Has Apple lost its way?

[Meredi86]

Hey all. Now that Lion is out we can have a good old chat about it. And the other releases that we have seen today.

"Justify this thread name" i hear people saying. OK here goes:

1) you used to be able to set your watch by Apple release dates. Now they upgrade, update and alter as much as any other computer producing company - leaving a lot of Apple fans (who would have thought about the update cycle) with now 7 month old out dated MB airs. I usually dont mind missing out on an update by a few days/months, but that was when you could tell that it was coming. what was the point in them revising the MacBook Airs just before christmas? Monetary gain. This company used to stand for more than that, they used to care about their customers, but it seems now that they have come back into the Computer market and are gaining traction they have just decided to ignore their customers and do what they want. If windows and Linux werent my only other two options then today i would sell all my Macs and swap to the other option. Wake up Apple and realise you have something called customer satisfaction to think about (this new lack of customer care is not only seen in their updating but also in their own Stores - and ill back that up with many examples too)

2) People have spent the past 20 years complaining that Apple are expensive products. I have spent 10 of those years defending the company and stating that while they may be £100 more expensive than the Dell or whatever counterpart they are £200 more WORTH it, so in actual fact the Apple is cheaper, as it is faster more robust and the Computer will last much longer (look at the clamshell iBooks) and sell for more on the second hand market. But now what is the cheapest Apple laptop on the market? thats right £800 and thats an 11 inch MacBook Air (if you notice they have dropped the MacBooks). So now all those people that were thinking that £650 was ok for the laptop - it is an Apple after all - and have been saving up for that £650 have now had a big middle finger in their face - "You want Apple? Then pay for it *****". How is one supposed to defend an £800 laptop with a sub 2.0ghz processor (ok i5 is a bonus over the standard i3 in competitor laptops) 2GB of Ram, a 64GB hard drive, a 384MB (shared memory - booo) graphics card, 11.1 inch screen and no CD drive? Yup you guessed it, try to defend that and people will laugh in your face telling you you are a moron. I agree with them, while i have a MacBook Air i have it for the niche its there for - uber lightweight - but not everyone wants that. Apple have just lost a major chunk of the portable computing market. and no the iPad does not count against a regular laptop - they are different machines that still at this point have different tasks.

I do like the Mac Minis though they look fairly tasty - just a few more 3rd party thunderbolt accessories and i may swap to one. Well if cheap decent screens come out for it (again £800 for a screen that isnt as good as a samsungs - the hub makes no difference, i couldnt care less about ethernet on my screen - i have wifi and a good network thanks.

Lion, well i am on the GM, but that may be the release but no-one knows so im not going to comment on Lion until i get the release clean installed tomorrow.

why is it every release Apple has these days there are glaring holes in them?? Can we please go back to the days of Apple putting out Star products at a competitive price with better tech and at the release times that they ground into all of their fans. Or am i just ranting at yet another rick wall of a company that claims they are about their customers and "Think Different" to their competitors? Steve Jobs, meet IBM, its the company you will be running in a very short time at this rate. (those who know Apple history will get my meaning on that last statement).

Rant over - feel free to banter with me but it would be nice to keep that banter clean.

[dljeffery]

It was actually 9 months, not 7 months, since the last release. If you look at past release cycles for the MacBook (MB, MBP, MBA) lines, you'll see that is in no way out of line (even though in some cases, such as with the pre-2010 MBA, and the now EOL'd MB, it stretched out considerably longer).

Also, if Apple were to add optical drives to the MBA line, they would in effect kill its market. That would be totally against what the buyers for this particular machine want.

About 10, maybe 11, years ago, I bought a Toshiba Portege 3440CT to use as my main computer, including Win32 development. I think I paid close to $3K for it; definitely not less than $2.5K. It had 64MB RAM, which I upgraded with third-party RAM to max out at 192MB. It had a 6GB disk, which I upgraded over the years, to 20GB and then 30GB. It had a 1024x768 11.3" LCD. It weighed 3.4 lbs. It had a less than full sized keyboard (maybe 90 to 95% the usual key size). And it cost a lot more than much more capable but much larger notebooks on the market at the time. The only selling point for the elevated price was extreme (for then) portability. I loved that machine.

And today, I would totally love an 11.6" MBA, for those same extreme portability reasons (but with significantly fewer drawbacks than back then). Right now I'm using a mid-2010 15" 2.4GHz i5 MBP with 8GB RAM and an aftermarket 160GB SSD. I don't use the SuperDrive (well, I have, well under half a dozen times). I keep the nVidia graphics chip turned off, because I don't need the additional power it offers, and because it makes the machine run hotter and the battery drain considerably faster.

Now, I do wish that I could get an 11.6" Air with 8GB RAM. But I can live with 4GB; prior to the MBP, I was developing on a 2007 MacBook with 4GB, and that was really fine overall. And I do miss the smaller overall size and weight of that machine. If the 2010 Airs had already been out when I bought my current 15" MBP, I'm quite certain I wouldn't have bought the MBP.

A big part of the reason why I went with the 15" MBP instead of the 13" MBP was that I wanted the additional pixels. So in a way it seems like the 13" MBA would make more sense than the 11.6" MBA... however, after using Lion for the past several months, I honestly don't think it will be an issue. The advent of full screen apps (especially Xcode), along with the way that Lion dynamically creates/removes spaces as needed for full screened apps, goes a huge way toward addressing my previous desire for more pixels. The only thing that would be a drawback is running the iPad Simulator at full size. But I'm already quite familiar with doing that on the old MacBook, plus even on my 15" MBP, it still requires some scrolling if the Simulator is in portrait mode.

So I'm actually happy with what Apple has been doing lately. And hoping to make that 11.6" Air upgrade sometime in the next month or two, and expecting that around 8 to 10 months from now, there will be an even better 11.6" Air on the market. But that won't make 2011's Air, or even 2010's Air, obsolete.