Has anyone seen that picture above of Steve Jobs near what looks like a prototype iMac? I've never seen such a machine before. Did he actually have that on stage with him??
Yeah, what the heck is that thing? Maybe it's just a monitor for the presentation, with the hardware hidden under the table or offstage.
Like previously mentioned, it's Apple's first LCD display. It had matching plastic for the blue and white G3. When the G4 towers shipped, they changed the plastics to match.
Has anyone seen that picture above of Steve Jobs near what looks like a prototype iMac? I've never seen such a machine before. Did he actually have that on stage with him??
Yeah, what the heck is that thing? Maybe it's just a monitor for the presentation, with the hardware hidden under the table or offstage.
Like previously mentioned, it's Apple's first LCD display. It had matching plastic for the blue and white G3. When the G4 towers shipped, they changed the plastics to match.
I was lucky enough to put mine in for "Tune Up", the program Apple offers for computer under 5 years old. For $276 they will tear it a part and replace anything they think might be going bad or going bad over the next 12 months - all for just st $276.
I got very lucky when I did my tube up (although I'm still pissed at the outcome)...
I sent mine in just because I was 2 months from the 5 year cut of allowed for TUNE UP. I asked them to look at my mouse, it wasn't clicking evenly and not passing the "12 point" click test.
I handed it to them on a Monday. Wednesday morning I got a call "it's ready". That was so fast that I asked "did this go to Texas? I mean that was really fast turnaround!" They said "yes." I hung up and headed over.
I double parked and sent in my friend to get it. He came out and I apologized to him..."I'm so sorry. I forgot to give you my credit card for the $276. What card did you pay with? I'll pay you back"
"No card. They just handed me the computer and I left"
WTF? "You left without payment ng??"
I came back around. A spot opened up so I parked and ran inside. I flagged down the manager Lateesha and explained we left without paying.
"If they didn't ask for money there was no charge"
"That's impossible. It went out on "Tune Up" it's a flat rate $276 and you know it. Charge my card!!"
"Let me print out your invoice." (She looked at it then looked up and said "Ok. First off, I don't want any problems from you Joseph. I know how you can be".
Huh?
"Well they according to this replaced the mouse and the battery because the battery was swelling slightly pushing into the mouse. That's probably the mouse problem you had. They replaced the entire logic board and.."
"Wait. What?? Why'd they do that. It was fine!"
"They replaced your LCD screen and your..."
"Stop! What is going on? I had a mouse problem. That's it!"
"See this is what you do. you get up into my face all the time. LOL (she was laughing). They replaced the 16GB of RAM... here let me do this another way. They replaced everything internal even the screws everything except the outside case ok? Now go home".
"But why. And why the hell aren't you taking my damn card? Take it!!"
"You know as well as I do if a unit goes out for repair and the serial number is in the range of a recall then all replacements are free. You know that so stop hassling me. Go home and TRY to enjoy you 'gift horse' andcdtop kicking it in the mouth!"
"Recall? What damn recall? You're making this up"
"I think it had to do with the graphics card. I don't know. Here that's the recall number go home and look it up"
"But the RAM was brand new?"
"It said the RAM wasn't optimized for this unit so it was replaced. Think of it this way.. now you have a back up. Now go home and leave me alone".
GRRRRRRRR! They do this shit to me all the time!
Basically I got a brand new 17". But I'd still buy a new one especially with all the faster specs and the touch bar. It's probably too much Campo Verde to ask for but it would be no vs. since the story stated they were putting employee hadusbon "Pro". I'm hoping that means double the ram and increased screen size too.
One can only dream.
Presumably there are no 17" Apple laptops because there were a tiny number of people willing to buy and lug them around. They had great screens though.
The sale numbers were the lowest for an Apple notebook, but I bet they'd exceed the Mac Pro in unit sales, probably have less R&D since most of it can be borrowed from the other MBPs, and I think it could come with a similar profit margin and even net profit per unit if they reintroduced the size.
Note that the 17" MBP did have increasing longer delays over the 13" and 15" models, and even included some aesthetics discrepancies compared to their smaller brethren. For instance, the 13" and 15" models were 1" and the 17" model was 1.1", if I recall correctly.
PS: A thank you to @razormaid for editing your post to include paragraphs. Good post but I skipped it pre-edit due to the giant paragraph.
Apple should release new Mac models every year. As previously done and as now does with iOS gadgets. And use standards, including ports and connectors, not using proprietary ones or soldering components like RAM, SSD, GPU and microprocessor. Not charging two to three times for the very same component as compared to resellers like Amazon.
Last but not least, Apple should focus more on headless desktop Macs and displays. All-in-one desktops are a huge waste, since computers may last for seven years, but displays last for more than 20 years.
1. Name a proprietary port or connector on the MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro?
2. More than 20 years ago we were using CRTs. Do you miss those?
The state of the mac went from stale to dusty to long silence to emergency catch-up mode. Ugly.
You got that exactly right. Something stinks at Apple, I'm not sure what it is but frankly the Mac division needs a new manager. Frankly they could hire a stripper form the local strip joint and get more active management of the division. Probably smarter too, as she would likely be able to understand customer needs better and have demonstrated communications skills. All we get from Apple these days, with respect to the Mac is complete BS, no useful information or commenting at all.
All-in-one desktops are a huge waste, since computers may last for seven years, but displays last for more than 20 years.
1) Notebooks, smartphones and tablets are also "all-in-one" devices so why aren't getting on Apple (and every over vendor) to at least sell a new logic board where we can unscrew, pry off and put our old display on it? After all, the iPhone does typically using the same basic, external chassis form for two years. You could even do the same with notebooks since any camera and mics connected to the display housing are just simple plugs that connect via USB internally.
2) It's May 2017, so 20 years ago was 1997. In May of that year Apple introduced the AppleVision 850. For a display that's suppose to last 20 years I've never even heard of that model. It was a CRT that used a DB-15 connector—not to be confused with VGA's DE-15 connector—for video and 2x ADB ports (Apple Desktop Bus) which was a "proprietary bit-serial peripheral bus connecting low-speed devices to computers." These are all now obsolete and have been so for a very, very long time. It also weighed over 67lb/30.5kg, which is amazing by today's standards for a 19" display, but that was the CRT technology. It was a great display utilizing Sony's Trinitron technology. Remember Sony?
"The AppleVision displays were designed as high-end monitors. They shipped with Sony Trinitron tubes for superb quality. In 1997, Apple released 'ColorSync', a powerful color management software. ColorSync enabled the user to match the colors of color documents while capturing, editing, and outputting. Released in May and August 1997, the first ColorSync displays 750 (08/97) and 850 (05/97) were identical to the AppleVision 750 and 850 displays and both series supported ColorSync." — History provided by the Apple Museum
Maybe I'm all alone on this - but I truly resent the soldered down DDRAM in the Macs that are on sale now. The last Mac's I've bought are all 2012 versions, so I can bump the RAM to 16 Gig. Do you know how well the i7 screams with 16 Gig vs 8 Gig? Simply stated, upgrading the DDRAM module from a USED Mac Mini with an i7, throwing in a few SSD's and investing a few hundred dollars in hardware will give you a machine that simply blows away a comparable new Apple product.
Please Apple - don't force me to buy 4+ year old machines, with old graphics processors. Let me buy a new Apple with what I can afford today; with the option to bump the DDRAM and even add a second hard drive (or SSD) later on when I have more money. Otherwise, the Hackentosh is the only viable answer, because buying an overly expensive Mac with hamstrung hardware that has ZERO upgradeability after the sale, simply is not a viable option.
The state of the mac went from stale to dusty to long silence to emergency catch-up mode. Ugly.
And Mac just had their best 2 quarters of all time.............Beautiful
Actually the new laptops had good quarters. The rest of the product line is in the doldrums.
This does however highlight how silly some of the commenting we saw in these forums with respect to new Mac Pros has been. In a nut shell the machines are very forward looking and most of the comments came from people looking to the past.
Now if only Apple would pull head from ass and get a model of the Mac Pro out that is reasonably priced. In the end the Mac Pro is failing simply because the design wasn't priced right for the niche it was capable of filling. lets face it the Mac Pro is't a high end workstation but on the other hand it is a very impressive desktop machine for people looking for a desktop - IF - its a big if - it was priced right to put on desktops. The machine was/is grossly overpriced for the niche it could have filled.
Frankly if Apple could build a machine on the Mac Pros chassis with an AMD Ryzen CPU and a modern GPU and sell it in the price range of $1200-$1500 they would have something many people would be interested in. Right now it is way to costly for most desktops and doesn't have the capabilities people expect out of a high end workstation. It is a bit of a joke really. In the end Apple really doesn't have a proper desktop machine yet, fill that niche and they would be running to find another bank to stash all their money in.
Doesn't Tim say this every quarter about every product?
Yes he does which is reason go be cautious. However the recent tone from Apple seems to indicate that they know hey have screwed up and are trying to address that. The question is what do they think they screwed up. Sadly it might be that they think they screwed by not communicating with the potential market enough. All this talk about all new Mac's could be baloney with nothing but speed bumps in the future.
AppleInsider said: The rumored "server-grade" iMac reportedly sports the Xeon E3-1285 processor, between 16 and 64 gigabytes of ECC RAM, up to 2TB of NVMe SSE storage, and the "latest" discrete GPU.
I don't get the title "server-grade" iMac. I suppose it would work as a server if you only needed one, although it certainly would not be my first choice. An in-office server doesn't have to be that powerful. One of our main servers is running on an Atom processor which is totally fine for the job. That is one of the trends these days - multiple machines with very low power consumption. The other trend is very powerful computers with lots of virtual machines. This iMac does not fall into either of those categories. Servers rarely, if ever, need a screen which is why it seems odd to me that someone would use an iMac as a server.
This iMac sounds more like a powerful graphics workstation to me. Right now I'm using an iMac 5K and love it.
The Medias focus on "Server-grade" is just plain nonsense. For what ever reason they took comments of a pro focused machine as some sort of indication that the machine would be outfitted with Mac Pro hardware. First off nothing was said to indicate that server grade hardware was going into the machine. Second even if an XEON is put in the machine it still isn't a server grade machine. The reality is many XEON's are nothing more than desktop chips with Xeon stamped on them and a few features turned on.
As you note a server can be made out of everything from an ARM based chip to an ATOM all the way up to many core Xeons in multichip configurations. The chip it self doesn't make a platform server grade.
Good. Cause I would gladly ditch my Hackintosh for a real tower Mac. I live on lots of processing cores, multi AMD GPUs and a lot of ram.
And a new 17" MacBook Pro would get me off my 2011 17" pro.
Heres hoping.
In the meantime, its nice to hear Apple is making some noise at least.
I was lucky enough to put mine in for "Tune Up", the program Apple offers for computer under 5 years old. For $276 they will tear it a part and replace anything they think might be going bad or going bad over the next 12 months - all for just st $276.
I got very lucky when I did my tube up (although I'm still pissed at the outcome)...
I sent mine in just because I was 2 months from the 5 year cut of allowed for TUNE UP. I asked them to look at my mouse, it wasn't clicking evenly and not passing the "12 point" click test.
I handed it to them on a Monday. Wednesday morning I got a call "it's ready". That was so fast that I asked "did this go to Texas? I mean that was really fast turnaround!" They said "yes." I hung up and headed over.
I double parked and sent in my friend to get it. He came out and I apologized to him..."I'm so sorry. I forgot to give you my credit card for the $276. What card did you pay with? I'll pay you back"
"No card. They just handed me the computer and I left"
WTF? "You left without payment ng??"
I came back around. A spot opened up so I parked and ran inside. I flagged down the manager Lateesha and explained we left without paying.
"If they didn't ask for money there was no charge"
"That's impossible. It went out on "Tune Up" it's a flat rate $276 and you know it. Charge my card!!"
"Let me print out your invoice." (She looked at it then looked up and said "Ok. First off, I don't want any problems from you Joseph. I know how you can be".
Huh?
"Well they according to this replaced the mouse and the battery because the battery was swelling slightly pushing into the mouse. That's probably the mouse problem you had. They replaced the entire logic board and.."
"Wait. What?? Why'd they do that. It was fine!"
"They replaced your LCD screen and your..."
"Stop! What is going on? I had a mouse problem. That's it!"
"See this is what you do. you get up into my face all the time. LOL (she was laughing). They replaced the 16GB of RAM... here let me do this another way. They replaced everything internal even the screws everything except the outside case ok? Now go home".
"But why. And why the hell aren't you taking my damn card? Take it!!"
"You know as well as I do if a unit goes out for repair and the serial number is in the range of a recall then all replacements are free. You know that so stop hassling me. Go home and TRY to enjoy you 'gift horse' andcdtop kicking it in the mouth!"
"Recall? What damn recall? You're making this up"
"I think it had to do with the graphics card. I don't know. Here that's the recall number go home and look it up"
"But the RAM was brand new?"
"It said the RAM wasn't optimized for this unit so it was replaced. Think of it this way.. now you have a back up. Now go home and leave me alone".
GRRRRRRRR! They do this shit to me all the time!
Basically I got a brand new 17". But I'd still buy a new one especially with all the faster specs and the touch bar. It's probably too much Campo Verde to ask for but it would be no vs. since the story stated they were putting employee hadusbon "Pro". I'm hoping that means double the ram and increased screen size too.
One can only dream.
Presumably there are no 17" Apple laptops because there were a tiny number of people willing to buy and lug them around. They had great screens though.
The sale numbers were the lowest for an Apple notebook, but I bet they'd exceed the Mac Pro in unit sales, probably have less R&D since most of it can be borrowed from the other MBPs, and I think it could come with a similar profit margin and even net profit per unit if they reintroduced the size.
Note that the 17" MBP did have increasing longer delays over the 13" and 15" models, and even included some aesthetics discrepancies compared to their smaller brethren. For instance, the 13" and 15" models were 1" and the 17" model was 1.1", if I recall correctly.
PS: A thank you to @razormaid for editing your post to include paragraphs. Good post but I skipped it pre-edit due to the giant paragraph.
I think Apple has been slow to appreciate the degree to which there is substantively important variation in the needs of current and potential customers that requires substantively important variation in the models that Apple sells.
Windows (and Android, for that matter) have dominant market positions for two reasons:
1. There are a lot of low price products 2. There is a lot of variation in the capabilities of the products, allowing them to meet the needs of more customers
I don't advocate that Apple grow by addressing #1.
There is evidence that Apple is starting to "get it." We don't have a single screen size for iPhones anymore, we now have 3. Same is true of iPads (sort of... the mini seems on life support). Apple now admits they need a more flexible/modular Mac Pro.
So Apple is moving in the right direction... it's just that sometimes there's a step backwards for every 2 steps forward, and sometimes those steps forward are slower coming than the steps backwards. Still, though... after the meeting with Gruber et al, I'm definitely more optimistic.
Yes I apologize for the unedited version of my post. I wrote my post in paragraph form, but this post stripped it out. I didn't know you had to make a space between paragraphs then hit the space bar a few times to create the separation manually. Facebook does the same thing on our Razormaid business site
What I'm worried is I need a new macbook but I don't want to buy one with a ridiculous and doomed to lose support touchbar.
So, you want to give up on TouchID and Apple Pay? Those are bound to touch bar.
He'll probably say that you can have those without the Touch Bar display, but then you'd have to rely on the main display to rely information about Apple Pay, for example, which may be a potential security risk. The T1 chip running a forked version of watchOS. The Touch Bar being an OLED strip certainly has a cost, but it's small display that doesn't have an excessively high pixel density so when compared to the rest of the innovations a thin OLED strip isn't a huge deal.
There's also other costs to update their development tools to support the Touch Bar display, but that's amazing uptake with even Amazon and MS added support nearly right away. This just shows how good planning is important, but creating some APIs and ties for macOS Sierra were probably pretty simple compared to the R&D to design an entirely new SoC running another version of OS X that includes the Secure Element and Secure Enclave for these hugely useful features.
I still can't figure out if the graphic display comes from the T1's GPU and OS or from the main OS and GPU, but either way it's amazing just how instant everything is, which is one of my concerns about doing this in a wireless keyboard. There's increased costs, a larger battery, and probably WiFi-assisted BT.
But let's say @casshern still hates the entire concepts despite its usefulness and even wishes the iPhone had a Blackberry-esque physical keyboard, he could easy just go into System Preferences to change the buttons back to the old standard, not set up Touch ID or Apple Pay, or just not buy one of these great new Macs.
I was lucky enough to put mine in for "Tune Up", the program Apple offers for computer under 5 years old. For $276 they will tear it a part and replace anything they think might be going bad or going bad over the next 12 months - all for just st $276.
I got very lucky when I did my tube up (although I'm still pissed at the outcome)...
I sent mine in just because I was 2 months from the 5 year cut of allowed for TUNE UP. I asked them to look at my mouse, it wasn't clicking evenly and not passing the "12 point" click test.
I handed it to them on a Monday. Wednesday morning I got a call "it's ready". That was so fast that I asked "did this go to Texas? I mean that was really fast turnaround!" They said "yes." I hung up and headed over.
I double parked and sent in my friend to get it. He came out and I apologized to him..."I'm so sorry. I forgot to give you my credit card for the $276. What card did you pay with? I'll pay you back"
"No card. They just handed me the computer and I left"
WTF? "You left without payment ng??"
I came back around. A spot opened up so I parked and ran inside. I flagged down the manager Lateesha and explained we left without paying.
"If they didn't ask for money there was no charge"
"That's impossible. It went out on "Tune Up" it's a flat rate $276 and you know it. Charge my card!!"
"Let me print out your invoice." (She looked at it then looked up and said "Ok. First off, I don't want any problems from you Joseph. I know how you can be".
Huh?
"Well they according to this replaced the mouse and the battery because the battery was swelling slightly pushing into the mouse. That's probably the mouse problem you had. They replaced the entire logic board and.."
"Wait. What?? Why'd they do that. It was fine!"
"They replaced your LCD screen and your..."
"Stop! What is going on? I had a mouse problem. That's it!"
"See this is what you do. you get up into my face all the time. LOL (she was laughing). They replaced the 16GB of RAM... here let me do this another way. They replaced everything internal even the screws everything except the outside case ok? Now go home".
"But why. And why the hell aren't you taking my damn card? Take it!!"
"You know as well as I do if a unit goes out for repair and the serial number is in the range of a recall then all replacements are free. You know that so stop hassling me. Go home and TRY to enjoy you 'gift horse' andcdtop kicking it in the mouth!"
"Recall? What damn recall? You're making this up"
"I think it had to do with the graphics card. I don't know. Here that's the recall number go home and look it up"
"But the RAM was brand new?"
"It said the RAM wasn't optimized for this unit so it was replaced. Think of it this way.. now you have a back up. Now go home and leave me alone".
GRRRRRRRR! They do this shit to me all the time!
Basically I got a brand new 17". But I'd still buy a new one especially with all the faster specs and the touch bar. It's probably too much Campo Verde to ask for but it would be no vs. since the story stated they were putting employee hadusbon "Pro". I'm hoping that means double the ram and increased screen size too.
One can only dream.
Presumably there are no 17" Apple laptops because there were a tiny number of people willing to buy and lug them around. They had great screens though.
The sale numbers were the lowest for an Apple notebook, but I bet they'd exceed the Mac Pro in unit sales, probably have less R&D since most of it can be borrowed from the other MBPs, and I think it could come with a similar profit margin and even net profit per unit if they reintroduced the size.
Note that the 17" MBP did have increasing longer delays over the 13" and 15" models, and even included some aesthetics discrepancies compared to their smaller brethren. For instance, the 13" and 15" models were 1" and the 17" model was 1.1", if I recall correctly.
PS: A thank you to @razormaid for editing your post to include paragraphs. Good post but I skipped it pre-edit due to the giant paragraph.
I think Apple has been slow to appreciate the degree to which there is substantively important variation in the needs of current and potential customers that requires substantively important variation in the models that Apple sells.
Windows (and Android, for that matter) have dominant market positions for two reasons:
1. There are a lot of low price products 2. There is a lot of variation in the capabilities of the products, allowing them to meet the needs of more customers
I don't advocate that Apple grow by addressing #1.
There is evidence that Apple is starting to "get it." We don't have a single screen size for iPhones anymore, we now have 3. Same is true of iPads (sort of... the mini seems on life support). Apple now admits they need a more flexible/modular Mac Pro.
So Apple is moving in the right direction... it's just that sometimes there's a step backwards for every 2 steps forward, and sometimes those steps forward are slower coming than the steps backwards. Still, though... after the meeting with Gruber et al, I'm definitely more optimistic.
One hypothesis on Apple not worrying about the 17" MBP is because they moved to Retina displays which not offer much crisper displays but also allow you to choose from 5(?) scaling options that all look great which means you could get back to the same effective display area as the 17" MBP by adjusting the scaling and having the display a little closer to your eyes.
I bet someone here could figure out the math to see exactly how much closer that would have to be to make it effectively the same functional area.
All-in-one desktops are a huge waste, since computers may last for seven years, but displays last for more than 20 years.
1) Notebooks, smartphones and tablets are also "all-in-one" devices so why aren't getting on Apple (and every over vendor) to at least sell a new logic board where we can unscrew, pry off and put our old display on it? After all, the iPhone does typically using the same basic, external chassis form for two years. You could even do the same with notebooks since any camera and mics connected to the display housing are just simple plugs that connect via USB internally.
2) It's May 2017, so 20 years ago was 1997. In May of that year Apple introduced the AppleVision 850. For a display that's suppose to last 20 years I've never even heard of that model. It was a CRT that used a DB-15 connector—not to be confused with VGA's DE-15 connector—for video and 2x ADB ports (Apple Desktop Bus) which was a "proprietary bit-serial peripheral bus connecting low-speed devices to computers." These are all now obsolete and have been so for a very, very long time. It also weighed over 67lb/30.5kg, which is amazing by today's standards for a 19" display, but that was the CRT technology. It was a great display utilizing Sony's Trinitron technology. Remember Sony?
"The AppleVision displays were designed as high-end monitors. They shipped with Sony Trinitron tubes for superb quality. In 1997, Apple released 'ColorSync', a powerful color management software. ColorSync enabled the user to match the colors of color documents while capturing, editing, and outputting. Released in May and August 1997, the first ColorSync displays 750 (08/97) and 850 (05/97) were identical to the AppleVision 750 and 850 displays and both series supported ColorSync." — History provided by the Apple Museum
The AppleVision series had terrible flyback transformers. Many of them didn't survive into the early days of the 21st century.
The state of the mac went from stale to dusty to long silence to emergency catch-up mode. Ugly.
You got that exactly right. Something stinks at Apple, I'm not sure what it is but frankly the Mac division needs a new manager. Frankly they could hire a stripper form the local strip joint and get more active management of the division. Probably smarter too, as she would likely be able to understand customer needs better and have demonstrated communications skills. All we get from Apple these days, with respect to the Mac is complete BS, no useful information or commenting at all.
The state of the mac went from stale to dusty to long silence to emergency catch-up mode. Ugly.
You got that exactly right. Something stinks at Apple, I'm not sure what it is but frankly the Mac division needs a new manager. Frankly they could hire a stripper form the local strip joint and get more active management of the division. Probably smarter too, as she would likely be able to understand customer needs better and have demonstrated communications skills. All we get from Apple these days, with respect to the Mac is complete BS, no useful information or commenting at all.
/s?
His stripper comment may be hyperbole, but I think the tone of his message is void of any sarcasm.
I too believe Apple has "awoken" and realized that the Mac still has a future. Whether this is because of fading iPad sales or not is anyone's guess.
I love my Macs...and really like my iOS devices. I hope Apple puts in more resources to MacOS and iOS. Let's get back to those high falutin' days where OpenDoc was a thing and in the absence of mobile devices software did not have to be designed within a mobile envelope.
The latest iWork advancements are appreciated. The updates to Pro Apps are appreciated.
Perhaps it's taken notable defections like Chris Lattner to for Apple to understand that engineers need to push the limits and challenge themselves. Make MacOS and iOS the most amazing AI platforms out there. Give developers tools they can use to enrich the platform and promote a healthy store ecosystem which entices people to pay for content.
Looking forward to WWDC..it should speak volumes about how Apple views the road ahead.
Comments
Note that the 17" MBP did have increasing longer delays over the 13" and 15" models, and even included some aesthetics discrepancies compared to their smaller brethren. For instance, the 13" and 15" models were 1" and the 17" model was 1.1", if I recall correctly.
PS: A thank you to @razormaid for editing your post to include paragraphs. Good post but I skipped it pre-edit due to the giant paragraph.
2. More than 20 years ago we were using CRTs. Do you miss those?
2) It's May 2017, so 20 years ago was 1997. In May of that year Apple introduced the AppleVision 850. For a display that's suppose to last 20 years I've never even heard of that model. It was a CRT that used a DB-15 connector—not to be confused with VGA's DE-15 connector—for video and 2x ADB ports (Apple Desktop Bus) which was a "proprietary bit-serial peripheral bus connecting low-speed devices to computers." These are all now obsolete and have been so for a very, very long time. It also weighed over 67lb/30.5kg, which is amazing by today's standards for a 19" display, but that was the CRT technology. It was a great display utilizing Sony's Trinitron technology. Remember Sony?
Please Apple - don't force me to buy 4+ year old machines, with old graphics processors. Let me buy a new Apple with what I can afford today; with the option to bump the DDRAM and even add a second hard drive (or SSD) later on when I have more money. Otherwise, the Hackentosh is the only viable answer, because buying an overly expensive Mac with hamstrung hardware that has ZERO upgradeability after the sale, simply is not a viable option.
Actually the new laptops had good quarters. The rest of the product line is in the doldrums.
This does however highlight how silly some of the commenting we saw in these forums with respect to new Mac Pros has been. In a nut shell the machines are very forward looking and most of the comments came from people looking to the past.
Now if only Apple would pull head from ass and get a model of the Mac Pro out that is reasonably priced. In the end the Mac Pro is failing simply because the design wasn't priced right for the niche it was capable of filling. lets face it the Mac Pro is't a high end workstation but on the other hand it is a very impressive desktop machine for people looking for a desktop - IF - its a big if - it was priced right to put on desktops. The machine was/is grossly overpriced for the niche it could have filled.
Frankly if Apple could build a machine on the Mac Pros chassis with an AMD Ryzen CPU and a modern GPU and sell it in the price range of $1200-$1500 they would have something many people would be interested in. Right now it is way to costly for most desktops and doesn't have the capabilities people expect out of a high end workstation. It is a bit of a joke really. In the end Apple really doesn't have a proper desktop machine yet, fill that niche and they would be running to find another bank to stash all their money in.
Yes he does which is reason go be cautious. However the recent tone from Apple seems to indicate that they know hey have screwed up and are trying to address that. The question is what do they think they screwed up. Sadly it might be that they think they screwed by not communicating with the potential market enough. All this talk about all new Mac's could be baloney with nothing but speed bumps in the future.
The Medias focus on "Server-grade" is just plain nonsense. For what ever reason they took comments of a pro focused machine as some sort of indication that the machine would be outfitted with Mac Pro hardware. First off nothing was said to indicate that server grade hardware was going into the machine. Second even if an XEON is put in the machine it still isn't a server grade machine. The reality is many XEON's are nothing more than desktop chips with Xeon stamped on them and a few features turned on.
As you note a server can be made out of everything from an ARM based chip to an ATOM all the way up to many core Xeons in multichip configurations. The chip it self doesn't make a platform server grade.
Windows (and Android, for that matter) have dominant market positions for two reasons:
1. There are a lot of low price products
2. There is a lot of variation in the capabilities of the products, allowing them to meet the needs of more customers
I don't advocate that Apple grow by addressing #1.
I do advocate that Apple grow by addressing #2.
There is evidence that Apple is starting to "get it." We don't have a single screen size for iPhones anymore, we now have 3. Same is true of iPads (sort of... the mini seems on life support). Apple now admits they need a more flexible/modular Mac Pro.
So Apple is moving in the right direction... it's just that sometimes there's a step backwards for every 2 steps forward, and sometimes those steps forward are slower coming than the steps backwards. Still, though... after the meeting with Gruber et al, I'm definitely more optimistic.
There's also other costs to update their development tools to support the Touch Bar display, but that's amazing uptake with even Amazon and MS added support nearly right away. This just shows how good planning is important, but creating some APIs and ties for macOS Sierra were probably pretty simple compared to the R&D to design an entirely new SoC running another version of OS X that includes the Secure Element and Secure Enclave for these hugely useful features.
I still can't figure out if the graphic display comes from the T1's GPU and OS or from the main OS and GPU, but either way it's amazing just how instant everything is, which is one of my concerns about doing this in a wireless keyboard. There's increased costs, a larger battery, and probably WiFi-assisted BT.
But let's say @casshern still hates the entire concepts despite its usefulness and even wishes the iPhone had a Blackberry-esque physical keyboard, he could easy just go into System Preferences to change the buttons back to the old standard, not set up Touch ID or Apple Pay, or just not buy one of these great new Macs.
I bet someone here could figure out the math to see exactly how much closer that would have to be to make it effectively the same functional area.
I love my Macs...and really like my iOS devices. I hope Apple puts in more resources to MacOS and iOS. Let's get back to those high falutin' days where
OpenDoc was a thing and in the absence of mobile devices software did not have to be designed within a mobile envelope.
The latest iWork advancements are appreciated. The updates to Pro Apps are appreciated.
Perhaps it's taken notable defections like Chris Lattner to for Apple to understand that engineers need to push the limits and challenge themselves.
Make MacOS and iOS the most amazing AI platforms out there. Give developers tools they can use to enrich the platform and promote a healthy
store ecosystem which entices people to pay for content.
Looking forward to WWDC..it should speak volumes about how Apple views the road ahead.