AppleZulu

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?

Or maybe there's a Mac tower in the future that will slot in below this device. If they want to sell as many Mac Pros as they can right out of the gate, it would probably unwise to roll out an "economy" version at the same time. Just looking at the naming convention of the current line-up of MacOS devices, there's one missing where a "Mac" would be. 

While I'm fairly certain that Apple doesn't develop product lines in response to internet chatter, it's nonetheless true that some people have been, for the last few years, fostering a narrative that Apple has "abandoned" real "Pros" in favor of offering sleek, slim, underpowered, non-upgradable, non-modular hardware. This new Mac Pro kind of destroys that narrative, doesn't it? So this device is aimed squarely at the Pro market, not the "enthusiast" market. In six months or a year, they'll offer some upgrades to the Mac Pro, making it even more spectacular, and maybe at that time, hit the 'enthusiast' market with a Mac tower that emulates some of the aesthetics of the Mac Pro, but smaller, with less power under the hood, and a lower price to go with it.

crowley said:

I can't see any obvious Store in the Apple Music app screenshots.  I hope they haven't retired the Music Store for those of us who haven't quite bought into streaming yet.

From the Catalina features page: "Music Store - For users who still like to own their music, the iTunes Store is just a click away."

While deemphasized, it seems unlikely that feature will go away any time soon. It represents income with little extra work to maintain it. 

oseame said:

Did I miss something about storage? i.e. is the stock 256GB SSD soldered in there and is the only internal storage expansion PCIe?

Yes, you missed something. It can have up to 4TB internal SSD.

The ‘full color night vision’ is actually a disappointing change from earlier models. The earlier versions were black-and-white for night vision because the built in LED spotlights on the previous models were infra-red, which the camera can see (and here’s the important part), but you can’t. 

So so with the old version, if a cat walks across the porch at 2am, it would trigger the camera, which would shine infra red light and take a monochrome-translated-to-black-and-white video of the cat. The cat wouldn’t be disturbed by the infra red light, and neither would you or your neighbors.  With the new version, it blasts whatever it’s pointed at with bright white light to get that full color video they’re so proud of. 

Who wants a bunch of bright spotlights triggering at all hours of the night? I suppose if you have a warehouse out on the docks, that might be ok. For most home applications, however, this feature is a non-starter. 

rogifan_new said:

Pretty much everything Apple announced yesterday was “me too”. And the only thing that seemed Apple like was the new credit card. Everything else was working backwards from the financials to a product. Everything else was we need to be able to charge customers a monthly fee which - will grow services revenue and offset declining hardware revenue - so come up with something. And from what I’m seeing in my twitter feed Apple News+ Is quite buggy right now. That along with most everything else announced not being available until the fall makes me wonder if this stuff was announced before it was ready. Hard to get excited for something you can’t get for at least 6 months and have no idea what it will cost.

It's as though people commenting here have never noticed how Apple operates. Literally less than two minutes into Tim Cook's remarks, he has it all laid out in three colorful spots on the big screen behind him: hardware, software, and services. He contextualized it and explained that this keynote would be all about services. Apple integrates each of these things with the others to work as a whole. It's in the very foundation of Apple's business model. They're not creating more services in order to offset declining revenue for hardware. They're creating more services to make the hardware and software more functional and useful to their customers. They're enhancing the Apple ecosystem, increasing the likelihood that iPhone sales will also drive decisions to buy ATVs, iPads, HomePods, Macs, AirPods, and Apple Watches. 

I've typed this in another thread already today, but it was six months between Steve Jobs' miraculous dog-and-pony show to introduce the iPhone and when it was actually available for sale. That demonstration famously had to be done in a precise sequence because any other order would have resulted in a complete crash of the device, which was being shown way, way before it was even close to ready. Yet, somehow, everybody thinks the iPhone emerged in final form from Steve Jobs' belly button and a week later a half billion of the things had been sold. No, even the game changing iPhone was introduced in incomplete form and customers had to wait six months to get one, and it was only available through AT&T. Sales figures were microscopic compared to what they would become under Tim Cook. It had a low-res camera, no GPS, and didn't even include SMS or cut-and-paste.

The iPhone was a "me too" dwarf in the Blackberry-dominated smartphone market, and was laughed at as a toy that lacked a physical keyboard. It was also a "me too" dwarf in the Palm Pilot-dominated touch screen PDA market, and was laughed at for lacking a stylus and handwriting recognition. Since it had no GPS, it wasn't even a "me too" dwarf yet in the Garmin-dominated mobile GPS market. (For that matter, after GPS was added in later models, they didn't yet anticipate the central role location services would play, so they farmed out maps to Google. Only later did they realize they were giving a nosy competitor the keys to their customers' data, and abruptly introduced Apple Maps to much, um, fanfare.)

And yet every time Tim Cook delivers a keynote, everybody can't remember past a week ago, and criticizes Cook for doing the exact same things that Steve Jobs did to earn his Silicon Valley Sainthood. The iPhone, it turns out, was more than a me too mashup of currently available tech. Its success came precisely because it integrated all that other stuff in a new way, and after several years of long-game incrementalism, it emerged as a must-have device that nobody knew they needed. Will the things introduced yesterday play out the same way? Who knows, but Apple has a track record, and that track record shows that they do indeed play the long game, taking their time to develop things that people eventually seem to think were there all along.