I disagree. It’s nice to know for a change that products are finally coming instead of just wondering endlessly.
We’re not talking about a few weeks or a couple months notice. We’re talking about self-imposed timeframes that are already far away and then woefully missed. We still don’t even have a price or timeframe for AirPower. It makes Apple look incompetent.
As a brand new accessory, this is altogether inconsequential. There's no great dilemma here.. Want wireless charging today? Buy a crummy third-party. Want a better solution, wait a little longer. It's not a critical use case so it's no skin off anyone's back.
Why do you believe any Qi charging pad that isn't Apple-branded is inherently crummy?
Apple never announced the new Mac Pro for a specific sale date. They only said they were going to reinvent it with the help of Pro users and customers. They never said it was going to be ready on any certain date. I for one would rather they take there time and do something awesome than rush and only do something so, so.
They may not have stated a certain date, but if they made a claim like like 2018, end of the year, or Winter, that's definitely a self-imposed timeframe that was missed.
from original Daring Fireball post: "I also have not-so-great news:
These next-gen Mac Pros and pro displays “will not ship this year”.
(I hope that means “next year”, but all Apple said was “not this year”.)
" https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives
Agreed. And with respect to the Mac Pro, what is taking so long? The target market for a Mac Pro isn’t looking for Apple to reinvent the pro desktop. Yes I know Apple isn’t going to just throw together a beige box but how hard is it design a next gen cheese grater? Isn’t the pro desktop essentially a solved problem?
Since you’ve never designed a computer from scratch then how would you know? If the solution is essentially solved then go buy the solution.
The reason you keep asking this question is because you look at Apple then try to force the company into a box that fits your level of understanding. What you might need to do is try to think outside your convenient little box.
It has been said time and time again.
“Skate to where the puck is going to be.”
Apple is not trying to solve a problem that has already been solved; they’re trying to solve a problem that is still forming. The workflow of professionals is changing. The new generation is more mobile, more flexible, more protective of their leisure time. They’re more likely to be freelance. They’re more likely to be working at home or in a smaller, open-plan environment. They need to nimble, agile thinkers who can grasp changes in technology that produce paradigm shifts once every three years or so.
Have you noticed how many non-technical people Apple hires? No, you probably haven’t because you’re one of those folk who thinks Apple should be able to everything from their existing talent pool. You keep asking why Apple needed to buy Beats. Why couldn’t they build a streaming service on their own? Building it wasn’t the problem. Making it successful was the problem. For that they needed music visionaries. They hire education visionaries to help them build a platform to support how teaching will look a few years from now. They hired Ahrendts to help them understand how retail will look in the future (as opposed to Browett who only understood what retail looks like now).
They thought they knew what the future professional wanted from a desktop machine. I’m not sure they were necessarily wrong, but the technological path they took was way off because they focused on the wrong thing. So now they’ve gone back to the drawing board and are looking at how people actually work, not at what people say the want in a machine. Why? Because people say they want expandibility, when in reality very few people ever open the box. So don’t assume that expandibility means tinkering about in the box. Get the new breed in and watch what they actually do.
I could be wrong but my guess is that Apple is going to take its own sweet time now because they do not want to redesign this system again for another ten years at the very least (how long has the current iMac form factor been around). They keep driving home this notion of “modular”, and I’m pretty sure there’s a reason why they use it as the foundation of “expandable”, rather than just saying “expandable”.
And it’s not just about the hardware. The Marzipan stuff is not about making iOS apps run on the Mac (contrary to popular belief), it is about providing a framework for building scaleable apps without the pain.
I should be able to work on any project on any Apple device from anywhere I want, in a rich fully-functional, task-oriented environment. I should be able to switch device and pick up that project from exactly where I left off. And that project should be secure and private for as I want it to be, and I should be able to collaborate when I’m ready.
The desktop hardware is just a small part of that.
Announcing products in advance will keep the consumers informed and might prevent them from buying other brands but putting a target date and then missing it is unacceptable!
I agree with the thrust of this article. The case most of the posters are bringing up in their disagreements is not really what Mike is talking about. As I read the article, he’s not condemning all pre-announcements, just questioning the length of the gap (particularly when something then misses the vague timeframe that was initially promised or implied).
While it is fine IMO to do the sort of announcement Apple has done with the Mac Mini — letting the community know that it hasn’t been cancelled — that’s quite different than, for example, saying that another much-anticipated thing is coming, but being very deliberately vague about when (like the 2019 Mac Pro’s initial reveal) or pre-announcing a product that is obviously aimed at the holiday market which then fails to appear during that window (like the HomePod).
I appreciate that it’s not always possible to stay mum about a new thing until you know it is ready to ship that week, but it seems to me that in those situations Apple should be upfront about both an expected window for release (like they are with iPhones), no more than 90 days away, and (importantly) be more transparent when a product has to slip from its original window. Despite how impatient Apple fans can often be, we do better (and so does the press) when we’re in the loop.
Apple never announced the new Mac Pro for a specific sale date. They only said they were going to reinvent it with the help of Pro users and customers. They never said it was going to be ready on any certain date. I for one would rather they take there time and do something awesome than rush and only do something so, so.
They may not have stated a certain date, but if they made a claim like like 2018, end of the year, or Winter, that's definitely a self-imposed timeframe that was missed.
They made no claim in April 2017 except not that year (i.e., not 2017). They were so non-specific and non-committal that some snarky posters immediate claimed that we’d not see one until 2020 at the earliest. Others said, well, if they said not in 2017 that surely means it’ll ship in 2018, otherwise they would have said “not this year or next year”.
Turns out both were wrong.
2019 is still not very specific. It could be less than 8 months away, or almost two years from now. I hope it’s closer to January 2019 than December 2019. We may get another update before it ships, or the next we hear might be that it’s shipping. Who knows? I sure hope it’s worth the wait though.
While I agree with the sentimonies, I'm leery of anything under a headline that starts, "Apple needs ..."
Apple *should* do a lot of things, in our opinion(s). They don't need to do jacksquat.
I don’t think Apple pays much attention to the opinions of bloggers or forum comment sections anyway. Certain bloggers, like Jim Dalrymple, do have their ear because they trust him. But the rest of us are just farts in a wind storm as far as Apple is concerned. Apple is going to do what Apple does, take it or leave it. I’ve taken it since 1982 (that’s 35+ years for those who can’t do the math) and have no plans to do otherwise.
Oh, I have a plan to move as soon as someone comes up with a better solution.
I agree with the thrust of this article. The case most of the posters are bringing up in their disagreements is not really what Mike is talking about. As I read the article, he’s not condemning all pre-announcements, just questioning the length of the gap (particularly when something then misses the vague timeframe that was initially promised or implied).
While it is fine IMO to do the sort of announcement Apple has done with the Mac Mini — letting the community know that it hasn’t been cancelled — that’s quite different than, for example, saying that another much-anticipated thing is coming, but being very deliberately vague about when (like the 2019 Mac Pro’s initial reveal) or pre-announcing a product that is obviously aimed at the holiday market which then fails to appear during that window (like the HomePod).
I appreciate that it’s not always possible to stay mum about a new thing until you know it is ready to ship that week, but it seems to me that in those situations Apple should be upfront about both an expected window for release (like they are with iPhones), no more than 90 days away, and (importantly) be more transparent when a product has to slip from its original window. Despite how impatient Apple fans can often be, we do better (and so does the press) when we’re in the loop.
I agree with most of your statements, and sure, don’t ever miss self-imposed deadlines. Under promise and over deliver, yeah yeah yeah fine.
But I still don’t see why a shorter pre-announcement period is preferable. Apple announced in September that AirPower would ship this year. Maybe that will turn out to mean December 2017.
Would it really be to any consumer’s benefit if Apple were to have held back that announcement until this coming August or September 2017? In what way is that possibly beneficial to me as an Apple customer? That’s an extra year of people buying something that they might well have waited for, had they only known Apple was going to be shipping something in a few months. I mean, Apple customers do tend to prefer Apple products. Some might choose not to wait, and buy a different product. That’s cool, but at least they made an informed decision.
And knowing in March or April of a December ship date is “consumer hostile”? I can’t imagine how Tesla’s pre-announcement periods (or delays) would be characterized lol
It’s this type of pre announcing that makes Apple start to look like everyone else. It’s what “they” do.
Apple, not perfectly - but mostly, would announce something and then make it available that same day. And when they didn’t, it would be that week.
Thats is the way to capitalize.
But now, with the desire to stave off criticism by saying “wait, something’s coming” Apple is creating an irritating feeling with the sense that they just thought to do it the mfirst nth before and then decide to actually build it out. The bad part is when they wait so long to finally ship something and it’s STILL missing key features, promised in an even later update.
I sympathize on one one end as it’s much harder to stay innovative now at a pace that is relevant while competitors have either stolen your ideas in order to compete and the ability to develop hardware and software at a fast pace is much more accessible these days.
Its at a time like this that a company saying no to hype to hype and lure tactics and simply relying by on make never the best products, fully developing them, ironing out the kinks, and SAYING NO to feature creep and making that truly excellent product available shortly after announcing it - separates a company from the pack in a huge way.
Id personally love to see Apple return to that ideal.
Its like... SURPRISE! We have this awesome new product/service/etc. and it’s 100% perfect and now that’s you’re salivating, you can go right to the store and pick it up!
thay kind of thing will only serve them well over and over.
Some of those early announcements were special cases I think.
With the AirPower, they wanted to release the iPhone X with wireless charging, so may have felt they had to address the charging mat question. The Apple Watch was at a time when it had been a while since Steve's passing and Apple still didn't have any new product lines, and Tim felt he needed to prove something. The Mac Pro was a case of Microsoft agressively courting pros (with Windows Creator's update and Surface products) and Apple feeling they had to respond, even if they weren't ready.
But the other products, yes it feels like somewhere along the way the special cases turned in to a bad habit.
Corporate Apple never even promised a delivery year, did they? Now I'll admit, I never expected delivery would be two years out from the initial announcement but that was carefully calculated to stem the tide of pro users from abandoning the platform. But what I think is that Apple doesn't have a handle on who those pro users really are. The mega-buck machines are primarily paid for by corporate funds and the users need them quickly to work on a contractual obligation or to replace a piece of equipment which went belly up.
Waiting a month is not an option, much less two years.
So Apple might just as well of waited until the new MacPro was ready to ship and avoided the endless negative publicity.
Agreed. And with respect to the Mac Pro, what is taking so long? The target market for a Mac Pro isn’t looking for Apple to reinvent the pro desktop. Yes I know Apple isn’t going to just throw together a beige box but how hard is it design a next gen cheese grater? Isn’t the pro desktop essentially a solved problem?
I could be wrong but my guess is that Apple is going to take its own sweet time now because they do not want to redesign this system again for another ten years at the very least (how long has the current iMac form factor been around). They keep driving home this notion of “modular”, and I’m pretty sure there’s a reason why they use it as the foundation of “expandable”, rather than just saying “expandable”.
My guess is that they want to say just enough to keep the important people interested, but not give away too many details about what modular is (assuming Apple has settled on exactly what they are doing themselves with regards to modular). What they are saying is that they are building a Mac Pro replacement -- it is not the end of the line. They also have indicated that the trashcan mac took them down the wrong path. I expect the memory, drives, GPU/TPU will all be upgradeable. I don't know what shape they will all take, and I think that is for a very good reason... they don't like telling their competitors anything either, they don't like locking themselves into something that during the design process had to change... they are only telling us the bare minimum... The Mac Pro is not dead (yet).
I disagree. It’s nice to know for a change that products are finally coming instead of just wondering endlessly.
I think this is why they started doing it. They kept getting so much backlash about never releasing anything they had to do something to show people that they are working on things.
That being said...I do wish they'd just go back to release something when its ready. I like the element of surprise, but I guess too many people in this world are too damn impatient.
What I would really like, is you know, I don't want to know about HomePod or iMac Pro ahead of time. I don't want to know about it at all. I'd love to see Apple just be able to have a damn keynote and nobody knows why and boom, here is this new iMac Pro with these specs and boom, here is HomePod and it can do this and this and it sounds amazing, etc. I know in this day and age its pretty much impossible because people can't keep their damn mouth shut about anything.
It's got nothing to do with people keeping their mouths shut. There are two good reasons for pre-announcements.
1. It discourages potential customers from buying a competitor's product. Anyone considering a voice-controlled music streaming device last year would probably have purchased a Google, Amazon, or Sonos device. By pre-announcing the HomePod, Apple persuaded a certain number of buyers to wait and buy it instead. The charging pad announcement has probably had the same effect.
2. Business operations require advance planning. In large corporations, acquiring a new workstation may require submitting a proposal with budget many months in advance. If one doesn't know what to expect, one can't make plans. Apple being silent about whether or not the Mac Pro would ever be updated led to at least one production facility I know of switching from Mac to Windows. We now know Apple was developing a new version, but the facility had no way of knowing that. Had they known, they may have waited instead of switching.
[...] reducing the time between announcment and release should be a real high priority.
I have mixed feelings about that. I really hate updates or new products that aren't ready for prime time. I'd rather wait longer if it means the product is sable, reliable and predictable.
lkrupp said: [...] Apple is going to do what Apple does, take it or leave it. I’ve taken it since 1982 (that’s 35+ years for those who can’t do the math) and have no plans to do otherwise.
Apple is lucky to have loyal customers like you.
I started buying Apple products when it became apparent to me that the product spectrum they offered was a good fit for the tasks we were trying to accomplish. Over time that product mix has evolved, with some new things we like being added, but also a few things that were important to us being dropped. So far the balance still leans towards Apple's products being the closest to matching our needs and wants, but I can't imagine why we wouldn't switch to another brand if that changed. I don't care who makes my hammer -- what matters is which hammer is best suited to making what I want to build.
Comments
"I also have not-so-great news: These next-gen Mac Pros and pro displays “will not ship this year”. (I hope that means “next year”, but all Apple said was “not this year”.) "
https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives
The reason you keep asking this question is because you look at Apple then try to force the company into a box that fits your level of understanding. What you might need to do is try to think outside your convenient little box.
It has been said time and time again.
“Skate to where the puck is going to be.”
Apple is not trying to solve a problem that has already been solved; they’re trying to solve a problem that is still forming. The workflow of professionals is changing. The new generation is more mobile, more flexible, more protective of their leisure time. They’re more likely to be freelance. They’re more likely to be working at home or in a smaller, open-plan environment. They need to nimble, agile thinkers who can grasp changes in technology that produce paradigm shifts once every three years or so.
Have you noticed how many non-technical people Apple hires? No, you probably haven’t because you’re one of those folk who thinks Apple should be able to everything from their existing talent pool. You keep asking why Apple needed to buy Beats. Why couldn’t they build a streaming service on their own? Building it wasn’t the problem. Making it successful was the problem. For that they needed music visionaries.
They hire education visionaries to help them build a platform to support how teaching will look a few years from now. They hired Ahrendts to help them understand how retail will look in the future (as opposed to Browett who only understood what retail looks like now).
They thought they knew what the future professional wanted from a desktop machine. I’m not sure they were necessarily wrong, but the technological path they took was way off because they focused on the wrong thing. So now they’ve gone back to the drawing board and are looking at how people actually work, not at what people say the want in a machine. Why? Because people say they want expandibility, when in reality very few people ever open the box. So don’t assume that expandibility means tinkering about in the box. Get the new breed in and watch what they actually do.
I could be wrong but my guess is that Apple is going to take its own sweet time now because they do not want to redesign this system again for another ten years at the very least (how long has the current iMac form factor been around). They keep driving home this notion of “modular”, and I’m pretty sure there’s a reason why they use it as the foundation of “expandable”, rather than just saying “expandable”.
And it’s not just about the hardware. The Marzipan stuff is not about making iOS apps run on the Mac (contrary to popular belief), it is about providing a framework for building scaleable apps without the pain.
I should be able to work on any project on any Apple device from anywhere I want, in a rich fully-functional, task-oriented environment. I should be able to switch device and pick up that project from exactly where I left off. And that project should be secure and private for as I want it to be, and I should be able to collaborate when I’m ready.
The desktop hardware is just a small part of that.
While it is fine IMO to do the sort of announcement Apple has done with the Mac Mini — letting the community know that it hasn’t been cancelled — that’s quite different than, for example, saying that another much-anticipated thing is coming, but being very deliberately vague about when (like the 2019 Mac Pro’s initial reveal) or pre-announcing a product that is obviously aimed at the holiday market which then fails to appear during that window (like the HomePod).
I appreciate that it’s not always possible to stay mum about a new thing until you know it is ready to ship that week, but it seems to me that in those situations Apple should be upfront about both an expected window for release (like they are with iPhones), no more than 90 days away, and (importantly) be more transparent when a product has to slip from its original window. Despite how impatient Apple fans can often be, we do better (and so does the press) when we’re in the loop.
Turns out both were wrong.
2019 is still not very specific. It could be less than 8 months away, or almost two years from now. I hope it’s closer to January 2019 than December 2019. We may get another update before it ships, or the next we hear might be that it’s shipping. Who knows? I sure hope it’s worth the wait though.
Did … did you just LOL yourself?
(Checks watch, taps foot. Checks watch again. Whistles tunelessly.)
But I still don’t see why a shorter pre-announcement period is preferable. Apple announced in September that AirPower would ship this year. Maybe that will turn out to mean December 2017.
Would it really be to any consumer’s benefit if Apple were to have held back that announcement until this coming August or September 2017? In what way is that possibly beneficial to me as an Apple customer? That’s an extra year of people buying something that they might well have waited for, had they only known Apple was going to be shipping something in a few months. I mean, Apple customers do tend to prefer Apple products. Some might choose not to wait, and buy a different product. That’s cool, but at least they made an informed decision.
And knowing in March or April of a December ship date is “consumer hostile”? I can’t imagine how Tesla’s pre-announcement periods (or delays) would be characterized lol
Apple, not perfectly - but mostly, would announce something and then make it available that same day. And when they didn’t, it would be that week.
Thats is the way to capitalize.
But now, with the desire to stave off criticism by saying “wait, something’s coming” Apple is creating an irritating feeling with the sense that they just thought to do it the mfirst nth before and then decide to actually build it out. The bad part is when they wait so long to finally ship something and it’s STILL missing key features, promised in an even later update.
I sympathize on one one end as it’s much harder to stay innovative now at a pace that is relevant while competitors have either stolen your ideas in order to compete and the ability to develop hardware and software at a fast pace is much more accessible these days.
Its at a time like this that a company saying no to hype to hype and lure tactics and simply relying by on make never the best products, fully developing them, ironing out the kinks, and SAYING NO to feature creep and making that truly excellent product available shortly after announcing it - separates a company from the pack in a huge way.
Id personally love to see Apple return to that ideal.
Its like... SURPRISE! We have this awesome new product/service/etc. and it’s 100% perfect and now that’s you’re salivating, you can go right to the store and pick it up!
thay kind of thing will only serve them well over and over.
Waiting a month is not an option, much less two years.
So Apple might just as well of waited until the new MacPro was ready to ship and avoided the endless negative publicity.
1. It discourages potential customers from buying a competitor's product. Anyone considering a voice-controlled music streaming device last year would probably have purchased a Google, Amazon, or Sonos device. By pre-announcing the HomePod, Apple persuaded a certain number of buyers to wait and buy it instead. The charging pad announcement has probably had the same effect.
2. Business operations require advance planning. In large corporations, acquiring a new workstation may require submitting a proposal with budget many months in advance. If one doesn't know what to expect, one can't make plans. Apple being silent about whether or not the Mac Pro would ever be updated led to at least one production facility I know of switching from Mac to Windows. We now know Apple was developing a new version, but the facility had no way of knowing that. Had they known, they may have waited instead of switching.
I started buying Apple products when it became apparent to me that the product spectrum they offered was a good fit for the tasks we were trying to accomplish. Over time that product mix has evolved, with some new things we like being added, but also a few things that were important to us being dropped. So far the balance still leans towards Apple's products being the closest to matching our needs and wants, but I can't imagine why we wouldn't switch to another brand if that changed. I don't care who makes my hammer -- what matters is which hammer is best suited to making what I want to build.