The thing to understand about apple is…they’re a bussiness.
They will do anything to make you leave your money at their store, this includes making simple technology seem like magic, and forcing you to only use their software store, not even M$ is as bad as apple.
Apple invents nothing, and sells years old hardware at a premium price, slaps it in a nice alumium cabinet, and install their own version of bsd. And tells you it is magic, but it really isn’t, it is just a old version of a open source OS, and in the case they go for bleeding edge hardware you get the core i9 latop which overheated.
With the loss of steve jobs, i expect alot of apple users to leave the highly priced ecosystem, because with the what are we at? iphone XS? they’ve just lost their mind, when it comes to blackmailing the customers, with the headphone jack socket, which is about the oldest, and most used interface ever, and they wanna make you pay an extra 10$ premium —>for a dongle<---- to use it… ontop of a allready jacked up iphone costing what? 1200$… because they removed it from the older 1000$ model, and for the hardware just a tad better then a raspberry pi, really #golfclap. But yet the cult makes people slurp that shit right up as innovative by marketing, and again the fancy alumium case.
They’ve always done this.
Mate, apple/NEXT (which is what the current Apple is a continuation of) are a lot of things, and they make some short-term user-unfriendly hardware choices, but you’re way off base.
Some of the things that have been heavily funded by, pushed hard to get traction in the real world, or started within apple and released as open source that are fucking great…
- MDNS (for autoconf) - RFC submitted by Apple
- NAT-PMP
- multi-path TCP
- Swift
- clang
- gcd
- webkit
- opencl
etc.
To say they invent nothing (and just re-package BSD unix) is complete fucking bullshit mate.
Hardware wise they pushed high-speed flash in almost all their machines, high dpi screens in almost all their machines, pushed adoption of USB 1 (without the legacy free iMac, USB would not have ever gained traction as there would have been no peripheral market for it), etc. They raised the bar.
Like it or hate it Apple mac hardware is the primary reason new hardware standards get adopted. Leave it to PCs and people will just keep using their old shit forever - you can still get PS2 and VGA ports on PCs for fucks sake and that shit should have died 15-20 years ago.
Apple’s abandonment of legacy stuff is not why they’re pissing me off. I applaud that. My beef is purely with pricing. Fact is i need to pay 500-1000 dollars more today for a similarly positioned notebook to what i bought 3 and 7 years ago.
In the PC world, prices for similar spec hardware have fallen. Apple’s hardware isn’t that far ahead any more.
The Macbook used to be THE standard for good quality trackpad, speakers, display and keyboard. There used to be a good reason to pay the premium, and at least 3 years ago if you compared like for like properly the premium was pretty fucking minimal vs. a comparable PC.
Now? They current keyboard is a shit show. The screens aren’t anything special, and PCs have caught way up. But Apple’s pricing has risen while others have fallen.
THAT is my beef. Quality is down and price is up.
Well Apple is gaining me as a customer.
Just to level the playing fields.
Even though Firewire was the better standard, with faster data rates and more power draw limits
3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Continuing the discussion from [Apple losing me as a customer]
They pushed FireWire too when no one else did.
Actually. Add FireWire to one of the things they co-developed. And thunderbolt.
FireWire was more expensive and thus intended for high bandwidth peripherals (back in the day thunderbolt equivalent).
USB was for everything else.
Too bad for you that Apple has exited the wifi market: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/04/26/apple-officially-discontinues-airport-wireless-router-lineup/
And, yes, it should be that simple. I guess Apple just wasn’t selling enough of them to make it worth their while.
Yeah, aware of that. Annoying. Airport wifi APs were some of the better gear on the market for a home use situation.
Or wireless in general. I’ve been reading that their W1 chip is just great to use.
Nothing compares to the tracpad on my MacbookPro Love it.
And my Performa laptop from 1995 still works. So does my Clamshell mac from the early 2000’s. And my MacPro 2009which I use daily for Logic Pro on My 30 Inch Apple Cinema Dislpay.
Mac built quality that Lasts.
But lately it seems it’s gone downhill. I will stick to my 2014 MacbookPro (awesome computer) and won’t buy a new Macbook because of shoddy quallity, no ports, no upgradeablity. Apple needs to get back to sanity and build quality again with options we want. I don’t want my Macbook to be a iPad with a keyboard attached, they are two different items with different uses.
On a personal note, I do think I’m going to upgrade my first generational Retna ipad to a 12" ipad Pro because i LOVE the apple Pen. I’ve used procreate on my ipad for years, but combine it with the new Pen and it is better than my Wacom Intuos tablet!!!
I’m waiting for this years refresh, if they keep the headphone jack I’ll buy the new version, if they drop it I will buy the Current one with the headphone jack.
I’ve got the 10.5 iPad Pro and it is indeed great.
I wouldn’t personally let the headphone jack (if it disappears on the next model) be a deal breaker to be honest.
Either use the adapter or bluetooth headphones. The CPU performance improvements are always well worth it.
Apple collecting is huge in the vintage computer hobby.
A Lisa is huge prize. I did have a working Apple IIe. You can never fully get the nicotine stains off the plastic no matter what you scrub it with.
As a commercial driver I always stop and log “on duty” on the truck’s computer. Anything really bad happens my phone will be confiscated as evidence.
I too have been a long time Apple fan from my very first Apple II until the day they put out a non-upgradeable trashcan that doesn’t meet my needs and called it a “pro”, whatever that means anymore…
Every mac I’ve ever purchased (with the exception of the original bondi-blue iMac) was user upgradeable. I even managed to upgrade the hard drive, memory and even added a Voodoo2 card to that iMac.
The day I needed to replace my 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 was the day I realized, Apple no longer makes a product that meets my needs at any price. I’ve been willing to pay for Apple products for a long time but that was the first time I came to realize it didn’t mater how much I was willing to pay. Apple just didn’t value me as a customer anymore.
That’s when I broke down and built myself a hackintosh. It scratched the itch for a time but anyone who’s done this may be able to relate, it really isn’t the best solution for a daily driver. Great fun to tinker with, but software updates are always met with trepidation and can take hours or even days to resolve unexpected issues. Great as a hobby but not so great for a computer I actually want to use.
I’ve been finding myself using other operating systems for a while now. I’ve run windows in bootcamp for years for gaming so that wasn’t a difficult transition but lack of unix underpinnings and of course MS shenanigans of their own has always left me unsatisfied. I’ve used Linux for many things, but its just not there as a daily driver either. I mean, its usable and I can get many things to work but its only just a step above hackintosh for ease of doing what you want to do many times.
Sadly, the grass is not greener on any side… I think I’m feeling what many comodore fans must have felt years ago. They’ve had decades to come to terms with it though.
While I’m no longer a huge fan, I’m not completely divorcing the relationship… yet. I’m far too invested in the ecosystem to give up on my iphone but that may change too if they keep making the same ridiculous decisions they’ve been doing.
Sadly, Android offerings aren’t any better and often worse in many ways… grass isn’t any greener here either.
The whole eGPU craze is giving me some hope of an “upgradeable” Mac in the future. Hopefully we’ll start to see Thunderbolt expansion chassis with multiple PCIe slots at more reasonable prices than the current generation. But for now such things are too expensive to tempt me, as well as the fact that most of them are exclusive to Thunderbolt 3.
Your post probably is better than my OP for expressing my feelings.
It is going to be so hard to get out of the Apple ecosystem and really there is no where to turn right now that is better, but I can’t stand what they are doing.
My iPhone 6plus is slowly dieing (often won’t charge, doing weird, random things, etc etc) but I just don’t want any of the new iPhones. I’m going to try to hold on to this until it’s absolutely dead, then I don’t know what I’m goign to do… there are a few 6s Plusses new to be found… but for how long? And how long until an update makes both the 6 plus and 6s plus obsolete like they did with my retina iPad???
Very sad time for me right now. Want to yell and scream at apple to stop this nonsense but they seem set to double down on it device after device.
This.
I’m at “grudging acceptance” stage.
The alernatives?
- Windows 10 - nope. not on my watch. at least not for anything other than a game loader
- android? nope. less secure, doesn’t work with the rest of my devices, and Google are an NSA front
- linux - not quite there yet, and i find the mac so much more productive any time i’m actually doing something other than games, plus i’m pretty far into the apple ecosystem
So. The price rises. Annoying. The hardware changes - i agree with many of them but some are annoying. Overall however there’s nothing in my opinion that is anywhere close as far as a cohesive user experience across many devices goes.
That’s worth money to me. How much money? Well… that’s an open question, and Apple are pushing the boundaries of that relationship at the moment.
edit:
ex-Amiga refugee here too
So I went to all the T-mobiles in my area and couldn’t find a 6plus or 6splus.
Then I went to apple store, same answer.
But they said the problem with my phone was known issue so they replaced it for 150 dollars with an allegedly new 6 Plus.
I say allegedly because it did not come in a factory new box, and when I got it home it wouldn’t charge with any of my chargers. So I went and bought two brand new apple chargers. Still won’t charge.
So back to the apple store tomorrow.
Very, very sad. 
Hold up, there’s an app called pro create?
Hahahahaha that’s great.
“There’s an app for that.” - Apple