Well, what do you expect people to buy? I'm sitting on a six year old MBP, having gotten rid of my 2009 iMac. New iMac? Meh, it might come to that, but I already have enough displays. Mac Mini to go with the display I already have? Surely you jest to suggest a four-year old model. Mac Pro? See: Mac Mini. Current laptops aren't an option unless I get desperate (i. e., current MBP dies tomorrow). I mean, I want a new Mac, there just isn't anything out there that makes me feel like I'd be getting an upgrade.

So my theory is that a lot of people are in the cycle I've been in for the last three years: "Meh, I'll wait to see what they have next year...<year passes>...Meh, I'll wait until...holy shit, is this thing really six years old?...<year passes>"

I'm a heavy tmux/vim user.

Apple replaced the best programmer's laptop on the market (their previous-gen MBP) with the MBP model that they sell now. It's not a bad laptop per se, it's just that it's not a programmer's laptop.

Apple sells the MBA which doesn't have enough pixel density to support tmux with multiple panes.

Apple sells the MB and the MBP with that execrable butterfly keyboard which is terrible for touch-typing for long periods.

There's nothing else anymore. They stopped selling that Ivy-bridge-era MBP model they were keeping around for serious touch-typists. Everyone I know who has one of these turkeys defends the keyboard, but then admits that, "anyways, I usually use an external keyboard anyhow." I need the built-in keyboard to be useable and Apple has given up on making those.

I'd buy a new programmer's laptop from Apple, but they just don't make those anymore. Apple took something we loved away from us - that's why the new MBP gets so much hate.

What is the problem with "touch-typists" and the new keyboard? Is the layout different in such a way that confuses you? Is it the lack of feedback from the touchbar?

Mis-taps on the touchbar are my main annoyance.

The ESC key issue isn't as bad - I have 'jk' remapped to ESC anyways. But the lack of feedback with the butterfly keys makes my hands feel like I'm setting myself up for repetitive stress injury.

The keyboard is just awful. Can anyone honestly say that they prefer the feel of the butterfly keys?

The MacBook and MacBook Pro's keyboards are markedly different. Sure, they're both butterfly, but MacBook Pro's keyboard is a lot more clickly/springy than MacBook's, which I can only describe as mushy. Have you tried using them for an extended period of time?

Steve jobs or whoever it was doing QA, I gotta say really had a knack for what is usable and makes the evokes a feel good emotion. The new macs nowadays look beautiful but horribly lack in usability in many ways. Steve Apple was very focused on usability. Aesthetics came later, now it’s the reverse.

Agreed, and there's a name for this. It's 'bullshit'.

Making a laptop with a terrible keyboard to save 2-3mm of thickness when no one really cares about such extremes of thinness. That's bullshit.

Making a laptop with largely unsupported USB-C ports and nothing else. No transition-year with both new and old ports, just tossing the old ports out abruptly and making customers buy fucking dongles. That's bullshit.

Eliminating function keys for a gimmicky touch screen which almost no one will use on a day-to-day basis a month after buying the laptop. That's bullshit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

A 2017 13" Macbook Pro should not require 5 service trips in its first year. Warranty or not, we're not talking about some $200 piece of crap that's made in China, we're talking about a premium laptop at a premium price.

Some people won't care about that. Some do.

I wonder how long before a lot more folks come to the conclusion that Apple premiums aren't worth paying anymore.

I have a 10yo Acer laptop that at the time cost me about 500$ which up to this day required no fix or trip to the repair shop.

If I had spent 4x the cash and still was forced to take the laptop to the shop 5 times to fix a myriad of design and production problems for a product that is marketed as high-end and professional-grade, I can assure you I wouldn't forgive, much less forget.

This was also my most expensive Apple purchase ever.

Usually, the trend goes the other way. I don't know about other folks, but I'm less inclined to forget after dropping $4300 on that unit.

What this person wants is a home, end, forward delete, pgup and pgdn key on the keyboard, which the touchbar lets me have. Funny how what "the people" want manages to line up exactly with your expectations and doesn't match mine at all.

I have the HDMI/old-USB to USB C dongle, but I hardly ever use it these days.

I'd gladly support an all USB C future.

I wish Apple would go back to the 2012 models and just refresh the internals.

There's not a lot I can do to register dissatisfaction with Apple's direction. I bought a 2016 mbp, then returned it (for a variety of reasons) - many of which have been beaten to death here in the last 18 months.

I watched my boss buying a new MBP on day one. Months later I still laugh when I see him fiddling with adapters that never work reliably.

People said the same things about floppy drives and cd roms.

That is not how Apple works, the reason they do such drastic changes like dropping support for floppy/cd drives, usb A ports is because they want to move the industry forward.

Our IT Department anecdotally reports that about 15% of the 2016 models had issues, and fewer of the 2017 models. Nearly all of our 2500 employees have MBPs or iMacs of some sort.

I should note that roughly 25% of that time has been on an external keyboard (Apple display, MBP lid closed), so it might not see as much use as others.

I don't care about saving $1k or $2k when it comes to a device I use that much. We're talking about a dollar an hour here. I've literally spent more money on coffee over that time.

Unless you're gaming on your laptop your requirements probably aren't that much higher than they were half a decade ago.

Luckily it has a gigabit Ethernet port so it can take full advantage of my gig internet.

Perhaps you just haven't really used a windows laptop recently and only remember the old days when Windows laptops really did only have a life span of about 3 years.

Maybe one should take care about where to service them from?

My impression when it comes to Mac is that people don't want to pay ludicrous prices for repairs e.t.c.. anymore. Also that they can not upgrade because their current machine can't handle the new OS e.t.c..

I was looking at laptops about 3 years ago and it was extremely hard to find ones that didn't use that cursed 1366x768 resolution.

No, it's not.

A 15" _2011_ Macbook Pro with a quad core i7 is still more than usable today.

If you bought a Macbook Pro with a powerful CPU (i.e., CPU model not ending with a U), you should easily get 10 years out of it.*

[edit] * At least until Apple decides not to support it with OS upgrades, but you can always run the latest Windows on it. And Windows generally runs faster in Boot Camp on Macbook Pros than OSX does natively.

When did this happen? The last time I used Bootcamp, it seemed almost specifically designed to make Windows feel like a sub-par experience compared to OS X

Using a then-brand-new 2012 MBP with the latest version of OS X at the time (I believe Lion?) with Bootcamp. Some of the bizarre omissions I witnessed were

- A buggy BIOS implementation instead of EFI (rEFInd at least let me try and boot Linux under EFI)

- SSD set to run in IDE mode, instead of AHCI, resulting in utterly crippled performance (required issuing dd commands to the disk from within OS X to fix)

- No GPU switching. Only the Radeon card was enabled, leaving the system running insanely hot and guzzling battery

The final straw was when I ran some test VM's on it, and under a sustained load, had the CPU hit an eye watering 117 degrees celsius. Shutting it down almost immediately and then asking on tech oriented IRC channels I was in if this was a bug simply yielded dismissal from Apple acolytes at the time

"Oh it's DESIGNED to do that, the whole system is a huge heatsink!"

"Just make sure it's getting plenty of airflow, it's fine"

$1200 in parts total. When (if) GPU prices go down I'll throw a new one and be good for another few years.

I expect hardware failure of the CPU or Motherboard to do the machine in before it becomes obsolete.

Put all my money into RAM and SSD, upper mid range CPU, mid range GPU, life is good.

I said nothing about price. You don’t want to know the eye-watering numbers attached to that iMac I sold. And it’s great that you and I can get such life out of our machines. But in the context of the topic at hand, its not great that you and I sit on five year old machines because Apple makes nothing so compelling so as to make me say, “Shut up and take my money.” Because I own shares of AAPL, too.

The GPU is a GT200M with 1GB dedicated RAM, still pretty much in shape versus the toy Intel GPUs.

In those 10 years extended it to 8GB and replaced the HD with a SSD.

Original sales price, 1 000 euros.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space...

i wonder if they think, unlike the SE, that it would actually vampire off too many sales from the high ticket models. what i wouldn't give for a 2015 style 8th gen CPU machine.

They do need to update the Mac Mini.

Well, what do you expect? They keep redesigning the hardware in authoritarian ways: Thou shalt not upgrade the memory yourself (RIP old Mac Pro aluminum tower); Thou shalt not have F and ESC keys; Thou shalt heretofore use USB-C and dongles or will be sent to dongle Hell (I think one of them only has 2); Thou shalt not have feedback on keys. Etc.

And in each of the Commandments there are those who rush to defend: "but I love the new keyboard, I remapped the ESC to Caps, and anyway I love the new garbage can design of the workstation, I prefer soldered memory".

And that the sales numbers speak? Fantastic.

But don't make me look for dongle every time I want to plug in a mouse, USB stick, YubiKey or any other of literary thousands of USB-A devices.

The user experience of this device is objectively worse. It made me think less of Apple - they decided to constantly annoy me to earn more money on dongles.

Female to female is fine, because there shouldn't be a host with a male end that isn't OTG.

And beyond that, there totally exist the banned adapters (C female to A male) but that has more to do with the fact that you can get anything from China, regardless of trademark infringement.

Griffin sells a magnetic USB-C cable - that winds up being a magnetic dongle to a charging cable. Apple doing this would have been considered a hack against their design and would have required them to include a lower quality data-only cable rather than the data+charging USB-C cables they currently include.

I understand that thickness perhaps knocked out the USB-A, but the same can't be said for SD. And since the ultra-thin keyboard hasn't worked out that well, then perhaps the MBP is a little too thin for its own good?

Legacy: (noun) a useful, established technology that Apple's designers feel it makes their computers less pretty.

Thing is, to take my work laptop home, I don't want to have to shell out for a dock just to use it at home too so on that hand, I'm happy the xps gives me options to not have to be reliant on a dock, as much as I love the use of a dock at work.

There's plenty of space for two, a prototype design with two ports even leaked a few years back

And yet one. It's not like the air even had a cornucopia of ports. It's not like i think it NEEDS them. But seriously, one port for everything?

I would already own one if it had two jacks, but that's just patently ridiculous. One port arguably is barely enough for a phone, much less a full on computer that's expected to be a device host for even just like, a flash drive.

I picture a meeting of a dozen folks, a powerpoint slide and statistics that show the two models (the four-USB-C version next to this "budget" single-port version). I picture a sort of an argument/pitch/"presentation" that suggests that a high percentage of folks -- consumers (or whatever they are called by marketing people) -- in the "Undecided" camp would lean to the more expensive version. Budgetary swing voters if you will who wouldn't accept a one-port world.

After that I picture some sort of final whitepaper (or whatever it's called), finally approved by someone in jeans who's higher up in the hierarchy of decision-making.

Behold - the Apple Product Lifecycle <tm>

The screen is amazing, innards slow and I love it for the purpose I purchased it for.

A new entry level 13" MBP 16/512 is A$2,819

Factor in increased discretional spending priorities for smart phones, smart home devices and gaming PCs or Consoles and you have a market problem.

It's not an argument that Macs are expensive as such, or dont represent good value. It's just that Macs are now very expensive for Australian consumers.

Anecodtally many workplaces will now provide employees with a laptop by default, so the need for a home computer is significantly reduced for some people. If you have a family, then a gaming PC or a console is what the Kids want, not a Mac.

Friends convinced me to build a monster Linux desktop PC, which I've been using ever since and have grown to love it. BUT, I'd switch back to an iMac INSTANTLY if I could a) afford it, b) justify it, c) mentally get over the fact that they've broken decades of love and trust, and treat customers like shit while cranking out increasingly crap products then telling us we should still lick their feet and hand over our first born.

How about making a desktop computer that can actually... compete? I don't care if it's expensive if it's GREAT. I don't mind stuff not being perfect if it's cheap. I won't buy shitty products for premium money though.

Soldered internals, thinness and lightness over performance and quality, sky rocketing prices with snail-pace development, increasingly shittier support and corporate "personality" (? Not sure if that's the right word, but they're becoming easier to hate due to constantly dropping the ball, pissing customers off, releasing shit products, ignoring issues, etc).

I miss the old Apple. I'd love them to turn things around. Release a thicker heavier MacBook that actually performs really well, is built rock solid, and costs $1k USD, even if that means having fans and vents and stuff. Apple has incredible designers, I'm sure they can still make it look good. Release an iPhone SE2 with a modern-era camera, 128GB storage, and make it $500 USD. Release an actual Pro/Geek friendly desktop like the old days, something around $1500 USD, comparable to a mid-to-high (not extreme high end) modern gaming PC, so we can actually render videos and do WORK without it crumbling like the Colosseum every time you ask it to break a sweat.

Yeh my prices and specs probably aren't "correct" but the idea stands. Increase the performance and quality, drop the damn prices, and stop being such a depressing shadow of your former self. Your piles of cash don't make us love you, good products we can actually afford do.

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.

Personally I consider the USD $1,799.00 starting price great value for the 27" 5K iMac, although as I hang on them for a few years I always get the CPU upgrade + SSD options and always buy RAM elsewhere (where it's much better value).

I'm also a late 2013 MBP hold out who was waiting for a great MBP option to upgrade to, but didn't find the latest MBP's was compelling enough to upgrade to so got a 5k iMac instead, glad I did.

But since then, there's the iPad. Apple's line is "the Mac is a truck, but most automobiles aren't trucks." And I hate to admit it, but for web browsing and word processing, the iPad is just fine. I don't like it, but I get it.

I still love them for my team. I have it down to a routine now, I buy one of the cheaper ones from the Apple refurbished site for about $400-500 or so, and buy an SSD from Crucial on the same day.

When it shows up I swap out the unusably slow internal 5400rpm drive for the SSD. That's a little tricky but once you've done it twice you can do it again in 10-15 minutes no problem.

Then I get it all fired up. I have a bunch of Dell IPS 4k screens in various sizes and get a another used one or two from B&H if I need more.

I'm very happy with this workflow, but it's still a hack. It sure would be better if Apple just made more reasonable desktop machines.

I also recommended Mac Minis as single purpose computers. A non profit I volunteer for uses one for live-streaming with WireCast and s Black Magic box, one to control lights, and a third for Propesenter.

But when I spec out a Mac Mini with a decent processor and RAM, I’m paying as much as I would for s low end 21” iMac with much better specs.

OTOH, the top three best-selling vehicles in the US are trucks: the Ford F Series, the Chevy Silverado, and the Dodge Ram.

Now it's "anyone can afford an Apple product." Get an iPhone for $125 a month or whatever it costs to lease and get a voice/data plan.

I would be curious to see what percent of the market is people that want their computer to be doing things powerful enough to justify a computer more powerful than an iPad pro is.

Disclaimer: Obviously a $300 chromebook destroys an iPad in price but you know so do a lot of Android phones and people still pay the premium for iPhones because they are sexy[1].

[1]https://www.recode.net/2017/9/12/16290910/apple-event-iphone...

It’s pretty clear Apple don’t care hugely about losing marketshare in education as their recent still pretty expensive edu focused “cheap iPad” shows. They will enjoy what they always did, quality computing products for a small marketshare who are happy to pay high margins for it, leaving the other PC manufacturers to bloody battle over minuscule margins and hard to differentiate product.

But they're just using the Chromebooks to access Google Docs and Google Classroom for school work. The cloud ecosystem is what will matter more than the browser used to get there. Kids care even less about the hardware it's running on.

Apple is too far behind now on all of this.

ChromeOS is barely noticeable outside US.

For me, I really truly cannot imagine working on anything other than a real computer. I need a lot of text and number input for really any kind of work. Anything that could be called work.

So what's happening with people? With the economy?

Marketing not so much (lots of spreadsheets), deep development or system admin also (though most of my sysadmin work can be done on an iPad with a terminal, I like the multi monitor displays on a real computer).

Comparing the base models of the 15-inch Macbook Pros on Geekbench:

  Single core:
  2012: 3216
  2018: 4918 (+53%)

  Multi core:
  2012: 10558
  2018: 21118 (+100%)

the issue I take with Apple is they do have the ability to come in under 1k and provide a good product that they can profit from both in desktop and laptop lines but they don't choose to.

on product availability and innovation the last major update to iMac was the retina screens discounting putting a workstation CPU in the same chassis. the mini is just a disgrace but this also comes with the fact that they dropped their stand alone screens and people have been waiting for a 4k Apple branded screen.

Photoshop and iMovie for instance all work fine. As ever XCode compilling could be faster, as could rendering iMovie videos.

But really, it's fine.

GPU sucks though. And I wish I had TB3.

I can't get myself to replace mine unless it totally dies, but damn does it run super hot a lot of the time. And it has since it was brand new. It really does feel like there was an apex in there that we've gone downhill from though, and the 2012 was definitely higher up there than we are now.

My feeling is that they were so jealous of Steve Jobs legacy that they had to redesign everything to prove something, and screwed it all up in the process. Maybe it's like having a parent who is very famous and successful and having to live in their shadow.

P.S. I don't really understand the obsession with getting the latest gen processors. Your main bottleneck is IO anyway if you don't do video encoding or some other CPU intensive tasks.

I doubt Apple will discontinue Mac sales in the foreseeable future.

I plan to rejoin the Mac fold next year and by the look of things, it will be a 5K iMac just because I want to do some Unixy things and you can develop anything on the Mac - iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows.

All of the third party software I care about is open source except for using MS Office occasionally, JetBrains Rider, and Plex. As long as the software support is there, I don’t care.

Honestly, it doesn’t take much investment in the Mac to keep it. Apple is already on the path of merging the Mac underpinnings with iOS underpinnings. Any investment in iOS is an investment in the Mac. Intel does a lot of the heavy lifting with chip design and motherboard design.

All I want is a slightly thicker laptop, with some key travel, and a couple USB-A ports. Is that too much to ask for?

We bought the Developer Edition, which is the official Linux model. The supposedly supported Linux has been throwing up error messages from moments after we first turned it on that have survived all software updates so far. The machine itself had some sort of battery failure after just a few months of occasional use, then an SSD that was corrupted to the point of being unbootable even when we had apparently recovered from those battery issues. More generally, the over-sensitive trackpad that has been widely criticised was an irritation for us as well, and the keyboard doesn't feel particularly good.

For a supposedly professional-grade laptop from a big name, that's obviously a long way short of the quality standards we'd expect. But then recent Macbooks have had their issues with both hardware and macOS, and we won't go near Windows 10 until Microsoft fixes the same complaints about updates and privacy that everyone keeps raising. Where's a business supposed to get professional-quality laptops that just work any more? :-(

That’s not saying it’s what I want in a $1k laptop, but what Apple thinks it is.

Also, notice that I wasn't complaining about battery life, so your response doesn't not address it.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/05/apple-macbook-lineup-cp...

I think they could start selling MacOS as a competitor to Windows. I realise this would limit some of the coolness and designer feel (and quality) you get from mac hardware, but hardware has become a lot more stable in the past decade or so. with their marketing, they could convince consumers to ditch windows and just put MacOS on their PCs for $X/month.

I think it is more important to measure its users usage shares, rather than unit sold market shares. For example, out of the 2 billion Mobile Phones sold in 2017, 1.3 billon of those are Smartphones, and 230 Million of those are iPhones. That is 230 out of 1300, or ~18%. However if we look at usage, there are close to 3 billion Smartphone users today, and according to Tim Cook's word in today's conference on iPhone user growth, we are looking at around 800M iPhone user, a 26% of the market. The iPhone user base is still growing, as it matches towards one billion iPhone users.

The Mac users bases last report were around 150 million, out of the estimated 1.5 billion PC in use. So 10% of total user base. The PC user base hasn't been growing at all, while the Mac user base keeps growing. I think the most important metrics to Apple, is how many users are leaving its ecosystem and how many users are entering it. It reported 60% of the Mac are sold to new buyers. So Apple is roughly adding ~10M Mac users per year.

I used to think Apple not caring about Mac was because they see Tablet / iPad ultimately as a replacement of Mac. But this hasn't happened. ( yet ) And it may take another 10 years before we know if Tablet could really take over. In the mean time I think it would be wise for Apple to keep the Mac growing, it needs at least 300M user base to make the ecosystem solid.

The thing that worry me most is Apple's inefficiency. With Steve Jobs, he manage to create so many thing with so little budget. Apple now take 7% of its revenue to R&D, the highest ratio it its history and it seems they don't have much to show for. Hopefully we will have MacBook SE and iPhone SE Plus this September.

Today's Apple is good, but we demand great.

Don't forget dropping the BOM in increasingly petty ways for such an expensive machine like no longer including the short power cable.

It's a $330 "laptop". It's less of a general computing device, but there's plenty of software avail for it.

You and I may not think about it as a development laptop, but it does the majority of what the majority of cheap laptop owners want. I love the iPad for family members because it Just Works(tm) and I don't have to play IT for most of it (save the occasional force-quit app).

Many mac users (and perhaps apple users in general) are the type of people willing to pay up for the top-of-the-line, latest-and-great, spare-no-expense tech gadget.

I've seen this with companies giving their developers the maxed out mac + mac accessories.

I've seen this with individuals who view their mac laptop as the biggest most important usage of their time.

Where have you seen apple struggle because they were being undercut by competitors?

I understand that Apple doesn't want to create a "cheap" Mac but they're even unwilling to do "affordable".

We were buyers of a lot of Mac minis, iMacs, and laptops, but folks are starting to ask for Surfaces and the Intel NUCs are a good deal. At this point, the graphics arts people might get Windows boxes if Apple doesn't get their crap together as Adobe runs just fine either way. That would be a true shame.

iOS is Apples futures.

If you haven’t gotten that memo in the 11 years of iOS existence, I’m sorry.

(And sadly, there is way less money to make selling iOS $0.99 apps)