hodar said: 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.
Hackintosh is not a viable replacement for a Mac. They are buggy, subject to crashes and often cannot be updated when a new OS is released. They are strictly for computer hobbyists. Another option could be to pick up an older Mac Pro cheap and trick it out. That's what I recently did. I already had the Mac Pro, but altogether I think I spent around $650 additional for new SSD, new Xeons, new 32 GB ram, USB 3, new Nvidia graphics card. Everything is upgradeable on that model.
Check out http://lowendmac.com for more information. They were very helpful to me.
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.
2 has never been Apple's way, either. Sacrificing performance for the sake of market share has never been Apple's way. If Apple plans to release a "more flexible/modular Mac Pro" this is not for increasing the market share, this is because the industry couldn't keep up with the Mac Pro still ahead of its time with the dual GPU, thermal core and Thunderbolt (albeit old) expandability. "A lot of variation in the capabilities of the products" is called market fragmentation in Apple's parleance.
Growing appreciation of Mac augers well for Apple in at least a couple ways.
In mature market for laptops and desktops, consumers more apt to pay up for quality, aesthetics, ecosystem, etc. So their $$/year of computing can remain the same if they hold onto machine for 3-4 years instead of two (or if resale value holds better)
2. Ditto the smart phone, even more since it’s a fashion accessory too. As replacement cycles lengthen, it becomes easier to spend bucks on such hard to quantify things as ease, quality, privacy etc.
P.S. I forget how much I paid for iMac 5K five months ago. But it was cheap since it has transformed my computing experiences. Rarely use my MBP laptops unless on road. Yet I’m holding onto old iphone 5s since it works fine and I can wait for Apple’s OLED phone.
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.
The Mac Pro and Apple display mess was indeed a fuckup of amateurish proportions. They are a computer company that is privy to roadmaps of their component suppliers. Yet, they built a Mac Pro that they themselves could not upgrade. They themselves. That's unbelievable. They lost about 2 cycles of workstation sales due to it. This is a sign that some high level designer or manager pushed the design all the way through production and ignored people who said it was a bad product, or they didn't understand how such a computer would be used and how it would be advantageous over what they had before.
I'm ok with the laptops and iMacs so far. Maybe they could push harder, but overall, it's fine. Some people hate the MBP TB? Me, indifferent. I hardly use the keys on my 2015 MBP and I presume I would have no problem, possibly even like, the MBP TB. Perhaps my only qualm is that they aren't pushing hard enough with the "Touch Bar" concept, (cf my desire for the Touch Bar to basically be a "Touch Board", just have a big 12 to 13 inch iPad Pro display there), but I understand that something like this is another 2 or years away. Oh, it's been 2 years for the Macbook. The MB12 should be in the $1000 range by now and the MBA retired. And the iMacs all should have Fusion drives as standard. These are typical niggles though.
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.
And void of any sense. This is just xMac whining...something Apple arguably hasn't built since the powermac MDD...
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.
The Mac Pro and Apple display mess was indeed a fuckup of amateurish proportions. They are a computer company that is privy to roadmaps of their component suppliers. Yet, they built a Mac Pro that they themselves could not upgrade. They themselves. That's unbelievable. They lost about 2 cycles of workstation sales due to it. This is a sign that some high level designer or manager pushed the design all the way through production and ignored people who said it was a bad product, or they didn't understand how such a computer would be used and how it would be advantageous over what they had before.
I'm ok with the laptops and iMacs so far. Maybe they could push harder, but overall, it's fine. Some people hate the MBP TB? Me, indifferent. I hardly use the keys on my 2015 MBP and I presume I would have no problem, possibly even like, the MBP TB. Perhaps my only qualm is that they aren't pushing hard enough with the "Touch Bar" concept, (cf my desire for the Touch Bar to basically be a "Touch Board", just have a big 12 to 13 inch iPad Pro display there), but I understand that something like this is another 2 or years away. Oh, it's been 2 years for the Macbook. The MB12 should be in the $1000 range by now and the MBA retired. And the iMacs all should have Fusion drives as standard. These are typical niggles though.
Apple certainly engineered themselves into a corner with the 2013 Mac Pro, but I don't see enough evidence to suggest that it's entirely their fault. The GPUs are socketed, we usually see several generations from Nvidia and AMD, and the PSU seemed perfectly reasonable to me back in 2013.
I'm not a gamer and I do nothing with 3D graphics or scientific modeling that pushes me to study these GPUs in detail, but it seems that most CE seems to increase the power efficiency over time, not dramatically increase it. Did anyone say when it was released that the PSU wasn't going to handle the future of PCI GPUs?
For me, based on the information that I have, that puts it into the same category as backing the wrong components supplier more than anything else. In some cases Apple has gotten lucky, like when a 2011 earthquake and flood in Taiwan(?) wiped out a huge portion of HDD manufacturing which affected Apple very little but caused their competitors to get less supply and at a higher cost.
In hindsight, we can say that Apple could've planned for Nvidia and AMD moving to support more power hungry cards with higher TDPs which could have made the Mac Pro larger and more expensive, but resulting in both a consumer upgradable and having Apple update their system annually or biannual as Intel saw fit to release new CPUs.
But I don't see this has a huge deal since we see Apple make missteps all the time and it was never going to make a large impact on their bottom line. If I have a gripe, it's why the MacBook Air hasn't been updated or removed by this point. It still has an old TN panel.
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.
The Mac Pro and Apple display mess was indeed a fuckup of amateurish proportions. They are a computer company that is privy to roadmaps of their component suppliers. Yet, they built a Mac Pro that they themselves could not upgrade. They themselves. That's unbelievable. They lost about 2 cycles of workstation sales due to it. This is a sign that some high level designer or manager pushed the design all the way through production and ignored people who said it was a bad product, or they didn't understand how such a computer would be used and how it would be advantageous over what they had before.
I'm ok with the laptops and iMacs so far. Maybe they could push harder, but overall, it's fine. Some people hate the MBP TB? Me, indifferent. I hardly use the keys on my 2015 MBP and I presume I would have no problem, possibly even like, the MBP TB. Perhaps my only qualm is that they aren't pushing hard enough with the "Touch Bar" concept, (cf my desire for the Touch Bar to basically be a "Touch Board", just have a big 12 to 13 inch iPad Pro display there), but I understand that something like this is another 2 or years away. Oh, it's been 2 years for the Macbook. The MB12 should be in the $1000 range by now and the MBA retired. And the iMacs all should have Fusion drives as standard. These are typical niggles though.
Apple certainly engineered themselves into a corner with the 2013 Mac Pro, but I don't see enough evidence to suggest that it's entirely their fault. The GPUs are socketed, we usually see several generations from Nvidia and AMD, and the PSU seemed perfectly reasonable to me back in 2013.
I'm not a gamer and I do nothing with 3D graphics or scientific modeling that pushes me to study these GPUs in detail, but it seems that most CE seems to increase the power efficiency over time, not dramatically increase it. Did anyone say when it was released that the PSU wasn't going to handle the future of PCI GPUs?
For me, based on the information that I have, that puts it into the same category as backing the wrong components supplier more than anything else. In some cases Apple has gotten lucky, like when a 2011 earthquake and flood in Taiwan(?) wiped out a huge portion of HDD manufacturing which affected Apple very little but caused their competitors to get less supply and at a higher cost.
In hindsight, we can say that Apple could've planned for Nvidia and AMD moving to support more power hungry cards with higher TDPs which could have made the Mac Pro larger and more expensive, but resulting in both a consumer upgradable and having Apple update their system annually or biannual as Intel saw fit to release new CPUs.
But I don't see this has a huge deal since we see Apple make missteps all the time and it was never going to make a large impact on their bottom line. If I have a gripe, it's why the MacBook Air hasn't been updated or removed by this point. It still has an old TN panel.
Removing the MBA would make the laptop range too unbalanced towards the Pro line. A new Core M Retina MacBook may be on the way, with larger screen, that would justify the removal of MBA. Just my inference, not an educated guess.
Hoping they announce the revised iMacs at WWDC and offer for sale soon after. My legacy Cheese Grater Pro (c. 2009), is showing some graphics card oddness and needs to be put out to pasture, soonly!
I think I'm just going to upgrade mine to the 2010-2012 chips, dump some more RAM and a hott video card in mine this summer & bide my time till the new model comes out... That's my plan anyway....
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.
The Mac Pro and Apple display mess was indeed a fuckup of amateurish proportions. They are a computer company that is privy to roadmaps of their component suppliers. Yet, they built a Mac Pro that they themselves could not upgrade. They themselves. That's unbelievable. They lost about 2 cycles of workstation sales due to it. This is a sign that some high level designer or manager pushed the design all the way through production and ignored people who said it was a bad product, or they didn't understand how such a computer would be used and how it would be advantageous over what they had before.
Oh wow...they lost 2,000 sales with those 2 cycles. Hahaha....
Its not like Apple hasn't developed and released a flop before. Even with the wonder and talented Steve Jobs at the helm its been done. Sometimes, you just have a dud. It happens to all companies, even Apple.
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.
I think you have this copied to a Note or something. Go ahead, keep posting how ignorant you really are.
When the 2016 MacBook Pro shipped, it took fire for CPU performance. But, when Intel's focus on chip improvements has been in battery life, I'm not sure what was expected, here, or what anybody expected Apple to do. The lack of compelling chip offerings from Intel is probably the main reason behind no MacBook Pro refresh for a long time.
It hasn't been since the Blue and White G3 days that Apple really cared about a beefy GPU. I don't like it, but that's the way it is over there.
It's easy to look back in retrospect at the Mac Pro and say that it was dooooomed. But, the conventional wisdom at the time was that GPU tech would follow CPU tech, and go parallel, rather than what ultimately developed. Not denying that it hemmed Apple in, but sometimes the company tries to skate to where it thinks the puck will be, and misses its target.
Of course, none of this really explains the Mac Pro's overall neglect, other than it's at best 5% of 10% of Apple's business bringing it down to well under one percent of the company's sales.
In the interest of full disclosure, I want a PCI-e Mac Pro. I love my 5,1, and it's faster than half the Mac Pro 6,1 line after upgrades.
I'm also a realist, and don't think that I'm going to get what I want.
When the 2016 MacBook Pro shipped, it took fire for CPU performance. But, when Intel's focus on chip improvements has been in battery life, I'm not sure what was expected, here, or what anybody expected Apple to do. The lack of compelling chip offerings from Intel is probably the main reason behind no MacBook Pro refresh for a long time.
It hasn't been since the Blue and White G3 days that Apple really cared about a beefy GPU. I don't like it, but that's the way it is over there.
It's easy to look back in retrospect at the Mac Pro and say that it was dooooomed. But, the conventional wisdom at the time was that GPU tech would follow CPU tech, and go parallel, rather than what ultimately developed. Not denying that it hemmed Apple in, but sometimes the company tries to skate to where it thinks the puck will be, and misses its target.
Of course, none of this really explains the Mac Pro's overall neglect, other than it's at best 5% of 10% of Apple's business bringing it down to well under one percent of the company's sales.
In the interest of full disclosure, I want a PCI-e Mac Pro. I love my 5,1, and it's faster than half the Mac Pro 6,1 line after upgrades.
I'm also a realist, and don't think that I'm going to get what I want.
I'm pretty much 100% certain the reason why Apple hasn't updated most of its Mac line was because of Intel. I've been saying this all along. If there isn't anything meaningful to upgrade to, then why release an update? People HATED when Apple released an update that didn't do anything and sometimes, it was slower than the outgoing model. This really did happen! Maybe some have short term memories or simply don't know but this is exactly how the G4 Macs went for quite some time.
I'd be shocked if Apple wasn't disappointed that they couldn't provide a new MacBook Pro that supported more RAM, but they had this product and had to get it out the door. I think a lot of people just think they need more RAM when 16GB is more than plenty of RAM for their needs. I don't really want to go down this road again so I'll stop here.
I would like to see a PCI-e Mac Pro as well and I think Apple would be missing the target again if they didn't release one with at least 2 or 3 PCI-e slots in it. I think its okay for Apple to release a Mac Pro with a mid-grade GPU inside it, but when you also make it so it can't be upgraded thats a double whammy in my opinion.
The state of the mac went from stale to dusty to long silence to emergency catch-up mode. Ugly.
Nonsense. My 5K iMac is stunning, best made, current, and can handle way more than I can thought at it. Stop fabricating nonsense and passing it off as fact.
Yeah, my 5K iMac is great too.
Just FYI, mine came out in 2014. Apple updated it once in 2015.
This is 2017.
It's not necessary or normal for most people to require desktop updates every 2 years. I'm a professional enterprise software developer, and my iMac is a freaking 2011, maxed out and running virtual machines, databases, IDEs, etc... That's just an extreme example. But claiming a 2-year-old machine w/ a fast processor and SSD is obsolete is a bit silly.
The state of the mac went from stale to dusty to long silence to emergency catch-up mode. Ugly.
Yep. Hard to ensure the frontrunner position of the iPhone when you refuse to update the computers needed by professional app developers to ensure those cutting edge apps can continue to be made! Not to be too dramatic about it, but Apple has developed some real blindspots about what pro users want in their Apple computers.
Not to get into the whole Pro debate, but I'm assuming you don't actually write software. There's no iOS app the 2015 5K iMac can't code.
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.
So much nonsense. Ok let's go: 1) standard ports, you mean like the new MBP w/ all standard USBC ports and nothing proprietary? 2) I want soldered components if it means they're smaller and faster. 3) You can't honestly be comparing prices from Amazon ala cart components to integrated components on a Mac which are covered by comprehensive support? Dear lord. 4) All-in-ones are great, people love them because they're stone simple. I have mine VESA-arm mounted and it's wonderful to have nothing else but this panel clamped to my desk. 5) No monitor is lasting 20 years, both because of faults and because tech changes before then.
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.
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.
Did you not read the lengthy articles where they said exactly why the MP didn't work out? The decision to go w/ parallel GPU processing, which didn't pan out and backed them into a thermal corner (ha) in the cylinder case w/ its triangle configuration inside.
It wasn't them twisting their mustaches coming up with ways to screw you.
5) No monitor is lasting 20 years, both because of faults and because tech changes before then.
Well, I have a Dell Ultrasharp 2405 FPW (24" IPS monitor from 2005) that still works well. At 1920x1200 it's a bit low res but better than a 2017 1080p monitor. A 23" ACD from the same era is probably still usable.
That you can buy a 27" 1080p display for $220 today is a different issue...assuming a 3 year replacement cycle using a mac mini vs 21" iMac you'd have saved money over time. I've always preferred the mini over the 21" iMac until the 2014 model.
It's amazing to me that a 2012 Core i7 mini is still worth $1000. More for the 2.6Ghz version.
The Mac Pro and Apple display mess was indeed a fuckup of amateurish proportions. They are a computer company that is privy to roadmaps of their component suppliers. Yet, they built a Mac Pro that they themselves could not upgrade. They themselves. That's unbelievable. They lost about 2 cycles of workstation sales due to it. This is a sign that some high level designer or manager pushed the design all the way through production and ignored people who said it was a bad product, or they didn't understand how such a computer would be used and how it would be advantageous over what they had before.
Oh wow...they lost 2,000 sales with those 2 cycles. Hahaha....
Its not like Apple hasn't developed and released a flop before. Even with the wonder and talented Steve Jobs at the helm its been done. Sometimes, you just have a dud. It happens to all companies, even Apple.
Based on the information released so far, the Mac Pro is speculated to be about 1% of Mac unit sales. Not a lot but these are $3000 to $10000 machines. Apple sells about 20m Macs per year. In the last 3 years, at 1% of the unit volume, that's 600,000 machines. With an ASP of $4000, that's $2.4b. Not a small chunk of change.
Apple didn't lose all these sales as they sold some 2013 Mac Pros, but small changes in percentages have quite the big effect here. If it was 1.5% of Mac unit sales, that's almost a million units and about $4b. If they had an attractive machine, maybe it could have been 3% of Mac sales.
Moreover, not having an Apple 4k Thunderbolt Cinema display hurt too. Here, laptop and Mac Pro customers would have bought them, and Mac Pro customers could buy two or three. An Apple branded 4k display would have been $1500, if not $2000. 700k units across three years would be about $1b. I think 700k display units across 3 years is low ball number. 60m Macs were sold. If 5% of those customers bought one, that's 3m displays for about $4.5b in revenues.
And this is just over the last 3 years. They say they won't have a new Mac Pro and display until after 2017, and there's no certainty for shipping in 2018.
Yes, everyone releases a dud. It may happen to a company's most important product, like Windows 8. But it doesn't mean they don't deserve to be raked over the coals. You guys don't need to defend them on this. You really don't. Apple didn't come to realize they had a dud late last year in 2016 or so, or waited until late last to finally bite the bullet and start over. That's astonishing.
They certainly knew that they built a machine that would have been hard to update and they knew the roadmaps of their component suppliers. Somebody messed up.
Comments
Check out http://lowendmac.com for more information. They were very helpful to me.
Growing appreciation of Mac augers well for Apple in at least a couple ways.
2. Ditto the smart phone, even more since it’s a fashion accessory too. As replacement cycles lengthen, it becomes easier to spend bucks on such hard to quantify things as ease, quality, privacy etc.
P.S. I forget how much I paid for iMac 5K five months ago. But it was cheap since it has transformed my computing experiences. Rarely use my MBP laptops unless on road. Yet I’m holding onto old iphone 5s since it works fine and I can wait for Apple’s OLED phone.
I'm ok with the laptops and iMacs so far. Maybe they could push harder, but overall, it's fine. Some people hate the MBP TB? Me, indifferent. I hardly use the keys on my 2015 MBP and I presume I would have no problem, possibly even like, the MBP TB. Perhaps my only qualm is that they aren't pushing hard enough with the "Touch Bar" concept, (cf my desire for the Touch Bar to basically be a "Touch Board", just have a big 12 to 13 inch iPad Pro display there), but I understand that something like this is another 2 or years away. Oh, it's been 2 years for the Macbook. The MB12 should be in the $1000 range by now and the MBA retired. And the iMacs all should have Fusion drives as standard. These are typical niggles though.
I'm not a gamer and I do nothing with 3D graphics or scientific modeling that pushes me to study these GPUs in detail, but it seems that most CE seems to increase the power efficiency over time, not dramatically increase it. Did anyone say when it was released that the PSU wasn't going to handle the future of PCI GPUs?
For me, based on the information that I have, that puts it into the same category as backing the wrong components supplier more than anything else. In some cases Apple has gotten lucky, like when a 2011 earthquake and flood in Taiwan(?) wiped out a huge portion of HDD manufacturing which affected Apple very little but caused their competitors to get less supply and at a higher cost.
In hindsight, we can say that Apple could've planned for Nvidia and AMD moving to support more power hungry cards with higher TDPs which could have made the Mac Pro larger and more expensive, but resulting in both a consumer upgradable and having Apple update their system annually or biannual as Intel saw fit to release new CPUs.
But I don't see this has a huge deal since we see Apple make missteps all the time and it was never going to make a large impact on their bottom line. If I have a gripe, it's why the MacBook Air hasn't been updated or removed by this point. It still has an old TN panel.
Its not like Apple hasn't developed and released a flop before. Even with the wonder and talented Steve Jobs at the helm its been done. Sometimes, you just have a dud. It happens to all companies, even Apple.
Of course, none of this really explains the Mac Pro's overall neglect, other than it's at best 5% of 10% of Apple's business bringing it down to well under one percent of the company's sales.
I'm also a realist, and don't think that I'm going to get what I want.
I'd be shocked if Apple wasn't disappointed that they couldn't provide a new MacBook Pro that supported more RAM, but they had this product and had to get it out the door. I think a lot of people just think they need more RAM when 16GB is more than plenty of RAM for their needs. I don't really want to go down this road again so I'll stop here.
I would like to see a PCI-e Mac Pro as well and I think Apple would be missing the target again if they didn't release one with at least 2 or 3 PCI-e slots in it. I think its okay for Apple to release a Mac Pro with a mid-grade GPU inside it, but when you also make it so it can't be upgraded thats a double whammy in my opinion.
Not to get into the whole Pro debate, but I'm assuming you don't actually write software. There's no iOS app the 2015 5K iMac can't code.
So much nonsense. Ok let's go: 1) standard ports, you mean like the new MBP w/ all standard USBC ports and nothing proprietary? 2) I want soldered components if it means they're smaller and faster. 3) You can't honestly be comparing prices from Amazon ala cart components to integrated components on a Mac which are covered by comprehensive support? Dear lord. 4) All-in-ones are great, people love them because they're stone simple. I have mine VESA-arm mounted and it's wonderful to have nothing else but this panel clamped to my desk. 5) No monitor is lasting 20 years, both because of faults and because tech changes before then.
Did you not read the lengthy articles where they said exactly why the MP didn't work out? The decision to go w/ parallel GPU processing, which didn't pan out and backed them into a thermal corner (ha) in the cylinder case w/ its triangle configuration inside.
It wasn't them twisting their mustaches coming up with ways to screw you.
That you can buy a 27" 1080p display for $220 today is a different issue...assuming a 3 year replacement cycle using a mac mini vs 21" iMac you'd have saved money over time. I've always preferred the mini over the 21" iMac until the 2014 model.
It's amazing to me that a 2012 Core i7 mini is still worth $1000. More for the 2.6Ghz version.
Apple didn't lose all these sales as they sold some 2013 Mac Pros, but small changes in percentages have quite the big effect here. If it was 1.5% of Mac unit sales, that's almost a million units and about $4b. If they had an attractive machine, maybe it could have been 3% of Mac sales.
Moreover, not having an Apple 4k Thunderbolt Cinema display hurt too. Here, laptop and Mac Pro customers would have bought them, and Mac Pro customers could buy two or three. An Apple branded 4k display would have been $1500, if not $2000. 700k units across three years would be about $1b. I think 700k display units across 3 years is low ball number. 60m Macs were sold. If 5% of those customers bought one, that's 3m displays for about $4.5b in revenues.
And this is just over the last 3 years. They say they won't have a new Mac Pro and display until after 2017, and there's no certainty for shipping in 2018.
Yes, everyone releases a dud. It may happen to a company's most important product, like Windows 8. But it doesn't mean they don't deserve to be raked over the coals. You guys don't need to defend them on this. You really don't. Apple didn't come to realize they had a dud late last year in 2016 or so, or waited until late last to finally bite the bullet and start over. That's astonishing.
They certainly knew that they built a machine that would have been hard to update and they knew the roadmaps of their component suppliers. Somebody messed up.