Apple Planned Obsolescence

I'm intrigued. Back in late 1995 just 32MB of ram cost £800 ($1248 at Dec 1995 exchange rates). For you to have over 4GB (say 8GB) back then would have cost you £200,000+ ($300,000). I have a copy of NetUser magazine from December 1995 I keep about for price comparisons from years ago. That's quite a PC to run Windows 95 and your 32bit CPU on.

Not to mention you would have had to have had probably 512 DIMMS loaded up.

Care to elaborate? Sure it wasn't 4MB? Or was it always mainframes?

 

I've seen enough laptops wear out compared to desktops, that I'll never buy myself a laptop again. I think the one I have is going on a year old now, and seems to be doing fine. I know how to maintain them properly though.

 

Oops found this when I got home -



I wish I could.

 

I accept the right of Apple-centric users to tell everybody else that the Apple ecosystem works for them. What I can't stomach is what I call the "you're holding it wrong" stance: that anyone who points out that these products have real and consequential shortcomings just don't know what they're talking about. It's so freaking obnoxiously elitist, and so obviously wrong.

I'm in IT as well, and I can tell you that there is a corporate cultural myopia that emanates from Cupertino that hurts Apple's penetration into the business sphere. Apple is terrible at coordinating with customers and/or other vendors when it comes to changes in iOS (and if you don't know already, because of the iPhone the iOS install base is much, much larger than the Mac OS install base). Apple does what it does and its "partners" trail along in its wake trying to fix the problems that their updates create. If you're risk averse, avoiding supporting Apple products is a no-brainer. Who wants to pay a premium for an extra headache?

 

You've been working in IT for twenty years and you can't deal with a Mac?

 

All four of my current Macs have only four gigabytes each, hasn't caused any issues. Of course I'm not producing video or any other computer intense operations. Just general computing: web-browsing, music-serving, word-processing and the like. All four are current with Apple's updates including Yosemite.

 

I don't need to, got plenty work on elsewhere. Plus when I have worked for Apple users they are notoriously tight when it comes to paying for support/fixes. They tend to expect Apple Store FOC support.

A few months ago I rebuilt a MacBook for a customer who didn't know how, plus didn't have the software etc. I charged them £50 for my time for doing it (it wasn't overly difficult and had novelty value), including swapping the old HDD for a SSHD and they went ballistic.

So I tend to avoid them.

 

Probably for the best. Legitimate repair costs are always discussed up front.

 

Completely uncalled for.

 

You don't discuss the cost of repairs beforehand?
Must be a different kind of "cult bubble".

 

Your lucky you don't need one for work. My work would supply one for me, but it would be heavy and I could only do work related stuff on it, That's why I bought the Yoga2 Pro.

I've never gotten a quote up front. I wouldn't trust anyone who did a quote without doing diagnostics first and I've never taken a PC to someone who did the diagnostics while I waited. And the diagnostics always cost money that could be applied to repairs.

I take it back, when I cracked a screen on a laptop, I got a quote for that up front. Desktop repairs never though.

 

Yes, but you know what it's gonna cost you up front.
At that point you have the choice whether to proceed or not.

 

That's true, and I've trashed one PC because it wasn't worth it.

 

I never saw more than 16 MB in a 68K Mac when I supported them in businesses. Even 68K NeXT cubes had no more than 32 MB and 16 was more common. At that time the first PC I built had 2 MB if I remember.

Mainframes didn't have more than 32 MB of "core" at that time and some surprisingly large operations had much less than that. What mainframes had minis, workstations and desktops didn't was multiple "channels" for I/O where they might be reading from and writing to a large number of tape or disk drives. They weren't doing floating point intensive stuff, just accounting arithmetic.

Memory stayed "high" in price for several years and then started its return to a downward plunge, I'm old enough the exact dates are fuzzy in my mind now.

 

Are you possibly confusing RAM with HDD storage? I find it unlikely you were running more than 4GB on a PC in 1994 - I'm not even sure that was even possible.

I worked at a job in 1993 where we had Windows NT servers with 128MB of RAM, and that was extremely expensive at the time. If memory serves, 8MB of RAM (MB, not GB) was somewhere in the range of a few hundred dollars back then.

 

Oh, at one time it was. In that era fifty bucks a meg was pretty common as I recall. So a gig would have been fifty thousand dollars. I think there actually were a couple of dual SPARC processor Sun server configs with that kind of RAM but no Intel CPU could adresss that much, or at least there was no physical way to get it on a board. We had a SPARCstation 20 with 64 MB, some SGI box with 32, the Macs had 8 or 16 and desktop PCs had maybe four....and we had padlocks on them so people didn't steal the RAM SIMMs or the video card! Plus we had the old HP9000/200 series HP BASIC machines with maybe 256K on them running test equipment that were the real moneymakers in the company.

 

The Mac is now only about 20-25% of Apple's user base, iOS devices and services therefor are its bread and butter today, and the market share of Mac is not very high in the desktop/laptop user space. Those tend to be more affluent, trendy types who like dealing directly with Apple perhaps.

It IS true that Apple has over its long history had a poor record of dealing with independent retailers, which is one reason for rabid anti-Apple sentiment in the US particularly, especially in small towns and rural areas. Those people have long memories. Apple policies directly led to the failure of some computer retailers and to several more losing a lot of money and swearing off Apple forever.

With the success of Apple Stores, independent Apple service providers have had less and less incentive to stay in the field. So while, at least in the US, Apple did not "put them out of business on purpose" at least in recent years, many have gone away.

 

Nah I'm sure it was MB of ram.

 

Makes sense then.

 

OP... Sorry if this has already been asked, but why is your iPad dying so soon?

 

On mainframes in the early 90s, you typically only got 1MB of virtual memory to run your programs in.

 

Methinks you protest too much. 20 years ago, 4GB of RAM was over $150,000, and I tend to suspect you didn't have 4GB in a 1994 machine. 4MB cost $150 back then. RAM price references here:

http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm

I haven't run a machine with less than 16GB of RAM in about 10 years, but it cost us quite a bit a decade ago. Now, 16GB of RAM is about $160 -- not a big deal at all. I know of heavy graphics users who routinely use 64GB, but it's all under Mac OS.

Don't ever assume that because people use Macs, they're less capable or doing simpler tasks than you are.

 

There are lots of reasons why XP is still popular. One, newer versions of Windows have a more stringent registration policy to combat piracy, so without a free upgrade path (legal or otherwise) to a new version, people don't upgrade. Two, a lot of people got burned by the move to Vista and Microsoft still hasn't regained their trust. Three, a lot of corporate IT divisions have invested massive amounts of time and money in Windows XP which they would have to shell out again if they upgraded.

Microsoft is practically begging users to abandon Windows XP, even to the point of giving $100 credits towards a new PC with Windows 8.1. XP is a huge security risk and Microsoft doesn't want to be in the business of patching it until the end of time because they're making $0 on that investment. They've also reacted by charging a significant fee to IT professionals for continued support in an effort to make XP cost more than an upgrade to Windows 8. As successful as XP was upon its initial release, it's now a curse that Microsoft is trying to shake.

 

I think it's because a lot of people don't have enough money to go out and buy a new computer and a new OS, so they live with what they have. The economy still sucks.

 

I remember reading the ads in the back of PC Magazine back in the mid-90's and recall a particular ad for a 1GB hard drive in 1994. The price? $10k.