Seriously, F Apple lately

[iAssimilated]

That seems reasonably upgradeable to me.

Upgradable, yes. Easy, not necessarily. The T480s requires you to open/separate the whole bottom of the laptop to access those parts. The T430 allowed you to replace the RAM and HDD by removing a couple of screws and unhooking the latch. Definitely easier to do for most people.

I will admit the T480s is easier to upgrade than say a 16" MacBook Pro.

 

[AidenShaw]

Upgradable, yes. Easy, not necessarily. The T480s requires you to open/separate the whole bottom of the laptop to access those parts. The T430 allowed you to replace the RAM and HDD by removing a couple of screws and unhooking the latch. Definitely easier to do for most people.

I will admit the T480s is easier to upgrade than say a 16" MacBook Pro.

My T440s was exactly like the T480s - remove a few screws and pop the bottom half of the case off.

I will admit that the first time I upgraded a T440s I was surprised at the force needed to unsnap the bottom - in addition to the screws, there are "snap" clips that need to be undone. I was uneasy with the amount of force needed to unsnap the bottom. I soon realized that if you start at a back corner, it's pretty easy to get the bottom off.

It's one price we pay for "small and thin". I remember upgrading a generation of Dell laptops from x86 Core CPUs to x64 Core 2 CPUs. The days of socketed laptop CPUs seem to be behind us, but so are the days of thick and heavy small laptops.

 

[Quu]

Having used Apple computers since the late 90's to me I don't think much has changed quality wise. Hardware and Software... there have always been successes and also problems.

But I don't think that has ever been a uniquely Apple thing. I can pretty much look at any company I buy electronics from and find similar highs and lows with both hardware and software.

I think all too often people look at the past with rose tinted glasses and think that was the golden age. But perhaps you weren't around when the iBook GPU's were failing left right and center or the iMacs screens were going blank or the G5 PowerMacs were leaking coolant fluid. Maybe you forgot MobileMe or iTunes Ping! (though these were more mistakes than bugs).

Heck Apple Maps, absolutely terrible in its first year. That was many years ago now, back when skeuomorphism was the thing people lambasted as dated and bad looking on this forum.

Personally the products they make still bring me plenty of joy and much less constanation than rival ecosystems. Nothing will ever be perfect you just have to accept that and not let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of you enjoying things.

 

[mmomega]

Having used Apple computers since the late 90's to me I don't think much has changed quality wise. Hardware and Software... there have always been successes and also problems.

But I don't think that has ever been a uniquely Apple thing. I can pretty much look at any company I buy electronics from and find similar highs and lows with both hardware and software.

I think all too often people look at the past with rose tinted glasses and think that was the golden age. But perhaps you weren't around when the iBook GPU's were failing left right and center or the iMacs screens were going blank or the G5 PowerMacs were leaking coolant fluid. Maybe you forgot MobileMe or iTunes Ping! (though these were more mistakes than bugs).

Personally the products they make still bring me plenty of joy and much less constanation than rival ecosystems. Nothing will ever be perfect you just have to accept that and not let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of you enjoying things.

This is essentially my outlook on what I call all "things" that exist, whatever that thing is.
There is no perfect product from any manufacturer. And high expectations and this unrealistic perfection idea will completely damage someone on any particular thing.
Or someone may say, "I don't expect perfection but....... " or "for this amount of money this SHOULD be this or that..."
All products, from the pet rock to whatever the most expensive thing ever produced, have flaws and that is ok. Once someone can acknowledge and accept this internally. They can move past this perfection idea and the anger they create in themselves. Don't allow marketing to make you have feelings on a thing, just buy it for what it is or don't.

 

[levander]

You guys with the Apple apologistics.,, ?I think you guys just haven’t been personally hit by a bad quality issue. And are unable to read media reports and get a sense for what’s going on.

Raising the bar to the perfect product, and saying “why would you expect Apple to be that?” You guys are being silly.

I’m putting up with a bug now where when I bought two Apple TV 4K’s, I figured out I need to configure them to run at 480p in the Settings app to stay under my ISP’s monthly bandwidth cap. AndI could just barely tell the difference between it and 480p on my TV when I looked at it, so I was very happy. 6 months later tvOS 12.1 is released and I wake up and the HDMI ports on the TV’s hooked up to the Apple TV 4K’s are fried and the 480p resolution no longer works. I have to turn them up to 720p. I call Apple and after a week of going back and forth and collecting logs and such for Apple, they tell me they’ve reproduced the bug in-house and a fix should be coming in an upcoming update. Now that was bad. But I’ve have been fine with it if a fix came out a month or two later. But four months later I call Apple back, collect a bunch of new logs, etc.. They say the engineers decided not to fix the bug. But they’re entering a new bug into the system and it should be fixed this time. Four months later I call back and they tell me there’s no record of this ever having been a confirmed issue... .so now ankther couple of months later, I’m dealing with some group who calls themselves the “executive response team“ about a different CarPlay issue and I ask them about the Apple TV 4K issue. And apparently some specialist was consulted. And they’re back to saying, just wait for an upcoming update... The issue should be fixed.

I‘Ve owned some pretty cheap video devices over the years, Chinese made DVD players and the like at times. Never have I had a product that just couldn’t display video at a resolution they advertised as supporting. Much less a product that actually fried an HDMI port in my TV.

This butterfly keyboard issue that’s been in the news is a monument to how not to handle quality issues. Their were videos on YouTube from independent repair shops saying there was problems from the design of that thing a few months after it was initially released. But Apple kept pushing that design for years before finally retreating.

Stuff like Maps was a trash product when it was first released is nothing compared to what’s going on now. Yes, releasing Maps was a bad move. But since it was a new product, there was nobody out there in the wild who was dependent upon Maps working. That’s not like paying two thousand dollars for a laptop, and when you go to use It, something as basic as the keyboard on it is kludgy and annoying.

Just basic things Apple is getting wrong right now. Like for some reason, Apple decided to break compatibility for Reminders between iOS 12 and iOS 13. Now Reminders are obviously important, or people wouldn’t be bothering to use them to remind them to do something. And Reminders are so basic, they have a due date and time, a description, and a flag as to whether or not they’ve been done. While they are important to the user, they are not complex to the software developer. However Apple decided they were best off breaking compatibility so that people who had to use one device on iOS 12 and another on iOS 13 would have issues, even though this was a feature that had been working flawlessly for years. And wasn’t terribly difficult for Apple to implement.

all this stuff happening at the same time indicates something is wrong inside Apple. And it’s going to take hard work inside Apple to fix it. If they’re taking the same approach some of their fans are taking and just figuring it’s a cycle with it’s ups and downs, we’ll see how it plays out... If that’s Apple’s attitude then it will never get fixed.

 

[Quu]

You guys with the Apple apologistics.,, ?I think you guys just haven’t been personally hit by a bad quality issue. And are unable to read media reports and get a sense for what’s going on.

Stuff like Maps was a trash product when it was first released is nothing compared to what’s going on now. Yes, releasing Maps was a bad move. But since it was a new product, there was nobody out there in the wild who was dependent upon Maps working. That’s not like paying two thousand dollars for a laptop, and when you go to use It, something as basic as the keyboard on it is kludgy and annoying.

I understand what you're saying here but this is really not unique. I had to have my iBook G4 serviced two times for failing GPU's (2004). And people had to do the same in 2008 with the NVIDIA GPU failures.

The keyboard issue was incredibly visible and they took ages to do anything about it but it's not really unique. Apples had a lot of hardware issues with their laptops over the years.

One that sticks out to me which doesn't get talked about much is their creation of Mini-Display Port as an everything connector when they launched Thunderbolt 1 and 2. This connector ... you just had to breath on it and it would lose connection. A design flaw only remedied when they moved to Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C. Every Apple notebook I had with that connector (I had several) all had connection issues a few weeks into use, that connector.. complete trash.

And there is so many examples like this. If you were here for the Titanium PowerBook G4. Peoples hinges were literally breaking on those machines only a couple months into ownership. In-fact it's difficult to buy one used even today (for nostalgia reasons) that doesn't have cracked or completely broken hinges.

I just want to be clear though I am not apologising for them. I'm not saying because they've always had problems this is fine. It's not fine. I'm just saying its always kinda been like this, if you have a long memory at-least (I'm getting old.)

 

[levander]

@Quu - I just tried googling Apple Mini Display port to see what you are talking about. This is typical of what I found:

Mini DisplayPort and DVI cables not working?

I recently bought a Mini DisplayPort to DVI and DVI/DVI cable to connect to my monitor. However, when I connect my MacBook Pro (late 2009) to the monitor it doesn't work - laptop screen flashes blu...

apple.stackexchange.com

Note that in response to the first listed comment, the guy solved his problem by returning the faulty cables he bought and getting new ones.

But it’s not even that Apple hasn’t had really bad problems problems in the past. It’s that really bad problems seem to be popping up a lot these days.

You‘re earlier example about Maps being released as shoddy software. Tim Cook personally signed an apology letter about that. Even though it was brand new software that no one was relying on yet. So I didn’t even think it was a big deal, I just kept using Google Maps like I had been all along anyway. And it came out later, Apple’s head of software was supposed to sign that letter. But he refused to, and he was fired like a year later.

What has Apple‘s response been to the recent quality control issues?

We did get “leaks” that they are now implementing flags in their software development. So that people using the software while it’s under development can turn off certain features if they’re just too buggy.

Johnny Ives has finally left the company. I’ve read that the whole butterfly keyboard thing that was such a disaster was actually his brainchild. But it’s me who’s put that together as an indicator that possibly Apple is getting serious about quality control. And are getting rid of designers who’s designs sometimes don’t work and have too much power to defend them inside the company despite this. We really have zero from inside the company that they know they need to do better. We just have a couple of ”leaks” that now they’ve implemented flags.

 

[robogobo]

This is essentially my outlook on what I call all "things" that exist, whatever that thing is.
There is no perfect product from any manufacturer. And high expectations and this unrealistic perfection idea will completely damage someone on any particular thing.
Or someone may say, "I don't expect perfection but....... " or "for this amount of money this SHOULD be this or that..."
All products, from the pet rock to whatever the most expensive thing ever produced, have flaws and that is ok. Once someone can acknowledge and accept this internally. They can move past this perfection idea and the anger they create in themselves. Don't allow marketing to make you have feelings on a thing, just buy it for what it is or don't.

Even pet rock makers don't release a known flawed product and ask users to troubleshoot it for them. I don't think anyone here is expecting perfection. We're just asking that Apple slow down and listen, and stop the release now fix later approach. And personally, I'm clearly fed up with their refusal to accept criticism and their censorship on their forums of anything that might tarnish their perfect image of themselves. Again, if you can't see that, then I can't help you. You're just joining the millions of users who want to believe Apple is something they aren't, and are willing to look past critical flaws that get in the way of power users' work and productivity.

Cue the "if you don't like it, don't buy it" cyclical tripe.

 

[mmomega]

If no one releases a perfect product then it has flaws to someone.
And when you read many comments here, people here do expect perfection. Find the many of comments where something needs to do this because it cost $$$$. If you use the words need to or should, there is an expectation behind it.

I do not go on Apple forums, so I would not see that.
I don't join anyone, to me Apple is exactly what they are. A big business pushing forward to continue making money.
From the founding date until today. Apple creates a product and they sell it, that's pretty much it. And they use a lot emotion in their marketing, a thing Jobs, one of the worlds greatest salesman created.
As soon as that company stops producing a product within a certain space and doesn't fit my needs, I move on.

Their servers, don't work for me in 4 offices and at home so I use a different product. I utilize 2 Windows and 4 Linux servers.
Their networking doesn't work for me, so I use a different product. pfSense, Ubiquiti.
Their backup solutions, don't work for me, so i use a different product. UnRAID, FreeNAS, Synology and QNAP.
Media solutions like iTunes don't work for me, so I have a Ryzen 3800X Plex machine.
Their GPU's don't impress me so all of my personal machines have an eGPU for better performance for the way I use it.

I'm not bothered if someone likes it or buys it personally, when I don't like it, I won't buy it either.
But it is fairly sound advise.

TETO