Mac Pro and China where there are skills for ambitious products. Are Americans not capable of that?
Americans are capable of whatever they're trained to do. We aren't a special class of human beings. Our industry simply isn't here anymore... Because companies like Apple moved it out of the USA to seek greater profits by using a nation of exploited citizens.
Americans don't want to do factory work. We're a first-world white-collar country now.
Tim Cook is smart enough to know this.
Nonsense. Tim Cook is one of the members of corporate America that creates and maintains the self-fulfilling prophecy of "no skills" by eliminating demand for said skills in the USA by closing down the USA's industry. It's exactly like the self-fulfilling prophecy of "no one wants pro level computers, because they're not buying them from us... (because we're not making them)".
Americans want to do factory work. Just not for a wage that would support affordable tech gear AND guarantee current quality, at minimum.
People don't even want to man a cash register for less than 15 dollars an hour. Who is going to cover up head to toe in protective gear and assemble computing equipment for pennies per hour like the Chinese?
People don't want to be wage slaves. People want to be able to live on their job, regardless of what the job is. But the people who think we live in a meritocracy would have us believe that there are jobs not worthy of paying living wages.
More importantly, it's not the workers that are to be blamed. It's the corporations that don't want to pay the workers. The corporations would have to choose between higher profits and foreign industry, or lower profits and local industry. Guess which choice they'll make? Guess which choice they're actively forced into making due to "fiduciary responsibility"?
These corporations have zero loyalty to the USA. Their only loyalty is to Wall Street. Wall Street is the biggest flaw of the American economy. Like Windows' registry, it's the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. It is only questioned by those who aren't making a direct profit (or those who don't expect to make a profit) off of their Wall Street gambling. Hint: most people aren't gaining from Wall Street gambling. It's a rich boys' club, and that club has a kids' table for all the temporarily embarrassed millionaires in the libertarian tech forums...
I was wondering that myself.
I think what he means is that each Mac model is constrained by what they want to charge for it. If it's made in China, the production cost are less and they can put more in it for the price they want to charge.
Then the simple solution is to take less profit. They can still profit, but the margins that they are expecting to mske, or are demanded by Wall Street, are what drives the decision making. They'll always choose greater margins because that's the inevitable trap of public ownership and pathological capitalism.
Apple designed S1 to be cheap. It's a simple ARM processor that can cost under 10 USD to make. It will run it's own OS. And putting touchID to the Ultra Magic Touch Keyboard it is not a challenge at all.
Apple will sell it for 199 USD.
Then I won't be buying one. That's a ludicrous price for a keyboard. Especially a disposable keyboard (you know it'll have a wireless design with a non-user serviceable battery glued in). Besides, it'll also probably have the same ludicrous sharp edges as the current BS "magic" keyboard. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with the designers at Apple? Doesn't anyone actually USE what they make over there??
You can have it both ways quite easily.
Add a future-use port while retaining a legacy port. It's not that hard. Apple clung on to FW800 far longer than they should despite it's obvious limitations every year and found a way to stick it into almost every Mac they could even when it was past it's use-by date.
So if they can make accommodations for their own technology it should be just as easy for others.
Imagine that. As for FireWire's "obvious limitations", it was slower in ratings, compared to USB2, but had better throughput, timing, and overall reliability. That's why it lasted so long. Only the "I've never used FireWire" people are able to think of it as a failure. Thunderbolt should've been an easy replacement, but Intel totally crapped the bed on that project the second they killed the original optical-electrical design and went for expensive and short "active cables" (and expensive chipsets). FireWire had no clear successor in practicality while Intel was failing to deliver on thunderbolt's potential.
I'd go further and say that as they show less and less interest in OSX, with each release seemingly more sparse in new feature than the last, spin it off to a new but related company who actually cares about it.
Of course you can build a very stable, low maintenance hackintosh now if that's what you want.
"Hackintosh", "stable", and "low maintenance" do not belong in the same sentence.
As for Mac OS features... We don't NEED more features. We NEED Apple to make the existing features EFFICIENT and RELIABLE. Mac OS has been turning into Windows with each successive version adding more system services into the constantly running mix. More interactive services, more network communication demands for iCloud and iOS synchronization, etc. The features have bloated the OS. They should realistically be making the code more efficient each version because the hardware is not growing in brute power like it used to. But they don't seem to be doing that.
User-facing features and cosmetics aren't the issue. But that's all marketing understands. Today's Apple is lead by people who know nothing about technology and only think about quarterly profits. The pathological capitalism is ruining the product.
if you want the Mac to survive stop buying iPhones and iPads and the apple watch
the more money Timmy see coming from mobile devices the sooner he will be killing the Mac
Yeah, right. That'll stop when the fads change away from Apple as darling. Then Apple will suddenly scramble to find the customer base to maintain the disgusting profit margins they've come to be used to. The pros won't be there to take up the massive amount of slack left behind by the abandonment of Apple by the fad-driven end consumers.
And what is your great plan to keep them here?
A lot more stick than carrot. Instead of socializing the losses and privatizing the gains, maybe there should be an expectation of corporate loyalty to the nation they operate their business within. Maybe there should be massive disincentives for outsourcing, instead of letting the pathology of greed-based capitalism drive outsourcing. The only reason they drove manufacturing out of the USA is because of the pursuit of profit. Make outsourcing fruitless and they'll be forced to accept the profit they have.
But this is all after the fact. Pathological capitalists have already ruined the economy and industry in the USA. It takes a LOT more misery to fix an institutional screw up than it does to prevent one. What we have here is a case of hyper-normalization. When the failure state is so normalized by people wanting to keep the spoils of a destroyed economy, the economy only worsens until absolute breaking. This is why I keep referencing pathology. Belief (or rather disbelief) keeps people locked into the path of least resistance and greatest inevitable failure.
They don't have the requisite skills.
...because American corporations abandoned the workforce that had the skills and the skills stagnated. Stop blaming the worker when the jobs aren't there. This is the ultimate in victim blaming: blaming the subjects of a kingdom of corporatocracy for the behavior of the corporatocracy.
1. I need the power to run 3D software.
2. I don't want Windows/Linux.
3. I don't want to buy a Mac Pro that is three years old.
4. No new Mac Pro = End of 3D video work, and No more computers in my house.
I gave up 3D because the software is abysmal. But I'm otherwise in exactly the same situation. I'm absolutely done with Windows and PCs. I'd rather give up entirely than force myself to tolerate them any further. The computer industry is a disaster of normalized failure.
It is just mind boggling what happened with that computer. So weird that it has just sat there for three years. And with the Mac Mini also sitting around and gimped, it creates such a hole in the lineup. It is the hole that has been there forever due to lack of the "headless" Mac. But Apple is just letting it get bigger and bigger. Crazy.
They're utterly detached from reality. They're being enthralled by the pathology of capital greed. The leadership is composed of ultimately privileged people, living in a seamless aluminum tower, doing no real work themselves. They cannot see beyond their own noses. Everything they do is designed to reinforce their own confirmation bias. They will kill a market to justify their belief in the lack of interest in that market.
Self-fulfilling prophecy tends to be the ultimate behavior of people trapped in their own self-blinded delusions.
Moving assembly back to Asia, why? How ambitious do you have to be to turn a few screws and squeeze a tube of adhesive?
It's not the assembly that's the problem. It's the engineering of smaller components that Apple relies on being done by foreign industry. Apple makes the package design, specifies the features, and then demands the electronics be built to serve both. The lacking expertise isn't the wage slave workers (that's not expertise; it's cheap labor). The lacking expertise is the actual electronics snd component engineering.
Maybe Apple should start building American expertise in that area. Before the collapse drains their overflowing coffers
First, thank you for posting that comment; many would prefer to ignore it.
Also, we hand out these participation trophies to kids, so they learn there should be a reward just for participating, which is mostly likely the opposite of what they will encounter later in their adult careers.
It's not that "many would prefer to ignore it". Many know it's absolute nonsense. There's a constant theme of blaming the subjects of an institution for the bad behavior of the institution. When the subjects have no control and only the illusion of choice, there's very little they can do to change things. But it's easier for the institution's "leadership" to convince their subjects to blame each other for the problems (especially by ensuring their subjects attack the weakest members of their group). It's cannibalistic behavior to suit the interests of the people making all the decisions.
