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.

Comments

2010

[Holi]

They haven't had a "great desktop" in 7 years.

Got the latest 15"

[cerberusss]

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.

Re:New Mac Pro in 2020!

[dgatwood]

It is an elegant design that completely ignores the needs of its target audience in favor of making something pretty. Most pros don't care at all about a sleek and elegant design, because we stick the computers under our desks anyway. What we care about are all the things that the previous Mac Pro did, but the current one doesn't. The tower design was a much, much better design for a sizable percentage of pro users, and the new design is a major downgrade that looks like it was designed as a high end Mac Mini with beefier CPUs and GPUs instead of as a pro machine.

With the exception of the faster CPU, the faster GPU, and the PCIe-attached SSD (all of which Apple could have done much more easily in the previous form factor), the only advantage that the new Mac Pro design has over the old one is cooling (fan noise). Unfortunately, the only people who care significantly about fan noise are audio recording engineers, and:

• Recording studios need way more than a terabyte of storage.
• Recording requires fast, low-latency storage, so they can't readily use a NAS in another room.
• Apple doesn't build any silent RAID arrays to go with the Mac Pro.

So their super-silent Mac Pros have a noisy third-party RAID array right next to them, completely defeating the purpose of making the computer silent in the first place. Worse, if folks take those machines on the road and need external storage, they have to carry two pieces of hardware instead of one.

Additionally:

• The previous design was trivially adaptable to rack mounting. The new one has to sit on a shelf.
• It is challenging to transport on the road because if it falls on its side, it rolls.
• It isn't stackable. The space it occupies and the space above it are lost, because it vents heat from the top.
• It has no standard PCIe slots, making GPU upgrades unlikely.
• It has no SD slot, requiring an unsightly external dongle that diminishes the visual appeal that would otherwise attract designer/photographers. (Mind you, neither did the previous model, which annoyed me on an ongoing basis, so at least they are consistent.)
• It lacks dual-link DVI, which at least initially was a minor headache for many folks.
• Apple's stock SSD is considerably slower than the PCIe SSDs you can use on the towers.
• The twelve-core configuration of the trash can is still not significantly faster in multicore performance than the fastest tower version, but costs considerably more.
• The single-core performance is considerably worse, so poorly multithreaded apps like Xcode really bog down on the newer models.

None of those design deficiencies impact every user, but each one takes a chunk out of potential sales by making it less suitable for some segment of one of its target markets. And these are just the design flaws that come to mind off the top of my head. For example, I seriously considered buying one myself before I realized that I would never survive with only a terabyte of effectively non-expandable storage, and I didn't want to spend ten grand for something that wouldn't really be faster than a previous-generation machine costing a fraction as much.

So basically, I'm not sure who the new Mac Pro was supposed to appeal to. It looks very pretty on your desk until you start hooking up external storage to replace the functionality that was present on the previous model. And in terms of functionality, it is more disposable than previous models, offering significantly fewer upgrade options, and yet costs significantly more. It is an absolutely baffling design that IMO marked the start of Apple's descent into madness. And that's why we say that it isn't "pro".