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Apple Keynote. Have I missed something?

I'd argue the reverse. The current MacBook/MacBook Pro are eye-wateringly expensive if you need a serious amount of onboard storage, e.g. 1TB or more. It is why I am slumming it with a 2012 pre-Retina model. I want my music collection with me, not in the cloud, not on a NAS at home and not on an external USB drive.

I don't understand this at all. It's like arguing against not getting mains electricity and taking a diesel generator everywhere.
 
I'm not in the industry anymore Matthew but there don't appear to be many non smart phones around these days.

There are loads of non-smart phones and if you just want a phone, phone then you are looking at about £40.
 
Yeah it's almost as if there has been loads of technical progress in the last decade of something.
 
I'd argue the reverse. The current MacBook/MacBook Pro are eye-wateringly expensive if you need a serious amount of onboard storage, e.g. 1TB or more. It is why I am slumming it with a 2012 pre-Retina model. I want my music collection with me, not in the cloud, not on a NAS at home and not on an external USB drive.

PS I find it rather odd that someone with a stereo that cost more than a luxury family car is arguing about £1k for a state of the art smartphone!

:D

I get more pleasure from the stereo and it should not have a built in obsolescence Tony.

With Macbooks I'm comparing a top spec model from 2007 with the closest today.

2007

2.16 GHz/1 GB RAM/160 GB HD/$1499 U.S.

2017

1.2GHz dual-core 7th-generation Intel Core m3 processor (Turbo Boost up to 3.0GHz)/ 8GB 1866MHz LPDDR3 memory/ 256GB SSD storage/$1299 U.S.
 
I want my music collection with me, not in the cloud, not on a NAS at home and not on an external USB drive.

We all have to hit our limit of acceptable progress at some point. ;)

I gave up when a mobile 'phone went north of £100 for a load of s**t I don't need like anything that I don't need to call or text someone.
 
Yeah it's almost as if there has been loads of technical progress in the last decade of something.

What? Between basic phones and those of yesteryear?

What exactly?

Nokia 150 is indeed better than anything on PLAC from 2007. Then a basic phone on that service was £99, Now just £15
 
I don't understand this at all. It's like arguing against not getting mains electricity and taking a diesel generator everywhere.

I really don't want a desktop computer. I've not used one for almost 20 years now, so that means my laptop needs to be in what always used to be described as the 'desktop replacement/power-user' class. To get that from Apple these days is very, very expensive as their priority of 'thinness' over performance or usability has relegated all but the top-end models to little more than netbooks IMO. I've just had a look at the Apple Store and to get a 13" MBP of the same spec as my upgraded five year old model (16GB/1TB SSD) is £2.7k! Ok, it has a nicer screen and just so much 'thinness', but I'd have to f*** about with an external optical drive to rip CDs etc, i.e. it is actually less practical.
 
Define "Mountain Bike" Joe.

It's a bit like asking a fair price for "a car" these days :)

Exactly. So, I could pick up a non-smart mobile for under a tenner. It wouldn't do much, but it would meet my limited requirements. Similarly, you could pick up a bike secondhand for about £50, and it would get you from A to B. If either of us wanted 'more' (more functionality, better design/build, more pride of ownership), then we'd move up the product tree till we reached a point where our ability to afford met the specification set we desired. The price of any consumer good is based on what the market will bear, not on any production cost + profit model.

Obviously some people will stretch beyond what they can afford, but compared to say, those who gamble or drink beyond their means, I would say the number likely to do so wrt the new Apple phone would be vanishingly small.
 
Joe, what I am saying is that, with bicycles for instance, the price increase has not remotely matched that of the iPhone and yet we have similar advances. The MacBook there is an example of that.

With the bikes I gave an example of the Colnago frameset prices over the past decade. Having said that, the American brands in particular are taking the proverbial with their new TOTR bikes and get similar reactions from me. I would not buy from them on principle.

The inflation on many of these prices is effectively negative. The rise in the cost of the iPhone is shocking in comparison. Another example is the reduction in the price of non smart phones over that period as shown - again despite advances.

If there is a market I agree, corporations will profit from it. Indeed they will seek to create that market through marketing as much as anything else. A bit like drug dealers.
 
If Apple have over-priced the new iPhone, it won't sell. They've made similar mistakes in the past.

I find it hard to get worked up over one consumer item when there are so many others that are priced to confer a mythical status on them. It's especially so, given the context of a hifi forum!
 
Granted Joe.

I can't remember paying retail price or buying anything new from an audio POV in decades.

It's really difficult to find old price lists on the web it seems. What's happened to audio electronics prices over the years out of interest Joe?

I see the B&W 683 was £900 in 2007. Now the S2 is £1150. The same price adjusted for inflation.
 
I really don't want a desktop computer. .

i don't think that what he's saying. you could place your "extra" storage on a web server (cloud is just a silly marketing term for that), or, as i have suggested before, on a tiny external drive that you plug in when necessary.

also, i'm not one to question people's personal computing choices, but i do find it odd that a person with a big music collection is opposed to the notion of a NAS device.



vuk.
 
p.s. is there such a thin as a "sock" of some kind that one can connect one of these phones to and be able to use a proper keyboard and monitor? if not, maybe tones can help us get a patent.

i don't understand how anyone can actually get any proper work done on a tiny device -- unless he is a gossip columnist or retails clerk.


vuk.
 
i don't think that what he's saying. you could place your "extra" storage on a web server (cloud is just a silly marketing term for that), or, as i have suggested before, on a tiny external drive that you plug in when necessary.

also, i'm not one to question people's personal computing choices, but i do find it odd that a person with a big music collection is opposed to the notion of a NAS device.

Upload speeds in the UK are pretty much third-world at any reasonable monthly rate, shifting best part of a TB up would be a nightmare. A NAS needs to be at home, a portable HD is just more clutter, something else to f*** about backing up. I'm not asking for the moon on a stick here, a 1 or 2 TB drive really is not an unusual thing, I've had a 1TB SSD drive in my MBP for about 3 years now! My complaint is modern Apple computers come with daft little HDs as standard, and for typical home consumers that may be adequate, but they always used to cater for the high-end musician/studio market, and that is the sort of kit I buy. I realise as someone who runs a high-end audio forum for a living and is a part-time muso my usage may not be typical, but it should still be catered for, just as it should were I a high-end photographer, video editor, graphic designer etc etc. This was always Apple's key marketplace. It was where they existed as a company.

PS I guess Apple think everyone lives in California or South Korea where cloud computing actually works. Here in the UK most people don't even get 512mbps upload (I get twice that, but it is still crap).
 
p.s. is there such a thin as a "sock" of some kind that one can connect one of these phones to and be able to use a proper keyboard and monitor? if not, maybe tones can help us get a patent.
I don't know about Apple, I guess the OS could be an issue, but Microsoft have been there,

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum

It's a shame about Windows on phones, and in a world where Google leads the evilness stakes it would be nice to have alternatives that weren't used by fanbois.

Paul
 
My concern with Apple's direction -- which may also apply to other computer manufacturers -- is the lack of expandability and upgradability of products, especially RAM and HD space, not to mention ports. I know why Apple does it. If you buy a phone or tablet or notebook today but find in a couple of years it no longer meets your needs you're forced to buy a new one.

It's a great business model, especially when augmented with slick marketing that's hard to resist, but deliberately planned obsolesce leads to pointless consumption and a mountain of e-waste that's shit for the planet.


Joe
 
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My Nikon's memory is almost full. I have to buy a new DSLR so I can continue to take pictures.

That's my beef with Apple in a nutshell.

Joe
 
Tony,

Surely you can stream all this on your phone? If not you probably don't want to spend £1000 on a new one :)

If your use case is "Want to rip my own CDs, can't/won't use Cloud, don't want a NAS and don't need backups and don't mind carrying laptop to listen to music" then fair enough but that's obviously very niche and not something Apple are going to design for. But I think really what's unique about your requirement is that you want it all in one laptop rather than having somewhere to store it be that NAS or cloud.

I do agree that their extreme pursuit of thinness at the expense of connectivity and battery life is wrong headed but they got a lot of pushback on that with the recent macbook updates.

Matthew
 
I'm prepared to bet the iPhone X sells in bucket-loads and they won't be able to make them fast enough! The market will support very high price luxury items, and as audiophiles we know this rather too well! Apple are just positioning themselves as the Rolex, Leica, Conrad Johnson or whatever of the smartphone market. For a huge number of people across the planet £1k is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. Just astounding technology, functionality and build quality for a fraction of a months wage. I don't see what the issue is really and the more I think about it the more I'm tempted to grab one (and the big one as I need music storage space). To be honest the main thing holding me back is the old IT Manager mindset of never trusting anything with a zero in the point revision, I'll likely let others bug test it and find the weaknesses and then grab the next version!

Yes agree on storage size. If you're prepared to pony up 1k for the phone, it makes sense to pay the extra 150 quid for much more storage.

Don't think I'll be getting one just yet, I'll wait for the S. I have put my name down for the watch pre-order though. The independent calls and texts were what I was waiting for, it's worth having one now I think.
 


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