This decline in sales isn't due to the Mini and Mac Pro options. They sell in too small volumes to be impactful. ASP on the MP is likely ~$5k and 100k units per year would be $0.5b and it's not going to be 100k units per year. This is out of $22b Mac sales. Mac Mini could be ~1.5m units at $700 ASP, which is ~$1b. These segments might have fallen in volume but not to zero.
I'd expect a more impactful thing on the Mac side would be the Macbook starting at $1299 vs the Air at $999. The Air doesn't have a Retina display and the MB is $300 more, which is mostly due to the SSD starting at 256GB. A 128GB Macbook at $1099 and having them with 2 USB C ports and dropping the Air might have made for better sales. Only Apple can tell which models caused the drop this year so they can make decisions about correcting it next year.
Currently the Mac Pro has E5v2 (up to 12-core) and D700 (which is roughly a W9000 Tahiti GPU). If it had been updated to the latest available hardware, it would have E5v4 (up to 18-core, 50% faster because higher than this is above the price range they've used, 36-core would cost $7k just for the CPUs) and they could have used a Fiji AMD GPU. There's a list of GPUs in this range here:
If the Mac Pro is to be refreshed, it looks like it is waiting on the Purley/Skylake-EP platform mid-2017 (the first link is an old article but shows the roadmap, XPoint isn't coming with the first gen now though):
Skylake-EP (over 20-core) plus some 16-18TFLOP Vega setup with 16GB HBM memory available around WWDC 2017.
The Mini can get a Skylake update but I doubt it will until the iMac line gets properly refreshed and that could be waiting for AMD's Radeon M490. They might just wait until Kaby Lake now.
It's not nice that the Mac line keeps getting ignored but people are on really long upgrade cycles now so 3 year refresh cycles for the lowest selling models shouldn't be all that surprising. An upgrade is only really worthwhile if it increases by 2x in performance so it makes sense that the Mac Pro would wait until it could move from 12 to 24-core and 7TFLOP GPU to 16-18TFLOP. This way Schiller is able to use all the superlatives in the presentation.
They could also drop both the Mac Pro and Mini and stick with laptops and iMacs and it would make almost zero difference to their earnings and people should expect that this is pretty much inevitable at some point. There's value in another MP refresh but once a future iMac reaches the performance of that, there really isn't and nobody really knows what the industry is going to do after 6 years when there aren't CPU advances to move to. One day chip manufacturers will have no choice but to keep making the exact same chips every year and people will use the machine they have until it dies, which in a lot of cases will be about 10 years, like a TV or microwave upgrade cycle. People who need 100-cores, 200-cores will just buy more machines and GPUs will be taking over a lot of computation.
Kaby Lake chips should be available for refreshes February-April and Skylake/Vega for the MP around June.
I was not expecting that this topic would turn into analytics of my company. Although, I don't owe anyone any explanations, I will provide some further insight into my previous comments.
First off the math: -We are not Walt Disney. I said, we are a small company. -We have 8 Mac Pros. -Before 2010, we would typically upgrade our machines every 2 years -Its 2017 so we missed 3 typical upgrade cycles. 3 x $80k = $240 000.00. I apologize. I was $60k away from using the word "several" hundreds of thousands. I did not actually sit down and do the math when I typed it. I never thought it would be a point of controversy, that I would be called on it, or it was meaningful in anyway.
Technical reasons Why we haven't upgraded: - In our business, Its all about the CPU - As mentioned. we typically update every 2 years and on average were seeing a doubling of performance at each upgrade. - 2012 cycle - First time we skipped because the 2012 MacPro's had very little improvement in terms of CPU - 2013 update - Looked cool but I didn't care what it looked like. They chose to remove a CPU which ultimately meant they could have offered a 24 core system but decided to go with 12 for the sake of making it smaller . Bottom line, very little improvement in CPU. Not worth spending 80k for no reason. - 2014 update - Understood it was not about me and learned to be okay with 1 CPU. Lots of rumors about Intels new E5v3 with 16 cores as a direct replacement part. Great... We will update to these. but they never appeared - 2015 update - E5v3 with 16 cores is for sure out... just waiting for the right keynote to get it in the MacPro. Phill's comment about innovating his ass and that this is the platform for the next ten years lead me to believe that they had the interest of simply inserting new CPU's with the same socket - 2016 update - Now furious. E5v4 with 22 cores is out. Surely they will update the MacPro. Tim continues to tell us how important the Mac is. New "Hello" event. Surely they will upgrade the MacPro there. Nope. -2017 update - More vague promises about how important the Mac is but this time he used the word "desktops" so maybe. yet here we are 7 years later, and there is very little improvement over our 2010 macPro's.
Why haven't we switched yet: - I mentioned a few things in my post 170 of some of the reasons why, so I won't repeat those - First off I never said that we are going bankrupt. We are doing great. I said, after stalling for 6 years, we are starting to notice that we are falling behind the quality that our competition can produce (more CPU allows them to crank up the realism. Its not enough for clients to notice but we notice and if we keep on this path, then yah, we will start losing clients. We are also aware that our competitors are experimenting with VR. If we don't start learning this, again, we will start to lose clients. So now, GPU's are important to us too. As of Jan 2017, the $10k MacPro is a joke for VR. - As a kid. The 128k Mac was my very first computer. It was so far ahead of the pack at that time and made a huge impact on my life. Lets just say I put all of my eggs in that basket and built a pretty decent sized company for myself. I make a really good living and I'm happy with what I do and the people I'm around. - By putting all my eggs in that basket, I did not learn windows or linux. I'm not saying I can't learn them, but until now, I have had no reason to do so because things have been great the past 32 years. - A lot of people working for me that I love like family are also in this position of only knowing Mac.
I don't want to go into my entire life storey so I think the small snap shot above is enough to make my point. I do think you calling me incompetent is a fair assessment in terms of soaking up every last drop of performance and profit from my company. No sane person would still be using MacPros for this. But at this point in my life, its not all about the money. I'm comfortable and enjoy my work. Learning the ins and outs of windows and/or linux to be good enough to not disrupt the company when something goes wrong is not something I would enjoy. It adds another layer of complexity which I would like to avoid if possible. As the saying goes, if it aint broke, don't fix it. We are at a cross roads. I believed their words that the Mac was important or more so I didn't want to believe the party is over. 6 years of stall is incompetence on my part and we can no longer masquerade the speed differences and advancements that our competitors have. I can not allow Apple to keep stringing us along. March is D-Day. Although, I enjoy how things are, its swim or sink time.
I would like to end by saying. I'm not sure how this turned into talking about me and this will be the last words I say about myself as it is irrelevant to the conversation. If it makes you feel better to call me names, go for it, it doesn't bother me. You have no idea who I am, nor have you waked a step in my shoes. In the end, my life or my company has nothing to do with me saying, in my opinion the current MacPro is an embarrassment. You are free to disagree with my opinion if you wish. cheers.
Technical reasons Why we haven't upgraded: - In our business, Its all about the CPU ... - 2013 update - Looked cool but I didn't care what it looked like. They chose to remove a CPU which ultimately meant they could have offered a 24 core system but decided to go with 12 for the sake of making it smaller . Bottom line, very little improvement in CPU. Not worth spending 80k for no reason.
35% CPU performance increase. That's not "very little". That's like getting an extra day every work week.
You aren't owed double.
Whether completing your work 35% faster or with a higher render quality was worth $80K depends but the assertion that Apple gave you no viable upgrade path for six years is flat out wrong and your venom for Apple unwarranted.
Even buying a couple of the 2013 machines in 2013 to augment the 8 you had would have helped you. Yea, it's late now but its not Apples fault you skipped an upgrade cycle that you shouldn't have.
Apple never strung you along.
They are a year and a half late with an update. There maybe should have been one mid/late 2015ish. There may or may not be a MP update in 2017 but not likely before June so you might as well abandon Apple now because they aren't shipping any updated MPs by March (a date pulled out of the collective rears of a few analysts). They aren't likely to use the Broadwell Xeons so Skylake-W as Marvin suggests. Man the screaming if the 2017 update was just to the broadwell would be deafening.
Why do I think you'll still be here in April complaining how Apple is stringing you along?
Technical reasons Why we haven't upgraded: - In our business, Its all about the CPU ... - 2013 update - Looked cool but I didn't care what it looked like. They chose to remove a CPU which ultimately meant they could have offered a 24 core system but decided to go with 12 for the sake of making it smaller . Bottom line, very little improvement in CPU. Not worth spending 80k for no reason.
35% CPU performance increase. That's not "very little". […]
To make matters worse, he's clearly stated all those Mac Pros he's actively not upgraded are "all about the CPU," unlike most Mac users that aren't pushing their CPUs to perform at their highest capacity for extended periods daily, so he's choosing to lose money to spite Apple.
What's interesting is that if these strictures were applied to the rest of the industry, executive offices would look like a barren wasteland industry-wide. Especially at Microsoft.
Apple execs get a pay cut for a slight decline in performance, yet Nadella still has a job at Microstupid.
And that is exactly how it should be. I like that Apple punishes its executives when they fail to hit their targets, and does so in public.
The company made a number of uncharacteristic missteps in 2016, the biggest of which was allowing bloggers and whiners to take control of the narrative.
They were far too passive. I might go as far as to say, resting on their laurels.
FOR APPLE, that's fair enough. Apple being held to high standards and holding their feet to the fire accordingly is something I can't really dispute as long as it's reasonable.
What's interesting is that if these strictures were applied to the rest of the industry, executive offices would look like a barren wasteland industry-wide. Especially at Microsoft.
Apple execs get a pay cut for a slight decline in performance, yet Nadella still has a job at Microstupid.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but hasn't Microsoft actually done pretty well financially since Nadella took over? Stock is up about 90 percent since he took over in February 2014.
Stock is doing well, money's being made. And in terms of a balance sheet, that's all that matters.
Surely, if there were suddenly billions of dollars to be made in rubber dogshit and MS shifted 90% of their focus to that, and made a killing on it, I'd say they're doing very well in terms of their balance sheet.
Except they'd have ceded a massive part of the market (say, mobile) to the competition.
Anyone can make money from anything, including all the *wrong* things.
Which is fine. But it leaves all the folks waiting for, expecting, desperately wanting, a viable mobile platform from Microsoft, with rubber dogshit.
What's interesting is that if these strictures were applied to the rest of the industry, executive offices would look like a barren wasteland industry-wide. Especially at Microsoft.
Apple execs get a pay cut for a slight decline in performance, yet Nadella still has a job at Microstupid.
Since Nadella has taken over at Microsoft, the share price has increased significantly. When Nadella was hired, Microsoft's share price was about $38 a share and now it's over $60 and still climbing. During that same period, Apple did peak for a short while but now it's down and flatlined. Investors don't tend to fire CEOs when they're increasing shareholder wealth. Apple should have been able to hold the momentum with all that reserve cash they had, but instead gave nearly all their gains back with nothing new on the horizon to change investor confidence. Microsoft shouldn't be doing as well as it is, but Wall Street absolutely loves the cloud business citing unlimited growth. Apple decided to go with AppleWatch and I and many others think it turned out to be a poor decision.
Hey in this biz you're only as good as your previous quarter, anyway.
But really only Apple gets that reminder in big, red letters, especially publicly. But who am I to say boo, if it keeps them honest in the long run, I'll have no complaints.
Apple's profit under Cook, however, has been enormous, while the stock price reflects a metric ass-ton of variable, confused nonsense, for which Apple isn't responsible.
They are not focused on Innovation, the iwatch was a failure. Instead of focusing on VR and being a leader in that they are taking a back seat. Instead of making their laptop and computer screens touchscreen, they make more expensive iPads. Instead of being a leader in home automation they took a back seat to google and amazon. They havent updated their mac pro line in several years now. Their computers receive marginal upgrades and the prices go up. If I was an investor, I would have dumped this a year ago, even with it trading near all time highs now. So many other great investments out there, even AMZN and NVDA have outperformed AAPL. Apple has absolutely built a great infrastructure around movies and music but its going to be cannibalized by Amazon Prime and other streaming services. Tim Cook has proven he isnt a Steve Jobs.
What does failure even mean? The Apple Watch is dominating the smart watch market, and their competitors have been selling watches for way longer. And you try to tell me with a straight face that the Apple Watch isn't innovative? You picked the wrong forum to anti-Apple diatribe. Too many nerds like me here.
Comments
I'd expect a more impactful thing on the Mac side would be the Macbook starting at $1299 vs the Air at $999. The Air doesn't have a Retina display and the MB is $300 more, which is mostly due to the SSD starting at 256GB. A 128GB Macbook at $1099 and having them with 2 USB C ports and dropping the Air might have made for better sales. Only Apple can tell which models caused the drop this year so they can make decisions about correcting it next year.
Currently the Mac Pro has E5v2 (up to 12-core) and D700 (which is roughly a W9000 Tahiti GPU). If it had been updated to the latest available hardware, it would have E5v4 (up to 18-core, 50% faster because higher than this is above the price range they've used, 36-core would cost $7k just for the CPUs) and they could have used a Fiji AMD GPU. There's a list of GPUs in this range here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10209/amd-announces-firepro-s9300-x2
The 3.2TFLOP S9000 Tahiti is close to what the MP has. The dual Fiji there is 13.9TFLOP.
The Mini currently has:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i5-4260U-Notebook-Processor.115082.0.html
and could have:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i5-6360U-Notebook-Processor.149856.0.html
30% faster CPU, 100% faster GPU.
If the Mac Pro is to be refreshed, it looks like it is waiting on the Purley/Skylake-EP platform mid-2017 (the first link is an old article but shows the roadmap, XPoint isn't coming with the first gen now though):
http://wccftech.com/massive-intel-xeon-e5-xeon-e7-skylake-purley-biggest-advancement-nehalem/
http://semiaccurate.com/2016/11/17/intel-preferentially-offers-two-customers-skylake-xeon-cpus/
AMD has finished with the FirePro branding so it's now Radeon Pro:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/marcochiappetta/2016/07/27/amd-retires-firepro-announces-polaris-based-radeon-pro-wx-professional-graphics-products/
These Polaris models actually don't look very good (5.7TFLOPs, GDDR5):
http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/graphics/workstation/firepro-3d/wx7100
Vega looks better and even the older Fiji S9300x2, the following site says it might be June when Vega is available:
http://www.pcgamer.com/amd-vega-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-next-gpu-architecture/
Skylake-EP (over 20-core) plus some 16-18TFLOP Vega setup with 16GB HBM memory available around WWDC 2017.
The Mini can get a Skylake update but I doubt it will until the iMac line gets properly refreshed and that could be waiting for AMD's Radeon M490. They might just wait until Kaby Lake now.
It's not nice that the Mac line keeps getting ignored but people are on really long upgrade cycles now so 3 year refresh cycles for the lowest selling models shouldn't be all that surprising. An upgrade is only really worthwhile if it increases by 2x in performance so it makes sense that the Mac Pro would wait until it could move from 12 to 24-core and 7TFLOP GPU to 16-18TFLOP. This way Schiller is able to use all the superlatives in the presentation.
They could also drop both the Mac Pro and Mini and stick with laptops and iMacs and it would make almost zero difference to their earnings and people should expect that this is pretty much inevitable at some point. There's value in another MP refresh but once a future iMac reaches the performance of that, there really isn't and nobody really knows what the industry is going to do after 6 years when there aren't CPU advances to move to. One day chip manufacturers will have no choice but to keep making the exact same chips every year and people will use the machine they have until it dies, which in a lot of cases will be about 10 years, like a TV or microwave upgrade cycle. People who need 100-cores, 200-cores will just buy more machines and GPUs will be taking over a lot of computation.
Kaby Lake chips should be available for refreshes February-April and Skylake/Vega for the MP around June.
I was not expecting that this topic would turn into analytics of my company. Although, I don't owe anyone any explanations, I will provide some further insight into my previous comments.
First off the math:
-We are not Walt Disney. I said, we are a small company.
-We have 8 Mac Pros.
-Before 2010, we would typically upgrade our machines every 2 years
-Its 2017 so we missed 3 typical upgrade cycles. 3 x $80k = $240 000.00. I apologize. I was $60k away from using the word "several" hundreds of thousands. I did not actually sit down and do the math when I typed it. I never thought it would be a point of controversy, that I would be called on it, or it was meaningful in anyway.
Technical reasons Why we haven't upgraded:
- In our business, Its all about the CPU
- As mentioned. we typically update every 2 years and on average were seeing a doubling of performance at each upgrade.
- 2012 cycle - First time we skipped because the 2012 MacPro's had very little improvement in terms of CPU
- 2013 update - Looked cool but I didn't care what it looked like. They chose to remove a CPU which ultimately meant they could have offered a 24 core system but decided to go with 12 for the sake of making it smaller . Bottom line, very little improvement in CPU. Not worth spending 80k for no reason.
- 2014 update - Understood it was not about me and learned to be okay with 1 CPU. Lots of rumors about Intels new E5v3 with 16 cores as a direct replacement part. Great... We will update to these. but they never appeared
- 2015 update - E5v3 with 16 cores is for sure out... just waiting for the right keynote to get it in the MacPro. Phill's comment about innovating his ass and that this is the platform for the next ten years lead me to believe that they had the interest of simply inserting new CPU's with the same socket
- 2016 update - Now furious. E5v4 with 22 cores is out. Surely they will update the MacPro. Tim continues to tell us how important the Mac is. New "Hello" event. Surely they will upgrade the MacPro there. Nope.
-2017 update - More vague promises about how important the Mac is but this time he used the word "desktops" so maybe. yet here we are 7 years later, and there is very little improvement over our 2010 macPro's.
Why haven't we switched yet:
- I mentioned a few things in my post 170 of some of the reasons why, so I won't repeat those
- First off I never said that we are going bankrupt. We are doing great. I said, after stalling for 6 years, we are starting to notice that we are falling behind the quality that our competition can produce (more CPU allows them to crank up the realism. Its not enough for clients to notice but we notice and if we keep on this path, then yah, we will start losing clients. We are also aware that our competitors are experimenting with VR. If we don't start learning this, again, we will start to lose clients. So now, GPU's are important to us too. As of Jan 2017, the $10k MacPro is a joke for VR.
- As a kid. The 128k Mac was my very first computer. It was so far ahead of the pack at that time and made a huge impact on my life. Lets just say I put all of my eggs in that basket and built a pretty decent sized company for myself. I make a really good living and I'm happy with what I do and the people I'm around.
- By putting all my eggs in that basket, I did not learn windows or linux. I'm not saying I can't learn them, but until now, I have had no reason to do so because things have been great the past 32 years.
- A lot of people working for me that I love like family are also in this position of only knowing Mac.
I don't want to go into my entire life storey so I think the small snap shot above is enough to make my point. I do think you calling me incompetent is a fair assessment in terms of soaking up every last drop of performance and profit from my company. No sane person would still be using MacPros for this. But at this point in my life, its not all about the money. I'm comfortable and enjoy my work. Learning the ins and outs of windows and/or linux to be good enough to not disrupt the company when something goes wrong is not something I would enjoy. It adds another layer of complexity which I would like to avoid if possible. As the saying goes, if it aint broke, don't fix it. We are at a cross roads. I believed their words that the Mac was important or more so I didn't want to believe the party is over. 6 years of stall is incompetence on my part and we can no longer masquerade the speed differences and advancements that our competitors have. I can not allow Apple to keep stringing us along. March is D-Day. Although, I enjoy how things are, its swim or sink time.
I would like to end by saying. I'm not sure how this turned into talking about me and this will be the last words I say about myself as it is irrelevant to the conversation. If it makes you feel better to call me names, go for it, it doesn't bother me. You have no idea who I am, nor have you waked a step in my shoes. In the end, my life or my company has nothing to do with me saying, in my opinion the current MacPro is an embarrassment. You are free to disagree with my opinion if you wish. cheers.
2013 MacPro MultiCore 23,163
35% CPU performance increase. That's not "very little". That's like getting an extra day every work week.
You aren't owed double.
Whether completing your work 35% faster or with a higher render quality was worth $80K depends but the assertion that Apple gave you no viable upgrade path for six years is flat out wrong and your venom for Apple unwarranted.
Even buying a couple of the 2013 machines in 2013 to augment the 8 you had would have helped you. Yea, it's late now but its not Apples fault you skipped an upgrade cycle that you shouldn't have.
Apple never strung you along.
They are a year and a half late with an update. There maybe should have been one mid/late 2015ish. There may or may not be a MP update in 2017 but not likely before June so you might as well abandon Apple now because they aren't shipping any updated MPs by March (a date pulled out of the collective rears of a few analysts). They aren't likely to use the Broadwell Xeons so Skylake-W as Marvin suggests. Man the screaming if the 2017 update was just to the broadwell would be deafening.
Why do I think you'll still be here in April complaining how Apple is stringing you along?
Stock is doing well, money's being made. And in terms of a balance sheet, that's all that matters.
Surely, if there were suddenly billions of dollars to be made in rubber dogshit and MS shifted 90% of their focus to that, and made a killing on it, I'd say they're doing very well in terms of their balance sheet.
Except they'd have ceded a massive part of the market (say, mobile) to the competition.
Anyone can make money from anything, including all the *wrong* things.
Which is fine. But it leaves all the folks waiting for, expecting, desperately wanting, a viable mobile platform from Microsoft, with rubber dogshit.
Oh well.
Hey in this biz you're only as good as your previous quarter, anyway.
But really only Apple gets that reminder in big, red letters, especially publicly. But who am I to say boo, if it keeps them honest in the long run, I'll have no complaints.
Apple's profit under Cook, however, has been enormous, while the stock price reflects a metric ass-ton of variable, confused nonsense, for which Apple isn't responsible.