Apple Removes Personal Pickup for Thunderbolt Display
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Digital Skunk
macrumors G3
Same here.
They've done that before so here's to them doing it again. Announce the new Mac Pro and new panels and then tell us orders start a month . . . . or heck, 6 months from now, and I'll be happy.
daveedjackson
macrumors 6502
Wasn't the clue that they were working on better (expect to exceed 5k) displays when they showcased the new custom screens design by Ive for the Apple retail stores?
theluggage
macrumors G3
Come on you two, can't we at least wait a few hours to confirm if pessimism is necessary?
+Pessimism: If they were going to replace it, they'd have pulled it completely, not just removed personal pickup.
+Optimism: If they're replacing it it would probably mean new TB3/USB-C Macs as well
~Neutral: looks like they've fixed the website so they don't have to take it down to make changes (since, even if there's no hardware, they'll probably be adding stuff about the next OS X, iOS and Watch OS as soon as the KN is over>
daveedjackson
macrumors 6502
i'm not convinced they'll have a huge hoo ha about the display upgrade... maybe just a new item in the store at some point... It's annoying though - for someone who is having huge 4k display issues with the nMP
tennisproha
macrumors 68000
So this rumor was very anticlimactic. 
BornAgainMac
macrumors 604
What exactly was the reason to remove personal pickup? Do other customers troll customers that purchase those at the price Apple charges?
villicodelirant
Suspended
Apparently their business model is best served by new phones than by, um, a $3000+ machine isn't three friggin' years old.
Quite frankly, I have no problem with that, there's plenty of other manufacturers to buy computers from.
It's a bit of a shame for those of us who used to fap to pictures of the MDD dual PowerMac, but heh, I guess 15 years are enough to change a company's core business.
Well, I think the non-retina MacBook Pro is still a pretty useful machine.
I would buy one right now, you know.
For $500.
smirking
macrumors 601
Yeah that thing fitted with an SSD and a lower price point is still a pretty impressive performer.
theluggage
macrumors G3
Probably because its a low-volume seller, they don't want to maintain huge stocks and the logistics of direct selling are easier. Maybe there's a high return/no-show rate. Whether it is replaced or not, this isn't a product that is going anywhere. If had ever been selling like hotcakes they'd have updated it to match the iMac years ago.
Inconvenient truth: yes, it is. PC sales aren't making much money right now.
Seriously: if you want a kick-ass workstation for pro graphics or computational heavy lifting, you can order yourself up a Windows or Linux machine with exactly the permutation of hardware you want. The dealer may barely scrape a profit unless you buy finance or support from them - but that doesn't matter because they're not having to fund the development of their own OS and application suite or build their own motherboards and graphics cards. All hardware manufacturers provide Windows drivers by default, and between manufacturers and the open-source community, Linux is fairly well supported. In the good old days, DOS/Windows simply didn't cut the mustard for pro graphics/DTP/media and all the decent software was for Mac, so they had a huge advantage - these days, maybe macOS has some marginal advantages, but all the software supports Windows.
Meanwhile, more and more of the things that you needed a kick-ass workstation for 15 years ago can be handled by a half-decent laptop or by a cluster of black boxes somewhere on the internet.
Apple can't turn out a competitively priced tower system and make enough margin to fund macOS and not risk cannibalising iMac sales. The new Mac Pro was a brave attempt to create an alternative to the "big box of slots" for an era with fast external data connections - but with the drawback that Apple have to eat the development costs for any upgrade to the GPU boards etc.
To be fair, one of the selling points of the Mac Pro is stability/reliability of Xeon + parity-checked RAM + custom thermal design: Mac Pro users might be happier with waiting 48 hours for their render to finish vs. a bleeding edge system that did it in 40 hours but with a 10% chance of crashing or melting, while making a noise like a jet fighter.
No - Apple's problem is that its laptop line is getting stale, and there is still money in high-end ultraportables.
Yes - that's part of Apple's (and the PC industry in general's) problem. Once upon a time, upgrading every 18 months gave you a night-and-day 100% performance increase. Now, upgrading after 3 years might give you a 20% higher cinebench score, which you won't notice c.f. your old machine with an SSD upgrade.
villicodelirant
Suspended
Completely agreed.
I was not being sarcastic in my previous post.
Still, it makes me feel a bit nostalgic for the days of the Pentium II snail ad.
Now excuse me while I cry all the way to the nearest Lenovo reseller.
theluggage
macrumors G3
Complaints on a postcard to IBM and Motorola for not making a low-power PPC G5 for portables until after Apple committed to switching.
I'm just waiting for ARM to decide to have another bash at the desktop and put Intel out of our misery. Back in 1987 the ARM could run rings around its Intel contemporaries (all without a heatsink) but all of the development since then has focussed on mobile/embedded.
poorcody
macrumors 65816
Actually when you think about it, if the monitor was going to be replaced sometime in the near future, removing personal pickup would allow better management of a smaller inventory (it takes a lot more units to stock inventory at individual stores compared to having one central-inventory that is direct-shipped).
So maybe they are stopping or slowing production and trying to maximize existing inventory.
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villicodelirant
Suspended
Oh well, I am not nostalgic for Motorola-branded chips, Intel ones are just fine.
I am mildly nostalgic for the days when the company's business focused more on the workstation market and less on watches and accessories.