21–30 of 34 posts
I got a new MBP for work, and every time I go home to my ~2015 model I am so happy to not be typing on this new shitty keyboard, and that is to say nothing of the oversized trackpad always accidentally causing me to move my cursor with my palm.
Honestly I'm shocked that there isn't a company in the SFBA that just buys up busted 2015 MBPs and refurbs them to sell at a much higher price. Maybe they're afraid of getting sued into oblivion by Apple. Or maybe time travelers from the future are depleting our recent timeline of 2015 MBPs.
RAM went bad? Tough, it’s soldered onto the board. LCD cracked? Well, Apple doesn’t make parts easily available to anyone except Apple, so unless you’re Apple authorized, you’re stuck buying them from resellers who’ve stripped them from other laptops. That screen replacement runs hundreds of dollars.
It’s the unfortunate reality of Apple making non-repairable, soldered-on boards to make their laptops a few mm thinner.
I highly recommend the Dell XPS series. I switched over to a Dell XPS 15 and really like it!
But i get it. Anything that doesn't run iOS amounts to quarterly revenue rounding errors. But until i can develop iOS apps ON iOS (shiver), their laptops remain a prerequisite to the app store's viability. I have to imagine this current path will come to back to bite them in some measurable way aside from the financials mentioned above.
It always pays to look at the alternatives. Sometimes the latest isn't the greatest. Unfortunately, time is particularly cruel to computing hardware and software. Downgrading to an old laptop is, at best, a temporary fix. The author of this article should consider other OS's and hardware manufacturers.
Not anymore, not really so. A desktop I own from 2008 is still usable for daily browsing after an SSD upgrade, and runs all the games I care about playing (given that I play rarely).
Not only am i still running on a 2012 Air because of Apple's seemingly conscious middle finger to developers, but i refuse to purchase any >= 2016 laptops for my company. We have made roughly $30,000 in laptop purchases in the last 24 months. All have been aftermarket '14 and '15 MBP's with loaded ram and replaced batteries. This isn't what i want to do, but i refuse to service keyboard and heating issues on a regula…
It's even worse for us in ops who are supporting you devs.
You want to develop on OSX, but Apple terminated their 1U server line aeons ago, so build farms and CI pipelines that are actually building all those wonderful iOS apps are forced to use racks and racks of mac minis -- a consumer-grade product not in the least suitable for enterprise use. They've gotten worse over the years too, as last I checked their RAM is now soldered on to the motherboard so it's not even upgradable. Cooling of these racks of mac minis is a nightmare, and it's a real waste of space as well, as there's a lot of wasted space in the racks betwen the four mac minis per U. Mac Pro's were another option that was just as bad in its own way.
Theoretically you could run OSX on a Supermicro or something (as a so-called "hackintosh"), but it's not supported and (though IANAL) seems to go against Apple's Terms of Service which only allow running OSX on Apple hardware, so it's usually not a realistic option, even though it might be a lot less hassle than running on dinky consumer-grade Apple hardware.
I'm not sure if Apple even has half a clue as to what it takes to support its development ecosystem, or maybe it just doesn't care because it's raking in the dough hand over fist no matter what they do.
I get it that he's ranting, but there's nothing new here. Apple software quality started to go downhill a long time ago, and now their hardware is catching up. It makes sense because hardware has a longer lead time. Anybody who disagrees can try explaining the mess that iTunes has become, or why I have to reboot both my phone and laptop (almost) every time I try tethering.
I remember being forced to use it when I got my first iPod over a decade ago and it was an awful bloated mess which couldn't deal with my mp3 collection properly (~50+GB at the time). I could count on it to just corrupt or reformat my iPod, crash, hang or corrupt the library at least once a month.
It left a very bad taste in my mouth and I have not purchased Apple hardware or software since.
One thing I disagree with the author, is that I don't think this is downgrade, I consider this is an upgrade, cuz there's more in a computer than just the spec.
Tho I'm not sure what I will use in 3 years, there might not be trustworthy macbook air anymore then.
I got a new MBP for work, and every time I go home to my ~2015 model I am so happy to not be typing on this new shitty keyboard, and that is to say nothing of the oversized trackpad always accidentally causing me to move my cursor with my palm.