For example? All I see is outdated design and hardware. Only "incredible" hardware I can think of is the new chip in iphone x.
The Macbook Pro is the best laptop out there as a power/battery life/build quality combo (having to spend for a "dongle" or new USB-C cables is not a technical concern for its technical capacity).
The iPhone X is top notch (pun intended) and has been praised in reviews all around the world. The AirPods have been described as mostly magical by their users (I'd add to that).
The Apple Watch is the best in its kind technologically, and has overtaken the #1 traditional watch maker in sales (and moves more units than competitive smart-watches). It's the only one that was deemed most accurate in its health measurements (heart, etc) from all smartwatches too in competitive tests.
The iPad continues to be the best tablet technology wise.
So?
Says who? I think Surface book/pro and Dell XPS have caught up and in some ways surpassed MBpro.
> The iPhone X is top notch
Don't disagree, but the hardware is nothing special. We have had this quality and refinement in Android flagships for a couple of years now. Apple has just caught up to the state of the art.
> The Apple Watch is the best in its kind technologically
Bullshit. Smart watches with better features, better hardware and better battery life have existed for a long while now. The iwatch is good, but not better than any other comparable watch out there, hardware-wise.
> The iPad continues to be the best tablet technology wise.
I think you're repeatedly conflating sales/revenue numbers with hardware and technological superiority. MBpro, iphone x, iwatch, ipad all are very well made and very high-tech products. They all have nice hardware. I am particularly impressed by the face mapping tech in iphone. But all of them are about at par with any high-end laptop, phone or tablet. In fact there are laptops with windows hello, which work very well for face login. The Galaxy phones pack in a lot of hardware features and have had a futuristic design which apple has just come around to copying. There is no clear hardware superiority in apple's products.
Reviewers, for one. Dell XPS is nowhere near the build quality of a MBPr, the Surface Pro is close but no cigar.
>Don't disagree, but the hardware is nothing special.
In what way? It's the fastest smartphone available, smoking the competition. The camera and image processing is one of the best, if not the best, on any smartphone. AR processing. Best in class sensors. Smoking fast graphics. Most custom designed by Apple. What else would it need? Magic unicorn engine, it doesn't have.
>Bullshit. Smart watches with better features, better hardware and better battery life have existed for a long while now.
Anything concrete -- some specific model, so that we can do a comparison for those "better features, hardware and battery life"?
>But all of them are about at par with any high-end laptop, phone or tablet.
"About at par" is the best one can say.
What other brands full featured, actual app ecosystem smartwatch is the form factor of the 38mm apple watch? Which of them have LTE even as an option? It's smaller than some of the fitbit type trackers, even.
You can gripe over other things about it, but no one else makes a _small_ smartwatch like it that isn't severely limited in some way
You have to be joking. Apple charges $2k just to get a quad-core CPU or more than 8GB of RAM. Soldered, mind you, so you can't just replace it later. Oh, and I hope you don't need more than 500GB of storage!
Build quality tends to include things like, you know, being able to fix it when things inevitably go wrong, rather than throwing it in the bin and paying $2k+ for another lottery ticket.
> The Apple Watch is the best in its kind technologically, and has overtaken the #1 traditional watch maker in sales (and moves more units than competitive smart-watches).
And Trump managed to get elected president. I guess that says more about the average consumer than about the product they're selling.
> The iPad continues to be the best tablet technology wise.
When was it ever?
Well, I have 1TB or storage on mine, so?
Second, whether it has cheap replacement options is not exactly a criterion about if it's the best out there or not.
Besides, any competitor product I can buy that doesn't have "soldered RAM" and would allow me to upgrade its RAM 2 years in the future, will also have lost more of its resale value compared to an Apple laptop.
I might as well sell my used MBPr for plenty of $$$ and buy a new model with more RAM 2-3 years down the road, than buy something that I can upgrade but would be selling for much much less than what I bought it for.
>Build quality tends to include things like, you know, being able to fix it when things inevitably go wrong
Horses for courses. I'd rather treat it as an opaque box, which either works or doesn't. I don't want to be the mechanic of my laptop.
>rather than throwing it in the bin and paying $2k+ for another lottery ticket.
Or you know, buying Applecare for it, and having the customer support that most people have rated as #1 in satisfaction in relevant surveys in the US for more than a decade.
>And Trump managed to get elected president. I guess that says more about the average consumer than about the product they're selling.
Well, Hillary got the popular vote, so where does that leave your argument?
>When was it ever?
Yes, since it's inception. In fact the competition for the first 2-3 years was so bad, it was laughed out of the market (not to mention the first competitors managed to cost even more than the iPad itself).
Where is that listed? The biggest one I can find on apple.com has a 512GB drive.
> Second, whether it has cheap replacement options is not exactly a criterion about if it's the best out there or not.
Presumably you'd be using it for a couple of years, not just right now.
> Besides, any competitor product I can buy that doesn't have "soldered RAM" and would allow me to upgrade its RAM 2 years in the future, will also have lost more of its resale value compared to an Apple laptop.
Have fun with your pyramid schemes.
> Or you know, buying Applecare for it, and having the customer support that most people have rated as #1 in satisfaction in relevant surveys in the US for more than a decade.
Yes, because I'm fond of paying more to (barely) solve the problem that they created in the first place. The $400 + $300 per incident add up to enough to just buy another laptop from a more competent manufacturer. Or you could just repair it, and keep the change.
It's one of the customization options they give. Perhaps it's not available for the 13"? (I have the 15")
>Presumably you'd be using it for a couple of years, not just right now.
Yes, usually use them for 3 years or so before replacement (previous model I had was a 2013 one, new model is a 2017). But I pick a model based on my needs down those 2-3 years. If I have a feel I'll be needing more disk, I get a bigger disk from the start.
>Have fun with your pyramid schemes.
Selling a used laptop (or anything) is hardly a pyramid scheme. For one, it doesn't usually get more than 1 sale, making the whole "pyramid scheme" accusation moot.
>Yes, because I'm fond of paying more to (barely) solve the problem that they created in the first place.
The payment is on top of the standard warrantee, and includes accidents and such that are not covered by most warrantees, so...
>add up to enough to just buy another laptop from a more competent manufacturer
Well, good luck with that.
It's easy to see where Cook falls short. It's much harder to figure out what went right at Apple because of his leadership, that otherwise would have gone awry.
What is "bold" about it, specifically?
Making the bet that people are ready to pay a lot more just for the sake of having something that feels nicer to use is also what makes the iPhone X a bold step, although some of the techs existed in different forms in the previous iPhones. Yes, I'm using the word 'feels' here, it's about things like FaceID, 3D Touch, Taptic Engine and all the other things that make the iPhone X experience radically different to using something like the android competition. They actually had to completely redevelop 3D Touch for the iPhone X, the old 3D Touch technology depended on the LCD backlights which aren't a thing with OLED.
They're things that don't dramatically improve productivity and they're not things that can be considered major features like having a better camera (like the Google Pixel 2 marketing). They're things whose sole purpose of existence is to make interacting with the device feel nicer. It's something that does not exist in android land.
It's that sort of thing that makes me keep using Apple's laptops too, despite the many things I do not like about them (like the all USB-C ports). The Taptic Engine + Force Touch, oversized trackpad makes doing things like dragging something across the screen with only one finger feel so much better than what you have to do with other trackpads which require either pressing the trackpad itself on the bottom area or pressing a button. I'm still amazed they managed to make vibrations feel like you clicked a physical button.
However I do think the SW part has been going down for a while. Maybe not enough resources or management takes it for granted.
And unfortunately to me bugs like "fails the 2nd time" or "fails at a specific date" (and yes I think the same of Android's missing month bug) means there are developers who don't know what they are doing.