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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
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.
Apples recent iPad commercial says it all.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
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.
The Quad Core Mac Mini I bought in 2012 is faster than any Mac Mini sold in 2018. Get it together, Apple.
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.
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.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
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.
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.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
The longer they don't update, the higher the percentage speed increase they can boast about with the new ARM Macs.
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.
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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!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
Imagine all the people...