The new Mac Pro was the first glimmer of hope. Now I read that they are releasing updated mbp 13 without touchbar. If they start offering full powered full port mbp 13 without touchbar my optimisim will be back.
I don't think anybody expected it to be as successful as it has been. And the feature set and their acquisitions e.g. Beddit gives a really interesting insight into where Apple is heading in the health sector.
How do you measure success? Because there is no way any comparison with the number of people who own an iPhone or any other kind of Apple device. Even in Japan where Apple has the lion share of the smartphone market I hardly see people with an Apple watch.
Samsung Buds OTOH stay in (and don't have the daggy bits hanging out).
You might also be surprised how many are knockoffs [1] which are rapidly improving in quality [2]:
[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/3311456/airpods-knockoffs-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRS_social_grade
The amazing thing about the classic Apple designs was the way they managed to be textbook Veblen goods while also appearing to be gender and class neutral. They were aspirationally expensive, but not blingy.
That changed when gold and pink started to creep into the design vocabulary and the prices started moving up. The classic designs were more democratic. Not everyone could afford them, but they managed the neat trick of appearing to be visually inclusive rather than aggressively exclusive.
From that POV, Watch has been a design failure. It lacks the social status of the high-end I-have-money watch brands. It's neither expensive-but-neutral nor an outrageously self-indulgent statement product. The expensive straps and stainless steel variants made a pitch for the latter, but it was never convincing.
As a signifier it's visually bland and even slightly vulgar, which is why it hasn't had the same cultural impact. It's also why it works for C1/C2s but not for the ABs. Sales may be fine, but in its current form it's never going to be the covert high status product that Apple used to do so well.
Apple is much more in line with a premium brand driven good like Nike, or Sony.
A true Veblen good phone would cost like $20000, be gold cased and nobody you know would own one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertu
[Only ever saw them on sales at Heathrow Terminal 5 and Courchevel 1850]
Apparently you measure success by "besting the single greatest consumer product success story in a generation". By this metric, virtually nothing would be considered a success.
Meanwhile, Apple became the biggest watchmaker in the world as of 2017. After only three years of producing watches, they unseated literally every other watchmaker in the world on revenue. That seems pretty damned successful to me.
It has disappointed, actually, according to the very article we are commenting on: "The company sold about 10 million units in the first year, a quarter of what Apple forecast"
You definitely can see it on more people's wrists than in the early days.
And the "Wearables, Home, and Accessories" revenue was 5.1 billion last quarter, which is bigger than iPad Revenue of 4.8 billion.
I actually think that Watch sales is a surprise on how well it is. Nobody expected it would be that good.
My point is, peripherals can be successful and game-changing.
The day watch becomes standalone and/or compatible with Android is the day it has a chance of becoming a true game changer. Until then I wouldn't even describe it as a peripheral, but just an accessory for an iPhone really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#/media/File:Ipod_sales_pe...
I'd say keep the Touch Bar, but add an escape key.
If you want "full port", invent a time machine and travel back to the time when people accepted cables. That time is gone now.
The issue comes to when it's a acceptables trade-off. I think for now the wireless future is not here yet, and won't be for the next year or 18 months.
Apple didn't pull it off with it's AirPods (too pricy for wide adoption, still lag in the bluetooth stack, only 3 or 3 designs available for something that needs to fit on people's ear), I'd say they were too early to pull the plug on wired.
If they were too early, people would stop buying their devices because of the "lack" of functionality. They haven't. That means that the people who claim they're too early were wrong.
It turns out that most people who buy computers and most people who complain about the range of ports on computers are not the same size groups, and are mostly not comprised of the same people.
My impression of airpods is they added on demand 'connect to me' and always on device listing to the bluetooth protocol.
I think a way to solve the 'which device to connect to' conundrum is to make NFC re-association a standard thing with bluetooth devices. So instead of screwing around with software menus, you would bash your 2 devices together and have them (re)connect within 200ms.
The nintendo switch kind of gives this to you with their joycons. Slide the joycon in and it's associated & connected with that switch, no software fuckery required. It's a lot nicer than many other BT experiences for me.
Wifi on the other hand, has been fairly good since day 1.
And you should only be buying the monitor if you are after a reference quality display. In which case you would know how cheap it is.
tl;dr the only people who buy the base model will be the enthusiasts who just want a Mac Pro, and they are indeed getting a bad deal, but this machine isn't for them, however much they want it to be.
256GB does not store you a lot of RAW photos, video, or whatever Pros are editing with this machine.
Not a good configuration for everybody, but pretty good for me.
Pretty big difference.
Apple's display specs are impressive but it's not actually going to compete with reference displays. It's missing all the actual reference display features (interlacing controls, SDI inputs, programmable LUT, info overlays, etc...). You can buy more products that add that, like this input box from Blackmagic: https://www.studiodaily.com/2019/06/blackmagic-caters-apple-... But now the price is adding up and you've got more boxes and dongles to deal with.
But out of the box the display itself is competing with high-end color accurate displays, the content creation displays. It's not competing at all with reference displays.
All that said more relevant to this discussion is the fact that Apple doesn't have a cheaper display at all. If you want a workstation and you go to an Apple store the only monitor option they have is the Pro Display XDR, when all you may actually want or need is the display from an iMac just in a standalone case for use with the Mac Pro.
Come on, this is just not true. It's an 8-core with 32GB of RAM and 256GB SSD for 6000$. Just because Apple found some PC workstation that's even more expensive than the Mac Pro doesn't mean it's good value.
I feel I very much should be in Apples target for a pro-machine considering my Windows workstation is a dual GPU 1080Ti machine (cost a fraction of an iMac Pro and outperforms it) I use for 3D rendering, animation and video editing. Yet when I point out it's terrible value I again just get told it's not for me and it's for people who edit "Marvel movies" for a living.
I mean the only real complaint you could have with their pre-Mac Pro lineup was it just didn't have any way to fill niches, everything had to be good for the 80% and not right for rest. Wouldn't it have made a lot more sense to target this product as modular enough to fill the rest of those needs instead of targetting it specifically at the highest-of-high-end blockbuster movie editors.
1) OSX 2) Top of the line specs
Anyone seriously buying a Mac Pro is either in the above group or just a crazed fanboy happy to pay the ludicrous premium to say they did.
On the other hand one has to wonder, however, if at some point around the same specs as the "low-end" mac pro, that a server wouldn't make more sense? Can you stuff a pro graphics card into a Dell R740 and have it far enough away that the fan roar won't be an issue when editing 4K video?
The Mac Pro is a luxury good and should be viewed as such. The fact that the tech community is up in arms about it because it's technically a computer is really their own fault for misclassifying the device.
Why would anyone buy a Telsa semi truck when the Ram 3500 HD costs half the price?
That was the entire point of my comment. I'm saying whywhywhywhy is confusing two different product categories just because those categories happen to overlap slightly at the high end of one category and the low end of the other.
And I don't think that the posting you answered was wrong. Apple calls this machine a "Mac Pro", so any professional users should be targetted by it - they don't have any other machines for professionals who require a desktop machine. Instead, they should have called it the "Mac Hollywood", as this seems to be the target audience.
I know plenty of professionals who use an 11” MacBook Air. Your definition of professional is not the same as everyone else’s, and it’s ridiculous to try to fit everyone else to your own mold.
Basically, stop using the argument “no REAL professional would ever...”. It’s a worthless argument.
There was no absurdity in the comment you answered on. Apple pitches the machine for a general "professional" audience, especially as it is the only modular Mac offerring. But in fact they only designed (and more importantly) priced it for a very special subsection of the professional audience. So they should be more specific in their pitch and also offer a modular machine for the rest of the professional users.
And your original comment would have been more constructive, if you had tried to make your point explicitly, as you are doing now.
Your definition of professional is not the same as everyone else’s, and it’s ridiculous to try to fit everyone else to your own mold.
I am not doing so. The original poster (and I agree) just also wants a modular Mac machine.
Basically, stop using the argument “no REAL professional would ever...”. It’s a worthless argument.
I have nowhere said that, please stop putting words into my mouth.
I'm not in the industry but from what I have observed of friends who are this Mac Pro is a machine that will evolve workflows compared to a DIY build workstation. As far as audio is concerned which I know more about this Mac Pro will be the industry standard for quite some time. They are already redesigning DAW software to facilitate the extra potential it provides.
The video accelerator card is the only Mac Pro-specific thing, and it's competing against existing (albeit more expensive) products that enable that, too. Like the RED ROCKET-X. Or the CUDA-accelerated decoders on Quadros that you can't put in a Mac Pro.
Except... if your content is all in ProRes. Then the accelerator card makes an appearance and could make life more pleasant. But if your workflow isn't ProRes, then that pleasantry comes at the cost of 1) more than doubling storage requirements, and 2) transcoding time (which is slow, because the ProRes accelerator won't help in turning something else _into_ ProRes).
For DAWs, I'm struggling to see the "extra potential" - it's a Xeon processor.
There was a time when Mac Pros were an excellent value, and you could afford one if you were a modestly successful entrepreneur. But with the new Mac Pro, Apple seems to largely ignore the needs of entrepreneurs and small studios. It appears targeted at large studios where the cost premium is a rounding error.
But contrary to popular belief, many "professionals" do consider cost when buying equipment. Being able to depreciate this stuff on your taxes doesn't suddenly make the cost irrelevant.
Dell: Xeon W, 8 cores, 3.7GHz, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD, $3,506 [2]
I know there are some configurations at some points in the product refresh cycle where Apple computers are price-competitive with Windows computers, but this isn't an example of it.
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/mac-pro-2019-specs-price,news-3... [2] https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...
Where did you read this?