Apple held it’s last major product announcement before the holiday buying season, and as usual, the stock went up leading up to the sale, and dropped when Apple announced their updated lineup. Some day people will realize that Apple’s stock is manipulated by the people who take advantage of the ramp up to announcement and the rumors to encourage the stock higher, and then if you look behind the numbers, there’s a fair amount of betting on the drop and short selling as the analysts then grump about the results and encourage the stock to drop. and this is all, I guess, legal and fair. Which is why you should (a) never invest in apple around launch times, and (b) certainly should never use stock movement as a justification for how well or how poorly Apple did with their launch and product updates — because the track record the last ten years is the people griping about it are invariably wrong, but folks still listen (for some reason).
If you’ve been around since my days when I worked for Mama Fruit, you may remember that I typically argued that buying on a Keynote was a poor decision, because you were maximizing the margin on the products. With very few exceptions, I typically bought a generation back, and refurb when I could get it, as the best value for hardware. When I did buy into the current product line, it was usually into the middle or lower end where the margins weren’t as juicy; the two exceptions I can think of were the Macintosh II I bought when I joined, and whatever the first generation was that switched from ADB to USB, where the generational shift in capability made a lot of sense.
That’s why, immediately after this keynote, I bought a MacBook Pro. 15″, one step down from top end, because that’s the one I could get the 512G SSD built in without going to a custom build and have it shipped next day. Why? my old machine (3.5 year old 2010 13″ MBP) tries its damndest, but just doesn’t have the horsepower to do heavy lifting with Lightroom and Photoshop. Geekbench indicates the overall performance of the new unit is a bit more than 5 times the old one: 2100ish to just under 11,000. It seems to be a tiny bit faster….
Plus, I see the ability to start migrating to USB3, which will let me start retiring all of my firewire drives over time, to be a really good thing. Thunderbolt2 is nice, but I’m looking more towards moving the heavy storage to NAS over the next year for both data and backups, and that makes the upgrade of wifi to 802.11AC even more useful to me (but the addition of the Thunderbolt interface lets me buy a hub that I can plug all my stuff into, making hooking up or carrying away the laptop a two cable operation, if you count the power cord….). And the battery life, and bigger retina screen…
So after years of making Apple’s marketing happen but not actually following it, I’m buying on the keynote, and I think it’s a good, powerful and cost effective unit. I really like the 13″ form factor, but the performance difference between it and the 15″ is just too great (I’d only get 3 time the boost — 2100 to about 6000 on the geekbench scales).
And then there’s Mavericks. While I won’t upgrade at work until my project ships, I dropped it on the home machine right away. I found it one of the most painless OS upgrades ever, so well-done to the team; this keeps getting more automatic every release (then again, I learned long ago not to geek out under the hood of the OS, so I don’t do things to the system I’ll regret later in the first place…).
There’s definite pain in iWork land, but I don’t use it a lot so that’s pain others are taking — the loss of Applescript is sad, but honestly, I probably would have predicted something like that if I actually thought about Applescript ahead of time. When was the last time Apple did any noticeable improvement to it? The group of users of Applescript is beyond niche. I wonder when it’ll be retired off the OS completely (I admit to never really being an Applescripter or a user of Automator)
But overall, Mavericks seems really nice, really stable, and it’s made a nice improvement to the performance of my old laptop; the new memory management is doing wonders, even when I do something stupid, like tell Lightroom to build a 300 image slideshow on the fly. On the cats, that was asking for a disaster, on Mavericks, it actually could, and it took a memory attack that hefty to force Mavericks into swapping, and the swap file went to a massive 8 megabytes or so… That Apple could build an upgraded memory system that even wrestle’s Adobe’s memory management to a truce? Impressive…
I’m really looking forward to seeing that it’ll do on today’s hardware, which will arrive in about 12 hours…