[mikehearn]

I interpreted that comment as a jab at the PC industry. The implication being that in the last 5+ years the PC industry has failed to offer 600 million users a compelling reason to upgrade. Isn't that the correct interpretation, considering the whole point of bringing that up is because they're positioning a new device intended to replace the PC? I seriously doubt it's intended to mean (to quote the article) "LOL poor people".

Granted, this interpretation would make for a boring thinkpiece and would not get me to #1 on HN.

[slantyyz]

>> The implication being that in the last 5+ years the PC industry has failed to offer 600 million users a compelling reason to upgrade

Compelling reason why I had to upgrade my iPhone 3G, iPhone 4 and original iPad after less than 3 years? Painfully slow and unusable.

Well if the compelling reason to upgrade is "painfully slow and unusable", then maybe a >= 5 year old PC that still works isn't a bad thing. If I'm not mistaken, my 2011 MBP's quad core i7 can still outperform the CPUs in today's Macbook Airs (the most popular Mac notebooks) in terms of pure processing power.

[pjc50]

Compelling reason why I had to upgrade my iPhone 3G, iPhone 4 and original iPad after less than 3 years? Painfully slow and unusable.

Exactly. Upgrading is a cost; not just money but also time. I upgraded my 1st gen iPad's OS exactly once (5 -> 6 I think) and it was a completely horrendous experience, involving PC iTunes.

The main driver of PC upgrades, apart from improved games, is bloat and the slow deterioration of Windows installations. It's not as bad as it used to be but reinstalling the OS and cleaning the fans can often substantially improve an old PC.

I still have my original iPad, but it's used for a very limited set of things as the browser is crashy and many apps aren't available for its OS.

Users want neither forced upgrades, manufactured obsolescence, nor bogus SaaS rentalware like Adobe Creative Cloud.

[livus]

I concur with you on not wanting forced upgrades and manufactured obsolescence.

But I have found rentalware (specifically Adobe Creative Cloud as I use it) to be a somewhat positive experience. Adobe pushes out updates frequently enough where you see positive increment in productivity without it being an annoying update. Plus it has bought the price within affordable range for people like me who can afford the software if we save up enough for a few years but not the down payment in one go. Having the payment broken down over months makes it more manageable. I have been a convert from a pirate to a legitimate paying user just because of this. Straight out licenses for adobe's software cost more than some kidney operations in my country before this SaaS model.

Jetbrains has also moved onto a SaaS model. If they continue with legitimate updates every few months, then that subscription is also worth paying for.

The only subscription I do not see any benefit in, as a individual developer, is Microsoft Office 365. That's more aimed at business's whose full life depends on the software.

[lewisl9029]

> The only subscription I do not see any benefit in, as a individual developer, is Microsoft Office 365. That's more aimed at business's whose full life depends on the software.

If the Office 365 subscription (for businesses) only included the Office suite, then I'd agree with you, but it also includes hosted email (for your own domain) and 1TB of OneDrive storage. To put that in perspective, Google Apps is a comparable product that offers hosted email, and it costs around the same but only includes 30GB of storage.

On paper at least, the subscription provides quite a bit of value. If only OneDrive for Business wasn't a piece of crap...

[livus]

Point well noted.

[kbenson]

> nor bogus SaaS rentalware like Adobe Creative Cloud

Eh, as SaaS goes, at least Adobe's has some compelling reasons to use it, the biggest one being cost. Sure, you'll pay more in the long run, but try telling someone trying to start out a small business that they should shell out multiple thousands of dollars for Adobe CS, or multiple hundreds of dollars per individual program if buying a la carte. That's the situation my Fiance was in, and I was finally able to move her to Adobe's SaaS offering and off of pirated Adobe CS because $40/mo is much easier to swallow than the prior cost. That they offer tech support, she can easily migrate computers, and there's no virus' bundled with the installer are all good selling points when coming from that side.

[slantyyz]

I still have all three of those iOS devices (and my wife's now retired 4S) mentioned in my original post.

The saddest thing?

The iPhone 4 has only one easy job to do. Play music in my bedroom. It can't even do that reliably. My iPhone 3G (now a desk clock) is more stable than the 4.

There's a reason I left iOS for Android on the phone side and Windows on the tablet side. I've been burned enough that I don't care to be burned again. Granted, Apple's devices are probably less prone to bloat now that Federighi took over from Forstall, but there's nothing compelling for me on the iOS side right now. A Pencil-enabled Mini would be very interesting, but that's about it.

[ant6n]

The hardware of the Iphone is nice. I'd like it but with in an Android OS (and an MicroSD card slot). But then again, I wouldn't be willing for pay for that, so I'll continue using my used LG3 I picked up for like 200$.

[majewsky]

I'd like an Android phone with the update availablity of iOS. Nexus is the closest contender, but they still stop supporting devices after about 1,5 - 2 years.

[Shog9]

I have a G3 like the GP... Unlocked, with latest nightly (Marshmallow) builds of Cyanogenmod. Pretty painless.

You can argue that Google and the OEMs should be making these upgrades easier and more widely available... And they should... But at least 3rd-parties filling in is an option in many cases. You can shop around to find the combination of hardware and software support that you want.

The problem with getting locked into a walled garden - no matter how nice it is - is that you're still locked in when winter comes.

[slantyyz]

(Lenovo) Motos are pretty good with this.

I've had a G and X Play, and update support has been pretty good.

[croon]

Nexus 5 is 2½ years old and is still supported.

[majewsky]

> It's not as bad as it used to be but reinstalling the OS and cleaning the fans can often substantially improve an old PC.

And if you're reinstalling the OS anyway, add an SSD (at least for the system files). This gives a substantial performance boost on most old PCs for under 100 $/€.

[phillc73]

Completely agree. I have a 5 year old Asus K54C (i3-2330m model).

About a year ago I upgraded RAM from 3GB to 6GB, which dealt with most of my multitasking and "large files in memory" issues.

About 2 months ago I bought a Samsung Evo 250GB SSD for under €90. This solved just about every other frustration I had with the machine - slow boot times, slow program load times etc.

The only issue I really have now is maxing out one core too easily and having the fan spin up loudly. Investigations reveal a CPU upgrade is possible.[0]

I have no intention of buying another laptop for a further 12-24 months, even if the plastic case of this one is held together with super glue and tape.

[0] https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/433227-asus-x54c-bbk9...

[jclulow]

Though, if you buy a cheap SSD, I would be careful not to depend on it for important data. Cheaper SSDs often have very low write endurance, and using them as the OS drive where there will be swap and hibernation files, as well as potentially large install and update activity, can drive them to a quick death.

[douche]

Is it no longer standard operating procedure to disable hibernation when you put an SSD in?

In any case, with an SSD, my boot times from cold start have been faster than coming back from hibernation were with rust disks. Plus, clean starts are less likely to leave things in a fubar state than the often-buggy hibernation

[chris_wot]

My iPad 2 barely functions now. Kind of pathetic really.

[agumonkey]

Surely true, phone hardware was quite 'limited' at first, unlike PC which were mostly capable of swallowing any task thrown at them (unless transcoding 1080p in real time or rebuilding LFS counts). On PC the main issue is: subpar and/or unsupported GPU (to avoid burning the main cpu for entertainment), absence of SSD, bad software stack.

[slantyyz]

>> Surely true, phone hardware was quite 'limited' at first

Well here's my problem with that argument. The 3G, 4 and iPad 1 were quite fast until the bloated OS upgrades started coming out.

The one thing that would keep me from being bitter is if Apple offered an easy way to downgrade to the original OS version of each one.

I don't run a lot of apps. The most important apps to me are the ones that come with the phone. If that meant living without some apps and new features but being able to keep the devices in use longer, I would have surely made that trade-off.

[agumonkey]

True, but I can also understand how for some time iPad 1 level hardware was just a bit too limiting. Now the bloated upgrades, as I said, did also help forcing users to "want" the new one more.

The thing that saddens me is that, business will always do that, it's the survival gene by making profit. On the other hand we could have nice open source, legit good software layers but it just doesn't happen the right way on smartphones so we're stuck with android / ios and their tricks.

[slantyyz]

>> Now the bloated upgrades, as I said, did also help forcing users to "want" the new one more.

My experience after switching to Android is not that though. Most of the major releases, including the upcoming N, offer performance improvements.

Granted, I don't know what that says about the code base, whether it was already so vastly inefficient that they find tons of room for improvements or whatnot, but it's definitely a refreshing change from iOS for me.

[Nullabillity]

Google wins when you upgrade Android, Apple wins when you buy a new iDevice. The different priorities shouldn't be surprising at all.

[agumonkey]

True, after version 7 iOS became too demanding. Ironically I had much love for first OSX releases that got better even on 1st gen iMac until 10.5 I believe. Apple put that gene to rest ..

[secstate]

All valid points, but it hasn't always been this way. There is a model for profitably and sustainably running a business that builds solid products and then services them.

We often act as though the world we live in is the only way things could have possibly proceeded, but after WW2 U.S. manufacturing invented the idea of the consumer to cope with manufacturing capacity built up during war time.

We are still effectively living in a manufacturing boom time created by a war machine.

[drdeadringer]

I've pretty much gotten to the point of upgrading my hardware only when continuing to use my current hardware is more painful.

Is this slowness//clunkiness liveable for what I'm doing? When the answer is "no" more days than "yes", it's time for me to go shopping. Until then, I'm ok with typing on something you might find on the Millennium Falcon.

[notahacker]

The irony of those comments is that one of the Mac's selling points is that after 5 years the average person can still expect it to be a decent machine running the latest OS and not corrupted by bloatware.

(My six year old PC laptop is an incredibly heavy piece of junk that crashes all the time due to the combination of corrupted hard disk and Vista, and it actually is sad that I still occasionally find a cause to use it, not least because it's still the least unreliable device for running Skype that I own)

[jdietrich]

This is why Chromebooks are brilliant devices for a lot of users. You lose out on functionality, but you completely avoid bloat. They reliably boot in 6-8 seconds and stay responsive with a dozen tabs open, even with a puny little Atom or ARM processor.

[incepted]

> I seriously doubt it's intended to mean (to quote the article) "LOL poor people".

He didn't mean to but this is the general reflection of the culture that permeates Apple as a company and the bubble in which they live.

I remember once one of my wealthy friends saying "I don't understand why people live in one bedroom apartments". I stared at her for a solid minute to determine if she was joking but no, she was dead serious. She genuinely did not understand. She was born and raised in a wealthy family and she just had lost track of the rest of the world.

Schiller and the Apple execs have similar blinders on and once in a while, the mask drops in a public speech because the speech writers and their proofreaders have similar blinders on and didn't realize the enormity of the implication.

[mikehearn]

As a hardware company, if a huge percentage of your user base is still using a product you made five years ago, there are two schools of thought:

1. "Great! Our products are so well-made, stable and backwards-compatible that users do not have to upgrade."

2. "This is terrible. We have failed so thoroughly to innovate that people are content with using five-year-old technology."

It's not like Apple is unaware of virtues of #1, but as a company they are clearly in bucket #2. In five years, if 600MM users are still using the iPhone 6, I'm certain they would also consider that "very sad". I don't think Schiller and the exec team have blinders, they are just holding the rest of the PC industry to the same standard to which they hold themselves.

[dkonofalski]

I feel like you're just exemplifying the exact opposite here. You're making a lot of assumptions about a statement that, in context, is pretty innocuous. For as much as you're saying that Apple as a company has these blinders on, I think you have just as much of an issue with blinders. The statement can be taken at least 2 ways. It's telling that you've turned one short statement into a generalization about an entire company.

[musha68k]

It's not as clearcut as you make it out to be though. More often than not those old PCs effectively deny a whole bunch of people access to reliable and fast modern computing. In that sense an iPad Pro would be very well worth the price. Think hidden opportunity costs through crappy, unstable UX.

Unfortunately the real problem with Apple is that they are still somewhat on track of losing the "functional high ground" as "it just works" doesn't apply as much as it used to only some years ago.

I hear that MS Surface is actually quite usable these days, I don't have first-hand experience with it though. I would be interested to know as I'm feeling more and more inclined of not recommending Apple products to that cohort anymore.

[intopieces]

But now you've changed the substance of the utterance entirely. He didn't say, "I don't understand why people use 5 year old computers." He said that it's "sad" that they do. And, when you believe that your product -- especially the latest iteration of that product -- genuinely improves people's lives, it follows that anyone who doesn't have it is 'missing out on something great.'

This controversy ranks right up there with the 'let's make her smile' bit from the iPad Pro announcement. Manufactured to create a story, but not impactful in any way.

[googamooga]

This story is old as the world. "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" - "Let them eat a cake", as great princess Marie Antoinette said upon learning that the peasants had no bread.

[yoha]

There is no support for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

[junke]

There is no proof it was actually her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

[Htsthbjig]

She never told that.

That was fictional phrase written in a novel by one famous writer, and attributed to Marie Antoinette, in order to discredit her because those who did benefit from that.

You should contrast your sources.

[FussyZeus]

I wouldn't say it's a bubble so much as they just aren't motivated to consider those viewpoints. Apple's products are high cost and high status, they have no reason to consider the lower end of the economic spectrum; that's not their market. It would be like Rolls Royce running radio ads in rural Kentucky. Yeah, many people there would probably like one, but they can't get one.

[aetherson]

I don't think that it means "LOL poor people" either. But I do think that it's bullshit marketing talk. Apple is perfectly happy to be proud (rightly, I think) of the enduring utility of older pieces of Apple hardware -- but if some other company's hardware continues to be perfectly serviceable for 5 years, that's sad?

Also, if you have a 5 year old PC that's genuinely not serving your needs any more, sure, you could pay $600 for an iPad Pro that also probably won't serve your needs, or you could pay around $400 for a new PC that will serve your needs.

[bitJericho]

Bought a dual CPU workstation with 12gb ram and two quad core 12 mb cache xeons for under 400 bucks. It's about 5 year old tech and its awesome!

[tdkl]

Yep, eBay is booming with second hand workstations like this. Cousin bought a HP Z210 Quad Core E3-1270 3.40GHz with 16GB RAM for 320€. Added a SSD and cheap GPU and is an awesome 500€ machine that can last for years.

[orbitingpluto]

Totally there. If your electricity is cheap, it's an awesome deal. Since, oh about, 2009, there are a lot of choices that are akin to buying a '57 Chevy.

[Mikeb85]

> The implication being that in the last 5+ years the PC industry has failed to offer 600 million users a compelling reason to upgrade

Or maybe the PC world did so well 5 years ago that Apple hasn't provided them a compelling reason to switch to an iPad?

[paulmd]

Yup. Clock-for-clock, Skylake is about 10-20% faster than Sandy Bridge, IPC improvements have been <5% per year. The apparent improvement since that time has been slowly cranking up the stock clockrates. If you overclock a Sandy Bridge to >4 GHz, which is extremely reasonable, then it keeps up just fine with a Skylake in most tasks.

CPU performance is largely "good enough" for most users. OS bloat has finally stopped: Win8.1 is just as fast as Win7 (and is more stable) and Win10 is faster and skinnier. Most users don't do anything intensive and probably wouldn't even notice if you substituted in a low-end processor. For those that do have big needs, GPU offloading has taken off in a big way.

This is kind of unfortunate in other respects. CPU performance (especially single-threaded) is extremely important for high refresh rates. At 144hz there's no margin for any weak link in the system. But I recognize that I'm kind of a niche user in that regard.

[cheald]

> Yup. Clock-for-clock, Skylake is about 10-20% faster than Sandy Bridge

Sorry, can you elaborate on this? Is Skylake somehow performing multiple instructions per core per clock cycle somehow?

[paulmd]

Sometimes - there's multiple types of execution units in a CPU core (even multiples of the same type), and a thread can dispatch to multiple units at once (superscalar execution). It can also reorder the instruction stream to keep all the units occupied (out-of-order execution), preemptively execute along the most likely direction a branch will take (speculative execution), etc.

Basically, it's all a massive game to keep all the units of a core busy to execute the desired instruction stream as fast as possible. Over time, successive CPU architectures have gotten better at playing the game: better occupancy, more execution units, and more powerful units (SSE, AVX, etc), which translates into a greater number of instructions executed per clock cycle (IPC).

That's why a Skylake is much faster than a Pentium 4, even though the P4 might run at a higher clockrate. The Skylake has better IPC.

And as a side note: what Hyperthreading does is duplicate the part of the core that manages registers and instruction dispatch for a thread. So you have a second thread that can utilize any execution units that the first thread left unoccupied.

Bulldozer works somewhat similarly: two threads share a single core, and each core has a pair of integer execution units but they share a floating-point unit. So kinda like a Super-Hyperthreading, where they include a duplicate of (what they hope is) the most needed execution unit. Doesn't always work out in reality though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar_processor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldozer_(microarchitecture)

[cheald]

Very instructive, thank you!

[baobrien]

High end chips have been doing multiple instruction per clock for a while now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar_processor

[dijit]

Added hardware instructions for common software instruction combinations taking load of the CPU itself and offloading it into a mini-ASIC.

Like AES, Floating point, h.264 etc;

[curt15]

Intel CPUs have had special AES instructions for a long time.

[markatkinson]

Agreed that the "LOL poor people" is probably not the intention however I am sure the internet will have a field day with it. With that in mind it will likely generate some really interesting discussions around the quality and longevity of Apples products.

Imho smart phone tech is plateauing and I get the feeling Apple is going to struggle more and more to justify the prices they charge for iPhones and other products. My iPhone 5 (4/5 years of use) broke 3 weeks ago, and after reviewing prices of phones I just couldn't bring myself to spend 3/4 times the amount on a phone when I can get one "just as good", but Android.

In fact I was chatting to a friend who recently also went from iPhone to Android, something he said that I took to heart was that spending more than R3500 (about $230) on a cellphone is an unnecessary luxury. I am willing to bet that limit could be pushed down too.

[paperpunk]

Couldn't you make the opposite argument from the same starting point?

That as the technology plateaus, and the upgrade cycle becomes longer, there's much more reason to spend more on a handset because you're not going to feel like replacing it a year later?

Spending a bit more doesn't seem like an issue for something that will last 4/5 years.

Your friend may say spending more than an R3500 is an unnecessary luxury on a cellphone. I say that the cellphone is the single most important piece of technology I own and so isn't the area I want to be stingy on.

Apple isn't necessarily the best choice even with that in mind, but that's a separate argument.

[markatkinson]

That is a valid point, but if I can get a good Android phone that lasts half as long for a quarter of the price then I am afraid I am going with the Android. But really now I am just throwing around numbers with no real experience of how long this android phone will last (Moto G 3rd Gen, so far so good).

Something I also found was during my transition I had two Android phones in the space of 3 months, (I used a friends spare while I replaced my iPhone), and transitioning from the one to the other was incredibly friction-less. I mean it actually made me pause and "wow" a bit.

I suppose my argument was more that the quality gap of iPhone to many Android phones has closed a hell of a lot over the last few years, and I am just not sure I can justify paying so much more for an iPhone anymore. Especially as the ZAR weakens against the USD.

[CaptSpify]

Your assuming that the item your spending more on is worth more. It's really hard to qualify on iPhone vs Android, but my super-simplified calculation is:

iPhone = 4 stars, Android = 4 stars

If the Android is $200, and the iPhone is $400, I'm gonna go with the Android

[npatrick04]

I built my desktop from scratch (for the first time) in 2005, added a couple components from other computers as they died, and still use it with no issues. I've thought about upgrading components in it, but since they haven't died yet, and it still works just fine, there's just not much of a point.

[stuxnet79]

Built a monster PC late last year and I see it lasting me a long time as well. I don't want to play the game of always jumping on the latest and greatest. Your pockets will always get emptied out and I've discovered accumulating material possessions and keeping up with the Joneses doesn't give me the endorphin rush like it used to. Thanks for this comment.

[devcamcar]

I did this back in 2009 and dropped a wad of cash on a Mac Pro tower. Thing is a frickin' champ. Upgraded it to 12GB of RAM and a nice SSD for the OS drive and never looked back. Turns out 4 Nehalem cores at 2.66GHz will last you quite a while if you don't do video editing work or play the latest games at full resolution.

[toxican]

This is the way to go, if you know how. Unfortunately a lot of people's brains just shut off when they have to think about their computer on that level.

[gnud]

Well, I've had my desktop computer for nearly 5 years. Upgraded the ram once, and added a new hard drive. It still does everything I need it to do.

I understand this is sad for Apple, but I don't see how it's sad for me?

[dublinben]

If you don't buy a new Apple computer every two years, they won't be able to afford to design a new computer to sell you every two years!

[dpweb]

Just bought a like-new PC on ebay for $200. It's not about being poor because anyone who says they can't scrape up $200 if they had to, is lying to you.

It's the shocking fact that (especially if cash strapped) you can live your life, without constantly buying more and newer things.

Of course Apple's stance is, you must buy our new products every year. But I can get on Facebook and email and whatever else on my $200 PC just fine - the value isn't there for alot of people.

[Tactic]

As someone that has lived on the street I can tell you that you are wrong about the $200. Don't read your life into others.

[dpweb]

There are people that extremely poor yes. They need help and society should help them. But they wouldn't be in the market for a new computer. My point is the cost of computing is about as low as it can be expected to get.

[hellbanner]

$200? That's a lot of money for many people.

[FireBeyond]

As opposed to what? It's still less than half the price of a usable iPad (I know the Mini 2 is $270, but let's not pretend they're comparable), let alone Mac.

[IanCal]

I think that's in response to the statement:

> anyone who says they can't scrape up $200 if they had to, is lying to you.

[hellbanner]

As opposed to someone working a minimum wage job & trying to eat decently, for example.

[douche]

That is only about two months of the cable internet bill or cell phone data plan that you would need to really be able to use the computer. To do anything that the vast majority of people want to use a computer for, anyway...

[ignoramous]

Yes. The irony is that iPhone and iPad are no better as explained in the article(s)[0].

"Based on my experience with Apple hardware newer than my laptop, I’m guessing it’s the former. Since 2011, I’ve bought a couple of iPhones (both dead), numerous connectors and power cords (all dead; I’ve switched to knockoffs), and a replacement laptop battery (currently half-dead and in need of replacement)."

[0] https://www.techinasia.com/awkward-moment-apple-mocked-good-...

[treebeard901]

I agree with your interpretation. It would seem to have more to do with the slowing sales numbers for tablets as well as the incorrect assumption we would be in a post-PC era at this point. That day will come eventually and while large tablets may not be the answer, Apple is certainly hoping it will be. There has to be a good bit of concern at Apple that they are still largely dependent on the iPhone.

[neovive]

There is quite a large cohort of PC users with minimal needs beyond a web browser for email, news and some basic entertainment (Youtube and simple gaming). Google has also done an amazing job with the Chrome ecosystem providing web services that meet all of these needs.

[pier25]

Of course one can interpret things in any way...

What if instead a Mercedes representative had said:

> People with cheap 5 year old cars is sad

Just before presenting its new car?

Would you think the same?

[yuhong]

I was thinking about selling Windows to a non-profit foundation for a while now.