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

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

#161

Post by WildUtah »

hyperpape wrote: post #99
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…

There are probably some people out there still making the argument that macs aren't more expensive, but I think most people have stopped, because the facts have changed. I'm having trouble finding it, but if I recall correctly, Joanna Stern was on John Gruber's podcast and flatly said the prices weren't comparable. Gruber either agreed or was silent.

As recently as 2-3 years ago there were Macs out there that cost less than any comparable PC. Ultra light laptops with retina screens were cheaper from Apple than Asus or Dell. Any machine with a 27" retina screen was $1000 cheaper from Apple. For five years before that, any 27" screen at all was much cheaper from Apple.

For many years, a $2000 MacBook Air was cheaper than its competition because there was no competition.

But today the PC vendors charge less than Apple once again. The universe is back in order and Apple's tech lead is confined to mobile phones.

Oddly, it's a self-inflicted wound. The totally useless expense of wedging a long, narrow Apple Watch into every keyboard is driving Apple's prices way, way up.

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

#162

Post by izacus »

velodrome wrote: post #11

Has anyone here used the MBP touchbar on a daily basis? Does it improve productivity or is it just a gimmick?

I've been using a 15" tMBP and the TouchBar has been a huge step back in usabilitiy for me. Mostly due to:

1.) It's utterly buggy. There are times when it doesn't boot after laptop comes back from sleep. Sometimes buttons don't redraw (e.g. missing ESC until you tap on that empty space). Sometimes it even hangs leaving you without brightness and volume controls. It's incredible how Apple managed to release something this buggy and how it passed QA.

2.) It gives no touch feedback at all, making pressing anything blindly on it feel terrible and inaccurate. Since each supporting app defines their own button position, it means that the buttons keep moving around making muscle memory pretty much impossible.

3.) Most of the time it's empty - pretty much none of the non-Apple software supports it. Volume control and brightness controls are now hidden behind a slider that's hard to hit blindly (as opposed to previous function keys).

4.) For most cases when it DOES work, it's still easier and quicker to press a keyboard shortcut because you can reliably press it without looking down at your fingers.

5.) It's pretty bright and sometimes distracting in the evening. This is a minor issue, but it's not synchronized with the keyboard brightness control and you can't darken it manually when working in dark environments or watching movies.

6.) TouchID is the only part I really like - it's made the OS experience way better.

If I could rip it out and replace it with proper ESC/Fx keys, I'd do it in a heartbeat. The part that most marketing materials don't show is this: the touchbar will only show shortcuts of the currently focused app (besides a few pre-set ones like volume, siri, show desktop). If the focused app doesn't support it, it'll sit there empty.

It would be significantly better if it would at least show shortcuts to dock applications, let you fully customize it with macros and shortcuts or let you control a certain app in the background while using another app. But you can't (yet I'm aware BTT exists, but even that hides macros behind another tap and slow animation).

All in all I can't fanthom how anyone at Apple thought this would be a productivity win for their most expensive 4000EUR laptops. I'd expect it to be useful for less techy people who don't use or know shortcuts... but for their high-end pro machines it's just a huge step back in usability.

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

#163

Post by nicky0 »

iak8god wrote: post #152
guitarbill wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Web browsing and a bit of office is offered as an example of the lightest imaginable load for someone actually using a computer. My daily needs are much heavier than that. To offer a line of laptops with 8GB of RAM as the max in 2017 is ridiculous.

Ridiculous to sell them or ridiculous to buy them?

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

#164

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

Zelphyr wrote: post #138

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 bough…

I have an IBM ThinkPad from 2004 and Lenovo ThinkPads from (more or less) 2010 and 2015, they all work fine. The 2004 one is slow with current software and the battery lasts like 1 minute, but otherwise it does what it should according to its (now weak) specs.

If you think Lenovos don't last, it's probably because you have seen low-end Lenovos (which indeed often break after 3-5 years). But a MBP is a high-end laptop, it should be compared to high-end laptops from other brands.

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

#165

Post by nicky0 »

bootload wrote: post #137
potatosoup wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

RCA out???

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

#166

Post by nicky0 »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #136
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

I'll believe it when I see it.

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

#167

Post by pixelcloud »

astrodust wrote: post #65
Shivetya wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How Apple can leave the Mac Pro and Mini in their old configuration this long is beyond reason. 1000 days since its debut. Apple should be ashamed of this. Yet this company is operating like the days before Steve returned except this time there is no Steve to right it I expect the iMac to get a new chipset but I would like to see the Mac mini updated. Either update the Mac Pro or pull it.

They claim there's updates in the works. Here's hoping they push them out soon.

And then you can wait another 1000 days for a refresh.

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

#169

Post by drewjaja »

feross wrote: post #64
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…

"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-…

Bought a base model 12 inch Macbook a few weeks ago and love it. Haven't had any issues with performance so far, although I haven't tried any IDEs yet, just been coding in iTerm2 and Vim.

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

#170

Post by anarazel »

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?

Isn't that hugely dependent on the use-case? If you're working with significant volumes of data - which makes sense even in testing to validate that your application actually behaves sanely with data volumes approach real-world scenario - you might not have a lot of fun with 3GB. And optimizing for great on-disk performance during local development doesn't have much benefit if your production workload is all memory.
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