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Apple Halting Mac Component Orders Due to Overestimated Demand?
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No. The average Mac buying consumer or business user wouldn't know what Haswell is.
All depends how you spin it
I go out on a limb here and argue that the exactly same piece of news would have caused a rally in Apple shares when they were still Wallstreet's darling because the speculation would not have gone into 'lagging sales' but 'new/much improved products around the corner' .
I go out on a limb here and argue that the exactly same piece of news would have caused a rally in Apple shares when they were still Wallstreet's darling because the speculation would not have gone into 'lagging sales' but 'new/much improved products around the corner' .
start putting graphics cards in the "13 mbp, lower the price by $200 dollars use a material that doesnt cause the machine to overheat while playing facebook games (gf not me ;p ) better airflow system, better screens for machines priced at over £800 should be the norm, better integration for ipad and osx.
Well, I do. Some of my friends do. My business does. Looks like we´re the elite, then.
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That one will probably come with an Intel HD Graphics 5200 and EDRAM (GT3), which is quite fast for an iGPU.
What most people who read and write on forums seems to forget or perhaps don't realize is that most people who buys computers doesn't give a flying **** about specs and what Apple's or Intel's release cycles are. "Haswell" is a concept that makes sense to perhaps 1% of all who buys Macs. "Retina" is a concept that might equate to "monitor looks better" which is a highly subjective feature that most won't wait for, if it is recognized at all.
Most people and most companies buy computers when it suits them, not when platform X reaches milestone Y. An the quantity "a lot of people" is too subjective. 1% of people buying Macs, around 200000 people yearly, that's still a lot of people.
No. You simply know the cpu's name. Most don't and don't care. A newer cpu is faster and that is what's important.
I'm also waiting for an update to buy a new mac (probably a macbook air) I have an Imac 2007 and it's still doing pretty ok.
IF, and I mean IF sales are down, I see three possible factors
price
it's high, it has always been high yes, but the market was different (the difference between mac and pc was huge, now they copy and steal each other every 5-6 months), the economic situation was different
product
Imac only the 2k Imac got an 'ok' graphics card, srsly?(but it's so thin!)
macbook air, it's display is just NOT living up to today standards and the bezel is fugly. I returned the 2012 model for this.
macbook retina, the retina is too expensive for the rumours about it. (bugs, screen manufacturer, everyone reads reviews)
mac pro, what's this?
mac mini, i consider this as a niche product
promotion
80% of all the rumours and advertising are about iphones and ipads. They consider the iphone as a cash cow and the ipad as a star. Macs are less important, i hope they are not considered as sleeping dogs lol
IF, and I mean IF sales are down, I see three possible factors
price
it's high, it has always been high yes, but the market was different (the difference between mac and pc was huge, now they copy and steal each other every 5-6 months), the economic situation was different
product
Imac only the 2k Imac got an 'ok' graphics card, srsly?(but it's so thin!)
macbook air, it's display is just NOT living up to today standards and the bezel is fugly. I returned the 2012 model for this.
macbook retina, the retina is too expensive for the rumours about it. (bugs, screen manufacturer, everyone reads reviews)
mac pro, what's this?
mac mini, i consider this as a niche product
promotion
80% of all the rumours and advertising are about iphones and ipads. They consider the iphone as a cash cow and the ipad as a star. Macs are less important, i hope they are not considered as sleeping dogs lol
I think you nailed it - if your 3 year-old machine is doing the job, why change it for something 10% faster? The biggest real-life speed boost comes from the move to SSD, which (as you have obviously found out) is an easy DIY upgrade.
Having said that - I've looked at the 13" rMBP in shops and it is a thing of beauty - the USP for me is how good the screen looks in "more space" mode which gives you a lot more real estate than any other 13". Its also usefully thinner and lighter than the 13" MBP.
The flies in the ointment are, as you say, the non-upgradable 8G ram and the high cost of having more than 256GB of SSD. I could probably live with 8GB (esp. with the improved VM performance of an SSD) but if I were buying a non-upgradeable machine I'd want to max it out to start with.
However - last weeks stats show that the whole PC market is getting hammered (for much the same reason) but Apple is doing better than average.
+1 I agree, took me years to upgrade my G5 tower to a new iMac the main reason I finally upgraded was the growing lack of support for the PPC Mac. Although it does feel great to have a much faster Mac now.
I don´t know a lot of people that own Macbooks, but the ones that do, know about the specs often beforehand. Since I work in IT, I´m surrounded by more informed people. Yes, the masses probably don´t know that, that´s true. And businesses don´t care either, they just buy what´s available.
Well, lower prices and sell more.
I am not saying Apple products are overpriced, but these are still economic downtimes and for some time to come too.
Most of the people I know with good salary cannot or are not willing to buy expensive apple laptops.. There are other things that rank higher on the list.
I am not saying Apple products are overpriced, but these are still economic downtimes and for some time to come too.
Most of the people I know with good salary cannot or are not willing to buy expensive apple laptops.. There are other things that rank higher on the list.
To most people speed does not matter either. Will this computer run X app or do Y function/feature. That's all most people care about.
Could just be they bulk bought when they needed the components, or they switched to suppliers who don't leak... or any one of many other things. I think the salient point is that which Tim Cook made, which is that without a context for why things are happening, even if it's accurate that a certain thing is happening, it doesn't necessarily mean what people think it means.
Best Buy Apple kiosks have always been a ghost town bc Best Buy monkeys push PCs. When have you ever seen the Apple section staffed?
They're great pieces of kit but they are undoubtedly overpriced now especially given the difficult economic global background and the emergence of tablets as viable and cheaper alternatives.
People just don't have several thousand dollars, pounds or euros to throw at a new laptop every two years especially given that these devices are now so inherently powerful. A four year old Macbook will still happily cope with everything most users can throw at it.
The introduction of the retina MBP's has increased the cost of Apple notebooks just at the time many are unable to afford them or are increasing the length of time they keep a laptop.
This has started to hit Apple but the impact on Microsoft/Intel will be even greater given their deliberate attempt to build a 2 year lifespan into most products which no longer holds up.
You make a valid point. Writing an article about one aspect of a company, ie apple's supply chain, then in the same article say that company's CEO advises against "reading too much into the supply chain".
This is like when MacRumors put up "there will be a 2nd iPad released in 2011 rumours (ie another one after the iPad 2). After Jobs said this:
So is this current article on Apple's supply chain, saying the Apple CEO is wrong? Just like they incorrectly claimed the Apple CEO was wrong in 2011?
MacRumors really thinks people will believe a random rumour over the words from the mouth of the Apple CEO? If MacRumors believe this, then they are very mistaken indeed.
That's the same as in the last five years. As my mother used to say, "we are poor. We can't afford to buy cheap things". When times are hard, you look very carefully where to spend your money. People still can afford spending $1000 on a MBP; they can't afford wasting $500 on a laptop that ends up not being used because it is rubbish.
Mac sales have been growing. Even if it is not growing, Mac marketshare is growing, and the major case for sales growing less than previously is the success of the iPad, so Apple isn't exactly suffering. Just like Apple isn't really worrying about shrinking iPod sales, because most people who don't buy an iPod don't do so because they are buying an Apple iPhone. And it has been noted that Apple makes more money selling Macs than Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer and Asus combined make selling PCs.
See, you are playing tricks here. You make an unfounded and unproven claim (overpriced) and than add the word "undoubtedly" to it. No, they are not undoubtedly overpriced. Most people doubt very much that Macs are overpriced. Actually, not only do they doubt it, the people doubting it are correct. Apple doesn't make cheap computers. But when you compare Macs to similar products made by others, it turns out time and time again that Macs are actually excellent value compared to quality products made by other companies. When the Retina 15" MBP was released, which is not cheap even to Apple's standards, I went to Dell's website and tried to find a comparable product. While Dell offers many, many cheap laptops, something comparable to the Retina 15" MBP (quad core, similar speed, same RAM, same SSD, 1920 x 1080 screen, no mention of weight and battery life) was actually more expensive.
Whatever it is, it is not a big jump that makes a Mac with Haswell processor an entirely different beast (unless you are into high performance computing or do quad precision maths calculations, where FMA is an absolute killer feature. iMac with Haswell could be capable of 200 billion double precision floating point operations per second). You buy a new Mac when your old one breaks down, or when the difference between new and old is big enough. And that just takes three years for some, five years for others. For switchers from Windows, Haswell is at most 5 percent of the reason to switch.
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If you think about it, the truck analogy is slowly coming true. If you look at and compare desktop, notebook and tablet sales.
I guess people just don't need to upgrade their computers all the time, like they used to. My MBP is over three years old and I don't feel the need to upgrade at all. It's a little slow, I guess, but more RAM and a SSD would fix that right up.