PickUrPoison

gerry g said:

What gets me is that the MacPro was always touted as modular at its inception yet all I see is a case with a set of proprietary modules, all of which are out of date, the chip I believe is EOL, still susceptible to the spector virus and has not had its number of executions per cycle upped in some six or seven years, Intel is developing a whole new architecture for it's next generation chips which this definitely isn't. The graphics card is not the absolute latest and will be superseded within six months of it's release tops, and I bet you anything it will not be upgradable. The USB forum have just finalised USB 4 spec and this only has USB 3, this is hardly a long term investment and to top it off I can't run Catalina as it breaks everything in sight, I think the best thing is to wait a year and see how things pan out

As always, if you don’t need a machine now, wait for another year or two (or five or ten). 

schlack said:

freethinking said:

I don't care too much about it being cheap (within reason) I just want a small form factor.

Exactly. Why is Apple missing us. I’d pay $800 for a killer small phone. 

You and maybe a few million others. Or five or ten million, whatever. If there were 30 million of you willing to pay $899 for an XS-type OLED model (or $599 for an XR-type LCD model) Apple would make an SE-sized iPhone.

Unfortunately for those who want a small form factor iPhone, in order to sell 30 million, it’s got to be priced at $349-399. Even Android phones, with 4-5 times the market share, can’t find enough buyers to make a small phone a viable product. At any price point, including $100-150, few want small phones. 

entropys said:

PickUrPoison said:

entropys said:

corrections said:

burnside said:

Maybe it was 5 years ago when we suggested Apple had a roadmap where MacOS and iOS would merge? Maybe we saw a leaked memo? Or maybe discussed on these forums? Nevertheless, they appear to be following through with that plan. MacBooks with A-series chipsets are around the corner. 

Rather than merging, Apple is defining new OS categories to define specific experiences: watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, and despite lots of shared code, each of Apple's platforms is increasingly specializing.

My opinion, which is all it is, was the plan of the new Cook suzerainty in 2013 was that the ipad and iOS derivatives were the future computing platform, and hence the focus on iOS devices and Mac development was de emphasised, or if you really want to be paranoid, actively depreciated. I note that MacOS isn’t in your list.

So we ended up with a long hiatus, new MBP and Mac Pros that apart from chip speed, were less utilitarian than their predecessors, and an increase in price, all to make the iPad Pro more attractive. It also meant the ying and yang between designers and engineers were loosened up to the advantage of designers, which leads to outcomes like the MBP keyboard fiasco.

it didn’t work out too well, hence the beginnings of a reverse course, starting in the design studio a couple of years ago, now starting to bear fruit.

Couldn’t disagree more. Apple wanted to make a better laptop, not worse, with the 2016 MBP platform. They wanted to improve the laptop form factor by making it even thinner and lighter via reducing the thickness of the keyboard. That is in no way evidence of a shift of the designer/engineer power balance. Engineers built that flawed keyboard, not designers—and if they had done a better job everyone would have been happier, of course. 

Similarly, the mis-step of the 2013 Mac Pro into a multi-GPU architecture vs. one big GPU—and the eventual realization in 2016/2017 of that mis-read of the future—is in no way evidence for your theory that Apple thought the iPad was the future of computing. As they became more capable, tablet computers simply took a chunk of the desktop/laptop market, plus they expanded the overall demand for computers as a whole by enabling new use cases. 

That’s really no different from when laptops came along and increased the market for computers by enabling mobile computing, at the expense of desktop market share. We also have iPhones now being used as a person’s primary, or only, computing device. 

Workstations>desktops>laptops>tablets>smartphones. They all coexist, and none is obsoleting any of the others. They all have their uses, and which solution is best depends on the application. Apple never thought the iPad was going to replace the Mac; that was mostly driven by paranoia, misinterpreting a Cook quote and misunderstanding the “What’s a computer” iPad commercial. 

Saying Apple thought iPads were the future computing platform is the same as saying Apple thought the touch user interface was going to replace the mouse (trackpad) and keyboard user interface. There’s nothing to even remotely suggest that was ever Apple’s thinking, and the fact that Apple never made a touchscreen laptop or monitor is all the evidence one needs that Apple doesn’t think iPads will ever replace desktop/laptop Macs. 

Yes some users can satisfy all their computing needs with an iPad, and won’t ever buy another laptop or desktop. Some don’t even need a tablet computer; a smartphone is sufficient for their needs. But Workstation/desktop/laptop Macs aren’t going away anytime soon, and neither is MacOS. 

Well, sure. I could be overegging it a fair bit. A juicy conspiracy that would more entertainly debated over drinks. I would say though in response to your comment

Saying Apple thought iPads were the future computing platform is the same as saying Apple thought the touch user interface was going to replace the mouse (trackpad) and keyboard user interface. There’s nothing to even remotely suggest that was ever Apple’s thinking, and the fact that Apple never made a touchscreen laptop or monitor is all the evidence one needs that Apple doesn’t think iPads will ever replace desktop/laptop Macs. 

kinda supports my theory. Apple never made a touchscreen Mac, but just about every windows laptop has touchscreen. iPad is superior to those, although I suspect windows’ touch interface is better than at the time my theory of an internal Apple plan to hyperfocus on iOS derivative devices as the future, and not be all that focussed on macs, might have been developed.
And of course, if we ever see a Mac laptop running a version of iPad OS and an A series chip ( or derivative) I would get even more suspicious.

Sure, who doesn’t love a conspiracy theory

re: Windows touch screen laptops, that’s not really relevant to Mac laptops. Apple thinks (knows) a trackpad/mouse is better than touchscreen+finger for devices other than handheld. That’s why if (when) you ever see Apple’s ARM CPU replace Intel on the Mac, it won’t be running iOS or iPadOS; it’ll be running MacOS/ARM (instead of MacOS/x86). 

crd said:

The problem I see is that pc tech has already improved since this computer was announced.  Cascade x with $1000 18 core CPU’s w/ 256gb ram max will be out soon.  Improvements on the amd side side too.

Newer isn’t necessarily better. The Cascade-X CPUs aren’t usable for the Mac Pro, due to their low max memory and lack of ECC support, and an insufficient number of PCIe lanes (the 18-core max is also an issue). Those CPUs aren’t even suitable for iMac Pro, due to the memory restrictions. (But the new iMac Pro will use the Xeon W-2200 series, which are much the same as the Cascade-X HEDT CPUs you reference. The Xeons cost a little more, but they support up to 1TB of ECC RAM.) 

entropys said:

corrections said:

burnside said:

Maybe it was 5 years ago when we suggested Apple had a roadmap where MacOS and iOS would merge? Maybe we saw a leaked memo? Or maybe discussed on these forums? Nevertheless, they appear to be following through with that plan. MacBooks with A-series chipsets are around the corner. 

Rather than merging, Apple is defining new OS categories to define specific experiences: watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, and despite lots of shared code, each of Apple's platforms is increasingly specializing.

My opinion, which is all it is, was the plan of the new Cook suzerainty in 2013 was that the ipad and iOS derivatives were the future computing platform, and hence the focus on iOS devices and Mac development was de emphasised, or if you really want to be paranoid, actively depreciated. I note that MacOS isn’t in your list.

So we ended up with a long hiatus, new MBP and Mac Pros that apart from chip speed, were less utilitarian than their predecessors, and an increase in price, all to make the iPad Pro more attractive. It also meant the ying and yang between designers and engineers were loosened up to the advantage of designers, which leads to outcomes like the MBP keyboard fiasco.

it didn’t work out too well, hence the beginnings of a reverse course, starting in the design studio a couple of years ago, now starting to bear fruit.

Couldn’t disagree more. Apple wanted to make a better laptop, not worse, with the 2016 MBP platform. They wanted to improve the laptop form factor by making it even thinner and lighter via reducing the thickness of the keyboard. That is in no way evidence of a shift of the designer/engineer power balance. Engineers built that flawed keyboard, not designers—and if they had done a better job everyone would have been happier, of course. Similarly, the mis-step of the 2013 Mac Pro into a multi-GPU architecture vs. one big GPU—and the eventual realization in 2016/2017 of that mis-read of the future—is in no way evidence for your theory that Apple thought the iPad was the future of computing. As they became more capable, tablet computers simply took a chunk of the desktop/laptop market, plus they expanded the overall demand for computers as a whole by enabling new use cases.