“One thousand, five hundred and fourteen days. Or: four years, one month, and twenty-four days,” Sam Byford writes for The Verge. “That’s how long it’s been since Apple released the last MacBook Pro to come without a Retina display… The $1,199 13-inch model was powered by a 2.5GHz Core i5 Ivy Bridge processor, a solid option for a midrange laptop in June 2012. I got one that month and am actually typing this column on it right now… Nothing unusual about that, of course — technology moves on. Except it’s now August 2016, and Apple is inexplicably still selling the exact same laptop.”
“For longtime Mac users, MacRumors’ Buyer’s Guide is an online institution. The publication catalogs the release dates of each major Apple product line and contrasts them against the company’s usually predictable timeframe for updates, ultimately delivering a verdict on whether it’s better to buy now or wait,” Byford writes. “Apart from the 12-inch MacBook, which was refreshed in April, every single Mac line from the mini to the Pro is designated as ‘Don’t Buy’ because of how long it’s been since Apple updated them.”
“The Retina MacBook Pro is 442 days into its current cycle, despite refreshes coming every 268 days on average in the past. The Mac mini has gone 657 days since its last update, which was controversial in itself since Apple removed quad-core options and made the product harder to upgrade after purchase,” Byford writes. “And the Mac Pro, released in December 2013 following much ‘Can’t innovate any more, my ass’ – fueled fanfare? It hasn’t received a single update since then. ‘This is without a doubt the future of the pro desktop,’ Phil Schiller said when announcing the Mac Pro on stage that year. Did he mean that this was the precise model Apple expects professional users to use literally forever?”
“There’s a certain point at which it just starts to look like absentmindedness, and many Mac computers are well past that point now,” Byford writes. “If Apple doesn’t want to keep its products reasonably current, that’s its prerogative. But if that truly is the case, maybe it shouldn’t sell them at all.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Sad, but true. Outside of the 12-inch MacBook (and that’s only for real road-warriors doing certain kinds of work), we wouldn’t recommend buying any Mac today. When people ask us, and they do quite frequently, our advice is the same: “Don’t buy now. Wait for new Macs.”
How many hundreds of billions of dollars more does Apple management need at their disposal in order to do their jobs properly? Any other reasonably competent company a quarter the size of Apple, generating a quarter the amount of income as Apple, should be able to unveil a new iPhone every year while still keeping their Mac lines at least reasonably up-to-date. Apple can’t seem to manage the former or the latter.
What’s the problem? Too big, too fast? Moving into the spaceship? Getting fat and lazy on easy recurring revenue? Too much old blood and not nearly enough new in Apple’s upper management ranks and on Apple’s Board of Directors? Jony’s painfully obvious disinterest or outright absence (see the ugly iPhone Smart Battery Case and the awfully-designed Apple TV Siri Remote, for two recent examples)? No Steve around to really motivate the troops? Founder’s quotes on the wall no longer cutting it already?
Seemingly confused, distracted, and lazy management is a painful thing to witness.
“Oh, but Apple is doing great!” you say? Sure, but you could make the case that they could be doing even better, perhaps much better. Perhaps even to the point of having Macs available that MacRumors and MacDailyNews and anybody else with a pulse could recommend buying today.
When you’ve sold yourself on the idea that the iPad is the future of personal computing by swallowing your own marketing hook, line, and sinker, and then fail to deliver on that promise for too long (skimping on RAM, offering underpowered multitasking, etc. – now, finally, largely corrected with iPad Pro), you neglect the horse that brung ya (Macintosh is his name) and shoot yourself in the foot (Q216 results, Mac sales unable to make up for the continued iPad sales decline, and Mac’s streak of outgrowing the PC market shattered).
Mirror, Tim Cook. Tim Cook, mirror.
A big picture revision and course correction would be well advised. Perhaps some new blood — not stuffed quite so complacently with RSUs, perhaps? — high up on the food chain, as well?
SEE ALSO:
Is Apple phasing out the pro-level Mac? – August 2, 2016
Apple confirms Mac market share loss – July 29, 2016
Apple prepping new MacBook Air with USB-C, reports claim – July 27, 2016
What’s happening with Apple’s Macintosh? – July 14, 2016
Sales suffer as Apple neglects the Mac – July 12, 2016
Apple’s Mac sales fall, economies shudder – July 12, 2016
IDC, Gartner: Apple’s Mac no longer bucking PC industry’s sales slide – July 12, 2016
Here’s the problem: Apple is ignoring the Mac – April 28, 2016
Apple’s Mac sales tumble 12% in second-biggest downturn since ’07 – April 27, 2016
Apple reports earnings miss in Q216 – April 26, 2016
Apple’s languishing Macintosh: Is a massive re-invention near? – April 25, 2016
Hey Apple, how about shipping a new computer sometime? – April 15, 2016
Apple’s aging Mac Pro is falling way behind Windows rivals – April 12, 2016
I couldn’t agree more. Apple, your stuff is severely out of date. Let’s get this ball rolling.
“Make great again….dump Tim Cook.”
Tim Cook is not a man of the risky future, he is man of safe today.
Tim Cook is not taking risks and staying in his comfort zone. His mission is to drive company to safe waters and stay there as long as possible. No risk, no innovation, yearly unnecesary pseudo-updates of macOS, iOS and iPhone, (who needs that?) neglecting Mac users and professional software clients.
Two years ago it looked for me like very safe and intelligent strategy. But it’s not. It’s just a simple human fear of close-minded HP guy who is in charge of Apple. He knows he is just a future blind guy seeing no visions and having no superpowers.
Apple needs a visionary, crazy and restless mind having constant creative itch to create something new and something different.
Captain Cook its time to go. Apple is not a warm seas cruiser its a battle ship.
Has technology changed at all that much? I had a PC i built in 2009 and was an Intel i7 920 quad core at 2.66Ghz overclocked to 3.2Ghz. I now have an Intel i7 4790k quad at 4Ghz and really don’t see that much of a difference. Same for the video card. I had two Nvidia 285’s and upgraded to a single 970 with about the same performance. So video was a little better and the processor was a little better, but nothing breath taking. For the prices though, I think Apple should be gunning with the latest technology every 6 months or at least once a a year. And making things even cheaper and still selling at the same price I think is not right as well. They dropped the CD drive and using integrated video saving money, but no cut in prices! Apple needs to go back to running quality processors of high end i5, i7 and Xeon and no more integrated graphics junk and be using the latest and greatest and best nvidia cards. They keep trying to push iPads over the computer and sorry, they just don’t cut it!
Since you asked …
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?dir=desc&q=intel+core+i7&sort=multicore_score
The tech market has traditionally responded with price cuts.
Case in point: a 2TB SSD retails today for as much as Apple wants for a 1TB _upgrade_ in an iMac.
But does Apple? nope. And sure, this is a reasonable business plan when the old models were being replaced regularly … but “regularly” doesn’t mean that a half {bleeping!} decade passes between hardware modernizations.
Yes it has.
Don’t look at just CPU clock speeds and numbers of cores. There’s a lot more to overall performance capabilities than just those things. Performance is a complex combination of everything from the storage bus speed (no one wanting high performance should be using anything but 8x PCIe 3.1, or if you want to be on the bleeding edge, PCIe 4.0), RAM speed and max RAM (override the macOS normal paging scheme and load 100% of the app and data into RAM and watch things fly), number of PCIe lanes (in both the CPU and the bridge chip, with two or more GTX 1080 cards), etc., etc. (I’m way too lazy to keep going.)
Agreed. And it goes much beyond that. The newer Intel processors are packed with support for new instructions for processing larger data sets. The Skylake Xeons can process arrays of 512 bits (e.g. 32 16-bit words or 16 32-bit words) in a single cycle.
Like your 64-bit processor? How about a 512-bit processor?
Cook is too busy pushing his personal political agendas. He has no time to lead Apple out of the Stone Age.
We’ve heard that cliche time and again and frankly it just isn’t true, just hateful anti-TC spew. Tim Cook is not spending all his CEO time on social or political agendas. Where’s your proof? In fact I bet no more than .02%, and most of that in personal off-the-clock time.
I could ask you the same question fscktard. But then your type are lifetime Sergeant Schultz’s who “Know nothing!” You win the specious idiot of the day award, idiot.
IP trolls, along with governmental and corporate collusion sure don’t help Apple inc.
WTF does any of that have to do with Apple engineers installing current year processors and graphics cards into their products?
I bought one of those for my wife last summer. It’s the only one with an internal optical drive, which she still finds useful. Would it have been better with a retina display or more modern processors? You bet.
I’m thinking of buying another one today. Why? Because the computer I’m using right now is the June 2009 version of the same computer and it wont be supported with under macOS Sierra and what ever comes next will probably not be a flexible, with a range of ports and no need for a bunch of dongles that only come from Apple,
The mid-2012 MacBook Pro 13 is a bargain and a real workhorse. Plus you can upgrade your own RAM, upgrade your own hard drive or convert to SSD and replace the battery with just a tri-lobe and phillips screwdriver. That’s a damned good computer, in my book.
Alas, it doesn’t come in Rose Gold, or anything other than Aluminum. Looks like a computer of all things.
Did the same thing for my son headed off too college. Maxed out the CPU with Apple, but then will max out the 16 GB RAM and buy a 1TB SSD for $300 TOTAL. Apple only offers a 500GB SSD for $500 and they only offer an 8GB RAM upgrade.
And we don’t have to buy an external optical drive. In my admittedly limited experience, even the OEM Apple external DVD drive is very, very flaky.
If Apple can’t price the SSDs any lower, they should offer conventional HD options. Sometimes you need space on the main computer HD and not on an external drive.
Good recommendation …
… and in looking at your post-buy shopping list (RAM + SSD), I do have to start to wonder:
Is Apple really so naive/stupid?
Case in point: they obviously have the sales data which indicates that many (most?) of their customers don’t buy RAM or SSDs – – but they also have OS X system configuration reporting data which says that these systems now have lots more RAM & Storage.
So … do these two Apple organizations talk to each other, to put 1 + 1 together on just how many customers are NOT buying the Apple OEM upgrades because they’re too damn expensive?
Similarly, the latter group can also inform the new product development group that relying on only the sales data provides a misleading perception of what their customer’s “hardware geek” profile is.
And so on.
Point being that we know that Mac’s are favored by the more educated (& presumably smarter) customer demographic, which would also mean that the customer base has figured out to optimize value from Apple … but has Apple figured this out yet for themselves?
Well, that is … other than saying “FU!” by locking down their hardware to deny DIY upgrades. The reality is that if these bumps were priced commensurate with the Market, most of these intelligent people would give Apple this part of their existing business, rather than take it elsewhere.
And Apple’s whole idea that a desktop PC needs to be as thin and light and small as possible is completely misplaced. If I’m talking about a desktop computer, then I want the options of swapping out HDs, RAM and video cards over a 1 inch smaller footprint.
This is why I never understood why they used 2.5″ HDs in the MacMini. They should have used the cheaper/more bang for the buck, 3.5″ drives for what should have been the cheapest Mac on the market. There was ZERO technological or even aesthetic reason to use an enclosure that small for a desktop machine.
At least give us one reasonably priced desktop machine where these options are available.
Except my 2012 27″ iMac is cool and quiet and THAT makes a BIG difference.
Hotter, slower hard drives over lightning fast SSD’s? Obviously you’ve never used and compared the speed differences. SSD’s are here to stay and for good reason.
Too bad you still need a Mac when the iPad goes into recovery mode. Only two ways to fix an iPad in recovery mode, plug it into a Mac or wipe it through “Find my Mac”. I guess iOS still needs some work to live without a Mac.
I agree that this trend is growing increasingly worrisome. They’re totally slacking on computers, which is a real shame.
(I have two upgraded Mac Pros, a 12.9 iPad Pro, a Macbook Pro etc)
but like I said before:
—-
for certain uses Macs today are falling behind.
Look at GPU speeds.
Barefeats.com shows a 6 year old Mac Pro with slower subsystem and processors but with Upgraded Video card running a GPU intensive game Diablo 3 beating current macs by a wide margin .
2010 Mac Pro with Upgraded Card : 181 fps
iMac 5k : 75 fps
current cylinder Mac Pro D700 : 73 fps
(lowest price with d700 is over $4500 !)
Macbook Pro retina : 27 fps
A hackintosh (with faster subsystem than that 6 year old MP) or high end windows machine will have even bigger differences than the above.
People have argued that fps is not important as games have a limit for fps playability but that’s not the point, the test shows GPU power. Besides games GPU power is needed for CERTAIN tasks like running multiple high res monitors or doing certain types of 3D etc. I have a 27 Cintiq pen monitor and another big monitor for example and would like to open several high end programs and lots of files at the same time.
The is not a single Mac today that you can upgrade the GPU. Since that Barefeats tests I believe there are even faster video cards.
Lots of mac uses today don’t realize that their photoshop brushes at large setting are going slow or games stuttering due to lack of GPU power (go look at the test results again. A Macbook PRO — I have one — is like 7 times slower than a upgraded 6 year old mac in GPU performance ! )
GPU performance is just one issue. RAM (PCs can go up to 512 GB), faster subsystems etc are others of concern.
(Remember the time when Jobs would put Macs side by side with PCs for shootouts running Photoshop etc and blow their socks off… ?)
I love the Mac and the MacOS but there’s something wrong with Apple’s behaviour towards certain types of PRO users. (I emphasize CERTAIN as lots of people are happy with their current macs)
also where the Mac marketing?
no serious Mac advertising since Mac PC guy (one new ad a month for 4 years) ages ago
(note Macs near match iPad revenues, beat iPad in the April quarter. Imagine if they actually marketed them… ).
not upgrading their macs regularly, a misfit of a Mac Pro (non upgradable GPUs etc), no mid tower between the mini and the Pro which many users have been clamouring for and no marketing (practically none to cash in on the Win 8 fiasco years which is bizarre) makes dropping Mac sales a self inflicted prophecy
——
Someone should send the URL of this discussion to Apple.
So incredibly well put. I run a “high end” lab at Palomar College in San Diego and I’ve had to delay replenishing all 34 machines in my lab waiting for a revision to the Mac Pro (we replaced about another 60 last month in lower-end labs, but those “new” Mac Pros are already 3 years old when just installed). Our plans are to move ahead with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity and other advancements. But I remain awaiting Apple and their management to catch up. Ugh.
And your reason for not using Ubuntu, Slackware or Scientific Linux in a “high end lab” is what exactly? A consumer oriented OS has no business in a high performance computing environment
I beg to differ.
Use macOS as a UNIX OS and you can do some very interesting things with it — as much as you can with those you mention. Plus, you get a good interface built in.
I’ve done rather high end scientific work since the 512 k Mac days. For the really big stuff I’d use absoft’s FORTRAN to write and debug the code then port it over to they big machines of the day as I had access to Cybers and Crays. But, writing and testing the code on the Mac was 100 times faster than trying to do it on those idiot savant machines.
The problem is, as the vast majority of people on this site have said, Apple’s hardware is woefully behind — to the point of being truly asinine. I haven’t bought a Mac Pro in almost four years and I used to buy several a year. Unless Apple comes out with a Mac Pro that is really designed for professionals (NOT designed for aesthetics but for real work) I won’t be buying any for the foreseeable future either.
And, there are many articles out there about how to take one of those 2012 Mac Pros and upgrade them for processors, GPUs, RAM speed, add cards for SUB 3.1, etc., etc. and end up with a Mac Pro that completely trounces even the very top of the line, maxed out, current Mac Pro.
And then on top of it there is always the Hacintosh route. For those that want to run multiple OSes and have the most recent hardware using an Apple Mac is not the best option given today’s Mac lineup. At the top of the line in hardware, it would not surprise me at all if Apple is losing as much as 25% of its sales due to Hacintoshes.
Yeah I hear you. My 2007 Mac Pro is begging to be replaced even though still working fine. (Just lost a 2006 iMac and my old G5 Mac Pro who gave up the ghost at last.) I will not be buying another Mac Pro (Im waiting Apple!!) unless it conforms to professional standards of upgradeability and versatility. As you perfectly said “NOT designed for aesthetics but for real work.” Amen to that!
I hope Schiller is having a dire thriller haunting moment over his “Can’t innovate my ass” moment of his. The problem with some types of innovation (like miniaturization & design for design’s sake) is that they are misguided and unnecessary. Completely not designed correctly for the market they are intended. Let’s hope there is a major correction upside to this VERY soon. Otherwise next stop – a Hackintosh or PC Workstation.
LINUX is amateur hour- the land of the eternal beta.
What do the servers that power the very web that you used to post that comment run on genius? Mac OS X? Or Linux?
For consumers, Linux is a world of second rate apps.
It’s the high end multimedia where we teach such things as Multi-Cam video editing with UHD/4k media, green screen compositing and VFX, 3D printing and product design, aerial mapping and numerous other subjects. I set it up with RAID servers for each row of 4 or 5 students that are Thunderbolt networked together to allow the media to be stored on the RAIDs. Students connect at between ~400 to 1200 MB/s and the multicam project alone requires at least 250 MB/s sustained per each student. That is only possible with the MacPro and its 6 Thunderbolt ports. Maybe that doesn’t fit your definition of “high end”.
Sadly, I must agree. As I have stated several times over the past few months, I simply could not justify a new iMac to replace my aging 5 year old iMac. For the price, the newer iMacs are just not worth it. So, I added a fast external SSD drive for booting up and running the the real workhorse software and did it all for less than 10% of the price of a new iMac.
I also replaced my even older 2008 Macbook with a 2015 version last year. A new Macbook Air. But, if I had to do it today, I would have replaced the HD with an SSD like I did in the iMac.
Apple needs to give us a road map for updates to the Macs that includes approximate arrival times.
I am almost in exactly the same boat Josh. Have a 2010 iMac special order that I’ve upgraded to 16 Gig of Ram and put a new SSD inside. Slow IO is killing me as FW800 is the best I have but when I compare my machine to a 2015 5k iMac not worth the 3k it would cost to replace it not with Thunderbolt 3, USB-C, USB 3.1, Displayport 1.4 all rolling out now. Come on release the tech!
I have the 2010 iMac 27″ as well and I upgraded the internal drive to 3TB and I then used the extra connector on the MB to run an external IDE to connect Hi Speed external Drives works great. I do need a new system but I’ll wait just a bit longer to get an iMac with Thunderbolt 3.
It’s my fault
If you weren’t such a liar, I could almost believe it!
So tell me MDN….Now do you believe us about Tim Cook?
The man is not a CEO.
I still remember when he messed up the production of iMac for Christmas. Then he apologized for Maps and wanted Forstall to do the same. Then he screwed up demand for every iPhone released since 2012.
By the way the battery case was not ugly. It was way ahead of most people. I love it!
Ditching Forstall was a huge mistake.
No, we don’t Paul. Mistakes happen with every CEO regime. More so at most other places. CEO is a not a whim game of willy-nilly musical chairs at the behest of unforgiving trolls. That way lies madness. Consider first the ramifications of what you’re saying. Better Tim learns from any issues than another lesser man takes the reigns and starts the learning process all over again.
Sell the Mac segment off to a group of ex-Apple employees who care, and then charge Apple several thousand tons of money to do the development of iOS apps, because as far as I know, all development is done on Macs.
Somebody needs to break out of the pack and run a Pirate flag up the pole.
So easy for you all to say as you sit in the stands.
Get in the arena or shut the fuck up. That includes you MDN!
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. -T. Roosevelt
You can bet your ignorant ass that if MDN were running Apple, the Macintosh would not be neglected as it is under Tim Cook.
In fact, if Steve Ballmer were running Apple, the Mac would be in better shape than it is now under Tim “Distracted Social Crusader” Cook.
I wouldn’t got that far on the Ballmer thing. Tim may be coasting, but Ballmer had a habit of throwing things in reverse. And literally throwing things as well.
Tim was coasting.
Now, Apple has reversed direction.
Sales for iPhones, iPads and Macs were all down last quarter.
Those are great words from one of USA’s greatest presidents. However, they are completely misplaced. Apple just got its ass handed to it in the last quarter of PC sales, deservedly so. The only new Mac to come out of Cupertino was a poorly designed (re-designed) netbook that is useless for anything but email and web surfing. Apple isn’t striving valiantly, it’s coasting on Jobs’ reputation while Cook is off to his social events.
This is the exact reason why my next computer will be either a PC or a Hackintosh. I don’t want a thinner desktop, I want a computer with a desktop GPU and one that I can swap out without dropping $4K on the trash can.
I’m not happy with post-Steve Apple but not going that far. Working among the sludge that is the WinDUHz OS is too much punishment on myself.
I do high end 3D that makes it impossible for me not to go that far. I was hoping they would come out with something like Alienware’s Graphics Amplifier, but Apple apparently doesn’t care to cater to power users anymore. Their machines are for the masses and casual users which is a shame.
I feel your pain and I’m coming up with a similar scenario for my pro needs. Such a shame. It’d be nothing for Apple to stay ahead of the curve.
What is all that cash for except to spend it on making all Apple products great and desirable? They’d certainly make it back in increased sales.
Staying model moribund and mis-designed (the limited Mac Pro 2013) is never going to increase sales or make customers happy. Mac is the foundation upon which everything operates (for the time being), like it or not.
Emojis r far more important than updating hardware. What’s wrong with you people
Apple has turned into a major disappointment on so many levels
Other than the remote being symmetrical which means it is easy to grab the wrong end in the dark, I love the new Apple TV and bought one to replace my old ATV2. I personally love the new remote and I think all that needs to be done is to stick something to it to make it easier to tell how you’re holding it, I was thinking of one of the small vinyl bumpers you can get at hardware stores might work. Put it on the underside and it won’t spoil how it looks.
Now, as to Mac hardware. I have two 2008 Mac Pro 8 core machines upgraded with lots of RAM and good video cards and I’m really disappointed that Sierra won’t be officially supported on them, especially when they are higher spec than some machines that will run Sierra. I need a machine that I can put lots of hard drives in and expand so I’d really like to see a new tower to replace the Mac Pro, but we shall see.
I also run two late 2013 Retina Macbooks, a 13 i5 and a 15 i7, use them to run projections in theatrical productions. At the moment they are fine but I’m looking forward to faster machines when it comes time to replace them.
OK. Bottom line it!
Apple, upgrade the pro line or spin it off as a separate company if you are NOT going to keep it current.
Very simple, very easy, done all the time with big companies that get too diverse.
Stagnating the MacPro and killing the Xserve shows no love for the high end consumer’s needs. Supporting all those desktops are tech people who have sever needs, now stuck with WinDUHZ.
WinDOH’S! 😉
the mac pro is dead. Apple will just ride the product line out as long as anyone is willing to over pay for it. Every intel processor upgrade, the previous generations processors always get cheaper. Older 12 core xeons that use DDR3 memory go for less then 100.00 per processor. Yet apple still prices its machines like the processor are state of the art and 1700 each. Apple currently chargers over 9,648.00 for its maxed out mac pro. The cost on the components have dropped through the basement. Apple makes hands down profit while burning little resources. Apple has lost its way. The mac pro is the canary in the cave.
at this point what difference dose it make
Thank you Macrumors for making it painfully obvious!!! About time that the pro-Apple press started to speak the truth about the state of the Macs.
Seems to me there have been a lot of unpopular people on MDN noticing this saddening trend 3 or 4 years ago. They were all rudely shouted down by the Apple fanboys. Too bad they were right all along that Cook has been a disaster when it comes to continuous improvement of the Mac. Apple has nobody but themselves to blame for becoming a fashion house with PC emoji and colorful overpriced watch bands while the rest of the tech world cranked out faster and more capable hardware on all fronts.
If Apple doesn’t fix the Mac stagnation in the next 6 months, there won’t be any tech reviewers left defending Apple’s horrid management of the Mac at all. And if Cook blows another fall product introduction like he usually does, then watch as AAPL continues to get punished on the market. As it should be when a corporation gets lazy and slow.
As you stated, it comes down to management. Whether it’s only Cook or a combination of him and other top guys, they don’t have anywhere near the ball-busting attitude of Jobs. This may be impossible given the circumstances, because none of them were close to the founding of the company and it’s not their baby.
If you haven’t seen the excellent Steve Jobs film, watch it. Steve Jobs was an asshole to his employees, but he got results. He may have made the right choice in Cook for the coasting phase in the years after his passing, but the time now is for very strong, aggressive, demanding and uncompromising leadership. Cooks not the man.
That linked article says basically in the “iPhone era” macs have received no love.
There should be no machine with a refresh older then 200 days.
As an Apple fan since 1985, I am sad to say the “WOW” died when Steve was buried. Unless Steve-o finds a way to teleport down into the center of that new Spaceship the day it’s christened, I don’t know how things will continue like this. Steve was the innovation, he kept Apple swimming forward ahead of the rest of the ocean. I’ll never stop missing his presence at Apple. The truth I feared in Oct. 2011 has revealed itself. Tim is a good, solid, anchor and anchors are useful, but we need a motor too. I had hope Scott Forstall was destined to take Steve’s place, he was most like him, but they dumped Scott overboard.
I wonder what the Mac team is being paid for… here is their 2016 completed tasks:
– Macbook went from Core M to Core m3 and added Rose Gold option
-13″ MacBook Air upped to 8GB of RAM
Second half of 2016 cannot be worse… talk about hope never lost!!
The delay makes some sense if Apple is considering a switch to a new architecture. It isn’t outside the realm of possibility for them to design an entirely new processor just for Macs just like the did for all their mobile devices. I mean not just shoving an A10X in a laptop but a completely different one for the Mac line. If that is indeed what they are up to then there would be no sense in continuing to develop hardware for the newer Intel processors just to achieve somewhat marginal performance gains.
Ed, I think you’re on to something. It’s the only explanation that makes sense in terms of explaining why almost the entire Mac lineup, excluding the MacBook, is so old.
The battery life increase associated with going to A* processors, assuming they are fast enough, would be a game changer. It’s a way for Apple to once again put a huge distance between their computers and those that are running Windows or Linux.
When 65% of your revenue comes from one product (the iPhone) and less than 10% from Macs, I’m guessing they just don’t care any more.
you might be right that that’s how Apple management is thinking. If so in my opinion it’s shortsighted.
— comparing profits with iPhone makes every product in the world a loser as it is the most profitable product out there. by itself it makes more money than Microsoft , it makes more money than ALL the cars and trucks sold by Ford.
— if something (god forbid) happens to the iPhone ( a small taste can be seen when the 6S wasn’t as in demand as the 6) then revenues go down. And the stock tanks , aapl is still 30% off highest level .
One reason Apple’s P.E is one third Google’s (i.e if it had Google/Alphabets P.E Apple stock would be 300+) is that investors say they FEAR Apple is ONE PRODUCT COMPANY. they like diversification.
they should push Mac, ipad , Services etc together (i.e increase their sales) to be 50% or more of Apple revenues to stabilize it even as they push iPhone.
— Macs according to a study some years back make 40% of the PC profits of the world. So it makes more than Dell, Acer etc. If it were a separate business it would be pretty big. So ignoring it is crazy. Just missing revenue estimates by small amounts can cause Apple stock to drop like a rock, so every cent counts.
— Mac profits could be higher if they Advertised. the last major Ad campaign Mac/PC guy was 66 different ads over four years (one ad a month) and it ended about the time Cook became interim CEO.
If you switch off the ‘OPEN for BUSINESS’ sign (together with slow updates etc) is it a wonder sales aren’t stellar ? (count how many dozens of iPhone ads they have had over the last few years vs Mac ads ).
In spite of that Mac sales near match iPads and in April beat iPads revenues and iPad over the last few years had many ads as well . (Apple doesn’t even run cheap WEB Mac ads, when i read MDN I get Dell, Acer, Amazon ads. )
— Macs are part of the ECO SYSTEM, without it the system is damaged. Force users to switch to PC and they might start looking at Android or Windows for their phones, tablets etc.
You are not forced to do anything if you don’t want to use it. I would never use an Android anything. There out of date and 99% malware based software is horrible. There is no continuity, it’s all over the place. Nothing works together because everyone is building things on there own with several different versions of Android so you don’t know what’s compatible either. Apple’s ecosystem helps you, not hinders you. You don’t have compatibility issues because Apple builds the whole widget. Unless you are trying to use older hardware. We’re talking 7 years old or more.
Yep. Dell & others would be thrilled to get the pro workstation contract from Apple. And would easily cater to our needs. Not to mention grow exponentially offering up OS X workstations and servers at more reasonable prices.
Like Power Computing did? Dumb.
I’ve already mentioned PC before in other posts and the unlikeliness of Apple repeating it. This would be a case of Apple just letting someone handle one type of Mac. And yes that’s not likely to happen either.