And no, PC sales are not declining because of the slowing down of Moore's law, but obviously because of smartphones and tablets.

I think an Ivy Bridge laptop would still be OK now with some upgrades. It would be hot and have bad battery life compared to Haswell, which was a big upgrade. I still think you would be crazy to spend 1000+ on such an old computer though.

TBH my next computer won't be an Apple laptop unless the next iteration is truly something special. They have gotten too expensive here in Japan.

As Apple started moving to SSD's, I believe they stopped caring about minimizing disk seeking when considering changes to their virtual memory implementation. I had a Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a spinning-rust hard drive, and was constantly getting beachballs when switching between applications (I had FREE RAM and was getting beachballs!!!).

(Apple's ~2012 virtual memory behavior was a strange beast -- it appears it would page an application's memory out to disk so that it could hang on to some disk cache. This was different than what I had become used to in Linux, which always prioritizes application memory needs above disk cache).

Disabling the pagefile solved the beachballs, but with the downside that when I did run out of RAM, the machine basically ground to a halt. I later upgraded that machine to use an SSD, re-enabled the pagefile, and was back to smooth running.

Is bloat the problem? Possibly. More likely it was shifting priorities (minimizing pagefile access probably just wasn't a priority anymore).

But if that is true ( Which align with my own experience ) this would really annoy me. SSD or not, it should ALWAYS fill up the memory first.

If Apple's customers are not still seeing those big payoffs from new technology then it becomes a game of costs. Changing a product mix every few years has its own costs - as demand for new PCs drops, these costs become harder to justify for an OEM.

It is totally possible that a 5- or 10- year refresh cycle keeps engineering and support costs down enough to be worthwhile if consumers accept the technology meets their needs. New technology will still make it to the end user here, but Apple is not going to do it at any cost - they are masters of profitability.

It's not "obviously" declining because of smartphones and tablets, at least not to me. Pretty much everyone has a computer (in the US), as it doesn't make sense to do many things on your cellphone (like write emails). They just aren't upgrading because they don't need to.

The only people I know who dont have computers are my friends working heavily blue collar jobs. Even most of them have laptop's, only a few don't have anything.

Couple years outta college? People are still using the PC they bought for college probably. I don't know a whole ton of people who went to college anyways.

Using a smartphone to do anything other than send short messages and read the web frustrates me to buggery, but for those people who find using a computer frustrating or tedious anyway a smartphone mustn't be much different or even probably a better user experience.

It's all social media/chat apps for them now.

Booking flights is easy, I use Kayak.

Hipmunk?

And those who have, no upgrades, but shining new cell phones and tablets.

That's not how it works.

Ports are way too wobbly unless you use your laptop as desktop. I love ability of using 2 external displays with MacBook keyboard and trackpad just right there in the center. But move the computer a centimeter and displays disconnect. Moderately painful!

Good enough for a lot of people, but if it matters to you, and you really want a mac, perhaps the external GPU is the option for you.

EIT: It is actually on sale, but US-only (hence why I couldn't see it with UK settings).

At what point the energy savings compensate recycling the computer and getting a new one? At what point does the reduced amount of materials warrant dropping a product line and scraping the tooling used to make it?

It kind of depresses me that three years is considered a long lifetime for a computer.

It can probably last over ten years for the average person, if good care is taken.

Tech enthusiasts are the ones who can see through the marketing and upgrade-treadmill BS; the "average person" can end up buying a new machine when they fill up their hard drive.

I use a 5 yo phone (Motorola Defy+). It runs Android 4.4.4, thus far I've not seen a valid reason for wanting something newer. It still runs for about 4 days on a single charge, using the original battery.

Things start looking bad for the tech industry when people start showing off with 'old' stuff instead of brand-spanking new.

I have an Android 4.4 phone, and while it has worked acceptably for me right now as I am self-employed, if I were working for a company that required me to have access to sensitive customer data, having a phone that still received security updates would be a hard requirement.

..which reminds me I have some more work to do, given the recent publication of https://source.android.com/security/bulletin/2016-07-01.html

I understand that we talk about this sort of thing quite a bit, but I can't imagine actually doing it myself. My phone is just supposed to work for me so I can get my real work done and have time to enjoy outside of it. I'm not supposed to work for it.

I'd guess you have to really enjoy working on that sort of thing, but then again you called it "work to do", so I'm not sure.

I have seen SSDs on ebay with the converter built in, maybe kill two birds with one stone?

Performance is more than acceptable, the thing boots (Linux) in a few seconds (that is, a few seconds after BIOS has done its thing of course). In other words, those 3€ for the adapter (incl. shipping) were well spent...

For tech enthusiast who enjoy smartphones unfortunately a 8 year old phone won't cut it. I have 4 year old Nokia Lumia that still runs fine and with an average 1.5 days of battery life (it used to live 2 days, it's aging). It works well for me because I care about basic apps, GPS, internet browser, and email. But for more apps heavy users most apps won't work if the phone isn't on the latest OS version, and most old phones can't upgrade to the latest OS version. For instance if Facebook stops maintaining messenger on windows phone 8.1, I'd loose my most used app. Fortunately the market share for 8.1 in emerging markets is still important enough for fb to keep a quality app.

I've much more often been frustrated by my phones. My last phone was at the point where I'd expect ~1 second delay for any interaction, whether that was opening an app or scrolling in a webpage. I think as the current one ages I'm going to start eliminating apps and wiping the phone more frequently than I do now, because I'd rather have all that money going toward my desktop and laptops.

A bit off topic topic, but is there any reason 32-bit Windows is still a thing? Every Intel processor I've seen since Atom failed is 64-bit.

Here's an Intel blog post from last year talking about it: https://blogs.intel.com/evangelists/2015/07/22/why-cheap-sys...

Heh, I use Linux (NixOS) with XMonad, st and Emacs, so it's always pretty responsive. Not used Windows in over a decade, so I can't comment on its speed.

> But for more apps heavy users most apps won't work if the phone isn't on the latest OS version, and most old phones can't upgrade to the latest OS version.

My phone runs Debian, so I haven't had any problems keeping up to date :)

Meanwhile, most of the components in my desktop are older than three years, and it's doing just fine.

That, to me, is the real tragedy/travesty. There should be some eco-EU-law or something against that, a bit like the micro USB charger standardisation. I say this typing from a 2008 (or was it 2009?) MacBook on which i've been able to replace the RAM (8GB), disk drive (SSD, single biggest improvement) and battery (lasts longer than when new from factory now), and all of those upgrades weren't expensive at all. Of course i run Linux and XMonad and pretty much the only graphical app is Firefox with NoScript, but still, i can't see myself forking out hard $$$ for a non-maintainable machine. The upgradability isn't even the big deal for me, because as someone else pointed out these days computers are "fast enough", it's the fact that certain components are just going to fail (especially the battery). And it absolutely sends sickly shivers down my spine that people are being forced to landfill perfectly okay hardware because of a battery becoming worn out. Seriously Apple, where have your holistic eco-friendly principles gone?

Make no mistake: ever since the AT/XT days the useful lifetime of a computer has been in the three year range because of the nature of matter and the physics we exploit to make digital circuits do what they need to do. Can you still use a 20 year old computer that runs Word Perfect 5 on MS-DOS 6.22 and isn't really made to do much more? Of course. And of course, you'll still be able to run OSX Panther on a 2005 MacMini for years to come, but you can't use those things for anything new or modern, you've created a little time machine that can only do what we wanted to do in 1985, or 1995, or 2005, instead of in 2015 (or soon enough, 2025).

Most of us want to use those new programs that rely on new algorithms that require the faster hardware, or old algorithms that massively benefit from faster hardware - we want spreadsheets to take less than seconds, not more than minutes, for ever-more complex work; we want games that run smoothly, not "not at all" or at 1 or 2 frames per second; we want our internet browser to start when we tell it to, not after a period of time that is long enough to wonder whether it even started at all.

Things all have lifetimes, and for computers that lifetime's about 3 years, and has been for decades. On the upside, computers are ships of Theseus: most of the time, we can just swap out broken parts for new parts, including faster parts, so really the lifetime of a single, unadulterated, intact computer is three years, but with a few hundred bucks every three years, we can keep pulling it back into the modern age until at some point nothing of the original remains - and the lifetime of THAT computer is much, much longer.

I wonder if there's a way to solve this problem that doesn't involve buying a new computer every three years.

In terms of software requirements, I think most people don't play heavy requirement games, and for basic personal and office tasks, the 2/4 threaded CPU's of the past few years have been up to the task of browsing, office suites (with responsive spreadsheets), and media.

My dad ran Ubuntu for a decade on my 13 year old workstation. He couldn't do anything I could do on my laptop. A Pentium IV with HT was good enough for his LaTeX and his MCMC simulations.

Not if you compensate for how much extra you paid for it.

> As a browser and a ssh machine it's good enough.

So you're just offloading the needed upgrades to someone else, while still ALSO needing to maintain your own computer (though to a lesser degree).

Unless you need the extra battery capacity (how often do you need to work for several hours without being close to a plug?) then it's much simpler to just run everything locally. Plus you don't need an internet connection! Plus using an IDE or anything else graphical will actually be a bearable experience!

It's not how much you pay for your computer, but how much you spend per year, on average, that counts. If a computer does its job for twice as long as the other, it's reasonable to pay up to twice as much for it.

Surely you mean "He could do everything I could do on my laptop"?

I usually get 5 years from my notebooks (batteries are an issue, of course)

I can't get a pair of shoes to last me 2 years. The fact that my 2013 MacBook Pro is still working is fairly surprising to me.

I just ordered a new touchpad sticker and keyboard for my 5 year old Thinkpad. I expect to replace the batteries within the next year, but other than that, I expect it to go to 10+ years, even though my previous Dell laptops did not make it past 5 years.

Three years is also not a long time considering the price of a MacBook. The basic model starts at $1299 [1]; $400/year for computing is a lot of money.

My two year old Chromebook is definitely a piece of crap; the motherboard is warped from having dropped it on carpet (carpet!) once, and the monitor has scratches caused by the keyboard. But that's okay, because I bought a very low end model that only cost $200.

[1] http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/

I sometimes get the "new tech" itch, but I haven't convinced myself that I'd get enough benefit to retire this thing, yet.

The author of the article was writing about non-retina MBPs, which are still for sale.

A mid-2015 15" rMBP purchased today is running a two-year-old processor from a three-year-old architecture. And the GPU, should you get the discrete GPU option, is from a four-year-old architecture (it's a GCN 1.0 part).

Although if the Broadwell parts weren't really an upgrade, then it does not matter. The old ATI part would be more annoying.

I also kind of understand why Apple didn't go with Skylake yet. Seeing all the problems with power management states in Linux and Windows land, it looks like they decided to skip this generation until that gets fixed.

Things run a bit slower for the apps that get unnecessarily bloated over time. Including some websites. Still fast enough day to day to not really matter. I was used to it about 3-4 years ago. Thanks to software improvements, my laptop actually got better over the years. ;)

For newer work - as needs change, specs change, it's advantageous to get new equipment to meet changing needs (generally faster processing in my case).

Of course, chances are that any other notebook might fail sooner, and I assume that my careful handling has increased the longevity of the device.

So when software support gets phased out, you might be able to get a few extra years on Linux if you wish to do so.

Heat is an issue, but with upgraded RAM and a SSD, it's gets the job done.

Mainly, I mostly use it as an Ubuntu machine at this point.

If this thing ever dies on me I'm just going to switch to Ubuntu.

You are in for a long wait. I can't imagine they'll ever release that size again. Apple's definitely shifting quickly to the 2 or 3 options that cover 95% of the market.

If you want the absolute screen size: indeed, I doubt there will be another. But if it's all about the pixels, you can already do better than the 17.

No matter how good your eyes are, you can only go so small without stuff becoming blurry. Personally 15"/1080p is about as small as I can go without text becoming unreadable without HiDPI scaling, and some of my friends complain about reading text on my laptop as it is.

So, for me, switching to a higher-DPI screen is not an option since it just means a higher cost, awful blur for the many applications that don't support DPI scaling, and somewhere between no and very diminished benefits. At the same time I'd never want to give up on all the extra screen real estate so 17" (or bigger!) would inevitably be the only option for me.

Also, preference and I'm not a huge fan of being so loyal to one company that they dictate my preferences. Been s pretty loyal Apple customer for laptop, phone, wife's computer, parents and iMac for since about 2005-2006. Between things like reducing their product line, not updating machines, not letting me set my own DNS on my phone and making political statements via their software the luster has worn off quite a bit.

For example, my tolerance for small text at 1:1 is about 160 dpi (4K on a 27" monitor), which is much lower than the 220 dpi of your Retina 15. Having said that, my eyes would have a better chance of tolerating the same 2880x1800 resolution on a 17" monitor at 200dpi.

At some point, that extra resolution is going to get wasted on a small screen if you're more interested in real estate over crispy retina text. I have a 4K 15.6" laptop, and there's no way in hell I could tolerate it at 1:1 with my aging eyes.

Personally I'd really like to see more powerful GPUs in MacBooks...

Must be rose-tinted glasses. Apple has been about peddling (what would otherwise be) low-end budget computers to fashion enthusiasts for massive markups for at least a decade.

I'm personally not a fan of the vendor lock in with Apple. You can spend similar money and get something that isn't difficult to replace the ram on, with slightly better specs, more disk space, etc. As long as you're cool with a plastic case ;)

This machine feels pleasant to use. It doesn't frustrate me or get in my way. (Unless I'm using finder or other awful OS X programs, but I'm not afraid of the terminal, so I just don't use those.)

I have an iMac from 2009 which is totally fine for day to day basic stuff, the kind of usage your average person requires.

I have a 2014 rMBP which is far more than enough for an average user. I use it as my primary development machine and push it pretty hard. Would I like something faster? Sure. But it's not too bad in that capacity.

I also have a 2016 rMB which is more than enough for basic usage and it's not too bad as a development machine. I prefer coding on my MBP but the difference is small enough that I've stopped bringing my work computer home with me.

Long story short: Except for a relatively small group of people with niche needs, people don't need new hardware anymore.

The Iphone 5 is good enough for the job but you wouldn't you buy an Iphone 5 for $800, would you?

The thing is that if you take today a 2012 MBP the last ones that were upgradables you can, for a few hundred buck make it much more powerful than and 2016 MBP

Anyone who buys a MacBook Pro today, before whenever it is the line gets updated, will be happy with it, which is of course a good thing. (Outside of being hit by hardware issues or something)

When the line is updated, you probably won't notice a performance difference between the current model and whatever the next one is. The time of huge improvements with every processor upgrade has long since past, the RAM speed will not be that much different and it will be using solid state storage at again about the same speed as the current model. This is why people will keep their hardware longer.

A lot of hardware upgrades are now coming from when the hardware no longer supports the latest OS. Sierra will work with MacBooks going back to 2009, and they had upgradable RAM and storage so even those laptops will be able to run the latest OS with performance that is acceptable to most people.

All of this means that Apple is going to have a slower cycle for hardware bumps since the cost of a rapid cycle probably doesn't bring the revenue spike it used to.

But the real upgrade would be to models that either already had integrated graphics (and now will have much faster integrated graphics), or that had GPUs (and with the new pascal/polaris generations, will likely have much faster and less power hungry GPUs).

You might also notice improvements in SSDs, though I'm skeptical that despite large relative improvements most workloads really benefit much - after all, any semi decent SSD will have largely moved most bottlenecks out of the I/O subsystem, and then it really won't matter much if you reduce those last few milliseconds of latency even further. Some people will notice, however, and what you will notice is that you don't need to choose between fast or large as much anymore - a 1TB ssd is pretty affordable, and smaller SSDs might even be classified as "cheap" by macbook standards.

Still, I last updated (my non-mac laptop) just after haswell was released, and discounting SSD size and GPU, modern laptops seem very unattractive. Due to the glass screen fetish nowadays; most are heavier and more fragile to boot - my 13-inch, more than 3-year old laptop weighs 929g, and the battery still lasts many hours. It's fallen a few times and has a few nasty scratches and one nicked corner, but... upgrades still seem kind of pointless. Are you really going to upgrade for a crappy-but-less crappy iGFX or a larger SSD?

this is a great machine! or in my case: it was a great machine, sadly there was an accident with a kid and some coke so I bought a late 2015 mac book, which is the worst computer I owned ever (see my review here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12165132 )

hope your mac book air stays with you for a long, long time, I miss mine....

If you knew that you need extra sub port all the time - why did you purchase this model? You could have easily get the mba or the retina 13" if you need more ports and longer battery life. I have the retina MacBook and I bought it only to be used as a web dev machine during my travel since I don't need sub ports and I can get 6 hours of work in sublime text + Apache running with no problem.

I think a lot of people who have issues with MacBooks are just not using a correct tool for the work, if you need a work machine with sub ports - don't buy the MacBook in the first place, it's not meant for that.

The MB is garbage. It's aimed at the Kardashians of this world. I'm starting to think the delay in refreshing other Mac lines is a desperate attempt to coax people into buying MBs which would otherwise go unsold.

Umm, YYMV. I am typing this on an MBR. I primarily use it for programming (mainly C++ and Lisp development in Emacs, but I have written two in-house iOS apps with Xcode). It has MS Office on it, though I must admit I mainly use that for docs other people have sent me, though I do use powerpoint. I am not a gamer.

The external adaptor doesn't really support the promised UHD output (it's flakey and unusable at those resolutions so I think your term "garbage" could apply to it) though it does support 1080p. In practice I mostly use it without an external display. The machine is so portable I don't think I could ever go back to a larger machine -- even my kid's MBA seems brobdignagian next to the MBR.

Xcode definitely felt a bit cramped on the small screen, but I'm not a fan of graphical IDEs (or IDEs in general) so that was the least of my concerns. I did most of the code development in Emacs anyway.

I found that in practice I almost never used ports on my MBP. I don't sync my phone to my computer any more; I used the built in MBP SD card reader but discovered I can read from my waterproof camera over wifi so don't miss that. I have a USB A port in my video adaptor but have yet to plug anything into it. I have never been much of a user of removable media.

I use my phone for presentations. I would use the computer but the "garbage" video adaptor is too flakey. Actually the phone is fine.

Oh, and I just checked with my GF who described my buttocks as "tight and cute". So I can confidently say that I do not fit the profile of a Kardashian.

(The Apple product that makes the least sense to me is the iPad...but that's a different discussion).

USB Type C isn't really baked yet (in the supply chain) so I guess this is part of the price for being on the bleeding edge.

I think Apple would have done better to have added Type C into another MB first, alongside the existing ports. But apart from the external display problem I really do like the MBR.

Amazon: http://amzn.to/2aGogRd

What I like about apple laptops and computers is that each of them is aimed at specific work type environment, and when people choose a wrong tool for the job they should blame themselves not the tool.

The problem is that Apple are selling MBs as the evolution of MBAs (which will never get a Retina upgrade etc etc), when they are clearly in a different category. The MB is overall less powerful and flexible than the MBA was, so a large segment of people "upgrading" is naturally disappointed.

> it's a perfect machine for browsing Internet and Word work on the go

It's a very expensive machine for browsing and Word. The market is literally full of alternatives "for browsing and Word" with same or better specs and better price points. Where the MBA was indisputably the best "thin all-use laptop", the MB is basically an expensive Chromebook with an Apple logo.

should I have done more due diligence - YES (but you know, once your beloved air gets the kids&coke treatment you tend to panic), am I owning now a piece of chunk I can't wait to get rid of (with the hopefully coming soon mac book pro generation) - YES

Not if "specs" includes thickness and weight. At the moment there is one laptop that's thinner, the HP Spectre, and the MacBook has a higher resolution screen, significantly less weight, and better battery life; it's up there on weight, too, excluding convertibles that have a separate keyboard.

It seems like Apple is hoping the consumer won't notice and still buy the brand as though it's a designer item and not electronics. I suspect that this is not the primary motivation for their current lack of new tech. I think that the largest part for this regression from the cutting edge is a consequence of no longer having Steve Jobs pushing every part of the company for its utmost.

Apple, when you anthropomorphize the actions of the company as a whole, comes off as arrogant. They had earned this by actually delivering the best you could buy. The best laptops, the best phones, the best music players, the best tablets. With the exception of tablets, this is no longer true, in any category (not even phones). And that is the issue.

Not whether the device is still good enough. It ought to be the best, because that was what we came to expect from Apple. The premium ought to be a no-brainer because you get what you pay for. It isn't like that anymore and if you're a fan of Apple (and I have been since the Apple IIe) then you really wish it were.

If I can only expect to get 3 years of use from a laptop, that's pretty disappointing. Especially one that starts at $1300. Or $1550 if you want the warranty to actually cover it for that period.

Also it's not my primary work tool. If your company wants to buy you one, great, but spending my personal hobby budget on outdated gear is a harder sell.

And yes, $43/month over 3 years is a lot of money. $1550, in fact. Breaking it down like that to make it feel like a smaller number is a shitty trick that only works because we have bad instincts at math.

Even more mundanely the 8k textures for Real Solar System on Kerbal Space Program don't even load on my MBP because the GPU RAM is too low for them.

My Hackintosh has a Geforce 980 in it which is leaps and bounds above what I can buy directly from Mac and solves a lot of these problems for me, but it is occasionally finicky and doesn't like to boot up and I wouldn't recommend it to a friend of mine who has an actual dayjob that involves a lot of video editing.

I've since upgraded to whatever the latest model is, and I've donated my old MBP to my parents, who are happy to use it

Some people may be able to. I really don't think you can say "anyone".

I've had my Air since 2013, and it's really starting to struggle. With Docker, especially.

That's 2 or 3 years more than the Macbook Pro that I would have undoubtedly paid more for.