techaccident

bitmod said:

Apple missed the mark completely on this... completely. They custom designed a Mac Pro for Pixar... what about the rest of us? FFS...

I believe that is the iMac Pro.

This is rather asymmetrical. Apple doesn't monetize Podcasts, they simply act as a clearinghouse for all those RSS feeds and they make an iOS app. They don't produce podcasts, nor do they manage or profit from advertisements on podcasts. They make podcasts convenient for many people, and they provide limited analytics to podcasters. That's it.

Spotify almost surely wishes to monetize podcasts, which means a rather different approach that that taken by Apple. I'd wager that approach will be far more advertising-intensive and involve a lot more user tracking.

The money quote:

"Both display extenders using an iPad and the DisplayLink products relied on unsupported workarounds to function in macOS."

That really tells me all I need to know.

So far we have iOS 11.0.3 running on iPhone 8 Plus, 7 Plus, 7, and an old iPad Air. Here are my datapoints:

iPhone 8 Plus: Came with iOS 11, data restored from iCloud backup. Had daily Springboard-style crashes at first (screen goes black with spinner, comes back in a few seconds with Passcode/Touch ID request). I did a reinstall and iCloud restore, that seemed to fix it. Works great, battery life is excellent. Camera is freakin' amazeballs.

iPhone 7 Plus: My wife's phone, upgraded OTA. Some anecdotal decrease in battery life, but otherwise just fine. Hard to do a very scientific take on this one, she uses it differently than I and often puts it back in her purse without locking. Oy vey.

iPhone 7: Daughter #1 phone. She reports no issues, but often runs her battery down every day because she uses it like the college student she is.

iPad Air: this aged beast has a harder time keeping up with animations, but works just fine with no change in battery life.

Daughter #2 is still running iOS 10 on a 6S, so I'll try to observe any changes there when she upgrades. Don't worry, she's 18 - if there's a problem, I'll hear about it. All day long.

lmasanti said:

I think that you miss the main point. Apples uses to say that it enters a new market (for them) when they can make a dent on it, disrupt it or give users something new.

^^That's pretty much it, IMHO. If Apple made a machine targeting gamers, they are competing with little differentiation against commodity Windows boxes - the thoughtfulness of macOS is lost when the focus is on gameplay, which flat-out doesn't leverage the integrations that Apple creates and values. Without the ability to articulate those things that make macOS special, Apple can't "put a dent" in that market.
I think that for Apple, leaving gamers to buy Windows PCs is fine - it's just another thing they don't make, like microwave ovens or TV sets. If those gamers want a nicer experience when using their computers for anything besides gaming, the discriminating ones will want a Mac anyway.
I don't think this is a niche Apple should target. The market for high end Mac hardware is with professionals, not gamers.