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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.
it's all BS.
Put up or shut up.
...seeing how many ports and upgradeable options they can remove.
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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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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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Apple is slut-shaming our laptops and phones into anorexia.
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:
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:
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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