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"If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that."
Those lines are especially interesting in light of a long report from Bloomberg today that indicates the Mac is "getting far less attention than it once did" inside the company. There are some rational explanations for this, as we've written before: Intel releases new chips less frequently than it once did, and when it does launch new products, they tend to bring only incremental improvements over their predecessors. The Mac also represents less of Apple's revenue than it did even five or six years ago—it usually generates somewhere between 10 and 12 percent of Apple's revenue, compared to 60 percent or more for the iPhone. But persons "familiar with the matter" detail to Bloomberg a few organizational changes that have negatively impacted the Mac and delayed some products past their originally planned ship dates.
Meetings between Mac engineers and Jony Ive's design team, once a weekly occurrence, have reportedly become less frequent since Ive delegated some of his day-to-day tasks to other employees last year. When developing new designs, the modern-day Apple is also apparently more willing to develop and test multiple ideas at the same time. This divides engineers' efforts and slows things down.
The 12-inch MacBook, for instance, was originally slated to ship in 2014 instead of 2015, but the team had to divide its efforts to develop both the current thin, light model and a "less ambitious" and slightly heavier version of the same concept. A problem with the redesigned batteries for the new MacBook Pros meant that they needed to be replaced, and engineering attention was diverted from other Macs to fix the issue. The problem with the redesigned batteries could account for the mediocre battery life that some users are reporting in the new models; the original batteries would have been molded to fill every nook and cranny inside the MacBook Pro's chassis à la the 12-inch MacBook, potentially increasing overall battery capacity.
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Back in the day when Apple wasn't so high on themselves that they actually addressed a diverse set of needs.This is great. The good old days indeed.
Love this comment LOL.They need to fix the following:
- Don't rip people off with garbage components (AMD mobile GPUs in desktops? LOL)
- Fix the miserable airflow which causes the iMacs CPU to run extremely hot at the expense of USELESS thinness and then get away with false advertising claiming "4ghz speed!!!!" while having to downthrottle because of said heating issues
- Not sell a Mac Pro with last years tech and next years prices with ZERO available upgrades for GPUs
I recently went to my local BestBuy to see what Kind of a PC my money could buy. From all the moaning on here you would think it would be a slam dunk. The top of the line choice was an HP tower for $1699. The specs were comparable to the baseline 27" iMac but with 125gb SD thrown in. If I try to find a 5k screen or even a 4K screen the price would be very close and for a much less elegant solution.
Interesting. I guess I would imagine it might make sense to travel over to the "gamer" type computers that are built for speed and video or to a workstation area. Then again, BB isn't my ideal for shopping computers any more than some other non electronics specialized B&M. However your point is well taken. I think going over to HP's website and seeing all their offerings shows a bit of a different story - especially where the HP Z vs Mac Pro is concerned.
Here is one typical find - for monitor and machine for one of their gamer systems.
Omen X Desktop (silly artsy gamer case)
$2049.00
HP UH 24" Monitor (4K?) approx 500 dollars
- 6th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-6700K Processor (4 core)
- NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1070; Founders Edition
- 16 GB DDR4 memory
- 256 SSD + 2 TB HDD storage
So out the door we could say just under 2600 dollars and this is akin to what some around here would say is that bottom of the line Mac Pro people wanted that was non-XEON.
If you go up some dollars into their HP Z workstation area, the differences become even more noticeable. HOWEVER, your point is more on spot with lower costing systems where it is not so slam dunk.
I find the Workstation Z "Mini" computers interesting but alas, wont be a good fit given it only has on board video (Intel 530 if I recall correctly) BUT it can take up to 32 gig RAM.
Depends on how you classify elegance fortunately the PC market is full of choice you can get anything you want at any dollar amount. It's a great time to be a computer enthusiast.Well no doubt you can always spend money but dollar for dollar the off the shelf PC does not offer much of a saving and in the end is a less elegant solution. For me the monitor on the iMac is much better than any out of the box monitor I can buy without killing the slight cost advantage to the PC. The way things read on rhs forums I would have thought the situation was mor dire.
Well no doubt you can always spend money but dollar for dollar the off the shelf PC does not offer much of a saving and in the end is a less elegant solution. For me the monitor on the iMac is much better than any out of the box monitor I can buy without killing the slight cost advantage to the PC. The way things read on rhs forums I would have thought the situation was mor dire.
Yes the iMac looks pretty darn pretty. I love the thin monitor that provides me with an opportunity to use laptop guts inside because full PC size parts wont fit. I also love the 27" shiny screens that allow me to catch those beautiful reflections and glare but not to be out done by the lovely saturated colours of images on my screen that rend images with great impact and are inaccurate representations of the graphic at hand. - All sarcasm aside, though what I say is accurate, the appeal for the iMac will remain as the typical non-intense or heavy user will thoroughly enjoy the experience and ease.
If the iMac monitor section was made twice as thick, it still would look the same from the front but offer so much more in terms of power, superior cooling and options. To me, the trade off for elegant and thin for a non-mobile computer is not worth it.
Well my point was the cost equation. I've never had a problem with an iMac monitor and I've made plenty of movies and done tons of Photoshop and Illustratator. My sense this debate has became much more of an identity issue for many people.
It's for sure identity related for some of us; that point I definitely agree with. All in one computers sure can be elegant, as Apple's iMac line is, but it's a shame that it comes at the expense of such things as desktop class graphics cards. I wouldn't be surprised if many of us in this conversation are power users, who would benefit from such things if only Apple offered them. Ah well, there's a balance to be struck in many things; the balance point Apple chooses often doesn't align with our preferences. True, the "line" must be drawn somewhere... I'll be honest and say that the primary reasons I still use Macs are my large existing investment in the ecosystem, and the fact that Mac apps require a Mac to compile them on. If those weren't issues I wouldn't hesitate to switch.Perhaps you are correct. I am in agreement that an all in one notion is elegant but honestly, I find several out of the box monitors to be as good or better. Perhaps that is all I should have mentioned in my last post. I believe your final comment/sentence is perhaps correct with respect to some here.
The reason they complain is because the bong-heads at Apple won't listen. They have reason to complain. In any case it is not all complaints, there are some cracking ideas on this thread - if only Apple would listen to them.Huge thread full of nothing but complaints.
Tim's idea of 'great' is like Donald Trump's idea of great. Utterly and completely at the whim of the tweet fairy.
well seems like after a meeting with said trump. trump PR is rubbing off of him. the reality distortion field that trump has over his poeple is a thing, i bet, tim dreams of.
even that qoute."The current generation iMac is the best desktop we have ever made and its beautiful Retina 5K display is the best desktop display in the world.
Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops. If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that."
very trumpian of him, GREAT! BEST!
The reason they complain is because the bong-heads at Apple won't listen. They have reason to complain. In any case it is not all complaints, there are some cracking ideas on this thread - if only Apple would listen to them.
He says the current iMac is the best desktop Apple's ever made and its 5K display is the best desktop display in the world.
Well said and completely correct.Apple has a very c. 1990 vibe to it at the moment*.
Tim Cook, like John Scully before him, is out to run the business and maintain profit margins like any other business, not recognising that Apple became great (and profitable) by taking regular punts on the potentially unprofitable. Then as now, the company is (by the sounds of it) chaotically run without a Jobsian character to give it a strategic direction.
Day by day, a once-simple range of products grows into a confusing plethora of products designed to cater for every conceivable market niche (if you want an Apple laptop, you can have a 12" MacBook, a 13" MacBook Air, a 13" MacBook Pro without touchbar and previous generation processor, a 13" MacBook Pro without touchbar and new generation processor, a 13" MacBook Pro with touchbar or a 15" MacBook Pro with touchbar).
Innovation is stagnating except where it can be used to maintain margins. Indeed Cook seems worse than Scully in this respect, in that Cook is killing products that supported the Apple 'ecosystem' but are marginally profitable like AirPort routers and monitor. Gone are the days you could say: 'Buy a Mac, because you'll be able to get other great hardware to support it which'll just work'. (In it's place: 'You'll have to buy a kludgy dongle to make that work'.)
Windows, once buggy, virus-laden, messy and confusing, is now going from strength to strength and, unlike in 1990, is supported by a wide range of hardware that is reasonably elegant in its design and construction (of course, there are also cheap beige boxes). And Android, like Windows before it, has already sewn up the commodity market for hardware in the mobile, and goes from strength to strength in market share (Apple says it's the most profitable company in mobile, but ultimately, where the market share is, so goes the development effort).
I've been an Apple fan for a decade. In that time, I've probably sold upwards of a dozen people on Macs who've often subsequently bought iPhones and iPads. For many years Macs could be recommended confidently, rather than defensively, because they were pretty good value and a pretty good product. But I'm back to being defensive again making excuses for a stagnant product line. I'm sick of it, so I won't recommend Macs any more as a matter of course ('don't buy that Mac desktop; it's saddled with slow hard drives and ancient processors').
It's all quite sad really...
(* And you know what they say about history repeating. The first time it's tragedy, the second time it's farce.)