Ah, now I understand. You're "ranting" because Apple might not make a computer you like when the ones you're happy with "eventually age out".
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Rant: 30-year Mac fanatic finally buys Windows
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Ah, now I understand. You're "ranting" because Apple might not make a computer you like when the ones you're happy with "eventually age out".
I will follow the OP in April, leaving, after having used Apple ever since the mac plus.
I will purchase one more machine through my company at retirement.
A waste paper basket will not be a considered option.
Someday, Tim Cook will be studied in business schools as the textbook example of destroying a corporate brand.
I will purchase one more machine through my company at retirement.
A waste paper basket will not be a considered option.
Someday, Tim Cook will be studied in business schools as the textbook example of destroying a corporate brand.
Biggest jab at Tim Cook I've read so far (IMO) -- seemingly warranted, too.
Apple is *already* not making computers I want to buy. They threw the switch in 2014 with the Mac Mini Chainsaw Lobotomy. I'm looking at the 2012 quad-core Mac Mini I'm typing this on now and think there's a good chance it may be the last Mac desktop model worth buying. Ever.
But other people *are* making computers I want to buy -- as show by my actually, you know, buying one. And if Apple's boneheadedly stupid decisions have blown through as much good will as I have had for the Mac for three decades, then they have really accomplished something startling. And not startlingly good.
I was a 30+ year PC user and builder (starting building in 2000) then switched over in 2014 to the 27" iMac 5K. I started with the PC when the OS was DOS 3.0/3.1 for my first PC, but fooled around with DOS 1.0 PCs at a friend's house. Ran a BBS (Bulletin Board Service) out of my basement in the late 1980s through the1990s that was pretty popular pre-Internet era. I laugh now when someone says it took them over 10 minutes to download a large file, when it took 4 to 7 hours (sometimes even longer and was a nightmare if someone picked up the phone if it wasn't a dedicated line during the download) to download a 100K file. Around 2000 I started to build my own PC for I could make it the specifications that I wanted. I never overclocked that much, but occasionally I would see how far I could take it. I even became a certified PC technician, but got tired of it after awhile. I decided to change fields and obtained a degree in Computer Graphics. Then about 4 or 5 years later decided to go switch over to the iMac for I wanted to curb my craving of always tinkering with the inside of a computer. I wanted to concentrate more on the using the computer for what it was intended for. Trust me once you get the computer building bug it's hard to stop tinkering around with the computer.
It might be just me for the iMac that I am currently using is up to the task(s) that I do, for I remember how computers used to be so slow that I was bordering on insanity and navigating around the OS was sometimes a chore. I remember trying a DOS command to do a certain task to no avail only to realize that I had a brainfart that cost me an hour or so of aggravation and even print a file that you created was sometimes a fun adventure. That is probably why I really never attempted to learn unix or linux very seriously. I can understand why people want to go the Windows route now over Apple, but I don't think Apple is spiraling downhill to badly. I hear people complain that Apple is too expensive, heck they been always expensive in my book. I will never became a fanboy of the PC and I will never become a fanboy Apple. I will never say I never buy/build another PC for I might, but right now I am perfectly happy with my Apple iMac.
It might be just me for the iMac that I am currently using is up to the task(s) that I do, for I remember how computers used to be so slow that I was bordering on insanity and navigating around the OS was sometimes a chore. I remember trying a DOS command to do a certain task to no avail only to realize that I had a brainfart that cost me an hour or so of aggravation and even print a file that you created was sometimes a fun adventure. That is probably why I really never attempted to learn unix or linux very seriously.
I can understand why people want to go the Windows route now over Apple, but I don't think Apple is spiraling downhill to badly. I hear people complain that Apple is too expensive, heck they been always expensive in my book. I will never became a fanboy of the PC and I will never become a fanboy Apple. I will never say I never buy/build another PC for I might, but right now I am perfectly happy with my Apple iMac.
I don't know, but much like the difference between art and porn, I'd let you know when I see it.
I'm a 20 year Apple user who is following suit, though I'll probably go with a Surface Book 2. I've had rotten problems with iDevices and Mac OS since November 2013.
Even though I was a loyal iMac user since 1999, I've flirted with the Mac Mini (bummed I never got the 2012). I've watched in horror as the Mac Mini was castrated, the Mac Pro languishes and Apple became the exact type of company I loathe: fashion over form, greedy, petty and blind.
A dear former co-worker is inheriting my newer 2013 iMac and I'll probably give away this trusty 2010 iMac away too once I have a PC in place here. As much as $ would help for the 2013 iMac, giving it away is what I need to do: to do right by this family. I got my $ worth from the 27" (and more than double that with this 2010 21.5" iMac).
I never, ever thought I wouldn't use a Mac at home...but Tim Cook changed all that. I can't in good conscience give this company another dime after they treated me so poorly with my 6s and subsequent attempted replacements. To say nothing of hours and data lost over the past few months. I won't support their decision to ignore most of the Mac line.
It hurts like hell to type this, but soon it won't. As I open my mind and move onto other tech, my cranking on Apple is coming to an end.
Even though I was a loyal iMac user since 1999, I've flirted with the Mac Mini (bummed I never got the 2012). I've watched in horror as the Mac Mini was castrated, the Mac Pro languishes and Apple became the exact type of company I loathe: fashion over form, greedy, petty and blind.
A dear former co-worker is inheriting my newer 2013 iMac and I'll probably give away this trusty 2010 iMac away too once I have a PC in place here. As much as $ would help for the 2013 iMac, giving it away is what I need to do: to do right by this family. I got my $ worth from the 27" (and more than double that with this 2010 21.5" iMac).
I never, ever thought I wouldn't use a Mac at home...but Tim Cook changed all that. I can't in good conscience give this company another dime after they treated me so poorly with my 6s and subsequent attempted replacements. To say nothing of hours and data lost over the past few months. I won't support their decision to ignore most of the Mac line.
It hurts like hell to type this, but soon it won't. As I open my mind and move onto other tech, my cranking on Apple is coming to an end.
I've been an Apple user since 2002 so i'm not far behind you and typing this on my 2012 mini. My first Mac was the iMac Snow with Classic 9 and the very first release of OS X. When Steve Jobs died I said to others that it would mark the peak for Apple and my intuition appears to be right.
Steve was a creative visionary that wanted to move the goal posts with fresh ideas and when others caught up, he released something else. Tim Cook never struck me as that type of leader. What we have today is an Apple that is strictly focused on one product line....their Phones, and that's really it. Their Macs, iPad's, all play second fiddle to their Phones. The scary part is that since the company has essentially put all it's eggs in one basket, it has tons of anchors with it's retail stores around the world. If their Phones were to "really" miss the mark in sales then all those stores could potentially drag the company down. It would be better to offer multiple products but those in charge have decided the iPhone gets all the glory and everything else will have to wait. Now the question is, would Steve Jobs have allowed this to happen? I would say the answer is an emphatic, NO.
That said if I made the switch it would be to Linux. It shares SO many similarities with macOS it's not funny. Today, Ubuntu and Linux Mint are fully featured OS'es that it rivals Windows and macOS providing everything the user needs to get the job done.
You know I've seen Linux and Ubuntu thrown around here and never researched what they were; I always presumed programming was involved, but I will investigate. Thanks for the information.
Welcome to an entirely different world. A very short history of Linux may be useful, then. I'll start at the beginning: back, oh, more than 40 years ago, the guys at AT&T Bell Labs were playing around with operating systems concepts. One huge OS they were working on, "Multics", eventually imploded by being too unwieldy to manage. A couple of the researchers working on it liked the concept, but realized that it'd be much, much better to concentrate on making the OS as small as possible, as simple as possible, and as portable as possible (to avoid having the OS be tied down to one particular hardware platform). The named the system they came up with "Unix", as a pun on the previous operating system's name.
The fundamentals of the OS were good, and it took off. It was indeed fairly portable, and therefore found its way onto many different mainframes, workstations, and eventually onto the new "personal computers" that had just started to become popular.
However, this is when AT&T was under investigation for monopoly practices, and they weren't in a position to start selling operating systems. As such, they went ahead and allowed copies of Unix to be used for no charge at universities for research purposes. Eventually, AT&T got out from under the legal issues, and tried to regain the commercial rights to the OS. But by that point, legions of college students had been hacking away on Unix for years, and were not interested in giving up their access to this powerful and portable tool. Efforts were made to create an "open" version of Unix; this included versions based on the last university-licensed copies (such as the Berkeley Standard Distribution or "BSD"), and to "Unix-compatible" systems that were freshly written from the ground up. Linux was one of these "Unix-compatible" operating systems.
Long story short: Linux took off as one of the most popular Unix-like OSs. As with Unix, it is relatively small (it uses less resources than OS X or Windows, and even the most recent versions of the kernel can run well on slower or older machines); it is relatively simple (making it pretty much the default choice today for anyone wanting to learn how to code an operating system); and it is portable -- you can find versions of Linux for an amazing array of hardware platforms today.
One of the most important aspects of Unix (and Linux) is that the core (or "kernel") of the OS contains only a minimal amount of functionality -- enough to manage the hardware, and little else. So, things like a graphical user interface are not part of Linux! Other people bundle a GUI and other tools with the Linux kernel, and provide the entire package as a "distribution". Ubuntu is one such distribution, and is quite popular for its user-friendliness. But there are many, many other distributions of Linux available...
No my friend Linux is totally different to when Linus Torvalds first floated the idea. Back then knowing the terminal was key to using Linux but boy have times changed. In fact Ubuntu and Linux Mint are two of the most popular Distro's in the world because they both put the least emphasis on the terminal. When you install Linux Mint or Ubuntu everything and I mean everything but the kitchen sink comes with it. It includes a movie, music player as well as a fully featured office suite that integrates with MS Office.
In fact I consider myself a Linux noob/dummy and I have no problem running Linux. And if I ever have a Linux question, a simple Google search answers the question 99.95% of the time within seconds. When I decided to give Linux a try I was taken back by the similarities of the system preferences UI in Linux and macOS. They look remarkably similar.
And another Linux Distro i've tried is openSUSE. Their software updates are handled like macOS and Windows within an update window. It's called Yast2 and it goes out looking for updates including the latest drivers.
Yeah today Linux is where the founder envisioned it to be while not even being a mainstream OS although that's now changing since Steam/Valve has thrown it's wait behind Linux and plans on releasing SteamOS. And remember, what made Windows king of the OS. It was playing DOS and Windows games.
Great way to test Linux is a VM such as Virtual Box which is a free download:
https://www.virtualbox.org/
If you have Parallels or VM ware which are costly but work well, will work also.
Then just download the ISO files from Ubuntu or Mint and give it a try.
Thanks everyone, I just briefly read some material on Linux and Ubuntu. I am beyond noob with all this. I do not have Parallels or VM, but I will keep investigating. Bear in mind, I'm more of a art person than a logic person, though I truly appreciate your responses. Now to understand those responses and how to possibly test without buying something else for the Mac. I will definitely read up more. I went back to using my 2010 since the newer Mac is soon to be sold.
Just realized I have several days of movie conversion ahead of me; once I switch platforms, I will close my iTunes account.
Upwards and onwards, much appreciated.
Just realized I have several days of movie conversion ahead of me; once I switch platforms, I will close my iTunes account.
Upwards and onwards, much appreciated.
Seems like much of your argument is based on performance and time. However those 2 things tend to counter each other at least for certain products.
If the 2015 had a 6700k (iMac in this example) releasing a 2016 a year from the 2015 wouldn't have worked. Well unless you were ok with the 6700k again.
It only makes sense to not revise it if there isn't anything to revise.
I was more surprised they released the MacBook then not releasing the iMac and Mini.
I have no argument or excuse for their otherwise questionable hardware choices such as dual core and soldering everything together.
But I'm going to try to stay optimistic about the next release with Kaby Lake (or more unlikely Zen). Really hoping for a quadcore option.
If the 2015 had a 6700k (iMac in this example) releasing a 2016 a year from the 2015 wouldn't have worked. Well unless you were ok with the 6700k again.
It only makes sense to not revise it if there isn't anything to revise.
I was more surprised they released the MacBook then not releasing the iMac and Mini.
I have no argument or excuse for their otherwise questionable hardware choices such as dual core and soldering everything together.
But I'm going to try to stay optimistic about the next release with Kaby Lake (or more unlikely Zen). Really hoping for a quadcore option.
I'm in the same boat. I currently have the following machines ...
2*2008 iMacs - maxed RAM in both
late 2008 15" MBP - 8Gigs RAM and SSD
2012 15" cMBP - 16Gigs RAM and SSDs
One of my 2008 iMacs might have finally given up the ghost, as it has refused to start since we lost power a couple days ago. This isn't that big of a deal, as it's just on the same desk as my 2012 cMBP.
The other 2008 iMac is used by my son to play minecraft, and watch some youtube video. This is the next one to be replaced. I'd LOVE to get mac mini to replace this, but refuse to buy the 2014, after it horrible downgrade from the 2012. I'm holding out to see what Apple comes out with in the spring. Otherwise, I'm going to investigate a windows machine, and locking it down for use by a child.
The misses is using the 2008 MBP. All is good except the battery - working on the 3rd one now. The machine has been upgraded as much as it can, thankfully. Got many extra years out of it, that the new disposable machines would not have. Similarly, this will be replaced in the next year or so. With Apple abandoning the Macbook Air, I am looking for $600 for a machine comparable to a $1K+ 2015 macbook refurb with decent specs(8-gigs ram with 256+Gig SSD). And most windows machines I've looked at, can have their RAM and storage upgraded, like the AWESOME Macs used to be.
My first Apple was the Apple ][+, back in 1979. So there is LOTS of soul searching here. Well, I left for a while in the early/mid 90s, so it won't be my first time out of the Apple ecosystem. Only this time it's much sadder, because it doesn't have to be this way. But it's the way Tim wants it - Anti-Consumer, glued/soldered in, thin for the sake of thin, Apple tax reaching exponential rates, etc...
I, too, just recently left the Mac world after first getting into Macs in 2004, with an eMac G4 and iBook G4.
I went through a number of Mac minis along the way - the most recent being a Mid 2011 model. I also had a number of MacBook Pros, and most recently had the Gold MacBook.
The Mac mini had reached the point of where I was ready to upgrade, and Apple just hasn't given me any indication they want to sell a product that I would like to buy anymore. I've moved back to the Windows environment, switching to an HP Spectre laptop and HP ProDesk desktop machines, both of which offered me much more power for the price of the Apple hardware.
Given this, I'm also considering switching away from the iPhone/iPad that I've had for a long time as well. Sad to see this happen to Apple, but I can't wait for Apple to offer me a product that I need/want.
I went through a number of Mac minis along the way - the most recent being a Mid 2011 model. I also had a number of MacBook Pros, and most recently had the Gold MacBook.
The Mac mini had reached the point of where I was ready to upgrade, and Apple just hasn't given me any indication they want to sell a product that I would like to buy anymore. I've moved back to the Windows environment, switching to an HP Spectre laptop and HP ProDesk desktop machines, both of which offered me much more power for the price of the Apple hardware.
Given this, I'm also considering switching away from the iPhone/iPad that I've had for a long time as well. Sad to see this happen to Apple, but I can't wait for Apple to offer me a product that I need/want.
You've put the situation so many of us find ourselves in brilliantly! As a quad core i7 mini owner there's nothing available that works for me as a faster replacement. Some blame intel for lack of development yet there are Windows 10 alternatives that have managed to overcome any technical issues very well.
I agree with the long time user, with apple you simply don't get any choice unfortunately. Does a laptop have to cost $3-4k ? better yet, you can't even buy a graphics card, how ****** is that? Apple dictates too much and is staring to have an impact on customer loyalty in my opinion.
I love FCPX so it's no way to switch to windows for me. Not really found of the look of windows either.
Problem is that the dollar is really strong at the moment so the apple prices are through the roof. Luckily FCPX is such an efficient software so that it runs really well on even my 2008 Mac Pro. That's editing 4K and 5K material. Rendering is a bit slow at the end, but nothing too crazy.
My 2012 MBP works well too, but I would like to upgrade
Problem is that the dollar is really strong at the moment so the apple prices are through the roof. Luckily FCPX is such an efficient software so that it runs really well on even my 2008 Mac Pro. That's editing 4K and 5K material. Rendering is a bit slow at the end, but nothing too crazy.
My 2012 MBP works well too, but I would like to upgrade
Bought a customized Alienware Alpha 2 over the weekend, so the countdown begins for me. I absolutely love my Moto Z Play phone, I expect the same for this Mini PC. I am seeing this all as a positive across the board. I put so much anger, resentment and money into Apple these past 3 years...so it'll be good not to be constantly stressing over tech.
Which Mac Mini?
But given your name, you are accustomed to towing the party line, else you find yourself in political prison, or worse. I can only hope you get your wish, to live in such a "paradise" such as those. Just please make it NOT be the same country I am in.
++++++++++++++++++What is your apple ID and password.......Apple demands to know...you will be punished for what you have said....there is no appeal.
Has anyone switched over to a System76 Meerkat system (https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat), either running Linux or as a Hackintosh? Looks like you can get a fairly nice little system for under $700 US.