Have you seen the Mac Pro "theatrical trailer" actually play before a movie?
3 times so far.
If you haven't seen it, you either haven't gone to the movies this summer or you've arrived late. And I think it plays just prior to the movie previews.
Each time, my date asks, what is that? During the trailer. Each time, I was only so happy to say "just wait"
And they thought "all that for a computer? Must be really cool" or something along those lines.
Come to think of it, you can tell Apple is enticing the Hollywood production crowd quite a bit this way as well as targeting your Everyman movie goer. Pretty smart.
Looking forward to picking one up at launch. Still need price details though.
I mostly agree. When I updated from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion I ditched Office 2001 for Mac and started using Numbers for work on both my MacBook Pro and iPad. It has been a mostly pleasant and productive experience. There are, however, some odd UI and feature inconsistencies between the OS X and iOS versions, as well as some formatting translation errors. It is time Apple put some serious resources into updating iWork on both platforms and bring the iCloud version out of beta. Btw, Apple recently started offering the iOS version for free on new device purchases. I remember shopping around and finding prices ranging between $800 and $1200 for Office 2001 for Mac! It was my first and only regret when I switched from PC to Mac and briefly considered going back to Quattro Pro and Lotus 1-2-3.
Apple used to install Pro towers powering HDTV displays at every opportunity in its retail stores. The ability to set up a relatively cheap, turn key video wall of several HDTVs would be an interesting market opportunity.
They also did that in their Executive Briefing Center:
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.
1) Ironic, isn't it. A site dedicated to Apple, who puts every effort into the smallest details, and we get this crap.
2) Slavery is still in effect, This 'Kaspers' Automated Slave' was probably used in the spirit of good humor, but I'm not laughing.
3) Weird that DED always defends himself in these threads, this time telling us it's written in TextEdit.app
I hate all of you who said Apple should scale down their Mac business, how long did it take Apple to update the Mac Pro? You want that to happen to all Macs? If Apple wanted market share, they could join the race to the bottom, which means shitty Macs, so that option is no good. On the contrary, I think we all know Apple will make Retina screen iMacs and displays at some point, which means they are expanding up market, there is no need to scale down anything. Yes more people are buying iPads over Macs, so what happens if these customers want to buy a Mac at some point and find its all 4 year old hardware? Buy a Windows machine from Sony or Lenovo instead? F*** no, theres a Mac for that.
Mac desktop are doing just fine. Is this site running out of stories to write? First is Android taking over iOS and tablets...now this? Really?
Tablets can not replace desktops in serious work tasks, at least not yet. The decline in desktop numbers just reflect consumers' usage for internet connection from desktop to tablets for daily simple tasks like checking email and social media. No need to hit the panic button!
Come back again when they reports 50%+ drop in world wide sales....then we can really talk about death of personal computers.
once we've tried multi-focus touch computing, using a mouse or any trackpad flavour is counter-intuitive. the convergence seems inevitable, and knowing apple, it is already real in some secret room both ways - though probably osx will end up being a rosetta-like feature in ios more than the other way around.
convergence seems to require a gentle transition for developers, though again i trust this is already happening in most of the big names secret rooms too. it is definitely a question of time on that side. and in practice it requires the right hardware, at the right time, made right like only apple seems to be able to now. the newton was premature, and so would a flag touch-desktop at this point. but one-system is the way to go.. for me we will have the pleasure of having ghosts and aliens in the same game=). personally i cant wait
Yes more people are buying iPads over Macs, so what happens if these customers want to buy a Mac at some point and find its all 4 year old hardware? Buy a Windows machine from Sony or Lenovo instead? F*** no, theres a Mac for that.
The people who work at Apple use Macs to design their software and hardware so unless they figure out how to make iOS devices do both, they'll be sticking with Macs too. The seem to predominantly use Macbook Pros so one move I could see happening down the line is ditching desktops and just going with laptops but it depends on what the market decides.
Last year, Apple made $6b revenue from desktops (4.7m units) and $17b from laptops (13.5m units). So desktops last year represented 25% of the Mac lineup in revenue and units. The revenue there is important. Although iOS devices make up the bulk of their $157b revenue in 2012, Macs were still $23b and it was still growing in 2012. I think it will have stalled this year but there's no reason to turn off $23b of revenue.
In 2011, desktop share was 28%, in 2010, it was 35%, 2009 30%, 2008/2007 40%, 2006 45%, 2005 55%.
In 8 years, the desktop went from 55% Mac share to 25%. What if it reaches 10% and 90% of Apple's Mac sales are Macbook Air and Pro? They can choose to build whatever they want and they need headless servers but I could eventually (over 5 years away) see them just selling laptops and a mini-style ARM server - all you need for the desktop experience really is a large display. Desktop purchases might level out though. The updates will definitely slow down as consumer demand slows down.
once we've tried multi-focus touch computing, using a mouse or any trackpad flavour is counter-intuitive. the convergence seems inevitable, and knowing apple, it is already real in some secret room both ways - though probably osx will end up being a rosetta-like feature in ios more than the other way around.
convergence seems to require a gentle transition for developers, though again i trust this is already happening in most of the big names secret rooms too. it is definitely a question of time on that side. and in practice it requires the right hardware, at the right time, made right like only apple seems to be able to now. the newton was premature, and so would a flag touch-desktop at this point. but one-system is the way to go.. for me we will have the pleasure of having ghosts and aliens in the same game=). personally i cant wait
Using many applications the precision of a mouse currently is faster and more accurate than anything else for fine detail and manipulation. However, I grant you many of the things done in those same applications would be great done with gestures. I've thought for the last few years that a large screen that lay down on the desk at a shallow, comfortable angle, with OS X and also gesture control would be cool. Graphic design, video editing in the likes of , FCPro, After Effects, PS or Music Applications like LPX and so on, all with the ability to use touch or a mouse whenever and wherever you wished. The on screen contextual key boards and ability to work like 'The Minority Report' (although not on a vertical screen for day to day work for me) whilst still being able to grab a mouse if required would seem a perfect and highly adaptable, creative solution to me.
iOS is based on OSX, actually. These two operating systems were designed from the beginning to be interconnected! They're both based Unix, aren't they?
This. I don't understand the push for touch screen desktops or "convergence." It is exhausting to use a touch screen on a desktop. Where previously I could move a mouse mere millimeters I now have to extend my entire arm. It's silly. Now, I could see at some future point it being useful to have a few touch-enabled elements on a computer...maybe assign my iphone to the left "side" such that if I swipe the screen to the left it "passes" the website/pages/document directly to my phone for continued viewing on the go and vice versa, but only for brief interactions, not for continuous use. One of the advantages of computers is that we no longer have to do with sweat what we can now do with computing. Desktops that exclusively rely on touch screen at the expense of a mouse and keyboard are a step backward, not forward.
Related, I was unexpectedly given a Leap Motion device for my birthday (because I wanted to play with one but didn't want to spend the money). I was exhausted after a mere two minutes and I haven't touched it since day one (though the person who gave it to me is awesome and I love that they did). I can't imagine spending all day straining with a touch screen desktop. I think those who support the idea of touch desktops are not all that in touch with their bodies and their capabilities. For brief interactions such as swiping information to another device or even calling up weather or a clock...sure. But to replace a mouse? No. A mouse is a fine piece of technology...and the Apple touch mouse is fantastic.
I also think part of the problem with declining sales could be down to less frequent upgrades. I have a unibody macbook pro, one of the first ones, and it's coming up to 5 years old now. Yet it still runs well. I don't use it for anything highly intensive but for me needs it's perfect. I know that the new ones are much snappier at launching apps etc, but for me there isn't a need to splash some more money on a new macbook/imac. Instead I bought an iPad and find that suits the majority of my web browsing needs. Whereas my previous computer lasted me all of 3 years and was painfully slow by the end of those 3 years therefore the need for an upgrade was much higher. I could see myself upgrading my 1 year old iPad before I upgrade my 5 year old Macbook Pro.
iOS is based on OSX, actually. These two operating systems were designed from the beginning to be interconnected! They're both based Unix, aren't they?
Yes, they share some internals, but there is a fundamental difference in how the two operating systems work. iOS with its individually isolated apps has strayed quite far from the unix philosophy of letting programs work together through inter-app communication. This isn't too important for iOS's current use cases, but it can be hindering when you try to work with more than one program at a time. Here is a nice article from the iOS software firm Ink explaining this issue (http://blog.inkmobility.com/post/60759200492/what-ios-can-learn-from-unix). With OS X, you get the real deal, a bona fide certified UNIX system with full-on interprocess communication and all the standard unix command line tools. Many scientists use OS X for those unix tools. iDevices won't take over Macs until iOS bridges this gap in functionality.
“I think we should use old tech because new tech is expensive.”
False equivalence. USB 3.0 is just as much new tech as Thunderbolt is, but it's quite cheap. Thunderbolt is, OTOH, amazingly expensive.
Thunderbolt also lacks future-proofness, because:
1. Apple removed ExpressCard slots because, supposedly, only a small percentage of users were using it. However, I'd be willing to wager that the number of people using ExpressCard was many times larger than the number of people who are using Thunderbolt for anything other than displays. No one is using Thunderbolt — and we know what Apple does to technologies that no one is using.
2. Thunderbolt is tied to Intel, and Apple will probably eventually start making ARM-based Macs at some point.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Apple started removing Thunderbolt from future Mac models, and if/when that happens, all those crazy overpriced Thunderbolt devices will be $1000+ doorstops.
False equivalence. USB 3.0 is just as much new tech as Thunderbolt is…
Former doesn’t do a quarter of what the latter does. It’s old tech and you know it. USB as a format–as a physical construct–has been around since ’96. “It’s faster” doesn’t make it new tech.
Thunderbolt also lacks future-proofness, because:
1. Apple removed ExpressCard slots because, supposedly, only a small percentage of users were using it. However, I'd be willing to wager that the number of people using ExpressCard was many times larger than the number of people who are using Thunderbolt for anything other than displays. No one is using Thunderbolt — and we know what Apple does to technologies that no one is using.
2. Thunderbolt is tied to Intel, and Apple will probably eventually start making ARM-based Macs at some point.
1. Having what to do with Thunderbolt at all? Thanks for proving you know what everyone (rather “no one”) is doing¡
2. Yeah, that co-development sure wouldn’t let Apple do anything with the format, huh¡
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Apple started removing Thunderbolt from future Mac models, and if/when that happens, all those crazy overpriced Thunderbolt devices will be $1000+ doorstops.
once we've tried multi-focus touch computing, using a mouse or any trackpad flavour is counter-intuitive. the convergence seems inevitable, and knowing apple, it is already real in some secret room both ways - though probably osx will end up being a rosetta-like feature in ios more than the other way around.
convergence seems to require a gentle transition for developers, though again i trust this is already happening in most of the big names secret rooms too. it is definitely a question of time on that side. and in practice it requires the right hardware, at the right time, made right like only apple seems to be able to now. the newton was premature, and so would a flag touch-desktop at this point. but one-system is the way to go.. for me we will have the pleasure of having ghosts and aliens in the same game=). personally i cant wait
I feel the same way. Multitouch renders indirect control obsolete. This is especially obvious when you consider that you can implement indirect control (such as a trackpad) in multitouch. Multitouch is perfectly suited for Apple's pro apps, since they're all essentially decks of controls. Precision control can be solved in a multitouch UI in many different ways. Apple could have released a large, horizontally placed multitouch screen for the Mac for this kind of thing. I think the reason they haven't is only because they have bigger plans. As usual, they want to do it right.
I don't think any of the reasons people cite against multitouch displacing indirect control make sense. Software and hardware limitations will go away. Larger screens will come. Multitouch devices can be combined with other displays and hardware keyboards. Precision control can be solved in software for different tasks. Most pro apps are things that are either obviously better with multitouch (video editing, music, etc) or that many people use with a Wacom tablet already (photoshop, etc). Software development just needs some changes in the OS and the addition of a hardware keyboard (although I'd like to see Apple experiment with touch-based development; touch can solve a lot of the problems with non-text-based development environments). All of this is technically feasible now - just make a horizontal iMac - although perhaps not in the most elegant way. The issue for Apple, I imagine, is that the MacBook would be replaced with some sort of iPad Pro, and it doesn't make sense to build a multitouch workstation until you have moved all portable computing to tablets, since the portable market is bigger.
For the average consumer the Mac still works well as a home-hub for everything else you might be carrying around, and will remain so for at least the next few years. There's really no alternative to that 'hub' at the moment...maybe if Apple releases a full-fledged smart-TV with large amounts of on board storage, or much better (faster, reliable and secure) access to iCloud storage then things will change.
Comments
3 times so far.
If you haven't seen it, you either haven't gone to the movies this summer or you've arrived late. And I think it plays just prior to the movie previews.
Each time, my date asks, what is that? During the trailer. Each time, I was only so happy to say "just wait"
And they thought "all that for a computer? Must be really cool" or something along those lines.
Come to think of it, you can tell Apple is enticing the Hollywood production crowd quite a bit this way as well as targeting your Everyman movie goer. Pretty smart.
Looking forward to picking one up at launch. Still need price details though.
iOS7 and OSX iLife/iWork are wonderful.
I mostly agree. When I updated from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion I ditched Office 2001 for Mac and started using Numbers for work on both my MacBook Pro and iPad. It has been a mostly pleasant and productive experience. There are, however, some odd UI and feature inconsistencies between the OS X and iOS versions, as well as some formatting translation errors. It is time Apple put some serious resources into updating iWork on both platforms and bring the iCloud version out of beta. Btw, Apple recently started offering the iOS version for free on new device purchases. I remember shopping around and finding prices ranging between $800 and $1200 for Office 2001 for Mac! It was my first and only regret when I switched from PC to Mac and briefly considered going back to Quattro Pro and Lotus 1-2-3.
They also did that in their Executive Briefing Center:
.ac wouldn't be of any use over .n because the bottleneck is with the NAND controller.
1) Ironic, isn't it. A site dedicated to Apple, who puts every effort into the smallest details, and we get this crap.
2) Slavery is still in effect, This 'Kaspers' Automated Slave' was probably used in the spirit of good humor, but I'm not laughing.
3) Weird that DED always defends himself in these threads, this time telling us it's written in TextEdit.app
I hate all of you who said Apple should scale down their Mac business, how long did it take Apple to update the Mac Pro? You want that to happen to all Macs? If Apple wanted market share, they could join the race to the bottom, which means shitty Macs, so that option is no good. On the contrary, I think we all know Apple will make Retina screen iMacs and displays at some point, which means they are expanding up market, there is no need to scale down anything. Yes more people are buying iPads over Macs, so what happens if these customers want to buy a Mac at some point and find its all 4 year old hardware? Buy a Windows machine from Sony or Lenovo instead? F*** no, theres a Mac for that.
Mac desktop are doing just fine. Is this site running out of stories to write? First is Android taking over iOS and tablets...now this? Really?
Tablets can not replace desktops in serious work tasks, at least not yet. The decline in desktop numbers just reflect consumers' usage for internet connection from desktop to tablets for daily simple tasks like checking email and social media. No need to hit the panic button!
Come back again when they reports 50%+ drop in world wide sales....then we can really talk about death of personal computers.
PC will be around for a long time. These are serious computers not i pad minis which to me is just a joke!
once we've tried multi-focus touch computing, using a mouse or any trackpad flavour is counter-intuitive. the convergence seems inevitable, and knowing apple, it is already real in some secret room both ways - though probably osx will end up being a rosetta-like feature in ios more than the other way around.
convergence seems to require a gentle transition for developers, though again i trust this is already happening in most of the big names secret rooms too. it is definitely a question of time on that side. and in practice it requires the right hardware, at the right time, made right like only apple seems to be able to now. the newton was premature, and so would a flag touch-desktop at this point. but one-system is the way to go.. for me we will have the pleasure of having ghosts and aliens in the same game=). personally i cant wait
The people who work at Apple use Macs to design their software and hardware so unless they figure out how to make iOS devices do both, they'll be sticking with Macs too. The seem to predominantly use Macbook Pros so one move I could see happening down the line is ditching desktops and just going with laptops but it depends on what the market decides.
Last year, Apple made $6b revenue from desktops (4.7m units) and $17b from laptops (13.5m units). So desktops last year represented 25% of the Mac lineup in revenue and units. The revenue there is important. Although iOS devices make up the bulk of their $157b revenue in 2012, Macs were still $23b and it was still growing in 2012. I think it will have stalled this year but there's no reason to turn off $23b of revenue.
In 2011, desktop share was 28%, in 2010, it was 35%, 2009 30%, 2008/2007 40%, 2006 45%, 2005 55%.
In 8 years, the desktop went from 55% Mac share to 25%. What if it reaches 10% and 90% of Apple's Mac sales are Macbook Air and Pro? They can choose to build whatever they want and they need headless servers but I could eventually (over 5 years away) see them just selling laptops and a mini-style ARM server - all you need for the desktop experience really is a large display. Desktop purchases might level out though. The updates will definitely slow down as consumer demand slows down.
Using many applications the precision of a mouse currently is faster and more accurate than anything else for fine detail and manipulation. However, I grant you many of the things done in those same applications would be great done with gestures. I've thought for the last few years that a large screen that lay down on the desk at a shallow, comfortable angle, with OS X and also gesture control would be cool. Graphic design, video editing in the likes of , FCPro, After Effects, PS or Music Applications like LPX and so on, all with the ability to use touch or a mouse whenever and wherever you wished. The on screen contextual key boards and ability to work like 'The Minority Report' (although not on a vertical screen for day to day work for me) whilst still being able to grab a mouse if required would seem a perfect and highly adaptable, creative solution to me.
iOS is based on OSX, actually. These two operating systems were designed from the beginning to be interconnected! They're both based Unix, aren't they?
Look forward to your Gorilla arm
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-touch-screens-will-not-take-over
This. I don't understand the push for touch screen desktops or "convergence." It is exhausting to use a touch screen on a desktop. Where previously I could move a mouse mere millimeters I now have to extend my entire arm. It's silly. Now, I could see at some future point it being useful to have a few touch-enabled elements on a computer...maybe assign my iphone to the left "side" such that if I swipe the screen to the left it "passes" the website/pages/document directly to my phone for continued viewing on the go and vice versa, but only for brief interactions, not for continuous use. One of the advantages of computers is that we no longer have to do with sweat what we can now do with computing. Desktops that exclusively rely on touch screen at the expense of a mouse and keyboard are a step backward, not forward.
Related, I was unexpectedly given a Leap Motion device for my birthday (because I wanted to play with one but didn't want to spend the money). I was exhausted after a mere two minutes and I haven't touched it since day one (though the person who gave it to me is awesome and I love that they did). I can't imagine spending all day straining with a touch screen desktop. I think those who support the idea of touch desktops are not all that in touch with their bodies and their capabilities. For brief interactions such as swiping information to another device or even calling up weather or a clock...sure. But to replace a mouse? No. A mouse is a fine piece of technology...and the Apple touch mouse is fantastic.
I also think part of the problem with declining sales could be down to less frequent upgrades. I have a unibody macbook pro, one of the first ones, and it's coming up to 5 years old now. Yet it still runs well. I don't use it for anything highly intensive but for me needs it's perfect. I know that the new ones are much snappier at launching apps etc, but for me there isn't a need to splash some more money on a new macbook/imac. Instead I bought an iPad and find that suits the majority of my web browsing needs. Whereas my previous computer lasted me all of 3 years and was painfully slow by the end of those 3 years therefore the need for an upgrade was much higher. I could see myself upgrading my 1 year old iPad before I upgrade my 5 year old Macbook Pro.
iOS is based on OSX, actually. These two operating systems were designed from the beginning to be interconnected! They're both based Unix, aren't they?
Yes, they share some internals, but there is a fundamental difference in how the two operating systems work. iOS with its individually isolated apps has strayed quite far from the unix philosophy of letting programs work together through inter-app communication. This isn't too important for iOS's current use cases, but it can be hindering when you try to work with more than one program at a time. Here is a nice article from the iOS software firm Ink explaining this issue (http://blog.inkmobility.com/post/60759200492/what-ios-can-learn-from-unix). With OS X, you get the real deal, a bona fide certified UNIX system with full-on interprocess communication and all the standard unix command line tools. Many scientists use OS X for those unix tools. iDevices won't take over Macs until iOS bridges this gap in functionality.
Thunderbolt also lacks future-proofness, because:
1. Apple removed ExpressCard slots because, supposedly, only a small percentage of users were using it. However, I'd be willing to wager that the number of people using ExpressCard was many times larger than the number of people who are using Thunderbolt for anything other than displays. No one is using Thunderbolt — and we know what Apple does to technologies that no one is using.
2. Thunderbolt is tied to Intel, and Apple will probably eventually start making ARM-based Macs at some point.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Apple started removing Thunderbolt from future Mac models, and if/when that happens, all those crazy overpriced Thunderbolt devices will be $1000+ doorstops.
Today ant the next view years, Apple will still invest in the Mac business.
Does anybody know a better mobile solution than the Air or a MBP?
Nope!
Former doesn’t do a quarter of what the latter does. It’s old tech and you know it. USB as a format–as a physical construct–has been around since ’96. “It’s faster” doesn’t make it new tech.
1. Apple removed ExpressCard slots because, supposedly, only a small percentage of users were using it. However, I'd be willing to wager that the number of people using ExpressCard was many times larger than the number of people who are using Thunderbolt for anything other than displays. No one is using Thunderbolt — and we know what Apple does to technologies that no one is using.
2. Thunderbolt is tied to Intel, and Apple will probably eventually start making ARM-based Macs at some point.
1. Having what to do with Thunderbolt at all? Thanks for proving you know what everyone (rather “no one”) is doing¡
2. Yeah, that co-development sure wouldn’t let Apple do anything with the format, huh¡
Prepare to never be surprised.
I feel the same way. Multitouch renders indirect control obsolete. This is especially obvious when you consider that you can implement indirect control (such as a trackpad) in multitouch. Multitouch is perfectly suited for Apple's pro apps, since they're all essentially decks of controls. Precision control can be solved in a multitouch UI in many different ways. Apple could have released a large, horizontally placed multitouch screen for the Mac for this kind of thing. I think the reason they haven't is only because they have bigger plans. As usual, they want to do it right.
I don't think any of the reasons people cite against multitouch displacing indirect control make sense. Software and hardware limitations will go away. Larger screens will come. Multitouch devices can be combined with other displays and hardware keyboards. Precision control can be solved in software for different tasks. Most pro apps are things that are either obviously better with multitouch (video editing, music, etc) or that many people use with a Wacom tablet already (photoshop, etc). Software development just needs some changes in the OS and the addition of a hardware keyboard (although I'd like to see Apple experiment with touch-based development; touch can solve a lot of the problems with non-text-based development environments). All of this is technically feasible now - just make a horizontal iMac - although perhaps not in the most elegant way. The issue for Apple, I imagine, is that the MacBook would be replaced with some sort of iPad Pro, and it doesn't make sense to build a multitouch workstation until you have moved all portable computing to tablets, since the portable market is bigger.
LOL
Microsoft rules the PC world while Apple rules the tablet/smartphone world.