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The LaserWriter has been replaced? The AirPort Base Station?

I wasn’t the one that stated “replacement” as a requirement. :) I’m content with the fact that, in the reality we live in, Apple sometimes releases new products that can, in some part, replace the product that came before, sometimes they don’t. The situation today is no different than it has been since Apple incorporated as a company.
You're the one talking about 45 year old items and focusing on components like floppy drives and peripheral devices like printers and routers which are totally irrelevant.
ALL routers work with Mac, 99% of printers do likewise but only Apple make Mac OS and only Apple make Macs.
So it's a straw man argument and completely flawed.
Apple towers have been made since 1987, it was never 'progress' to drop that form factor in 2013 as is proven by the fact that tower based computers are still ubiquitous today. The trashcan Mac Pro flopped spectacularly and resulted in Apple returning to the tower form factor in 2019.
It's not 'progress' to charge nearly 3 times as much for your tower as you had done previously, nor is it progress to offer an unexpandable Mac to those not willing to stump up £5499 for a form factor that up until 2013 was an Apple staple. Only someone nescient or completely unreasonable would argue otherwise.
 
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So you will be running Final Cut Pro on your Windows PC?

There is ONLY one reason to buy the Mac Pro and that is to run apps that only run on Macs.

DaVinci Resolve runs on Linux (and Mac and Windows) So if that is the app you use there is little reason to own a Mac.
Let's be honest here.... This isn't really the ONLY reason or even the REAL reason for many Mac users. (It's a GOOD reason when you really do rely on an app that's only available for Mac.)

But I'd say most people sticking with Mac do it primarily for the familiarity of the OS. At this point, for example? Almost everyone I know working in marketing in some capacity as a "creative" can do what they need just fine on a Windows machine. They have all the Adobe apps, etc. In some ways, a machine like a Microsoft Surface might even be the better solution for them when you take the touch-screen and pen into account.

They're typically still seen using Macs though, and often the high-end models/configurations. Why? Really, a combo of not believing Windows is as stable/reliable and a familiarity using Mac OS.

IMO though? When Apple really pushes the prices for systems like Mac Pros into the stratosphere? They alienate even this audience because at some point, the cost is more than corporate budgets will allow. (My cynical side says this might be deliberate on Apple's part, as a graceful way out of that whole market segment? After the abysmal support of the high-end "Pro" market for years, including the Trash-Can Mac Pro which didn't cut it for people and the long delays for something new? Apple may just be saying, "Here! See if you'll still pay THIS much for one of these towers? Because we'd rather let it die off so we can claim the interest is no longer there for it.")
 
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The LaserWriter has been replaced? The AirPort Base Station?

I wasn’t the one that stated “replacement” as a requirement. :) I’m content with the fact that, in the reality we live in, Apple sometimes releases new products that can, in some part, replace the product that came before, sometimes they don’t. The situation today is no different than it has been since Apple incorporated as a company.
Perhaps your given examples confuse your point. Because the answer to both the LaserWriter and Airport question is a resounding "Yes". Both of those things have been replaced. Apple might not have been the company to replace them, but laser printers and wireless access points are absolutely still in use today.

Maybe your point is that Apple sometimes gets to a point in a product line where they realize that someone else does it better and cheaper, so they discontinue those products. Your examples definitely hold up in that case. And it may also hold up when Apple abandons the professional workstation market, just like they did the Server market.
 
So what I'm hearing is you don't do the kind of pro work that most people in the market for these machines do and are happy to proclaim this isn't a problem for you who likely doesn't even need this machine....

In other news, the people who are editing pro video and rendering special effects and would be the folks shelling out $10-$50K for a set up probably really do need more RAM than what Apple is going to be capable of offering.

You would think Apple could engineer a means of letting a user put additional RAM into a slot and MacOS would be able to use that ram in conjunction with the soldered ram on the SoC. You'd think..... sounds like they found a way to do it for graphics cards unless that is BS

If you are able to spend $10K, then you are able to get a Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra 128Gb's of RAM and 8TB SSD.

This report does not go into how much RAM would be available on a new Mac Pro. Hopefully it would match what the current Mac Pro 2019 model can handle, but anyone would be guessing at this point.
 
Perhaps your given examples confuse your point. Because the answer to both the LaserWriter and Airport question is a resounding "Yes". Both of those things have been replaced. Apple might not have been the company to replace them, but laser printers and wireless access points are absolutely still in use today.
From the OP:
You can make a profit, keep all your staff and still produce products that are in line with the model they replaced.
There was no leeway in this statement for a third party to replace them. Not my requirement, the OP. This was in response to another post where the OP blamed sites like MacRumors for the actions Apple has taken.

For me, if Apple doesn’t make products I like, (or no longer makes a product that I liked) my assumption is that I’m simply not the target market for what they’re making… not that they are intentionally spiting me personally. :)
 
Perhaps your given examples confuse your point. Because the answer to both the LaserWriter and Airport question is a resounding "Yes". Both of those things have been replaced. Apple might not have been the company to replace them, but laser printers and wireless access points are absolutely still in use today.

Maybe your point is that Apple sometimes gets to a point in a product line where they realize that someone else does it better and cheaper, so they discontinue those products. Your examples definitely hold up in that case. And it may also hold up when Apple abandons the professional workstation market, just like they did the Server market.
You brought printers, routers and floppy drives into this, not me and its a straw man argument.
I was never talking about peripherals or components, that was purely you and it's completely irrelevant.
You can purchase routers and printers from literally dozens of manufacturers - these are the items that have been available for decades, work perfectly with Macs and their functionality has surpassed the Apple branded alternatives.
However only Apple make Macs and Mac OS...no one else.
Expecting Apple to replace their tower with another tower (Instead of a cylindrical debacle) shouldn't be a 'shock' nor should it then take seven years to reappear and when it does cost nearly triple what it did before to get that form factor.
They are basically forcing you down a path they have been repeatedly told we don't want to tread. First by the Cube and secondly by the Trashcan Mac Pro both of which were spectacular flops and all Apple continue to do is rehash that formula and send it our way again and again.
Now they've made the Mac Pro the only expandable Mac in their lineup and it's £5499.
So your choices at Apple are...
Unexpandable iMac, unexpandable Mac Mini, unexpandable Mac Studio to go along with their unexpandable laptops...so basically any kind of Mac you want...as long as it's an unexpandable one.
All of this to deafening silence from Apple enthusiast websites like Mac Rumors which is partly why in 2023 we have models shipping with just 256GB storage and a £5499 tower workstation with just 512GB, because if Apple interest websites like Mac Rumors and others won't hold Apple to account...who will?
They are complicit by never...ever...criticising Apple and if they had have used their position to do so occasionally, then it's possible our 'options' for Macs would be different and Apple would still employ their staff and still make a profit.
 
You're the one talking about 45 year old items and focusing on components like floppy drives and peripheral devices like printers and routers which are totally irrelevant.
You can make a profit, keep all your staff and still produce products that are in line with the model they replaced.
That’s what you wrote. It appears that, in reality, no they don’t always produce products that are in the line with the model they replaced (if they ever even replace it). And, all of that is totally fine.
 
That’s what you wrote. It appears that, in reality, no they don’t always produce products that are in the line with the model they replaced (if they ever even replace it). And, all of that is totally fine.
Semantics.
Your original reply was that by listening to people on Mac Rumors the company would lose money, layoff staff and the CEO would be fired.
I'm paraphrasing but that was basically it.
You then leapt to Apple II, printers and floppy drives which had nothing whatsoever to do with my post (but did make me smile).
 
I don't see it that way. I think the stability and reliability or ram is such that its a not a concern
I would like to see data on how unified-memory stands up against errors, I am sure there is a difference, but I would like to see data.
 
Let’s just see what they put forth. Leaks are becoming lamer and lamer… It cant be worse then Mac Studio, and it is quite dang good…

I am excited to see how they tackle expandability and beef up the gfx!
 
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Absolutely consistent with my expectations of present day Apple.

The basic design of the Apple Silicon System on a Chip straight up dustbins user-upgradable RAM. I largely expected that there would be slots for storage and some add-in cards. But there hasn't been a whisper concerning PCIe support and at what level. But I do not know if Apple Silicon will support third party Graphics Cards - they certainly are not supporting NVIDIA - so it may support only media, networking, and other specialty cards.

But with the failure of M2 Extreme development - likely because they had severe issues with getting performance to scale with the size (and price!) of the doubled up chips even in the M2 Ultra. Something reported by many reviewers of the Mac Studio, along with heat throttling. So that's a "back to the engineers" moment for Apples marketeers. So with their Chonkin' Huge Mutha Chip plans in the bin, not much point from Apples View to devote a lot of energy and resources into redesigning the Mac Pro form factor, and just adapt the existing case. (which, all things considered doesn't suck). And don't expect any price reduction either.

As for a 27" iMac Pro. You'd love to see it. But we're not. Certainly not this year. With a down-speced Mac Pro, an iMac Pro would represent that Original Sin for Apple, blurring product line boundaries between the Mac Studio and Mac Pro. So almost certainly no iMac Pro this year, and given the utter lack of any supply chain leaks, possibly not at all. There MAY be a more consumer targeted lower spec 27-Inch iMac in the works, since the 24" iMac did not get a M2 upgrade, and is still rocking the most basic M1 chip - but also no reliable murmurs of such a product. All the rumors of either machine feel more like wishful thinking in the Mac Enthusiast communituy.

I'D sure like to see either product, since I'm a "working class" Creative Pro and I don't see any price relief on ANY future version of the Mac Pro, regardless of its specs.
 
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because if Apple interest websites like Mac Rumors and others won't hold Apple to account...who will?
Probably Apple interest sites that don't want to stay in business.

It's pretty clear from comments I've read even on this site that, as a whole, Mac loyalists don't like to hear criticism of Apple from tech reviewers. There's a good reason why Linus Media Group and Mac Address, for example, get an incredible amount of hate in the comments on this site, while sycophantic Apple boot-lickers like Snazzy Labs and Max Tech get the nod as "impartial" Apple reviewers.
 
What’s the point in doing a modular Mac to lock the ram. This isn’t what any customer wants. I miss having upgradable ram on the laptop never mind desktop.
The worst one I saw years ago was my dad got a new desktop, and I was going to connect the old drive as a slave, but there was no second connection on the cable
 
Good point. Almost everything Apple makes is, “We’ve got this good experience from the iPhone, instead of making something new, let’s just build off of that”. The more they focus on the top seller, the more they can use that R&D to create iterative solutions they can flow to the rest of their product spectrum. Which means we’ll always see a new iteration come to some mobile platform first, then an iteration of that, which adds multiples of the same cores, on the desktop. Something TRULY unique and ONLY for desktop is highly unlikely.

Steve ALSO had a quote before he returned to Apple.
"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."

Apple used to invent entire new product categories. Just because new Apple products were “derivative” doesn’t mean they weren’t “game-changers” and doesn’t mean Apple didn’t change the industry and change the world (repeatedly).


The Apple ][ changed the world.
The Mac changed the world.
Though commercially unsuccessful, the Newton changed the world.
The iMac changed the world.
iTunes changed the way we consume music (and would lead to how we consume media writ large).
The iPod wasn’t the first digital audio player, but it was seen as “a new invention” and it took the entire world by storm.
The iPhone had things in common with existing mobile phones, but was different enough that it’s largely viewed as “a new invention,” a new product category, and it too changed the world.
Siri was a game-changer (but not lately).
The iOS App Store changed the world and made the word “app” part of popular vocabulary. (“There’s an app for that.”)
The iPad with iOS was widely viewed as a new invention and a brand new product category. It brought an entirely new level of simplicity and ease-of-use that was without precedent.

But Apple today is still coasting on the innovation brought by Apple under Steve Jobs’ Leadership.

Apple has not created a single new product category since Jobs’ departure.

Apple today no longer feels like the pioneering leader it was always regarded as since its inception.
 
Yeah, not so much, but I'll agree on the USB one.


Windows NT was a completely different architecture from Win 9x. The reason why the "lift" was "heavier" for Apple was because they were already five years late to start the transition - Microsoft had already been adapting Windows NT technologies (such as Win32) onto Windows 95 in order for developers to develop software that would work in NT.

And Apple did graft modern OS features onto Mac OS 9. Lest we forget Apple attempting to make OS 9 look like a multi-user operating system.


You clearly do not know anything about the architecture of Windows if you think that the C:\ drive is DOS "winking" at you. There is not and has never been MS-DOS underpinning Windows NT. There is a virtual DOS mode (NTVDM) that exists for backwards compatibility, and many other design decisions meant to facilitate backwards compatibility (drive letters being one of those decisions). Contrary to what you are implying, the preservation of drive letters and path naming conventions is likely one of the things that helped make the move to a modern OS smoother for Windows users than for Mac users.

Both Apple and Microsoft were transitioning their operating systems from one OS architecture to a completely new, more modern architecture. The fact that Apple chose an existing Unix-based OS while Microsoft built a new OS from scratch should have put Apple ahead of the game. It didn't.


You are missing the point as well. You're making out like the process was harder than it really was for PC owners. For the vast majority of PC owners in the late 90's (before ethernet was standard on all PCs as well), it was not a very difficult task, and it was usually one undertaken by a tech, either when that PC owner first bought the computer, or when the ISP's technician came to install their broadband service. Yes, PC users had to install a PCI card into their computer and configure a driver to get on the net. Somehow, most managed to do that without any major trouble.

You are also assuming that most Mac users had built-in Ethernet suitable for broadband. That might have been true when the G3 Desktop and Tower came out, but only a couple of years earlier, those of us who had Macs not only didn't have ethernet cards, we had to buy the more expensive Mac compatible cards by Asante, because the cards provided by the cable company only worked with PCs. That was my experience in 1996 when I first connected to Cable internet with my Performa 6400. Don't even get me started with configuring Open Transport and actually getting the thing working prior to the Mac OS 8.5 days.


Good for you for being a knowledgeable tech dude helping out your friends. I'm sure the 20 minutes you spent installing the card were the longest 20 minutes of your life. Then you got to watch while your friends got to download free music off of Napster for nearly a full year before it became available on your computer.


As I said before - I was in the business. I was a Mac salesman at a Mac/PC store which also partnered with a broadband ISP offering ADSL to customers. I encountered people everyday in both camps who were getting connected to the internet on both Macs and PCs. I was a Mac fanatic at the time, but even I could see that setting up even a Windows 98 PC to connect to broadband at the time was not that hard, and people everywhere were doing it.


I guess your version of history differs from mine. Cest la vie.

My earlier reply, “C’est la vie” was deleted because, the notification said, “This is an English language forum.”

😆

Bots. smh…
 
But Apple today is still coasting on the innovation brought by Apple under Steve Jobs’ Leadership.
Apple has not created a single new product category since Jobs’ departure.
Apple today no longer feels like the pioneering leader it was always regarded as since its inception.
Oh sure we are now discussing a possible AS platformed Mac Pro, something so far advanced compared to Macs back in August, 2011 would have been. When I think of the difference of my old mid- 2012 retina 15" laptop that came a year later after Steve had left and now a decade later I am using a 16" M1 Max MBP its like who cares if Apple hasn't created new product categories since then. New technology isn't always the product of a particular company, but a particular company products can certainly create new trends on what is used and how its is used, that is something that every year that has gone by Apple has kept doing aside from technology hurtles that need to be crossed before innovation happens. A lot of Apple products were just using existing technology and making it more consumer friendly, it's not like they had a Thomas Edison running the company.
 
Absolutely consistent with my expectations of present day Apple.

The basic design of the Apple Silicon System on a Chip straight up dustbins user-upgradable RAM. I largely expected that there would be slots for storage and some add-in cards. But there hasn't been a whisper concerning PCIe support and at what level. But I do not know if Apple Silicon will support third party Graphics Cards - they certainly are not supporting NVIDIA - so it may support only media, networking, and other specialty cards.

But with the failure of M2 Extreme development - likely because they had severe issues with getting performance to scale with the size (and price!) of the doubled up chips even in the M2 Ultra. Something reported by many reviewers of the Mac Studio, along with heat throttling. So that's a "back to the engineers" moment for Apples marketeers. So with their Chonkin' Huge Mutha Chip plans in the bin, not much point from Apples View to devote a lot of energy and resources into redesigning the Mac Pro form factor, and just adapt the existing case. (which, all things considered doesn't suck). And don't expect any price reduction either.

As for a 27" iMac Pro. You'd love to see it. But we're not. Certainly not this year. With a down-speced Mac Pro, an iMac Pro would represent that Original Sin for Apple, blurring product line boundaries between the Mac Studio and Mac Pro. So almost certainly no iMac Pro this year, and given the utter lack of any supply chain leaks, possibly not at all. There MAY be a more consumer targeted lower spec 27-Inch iMac in the works, since the 24" iMac did not get a M2 upgrade, and is still rocking the most basic M1 chip - but also no reliable murmurs of such a product. All the rumors of either machine feel more like wishful thinking in the Mac Enthusiast communituy.

I'D sure like to see either product, since I'm a "working class" Creative Pro and I don't see any price relief on ANY future version of the Mac Pro, regardless of its specs.

A user-upgradable Mac is not in Apple’s interest re: having to replace it with a whole new Mac every few years.

As your performance/capacity needs grow, and you upgrade your Mac accordingly, it extends the life of your Mac — and we can’t have that!

Mac Studio and “iMac Pro” are probably more in Apple’s financial interest vis-à-vis product lifecycle.

(Apple is failing to recognize, though, that many industry and other serious Mac Professionals heavily upgrade their “open” Macs on day one — and do buy the next “open” Mac Pro in two years or so anyway.)

Off topic: does anyone have a handle on what Apple got out of their $500 million purchase of Anobit? Apple SSDs are still rapaciously expensive and I don’t know if their performance is head and shoulders above other SSDs on the market.

I did read that Anobit had a proprietary technology that drastically extended the lifespan of SSDs, but from what I hear from repair technicians, Mac SSD failures are far too common.

And what did Apple get from its purchase of Raycer? Although I must say, getting Bob Mansfield out of the deal was probably worth it. He’s a genius.
 
Oh sure we are now discussing a possible AS platformed Mac Pro, something so far advanced compared to Macs back in August, 2011 would have been. When I think of the difference of my old mid- 2012 retina 15" laptop that came a year later after Steve had left and now a decade later I am using a 16" M1 Max MBP its like who cares if Apple hasn't created new product categories since then. New technology isn't always the product of a particular company, but a particular company products can certainly create new trends on what is used and how its is used, that is something that every year that has gone by Apple has kept doing aside from technology hurtles that need to be crossed before innovation happens. A lot of Apple products were just using existing technology and making it more consumer friendly, it's not like they had a Thomas Edison running the company.

That’s easy to say when you or I have no clue what a new product category from Apple would look like.

If Steve Jobs had lived and remained at the helm of Apple, it is downright impossible for anyone to imagine what new product categories he would have invented.

(He was negotiating and working on “iTunes for TV content and movies” at the time of his death. He handed the initiative off to Eddie Cue who totally dropped the ball.)

But as Steve Jobs said himself:

“Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want.’ But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’ People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

Steve Jobs was a futurist and a visionary. He was Apple.
 
So the whole idea of the 2019 Mac was to make it expandable and upgradable. But I think I am hearing that I won't be able to "upgrade" (cough, cough) to the latest Apple chips. Well, bummer.
 
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