“The shine is officially off of Apple,” Mark Spoonauer writes for LAPTOP. “After taking the top spot in our annual Best and Worst Laptop Brands report since 2010, Apple has fallen out of first place for the first time. But not to second place. Or even third. The MacBook maker plummeted all the way to fifth out of 10 companies.”
“Each year, we evaluate the top laptop brands in several categories, including design, reviews, tech support, warranty, and value and selection. This year, Apple impressed with its tech support, taking first in our undercover Tech Support Showdown,” Spoonauer writes. “But it goes downhill from there, as Apple has disappointed creative professionals with its latest wares while also abandoning mainstream shoppers on budgets.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The hits just keep on comin’.
SEE ALSO:
The culture at Apple changed when Tim Cook took over as CEO – April 10, 2017
Apple’s vaporous next-gen ‘Mac Pro’ may not arrive until early 2019 – April 7, 2017
Laggard, trailing Apple needs to catch up HP’s workstation designs – April 7, 2017
Why Apple’s promise of a new ‘modular’ Mac Pro matters so much – April 6, 2017
Apple’s cheese grater Mac Pro was flexible, expandable, and powerful – imagine that – April 6, 2017
More about Apple’s Mac Pro – April 6, 2017
Apple’s desperate Mac Pro damage control message hints at a confused, divided company – April 6, 2017
Who has taken over at Apple? – April 5, 2017
Apple’s embarrassing Mac Pro mea culpa – April 4, 2017
Who’s going to buy a Mac Pro now? – April 4, 2017
Mac Pro: Why did it take Apple so long to wake up? – April 4, 2017
Apple sorry for what happened with the Mac Pro over the last 3+ years – namely, nothing – April 4, 2017
Apple to unveil ‘iMac Pro’ later this year; rethought, modular Mac Pro and Apple pro displays in the pipeline – April 4, 2017
Apple’s apparent antipathy towards the Mac prompts calls for macOS licensing – March 27, 2017
Why Apple’s new Mac Pro might never arrive – March 10, 2017
Dare we hold out hope for the Mac Pro? – March 1, 2017
Apple CEO Cook pledges support to pro users, says ‘we don’t like politics’ at Apple’s annual shareholders meeting – February 28, 2017
Former Apple engineer: Tim Cook made Apple a ‘boring operations company’ – January 17, 2017
Yes, I just bought a ‘new’ Mac Pro (released on December 19, 2013 and never updated) – January 4, 2017
Attention, Tim Cook! Apple isn’t firing on all cylinders and you need to fix it – January 4, 2017
No, Apple, do not simplify, get better – December 23, 2016
Rare video shows Steve Jobs warning Apple to focus less on profits and more on great products – December 23, 2016
Marco Arment: Apple’s Mac Pro is ‘very likely dead’ – December 20, 2016
How Tim Cook’s Apple alienated Mac loyalists – December 20, 2016
Apple’s not very good, really quite poor 2016 – December 19, 2016
Apple’s software has been anything but ‘magical’ lately – December 19, 2016
Lazy Apple. It’s not hard to imagine Steve Jobs asking, ‘What have you been doing for the last four years?’ – December 9, 2016
Rush Limbaugh: Is Apple losing their edge? – December 9, 2016
AirPods: MIA for the holidays; delayed product damages Apple’s credibility, stokes customer frustration – December 9, 2016
Apple may have finally gotten too big for its unusual corporate structure – November 28, 2016
Apple has no idea what they’re doing in the TV space, and it’s embarrassing – November 3, 2016
Apple’s disgracefully outdated, utterly mismanaged Mac lineup is killing sales – October 13, 2016
Apple takes its eye off the ball: Why users are complaining about Apple’s software – February 9, 2016
Open letter to Tim Cook: Apple needs to do better – January 5, 2015
Thanks Cook for doing such a shit job as always.
Steve, we miss you so bad!
Timothy needs to take his billion(s) and devote his life to his real passions: social injustice, inequality
These are admirable goals but not ideal for an Apple CEO. Apple is a product company that must continue to create great products. My entire career is maintained using Apple products. If/when there is a BETTER option at some point in the future I will jump ship and never look back. My allegiance goes as far as my bank account.
Lol this is some random site, the guy gets paid for his negative review for finding out 3 “weaknesses”. Anybody can make a site like that if he wants. I can easily create a review site of kings and queens and compare the queen of England to king of Sweden and search for their weaknesses or something. Lenovo wants to be the first so it drops the guy 1000€, so he writes something. Does not matter what he writes, the money comes and its good. Can always make another site later.
Let’s hope the sleeping giants at Apple are now fully awoken rom their slumber and seeing the carnage of their isolated Ivory Tower folly. (And learning too much design is as bad as not enough.) Better get back to the basics of pleasing & delighting customers (by understanding their needs) at non-inflated pricing… or risk much.
What Apple really has to understand is that officially there is only one source for Macs which underlines how much they HAVE to get it right. Your audience will no longer wait years for you to understand your mistakes and take even more time to right the ship. Life’s too short.
Thank you for a rational critique… particularly in comparison to the now-deleted screechings of Botty.
A bit harsh of a critique, perhaps, but increasingly applicable as Apple delays the evolution of its desktop Mac offerings. Apple has also failed to generate as much enthusiasm with its recent MBP update. The single biggest issue was the increase in price. After years of decreasing price points and/or greater performance and capability at the same price points, Apple raised prices for the MBP. That was unwise. Other significant MBP gripes included the 16GB RAM limit and less-than-stellar graphics options. Other complaints, such as the keyboard, would likely have amounted to mere grumbling if not for the larger gripes.
I continue to support Apple. But the company is trying my patience. As Apple has demonstrated in the past when it was much smaller and had fewer resources, it is possible to make major updates to its laptop and desktop Macs while also designing new, innovative products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Certainly, given its current size and resources, Apple can match or exceed its past performance.
There was a story on Morning Edition this morning about how Apple doesn’t seem to be as innovative as they were in the past. So now it’s national news!
Really? Take a good look at the current audience at conferences, at schools, at press conferences, on transit cabins or even at your local wifi-enabled coffee house … seems to me Apple sales are doing fine. Perhaps the tech press needs to get out more.
While it is true that Mac sales are still pretty strong and that I routinely see a majority of Apple laptops at business meetings and conferences, those are both *trailing* indicators of Apple’s future. Looking ahead, Apple must do better in evolving its portable and desktop Macs.
K-Mel: totally agree. Apple investors/interested parties MUST be mindful of the trailing indicators. What can be quantified now was “built in” awhile ago. What is happening now (dearth of updates, etc) will be truly felt later.
Maybe Tim is right. Apple needs more women in top management. And one fewer male homosexual.
oh, Kent, you just can’t say that! it’s soooo homophobic! what’s wrong with you, anyway?
signed,
United Libtärds of America
kent can certainly say it. This is America, after all. But it doesn’t mean that what he says or posts isn’t inane. In fact, it generally is quite stupid. The same goes for you, of course, botty.
I just think of Tim Cook as a person. Based on the content that you and kent regularly post, however, you both seem way too obsessed with Cook’s sexual preference. The irony is you both probably whack off to lesbian porn. That irony probably escapes both of you.
Jeezus Chrysler, you are the poster boy for obtuse, Melvin.
Coming from you, that really hurts…not a bit.
Mel, Tim Cook himself opened the door for this one by going over the top about diversity. It’s a neat question whether basic attitudes (some of which affect how a person runs a company) are affected by one’s personality, of which sexuality is a VERY large part.
But I think that it’s now been sufficiently demonstrated that Apple’s board needs to start searching for a replacement CEO. If Tim wants to stay around, get him back full-time handling the logistics chain, which he arguably does better than anyone else in the industry. (I’d say he’s a victim of the Peter Principle, but then people would start making rude comments.)
Jeeze Kent?
The Information Technology news media is no different than the mainstream media. It operates in a bubble. It is an all but sealed echo chamber where only repetition of the first or loudest comments can be heard.
On any subject, the first observation, remark, or criticism takes hold and is often repeated ad nausea across all outlets. One reviewer can set the tone for every blogger, vlogger, editor, and reporter in the bubble. Opinion is mass produced, mass consumed, regurgitated and consumed again. A dissenting viewpoint is seldom recognized.
For a case in point, look at Apple’s latest MacBook Pro. Since it was announced, almost everyone complained about the exact same aspects, from the most obscure YouTube reviewer to the most high value traffic laden mega-websites.
It didn’t have the latest processor. It didn’t have 32GB of RAM. The new keyboard sucks. The trackpad is too big. It only has USB-C ports.
If you listen to all this crap, you will start to believe it as well. I did. I started wondering what the hell is wrong with Apple. Then I got one. I got the top of the line MacBook Pro except I only got 1 terabyte of storage to save a bit of money.
I’ve been at this computer stuff for quite a while. I’ve owned many high end desktops and laptops. I’ve owned PC laptops, PC gaming laptops, PC ultrabooks, and pretty much every major laptop released by Apple. So when I say this, it is with some experience; The new 2016/2017 MacBook Pro with touchpad is quite possibly the finest personal computer I’ve ever owned, desktop, laptop, or tablet, PC or Mac.
While I admit that the touch bar is largely a tease of things to come, for every other dig at the new MacBook Pro I can answer it with factual usage experience. Starting with USB-C and the so called dongle nightmare, I have 2 dongles. 2. One is barely 2 inches long and provides 2 standard USB ports, a USB-C port, SD-Card reader, microSD card reader. I also have a USB-C to Ethernet Port. OMG it’s not the end of the freaking world.
Over time, this computer will become the norm. It’s the most future forward laptop on the market.
This machine is fast. It finishes my scripts for big server log analysis as much as 23% more quickly than my previous top of the line MacBook Pro, largely due to the I/O of the USB-C drives.
The screen is incredible. This is coming from someone accustomed to staring at an iPad Pro Retina display as well as an iMac 5K Retina display all day. It’s extremely bright and the colors just pop at you.
The sound quality is good enough for music listening without headphones.
The Keyboard? I’m a fast touch typist and its great. I have no problems with it whatsoever. As far as the trackpad is concerned, the palm rejection is excellent. I never experience a cursor hopping to the wrong place.
Not only is it fast and capable, it’s extremely thin, light, and damn good looking.
There is an understated classic beauty about it.
I find the new “polished black mirror” Apple logo to be a quiet and distinguished improvement. In fact, if I had to describe my overall impression of the new MacBook Pro in one sentence, it would be, “A study in refinement.” It’s just that cool. It’s black suit, white shirt, black tie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, kind of cool. It’s black coffee minimalism.
While ostensibly targeted at the power hungry creative and video market, the new MacBook Pro with its sophisticated gravitas seems equally targeted at the executive suite on the top floor of a Dubai skyscraper. This style will serve Apple for many iterations to come.
The MacBook Pro squeezes the power of a PRO laptop into an ultrabook slim case. In comparison, many of the PC laptops it competes with are much larger and more clumsy. Not to mention uglier.
There are numerous things to complain to Apple about, but this laptop really isn’t one of them.
We all went nuts over not having 32GB of RAM, and I still want that, but it should be in no way a deal breaker if you need a new laptop. Everyone who matters out there has stated repeatedly that KabbyLake is no significant improvement over the Skylake processor in the MacBook Pro.
I agree totally. It’s hard to put into words what they have distilled into this object. It truly does seem like a solid piece of creative potential. Not an assembly of parts.
Way to go. Great response.
The jokers at laptop complain it doesn’t have a touchscreen. They want every port in the world.
And act like windows and mac operating systems are equal. Yeah right. They say, “the Asus is a better value.” at the bottom end. Sure, if you only look as deep as price.
The repeated BS about 32 is that with 16 and the speed of the new SSD, swaps memory so fast you don’t have to have 32.
Great to hear. The review mainly sounded sour on dongles. Oh well.
Thelonious – You have the voice of real life wisdom which comes from experience, not oposing or trolling other’s opinions. Nice to read as always. Thnx.
The glowing white Apple logo on previous MacBooks made them easy to spot when they appeared in movies and TV programs. It was (and is) some of the best advertising for Apple laptops. And it was free. The good guys usually had MacBooks, the bad guys had Dells (or similar crap). The silver logo on the new MacBooks is barely visible in comparable settings.
thelonious – how much battery life have you gotten out of the macbook pro?
Thanks
If I have annoyed you Melvin, you have made my day…
again.
The “ribbon” is a gimmick.
PS… when you start to experience the convenience of plugging this beauty into something like the LG38UC99 21:9 Curved Monitor or a 5k monitor and watching all the extra cables on your desk disappear due to USB-C, you’ll see. Apple knows what they are doing here.
I also have a gaming laptop. A Razer Blade Pro. Cost about the same as the MacBook Pro. It’s an equally powerful laptop, the big difference being it supports gaming targeted GPUs.
Yet it is also shunned by a lot of the PC press, primarily due to costs. I think price is the big issues with many of these people. They want the high end toys, but want to pay low end prices. All of this technology is never going to be squeezed into something that cost as little as a ChromeBook.
Not low end prices – but people are being priced out of Mac.
I returned my new MacBook Pro. Sticking with my iPad Pro and iMac, at least for now. For the first time since 1984 I am considering a non Mac for my next purchase. The Mac is dead, long live The Mac!
Same here. User since the Classic II.
Seriously thinking about building a hackintosh.
https://www.tonymacx86.com
I returned mine too. The MacBook pros are ridiculously overpriced piece of crap with horrible battery life Apple should be ashamed of themselves. That company has some serious issues to contend with and needs to start thinking about what it’s doing rather than worrying about that damn spaceship bull crap they got going on.
But they were really really pretty. And thin.
The “ribbon” is probably the future.
It is difficult to imagine Apple retreating from the ribbon feature, regardless of the widespread dissatisfaction with it.
I had a hardware issue with my previous 13″ screen MBP (2 years old), so my company got a new one for me. I like the fact that it is smaller and lighter than the old one. When working with my photos, the screen seems a bit better as well (had no complaints about the old one.) Keyboard and trackpad seem good, and performance is fine for my needs.
As far as negatives are concerned, I miss the ability to charge my iPhone, download photos from a SD card, transfer files to a flash drive, and connect to a HDMI projector or screen without needing a dongle. I got a HyperDrive, and it works well, but I wish I didn’t need it. I also really miss having the ability to use my 2010 27″ iMac as a secondary screen. The Genius at my local Apple store confirmed that the new machines lack that ability, even though I did invest in the Thunderbolt adapter dongle that enables me to connect. It turns out that the necessary MiniDisplayPort functionality is not included in the USB-C ports. Battery life is also no better than it was on the old machine, under similar conditions.
I would be very interested in a MBP with at least the ports and functionality that the old models had, even if it ended up being a tad larger and heavier than the equivalent machine with only 2 USB-C ports.
Is Cook actually aware of all the hits, does he refuse to believe their validity or is he just whistling in the wind practicing his next conference speech which as we all know shouldn’t take long due to its repetitive nature.
“We have great products in the pipeline….” (end of speech)
-Tim Cook
remember that time when Jobs put a a gun scope sight over Mike Dell’s face onstage?
boy, those days were fun.
Apple doesn’t care. They are making a ton of money. We are too stupid to not understand where the puck is heading.
I just don’t see how any of this applies. Even the recent article stating JDPowers rates Microsoft tablets higher than the iPad.
When you buy an Apple product, that’s what you buy. It offers certain features and functionality. It has never claimed to be the best or the first or anything other that great or revolutionary, never done before. This tends to hold true when combining feature sets in a single device.
What is it that people are buying that, this article or any article that rags on Apple, makes reading this stuff a valid argument. Does it even represent the kind of customer Apple wants? I don’t think so.
The people who complain the most, don’t really seem to have a need for Apple products. Those who use Apple gear, get their job done, and that’s what counts.
I think people in the IT industry bought Apple products, where they bought PCs before, but now rag on Apple because it’s part of their MO. Blame someone else because they are shitty at their job. Since they convinced procurement to let them buy Apple, and rbru still can’t do their job, it must be because the designer is too old or too slow or some other FUD item.
Notice how the stocks are up, but now the hardware sucks?
Same old same old – BS for clicks.
I think the high end Macbook problem is that the bean counters decided to save costs and produce one (a hybrid) of the Macbook Air and the Macbook Pro.
The current touchbar Macbook is actually a high end or lux Macbook Air, an ‘executive’ laptop instead of a swiss army knife ‘truck’.
they should have also built a heavier 32 GB Macbook Pro with more connectors, the highest end GPU, etc. for the ‘truckers’.
Very sad. And not unexpected. That is even more sad.
A few days ago I read an article on how to predict when an otherwise successful company was going to start the slide downhill. One of the best predictors is a fancy new corporate headquarters. The more expensive and palatial it is the more it correlates with the downhill slide. Need I say more?
Well I will say more. Apple needs to spend less time on its new fancy headquarters building and more time on enhancing the Apple ecosystem and listening to its customers. I don’t care if the Mac Pro will be replaced maybe in 2018. I need a new Airport Router now! I don’t care if you think I should be using an iPad Pro instead of my MacBook Air!!!! It’s my money and I will spend it as I want, not how you think I should spend it. WAKE UP APPLE! WAKE UP!
People trapped in their own little world with others who think just like them, can get it wrong.
The new headquarters had to be a priority. It was Steve’s project.