KidGloves

Blah, Blah, Blah Daniel... For all the money Apple generates from Mac sales you would think they could offer an option in the middle ground between the Mini and the Pro. Dell, HP and the rest can sell LOADS of different product lines and still make a profit. A Mac user has only one place to go to buy a Mac and Apple offers severely limited choices. Imagine if BMW offered only the 1 Series, 2 Series, and the 7 Series. That's the state of desktop Mac options. 

I'm sick reading you banging on about how smart and profitable Apple is. As you say, the Mac division on its own would be a Fortune 500 company. When did they last truly innovate? Have you seen some of the recent PC hardware? It might not all be perfect but they try. Apple design for me has been getting lazy for years. The whole trash can Mac Pro was possibly the worst bit of design in Apple's history. All the users wanted was a powerful box they could stick under their desks, maybe fit some cards into for specialist pro tasks, and not really think about at all. Instead, they got something that's beautiful to look (well at least until it has wires spewing out all over the place) but not much more useful than a Mac Mini for professional tasks. It's then left for years without a single update. Absolutely crazy for a Fortune 500 sized outfit.

The new Pro looks amazing but it's targeted at a very small niche audience. I and a lot of people like me need something bigger than a Mini and smaller than a Pro. A Mac Middle if you will...

One thing we have to remember here is that Apple is the SOLE provider of the hardware. We have no choice than to go with what they give us and I'm really losing patience with them. There are a load of PC manufacturers that will sell you a big box with plenty of room for expansion so every possible user is covered. Some fully specced PC's sell for well over $50k. You might say that it's a small market but Mac users have no choice at all in this department and it would be SO easy for Apple to fix it.

Apple is the most valuable company in the world. If they can't offer a line for pros one has to ask why not? The PC guys can. It's not hard. Big case. Plenty of slots and ports. Decent power supply. Job done. Apple could do this easily. Small PC outfits can to it easily at a profit. What can't Apple?

What's bugging the lift out of me is Apple's obsession with small. In everything. The 2013 Pro was a disaster because of this. I don't want a lovely, delicate machine that needs additional boxes for expansion and ends up with wires and plugs everywhere. It's going under my desk FFS. I don't care what it looks like.

Why doesn't Apple spin off a Mac hardware division that offers Pro boxes? If the market is that small it won't effect what they do just now but people who have a particular need for expansion will be catered for and can stay with macOS.

Steve Jobs was fond of saying that design is not only about how something looks but how it works too. Modern Apple would do well to remember this. Pro machines are not about how they look on the desk but how well they can serve you to build and create. The 2013 Mac Pro was almost entirely about how the thing looked which was crazy.

Please Apple, give us a simple box that offers the expansion possibilities users need and make the price fair too. I want to stay with Apple, I've been an Apple user since 1989 but for the first time I'm seriously looking at a Windows box which is just sad.

If you want to use recycled aluminium and have space for a big battery there's not much room for styling I suppose. They're Pro machines that put performance above style and that's the way it should be. It looks like nothing on the other side will come anywhere even remotely close. Can't wait for the comparisons but these machines look like big gamechangers. 

Surely this can't be true. In my opinion, the iPad Pro is already far too expensive. Adding a keyboard and matching the 256GB you get with a MacBook is £1748 compared to £1149 MacBook Air. That's £600 more and that doesn't even include an Apple Pencil to take advantage of the touchscreen features. Add that and it's £1887. Nearly 2 grand! 

This is already in the crazy zone for a device that's still very limited by its software/OS. Most testers have struggled to use one as their main work machine. I would suggest Apple focuses on making iPad OS fit for purpose, rather than mincing about with the screen (which nobody seems to have much of a problem with).

Looking at tumbling Mac sales, one has to wonder if Apple really understands the current financial climate facing a very significant part of the world. They have, without doubt, developed their best-ever range of devices. Just about everything Apple offers now is best in class. But the prices are becoming insane. With the M series MacBooks they had the chance to finally get volume and move out of being an expensive niche choice. But as usual, they got greedy. The RAM and SSD pricing is crazy. I would love to see even smaller and cheaper M1 devices targeted at education to grow the installed user base. A smaller M1-based budget laptop to compete with the £500-£800 PCs. Get people onboard with Mac and they'll buy a proper one next time. This just seems so shortsighted.

Think back to the first iPhone home screen. That was it until developers got involved. As said above, this is a novelty/developer product at the moment. On the first iPhone things like the accelerometers were a wow feature. We had to wait a while before they became properly useful. I think this is very similar to that first iPhone. We're all much harder to impress these days and this will always be more niche than the iPhone, at least for a long time. But it will gradually become more and more useful. It might take 10 years before screen and battery tech shrink it down to the size of reading glasses but by then it might actually start to replace the iPhone for some people. 

Think of how much more powerful the current iPhone is compared to the iPhone 5 or the trash can Mac Pro. The next decade will bring huge reductions in component size and power efficiency. But we can't get there in one step. I'm sure in 10 or 15 years' we'll all laugh at how limited the Vision Pro is in the same way we all look at that first iPhone with its tiny screen and lack of just about everything. But you have to start somewhere, and this looks like a fairly impressive and potentially useful beginning to me.

A trillion operations per second. On a phone. I remember when the G4 came out and it was classed as a supercomputer as it could do a billion per second. A thousand times more from a phone. 
The 20 years ago version of me didn't see that coming.

danox said:

hmurchison said:

The only reason why I laugh at the notion of an $2k iPad Pro is not because it's bad hardware.  I just don't feel like iPad OS and iPad software is exceptional given the constraints the iPad places on workflows.  

And yet the so-called competition can't match it to this day with software and hardware, but Apple is supposed to give it away.

Nobody is asking Apple to give it away. I would suggest they put more emphasis on making the OS work as a viable alternative to a MacBook or PC laptop. I certainly don't look at an iPad and think "Oh if only the display was better". I do however struggle to match the multitasking options of my MacBook and have lots of other complaints (not least of which is the current price when marched up with a decent keyboard). The idea that this price may rise substantially just seems to be absolutely the wrong priority. Make the OS amazing and then start tweaking things that are already really good.