I think what the article fails to touch on is that people (myself included) used to love upgrading to the new Apple products because of new innovations or upgraded tech. The second-hand market for Apple products shouldn't be looked at as a problem, but rather a new demographic of people entering the ecosystem which might have been out of their price range otherwise.
For me, I was itching for a reason to upgrade from my 2012 rMBP and to be honest, I have no plans to now. I don't want a thinner or lighter laptop, I just want everything to work all at once and some better battery life. The USB-C (and they fact that they didn't even mention it during the terrible keynote) was my biggest drawback, because now I literally have to buy adapters to plug in to my pre-existing adapters for this damn thing to work... Nope.
When Apple got rid of the CD/DVD drive, or FireWire, it wasn't this much of an issue because I could agree that those were things I didn't use (along with the vast majority). But with the headphone jack (on the iPhones only thankfully), and now the SD card reader, USB, HDMI, and Mini-DP... All things I use on an almost daily basis. It sucks that people will have to buy ~ $100 of adapters to get their old functionality back.
Also, if they're really touting this thing as such a professional's device, then their magical touch bar is even more flawed. I plug in external monitors when I use Final Cut Pro, Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. - most of their demos. Looking at a different monitor and then using the touch bar seems like such an awkward gesture.
Wasn't one of the main premises of it that it reduced IT support time? "Only 5% of IBM's Mac employees needed help desk support versus 40% of PC users." In that case, it's even less of a relevant comparison now.
Did anyone else have some pretty terrible results from the speed tester? I was pretty optimistic seeing their sample screenshot - am I missing something? http://i.imgur.com/UwNBGf3.png
Would probably be a BIOS update distributed from the motherboard manufacturer. As the article states, people could just not update,but finding hardware with the older BIOS will be more and more difficult over time.
Might be worthwhile to simulate a slow internet connection speed (either by firewall, or by downloading some third party app) to see what's tolerable to you. At 3Mbps, you're at the peak of 3G speeds basically - may be a good mental comparison.
Might be a random dream, but could you place magnets in the box or bag it's shipped in? As in, here - start the process / rub magnets against it while shipping and then degauss it again once it gets there?
