Apple Has Taken Its Customers Hostage
Let me put this out there right now, I used to be a huge fan of Apple. All throughout high school and college I was a tremendous advocate for their products and would only use their technology.
But then, about two years ago, my Apple died on me. It was an old computer so that probably wasn’t overly surprising but I needed to find an alternative fast. That’s when a friend of mine put together a custom HP for me out of old parts and it’s been my main computer ever since.
This week I managed to get my Apple up and running again and came to a few shocking surprises. First, it’s basically an electronic paperweight at this point. It was a 2009 Macbook Pro Core Duo 2 and I was shocked to discover that it was running an i2 CPU and only had 2GB of RAM on it. That model was actually an upgrade from the earlier 1GB models which had been released a few years earlier.
But, it was almost a decade old, different times called for different needs. Maybe customers didn’t require as much RAM or processing speed to do real work.
The problem that I ran into brings us back to the present. With 2GB of RAM there’s no way to upgrade the OS. Mojave isn’t an option but going as far back as Sierra and El Capitan nothing works. In theory I could keep it as is and use it solely as a music player but iTunes is about to be discontinued. So what now?
Apple, whether it knows it or not, has just done serious damage to not only it’s customers and the tech community but the environment as well. If you don’t have the most current Apple product your old one is useless. Since Apple doesn’t trust it’s customers enough to let them play with the insides without bricking the machine itself there’s not a whole lot that can be done. The company has essentially just created millions of pounds of electronic waste, something the world doesn’t need.
Let’s compare that to my current production computer. It’s an HP Elitebook 8560w originally released in 2008, a year before my Apple Core Duo 2. Since it can be repaired by the owner it has been modified with significant RAM (currently 8GB) and an i5 PCU. Sure there’s the i7 and above but the i5, with zero tweaking, can handle whatever is thrown at it on a daily basis.
I actually accidentally shorted out the HP once but, thanks to the ability to work on it myself, was able to fix it. My OS was acting up about six months ago and it wasn’t reading my dual-boot option. When I realized I couldn’t fix the problem rather than throw it away and buy a whole new computer I just did a fresh install of Ubuntu. Problem solved and I can move on with my life.
Apple has essentially taken their customers hostage by sticking to its closed ecosystem mantra. The price tag on their products doesn’t help matters either. The 2019 Mac Pro has a starting price of $5,999. Compare that to the recently released Microsoft Surface Studio 2, a high-end desktop, which only costs $3,500 but comes with 1TB of storage of a 2TB SSD Drive.
The two accomplish almost the same things with a significant price difference. Plus, if something happens to your Surface you can fix it or upgrade it yourself rather than dropping another $6K+ on a new Mac Pro. Chances are that Surface will be in classrooms for years still running like a workhorse while the Mac Pro finds itself obsolete just a few years from now.
The economy isn’t what it once was when Apple came into it’s own. During the Golden Age of the 1990s it was much easier for people to drop a few thousand on a personal computer, itself a luxury back then. As the world comes out of one recession and find itself in another users need to be able to make their equipment last longer and work better.
Don’t get held hostage by Apple and it’s “Think Different” motto. If it wanted you to think different it would encourage customization at an affordable price. Instead the company has made it clear that customers must by play by their rules for their price or go somewhere else. It turns out that’s actually the best option. The grass is greener outside of Apple.
