“It’s not easy when you’re 40. You can’t keep up with things the way you used to,” Chris Matyszczyk reports for CNET. “You start to peddle old ideas instead of new ones. This, perhaps, is at the core of criticisms leveled on occasion at Apple.”
“Oddly, the latest comes from Microsoft’s general manager of the Surface line, Brian Hall,” Matyszczyk reports. “In a tweet on Thursday that sounded in equal parts exasperated and bemused, he said: ‘I compete with Apple and respect them. but they ARE doing their customers a disservice at times with old tech…'”
“Perhaps that’s a symptom of the expectations that Apple has engendered across its whole product line,” Matyszczyk reports. “Perhaps we humans should just chill a little and let Apple do its thing. Or perhaps Apple is slowly weaning us off certain sorts of computers altogether.”
I compete with Apple and respect them. but they ARE doing their customers a disservice at times with old tech… https://t.co/PR2pC6TsJh
MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft’s Brian HallMicrosoft’s recently completed quarterly Surface (Surface Pro, Surface Book, Surface Hub) revenue: $965 million versus Apple’s latest quarterly Macintosh revenue: $5.239 billion.
We used the Mac figures for Apple because we assume that even Hall, despite his place of employment, isn’t stupid enough to be calling iPad “old tech,” since Apple’s A-series mobile processors are unparalleled and he dreams that he had access to them after he closes his iPad Pro before retiring every night.
If apple ships old tech then what exactly is windows? A wizzy but nearly unusable menu structure, surface pro tablets that profess to be laptops yet offer almost no storage for that purpose, and do we mention the paucity of surface specific apps? These are excuses and pale imitations instead of products that serve the public. Fix your own glass house Brian. The world is full of stones
I don’t know..I think he’s actually being honest and genuine. Aside from the fact that the surface is itself underpowered, etc, he’s making a statement most of us here have also made. It’s hard to have a respectable competition when your rival appears to be faltering. Sad, in a way..that said, his comments about letting Apple just do its thing shows he has some insight.
You have to know the world knows you are clueless and asleep at the wheel relying on $MShat for the direction Apple was pointing when they disappeared.
Apple Mac hardware has never been this out of date. Hopefully this changes in the next few months. I have a MacBook Pro that is dying to be replaced but I wont do it with today’s miserable hardware.
I very seldom agree with Microsoft on anything. But this time they have hit a chord with me. Apple’s operating system is very good and the top of the list for me. Apple’s hardware is another matter. It’s like they pulled everyone off it for other projects. The hardware is way behind in graphics. People like me and several others that have commented are waiting to get a real great machine out of Apple. And this has been happening for at least the last two years. Look at the Mac Pro. What is with that? My workhorse, the iMac really needs to be upgraded again. I will let others speak on the laptops. I have to agree with Birdseed, Apple has a “miserable” hardware selection right now. I really hope this changes, it does a disservice to the people working so hard on the operating systems.
I’m not enthused about Apple these days, but I did just upgrade my old iPad to an iPad Pro 9″ and it’s awesome (for an iPad). Love my 2014 Retina MB Pro as well, and my iMac. So who’s making anything better. Just one look at Windows OS and I become overjoyed to be running back to my Mac’s. And yes, I do have Win 10 running in Parallels and it’s just plain ugly (still – as always).
MDN should stick to debating claims…and less on red herring.
Argument: Apple is peddling old tech.
Rebuttal: “but, but, but look how much more money macs made as a business…IN A QUARTER!!!(fingers trembling from overreaction, accelerated by too much caffeine, with a measure of “Apple can do no wrong”)
Everybody knows a Winblows installation lasts about 1 year before you need to redo from scratch. It’s called Winblows bloat. Never had that problem with OSX. And the Mac hardware just lasts longer. Brian, get a clue, buy a MAC.
Moore’s Law, for the moment, is dead. But Apple is being seriously lazy when they’re two or more generations behind on Intel CPU releases. That’s indefensible and shouts of lost focus.
Something has always bothered me about the “Apple is lazy” meme, and it’s this: there is no natural sync amongst R&D cycles, supplier contracts, consumer upgrade cycles, and economic trends. If there were, Apple could be PROVEN to be OUT OF SYNC and therefore incompetent or lazy. But there isn’t because shit happens.
Still, people who write about high technology do in fact try to prove this. They think in terms of fixed and predictable calendar events, somewhat as if Moore’s Law were Newton’s Fourth Law of motion. We all tend toward magical thinking. We become rapturous, at times, about received promises. Shamans, pundits, politicians, charlatans, and journalists know this very well. They all make a living from it.
Thus we readily participate in holding Vulcan’s feet to the fire because we have been told that he hasn’t delivered—on schedule—a newer and sharper sword to conquer our twin enemies, boredom and aimlessness.
Oh yes! Excellent examples. There’s a book’s worth. The human inner world remains one of the barely explored, least understood frontiers. And we think we’re going to create ‘artificial intelligence.’
…our twin enemies, boredom and aimlessness.
There’s a subject for our times. They drive some people to ruin in the first world, strange forms of madness that are incomprehensible to those with tougher lives. I suspect we haven’t seen the worst of these two’s monster children. Amidst our neo-feudalist, corporatocracy new world order, while the idle rich bury themselves in trivia in an attempt to hide from their responsibilities to miracle planet Earth, our only home… Then we will see nightmares walking. The following generation will recoil with revulsion and mistakenly call these horrors the products of creativity, instead of the spawn of self-destruction. The last depression will result and out of depression the last war…
I found my anti-depressant pills! Never mind. 😉
Brian Hall – when you want shitty computers with a shitty, still-virus-prone OS and the fashion sense of the never-laid.
On a more serious note, in the mobile space, I haven’t seen many CPUs that best my i7-4960HQ (2013 MBP). That doesn’t mean Apple should still sell that 2012 MBP as “new,” of course.
1) The Microsoft Surface, for all it’s ‘huge’ness and marketing bombardment, is still a FAIL, not even rating in the top five tablets sold.
2) Pot calling Kettle ‘black’ Brian.
3) But OH YES! Apple has some catching up to do with Macs vs Intel chip releases. Why Is That Apple?! Embarrassed much? The kettle is now boiling over…
Yea I remember the old days…
I remember getting excited over a Mac SE 4/20 with a FDHD 1.4MB floppy disc and it was a great day! Wow the computers of today we would of killed for back then! 😁 We dreamed of Netscape Navigator. The Newton MessagePad or a digital camera or color OneScanner was not yet available. Ofoto anyone? Loved it.
They had nothing. Just Beige. Well technically called platinum. No extra anything. They weren’t even on the wish list yet. An external 2X CD player? Forget about it.
It had a 9″ black & white monochrome monitor. Just dithering I paid $2660 for it. No wifi or Ethernet. Just ADB and serial ports. Compare that to what you can get today for that much. 🙂
Plus an external 17″ black & white greyscale monitor I paid around a grand. Plus a 300 dpi black & white Personal LaserWriter NTR would set you back another $1600? There weren’t any cheap inkjet printers, with good scanners yet. Over 5 grand and still no color or scanner or CD player. Or anything. Oh but one tiny internal speaker. Maybe a StyleWriter down the round
We have gotten spoiled.
The OS? How about the Font DA mover? Remember that fun?
And Mulitfinder. Who remembers not being able to run two programs at once? I think it came with Macintosh System Software 6.08? Went up to what was called Mac OS 7.5.5
You know? Classic Mac OS 9.2.2 Steve had a funeral for it.
OS X public beta Finally! $29 bucks.
Yes they used to charge for these things. All the Operating Systems cost money. Thankfully I was part of a VAR at the time.
How soon we forget. And get spoiled. Don’t get me started on PhoneNet networks. The Chooser or 300baud modems and staying up all night on BB systems. Fun times.
AOL was the king and the Internet was called Internet explorer by people that didn’t know any better, because that’s what they used. Just Static pages back then. Nothing fancy. Yay. Just the beginning. People writing html by hand was normal.
31 disks HD floppy discs or so to install any program from MS. Why that was normal. God help you when the 27th disc you made with disc copy had an error. 👍🏼
Later as external components became available. Remember the SCSI chain?? Lol how fun to have 6 external devises hooked up and not crashing!
And the Extensions Manager? Yay was that also fun. And a blessed system folder. You had to pray to the postscript gods to print to any imagesetters to print to film correctly.
Remember waiting for Photoshop to just open? And then waiting to finish a blur?
Or illustrator to render after making a big scroll. Lol
I sure miss PageMaker and FreeHand. Not much of a Quark fan.
Omg how fast and everything is already built in compared to the way it was. Today’s systems have it all. I agree that If Apple would just make a 8100 size expandable tower. It would make a killing.
When you have been there it’s not that bad now.
I know we all want better and faster. But heck upgrades are going to happen sometime.
Sooner than later.
I agree that they probably moved resources to iOS. Maybe that has been the problem?
My 2012 MBP with 16GB of ram and two SSD drives does so much more than anything back then could do.
Hopefully the new campus 2 will be finished soon and Apple will move people around and settle down…then the creativity that Steve wanted from the new campus 2 design will bear some really good fruit!
If the commenters here were discussing the latest hammer, they’d be equally as imbecilic.
Computers are tools – though at times it’s pretty clear that the biggest tool of all is the fanboys/girls who just have to demonstrate how much of a tool they are by mouthing off about their tool being longer or wider or better at satisfying life the Universe and everything!
There are times that human individuals make the amazing things that the species has come up with seem more like things that deserve more to be given the ‘hoik’ purely because it’s about the only thing that’ll silence the constant barrage of bollocks and drivel that exudes from their lips and fingertips!
Be thankful that you’ve even got access to these pieces of equipment that our grandparents could have only dreamed about… Bunch of ungrateful sods.
I inherited my father’s and grandfather’s woodworking tools, and they are very fine indeed—handmade for the most part, and well worn by their rugged hands. I admire them as works of artisanship, as intimate memoirs of long and productive lives building and crafting things that mattered in the lives of their families and their communities.
I have the same quality of appreciation for the things I buy from Apple, after the brief period of time it takes to turn them personal. Across the long divide of design, marketing, and consumption there persists the idea of devoted service to a task. I am not just a user, but a participant in a social process designed to make a better life for my family and community.
Ha,ha! Hey Brian look who’s calling who’s tech old. The iPad’s processor clearly blows that Surface crap out of the water. And as MDN said the sales numbers of 5 billion over your puny 900 million say a lot about which product is better. Putting a full blown desktop OS on a tablet doesn’t work. It’s slow, takes up to much ram just to run it. Go peddle your lies somewhere else.
Brian, take it from me:
You might want to go with XXXL on your next Zune-colored “trying too hard to look cool” hoodie.
(Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.)
If apple ships old tech then what exactly is windows? A wizzy but nearly unusable menu structure, surface pro tablets that profess to be laptops yet offer almost no storage for that purpose, and do we mention the paucity of surface specific apps? These are excuses and pale imitations instead of products that serve the public. Fix your own glass house Brian. The world is full of stones
I don’t know..I think he’s actually being honest and genuine. Aside from the fact that the surface is itself underpowered, etc, he’s making a statement most of us here have also made. It’s hard to have a respectable competition when your rival appears to be faltering. Sad, in a way..that said, his comments about letting Apple just do its thing shows he has some insight.
The “comments about letting Apple just do its thing” came from the CNET reporter, not the MSFT exec.
Ahh..thanks for that detail. I’ve been conditioned to ignore CNET reporters, so I attributed the comment to the MS employee.
You have to know the world knows you are asleep at the wheel Mr. Cook when MS starts telling you that your reck needs to be updated.
You have to know the world knows you are clueless and asleep at the wheel relying on $MShat for the direction Apple was pointing when they disappeared.
Apple Mac hardware has never been this out of date. Hopefully this changes in the next few months. I have a MacBook Pro that is dying to be replaced but I wont do it with today’s miserable hardware.
Miserable? Man, are we spoiled by tech, or what?
I very seldom agree with Microsoft on anything. But this time they have hit a chord with me. Apple’s operating system is very good and the top of the list for me. Apple’s hardware is another matter. It’s like they pulled everyone off it for other projects. The hardware is way behind in graphics. People like me and several others that have commented are waiting to get a real great machine out of Apple. And this has been happening for at least the last two years. Look at the Mac Pro. What is with that? My workhorse, the iMac really needs to be upgraded again. I will let others speak on the laptops. I have to agree with Birdseed, Apple has a “miserable” hardware selection right now. I really hope this changes, it does a disservice to the people working so hard on the operating systems.
What’s really new beside cycle updates?
Patience. Wait until you see the next gen Apple computer. They will be, as always, years ahead and everybody will start their copiers.
Integrating technologies takes time to make it seemless. The new generation will blow our mind. Everybody will flock to Apple.
new macs
http://9to5mac.com/2016/08/08/new-macbooks-expected-to-feature-touch-id-power-button-as-well-as-oled-touch-panel/?pushup=1
I’m not enthused about Apple these days, but I did just upgrade my old iPad to an iPad Pro 9″ and it’s awesome (for an iPad). Love my 2014 Retina MB Pro as well, and my iMac. So who’s making anything better. Just one look at Windows OS and I become overjoyed to be running back to my Mac’s. And yes, I do have Win 10 running in Parallels and it’s just plain ugly (still – as always).
I think he’s talking about The Mac here.
If so then he’ll has frozen over because I agree with him.
Tim Cook says apples next products will be in every part of our lives:
http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/08/08/apple-ceo-tim-cook-says-future-products-will-be-in-every-part-of-your-life-that-we-can
Apart from the parts of life that go near server rooms. & pro desktops. & pro gaming. & DIY upgrades. OH YEAH & VR.
To all though with a wait and see attitude:
ITS BEEN TWO YEARS IN SOME CASES.
MDN should stick to debating claims…and less on red herring.
Argument: Apple is peddling old tech.
Rebuttal: “but, but, but look how much more money macs made as a business…IN A QUARTER!!!(fingers trembling from overreaction, accelerated by too much caffeine, with a measure of “Apple can do no wrong”)
Oooooo…k……?🙄
Exacerbated by the fact that it’s our money We should be somehow enthused over Apple having..
I’ll take old tech vs. the breakneck speed at which MS creates security holes.
Everybody knows a Winblows installation lasts about 1 year before you need to redo from scratch. It’s called Winblows bloat. Never had that problem with OSX. And the Mac hardware just lasts longer. Brian, get a clue, buy a MAC.
“…doing their customers a disservice at times with old tech…’”
That’s like the pot calling the kettle disingenuously black.
It’s Mac, not MAC.
Thanks, Grammer Nazi…
Extreme tech did an article on this and, as it turns out, the lack of hardware upgrades isn’t actually a big deal:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/233058-apples-stagnant-product-lines-mostly-reflect-the-state-of-the-computer-industry
Moore’s Law, for the moment, is dead. But Apple is being seriously lazy when they’re two or more generations behind on Intel CPU releases. That’s indefensible and shouts of lost focus.
Something has always bothered me about the “Apple is lazy” meme, and it’s this: there is no natural sync amongst R&D cycles, supplier contracts, consumer upgrade cycles, and economic trends. If there were, Apple could be PROVEN to be OUT OF SYNC and therefore incompetent or lazy. But there isn’t because shit happens.
Still, people who write about high technology do in fact try to prove this. They think in terms of fixed and predictable calendar events, somewhat as if Moore’s Law were Newton’s Fourth Law of motion. We all tend toward magical thinking. We become rapturous, at times, about received promises. Shamans, pundits, politicians, charlatans, and journalists know this very well. They all make a living from it.
Thus we readily participate in holding Vulcan’s feet to the fire because we have been told that he hasn’t delivered—on schedule—a newer and sharper sword to conquer our twin enemies, boredom and aimlessness.
We all tend toward magical thinking.
Oh yes! Excellent examples. There’s a book’s worth. The human inner world remains one of the barely explored, least understood frontiers. And we think we’re going to create ‘artificial intelligence.’
…our twin enemies, boredom and aimlessness.
There’s a subject for our times. They drive some people to ruin in the first world, strange forms of madness that are incomprehensible to those with tougher lives. I suspect we haven’t seen the worst of these two’s monster children. Amidst our neo-feudalist, corporatocracy new world order, while the idle rich bury themselves in trivia in an attempt to hide from their responsibilities to miracle planet Earth, our only home… Then we will see nightmares walking. The following generation will recoil with revulsion and mistakenly call these horrors the products of creativity, instead of the spawn of self-destruction. The last depression will result and out of depression the last war…
I found my anti-depressant pills! Never mind. 😉
Brian Hall – when you want shitty computers with a shitty, still-virus-prone OS and the fashion sense of the never-laid.
On a more serious note, in the mobile space, I haven’t seen many CPUs that best my i7-4960HQ (2013 MBP). That doesn’t mean Apple should still sell that 2012 MBP as “new,” of course.
1) The Microsoft Surface, for all it’s ‘huge’ness and marketing bombardment, is still a FAIL, not even rating in the top five tablets sold.
2) Pot calling Kettle ‘black’ Brian.
3) But OH YES! Apple has some catching up to do with Macs vs Intel chip releases. Why Is That Apple?! Embarrassed much? The kettle is now boiling over…
Yea I remember the old days…
I remember getting excited over a Mac SE 4/20 with a FDHD 1.4MB floppy disc and it was a great day! Wow the computers of today we would of killed for back then! 😁 We dreamed of Netscape Navigator. The Newton MessagePad or a digital camera or color OneScanner was not yet available. Ofoto anyone? Loved it.
They had nothing. Just Beige. Well technically called platinum. No extra anything. They weren’t even on the wish list yet. An external 2X CD player? Forget about it.
It had a 9″ black & white monochrome monitor. Just dithering I paid $2660 for it. No wifi or Ethernet. Just ADB and serial ports. Compare that to what you can get today for that much. 🙂
Plus an external 17″ black & white greyscale monitor I paid around a grand. Plus a 300 dpi black & white Personal LaserWriter NTR would set you back another $1600? There weren’t any cheap inkjet printers, with good scanners yet. Over 5 grand and still no color or scanner or CD player. Or anything. Oh but one tiny internal speaker. Maybe a StyleWriter down the round
We have gotten spoiled.
The OS? How about the Font DA mover? Remember that fun?
And Mulitfinder. Who remembers not being able to run two programs at once? I think it came with Macintosh System Software 6.08? Went up to what was called Mac OS 7.5.5
You know? Classic Mac OS 9.2.2 Steve had a funeral for it.
OS X public beta Finally! $29 bucks.
Yes they used to charge for these things. All the Operating Systems cost money. Thankfully I was part of a VAR at the time.
How soon we forget. And get spoiled. Don’t get me started on PhoneNet networks. The Chooser or 300baud modems and staying up all night on BB systems. Fun times.
AOL was the king and the Internet was called Internet explorer by people that didn’t know any better, because that’s what they used. Just Static pages back then. Nothing fancy. Yay. Just the beginning. People writing html by hand was normal.
31 disks HD floppy discs or so to install any program from MS. Why that was normal. God help you when the 27th disc you made with disc copy had an error. 👍🏼
Later as external components became available. Remember the SCSI chain?? Lol how fun to have 6 external devises hooked up and not crashing!
And the Extensions Manager? Yay was that also fun. And a blessed system folder. You had to pray to the postscript gods to print to any imagesetters to print to film correctly.
Remember waiting for Photoshop to just open? And then waiting to finish a blur?
Or illustrator to render after making a big scroll. Lol
I sure miss PageMaker and FreeHand. Not much of a Quark fan.
Omg how fast and everything is already built in compared to the way it was. Today’s systems have it all. I agree that If Apple would just make a 8100 size expandable tower. It would make a killing.
When you have been there it’s not that bad now.
I know we all want better and faster. But heck upgrades are going to happen sometime.
Sooner than later.
I agree that they probably moved resources to iOS. Maybe that has been the problem?
My 2012 MBP with 16GB of ram and two SSD drives does so much more than anything back then could do.
Hopefully the new campus 2 will be finished soon and Apple will move people around and settle down…then the creativity that Steve wanted from the new campus 2 design will bear some really good fruit!
Didn’t mean to rant. Just remembering.
If the commenters here were discussing the latest hammer, they’d be equally as imbecilic.
Computers are tools – though at times it’s pretty clear that the biggest tool of all is the fanboys/girls who just have to demonstrate how much of a tool they are by mouthing off about their tool being longer or wider or better at satisfying life the Universe and everything!
There are times that human individuals make the amazing things that the species has come up with seem more like things that deserve more to be given the ‘hoik’ purely because it’s about the only thing that’ll silence the constant barrage of bollocks and drivel that exudes from their lips and fingertips!
Be thankful that you’ve even got access to these pieces of equipment that our grandparents could have only dreamed about… Bunch of ungrateful sods.
I inherited my father’s and grandfather’s woodworking tools, and they are very fine indeed—handmade for the most part, and well worn by their rugged hands. I admire them as works of artisanship, as intimate memoirs of long and productive lives building and crafting things that mattered in the lives of their families and their communities.
I have the same quality of appreciation for the things I buy from Apple, after the brief period of time it takes to turn them personal. Across the long divide of design, marketing, and consumption there persists the idea of devoted service to a task. I am not just a user, but a participant in a social process designed to make a better life for my family and community.
I presume Mr Hall is using outmoded diets and fitness equipment by the looks of it.
Ha,ha! Hey Brian look who’s calling who’s tech old. The iPad’s processor clearly blows that Surface crap out of the water. And as MDN said the sales numbers of 5 billion over your puny 900 million say a lot about which product is better. Putting a full blown desktop OS on a tablet doesn’t work. It’s slow, takes up to much ram just to run it. Go peddle your lies somewhere else.