On The Sad State of Macintosh Hardware (rogueamoeba.com)

Quentin Carnicelli, the chief technology officer at Rogue Amoeba, a widely-reputed firm that produces several audio software for Apple's desktop operating system: With Apple recently releasing their first developer beta of MacOS 10.14 (Mojave), we've been installing it on various test machines to test our apps. The inevitable march of technology means Mojave won't install on all of our older hardware. There's no shock there, but the situation is rather distressing when it comes to spending money to purchase new equipment. Here is the situation, as reported by the wonderful MacRumor's Buyers Guide: At the time of the writing, with the exception of the $5,000 iMac Pro, no Macintosh has been updated at all in the past year. Here are the last updates to the entire line of Macs: iMac Pro: 182 days ago, iMac: 374 days ago, MacBook: 374 days ago, MacBook Air: 374 days ago, MacBook Pro: 374 days ago, Mac Pro: 436 days ago, and Mac Mini: 1337 days ago.

Worse, most of these counts are misleading, with the machines not seeing a true update in quite a bit longer. The Mac Mini hasn't seen an update of any kind in almost 4 years (nor, for that matter, a price drop). The once-solid Mac Pro was replaced by the dead-end cylindrical version all the way back in 2012, which was then left to stagnate. I don't even want to get started on the MacBook Pro's questionable keyboard, or the MacBook's sole port (USB-C which must also be used to provide power). It's very difficult to recommend much from the current crop of Macs to customers, and that's deeply worrisome to us, as a Mac-based software company.

Comments

Apple only a consumer-level gadget company now.

[Sebby]

Except for the very, very few 'pro' products they've (reluctantly) released (and barely updated), they've basically given up on the Pro crowd, and are clearly only concentrating on 'gadget' devices for consumers, not meant for professionals (creators, etc.): iDevices, AppleTV, AppleWatch & HomePod.

Re:Apple only a consumer-level gadget company now.

[aitikin]

Except for the very, very few 'pro' products they've (reluctantly) released (and barely updated), they've basically given up on the Pro crowd, and are clearly only concentrating on 'gadget' devices for consumers, not meant for professionals (creators, etc.): iDevices, AppleTV, AppleWatch & HomePod.

The signs that this was coming have been on the wall for a while. I've been getting away from Mac exclusive software ever since Final Cut Pro X had it's debut (and I don't work in video at all). The debacle that was the initial release (seriously, no multicam editing?) was a clear sign to me that Apple was giving up on its professional users. I jumped ship on anything that was only available for a Mac and (even though I'm typing this comment on a Mac Mini) can switch to another OS at any time.

Re:Apple only a consumer-level gadget company now.

[greenwow]

Especially since they haven't allowed memory upgrades beyond 16 GB for over six years! We still have hundreds of four+ year-old MacBooks since we can't upgrade them for more memory. Just sucks having engineers waste time with old and slow laptops, but at least they still basically work unlike a Dell or other PC laptop. As soon as Apple finally allows more memory, we're going to replace most of the laptops used in our company.

Re:Apple only a consumer-level gadget company now.

[irving47]

UMAX, Power Computing, Motorola (I think), etc... When Jobs came back, he made the licensing agreements so ridiculous, nobody wanted to continue, so they died out within a year or two, having had the terms changed on them so drastically.

Re:Apple only a consumer-level gadget company now.

[RatBastard]

Agreed. I ran Mac Pros (I started with a G5 Power Mac, actually) all the way through the 2012 model year. Stayed on a 12-core (dual 6-core) Mac Pro until 2016, when I could no longer defend the use of the machine any longer. No support for modern NVidia cards meant no support for the software I was using that was increasingly going CUDA. And the 2013 Mac Pro? What a joke.

My Win10 workstation runs circles around my Mac Pro and gives me the flexibility to use whatever video cards best suit my needs. I can't see a professional of any stripe using a Mac anymore.

Re:Apple only a consumer-level gadget company now.

[The Grim Reefer]

but at least they still basically work unlike a Dell or other PC laptop.

WTF. I just updated my Dell branded work laptop after 5 years. I would have kept using it but needed more video RAM. It had 2 GB. My new dell has 8GB of video RAM. I expect to get at least 5 years out of it.

My old laptop still worked fine and had whatever the high end i7 was at the time with 20GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a 2TB spinning drive. It has some small dents in the outside metal case and the battery needs to be replaced. But otherwise it's still a pretty fast laptop. Granted, it's not small like a Mac, but I needed a 17 inch screen, so Mac wasn't even an option for me.

Re:Apple only a consumer-level gadget company now.

[JoeWalsh]

I'm getting away from Mac, too, having run exclusively them since Mac OS X 10.1 was released. Before that, I ran Linux, and recently I've begun the process of transferring back. I recently built myself a nice 8th-gen i5 system and loaded Manjaro Linux on it. Life's good!

Re:Apple only a consumer-level gadget company now.

[dgatwood]

The 2014 Mac Mini was a colossal failure. Between the elimination of the two-drive version and the elimination of the quad-core configuration, it went from being a great mini server to being an almost completely useless toy. I'd imagine their sales dropped commensurately, though they don't break out sales by product line enough to be certain. So I suspect it isn't getting updated because it has terrible sales, and it has terrible sales because the last upgrade was a huge downgrade.

Re:Apple only a consumer-level gadget company now.

[phayes]

The problem isn't Apple, it's Intel who, has refused to add the support of more than 16 Gb of LPDDR RAM to their chipsets year after year after year.

Do you really think that Apple _doesn't_ want to sell you 32 Gb of soldered on RAM for what they would be marking it up for?

As for using power hungry desktop DDR like PC makers do, it'd kill the battery life on MBPs.

Re:Apple only a consumer-level gadget company now.

[dwpro]

Many of us had to buy a mac mini in order to have the required mac device in our toolchain for mobile development, and that useless toy was the most cost-effective way to pay that tax. For that reason I'm glad they offered a low-budget option.

How About "Good Enough"?

[nuckfuts]

As a society, we have become obsessed with never-ending growth and progress. It's not good enough that a company provides jobs and turns a profit. It has to show "growth". It's not good enough that a given computer can perform all sorts of useful functions. It has to be reinvented as more powerful every 374 days.

I do agree that a Mac Mini should cost less now than it did over three years ago. But what's wrong with good enough? I recently went shopping for a new TV. I expected that with 4K TVs being common now, I should be able to pickup a 1920x1080 TV for a good price. I was wrong. I ended up making a deal on a 4K TV, even though I almost never watch anything in 4K.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[ShanghaiBill]

As a society, we have become obsessed with never-ending growth and progress.

That is not the issue here. Just because hardware is updated every year doesn't mean people need, or want, to upgrade that often. But when their old hardware finally needs to be replaced, they shouldn't have to buy a "new" computer based on tech from two years ago.

I really don't understand Apple's strategy. They have a huge locked-in customer base, and high profit margins. Any other hardware manufacturer would love to be in their position. They could be making a lot of money by releasing more often. Yet they don't. It doesn't make sense.

Re: How About "Good Enough"?

[yeshuawatso]

You're missing the entire point (and ironically the jokes/memes). Apple not updating it's lines puts it even more behind than it already was when the products are usually released. There's that old joke that if you bought a Mac you just bought 2 year old PCs at next year's price. Apple updating the hardware each year just catches it up with all the other Windows and Linux PCs of the previous year. That's why people are pissed.

I'm just holding off hoping that Apple will update mY MBP to use third party docks or at least re-enable displaylink so I don't have to use the 20+ dongles just to get a second monitor and all of my USB A stuff to work again. I'm tired of looking at all of these PCs in my office connect all of their prereferals to their Windows laptops with one cable while I'm looking like I've tapped directly into the Matrix due to dongle hell. Before you ask, you can't just plug in ANY thunderbolt dock into macOS, it won't work with a nice message that it's unsupported. And not because it won't work, just because Apple wants to be a dick and block it so I have to use a Thunderbolt Unlocker kext just so it can partially function. DisplayLink killed off the rest of the dock's use since 10.13.4.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[atriusofbricia]

As a society, we have become obsessed with never-ending growth and progress.

That is not the issue here. Just because hardware is updated every year doesn't mean people need, or want, to upgrade that often. But when their old hardware finally needs to be replaced, they shouldn't have to buy a "new" computer based on tech from two years ago.

I really don't understand Apple's strategy. They have a huge locked-in customer base, and high profit margins. Any other hardware manufacturer would love to be in their position. They could be making a lot of money by releasing more often. Yet they don't. It doesn't make sense.

Seems to make plenty of sense. It's contained within what you said right here: "huge locked-in customer base". What else are those people going to do? Move to Windows? Linux? They're solid Mac users. A lack of hardware updates and such doesn't matter. Their sales are still strong with little to no new investment. That base is more than happy to keep paying more and getting less.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[TheFakeTimCook]

As a society, we have become obsessed with never-ending growth and progress.

That is not the issue here. Just because hardware is updated every year doesn't mean people need, or want, to upgrade that often. But when their old hardware finally needs to be replaced, they shouldn't have to buy a "new" computer based on tech from two years ago.

I really don't understand Apple's strategy. They have a huge locked-in customer base, and high profit margins. Any other hardware manufacturer would love to be in their position. They could be making a lot of money by releasing more often. Yet they don't. It doesn't make sense.

Everything from mid-2012 to present can run Mojave. That's SIX, not TWO, years ago.

The issue is not the CPUs, but the GPUs. Those earlier Macs do not have "Metal-compatible" GPUs, and so, Apple drew the line in the sand "there" for Mojave.

I suspect someone in the Hackintosh Community will come along and supply the missing Frameworks to allow installation on those older machines.

But even if that is not practical, those machines can still install High Sierra, and that has sufficiently modern Frameworks that it will be supported by Apple and third-party Applications and OS-Features for at least another 5 years or so.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[DontBeAMoran]

Good enough would be fine, but Apple never lowers their prices even years after the computers have launched.

Good enough would be fine, but 4GB of RAM with the latest macOS is far from being sufficient even for basic Web browsing.

Good enough would be fine, but the latest macOS are absolutely slow as molasses when used with mechanical HDDs, which is what Apple are still using in the Mac mini, not even offering an SSD option for the low-end model. I'd rather Apple sold the low-end Mac mini with a 64GB SSD than a slow 500GB HDD. And maybe upgrade the RAM to 8GB with the money saved.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[motorsabbath]

"Good enough" would be fine, but Apple hardware is no longer worth the premium price. After owning Apple laptops since 2003 (my Powerbook still runs great) when my wife's 13" MBP finally kicked the bucket last week I gave her my 15" i7 MBP (totally good enough) and bought a Dell 9570 for $1000 less than a "good enough" 15" Mac.

Apple is flat-footed in this space. Good enough is fine but the prices should reflect that. All they care about is the phone ecosystem.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[sycodon]

My washer uses tech from 20 years ago. It cost $250 delivered. The latest washers cost nearly $1,000.

My clothes still come out clean. And the Dryer dries them.

Technology for technology's sake is a waste of money and I'm afraid that computers have reached the appliance stage for regular consumers.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[XXongo]

"they shouldn't have to buy a "new" computer based on tech from two years ago."

Why? What is different from 2016 technology from 2018?

Indeed. Why not? If my computer served my needs, why would I want a different one?

I have the same problem with toasters, frankly. When my 20 year old toaster died, I want another one just like it, not some shiny contraption with electronic doodads that add no value to what I want to do, which is toast bread.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[aaarrrgggh]

Your old washer used 40 gallons of water per load. A $1,000 washer can use as little as 12 gallons for a full load.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[DontBeAMoran]

This isn't about speed, it's about price. Compare the price of a CPU in 2016 and the same CPU in 2018. The 2016 CPU costs less in 2018, but the 2016 Mac is still sold at the same price in 2018.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[sootman]

It is NOT "totally fine". "Good enough" from a few years ago is NOT "good enough" here in the future year of 2018. The #1 thing done on a computer is browse the web. Web pages have gotten fatter and slower with JavaScript and parallax scrolling and a bunch of other shit that I don't care about but people insist on doing and the trend is not going away.

Intel is making faster chips. Memory is cheap. I just want a computer in a form factor I like that runs my OS of choice and can keep up with the world that's changing around it.

Re: How About "Good Enough"?

[ShanghaiBill]

How many gallons of water does $750 buy?

Irrelevant, since the inflation adjusted price of a new washer is actually LESS than a washer cost 20 years ago.

On Lowes.com they list a front loading washer (they kind that saves water) for $649. In 1998 dollars ($1.83 in 2018 $s) that would be $352. Could you buy a front loading washer in America for $352 in 1998? I don't think so.

If you are willing to buy a top-loader, they start at $399. That is $215 in 1998 dollars.

As a general rule, prices of services have gone up faster than inflation, while the prices of goods have gone down.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[TheFakeTimCook]

It is NOT "totally fine". "Good enough" from a few years ago is NOT "good enough" here in the future year of 2018. The #1 thing done on a computer is browse the web. Web pages have gotten fatter and slower with JavaScript and parallax scrolling and a bunch of other shit that I don't care about but people insist on doing and the trend is not going away.

Intel is making faster chips. Memory is cheap. I just want a computer in a form factor I like that runs my OS of choice and can keep up with the world that's changing around it.

My mid-2012 MacBook Pro suffers no detectable slowdown or inability to handle complex websites, etc.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[blindseer]

Upgrade less often.

If I upgrade every 4 to 6 years instead of every 2 to 3 years, then Apple is selling half as many computers. Why would they want to do that?

Isn't upgrading less often a trend generally across electronics now? It seems to me that it is.

Years ago I remember being able to pick up perfectly functional computers from friends and family because they bought something newer and faster. I'd be invited over to help them set up their new computer and in exchange I'd get their old hardware. Given the pace of improvement of electronics at the time I'd mostly just use the computers I got for parts or as "toys" to play with while I experimented with different Linux distributions and such. At some point I no longer got perfectly functional computers in exchange for my services. Instead I'd get laptops with dead screens and/or batteries (still useful for me as desktop computers), a desktop that had critical parts broken (I'd part them out to upgrade my gear), or other half functional gear. Now I get nothing, well I'd still take their hardware in hopes of getting something but mostly it's just so that I can help them in recycling the gear properly. People don't upgrade any more unless what they have is completely beyond repair.

I suspect several factors in this. One big factor, and the major topic here, is that technology is not improving like it once did. We've pretty much hit a plateau on clock rates so we get instead smaller, but no faster. We get cheaper computers I guess, but so long as the $1000 computer someone bought keeps doing what they bought it to do they aren't likely to buy a $500 computer to replace it.

Another factor I see is that the economy hasn't been that great. People that have trouble paying their phone bill are not likely to get a new phone.

Then there is the matter of hardware being more durable. I know people that bought new phones because the old one fell into the toilet, got it's screen cracked from falling off a table, or buttons and switches wore out. Waterproofing and near bulletproof glass is common on phones now. With desktops losing their optical drives, spinning platter drives, and even cooling fans, the parts that can wear out are minimal. Keyboards and mice don't even wear out like they used to.

There's also the matter of there not being a "must have" application that requires a faster computer. People use their computers to chat on web forums, consume the ample audio and visual content on the internet, or whatever. Just about any computer can do that. Most any cell phone sold in the last 5 years can do that. The people that drove computing in the past, gamers and content creators, are often satisfied with pretty run of the mill stuff. Those that want "more" don't dominate the market like they used to. This might also be because those that want "more" can just buy another cheap computer to help them in their work, dividing the work among many computers, than have to invest in one big computer to do their work.

I don't see this as unique to Apple, this is an industry wide phenomenon. Seems to me that every manufacturer of electronics has slowed down in producing new offerings.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[barc0001]

> You guys don't get it: 4 cores at 3.4Ghz vs 6 cores at 3.6Ghz makes no difference.

Horse pucky. There's a LOT of shitty bloated software out there, and for the average end user running a browser with 20 tabs open and a mail client and a music player and half dozen other things those two extra cores definitely come into play. If developers today optimized like we used to back in the 80s and early 90s, then yeah even a 5 year old processor would be overkill, but that's not the case. Each release of most software out there packs more features at the expense of efficiency. Hell, even website redesigns do that - replacing slim and fast with flashy/pretty and bloated.

> Those types of "improvements" don't matter for consumers and aren't worth the redesign

If they don't matter, why do all the other companies do them - and especially in the laptop space - get better power consumption? Plus, there are more people out there than you think who still like casual gaming who aren't going to go build a gaming rig so having those extra cores and a better IGP do make a tangible difference.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[fuzznutz]

Bingo. So if Apple redesigns it, are they going to raise the price, or lower it? Sure you can argue that Apple should lower the price, but that won't happen because price isn't only based on the cost of the components.

I think you misunderstand. I believe the complaint is that Apple is currently selling computer hardware using a CPU that has dropped in cost over time while keeping their selling price point unchanged. Added to that fact, fixed costs over time should drop as engineering, development, and tooling costs are paid for. Nobody expects Apple to sell "new design" hardware for less that the older models.

Apple has great vendor lock in since their computers are not easily substitutable, but eventually that can be overcome if the cost/value proposition goes too high.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[omnichad]

They have a huge locked-in customer base, and high profit margins. Any other hardware manufacturer would love to be in their position.

I have a theory. Jobs wanted to have his hands in everything. He only has so many hours in the day. Even with Jobs gone, it seems that they're still running the company the same way. Despite having billions in cash reserve, they aren't spending it hiring more divisional management - they are letting less profitable segments wither and die because they're being so short-sighted and giving them no oversight to grow.

Re:How About "Good Enough"?

[Etcetera]

My washer uses tech from 20 years ago. It cost $250 delivered. The latest washers cost nearly $1,000.

My clothes still come out clean. And the Dryer dries them.

Technology for technology's sake is a waste of money and I'm afraid that computers have reached the appliance stage for regular consumers.

I used to think that, but washer/dryer tech (even aside from phone integration and whatnot) has indeed improved massively, even from 10 years ago.

I made a decent-midrange washer/dryer purchase in 2003 and replaced them with a pair of LG uprights on Black Friday around 2011. They used 1/8th (literally) the water/gas and got my clothes notable cleaner, with less fabric damage and fading, and with cheaper per-load detergent (HE).

I moved in 2016 into a place without a gas hookup, so for a while was using a small-space washer-dryer combo from 2006. The difference in wash quality was astonishing, several loads requiring more than one wash despite using proper detergent and loading. Replaced them last year with a newer version of my last LG's and haven't looked back. Also, they have a 10 year drive warranty, and Home Depot tacked on another 5 year warranty beyond that. Delivery and haul-away was an extra 50 bucks.

Seriously. Replace your old washer/dryer. It's worth it.

Apple stopped loving me

[PopeRatzo]

I've owned every single model of Mac Pro, but enough is enough. I used to do music production and sound design primarily using Logic and Pro Tools on Mac Pros, but the last iteration was my breaking point. The juice just wasn't worth the squeeze any more, and I found much better tools for Windows (Cockos Reaper, Pro Tools, etc). After decades of loving the work-flow and support and quality, I just got the feeling Apple was jerking users around and just didn't care about the desktop platform any more. Happier now.

Re: Apple stopped loving me

[PopeRatzo]

100% this. I gotta ask tho, why not build a hackintosh?

You know, I tried. I had problems because some of the music production software I was using at the time required hardware dongles to unlock. That's when I changed my main DAW to Cockos Reaper and once I had given up on Logic, I figured, why do I need Macs for anything any more?

I remember when I was teaching, Apple was all about the education market. They really worked hard to get our business and demonstrated that they valued our input and our business. The school I worked for even had it's own Apple rep (not regional, but specific to the school). They flew a bunch of us out to Cupertino to get our input more than once. I don't care so much about the free trip and the lagniappe, but that bite out of the Apple logo that once represented the company's commitment to education is now long forgotten. They just want to sell handheld consumption devices to hipsters.

No shit

[sjbe]

It's very difficult to recommend much from the current crop of Macs to customers, and that's deeply worrisome to us, as a Mac-based software company.

Apple's Mac division has really kind of gone of the rails in recent years. They've made multiple repeated bizarre design decisions and they seldom update their hardware. While is hasn't been all bad, it's getting hard to recommend the Mac to people I previously would have done so without hesitation. They cater to a fairly specific customer and that's fine but they aren't even doing a very good job of that anymore.

It's pretty clear that the focus of management is on the iPhone. Understandable but I think they are shooting themselves in the foot. A lot of the value proposition from Apple comes from the tight ecosystem integration. Without that it's not so compelling to buy an iPhone or an iPad. Honestly I don't see a lot of tight integration in ways that are useful to me.

I have a Mac Mini and I'm about to replace it but probably not with another Mac Mini and the way things are going not with any other type of Mac either. Apple just isn't investing in the Mac and if they cannot be bothered in spite of the massive cash hoard they have then why should I care either? Apple should be making the Mac the best type of PC available and they just aren't. They are nice enough but they're behind the technology curve at this point. I don't think they need to be bleeding edge but they aren't even close to the edge on PCs anymore. Either they are incompetent or they just can't be bothered and I tend to favor the later theory.

Re:No shit

[garcia]

I bought an 8.1MBP in March of 2012. Aside from a new SSD upgrade installed last December, I haven't done anything to the machine and it's still rock solid.

I have a work 13.1MBP and compared to the Dells most others use, I never have a slow down or require repair.

I don't care what tech they're using or how much it costs: I still recommend it to other people because they run well for a long time and don't require as much maintenance as their PC counterparts.

Pros are leaving in droves.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is destroying one of their best markets. That is, people who use it for pro audio and also graphic workstations to some extent. The hardware compatibility silliness and lack of updates and support if pushing tons and tons of audio people away. I organize raves and electronic music shows. Apple machines used to be considered the premium choice for live performances and DJ software, but it has all changed in the last few years. For the first ever since laptops became a thing on stage, I've seen former die hard Apple users make the switch to Windows over the last couple years.
Apple has made it clear that they just don't care about professional media customers anymore, unless they are the kind that can buy $4000 of new gear every year. But even then, people are catching on that it's just not very cost effective anymore. Not to mention that Windows performance and stability has drastically improved too, making it a viable switch, that didn't used to be the case.

Re:Pros are leaving in droves.

[DontBeAMoran]

To really drive the point home, I think someone should do one of those "Hi, I'm a Mac. Hi, I'm a PC." TV ad again.

This time, the Mac would be represented by a millenial that's more preoccupied by his social media status and how thin he looks because of this great diet he's on and how he's a great person because he has many LGBT friends and they only talk about PC issues, while the PC would be represented by a normal person doing actual work, playing great games, talking with other people about any subject like a normal person.

Posted from my Mac mini. I'm not anti-Apple, I'm anti-stupid and Apple are really testing my patience these days.

Re:Pros are leaving in droves.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the Mac would be a 40 something cougar going after the millennial, while kicking their family to the curb.

Re:A $5000 laptop? Typo?

[WankerWeasel]

The $5,000 machine mentioned is the iMac Pro, a desktop. The $5,000 base model comes with pretty strong specs. 3.2GHz 8-core Xeon W, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Radeon Pro Vega 56, and a 27" 5k display.

"What's a computer?"

[Comboman]

Apples recent iPad commercial says it all.

Re:"What's a computer?"

[gatkinso]

I thought that was a Microsoft Surface commercial.

...when mac was innovative

[MindPrison]

That was many years ago.

I got something called a Message Pad 2100, that thing was an awesome wonder (ipad predecessor) invention that packed a whole lot of power for 1993, it packed a punch of 162 MHz, could talk, had a large touchscreen, could bring you to the internet, even wireless with the right PCMCIA card.

I'm no mac fan, especially not today - but back in its heydays with powerpc and a promising new architecture, those things were the beast within the graphics industry, nearly all printing & ad bureaus worth their salt had to have one.

Today - it's all about bling-bling, and looking gorgeous (because frankly, that part they got right). But they're expensive, old-tech consumables that you can basically throw away after a few years of use, because they won't support them anymore. And if you've seen a few experienced repair tech's videos on youtube - there are downright design-flaws that has been repeated thorough the production of the mac's the last 5-7 years.

Mac needs to find its roots again, when innovation and driving our world of tech forward actually meant something.

We need a Threadripper Mac

[xack]

Imagine a Mac with the newly announced 32 core Threadripper in an ATX case that can be fully upgraded. But instead we will get four core 16gb MBPs with inadequate ports again. They didn’t even announce hardware at WWDC because they are so weak at it.

Mobile First... should become "Mobile Centric".

[bigpat]

Not just Apple really... but yes especially Apple. Companies seem to be very focused on a mobile first approach. Which is perfectly fine. The reality is that many of us still need mouse and/or keyboard and large screens for productive applications. And we probably don't need faster processing, or more RAM or much more storage so spec. stagnation is real in the desktop and laptop space.

Personally I would like to see better "docking" abilities for smartphones in hardware and software so you can just plop your phone down on a desk with a big monitor and keyboard/mouse and start working on a larger screen where you can get all the apps you need. And it would be good if it was much more seamless across android and iphone.

There is another level of creativity and productivity to be had if we can realize more of that future level of integration that has been the stuff of sci-fi for years.

We seem to be closer than ever, but the impediments are both the security of letting devices communicate more freely and the arbitrary divisions of proprietary software hardware stacks that keep our technology apart and makes it less useful than it could be.

Dell / hp / others all do specs bumps / price drop

[Joe_Dragon]

Dell / hp / others all do specs bumps / price drops over time. But apple still has 5400RPM hdds in the imacs.

Apple looks for ways to make system thinner and thinner and takes ports away.

Re:My PC is from 2006

[ewhenn]

Processors have improved dramatically since 2006. I selected 3 chips that were all relatively high end for a desktop but reasonably affordable and popular chips (not extreme CPUs) from the stable of Intel corp. Namely: Q6600, I5-2500K, I5-8600K. The Core 2 Quads came out late 2006/early 2007, Sandy bridge in 2012 and Coffee Lake 2018, so a relatively even timeline distribution. Shortly after launch the Q6600 was $280, 2500K $220, 8600K $260.

Take a look at the benchmarks and performance scores, not to mention platform changes. We also went from no standard SATA SSDs during C2Q's reign to NVME SSDs for the 8600K. Just because you only use excel on small data sets which can still be done with a C2Q doesn't mean that there haven't been large gains.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/c...

Mac Mini

[rhadc]

The Quad Core Mac Mini I bought in 2012 is faster than any Mac Mini sold in 2018. Get it together, Apple.

Apple needs to be good again. Serve the pros.

[techm]

I've been on Apple's platform since 1990, I saw it through the horrid time before Jobs' return. What did Jobs do? He made the mac cool again, sure, but he also made amazing machines with an amazing OS (OSX is the only reason I still am on the platform) and it was embraced by the pros - graphic designers, video editors, music producers... the performance, stability and workflow was unmatched. Now look at it. The only powerful machine they make is well out of the price range of all but the largest companies. The next step down is pathetic to say the least. Design and video professionals leave the platform in droves, why? because Apple made sad, underpowered machines covered in marking wank and focused on their gadgetry. Apple - shape up, or ship out. Unless you make a top end machine for $2500 that can be used in professional 4k video editing, motion graphics, audio production, graphic design, as well as support the huge potential of the mac gaming market (which never has been tapped but always should have been) - then go home and get lost. Make it modular, allow us to customize and upgrade our machines. Be good enough so we can love the mac again. Stop making $2000 facebook machines, make us machines we can be proud of. Unless you do this - my next machine will not be a mac, something I haven't done in 28 years.

Re:A $5000 laptop? Typo?

[iotaborg]

And 3 years from now, it's still going to be the same machine, with the same $5000 price tag.

They've standardized on laptop parts

[sandbagger]

Even the new so-called Mac Pro iMac throttles itself before the fans spin up. This is laptop engineering, not desktop engineering and I fear they may have lost that expertise. As someone who depends on a Mac Pro 5,1, sorry but it looks like my next machine will be a Hackintosh. I don't need the latest bell and whistle on the desktop. What I do need are:

  Something that I can depend upon for a high availability duty cycle
  Using all 110 volts coming out of the wall
  Spinning as many large hard drives as I can fit in the box
  PCI cards for the SSD raid boot, swap file SSD, full size graphics card and communications card

And I'm no-one special.

Addressing that third point, Our German friends have a wonderful word: Kablesalat (literally cable salad). The current Mac Pro iMac and Coke Can Mac Pro force you to have multiple power bars nearby for brick on string external power supplies for all of your hard drives. Jesus? Who thought that was a practical idea for given how the cable transformers are made it's often impossible make full use of the sockets.

If the answer is put them all in a single raid box you're missing the point. Not everything needs to should be or should be a raid.

If anyone at Apple is listening: you're telling people who want to buy from you, and have options, and are sophisticated enough to be fault tolerant, to f*** off. Well, do as you will but it seems to me you should reserve that attitude for people who don't have options.

PS, can you make another seventeen inch laptop large enough to hold hard drives? Those new video cameras soak up a lot of hard drive space.

Re:Also the $5K imac pro sucks to thin / storge lo

[DontBeAMoran]

Nobody asked for the fucking iMac Pro, just like nobody asked for the fucking trashcan Mac Pro.

It would be nice if the industrial designer was pushed aside and Apple let the engineers design computers and then order the industrial designer to make it look nice. It's currently the other way around and unfortunately engineers can't break the laws of physics.

Re:My PC is from 2006

[XXongo]

I'm with the original poster. I don't see why it matters whether the mac hardware is "stagnant". I care about whether it does what I want it to do.

My laptop runs everything I want to run fine. Why would I want to "upgrade" to something "better" if it's not actually any better at what I want it to do?

I'd much rather they spend their money fixing system bugs.

Don't abandon us

[Major Blud]

I was pretty disappointed when I downloaded the 10.14 Developer Beta and was told that it wouldn't install on my Mac Pro....a machine with 12 logical cores running at 3.2 Ghz, 32 GB of RAM, 512 GB SSD, and a 3 GB ATI Radeon 7950 that's Metal compatible . The release notes say that support for this machine is coming in a later beta release, but who knows when this will happen.

I realize that my machine is about 6 years old, but Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04 run just fine on it. They really need to release this Mac Pro tower that's been rumored, because I sure don't want to move to the trash-can or an iMac.

Excel! [Re:My PC is from 2006]

[XXongo]

Ninety percent of the market uses Excel to work on small data sets.

I use Excel to keep track of my grocery bills, and sometimes to add up travel expenses when I take a trip.

I expect a faster processor would add *microseconds* to my free time.

Re:ARM based Macs

[doconnor]

The longer they don't update, the higher the percentage speed increase they can boast about with the new ARM Macs.

If you're an artist we're nowhere near good enough

[rsilvergun]

there's plenty of room to improve video editing, film production, computer programming, scientific research and even business finance. AMD's doing a brisk business with 16 and 32 core desktop processors. I don't see anything close to that on offer from Apple.

Re:My PC is from 2006

[MightyYar]

I'm a big Mac fan - I've been using them as my main computer since 1993.

With that said, the stagnation got to be too much. I picked up an HP Envy recently that costs about half of what an i7 does on the Mac side, and it has one of the new 15 watt TDP chips in it so it is cool and has decent (but not spectacular) battery life. Sure, I die a little every time I need to use Windows 10 - but at the end of the day I just couldn't spend too much money on hardware that seems to be somewhat flaky.

Tangentially, why the hell can't Microsoft figure out high-res displays? Are my choices really teeny-tiny or big-n-fuzzy? Sheesh. And if it were just legacy support, fine - but it's the situation with MS's own bundled apps!

Re:My PC is from 2006

[mlyle]

Hey, I'm a big Apple fan. The thing that's unfortunate right now is: if you are at a point where you should upgrade systems--- laptop life, OS support, etc--- all of the offerings are underwhelming: dated and not price-performant. Apple has always been a premium option but you'd usually get premium, up to date hardware for it until the past few years.

I'm on a Linux laptop these days and I hope they fix it so I can go back to everyday use of MacOS.

state of affairs

[Nex6]

it kinda the way apple is, its the "state of affairs" of things. apple is knife focused on iOS devices. and mac is yea we do that to.
32GB ram laptops are not uncommon, even 64GB can be had... and now lenovo is pushing out a 128GB ram laptop apple? 16GB....

there is alot of people that need power, and apple is not paying attention to them. so they are moving to windows in most cases a few to linux
but most are going to windows 10, not becuase the love windows.. but because they can get better hardware.

Mod me down

[squiggleslash]

I know this is controversial, but if Apple isn't going to care about the hardware any more, perhaps it's time it pulled out of the market and sold macOS as a standalone product for third party PCs. And if they don't want to support it, they can contract that out too, maybe even partner with someone like Canonical (who have a great track record on making a third party OS work on everything out of the box.) With Intel and AMD controlling the entire non-standardized part of the hardware chain it's easier than it's been since the early nineties to produce a single OS that'll work on everything anyway.

It's always been the OS, not the hardware, that's made me crave Macs, but I haven't owned one in over ten years because I just don't trust them with hardware any more, and can't get a Mac with a specification I'm comfortable with.

If they no longer even care, then it's time to let their platform blossom.

Get them while they are new and hold on to them

[williamyf]

With Macs is always the same. As soon as a significant upgraded specs machine is anounced, you buy it, with max CPU and RAM (since those are soldered). Skimp on the (removable) SSD if you must.

When Updated machines just hit, they are price-competitive with whatever has similar specs in the PC world (apple uses their scale to get good deals from component suppliers, and pass a very, very little part of the savings to us).

then hold on to it for a Very, very long time. Because, after a couple of semesters without upgrades, thos machines stop being price-competitive with their similar specd PC equivalents. If you are "forced" to buy a mac ahead of time, buy 2nd hand.

When the next significant update hits, lather, rinse, repeat.

Since this tends to align with my personal tastes, I have no Problem, but some people can not (or do not want) to operate in that pattern, I feel for them.

My MacBook aluminum Unibody Late 2008 lasted me (with SSD and RAM upgrade) until 2015. Now I am rocking and Early 2015 Air (maxed CPU, Maxed RAM, Downgraded SSD). And by the looks of it, this Air will last 7 years as well...

Yes, I am not a pro. Nowadays I am just a lousy cloud (mostly openstack) trainer and architect.

Re: My PC is from 2006

[MightyYar]

With computers it isn't quite so simple.

Your inputs are changing. Let's use a simple example of someone dealing with videos or photos. Resolutions and color depths have increased to where they overwhelm the memory and storage available in older equipment. The processing of these files also takes longer.

Hard drives fill up, log files get longer, patches accumulate, caches grow larger, temp directories fill up. Software is installed but rarely cleaned back out, so total number of processes climb. Drives fragment, software gets more complicated.

Same here with my mid-2013 MacBook Pro

[mfearby]

My mid or late (can't recall, I'm at work) MacBook Pro from 2013 "suffers no detectable slowdown or inability to handle complex websites, etc" as well. Mind you, a 500GB SSD, Intel i7, and 16GB of RAM should still be decent, even today.

That being said, though, the chances of my next computer being an Apple are 50:50. I'm probably going to come back to Linux and just have a decent mid tower PC.

Re: My PC is from 2006

[jedidiah]

> Old macs are generally inline with old PC's

Except "Old Macs" are your only option. "Old Macs" are being sold as "New Macs" at the same high price points Apple has long be famous for.

Outside of the Apple reality distortion field I can get an "Old PC" for CHEAP or a MUCH better "New PC".

Consider this another iteration of "ANY monopoly is bad".

Apple has a negative incentive to update Macs

[dschnur]

Apple's margin is extremely high on phones. It's one of the reasons it is a darling of Wall Street.

What's the margin on new PC hardware? Minimal, even for Apple.

If Apple were to come out with new computers every year, they would have a higher amount NRE on their books, and the components to make their computers would be more expensive to boot. Older components on a large scale are cheaper by a long shot. Apple can't compete with smaller companies since it needs parts on such a scale when it releases new computers that manufacturers can't keep up. By not investing in new computer development, Apple is playing the dangerous game of having a locked in market, overcharging those who use their gear, and expecting it to last -- or not caring about its users at all.

Apple's not the only offender.

[SvnLyrBrto]

Apple may be on the egregious side. But they're far from the only offender here. *Everyone* seems to be letting their real computers stagnate in favor of gadgets. And I suspect that it's not even the fault of any of them; but a result of Intel's recent trend of sitting around with their thumbs up their bums.

About three years ago, I bought a top-end iMac with a core i7 CPU that tops out "turbo boost"ing at 4Ghz. Leaving aside "pro" model and Xeons, the top-end iMac now is an i7 @ 4.2Ghz... which you would think would say something bad about Apple. But a quick check for the top-end consumer non-Xeon HP and Dell machines that I could find, turns up machines specced at core i7s topping out at most 4.6hz. That's better; but not by much. Granted, an i7 @ 4Ghz today is not quite the same thing as an i7 @ 4Ghz from three years ago. But the improvements are fairly incremental and underwhelming yawners... especially considering we've had two full 18-month Moore cycles in the meantime. The Intel of old would have improved its product lineup considerably more than they have bothered to do these last 36 months.

Perhaps this is the root of the persistent rumors of Apple switching to its own ARM-based chip designs? After all, that's pretty much how Apple wound up on Intel in the first place... IBM was letting the PPC G5 stagnate and Motorola pretty much checked out entirely.

The market for new machines

[sjbe]

My point is that is really hasn't. My laptop already does all the things I need to do with it.

That does not matter for purposes of buying a new one. All that means is that you aren't going to upgrade until you either get a new use case requirement or it breaks. And when you do replace it you almost certainly are not going to buy the same model even if it worked just fine. You are going to buy something that most likely is technologically superior to whatever you are currently and likely for the same or less money. Because why wouldn't you? It's like buying a new car that gets notably better gas mileage and goes faster for the same money as what you bought 3 years prior. Nobody is going to buy old inferior technology unless they absolutely have to. And companies that don't keep up with the state of the art are going to lose sales to companies that do keep up. Right now Apple is not keeping up in their Macintosh division.