xyzzy01

hentaiboy said:

Is there a precedent for Apple Watch headlining a launch event rather than being “one more thing”?

It's been a major part of the last launch events - IIRC, it was featured near the start of the event and definitely not just passed by. The end was saved for the phones,.

frnck said:

Like if Walmart was giving you cash to buy in their stores! Why does the debate ignores always that distributors have always had a cut for their effort? Apple sells hardware and distributes software on it. When you think there is a market, define the price and let it be distributed for you! I value the screening made by Apple and no longer buy outside of the store on my Mac either and above all I value the simplicity. I believe there are options to buy outside and use on Apple devices but you will find users like me that will pay the extra for the simplicity....and those are typically users that pay....whilst It seems to me complaining developers keep listening to users that don’t want to pay and get everything for free....

Because you can buy and run software on Windows and MacOS without any cut to the platform vendor. They have sold you their products (OS, HW etc) already, they're not trying to double dip by acting as a mandatory toll fee gatekeeper as well.

On the opposite side, you have consoles where this have not been possible... but the HW has often been sold at a loss (at least if including R&D), and the profit was in controlling the software.

"If every developer could accept their own payments and avoid the 30% tax by Apple and Google we could pass the savings along to all our consumers and players would get a better deal on items. And you'd have economic competition."

While I certainly see the problematic part of the 30% tax, there is no reason to believe the CEO's statement here. These items have a marginal cost of 0, and are priced at the level that results in maximum revenue. 

"The MacBook Pro weighs in at just 3.1 pounds,"

This is not correct. According to Apple's web pages, the weight is 2.0 kg (4.3 pounds ). Still lighter than the Razer, but closer to 75% than 50% of its weight.

It's also strange to read that the Razer display is "only 400 nits of brightness. That's better than the Full HD screen, but still far from the MacBook Pro. ", while the graphics difference (the Razer has more than double the performance) is downplayed: "the performance of the discrete GPUs used by Razer in the Blade Pro is considerably better than those used in the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Again, Apple could catch up by upgrading the GPUs in a future MacBook Pro refresh. "

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that Apple will catch up for quite a while - partially weight (cooling), and partially because Apple is married to the vendors currently trailing the performance game: AMD is beating Intel soundly in CPUs, and Nvidia is beating AMD for GPUs. Apple uses Intel CPUs and AMD CPUs only, unfortunately.

And while not many networks support WiFi 6 now, they certainly will during the lifespan of these laptops...

That said: What will my next purchase be? Apple. Due to MacOS and general build quality. I just wish they'd switch CPU and GPU vendors, and go for WiFi 6 - but I'm going to buy what they have anyway. No competition on the OS front.