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Microsoft The Almighty Buck Windows Apple Hardware

That Awkward Moment When 'Apple Mocked Good Hardware and Poor People' (dailydot.com) 551

An anonymous reader quotes a DailyDot article: Phil Schiller, Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, took the stage in Cupertino, California, earlier this week to explain some of the new features and specs on the new iPad Pro. Between showing off a new display and camera, Schiller also took some digs at Windows and PC users, specifically calling out those users who are on computers more than five years old. Schiller said that 600 million people are using PCs that are over five years old. 'This is really sad,' he said.
C. Custer, reporter for Tech in Asia also didn't like Schiller's remarks. He writes: If Apple's really targeting those 600 million old PC users, it seems to have done a pretty poor job. It's been more than five years since I saw the need to upgrade my primary computer, and nothing about the iPad Pro presentation made me rethink my position at all. But of course, Apple isn't really targeting those people. That was mostly just a cheap shot, a jibe at all of us poor fools who haven't yet seen the light. That's why the audience laughed knowingly, and even applauded. "Using the same machine for five years? How barbaric! Thank god we live in civilized society, where everyone throws their gadgets out and buys new ones every two years."
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That Awkward Moment When 'Apple Mocked Good Hardware and Poor People'

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  • Meanwhile... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rwven ( 663186 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:02PM (#51761927)

    ...The coworker sitting next to me us using a 5.5 year old macbook pro and defending it as "still as good as anything new."

    What a barbarian.

    • Re:Meanwhile... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:06PM (#51761973)

      My last Mac is 10 years old now. MacBook Pro Core 2 Duel. I still use it to watch some stuff on iTunes with it.
      My Current laptop a ThinkPad is approaching 5 years now. Compared to the new tech, it still is very fast and I have no needs for an upgrade.

      • by cdrudge ( 68377 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:18PM (#51762089) Homepage

        MacBook Pro Core 2 Duel

        So do the cores battle each other to see which one is better? Or how does that work?

      • Re:Meanwhile... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:22PM (#51762135) Journal

        My Current laptop a ThinkPad is approaching 5 years now.

        Snap! Mine's a W510. Actually, it might be older than 5 years. Well, I say laptop, I use it as a portable desktop which I take home once every few weeks or so.

        It's acceptably fast, not a speed demon nor a slacker. A very few things could be faster, but I don't bump into them often enough to upgrade. It also holds desktop sized SSDs and has 16G RAM so it's fine for just about everything I do.

        My eee900 is even older. 8 years, I think, though gmail is getting almost unusable though in the web client (50% speed, 50% screen space). Proper clients still work fine and trolling^Wbrowsing on slashdot is fine too.

        • Mine's a W510. ... and has 16G RAM

          Awesome -- I have the same laptop. Haven't put a SSD in there yet -- when I need to breathe new life into it I guess I should do that...

          • Re:Meanwhile... (Score:4, Interesting)

            by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:47PM (#51762519) Journal

            Awesome -- I have the same laptop. Haven't put a SSD in there yet -- when I need to breathe new life into it I guess I should do that...

            Mine came with an SSD in the primary drive bay. However, my DVD drive died, so I bought an SSD adapter for the drive bay and shoved a half terabyte Samsung drive in there. The adapters are passive since the DVD drive is SATA based. So, you can double up.

        • My eee 701 (yeah, an original Surf, eat that one Chromebooks!) is still perfectly serviceable with an SD card for storage. It's just too small of a screen and keyboard for me to want to use on a regular basis. My primary laptop is a 7 year old Asus laptop that I decided to replace the screen on instead of replacing the whole laptop because it's plenty fast for what I use it for, the battery is still in good shape, and I don't want Windows 10.

          • I use an Intel 4004, with an RS232 port for input, and a blinking LED for output. I power it with a lead acid battery, using a zener diode to step down the voltage. I works as well as the day I bought it back in 1971.

        • by PRMan ( 959735 )
          I turned my eeePC netbook into a file server. It runs Windows 10 on a 256 GB SSD and only uses 10W of power so it's cheap to run 24/7. I see no need to upgrade it. It's 8 years old and works just fine as a file/media server.
      • Given how Intel's attention has shifted to a combination of GPU bumps and energy efficiency improvements, with improvements in absolute performance, rather than performance/watt, being pretty tepid; laptops have at least benefited from getting somewhat slimmer and lighter for the same amount of power. For desktops, the next big reason to upgrade will be when DDR3 starts to get scarce and expensive because of the move to DDR4. Unless you absolutely must be able to boot from an NVMe SSD or something, there ju
      • Re:Meanwhile... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:38PM (#51762373) Journal

        When we looked at upgrading our hardware last autumn (most of our systems are Dell Vostros with 2 or 3gb of RAM bought in 2009 and had Windows Vista Pro), we decided that there was nothing new hardware could offer most of the staff. All but a few staff are basically running a browser and Office 2010, which these older systems run quite well. While I'm no fan of Windows 10, at the end of the day, it just seemed a better investment to buy Windows 10 licenses, upgrade the forty or so workstations we have, and factor attrition through hardware failure into the equipment budget. Yes, there's a bit of a gamble, in that we could have twenty of these seven year old computers crap out in one year, but we have a few spares and don't view it as a significant risk.

        Save for certain applications (mainly graphics intensive or calculation intensive applications), PCs really peaked in the last decade, and the gains to be had to updating to the newest hardware isn't likely even be noticed by most users. The chief reason to even upgrade the operating system is because Vista's EOL is approaching, and it is getting rather long in the tooth (Chrome support will be pulled soon).

    • I bet a 5-year old PC would still play games a lot better than any Macbook.

    • ...The coworker sitting next to me us using a 5.5 year old macbook pro and defending it as "still as good as anything new."

      What a barbarian.

      Would make sense if it was a Mac Pro, a 5 year old Mac Pro is literally better than anything currently available from Apple.

      • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:35PM (#51762335) Journal

        What a barbarian.

        What a sad barbarian. If he bought a brand new Apple(tm) MacBook(r) he'd be a happy barbarian.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      My 6 year old macbook pro is arguably better than anything new. It has a 17" display. Apparently hipsters have some sort of size phobia, I'm not sure if its a rape trigger, or just a micro-aggression, but it offers plenty of pixels and enough room to see them all. With an SSD and an i7 it's plenty fast enough for medium games and all desktop work.

      I guess I understood Schiller's comment to be mostly about "market size", and directed towards investors, who I think are the actual primary target of the iPhone S

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I set up a 15 year old PC with gentoo as a basic internet machine for my parent's kitchen, and aside from the general web bloat over the last 3 or so years, they are happy with it, and I am happy with it. The value for money in a traditional PC was and remains superb.

      Meanwhile my ~4 year old laptop is grinding to a halt for daily general use. I've been forced to turn off javascript to even get websites to load nowadays. It's the same with tablets. I have never seen computers become so obsolete quite so quic

    • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      My father has a Quadra 610, one of the last true Macs with a Motorola 68k processor.

      • by sudon't ( 580652 )

        My father has a Quadra 610, one of the last true Macs with a Motorola 68k processor.

        Hope he's running System 7! It all began to go downhill with OS 8...

    • by RobotRunAmok ( 595286 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:25PM (#51762189)

      The rich boys and their expensive toys, about which they understand a fraction.

      It's tough to show off your new Porsche to the Marketing chippies around the watercooler, so your new Apple-thing will have to suffice...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      my desktop is pushing 8 years now, a phenom 2 rig with 16 gig of ram and a 1 gig amd video card.
       
          it does what i need it to do, Yeah I have newer devices, but to say that a PC thats older than 5 years is no good..... it seems quite smug. Its not the early 90s where you really did need to upgrade every 2 years
       
        ~Ganjadude

    • by hattig ( 47930 )

      Indeed my MacBook Pro is 4.5 years old and still pretty darn powerful (4C8T, etc). Added an SSD. Bumped to 16GB. But it was top of the line back then.

      The only reason to upgrade would be to get a retina display model. Intel have done sweet FA with their CPUs since Sandy Bridge apart from save a little power and increase their profits. But the same goes for old PCs with C2D, C2Q, Nehalem, SB, etc. They're good enough for most things, still.

      But indeed I agree that the comments made could be interpreted as 'poo

    • by chihowa ( 366380 )

      I just bought a new Macbook Pro six months ago and specifically opted for the "Mid-2012" model (because you can still upgrade/replace the battery, SSD, RAM), so they shouldn't be quite as smug as they are. It's not five years old, yet, but it's actually better than their newest models in many ways.

    • There are a couple of reasons, beyond being a gamer, to upgrade a 5+ year old computer.
      - SSD drives - faster bootup times
      - USB 3.0 - Quicker backups to external drives, faster photo transfer from memory cards (devices must be USB 3.0 as well)
      - Better battery life for Laptops - Most last around 6 hours now, about triple what they used to.

      However, most of these are not important enough to the average consumer to shell out $700 for a new computer.

      • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

        In most 5-10 years old laptops it is easy to swap the HDD with a SSD without having to buy a brand new computer. Older than 10 years you can but you need to make sure it is SATA and it starts being a waste of money. Desktops are even less of a problem.
        On desktops, USB 3.0 controllers are around $30 if you really want it.
        About battery life you are mostly right. Especially considering that your 5+ year old battery is likely to be toast and replacements are not always cheap or easy to find. If you are mobile y

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:05PM (#51761957)

    Modern app appers know that only apps can app apps, and if 600 million LUDDITES are still using LUDDITE software, that ruins it for the rest of us app appers! Apple wants to destroy LUDDITE software and replace it with good wholesome appy app apps!

    Apps!

  • by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:05PM (#51761961) Homepage

    The Apple Marketing really are targeting the shallow and vacuous assholes who want to feel smug about the latest shiny?

    My last PC was over 6 years old before it keeled over, and I hope this one lasts about the same.

    Know what I still don't have? My first gen iPad that Apple updated until they made it useless. Know what I do have? A 3.5 year old Android tablet.

    Huge amounts of people are running older machines ... and, once again, people in marketing are shallow idiots.

    • LMOL yeah because Microsoft doesn't do the same thing. I guess you missed the commercial they had mocking a person using an old computer and showed them the errors of their way.
    • by wile_e_wonka ( 934864 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @01:06PM (#51762761)

      5 years ago, using a 5 year old computer could be rough. All but the most powerful machines seemed to be largely unusable by that age. But 5 years ago, 64 bit multiple core processors became common. 8 gigs of ram or more was suddenly commonplace. Hard drives under hundreds of GBs were uncommon. And then cheap SSDs came on the scene, reviving old hardware everywhere.

      So, yeah, anymore a 5 year old computer is commonplace. I purchased my home desktop in 2010 (Dell XPS 8300, if I recall correctly, with a core i7 and 8 gigs of RAM), I added a 100 GB SSD in 2013 for use as the boot/OS drive, a second monitor around the same time, and a 4 TB drive for media storage in 2015. Although I am a relatively techie person, I see no need whatsoever to purchase a new computer within the next few years. Normally I want to be up with the times, but I am having a hard time seeing what I am missing out on. USB C, I guess? I can't think of anything else.

  • by NotDrWho ( 3543773 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:06PM (#51761977)

    No way!

  • My iMac is almost 7 years old and it's mostly fine. It was, though, top of the line. Are those 600 million PCs core2 duos, i3s, or what?

    • The 7 year old PC I just retired was a quad core i7-920. It had an upgraded GPU and an upgraded SSD drive that kept it nimble for quite a while.

      My wife's poor iMac of a similar vintage couldn't readily be upgraded on either front so she got a new machine last year instead (Pro Tip: Mac's are still cheaper than marriage counseling or divorce lawyers). Pay more, get last year's mobile grade processor, and you can't upgrade the RAM or hard drive to keep it going. No wonder Apple expects machines to be upgra

  • An offhand joke? During the launch of a new product? Disparaging older and/or competing products? I am outraged!
    • No, it's not disparaging the products, it's disparaging the people who own and use those products. Big difference.

      And, uh, being a dickhead in a marketing launch does not magically excuse him being a dickhead.

  • Don't overreact (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LichtSpektren ( 4201985 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:10PM (#51762021)
    It was a dumb comment for sure, but turning this into a matter of class warfare or social justice is orders of magnitude dumber.
    • Well we need to give everything some political twist to it. Otherwise how can we show that we are serious informed adults, unless there is something to rail against.

    • Re:Don't overreact (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:27PM (#51762211) Journal

      It was a dumb comment for sure, but turning this into a matter of class warfare or social justice is orders of magnitude dumber.

      What's dumb is ignoring class warfare as the elite drop bombs on your head, and decrying social justice when you're having injustice inflicted upon you every day.

      But maybe you're more comfortable in the role of useful idiot. You wouldn't be the first.

      • It was a dumb comment for sure, but turning this into a matter of class warfare or social justice is orders of magnitude dumber.

        What's dumb is ignoring class warfare as the elite drop bombs on your head, and decrying social justice when you're having injustice inflicted upon you every day.

        But maybe you're more comfortable in the role of useful idiot. You wouldn't be the first.

        Why exactly should I fight class war or social justice wars, to no benefit to myself but all the benefit to the wealthy politicians and other demagogues that profit off of it? Sounds like you're the useful idiot.

      • Re:Don't overreact (Score:5, Insightful)

        by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @01:02PM (#51762709) Homepage

        Huh? Useful idiots are Western leftists. The term was coined in the Soviet Union, whose Communists could not understand why people could live in such magnificent free societies and yet wish to turn them into authoritarian hellholes like their own. Shrugging their shoulders, they called them "useful idiots" and used them for their own purposes, showing them Potemkin villages on their pilgrimages and putting them up in the best hotels for free. Their descendants are today's Cultural Marxists who still continue with the plan but have no Soviet Union to betray the West to. I see already that the story has already been twisted from "out of touch Apple executives who want to sell more crap" into "cis white males fucking disgust me". You can misuse a term if you want but that doesn't make it right.

        "There's glory for you!"
        "I don't know what you mean by 'glory'," Alice said.
        Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you'!"
        "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.
        "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more or less."
        "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
        "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be Master - that's all."
        -- Alice in Wonderland

        • Re:Don't overreact (Score:4, Informative)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @02:33PM (#51763549) Homepage Journal

          Huh? Useful idiots are Western leftists. The term was coined in the Soviet Union

          Tee hee.

          In the Russian language [wikipedia.org], the equivalent term "useful fools" (ÐоÐÐÐнÑÐ ÐÑfÑÐÐÐ, tr. polezniye duraki) was already in use in 1941. It was mockingly used against Russian "nihilists" who, for Polish agents, were said to be no more than "useful fools and silly enthusiasts".[3]

          So close, yet so fail. Nice try, though.

          • Re: (Score:3, Flamebait)

            The term is a mistranslation of the Russian and yet that's how it entered the English language. The term "transmission belts" was also used. None of it changes the fact that educated Western leftists, much like yourself, worked tirelessly for decades to turn our own shining societies into totalitarian dystopias, and your masters could not understand why. The fact that you now want to take this well-defined epithet and strip it of meaning to suit your purposes sickens me.

            The purpose of Newspeak was not on

    • Re:Don't overreact (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ranton ( 36917 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:31PM (#51762277)

      It was a dumb comment for sure, but turning this into a matter of class warfare or social justice is orders of magnitude dumber.

      My interpretation goes the other way. This is similar to how a drunk man speaks a sober man's thoughts. This comment shows how he really feels about people who don't refresh their devices every other year. He would never say this publicly other than in a slip up like this.

      Ultimately it shouldn't be surprising to anyone though, which is why I think calling it awkward instead of outrageous is accurate. Anyone who is paying attention knows there is a huge chasm between the upper middle class / wealthy and the working class / poor. I grew up in a working class home and now that I am in my 30's with a $200k+ household income I find it hard to remember how I ever lived on $40k. In only a decade I have lost nearly all empathy with people who had the same upbringing as mine, and in its place is only sympathy for those who I barely understand anymore.

      I now have similar awkward moments sometimes when I talk with an old friend who has kids the same age as mine, but is raising them on a $50k household income. If I accidentally bring up how our maid is a lifesaver or how "hard" it is to afford $3200 in monthly daycare costs it could certainly come off as elitist.

    • by Kohath ( 38547 )

      Haters and dividers need to hate and divide people. Phony outrage is one of their tools.

  • by sittingnut ( 88521 ) <sittingnut.gmail@com> on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:14PM (#51762049) Homepage

    apple (and all non generic hardware pushers) needs consumers to continuously discard their old and buy its newest overpriced products with their much hyped latest features ( however unsubstantial ) in order to make profit.
    this can only be achieved by social conditioning. a herd mentality is created where members of the herd feel fulfilled and happy, and be in a satisfactory social status, only when they have the latest.
    so of course, they must laugh and mock at those outside the herd, make members of the herd join in laughing and mocking, more publicly the better.

  • Tablet w/ LTE + Keyboard + Pencil = $1000 - and that's the small version with less memory than most flagship smartphones. But, hey, if you can sell as many as you can make, why the fuck not, right?

  • I'm typing this on a laptop I bought for work, a 2014 MBP Retina. I suppose this is my daily driver but it's a toss up if I work at home (2 monitors have their advantages). When I worked exclusively from home, my work computers were a 2008 MBP and an Optiplex 740 (2013-2014). Hell even now I "upgraded" my gaming computer to a Optiplex 780 with a nicer GPU (2010 for both). I won't need a new desktop for a long time.
  • by non0score ( 890022 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:20PM (#51762117)

    Apple has been playing the class warfare/have vs have-not/status symbol card for a while now. It plays to exactly what we (the general masses) intrinsically fear -- being singled out, not being "in", not fashionable, looking like a dork, etc.... It's also one of the reasons why the 99% hate the 1% -- because the 1% flaunt their wealth in front of others. Do you want to be flaunted to? Or do you want to do the flaunting to those plebeian Android/Windows/BB/feature phone users?

    We have to realize that Apple is a fashion company first, a tech company second. Blue bubbles, anyone? Or are you "green with envy"?

  • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:20PM (#51762121) Journal
    It is vaguely unusual for someone to say it so plainly; but I'm not sure why this position would be even slightly surprising. Apple mostly sells hardware. If you sell hardware, people who are using 5+ year old PCs are lousy customers(regardless of cause: maybe they are too poor to buy the new and shiny stuff that they do want, maybe their needs just haven't changed enough to make an upgrade worth it, though they could afford whatever new and shiny stuff they felt like, the effect is the same). Why wouldn't your marketing message be anything other than encouragement to the people who do buy new stuff frequently; with a secondary focus on encouraging people with old stuff to feel that they are missing out?
  • My MacBook is from 2006 and the last major rebuilt of my gaming PC is from 2007. I'm looking for replacements in the near future.
  • Really Sad? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JustNiz ( 692889 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:22PM (#51762141)

    >> 600 million people are using PCs that are over five years old. 'This is really sad,' he said.

    No it really isn't. Most people just use PCs to write emails and surf the net. Heck even 5 year old hardware is overpowered just for that.

    • Re:Really Sad? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @01:00PM (#51762681)

      This is the fundamental problem all computer makers face. The relentless advance of computing tech has far, far outpaced the computing needs of most people for at least the past 10-15 years. As long as the hardware keeps functioning, those people have no real need to buy anything new... so the manufacturers have to resort to other tactics (appeals to snobbery, techno-lust, inventing new "must have" features, etc.).

      And, as others have pointed out, that comment of Shiller's was especially out of place given how many Mac users point to their still functional and useful "ancient" Macs. Heck, I've got a 2006 MacBook Pro that's still happily humming along, playing the role of our home media server. The battery is basically non-functional; but that's irrelevant for it's designated task.
       

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:22PM (#51762143)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Andrio ( 2580551 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:23PM (#51762169)

    When your PC is self-built and maintained with upgrades as needed, it's hard to tell the age of it. I got one part in it that's only like a year old, but I got a secondary HDD in there that's from the last decade.

  • by Average ( 648 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:24PM (#51762179)

    Interesting coming from a company that will sell you a 3y9m old machine today (http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MD101LL/A&step=config#). Reports are that they still sell rather a lot of them, because they're upgradable, repairable, and work just fine.

    As for me, my 2010 MBP literally came out of a garbage skip. Found it with a bulging/burst lithium battery (far from an Apple-only issue). $50 worth of eBay grey market battery later, and I have a pretty solid machine for XCode and Mac testing. If it weren't for that, I just wouldn't test or dev anything for Macs. Couldn't afford to.

  • Apple makes money selling hardware. That's their business model. So, they will do whatever it takes to encourage selling new shinies, including encouraging their customers to "trade up" to a newer model via hype, minor upgrades or "social engineering" to get their customers ready to buy.

    Companies selling "durable goods" love to have their customers buy their products more often than necessary. They all use these sorts of tactics to make that happen to improve their bottom line. Apple is no different.
  • The business model of modern corporations require you to consume their products as fast as you can, whether you need it or not. I could see needing to upgrade to a new computer every few years twenty years ago, but not anymore. I recently retired my 10 year old PC, and I can't tell much of a difference between it and my new PC I built. Unless you need the latest processor power for some special application, a new PC every five years in this day and age is just overkill.
  • Posting this from a 5 year old iMac that runs everything I need just fine, including El Capitan and the Windows 10 VM I just installed. Of course, I upgraded the RAM, which is damn near impossible to do on a new model. Now that is sad.
  • I have:
    - 2011 MacBook Air i5 13.3" - still runs well on OS X 10.11. Works well casting video to Chromecast.
    - 2011 iMac i7 27" - has gotten slower and slower with each OS update, upgrading to SSD a year or so ago fixed that. Now runs very well with OS X 10.11.
    - 2012 iPad mini - deceased due to digitizer problems. Got slower and slower with each OS update, also, could not keep more than one webpage tab stored in RAM at once. Was planning to upgrade it anyway due to the performance, but the "ghost touch" on th

  • How it used to be (Score:5, Interesting)

    by david_thornley ( 598059 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:36PM (#51762345)

    Way back when, Apple was claiming that its computers lasted longer, and retained their usefulness longer, than other computers. Suddenly, this is supposed to be a problem?

  • So you can get off your "me so offended horse" - every freakin' technology companies makes fun of people who aren't using the latest and greatest. Microsoft EVEN claimed that if you upgrade the process in your computer you will need to be using the latest version of Windows or else it won't work properly.

    Seriously, people with short attention spans.
  • Gaaahh. My MacBook Pro is 6 years old. Still does a great job. That comment is from a throw-away viewpoint, which seems to feel that everyone has lots of money to give Apple, and no need to spend it on anything else. Let's see: I have a house to pay for, a sick wife, a son in college, a dog, 2 cars to pay for, insurance for everybody, all the associated bills needed to pay for a house, etc. Left over is a few dollars I try to put towards retirement. I don't need to waste my money on useless Apple cr
  • by WheezyJoe ( 1168567 ) <fegg&excite,com> on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:39PM (#51762401)

    Got a Phenom X4 [wikipedia.org] chugging happily since 2009. Got a Sandy Bridge i5 2500K [wikipedia.org] purring along since 2010. Even my Macbook Pro is a 2010 model, doing great since I swapped out the drive for a Samsung SSD, and my iPad is from 2012, the first to use retina and the last to use the wide (non-lightning) connector.

    Sorry, Apple marketing guy. Got nothing against Apple products... they're pretty and work well. But my shit's working just fine, thank you very much, and I'll take no compulsion to trade up before I'm damn good and ready. Don't piss on me just because I know how to source reliable equipment and maintain it well.

  • How about the Mac Pro? The last time they did an update on that machine was in 2013! All of the hardware in that product line is at least three years old, and a good portion of it was about a year out of date when it came out in 2013. For a machine that costs upwards of four grand, you are certainly not getting your money's worth!

    You can get a significantly more powerful machine today for half the cost.

    • most mac users don't care about "power"

      there is good reason I chose mac at work over the windows IT also offered

  • This is nothing new at all. This has been Apple user attitude since the Macintosh came out. The attitude was to look down on those poor pitiable IBM users because they didn't have the best, and had to bow down before the silicon gods to receive their next batch of poorly engineered hardware. This was back in 1985. Nothing has changed.

    This wouldn't even be an article other than some journalist seized an angle and went with it. I bet the spokeslady never saw it coming, because she's so into it that it's

  • Expected the tablet bubble to burst years earlier than it has.

  • by kuzb ( 724081 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:55PM (#51762625)

    ..is that Apple execs thinks we should have to upgrade perfectly working hardware every year. I put a new video card in my intel i7 920 and it still performs pretty damn good for all the tasks I use it for. This is just more proof of how far out of touch Apple is with the real world.

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @06:03PM (#51765339)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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