THe difference is that Dell is way much less money. In addition, Apple used to lead, and now is trailing. You are trying to compare a Mercedes with a Fiat. Or so people claim that Apple suppose to be so much better...
I certainly know that we can carry a 4tb external HD. Which actually defeats the purpose of portability. 256gb internal in todays world when phones can have 256gb capability seems like a joke for Pro Computer.
Is progress alienating your entire customer base and not be able to connect you own Apple products? That is extremely poor design. They just could have included one old USB port so people can still use all the external HDs and legacy USB Hardware including connecting their own iPhones and save themselves alot of issues... but they did not...
It is NOT debatable. Again it is just an excuse for Apple to charge for more expensive repairs. It is ridiculous that a so called Pro Machine cannot be upgraded. Furthermore, having all components soldered has been proven to be more prone to data loss should any of the components fail.
Failure rates among PC manufacturers and Apple will tell us if Apple has made the right choice, but they have been doing this for a while with their various product lines, and I have not heard that Apple is having more returns due to fauly DRAM and flash storage.
We do not have to wait. Apple has been doing wrong choices for many years already. You can see that in the poor quality and design of the latest Macbooks. The 2016, had problems with battery, has a class action lawsuit for the keyboard problems (which they new and concealed) and they discounted all the adaptors to ridiculous prices due to the so bad PR it got on release due to the lack of ports and expandability.
and what is worse no one is fired...
Plenty of auto manufacturers would love to figure out how to seal the engine bay shut and never have to replace tires on a car, leaving us to replace the whole car once it dies. Volvo was the first to concept that, they will not be the last.
The TouchBar does not add $300 to the cost of the MBP, at least not the 15". The 2015 base started at $1999, but had no discrete GPU, which would have added at least $200 to the price. You can figure $200 maximum for the TouchBar, maybe less. Some people love it, some people hate it, but it is what it is. I will mark you down in the "Hate It" category.
Trying to force a useless touchbar on the entire line in order to overcharge the All the customers, it does not look like a good idea. That is why people are voting with their wallets and waiting to buy for the Macbooks without the touchbar.
Apple has not been selling less due to poor design. They have been selling less because they have 3 product lines that have not been upgraded in 3 years or more (Mac mini, MacBook Air and Mac Pro). Hopefully, along with an overdue upgrade for the iMac, these lines will be refreshed and Apple will provide some much overdue commitment to the Mac.
I would love Apple to disclose the return rates of the 2016 Macbook Pros... but they won't.
Not just the Macbook, but the entire Apple computer line up is so outdated that is beyond ridiculous.
What is worse, is that in the past 9 years, we have not seen any major computer innovation in any of Apple computers.
Apple only upgraded internal components. I think that is quite a long time for the customers to wait.
They even say clearly on their Ads.... What's a computer...??
If I buy a Dell XPS 13 (9370) with a Core i7-8550U, 8GB RAM, 256GB m.2 NVMe storage and upgrade to the UHD display they offer, I am at exactly the same cost as the base 13" MacBook Pro w/Touch Bar - $1799.00. So,
no, the Dell is not "way much less money".
For the same amount of money, users have to decide on a couple of tradeoffs, would they rather have a faster CPU with the MacBook Pro or the higher resolution screen in the Dell. Make sure you decide how much DRAM you need with either one, because it is soldered to the motherboard on both the Dell XPS and the Apple MacBook Pro. The Dell lets you exchange out storage, should you want, so points go to Dell for that. All in all though, they are very similar, and so are their prices. Any premium laptop, which is what Apple sells, is going to cost more money, whether it is from Dell, HP, Lenovo or Apple.
Apple has the widest array of storage options compared to others when it comes to their laptops now. 128GB all the way up to 4TB. The upgrades are not all that expensive if you look at the cost of a top tier m.2 NVMe drive and not the New Egg Shell Shocker of the Day deals, which these Apple's are not. You cannot even buy a 4TB m.2 NVMe drive as far as I can find. If I sit down and seriously analyze what I have on my work MacBook Pro, 512GB is plenty for my usage. A post from another user said that he finally felt like he had breathing room now that he could upgrade to the 2TB tier on the 13" MacBook Pro. Maybe he has a valid reason, maybe not, maybe he never deletes anything. I personally do not need that much storage, especially not on a portable computer, too many things can happen. Again, YMMV.
Whether or not the iPhone can be purchsed with 256GB of storage is not germane to the issue. The iPad Pro has a 512GB version, but having that much storage does not make it any more or less "Pro" for the user who cannot get the work done on it that they need to do...64, 256 or 512GB, it is still just as useless.
Any time there is progress, people are going to get alienated, it is human nature. I remember when USB was introduced and I worked with people who were pissed off to no end, because USB was not nearly plug and play as everyone would like to think. And it was designed to replace the Serial, Parallel and PS/2 ports on a computer. Again, if you need to connect your iPhone to a USB-C port, there is a cable for that. If you need to connect it to a USB printer or USB audio interface, there is cable for that. If you need to connect it to your Kindle or Android phone, there is a cable for that. If you need to connect to a managed switch with a DB-9 serial port, there is a cable for that. Sure, not everything is going to get a cable or they have USB Type-A permanently attached, but there are adapters for that. Adapters are a fact of life for both PC and Mac users. I have an old Microsoft Office keyboard that I adored, but it was USB only and the computer I was using it with did not have USB, it had PS/2 ports, so I had to use an ADAPTER/DONGLE. My Kindle Fire tablet and my Surface RT have HDMI out, but it is mini-HDMI connector, so I had to buy a new cable or buy an adapter. I did not spend my days crapping on Amazon and Microsoft because they did not make it a full size HDMI port.
Yes,
it is debatable, unless you have specific information (case studies, reports, et al.) that clearly point out that soldering on the memory and flash storage is inherently less reliable. I would argue that it is more reliable as Apple can do individual QA of the components while qualifying the boards before assembly into the enclosure. They could do the same with an m.2 socket or an SO-DIMM slot, but those require human hands to seat those components, which is another way for static electricity to be introduced into the system. After sale, you also have unknown variables when people decide to upgrade, including whether or not the person buys the right parts and knows how to install them correctly. I did have one Apple Genius tell me that people upgrading their DRAM themselves was the single largest failure point for Macs. Take it for what it is worth, it is one Genius at one store who told to me, so anecdotal and not gospel.
If you do not back up your data, you have no one to blame but yourself. Stuff breaks, no matter who makes it...Apple is not some guy in a top hat twirling his moustache waiting for your computer to break just so he can stick it to you.
Reliability of Apple's computers and your opinion that Apple has been making the wrong choices for years are not the same thing. Battery problems are not exclusive to Apple and are not limited to the 2016 MacBook Pro (can you say Samsung). While the keyboard does have issues (although, I have not had one single issue with mine), the problem has been magnified 100x by a certain segment of users on this forum who are upset with Apple about the design of the 2016-2018 MacBook Pros in general and latched on to the issue to try and prove what a horrible computer Apple made. Someone could literally find the
cure for cancer using a 2016 MacBook Pro and there would be sneers of, "Bet he could have found it faster if he didn't have to use that s***y keyboard!" on this forum.
Again, while the Touch Bar might be useless to you, it is not useless to others. Apple made a decision that it was enough of an innovation that they included it in the entire MacBook Pro series. I would love to see a standalone keyboard with the Touch Bar, but I suspect that it would be around $200-$250 and I think Apple knows that the market for that is quite small at this time. Perhaps, Apple will introduce it and lower the cost of the MacBook Pro in the future.
The low sales for the quarter come from the fact that several of the product line need refreshes desperately (Mac mini, MacBook Air, MacBook and Mac Pro), along with the fact that there were no new Macs introduced during the quarter. Both the MacBook and MacBook Air are waiting on CPUs to be released by Intel (Amber Lake Y-series and Coffee/Whiskey Lake U-series with Iris Plus GPUs), the Mac Pro is 2019 and that leaves the 21.5" and 27" iMacs that will most likely get 9th-Gen Coffee Lake CPUs, skipping the 8th-Gen. Heck, even the iMac Pro might soon be updated to a 22-core Xeon if Intel has it ready when they release the 22-core version of the Core i9 X-Series.
Apple probably will not disclose anything to you or me. So what?
The
entire Apple computer lineup is not outdated. The MacBook Pros all use the most recently released CPUs, the MacBook has the latest shipping CPUs from Intel, the iMac has Kaby Lake, which is hardly outdated or slow, just not the most recently released. The Mac mini, MacBook Air and the Mac Pro all need to be updated, and hopefully, they will be.
The personal computer is a mature product, I am not exactly sure what major innovations you are looking for from Apple, or anyone else for that matter.
Indeed,
what is a computer? Your iPad, your iPhone, your Mac, your Watch? There is nothing wrong with emotional investment until it turns into entitlement and outrage, but I digress.
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A 2014 model bought in 2015?
Don't be facetious, Apple update the iMac twice in 2015, just as I posted earlier. Nice try.
https://support.apple.com/en_US/specs/imac
