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Apple Confirms iMac Pro Will Be Discontinued When Supplies Run Out, Recommends 27-Inch iMac
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Once Apple stop trying to entice new users into the Mac fold, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Short term, as I said, you can make hay by selling more-and-more premium products to the loyal, but longer term, if you're not winning over new users, that pool of loyal customers will only shrink.
...and it's not just Mac - there have been similar patterns with the iPhone in the past, with the focus on pushing up the price of flagship smartphones, knowing that the faithful will pay whatever you ask, while only offering warmed-over versions last year's models as lower-end options. It's not that iPhone sales have stopped growing - but there have been several past years where revenue has grown disproportionally to sales volume. They nearly came a cropper a few years back in the iPhone 5 era, when they dragged their feet on larger-screen phones that were all the rage with Android (while the iPhone faithful were insisting that size wasn't important).
I'm really hoping that Apple Silicon will make Macs a contender again, rather than a slowly shrinking pond where the big fish haven't quite realised why the eating is so good these days...
...that can be up to 9% if you disregard some journalist's "gut feeling"...
MacBook Air/13" MBP: $1,000 - $2300 - probably skewed towards the base $1000-$1300 models
Mac Pro: $6000 - $50,000 - and, since there's little dispute that the $6k model is ~meh that's probably skewed towards $10,000+
So even if you assume that there's some fixed "profit margin" across the board, Apple could be making 10 times the profit on each Mac Pro sale c.f. each low-end MacBook sale. I suspect the margin is higher on the Mac Pro - partly because of the "joke base spec + upgrades" model (and we know some of the upgrades have windfall margins).
Basically, even at "a single digit percent", Mac Pro sales are a significant source of income for Apple.
Another self-fulfilling prophecy. Make a cheaper machine and you'll sell more. Whatever the "cost" price is of a Mac Pro, that is the consequence of deliberate design decisions made by Apple. Nobody held a gun to their heads and told them to use Xeon W 3xxx. 512GB RAM would have been a welcome upgrade from the iMac Pro's 256GB (the 1.5TB support means paying a huge premium for the M-postfix 24 and 28 core versions of the Xeon). People wanted PCIe slots - I don't recall anybody demanding 8 of the suckers.
While things like the $700 wheels and the $1000 XDR display stand are optional, and not deal-breakers, they really show up Apple's short-term, greedy tendencies. It's "luxury car" conspicuous consumption thinking, not "premium PC" get-what-you-pay-for thinking. It's also been a major contribution to making the Mac a laughing stock outside the Mac user's bubble. (Personally I think the $200 VESA adapter, which is not optional unless you get the $1k stand, when it would have been easy to blend 4 bolt-holes into the steampunk-style display back, is the egregious thing).
The number of loyal Apple II customers shrank, and, in the same way, the loyal Mac customers will shrink. At some point in the future, loyal iPad customers will shrink as Apple transitions to the next thing. As long as Apple keeps an eye on the future rather than the past, then they’ll have the ‘next’ platform (Apple NeXT
) ready for old customers to transition to and new customers to buy into. Apple “the company” can continue to exist even while the platforms they profit from come and go.Objectively, a significant source of income? Sure. Significant to Apple? Services is significant to Apple. The iPad is significant to Apple. They could drop the Mac Pro line tomorrow and there would be no significant impact seen in the next quarterly results, so no.
Going back to a prior post, the Mac Pro as a system was REALLY not needed. They were satisfying the vast majority of their professional customers with something that was already available. The customers they were not satisfying (and, most importantly, that they thought were WORTH satisfying) were people that wanted MORE than what was already available. They consulted with those (maybe 15-20) entities, brought them in to Apple to define their workflows and Apple created the system THEY needed. They didn’t consult with folks that wanted a mini-tower because “mini-towers are cool”. They didn’t consult with folks on a fixed income that wanted to replace their cheese grater. They consulted with folks who were likely making significant amounts of money with the current high end of Apple’s Mac line who knew they could make MORE money if they had more performance/flexibility. To make the R&D money back on a system that was intended to sell in VERY low numbers, the price was increased. It ABSOLUTELY was a self-fulfilling prophecy, they absolutely had the intention of creating a system that would intentionally sell in ludicrously low numbers for a ludicrously low number of customers.
This was clearly the case. The 2013 MP was basically a machine designed around making the product category worthwhile to Apple. The cheese graters were big, heavy boxes that took up loads of space in inventory and sold in comparatively tiny numbers. The 2013 was vastly smaller and lighter, with increased margins. Unfortunately, it didn't make sense to their customers, so sold poorly. Apple wasn't really sure what to do, and eventually settled on making a iMac variant with a Xeon. When they got cold feet over that being enough, they decided to make the big, expandable box their customers actually wanted, but simply charge £6K+ for it.
The 2019 MP was announced before the iMP came out, but then took over two and half years to come out. They were clearly starting from scratch, having disbanded the Mac Pro team. Apple is highly secretive and takes great pains to keep future products under wraps; it's unheard of for them to pre-announce a machine years in advance. Of course, they had no choice - they knew the new tower would take ages to design from a standing start, and they couldn't just stay silent though the intervening years. With no indication from Apple of their roadmap, pro customers would continue to just give up and move to Windows (and CUDA).
IIRC, the pro backlash that really stung Apple was over the Touch Bar MBP, due to its few ports, pointless elimination of widely used, current interfaces (SD, HDMI, USB-A, Ethernet), unreliable keyboard, lack of Escape key, pointless Touch Bar, inadequate thermal solution etc. It took Apple by surprise, as they genuinely expected everyone to love the new machine. It probably scared them to realise how out of touch they were with Mac users.
I just don’t think so. Folks that didn’t need anything more powerful than the iMac Pro (99.999% of customers) were fine. This tiny number of customers that DID need more were being invited to Apple to discuss their workflows and what’s required to meet that need.
While I don’t doubt that there was a lot of complaining, it was mostly from folks that Apple wasn’t listening to anyway.
The people who were complaining wanted a modular Mac more than they wanted a Pro Mac.
Hence the uproar when the 2019 Mac Pro was announced. By finally meeting almost every one of their demands for a Mac Pro, Apple ended up making a computer that was 100% not for them.
That was the sweetest, sweetest irony of all.
Satisfying the “majority” of customers is how you become irrelevant over time. And also why Apple is “that lifestyle company” over in Cupertino. A serious computer company has to be able to make a serious computer. And damn the costs.
True. It is about 180 ppi. This seems fine with my old eyes but almost certainly isn’t acceptable as Retina as defined by Apple.
...only Timmy's not a bean counter, maybe by management style (jumping over dollars to get to pennies methodology). He majored in Industrial Inganeering.
Regardless, if App-hole were to auger in tomorrow, the Kook wouldn't feel one bit of pain, sporting a perpetual grin on his face for his amassed fortune (as well as most of the upper C-Level). We believe his direction (having been lauded for his...ahhh, "leadership?"), changing OSes faster than we change our socks and those OSes plagued with issues far more than any other rock-solid highly stable OS preceding 10.14, dismal to poor product releases, focusing on "toys" with sustainable revenue (apple watches, apple TV, Fitness apps, apple music, ) will be the result of apple's demise (from $42.50/share 1.8 years ago to $145/share 2 months to $116/share 8 days ago and heading south).
In 2016, journalist Thomas Ricker summed up the public's perceived lack of innovation at Apple in recent years, specifically stating that Samsung has "matched and even surpassed Apple in terms of smartphone industrial design"...that Apple is incapable of producing another breakthrough moment in technology with its products. We also even had an AAPL Sr. Tech Support correct us regarding apple's bumbling direction. He commented that apple's widespread issues have been increasing for the past 4-5 years when we said 2-3 years.
Unfortunately for us, after 14 years with apple jumping back on board with Microsoft would be disastrous, a major hit. Looks like we're being forced into the Mac Pros as our last desktops. Despite the high praise for the iMacs, that toy's limitations are too restrictive: only 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports sharing one controller (40Gb/s - 2 devices=20Gb/s per device accessing both ports concurrently), unable to change the HD (without taking a screwdriver, crowbar or hammer to the built-in screen), crowded workspace resulting from tethering external devices and the list goes on.
The success of apple has purely been from momentum from before this guy's unfortunate tenure at apple.
You mean, like a decent desktop PC? Every other manufacturer seems to manage that just fine. It's only Apple users with Stockholm syndrome that act like it's asking for the impossible.
No one was demanding a 28 core beast for £2K, just something with an upgradeable graphics card and a few slots, for a reasonable price.
It makes sense if you buy into the grand theory of Apple. You are free to disagree with it, but it does show that there is a method to Apple’s apparent madness.
My (admittedly somewhat charitable) take is that Apple may have been a tad over-aggressive in trying to get people to switch over to mobile. Apple did disclose that the majority of Mac users don’t use professional software. As such, Apple may have at one point genuinely believed that they could migrate Mac users over to the iPad, or at least shift their workflows over the the iMac and Mac laptops (hence the iMac Pro to replace the 2012 trash can Mac Pro). Hence doing away with the need for a Mac Pro altogether.
In other words, Apple was trying to give Pro users what they didn’t know they wanted, before they realised they wanted it.
The pro Mac community naturally didn’t react well to such a sentiment, there was a lot of drama, and Apple capitulated somewhat in a bid to avoid an all-out revolt by announcing the 2019 cheese grater Mac Pro.
I guess this is one occasion where Apple really betted on the wrong horse.
All of Apple’s Macs are serious. Wether or not there really is a need for a Mac Pro is highly debatable in my opinion.
Apple isn’t just a lifestyle brand but one of the most influential brands whatsoever.
Calling them lifestyle is even however still to be preferred to being a status symbol for computer illiterate designers and some architects like the brand was 20 years ago. So there’s progress.
Desktop PCs? Apple declared the year of the notebook in 2003. They never came back. Enough said.
Besides, they probably think the Mac mini is as Apple as a desktop could ever be.
Good video. I wonder if Apple is just delaying their initial decision to remove high-end Macs from their lineup. The M1 Macs might show the way given that their lowest of low-end SoC is wickedly fast. If Apple can give everyone the power of a Mac Pro for the price of an iMac then they made the correct decision. It might be that they just moved a bit too fast after the 2013 Mac Pro.
Of course the Mac Pro isn't just about CPU & GPU performance. Expandability and massive IO is also part of it. The 2013 Mac Pro had a lot of fast IO but not much expandability. I don't know how they plan on solving those problems for their high-end customers. I wouldn't bet on Apple adding expandability to their main product lines. Things like removing external GPU support doesn't bode well. Maybe they will do as the video expects and will just kill those products and move on to the next.
That was then, and I sometimes wonder just how much of it was due to Jony Ive at the helm, and his seemingly never ending quest for simplicity. If news of the next MBP bringing ports like HDMI back, it may signal that Apple is willing to walk back some of their more controversial design choices like the touchbar and going all-in on USB-C ports. Apple may be okay with simply what pro users say they want, if they can keep them as customers.
We will just have to see, I suppose.
Presumably you meant this ironically, but a bit hard to tell.
Laptops are clearly many people's preferred choice, and they're handy for deploying in organisations, but they're not optimal for every situation. Someone with mid-range performance requirements is looking at either a low cost desktop or a very expensive laptop; if you're primarily desk-bound the latter doesn't make a lot of sense.
Presumably Apple consider the 2019 MP to be as true an Apple product as the mini; a desktop PC is simply mid-way between the two. It's just a segment they studiously ignore.
I have to ask what the motivation is for all this, ultimately. Are they so caught up in avoiding the Innovator's Dilemma that they're frantically trying to push people into ever newer form factors? It seems their inflated market cap demands constant growth and hence product churn, but iPhone-style revolutions are few and far between in practice.
Neither the iPad or Apple Watch have been anything like the success of the iPhone. Both are the leaders in their respective categories, but neither is immensely compelling. iPads are fine for YouTube and Safari, but only a masochist or someone with a fanatical belief in 'progress' would use one for actual work. And what's the Apple Watch for? It's basically a disposable gadget with some fitness applications.
Apple called it right with the floppy drive, serial ports and optical drive, but these predictions were only a little ahead of their time - the writing was already on the wall. Declaring that current, widely-used interfaces like HDMI and SD cards are obsolete seems like trying to repeat the same trick too often. It's faux-progress, and not particularly clever.
Perhaps all this is shortsighted. Maybe AI will wind up doing all the work, leaving us to be sustained by UBI as we live in the matrix via Apple VR glasses. But that's a long way off (and not particularly desirable).
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Yes they absolutely ignore it. The last Mac that came close was a G5 Powermac back in the day and even those were not cheap. The segment is just dead to them, or in other words, they can’t make enough profit to be interested in participating.
Again, can we even remotely believe that Kook is sincerely concerned for the future of Apple? Concerned about leaving a legacy? Possibly, however, to reiterate, he and his senior C-Level would dismiss any evanescent legacy should Apple cease to exist, with huge grins on their faces, content with the huge fortunes they've amassed over the past 10 years.
Someone on this forum commented that the Kookies (apple) got overzealous focusing on the mobile market (devices, iOSes, networks, apps, etc). That isn't the only segment they got reprehensibly overzealous in. For one, just one out of many, looking back at that keynote release demo hype of the "trashcan", as Apple desktop users (having also installed numerous Apple desktops in SMBes), that circus performance was absolutely insulting, even embarrassing. The C-Level trying to sell the sizzle of that product, grossly overlooking the obvious drawbacks (mostly from a business perspective, but also among a plethora of legacy Mac Pro retail customers), was insulting to most Mac Pro users (when they first reached the local Apple store, one of the seasoned Apple Store sales managers trying to sell us on the iMac Pro, pointed over to the "trashcan", literally chuckling while he did so, not even interested in showing us the "Mac Pro" cylinder). As many have cited in this forum and elsewhere, these major apple "oops, oh well", swept under the rug scenarios compose a lengthy list.
Yup, you go Timmy. Charge after those cutesy market segments with dreams and delusions of sustainable, billions of dollars of monthly revenue...Apple TV, Apple Fitness+, Apple Watch, etc., etc., etc. A real shame, especially for the Apple business users who would find it productively and financially devastating to convert back to Microsoft.
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In a nutshell, Apple is all about minimalism and purity in hardware design. Their products are not about having the most number of features or being the most useful, but about being the purest mix of form and function.
Apple is all about making great products, but their definition of “great” is always from the eyes of their design department, not the general public.
It’s why the iPhone never had expandable storage or removable batteries, because Apple felt that supporting them would compromise the integrity and beauty of the device.
Thin, light and uncompromisingly simply. That’s what makes a great product to Apple, not an endless list of features.
I will say that in their own way, Apple likely thought that they were legitimately doing their user base a favour by trying to migrate people over from laptops to iPads. Or that a 2016 MBP with twin LG 5k displays and a e-GPU would suffice as a desktop replacement.
Apple thought (likely still thinks) they knew better than their pro user base, and they thought wrong in this case. The Mac community proved to be a lot more resistant. That and some people legitimately needed the full power of a Mac Pro for their work. So Apple ultimately felt that the pro user segment, niche of a niche as it was, wasn’t a demographic they were really to give up just yet.
I agree that Apple set out to make a thing complainers didn’t want or need. However, I don’t think Apple was trying to give Pro users what they didn’t know they wanted, before they realised they wanted it. Those Pro users may have THOUGHT Apple was trying to give them something they didn’t want… but they would be mistaken. Apple was giving other users what THEY wanted!
They had dropped that particular group of Pro users like a hot potato and haven’t looked back.Welllllll, Apple’s never satisfied the majority of customers with the Mac. I don’t think they’ve had too much over 25% marketshare ever. They’ve always been about focusing on a profitable minority in pretty much everything they’ve ever done. And, Apple dropped Computer from the name a LOOOONG time ago. If that means they’re “that lifestyle company”, then that’s what they are.
The future of Apple? Yes. The future of any individual product line? Well, it comes down to whether or not “question the second” enables “question the first”.