People with little knowledge, I have a 10 year old macbook pro and its not good for much apart from backing up my iPhone and web browsing/office.
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Popular Mac Developer Slams Apple for 'Sad State of Macintosh Hardware'
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Is IOS the future?
We are hitting a plateau with phones too, its already happened with the iPad the market has shrunk less than the mac. The post PC era device makes up 7% of apples sales down from 12%? yet the mac makes 8%.
Sales are not increasing, pricing is. Apple may have increased profits 16% over the same quarter last year but phone prices rose from £649 to £999 thats where the money came from.
Is the iPhone X worth 35% more? Especially with how many bugs and poor implementation of IOS. Yet people dimiss this as teething problems and it will get better in later builds of IOS. Not acceptable.
Everyone has a smartphone now, buying the next model like the mac is no longer a game changer its an incremental update that does not revolutionize the way you use the device.
Essentially all the products are well designed well implemented and even the cheapest smart phones are very impressive. The rest is gimmicks.
Really all the markets are at breaking point. The next movement is ready to happen but nobody knows what it is.
What is really strange to me is that apple are going to be the first trillion dollar company yet employ far less people than some of the other big tech conglomerates to the point where they dont seem to have enough people to keep on top of their own product line...
I have a feeling that the reason we havent seen macbooks is because the 8th gen CPUs are running hotter than the previous gen and the thermal envelope of these new thin macbooks is already at throttling point. Same with the iMac the 7th gen i7 throttles as it is with the tiny fan...
We are hitting a plateau with phones too, its already happened with the iPad the market has shrunk less than the mac. The post PC era device makes up 7% of apples sales down from 12%? yet the mac makes 8%.
Sales are not increasing, pricing is. Apple may have increased profits 16% over the same quarter last year but phone prices rose from £649 to £999 thats where the money came from.
Is the iPhone X worth 35% more? Especially with how many bugs and poor implementation of IOS. Yet people dimiss this as teething problems and it will get better in later builds of IOS. Not acceptable.
Everyone has a smartphone now, buying the next model like the mac is no longer a game changer its an incremental update that does not revolutionize the way you use the device.
Essentially all the products are well designed well implemented and even the cheapest smart phones are very impressive. The rest is gimmicks.
Really all the markets are at breaking point. The next movement is ready to happen but nobody knows what it is.
What is really strange to me is that apple are going to be the first trillion dollar company yet employ far less people than some of the other big tech conglomerates to the point where they dont seem to have enough people to keep on top of their own product line...
I have a feeling that the reason we havent seen macbooks is because the 8th gen CPUs are running hotter than the previous gen and the thermal envelope of these new thin macbooks is already at throttling point. Same with the iMac the 7th gen i7 throttles as it is with the tiny fan...
People just dont seem to understand who Apple is these days as a brand, and what their strategy is. Most seem to have perceptions of the company from the ‘90s still.
I 100% believe Apple is heading in the right direction and we are in a slightly bumpy phase of technology.
I also believe Apple provide fantastic computers to their customer . If you dont like what they are making , think they are too expensive etc then you are obviously not their customer, and as such should be searching for another solution.
I 100% believe Apple is heading in the right direction and we are in a slightly bumpy phase of technology.
I also believe Apple provide fantastic computers to their customer . If you dont like what they are making , think they are too expensive etc then you are obviously not their customer, and as such should be searching for another solution.
Wa all wants something like this:
but we will get another trash can with smaller trash can modules with Apple blessed components.
Ever heard of rhetorical questions?
(And no, you don't have to answer that, because it is a - drum roll - rhetorical question.)
I wish we would get someone like that but it will be something no one asked for like the trashcan
If its size happens to match Phil’s body measures, I will not oppose
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Why if you want a bigger screen should you have to have the very best of everything and have to pay £2600 for it.
For many its just about the screen size. A 15" macbook would be perfect for a lot of people. It would still be half the weight but offer the same screen size. The 15" is a great machine but seems a mistep to only sell it as a powerhouse because of the screen size. Why cant the 15" be portable a 15" variable of the macbook will still be lighter than the 2015 13" macbook pro.
It would be very compelling for a lot of people. It may even offer enough room for a second USB C port.
Price the 12" Macbook at £1099 and the 15" macbook at £1499. Would offer two very compelling and more affordable laptops.
You cant tell me that the retina which is 6 year old tech will be the main factor in price its all BS at this point. There are far higher resolution products on the market for less.
That being said for the sake of crap graphics cards and processing power, keep the 2k retina and many would be happy.
Keyboards. Every generation of every Mac laptop has had built in manufacturing / design defects.
Its usually the GPU / Apples bad cooling designs burning out components. All the way back to the G3 white laptops.
But the way they mount the screen, coatings, hinges etc... have all causes issues. Just to get that 1 more mm thinness they compromise lifespan every-time.
Thats why the Apple repair quotes are a joke and essentially fraud. They have you pay to fix known design defects and their manufacturing processes are such that if any one component fails, they generally need to replace the whole board. Or now, board, battery, top case etc...
LoL
Macs don't have custom Intel CPUs, heck Intel doesn't really make custom silicon in general.
The CPUs used by Apple are the same CPUs everybody else is using. Nothing special.
Sure about that? Have you ever designed a computer before? You’d think it would be easy just to swap out old chips for new chips with better performance, but there are a lot of testing and compatibility issues that need to be done when just upgrading something as “simple” as a CPU chip.
I’d like to see updated chipsets, too, but it seems that just swapping out old chips for new chips doesn’t necessarily mean that everything’s going to run better.
That means the Mac revenue is bigger than iPad. So why are there still a lot of iPad updates coming?
Swapping out defective components like entire logic boards for new ones probably costs the manufacturer less money and time than trying to diagnose just the defective part. Automobiles work the same these days. I’d personally prefer to see them work more on diagnosis and repair of specific defects and individual parts affected rather than just replacing entire components, but that seems to be the trend these days. I just hope that they are recycling the rest of the parts in the component that aren’t problematic.
I honestly think Apple should go back to the old 2x2 grid. A consumer laptop, a pro laptop, a consumer desktop, and a pro desktop. It would shrink the product line down to a manageable size, cover all the bases, and allow for an easier refresh cycle.
Other pc vendors with 10% of apples profits manage to do it quickly every single time .
I don't see Apple using their ARM parts in anything but their phones/ipads and other "smart" devices that don't have screens. They may come out with a "laptop-ized" ipad, but that's about the extent of it.
The reason is that making a jump TO ARM for their desktop's and laptops would be throwing the performance out the window. They can do what they do with the iPhone/iPad because at the scale of producing the CPU/GPU chips for those it's the right trade off for performance and battery life.
A desktop does not care about battery life. A comparable "arm" chip ramped up to desktop power would no doubt be worse than an Intel CPU offering.
My guess on the reason for no updates over the last two years are the "intel cpu exploits" that were even in the 8xxx series parts. Intel has also recently fallen behind AMD in the CPU race.
Quite frankly it's embarrassing that Apple ever sold any Mac with the Intel iGPU as the only GPU part. Apple sets the baseline for what other manufacturers think are luxury laptops, and this just makes Dell and HP sell iGPU systems for $2000 because they see Apple doing it and think customers are dumb.
For reference I bought a Lenovo Legion laptop last year because Apple's offerings were simply, BAD. Macmini 2012 sits there on a shelf as my backup system/iOS dev machine, but otherwise never played the role of main machine for more than a few days every year when something inevitably breaks Windows.
I've been hoping Apple would eventually release a worthy Mac Pro, and every year since 2010 I've been disappointed. That 2013 model was kinda a slap-in-the-face attempt to "mini"-ize a Mac Pro, and while stylistically it's not bad, it's not what we asked for. This design would have made for a good MacMini alternative, not a Mac Pro.
But it might actually be too late. I don't know of any professional that was willing to put up with 10 years of no updates. Apple is right, people don't replace their "pro" systems every 2 years like a phone, they replace them every 5-7 years, so every 5 years would be the right time for a full system replacement, but only if they allowed the CPU, GPU, RAM and storage to be upgraded in the meantime. If those are part of the system board, than that shortens the lifespan of the system.
Like we should be reducing e-waste, and that means we should be seeing updates to hardware when that hardware can't be upgraded. These 2-year lifecycles of "smart" devices is horribly wasteful, and to try and move desktops and laptops to this model would be even worse for generating e-waste. Especially when the CPU power has generally been flat since since 2010, and has instead all gains made have been from the combined die shrink and multi-core developments. However the more cores a system has, the lower the clock speed, and "gaming" systems need the fastest cores, so a 4Ghz quadcore is preferred over a 2.8 Ghz 8-core, or 2Ghz 16core system.
Here's what I'd want or accept from Apple:
Mac Mini replacement - Mid-end and High-end desktop in a non-upgradable box (NVME drive and SATA drive being replacable and removable)
Mac Pro replacement - Mid-end (equal to a $1000 Intel LGA 1151, single GPU Windows desktop PC) and High-end ($2000 Intel LGA 1151, single GPU Windows PC) along with the major difference being the CPU and GPU installed. A third tier for "Workstation" tiers would have enough PCIe lanes to run 4 GPU's at 16x.
There are hurdles however. There's a large performance gap between an AMD GPU and a nVIDIA GPU, and to get gamers onto the platform would require being able to have both options. Intel's iGPU parts are a joke, and using them for anything but video decoding is a suffering experience.
Ultimately, I think at this point if Apple is not willing to produce a system that the pro's want, they should sell licenses for it by licencing an an OEM (eg ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte) to produce a Mac-quality motherboard, and have the Apple firmware installed onto those boards to allow running Mac OSX without any need for hacks. This would leave control of MacOS X in Apple's hands to ensure that only high quality parts are used, and that OEM's would not be permitted to customize the boards beyond what Apple specifies should be on the board. Then those OEM's could just sell "non-mac" versions in quantities that just have their normal firmware to get the cost down. If people flash the mac firmware to the non-mac version, who cares. The entire point of this exercise is to provide a legitimate avenue to build your own mac.
You must be using an old iOS calculator. These pc vendors do not exist.
IOS dev machine -> get Imac Pro 5 grand to sell 99 cents. Marvellous yeah. Opps 66 cent .. 30 percent margin cut.
If we go past august 15th without an iMac update it will simply indicate how little Apple cares about desktop. That is the 20th anniversary date of iMac
It's the biggest company in the world...
I completely disagree. I'd bin both of my C2D iMacs were it not for the fact that they Run ALL of Adobe CS5 in the same way as they did straight out of the box and they're very useful to me. I have newer Macs running newer software that I use as daily drivers, but even for doing fairly sophisticated Photoshop and likewise, they are still very capable machines. 10 years on. I'm not going to throw something out just because it's old - who knows how much longer they'll last, but I reckon they've still got plenty of life left in them. One of them has been left on 24/7 for a good three quarters of its life. It's bombproof!
Rogue Amoeba developer Quentin Carnicelli, who works on Mac software like Airfoil, Audio Hijack, Loopback, and Fission, this week penned a critique of Apple's Mac lineup and the company's recent lack of Mac updates, and that missive has been gaining some attention from Mac fans.
Using MacRumors' own Buyer's Guide, Carnicelli points out that it's been more than a year since any Mac, with the exception of the iMac Pro, has been updated.
It's been 375 days, for example, since the iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air machines were last updated, and it's been 437 days since the Mac Pro saw the price drop Apple implemented as it works on a Mac Pro replacement.
The Mac Pro has not seen a hardware update since December of 2013, more than 1600 days ago. Apple has promised its professional users that a high-end high-throughput modular Mac Pro system is in the works, but we thus far have no details on when it might see a release.
The Mac mini, Apple's most affordable desktop Mac, has gone 1338 days without an update, with the last refresh introduced in October of 2014. While Apple has made promises about a refreshed Mac Pro, no similar statement has been provided about a future Mac mini, aside from a comment from Apple CEO Tim Cook stating that the Mac mini continues to be important to Apple.
According to Carnicelli, the state of the Mac lineup is "deeply worrisome" to him as a person who works for a Mac-based software company. Customers are, he says, forced to choose between "purchasing new computers that are actually years old" or "holding out in the faint hope that hardware updates are still to come."As Carnicelli points out, Apple could reassure its Mac users with updates and speed bumps to its Mac lineup on a "much more frequent basis," calling the current lack of updates "baffling and frightening to anyone who depends on the platform for their livelihood."
Apple in 2017 refreshed much of its Mac lineup (iMac, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and MacBook) at its Worldwide Developers Conference, but this year, Apple opted to focus instead on software, with no new Mac hardware announced. With no new hardware in June, based on past release history, we could be looking at an 18-month upgrade cycle this time around, as pointed out by iMore's Rene Ritchie, with new Macs making an appearance in September or October.
Some of the blame for Apple's lack of updates can perhaps be placed on its reliance on Intel, and in the past, some Mac refreshes have been pushed back due to delays with Intel chips. This is likely one of the reasons why Apple is planning to transition from Intel chips to its own custom made Mac chips as early as 2020.
MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, and MacBook Air upgrades are not in the dire state that Mac Pro and Mac mini upgrades are in, but increased attention on issues with the MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards has left Apple customers eager to see those machine updated, especially as Apple has not acknowledged these keyboard issues despite their prevalence in the media.
"Apple needs to publicly show their commitment to the full Macintosh hardware line and they need to do it now," writes Carnicelli.
Carnicelli's comments on the state of the Mac lineup came just before Apple released a new Mac advertising campaign. Called "Behind the Mac," the campaign highlights creators who use their Macs to "make something wonderful."
The first ad spots in the series focus on photographer and disability advocate Bruce Hall, who uses his Mac for editing photographs, musician Grimes, who uses the Mac "from start to finish" to write all of her music, edit music videos, and more, and app developer Peter Kariuki who used his Mac to code the SafeMotos app, which is designed to connect passengers with safe motorcycle drivers in Rwanda.
These ads, while inspiring, may be seen as too little too late by those who have grown frustrated with Apple's Mac lineup and have come to see the lack of updates as an indicator of a lack of commitment to the Mac.
Article Link: Popular Mac Developer Slams Apple for 'Sad State of Macintosh Hardware'
Very valid points of course! It's silly how long it's taking between models/versions.
Along with this, how about the recent news about them dropping the Airport line?!
I thought that was a stupid move. I could understand if they were hurting for cash, but there's no way they can't keep supporting that branch.
It's yet another chink gone in the Apple Ecosystem. I still have the Airport, my Macs, iPhone and iPads all communicating together well, but if they keep removing more of the ecosystem, what incentive is there to stay?
It's bad enough their Macs have become 2nd fiddle. Someone, or a group of people, within Apple forget that is what got Apple going and can still be a core part of their product line.
Cheers,
Brian