I would love to be able to take a small iMac off of it's stand and draw directly on it, edit photos directly on it, CAD, for music, take to school, work. There are a lot of applications that would benefit from being touch enabled that require more power that what is available on the iPad.
I can see the Mac being touch enabled sooner than later.
Steve Jobs said it best when he said, "PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around but one out of x people will need them."
Most users simply never needed all that other crap that comes with a desktop OS for their typical usage needs and the proof is the success of the iPad.
I see Apple creating a ARM based content server for the home. It will share content with ARM iDevices/screens from iPhone to AppleTV. using Airdrop and Airplay. Content creation will be done using iWork and iLife and will be saved locally as well as iCloud.
Professionals and Prosumers will still need and use Intel/OSX "trucks" with Pro level creation software: Aperture, FCP, Logic Pro etc., .
An iOS iPad-based desktop with a mouse and keyboard interface appears to be the answer to a majority of consumers who want a fairly powerful machine at home, but don't really need a full-blown PC. Arm-based, it should be cheaper than an iMac or a mini.
The ipad is very capable. It can do video. it can do word processing. It can do a lot of things a desktop can do. Take the portability out and sell it as a new line of desktop machines without touch, but with a power supply, stand, keyboard, and mouse and what do you have? Can Apple do this for less than the cost of a mini or MBAir with a display (or without)? If so, it would really be post-PC.
DED, I love what you did by making the next Mac Pro the period on the question mark but I think you missed an opportunity to really tie it together.
It doesn't make sense either, every Mac here is an all-in-one, then the odd man out Mac Pro, Mac Pro belongs in a different lineup.
And look at the internals, theres 2 GPUs in the Mac Pro, workstation, server class CPU, 1866Mhz RAM, SSD only, and buy your own monitor, its hardcore computing and sure sounds a lot more expensive than iMacs.
To me the future is convergence done well. A desktop OS requires a different GUI metaphor than a mobile one. Apple is doing this right (exceptions like the dreadful scrollbar inversion and stupid Launchpad left aside).
What I see is that the iPhone 7 or so will be able to transform into a desktop OS by hooking it up to your monitor. You essentially get an evolved version of OSX. When you disconnect, it just uses the iOS portion.
Content and settings are shared through the local and remote filesystem. Let's hope iCloud makes sense by then.
Ubuntu seems to be pursuing this idea with their Ubuntu Touch project, at the heart of which is a user interface that automatically configures itself depending on the display size. Even if their execution doesn't work out, it may be an idea worth considering by a party with more resources and existing mindshare.
I strongly echo the previous comment regarding the speed of hard drive connections via USB 2.0 versus USB 3.0. Asserting that USB 2.0 is "faster than virtually any hard drive" either means that you haven't had much experience with USB 3.0 drives, or you weren't paying much attention.
I routinely copy gigantic HD video files between standard 5400 rpm external drives, and the difference in speed between copying USB 3.0 - to - USB 3.0 versus USB 2.0 drives is like night and day. USB 3.0 just flies. Its also a godsend when I make my weekly bare-metal MacBook Pro backups to 7200 rpm drives; I no longer have to knock myself out finding external drives with FW800 support.
Because Kasper's Automated Slave is written by idiots who know nothing about properly translating CP-1252 Extended ANSI characters to UTF-8. One way to avoid this mess when writing articles is to STOP USING MICROSOFT WORD.
Especially when they can write it in TextEdit.app or any basic VIM format and let the CMS manage the formatting.
An iOS iPad-based desktop with a mouse and keyboard interface appears to be the answer to a majority of consumers who want a fairly powerful machine at home, but don't really need a full-blown PC. Arm-based, it should be cheaper than an iMac or a mini.
The ipad is very capable. It can do video. it can do word processing. It can do a lot of things a desktop can do. Take the portability out and sell it as a new line of desktop machines without touch, but with a power supply, stand, keyboard, and mouse and what do you have? Can Apple do this for less than the cost of a mini or MBAir with a display (or without)? If so, it would really be post-PC.
Video and Word Processing on any tablet is GARBAGE next to a Desktop/Laptop and you know it.
I take your point, but, I think most people are just using the iPad for email, facebookie, photos, video and surfing. Pretty much what they were doing when they had a PC "truck" under their desk.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm using my iMac less and less and my iPhone and iPad more (Just sold my iPad 2 to get a Mini). I'm using my printer less and less. I mean a lot less!
Granted you're not going to create the movie "Gravity" on iPad, but for the vast majority of people the iPad is the future not the PC under the desk or even a laptop for that matter.
Everything I do is more fun on the iPad.
In short, you're just a consumer who never had a true need/high demand for productivity and thus the iPad/iPhone suits you, until you get to work when you actually can't get work done without the desktop/laptop.
Anyone in professional engineering, applied sciences, etc., who proclaims the iPad replaces their workstation better expect to be laughed out of their respective profession. It's not a replacement. It's another tool.
I strongly echo the previous comment regarding the speed of hard drive connections via USB 2.0 versus USB 3.0. Asserting that USB 2.0 is "faster than virtually any hard drive" either means that you haven't had much experience with USB 3.0 drives, or you weren't paying much attention.
I routinely copy gigantic HD video files between standard 5400 rpm external drives, and the difference in speed between copying USB 3.0 - to - USB 3.0 versus USB 2.0 drives is like night and day. USB 3.0 just flies. Its also a godsend when I make my weekly bare-metal MacBook Pro backups to 7200 rpm drives; I no longer have to knock myself out finding external drives with FW800 support.
Note the context of mobile devices and calm down slightly.
Profits are what drive everything in business. With fewer desktop sales each year there might be an interesting change in the computer business. Intel and AMD might stop their investment in making better desktop chips. They could shift their focus to mobile chips. With that done the existing fast desktop chips might not get updated at all. I believe such a time is coming.
To beat Microsoft on the desktop, you go after Office. Beating Microsoft is a much easier proposition than beating Google.
Exactly, it needs to be enterprise worthy. It need better paragraph numbering and markup.
I've often wondered if Apple has lingering contractual restraints for the deal Steve Jobs made with MS in the late 90s.
Another strategy would be to buy an engineering platform like Solidworks and/or autoCAD
The one thing that worries me about the new Mac Pro is I haven't heard even one word about price. I understand the maxed out one costing a pretty penny but I wonder if Apple will make one also affordable at the entry level as they used to do so often in the past. If they make an entry level model around $2,100 +/- a few hundred I could really see them selling well. If the low end basic model is over $2,500 then it will simply be overpriced for many people. I expect the fastest one with maxed Ram, HD, and top of the line GPU card to cost well over $5,000 but interested to see how many price points/configurations will be available.
Given that the Mac Pro is designed and marketed as a premium pro product targeted toward a relatively small customer base, at least as compared to the broader consumer market, and given that it is being manufactured stateside where production costs are higher, I wouldn't hold out much hope of a modest entry point. After all, the current Mac Pro starts at $2,499 w/ 6GB of memory, 1 TB hard drive, and 1 GB graphics card. I think many pro users would consider these specs to be inadequate, particularly for video production. The current high end Mac Pro maxes out at over $11,000.
Of course, many medium to large design and video production shops can likely justify the premium by recouping the investment, while small shops or individual designers cannot. That is why many creative professionals find the iMac is good enough for their needs.
Expandability is another issue entirely. One of the main arguments for the Mac Pro has been its internal expandability. It'll be interesting to see how pro users react to the new Mac Pro as it has moved expandability outside the box.
1. Notebook business will be there and desktop business will be there, they both have their own markets and both markets are essential.
2. Microsoft will come out with their next OS (which may be good) and Apple will continue to lead the standards with the next versions of OS X. Therefore, PC business will be there and so will be Mac business (the only difference will be that Macs will continue to outsell PCs at a significant rate).
3. Touch screen notebooks and desktops are ridiculous according to me. The modern computer was defined by Apple II, and it will continue to be the standard for decades to come. Computers simply have a different usage pattern and application as compared to the more intimate mobile devices. Therefore a mouse, trackpad and a keyboard are the ideal input devices on a desktop or a notebook computer, and a touchscreen is the ideal input device on a smartphone or a tablet.
4. Though convergence of OS X and iOS is possible, it will not happen, especially in a company like Apple that understands ergonomics. If you want a proof of disaster of convergence, look at Windows 8 (and it's not even a complete merger, just the UI confluence alone proved disastrous enough).
In a sense, Apple did that. If you remember how Jobs introduced the iPhone: He said, "Today we are introducing a new iPod, and new computer, and a new phone... then he repeated it several times...until the audience got that it was one device.
With regards to the Mac going away; It's the desktop Mac that is losing sales, not the laptop. Apple's laptops, especially the MBA, are doing fine. The build quality is so much better then the other brands that most of the Apple laptops eventually end up running Windows. In fact, if you check out Apple's site, it is possible to have the laptop ship to you with Windows installed, in place of OSX.
Rather then call it a post-PC world, it's more of a post-desktop world. I love it!!
I agree. I haven't owned a desktop in over a decade. The Power Mac G4 was my last desktop. It was replaced by a MacBook and then a MacBook Pro. My late 2008 Macbook Pro, upgraded with an SSD, has aged very gracefully. It benchmarks at about 25% of the current top MacBook Pro. Usage is split equally between my laptop and my iPad.
My brother-in-law, who works in the computer industry, a lifelong dedicated Windows user at home and at work, just bought a Retina MacBook Pro and loves it. He always argued cost without giving adequate weight to value. Of course value is individual and in part subjective, particularly in regards to the user experience. The only thing is, I had to remap the Control and Command keys for him. Baby steps.
You can't create an iOS app on an iOS device. You need a Mac to do that. Artists, videographers, designers all need large screens and Macs.
Apple will simply scale-down the Mac business accordingly.
Exactly!
The author of the article overlooks or ignores that even OS X Macs were never regarded as PCs. This is a post-Windows world.
Also, Microsoft proved that all that most computer "hobbiests," as they used to be known, were interested in was games. And I commend Apple for developing a high-class mobile iOS for people who only need a peashooter-powered computing device to engage in social networking, and play their games, to get them through the day.
Otherwise, when iOS mobile devices get as powerful as a desktop computer, and iOS merges into OS X or vice versa, I'll buy an iOS mobile device and use it with a large screen.
A larger screen iPad model would erode Window sales even further.
It think many digital artists would love to get their hands on a larger iPad, as long as the weight was kept in check. It would also need to have pressure sensitivity built into the hardware, either licensed from Wacom or Apple's own tech. Since I'm dreaming, why not throw in tactile feedback through the use of haptic technology to distinguish the texture of various virtual surfaces. Wacom has Cintiq, but it is a specialized purpose-built input tool that is neither portable nor inexpensive.
Comments
I would love to be able to take a small iMac off of it's stand and draw directly on it, edit photos directly on it, CAD, for music, take to school, work. There are a lot of applications that would benefit from being touch enabled that require more power that what is available on the iPad.
I can see the Mac being touch enabled sooner than later.
Steve Jobs said it best when he said, "PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around but one out of x people will need them."
Most users simply never needed all that other crap that comes with a desktop OS for their typical usage needs and the proof is the success of the iPad.
I see Apple creating a ARM based content server for the home. It will share content with ARM iDevices/screens from iPhone to AppleTV. using Airdrop and Airplay. Content creation will be done using iWork and iLife and will be saved locally as well as iCloud.
Professionals and Prosumers will still need and use Intel/OSX "trucks" with Pro level creation software: Aperture, FCP, Logic Pro etc., .
An iOS iPad-based desktop with a mouse and keyboard interface appears to be the answer to a majority of consumers who want a fairly powerful machine at home, but don't really need a full-blown PC. Arm-based, it should be cheaper than an iMac or a mini.
The ipad is very capable. It can do video. it can do word processing. It can do a lot of things a desktop can do. Take the portability out and sell it as a new line of desktop machines without touch, but with a power supply, stand, keyboard, and mouse and what do you have? Can Apple do this for less than the cost of a mini or MBAir with a display (or without)? If so, it would really be post-PC.
DED, I love what you did by making the next Mac Pro the period on the question mark but I think you missed an opportunity to really tie it together.
It doesn't make sense either, every Mac here is an all-in-one, then the odd man out Mac Pro, Mac Pro belongs in a different lineup.
And look at the internals, theres 2 GPUs in the Mac Pro, workstation, server class CPU, 1866Mhz RAM, SSD only, and buy your own monitor, its hardcore computing and sure sounds a lot more expensive than iMacs.
To me the future is convergence done well. A desktop OS requires a different GUI metaphor than a mobile one. Apple is doing this right (exceptions like the dreadful scrollbar inversion and stupid Launchpad left aside).
What I see is that the iPhone 7 or so will be able to transform into a desktop OS by hooking it up to your monitor. You essentially get an evolved version of OSX. When you disconnect, it just uses the iOS portion.
Content and settings are shared through the local and remote filesystem. Let's hope iCloud makes sense by then.
Ubuntu seems to be pursuing this idea with their Ubuntu Touch project, at the heart of which is a user interface that automatically configures itself depending on the display size. Even if their execution doesn't work out, it may be an idea worth considering by a party with more resources and existing mindshare.
Edit: quoted the wrong post.
I routinely copy gigantic HD video files between standard 5400 rpm external drives, and the difference in speed between copying USB 3.0 - to - USB 3.0 versus USB 2.0 drives is like night and day. USB 3.0 just flies. Its also a godsend when I make my weekly bare-metal MacBook Pro backups to 7200 rpm drives; I no longer have to knock myself out finding external drives with FW800 support.
Because Kasper's Automated Slave is written by idiots who know nothing about properly translating CP-1252 Extended ANSI characters to UTF-8. One way to avoid this mess when writing articles is to STOP USING MICROSOFT WORD.
Especially when they can write it in TextEdit.app or any basic VIM format and let the CMS manage the formatting.
An iOS iPad-based desktop with a mouse and keyboard interface appears to be the answer to a majority of consumers who want a fairly powerful machine at home, but don't really need a full-blown PC. Arm-based, it should be cheaper than an iMac or a mini.
The ipad is very capable. It can do video. it can do word processing. It can do a lot of things a desktop can do. Take the portability out and sell it as a new line of desktop machines without touch, but with a power supply, stand, keyboard, and mouse and what do you have? Can Apple do this for less than the cost of a mini or MBAir with a display (or without)? If so, it would really be post-PC.
Video and Word Processing on any tablet is GARBAGE next to a Desktop/Laptop and you know it.
I take your point, but, I think most people are just using the iPad for email, facebookie, photos, video and surfing. Pretty much what they were doing when they had a PC "truck" under their desk.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm using my iMac less and less and my iPhone and iPad more (Just sold my iPad 2 to get a Mini). I'm using my printer less and less. I mean a lot less!
Granted you're not going to create the movie "Gravity" on iPad, but for the vast majority of people the iPad is the future not the PC under the desk or even a laptop for that matter.
Everything I do is more fun on the iPad.
In short, you're just a consumer who never had a true need/high demand for productivity and thus the iPad/iPhone suits you, until you get to work when you actually can't get work done without the desktop/laptop.
Anyone in professional engineering, applied sciences, etc., who proclaims the iPad replaces their workstation better expect to be laughed out of their respective profession. It's not a replacement. It's another tool.
The article was written in TextEdit
Note the context of mobile devices and calm down slightly.
Profits are what drive everything in business. With fewer desktop sales each year there might be an interesting change in the computer business. Intel and AMD might stop their investment in making better desktop chips. They could shift their focus to mobile chips. With that done the existing fast desktop chips might not get updated at all. I believe such a time is coming.
I've often wondered if Apple has lingering contractual restraints for the deal Steve Jobs made with MS in the late 90s.
Another strategy would be to buy an engineering platform like Solidworks and/or autoCAD
The one thing that worries me about the new Mac Pro is I haven't heard even one word about price. I understand the maxed out one costing a pretty penny but I wonder if Apple will make one also affordable at the entry level as they used to do so often in the past. If they make an entry level model around $2,100 +/- a few hundred I could really see them selling well. If the low end basic model is over $2,500 then it will simply be overpriced for many people. I expect the fastest one with maxed Ram, HD, and top of the line GPU card to cost well over $5,000 but interested to see how many price points/configurations will be available.
Given that the Mac Pro is designed and marketed as a premium pro product targeted toward a relatively small customer base, at least as compared to the broader consumer market, and given that it is being manufactured stateside where production costs are higher, I wouldn't hold out much hope of a modest entry point. After all, the current Mac Pro starts at $2,499 w/ 6GB of memory, 1 TB hard drive, and 1 GB graphics card. I think many pro users would consider these specs to be inadequate, particularly for video production. The current high end Mac Pro maxes out at over $11,000.
Of course, many medium to large design and video production shops can likely justify the premium by recouping the investment, while small shops or individual designers cannot. That is why many creative professionals find the iMac is good enough for their needs.
Expandability is another issue entirely. One of the main arguments for the Mac Pro has been its internal expandability. It'll be interesting to see how pro users react to the new Mac Pro as it has moved expandability outside the box.
My take:
1. Notebook business will be there and desktop business will be there, they both have their own markets and both markets are essential.
2. Microsoft will come out with their next OS (which may be good) and Apple will continue to lead the standards with the next versions of OS X. Therefore, PC business will be there and so will be Mac business (the only difference will be that Macs will continue to outsell PCs at a significant rate).
3. Touch screen notebooks and desktops are ridiculous according to me. The modern computer was defined by Apple II, and it will continue to be the standard for decades to come. Computers simply have a different usage pattern and application as compared to the more intimate mobile devices. Therefore a mouse, trackpad and a keyboard are the ideal input devices on a desktop or a notebook computer, and a touchscreen is the ideal input device on a smartphone or a tablet.
4. Though convergence of OS X and iOS is possible, it will not happen, especially in a company like Apple that understands ergonomics. If you want a proof of disaster of convergence, look at Windows 8 (and it's not even a complete merger, just the UI confluence alone proved disastrous enough).
In a sense, Apple did that. If you remember how Jobs introduced the iPhone: He said, "Today we are introducing a new iPod, and new computer, and a new phone... then he repeated it several times...until the audience got that it was one device.
With regards to the Mac going away; It's the desktop Mac that is losing sales, not the laptop. Apple's laptops, especially the MBA, are doing fine. The build quality is so much better then the other brands that most of the Apple laptops eventually end up running Windows. In fact, if you check out Apple's site, it is possible to have the laptop ship to you with Windows installed, in place of OSX.
Rather then call it a post-PC world, it's more of a post-desktop world. I love it!!
I agree. I haven't owned a desktop in over a decade. The Power Mac G4 was my last desktop. It was replaced by a MacBook and then a MacBook Pro. My late 2008 Macbook Pro, upgraded with an SSD, has aged very gracefully. It benchmarks at about 25% of the current top MacBook Pro. Usage is split equally between my laptop and my iPad.
My brother-in-law, who works in the computer industry, a lifelong dedicated Windows user at home and at work, just bought a Retina MacBook Pro and loves it. He always argued cost without giving adequate weight to value. Of course value is individual and in part subjective, particularly in regards to the user experience. The only thing is, I had to remap the Control and Command keys for him. Baby steps.
Exactly!
The author of the article overlooks or ignores that even OS X Macs were never regarded as PCs. This is a post-Windows world.
Also, Microsoft proved that all that most computer "hobbiests," as they used to be known, were interested in was games. And I commend Apple for developing a high-class mobile iOS for people who only need a peashooter-powered computing device to engage in social networking, and play their games, to get them through the day.
Otherwise, when iOS mobile devices get as powerful as a desktop computer, and iOS merges into OS X or vice versa, I'll buy an iOS mobile device and use it with a large screen.
A larger screen iPad model would erode Window sales even further.
It think many digital artists would love to get their hands on a larger iPad, as long as the weight was kept in check. It would also need to have pressure sensitivity built into the hardware, either licensed from Wacom or Apple's own tech. Since I'm dreaming, why not throw in tactile feedback through the use of haptic technology to distinguish the texture of various virtual surfaces. Wacom has Cintiq, but it is a specialized purpose-built input tool that is neither portable nor inexpensive.