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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.
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 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.
>> 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 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
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.
Are you guys insane? Just plug in an external keyboard and mouse and display if you want it. Get a docking station. Desktop PCs are dead, except for gaming. Get over it.
At work, I have a mid-2015 Macbook Pro Retina. IMHO it has a number of advantages over a desktop computer, even though I never go on the road for work, so that aspect of portability doesn't matter to me. When I'm at my desk, it's connected to a keyboard, mouse, and nice big monitor. Same when I'm working from home (hard to imagine lugging a desktop box home from work). I can take it to meetings to take notes or to give presentations. And I really have no complaints about its performance (2.8 GHz i7, 16 gigs of RAM, 1 gig SSD).
The problem is that people buy Mac Pro for the GPUs in order to use OpenCL, or god forbid, CUDA. Not CUDA on the trash can, but you know what I mean.
And they haven't done shit with the GPUs in that thing, and they were bad when it launched 3 years ago, which in GPU lifetimes is like 5 product cycles.
I suppose if they sold more of those things, it would be an opportunity for a company to reverse-engineer the BGA connector they are using to attach those GPUs, which we know contains power, PCI-e, and DisplayPort and create upgrade cards - this is what would have happened 15 years ago. But nobody is interested in spending millions to do that in order to move several thousand units even at the inflated price you could expect.
That thing is the true example of form over function. Why spend $6k for one of those with two old shit GPUs when you could spend $1000 less for a workstation from Lenovo with 3 Quadro cards, Xeon E5 v4 processors rather than v3, faster RAM, far more configuration options, and still get the precious Thunderbolt that Apple drones on about.
That Mac Pro sucked two years ago, and hasn't gotten any better with age. Apple neglected their Pro customers, and now they aren't Apple customers any more. And I say this as someone who used Mac Pro as a desktop since 2006, until last year when I built a PC using the Intel X99 chipset with DDR4 RAM and capabilities for 4 GPUs - something that is apparently well beyond Apple's capabilities.
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