News - OS X update breaks certain MacBooks

[shiato storm]

someone bad-mouthing apple? how dare they!!

actually couldn't give a toss. i use them because they work well for what I need. if a pc had done the same I'm sure i'd be using one of those now...its what works for you, why do people get so worked up over it all??

[WoLFe]

someone bad-mouthing apple? how dare they!!

actually couldn't give a toss. i use them because they work well for what I need. if a pc had done the same I'm sure i'd be using one of those now...its what works for you, why do people get so worked up over it all??

Quite.

[this_is_gav]

why do people get so worked up over it all??

Well, you felt compelled to reply... soooo.

You could ask a similar question of most things technology related in the past 24 months.

[TheAnimus]

"Cheap Software" - great! It means I pay far less for every OS X upgrade than the hundreds Bill G wants for Windows.

Yes, but it does mean every upgrade....

MS generally seam to have this habbit of giving away service packs for free. OS X seams to call them new OS's.

When you actually look at the cost of the OS ms really are so much cheaper, espesually for buisnesses.

What is really shocking here is mac have so few types of hardware configuration. MS spend billions on their testing teams, trying to test pratically every type of hardware past n present, so many very different chipsets, cpus, graphics cards, sound cards etc.

They do drop the ball of course, and with the staggering number of different combinations of hardware its not hard to see how or why.

Apple just dont care, their computers arm isn't really making money. Its all about the cheaper consumer electronics for them, so the computers arm seams to be suffering from an underinvestment.

[Gordy]

Apple just dont care, their computers arm isn't really making money. Its all about the cheaper consumer electronics for them, so the computers arm seams to be suffering from an underinvestment.

I haven't heard such crap spoken in some time.

Here is apple's latest figures http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/10/21results.html

"Apple shipped 2,611,000 Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing 21 percent unit growth and 17 percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter."

Yes they sell a lot of iPod's/iPhones, but they are much lower value than the computer side. To say they are losing money on the computer side is wrong from the financials they released they are making more than ever. And those figures were before the new macbooks/pros were released.

In regards to the testing though you are bang on, MS have a far harder time than apple and apple shouldn't be making mistakes like this.

[TheAnimus]

I haven't heard such crap spoken in some time.

.....

To say they are losing money on the computer side is utter wrong they are making more than ever.

Indeed, to say that is wrong, and utter crap.

But, its also VERY wrong to overlook the fact that the ipod makes them more dollar, per dollar.

A simple investor in any company looks at the PE ratio.

It is the job of a company like apple as such to make sure its the dollar now, that is returned, whilst still having diversification etc for future development growth with the market.

So, despite selling millions of laptops, they can turn a faster buck on the iPods.

This is bizzare but you can often see this effect in Sony. I love them as an example of this because they bought some record labels to ensure that audio CD wouldn't go the way of betamax. Then all of a sudden the labels started to make more money than the electronics company that had bought them, a lot, lot more. All of a sudden the bulk of their investment money goes into the other side. Its a delicate balance to run, and sony often look to me like they got it wrong in many places loosing their dominant posistion, ie walkman.

So you get what i mean, iPods etc are a more profitable concern as apple have demonstrated. As such demands to cut corners on their other products will get more intense, and, this is my point, the chance of a easily avoiable, completely un-acceptable company failing will increase, because the costs where been to heavily slashed on that arm.

[Gordy]

Without knowing the profit margins for the iPod and the mac's there is simply no way of telling which is more profitable per dollar. I would imagine that the ipods are a lower margin item simply because of apple's ability to easily drop prices on their computers for students etc (16% is more margin than acer or asus get for their products, and I don't see apple selling to students for a loss?)

I'd imagine that the r&d costs for computers/ipods is pretty similiar, but the support costs for computers will be higher by some margin.

[Zadock]

Rather than arguing over what is making money and what isn't, the point here is that Apple simply hasn't tested the update with different firmware versions and when you look at it from the point of view that the animus gives us here that is really very poor its not as if they had to test the update with lots of different pieces of hardware with lots of different versions of firmware on them in dozens of different combinations. For a technology company in the 21st century its really quite grossly negligent... I hope they will apologise to their customers and promptly rectify the siutation.

[aidanjt]

And it's not as if Apple has a gazillion different computers to test their OS upgrades with. They have what?.. About 6 different computer models per generation, new generation every 18 months, give or take. Not exactly a huge testing metric.