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Are (i)Macs becoming less and less bang-for-buck computers?
- Thread starter Tigerman82
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no crystal ball or meth needed, apple has developed a pattern were the big cat OSXs have become obsolete within the next decade and already the landmark ones are starting to be dropped behind the company rolling ball of progress or stubbornness.
I'm confused by your statement. Apple supports the current, and previous two OS releases with fixes and updates. That means Mojave, High Sierra, and Sierra are still fully supported. Anything behind those OS's is not supported. This is not that unusual, since Apple does not produce an LTS branch for their operating systems. If they were to establish an LTS branch, it probably would be High Sierra for HFS and non-metal GPU support.
It's not like the operating system costs you anything to upgrade. Why would you hang onto an unsupported OS?
The last "great cat" OS was supported until mid 2015. (10.8 - Mountain Lion)
ROTFLMAO
I just love it when someone comes back with that statement. And do you actually run the screen at 5K or do you do the 'Default for display" option to automatic scale down so in reality, you are just getting 1/4 that resolution with it doubling up pixels? What you are really saying is you believe that you need that pixel density because you drank into the Apple Koolaid and now think if it doesn't say Retina then it must be crap.
And what about all of us with this wicked high-resolution 5K monitor that after 2-3 years of use now have terrible screen retention issues that every other REAL monitor that is made don't seem to get? The curse of buying Apple.
Yes, Quality Control is now really in the dumps as Apple is now all about form and fashion over function and reliability. Not to say that Apple doesn't make some technically good hardware and have a pretty reliable software. If all is working fine then you don't have a problem. Some of us have not had as much luck and the side of Apple support is, try installing the latest upgrade and hope it fixes the problem, and if it doens't, just hope it didn't introduce some new ones.
Microsoft isn't much better with the software front. And all the other hardware vendors out there don't offer anything that is a panacea of reliability. You pays your money and takes your chances. If you buy a computer that is 1/2 the price, then if you happen to get the dud, then you are only out half the money and can likely flog it for some money back and buy another one and chances are you next computer won't have anything wrong with it. You have about as much chance of getting a dud with Apple as you do with anyone else. You just pay more.
Question, if fixing a bug requires fixing source code, how do you expect developers to get it to you other than an update? Of course they want you to install the latest update. It has the fixes for known issues in it. I don't understand how you think that is a bad thing.
Simple math will tell you that 27" 3840x2160 and 150% UI scaling results in text and other UI elements at the same size, but only 3/4 as crisp as the 27" 5120x2880 and 200% UI scaling with the Default for Display setting.
Running the 27" 5120x2880 display at 100% UI scaling makes everything too small, but I have no reason to do so as 200% makes everything the right size and quadruples every pixel (150% does not perfectly quadruple every pixel, and hence I can see some issues arising like blurred lines on a fixed-grid UI).
200% UI scaling on the 27" 3840x2160 display makes everything a lot bigger than the 27" 5120x2880 display at 200%, and only gives you the equivalent screen space of a 1080p display.
Yes, given the poor quality control it's a compromise, especially when dealing with image retention on the 2014 and 2015 iMacs (doesn't seem as common on the 2017) and dust spots. But downgrading to a 3840x2160 display from my current 5K iMac would be an even bigger compromise.
Perhaps you should be criticizing other display vendors for not offering a better or more cost-effective 5K display, just as much as you criticize Apple / LG for not offering better quality control on theirs.
If the error was as cut and dry as that then the world would be a far better place. But when you go out and buy a piece of hardware like an iMac, and there are things that just don't work on your new computer that not everybody has issues with, then you can get rather frustrated. For example, the owners of the new iMacPro who are getting non stop T2 Kernel Pannics. This could be a software error, or it could be a chip that is enough out of spec, or it could be a chip placement missalignment that causes the intermittant error, or it could be just bad luck. But if you own one of these rather expensive iMacPro's and cannot get any work done becuase the mac just doesn't want to play nice, and Apple turns to you and says, we will look into it but cannot come up with a solution you would start to get upset. If they don't come up with a solution for 3 years and when your apple care runs out they say, sorry, but the case is now closed, I think you would be rather pissed.
I have one of those first iMac5K from late 2014, that for some reason, Facetime cannot get the associated picture from contacts right when they call me. It rather picks a picture at random. So I can have a work colegue call me, and it will instead of show the right photo associated with that contact, it will randomly pick a picture from another contact and show that. It's rather annoying. I will bet your that I am one of maybe a handful of people who this error occurs to. It is of ZERO priority to fix so it never will be. It has happened with every OSX that has been installled onto this iMac, and trust me I have installed every OS multiple times. Why does it happen??? Apple cannot re-produce the error but have seen it with screen sharing. I just have to live with it.
When Photo's was released, it broke the ability for me to zoom in pictures to associate with a contact. Again, it just does it on this iMac. Again, Apple cannot reproduce the error but have seen it happen and just know it cannot get fixed.
I cannot use a BlueTooth keyboard with this iMac. For some reason, just the bluetooth keyboard and no other bluetooth device will randomly be rejected from the iMac. The only way to get it to work again is to pull the power for 2 minutes and then plug it back in. I have tried to repalce the keyboard 3 times. All get the same problem. I eventually just purchased a usb keyboard and said to hell with trying to figure it out.
All issues on the same iMac but Apple has steadfast said it is not a hardware issue and so no internal hardware on this iMac has been changed other than the display when it started to get really bad retention, but only after I convinced an Apple Genius that it had enough bad pixles on the display. I think he finally just felt sorry for me.
This is what comes with buying an Apple iMac. I bet that anyone reading this will say I have a lemon, but there is nothing I can do to get Apple to fix it. it is now outside of warranty and I just work around the bugs. I bet that 99.99% of the people out there don't have these issues, but if your the unlucky sod who does, then you'd be thinking that Apple are absolute pricks like I do, and would think twice about buying, and if I did and I found any even remotely tiny flaw, then I would simply return it in the 10 day window and try another.
Simple math would also say that a 21mp camera should shoot better than a 16mp if you buy into the pixel count game. But experiance will show that simply packing more pixels doesn't really amount to much, but it is all in the quality of the sensor. And it also knows that if you print it out to a 4x6 standard photograph print, you will be hard pressed to even tell the difference between a 8mp camera shot and a 21. Some times simple math doesn't apply.
The side of retina is that you can say a 5k screen, that gives a somewhat sharper picture due to saturation that you get with a 2560x1440 screen. If you wanted to run a 4k screen, then you are right that the UI at 100% is simply too small to use, and running it at 200% you have effectively a sharper saturation version of a 1920x1080 screen.
I would say that the quality of the screen is more important than the resolution for the most part. A 5K LG screen that has image retention issues and burn in problems is not nearly as good as a 4K or even a 2.5K screen that is colour accurate and has propper sharpness and no screen issues.
Interestingly in my 2010 Mac Pro blutooth never worked properly either. No apple mouse I ever attached would work properly they were super juddery and unusable with drop outs every 5 mins, same with keyboard, my beats X would connect but never work and then just drop out. Since I had the problems I have religiously used wired apple mice and keyboards and I am still using the gen 1 chicklet keyboard from 2007 and the apple mighty mouse from 2005. Still like both a lot although I do have the magic mouse but it was so bad that I only used it with my portables and not often because I dont do a lot of work on them.
With the upgrade to HS everything works a treat which I find odd as it was released 8 years after my mac pro... Got there in the end. Still these things weren't deal breakers but certainly a frustration.
With the upgrade to HS everything works a treat which I find odd as it was released 8 years after my mac pro... Got there in the end. Still these things weren't deal breakers but certainly a frustration.
bingo!, these machines do not stand the test of time and not worth the investment. my 2012 macmini is struggling to run elcapitan and the 2010 MBA has many many issues mostly because apple software is designed not to function smoothly on their older computers.[/QUOTE]
At one point you were paying for the design, quality and experience and the competition was churning out beige boxes. Over the past few years, quality seemed to have slipped a bit with Apple. The design decisions are questionable at best. Take the iMac, why make it thinner? Its not like you're needing to travel with it and making a thin enclosure only causes more headaches. As for the MBP, its a beautiful design but with the hot running coffee lake processors the thin design fails to evacuate the heat as efficiently as it should.
All in all, the competition has beautifully designed computers that are less money and you get more processing power and are equal if not better quality wise.
All in all, the competition has beautifully designed computers that are less money and you get more processing power and are equal if not better quality wise.
a thinner imac means more profits by using less materials and prone to defects with a thinner weaker casing. My biggest complaint with apple computers now is i cannot use ALL my apple products as i did couple of years ago, thanks to their stoppage in support and development. These apple items still power on, function, but are getting limitless by the month in how i used to use them. i think i replaced every mabbook, imac, itouch and ipod. even mice and keyboards since 1998, and tired of doing so!
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Good for you, but i dont use your computer, unless we can work something out?.....highest sierra span span span and span so bad i had to unplug the computer daily. this was just to read a nikon photo card and simply extract some photographs. Im having issues with El Crap were the airport needs to be muted and muted just so that function can work.
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Well its a bit of a stretch to assume apple should support your machine forever... Like all tech as soon as you buy it its out of date. Apple is probably one of the better companies in terms of support, they still support near enough all macs to 2012 and still support the 2010 mac pro... its nearly 2019 thats 9 years of supporting devices. Thats with mojave, HS is still very relevant and also runs faster than mojave and supports machines back to 2009... Sierra is still ok also and that supports mac back to 2009. Even Pre 09 the Core2Duo machines and you cant do a huge amount with them. I have a 2008 iMac that runs El Cap and its the base 2.0ghz i put 4gbs of ram in it and an SSD and it runs super smooth! It will play youtube with no problem web browsing is fine etc... play music office etc depends what your doing. Just feels old the display is pretty poor.. washed out, bright but thats what makes it feel old.
I still use my 2010 mac pro as a main production machine, if you put it under a desk where you couldn't see it and didnt profile the machine I think you would be very hard pressed to tell it wasn't a newer machine. Although for my work I could do with an upgrade it keeps chugging and essentially has since 2010 and it was only £2500 then... you would struggle to get a mid range macbook pro for that too and there is no chance they will last 10 years.
Granted I have upgraded it but really its not cost me much, £30 for a 4 port USB 3, £150 for the 3.46ghz 6 core processor, £100 in ram, 2 PCI-E SSD sleds for £200 for raid 0 which runs over 1000mb/s.
IMO that is extremely good. In a time frame like 9 years its not necessarily because they dont want to its because technology moves on and hardware becomes obsolete. In terms of portable machines batteries etc wont last as long as the support apple provides, same with the iphones still supporting iphone 5S with ios 12.
The main gripe is that the modern machines with their soldiered hardware means that when the OS become more robust and the standard 8gb of ram will be a limiting factor down the line especially when most come with 128 and 256gb ssd the swap of data that currently works well because of the ssd speed will be turned on its head when the SSD is inevitably full.
This will certainly make these machines feel a lot older a lot faster. In other respects with TB3 you dont know whats up their sleeve if EGPUs can run on TB3 and the mac pro is meant to be modular... this port could mean these machine can still be relevant later down the line.
Otherwise they will be paperweights.
I still use my 2010 mac pro as a main production machine, if you put it under a desk where you couldn't see it and didnt profile the machine I think you would be very hard pressed to tell it wasn't a newer machine. Although for my work I could do with an upgrade it keeps chugging and essentially has since 2010 and it was only £2500 then... you would struggle to get a mid range macbook pro for that too and there is no chance they will last 10 years.
Granted I have upgraded it but really its not cost me much, £30 for a 4 port USB 3, £150 for the 3.46ghz 6 core processor, £100 in ram, 2 PCI-E SSD sleds for £200 for raid 0 which runs over 1000mb/s.
IMO that is extremely good. In a time frame like 9 years its not necessarily because they dont want to its because technology moves on and hardware becomes obsolete. In terms of portable machines batteries etc wont last as long as the support apple provides, same with the iphones still supporting iphone 5S with ios 12.
The main gripe is that the modern machines with their soldiered hardware means that when the OS become more robust and the standard 8gb of ram will be a limiting factor down the line especially when most come with 128 and 256gb ssd the swap of data that currently works well because of the ssd speed will be turned on its head when the SSD is inevitably full.
This will certainly make these machines feel a lot older a lot faster. In other respects with TB3 you dont know whats up their sleeve if EGPUs can run on TB3 and the mac pro is meant to be modular... this port could mean these machine can still be relevant later down the line.
Otherwise they will be paperweights.
We're not talking about camera quality or print quality here, we're talking about computer displays. The two are not comparable.
Simply put, I don't want to downgrade to a large 27" display that only gives me the equivalent screen space of 1920x1080 when set to 200% UI scaling. Even my 24" iMac from 2006 has more screen space at 1920x1200.
Can you link to a 27" 4K screen with 500 nits max brightness and DCI-P3 or Adobe RGB support? (Late 2015 and Mid 2017 5K iMacs have 500 nits and DCI-P3, and as someone who previously owned a Late 2014, there is a noticeable difference.)
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On the PC side most machines from 2011 are still able to install and run the latest version of Windows, even if the manufacturer no longer supports the drivers. The same is not true for 2011 Macs, and being stuck on an old version of MacOS you can expect app support to disappear a lot faster than an old version of Windows.
Some of Apple's own apps like Apple Configurator already don't support High Sierra in their latest versions, and support for Sierra has been almost nonexistent for months now. It won't be long before Xcode requires Mojave as well, essentially obsoleting 2011 Macs for iOS and MacOS developers.
In my industry, when you fail to update you are a liability not only to yourself but to those around you. But let's ignore that bit for now and talk about some logistical concerns, which seem to be what you are upset about. Calculations will be done in USD, since I'm not sure which country you hail from.
Your 2010 MBA (assuming you got the larger 13" one) cost 1,300$ ish. But lets say you threw some upgrades on it and it cost you 1,700$, to be safe. Let's also assume you purchased the 2010 MBA in 2011. The dollars per day of your hardware choice was around 0.67$ because of how long you've held onto that laptop. Are you still getting 0.67$ worth of computer performance today? I would say so, seeing as you can use the machine at all. A similar calculation could be said for your mini.
Lets not forget that your MBA and Mac mini are on the cheaper side of Mac hardware to begin with. Apple has to take care of users that need the latest hardware, because they have to keep up with competing hardware companies. At some point, in order to include all of the features (which they don't) that Windows has, as well as introduce some of their own, they need to objectively assess how far back they can realistically support those new features on, because older hardware just can't cut it anymore. That's not Apple's fault, that's progress and the industry standard.
Raging at Apple for not supporting technological dinosaurs (coming up on almost a decade old) is wrong. It's incredible that Apple's hardware lasts 9 years and still manages to do anything at all.
Now, for my humble opinion, you are overdue for an upgrade. If you don't like the T2 chip, fine. Go grab an iMac from 2017. But based off my own usage and the observations of all of the other Macs my co workers use, there is nothing wrong with the T2 chip by design. If you have a faulty product, that happens, exchange it for the same model from Apple or get it repaired. Apple's support in this area is incredible, and an industry best. That is why I still have faith that Apple will not be going away any time soon. If you're really sick of Apple, and the direction they are headed, then buy a Windows system. Vote with your dollars (euros, whatever) and the market will respond. Sitting around with a "woe-is-me" or salty attitude is helping no one, and probably isn't healthy for yourself. You have choices, exercise them.
The issue is my 2010 iMac cannot install the latest macOS for no other reason than Apple will not allow it. If I wanted to try to install Windows 10 on a machine from 2010, I can. No one will stop me. Apple has made an artificial limit.
I do not want to support the person you are referring to in your post because I do not agree with them wholeheartedly. Having said that, the $.67 a day argument is a bit of a red herring. You are bending the numbers in order to fit your argument. In the end, Apple could easily allow macOS Mojave to be installed on older machines if they wanted to. They simply choose to have timed obsolescence. In all honesty, machines from 2010, especially if they have an SSD run pretty darn well. 2010 to 2018 is not like 1990 to 1998 or 2000 to 2008. My 2010 iMac is a perfectly good machine that could continue to be a fine workhorse, but it is now stuck on High Sierra and is not far from no longer getting even security updates and access to the newest apps. Again, only because Apple decided it so.
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I bent the numbers in their favor. I assumed it was not purchased at release and that they purchased something that was not the cheapest model.
Also the Mojave limitation is due to Metal acceleration typically. Hacks that have put Mojave on 2010 and older hardware have shown that Mojave runs terribly (almost unusable) on them. That's not artificial, that's practical.
Agreed. And before someone tries to defend Apple's decision to require Metal in Mojave, I will only say this once: MacOS Mojave still has an OpenGL renderer, the kexts needed to support pre-Metal GPUs were simply omitted from the OS.
A couple weeks ago, I commented on this article mentioning the inclusion of a 2011 iMac in one of the promos. Looks like Apple has taken that specific promo down, as it was giving us the correct impression of a 2011 Mac as capable rather than obsolete
Interesting, I had not heard that. Though I wonder if perhaps the kernel extensions were omitted for technical reasons. Has anyone tried simply adding them on those systems? You would think that if that worked we'd have heard about it, though.Agreed. And before someone tries to defend Apple's decision to require Metal in Mojave, I will only say this once: MacOS Mojave still has an OpenGL renderer, the kexts needed to support pre-Metal GPUs were simply omitted from the OS.
A couple weeks ago, I commented on this article mentioning the inclusion of a 2011 iMac in one of the promos. Looks like Apple has taken that specific promo down, as it was giving us the correct impression of a 2011 Mac as capable rather than obsolete
I have no doubt you are correct that Mojave does not run well on old hardware, but that does not absolve Apple here. Windows 10 runs pretty well on old hardware, and there is no real reason Apple could not do the same. In fact, it should be easier for Apple since they have a much smaller number of configurations to worry about. I maintain the reason is arbitrary. It should not be up to Apple to decide when I have gotten enough out of my system.
EDIT: As for the numbers, would you pay $20 a month for that 2010 MacBook Air? Or $360 a year? Are you getting that much value out of it? See how the same "numbers" can skew the perception?
Even that screen is worth half the price of iMac, or even more, depending on configuration. iMac is the BEST bang for the buck that Apple currently offers, Mac wise.
OP doesn't know what they're talking about.
OP doesn't know what they're talking about.
Yes, and for some it does work. For example, my 2011 17" MacBook Pro can run Mojave with acceleration using the kexts from MacOS Sierra, as long as the dedicated AMD GPU is disabled.
The 2011 Macs with dedicated AMD GPUs and no integrated GPU are the most problematic, as the kexts from High Sierra aren't fully compatible with Mojave. But it likely wouldn't be difficult for Apple include an updated version that is compatible.
Kexts are frequently updated to match major MacOS updates, but Apple has completely omitted kexts for pre-Metal GPUs, hence no updated version.
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There is a small thread about running Mojave on unsupported Macs here on MacRumors. It's only 433 pages long though.
macOS 10.14 Mojave on Unsupported Macs Thread
They math out to the same value to me. I've never understood why other people have skewed perceptions when considering time intervals differently. But that could be just me.
As for your other point on Windows 10 supporting very old systems, you have a very good point and I will concede that macOS does not support as old of hardware as Windows. But this is due to a concerted effort by Microsoft to get everyone on Windows 10, so that they can switch to a Windows as a Service model. It is a long term investment by Microsoft, and at some point we will be saying that Windows 10 v 2809 (or whatever number) is no longer compatible with 2010 hardware or something to that effect.
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I hadn't checked on that forum in a while, and things seem to have evolved since I last looked. My information on that subject is simply out of date it seems.