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Tim Cook Assures Employees That It Is Committed To Mac and 'Great Desktops' Are Coming (techcrunch.com)
Apple CEO Tim Cook has assured the employees that the company is committed to the computer lineups and that a desktop computer is certainly on the way. From a report on TechCrunch: "Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we're committed to desktops," Cook wrote. "If there's any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that." Cook cites the far better performance of desktop computers, including screen sizes, memory, storage and more variety in I/O (ha) as a reason that they are "really important, and in some cases critical, to people." So no matter how you feel about the state of the Mac at the moment, you have new machines to look forward to. No mention of whether that meant iMac or Mac Pro or both, but at the very least it's encouraging to those of us who couldn't live without a desktop computer.
Maybe it will be a REAL pro machine this time?
Or not!
It will be $$$$ for what you get and you will #@$%%*$*# buy it anyway!
it's all BS.
Put up or shut up.
Thats the only thing that matters apparently.
"Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we're committed to desktops," Cook wrote. "If there's any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that."
It means nothing until they back it up with real products that people can buy. Apple is clearly capable of making great desktop computers but they have kind of taken their eye off the ball lately since most of their revenue comes from the iPhone. I haven't seen a lot of innovation from Apple in the PC market for a while now and I'd say they've had more misses than hits. I think their desktop PCs are fine but not everything they could be.
Hope they have addressing the underspec'd macbook 'pro' (more like consumer-plus) on the roadmap too
...seeing how many ports and upgradeable options they can remove.
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Working on laptops is a horrible experience.
How mac users can tolerate this is baffling.
The desktop market's been stagnating for years. Are Apple chasing the scraps from M$'s table? Even M$ are changing their emphasis away from desktop!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Brace Yourselves!...Layoffs are coming!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
How much do we want to bet that there is a vocal contingent within Apple who aren't satisfied with Apple's drive to eliminate features on their products? Personally, with all of the slimming and peripheral port gutting, Mac's have lost a lot of their luster. Sounds like others are agreeing with me.
I can't wait to see Apple's take on DongleDrivenDevelopment for the desktop. Likely have no ports for anything, but it will be REALLY THIN.
So he admits they aren't good now? WOW
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
They haven't had a "great desktop" in 7 years.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
possibly with a TouchBar, as great and up-to-date as the iTrashCan? :-/
I waited for some time for a new mac mini as I needed a computer for my son, but got an Intel NUC in the end. It does feel like Apple has given up on stationary computers, but lets hope this means a new lineup. I think they badly need a new mac mini if they want to stay be a real force in this space.
How much do we want to bet that there is a vocal contingent within Apple who aren't satisfied with Apple's drive to eliminate features on their products?
I don't actually have a problem with the fact that they went to USB-C or removed the function keys. Those are actually sensible things to do in principle. What is annoying is how they went about it and the lack of consideration for users real world needs. Removing the function keys is fine if you have something better but it's not clear that they do. Going to USB-C is fine but they didn't consider things like a replacement for Magsafe or the fact that maybe having at least one old school USB port might be useful to many people. I like the goal of reducing the number of ports to the minimum possible number very much but the path there should reflect the reality of the world we live in.
Actually the thing that annoys me the most about their laptops is the lack of a proper delete key meaning a key that will delete the character to the right of the cursor when pressed. What they call a delete key is what everyone else calls backspace and they don't have a delete key on their laptop keyboards. One has to push a function key combination to do that and that is more than a little irritating to me.
>> it's encouraging to those of us who couldn't live without a desktop computer
My primary work computer has been a _laptop_ for the past five years. Sometimes a high end Windows PC, sometimes a Mac Pro. Most of the time I use a keyboard, mouse, and two extra monitors with my laptop at my normal desk.
What's to miss from an old-school desktop?
I bet their new desktop comes with NO ports (everything bluetooth), no external media drives (it's all in the cloud baby), and no monitor (they beam it into your brain).
I guess it is time to find some love for Windows 10 then. This much ballyhoo is almost certainly the death knell of the Mac computers.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
"Apple II Forever" or something like that?
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Black_Wednesday.txt
Here's what Cook says:
Reading a bit between the lines... he said desktops are important and then fails to mention the Mini or Pro. Don't think that bodes super well for those product lines — at least, they're definitely not Top Priority. Hoping I'm reading too much into this; real professional workstations in the product lineup seems like a pretty important strategic spot for them if they're trying to appeal to the "media and development professionals" market.
There is sure a lot of negativity in the comments so far. Must be SAD, it's that time of year in the northern hemisphere.
What is the point in having software packages like Final Cut Pro X when you don't want to create computers or laptops anymore that are geared towards people who uses this?
The new Macbook "pro" are above stupid. It's a too expensive fix for those people who got the Macbook and are having problems with thermal throttling. So now they can get a "Pro" without all the ugly ports. Furthermore, the price for a proper Macbook Pro around these parts $4400. Are you fucking kidding me?
Talk about living in a bubble detached from the rest of the world.
The Mac Pro has not been upgraded in ages and then there's the iMac, which I also own today. But as someone who needs massive amount of storage and changing demands, it's really only the Mac Pro that could be a solution.
Programs like disk utility have been neutered, so I can't get a iso to usb boot to work anymore(does it even support that now?). :)
Maybe it is time to go back to Windows again so I get some decent options. It has been some interesting 10 years that I have used Apple computers.
I have tried many different operating systems on my desktop through the years( AmigaOs,CP/M,DOS, OS/2, Linux,Windows.*(up to XP),OS/X so maybe it's time to change again.
Is it just me or is he channeling Donald Trump.
I don't believe it. Apple has great engineers, but for a product to be popular it needs product vision. Jobs was unique in that he could anticipate where people were going and build a product that was the right product and ready to sell at the right time, resulting in huge success and massive dedication to the Apple brand.
Tim Cook is none of these things. He's a solid engineer but he has no vision. The Watch has no discernible purpose and the product lacks a killer app; it's successful because of the Apple brand but it is not a necessity the way the iPhone or iPod was. The latest Macbook Pro is obviously a misstep. The iPad Pro was a lame attempt at competing with the Surface, and was priced in a way that damaged the Apple brand.
No, unfortunately Apple was a great company because of Jobs, but Jobs had no successor. He didn't develop anyone to replicate his talent for product vision, and Apple is suffering because of it.
No ports at all! Soon we will force you to charge on a pad and only be able to connect things via bluetooth!
So I'm an iOS developer. After ~10 years of working for the man, doing Python and C++ on Linux, I wanted to do fulltime freelancing.
That means buying your own hardware. Since starting freelancing, I needed to be frugal and made do with a 2013 MacBook Air. But now that I've got a real solid client, I've upgraded to the latest 15" MacBook Pro.
It's a crazy capable machine. Love the fact that you can login with your fingerprint, and the new touchbar is nice. Not great, but nice. But it's thin, has four very capable thunderbolt ports disguised as USB-C, and runs all of my stuff like a demon. I don't care that it's Skylake instead of the latest Kaby lake, because it's not like we iOS developers have a choice anyway. Gotta run with what Apple provides. And a quad-core Skylake with the crazy fast SSDs that the MacBooks have, that's way beyond what I actually need. Good stuff.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
current ones are such P.O.S. :( Was totally ready to upgrade my mid 2015 MBP and plunk down ~$3k but then they actually shipped them and well., there's still $3k in my bank account waiting for something worthy of it.
We are going to make desktops. And believe me; It is going to be great desktops! Trust me!
I've watched the capabilities in the Mac OSX decline over the past decade. Apple pulled support for PowerPC, which was understandable. Then they pulled support for the X windowing system. Fine. Now you cannot write to an NTFS partition on a USB stick. If you want to write data out of the system onto an external disk, you MUST use the Apple branded partitions that are not readable on anything but Apple (and Linux, thankfully). Everything Apple has done with OSX is to support Apple hardware and Apple dependencies and there is no playing with anybody else.
So we had Microsoft who works for Microsoft alone, and Apple is catching up with their own brand of "pound sand" for us consumers. The end user cannot even change the color of the dock and only has a handful of pre-selected colors to do anything else in the OS. How much longer will we be allowed to change the background before the latest and greatest OSX won't even allow that? This is the simple stuff that has been around for ages.
Now my friends who were equally impressed with Mac 7 years ago are also asking me WTF?!?! Until Apple gets serious about returning their precious OSX back to the game and give the user options again, they will continue to lose consumers back over to Microsoft. Apple gained market share because of Vista, and they are starting to lose that ground because of their own flavor of "Vista".
The trend comes from the fact that PC sales have plummeted, globally.
Even if the PC market wasn't down, Apple still would make more money from iPhones than Macintoshes. Mac's account for something like 10-15% of Apple revenues. Nothing to sneeze at but no where close to the 50%+ they get from the iPhone.
Smart Phones, and Tablets are what the non tech buyer are favoring.
Don't kid yourself. EVERYBODY is buying those including the techies.
The charging pad will ONLY be available from an Apple store of course. Your device will have a firmware "feature" which will cause it to explode if you try charging it on a non-certified Apple charger.
Cook could make tremendous inroads in the enterprise if they made machines which were more business friendly. Yes, businesses would pay the price premium for a nice Mac, assuming it could work with AD better than they do now, have usable GPO based management tools, and be able to allow for Wi-Fi access at the login screen. SCCM, SCOM, et. al. hooks wouldn't hurt either.
As for hardware, something iMac-like would work, but with the ability to yank the camera and mic in a reversible fashion (older iMacs were able to be ordered with this done.) Server-wise, the XServe needs to come back.
Apple could also make a mint if they created their own VDI technology. Something like Dell's vWorkspace, except on XServes. If Apple made sure they would stand behind this, this would bring a lot of cash into Apple's coffers for not that much R&D.
Apple has a lot to gain by going to the enterprise. Name recognition would get companies to buy their products over commodity PCs, and it is easier to make one sale of 100,000 Macs than 100,000 sales of a Mac apiece.
What about some kind of server? or open mac os to run in a VM on ANY BASE Hardware. If just for an local update server.
The mini has been cut down from the last system and the old mac pro was a poor fit the new one even worst
Apple under Cook is producing stuff that people who are tech-savvy DO NOT WANT.
The new iPhone is a piece of crap which is less useful to me than my iPhone 6.
The new Macbook Pro is a JOKE. Again, the previous Macbook Pro is a more useful
machine.
Cook seems to believe Apple customers are all a bunch of idiotic sheep. Well, some are,
but some are not. I'm already shopping for alternatives and unless Cook resigns I am done
buying Apple stuff.
Sounds familiar ....
Solder the RAM and SSD into a desktop configuration, while removing as many ports as possible. Seriously, they have to either keep wired Ethernet, HDMI, and USB 3.0 for the next generation of desktops (tacitly admitting it was a mistake to remove them from the MBP), or build a Thunderbolt 3 iMac and see if anyone wants to keep playing the dongle game. They can't use size and weight constraints as an excuse for diminished connectivity and planned obsolescence in a desktop machine. And they'll have to do something to support modern video processors. Nobody is going to pay a premium price for a desktop with as many limitations as the latest MBP.
... and they run Linux. And, for all you trollboyz out there, the louder your protests, the more you prove the point. "Methinks the troll doth protest too much."
Great Macs are in the future? Really? Mac Mini anyone? Mac "Pro"? Even the iMac is a joke. Apple has lost sight of its core business, making computers. They're a garbage cellphone and music company now that still produces some other things but only because they forgot they produce them, and as soon as they realize they're wasting money ON producing them, they'll stop. This is the same path taken by Radio Shack before they disappeared.
There's a higher profit margin in making cellphones designed to cost more and more money, with money with minimal improvements between generations, and forcing customers to adopt whatever garbage you want to foist on them.
Buy a crappy headphone company, stop making things with headphone jacks in the hopes of convincing people to buy what is now YOUR company's headphones.
Don't let users upgrade anything ever because that reduces the amount of money you can earn in the future. Don't let users customize anything because again, that reduces your potential future income, because there's value in crushing your users' aspirations to ever be in charge of their own lives, and there's value in convincing your users they don't own the things they've bought.
Why do you think Apple fought so hard to keep using DIGITAL RESTRICTIONS MANAGEMENT on YOUR music? They want everything to be proprietary. They want to steal ideas, people, value from everyone else, like open source software and taint it with their evil and follow Microsoft's tried and true tactic of embrace and extend.
Apple is a perfect example of the how and why capitalism without control is a destructive force that far from offering the best products and services at the lowest prices, in the most rapid, flexible and responsive fashion, answerable to market forces instead offers mediocre products and services, (sure our phones can't use expandable memory forcing you to pay through the nose for a useable device but look how thin!) at ridiculous, astronomical prices, (iPhones now top out at over a ludicrous THOUSAND BUCKS A POP, but look how ohhhh... thinnnnn) offers only whatever they feel like offering, (want a headphone jack? Nah, what you really need is a second speaker, for stereo sound, mere inches apart because at Apple, we think you're a moron who doesn't understand how stereo works, and will pay us through the nose every year or two as we "innovate" (hahaha) by making thinner and thinner and progressively less and less capable devices...)
Apple STILL hasn't figured out how to make the damned thing waterproof or charge wirelessly, because to them, that would make the phones last longer and thus again... cut into their bottom line.
The problem IS the system. But apple's "leadership" bears a considerable portion of the blame.
New product line: The Woz.
Mid-tower boxes with motherboards from an authorised licensee at a reasonable price.
All it needs is marketing, and Apple could market life insurance to the dinosaurs.
I don't know. Maybe Tim should not spend any more time with The Donald. Empty promises are the last thing that Apple needs to be making right now, when it comes to a market segment that they have neglected for so long.
No ports at all! Soon we will force you to charge on a pad and only be able to connect things via bluetooth!
Apple has to keep at least one port. They'd let you charge using sunlight if they either bought the sun, and could charge you money for using their light, or figured out how to make a proprietary form of light only they could produce.
They'd call it iLight and it would be the thinnest, lightest form of light ever made. The photons would be 23% smaller than the old, industry standard photons that haven't changed or been upgraded in FOREVER, and they'd be up to 17% FASTER!
Then they'll bring someone out to explain how innovative they are in figuring out how to make something seem 23% smaller or 17% faster by creative use of terminology or phrasing.
Looks to me like they have been using Apple Maps for their roadmap lately.
I'm trying to think of when that last happened.
It's happened routinely. Apple has made quite a few computers that could properly described as great - at least for their time. Some even fairly recently. They've got the ability to do it but their attention has been pointed at the mobile market for a while now and I think the Macs haven't gotten adequate management attention.
Graphite G4, maybe? That really ticked all the boxes in terms of great performance, a beautiful case, and assloads of I/O and expandability
That's a very narrow definition of what makes a great computer. I would argue that great computers come in many forms and the greatest of them are ones that change markets. Apple has had more than a few of those. And beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Personally I thought the Graphite G4 liked a bit like a plastic toy but that's just my personal tastes talking. Obviously it spoke to you. Expandability can be nice but if you never use it then it is wasteful - and most people will never use it. To some extent what makes a great computer is judged by sales. A great computer is one that strongly fits what people want from it and are willing to actually buy.
MMGA - Make Mac Great Again
Cue the Samsung Legal Team suing for Explodey Infringement...
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
I worked for a startup once. Already gone public, nice building in the valley, etc. We had a conference call with the CEO, who said they'd just inked a big deal with a certain large PC maker and we were on track to be a $100M company in a year or two. Fast forward 2 months, and... We're broke! Almost everyone was laid off: I got 3 weeks severance.
Anyone who thinks Apple is different needs to read up on QuickDraw3D, OpenDoc, older Macs with DSPs, and x86 daughter cards to run Windows. For that matter, top secret Intel Macs, while they were still calling x86 junk. They won't breathe a word about what's going on while the old stuff still sells at a profit.
Don't open it!
Don't touch it!
As a matter of fact - don't even look at it!
Don't think about it!
Wouldn't they be too busy torturing the drivers to pay any attention to their school-work?
And that will be two proprietary uses for the NFC chip on-board and it still won't interact with any other NFC technology.
I very much dislike the apple desktops. We have more problems with hardware on that mac pro then all other models put together. Then there's that imac fusion drive. It's a total cop out. Just put in a flash drive so you can have one point of failure instead of two!! I can't wait for how many problems the next gen of desktops is going to bring.
Should of at least had an power port and not tie up of the data ports for it.
I disagree that that is a problem. I don't want a special power cord. Having everything use the same type of cord is actually an awesome idea. But I think Apple got a little too eager to convert everyone. A transition period would have been helpful.
Don't worry Apple polishers! We certainly won't lose sight of our goal to sell you otherwise affordable hardware with our glowing corporate logo on it for a premium price. We won't leave desktop and laptop users out in the cold by focusing on our mobile products, which make up the bulk of our profits, no sir!
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
Your job - Put Tim Cook under an Apple ][ Forever banner in the Mac OS work area.
Jobs died and some funny goofy shareholder catering fuckball jerked his way to the top spot. It's like Louis Vuitton deciding to stop handbags and focus on selling volumes of "Hand Bag Lites" to burgeoning middle classes of former third world countries whose only goal is to buy a piece of the brand. Make your shit work again for the people who don't like your competitors for the right reasons - the minions will still follow.
IBM once said that it was fully committed to OS/2. What is OS/2 asks the young whipper-snapper? It is lost to the history books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I sure hope that they release a new Mac mini with user replaceable RAM. I don't have enough money for a Mac Pro and I refuse to buy an iMac since I have an expensive high gamut color calibrated screen.
Assuming you don't get mugged for the laptop.
Avoiding being mugged used to be easy back when there was a category of inexpensive laptops that would comfortably fit in a satchel that isn't obviously a laptop bag. But 10-inch netbooks were discontinued four years ago.
I wouldn't be comfortable with anything beyond a cheap Chromebook on the buses I used to take.
The problem with a Chromebook in developer mode is that its firmware prompts people to wipe the hard drive. So if anybody picks it up, turns it on, and presses Space Enter as prompted, you lose any uncommitted changes, and you also lose the use of the laptop until you return home to reinstall Crouton.
With a paper-white display, Retina quality, crazy thin, infinite battery life and touch enabled. It's a sheet of paper...
Apple, showing the courage of Gutenberg!
subject box.
Too late, Oracle already did that...
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
Xorg 1.19 has just been released and 1.20 is coming out soon (or is it .2x now?) Now the X11 protocol on the other hand is pretty much 'mature'. The only way to change things is to drop features and at that point you might as well use VNC or RDP (both of which there are already X servers for, as well as a X proxy server for screen-like services for X desktops.)
Having said that, maybe wayland and company will offer an appreciable increase in performance and productivity warranting the migration. Personally X is plenty fast for me in most cases, and with a compositing window manager the only performance degradation compared to windows is d3d9/d3d11 suppport, the former of which wine+mesa d3d9 state manager+open source r600/radeonsi/nouveau overcome. d3d11/12 support isn't there yet, but it looks like it will be supported via a vulkan wrapper, along with all future gpus using an opengl wrapper as well.
So Apple have announced nothing, and still get a headline. The reality is that Apple has had no competitive hardware to offer for many years in any 'professional' desktop or laptop. I think that that is a pretty irrefutable statement. I also see a macos that badly lags technically, and forces inefficient GUI based working practices on users. Apple's hardware offerings are actually not bad - they have decent but small screen in their laptops, but they are more like very overpriced low/mid range consumer machines, rather than machines aimed at the professional. The laptop RAM limits are an absolute killer for use as professional/development boxes, the GPUs are not very good, and the lack of expansion offerings is just crazy, and you can't get a proper keyboard, or even a non-American keyboard layout in the UK. Eclipse is just one example that can use more RAM than you can have in a macbook pro - and the crappy filesystem provided by macos struggles with just about any job your throw at it, even with a top quality SSD. Forget about indexing a few million lines of C++ on a mac, or compiling a medium sized code base. There are also not many good development tools. Xcode is abysmal, crashy, slow, and has rotten C++ support. There are also some weird proprietary Apple languages like swift/objective c, but who's going to write non-portable code in these silly things? I wan't to like Apple, but at every turn, their offerings are plagued by glaring deficiencies, and arrogantly insane decisions.
The trend of macos/windows 10 toward dumbed down guis for things that can be done more efficiently from the command line, is essentially leaving the only options for competent users as being Linux or one of the BSDs. And, yes, I know that you can use a UNIX prompt on a mac, but just try to work permanently from there - then you'll know what purgatory is like.
Not only does Slashdot now spend too much time regurgitating big companies PR, they also announce "going to" and pipe dream stories which is on the horizon. This "news" isn't useful for anyone. Get your act together Slashdot!
On the model Mac Pro I have, which is a nice silver tower, I can use a drive space to install an SD slot (along with more USB ports, etc.) Or whatever else I might need. because it's, you know, expandable.
I am actually in the market for a new Mac Pro. Luckily, EBay has plenty of 12-core silver towers at very reasonable prices. So no problem here. I can keep buying Apple's previous rational designs while eating popcorn and watching them go batshit with incredibly stupid (but courageous, oh so very courageous) new designs.
My 2008 8-core is doing fine, but I would like more speed, and memory for it is expensive, and I assume that eventually it will die in some horrible way, so time for some spares. I have a lot code invested in the Mac application zone. Plus I am reasonably fond of OS X, to the point where I definitely prefer it. So a Mac it still will be. From EBay!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I have 8 monitors on my multi-CPU, multi-core, desktop machine. It works reasonably smoothly, and I do tax the system a bit. Realtime signal processing, concurrent (big) compiles, network monitoring, browsing, slack and Ryver, a virtual windows machine used for cross-platform builds and testing. It would be... interesting... to meet up with a laptop that could keep up with all this. Discounting the fact that it would really be in my way unless I hid it under the desk or something.
I'm looking for more power. Not less.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
For the masses. /Brugaaah
Tim cook want to assure everyone that he's committed to profit at any cost. Fuck customers, fuck empoyees, and fuck everyone else. It's profit or nothing. He does not give a shit about quality.
A promise from a CEO is pretty much the same as a promise from a politician.
You are correct that a Windows laptop, which is capable of running Delphi, is less expensive than a low-end MacBook if you look at hardware alone. But according to the pricing page, a Windows PC with a validly licensed copy of Delphi Professional ($1,264.50) and the Mobile Add-on Pack ($702.00) is more expensive than a comparable Mac with a validly licensed copy of Xcode.
And can Delphi for Windows deploy to iOS devices for testing and package for the App Store?
Tim Cook steps up to the platform and announces: Great desktops are coming," he crosses his fingers behind his back and thinks, "They are called the Microsoft Surface Pro and clones of such. Oh, you meant great Mac desktops. Well . . . Apple's OS X can't even support touch input yet, so, uh, we are trying to decide whether to
1) move forward with IOS as our new desktop OS, in which case it will be six to ten years before our desktop/laptop OS reaches stability for applications as opposed to apps
Or
2) invest two to four years in implementing touch events into our OS X operating system, at which point phones and tablets can run full blown desktop OSes so we will be left to wonder why we have two operating systems, then release a great desktop;
Or
3) just focus on mobile and hope mobile kills the desktop/laptop.
Let's go with 3, but I better give lip service to Mac lovers for a few years.
He tells a few more lies. Then Tim Cook leaves the platform and wonders how long it will take before everyone realizes he is doing nothing for Apple and has been floundering since the death of Steve Jobs.
OMG, are we witnessing what amounts to Nero and his violin while Rome burned?
Sure seems so.
Damnit.