geirnoklebye

tmay said:

Let MS have that.

With that attitude Apple would have been toast in the 90-ties. It was not what we fought for; to let MS have it. 

macxpress said:

Why don't you submit your resume?

Because I receive pension from them! ;-))

tmay said:

I'll go with 50,000 units/year x $1000 (seems high for out years) which is $50 million in revenue. With margins of 40%, that's $20 million in profit. But then there is that development cost for a product in a shrinking market, and the engineering and marketing costs to keep it fresh. Is it even a necessary product?

Sure, you can hold that up in isolation, but offering a minimum of server and pro class type configurations spawns a whole lot of backend development that now leaks off to Microsoft and Linux. Development that in turn could fuel the iOS and low-end portable clients in myriads of ways.  

Microsoft's server software now pulls the bulk of their revenue and is pivotal to their success and proliferation in the enterprise market. Of course going after this market is an entirely new ballgame that Apple in the past never have mastered, but then again they indirectly have to as iOS clients adaption increasingly is rising in SME and large enterprise alike. To be so entirely on the back burner in this area is frankly shocking.

It is also a matter of priority. Virtue signaling with red phones, that don't bring them one extra dollar in revenue, is more important than catering to their core and keeping existing product line current. 

Apple's Macintosh hardware business is also not shrinking (for the record). 

tenthousandthings said:

However, although the promises themselves were vague, they were not anonymous.

That is absolutely to the core of the issue.

When a CEO makes a public statement that a current product line is important to the future of the company, yet it has not been updated for 4 years, with absolutely no horizon of a replacement, you both start to build resentment and abandonment in your user base. Those users you shed in that process is likely to never return + they will stop being ambassadors for your platform and products. 

The situation with the mini is that the most powerful model was shipped in 2012 - that is 6 years ago, and people scour iBay for these i7 equipped systems and pick them up at prices that are often higher than the original retail price. Of course that situation is not sustainable, and a direct loss for all parties et the end of the day.

Many people completely fail to understand how the mini is used. Often it is sitting there headless in a corner chugging away as a small business server year after year after year with maintenance cost that is negligible compared to most alternatives.

Although the selection of software is small, there are software titles that are macOS only, and since Apple forbid virtualization of macOS on anything but Apple hardware, while at the same time removing any sensible small server configuration, they more or less pull the rug on a class of use cases.  The ability to run macOS server type applications in combination with open source software on the same box can be incredibly valuable. Replacing this with a cloud server solution is often not possible both for practical and legislative reasons. The practical reason is that there is no hardware that legally can run macOS in the datacenter. 

The Mac Pro is much of the same story where the trash-can model is a) almost impossible to place in a standard datacenter rack and b) carries a lot of hardware that is completely unneeded in such a setting resulting in higher cost overall, higher space requirements and higher cooling requirements than alternative hardware.

Adding insult to injury is the complete gutting Apple has announced of the macOS server software. 

When I speak of decimation of the macOS ecosystem I don't count in iOS directly, but it is actually, in a bad sense, part of it because on the Altar of iOS, they have dumbed down many aspects of macOS, been very late to deliver key technologies to these users, but importantly also dumbed down or removed productivity applications that in effect has made it more painful to use macOS in many settings. 

Removing the routers and the Time Capsules also makes it harder for users to orient in the marketplace, select and maintain an environment where doing backups were almost a no-brainer.  The need for local backups rather than cloud backups can both be based in legal requirements,  but equally important major sections of the markets Apple operate in don't have bandwidth in excess because they mostly have mobile type connections, rather than the relative abundance of fast wired connections in parts of North America and Western Europe. 

macxpress said:

I'm sure I provide more of an Apple service to the community than you ever will.

I seriously doubt that you will.  

Having worked in Apple product management I happen to know what goes into the development of the products and how the future product plans are laid out years in advance. I know that not updating a product for multiple years usually means the product is EOL or there is a serious creativity crisis in product development/management. 

Apple's main mantra for product development was always market creation, and they still do in some segments. However the decimation of the ecosystem around macOS signals a company in crisis that no longer are able to create and inspire in the product segment that still carries the company (in that all products rely on code generated on macOS). 

macxpress said:

I'm a person who works in IT who supports macOS, iOS, ChromeOS, Android, and Windows all in one organization. Believe me...I know what works and what doesn't

Maybe you do in your particular company, but you sure as heck know nothing about Apple's user base overall and what makes it tick. 

Actually you come across as someone who would call your users for lusers, because that is the undertone of most of your postings dissing Apple and Apple customers. 

The Apple user base is people looking for the ease of use that has been the hallmark of Apple's system integration in their own ecosystem, and now that base are thrown to each on their own to figure out how to make their system work across system upgrades, diverse components and time.

Tim Cook stands at the risk of throwing out the very core base that was willing to pay a premium price exactly for that integrated environment where all worked.  They came to Apple either because they did not have the time to tinker around or they simply had no interest in the technical issues as they were focused on other, to them more important things, where the Mac became their tool for expression, creativity and business development.