“Apple will announce new products in 2017. Some will be innovative and some percentage of us will hate the changes. Others will be iterative and some percentage of us will claim boredom at the lack of change,” Rene Ritchie writes for iMore. “Either way, the year will be filled with equal parts surprise and delight and doom and gloom, just like every year. What’ll be different is the stakes. The tenth anniversary of iPhone approaches. Apple’s mobile silicon is eclipsing Intel’s and iPads are becoming serious portables. Apple Watch is doing great in a world where other wearables have all but perished, at least for now. And a choice is going to have to be made about the future of desktop Macs.”
“Apple Campus 2, the company’s biggest physical product ever, is going to ship, and perhaps forever change how everything else ships,” Ritchie writes. “WWDC 2017 will bring us iOS 11, macOS 10.13, watchOS 4, and tvOS 11. And there just might be a few surprises revealed along the way.”
Ritchie writes, “So, with all that in mind, here’s what I’m expected — and not expecting — from Apple in 2017!”
Read it all in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We share Rene’s beautiful dream: “Apple returns to Mac mini and Mac Pro that own their niche-appeal, are easy to update and expand, and that show the world why we still need trucks and just exactly what they can do.”
I expect nothing from Cook.
Zero. Zilch. Nada.
I’m done with Tim and his lack of tech vision. Wake me up once he’s gone.
I want the future, not the past, that’s why I don’t care about Mac Mini or Mac Pro.
can life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness be far behind…?
Appropriate, innovative updates to the Mac mini and the Mac Pro ARE part of the future. Don’t put blinders on just because Apple may be doing so.
The Mac mini is a hugely versatile machine! It acts as my Music Server and video playback device when watching the ‘Net. I have the late 2012 units that can be upgraded with SSD’s and more RAM. My Mac mini is smoking fast!
I hope Apple realizes the usefulness of such a system and allows us to upgrade components instead of Soldered in RAM!!! C’mon Apple wake up!!!!! People are dying to give you money for stuff the need and want…please listen to them!!!
Dear Apple
1 – MacPro
Update the MacPro every year with any updates that exist – more ram, faster graphics, MORE I/O ( not less ), more storage, expandability and upgradability. THIS is what a PRO user wants and needs. No reason not to update this yearly. In the Q1 timeframe, a time when companies allocate funds towards equipment and the consumer market slows down. It’s not a fluke why the consumer electronics show, NAMM, auto show, etc.. all pimp new products in Jan/Feb.. now sell to them.
2 – Displays
No reason to blow this market off. You proudly advertise how great your retina display is, yet you ignore making a desktop one? Confusing. Make displays to compliment your MacPro and MacMini
3 – Mac Mini
I still think this product is used and should still be made, just update it.
4 – iMac
WHY is this not a priority to Apple? Make NEW iMacs every year. Announce AND release it in Q3 for the Holiday season and make sure you manufacturer enough to meet the demand.
5 – iPhone
Increase battery life. More innovation. Don’t neglect the 4″ size, just because samsung made you think the world wants huge phones… not everyone does. Loose the “s”, it makes no sense on the marketing side to the consumer. And if you are going to do a whole keynote and release a new model, make sure it has more than “look how think it is”
6 – iWatch
Don’t allocate all your time on this product. It’s fine, let it grow as such. No need to allocate all your resources to it.
7 – AppleTV
Where is 4K? Almost all TV sets are promoting 4k and you’re behind the curve. Also, the i/o again is lacking for systems that run like Control4 that needs better options for i/o.
Get the deals done with the networks to help consumers rid the stranglehold on cable companies that over-charge for a million channels.
8 – MacBook Pro
bring back i/o!!!!
If you want to be respected as a PRO machine, allow there PROS to USE it without 1,000 cables coming out of it.
9 – MacBook / MacBook Air
just give them a refresh more often than 3 years
I really dont understand the difficulty to update these yearly, without the need for a re-design…
10 – Stock
Keep buying back diluted shares so it’s harder to be manipulated. AAPL is one of the most manipulated stocks on the market.
11- Aquisitions
Make sure what you are looking to acquire is not something Apple can achieve on it’s own with the talent within. (See Beats). And whoever is negotiating these deals needs to grow a pair and learn how to get better deals and not waste so much money on some of these companies. When I see what Apple pays for these acquisitions, I shake my head.
If you’re gonna quire a company, acquire Adobe.
12 – Diversify
Apple needs to diversify manufacturing to more than one resource to meet the demand. Be the leader in bringing back manufacturing on a large scale back to America. Utilize China, Mexico and India to meet demand for products so the consumer can purchase the products you are advertising.
13 – Advertising
More money needs to be spent on Advertising and aggressive advertising. Apple has gotten a little weak on ads, which the exception of the light bulb one.
14 – iTunes
Fix iTunes. It’s such a pain and over-bloated. iTunes 2010 runs better than iTunes 2017… that is messed up.
15 – Software
Fix Mail. Fix spotlight. Bring back Aperture.
Allocate staff to interact with users of your software and aggressively update them based on the users input. It’s not that difficult.. the users will give you the answers to the quiz. Listen to them and your software will shine.
16 – iCloud
This is kind of embarrassing. Other companies offer better services for less money.
17 – Retail
Allocate more employees to help people at the help desk. Every store I go in has 10-20 sales people, mostly talking to one another, meanwhile 2-3 tech people are backlogged with pissed off customers. This is mis-managed and can be better handled. Remember, since opening retail you sell more sku’s, so you need to service them better.
18 – Keynotes
Tim, step aside and let someone with passion, excitement and a great stage excitement do the keynotes. Make them count. Don’t assemble the press and your fan base to come to one of these events to tell them the new iPhone is thinner. Don’t waste everyone’s time and understand when you have the stage.. perform… sell… and if you lack things to talk about, then it should be telling to your allocate of the talent around you and how to utilized them.
19 – Apple Pay
WHY is this not being advertised like crazy? No excuse for the lazy approach to this. Advertise this everywhere. Co-Brand with world brands. Do a co-brand commercial with subway showing people buying a sandwich and paying with their phone in seconds. Show how easy and secure it is. Almost every person I tell about Apple Pay has no clue about how much more secure it is than the other choices. Even the retail staff doesn’t know. Who’s job is that to tell them?
Apple! Run ads showcasing that strength.
20 – HomeKit
See how users use products like Control4 and start building the ecosystem for that. I feel this, along with CarPlay, can be a game-changer if done right. You create great things like HomeKit, yet trying to educate the consumer about it is lacking. There should a fun section on the website all about these technologies you have. Consumers should not have to dig for that info. The website and marketing should be promoting them more aggressively.
21 – iPad
iPad should be updated every year and announced and released Q3 for holiday quarter sales.
22 – R&D
Make sure the products are tested enough so you don’t have issues after the release (see maps, EarPods, macbook pro 2016 battery, etc.. )
Those are some of my ideas.
Dude, your living in a dream world. Apple doesn’t care about this stuff. If they did, it would have happened already. Nice thoughts, but this is not the Apple of today under the current leadership (if you can call it that). While my current devices still work well, I’ve moved on. Went with the surface 4 pro, going to get the EERO WAPs. I’m tired of waiting for Apple to get their shit together, actions speak louder than words MR. cook, and lately all we have heard is words. Apple is lost at sea.
Bravo! Well done.
Amazing that all Apple actually has to do to blow minds is to recognize and resurrect part of its past. I don’t need no radical desktop makeover- in fact, they could make it thick again and I’d be ecstatic. Faster and snappier, too though. Upgraded- Again.
On Jan. 3, 1977, the Apple Computer Corp. is incorporated.
Happy 40th INC birthday Apple!
If Apple doesn’t do a decent job at refreshing the Mac mini and Mac Pro in the next weeks, there is good reason to be concerned about Apple’s future. And I say that as an Apple-platform developer since 1978. Tim Cook must deliver some enterprise-class Macs ASAP. I hope he does that. If he needs to outsource that hardware to IBM, so be it.
The only way Apple will update the Mac mini and/or Mac Pro within the next month is if they include prior generation CPUs and such. It will be like my complaint about the current crop of MacBook Pros. Apple could have shipped those exact variants as much as five months before they did. Apple could have been prepared to ship new MacBook Pros in February/March of this year.
As I’ve said before, Apple has gotten itself out of cycle with the rest of the industry. Rather than be proactive and have designs ready to implement and ship within days or a couple weeks after a new set of components are available and standards get ratified, Apple is shipping things as much as nine or ten months after that. Then, rinse and repeat. (But in cases like the Mac mini and Mac Pro, they seem to have abandoned even that strategy.)
The problem *IS* the combination of bean counters and the push to the lowest cost and highest return on internal development efforts. It can take two years or more to bring a new Mac to market. The options are to wait until the components and standards are nearly 100% complete before starting those Mac designs OR to start with very early design information which will likely change slightly and therefore require design changes in the Macs before the designs are finalized.
The first is the most cost effective, but it means that Apple will be shipping everything way late — months or maybe even a year or more after the rest of the industry is shipping things. The second gets things out the door as early as possible but the development costs are higher to cover those last minute changes.
Apple used to be the latter. Remember Apple shipping 802.11n “compliant” boxes even before the standard was completely ratified? Those days are long gone. It’s the days of the bean counters penny pinching at Apple.
If Apple does wait and announce/ship with the latest and greatest, the Mac Mini won’t be announced until February and won’t ship in quantity until early March. If Apple does wait and do the right thing on the Mac Pro, it won’t announce until April or May and won’t ship in quantity until at least May. (The scary thing is that those dates could still hold and we’ll still see last generation equipment!)
I hope that Apple returns to its old ways, but that hope is fading.
So are you advocating that Apple become the next Dell, i.e., the champion of the race to the bottom?
That’s not the Apple that most of us have loved for the past 40 years!
Don’t hold your breath for new desktops.
If Apple follows your advice, then they shouldn’t hold their breath for new customers.
Apple’s laptop lineup is weaker than it has been in over 6 years, it’s not going to grow the Mac business. High performance and large screen desktops are without question necessary and popular, if Apple would only listen to its customers.