One photog's not so great experience with Apple

On Monday, September 17, 2018 at 8:56:49 PM UTC-4, nospam wrote:
-hh wrote:

Now some people will try to blame
Intel for this (see below), but that doesn't excuse bugs in the OS,
or defective motherboards (see iPhone 8 recall), and the all-too-many
other recent examples of Apple shipping "beta" quality products.

those are separate issues, especially the iphone 8, which doesn't use
an intel x86 processor. some versions have an intel baseband but that's
entirely different.

That Apple is having such problems across all of their product
lines ... including those without Intel CPUs ... means that the
common problem isn't one supplier (Intel), but at Apple.

apple isn't having such problems across all of their product lines.


Listen to yourself! Its like saying that a car with three flat tires is just "doing fine".



apple has some of the highest customer satisfaction rates in the
industry, which could not happen if there were widespread problems.

Parroting others doesn't make it any more true.
As I said, reputation can be coasted on.


part of that is intel's fault, who is continually late with new chips.

That none of the other big PC OEMs .. Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc, manifest
having
the same problems coping with Intel makes it all clear that this isn't an
"Intel Problem", but an Apple problem.

oh yes they do.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/debian-...kylake-kaby-la
ke-processors-have-broken-hyper-threading/

No, because the claim was that Intel was unable to meet delivery
schedules for new chips, so noting that there's also been problems
with hyperthreading fails to substantiate that original claim.

yes it does. apple isn't going to use chips with known issues.

microsoft did it and it bit them in the ass.

Yet Dell, HP, Lenovo didn't ... You're cherrypicking.


It could be because...[Microsoft Surface]
For example, the Mac mini hasn't gotten a hardware
update for four (4) years. Its CPU is Intel's 5th
Generation "Haswell", and since then, Intel has shipped:

6th Gen - Broadwell (1Q2015)

7th Gen - Skylane (4Q2015) & Kaby Lake (3Q2016)

8th Gen - Coffee Lake (1Q2018) ... which are in the MacBook Pro's which
Apple finally updated in July, a full quarter later than their
competition,
who first shipped back in April.

the difference in the various generations is not that much and the mini
doesn't sell in huge numbers anyway.

That's lame excuse-making for the world's biggest by market cap corporation.

Particularly since in the meantime, there's been other companies who sell
similarly small form factor desktop PCs who _have_ been able to keep their
hardware designs up-to-date.

macbooks and imacs were recently updated, which are about 90% of mac
sales.

And design-wise, the mini is nothing more than just a repackaged Macbook,
which incurs minimal developmental & deployment costs.


the imac pro is well ahead of what pcs have to offer at similar prices.

Depends on what's important to one's workflow & needs as to if it is better
or not. If you want a beautiful screen but with obscene internal storage prices,
and zero repairability, the iMac Pro is for you.


nothing comes close to the performance of the latest iphones. even last
year's iphones were beating the competition.

Better is the enemy of good enough. What I need from my iPhones (yes, that's plural)
is better battery life, not faster frame rates to play games.

Oh, and dual SIMs (real ones, not an eSIM) for use when on international travel
to take advantage of non-outrageous local cellular costs would be nice too. The
first time that I had a $1500 monthly bill was quite fun trying to get accounting
to approve it.


rumours suggest an october event, where new macs and ipads will be
announced, possibly other stuff.

Still vaporware until it happens.


in other words, an updated mini with coffee lake wouldn't be that much
better than what exists now.

Where "not much faster" is ~35% CPU and ~50% higher memory bandwidth.
Even before considering also having higher core counts available.

what matters is real world performance.

Yet benchmarks still exist as they serve a useful purpose.

this year's macbook pro versus last year's macbook pro versus the 2015
is not *that* much.

Google is your friend.


We can similarly look at the Intel Xeon line for the Mac Pro, which
has gone five (5) years without any hardware refreshes. Anyone
really want to claim that Intel hasn't released _any_ Server/
Workstation CPUs in five years?

apple admitted they made a mistake with the trashcan mac pro.

Way back in April 2017, so where the **** is its replacement already?

18 months is not very long.
apple's product cycles are 2-3 years.

And 2-3 years from when the Trash Can first shipped in 2013 is ... 2-3 years ago.

That it took them so long to 'fess up to having screwed up is a sign of bad leadership.


Keep in mind that it only took Apple six (6) months to ship "Yikes!".

that wasn't a complete redesign and an entirely different era.

As if it requires a "complete redesign" for them to replace the guts of the
"cheese grater" a third time. /S Because there's _still_ nothing wrong
with the pre-trashcan Mac Pro design, other than Apple not wanting to.

The longer that a next Mac Pro doesn't ship - - the bigger of a disaster it is going
to be, with a closed and non-maintainable architecture that's only good for Apple.


they've been working on a redesigned mac pro, which will probably be
announced next year sometime.

No, they've *said* that they're working on it. And there still isn't
any firm release date, so it is classical vaporware.

are you accusing apple of making false and misleading statements?

Nope - merely repeating what Apple Fanboys have said about Apple's
competitors for the past twenty years.

Prove me wrong by citing the release date that Apple has published in a
Press Release that's archived on Apple's website. Unless you can produce
that, the words are just more vaporware.



Apple has left open their barn doors so wide that they could announce
on Christmas Day 2019 ... and claim that they're not "late".

they never announced a date for the next mac pro, so it can't be late.

Ergo, it is still vaporware.


The MacBook Air isn't a spring chicken either; its running on
a Broadwell CPU from 2015, and its last "update" was merely a
cull of base specifications to options, and decreasing the
manufacturing line from six discrete models to two.

except that it's still selling quite well. not everyone needs
top of the line.

Try keeping your excuses consistent:
* the mini isn't being updated because it isn't selling well
* the air isn't being updated because it _is_ selling well

they're not excuses and it's two different products.

The rationalization attempt is still a flagrant self-contradiction.

i said the air *was* updated, just not at the same price point, so they
kept the old air around, which is an extremely popular product.

The air's last "update" was to kill off the 11" and to make the previously
optional 13" version the new base version. That's why they went from
six part#s to just two.


its replacement is the retina macbook, except that they can't
make that at the macbook air price point yet, so they're keeping
both, for now.

Amazing how other manufacturers are able to sell both MB and MBA
classes of machine for roughly half what Apple charges. Sure, we
can say that its the OSX secret sauce that makes it worth paying
more, but this much more...not really.

not with the same specs, they aren't.

Yes, less. And for the example I provided, I own both.


apple kept the 2012 non-retina macbook around for a few years because
users kept buying them. they also kept the ipad 2 around for a few
years because users kept buying them too.

Those were for .edu sales...and the early retina display models had
a pretty steep price markup, which motivated some customers to sidestep
them, just as is being done of late with the non-touchbar MBP's.

nope. there was no restriction on who could buy them.

edu did buy a lot because of the price, but so did non-edu customers.

What I wrote isn't contradicted by what you said.


Meantime, the MacBook & iMac have gone 400+ days since last
refresh and could use the already-shipping Coffee Lake CPUs
currently being sold in the MBP's. About the only rational
justification for not having already released them is that
the world's biggest corporation by Market Cap can't afford to
have enough people to walk & chew gum at the same time, so
they're staggering their rollouts (and drawing down existing
inventory too), even though from a calendar schedule standpoint,
it means that Apple has already missed the back-to-school sales
bump and is now also quite likely to miss the Christmas sales
bubble (again) too.

Yup, its all Intel's fault! /S

i said partly intel.

While trying to imply that it was the majority fault. So then,
care to put a percentage on it? 10%, sure, but no way in hell
is it more than 25%.

yes way in hell. apple can't ship what intel can't make, and in the
volumes apple needs.

Noted previously:

"[the mini's] CPU is Intel's 5th Generation "Haswell", and since then, Intel has shipped:
6th Gen - Broadwell (1Q2015)
7th Gen - Skylane (4Q2015) & Kaby Lake (3Q2016)
8th Gen - Coffee Lake (1Q2018) ..."

Intel was there - - so where was Apple? Asleep at the switch, trying
to use the excuse that the products weren't selling well for any reason
other than they had become decrepitly out of date while never having
their prices slashed to match the market.


and keep in mind that there's a processor change brewing.

Yeah, I've heard those rumors too. Knowing how Apple likes
to vertically integrate, there's chance, but the problem with
it is that it takes 2+ years for the software vendors to all
provide updates to make a new workflow actually better; BTDT x3.

nonsense. for most developers, it's little more than recompiling and
testing.

They still got to go do it....

....and as I pointed out, even Apple hasn't done a good job in finishing
even getting all of their OS-supplied Apps up to 64 bit.


ios apps are already compiled for x86 and arm.

for apps on the app store, developers won't even need to do the first
part because apple's bitcode can build the appropriate binary on the
fly.

more complex apps may need additional work, but certainly not 2-3 years
worth.

How long did it take Adobe to give Mac Photoshop 64-bit support?


obviously, anything that relies on specifics about the x86 instruction
set or hardware will need more effort, but very, very few apps fall
into that category.

In the meantime, customers have to cope with deoptimal code klunges
that make the "better" hardware not run as good as the old stuff..

....which is precisely what's happened historically on each of Apple's
prior major CPU architecture changes.


apple's a11 and a12 chips in their iphones are benchmarking in the
range of macbooks, in some cases better, and that's with a chip
designed to run on a small battery in a pocket sized device.

Still doesn't solve the Application software problem. And given how
Apple is struggling to get even their own core Apps up to 64 bit
clean before they EOL themselves, the prospects of a new CPU change
not being an utter disaster are pretty damn low.

nonsense.

You clearly don't keep up well on the real Apple news, for it was but just
three months ago (June 2018), Apple finally got around to updating OSX's
DVD player app to be 64-bit compliant:

http://www.applemust.com/rejoice-apple-will-let-you-play-dvds-on-mojave-macs/


an arm chip designed for a laptop or desktop, not limited to the
thermals, power and size constraints of a phone, would be much better..

If you set your bar low enough, anything is possible. So how
about an Apple ARM that can take on a Xeon class that would be
suitable for a Mac Pro desktop?

how about no straw men.

nobody is expecting arm chips to debut in a mac pro.

No, your name isn't "nobody"; it is "nospam".


the most likely place is in a future macbook air or mac mini. the
latter could even be the size of the existing apple tv.

Then let it go run iOS and not meddle in content creation workflows.


another part is that the industry has changed and desktops and laptops
have taken a back seat to mobile, and not just apple. the iphone is the
largest part of apple's revenue, so that's what gets the most
attention.

Yet the Mac still is more profitable than the iPad product line,
despite how the latter gets updates ... and advertising.

mobile is the future.

" Å* PCs are going to be like trucks. They're still going to be around,
they're still going to have a lot of value, but they're going to be
used by one out of X people"
- Steve Jobs, 2010

yep

Yet there's still no truck. Just fanboys trying to claim that a big shiny turd
called an iMac "Pro" is everyone's workflow panacea. /S


And what we're learning about how the public is applying mobile,
particularly under iOS, is that mobile is for content _consumption_
much more so than it is about content _creation_.

nope.

most people are consumers, regardless of platform.

however, those who do create can *easily* do so on ios.

Except that doing so is even easier with other UIs.


ios is getting most of the attention.

As a consumption platform.

imovie, photoshop and thousands of other apps say nope.

iMovie, like iPhoto and iWeb ... are dead to Apple.

And even though Photoshop has become a rent-based cash cow for Adobe,
it exists more so today because they went platform agnostic so that they
wouldn't have to tolerate Apple's inconsistencies.




aperture was a complete market failure.

the majority of mac users chose lightroom over aperture. products that
fail in the marketplace are normally canceled.

when aperture first came out, it was *very* slow. apple said not to use
it on anything slower than a powermac. its speed got better in later
versions but it still was slower than lightroom and also lacked the
seamless integration with photoshop and raw support wasn't as fast as
from adobe. apple cut the price of aperture more than once, but nothing
could save it. it's surprising it lasted as long as it did.

More excuse making, particularly since the bang-up job that Apple
did with Final Cut serves to illustrate what they can do in the way
of non-crappy software writing when it has leadership attention &
support.

it's not an excuse. lightroom won the battle from the very beginning
and apple decided their resources were better spent elsewhere.

LR has had its problems too ... Apple poured tons of money into other
endeavors and tortured their Aperture customers with a long lingering
death.


photos is much better than iphoto and *significantly* faster. photos
was never intended to be a replacement for aperture, which is where
most of the complaints come from. its for casual users, not photo
enthusiasts.

photos is faster...but that's it. it still can't even do today what
iPhoto did back in 2015, particularly in terms of DAM.

nonsense. it handles larger libraries and muuuuuuch faster.

There isn't an iOS device made that can support my libraries.

however, it's *not* a pro level tool. for that, get lightroom.

Already have it, fanboy.

And that's a workflow where Adobe is helping me to become OS-agnostic
so that I have options other than being held hostage to the whims of Apple.



As such, it
wasn't even a decent replacement for iPhoto, let alone Aperture.
The only reason why photos hasn't gotten totally slammed is because
most customers today are iOS based casual users who've never used
anything better.

no, it's because casual users don't *need* anything better.

those who do need something better overwhelmingly chose lightroom over
aperture and never even considered iphoto or photos.

With the real reason why was because they were already on Windows.
And more are switching every day because Apple's inaction and failure
to cultivate existing relationships has effectively told their photo-centric
customer market to go **** off.

As I said ... disenchanted customer & increasingly cynical APPL stockholder,
as I do see Cook driving the company off a cliff for a likely fatal crash.


-hh