Apple Still Seeing Strong Mac Sales Growth Amid Easing iMac Constraints

[lifeinhd]

It goes back to Steve's cars vs. trucks analogy. There is no doubt in my mind that the iPad/tablet form factor was the car revolution of personal computing. They have sold like hot cakes and will continue to sell quickly all around the world. Their simplicity and price simply cannot be understated. With that said, the best selling vehicle in the States is still the Ford F-150, a truck. Laptops and desktops will still have their place in society and they will still be developed and maintained, even as future tablets gain more and more power.

Heck my smartphone has more power than computers I owned not even a decade ago, but you don't see me giving it up simply because of some specs.

Thing is, the gap is narrowing, from both sides.

I used to use my iPad 1 fairly regularly, because my old '06 MBP was getting slow, and worst of all it had terrible battery life so it could never be far from an outlet.

Since getting an rMBP though, it's the opposite. It's 4x as fast as my old MBP, gets great battery life, is lightweight, and has a fantastic display. Suddenly my iPad seemed slow (actually it still is, even after restoring) and with a terrible display (though still great battery life). Now my iPad mostly sits under the bed, collecting dust. I've used it maybe a couple dozen times since getting the rMBP in September last year.

TL;DR, we're at a point where "trucks" are getting great gas mileage, are practical, and can out-muscle cars.

 

[iChrist]

My MacPro performs over twice as fast as a top spec-ed iMac or RMBP... Over twice as fast! Do the math yourself little boy...

Sure it does.

 

[\-V-/]

Sure it does.

The high end iMac is about half as much as the current Mac Pro... and it's almost on par with the Mac Pro from 4 years ago. The gap will be widened significantly once the new Haswell Mac Pros are released. Now please troll elsewhere.

 

[tekboi]

Maybe apple will one day go back to it's Desktop roots. I love my iPhone... but i'm starting to feel that Apple is lacking in the Power User realm

 

[Giuly]

With Mac at only 10% of revenue and PC sales declining, it might be time for the Mac-Midi expandable, single chip 4 core i7 Mac. And a stackable external enclosure. If all they do is cannibalize PC sales, it would be a winner. As you know all Macs run Windows!

Blade MacPro too.

We have long since needed a Mac that could replace all the utility purposes commodity PC's are installed into. Premium price and quality okay! TCOO is very low. It might need a parallel and serial port option! Okay if it immediately converts to the internal USB/PCIe bus.

Rocketman

If my calculations are correct, a 24" iMac would make more sense.

And if by "Blade MacPro" you mean 'Mac in the Cloud', I predict Microsoft or Ubuntu to be first to market with this, as they don't give a crap about hardware sales but would benefit from charging you a monthly fee to use a high-performance computer located in a datacenter.

Or you mean XServe, but that obviously didn't work out that well.

 

[thekev]

The high end iMac is about half as much as the current Mac Pro... and it's almost on par with the Mac Pro from 4 years ago. The gap will be widened significantly once the new Haswell Mac Pros are released. Now please troll elsewhere.

Don't you mean Ivy Bridge EP Mac Pros? The Haswell variants out this year won't really extend beyond those appropriate to the imac. Intel's release schedule has been a bit odd, but that is what it is.

 

[vmachiel]

I would guess the iMacs are still selling, the laptops sales on the other hand will drop off until they add touch.

Have you tried touch on a laptop? I have and your arm wants to die and fall off after about half an hour.

 

[hleewell]

Modular, stackable Mac Mini. Mac Mini Pro with removable HDD module. The Mac Mini is the one thing in the Mac line up that has all kinda potentials.

 

[JM-Prod]

Image

Image



The high end iMac is about half as much as the current Mac Pro... and it's almost on par with the Mac Pro from 4 years ago. The gap will be widened significantly once the new Haswell Mac Pros are released. Now please troll elsewhere.

iChrist is just an annoying troll. My 12-core MacPro renders a geekbench score well above 27 000 btw. Running 96GB ram, and CPU's clocked at 3.33 Ghz, 512 GB SSD and GTX580 3GB.

A tower is for different needs than a laptop. Laptops are good writing machines and field tools. Not a nr.1 workstation.

 

[MacFro]

I can't say I have noticed this "easing of imac constrains" yet.

Been waiting 10 weeks as of today. Ordered through "premium" reseller.

 

[the8thark]

If the Mac was it's own business it'd still be a fortune 500 company. And since we know what of Apple's total revenue, the Mac is. That just show's how well APple is doing now.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

Some wall street idiots heard a rumor that Cook will increase the dividend tomorrow. And they saw that the Galaxy S4 was a bust (immediately after the keynote). Suddenly Apple doesn't look so bad, because we've realized that innovation is hard. (for the moment)

Those analysts finally realized that even Samsung can't innovate year after year.

 

[iGrip]

It goes back to Steve's cars vs. trucks analogy. There is no doubt in my mind that the iPad/tablet form factor was the car revolution of personal computing.

What is "the car revolution"? Did you just make that up so that The Steve's marketing-speak might make some sense?

Or is there some automotive phenomenon known as "the car revolution" where cars suddenly appeared on the scene and replaced trucks? I never heard of anything like that.

 

[\-V-/]

iChrist is just an annoying troll.

I've noticed.

My 12-core MacPro renders a geekbench score well above 27 000 btw. Running 96GB ram, and CPU's clocked at 3.33 Ghz, 512 GB SSD and GTX580 3GB.

Nice.

A tower is for different needs than a laptop. Laptops are good writing machines and field tools. Not a nr.1 workstation.

I agree.

 

[Rad99004]

Have you tried touch on a laptop? I have and your arm wants to die and fall off after about half an hour.

I bought a surface RT and use the touch screen, mouse and keyboard all the time.

There are some things that just make more sense to touch the screen.

 

[smirking]

iChrist is just an annoying troll. My 12-core MacPro renders a geekbench score well above 27 000 btw. Running 96GB ram, and CPU's clocked at 3.33 Ghz, 512 GB SSD and GTX580 3GB.

I replaced my 2008 Mac Pro with a MacBook Pro recently and even though the CPU benchmarks favor my new laptop handily, it doesn't tell the entire story and in terms of real world usage, I'm not sure if my MBP wins. Had I known the full extent of the headaches I would have to endure for switching to a laptop, I'm not sure I would have done it. I gander that a lot of the people who are making fun of the Mac Pro being old and out of date, have never owned one and don't understand just how much punch is packed into these things.

 

[JM-Prod]

I replaced my 2008 Mac Pro with a MacBook Pro recently and even though the CPU benchmarks favor my new laptop handily, it doesn't tell the entire story and in terms of real world usage, I'm not sure if my MBP wins. Had I known the full extent of the headaches I would have to endure for switching to a laptop, I'm not sure I would have done it. I gander that a lot of the people who are making fun of the Mac Pro being old and out of date, have never owned one and don't understand just how much punch is packed into these things.

...being expandable is of course extremely important, even though being over twice as fast as a fully spec'ed rMBP or iMac is not to be taken lightly.

Besides the 512GB SSD system disk (Samsung SSD 840 Pro), in optical bay nr. 2 (empty by default), 8 terrabytes of hardisks in the internal HD-slots outperforms a single SSD easily. 8.5 Tb of internal storage at r/w of over 500 MB per sec, combined with professional interface cards internally, makes the thought of a medusa-like desktop solution unbearable.

 

[MrNomNoms]

Desperately need a new Mac Pro.... Release it now!
Even if they don't sell truckload of it, serious peoples need those awesome Desktop. Doing so, it help keeping us in the ecosystem, buying iMacs, MacBook Pro, iPhones and all that stuff...But i really need a new Mac Pro...


Help us , flood their suggestion system
Apple.com/feedback

Maybe they're banking on people pushing the processing power into the cloud and the rate of high speed internet connections become common enough that one can offload processing to said datacentres rather than requiring beefy workstations.

I don't think Apple is going to abandon the desktop as some people claim but at the same time one has to accept that at this point computers are already very mature with most of the work occurring in the portable space around bringing iOS up to speed when compared to the more feature rich desktop version. What I'd love to see being bought about is Apple offering a 'creativity cloud' where Final Cut is not only massively enhanced but Apple offer rendering capacity in dedicated datacentres aka what Sun used to call 'utility computing'.

 

[Larry-K]

Best Buy and Amazon had a pricing error and sold quite a few $3500 12 Core beasts for $2500.
So maybe a few more than two.

They oughta price them that way everyday. Even I couldn't resist forever, and if they announced the end of the line for the MacPro I'd certainly grab one.

Considering how old most of the components in MacPros are, that's a fair price.