seemed like an authority on things within its purview, the corporate version of the adult in the room. I hated the feeling of loosing that.
For the first time ever, Consumer Reports DOES NOT recommend purchasing the Macbook Pro, due to extremely inconsistent battery performance.
Silver lining: It sounds likely that something about Safari (which is what they use in their battery tests) is responsible, since the problem seems to go away when using Chrome.