I say Apple should update as soon as new technology is available, and is financially feasible to do so.

People who must have the latest and greatest are buying for superficial reasons, and their complaints are just as superficial. These same people complain just as loudly when they're ready to upgrade and Apple doesn't have a new model for them. They don't want to wait.

Apple can't win here. If they update too long, people complain. If they update too quickly, people complain. They are doing the right thing for two big reasons:

1. They have faster technology available. Why wait? Put it in and sell it for those that are ready to buy.
2. Christmas is coming. Does Apple really want to sell millions of iPods this Christmas knowing that it is still using the old 30-pin dock connector which has been abandoned?

"Over three quarters of the 1400 people interviewed said they felt Apple products are updated too frequently..."

People need to stop whining and just buy the tech gear when they need it. Stop worrying about being the coolest kid on the block with the latest hi-tech gadgets. Like anything hi-tech, it WILL be replaced with something better eventually. Just because Apple updated the iPad doesn't mean that your current iPad suddenly stops performing the tasks it was doing fine the week before.

I bet the survey did not ask "Would you prefer that Apple only update products once every 5 years?" :lol:

The 3rd gen iPad is still the same thing we all lusted after and purchased - it is no less capable today then it was last week. I would argue Apple isn't fast enough in some areas with updates. I was hoping this week would bring a new thunderbolt display with USB 3.0 but I'll just wait until it does come out and then get it. Am I a fanboy? You bet! Am I upset Apple is improving their products to make them better? Not at all - bring me the new goodness.

I agree with many of the posters here. Upgrade as soon as possible, even if that means out of cycle. To be honest I look at the new iPad as a iterative change that doesn't make me run out and want to get a new one. Am I little envious, of course but thats about it. I was wondering when something like this was going to occur. The new iPad had to be released to help with the international community. In fact I would be more angry if I was a in Europe and bought the "Old" iPad and then the new iPad's LTE worked with their service.

Only fools whine that in tech vendors keep offering us more for less as time progresses.

I agree with most here, other than like most products, I think Apple should in this case provide a 30-day return policy. (I know w/ iPhone, there is a 14-day return policy)

Apple has to because competitors (Microsoft, Samsung, Google, and Amazon) are going full speed. You don't stop until the competitors are financially exhausted. Even then, Apple should just keep going. It's all business.

Originally Posted by hayesk

I say Apple should update as soon as new technology is available, and is financially feasible to do so... Apple can't win here. If they update too long, people complain. If they update too quickly, people complain.

Agreed.

I think a lot of the whining is due to Apples seeming abandonment of their computer line. They make all their money on portable devices so of course they spend all their time and effort there. Which makes sense but it annoys the hell out of people looking at a hundred and three year old computer (Mac Pro) that really, really needs an update while something that was released thirty-two minutes ago has now had it's 17th update... today.

Originally Posted by macvette

People need to stop whining and just buy the tech gear when they need it [BLAH BLAH BLAH]...

An upgrade is one thing... but... twice-as-fast...?! That's pretty major. It happens, just not as often by this much of a margin. Seems like they're re-booting the product line -- wouldn't surprise me if the iPad 2 gets pulled this March with a 'refreshed' iPad 4 focusing on a thinner design. Right about then the Retina Mini would also launch, becoming the entry-level device. IMO, we won't see an 'entry-level' Mini -- it'll just receive an annual refresh. I could very easily turn out to be completely wrong, I'm no expert ;-)

No issues at all with my 64gb iPad 3 -- but to think that if I'd continued on a very short 6 months with my iPad 2, I'd have one twice as fast now. I'll get over it :-)

Hmmm. It might be alleviate the complaints if Apple would just stop writing such inefficient code.

Back in the late 1990s, for ordinary day-to-day tasks, you could run Mac OS 8 and get satisfactory performance out of a PowerPC 603e at a couple of hundred MHz with maybe a few hundred MB of RAM. Now, to get the same level of performance on just ordinary day-to-day stuff, you need a multi-core, multi-GHz CPU, several GB of RAM -- and chances are good you'll STILL have occasional slowdowns. The tasks being performed are largely the same, but the code doing the work is vastly less efficient. And the problem is only getting worse, as Apple adds more and more shiny junk to the OS and moves the border of obsolescence closer and closer to "you must have the latest hardware to run the current OS". Heck, the SE/30 could run the latest version of the Mac OS 11 years after it was released. Once upon a time, a Mac was a much better investment than a PC -- the average user kept their Mac for 5 years. Apple doesn't do that any more; after 3 years, you'd better sell it and move on, because you can't keep up with the latest software anymore.

Wrong.

Performance was not satisfactory in those days and we knew it then. Even simple Excel performed inadequately.

Photoshop performance did not really get adequate until circa 2006 Intel.

Things are not "less efficient" today. Today a $500 Mini runs almost any app adequately, just not in a heavy workflow. My $4500 IIx was a dog on heavy apps.

Yes devs are still building apps to take advantage of available power but my 2006 Macbook Pro still runs basic apps adequately.

Apple keeps producing much more performance for less money:
http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks

How is that "vastly less efficient?"

-Allen

Originally Posted by SierraDragon

Wrong.
Performance was not satisfactory in those days and we knew it then. Even simple Excel performed inadequately.
Photoshop performance did not really get adequate until circa 2006 Intel.
Things are not "less efficient" today. Today a $500 Mini runs almost any app adequately, just not in a heavy workflow. My $4500 IIx was a dog on heavy apps.
Yes devs are still building apps to take advantage of available power but my 2006 Macbook Pro still runs basic apps adequately.
Apple keeps producing much more performance for less money:
http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks
How is that "vastly less efficient?"
-Allen

A Mac circa 1995 could boot, get you into a word processor, let you compose a document, print it, save it, and move the file around afterwards (if you so desired) with no significant delays beyond those caused by specific non-internal hardware bottlenecks. (That is, if you were working with floppies, you had to suffer the delays of floppies, and you had to wait for the slow connection to the printer -- in those days most printer connections were slow -- to feed your whole document through. But those problems weren't based on the software.)

Mac OS X takes longer to boot than any Mac I remember from the 1990s which had a hard drive. Once you get logged in, there's a fairly large delay to launch even simple programs -- they aren't just as slow as 1990s-era programs, they're SLOWER -- and basic functions like changing fonts take longer to respond. Given that the CPU, bus, and even RAM response speed have all improved since then, the only explanation for how slowly everything moves is that it's vastly less efficient. Probably because Apple loves to cram in new features which we don't need and can't prevent the OS from loading. (I'd give a lot to completely shut off Spotlight, for example. The indexing is a pointless waste of time for me, because I never use the search portion. But I still have to put up with mdworker churning away in the background.)

Originally Posted by The Vicar

A Mac circa 1995 could boot, get you into a word processor, let you compose a document, print it, save it, and move the file around afterwards (if you so desired) with no significant delays beyond those caused by specific non-internal hardware bottlenecks. (That is, if you were working with floppies, you had to suffer the delays of floppies, and you had to wait for the slow connection to the printer -- in those days most printer connections were slow -- to feed your whole document through. But those problems weren't based on the software.)

The fact that printing would completely lock up your computer for the twenty minutes it took to print, however WAS a software issue.

Unless you turned on background printing, which would mean thirty or forty minutes, while your machine remained semi-usable, unless GOD FORBID YOU OPENED INTERNET EXPLODER or another new application and inevitably locked up your system entirely.

Originally Posted by The Vicar

Mac OS X takes longer to boot than any Mac I remember from the 1990s which had a hard drive. Once you get logged in, there's a fairly large delay to launch even simple programs -- they aren't just as slow as 1990s-era programs, they're SLOWER -- and basic functions like changing fonts take longer to respond.

Weird. My 90s were apparently rather different from your 90s. But then, most of the stuff I'm doing right now was simply outright impossible back then, and partially possible with six-figure-dollars dedicated hardware.

The 90s machines I worked with also booted substantially more slowly than the machines I work with today. Of course, that's a useless metric, since I don't actually reboot my machines.

I do remember the Mac Iici in 1990 booting HELLA fast, though. Running System 6. And costing some $7000 or so, which, inflation-adjusted, is more than the most expensive Mac you can buy today.

Also, you have clearly never run a system off an SSD. Try it some time.

Originally Posted by The Vicar


Mac OS X takes longer to boot than any Mac I remember from the 1990s which had a hard drive.

You totally miss the point. Hardware and software evolve together to hopefully optimize the computing.

OS 10.8 will not run under 128k or fit on a 400k diskette. That does not mean System 2 was a better OS, or that the efficiency to run under 128k made it better.

Today no one should buy a Mac with a HDD for boot, so designers should be optimizing for booting from SSD; not wasting time trying optimize for by-definition-lame HDD performance. Anyone who chooses to boot using outdated boot technology has made a conscious choice to hamstring performance.

Same thing for RAM. With RAM dirt cheap I want and expect designers of OS and apps to spend their time optimizing for performance under large available RAM - not the opposite.

I have been using and managing Macs since the 128k and nothing has been anywhere near as quick as my current 2011 MBP with SSD and 8 GB RAM. And even though an Aperture/Photoshop workflow will page out from the 8GB RAM, the SSD ameliorates the negative impact such that I have not yet gotten around to boosting the RAM.

-Allen