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Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

9to5mac.com

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Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#131

Post by icebraining »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #68
feross wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you want to write fast software, use a slow computer" - Dominic Tarr The 12" Macbook is the best computer I've ever owned. Switched to it from a 2014 Macbook Pro, and found it very easy to adjust. The only time it struggles a little bit is when I run Windows in VMware, on occasion. The biggest benefit of the Macbook 12" is that if software runs well on your computer, you know it's guaranteed to run extra buttery-…

It's a good quote, but I feel it reflects a time when I didn't also need to run a stack of Redis, RabbitMQ, Postgres and webserver apps on my development box.

We run Gitlab (Rails + Unicorn + Sidekiq + Nginx + Postgres + Redis) on a 3GB single-core VPS and it runs fine, without needing the swap. Is the stack really the problem?

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#132

Post by hocuspocus »

nessus42 wrote: post #122
jclardy wrote: post #10

Makes sense with Apple's current terrible product line setup. Both the retina MacBook and 2016 MacBook Pro are much more niche than their last generation. Also much more confusing as the MacBook Air successor is $500 more than the 13" Air was (The non-touchbar MacBook Pro is the spiritual successor to the air.) The true 13" Pro for 2016 is also $500 more than the last gen. The 12" MacBook is there...but it is a super…

I have a Retina MacBook next to my sofa in the living room and a 27-inch Retina iMac with 16GB RAM on the desk in my study. At work I have a four year-old 27-inch iMac with all SSD storage and 16GB of RAM. It's still going strong, and I never think it's too slow for anything, despite developing in Scala, which has a slow compiler, and using Intellij or Eclipse, which are resource hogs. I love them all to death. It do…

How do you deal with noise though? Scala and SBT can make the whole Apple product line noisy in my experience :)

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#133

Post by pmyjavec »

icebraining wrote: post #131
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good quote, but I feel it reflects a time when I didn't also need to run a stack of Redis, RabbitMQ, Postgres and webserver apps on my development box.

We run Gitlab (Rails + Unicorn + Sidekiq + Nginx + Postgres + Redis) on a 3GB single-core VPS and it runs fine, without needing the swap. Is the stack really the problem?

It runs fine, but why not have, it runs "awesome" :)

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#134

Post by [deleted] »

edblarney wrote: post #71
jclardy wrote: post #10

Makes sense with Apple's current terrible product line setup. Both the retina MacBook and 2016 MacBook Pro are much more niche than their last generation. Also much more confusing as the MacBook Air successor is $500 more than the 13" Air was (The non-touchbar MacBook Pro is the spiritual successor to the air.) The true 13" Pro for 2016 is also $500 more than the last gen. The 12" MacBook is there...but it is a super…

I just bought a new Macbook, and I can say that it's a great product. Probably the best on the market. The problem I had was cost - they are over-priced. Yes, I've heard the argument that if you want 'x RAM with y CPU' etc it will 'cost just as much' - but this is just no longer true. The Macs with 16G memory are crazy expensive. My Mac has 200-ish G hard-drive which is f-ing retardedly small. They should all have 1T…

[deleted]

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#135

Post by wmeredith »

m_mueller wrote: post #109
capkutay wrote: post #86

The jury has been out on Tim Cook's performance as Apple CEO since he took over about 7 years ago. I think this new line of Macs is evidence that he's just too focussed on operations to the point where it's ruining their products. I'm guessing the move to consolidate the ports and kill the audio jack may make total sense internally at Apple when it comes to their 10-year manufacturing operations plan and really maxim…

IMO the big mistake was to give Jony Ive that much power. Should have put Scott Forstall there instead, the man who made their most important product work, but they got rid of him for being too opinionated and against the grain. Well, that's probably exactly what you need in a product developer. (S)He doesn't need to be a good designer, just recognize good design. Ive is just way out of touch with their customer base…

> Ive is just way out of touch with their customer base.

The guy who is chauffeured to work in a car that is twice as expensive than my three bedroom house? Say it isn't so!

Ive knows exactly what people want. A $200 watch in a $10,000 gold case so the boys down at the country club won't make fun of me from behind their Omegas and Rolexes, amiright? Sigh... As a long time die hard fan of the Apple that made really interesting transformative tech, watching their decline makes me sad.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#136

Post by ComputerGuru »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #56
bostand wrote: post #2

Given the CES announcements from Lenovo, Samsung and asus I can only assume 2017 will be even worse for Apple. Laptop with 25 hrs battery? Give me two please!

And yet no one but Apple can seem to make a decent track pad (even for windows). It's a show stopper for me whenever I think of moving back to a PC.

I realized aside from glass vs plastic (which is huge), most trackpad hardware is actually decent. It's the drivers that suck. The next Windows 10 update ("creator's edition") has a better "precision trackpad" driver that will finally do what Apple's trackpads have done for a decade and fixes all the precision, tracking, resting your palm, etc. issues that have long plagued Windows laptops. Just make sure you get a glass trackpad.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#137

Post by bootload »

potatosoup wrote: post #54
Kevin_S wrote: post #49

Just wanted to add an opinion you don't see as much here, as a non-developer. It's not just developers who are pretty upset about the new Macbook, myself and my fiance were both in the market, and my fiance used a MBP through college. She pretty much fought me on the new MBP until she tried it in store, and promptly was against it. She's going with a Surfacebook and I'll probably go with the new Dell XPS 15 with the…

What was she actually against in the new MBP? (New MBP user myself, don't like the touch bar, but otherwise a fine machine.)

"What was she actually against in the new MBP?"

Newish MBP user chiming in. Peripheral access and costs.

- no DVD/CD player

- no Ethernet

- no SD card slot

- no RCA out

What I see is good new machines with the above peripheral access removed. The advantages are no mechanical moving parts, technically better KB, access to faster SDD, software upgradable for quite a while. The hidden advantage is the new Macs are less polluting and fewer moving parts. Is this worth the added cost, lower power supply and loss of peripheral and access though? Out of the box, I had/have zero problems in my current work use/flow as a ^glorified^ VT-100 terminal.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#138

Post by Zelphyr »

Everyone is complaining about the confusing direction of Apple with regards to the Mac but when I look around, I often wonder if they're just not reacting to what is really happening. For example; my wife's 10 year old MacBook died last year and for the most part, she hasn't missed it. She uses her phone for everything. And for the things that she can't/doesn't want to do on her phone, she uses her iPad.

I just bought the family an iMac for Christmas and my kids use it often, but they also spend at least as much time on their iPods.

I think what Apple is seeing, and reacting to, is that the younger generation of non-developers are increasingly using their mobile devices for everything.

We as power users hate it because we want to continue to have a solid laptop and/or desktop on which to do our work. But I'm guessing that despite our complaining, we're on the whole willing to pony up the money.

Not to mention, these machines last a really long time. I'm writing this on a mid-2012 MBP that even with a battery that is going bad will still outlast my friends Window's laptops. So yeah, $2400 is a lot for a laptop by comparison. But its not so bad when you consider that you can reasonably expect to have that machine for a much longer time than a Dell or Lenovo.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#139

Post by nessus42 »

hocuspocus wrote: post #132
nessus42 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Retina MacBook next to my sofa in the living room and a 27-inch Retina iMac with 16GB RAM on the desk in my study. At work I have a four year-old 27-inch iMac with all SSD storage and 16GB of RAM. It's still going strong, and I never think it's too slow for anything, despite developing in Scala, which has a slow compiler, and using Intellij or Eclipse, which are resource hogs. I love them all to death. It do…

How do you deal with noise though? Scala and SBT can make the whole Apple product line noisy in my experience :)

You mean make the fans blast?

Well, they're not that loud. The building H/V airflow is usually a lot louder. And my Retina MacBook doesn't even have a fan. (Though I also don't do a lot of software development on it, I have done development on slower machines, and it wasn't terribly painful. Depending on what I was doing, of course.)

I still remember the days of programming in C++ using C-front, and a compile would take 20 minutes. Being a gdb wizard was essential. These days, even with Scala, compilation is fast enough on a four-core iMac that debugging via print statements is easier than using a debugger.

I guess I'm old enough that I just haven't gotten spoiled by expecting everything to be superfast. Though what does annoy me is how slow many websites are. Grrrrrr! When programming in fancy IDEs is faster than surfing the web, you know that something is wrong with the world....

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#140

Post by guitarbill »

iak8god wrote: post #96
edblarney wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just bought a new Macbook, and I can say that it's a great product. Probably the best on the market. The problem I had was cost - they are over-priced. Yes, I've heard the argument that if you want 'x RAM with y CPU' etc it will 'cost just as much' - but this is just no longer true. The Macs with 16G memory are crazy expensive. My Mac has 200-ish G hard-drive which is f-ing retardedly small. They should all have 1T…

> Yes, I've heard the argument that if you want 'x RAM with y CPU' etc it will 'cost just as much' - but this is just no longer true. The Macs with 16G memory are crazy expensive. What boggles my mind is how many of them max out at 8G. I couldn't care less about CPU, and I'm flexible about storage, but 8G RAM is ridiculous. I'm currently using a couple of MS office apps and a web browser on my 2015 MBP and it's using…

> but 8G RAM is ridiculous

8G RAM is not ridiculous. Statements like this just show how far out of touch people are. Many workloads benefit from more RAM. And for some it's a hard requirement (e.g. VMs), but web browsing and a bit of office is not one of them. This is why virtual memory/swap space is a thing - and with an SSD that's also not as horrible as it used to be.

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