As somebody who's interested in the products, not the financials, and actually owns an old Mac Pro, I'm still allowed to want an up to date Mac Pro, right? Or should I just shut up about it, because I should care more about Apple's profitability?
I'm going to say what Daniel won't (because he has to retain future credibility...)
Let's look at the full picture here. - Are Macs PROFITABLE? Yes. Certainly as a class, probably even just in the Mac Pro category.
- Are Mac STRATEGIC? Yes. Where else are developers (inside and outside Apple) going to write apps? Sure, in THEORY, they could do this on Linux or using Dev Studio, but get serious. Apple's whole philosophy is based on owning everything, from the CPUs to the dev tools to the UI. Giving up control of dev tools makes ZERO sense.
- Are Macs POPULAR? Sure they are. I expect every Apple technical employee and most of the non-tech employees owns a Mac. They are white goods (meaning that you update them when they die, after seven to ten years, not every two years) but that's not the same thing as being unloved.
OK, this means Apple has serious reasons to keep Macs going. So why does it seem otherwise? To me the answer is obvious: Apple is working on their NEXT "large screen+keyboard" platform and all the serious resources are going into that. Today's Mac is in a holding pattern, receiving the bare minimum of attention and no more.
On the hardware side, Apple has basically reached the point where they no longer need Intel. If they're willing to give their existing cores an Intel power budget, they can exceed Intel performance. And Intel has been a LOUSY partner over the past few years, constantly limiting Apple's freedom of action. Instead of a competent deep security model they gave something so complicated that no-one understands it and most security experts don't trust it --- and of course with the usual "it's in some chips but not others". Their in-built GPU performance has constantly lagged, and thwarted Apple's attempts at a big-bang introducing 4K h.265 content across the entire product line. Intel took way too long to roll out USB3 support in its chips (and then subsequent USB updates), and Intel's attitude to Thunderbolt makes no sense --- they claim to love it but seem to do everything they can to prevent it taking off in a big way. So Apple would be far better off ditching Intel for its own hardware control. We're getting close to the point where that's possible. The core's are ready and (my guess) the entire chip (ie not just the cores, but multiple cores [3 or 4] on a chip, multi-processing links to glue multiple chips together, more aggressive GPUs, on-board TB and USB, etc etc, probably already exist in various prototype forms and are being tested, both in Apple labs and perhaps even as part of Apple data centers.
On the software side, likewise, MacOS has its strengths but, of course, is also showing its age. It's riddled with concepts at the OS level that made sense when it was introduced almost 20 years ago, but make rather less sense given the way we do things today. Obviously some iOS ideas have been retrofitted, but even iOS is ten years old, and iOS is solving a different problem. There are a variety of good ideas for how to design future OSs given the current priorities of mobility (between devices), many cores, and low power, and it would make sense to create a new OS built on these ideas. (For example the Barrelfish research OS starts with the idea of having many cores available connected by not necessarily coherent links, and builds a performant OS on these foundations using a shared-nothing model. This gives you much better scaling, more easily translates to a world of heterogeneous processors --- big and LITTLE cores and GPUs --- AND [most interesting] generalizes better to a personal compute cluster where you want your Macs, your iPhone, your iPad, your Watch, your Airpods etc all communicating reliably and rapidly with each other.)
So the way I see it, Mac looks like its dead because, in a sense, it is. 90% of the "Mac" team, hardware and software, are working on Project Hexagon (or some other cool code name) creating the whole range of new Mac laptops, desktops, Pros, even (at least for Apple internal consumption) serious servers, together with a new OS that not only does what we want our Macs to do (ie fixes all the damn bugs we've been complaining about for the past three years) but also lays the foundations for the next twenty years of computing. There's only a skeleton team working on the Mac today making minimal HW changes and the minimal OS changes necessary to track the new features in WatchOS and iOS.
Use common sense people. Apple, you think???, know they have more money than IBM, Intel, MS, VMWare, etc. They also know, more than the rest of us, how MacOS has been pushed to its limits, and how the future of computing includes many more wearables and other such devices, includes lotsa AI, new sensors, new UI modalities, includes lotsa cloud computing. They also know that there's lotsa money in enterprise, along with lots of pain. And that Mac, in its current form (and for that matter iPhone soon) have pretty much reached maximum penetration. Finally Apple has always been willing to throw out the past and "think different". Mac 1.0 Newton. OSX, iOS, Swift, each time Apple didn't just do continue to patch the old way of doing things the way MS and say, the Unix community, do things --- they rethought everything and threw out most of the past. Why wouldn't Apple put this all together to come up with a new compute paradigm --- new hardware (Apple designed from the ground up) running a new OS and using new frameworks? Of course there'll be backward compatibility, just like there was with the PPC transition, the MacOS->OSX transition, the Intel transition. That's so obvious it's not worth talking about. Likewise the supposed "oh it's essential to be able to run Windows apps" argument strikes me as absurd. You can buy PCs on a stick today --- plug one of those into your USB3.1 connector, run a virtualization app (that feeds the PC-on-a-stick virtual keyboard, pointing device and display) and voila, you have your PC solution.
So that's my answer. Sometime in the near future (before 2020) Apple introduces the future of desktop/laptop computing...
Good points... But are sure that future won't simply be an IPad with a keyboard? ... Oh wait... Never mind.
Have you ever been to a large coding shop? Or a serious design studio? Screen space is massively important for a lot of professional work, whether you're doing 3D Art, web design, programming, serious spreadsheet work, or tracking lots of trading data. It's absurd to imagine that Apple and its power users are going to comfortably switch from using 3 simultaneous 30" screens to using a single 12" screen.
There is a bizarre pathology of the mind that insists on the ONE WAY of doing things. This fantasy takes many forms. In the future we'll all wear ONE type of clothing ala every lousy 60s SF movie. Or we'll use ONE social network. Or we'll eat ONE type of food. Or, relevant to this article, we'll use ONE computer. This fantasy has already crippled MS (their ONE OS was supposed to work everywhere, but that's a fantasy that makes no sense. Pursuing it meant they have nothing at the low end --- no MS Watch --- and at the high end the server folks want nothing to do with Win 10 and what it seems to imply for them.) It's crippled Intel --- their insistence on one ISA (x86 of course) meant they lost mobile, are losing IoT, and are working hard to lose server level dense compute to dedicated GPU and AI chips. And in the world of Apple commenters, this fantasy takes the form of imagining that it makes SENSE to give up large screens and a powerful keyboard for an iPad...
WHY? WHY WHY WHY??? Computers are cheap and getting cheaper. You can buy an ENTIRE damn Apple suite, Airpods, Watch, Phone, Tablet, Laptop, and iMac for less than it used to cost to buy a single Mac thirty years ago. Why would you NOT buy the entire suite and get value from all the components? The thinking here is as crazy as thinking that we'll all start wearing the same clothes. Why? What problem is it solving to all wear the same clothes? Who is pushing that we all wear the same clothes? This ONE WAY thinking never makes sense when you look at the big picture, but there's a certain type of (broken) mind that seems to insist that is the way we can and should do things, just because.
As somebody who's interested in the products, not the financials, and actually owns an old Mac Pro, I'm still allowed to want an up to date Mac Pro, right? Or should I just shut up about it, because I should care more about Apple's profitability?
I'm going to say what Daniel won't (because he has to retain future credibility...)
Let's look at the full picture here. - Are Macs PROFITABLE? Yes. Certainly as a class, probably even just in the Mac Pro category.
- Are Mac STRATEGIC? Yes. Where else are developers (inside and outside Apple) going to write apps? Sure, in THEORY, they could do this on Linux or using Dev Studio, but get serious. Apple's whole philosophy is based on owning everything, from the CPUs to the dev tools to the UI. Giving up control of dev tools makes ZERO sense.
- Are Macs POPULAR? Sure they are. I expect every Apple technical employee and most of the non-tech employees owns a Mac. They are white goods (meaning that you update them when they die, after seven to ten years, not every two years) but that's not the same thing as being unloved.
OK, this means Apple has serious reasons to keep Macs going. So why does it seem otherwise? To me the answer is obvious: Apple is working on their NEXT "large screen+keyboard" platform and all the serious resources are going into that. Today's Mac is in a holding pattern, receiving the bare minimum of attention and no more.
On the hardware side, Apple has basically reached the point where they no longer need Intel. If they're willing to give their existing cores an Intel power budget, they can exceed Intel performance. And Intel has been a LOUSY partner over the past few years, constantly limiting Apple's freedom of action. Instead of a competent deep security model they gave something so complicated that no-one understands it and most security experts don't trust it --- and of course with the usual "it's in some chips but not others". Their in-built GPU performance has constantly lagged, and thwarted Apple's attempts at a big-bang introducing 4K h.265 content across the entire product line. Intel took way too long to roll out USB3 support in its chips (and then subsequent USB updates), and Intel's attitude to Thunderbolt makes no sense --- they claim to love it but seem to do everything they can to prevent it taking off in a big way. So Apple would be far better off ditching Intel for its own hardware control. We're getting close to the point where that's possible. The core's are ready and (my guess) the entire chip (ie not just the cores, but multiple cores [3 or 4] on a chip, multi-processing links to glue multiple chips together, more aggressive GPUs, on-board TB and USB, etc etc, probably already exist in various prototype forms and are being tested, both in Apple labs and perhaps even as part of Apple data centers.
On the software side, likewise, MacOS has its strengths but, of course, is also showing its age. It's riddled with concepts at the OS level that made sense when it was introduced almost 20 years ago, but make rather less sense given the way we do things today. Obviously some iOS ideas have been retrofitted, but even iOS is ten years old, and iOS is solving a different problem. There are a variety of good ideas for how to design future OSs given the current priorities of mobility (between devices), many cores, and low power, and it would make sense to create a new OS built on these ideas. (For example the Barrelfish research OS starts with the idea of having many cores available connected by not necessarily coherent links, and builds a performant OS on these foundations using a shared-nothing model. This gives you much better scaling, more easily translates to a world of heterogeneous processors --- big and LITTLE cores and GPUs --- AND [most interesting] generalizes better to a personal compute cluster where you want your Macs, your iPhone, your iPad, your Watch, your Airpods etc all communicating reliably and rapidly with each other.)
So the way I see it, Mac looks like its dead because, in a sense, it is. 90% of the "Mac" team, hardware and software, are working on Project Hexagon (or some other cool code name) creating the whole range of new Mac laptops, desktops, Pros, even (at least for Apple internal consumption) serious servers, together with a new OS that not only does what we want our Macs to do (ie fixes all the damn bugs we've been complaining about for the past three years) but also lays the foundations for the next twenty years of computing. There's only a skeleton team working on the Mac today making minimal HW changes and the minimal OS changes necessary to track the new features in WatchOS and iOS.
Use common sense people. Apple, you think???, know they have more money than IBM, Intel, MS, VMWare, etc. They also know, more than the rest of us, how MacOS has been pushed to its limits, and how the future of computing includes many more wearables and other such devices, includes lotsa AI, new sensors, new UI modalities, includes lotsa cloud computing. They also know that there's lotsa money in enterprise, along with lots of pain. And that Mac, in its current form (and for that matter iPhone soon) have pretty much reached maximum penetration. Finally Apple has always been willing to throw out the past and "think different". Mac 1.0 Newton. OSX, iOS, Swift, each time Apple didn't just do continue to patch the old way of doing things the way MS and say, the Unix community, do things --- they rethought everything and threw out most of the past. Why wouldn't Apple put this all together to come up with a new compute paradigm --- new hardware (Apple designed from the ground up) running a new OS and using new frameworks? Of course there'll be backward compatibility, just like there was with the PPC transition, the MacOS->OSX transition, the Intel transition. That's so obvious it's not worth talking about. Likewise the supposed "oh it's essential to be able to run Windows apps" argument strikes me as absurd. You can buy PCs on a stick today --- plug one of those into your USB3.1 connector, run a virtualization app (that feeds the PC-on-a-stick virtual keyboard, pointing device and display) and voila, you have your PC solution.
So that's my answer. Sometime in the near future (before 2020) Apple introduces the future of desktop/laptop computing...
Good points... But are sure that future won't simply be an IPad with a keyboard? ... Oh wait... Never mind.
Have you ever been to a large coding shop? Or a serious design studio? Screen space is massively important for a lot of professional work, whether you're doing 3D Art, web design, programming, serious spreadsheet work, or tracking lots of trading data. It's absurd to imagine that Apple and its power users are going to comfortably switch from using 3 simultaneous 30" screens to using a single 12" screen.
There is a bizarre pathology of the mind that insists on the ONE WAY of doing things. This fantasy takes many forms. In the future we'll all wear ONE type of clothing ala every lousy 60s SF movie. Or we'll use ONE social network. Or we'll eat ONE type of food. Or, relevant to this article, we'll use ONE computer. This fantasy has already crippled MS (their ONE OS was supposed to work everywhere, but that's a fantasy that makes no sense. Pursuing it meant they have nothing at the low end --- no MS Watch --- and at the high end the server folks want nothing to do with Win 10 and what it seems to imply for them.) It's crippled Intel --- their insistence on one ISA (x86 of course) meant they lost mobile, are losing IoT, and are working hard to lose server level dense compute to dedicated GPU and AI chips. And in the world of Apple commenters, this fantasy takes the form of imagining that it makes SENSE to give up large screens and a powerful keyboard for an iPad...
WHY? WHY WHY WHY??? Computers are cheap and getting cheaper. You can buy an ENTIRE damn Apple suite, Airpods, Watch, Phone, Tablet, Laptop, and iMac for less than it used to cost to buy a single Mac thirty years ago. Why would you NOT buy the entire suite and get value from all the components? The thinking here is as crazy as thinking that we'll all start wearing the same clothes. Why? What problem is it solving to all wear the same clothes? Who is pushing that we all wear the same clothes? This ONE WAY thinking never makes sense when you look at the big picture, but there's a certain type of (broken) mind that seems to insist that is the way we can and should do things, just because.
I agree with you on the fantasy of seeing only one-way to do things... ... Like assuming that an IPad can have only a single lightening connector, an on-screen keyboard, a 10" screen and nothing else...
Yes, there will be a select, but ever shrinking, few (like those you site) who demand more than the IPad of the future will EVER be able to deliver. But, Apple exists for the other 99%....
BTW, I think it is inevitable that Apple will concede that maintaining separate OS's for each hardware platform is both overly expensive and limiting as the functionality of those hardware platforms begin to converge -- such as when the Apple Watch begins to take on the same functionality as the IPhone. Or, the IPhone or IPad begins to have the same power as an MBP... At that point, keeping separate OS's for IPads and MBP's will make as much sense as maintaining separate OS's for MBPs and IMacs: an expensive but overly limiting convention like function keys.
For years, business people have brought their laptops back to the office, dropped them into their dock, and used large screens to update their spreadsheets or review the day's latest trading data. Particularly as data & programs move back off of an embedded hard drive, GPU's move out of the mobile platform, and processors become more powerful, that MBP could become a whole lot smaller and lighter... Currently, the distinguishing characteristic off the MBP from an IPad is the TouchPad. A touch pad is just a different input device. There is no more reason to think that an IPad could not accept input from a touchpad (or mouse) than it could from a separate keyboard -- which it already does.
Steve jobs took LSD and derived from that experience the apple experience of today. His creative nature was more powerful than any profit motive and profit is important. Albert Einstein once said imagination is more important than knowledge.
As somebody who's interested in the products, not the financials, and actually owns an old Mac Pro, I'm still allowed to want an up to date Mac Pro, right? Or should I just shut up about it, because I should care more about Apple's profitability?
I'm going to say what Daniel won't (because he has to retain future credibility...)
Let's look at the full picture here. - Are Macs PROFITABLE? Yes. Certainly as a class, probably even just in the Mac Pro category.
- Are Mac STRATEGIC? Yes. Where else are developers (inside and outside Apple) going to write apps? Sure, in THEORY, they could do this on Linux or using Dev Studio, but get serious. Apple's whole philosophy is based on owning everything, from the CPUs to the dev tools to the UI. Giving up control of dev tools makes ZERO sense.
- Are Macs POPULAR? Sure they are. I expect every Apple technical employee and most of the non-tech employees owns a Mac. They are white goods (meaning that you update them when they die, after seven to ten years, not every two years) but that's not the same thing as being unloved.
OK, this means Apple has serious reasons to keep Macs going. So why does it seem otherwise? To me the answer is obvious: Apple is working on their NEXT "large screen+keyboard" platform and all the serious resources are going into that. Today's Mac is in a holding pattern, receiving the bare minimum of attention and no more.
On the hardware side, Apple has basically reached the point where they no longer need Intel. If they're willing to give their existing cores an Intel power budget, they can exceed Intel performance. And Intel has been a LOUSY partner over the past few years, constantly limiting Apple's freedom of action. Instead of a competent deep security model they gave something so complicated that no-one understands it and most security experts don't trust it --- and of course with the usual "it's in some chips but not others". Their in-built GPU performance has constantly lagged, and thwarted Apple's attempts at a big-bang introducing 4K h.265 content across the entire product line. Intel took way too long to roll out USB3 support in its chips (and then subsequent USB updates), and Intel's attitude to Thunderbolt makes no sense --- they claim to love it but seem to do everything they can to prevent it taking off in a big way. So Apple would be far better off ditching Intel for its own hardware control. We're getting close to the point where that's possible. The core's are ready and (my guess) the entire chip (ie not just the cores, but multiple cores [3 or 4] on a chip, multi-processing links to glue multiple chips together, more aggressive GPUs, on-board TB and USB, etc etc, probably already exist in various prototype forms and are being tested, both in Apple labs and perhaps even as part of Apple data centers.
On the software side, likewise, MacOS has its strengths but, of course, is also showing its age. It's riddled with concepts at the OS level that made sense when it was introduced almost 20 years ago, but make rather less sense given the way we do things today. Obviously some iOS ideas have been retrofitted, but even iOS is ten years old, and iOS is solving a different problem. There are a variety of good ideas for how to design future OSs given the current priorities of mobility (between devices), many cores, and low power, and it would make sense to create a new OS built on these ideas. (For example the Barrelfish research OS starts with the idea of having many cores available connected by not necessarily coherent links, and builds a performant OS on these foundations using a shared-nothing model. This gives you much better scaling, more easily translates to a world of heterogeneous processors --- big and LITTLE cores and GPUs --- AND [most interesting] generalizes better to a personal compute cluster where you want your Macs, your iPhone, your iPad, your Watch, your Airpods etc all communicating reliably and rapidly with each other.)
So the way I see it, Mac looks like its dead because, in a sense, it is. 90% of the "Mac" team, hardware and software, are working on Project Hexagon (or some other cool code name) creating the whole range of new Mac laptops, desktops, Pros, even (at least for Apple internal consumption) serious servers, together with a new OS that not only does what we want our Macs to do (ie fixes all the damn bugs we've been complaining about for the past three years) but also lays the foundations for the next twenty years of computing. There's only a skeleton team working on the Mac today making minimal HW changes and the minimal OS changes necessary to track the new features in WatchOS and iOS.
Use common sense people. Apple, you think???, know they have more money than IBM, Intel, MS, VMWare, etc. They also know, more than the rest of us, how MacOS has been pushed to its limits, and how the future of computing includes many more wearables and other such devices, includes lotsa AI, new sensors, new UI modalities, includes lotsa cloud computing. They also know that there's lotsa money in enterprise, along with lots of pain. And that Mac, in its current form (and for that matter iPhone soon) have pretty much reached maximum penetration. Finally Apple has always been willing to throw out the past and "think different". Mac 1.0 Newton. OSX, iOS, Swift, each time Apple didn't just do continue to patch the old way of doing things the way MS and say, the Unix community, do things --- they rethought everything and threw out most of the past. Why wouldn't Apple put this all together to come up with a new compute paradigm --- new hardware (Apple designed from the ground up) running a new OS and using new frameworks? Of course there'll be backward compatibility, just like there was with the PPC transition, the MacOS->OSX transition, the Intel transition. That's so obvious it's not worth talking about. Likewise the supposed "oh it's essential to be able to run Windows apps" argument strikes me as absurd. You can buy PCs on a stick today --- plug one of those into your USB3.1 connector, run a virtualization app (that feeds the PC-on-a-stick virtual keyboard, pointing device and display) and voila, you have your PC solution.
So that's my answer. Sometime in the near future (before 2020) Apple introduces the future of desktop/laptop computing...
Good points... But are sure that future won't simply be an IPad with a keyboard? ... Oh wait... Never mind.
Have you ever been to a large coding shop? Or a serious design studio? Screen space is massively important for a lot of professional work, whether you're doing 3D Art, web design, programming, serious spreadsheet work, or tracking lots of trading data. It's absurd to imagine that Apple and its power users are going to comfortably switch from using 3 simultaneous 30" screens to using a single 12" screen.
There is a bizarre pathology of the mind that insists on the ONE WAY of doing things. This fantasy takes many forms. In the future we'll all wear ONE type of clothing ala every lousy 60s SF movie. Or we'll use ONE social network. Or we'll eat ONE type of food. Or, relevant to this article, we'll use ONE computer. This fantasy has already crippled MS (their ONE OS was supposed to work everywhere, but that's a fantasy that makes no sense. Pursuing it meant they have nothing at the low end --- no MS Watch --- and at the high end the server folks want nothing to do with Win 10 and what it seems to imply for them.) It's crippled Intel --- their insistence on one ISA (x86 of course) meant they lost mobile, are losing IoT, and are working hard to lose server level dense compute to dedicated GPU and AI chips. And in the world of Apple commenters, this fantasy takes the form of imagining that it makes SENSE to give up large screens and a powerful keyboard for an iPad...
WHY? WHY WHY WHY??? Computers are cheap and getting cheaper. You can buy an ENTIRE damn Apple suite, Airpods, Watch, Phone, Tablet, Laptop, and iMac for less than it used to cost to buy a single Mac thirty years ago. Why would you NOT buy the entire suite and get value from all the components? The thinking here is as crazy as thinking that we'll all start wearing the same clothes. Why? What problem is it solving to all wear the same clothes? Who is pushing that we all wear the same clothes? This ONE WAY thinking never makes sense when you look at the big picture, but there's a certain type of (broken) mind that seems to insist that is the way we can and should do things, just because.
I agree with you on the fantasy of seeing only one-way to do things... ... Like assuming that an IPad can have only a single lightening connector, an on-screen keyboard, a 10" screen and nothing else...
Yes, there will be a select, but ever shrinking, few (like those you site) who demand more than the IPad of the future will EVER be able to deliver. But, Apple exists for the other 99%....
BTW, I think it is inevitable that Apple will concede that maintaining separate OS's for each hardware platform is both overly expensive and limiting as the functionality of those hardware platforms begin to converge -- such as when the Apple Watch begins to take on the same functionality as the IPhone. Or, the IPhone or IPad begins to have the same power as an MBP... At that point, keeping separate OS's for IPads and MBP's will make as much sense as maintaining separate OS's for MBPs and IMacs: an expensive but overly limiting convention like function keys.
For years, business people have brought their laptops back to the office, dropped them into their dock, and used large screens to update their spreadsheets or review the day's latest trading data. Particularly as data & programs move back off of an embedded hard drive, GPU's move out of the mobile platform, and processors become more powerful, that MBP could become a whole lot smaller and lighter... Currently, the distinguishing characteristic off the MBP from an IPad is the TouchPad. A touch pad is just a different input device. There is no more reason to think that an IPad could not accept input from a touchpad (or mouse) than it could from a separate keyboard -- which it already does.
An iPad that can connect to three screens is not interesting. Or, more precisely, talking about it so vaguely is not dealing with the essential question. The issue is not hardware, hardware is easy. The issue is software. The difference that MATTERS between MacOS and iOS is that one is a set of APIs and UI targeting multiple screens, windows, and a keyboard; and the other is a set of APIs and UI targeting a single screen, no windows, and touch.
The future of the Mac is a discussion about what happens to that UI paradigm. No-one's interested in the trivial question of whether iOS hardware will get "good enough" to support a desktop in future; what matters is the UI, API, and SPI that comes with that "desktop" support. Continuum is not interesting technology, in the way Continuity is interesting; Continuum is trivial technology. Apple could easily copy it, but I don't see Apple going down that route because Apple's in the business of providing multiple tools that all work well, not a single tool that does everything badly.
Fine, Got it, I don't disagree much with what you say. It's a rehash of what's been said before. Unfortunately it's quite naval gazing as it's very tech crowd mud slinging focused.
I get that laptops are much more popular than desktops today, but I fail to see the leadership part from Apple. By focusing on the laptops they reinforce the past choices of consumers, makes sense. However that can become a trap as it will build a gulley from which you don't get out. If the laptop is the only computer that you need, what is the role of the iPad. If however you keep strengthening the laptop product and the desktop, you can credibly pitch the idea of the iPad carried everywhere plus the desktop where you work as another setup. I can imagine other solutions to the need for heavy duty compute power, but I don't see them being ready for sale in the next couple of years.
If Apple only supports one set of computing devices for the ideal Apple customer I think they make a grave mistake. I don't know that they are aiming to do this, but I think that the update rate of their PC line has in recent years has moved in that direction.
Fine, Got it, I don't disagree much with what you say. It's a rehash of what's been said before. Unfortunately it's quite naval gazing as it's very tech crowd mud slinging focused.
I get that laptops are much more popular than desktops today, but I fail to see the leadership part from Apple. By focusing on the laptops they reinforce the past choices of consumers, makes sense. However that can become a trap as it will build a gulley from which you don't get out. If the laptop is the only computer that you need, what is the role of the iPad. If however you keep strengthening the laptop product and the desktop, you can credibly pitch the idea of the iPad carried everywhere plus the desktop where you work as another setup. I can imagine other solutions to the need for heavy duty compute power, but I don't see them being ready for sale in the next couple of years.
If Apple only supports one set of computing devices for the ideal Apple customer I think they make a grave mistake. I don't know that they are aiming to do this, but I think that the update rate of their PC line has in recent years has moved in that direction.
Personally, I don't see one product line winning out and eliminating the other product line. Rather, I see technology enabling the merger of those product lines into essentially one -- where the major difference is in form factor rather than hardware or software.
For instance: comparing the Apple Watch to the IPhone to the IPad. They are each very different form factors with their own, unique advantages and disadvantages -- but all are based on the same underlying hardware and software.
Fine, Got it, I don't disagree much with what you say. It's a rehash of what's been said before. Unfortunately it's quite naval gazing as it's very tech crowd mud slinging focused.
I get that laptops are much more popular than desktops today, but I fail to see the leadership part from Apple. By focusing on the laptops they reinforce the past choices of consumers, makes sense. However that can become a trap as it will build a gulley from which you don't get out. If the laptop is the only computer that you need, what is the role of the iPad. If however you keep strengthening the laptop product and the desktop, you can credibly pitch the idea of the iPad carried everywhere plus the desktop where you work as another setup. I can imagine other solutions to the need for heavy duty compute power, but I don't see them being ready for sale in the next couple of years.
If Apple only supports one set of computing devices for the ideal Apple customer I think they make a grave mistake. I don't know that they are aiming to do this, but I think that the update rate of their PC line has in recent years has moved in that direction.
Personally, I don't see one product line winning out and eliminating the other product line. Rather, I see technology enabling the merger of those product lines into essentially one -- where the major difference is in form factor rather than hardware or software.
For instance: comparing the Apple Watch to the IPhone to the IPad. They are each very different form factors with their own, unique advantages and disadvantages -- but all are based on the same underlying hardware and software.
But they aren't ONE product line, nor is there any avenue where there is a 4" to 13" iPhone or 4" to 13" iPad, much less any such merger of macOS and iOS-based devices into a single product-line. That presumption of merging into a single iBlob goes against everything Apple has done with HW and SW. Think of it like Darwin's theory of Natural Selection—it all came from a unifying origin but it's diverged from a common ancestral consumer electronics or software-base.
With their massive war chest, there is no way that Apple could fall down. I'm just thinking that Apple could invest in behemoth project like spearheading the hyperloop transportation all over the continental United States.The cost could be huge but it could be done in phases and in the long run,it could provide Apple with a recurring revenue stream.
Comments
Screen space is massively important for a lot of professional work, whether you're doing 3D Art, web design, programming, serious spreadsheet work, or tracking lots of trading data.
It's absurd to imagine that Apple and its power users are going to comfortably switch from using 3 simultaneous 30" screens to using a single 12" screen.
There is a bizarre pathology of the mind that insists on the ONE WAY of doing things. This fantasy takes many forms. In the future we'll all wear ONE type of clothing ala every lousy 60s SF movie. Or we'll use ONE social network. Or we'll eat ONE type of food. Or, relevant to this article, we'll use ONE computer.
This fantasy has already crippled MS (their ONE OS was supposed to work everywhere, but that's a fantasy that makes no sense. Pursuing it meant they have nothing at the low end --- no MS Watch --- and at the high end the server folks want nothing to do with Win 10 and what it seems to imply for them.)
It's crippled Intel --- their insistence on one ISA (x86 of course) meant they lost mobile, are losing IoT, and are working hard to lose server level dense compute to dedicated GPU and AI chips.
And in the world of Apple commenters, this fantasy takes the form of imagining that it makes SENSE to give up large screens and a powerful keyboard for an iPad...
WHY? WHY WHY WHY???
Computers are cheap and getting cheaper. You can buy an ENTIRE damn Apple suite, Airpods, Watch, Phone, Tablet, Laptop, and iMac for less than it used to cost to buy a single Mac thirty years ago. Why would you NOT buy the entire suite and get value from all the components? The thinking here is as crazy as thinking that we'll all start wearing the same clothes. Why? What problem is it solving to all wear the same clothes? Who is pushing that we all wear the same clothes? This ONE WAY thinking never makes sense when you look at the big picture, but there's a certain type of (broken) mind that seems to insist that is the way we can and should do things, just because.
... Like assuming that an IPad can have only a single lightening connector, an on-screen keyboard, a 10" screen and nothing else...
Yes, there will be a select, but ever shrinking, few (like those you site) who demand more than the IPad of the future will EVER be able to deliver. But, Apple exists for the other 99%....
BTW, I think it is inevitable that Apple will concede that maintaining separate OS's for each hardware platform is both overly expensive and limiting as the functionality of those hardware platforms begin to converge -- such as when the Apple Watch begins to take on the same functionality as the IPhone. Or, the IPhone or IPad begins to have the same power as an MBP... At that point, keeping separate OS's for IPads and MBP's will make as much sense as maintaining separate OS's for MBPs and IMacs: an expensive but overly limiting convention like function keys.
For years, business people have brought their laptops back to the office, dropped them into their dock, and used large screens to update their spreadsheets or review the day's latest trading data. Particularly as data & programs move back off of an embedded hard drive, GPU's move out of the mobile platform, and processors become more powerful, that MBP could become a whole lot smaller and lighter... Currently, the distinguishing characteristic off the MBP from an IPad is the TouchPad. A touch pad is just a different input device. There is no more reason to think that an IPad could not accept input from a touchpad (or mouse) than it could from a separate keyboard -- which it already does.
The issue is not hardware, hardware is easy. The issue is software. The difference that MATTERS between MacOS and iOS is that one is a set of APIs and UI targeting multiple screens, windows, and a keyboard; and the other is a set of APIs and UI targeting a single screen, no windows, and touch.
The future of the Mac is a discussion about what happens to that UI paradigm. No-one's interested in the trivial question of whether iOS hardware will get "good enough" to support a desktop in future; what matters is the UI, API, and SPI that comes with that "desktop" support. Continuum is not interesting technology, in the way Continuity is interesting; Continuum is trivial technology. Apple could easily copy it, but I don't see Apple going down that route because Apple's in the business of providing multiple tools that all work well, not a single tool that does everything badly.
I get that laptops are much more popular than desktops today, but I fail to see the leadership part from Apple. By focusing on the laptops they reinforce the past choices of consumers, makes sense. However that can become a trap as it will build a gulley from which you don't get out. If the laptop is the only computer that you need, what is the role of the iPad. If however you keep strengthening the laptop product and the desktop, you can credibly pitch the idea of the iPad carried everywhere plus the desktop where you work as another setup. I can imagine other solutions to the need for heavy duty compute power, but I don't see them being ready for sale in the next couple of years.
If Apple only supports one set of computing devices for the ideal Apple customer I think they make a grave mistake. I don't know that they are aiming to do this, but I think that the update rate of their PC line has in recent years has moved in that direction.
For instance: comparing the Apple Watch to the IPhone to the IPad. They are each very different form factors with their own, unique advantages and disadvantages -- but all are based on the same underlying hardware and software.