I voted yes.
Only because I am a very pedestrian computer demi-god and OS X is what i have become used to since it was included as an upgrade disc with my first iMac SE in 2001 (os9.2).
Having read through Dave's experiences I can see his point, but having quite limited skills in this area, I just don't want to have to go through all that again.
Currently it is a base model mini and perfectly adequate for photo management, invoicing, online research and shopping.

No.

Aside from value for money concerns, one of my hobbies is building and tinkering with computers, which rules out Apple (or any desktop pc manufacturer). Unless you're going down the hackintosh route (still no).

Of course we have laptops, but I could buy any two or three of our machines for the price of a new mac book. The recent donglegate fiasco has done Apple no favours either.

We have tablets and phones but, having previously owned an ipad and iphones, I [LIFTED] hate itunes.

My experience of Apple is dire...


iTunes bringing whatever it's on to a crashing halt, then leaving system-hobbling debris behind

Laughably crap/expensive basics like cables and headphones

Incredibly overpriced even though I find sh1tty Windows to be more intuitive, same with Android. I can't find some of the most basic options and menus in iOS, and it's not like Windows 8+ has that tied down...


All that said, M$ are utterly determined to control people's behaviour at this point, so I can only hope they've gotten past that cnutiness when this laptop dies/needs updating.

(I should probably point out at the beginning that none of this refers to Spreadie in person).

Now, where's the thing. I can get some people want different ports on their machine. That's fine. I can get they want Apple to put different ports on the machines they make. Also fine, but not going to happen, as anybody who has even a cursory knowledge of the history of Apple understands. Apple have famously never really given a crap what their customers want, because Apple believe they know computer manufacture and design better than their customers do. Which in the vast, vast majority of cases is actually going to be true, but anyway. Customers can always ask for whatever they want, fine. They can complain when they don't get them but as this thread shows Apple are not the only choice on the list any more for a lot of people and that's what capitalism is about - if company A aren't fulfilling your needs, company B step in to do so. That's how things work.

But.. you spent 1500 quid on a new laptop and then bitch about spending 20 quid on an adapter? Really? GET IN THE SEA. You knew the specs the thing had when you walked into the shop. You knew how much the adaptors cost. If you didn't know these things, or if you didn't calculate the total price of the good to get it to do what you want it to do before you put your credit card down, you're an idiot. Apple are perfectly up front about the features their computers have and don't have and the cost of working round the design decisions they chose to make. If you can't figure that out for yourself, at least for god's sake don't advertise your shortage of thought on the internet for everyone to see.

'Fiasco'? No, sorry but...sod right off. That's internet lunatic over reaction at it's worst. Apple not making exactly the laptop you want is not a disaster. You having to buy a dongle that costs 1.3% of the amount you just spent on a shiny piece of tech is not a personal insult. VW is a fiasco. Firestone tyres was a fiasco. Brexit is a fiasco. Having to plug a widget into your laptop is a minor inconvenience at worst.

Jesus wept, when did we become such a bunch of crybabies?

/rant.

I agree with you, up to a point, Jon.

But if I forked out a grand on an APPLE monitor last year and 2 - 3 grand on a new MacBook Pro, to replace my old one, this year, then I would expect that they are plug compatible. I mean, Apple to Apple, that works right? Or how about buying a new MacBook Pro and a new iPhone 7, both new, hot off the press items, yet you can't connect them together, because the iPhone uses Lighting to USB-A and the MacBook only has USB-C...

Making a complete cut-over in one generation, without offering even a single Thunderbolt port or a Thunderbolt dongle in the box seems a bit off. Most companies would say, "the customer has spent at least 3 grand with us, give them the $5 dongle in the box as goodwill," but Apple seem to be saying, "the customer was dumb enough to give us over 3 grand, why not gouge them for another $20?" It is this arrogance that puts me off Apple today.

I had one of the new MBP's in my hands last week (was a customers), there's literally not enough space for any port other than the the Thunderbolt3/USB-C ports that are on there.
Not having ports to hand for the occasional time you need them can be annoying but most people will with use them just as a laptop with a wireless mouse (if they need one) or you'll have 1 cable going to a dock/thunderbolt screen so you'll need a £20 adapter.

I have 2 cables connected to my current MBP. a power supply and a dock connector (which connects to my screen, network, usb etc) despite the fact it's got usb, video & Ethernet onboard. I don't want to be plugging 10 cables in to my machine every morning.

I agree with Apple being over-hyped products (despite owning iphone, ipad and ipod (somewhere)). But I am sure laptops used to have docking stations in the 90s? The idea being the docking station had full sets of ports, including extra proprietary ports.

Presumably this would mean you didn't bother checking the spec of your 2-3 grand macbook pro before you bought it, in which case more fool you. Because if you HAD checked the specs first you'd know that it wasn't compatible and then you wouldn't have bought it, would you? Or at least you'd have realised you needed a dongle and made your buying decision including that fact.

Sorry, no, that line simply doesn't wash. You can say Apple should have put compatible ports in, but then you have to accept that brings it's own problems - you can effectively never get rid of any ports in favour of new ones because there will always be people with 'legacy' kit, and therefore your laptop will be larger, heavier and not work as sleekly. You may be willing to accept that compromise, I couldn't speak for you. What you cannot do is say "I bought this new shiney thing and it doesn't work with my other shiney thing. Apple should fix this. For free!" because the actual problem there is that you didn't bother looking at the box before you got your credit card out. 'Caveat emptor' is a pretty well established legal principle.

We can discuss what Apple should do, or should have done. That's all fine. But basing an argument around what is essentially 'I was too stupid to realise what I was doing and it's all Apple's fault' is just cobblers.

Yes.

The last time I used a computer that wasn't a Mac was in 1990 and it was running whatever the latest version of DOS was with a run-time version of Windows 2 for Pagemaker and Corel Draw. I have zero understanding of how Windows works and every time I see someone using it it seems to be either cripplingly restrictive or mind-bogglingly over-complicated, although I suppose that is mostly down to my lack of familiarity more than anything.

I don't understand the continued obsession with more power for computers. My 2008 Mac Pro runs all the apps that I want (latest version of Adobe Creative Cloud and Logic X) at excellent speeds, and TBH the Mac it replaced a 2007 Mac Pro was plenty fast enough too, but I needed something that would support and OS more up to date than Lion in order to run Adobe CC 2015.

A lot of the time using a Mac was the only way that I could access the software that I needed to use. Back in 1990 when I started working on Macs you had to have one in order to run Quark XPress and back then there were no credible alternatives when it came page layout programs. These days Logic is Mac only and while there are quite a few alternative DAWs, I have 20+ years invested in this particular application, and I'm in no hurry to have to learn something different.

No, this would be the case of my Mac is dead, I need a new one... I would expect it to still work, out of the box, with other Apple hardware that is still under guarantee!

I'm not saying it should work with a 10 year old Firewire scanner, I'm talking about official Apple peripherals, sold to enhance the MacBook Pro line until this summer!

Of course, I could take other action and buy a Windows PC with Thunderbolt ports - few and far between, but currently more than there are new MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt ports (as opposed to USB-C with Thunderbolt passthrough, when used with a dongle).

It was hyperthetical, but if you dropped your MacBook Pro and it was damaged beyond repair and you had to buy a new one, but you still have a new Thunderbolt Display, I find it a bit mean spirited of Apple to charge you for the dongle. I would expect them to "ensure compatibility" with their own hardware, even if it means showing the receipt for the Thunderbolt Display and getting a free dongle that way.

That is why I like, for example, the new HP Spectre X360, it has dropped the proprietary charging port and has 2 USB-C ports, one of which can be used for charging, but it also has a legacy USB-A port, because most peripherals are still only available with USB-A connectors. That would mean, for example, that I could still use my existing docking station with it. I would then expect late the 2018 model to finally do away with the USB-A.

Guarantee is irrelevant. A guarantee says this particular 'thing' will continue to function normally for a reasonable period, not that it will be compatible with any other thing, let alone any other thing that may come out at some point in the future. Note the ability to plug your thing into any other thing is not legally considered to be part of 'normal function' unless that's the thing's core function requires it (say it's a USB stick), because that would make every guarantor hostage to every other manufacturer. anything that can operate autonomously - like say a laptop - has to be considered in and of itself.

I also think this post is possibly getting needlessly eupehemistic.

If you specifically ask when buying something 'is it compatible with this other thing' and they say yes and it turns out it's not, then you have a case for a refund under the Sale of Good Act (at least in the UK, I don't know what German legislation says about it). But if you buy something without checking whether it works with/connects to your existing thing and it doesn't, its your fault. Both in law and, frankly, in logic.

As to your argument about it should support kit that's recent, there is ALWAYS 'kit that's recent'. if the kit that's recent now has to have USB-A to work with the kit that's legacy now, that means the kit that's new in the future will have to have USB-A to work with the kit that's recent now but will be legacy then. And so on forever. At some point we were going to hit this break point where USB-A was being dropped in favour of USB-C but there was still a lot of non USB-C peripheral kit around. This was bound to happen eventually. It HAS to happen eventually. It's happening now. As the internet says, 'deal with it', because you were always going to have to.


Caveat Emptor. You make a buying decision based on what you're buying and what you require of it. if it doesn't meet your requirements, don't buy it. Buy something else.


However on the flip side there are a fair number of USB-C only Windows laptops. If I buy a Dell XPS-13 with USB-C ports I maybe can't plug my Dell monitor into it. How is that different? The focus is increased here firstly because it's Apple and that gets clicks and secondly because Apple has such a limited range of laptops compared to say HP or Lenovo. If you want an Apple laptop right now and you don't want to go USB-C your choice is fairly limited. However I strongly believe at some point that will equally true of Dell, Lenovo and the rest.


You may expect that, but there's absolutely nothing in the consumer legislation (again, in the UK at least) to require it, so no company is going to do it just because. I suspect the lowering in price of the dongles for a period is about as much goodwill as people were ever going to get.

I would, yes, but I’d be looking at the refurb shop. Sold as new, but returned stock or faults repaired. They’ll be a generation behind at the moment, so will have the ports anyone feels are necessary.

I expect 3rd party uptake on USB-C peripherals anyway, that will kick in in ernest next year.

More concerning is the hardwired SSD on the laptops. My Mac buying tactic has always been to go for the max processor speed, but keep RAM and HD to a minimum, and swap those for cheaper 3rd party updates. However, this is becoming harder to do as Apple strives to make things thinner and thinner., As they do this, so the ports and plugs that these removable components used are being discarded in favour for surface mounting everything. Certainly, this makes for a thinner machine, but not necessarily an upgradeable one.

The current MacBook Pro signposts a direction Apple want to take with the keyboard, but I am much impressed by the Microsoft drawing board PC - something that I always hoped Apple would turn the iMac into. However, there’s that horrible experience of Windows lurking in the background, so I’ll have to look on from afar and hope Apple catch up somehow.

I like how you threw that grenade in, Caz!

I've used Macs to earn a living with for over 20 years so would say 'Yes' but I'd probably go for a lower spec if I could get away it. Saying that, I suppose I could move to Windows if I had to, Adobe CC is cross platform - I've used Windows as well, but I don't get along with it to be honest. Windows 10 is better than I was expecting but still annoys the hell out of me so I'd want to throw it out the window within 5 minutes!

I don't like the way Apple is taking the Mac platform, but if it allows me to continue earning a living then I'd work around the issues. As Jon says, if you don't like the options available, spend your money somewhere else.

I'm certainly hoping that the next refresh upgrades the core components significantly. I don't mind the shift to USB-C, the amount of crippling crap I've seen in the name of backwards compatibility is positively frightening. I'd expect that the next iteration of the iPhone might well come with a USB-C cable as standard, but I'll believe it when I see it.

With regards to docking stations, yes they were pretty common on business machines, but they were hugely expensive in terms of internal space requirements. Given the way everything is going thinner and thinner, that's going to be too much of a compromise on the other hardware.

I feel like a twat for saying this, but I think Apple are seriously missing Steve Jobs, I don't see any scenario where he'd have had this mix and match issue being allowed to be released to the public. They're also heading for the issues that they had when he came back to the company where they just have too many disparate lines of products with too many options, and it's far less clear what options are intended for which sort of user.

Well I didn't think it would turn in to a massive debate about the latest hardware and dongles

*gets popcorn*