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That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

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Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#531

Post by circa »

I agree with a lot of this in the personal world. Sure a lot of people don't have the money to upgrade.

At my old job, at an MSP, I used to upgrade a TON of people from XP to Win 7 or 8.1 in the small/medium business world. I could not believe how many companies absolutely had the money to upgrade their PCs but simply did not want to because they were afraid of the learning curve. It basically came down to that. They had no problem paying for us to "fix" their XP machines at $125+/hour. The same went for a lot of servers. Who knows how many of those are in the said 600 million pool.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#532

Post by jgh »

SyneRyder wrote: post #77
rockshassa wrote: post #12

I just can't bring myself to feel the author's anger, in any capacity. He wants to position this as a jab against those who build their own PCs, but that is utterly irrelevant. What percentage of those 600 million five-year-old PCs do you really think are being thoughtfully maintained by modders? Does the author realize that most people do not want the responsibility of maintaining their own hardware? Or that they do…

I have two 10-year old PCs in active use on my desk right now - both are running Windows 10, one is playing back Netflix right now while I type this on a third (brand new) machine. The kicker? Those two 10-year old "PCs" are actually MacBooks. They still run fine & do everything I need those machines to do - but I had to install Windows 10 on them, because Apple stopped supporting their own hardware. A machine that m…

Have you ever tried to do any multimedia application or driver development on windows? What a friggen nightmare compared to OSX. That support for old machines comes at a price.

Edit: that said I am a little sad Im gonna have to do something about my 2007 mac mini now that chrome is ending support for lion.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#533

Post by vidarh »

ryao wrote: post #467
vidarh wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Budgets rapidly break down when you're regularly faced with unforeseen but necessary expenses that blow your cash reserves out of the water. A lot of the problems of poverty is that once you get below a certain level, even if you are the most thrifty person around, you lose predictability in ways that end up costing you a lot of extra money. Suddenly your employer pays you a day late and your carefully arranged bill…

The purpose of trying to budget is to stop living from paycheck to paycheck. There might be some people for which this will not work, but the ones leasing new cars every few years (or signing overpriced contracts because of the "free" phone every two years) are not among them. I am sure that many people in such circumstances could find little things that could be cut if they looked (e.g. Cable TV, the landline phone,…

People leasing cars are not who I am talking about - they are not poor. If you are poor you don't get approved for credit to lease cars. At least my definition of poor draws the line well below that point.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#534

Post by wutbrodo »

bluthru wrote: post #493
peeters wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think it's fair to expect Apple to support 32-bit processors anymore. It might not be fair to expect it, but it's absolutely fair to count it against how Apple supports their customers.

I don't understand what you mean. Are you saying that Apple doesn't support their customers well because they don't spend time writing software for 10 year old hardware?

> Are you saying that Apple doesn't support their customers well because they don't spend time writing software for 10 year old hardware?

This isn't even close to what he said, and it only makes sense if you have an extremely reductive black-and-white view of the world. There are places on the spectrum between "perfect support" and "absolute shit support", and the phrase "count against" simply implies that supporting decade old hardware is a notch higher than the same support setup without that advantage.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#535

Post by 9999 »

jayfk wrote: post #318

I bought a Mac Pro 4,1 from 2010, flashed it to the 5,1 firmware, upgraded the CPU, added a Graphics Card, 4x 3TB drives and a PCIe SSD blade. Best thing I've ever did in terms of apple hardware.

I just did the same thing! I went with the 5,1 though, putting 5690s in there. I was going to buy a maxed Macbook Pro, but they didn't announce anything and I have work that needs to get done.

If you maxed out the RAM, have you thought about doing a RAM disk?

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#536

Post by ryao »

vidarh wrote: post #533
ryao wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of trying to budget is to stop living from paycheck to paycheck. There might be some people for which this will not work, but the ones leasing new cars every few years (or signing overpriced contracts because of the "free" phone every two years) are not among them. I am sure that many people in such circumstances could find little things that could be cut if they looked (e.g. Cable TV, the landline phone,…

People leasing cars are not who I am talking about - they are not poor. If you are poor you don't get approved for credit to lease cars. At least my definition of poor draws the line well below that point.

I know of poor people in India who lack the ability to get jobs due to disabilities. They either have never had a job to be able to have a pay check or had jobs before they became disabled and are unlikely to see a pay check ever again. I know of a few instances of abject poverty in India through a priest I know. In one instance, the sole provider of a household developed a medical condition that rendered him unemployable. In another instance, people at a shelter for the physically and mentally disabled lack things like wheel chairs and bedding, with some of them just lying on the floor.

In both cases, I know people are sending money to help them. That is especially true in the case of that household in a poor village where the father is a disabled craftsman while the mother is completely uneducated. Enabling the children to study will give them the opportunity to work for a better life, which is an opportunity that their parents will never have.

Anyone who has a paycheck has the opportunity to obtain financial advice from sites like YNAB. Not all such people live as they would like, but being able to imagine something better puts them in a whole different category than actual poor people. They are able to make financial decisions and save for the purpose of making their lives better in the future. The truly poor lack such luxury.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#537

Post by rdl »

I just realized my gaming PC is almost 5yo. i7-970, 6 core, x58, 560 Ti, 24 GB, a couple SSDs. Was high end when I built it and still basically ok now.

Computers really have plateaued in a lot of ways. Phones for 2-4y vs 1-2y, laptops for. 3-6 vs 2-3, desktops for 4-8 vs 3-4y.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#538

Post by mrob »

Drakim wrote: post #249
skywhopper wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are capable smartphones for much cheaper then an iPhone that could get the job done. That's what GP was likely getting at. True enough. And yet, if you yourself are not actually poor, you may not realize the value that a marginal luxury like an iPhone or Air Jordans or a top brand purse (sorry, I don't know what the hot brand of purses is atm) can bring to someone in that situation. Spending a few hundred dol…

The same case could be made for the poor buying golden jewelry. I don't find it very convincing.

The same case could not be made, because gold is much less effective at signaling wealth. Gold plated jewelry is visually identical but much cheaper, so there's a "market for lemons" situation where the signaling value of solid gold drops to that of gold plated items. You can even get gold plated tungsten for the rare cases where weight matters. Fake iPhones are much more obvious.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#539

Post by dror »

rockshassa wrote: post #12

I just can't bring myself to feel the author's anger, in any capacity. He wants to position this as a jab against those who build their own PCs, but that is utterly irrelevant. What percentage of those 600 million five-year-old PCs do you really think are being thoughtfully maintained by modders? Does the author realize that most people do not want the responsibility of maintaining their own hardware? Or that they do…

In the last 3 months I bought 2 Toshiba 13 inch Chromebook for $300. "A properly configured iPad, leveraging iCloud for device backups, photo backups, email credentials etc, solves all of these problems." but a Chromebook does all of that with close to zero configuration with a device that has a built-in keyboard, and a 13 inch 1080P screen. You do loose the touch interface, but end up paying roughly half of the iPad's price.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#540

Post by ryao »

samstave wrote: post #504
noxToken wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not sure if I was suddenly without money, the iPhone would be what I would want to give up. If you have an iPhone and then become poor, sure. You probably won't get ahead much by getting rid of your iPhone. If you're already poor, then an iPhone (not a smartphone) is definitely a luxury. There are capable smartphones for much cheaper then an iPhone that could get the job done. That's what GP was likely getting…

I think the real problem is that new updates to iphone software are not capable of being run on old iPhones. Thus, the older, yet still physically capable, phones are softly obsoleted. There is no reason there shouldnt be a 3G, 4, 4S capable of owrking and in the hands of "the poor" Why not a turn-in system where older yet still functioning phones are given to anyone who wants them. I personally am guilty of not prop…

> I'd happily have contributed my old phones to some program where either poor or kids can have them freely.

I asked a Roman Catholic priest I know to give my household's old iPhones to the poor during his trip to India last year. I had originally planned to sell them when I had a chance after upgrading myself and my parents, but I changed my mind when I heard he was going to visit his village in India where there are many poor people.

You could ask your local Roman Catholic parish if any of the priests plan to travel to poor places. They tend to be from all over the world, many are from poor places and they tend to visit family every year or so. They would definitely be able to give your phones to the poor.

Just make sure that the phones are unlocked, supports GSM internationally (if it is a US phone) and have a charging cable. In my case, I neglected to realize that the NEMA outlets used in the US are not typically used in India and included the US chargers. Compatible AC to USB chargers are cheap enough that it was not a big deal.

Also, models like the Virgin Mobile iPhone 4S whose baseband is programmed to only connect to US CDMA networks would only be useful for parts in many other countries. Phones that are locked to CDMA in the US, but support GSM when unlocked for international use, like the Sprint iPhone 5 will work fine, provided that they are unlocked before they are sent.

If it is a CDMA only phone that is not locked to the US, you could check to see if the country where the priest is going has a network compatible with it, although it is hard to find coverage maps for CDMA outside the US to know if those networks would actually be relevant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CDMA2000_networks http://www.memphissoftware.net/img/coverage1.jpg

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