Tim Cook: Apple 'Spending an Enormous Amount' on 'Macs of the Future'

There are a million great things they COULD do with Mac, But I get we get trivial stuff lie

1) iMacs with more pointy edges to make then look thinner
2) more pastel-like shades of color in Mac OS X icons

They will call a big press conference, invite the media and call it "innovation".

What they need to do is make some major non-cosmetic changes in Mac OS X

1) Why can't Spotlight work as well as Google Search for the files that are on my Mac. It should be able to search the content inside the file and find things that are close and related even if expressed using different words.

2) why do I even have to think about disk drives? When I add RAM it just goes into a pool and the OS manages which apps use which bits of RAM. But with disks I have to know what data is on what drive. Storage should be "pooled" transparently. So when I run low I just "add more" and don't need to think.

3) ALL information kept in a "library" needs to be multi-user. Aperture, iTues, iPhoto, iMove and FCP X "events" and so on needs to be accessible by anyone who has an account on the computer. Of douse permissions (read, write,..) apply. Apple engineerigs I'm certain know how data are secured in a SQL DBMS. They need to apply this same method. Peole like to cola berate but also like to their data separate from other's data. Technical solutions to this have existed for decades. Apple just needs to do this.

4) Apple needs to get into back-end data stores. Keeping data on a computer is so 1990's. I want my data to follow me BUT I want most of my data to live on my fast local network and not the external cloud. Call it a "local cache of the could" or cal the cloud a "remove backup of local storage" either way you get the same thing. the same data and desktop on any computer I own with local storage and off-site secure backup. See #2 above. It should all be just "storage" and not many little places where I have to know what data lives where. I should be able to buy more local storage, more networked storage or more off-site storage and it "just works", like adding RAM.

That said, I'm betting all they do is cheap cosmetic changes.
 
Mac of the Future = paper thin beautifully designed piece of hardware manufactured using cutting edge industrial engineering. Can't do anything except surf the web, check email and play Candy Crush. Retail Price = cost of goods x 3
 
Michael Goff said:
How would being on Apple's ARM version help with the monopolistic part? And how is ARM better than x86 for a laptop?
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Because ARM Holdings does not misbehave and is open to licensing the architecture.

If ARM keeps on getting more powerful, the argument to prefer x86 might disappear, Windows now runs on ARM and the way to go there is pure .NET (or better, Java)
 
cube said:
Because ARM Holdings does not misbehave and is open to licensing the architecture.

If ARM keeps on getting more powerful, the argument to prefer x86 might disappear, Windows now runs on ARM and the way to go there is pure .NET (or better, Java)
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Except OS X on ARM would be using Apple's SoC, and nobody else's.

ARM will never be as fast as i5 or i7 without dropping the power use advantage (or counting backwards, as in 5-7 years from now ARM might catch up to Haswell)
 
Moonjumper said:
Does that mean there will be a new Mac Mini soon?
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It's time we had a quad core, performance mini, with good memory and storage options. I'd pay extra for one of those, for lab work (doing a lot of messing about with VMs at the moment, and that can slow down my dual core laptop). The Mac Pro, OTOH, is too much for me, in every sense of being too much for me :).

As for Cook's statement, one must remember Apple makes a healthy profit on every Mac, unlike those who shift commodities.
 
NewbieCanada said:
No, Windows laptops outsell Windows desktops by a comfortable margin.
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Alright, at this point in the game you're probably right about that.

NewbieCanada said:
Mac laptops outsell iMacs, Minis and Pros by a large margin and iMacs outsell Minis and Pros by a large margin.
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iMacs are also more powerful than Minis, and significantly cheaper than Mac Pros. For anyone who wants a discrete graphics card they're going to be the most popular choice -- because they're essentially the only choice in that market segment for Macintosh. :rolleyes:

NewbieCanada said:
Apple is not going to put research money into a small, unprofitable niche that appeals to a few hobbyists and doesn't serve their purposes.
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Mini-towers are not "niche" products. They're what a standard "desktop PC" is (note: and All-In-One is not a desktop PC, it is defined in it's own category of all-in-ones, just like netbooks were considered separate from laptops). "Niche" is the big gaming full tower PCs that have five expansion slots and stand 3 feet tall. We're not talking anything close to that.

NewbieCanada said:
People have been arguing about this for YEARS. Face reality - if it made sense for Apple to do it, THEY WOULD BE DOING IT.
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Ah, yes. the Apple Knows Best argument I mentioned last post. If it was a good idea, they'd already be doing it. Apple is infallible.

It takes Apple years to realize its mistakes quite often. The keeping on the PPC platform when it was going nowhere, and then the switch to Intel being the first thing that comes to mind.

How many years did Apple put out the hockey puck mouse?

For the first three years of iOS you couldn't multitask. Yes, no mistake there.
 
Michael Goff said:
ARM will never be as fast as i5 or i7 without dropping the power use advantage (or counting backwards, as in 5-7 years from now ARM might catch up to Haswell)
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I would not say that. The A7 chip is already faster than my C2D Mac, which I purchased just 3 years before the A7 chip came out. And that's at just 1400MHz.

Considering the rumors that Apple is building its own chip fab facility one can only speculate it's a matter of time before Apple ditches Intel all together.
 
Cloudsurfer said:
I would not say that. The A7 chip is already faster than my C2D Mac, which I purchased just 3 years before the A7 chip came out. And that's at just 1400MHz.

Considering the rumors that Apple is building its own chip fab facility one can only speculate it's a matter of time before Apple ditches Intel all together.
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And they can ditch 3/4 of Mac users at the same time!

Edit: Intel has gotten their chips a lot faster over the course of these last few years. So unless Intel sits on their rears and lets ARM win, it won't happen on the high end.
 
Considering the 'Enormous Amount" they expect us to spend on them, I would expect no less.

Sadly, they don't make anything I want or need right now, so I'll just have to wait.
 
Michael Goff said:
And they can ditch 3/4 of Mac users at the same time!

Edit: Intel has gotten their chips a lot faster over the course of these last few years. So unless Intel sits on their rears and lets ARM win, it won't happen on the high end.
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And people ignore this thing; ARM's strength is its ability to scale down but once you start scaling up and adding on all the goodies found in a desktop processor you soon find that the 'benefits' of ARM quickly vanish thus making it no better than what Intel has to offer. ARM isn't some magical elixir that makes things magically work.
 
WallToWallMacs said:
And people ignore this thing; ARM's strength is its ability to scale down but once you start scaling up and adding on all the goodies found in a desktop processor you soon find that the 'benefits' of ARM quickly vanish thus making it no better than what Intel has to offer. ARM isn't some magical elixir that makes things magically work.
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I think ARM has become just another hype word.
 
Michael Goff said:
And they can ditch 3/4 of Mac users at the same time!

Edit: Intel has gotten their chips a lot faster over the course of these last few years. So unless Intel sits on their rears and lets ARM win, it won't happen on the high end.
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Yeah, I've been through enough processor architecture changes with Apple, they can go ahead without me on the next one.
 
cube said:
So? There would be multiple sources for the whole industry.
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And there are two sources for x86 chips. By the way, how would OS X on ARM have anything to do with that? I am asking for how having OS X on ARM, with Apple being the only ones to make chips for it, would be any better in terms of monopoly than buying chips from Intel.
 
Michael Goff said:
And there are two sources for x86 chips. By the way, how would OS X on ARM have anything to do with that? I am asking for how having OS X on ARM, with Apple being the only ones to make chips for it, would be any better in terms of monopoly than buying chips from Intel.
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If you want top performance nowadays, there's no choice but Intel. See how we got there.
 
The tech-savvy community (ie. young crowds, startups) are 90% Macs. I recently spent a day in a co-working space where there were 300 people in the room and it felt like I was working for Apple... 99% of the computers were Macs with the odd PC in the mix. It was insane. And in my office (startup developing software), everyone is using Macs. The world has finally woken up, and that's why MS is panicking.

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Larry-K said:
Yeah, I've been through enough processor architecture changes with Apple, they can go ahead without me on the next one.
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The architectural shifts executed by Apple have been insanely smooth. What's your beef?
 
coolfactor said:
The architectural shifts executed by Apple have been insanely smooth. What's your beef?
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They did a great job the first couple of times, then they yanked the rug out by abruptly removing PPC emulation in Lion. That cost some of us a lot of money. After that I'm not sure I totally trust Apple to transition to another hardware architecture without inflicting some pain on users.
 
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