Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

Apple:

> So we ran into heat sink problems with MacPro. Also, people wanted a pro machine to be extensible and upgradeable.

> We learned from our mistakes. We give you the non-upgradable non-extensible iMac Pro that is also a heat sink problem.

[1][2]

Apple has completely dropped the ball on the pro market. Not only did the completely missed the mark with the "trashcan" MacPro (in all respects: the pros didn't want it, Apple themselves couldn't iterate and improve on the design), but they have all but abandoned anything pro-related:

- MacOS stagnates.

- MacBook "Pro" is not really a pro machine [2]

- iMac Pro is a bone thrown to the crowds to wow and please, and it has "trashcan" Mac Pro written all over it

- Thanks to the USB-c SNAFU you can't even connect external monitors to Macbook "Pro"s reliably (keeping the native color range and resolution)

And there are multiple other issues big and small. To that end, Ars Technica's "Bad" and "Ugly" conclusions are quite damning.

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[1] Quoting myself, https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/940673994126249987

[2] Mac Pro's issues: https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai...

[3] "The Best Laptop Ever Made" https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever and "Fixing the MacBook Pro" https://marco.org/2017/11/24/fixing-the-macbook-pro

1. MacOSX has not been stagnating. The focus has just been on behind the scenes improvements e.g. exclusive 64-bit, Metal 2, APFS and I am very glad this is the case. Apple needs a lot more of this.

2. MacBook Pro definitely has issues (keyboard) but in every other respect it is a pro machine. If you can provide an alternative I would be thrilled to know about it. And if "pro" = "lots of ports" well frankly I have standardised on WiFi, BT and USB-C for all my devices and so I haven't missed any of them.

3. iMac Pro is not designed for crowds. And it isn't a replacement for the Mac Pro which is coming this year.

4. I connect dual monitors to my MacBook Pro every single day and have never had issues with the color gamut or resolution changing.

It also thermally throttles under the sort of heavy loads people buy workstations for and that's using the lowest spec one.

ad 2) touchbar is a gimmick making tasks more difficult (you have to visually check what you're doing), battery time is lower in comparison with older MBP, touchpad is uncomfortably big (touching it accidentally). The ports are not really an issue in comparison.

All this feels like they deprecated the Pro series, and replaced it with... this. Honestly - what is the difference between Macbook and MBP now - the touchbar?

Agree with 1. Disagree entirely with 2. I have two MacBook Pros (one from work) and the keyboards both have issues. One is newer and they tried to fix it, didn't work. The touchbar is a gimmick. It's decent on small workloads, and of course is fairly useless on heavy workloads. But none of that surprises me. They push the limits of what is possible with hardware design. The worst part is price. These macbook pros are close to $4k each. Go ahead and look what you can buy for $4000 if you aren't buying apple. You can get laptops that are much cheaper, much faster, somewhat extendible, and _well designed_. This is probably the last macbook i'll buy unless something changes.

Apple definitely is dropping the ball on its professional customers. These machines are great for browsing the web or writing some code (assuming you have an external keyboard), but anytime you need to do some actual computation, you need an EC2 instance or a different workstation. The DL/ML community is more or less left out unless they use an external GPU chassis (which is trash).

I get that they are not trying to make workstations or servers, in any case, higher end chassis should be extendible, at least if you want professionals to use your products.

Anyone dropping ~10k on an iMac Pro either has more money than they know what to do with, or they're a fool.

1. OSX has not been stagnating. It’s been regressing. Design patterns that used to be encouraged by Apple led to first party and third party apps that were small, focused, inter-operated with other apps and were extremely scriptable. All this was supported by window handling that made it easy to support a workflow involving multiple apps. The new design patterns encourage apps that are to be used full screen, have low visual density, and does not encourage inter-app communication or scripting at all, and with the sandbox actively discouraged it.

Even Gruber has been pointing out how Apple is encouraging apps that eschew all the advantages that OSX has over iOS to the point that it’s much better for devs to simply build web apps (his focus is more on the sandbox though so that’s another way OSX has regressed).

https://daringfireball.net/2018/02/non_native_apps_threat_to...

You do realize there’s a modular Mac Pro in the pipeline, yes?

Long overdue unfortunately. I have a trashcan, a cube, a mini, a plus, laptops... I like MacOS, but I wish they would have build modular computers earlier.

There’s a Mac Pro in the pipeline.

Whether or not it will be modular is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile by the time it is released (if it is released), it will have been almost 4 years since the previous update, and almost 6 years since the last MacPro actually wanted by professionals.

They've explicitly called it modular.

In addition to the new iMac Pro, Apple is working on a completely redesigned, next-generation Mac Pro architected for pro customers who need the highest-end, high-throughput system in a modular design, as well as a new high-end pro display.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/06/imac-pro-most-powerfu...

I'd wait and see. The previous iteration was called the most expandable Mac Pro yet. And we ended up what we ended up with.

So far I wouldn't hold my breath. The newest iMac they call "Pro"? It's a pain to even change the RAM in that thing. So much for "listening to the pros".

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