The Mac Pro only represents a sliver of Apple's consumers... With the iMac gutted, people are opting for a Macbook Air which is essentially the same thing in a smaller form factor. Ha Ha.
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U.S. Mac Sales Down in June Despite Introduction of New MacBook Airs
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The Mac Pro only represents a sliver of Apple's consumers... With the iMac gutted, people are opting for a Macbook Air which is essentially the same thing in a smaller form factor. Ha Ha.
I think I'll just build me a Windows 7 system with a gorgeous Dell IPS monitor and proper internals that should be in every computer in 2013. I'd still come out $300 less than the $1800 I just spend on a refurb iMac that still includes a 5200RPM drive.
Mac sales down
Well sure, no surprise:
1. The Price of a 15" MBP is ridicules especially if you want a high-end one.
2. The new MBP (Retina) does not allow you to upgrade Storage!! I mean besides RAM that is what any user want's to be able to do. I have 2 SSD's in my MBP and this is my third disk upgrade over the years - ie from SATA to SSD and then too 2xSSD and that flexibility I do not want to give up!!!
3. Who can afford a 128GB storage on a laptop used in a professional environment??
4. Did I mention the price is crazy? and that for a very limited system!
5. About time Apple reduces it's margins in a period of economic downturn a little lower margins would improve sales overall!
Well sure, no surprise:
1. The Price of a 15" MBP is ridicules especially if you want a high-end one.
2. The new MBP (Retina) does not allow you to upgrade Storage!! I mean besides RAM that is what any user want's to be able to do. I have 2 SSD's in my MBP and this is my third disk upgrade over the years - ie from SATA to SSD and then too 2xSSD and that flexibility I do not want to give up!!!
3. Who can afford a 128GB storage on a laptop used in a professional environment??
4. Did I mention the price is crazy? and that for a very limited system!
5. About time Apple reduces it's margins in a period of economic downturn a little lower margins would improve sales overall!
Wrong. Ask any customer in an Apple store, or any normal person what Haswell is. They'll probably think it's some new dumb JJ Abrams movie.
Get used to this downward trend.
1- The whole industry is experiencing it
2- Apple's decline will pace the others until they bring their prices in line with reality
I know I am...
Jesus... So if I write one little thing out of line you people quote out the ass of "NO, not everyone hurdurdur".
Let me rephrase it then "people are waiting for the Macbook Pro refreshes" Most of the threads I'm in here ask get now or wait for haswell. So on the forums its pretty well known. As for the general public, if they are at any level knowledgeable on Apple, they know to expect refreshes every year... When they see Apple refreshed their low end model, why would they go and buy an old high end model? What Im trying to say ultimately, is an upgrade in their netbook/ultrabook line is hardly enough to influence sales. Especially since its not the flagship line of Macs. Anyway I agree the PC market is dwindling due to tables, its just ridiculous to think they're profit would be up with no worthy refreshes this quarter.
I don't know about everyone, but I am keeping my plastic in the pocket until Apple release the new rMBP's.
-Brian
And you would be wrong.
Escaping PCs Assuming further that other vendors have the same profitability ratio as the top 5 combined yields a figure of 45% profit capture of PC market for Apple. This is not as good as its performance in the phone market, where Apple has about 72%, but its not bad. ( Asymco )
I agree with Horace Dediu. About half of industry profits is not bad for a company that does not understand what customers want. Users want big and heavy desktop PCs with optical disk drives and noisy 7200 rpm hard drives. Also big and heavy 17" laptops with Blu-ray and lots of different sized D-Sub ports everything between 9 and 50 pins.
You know, Pro Computing.
Wrong .. it's the GPU which not fast enough. rMBP top model CPU competes nicely with the desktop counterparts..
Graphics are still the weak sauce of notebook world. No matter what.
There is a reason - why should I have to spend a further $40 for one; plus go to the hassle of buying one and mounting it externally on my desk. Do you think the price saving is being passed on by Apple (nope!) and do you not think it would be more convenient to have a drive (and your iMac be 2mm thicker!) than non at all? I've owned many macs and never had a problem, so maybe you're in the minority as far as it breaking ... and how can you say people wanting an optical drive are in the minority ... do you have figures to back this up ... because I doubt you'll find its true. The reasons why Apple are removing optical drives now (when ALL other manufactures are not) are:
1. They make more money (less parts to source)
2. It forces users to Apple cloud services
3. It ties people further into the Apple ecosphere (money!)
4. They can make their kit slimmer and market them as being wow (ironic as its at the expense of functionality)
Open your eyes to the reality.
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http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/06/tech/innovation/imac-disc-drive
You mean I (and everyone else) should open my eyes to *your* reality? The "reality" is that technology moves forward and older technology gets left behind. Do you think this is the first time a piece of technology has been dropped before all their previous users have stopped using it? Inevitably there are going to be people such as yourself who are upset about it.
And while I'm sure you may have a legitimate need, the new form factors without an optical drive doesn't prevent you from using an optical drive - it just requires an accessory. If the critics steered their design decisions, Apple would still be using a floppy drive, still have Firewire ports, and still have an ExpressCard slot. Many of us have now moved on to online storage, stream , or e-mail just about everything. Less physical media means less breakage, fewer lost items, and less hassle. Sorry that you find the new way of doing things to be more of a hassle, but this is generally what happens when technology moves forward.
And I don't need figures to prove anything. Apple is a for-profit corporation - among the best and biggest. If the majority of their users have as urgent a need as you do, they wouldn't have risked facing a revolt. They made the move because they know - far better than you - what the majority of their users actually use. I'm NOT saying that every move they make is correct, but so far I don't see a huge revolt by users over needing to use an external optical drive.
Without an optical drive, I can achieve the same functionality as all of these things, and with far less hassle. And no, other than buying their devices, I am not paying Apple anything extra to do it. I buy music online from Amazon, it's automatically saved into my iTunes Library, which is autosync'd wirelessly to my iPhone, which connects wirelessly via Bluetooth to my car, my iPad and iPhone both sync up so I can download/watch videos from my iPad Mini, whether via Videos, or Plex (and soon VLC again). I do backups (twice a year) using a small external hard drive that's USB powered and I download all of my software now since virtually everything is available for download.
IOW, I've moved on and learned how to fully utilize all conveniences current technology offers. If you don't want to, that's fine. But I find it ironic that you're complaining about Apple's complacency.
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I don't care if "Fusion" is smarter, it is a brittle impractical kludge.
Standalone hybrids are elegant. They are transparent in all situations.
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SSDs are too small. Macs should come with cheap hard disks so that I can replace it with the ones I need.
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See above.
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Desktops are not fast enough single threaded, either.
My daughter just bought a MBP WITH the optical drive. It will get her through the last year and a half of college. College provides Parallels and Windows free to students as some of her Engineering programs are Windows only. Plus some of the textbooks still only provide tutorials and stuff on the included CD/DVD in the book (no downloading).
The coming update that will likely kill off the optical drive in the MBP prompted her not to wait any longer with her purchase.
She downloads lots of stuff but still uses the optical drive due to necessity and desire. Having it built in makes more sense for her.
There are a ton of people like this. I almost never use the optical drive, however I don't want my iMac to not have one. Just today I needed to burn some workout DVDs for my wife. People who use the laptop as their only computers also would likely feel the same way. I don't mind my retina macbook pro not having an optical drive, but only because I can remotely use the one on my iMac if I needed to, if only had the retina macbook I would have to buy a superdrive which seems clunky and many people would find that silly when buying an expensive laptop to have to add a superdrive to the cost. I think that eventually the day will come that optical drives aren't needed but that day isn't here yet for laptops and desktops and may never be because of the popularity of tablets to fill in for people who want a device with no optical drive
As long as you make the information public, use of knowledge from within the company to know when to trade stock is not illegal. And speech in this country is protected under the first amendment, so you can say whatever you want, it is left up to everyone else whether or not to believe you.
Absolutely. The point was though that even if there is a power boost it does not look like it on paper.
I did read your post.
My situation is like this: I've been using PC's since the OS was called MS-DOS 1.2. Both professionally and home.
I am sick and tired of MS. I have had more hardware than most people here.
Two years ago I bought an old Mac mini (2006 model), just to test if the Other side of the Fence really was greener.
Its specs are laughable by todays standard, but it just runs and runs and runs.
Oh .. I forgot my ancient iPod that live its life in my car. I did chance the battery a couple of years ago. And it does not like temp below freezing. In the winter if I've left it overnight in the car it starts playing ABBA. That's kind of annoying when I prefer Motörhead
After all these years I've decided to clear my house for anything MS has made.
Now both my wife and I have iPhones (although I was through a number of 'droids first). The iPad 2 I bought as soon as they became available here is now "belong" to my wife. It's simply amazing.
My laptop is next to go. I currently own a maxed out Dell (Core i7, lots of RAM, SSD, you name it) but like all other PC's running Windows it's getting slower and slower.
I really don't want to make a clean install again. It has to go. It's not a bad PC, just crippled by a POS OS.
So .. that brings me to the post about keeping my plastic in the dark until Apple release the new line of rMBP's.
That will be my first modern Apple computer. I am not desperate or in a hurry to buy, so why buy something that is being updated with new models a few weeks later?
-Brian
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I did read your post.
My situation is like this: I've been using PC's since the OS was called MS-DOS 1.2. Both professionally and home.
I am sick and tired of MS. I have had more hardware than most people here.
Two years ago I bought an old Mac mini (2006 model), just to test if the Other side of the Fence really was greener.
Its specs are laughable by todays standard, but it just runs and runs and runs.
Oh .. and an ancient iPod in my car. I did chance the battery a couple of years ago. And it does not like temp below freezing. In the winter if i leave it in the car it starts playing ABBA. That's kind of annoying when I prefer Motörhead
After all these years I've decided to clear my house for anything MS has made.
Now both my wife and I have iPhones (although I was through a number of 'droids first).
My laptop is next to go. I currently own a maxed out Dell (Core i7, lots of RAM, SSD, you name it) but like all other PC's running Windows it's getting slower and slower.
I really don't want to make a clean install again. It has to go. It's not a bad PC, just crippled by a POS OS.
So .. that brings me to the post about keeping my plastic in the dark until Apple release the new line of rMBP's.
That will be my first modern Apple computer. I am not in a hurry to buy, but why buy something that is being updated with new models a few weeks later?
-Brian
Yeah, I understand you were agreeing with my point. I just figured Id clarify for everyone though
While I gave you specific reasons why fusion drives are a better option, the only reason you gave was a kludge, not really a compelling argument. Fusion drives are transparent too.
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Why Not buy an iMac? Well ...
Bravo, bravo! It needed to be said. I canNOT buy a new desktop mac in which a failed HD means the machine has to be boxed up and shipped back to Apple. Give me a break.
My family has 3 iOS devices and 3 Macs at home, and I have 4 Macs at work, students have three more, and I have used Macs since the mid/late 1980s. So I'm a core apple-head. And I don't see the reason for a slimmed-down iMac with irreplaceable HDs and (in 21") memory. All I wanted was the prior iMac with USB3 and spec bumps.
Now we have a desktop that will fall to the floor more aerodynamically.
For my use diversity and port needs, a Mac Pro makes more sense, but the new gen may exceed $2500-3000. The ONLY iMac I would consider buying new is the recent 27" addition that has only flash memory - no moving parts. That, or a prior gen refurbished.
I'm an apple (and before that, Unix/Linux) guy and a heavy computer / supercomputer user, but Apple's direction has left me concerned and disheartened. C'mon, Apple.
Bravo, bravo! It needed to be said. I canNOT buy a new desktop mac in which a failed HD means the machine has to be boxed up and shipped back to Apple. Give me a break.
My family has 3 iOS devices and 3 Macs at home, and I have 4 Macs at work, students have three more, and I have used Macs since the mid/late 1980s. So I'm a core apple-head. And I don't see the reason for a slimmed-down iMac with irreplaceable HDs and (in 21") memory. All I wanted was the prior iMac with USB3 and spec bumps.
Now we have a desktop that will fall to the floor more aerodynamically.
For my use diversity and port needs, a Mac Pro makes more sense, but the new gen may exceed $2500-3000. The ONLY iMac I would consider buying new is the recent 27" addition that has only flash memory - no moving parts. That, or a prior gen refurbished.
I'm an apple (and before that, Unix/Linux) guy and a heavy computer / supercomputer user, but Apple's direction has left me concerned and disheartened. C'mon, Apple.
Sometimes you can explain all you like, but some people never get it!!!!
You carry on buying Apples stripped out PC's, happy spending!!!!!
That's why more and more applications use multi threaded.
Plus it will never be fast enough or anyone would not buy a new computer every few years. It's the economy so I don't really get your point.
But my point is the top end mobile CPUs already competitive with its desktop brother, well at least the non-overclocked ones.
While graphic cards for laptop remains in the limbo compared to its desktop variant.
A little thing called freedom of speech. We can say whatever we want to impact the stock price too. It's just that no one listens to us.
A little thing called freedom of speech. We can say whatever we want to impact the stock price too. It's just that no one listens to us.
Not really. You impact a stock price by what you say and see what happens. Your day goes real bad.
Haswell is a disappointment in the PC/Windows market. I am not seeing any significant increase in performance in PCs, except a slight boost in graphics performance (~10%) over 3rd gen iCore integrated Intel graphics.
Battery life in PCs seems to be the same as 3rd gen. The Air is about the only laptop I've seen so far reporting any significant increase in battery life.
Best Buy had two nice Toshiba laptops side-by-side with gen 3 and gen 4 iCore and the performance specs (Windows Experience Index) were almost identical as well as the advertised battery life of ~4 hours.
Haswell = underwhelmed
Fusion drive is not transparent in all situations.
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There's a limit to what can be done with multithreading. Much faster single-threading is still needed, even for multithreaded applications.
And laptops are at most quad-core. They are not competitive with desktops.