I was an Apple user from the mid 80s starting with the Apple //c. Moved from a IIgs to a Mac SE and a bunch of Macs in-between before switching to Windows in 97 and back to Mac in 05. The most expensive Mac I ever bought was a Powerbook 170 which was a whopping $4K CAD (in 1991 dollars), even with a friend's Apple employee discount. I also had a couple of Newtons along the way.
The second most expensive Mac I ever bought was an early 2011 15" Macbook Pro (yeah, that one), and that didn't end well for me. It was the first laptop I ever had of any brand that just up and died. It happened just after my AppleCare lapsed, but before they issued the repair order. That soured me on Apple for good, and I haven't looked back since.
I don't miss the "old" Apple. In my mind, Peak Apple was 2012, pre-Retina Macbook Pro. Macs in 2012 were still relatively user serviceable while being reasonably compact.
> FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
There is no Apple-bias. Apple hardware is not really any better than other brands, but they are chic and you pay for it. That's almost always been the case, speaking as a Mac guy before it became cool (pre-iPod). Stories of longevity for any brand are generally from people who take care of their stuff, but you can find exceptions even here.
I bought a refurbished Lenovo laptop 10 years ago for $300, it's still going strong after updating to an SSD a couple of years ago. The comparable Apple hardware would have cost 3x that. I also don't have to worry about losing security updates because my hardware doesn't go EOL like you just described.
> It would cost me $3000 to replace it with a computer that is not significantly more powerful, has a smaller screen and less I/O functionality, and would be incompatible with my audio interface unless I daisy-chain multiple adapters to get Firewire. Fuck that, as long as possible.
To be fair, with the new Macs you still get to daisy chain adapters...
Here's the thing, nobody can take away how great the Macs we have now were when they came out. The fact that it was so well built and so powerful that you're still using it after 5 years speaks exactly to what we loved about them.
But the new MBPs aren't the same. They're just as expensive as they always were, but they don't have forward-looking specs. Unlike the old ones, we don't see the new ones being machines we can keep around for the next 5 years.
I've got a 2013 MBP and it's got virtually identical specs as the new 2016s. (Used similarly upgraded from base units both times -- with Apple care this cost ~$3,300 then and would cost ~$3,300 now.)
> I mean, you have an 8-year old computer. What did you realistically expect would happen here?
I’m an avid Mac user, but the short lifespan of Macs is an anomaly in the world of computers.
I use my old MacBook Pros as Windows and Linux machines now. They’re plenty fast and, honestly, feel much faster with Windows than they did with macOS.
I can understand why Apple deprecates old hardware, but cutting expensive machines after only 7-8 years is really disappointing. There are a lot of these machines in great condition out there.
My parents and in-laws all got burned by Apple’s early deprecation. When you’re not a hardcore daily computer user, these machines can easily last over a decade and do just fine for web browsing and other common tasks.
My retina macbook 13" is three years old, still as snappy as I first got it, no issues at all. Everything still works completely fine and it feels solid. The battery still holds 90% of its original charge. That's why I'll get a macbook again, because if I hadn't I'd have gone through at least 2 Windows laptops between then and now. These are just built way better. Other examples of laptops that compete on build quality, weight, and size are just as expensive.
But I do agree that they need to pull a miracle to get the mac lineup out of the sorry state it is in right now. I guess they're good enough for most people, and looking around at my university library I'm sitting in right now I can see many people with new macbooks and macbook pros. The hard part is for Apple to do something _interesting_ without making it _worse_...
> I bought an expensive Macbook, and I never had any issues outside of the inevitable "moores law" depreciation.
I hope that keeps going. I used a macbook for work for almost 8 years, and they did OK, but I had one that decided not to take external power and the hard drive wasn't removable, thankfully I noticed it wasn't charging while it was near full so I could pull a backup to a spare work hand. And then there was the year where iTunes would have a 25% chance of spewing high volume digital noise at me instead of playing music. I guess that was a software problem because it went away with the next major OS X release, but no useful forum contents. I think there was something else bothersome too, but not sure anymore.
> And as IBM reported a couple weeks ago, even at higher prices, Macs tend to be cheaper to own. I’m writing this on a mid-2010 non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro I bought six years ago last June. Yes, over time I increased the memory to from four to 16 gigs, took the hard drive up from 240 gigs to a terabyte Fusion drive, replaced both the battery and the keyboard when they wore out, but that still puts me only about $1600 into this device with which I have so far generated well over $1 million in revenue.
My own experience with Apple's computers has been similar. The last Apple I purchased was a MacBook Pro back in 2006/7 that lasted me a solid eight years, including three in an extremely hot and dusty environment. The only problem it ever had was a faulty optical drive (and I did always have lots of trouble with Apple's laptop optical drives). But that is just one more individual experience.
Anyway, I don't know that "revenue generated while using the computer" really says anything at all. And I doubt Apple would come out ahead in that calculation industry wide.
There's no PC manufacturer that comes close to Apple build quality. My dad is on a 2009 MBP that runs great. Well worth the extra dollars up front. Swapped out the HD for an SSD and that thing is so fast. I'm still on a late 2010 MBA. It could be faster, but I use the cloud for compiling software (a preemptible 1CPU/7.5GB instance on GCE is $0.01/hr, for an extra cent you can get another core).
So I don't really understand why people (a) serious people keep buying new computers when old Macs are great and (b) say that Apple products are expensive.
> Bullshit, if anything I believe the opposite is true. What is your source for this?
In my experience this is true, but not for technical reasons.
It just seems to me that there a lot of people happily using almost 10 years old macbooks just because they want a macbook, but probably can't afford a new one.
Just try to sell a 6/7 years old mac and then try doing the same with a Windows laptop from the same year: you'll sell the mac much more quickly, for a higher price.
I think that old macbooks still have a market, most old laptops don't, but this is just my impression.
> Apple’s laptop hardware still seems to be the gold standard to me. I have 10 year old laptops that still work great.
Last time I looked at second hand laptops. Most of those the +5y old macbooks in the market had huge issues / defects (and also looked like shit) while you could find a lot of decent refurbished thinkpads and HP elitebook from the same era with no advertized defects (and those I bought didn't have any). I am excluding battery life as regarldess of the brand all needed a brand new one.
So they seem to be the gold standard when new. But they certainly don't age so well.
>> In general Apple's laptops are just well built and feel solid. Some PCs are like that, many aren't due to cost. If I'm going to use a machine every day for 4 years I want to know it's well built and holds up well.
Be glad you're not like me and are stuck with a lemon like the 2011 Macbook Pro. It's a well built (chassis-wise, at least) and solid brick with a well known design defect that Apple refuses to acknowledge exists.
I have since left Apple, mainly the unibody Macbook Pros that I love so much have been discontinued in favor of models with soldered on RAM, expensive to replace SSDs. I'm not a fan of how Apple is "closing up" the expandability of their hardware.
With the current Macbooks, I wouldn't have been able to upgrade from 4GB to 8GB to 16GB of RAM as the prices came down (and without paying Apple's exorbitant prices for RAM), or upgrade their hard drive to a hybrid drive, and to growing sizes of SSDs as the prices came down. Damn, I miss those unibodies.
> You need to be pretty dumb to buy a Mac now. They're clearly the company's red-headed stepchild. WTF would I buy a 4 year old computer at premium price?
I bought a new MBP a couple of months ago. I would have much preferred to wait until the line was refreshed, but my toddler poured milk into my mid-2012 MBP and I needed another laptop now. Given the choice between a $2k MBP that's a couple of years behind in specs and a $1k Windows machine that I'd have to spend hours installing Linux on and dealing with getting all the compatibility issues dealt with... it made sense to buy the MBP.
> It was amazing, and infuriating, to have your decently high-end system basically obsoleted in two generations. And, the DOS to Windows transition didn't help matters. It seems really odd in a time where you could still be using a 10 year old i7 and be just fine.
Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more - I think. I remember being annoyed that my decently high end system, purchased at the beginning of 2000, could no longer run many of the latest games (in some cases not even coming close to minimum specs) by early- to mid-2002.
I really stretched myself to buy that system in the first place and couldn't afford to replace it for years. I bought a new system in 2004 and then didn't buy another until 2011 when I moved to laptops and bought a 17" Macbook Pro (by which time it too felt very obsolete, whereas that 2011 MBP would still be fine if its GPU hadn't desoldered itself in 2017).
Nowadays I run a 7 year old MBP that's still more than capable of handling everything I need. Biggest issue is the battery life is really starting to suffer.
>> Apple has been the butt of jokes at least since 2008 when I first got my first Apple product (an old 17" MacBook Pro). Back when I was looking at laptops then, I saw the same complaints that I see about the new MacBook Pro: too expensive, specs aren't good enough, etc., etc. None of this is new.
But actually some of it is new. I go back to the Apple ][ days, so I've seen my share of disdain of Apple products from people who weren't users of Apple products.
A lot of the uproar in the past several months, however, has come from vocal Apple users who feel let down.
> my 8 year old Macbook Air is still more or less as functional and useful as it was when I got it.
Right? I remember the enormous performance jumps from 286 to 386 to 486DX2 to Pentium to P6S...
Today, I'm still using a late 2013 MBP. Other than the lame 128GB of disk space, it is still my primary machine and is fine for everything I do. Most of my work is done in the cloud anyway so its essentially a 1970's dumb terminal.
> I don't know about others, but I don't dare to buy Apple products anymore. My 2012 MacBook Pro is still going strong, but newer MacBooks don't have anywhere near the same build quality and durability.
Apple's history of design issues and ignoring them goes all the way back to the Powerbook G3 and G4 Cube. This isn't some sudden drop in quality. People just have short memories.
>My current Macbook Pro cost me about £1100. No part of it is user serviceable so it's disposable.
In that sense maybe, but not in the "low quality" sense (which disposable also implies, e.g. disposable razors etc). Besides modern cars are not "user serviceable" like 70s cars for the most part either, but they are not "disposable".
>My first Apple laptop, a Titanium Powerbook was almost 3 times that.
The overall price for the high end laptops on the market dropped since the Titanium powerbook though, and modern MBPrs are still priced at the high end segment of today's prices.
You can't expect 1999 prices for a 2016 computer when the tech innovations make both low and high end products more affordable all the time.
>My point was the company isn't what it once was, it's not a high end tech company for the few but a disposable tech company for the many.
"High end tech company" does not necessitate "user serviceable".
The tech in the Mac, compared to the average laptop, is way higher, and the engineering process to build a new MacBook Pro Retina model (from the machining to the logic board, batteries, etc) is far more advanced. Hence, high end of the market.
Nor was the Mac ever "for the few" -- it was always intended as a mass market PC, for those with the money to spare, not just some tinkering propellerhead elite ("the computer for the rest of us"). Heck, they even sold cheaper models back in the day (the Mac Classic, the original iMac, etc).
> FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
I agree with you, but that doesn’t change the fact outside the US, many Apple products are 15+% more expensive than they were a few years ago. In the UK we’re in the middle of a cost of living crisis—my bills have shot up and I simply don’t have the extra disposable income.
I mean shit, I’m a decently paid developer (for the north of the UK, so not London) and until my most recent rise a base 16” MacBook Pro cost almost an entire month’s take-home salary.
> To be fair, you can easily use apple hardware for 5 years
I have a MacBook Pro from 2015 which I still use every day. It's still going strong.
My only issue with it is that it can't be upgraded to MacOS Ventura, and it prevents me from enabling full encryption on all the iCloud stuff. I will probably replace it with a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro 16" later this year and my expectation is that it'll last me for another 8 years. Yes, 4 grand for a laptop is a lot, but not really if it lasts for 8 years and then can be resold to recoup some of the cost or given to a family member.
So for me the lifespan of the machine is over (iCloud encryption being the dealbreaker), but I'm sure it'll last at least a couple of more years for someone else.
> And as IBM reported a couple weeks ago, even at higher prices, Macs tend to be cheaper to own.
>but that still puts me only about $1600 into this device
I always forget how dis-attached and money-blind pro-apple authors are from the 98% of people and how they approach money. I guess if I was in the 1%, I'd also think Apple was the cheap option! (I'd probably also think that about Lexus and BMW...)
$1600 over 6 years, or about $270 a year, is not inexpensive and the false label "cheaper to own" is absurd to the highest degree.
I could go out right now and buy a $600 laptop, a $200 chromebook, and be out $800 dollars. Then I could build a $500 rather powerful budget desktop, and be at $1300, with three devices, and have $300 leftover for repairs or upgrades.
I could buy a $800 laptop and another one in 3-6 years for that price.
I could buy an iPad, a Chromebook, and a $600 laptop. I could buy three $500 laptops.
There is no universe in existence where spending $1600 total cost of ownership in 6 years approaches ANYTHING CLOSE to "cheaper to own".
Frankly, I DON'T EVEN KNOW windows users who have spent $1600 in the past 6 years total, except for hardcore PC gamers whose hardware so dramatically eclipses the medium-grade consumer level tech in Apple laptops that to compare them is entertaining and silly.
Depends on what you mean by "old".
I was an Apple user from the mid 80s starting with the Apple //c. Moved from a IIgs to a Mac SE and a bunch of Macs in-between before switching to Windows in 97 and back to Mac in 05. The most expensive Mac I ever bought was a Powerbook 170 which was a whopping $4K CAD (in 1991 dollars), even with a friend's Apple employee discount. I also had a couple of Newtons along the way.
The second most expensive Mac I ever bought was an early 2011 15" Macbook Pro (yeah, that one), and that didn't end well for me. It was the first laptop I ever had of any brand that just up and died. It happened just after my AppleCare lapsed, but before they issued the repair order. That soured me on Apple for good, and I haven't looked back since.
I don't miss the "old" Apple. In my mind, Peak Apple was 2012, pre-Retina Macbook Pro. Macs in 2012 were still relatively user serviceable while being reasonably compact.
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