Hi all,
First, I'd like to thank everyone for making this site and the buyer's guide so valuable. Both are an excellent resource to people interested in Macs. I'd also like to apologize for the length of this post.
Problem
Looking over the Buyer's Guide, it appears Apple updates hardware lines more frequently since the Intel transition than they were pre-transition.
The worst example is probably the MacBook Pro. The current average amount of time between updates is listed as 182 days. Since the Intel switch, the average is actually 106 days. It's been 129 days since the last update. You can see the problem: we are currently over the average number of days between updates for the MacBook Pro.
Solutions
(1) Ideally, you could just do away with the stats on the PowerPC models, or move them to another section. Since we're relatively early in the transition, it might make sense not to do this until we get more data points.
(2) At the very least, I suggest adding a warning at the top of the page about this.
(3) Another (hopefully) simple solution would be modifying the graphs to put a marker in showing where the transition from PowerPC to Intel occurred. This would allow users to see the difference more clearly.
(4) If possible, it would be super-nice to see the average days between update calculated post- and pre-transition, and maybe the total. But this might be too much work.
If there's anything I can do to assist with this, let me know.
Again, I want to thank everyone for making this site the valuable resource it is.
Thanks for your time,
Billy Shears
(I tried doing a quick search for this, and found a few mentions of it but no answers given by MacRumors staff.)
First, I'd like to thank everyone for making this site and the buyer's guide so valuable. Both are an excellent resource to people interested in Macs. I'd also like to apologize for the length of this post.
Problem
Looking over the Buyer's Guide, it appears Apple updates hardware lines more frequently since the Intel transition than they were pre-transition.
The worst example is probably the MacBook Pro. The current average amount of time between updates is listed as 182 days. Since the Intel switch, the average is actually 106 days. It's been 129 days since the last update. You can see the problem: we are currently over the average number of days between updates for the MacBook Pro.
Solutions
(1) Ideally, you could just do away with the stats on the PowerPC models, or move them to another section. Since we're relatively early in the transition, it might make sense not to do this until we get more data points.
(2) At the very least, I suggest adding a warning at the top of the page about this.
(3) Another (hopefully) simple solution would be modifying the graphs to put a marker in showing where the transition from PowerPC to Intel occurred. This would allow users to see the difference more clearly.
(4) If possible, it would be super-nice to see the average days between update calculated post- and pre-transition, and maybe the total. But this might be too much work.
If there's anything I can do to assist with this, let me know.
Again, I want to thank everyone for making this site the valuable resource it is.
Thanks for your time,
Billy Shears
(I tried doing a quick search for this, and found a few mentions of it but no answers given by MacRumors staff.)