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Tim Cook Assures Employees That It Is Committed To Mac and 'Great Desktops' Are Coming (techcrunch.com)

Posted by msmash on from the relax-guys dept.

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.

42 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. New Mac Pro in 2020! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Maybe it will be a REAL pro machine this time?

    1. Re:New Mac Pro in 2020! by tripleevenfall · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Apple seems to think that all you need are ever more miniature mobile devices strapped all over your body and connected wirelessly to each other, requiring proprietary adapters to charge and having batteries you can't replace.

    2. Re:New Mac Pro in 2020! by MachineShedFred · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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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    3. Re:New Mac Pro in 2020! by naughtynaughty · · Score: 2

      Very true, still have my 2012 Mac Mini's, since I was able to upgrade their memory and the disk drive over the years they've remained useful.

      No doubt that the 2017 Mac Mini will be non-expandable just like the 2014 version, Apple counts on that revenue from people over-paying for memory and disk space today just because they won't be able to upgrade in the future.

    4. Re:New Mac Pro in 2020! by imashination · · Score: 2

      It may have a state of the art physical design, but this is a design which has served virtually no function other than to make any meaningful upgrades impossible. If apple had at least kept up and offered systems with modern components then this could be overlooked to a degree, but they havent. Talking as a 3D user, the current top end mac pro is nothing short of laughable in terms of specs. A single CPU socket competing in a world of dual and quad chip workstations, Two immensely out of date GPUs which are exactly the same as the ones launched three years ago, in real-world performance they're beaten by a single low-mid range gaming card. The forums I visit are filled with post after post of mac users asking the windows guys for help picking a machine.

      You simply cannot leave the same old machine on sale for 3 years and expect to maintain a market. At least in the past when apple did this it wasn't too bad because the larger cheesegrater towers were somewhat expandable and could be kept somewhat up to date, but the trashcans have no decent cpu options short of what they shipped with and most people would have maxed the memory out in the first place.

      Put another way, if apple left it 3 or 4 years between iphones, they'd have people jumping ship; that's the current situation for pro macs right now

    5. Re:New Mac Pro in 2020! by dgatwood · · Score: 5, Informative

      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".

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    6. Re:New Mac Pro in 2020! by Bongo · · Score: 2

      Quite. I bought a new Mac Pro: it's called an HP Z series workstation.

    7. Re:New Mac Pro in 2020! by dgatwood · · Score: 2

      Many pro users just want a powerful machine that doesn't require any special accommodation to make it usable in their studio. Rack mountability and portability? Those are niche cases. More important is silence and desk space. The trash can is a brilliant design for a single-computer, quiet desktop.

      Rack mounting is common in recording studios, and portable rack use is common for gigging musicians. Silence is critical, but the previous Mac Pro was also fairly quiet until the fans ramped up, and the difference in baseline noise level goes away if you have to attach a third-party RAID box to make up for a lack of adequate internal storage. Lack of even a single drive bay was IMO a critical design mistake.

      For that matter, most recording studio setups deliberately use separate drives for audio data and the OS so that occasional paging and other system activity doesn't impact audio performance. And although the faster random access performance of the SSD certainly helps with that, a system with only one drive is still arguably compromised by design for audio purposes even if you ignore the lack of capacity, because the previous Mac Pro could have multiple SSDs if you needed them.

      The trash can would make a better midrange system with a single, modest (geforce 1050 range) graphics card and a single consumer-grade, quad processor. Those things don't even need to be replaceable if the system price is in the $1500 range.

      This. It's an overpriced high-end Mac Mini, not a true successor to the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro was effectively discontinued in 2013.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  2. Until the product is actually released by H3lldr0p · · Score: 5, Insightful

    it's all BS.

    Put up or shut up.

    1. Re: Until the product is actually released by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I was wondering the same thing. My conclusion is that the iPhone market (Apple's cash cow) is nearing the same saturation level desktops have come to. Even diehard Apple fans I know don't feel the need to constantly swap their phones until software support starts stagnating too far.

  3. Yes, but will it be thin? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Thats the only thing that matters apparently.

    1. Re:Yes, but will it be thin? by ckatko · · Score: 4, Funny

      Apple is slut-shaming our laptops and phones into anorexia.

  4. Talk is cheap. by sjbe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:Talk is cheap. by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Apple is clearly capable of making great desktop computers

      I'm trying to think of when that last happened. Graphite G4, maybe? That really ticked all the boxes in terms of great performance, a beautiful case, and assloads of I/O and expandability. Before that, I'd argue that the last great hardware they built was 68k-based. (I owned a Rev.1 B&W G3 with the CMD IDE data corruption failure, otherwise I might have pointed at the Bondi Blue machines. They weren't beautiful, but they were striking, if you were into low-end Swatch watches.

      The big-balls G5 commonly leaked its juices out onto tables. Everything since has had some kind of stupid limitations in the expandability department, culminating in the recent rice cooker/wastebasket. Is Apple ideologically capable of producing a great desktop, like they were doing regularly in the 68020-68040 era?

      --
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  5. Hopefully laptops too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Hope they have addressing the underspec'd macbook 'pro' (more like consumer-plus) on the roadmap too

  6. Our engineers are hard at work this very moment... by Bill+Hayden · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...seeing how many ports and upgradeable options they can remove.

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  7. Translation by ArhcAngel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Brace Yourselves!...Layoffs are coming!

    --
    "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
    1. Re:Translation by ArhcAngel · · Score: 2

      OH I'm sure it is coming. Every company I've ever seen make a statement like this has done the exact opposite within weeks of the statement. It is meant to allay employee fears and keep investors happy but usually induces a quiet panic in the affected BU. If they were actually planning something they would instead tease the upcoming hardware to generate enthusiasm.

      --
      "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
  8. Sounds like an internal mutiny by DatbeDank · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Sounds like an internal mutiny by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Funny

      The Onion. It's sort of like rule 34.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    2. Re:Sounds like an internal mutiny by AC-x · · Score: 2

      You'd have thought something like a keyboard would be indespensible, but the folks at Apple are visionaries and if they want us to work without a keyboard I expect we'll find a way

      Funny you should say that

  9. With no ports! by exabrial · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. 2010 by Holi · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    --
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  11. Re:pathetic by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Working on laptops is a horrible experience.
    How mac users can tolerate this is baffling.

    Trollish as this may be, you have raised an interesting question. ALL laptops are crappy compared to a good desktop running the same OS: cramped keyboard and display, processor low-specced to prevent overheating, components that have to be ruggedized against vibration and shock. Everything on a laptop costs more to repair than on a desktop.

    We have been putting up with the limitations of laptops because of the need to be able to run the same software on the road as on your desk. Now that tablets and phones are taking over on the road, the advantages of good desktops are being recognized again.

  12. w/ a TouchBar? by rene2 · · Score: 2

    possibly with a TouchBar, as great and up-to-date as the iTrashCan? :-/

  13. New Mac Mini? by muffen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  14. The method is the problem by sjbe · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re: The method is the problem by Yvan256 · · Score: 2

      It would be a little hard to use a Mac mini on a plane, train or automobile.

  15. Courage and Bravery! by mlw4428 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

  16. Well, shit ... by gander666 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 ... but I repeat myself. - Mark T
  17. He only mentions iMacs... by njvack · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here's what Cook says:

    The current generation iMac is the best desktop we have ever made and its beautiful Retina 5K display is the best desktop display in the world.

    Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops. 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.

    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.

  18. Re:pathetic by 110010001000 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  19. Re:pathetic by tsqr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).

  20. Re:pathetic by SubtleGuest · · Score: 2

    If I'm going to do all of that why don't I just get a desktop and not mess with all that shit?

  21. Re:pathetic by Freischutz · · Score: 2

    Working on laptops is a horrible experience. How mac users can tolerate this is baffling.

    Trollish as this may be, you have raised an interesting question. ALL laptops are crappy compared to a good desktop running the same OS: cramped keyboard and display, processor low-specced to prevent overheating, components that have to be ruggedized against vibration and shock. Everything on a laptop costs more to repair than on a desktop.

    We have been putting up with the limitations of laptops because of the need to be able to run the same software on the road as on your desk. Now that tablets and phones are taking over on the road, the advantages of good desktops are being recognized again.

    Of course everything costs more to repair on a laptop than a desktop. It's the nature of laptops to be as compact and light as possible and those are the things you sacrifice. How many upgrading options you want to sacrifice for reductions in weight varies from person to person. I am prepared to sacrifice a whole bunch of upgrading options and repariability for radical reductions in weight but other people may not feel that way. If you want an upgradeable laptop stay away from ultra compacts and buy one of those big clunky Dell slabs. As for tablets taking over from laptops for work on the road I can't second that. Unless all you do is very simple word processing, spreadsheet work or something in that vein you are better off with a laptop simply because it has a more powerful and flexible desktop environment. I don't play games, my development projects are not so resource heavy that replacing an i5 with an i7 will cut an hour off my compile time so a 12" MacBook type ultra compact laptop is more than enough for me and the amount of Photoshop work I do. I'll never buy a big fat tower case desktop again as long as I live. If I ever feel the need for more processing power I'll get something in the same league as the Mac Mini and the only upgrading options I'll care about there is RAM and storage.

  22. Percent of sales by sjbe · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Percent of sales by MightyYar · · Score: 2

      Don't kid yourself. EVERYBODY is buying those including the techies.

      I'm pretty "techie", though quite far from needing a truly bleeding edge machine most of the time (I can use AWS when I need bursts of computing). You are 100% correct. I really don't buy or even upgrade PCs at the rate I used to - progress has stalled somewhat on the desktop. For many techie tasks, you can, when push comes to shove, use a high-end machine from 10 years ago if you update the memory and stick a flash drive in it. In contrast, a 10-year-old phone (or God forbid, pre-iPad tablet) would be hopelessly obsolete. I have a wife and kids, too, and so that means I'm a few upgrade cycles in on phones and tablets for each PC that I buy. And the last two "PC"s that I bought were Chromebooks, since that's what the kids use at school. I have an old Core2Duo workstation with plenty of RAM set up for the kids that almost never gets powered on because the kids use the Chromebooks, despite being less capable and having a tiny screen.

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  23. Re:Got the latest 15" by UnknowingFool · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You developed Python and C++ for 10 years yet didn't own your own computer? That seems highly unlikely.

    So it's not likely that after 10 years of working for a company as a developer (which supplied the company hardware), he THEN decided to do freelance and THEN bought his own hardware FOR DEVELOPMENT? Also, he never said he didn't own a computer before that; he said development meant he had to buy hardware. He, like many of us, could have had personal machines not up to snuff for development.

    Personally I have Windows, Mac and Linux machines: not one of them is suitable for development. The Linux machine hardware is pretty weak hardware; the Mac was a hand-me-down which I use as a media server; the Windows machine is a gaming machine. If I started freelance development, I would have to get another machine.

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  24. Re:Our engineers are hard at work this very moment by mujadaddy · · Score: 2

    Cue the Samsung Legal Team suing for Explodey Infringement...

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  25. Believe it when you see it by paulxnuke · · Score: 2

    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.

  26. Like IBM committed to OS/2? by ripvlan · · Score: 2

    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/...

  27. Re: Our engineers are hard at work this very momen by ZorroXXX · · Score: 2

    Apple ... if they either bought the sun ...

    Too late, Oracle already did that...

    --
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