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Comment by jrnichols | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the same boat this author is. It's disappointing to see the desktop market lagging so far behind. For all of the 68k/PPC years, we could at least say "different architecture" and Intel hadn't caught up. Now we're all Intel, and it's Apple that isn't keeping up. It's frustrating, and I'm not necessarily a "Pro user" anymore at all. I have a current generation Mac Mini, and it's over 2 years old now. What I can buy from the Apple Store right now for the same price is what I got 2 years ago.

I wish I know what Apple was thinking. One would have thought that the "iPhone halo effect" was something that they would have wanted to give momentum to. Instead people are looking at Windows units again.

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> I wish I know what Apple was thinking.

It's literally incomprehensible. Just make a really good fast desktop computer. They're one of the largest companies in the world now with essentially unlimited financial resources, and decades of core competency in making high end desktop computers. So like why don't they just fucking do it.

> So like why don't they just fucking do it.

Google shovels billions into these absurd projects that never go anywhere and nobody blinks because it's Google. They announce projects and then cancel them just before they hit store shelves, or worse, after they've sold some and then decide to arbitrarily brick them. It's just Google being Google. Nobody cares.

Apple removes a single connector on their product and everyone goes apeshit. "Apple's doomed!" "Apple profits are going to suffer! Sell!" Doesn't matter that their device sold in record numbers. It's about perception.

Apple has to tread carefully. They too unbelievable amounts of shit on the Cube, a computer that in retrospect was just one stepping-stone on the path towards the very successful Mini, and on other "failures". They're allergic to public humiliation like that, and a desktop computer that sells only in low volumes is a failure.

Google treats their real product pretty well (such as the Google Pixel), it's just that Google has a lot of "beta" products NOT actually meant for consumers.

And concerning Apple, their connector choices have been really stupid for the past 10 years, only the magsafe was nice.

Google will kick their "real product" to the curb pretty fast. How many people bought a flagship Android phone only to find updates dried up after two years? How many people committed to various Google services only to have them abruptly shut down?

Apple might have stubbornly stuck to their 30-pin connector for way too long, but at least people who bought accessories for it weren't frozen out when the latest incarnation of USB Mini/Micro/Whatever caught on.

"Really stupid" is shit like the Nexus Q (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_Q) discontinued before launch, or the half-assed effort to get Android vendors to update their software more often. It's Microsoft's utter failure to capitalize on any meaningful market share in the mobile space when they were a leader in mobile/PDA/tablet applications for years.

The problem is that they still have a pretty small product design department, and they're committed to not shipping "crap" products.

What I really don't understand is why they didn't foresee this, and just updated their cheese grater Macs. After all, it's way easier to simply update a motherboard to fit a faster CPU than it is to rearchitect the Garbage Can design every time there's a new CPU and GPU architecture out there.

The only thing I can think of is that they've either just downprioritized a lot to focus on $new_secret_product, or that they've developed a new Mac Pro that for some reason didn't pan out, so they needed to start over again.

They've invested heavily into new manufacturing processes since they designed the cheesegrater. Those processes can produce things like the garbage can easily enough, but they can't be made to produce the old cheesegrater parts as-is. They'd need to effectively redesign the cheesegrater at this point anyway, if they wanted to build more of (something that looks and works like) them using the suppliers+factories they have today.

The cheese grater design is one of my favourite designs for a tower ever and I've never owned a Mac.

The business partner has an old one that he uses because it has some old software he needs for design files.

When it eventually dies I'm converting it to a normal PC case and using it for my next build.

It's just a beautiful design.

>It's literally incomprehensible. Just make a really good fast desktop computer.

For the sake of argument, why? It's probably one of their worst selling products. Nobody defends the remaining iPod enthusiasts when they demand a new giant capacity iPod.

Maybe we just need to accept that Apple doesn't want to be in the desktop computer business for much longer?

Because they are a computer company.

Their inability to make a top of the line desktop is threatening my ability to justify buying their laptops or anything else from them. I run a company. I'm not going to mix and match operating systems and if I can't have high end desktops for heavy media work I'm going to switch everything eventually. I'm not abnormal.

People keep trying to come up with some 4D chess explanations for why this makes sense for the always wise and prescient Apple. It's much simpler to use Ockham's razor to conclude that they are making a shortsighted mistake.

>Because they are a computer company.

You saying this doesn't make it true. To a neutral observer, Apple looks like a technology company that makes consumer products, including sometimes computers.

> Apple Computer

Edit: From Wikipedia:

During his keynote speech at the Macworld Expo on January 9, 2007, Jobs announced that Apple Computer, Inc. would thereafter be known as "Apple Inc.", because the company had shifted its emphasis from computers to consumer electronics.[93][94] This event also saw the announcement of the iPhone and the Apple TV.

Obviously the shareholders want the business to focus on whats the most profitable. iPhone seems basically to be a license to print money for Apple.

Still, I think there are two arguments:

They are sitting on so much cash. There is obviously a cultural or organizational problem that produces to much friction to keep this product line up to date. I'm fairly certain many other corporations, if provided access to basically infinite cash, could figure out how to put new ram in an existing product line every year.

There's huge value in having creative professionals and developers use your product. Keeping people in your ecosystem is important. This might be hard to quantify on the bottom line, but it seems like an obvious strategic mistake to give up this advantage.

>Keeping people in your ecosystem is important.

What if the ecosystem they want is iPads and iPhones?

It's not my saying it that makes it true, it's the fact that they made every single one of the 50 or so varying models of desktop and laptop computers that I have purchased over the last 16 years.

Every time someone brings up sales volumes, they don't seem to connect the shitty updates with correspondingly shitty sales. Of course the Mac Pro sells in low volumes; it's a frigging 4 year old computer now. Same with the mini. If Apple updated these on an annual basis (just the cpu/gpu etc) then maybe sales wouldn't look like shit.

And they clearly make substantial profits on the Mac line, so again why don't they just fucking do it?

Even if they didn't who cares? For example, every motor vehicle manufacturer has an unprofitable racing effort and generates interesting concept cars and special editions to fill out the line.

Apple can have a flagship line that's break even or worse to anchor the high end. It's literally inexplicable, and I think framing it in the rational actor model is a mistake, it's best explained as a fuckup.

I wish I could upvote this (and your other comments) 100 times. Amazing high quality machines will keep the design and dev community on Mac for years to come, churning out the apps that help to make the iPhone ecosystem work.

Bleeding power users to alternative systems creates vulnerability.

These arguments would be the same for Microsoft circa 2007. Why should Microsoft care if the designers, developers, and tastemakers hate their products? They've got so much lock-in that people will be forced to use their stuff forever. Wheee, we're invincible. We all know how this turned out.

I'm running up against low memory issues on my 16gb MBP lately. I absolutely cannot responsibly update my Apple product right now because of the 16gb limitation on the MBP. It does matter!

I'm getting ready to bite the bullet and go back to Linux desktop.

My theory is that they strongly believe PCIe-over-Thunderbolt (now -over-USB-C) will obviate all need for internal expandibility/upgradability, and they went all-in on a form-factor (the garbage-can Mac) to take advantage of that... and then the market has stubbornly refused to co-operate by releasing Thunderbolt peripherals equivalent to internal components. So they're playing chicken with said market, probably under Intel's repeated promises to make it happen.

Which won't happen until Intel is more willing to loosen their grip on Thunderbolt. With Thunderbolt, in order to even get in the door, you have to file an application to request to get into the development program which they promise to get back to you within three weeks in order to just get the datasheets needed to start designing. Conversely, protocols like PCIe and USB, you can get the chips, the datasheets, and development boards, with no signup process, just waiting a few days for the items to come in the mail. When you treat your customers like that, it's no surprise that the takeup on thunderbolt has been tepid.

Not to mention you can only buy controllers from intel, and we are talking $50+ a controller, its totally insane.

When my machine isn't portable, I'd much rather have my upgrades mounted inside a generously-sized case than a tiny one surrounded by a rat's nest of cables.

You touch on what I miss about the old days from Apple, the "speed bumps". Apple used to make updates to the Macs a bit more often then they do these days. A lot of the time the updates weren't much more then a slightly faster CPU and maybe a new graphics. I don't expect completely new designs every year, but it boggles my mind why Apple won't put in better CPUs that are pin compatible with their motherboards.

I think it boggles our mind because of cognitive dissonance. The answer is a George Carlin They Don't Care About You rant, but we don't want to think of Apple as being that crotchety, but are merely distracted.

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