321–330 of 353 posts
There is one thing that to me indicates Apple has really thought through the consequences of this new design: The fact that the SSD is socketed and thus user removable. The machine retains that most critical aspect of home or in-store servicability. Why this is important: the specific failure case where you have a faulty logic board, or any other failure that requires a full machine replacement. You still have the ab…
> Would we support laptops that required replacement every year or two as applications required more memory and batteries atrophied? This is the key misunderstanding most people made: a 2010 MacBook Air still makes a fine system, even for software developers. For almost all users, hardware capacity has exceeded their needs for years and the newer battery technology holds up better than the older designs as well.
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Upgrade-by-replacement. In 2 years you'll still be able to sell this machine for about 70% of its original price. From there you can buy the latest & greatest model at basically a 70% discount. Factor in the price of the parts you would have upgraded and I bet it's a wash or pretty close to it.
Where do you get the 70% figure from? I bought my 2010 MBP almost exactly 2 years ago for $2700 + ~$300 for an SSD + drive enclosure. Today I'd be lucky to sell it for $1500 considering you can get a 2011 MBP refurb for that price.
That said, pick up a $1,500 MacBook Pro and you shouldn't have any trouble selling it on for $1,000 after two years of ownership. Even better if you bought it with a student discount, and it has a three-year warranty (included with the student discount, at least in the UK).
It's something people often don't consider in the 'Mac vs. PC' debate. Yes, a MacBook Pro may be $200 more expensive than a similarly specced laptop from another manufacturer, but it's the total cost of ownership you should be considering, and PCs tend to depreciate an awful lot worse than Macs...
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I'm sorry, but you'll need to back up that claim with some sources. It absolutely does not stand on its own. The only example I can think of would be the Macbook Air and how it has inspired the rest of the industry to make more lightweight laptops. Apart from that, I cannot see a single thing Apple has done which the industry has followed on, mostly hardware-vise, for their PCs, Apple has done almost zero innovation.…
Among others: - Ditching the floppy disk drive on the original iMac G3. - Switching to all USB instead of a mix of serial and parallel ports. - The one piece case design of the late 2008 Macbook Pro as now mimicked by half of HPs laptop range. And that's just the easy ones.
And ditching the floppy was actually something you could not do on a Windows-machine until quite recently. I'm not sure if you are aware of this or not, but until Windows Vista, if you wanted to install Windows on a machine which had IO controllers or other hardware it did not recognize required to complete the install, you would need to provide Windows setup with drivers. And until Windows Vista those drivers could only be provided by a floppy. For real. I know it sounds like madness, but those were the breaks. PC vendors had to deal with that.
So basically until Vista, having a floppy-drive was a defacto requirement for a Windows-machine. And people didn't like Vista, so until Windows 7 you sort of had to play by those rules as well.
As for laptops, I find it hard to give Apple credit for innovating when all they did was the same as everyone else, make things smaller and lighter, only taking it a bit further.
So... None of your points have any substance to them what so ever. But you said those were the easy ones. In fact they were so easy that they completely missed.
With that out of the way, please feed my interest. Give me the real juice, the uneasy ones, if you like. Tell me how Apple in any way has done anything which can be considered innovative in the desktop space, which "the rest of the industry will copy"?
I'm thrilled with interest here.
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Among others: - Ditching the floppy disk drive on the original iMac G3. - Switching to all USB instead of a mix of serial and parallel ports. - The one piece case design of the late 2008 Macbook Pro as now mimicked by half of HPs laptop range. And that's just the easy ones.
Switching to all USB was a natural consequence of all new gadgets and equipment coming with a USB connector, not a innovation by Apple. And ditching the floppy was actually something you could not do on a Windows-machine until quite recently. I'm not sure if you are aware of this or not, but until Windows Vista, if you wanted to install Windows on a machine which had IO controllers or other hardware it did not recogn…
Same could be said with Bluetooth. Lot's of talk about how great it was/would be, but none of the PC manufacturers really did anything with it until Apple started to ship it standard on their devices and make a fuss about it.
Ditto with WiFi. I believe that the original iBook was the first mainstream computer designed and sold with integrated wireless networking. I don't recall any PC manufacturers chomping at the bit to make it standard across the range on their models.
"As for laptops, I find it hard to give Apple credit for innovating when all they did was the same as everyone else, make things smaller and lighter, only taking it a bit further.'
Taking it "a bit further" by innovating in manufacturing processes. Please point me to PC laptops that were constructed from a single block of aluminium prior to the late 2008 Macbook Pro.
Given that you seem to claim that there is so much rampant innovation in the PC market, please point it out.
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> your *clunky* Dell laptop Careful, there. Your bias is showing.
I use a Dell laptop every day. I really enjoy it. Competent and well-built machine. Good value, all that. If I put it next to my wife's MacBook Pro, well, the only word for it is "clunky". Put a reasonably handsome man next to George Clooney and he'll look clunky, too.
Of course, they have also made it somewhat shamelessly MacBook like in certain respects: large touchpad, calculator-style keyboard...
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If Dell comes up with something as refined as the MacBook Air in the next few years, I'll be truly surprised. HP has been working towards making better products through better design. Sony keeps working on creating these crazy, over-styled products, but they are different. Dell seems to be cranking out the same basic thing.
Those aren't the only companies making Windows-based PCs. I use a Toshiba laptop.
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That's a lot of net profit into their pocket, for each unit. You should never price things based solely on how much the inputs cost. If people are willing to pay huge premiums for incremental RAM upgrades, Apple will gladly let them.
Willing is not the same as having no other choice.
But you do have a choice. Apple still makes the older MBP design with greater upgradeability. The tradeoff, though, is that if you want the sexy screen, you give up the upgrade options.
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I deleted my post because honestly I think Apple and its future belongs to users like yourself, and that it will work out fine for everyone in the end. Just know that I have been buying a respectable number of Apple machines over the years, including three Mac Pros - which probably just confirms that I really am a member of an audience that Apple actively tries to get rid of. So yeah, I can afford a MacBook Pro. I'm…
What will you replace it with? That's my problem -- I require Mac OS X.