So Schiller is basically saying Apple made a mistake without using that word. I'm a little surprised it took them this long but saying you screwed up is not easy.
Yeah, I can't remember you saying it either after all the years posting off-base conspiracy theories about Apple trying to screw you with malicious intent. I guess it is hard to say.
I'm not sure what this announcement has to do with me.
Nothing. I'm referring to the act of admitting when you're wrong, which you criticized in my quote. And I'm pointing out that yes, it must be hard because we never hear you say it after your cases of being wrong, either.
No, they never suggested any such thing. It is an about-face for the tech media that drew its own (wrong) conclusions, as usual.
But they allowed the notion they were out of the display business to linger on. I think had the LG display been better received Apple wouldn't be taking about new displays.
So even tho wrong, you think you would have been right. Got it...Convenient world view.
Huh? I really do believe if the LG display had been better received Apple might have thought twice about reviving their own display business. A lot of people besides me thought they were out of the display business for good. What's convenient is people whose opinions are Apple can never do wrong because then no matter what Apple does they're always right.
Don't adjust your TV set. Apple refuses do something as simple as watch LinusTechTips on Youtube, among many others like Snazzy Labs, to see that 15-year-old boys and girls can build or modify Mac Pro's 3 times faster at 30% of the price. It's true.
The company doesn't even support the Kaby Lake CPU — what's that, 9 months beyond its Aug 2016 release? But tech journalists are so enamored with Apple's integration they can't take their eyes off the shiny objects & accessories to see that it is not - even with this announcement - a priority. Anytime it humbles itself to the Apple community, loyal users swoon. Just remember, it's a tool, it's a device. What are your needs? I like my MacBook Pro for traveling, teaching. But it is NOT a 4-wheel drive in the matters of 3D rendering and Video Editing. Games. Adobe apps, it all has an economy of scale.
Look for yourself. You can still have a Mac and not have to be bound to Johnny Ive's Wheelchair With Touchbar.
If you built a base machine today, using a Ryzen 1800 by AMD with 8 cores, 64gb of 3200 RAM, an M2 (mini ssd that delivers sequential Read/Write speeds up to 3,200 MB/s) to hold the OS and a GTX 1070 -- at $1350, you will score almost 20,000 on the Geekbench logs. (Compare to Apple's $8,000 8-core MacPro at a score of 24,000) It is not a Mac and does not have to be. It's an example of where technology is and where Apple's commitment is not. The Youtube videos are proof you can make wicked fast Macs -- and they are stable.
What Apple has done with this patronizing announcement is make a campaign promise years late. Reason? Hi-end users are not a big part of its revenue. Don't buy into lip service like Rural America did last fall. Question the Answer. I'm sure even I am only scratching the surface.
Nice conspiracy theory dude. But the reality: MPs are only a single-digit of Apple's Mac sales. Lowered priority. Plus add in the Intel problems.
Two things to applaud. Communication and admitting they got the design wrong.
Read it again. They bet on parallel processing in the GPUs, but the industry didn't move there. It's not so much as the "design" being wrong, as it the prediction of industry computing trends.
Exactly. Industrial designers at Apple don't make a decision like this. Jony Ive didn't wake up one day and decide the Mac Pro needed to look like a trash can.
You wouldn't have to admit you were wrong, if you listened to what your customers wanted in the first place.
Easy to snipe from the sidelines. But remember: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse."
Apple bet on parallel GPU processing. Didn't happen. Apple didn't get to be the greatest public corp in history by doing consumer surveys. They make big, bold bets. Many times they pay off. Here they didn't. Not that big of a deal since sales represent a single-digit of all Macs sold. And I doubt you even have one, despite the bitching.
Let me tell you what this shows me. Apple has completely forgotten about the iMac, Mac Mini and Mac Pro lines for years. When I read that something like this will not be ready until next year what else can one think? We may get a new iMac in the Fall to Winter of this year. Seeing is believing. And announcements like this that are given just to try to hold the market. But that has been it. What has Apple been doing for the last 3 now 4 years? It certainly hasn't been doing desktop computers. Tim? what have you been doing? All we've heard from you is words when it comes to desktop computing. You don't "love" the Mac. The only reason you've started to do something now is because of competitive pressure and product linkage. You've never really cared about the Mac users. You're great at opening markets and distributor pipelines but you've failed miserable when it comes to computers. The iPhone and things that hook to the iPhone are the only places I've seen an innovation in for years. But who cares, I'm only one voice. The only reason many of us are still here is the operating system. With all the billions and billions in the bank and you can't find any money for engineers and product people to really push the Mac to where it should be is a crying shame.
The Mac is a DYING and SHRINKING platform. PERIOD.
There is no way you can deny it.
Has Cook let the Mac line rot? Yes. And he had a good reason. Because the Mac is not the future. iPad/iPhone/Wearables are the future. So don't expect Apple to put large resources into the Mac. It just isn't worth it.
Its like investing big money into a cruise ship that is sinking. Facts are facts. Less and less people are using PC's everyday. 10 years from now PC use will be about half of what it was at peak PC.
Yes, Apple is updating some Macs the next 2 years. But the only reason they are doing that is to ease the transition from Mac to iOS. In 10 years its pretty much undisputable that the Mac will be just like the iPod today.
Wrong. Mac sales grew in 2016 and have been growing in general. From the people in the room (DF):
"My takeaway is that the Mac’s future is bright. Mac sales were up in 2016, once again outpacing the PC industry as a whole, and the new MacBook Pros are a hit, with sales up “about 20 percent” year over year. The Mac is a $25 billion business for Apple annually, and according to the company there are 100 million people in the active Mac user base worldwide.
Yes, those numbers are all peanuts compared to the iPhone, but everything is peanuts compared to the iPhone.
Ternus put it plainly: “Some of our most talented folks are working on [the Mac]. I mean, quite frankly, a lot of this company, if not most of this company, runs on Macs. This is a company full of pro Mac users.”"
Does not change the fact that Mac/PC is DYING and DECLINING.
Dec2016 quarter they sold 5.7 million Macs. Dec2017 quarter they sold 5.4 million Macs. Unit sales are DECLINING.
My whole point is Apple will be investing more money and time in iPhone/iPad/Wearables than Mac going forward. I'm not saying they will totally abandon the Mac. But don't expect it to get priority over iOS products.
I'm not arguing what their future priorities may be. But your claim on Mac sales is false, you've cherry picked that YoY quarter, despite the overall trend being upward:
...so because sales are trending upward, it is not yet fair to say they are "shrinking and dying" as you have. I could cherry pick on of the iPad declining quarters too, but that doesn't mean it's dying either.
What is interesting is the last several spikes & dips in the two product lines seem to correlate.
No, they never suggested any such thing. It is an about-face for the tech media that drew its own (wrong) conclusions, as usual.
But they allowed the notion they were out of the display business to linger on. I think had the LG display been better received Apple wouldn't be taking about new displays.
So even tho wrong, you think you would have been right. Got it...Convenient world view.
Huh? I really do believe if the LG display had been better received Apple might have thought twice about reviving their own display business. A lot of people besides me thought they were out of the display business for good. What's convenient is people whose opinions are Apple can never do wrong because then no matter what Apple does they're always right.
I don't know any people with that position -- you're projecting a straw man onto me.
It doesn't matter how many people thought what you thought -- Apple never said they were out of the display business, and it doesn't matter what you think may have happened in an alternate timeline. We live in this one. You were wrong. Not a big deal, but still a fact.
Two things to applaud. Communication and admitting they got the design wrong.
Read it again. They bet on parallel processing in the GPUs, but the industry didn't move there. It's not so much as the "design" being wrong, as it the prediction of industry computing trends.
I found the frankness of them admitting that they backed themselves into a thermal corner quite enlightening - that kind of transparency was quite refreshing. I wonder how Apple's implementation of parallel GPU's differs from SLI with nVidia cards or CrossFire in AMD cards. Conceptually may be quite similar but the devil is in the details...
John Gruber who was in the room has a great piece on this. In it he reveals MP customers are a single-digit of total mac sales. He believes closer to the 1% than 9:
Finally, someone who's actually read an account from someone who was actually there.
To begin with, folk seem to be carrying on as though Apple have never admitted they made a mistake before. May I remind the senile around here about Maps.
From reading Daring Fireball, it appears that the mistake was in where they thought the market was going. They thought that external GPUs hooked in through Thunderbolt were going to be the way forward; sadly, they got that wrong. I'm not really sure how you back yourself into a thermal corner though. Did they think that anyone apart from them was working to make components run more efficiently and put out less heat?
So 30% of Apple sales go to professionals, who are served by the iMac; of the that 30%, between 1 and 9% (and I think 3% is optimistic) is made up of Mac Pro users.
Judging by these figures, I'd say that the whining will continue next year when these machines are released because they will be hellishly expensive.
I said before that a new Mac Pro was on the way, I also said that when it arrives, people here wouldn't like it. That's not really a clever prediction though; folk like to complain, that's all there is to it.
Still, the new monitor is a surprise. I did not see that coming, and I think if LG hadn't drop the ball from such a ridiculous height then Apple may have been happy to let them carry on. Unfortunately, LG have made such a poor job of this that I think it's best that Apple take it back from them. I imagine LG will still be making the panels though.
Why have they announced it now? To shut people up. The noise was in danger of distracting their marketing efforts for the iPads and the future iMacs. Now that they've cleared the air then it's one less distraction. The only thing they have to worry about it is the inevitable teeth-gnashing when the new Mac Pro is eventually released, but one problem at a time.
Here's the thing: when this super-expandable Mac Pro is released, about 0.5% of the so-called 'professionals' here will buy it, and about half that number will ever open the case. Half of that number will actually expand it.
So Apple is incapable of walking and chewing gun at the same time? How long does it take to design a tower that serves the market- we do not give a crap about styling. Take the Pre-Trashcan form factor and update it for the current market- that should take a small team little time.
A company as big and well heeled as Apple should be able to serve a select small market and waste gobs of money on crap like Animated Balloons on Text Messages and Facebook integration. Serving specialty markets is common in business all the time- you do not have to make a killing on every product line. The line should have been kept up to date all along and the Black Trashcan was a tragic mistake.
In Medicine, Hospitals and Clinics commonly offer necessary services that are break even at best because it is in the best interest of the customers. Mammography is a prime example- unless you do huge volume you will never make a dime providing the service, but it is done anyhow. Apple makes truckloads on iPhones and should be able to subsidize the high end pro market.
Comparing Apple to a Hospital....................LOLOLOOLLOLOLOLOOLOLOLOLOLOOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!
I am comparing businesses. And BTW, one of the markets Apple abandoned was high end Radiology Workstations so you could have your Trashcan and Facebook integration. Pro Computers do more than edit video, compose complex music, or maintain large databases.
Apple is a business, a Hospital is a business, an Airline is a business, a Car Company is a business. Now you might want to fix your keyboard because it is either sticking on L, O and ! or you might want to grow up.
Again comparing Apple to a Hospital.......................LOLOLOLOOLOLOOOLOLOOOLOLLOLOLOOOLLLOOL!!!!
I'm sorry but you have no idea what you are talking about if you think the business Apple runs is even comparable to a hospital.
But Apple, IBM, etc. sell Macs and iDevices to hospitals, airlines... And apparently some Mac Pros and lots of maxed-out iMacs to IT in those businesses... if only for code development.
That wasn't the point. DavidAlGreogory's point is that Apple should run there BUSINESS like a hospital. Which is totally and utterly ridiculous and ignorant.
He said Hospitals run machinery that loses them money to serve a niche customer group and he expects Apple to do the same. He expects Apple to run its business like St Mary's Hospital. Ridiculous.
No, his point is that Apple is a business -- not the same business as a hospital -- but a business, nonetheless!
Apple realizes that there is great potential to sell Macs and iDevices to businesses (including hospitals) -- hence Apple's partnerships with IBM, Cisco, SAP...
Because it doesn't jibe with your one-size-fits-all vision of the future doesn't make it untrue.
No that was not his point. Did you even read his original comment that I LOL over? Well here it is:
"In Medicine, Hospitals and Clinics commonly offer necessary services that are break even at best because it is in the best interest of the customers. Mammography is a prime example- unless you do huge volume you will never make a dime providing the service, but it is done anyhow. Apple makes truckloads on iPhones and should be able to subsidize the high end pro market."
So he's saying that since hospitals are willing to lose money on niche customers so should Apple. That is RIDICULOUS. Apple is NOT a hospital. Hospitals key core values is suppose to save lives. Apple is not in that business.
So saying Apple should run their Business like the Mayo Clinic is BEYOND IDIOTIC.
Yes, I'm afraid you're right.
Apple doesn't use the money from one division to subsidise another. That is a poor way to run a tech business, ask Microsoft. They used Office to prop up the rest of the company for years; the result was that the rest of the company became fat, lazy and chaotic.
Every Apple division has to support itself (though I imagine they all pay some tithe for the development of new products and services). Apple doesn't focus on the iPhone; it just looks that way because the mobile division has more money than everyone else … which they earned.
If the company decides to start using the mobile profits to prop up other parts of the company rather than cutting those parts out, then you really should sell your shares.
Apple has lost thousands of customers over the last 6-7 years to Windows. The cheese graters got too old and the trash can was inadequate for many so they started looking at Windows machines and they liked what they saw (sort of). The new Final Cut added to the exodus and really pissed off a lot of long time Mac users. They moved over to Premiere or Avid, first on Macs and then later on Windows machines. After Effects users did the same thing. The end result is a ton of people who now won't even consider Apple hardware or software for editing or effects work for video post. The serious 3D people left a long time ago because of the hardware limitations.
While I applaud the Apple announcement today, I will have to wait and see what they bring to market. They talked about one big heavy duty GPU - okay that's fine, but they should consider adding the ability to support a card cage filled with GPUs and maybe CPUs. People in video and film have software that can use (even require) that sort of power. DaVinci Resolve is one such system. Connect a AppleCage via USB C and fill it with GPUs or whatever - easy and peasy. The long lost power users also liked the abiity to put four drives inside the old cheese graters. It was often used as temporary storage for processing or loading etc. Primary storage was usually a high speed RAID. I know that sort of feature makes for a physically large computer, but these people don't care they want features that add versatility. The old cheese graters had that in spades. Need Fiber Channel, we got a card for that. Need some new form of SCSI, got a card. Need more GPU power, slap in a card. Need some extra terabytes for a big job, slam in some drives. This isn't hard to understand and doing it won't hurt the Apple brand. It could help the brand if old users were to come home because this new comuter is insanely great. We will see.
So Apple is incapable of walking and chewing gun at the same time? How long does it take to design a tower that serves the market- we do not give a crap about styling. Take the Pre-Trashcan form factor and update it for the current market- that should take a small team little time.
A company as big and well heeled as Apple should be able to serve a select small market and waste gobs of money on crap like Animated Balloons on Text Messages and Facebook integration. Serving specialty markets is common in business all the time- you do not have to make a killing on every product line. The line should have been kept up to date all along and the Black Trashcan was a tragic mistake.
In Medicine, Hospitals and Clinics commonly offer necessary services that are break even at best because it is in the best interest of the customers. Mammography is a prime example- unless you do huge volume you will never make a dime providing the service, but it is done anyhow. Apple makes truckloads on iPhones and should be able to subsidize the high end pro market.
They have a pro machine that is already packed with power. There was very little "urgency" for a new pro machine other than consumers that don't like the idea of paying full price for a 3-year old machine.
The fact that they announced so far ahead probably reflects the fact that Mac Pro sales are so bad that they want to assure Pro users that they know there's a problem and they are working on it. They're trying to head off losing those users to Windows PC's. I wish they would breathe some life back into the mini while they're at it.
Elvis has left the Building in Video. The tragic combination of iMovie Pro X ( d.b.a. FCPX) and the trashcan sent the editing world away from Apple and rightly so. Apple, with the attention span of a housefly, abandoned Aperture and those customers. They also ruined Logic Pro in a similar manner.
As someone with a real Mac Pro Tower, who bought and used Final Cut Pro, Aperture and Logic I was and am not amused. It did not have to be this way.
Apple has more money than any other company on the earth and huge human resources to devote to multiple product lines simultaneously as it is not the starving company of 1997 trying to remain afloat. They should be able to keep the Mac current while wasting money and people on crap like Beats. And , if it comes down to Planet of the Apps or a new Mac Pro, tell Eddie Cue to have a nice day and find a new job.
Your shitty troll posts are so shitty. FCPX is a vastly improved version of final cut, if you actually ask the pros who fucking use it, and it has MORE features than the older one, while being more intuitive to use. Same with Logic Pro. But hey, I guess that's a trendy meme to say. Or, maybe you're the one with the attention of a house fly, since you were not willing to invest the small amount of time required to adapt to a better system?
"They should be able to keep the Mac current while wasting money and people on crap like Beats. "
Beats is EXTREMELY profitable, and because of that acquisition Apple now essentially owns the majority of the high end headphone market, while being to integrate its own technologies (W1) into these products to make them work even better with Apple's stuff, and vice versa, creating multiple incentives for consumers. Your insinuation that Beats is somehow losing Apple money is a flat out lie, or a falsity based on your grotesque ignorance.
I hope it's not back to the cheese-grater size again. That was a hefty machine that really didn't offer much upgradability for its size. The transition from that design to the compact cylindrical Mac Pro made sense as it was only a small reduction in upgradability.
Really, I have a Mac Pro that runs USB 3, has room for massive internal storage without a spaghetti bowl of cables, can be CPU upgraded in minutes, takes standard memory and can run rings around the Trashcan. The Mac Workstation design was a great job of HW engineering.
USB 3 is old, "massive internal storage" means obsolete 3.5" spinning disks on a SATA II bus, lol, the newer Mac Pro also takes additional memory, and lol again. It was a decent bit of engineering in 2006, basically a retool of the G5 chassis.
Your a fool my ancient Mac Pro 5,1 is loaded with SSD's and spinning large raid drive, USB 3.1 and a GTX1080 not upgradable? You obviously don't know how to work on a computer do you?
As for an Apple-branded pro display, that announcement would appear to be an about-face for the company, after it suggested last year that it was permanently exiting the standalone monitor business. It instead partnered with LG Display for a pair of new ultra-high-resolution displays that connect over USB-C and Thunderbolt 3.
Actually no, AI -- Apple never said they were leaving the monitor business. That was a "rumor", put forth by Verge's Nilay Patel, a prime anti-apple troll. No release, no announcement.
Just like how they have not said theyre leaving the wifi business, despite the rumors and your own articles and supposed sources.
AI didn't say Apple said it was leaving the monitor business. They said "it was suggested" (passive verb, an AI favorite to obfuscate the subject of that sentence) that Apple was leaving exiting the standalone monitor business. So it seems they are agreeing with you.
I left them late last year (after 30 years) and can't see going back. Switching to Windows was SO much easier than I imagined it would be.
Notice that there is NO promise to be more forthcoming with those of us who have to purchase equipment and NO promise that Apple won't go under their cone of silence again for another 4 years after they release something to replace their current old-timey Mac Pros.
If this refresh/update comes out in 2018, then it's what, only three years late?
Never good enough for some people. How miserable.
It was released on December 19, 2013. The next update of ANY kind was April 4, 2017. In the computer world, that's a long time. Waiting until *maybe* 2018 or later for a significant upgrade to what is supposed to be the professional workstation model with huge amounts of processing power is simply asking for some dissatisfied customers.
I'm sorry but there's simply nothing that Apple could do that would have sirisfied some of the people who post on the blogs and rumor sites. Nothing. Also, the fact that Apple didn't just drop the Mac Pro when they said in the DF piece that it accounts for a single digit percentage of PRO users, (not overall users, not Mac users, but people who use a pro level app daily or at least once a week) is a very very good sign that all the whining about the doom of Apple and Tim Cook, yadda yadda, was a lot of wasted breath, typing, and energy.
No, the MP is single-digit of ALL mac buyers:
"Apple declined to describe the Mac Pro’s share of all Mac sales any more specifically than “a single-digit percent”, but my gut feeling is that the single digit is a lot closer to 1 than it is to 9."
True. I misread that. Mea Culpa. However, as Sog pointed out. 500,000 mac Pros is a product worth dropping when you're a company who sells millions of other Macs and ios devices, so my point is the same.
Comments
Nice conspiracy theory dude. But the reality: MPs are only a single-digit of Apple's Mac sales. Lowered priority. Plus add in the Intel problems.
Easy to snipe from the sidelines. But remember: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse."
Apple bet on parallel GPU processing. Didn't happen. Apple didn't get to be the greatest public corp in history by doing consumer surveys. They make big, bold bets. Many times they pay off. Here they didn't. Not that big of a deal since sales represent a single-digit of all Macs sold. And I doubt you even have one, despite the bitching.
...so because sales are trending upward, it is not yet fair to say they are "shrinking and dying" as you have. I could cherry pick on of the iPad declining quarters too, but that doesn't mean it's dying either.
What is interesting is the last several spikes & dips in the two product lines seem to correlate.
I don't know any people with that position -- you're projecting a straw man onto me.
It doesn't matter how many people thought what you thought -- Apple never said they were out of the display business, and it doesn't matter what you think may have happened in an alternate timeline. We live in this one. You were wrong. Not a big deal, but still a fact.
To begin with, folk seem to be carrying on as though Apple have never admitted they made a mistake before. May I remind the senile around here about Maps.
From reading Daring Fireball, it appears that the mistake was in where they thought the market was going. They thought that external GPUs hooked in through Thunderbolt were going to be the way forward; sadly, they got that wrong. I'm not really sure how you back yourself into a thermal corner though. Did they think that anyone apart from them was working to make components run more efficiently and put out less heat?
So 30% of Apple sales go to professionals, who are served by the iMac; of the that 30%, between 1 and 9% (and I think 3% is optimistic) is made up of Mac Pro users.
Judging by these figures, I'd say that the whining will continue next year when these machines are released because they will be hellishly expensive.
I said before that a new Mac Pro was on the way, I also said that when it arrives, people here wouldn't like it. That's not really a clever prediction though; folk like to complain, that's all there is to it.
Still, the new monitor is a surprise. I did not see that coming, and I think if LG hadn't drop the ball from such a ridiculous height then Apple may have been happy to let them carry on. Unfortunately, LG have made such a poor job of this that I think it's best that Apple take it back from them. I imagine LG will still be making the panels though.
Why have they announced it now? To shut people up. The noise was in danger of distracting their marketing efforts for the iPads and the future iMacs. Now that they've cleared the air then it's one less distraction. The only thing they have to worry about it is the inevitable teeth-gnashing when the new Mac Pro is eventually released, but one problem at a time.
Here's the thing: when this super-expandable Mac Pro is released, about 0.5% of the so-called 'professionals' here will buy it, and about half that number will ever open the case. Half of that number will actually expand it.
Yes, I'm afraid you're right.
Apple doesn't use the money from one division to subsidise another. That is a poor way to run a tech business, ask Microsoft. They used Office to prop up the rest of the company for years; the result was that the rest of the company became fat, lazy and chaotic.
Every Apple division has to support itself (though I imagine they all pay some tithe for the development of new products and services). Apple doesn't focus on the iPhone; it just looks that way because the mobile division has more money than everyone else … which they earned.
If the company decides to start using the mobile profits to prop up other parts of the company rather than cutting those parts out, then you really should sell your shares.
While I applaud the Apple announcement today, I will have to wait and see what they bring to market. They talked about one big heavy duty GPU - okay that's fine, but they should consider adding the ability to support a card cage filled with GPUs and maybe CPUs. People in video and film have software that can use (even require) that sort of power. DaVinci Resolve is one such system. Connect a AppleCage via USB C and fill it with GPUs or whatever - easy and peasy. The long lost power users also liked the abiity to put four drives inside the old cheese graters. It was often used as temporary storage for processing or loading etc. Primary storage was usually a high speed RAID. I know that sort of feature makes for a physically large computer, but these people don't care they want features that add versatility. The old cheese graters had that in spades. Need Fiber Channel, we got a card for that. Need some new form of SCSI, got a card. Need more GPU power, slap in a card. Need some extra terabytes for a big job, slam in some drives. This isn't hard to understand and doing it won't hurt the Apple brand. It could help the brand if old users were to come home because this new comuter is insanely great. We will see.
They have a pro machine that is already packed with power. There was very little "urgency" for a new pro machine other than consumers that don't like the idea of paying full price for a 3-year old machine.
It's not as simple as it may seem.
Your shitty troll posts are so shitty. FCPX is a vastly improved version of final cut, if you actually ask the pros who fucking use it, and it has MORE features than the older one, while being more intuitive to use. Same with Logic Pro. But hey, I guess that's a trendy meme to say. Or, maybe you're the one with the attention of a house fly, since you were not willing to invest the small amount of time required to adapt to a better system?
"They should be able to keep the Mac current while wasting money and people on crap like Beats. "
Beats is EXTREMELY profitable, and because of that acquisition Apple now essentially owns the majority of the high end headphone market, while being to integrate its own technologies (W1) into these products to make them work even better with Apple's stuff, and vice versa, creating multiple incentives for consumers. Your insinuation that Beats is somehow losing Apple money is a flat out lie, or a falsity based on your grotesque ignorance.
I left them late last year (after 30 years) and can't see going back. Switching to Windows was SO much easier than I imagined it would be.
Notice that there is NO promise to be more forthcoming with those of us who have to purchase equipment and NO promise that Apple won't go under their cone of silence again for another 4 years after they release something to replace their current old-timey Mac Pros.
All-new Mac Pro with modular design
Oh, wait...
Microsoft may have Pushed Apple to rethink their Mac Pro that will Debut in 2018 with a New Modular Form Factor
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2017/04/microsoft-may-have-pushed-apple-to-rethink-their-mac-pro-that-will-debut-in-2018-with-a-new-modular-form-factor-1.html