Mac Pro update: Apple promises another pricey thing it will no doubt abandon after a year

Re: "Once upon a time, you couldn't get a PC of equivalent spec as a Mac Pro"

In 2013 the trash can was good value, you couldn't buy a machine with that CPU/GPU's/RAM/PCIeSSD etc for the price, even a DIY machine would cost far more.

Yes that was way back in 2013 and the world has moved on. I guess for the most part people didn't need expensive Xeon CPU's as they didn't work in music/video production, they just wanted an 'iMac Pro' with a modern i7 and decent GPU in to play games on.

Re: Apple, so disappointing now.

"We have Apple publicly accepting it called this one wrong"

Any reference for that statement?

Re: Apple, so disappointing now.

How do you get two cc of mouse blood as Apple only breed tailless mice now?

Anyway, yes, I agree it is unfair to call fat lady singing at Apple on the Prosumer ranges. I just wanted to point out that Apple really, really cut its own in that field once upon a time, and I'd love to see them back, but

1) what do they mean by pro now? Do they have a target audience? Is it just media creatives?

2) you snooze, you lose. They are losing ground heavily to competing platforms, and once there's a foot in the door, it's hard to reverse investments. Apple know this; it's how come they still are major league players in the media field, but ground once lost can be hard to regain.

The old wind tunnel case was actually pretty darned good. Weighed a lot, true, but it had solid build quality written all over it. The 30" Cinema Display was de facto standard for video editing a few years ago. The inclusion of IEE1394 made connecting video cameras an absolute doddle. They really need to pull a rabbit out of the hat on this.

Re: Apple, so disappointing now.

Pedigree-Pete wrote:

Ah! Those were the days in the early 90s. 1152 x something in 24 (32) bit colour ON A PC.

1152x896, although not sure why it wasn't 1152x864 for 4:3 ratio. Thinking back, it might be because 1152x896 is the most pixels you could fit in before crossing a MB boundary.

Re: We've let you down...

They have sold mainstream non upgradeable macbooks to nearly everyone that wants one/afford one (except a new generation coming through). They could restrict it to an older version i.e. El Capitan. The profit margin on a bare bones Apple Branded case alone, could make them a decent profit.

It would be a different market. Apple's biggest competition in terms of buying a new macbook at the moment is actually second hand Apple iMacs and macbooks.

Apple could market it like the App Store, but for Hardware. Hardware could be certified, Apple receive a fee for each part purchased via a hardware store.

Apple now have a gap for 18 months in new high end customisable Mac Hardware. It's daft. Gigabyte and the rest could provide the compatible platforms within 6 months. macOS needs to go 'open' for Pro Hardware.

Re: We've let you down... @s2bu

"Clones pretty much almost killed Apple last time. Why would they go down that same road again?"

At the time Apple was solely dependent on their computer business. Now their main income is from phones and tablets, music sales and App Store transactions.

Licensing OSX could make some money, but at the cost of their own hardware business. Many OSX inclined users would just flock for the cheaper Hackintosh PCs in the end - most people can live very well with a slighly heavier/thicker laptop without Thunderbolt - and with extra USB & A/V ports.

And if the Mac business dried out then Apple would pour even less resources to OSX, and one day they'd just silently end support for it. Like they never announced end of support for Quicktime or Safari on Windows, they just withered away when Apple unplugged them.

Re: We've let you down...

Clones pretty much almost killed Apple last time. Why would they go down that same road again?

Because they now have multiple revenue streams like iTunes and app sales? Their income is not just from hardware anymore.

Re: We've let you down...

I still have my quad-processor Daystar Genesis 466 box out in the garage. Absolutely smoked the PMac 9600 (Apple's top-shelf kit at the time) in the few multi-processor supported apps available then; it otherwise ran slower than my PMac 6500.

Aside from that, it's wise that the company is realizing its mistake in abandoning the pro/creative community, which (aside from education) is what kept the company afloat during the dark days of the 90's. I personally haven't bought a new "pro" Mac since 2004, when I laid down $3k for a PMac G5 DP 2.0. I do still use my older wind-tunnel G4 (maxed out) for Photoshop and Final Cut duty, where it's still perky enough.

Re: We've let you down...

Clones pretty much almost killed Apple last time. Why would they go down that same road again?"

It's about market segmentation. While it makes no sense to allow low cost hackintosh clones, it would make a lot of sense to sell OS licenses to the professional crowd, that prefers to have their hardware build to spec and doesn't care so much about the price, if they can get what they want.

Some licensing model based on CPU cores, together with a nice service contract can be very profitable. It would open a high profit market segment that Apple cannot reach with their current strategy. Investment would be minimal. Kind of win-win for everyone.

Re: Why would they go down that same road again?

They could release only OS X server for 3rd party hardware.

They could give it a big price tag, and a caveat that it was used either in supported VMs or certified hardware, if you want support.

That wouldn't hit their main market, and price would not be a problem for the target market.

Re: We've let you down...

>Clones pretty much almost killed Apple last time. Why would they go down that same road again?

I can't see them ever licensing OSX. That would be a bad plan as it would tarnish the image. Far better just to turn a blind eye to the enthusiast hackintosh arena (those people are not your customers anyway).

However, they do need to lift their game. I don't mind proprietary as long as it is appreciably better. The touch-bar ain't it!

How about...

Chasses where components are accessible from the outside? Memory, disks, graphics cards etc. Graphics cards don't have to be hot-plug but how about a format which allows them to be exchanged without opening the box?

Some hot plug components would be good - especially disks/ssd's. It isn't that hard!

Drobo-style storage arrays? How many SSD's can you fit in a mini-tower? Would water-cooling help to give you a smaller form-factor?

10G Ethernet - dual ports. Seriously people, given the price of this kit, that isn't an unreasonable request. Any non-laptop is going to be wired, so wire it seriously. Include a couple of 1G ports as well if you want.

Optical Thunderbolt? I've pretty much given up on expecting this, but it would be a nice surprise.

How about hotplug CPUs? I"d like a lower power CPU for email and browsing on the big screen, but I don't really need a couple of Xeons for that.

Re: We've let you down...

Clones pretty much almost killed Apple last time. Why would they go down that same road again?

When you look at revenue, Apple make the same from services as from Mac sales (~$7Bn in Q1 '17).

Anything Mac related is dwarfed by iOS sales.

Offering macOS as a license on approved or generic hardware would cater not just to pros but also to semi-power users like me who want the macOS/BSD environment but are seriously considering moving back to Windows because the hardware is better. I'm not buying a USB-C macbook pro, I'm not buying a trashcan Pro. I might buy a refurb macbook that has some ports, or I'd consider an OEM laptop onto which I could install macOS as a supported OS and get drivers for!

Yes, it would damage their hardware business, but they'd sell a bunch of licenses and software to people who would otherwise be licensing software for Windows...

And if they sold hardware at sensible, comparable prices, they'd sell a bunch of that as well - because it looks pretty and people like the build quality (even if you can't upgrade it).

The problem they face is that they're selling a premium product into a market where even a Chromebook looks relatively svelte - once upon a time you could identify a macbook from across a room because it wasn't an ugly hulking block of grey or black plastic. Nowadays everyone is doing nice product design and uni-body cases. The USP that Jonny Ive brought to Apple is dead and gone.

Okay, I say premium - how long did the Airs struggle on with a 1366x768 screen when laptops half the price had gone to HD? For a product aimed at "creative people", they weren't valuing the bit you looked at very much...

Re: We've let you down...

MacOS/OSX has less market share than Windows XP at present (from netmarketshare.com). They have nowhere to go but up.

The main reason people seem to give when they talk about why they bought a Mac was that it "just works." Well, the reason it "just works," if in fact that was ever real, is because Apple is both the hardware and software manufacturer, and they can tailor it very closely to the needs of the machines it sells, and they can test every possible combination of Mac hardware thoroughly to identify issues before it ships.

Windows, of course, runs on everything, since MS is mainly a software company (unlike Apple), and they cannot test on even a small fraction of the combinations of hardware that are in use out there in the real world. Ideally, the OEM would do this testing, but they'd still be at a disadvantage compared to a company that knows the ins and outs of the OS (and has the source code). In practice, PCs tend to be seen as commodity items, purchased on specs alone, so things that lead to stability like quality components (PSUs!) and adequate testing tend to be ignored.

Windows acquired a terrible reputation for crashiness, and a good bit of it is not Microsoft's fault, per se. If a Windows PC crashes, they blame Windows... after all, it's Windows that delivered the error and stopped working. In most cases, though, it's not faulty MS coding that causes the blue-screen, but faulty hardware or drivers.

That was particularly true in the Win 95 days, which were the early days of PnP (Plug 'n' Play), which we used to call "Plug 'n' Pray" at the time. The ISA bus was still in most new PCs, but it was never meant to be self-configuring, and the workarounds meant to make it self-configuring were kludges at best. In addition, a lot of the PnP ISA hardware that appeared was of abysmal quality, and so were the drivers.

This tended to make hardware/driver issues nearly universal in the commoditized PC market, but it was MS that got the blame.

Apple would have to play this carefully; they would want to preserve the idea that to get "just works" performance, it has to be a real Mac, while simultaneously selling MacOS on the idea that it works better on PCs than Windows does. I think it could be done, though.

Re: We've let you down...(4 Updraft102)

I know of no-one who would contemplate paying the Apple Tax to get off Windows. Them that can't simply say "Windows 10 takes some getting used to but is really not that bad" and those that can will build out a Linux based answer. People who belive that there is an audience waiting to fork over 3 grand for a computer for home use either are barking or work for Apple.

As for buying a Mac to run Windows, that is the gaming crowd. For much as people hate to hear it, y' can't get "all the good games" on all platforms.

Apple continuously fail to properly identify the target audience for their high-end kit, and use the same idiotic form-over-function calculus to make design choices. If Apple were not so obsessed with the pretty they might pause and consider what they could do if the owner did not want to look at the blood thing while he/she worked.

Not that I'm in the market. I cracked my brother-in-law's G3 once as a favor and was appalled by what I found inside the case.

@ J. Cook

Better check your sarcasm detector. ☺

Re: Not lost...

Well, after the type of language used in this article, I'm not surprised it was never sent!

Re: Not lost...

aka Lost in the outbox.

Re: Apple

Apologies, under the new rules it's called "macOS".

I'm not changing my #ifdef though.