bigpics

"It was a problem in the flux capacitors, Marty....!!"

I feel the biggest difference between the "old Apple" and the "new Apple" (if you allow the notion there's a real post-Jobs demarcation), is that the core mission of the old (Jobsian) Apple was to invent (and perfect and add enjoyment to) whole new ways of solving problems and meeting needs - both existing and emerging - with entirely new (or close to "perfected") tools for those who wanted or needed to use digital tech (i.e., famously, "the rest of us") - in ways, that yes, generated a shit ton of money.

It was still the "Apple way," there were still aspects of a walled garden, still we'll tell you what your range of options are in order for us to maintain control over key aspects of its tools, but it was still very much customer need forward.

Whereas in this new Apple, it feels more like "how can we manipulate the people who use our tools into helping us make more money by tweaking existing lines of business not invented at Apple".... ....I just feel that the value add of another streaming video service with proprietary content, another music service, another digital news distribution platform etc. is more to Apple's bottom line than to most people's lives other than giving them a familiar brand to choose for those services. Color me unimpressed, even though I realize that in our economic system, large growth companies in highly competitive industries that aren't figuring out new (or borrowed) ways to grow are already dying, so lacking much that's obvious to invent (unless they have things in the pipeline that I'm not aware of), they have to expand into markets already crowded with alternate "solutions."


Accordingly, I stay as cross-platform as possible (Google/YouTube music works great on all my heterogenous devices, DropBox and Evernote are blessings that go places with me that iCloud and Notes don't - same with Pages which creates files I can't share with most of the computing world, leaving me dealing with (though not loving) Word.   

Sanitized, corporate-approved, pre-censored...."creativity"....? That last thing is not like the first three, so count me out.

Nothing but MOR stuff you've seen a million times before. Someone else said "anodyne," and yeah, another good word for it.  

PS: Does Apple Music censor today's music lyrics? I'm betting no. So add hypocritical to the list above. 

bluefire1 said:

Retina display alone is reason to upgrade.

Keyboard alone is a reason to consider NOT upgrading.

So there's that.

I also just priced going to 512 SSD and 16 GB RAM: $1799!  That's a whole bunch of simoleans for 8 GB of RAM and a bigger (but not expensive today) SSD.

If that price included a real i5 or i7 class CPU I'd be on the bubble.  But as is, hoping for further movement toward less suckage in the keyboard on the MBPs this summer.

Meanwhile, with a new keytop surface my 2013 MBA (512/8, i7) MBA is running like new.

I've given up trying to understand Apple's decision-making on portable Macs the last four years.  Anemic performance for $1800 (with 16GB Ram and 512 SDD) and "You VILL like our butterfly keyboard EFFEN IF you don't".....??? Do people like a nice screen and an orangey gold color that much? 

It does make the 13" MBP more appealing at least, though still not thrilled at the notion of $2899 for the fairly well-equipped with the dead end touch bar and.... ....that Keyboard.  Clackety-clack here I come...??

Maybe Intel will deliver in 2019 and they'll deliver a less thermally constrained 15" with 32GB of lower power RAM and drain my wallet of $4,000 for a pretty great machine with still challenged input (with a year to show that the KB holds up to the crumb menace). And finally start doing all of those power-needing projects I've been deferring.....