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At Apple, Mac Is Getting Far Less Attention - How It Handled the New MacBook Pro Is a Living Proof (bloomberg.com)
Apple CEO Tim Cook may have assured employees that the company is committed to Mac computers, but people working in the Mac team say the company now pays far less attention to the computer lineup, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who has been right just about every time with Apple scoops. From his report: Interviews with people familiar with Apple's inner workings reveal that the Mac is getting far less attention than it once did. They say the Mac team has lost clout with the famed industrial design group led by Jony Ive and the company's software team. They also describe a lack of clear direction from senior management, departures of key people working on Mac hardware and technical challenges that have delayed the roll-out of new computers. While the Mac generates about 10 percent of Apple sales, the company can't afford to alienate professional designers and other business customers. After all, they helped fuel Apple's revival in the late 1990s. In a stinging critique, Peter Kirn, founder of a website for music and video creators, wrote: "This is a company with no real vision for what its most creative users actually do with their most advanced machines." If more Mac users switch, the Apple ecosystem will become less sticky -- opening the door to people abandoning higher-value products like the iPhone and iPad. The report also sheds light on battery issues in the new MacBook Pro lineup that many have complained about. From the report: In the run-up to the MacBook Pro's planned debut this year, the new battery failed a key test, according to a person familiar with the situation. Rather than delay the launch and risk missing the crucial holiday shopping season, Apple decided to revert to an older design. The change required roping in engineers from other teams to finish the job, meaning work on other Macs languished, the person said. The new laptop didn't represent a game-changing leap in battery performance, and a software bug misrepresented hours of power remaining. Apple has since removed the meter from the top right-hand corner of the screen.
You have to have a Mac to make iOS apps.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I dunno... it certainly seems that way, especially when you consider that Macs (or rather, OSX-running stuff) represent what, 10-20% of their revenue nowadays, when compared to iPads and etc?
But then, if you look at the population at large, we're seeing a somewhat similar trend.
You and I (and anyone who loves to tinker with stuff) are decrying the lack of ports, lack of upgradeability, etc... meanwhile, Joe Sixpack never bothers to do much more than occasionally up the RAM on his laptop, his wife dumped her laptop for an iPad/tablet years ago, and a *huge* percentage of folks do nearly everything on their smartphones nowadays.
Port usage is different too among most consumers - most folks have long ago begun switching to bluetooth and wifi to connect stuff. Printers nowadays are wifi-connected, so what's the point of having a dedicated printer cable port? Geek sticks? Okay, we'll still need a USB port.. but that's about it. Camera/SD cards? USB adapter, as always, or just use the USB cable, or...
Makes perfect sense to the average consumer, who doesn't have a lot of use for the holes in their laptop, and isn't going to bother with upgrades beyond maybe a bigger hard drive a couple of years down the road - when it comes time to buy a new laptop. I don't blame them, either - there haven't been any real advances in performance over the past, what, decade? At least when it comes to the trinity (CPU, RAM, Disk), it's been incremental at best.
This presents a problem for the tinkering crowd. I can't just buy a baseline MBP and bump the disk and RAM when I get home. I can't plug in all my old shit like I used to. Unlike most consumers, I actually use the built-in Ethernet port once in awhile on my 2012-era MBP (occasionally troubleshooting the home router/sat-link ISP). Stuff like that. But then, I see my own home rigs changing: the laptop I sit in front of connects to boxes I've rigged as servers: media, storage, what-have-you. Given this, I don't mind so much if I can't do as much with the laptop nowadays. If I want to do gaming or some real demanding thing, I can turn to my fire-breathing dual-boot (Hackintosh/Linux) desktop - either by sitting in front of it, or by using RDP, or...
I think it's part and parcel of Apple's response to usage patterns among the general public (not the geeks, but the general public), which makes more sense to them, at least financially.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The Mac Pro using the 12 core Xeon is based on Ivy bridge, that is quiet old. There has been Haswell, Broadwell, and now Skylake since it came out. The Wifi doesnt support N just AC. Only 1 Xeon CPU. Only 64 gigs of memory when you can buy 64 gigs for a desktop now cheap. And they still use the AMD FirePro D700 for the gfx card is bad. Its about the speed of a 980, when nvidia 1080's are out.
They gave up on power users, they gave up on power laptops. If you are an adobe photoshop user and you need speed, you migrated to windows awhile ago.