Post #417,641
4/5/17 2:44:53 PM
4/5/17 7:35:46 PM
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Mac Pro: End of an error
The pro user community has not been feeling the love for the past few years as the black cyclindrical “trash can” Mac Pro, which had expandability issues to begin with, has not had a refresh since its introduction. Cupertino has finally taken note:The news, if you want it straight: Apple is acknowledging that the Mac Pro they introduced in 2013 has run aground on the cleverness of its own design, and they’re re-thinking the entire machine. In addition, they’ll be releasing a new external display — something it had previously opted out of. I’ve been mystified these latter years at the way Apple appeared to have blown off their power users, the same segment that kept the goddamn platform alive when it was on a feeding tube and a respirator two decades ago. Yeah, most of the firm’s income today is from the iOS side of the house, and while the Mac turns a healthy profit, four out of five units sold are notebooks, but surely there’s something to be said for maintaining a prestige top-of-the-line product even, if need be, as a loss-leader. My work iMac is getting pretty long in the tooth—it will turn nine the month I retire this year—so I’m not likely to be in the market for the new Pro when it ships in 2018. I can limp along on Old Paint for the remainder of my professional life, even though performance-wise I bump into that 4GB ceiling with irritating frequency. I am thinking, however, of marking my emancipation this fall by gifting myself one of the last-generation (2012) “cheese-grater” Mac Pro units, ramped up to 32 or even 64GB. This would allow me to continue using my existing Firewire and USB peripherals, and also my 30" display, presently attached to an elderly first-generation cheese-grater that topped out several OS iterations ago, but which has a few useful internal components that could be transplanted to the new box. If I go through with this, I am going to end with a truly preposterous number* of Macs on the premises. Anyway, heartened to see that the pro users (I do not count myself among that exalted community, although I think I approach considerably closer to it than do most consumers) apparently haven’t been forgotten. I suspect that Apple would have preferred not to let this cat out of the bag quite this early, but we were beginning to hear rumbles of mutiny from the user base. cordially, *With the addition of the proposed 2012 tower, and with the removal of personally-owned equipment from my office to home, there would be eighteen altogether, although this figure includes a mothballed clone from 1996 and my original 9" 1984 jobbie, which was probably last fired up during the reign of Bush the Elder. I imagine the lubricant on its 400k internal floppy drive is the consistency of wet asphalt.
Edited by rcareaga
April 5, 2017, 07:35:46 PM EDT
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Post #417,646
4/6/17 1:05:58 AM
4/6/17 1:05:58 AM
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It really is hard to figure out what they're thinking.
We had a Mac Server at work for a while. The hardware seemed great (though the fans were loud), but the guy who bought it and ran it said that Apple had poor quality control on updates (e.g. reset users file permissions on updates, IIRC) - stuff that never should have been allowed to make it through QC.
People writing apps for iOS aren't doing it on their phones. They need a reasonably powerful desktop to do that, so they need to keep OS X macOS updated and they need compelling hardware to run the compilers and so forth. And presumably they're not filling their server farms with iMacs or MacMinis....
It really is hard to figure out what those guys are thinking. They have more money than the FSM, but they let their computing hardware rot on the vine.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've considered getting a mid-2012 13" i7 MBP off of eBay as a mess-around non-Winders laptop. My Chromebook is OK, but there are times when I want to save things locally and it's a pain on that. They're pretty easy to upgrade to 16 GB and a SSD and will run the latest OS, but they're kinda heavy...
:-/
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #417,647
4/6/17 2:44:38 AM
4/6/17 2:59:04 AM
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I'll tell you what they're thinking
Cook and co will look at the numbers.
tl;dr: it's all about the iPhone, to the tune of 90% of revenues.
That 90% is there in no small part because there's an app for that. At the moment, Apple is determined that those apps are written on MacOS.
(It's worth noting at this point that Apple does not (and probably cannot) eat its own dogfood when it comes to running the business; LOB apps are not Pages and Numbers, it's Word and Excel, and their internal messaging is Exchange.)
Anyhoo, hardly anyone is buying desktop Macs any more and of that small number, a low single-digit percentage is buying Mac Pros. The black bin Mac Pro was hubris writ large. It's completely impossible to meaningfully upgrade; you can't rack-mount it in any sensible manner; and probably most telling, the thermal budget is so low that it's trivial, in 2017, to spend literally £1500 to get a PC system that will comprehensively crush a maxed £8000 Mac Pro (pro-tip - you do this by buying an Nvidia Titan X card).
tl;dr: Apple doesn't own the creative sector any more; you get more bang/buck in PC land (whilst running the exact same software) and since Dell (and others) started making displays that matched and even exceeded Apple's, another reason to buy Apple disappeared.
In performance computing-land, Apple bet on OpenCL and the world went "ha, fuck no! We're going to get us some CUDA lurve" and so the already uncompetitive Mac Pro went from "expensive trinket" to "expensive, stupid trinket".
Apple will refresh the Mac Pro not for any business reasons, but because if they don't, they will come under pressure to port XCode to Windows*.
If ever that day comes, Apple will exit the desktop PC market.
Apple's problem here is that the ridiculous design of the black bin Pro has given its userbase five years to figure out high compute/GPU alternatives, whilst not offering any of those alternatives itself (even the gruntiest graphics card you can spec in a top-of-the-line iMac is basically crap; you can't fit more than 32GB in any current Mac, which is just fucking ludicrous in 2017, etc. etc. etc.)
*I think that Apple is currently and paradoxically simultaneously more successful and more vulnerable (in phones) than ever before. The hardware gap between iPhone and everything else has more-or-less closed - Samsung, Sony, and HTC (and maybe LG) can all build a handset that matches iPhone on fit'n'finish, despite what the zealots will try to tell you, and they all offer more options and choice. I'll let you know on the 20th whether the software gap seems to have closed - but it's definitely closing. Apple's business strategy here is to go "premium", pushing handset prices ever upward, but even then, a nod was given to the "low" (har har) end with the iPhone SE. What all this rambling leads up to is that if push ever came to shove, Apple would cheerfully and without hesitation sacrifice the Mac in all its forms, if it meant keeping iPhone healthy.
Edited by pwhysall
April 6, 2017, 02:59:04 AM EDT
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Post #417,648
4/6/17 8:50:16 AM
4/6/17 8:50:16 AM
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Re: Not eating their own dogfood
A basic rule for software companies is never spend time and money writing code that isn't your main business. This is usually to keep your geeks from writing their own bug tracker. There are companies that do *just that*. Let them. Or accounting, or word processing.
But Apple's selling point had always been It Just Works. Which means integrated hardware and software, designed to work together. If they can't maintain the walled garden inside their own literal walls, they're slowly drowning.
BTW if I believed in omens ... When I swiped "walled garden" above it auto-corrected to "raped garden".
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Post #417,650
4/6/17 9:48:55 AM
4/6/17 9:48:55 AM
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I can't remember where I saw it
But I did read an article that shows just how dependent Apple is on other people's software (and hardware) to run their business - to the point where the only bit of an Apple store that runs on an Apple platform is the POS, which is an iPad.
"Other people" is of course "Microsoft" and "Oracle" and "Dell" (other big PC OEMs are available), with filthy communist Linux doing its usual infrastructure turn.
Even iCloud is smeared out across AWS and Azure.
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Post #417,651
4/6/17 10:48:35 AM
4/6/17 10:48:35 AM
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iCloud uses Google now as well.
But it's a stopgap. Apple is building enormous data centers, and as part of Project McQueen is weaning off of 3rd party providers. They also bought a NoSQL database company in 2015 to start replacing their Cassandra/Mongo/etc. databases.
Your article about the Apple Store is incorrect: I happen to sit next to a previous Apple Genius who can confidently state that the only Windows screen he ever saw in an Apple Store was on a phone that someone was replacing or in Boot Camp. Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #417,652
4/6/17 10:58:41 AM
4/6/17 10:58:41 AM
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Oh goodie
I can't wait for Apple's famous capability in cloud to be entirely in their hands :)
As for the Store bit - yes, there's no Windows in the physical Stores, but there's no Apple platform in the stuff that the POS iPads and front-end Macs etc talk to.
I heard that they're a big SAP customer, which means for all practical purposes, they're an Oracle shop, too. That'll mean either Windows, Linux or (gawd help us all) AIX at the back end.
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Post #417,653
4/6/17 3:49:35 PM
4/6/17 3:49:35 PM
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Clouds of glory
Apple really has been conspicuously maladroit here, hasn’t it? I’m not remotely competent to evaluate the technical issues involved, but since the hamfistedness goes all the back to Jobs’ watch (I seem to recall reading that he chewed out the old iTools/dotmac team so thoroughly that one or two of them are still severely catatonic, confined to a sealed ward at the Stanford Medical Center and fed through tubes), and since other entities seem to have a handle on the tech, one wonders what it is about Apple that makes them so inept here? If cloud computing is rocket science, surely Cupertino can afford to hire an entire stable of von Braunses. A puzzlement.
cordially,
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Post #417,654
4/6/17 4:59:33 PM
4/6/17 5:09:31 PM
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I haz a feery
It goes like this: MS made their own cloud to run on their own OS to support their own platforms and they used their own dev tools to do it. They understand the whole thing top to bottom in excruciating detail, and then they run their business on it.
Amazon built AWS to run their business on, and they hired a shitload of really smart people to do it, and they had the ultimate micromanager at the top deciding everything.
Google's stuff runs their business (there's a trend here,) and they too hired a shitload of really smart people and wrote a fuckload of their own software to do it.
Apple run their business on SAP and Oracle and AWS and Azure and Google and they simply don't have the culture or talent (there's only so many sufficiently talented programmers out there, no matter how much money you wave around, and they've still got to be managed right, otherwise they'll just write the best bug tracking system in the world) to build a platform that can do it.
They'll spend a fucking mountain of money on these data centres, and on programmers, and on consultants, and they'll end up with pretty much what they've got now - a cloud system that's mostly used to store photographs.
tl;dr: Apple is a hardware company.
ETA: All this is a throwback to drook's comment about not writing code that's not relevant to the core business. Apple's core business is iPhone, not iCloud.
Edited by pwhysall
April 6, 2017, 05:09:31 PM EDT
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Post #417,656
4/6/17 6:30:16 PM
4/6/17 6:30:16 PM
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If Apple isn't thinking about things after the iPhone, then they're doomed.
And I don't think it's a watch or a self-driving car, either.
The days of the $1000 phone are numbered. I'm sure Samsung and Cook know that, but Samsung is big enough to survive $50 smart phones. Dunno if Apple is... Letting the Mac platform whither isn't a good sign, IMHO.
But we'll see.
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #417,655
4/6/17 5:52:02 PM
4/6/17 5:52:02 PM
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Apple encourages internal battles.
Or at least, Steve jobs did. And they were complex battles, with not just poached staff but also other resources. I can't remember the name of the site made by an older Apple employee that described how the Mac came into being.
The Mac was championed at and by Apple over both the Lisa and the IIgs. The latter, in particular, was cheaper, faster and just better than the first Mac in a quite a lot of ways. But it was competition and Steve picked a side...
Wade.
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