Apparently, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
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Funny, iOS5 made my iPod touch obsolete with a flick of a finger. Apple tech support recommended that I scour my drive cache for older apps that would run when everything updated itself.
My end solution was to never attach the thing to my computer again and move to another OS. I’ve been happier ever since. YMMV.
The original article is about iPads and other i devices. Apple’s real computers seem to be just fine in the long run, it’s their iOS which seems like it’s out to let you down when they think you should upgrade.
Do I have to buy every model, Apple? Isn’t it OK if I just buy one every once in a while? WOULD IT MAKE THE ARMRESTS ON YOUR THRONE OF MONEY TOO THIN, IF I ONLY DID THAT??
You hit the nail on the head there. Everyone goes on about how phones and tablets have killed PCs, and I guess for the people who used PCs solely to check email, browse the web, and play casual games, yeah, I suppose they did. But I’m sitting here on a PC I built 5 years ago from older parts, and it works fine. I replaced a hard drive a couple of years ago, and at one point I put in an nVidia graphics card, but it does everything I want or need it to do nearly in the blink of an eye, so why upgrade?
Yeah…I’ve got a budget DIY PC in an Antec Three Hundred and the thing is a behemoth. I only have the two case fans the thing came with, and it’s more than enough cooling–if I were to stick a thermometer in there, I doubt it’d be much above room temperature inside.
The only thing that makes me antsy is that I wouldn’t want to rely on a 2.5" drive, tiny SSD, NAS, or storing it on someone else’s server over the Internet a.k.a. “the cloud”. I want a nice, reliable (compared to 2.5") 3.5" drive. Everything else can be shrunk down, just give me a couple of 3.5" bays, and the ability to add/remove/swap things like the GPU, and nobody gets hurt.
Also the “release a patch for the previous OS release that subtly breaks an essential feature, and suggest that the problem has been resolved in the new release” tactic.
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It’s not just Apple’s problem.
I’m a diehard fan of Thinkpads. My two workstations are both X61 laptops, both purchased used for around $100, both running such a stripped down version of linux that even though they are ultraportables they work just fine as multi-tasking heavy workstations hooked up to a large monitor. My primary machine I upgraded to 8GB and SSD, so I’ve got $300 total into it…but that’s still peanuts. Seeing how Lenovo screwed the brand up, my plan is to collect about 5 thinkpads and not buy another computer for 20 years.
Ditto my three year old phone running the latest version of Cyanogen, etc.
Why in the world would I upgrade?
Doing more with less not only makes financial sense, it’s very good for the environment.
I respect what the industry has been trying to do to innovate new form factors. But me, I’m perfectly happy with the laptop shape, thank you very much…
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For goodness’ sake don’t buy one of the new iPads. Everyone knows that Apple chain their factory workers to the line with barbed wire bondage collars, and shoot babies in the head just so as to have an exclusive artisanal way to collect lead for their special solder. And when you just think that those self-same workers get paid 5x the wages and are freed from their bonds when it is time for the line to make a run of obviously superior Android tablets, it just makes you want to spit.
Besides, if you TruBelieversInTheEvilOfApple refuse to buy a new iPad, I might have more chance of getting one soon to replace my horribly cracked-screen iPad 2.
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Apple, and their software ecosystem, are rather like Logan’s Run: a cult classic, and fanatical about killing old people.
Apple themselves just exude the attitude (I love the one where Adobe, probably the largest 3rd-party dev on the platform, only learned that 64-bit Carbon was Not Happening during the same public announcement as everybody else. No roadmap, no early warning, no nothing. That shows that you mean business.); but it’s impressive how effectively they’ve gotten 3rd parties on board. Even software not obviously aided by new OS features usually leaves you high and dry within a few OS cycles.
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It was the only shape they could think of that fits even more poorly than their existing products in a standard 19" rack…
I’m not surprised that this kind of bullshit doesn’t work for tablets. I am pretty surprised and dismayed at how well it does seem to work for phones. As someone more than content with a 5+ year old flip phone that works fine, I’m totally baffled by the mentality I see in folks who NEED to upgrade from one virtually identical smart phone to another with extreme regularity. It gives me miserable fever-visions of those Asian cities buried more and more under mountains of Western e-waste.
That’s strange, as all iOS I know kept their 4s or even 4 and updated to iOS7 and are pretty satisfied with the update. Same here with iPad 2. (Updated to 5s, though, because that one is quite a bit faster and has a better camera.)
I had an iPad 2 but upgraded to a 3 for the retina display. Prior to today’s announcement about new iPads I decided that if they made it lighter I would buy it. They made it lighter and so I’m going to buy it.
It’s like with any electronic device. Different people feel the need to upgrade at different times – or hold onto it until it breaks.
Where is the problem? There are still plenty of new customers and lots of them are not in the US, too. (Shocking, ain’t it?)
Also, if “works fine” were be a reason not to buy, the car and housing market would plummet.
In any case, it’s a computing device, so there are the obvious improvements of
- faster
- lighter
- higher resolution
So yeah, while my iPad 2 does work fine, I wouldn’t mind a smaller, faster device with a higher resolution.
Considering that the iPad 2 is still being sold, there is obviously a market for it, so I can either resuse it as a secondary device, gift it within the family or sell it. So it’s not like buying a new model will add the old model to the landfill before it’s defective.
I once had a blog that touched on this in general (I didn’t update much and discontinued even that, but it’s still there at http://goodenov.blogspot.com/) - it’s a (pseudo?)-economic concept I call “good enough”. Most people, especially when the economy or their personal budget is tight, will buy something which meets their “good enough” criteria: enough function at a price they’re willing to pay. This concept holds down upgrades when one generation of a product provides enough or more than enough function for the customer; they can’t justify to themselves the upgrade cost just for ‘new’ or ‘prettier’.
All of the above was probably written in some economics text I never read, of course - feel free to add pointers to resources that I can read reflecting those ideas!
I got a Silverstone case a few years back just to change the form factor up and have reduced everything down to one fan from the PSU cooling the whole thing, it’s great. There’s more space in Micro ATX cases than you think, with two optical drive bays, two 3.5" bays, 16x PCI slot and three expansion slots are still free.
Then there’s another end market that Apple does not prefer to talk about:
Apple’s gonna have to pry my jailbroken device from my cold, dead hands.
Interesting article. I heard the Open Handset Alliance mentioned the other day when it was suggested HTC were going to make Amazon’s new phone.
Hey, there’s still Jolla, right?
Curious as to how many applications are actually able to utilize 12 threads.
I have heard fantastic rumours of computers so advanced they can have several applications running at the same time…
The question as to user need remains. My 4 core / 8 thread cpus don’t exactly struggle to keep up even with the rather heavy loads I subject them to.
I have the same reaction to high end sports cars on the freeway. Your car can go 200+ mph?! Great! Too bad you have 90 mph tires on it and the highest speed limit around here is 80, but hey, great!
If it’s the sports car thing that Apple is going for ok, great, but I thought someone might be able to point out a wide market use for a 6 core cpu that isn’t serviced well enough by the more widely used 4 core solution.
Video, Animation, 3-d rendering, Photography all can use as many cores as you can throw at them. Notice now why creatives love Apple? They make this stuff easy and transparent. So you can pay attention to the important things.
When you do that kind of work you spend a lot of time waiting for the render to finish so you can move on. Video editors were drooling to have one, you can be sure. Apple knows their market on this.
I could put a bunch of those Mac Pros to use right now. Someday . . .
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