It’s certainly a lot more relevant to phones and tablets. Possibly laptops-- a laptop you can use for more than ten hours a day is better than one you can only use for five or six.
Reasons why I might want to upgrade my 2009 iMac: video card is obsolete for games. Hard drive is dog slow, Video compression would be useful, and so would being able to talk with an AppleTV–though I’m prepared to be disappointed, Also, the combination of IOS8/Yosemite likes Bluetooth 4.0 and apparently won’t exploit USB Bluetooth adapters.
Processor speed? I suspect that the miserable video performance of my current machine ensures that I don’t run software that will reveal my Core2Duo’s limitations.
What makes me think that people aren’t happy with their computer’s performance after 8 years? The fact that the typical consumer upgrades before then.
If you could install any graphics card you wanted, Apple wouldn’t have to only build computers with those slots (added cost), allow space for those slots (added design complexity), presumably add ordering options and upgrades (added supply chain complexity), but also support a bunch of graphics cards if they don’t want to risk consumer anger when the cards they buy don’t work properly. These problems are much smaller when it comes to standardized hard drives and RAM.
It’s disingenuous to treat the average consumer as being different than you? OK.
Whether you like it or not, people generally don’t keep their upgradeable PCs for longer than 8 years, and they certainly don’t do it because they are able to upgrade more than just their RAM and hard drives.
Because a computer is an appliance and you lack the need, ability, or desire to upgrade the components? That might not describe you, but it describes a lot of people.
Why should anyone buy a tablet or smart phone that can’t be upgraded at all? Regardless of your personal feelings on these mobile computing devices, people still seem to be finding reasons to buy them.
This is completely untrue. If you do not actively click on the “OK” on the prompt the pop up will minimize and never restart the computer on its own. However most people have a tenancy to automatically click on any prompt without reading what it says and you do not need to change your registry or anything else to disable auto update, you just need amin rights to your PC.
A clear case of RTFM.
Which is why you have the option to not install it and can continue buying older versions of an OS with the knowledge that new applications will support it and knowing that it will be getting updates many years after it is even discontinued.
Every Mac from the early days until the iMac went to USB had two RS-422 serial ports. And SCSI, which is inherently both backward and forward compatible.
So we’re talking, what, about fifteen years? Why, that’s about the same time it took them to replace the iPod’s thirty pin connector with Lightning. (Which, to hear their detractors tell it, has happened about every three weeks.)
I recall that when my dad upgraded his IIe to a IIgs, the Apple II mouse didn’t work properly with war for middle earth, so we ended up buying an expensive, but cooler looking adb mouse. i think the parallel printer also needed to be replaced with a serial version, but that may just have been a limitation associated with MousePaint.
Or any other kind of a printserver gadget. I have one for my local HPLJ1200 (the gadget was discarded from industrial setting because of missing print jobs - it still misses one here or there but it is not so often and it was free).
