roundaboutnow

jSnively said:

The enthusiasts complaining about this machine are justified. The people pointing out that this machine is for an extremely niche and specific market are also correct.

IMO Apple messed up here, and they're going to get a lot of crap for it. This is a form factor that could, and should, have scaled to make multiple market segments happy. Instead Apple went as far to the extreme end as they could, to the exclusion of the middle road, and completely priced out individuals.The enthusiasts just wanted an expandable i7 with like 16-64GB of RAM and a good GPU they could upgrade. That should have been possible with this design.

Feels like a swing and a miss to me. Apple is either completely out of touch with the enthusiast market, or it might be time for the enthusiast market to give up on Apple. I think they probably sold a fair amount of PCs today.

Also, I know it's personal preference but man is that thing ugly. Can Ive stop trying to make every Apple product look like a Braun appliance from the 60s and 70s?

I guess everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I am surprised to see this from an AI Administrator.

As both a pro and personal user, I think the new MacPro is frikkin awesome and looks cool too. And there is a rack mount version! Using one of these to drive huge blended or tiled screens in commercial environments (which there are more and more of everyday) will be amazing.

So what the hell is an "enthusiast" anyway? I thought I was an enthusiast, but the way you put it, maybe not. If you mean tinkerers or gamers, well OK, I'm not one of them, but I think that community has plenty of other platforms to play around with.

A big impediment to abandoning USB-A any time soon is the fact that they are now so commonly used as a DC power port in cars, airplanes, hotels, etc. There are those electrical outlets that have them built-in, and they are even integrated into lamp bases. All of these implementations are in products that have at least 10 if not 20+ year lifespans.

I'm not crazy about the USB-A cable, and for DC power only applications, it is not a great choice. But damn if it isn't ubiquitous.

I think we'll have to get used to at least having an adapter to whatever charging-capable cable we have to be able to take advantage of the installed base of these ports for quite a while.

6502 said:

I love Macs and have had one at home for 25+ year. But, I rely on Excel a lot at work and Excel just sucks on a Mac, and it's just not worth emulating it when I can just use a cheap W10 machine.

Are you at least using Mac Excel 2016 (with latest updates)? It's a lot closer to the Windows version than it used to be.

I consider myself fairly proficient on Excel, and find everything I need to do on the Mac version works well. But then, there are still plenty of advanced features that I don't use, so maybe this is where the comparison breaks down...

What are you doing on Excel that sucks on the Mac version?

I usually use Apple Maps nowadays, even when I generally know where I'm going, just to get traffic, arrival times and details to get to specific location. It has proven to be accurate and reliable in the majority of situations.

The other day I gave Google maps another go. I recalled the ability to drag the blue route lines to other streets if you want, and I was preparing to take surface streets downtown due to a major slowdown on the freeway. The alternate suggestions from Apple were not to my liking, but neither were Google's. However, I'm familiar enough with the streets to pick a preferred path, and I wanted to be able to change the route and have a more direct path with fewer jogging over a number of blocks (both Apple and Google do this block jogging -- I guess the idea is that a faster route is being selected, but it doesn't seem to account for time needed to wait before you can make the turn).

It would be nice if Apple had this manual re-routing feature.

This time, I was pleasantly surprised to see a couple of other features in Google maps that I hadn't noticed before. One was once I entered the destination address, Google noticed that it was downtown, and mentioned that parking was often a challenge and asked if I wanted directions to the closest parking facility. That was pretty cool. Also, as I made my way, my chosen route did have to cut through a short section of side street, but when the voice command came up, I was not only directed to turn right onto the specific street, I was also told to turn right at the Jack in the Box which was there. None of the other turns referenced a landmark, but it was amusing to have a specific business used a reference/landmark. Now that I think about it, this does seem a bit -- subliminal? -- but it was actually helpful. I guess this is how they get you!

That said, I do think Google maps is actually pretty good. I'm not super concerned about the tracking aspects, but I can't ignore it either.  Still, I'm inclined to stick with Apple maps due to the level of integration across all my devices, which seems to keep getting better, and I prefer to support Apple in this regard.

Soli said:

roundaboutnow said:

Soli said:

1) Maybe that's still an exceptionally large number, but looking at the number of products Apple sells with displays I'd expect that Apple would outnumber all those other company's mentioned, especially when you look at products with displays from all companies and how they relate to profits.

2) I hope microLED bears fruit soon.

SID/Display Week gives out "Best in Show" awards. I saw a press release that one of the awards was for microLED, but the SID website hasn't been updated with the 2018 awards yet...

...found the press release from AUO:
https://www.auo.com/en-global/New_Archive/detail/News_Archive_Awords_20180524

Do you think microLED is ready for mass production at costs and quality that are feasible for Apple's needs this year? I'd think that if it's possible that even just the Series 4 Apple Watch, even if just in the higher-end Watches, would be a great fit to get microLED to market.

I don’t know about this year, but I would not put it past Apple to surprise us all. 
Here is a good source of microLED info:
https://www.ledinside.com/taxonomy/term/16313