MacBook Lineup Represented Estimated 1 in 10 Notebooks Shipped Worldwide Last Year

[69Mustang]

...and always discontinuing older models because they introduce 100 different models with slight variations on the tiniest things like WLAN cards, LCDs or even different shaped chargers.Makes it much more difficult to source parts in the long run, plus they are deemed EOL before you know it. Plus brands like HP lock down the system so it won't boot if you put in "unsupported hardware" - e.g., an 802.11ac card over the shoddy 801.11n cards that a lot of their laptops ship with.

This isn't a positive.

Between the two, I'm much happier with a simplified lineup that is updated annually. That means more consistency with build quality, cheaper production for the manufacturer, parts guaranteed to be manufactured for 5 years, and historically an EOL date of around 5-7 years from last sold.

Uh, okay. Has nothing to do with my comment, but okay. You're arguing an unrelated point that doesn't change the accuracy or truthfulness of my comment.
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The major problem on those pc's, it runs windows so more problems to be expected, this has been proven, but hey, you can look at it positively as well cause if all PC's would run macOS a lot of IT people would loose their jobs.
There's plenty more why MacBooks are far better, for instance the trackpad, No-one in the PC/Windows world has a as good as a Mac trackpad.
Windows Update sucks too, and then there is settings and control panel, what a lot of junk.
But hey, enjoy solving problems while I just use my Mac without worrying.

Your experiences are nothing like mine... at all. I use my WinPC's for work and pleasure. I use my my Mac for pleasure. I have no issues navigating either OS. I have no issues with the settings or control panel either. Who does? I'm not riddled with viruses or any other malware. I am at a loss to figure out who would actually have the Windows experience you're describing. Definitely no on I know. Probably not most of the people you know either.

 

[Leguna24]

Your experiences are nothing like mine... at all. I use my WinPC's for work and pleasure. I use my my Mac for pleasure. I have no issues navigating either OS. I have no issues with the settings or control panel either. Who does? I'm not riddled with viruses or any other malware. I am at a loss to figure out who would actually have the Windows experience you're describing. Definitely no on I know. Probably not most of the people you know either.

I agree completely, while my usage is reversed - Windows for pleasure only and Mac for work and pleasure - topics like malware or viruses are pretty much a non-issue. Settings and all that can be found easily and are self-explanatory on both systems. So really it just comes to personal preference, available applications and usage in general.

 

[keysofanxiety]

But Apple doesn’t update all their Macs annually.

True, but as the EOL date is from last sold rather than first introduced, it means that any products which haven't been updated for a long time will have a very long period of support when they are finally updated. Just look at the 2012 13" cMBP - that should still be supported for another 3 years. Plus market saturation for these models means the prices are lower and you can pick up some great deals on the used market.

So although it's not perfect as in an ideal world I'd always love to see the latest hardware in the Macs, there are a lot of positives from this. Many consumers who buy the base MacBook Air wouldn't necessarily see any difference with a slightly faster CPU, yet the manufacturing cost of this would be significantly increased due to new Logic Boards & more costly CPUs, so there's little point in doing that. It's always a balancing act and generally speaking, I think Apple walk the line fairly well with updates to their portable line.

 

[robsp2000]

Lower prices, I think. That market share includes Chromebooks. Apple's idea of a budget laptop is one that starts at €1.097,91 in the Netherlands (Air, of course, rMB starts at 1.497,91). It doesn't matter how much better it is than competition when there's no actual cheap entry point into the system. (The 2014 Mini is not a cheap entry point. If anything, the existence of basic Mini model serves to limit Mac sales.)

I don't see anything wrong with that actually if a lower price ends up meaning lower quality. It's like saying there is no cheap entry point to a luxury vehicle.

 

[SoApple]

Is there an HP refresh coming soon? Or a Lenovo refresh? Does anyone know? Does anyone care?
[doublepost=1518453433][/doublepost]
He _is_ doing a great job.

I was talking about the macbook and yes people care.

 

[kemal]

My personal view:
Cannot speak for others. But love my rMBP. [Now running MacOS 10.3.3, which corrected the glaring problems with the earlier High Sierra releases.]

Excellent. But your "1" key might have a spec of dust under it.

 

[Peperino]

Does this mean they are doing a good job with Laptop design? NO

The latest Laptops are one of the worse design ever.

They removed one of the best features (Mag-Safe)
Way overpriced for what they are delivering.
No connectivity
Can not connect even your own iPhone
Limited Ram.

Hey, but thank god they are doing Animojis... for god sake...

 

[CmdrLaForge]

And this is why Apple doesn't fix the keyboards...

 

[Ploki]

Laptop and desktop sales have really slowed for the entire market. Apple has held on well considering.

Considering content *creators* (and odd gamers) are the minority and average *consumers* are majority, giant tablets offer a much simpler experience than a PC format.

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

This weekend, I managed to put together this video and uploaded it to YouTube using nothing but my $35 Raspberry Pi and my iPhone 6+. I suspect I could have done it with just the iPhone 6+.

Just another nail in the coffin of traditional computers like the Mac.

 

[CmdrLaForge]

My personal view:
Cannot speak for others. But love my rMBP. [Now running MacOS 10.3.3, which corrected the glaring problems with the earlier High Sierra releases.]

Really? My messages are still completely out of order. Not sure if others have the same issue but I assume as I am never alone with those type of issues.

 

[Jesse Waugh]

I must be living in a different universe than yours.

Yup - in your universe Apple updates its computers.

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

Considering content *creators* (and odd gamers) are the minority and average *consumers* are majority, giant tablets offer a much simpler experience than a PC format.

Tablet sales have fallen even more in the past several years than laptop and desktop sales. The real killer is the smartphone.

A ton of what we do now takes place on our phones. There's not a whole lot most do on a PC at home that they don't do instead on their phone now. Sure there are some things that might be a bit easier on a laptop or desktop, but not enough so to justify buying a whole new machine. More and more are going smartphone instead of buying a tablet, laptop, or desktop.

 

[Ploki]

Does this mean they are doing a good job with Laptop design? NO

The latest Laptops are one of the worse design ever.

They removed one of the best features (Mag-Safe)
Way overpriced for what they are delivering.
No connectivity
Can not connect even your own iPhone
Limited Ram.

Hey, but thank god they are doing Animojis... for god sake...

You're underestimating what new laptops deliver.
The latest 15" have the fastest SSD in the industry. It's at 60% speed of RAM in a 2010 MacBook Pro...
And you can have 2TB of it.
Even if you page out, you're still running pretty fast.

Four completely customisable thunderbolt3 ports, together offering more expandable bandwidth then a cheese-grater Mac Pro did. (And these are still used as workstations all around the world).

CPU although quad-core, is 30% better than 5 years ago. Not amazing, but still okay.

Not to say 32GB and 6-cores on 15" wouldn't help, but your points are only semi valid.
[doublepost=1518461135][/doublepost]

Tablet sales have fallen even more in the past several years than laptop and desktop sales. The real killer is the smartphone.

A ton of what we do now takes place on our phones. There's not a whole lot most do on a PC at home that they don't do instead on their phone now. Sure there are some things that might be a bit easier on a laptop or desktop, but not enough so to justify buying a whole new machine. More and more are going smartphone instead of buying a tablet, laptop, or desktop.

which ironically are now priced as entry level laptops anyway hehe.

Wonder what future holds for Pro apps... You can do much on a phone, but proper high end design, video editing, post production, music production... still not nearly there.

 

[TheRealTVGuy]

I agree completely, while my usage is reversed - Windows for pleasure only and Mac for work and pleasure - topics like malware or viruses are pretty much a non-issue. Settings and all that can be found easily and are self-explanatory on both systems. So really it just comes to personal preference, available applications and usage in general.

Until you try to add a printer or a scanner... Even in Windows 10.

 

[mtneer]

Uh, okay. Has nothing to do with my comment, but okay. You're arguing an unrelated point that doesn't change the accuracy or truthfulness of my comment.
[doublepost=1518457886][/doublepost]
Your experiences are nothing like mine... at all. I use my WinPC's for work and pleasure. I use my my Mac for pleasure. I have no issues navigating either OS. I have no issues with the settings or control panel either. Who does? I'm not riddled with viruses or any other malware. I am at a loss to figure out who would actually have the Windows experience you're describing. Definitely no on I know. Probably not most of the people you know either.

I think he may be recalling memories from the days of clicking on "Anna_Kournikova.exe" and how being on a Mac may have saved the user from running a Windows executable. But exploits today have gotten way more sophisticated and targeted, so real security is more up to user behavior (and gullibility) as opposed to the OS.

 

[TheShadowKnows!]

Really? My messages are still completely out of order. Not sure if others have the same issue but I assume as I am never alone with those type of issues.

i have no problem with out-of-order iMessages. And, like you, we own plenty: two rMBPs, one iPad, and two iPhones. All running to up-to-date releases.

Not saying that issue has not been reported by many others.

Maybe we are outliers. We have had earlier horrible artifacts from the GPU, but were corrected eventually (after a long wait) by 10.13.3.

But out-of-order delivery -- no.

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

which ironically are now priced as entry level laptops anyway hehe.

Wonder what future holds for Pro apps... You can do much on a phone, but proper high end design, video editing, post production, music production... still not nearly there.

There's still a decent market for laptops. Businesses will continue to buy them largely. Many at home want them. Students do too. While there's a lot tablets and our phones can replace, there are certainly uses we'll still want laptops for.

It's just in areas where it's not worth the extra expense that we see the sales declining. The average user at home doesn't need a laptop anymore as all they used it for was web browsing, social media, and some email, all things their smartphone now does. No need to spend the extra money on a laptop when you already have a phone to take care of those things.

 

[Falhófnir]

Apple's market share is growing and that's a good thing. The growth is outpacing individual PC manufacturers, but as far as the ecosystem is concerned, they are still only 10% of the overall PC market. That's weak, which is surprising because macOS has great features, is easier to use in my opinion, and the hardware it runs on is better and retains value longer.

All those things should be important to consumers and businesses. So, what's missing?

http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-mac-lost-most-pc-market-share-in-2016-chart-2017-1
As per that ^ It's really more like they're rebounding form a particularly poor 2016. At the end of the day, Macs are still very niche globally. Even in their strongest markets like the US and UK, they bounce along in the teens for market share, this is the tradeoff for only targeting the topmost quartile of the market.

 

[MrBat]

Tim Cook is doing a Damn good job of destroying Steve Jobs legacy.

To some extension, I agree.

Current MacBook Pros are just powerful "phones", specced up at factory and almost unrepairable. I like the design, but the trade-offs are just too much to my taste.

Last MacBook Pro I was an absolute fan about (and I really mean it), was the mid 2012 model:

• Removable battery, user side
• MagSafe. Loved it
• RAM upgrade, user side
• HDD upgrade/replacement, user side
• ODD replace to HDD, user side
• Awesome keyboard, best in class. Period

These old MacBooks make wonderful Windows 10 laptops though.

Dells XPS and soon to come Thinkpads with USB Type C charging port are getting "close enough" (not quite tbh) to bite the bullet and go for them instead of newer MacBook Pros.

I guess not being completely taken up by macOS and more precisely by Final Cut Pro makes the switch a no-brainier.

Still makes me sad though.

 

[justperry]

Uh, okay. Has nothing to do with my comment, but okay. You're arguing an unrelated point that doesn't change the accuracy or truthfulness of my comment.
[doublepost=1518457886][/doublepost]
Your experiences are nothing like mine... at all. I use my WinPC's for work and pleasure. I use my my Mac for pleasure. I have no issues navigating either OS. I have no issues with the settings or control panel either. Who does? I'm not riddled with viruses or any other malware. I am at a loss to figure out who would actually have the Windows experience you're describing. Definitely no on I know. Probably not most of the people you know either.

Didn't say anything about viruses.
Fact, Apple's trackpads are far superior.
Windows Update is still the mess it was 10 years (or more) ago, just looking at the progress bar and looking at your upload/download speeds will show you it's not accurate at all, takes forever as well.
I do lots of troubleshooting on windows, yes, it got better but there are still plenty of issues with it.
So, I guess we agree to disagree.

 

[ani4ani]

My personal view:
Cannot speak for others. But love my rMBP. [Now running MacOS 10.13.3, which corrected the glaring problems with the earlier High Sierra releases.]

As comparison, I had the use of a fully-loaded, Dell XPS 9560 at the office, which was made necessary by an asinine Active Directory requirement -- shortly thereafter, I gave this unusable machine away.

It may just be the Dell XPS, but it was total crap with a glitchy touchpad and its labyrinthine WIN10, when compared to the MBP. [So I turned to running Parallels Desktop for Mac to provide WIN10 app compatibility which run the office's WIN10 business apps over the MacOS device handlers.]

...of course, if it was not for those pesky Windows applications you would have nothing for your rMBP to do would you?

 

[Zdigital2015]

Does this mean they are doing a good job with Laptop design? NO

The latest Laptops are one of the worse design ever.

They removed one of the best features (Mag-Safe)
Way overpriced for what they are delivering.
No connectivity
Can not connect even your own iPhone
Limited Ram.

Hey, but thank god they are doing Animojis... for god sake...

I will miss MagSafe...it has saved me more than once. However, for years and years and years, people have asked for industry standard solutions from Apple and that's what we got from them - USB-C Power Delivery, which did two things - it simplified and consolidated the connector for charging power to a new standard that the entire computer industry is behind (USB-C), which allowed to simplify the logic board and how the MacBook Pro deals with power, charging et al. which will lead to some really interesting charging solutions down the road that we will be glad we have access to.

The Touch Bar raised the cost of the 13" and 15" by about $300 each, and we can debate how useful it is to users, but it's here to stay. I like mine and I use it every day. Your Mileage May Vary.

The MacBook pro has incredible connectivity with 4 high bandwidth Thunderbolt 3 ports. It is now a Swiss Army Knife...don't need an SD-Card reader, don't buy one. Need a CFast or XQD reader, buy one with a USB 3 Micro-B 10-pin connector and the right cable ($8.99) and you're in business. Need an eGPU, covered. Need a Dock, covered. Need to connect to a USB 2.0 audio interface, swap out a cable and you're done. Don't need any of it, use wireless instead. You can literally customize the MBP for all of YOUR needs.

Need to connect your iPhone to your MacBook Pro, buy the right cable and you're good, OR, just sync via Wi-Fi, it's been an option in iTunes for a while now. Not sure why this is hard for people to accept.

Limited RAM...well, go talk to Intel, it's their chipset. I would love 32GB of RAM, but it is a tradeoff right now. Hopefully, later this year.

 

[Peperino]

You're underestimating what new laptops deliver.
The latest 15" have the fastest SSD in the industry. It's at 60% speed of RAM in a 2010 MacBook Pro...
And you can have 2TB of it.
Even if you page out, you're still running pretty fast.

Four completely customisable thunderbolt3 ports, together offering more expandable bandwidth then a cheese-grater Mac Pro did. (And these are still used as workstations all around the world).

CPU although quad-core, is 30% better than 5 years ago. Not amazing, but still okay.

Not to say 32GB and 6-cores on 15" wouldn't help, but your points are only semi valid.
[doublepost=1518461135][/doublepost]

which ironically are now priced as entry level laptops anyway hehe.

Wonder what future holds for Pro apps... You can do much on a phone, but proper high end design, video editing, post production, music production... still not nearly there.

So i guess the Macbooks so called "Pros" are semi Krap...

Old processors, limited ram. they are NOT user upgradable and I can keep going.

Never in the history of Apple a great feature such as the Mag Safe, has been replaced for a lower quality one.
[doublepost=1518470470][/doublepost]The MacBook pro has incredible connectivity with 4 high bandwidth Thunderbolt 3 ports. It is now a Swiss Army Knife...don't need an SD-Card reader, don't buy one. Need a CFast or XQD reader, buy one with a USB 3 Micro-B 10-pin connector and the right cable ($8.99) and you're in business. Need an eGPU, covered. Need a Dock, covered. Need to connect to a USB 2.0 audio interface, swap out a cable and you're done. Don't need any of it, use wireless instead. You can literally customize the MBP for all of YOUR needs.

Need to connect your iPhone to your MacBook Pro, buy the right cable and you're good, OR, just sync via Wi-Fi, it's been an option in iTunes for a while now. Not sure why this is hard for people to accept.

Limited RAM...well, go talk to Intel, it's their chipset. I would love 32GB of RAM, but it is a tradeoff right now. Hopefully, later this year.[/QUOTE]

Incredible connectivity??? Really?

If you have USB3 hard drives you need an adaptor. If you need to connect to Thunderbolt Hard drive, you need an adaptor. If you need to connect to HDMI you need an adaptor.

And we should not have to purchase a new cable to connect the iPhone either, especially if we are overpaying for the price they are selling the Macbook Pros.

Do you want to include the new USB-C, OK. But the solutions provided by Apple in the last Macbook Pro are lame.

I wonder why the top growing product category in Apple is the adaptors....

Furthermore, the so called Macbook "Pros", have a quite old Processor, limited RAM and most of all is not user upgradable.
Neither Ram nor internal Hardrive can be upgraded.

 

[and 1989 others]

Who renders when Apple used to make a consumer affordable stand alone Desktop. It was marvellous. Not any more though.