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Silicon Valley Veteran On Apple: Company Has Become Sloppy, Missed Updates, Delayed Refreshes (chuqui.com)
Silicon Valley veteran Chuq Von Rospach's blog post, in which he has criticized Apple for the things it did last year, has received quite a few nods from developers, analysts and users alike. Von Rospach, who has previously worked at Apple, has lambasted at the company for, among other things, how it has handled the Mac Pro, a lineup that hasn't seen any refresh in ages, and the AirPort routers, which too have been reportedly abandoned. From the post:Back when I was running most of Apple's e-mail systems for the marketing teams, I went to them and suggested that we should consider dumping the text-only part of the emails we were building, because only about 4% of users used them and it added a significant amount of work to the process of creation and testing each e-mail. Their response? That it was a small group of people, but a strategic one, since it was highly biased towards developers and power users. So the two-part emails stayed -- and they were right. It made no sense from a business standpoint to continue to develop these emails as both HTML [and] text, but it made significant strategic sense. It was an investment in keeping this key user base happy with Apple. Apple, from all indications I've seen over the last year and with the configurations they've shipped with these new laptops, has forgotten this, and the product configurations seem designed by what will fit the biggest part of the user base with the fewest configuration options. They've chopped off the edges of the bell curve -- and big chunks of their key users with them. The most daunting sentence from his post, according to Nitin Ganatra, who worked at Apple for 18 years and headed engineering of iOS, is, "If you just look at the numbers, things are okay."
A comma is needful between ''year'' and ''has'.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Delayed Refreshes By Long"?
Long what, exactly?
I'm thinking apple knows how long most of these are supposed to be depreciated on balance sheets and times the updates on past sales volume each year
sure some people are screwed, but it's not like most companies will let you buy a new one yearly or every two years without a good reason
This is what happens when you don't have a CEO with BPD cracking the whip.
The veterans can sputter all they want about metrics.
It made no sense from a business standpoint to continue to develop these emails as both HTML [and] text, but it made significant strategic sense.
the fact that this rose to the level of a marketing decision shows that as far back as Chuq's tenure, Apple has been on a steady decline. As an email admin, let me spell this out for you. You supply email in text and HTML format because people who do real and meaningful work on desktops and laptops want to see the text, not HTML. these are the same people who still use real F keys, a real escape key, and consider removing the headphones from a cellphone a form of jackassery, not bravery.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'm a field engineer. My new laptop cycle is approaching and the MBP is not in the running.
The Surface is looking pretty good for my usage. I already started to migrate out of the Apple ecosystem. Just a few last ties left then I'm free.
It was an amazing, new age when Apple adopted Unix, and brought Mac OS X to the world; the developer was made king, and it was fun to help Apple build its ecosystem.
Then, Apple got a taste of money.
Cha-Ching: Little pocket-devices that could be walled off and metered for every little fucking penny; hell, developers even had to pay for the privilege of developing "apps", and they were forced to "upgrade" from perfectly useful PowerPC Macs to the new x86 ones just to play with the SDK.
Now, the creative people have been forced out to make way for the conservative, Vogonic bean-counters. It's the natural pendulum of innovation.
"Silicon Valley Veteran On Apple: Company Has Become Sloppy, Missed Updates, Delayed Refreshes By Long"
By contrast, if the company you work for has always been sloppy and slipshod, people simply lower their expectations and it's no big deal.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
E-mails? Really? THAT's Apple's problem? And spouting off about HTML in e-mails? HTML is total inconsistent crap. What looks fine to one user on one platform and one browser looks totally different to another. That said, this post reminds me of the time that Steve Jobs came into a meeting as asked what some particular software product was supposed to do. After receiving an answer he said, "Can anyone tell me why the f*ck it doesn't do that?" Apple has indeed lost its way. They have all but abandoned the power users and power developers (there are plenty of things that Android developers have access to that iOS developers don't). Why the hell did Apple buy Beats? Seems like they're focusing on trying to make the next big thing and that's sucking all the resources away from other product lines.
and got modded down.
Ugh, for someone who supposedly worked at Apple. You think you would pick up a few design ques from them...
Purple text on an off-white/pinkish background?!
Let me back up. PURPLE F**KING NORMAL TEXT?!
My god. No wonder you don't work at Apple anymore, a child could come up with something more pleasing to the eye.
Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, BMW, etc. don't make race cars and compete in things like 24 Hours of LeMans, WRC, etc. because those cars and those events make them money. They do it because 1) It provides a venue to show off cool new technology 2) It provides them marketing cachet, name recognition, and bragging rights.
Apple has lost sight of this. Apple is happily making Corollas & Caravans - which sell large volumes and make a profit. But it has forgotten the high-performance end of the bell curve where the bragging rights are earned and new tech is shown off.
Any potential innovation costs money and fails to produce the same levels of profit as existing products will be seen as a failure, so Apple is stuck doing nothing because its the most profitable thing in the short term.
The problem seems to be by the time the highly profitable products stop producing huge levels of profit they won't have any new products available because no innovation is likely to produce the same profits, so they don't do any innovation as it will be only a cost or cut in overall profitability.
What I'm curious is whether investors will be happy with innovation-less profit or whether they will respond to public criticism of lack of innovation and put pressure on Cook to pursue more meaningful innovation even if it hurts short term profitability. And more meaningful innovation means real stuff, not grinding users for headphone dongles or new wireless headphones.
Mac pro got to thin and the lack of loop back cable system for TB like other pro workstations boxed them in.
The PSU does not have the power to run the system at full load and also the heat limits it as well plus only 1 cpu also limits the pci-e lanes to a point where they only have 1 storage port.
Right now getting TB3 in there will be hard with out adding more pci-e switches (with video cards taking an bandwidth cut down) / adding an cpu / cutting down to 1 video card (still needs an pci-e switch to feed out the pci-e from the X16 for 1 video card).
They should of keep the tower or even went bigger if just to hide the DP to TB card cables.
They won't for long if they keep pissing off their highest revenue-generating customers.
I'm curious who you think those "highest revenue-generating customers" actually are. I'm willing to be it isn't who you think it is. Just because you buy a Mac Pro every few years doesn't make you a "highest revenue customer". Well over 50% of Apples revenues come from the iPhone and you can tell that Apple's focus is more on that product than any other. Also the customers generating the most revenue are very likely to be a different group than the most profitable customers. At the end of the day it's profits, not revenues that matter.
Thank you - probably the funniest thing I've read in 2017 so far.
Apple has always been a little behind on the hardware in its devices. For example, the iPhone got LTE support a couple of years after it became common with Android phones. They've also been somewhat quick in the past to drop support for things like FireWire, so there's precedent for some of their decisions. These were strategic choices that can be defended.
Being a little slow to add features can be a good thing if it ensures that the new features don't adversely affect user experiences. LTE adoption was slow partly due to concerns about battery life. The strategic decision to remove an older feature like floppy drives or FireWire can make sense if there's something newer and better to replace it with.
The real problem is that Apple's hardware and software, if lagging slightly behind their competitors, had the advantage of being particularly stable, reliable, and of superior quality. I could count on OS X to just work and not experience the problems of Windows systems. Mac hardware could be counted on to not fail nearly as soon as cheaper competitors. They've always been more expensive, but I could justify the expense as paying for superior quality. That doesn't seem to be the case any longer, especially with the software being less stable and reliable than in the past. I can accept higher prices and hardware that's slightly behind the leading edge as long as I'm getting a top quality product. I can accept strategic decisions to discontinue features if it makes sense to move toward a newer and superior alternative.
Unfortunately, Apple seems to have gotten away from quality in favor of pure marketing. That's a shame, because the best marketing for Apple products and the associated expense was that they really were better than their competitors. The "Hello, I'm a Mac.. and Hello, I'm a PC" commercials were an outstanding marketing tactic that focused on the superior quality of Apple products. If Apple still wanted to promote quality, that would still work in the present day. It's clear that a lot of Windows users don't really like Windows 10. There are also a lot of issues with the forced updates and removal of user freedom. Some of the updates definitely seem half baked, which results in a really bad user experience. The old Apple would have been marketing the hell out of their computers as an alternative to Microsoft's aggressive and hostile behavior toward users. The marketing strategies of 10 years ago would work quite effectively in 2017, but Apple no longer seems willing to focus on quality.
If Apple focused on quality software and solid (even if slightly older) hardware, they could be a Windows killer. This is an unfortunate missed opportunity. I can't imagine that Jobs, were he still alive, would miss out on the opportunity to make a huge dent in Microsoft's desktop/laptop market share.
Approximately coincident with OS X, Apple changed its logo from a bright gay rainbow to a dull impotent boring gray. What does that tell you?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Diminishing returns.
Do what maximizes profits, ignore the rest.
Considering the cash Apple has, they're on the right track.
Note: I don't agree with said track, but the edge users don't justify the costs involved, so out they go.
Business 101: Cash is king.
And as long as Apple makes bucketloads of cash from their current iProducts, they will. When it stops, they will re-evaluate where they are in the world, but not before then.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I used to be a big Apple defender but not anymore. They should just give up on desktops/laptops and stick to iPhones. They just don't know how to make a computer that a professional actually wants to use anymore.
It used to be that Apple did things well, and did the UI with a consistency, but that is a thing of the past. For example, Steve Jobs would not have allowed the myriad of touch keyboards I find on my ipad, iphone, ipod—the whole point of the ToolBox was to keep a uniform user interface. Its operating systems have become a mess, ease of use and organization have been slowly diminishing for a long while now, but thank heaven that unix is still there, sort of.
... care.
But they still cared enough to analyse what the actual usage numbers were.
You can say, "Hey, they looked at raw numbers and didn't think their power users depend MORE on those messages than the rest do."
But you can't say, "They didn't bother to look at all."
And I'm RIGHT UP THERE with Apple shit-talkers. But you gotta come with real arguments before I get behind you.
As a developer/power user who sits at the far end of the bell curve, here's what I see as the folly of Apple's ways.
I switched to Macs after working on a beta version of OS X in the late 90s. Unix + sensible desktop was enough to keep me off the Linux train for daily use. That the hardware was also well designed with a good level of performance was also important. For the next 10 years or so, that held true.
But, in the last 5 years:
- the hardware has stagnated (e.g., I'd really like to buy a MacMini for my kids, but there's no way I'm shelling out Apple prices for 3 year old processors)
- new hardware decisions make it difficult to use existing peripherals (music is a hobby - no way am I dropping a few grand on new audio interfaces just b/c I upgraded my Mac and need to support new ports)
- Apple has ignored sensible design decisions made on the non-Apple side of the world (specifically, touch screens on laptops - my wife as an HP for work and the touch screen is useful, those old studies that claim otherwise are just that, old and dated).
- The OS continues to have a slew of undocumented features that may or may not be useful, but definitely affect performance (the real dig here: just document the features Apple, I hate discovering things OS X has done for years on random blog posts)
- The iPhone and OS X still don't work well together
Why does this matter from the perspective of the bell curve and my place on it? Simple: I switched not only my family, but also my company over to Macs. The middle part of that curve was filled by people following people like me into the Mac universe. I'm seriously considering dropping Macs for computer use and (horror of horrors) going back to Windows + Linux. If I go that way, it's just a matter of an upgrade cycle or two before those in my sphere of influence abandon Macs as well.
Apple seems to have forgotten that it's us geeks that couldn't wait for Linux on the Desktop that helped drive adoption 15 years ago. Kinda like the Democrats forgetting that the working class matters.
-Chris
Someone will come alone and serve the 4%, developers, mavens, authors etc will spread the word and take over from Apple as a new leader. Someday. Don't worry, it's a normal part of business.
-- that people still get traction bloviating about Apple "products".
Nothing but zzzzzzzzzzzz since they stopped being Apple Computer.
Let HP and / or DELL take over for the pro workstations.
Right now I'm using a mid-2012 MacBook Pro that I've just upgraded with a Samsung SSD. The reason I chose to upgrade the storage instead of buying a new MacBook Pro was that I couldn't justify spending $3000+ for a laptop that was unrepairable and unexpandable, and would have to be sent to the recycle bin if it broke after the AppleCare warranty expired. I'm hoping this upgrade will get me through the next couple of years, but what happens after that?
At some point I will need to buy a new laptop. So what are my choices, if not another MacBook? A Windows 10 machine? Absolutely no way in hell. Put Linux on a PC laptop? Maybe, but avoiding the time and effort of supporting a Linux installation is the entire reason I use a Mac.
But what if (for example) Google decided to take a page from Apple's playbook? What if Google were to develop its own laptop with a real Linux / UNIX / BSD OS with a nice GUI, and support it the way Apple does? Not just a Chromebook, but a laptop with a new OS to complete with MacOS? And what if that laptop had a sane upgradeable / repairable premium design, without Apple's obsession for thinness and appearance over functionality?
If such a laptop existed, I would buy it in a heartbeat. And when I did, I would almost certainly switch from an iPhone to a Pixel, and from the Apple to the Google ecosystem. Everyone says "Google is the new Apple", so why shouldn't that be true? Google has the culture and the resources to play the game by Apple's rules, and take a huge chunk of mindshare away from Apple. Not to mention the fact that Google apps like Assistant and Maps already leave Siri and Apple Maps in the dust.
There needs to be a new option for laptop and desktop machines. Apple and Microsoft have both gone off the deep end, pursuing development paths that are leaving power users in the cold. Google could step in and become the new king of the mountain in very short order - if it has the will to do so.
I feel Apple's biggest problem is it's veterans, those with the company for some time, and their egos are getting out and being expressed. More of the, "I've wanted to do this for a long time. Now I can." mentality. There is no restraint, no clear vision. It appears every department director has been freed to do as they seem fit. This is evident, from all the defending Apple did during the unveiling of the new Macbook Pros and through the press and social media after its October release.
Apple has lost their direction and has way too much money to understand they need to wrangle in everyone to get them back on track making truly amazing products. All they care about is moving the ticker and keeping it green through P&L performance and units moved, just like every other American company that relies on the stock market to gage performance in which Apple ultimately fails to meet expectations. Essentially Apple has become the Microsoft of the last 20 years or more so Pepsi Co.
_buzlink_
Apple was a terrible company in the 90's. They nearly went out of business and failed to deliver the products they promised on multiple occasions. Being an Apple fanboy in the 1990's was like having a bad boyfriend that you kept going back to, they rest of non-fanboys could only look on in pity.
Without Steve Jobs to save the company, Apple will fall back into its old habits.
Have you ever called their support? I don't want to touch either company with a 10ft pole.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Nah, Apple should go full Dark Side and license the Mac line to Lenovo.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Let HP and / or DELL do the design. Apples looks and thinnest does not work with pro workstation design
Nah, Apple should go full Dark Side and license the Mac line to Lenovo.
Sorry, Lenovo's standards are too high.
can afford to spend some of it on updating their PCs.
I've been an OS X user since 2006 when Intel Macs arrived. I was strictly a linux user for the prior 7 years having abandoned Windows in the late 90s.
The reason I went to OS X was that its *nix under the covers (and gave me all of the programming/scripting power I needed) and also was incredibly stable. I would literally go for months without rebooting and without native (X86, not PPC emulated) apps crashing...at all...ever.
I feel that from a stability POV OS X peaked around 10.6. Ever since then, a pattern of increasing crashes and decreasing reliability has followed every release. The amount of instability is still very small, but when as a user you are used to 0 problems, it is very frustrating. (iOS seems to have followed a similar trajectory lately as well.)
I don't know what's happened to the QA process at Apple and I also don't see the point in rushing out a new OS every year. I would love for them to go back to the simpler, more stable approach that they have 5-6 years ago.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
While most computers don't get monumental improvement gains anymore
That is only true for the CPU not the GPU which has seen huge improvements over the past 4 years. Since the Mac Pro comes with its GPUs soldered to the board the ONLY way to upgrade them is to buy a new machine. A quick google (which admittedly did not return the most reliable looking of pages!) suggests that a single 1080 today is 50% more powerful that both the Mac Pro GPUs combined which, if true, would mean that a dual 1080 machine would have about three times the performance of the current MacPro. I'd call that a significant performance increase.
All true, but the real question is also if they are losing the "Decision Makers".
It's not just the decision makers of today they seem to have lost but also those of the next generation. A few years ago when I looked at my students many would have mac laptops open with the rest a mix of different PCs. Now there are far fewer macs and it seems that many of the students who had deep enough pockets for a mac have Surface Books and Surface Pros. Since this was last term it also means that MS was beating Apple BEFORE the latest MacBook Pro disaster so I expect the trend will be even stronger next year.
Well, owing to the fact that Apple had its more colorful rainbow-like logo for almost 2 years before the rainbow flag was used for the first time as a symbol for gays, It's dubious that there was any intent on Apple's part to show such affiliation.
The changing of Apple's logo from its original colorful one to the current grey one was coincident with Steve Jobs return to Apple in 1997.... This change was one of perhaps about a dozen other significant changes that Jobs was making in the company at the time, wanting to "bury the past", and give the company a whole new look on the inside and out. The logo change was more likely reflective of Job's intent to completely overhaul how Apple would be seen by the general public and its consumers than it was intended to dissociate from any perception that may have arisen in more recent times that it was affiliated with gay pride. .
1997 was, incidentally, during the time of OS8, not OSX. OSX was first released in 2001.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That is EXACTLY the name of THAT Game.
"..., how it has handled the Mac Pro, a lineup that hasn't seen any refresh in ages,..."
Refresh? You mean it hasn't visited the ladies room to powder its nose, in ages?
My iPad Air 2 has never been the same since iOS 10. The device, in general, is noticably slower. Querky. The mail application hangs, doesn't update properly (read/unread). Safari crashes. Split view mode provokes problems when app switching. MEH.
Wow a bunch of internet folks all talking about how apple has lost its way. ... most of you know nothing about business....running a business.
I do not agree. As a a share holder and as a company owner I can say
Certainly none of you have run anything like Apple. so keep thinking they are dying when in fact they are continuing to dominate and making huge profits. So they are not catering to your specialty noche needs. No one cares. Good luck getting anyone else to care. Again none of you have done anything like what apple has successfully done. Keep trying to impress your egos and how smart you think you are. How many billions....hundreds of billions have you generated? How many people do you employ and how much is that payroll you pay? Oh right....you are nothing but rounding errors...but think your important. Good luck with that.
The article didn't mention a frequent user complaint: Apple's obsession with trumping the competition by making the whole universe two-dimensional. The newest release of every product is thinner than the last, even though users in every single online forum keep wanting to trade some thinness off for more battery life. In the face of all that reaction the next release will be thinner still, even to the point of compromising structural integrity (iPhone Plus, iPad) and ports (MacBook Pro) and hardware features (iMac).
Tim Cook is a business school type thinker. He is an accountant. He makes his business decisions as a pure profit maximization game, increasing profit margins and eeking out as much money from the market as he can. The problem with this type of thinking is that it ignores the subtle realities of the Apple computer market. Macs specifically have been perceived by many as "professional" machines. Graphical designers have used OSX because it has been a reliable and relatively trouble-free platform on which to create. Software developers have often used Macbooks to develop on because OSX is a fairly polished Unix platform (though they likely often use virtual machines). Myself, I have enjoyed using Macs because of features such as the outstanding integration of the pdf format into OSX. I often use Preview's ability to take vector based snippets of a pdf file. Doing this on other operating systems is impractical, but on OSX you just draw a box around a pdf graph, choose "copy", and then "New PDF from Clipboard". In other OS environments, you can only copy a bitmap version, but on OSX, you get the actual vector version.
Most users probably don't use this pdf feature. However I find it essential. Under current management, because few users make use of OSX advanced pdf features, it might be seen as something that can be neglected or removed. If they removed it, then I would lose much of my enthusiasm for OSX. And my enthusiasm matters, because I often pass that enthusiasm onto my students. In 2007 my enthusiasm for OSX resulted in at least 20 new Macbook purchases that I am directly aware of. As OSX shifts to MacOS and seems to go towards merging with iOS, I find my enthusiasm begin to wane.
As Apple continues to assert more and more control over how I use my machine, on the apps that I install and the settings I can change, I find I am becoming increasingly against the agenda of Apple. I believe that our computers should be Turing Complete, that we should have full control over our devices. My students are more likely to hear me grumble about my Mac than to wax poetic about its unique capabilities. Tim Cook doesn't seem to realize the importance of users like me. In my own localized way I had an outsized contribution to Apple's explosive growth in 2007-2010; I see 200+ students every year, and my enthusiasms and views rub off on many of them. Apple's seeming assumption that they can ignore the tails of the bell curve of their user base is short-sighted and in my opinion will eventually compromise Apple's valuable brand image.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
As far as I know the vast majority of Google's developers use a MacBook Pro (previous generation).
A good half of those at least will shudder at the thought of no proper Esc key and gratuitous omission of at least one regular old USB 3 port, and 16GB RAM is looking small for a development box these days. Oh, and the sheer horrible design thinking exhibited by omitting the amazing magsafe connector will be enough to sway some of those.
So confronted by grumbling developers threatening to order Surface Pros, Google may just make a super-souped-up chromebook+ for developers by freeing up user access to more of the Linux OS underneath, adding a giant SSD, etc.
Please.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
That the rainbow has gone from the logo to the CEO, leaving only those 50 shades of grey behind
Mac pro got to thin and the lack of loop back cable system for TB like other pro workstations boxed them in.
The PSU does not have the power to run the system at full load and also the heat limits it as well plus only 1 cpu also limits the pci-e lanes to a point where they only have 1 storage port.
Right now getting TB3 in there will be hard with out adding more pci-e switches (with video cards taking an bandwidth cut down) / adding an cpu / cutting down to 1 video card (still needs an pci-e switch to feed out the pci-e from the X16 for 1 video card).
They should of keep the tower or even went bigger if just to hide the DP to TB card cables.
Or maybe, just maybe, Intel could get off their butts, and update the Xeon to have more/faster PCI-e lanes?
People are not interested in election polls because people want to form their own opinion.
Election polls and predictions should in fact be forbidden. Each invidual vote is by law a secret one, so that also means the set of all votes should remain secret until counting.
I can't vote in this country but in the countries I can vote it I never discuss upcoming elections even with family and I don't let them discuss with me.
My vote is my vote, I don't care nor want to know who you are voting for.
Even with more pci-e lanes still stuck with small case now with 2 cpus then apple can have like 10 TB 3 buses with 2 video cards and 2 storage cards.
Even with more pci-e lanes still stuck with small case now with 2 cpus then apple can have like 10 TB 3 buses with 2 video cards and 2 storage cards.
Wonder how much taller/fatter it would have to be to fit in that extra stuff?
The whole tech industry is running out of steam. Kaby Lake isn't really much of a refresh either. Tech $$$s are now playing catch up with IBM to topple Watson in the datacenter while over-subscribing their platforms for cat videos.
Microsoft bet on operating systems until Apple proved it's better to do with hardware. Now Apple has run out of hardware. GPU is too hard to program for in the general case. Perversely we're all gonna have to go back to proverbial punched cards in the datacenter before we'll find the next magic bullet, there's just no enthusiast market for 80 core CPUs in the desktop space - we can't watch that many cat videos at once and the bandwidth isn't there anyway.
Cloud, SaaS, PaaS, HaaS, EaaS - the game is played here now, but CapEx is mind-meltingly gigantic. Only the biggest players can play.
For the rest of us it's how many flops/watt can we get out of an ARM, and how many cat videos per hour of wall time charge. Maybe battery science?
Where is my 128gb 4" phone? Apple has no clue.
They do : there's a new high end, single socket for Skylake-X (i7) and Skylake-W (Xeon, but the same). As opposed to supporting dual sockets or more. The Skylake-W will have 48 PCIe lanes. Thing is, it's for mid 2017, so this gonna be a long boring wait still unless Apple is first to the market launching with that CPU.
Before, I used to assume Apple would re-launch the Mac Pro with Broadwell-E, skipping the Haswell-E generation, but nothing came out.
we all already know that most conpanies work top down and jobs was different because he would say its ready when its ready. Now apple thinks its a gravy train but its not. Apple needs to realize that the person they've put in charge should tell management when its ready, not when it will be ready then get shit when its not. good luck finding that person apple, here's a hint, it's the one you will hate the most that will make you the most money you pieces of shit.
What kind of spelling is that?
Yup, such high standards loading malware directly in the BIOS...maybe high triad standards. But surely not our high standards.
How fo you control for error? How do you get a baseline?
Rhapsody was announced in January 1997 - so the new OS strategy that would lead to Mac OS X was in place at that time. It was no big secret.
Your claim that votes are secret by law is false. Votes are "privacy protected" but far from secret. If you chose to let your vote be public (polls) that is your own choice and a freedom protected by free speech. If you don't believe in the first amendment than I understand why you don't have a right to vote in this country.
They do : there's a new high end, single socket for Skylake-X (i7) and Skylake-W (Xeon, but the same). As opposed to supporting dual sockets or more. The Skylake-W will have 48 PCIe lanes. Thing is, it's for mid 2017, so this gonna be a long boring wait still unless Apple is first to the market launching with that CPU.
Before, I used to assume Apple would re-launch the Mac Pro with Broadwell-E, skipping the Haswell-E generation, but nothing came out.
Perhaps there wasn't enough performance improvement with the Broadwell E (wasn't Broadwell mostly about better GPU and power usage/control, neither of which mean anything to a Mac Pro)?
Good to hear about the Skylake-W, though. I think Apple was waiting for TB3 to come out, with a CPU with the PCI-e lanes to support it, before updating the Pro. Apple probably has Engineering Samples of those new Xeons at this point; so maybe it's a work-in-progress. Here's to hoping!!! But no one wants to suffer The Osborne Effect by pre-announcing a product under development too soon... I have heard they have "archived" the Support documents for the late 2013 Mac Pro; which is either a very good, or very bad, sign...
... has become courageous.
FTFY.
What you say is true (although less so about the 'default OS' since physics students tend to be more aware of their computing) but you are missing the point which is that the number of macs has drastically decreased from a few years ago and the machines they are being replaced with, MS Surface books, are NOT noticeably cheaper than a mac, at least until the recent large price hike.
Hence comparing like with like the number of macs has dropped significantly and that is before the recent laptop releases which only provide even more incentive to dump macs.
Performance users would look at cloud computing for extra horsepower.
Well it is interesting that you say this because while you are correct for CPU for GPU the situation is very different. I've actually been leading a project to develop a cloud based cluster to meet our local research computing needs and GPUs are very tricky in the cloud unless you buy the massively expensive Tesla cards which are 5-10 times the price of regular 'gamer' GPUs.
So if you have single precision work (double precision work requires the expensive cards) cloud computing is still rather tricky because nVidia do not want you to do this. A colleague of mine did manage to figure out last month a way to get the driver for nVidia 10-series cards working under OpenStack - you have to a a patch to KVM to hide the fact that the machine is a virtual one from the nVidia drivers - but this is a hack an not really easy to scale at the moment.
Maybe he's Canadian.