51–60 of 145 posts
I see a lot of risk and potential downsides, but with each new disaster of MBP released or eternity between updates it becomes more attractive.
The tight integration with the iPhone (phone calls, messages, handoff) might suffer and that would be painful.
Mid-2012 MBP with SSD, retina, and 16gb here. I've got an HDMI port, SD card reader, two USB ports, two thunderbolt ports, magsafe power, and a proper, reliable keyboard. I despair at the current crop of mac hardware. If this machine dies on me before some decent mac hardware arrives, I'm not sure what i'll do - but it definitely won't involve buying a new macbook with the touchbar, stupid keyboards, and no ports.
Mid-2012 MBP with SSD, retina, and 16gb here. I've got an HDMI port, SD card reader, two USB ports, two thunderbolt ports, magsafe power, and a proper, reliable keyboard. I despair at the current crop of mac hardware. If this machine dies on me before some decent mac hardware arrives, I'm not sure what i'll do - but it definitely won't involve buying a new macbook with the touchbar, stupid keyboards, and no ports.
I know a lot of people I know have seen this coming and in the past few years have either switched to Windows (creative types) or to Linux (developer types). It's fascinating to see Apple's fall from grace. They were once considered the go to hardware vendor in nearly every market segment, are now being easily passed by their competitors.
Apple has never had a majority market share in any segment. Ever. There was a time where they were popular in Japan and where they were popular in the creative fields, particularly print, advertising and film because of a few specialized applications (Quark, Final Cut, etc.).
They ended up popular in college campuses post iPod and popular with developers in the 2006/2007 time frame after they switched to x86 because the combination of x86 and Unix made for a pretty developer friendly box.
The new line of hardware has its problems, but that’s always been the case. The current line has a high failure on keyboards, the previous line had a problem with delaminating screens, the line before that thermal problems.
They are selling more today than any other point in history and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
Any similar ultrabook alternative at $950+-?
Mid-2012 MBP with SSD, retina, and 16gb here. I've got an HDMI port, SD card reader, two USB ports, two thunderbolt ports, magsafe power, and a proper, reliable keyboard. I despair at the current crop of mac hardware. If this machine dies on me before some decent mac hardware arrives, I'm not sure what i'll do - but it definitely won't involve buying a new macbook with the touchbar, stupid keyboards, and no ports.
From a business standpoint, it's hard for Apple to justify investing in a product like that contributes a small and diminishing fraction of their revenue.
I think this is a combination of issues: USB-C's ecosystem was confusing and good products never materialized, or if they did nobody could find them in the sea of junk. The lack of hardware updates, which seems to have started with the 5-10% performance bumps Intel piddled out in the absence of competition from AMD from 2011-2017. Most of the CPU's and GPU's that could have been used frankly weren't much better than…
It's seen a pretty wide-spread uptake over the last couple years, and you're hard pressed to find a new laptop from any manufacturer that doesn't use it for charging.
I sadly gave up on the Mac. My next personal device is a Dell XPS. The platform is great, and I liked the (declining) 3rd party ecosystem, but if the company doesn't give a crap about the platform, why should I? It's probably too late, but Apple needs to break the industrial design team's stranglehold on the platform. You can only focus on things that the customer doesn't care about for so long. I pulled the plug whe…
Switching is a mixed bag.
I notice (at least on HN) that there are two types of people on Mac.
People who are highly sensitized to details and those who are not. If you're sensitized to stuff like touch pads, coil whine, etc., you may not find pleasure in switching to a PC, because PC makers don't spend a lot of time on those details.
If, however, you're not sensitized to small details, switching to PC is a pretty painless process.
Meanwhile I can’t imagine going back to the thicker form factor.
I don’t mean to downplay people’s issues, and Apple definitely didn’t do a wonderful job here.
But I do find that my day to day experience is net positive. Humans are very adaptable.