There isn’t a brainwashing event every year telling you about the next great toaster. There isn’t a forum called toaster rumors with articles comparing your toaster to the next one. Many people are easy targets
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Apple Users Are Keeping Their Devices for Longer as Upgrades Slow
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Because they were rubbish? HP, Toshiba, Asus, whatever, by year 3 they were all dying, and I'd have to nurse them along for as long as possible until I could shell out for another. Broken hinges, cracked cases, replaced HDDs, many Windows re-installs, etc. Until 2012, when I got a MacBook Air, which I used daily until this year.
My desktops survived far longer by virtue of continual upgrades. By the time I replaced my previous PC, the case was the only original part. My current PC is escaping that by virtue of my not using it. It's not even plugged in, it's under a pile of boxes. Eventually I'll want to play Train Sim World 4, and dust it off, but until then, I've got no reason to bother finding it.
From what I’ve seen amount private individuals, they keep their Macs for several years. Businesses do tend to replace theirs after 4-5 years. That the survey topped out at 3 years means it really didn’t capture a clear picture of really.
If you turn on the feature that displays what Siri hears on your screen, you will see that Siri generally hears you just fine. The problems are later in the process when Siri’s 10 year old natural language processing AI shows how antiquated it is and Siri completely misinterprets your request. LLMs are much better at interpreting intent and that is the big improvement we hope to see in Siri 2.0.
If that were really true they would engineer their devices to fail quickly. That doesn’t happen because people don’t like it. They would switch to another company’s products. People like Apple products because, in general, they last longer than many other product lines. Fortunately cynicism doesn’t make products fail faster.
It depends on their state of mind. Those who consider themselves a failure will always fail.
I know people much older than that who have no trouble with technology. My father at age 60 learned to install Linux on his PC and do a lot of useful things. He would have loved the AVP.
What are the year and specs of your "old" iMac, and what are you hoping to do with the new machine? (Let's see if I can save you a pile of money that otherwise would go to the NSA skinsuit.)
That may be true with those manufacturers (I have a non-Apple laptop that work provided (although I appear to have lost it so can't check the manufacturer, I should probably try to find that....), seems fairly well made), but we're talking about Apple PCs here. I haven't heard of those sorts of issues occurring with Apple PCs, certainly haven't happened to mine.
LLM don't interpret intent, they merely give back the most statistically relevant response from the training data.
NLP has been doing this pretty accurately for a decade, Apple just has not kept up, or does not have the skills to do it correctly. There is no reason to believe that they will get it right for several more years.
Car manufactures are not going to receive it. CarPlay 2 requires the car manufacture to design the on-board computer differently.
Apple can release it to any car manufactures that wants it right now, but Apple treats car manufacturers like it treats its developers, "Apple nanny way or the hiway". Car manufactures are done putting up with that because they are large enough to ignore Apple.
You missed the point: if devices were more repairable and upgradeable people could keep their phone, laptop or tablet for 10 years or more instead of just 5-6 years. Not good for Apple’s pocket, so they sealed the devices and glued everything to reduce its useful life to only 5-6 years. And that’s now. They were even more aggressive on that years ago (examples: the original ipad stopped getting software updates only 2 years after its release, now all ipads get at least 5 years. The original apple watch stopped getting software updates only 2 years after its release, whereas now apple watches get at least 5-6 years of updates).
Exactly right
I don't know why so many folks defending Apple practices gloss over this.
5-6 years is nice ... 6+ is way better!
Every day I use a 9 year old MBP, two different 8 year old iPhone SE1s and always, every single day, I'm using one or two of my 10-13 year old iPod Shuffles
I would use the Shuffles in perpetuity if I could replace the batteries ... sadly I've lost 2 at this point due to that
I now keep my mac for 10 years and don’t upgrade the base OS unless a program upgrade requires it.
You’re wrong. After a device stops getting software updates due to “hardware limitations” the countdown starts for devs to stop supporting their apps on the last software version it did get. And when that happens the device is no longer useful for most people. That’s usually 7 years at most. Almost every user tends to upgrade much sooner than that, though, which is what apple actually wants.
Apple keeps releasing the same phone every year with basically no upgrades at all so why should we buy it?
Chrome will run on macOS Catalina, which is officially supported on machines as old as 2012.
Absolutely, but that’s not 7 years. Apple updates their devices for about that long, then it’s usually years after that before apps stop being supported. The Amazon app needs iOS 15 or later, which the iPhone 6S released in 2015 runs. Roblox needs iOS 12, which the 5S from 2013 runs.
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Oh, i got the point, but I do not believe that very many people really would upgrade their devices after 5-6 years anyway. That is something that a minority of technically minded users would do, but it would have little impact on Apple’s sales volumes.
I can understand your point but I don’t believe that Apple is doing this just to make devices less useful and to push people to upgrade. That is at most a secondary effect.
The counterpoint to that, as I have pointed out numerous times, is that Apple has already factored this in, and pivoted accordingly. They have numerous ways of monetising users who are holding on to their devices longer.
Take a customer who buys a 2nd hand iPhone on the gray market (and therefore earns Apple no money). That person may still go on to purchase accessories like the apple watch, AirPods or AirTags. They may subscribe to services like Apple One, or purchase apps. Heck, simply paying for something with Apple Pay nets Apple a cut. And each iPhone that gets added to the active install base means Apple gets to negotiate for more money from Google just to keep Search default in Safari.
Of course more hardware sold means more money for Apple at the end of the day, but I feel Apple is less bothered about this now than they were in the past.
Nope. Just the iphone sales alone still make up over 50% of their revenue. That’s how much they rely on iphone sales.
Those are just the funny numbers that you the consumer are given, with no way of verifying any of it. Apple Co., like all of "Evil Big Tech", is a skinsuit for intelligence entities. Its mandate is to collect your data and pass it along.
The number probably comes from Apple’s quarterly financial statements. There is not reason for them to lie on that and a lot of reasons not to. You are just fishing for some kind of gotcha but it’s no clear what the aim is.
Apple has been lying around the clock about damned near everything for forty straight years, and are no "cleaner" than Microsoft and Google in that regard.
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