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Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

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Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#91

Post by lethargic_meat »

gurneyHaleck wrote: post #49
jrnichols wrote: post #21

the whole desktop line is in serious need of a refresh. at least some new Mac Mini units. it's been over two years now. I bought the mid-range Mac Mini, and it's identical to what's in the Store today. That whole line needs more RAM, newer CPUs, and SSD across the board. :|

But don't actually LIKE the mac mini. It's not something I particularly want. I do kind of want the huge cinema displays. But they're expensive. I do kind of want the cylindrical mac pro. But it's expensive. Apple's laptops are the sweet spot. I want them. The price is right. And they have performed. Tablets and touchscreens suck compared to a solid laptop. Mac minis are borderline indistinguishable from any other ma…

Mac Pros were hugely disappointing for professionals: - The big boxes were highly upgradeable, which is what a professional needs. - The trashcans are a nice concept but traded the main perk of Mac Pros for design.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#92

Post by pdimitar »

linguae wrote: post #77
dba7dba wrote: post #5

I wish Apple never had their success with iTunes and iPhone. It was like winning lottery for them. And you know what happens when someone wins lottery. They forget about their roots and in the end, only ruin remains.

Honestly I've been feeling the same way lately, not so much about iTunes but about the post-iPhone, post-Steve Jobs Apple. I've been a Mac user for over 10 years. In 2006 it felt that Apple was fully devoted to the Mac and its Mac customers. It made computers that fit the needs of a wide variety of people, from casual users to power users. Its hardware was upgradeable, even if it sometimes meant needing to unscrew a…

I've never been an Apple user but I feel you. For me the most baffling part is that a company with supposed hundreds of billions in cash reserves is just sitting on their bottom ignoring a good chunk of their users. I've heard some news that they fired a lot of QA engineers as well but I have no clue if that's true or not.

It does make a lot of sense to keep a strong hold of your market even if you are struggling. Even if you don't have good ideas about innovation, periodical hardware refreshes and opening up a little would project an image of you planning to return, even if it's 2-3 years down the line.

The lack of action from Apple's side however is the most non-sensical reaction in this situation. I honestly can't explain it -- unless we assume that bean-counting businessmen forbid any action where no big profit margins are visible.

As for the current PC/laptop landscape, you might be a little too melodramatic. Windows 10 is an extremely capable consumer-grade OS and while it absolutely doesn't have the polish of macOS, it's the OS that works with the most hardware in history (I was really surprised to read you had a problem with your USB dongle; I have 5 different brands of dongles, USB Type-A and Type-C alike and they worked out of the box) and shows a lot of potential for the near future.

I do agree that the [former] attention to detail Apple showed was unmatched. It's a huge loss to simply let a good chunk of your users go.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#93

Post by lemming »

lisper wrote: post #26

What I really want is for my state (SSD, RAM, maybe the CPU, but probably not the GPU) to be easily detachable from my human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, display). I want to be able to use a desktop in one place, then unplug a small unit which contains the aforementioned state (i.e. the equivalent of a sleeping laptop but with no keyboard or display), carry that someplace else, plug it in to a different set of…

Absolutely. I actually feel like the Mac Mini form factor could be good enough for this. It's not pocket sized, but it's better than a laptop, I could happily schlep it from the office to home again. The one thing it's missing is being able to turn it into a laptop somehow when I do actually need that, i.e. when travelling.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#94

Post by eropple »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #67
sliken wrote: post #59

I'm sure 6 months ago apple would have said they are working on "great" laptops. But we ended up with half ish the battery life promised, 16GB ram max, and needing dongles to connect to monitors, mouse, cameras, or external disks.

That dongle situation will be resolved in a year and for the better.

I really have my doubts, because most of the gear I have won't be changing by then. The "solution" will remain for me to have two sets of cables for most of my gear: USB-B/C to USB-A and USB-C cables (because I'm not replacing my desktop anytime soon).

That's a bad solution.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#95

Post by milankragujevic »

derefr wrote: post #72
lisper wrote: post #26

What I really want is for my state (SSD, RAM, maybe the CPU, but probably not the GPU) to be easily detachable from my human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, display). I want to be able to use a desktop in one place, then unplug a small unit which contains the aforementioned state (i.e. the equivalent of a sleeping laptop but with no keyboard or display), carry that someplace else, plug it in to a different set of…

You could keep a virtual machine on the SSD, with each docking host having the same VM software installed. Then you'd literally be able to hibernate the VM and physically move it.

I literally thought about doing this today. Have Ubuntu + VirtualBox on multiple computers and any OS in a virtual machine and use a USB 3 SSD (you can get either a specialized one or a generic SATA SSD and a USB 3 enclosure) as the storage medium. I'm going to try it now, might even make a blog post if it works out.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#96

Post by carussell »

yakult wrote: post #44
lisper wrote: post #26

What I really want is for my state (SSD, RAM, maybe the CPU, but probably not the GPU) to be easily detachable from my human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, display). I want to be able to use a desktop in one place, then unplug a small unit which contains the aforementioned state (i.e. the equivalent of a sleeping laptop but with no keyboard or display), carry that someplace else, plug it in to a different set of…

I would go a bit further: I want my state to be inside a seamless hardware agnostic VM, that I can access anywhere through public terminals that I only partially trust. I would have the option of either having my storage with me that I plug in, or in the cloud and I just provide 2fa. My device would have a cpu/gpu/etc befitting a mobile device, and the most barebones / untrusted terminals would just be screen/inputs/…

What is partial trust and how does it differ from full trust?

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#97

Post by anexprogrammer »

enjo wrote: post #17

The latest rev pushed me to a PC for the first time in like 15 years. It's partly because I didn't love the new Macbook Pro, but also cause hey..change is fun sometimes. I'm very happy with my new Surface Book. I never thought I'd like the touchscreen as much as I do. I LOVE being able to go to tablet mode for calls and stuff where I sort of want to just wander around. The pen has completely changed how I do flow-cha…

When I've switched back and forth (to Thinkpads), I don't miss the touchpad as I love the trackpoint. I do miss trackpoint a few months when I've switched to Mac, despite the excellent touchpad.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#98

Post by eropple »

hkarthik wrote: post #6

This comes at no surprise. I predicted that at some point desktop computers used by designers and software engineers would start approaching workstation class pricing (around 4K USD or more) as laptops took over. This will reflect the depressed demand as more people are able to get what they need done via a laptop. Apple might be one of the few manufacturers able to sell desktops at a loss, and justify it since the M…

High-end GPUs are overkill for most tasks for software developers. My current PC has a $600 GPU in it (because I wanted to buy top-of-the-line, and that meant the 980 Ti; I carried it over to the new build), which is now about a $300 GPU. The rest of the desktop was $800, including 32GB of RAM and a 6700K. It's not nearly as expensive as you suggest and it's not going to be.

A high-end PC is going to top out at $1400 or so for the foreseeable future. You can go higher if you want to pay for it--but you aren't going to need to. If anything, those prices will come down, not go up.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#99

Post by roystonvassey »

enjo wrote: post #17

The latest rev pushed me to a PC for the first time in like 15 years. It's partly because I didn't love the new Macbook Pro, but also cause hey..change is fun sometimes. I'm very happy with my new Surface Book. I never thought I'd like the touchscreen as much as I do. I LOVE being able to go to tablet mode for calls and stuff where I sort of want to just wander around. The pen has completely changed how I do flow-cha…

Strong opinions, weakly held :)

But, yes, I transition from a Mac (home) to Windows (work) daily and while I can choose not to, I find that working on different OS and learning its nuances has taught me a lot about how my Python programs execute, for instance.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#100

Post by untog »

threeseed wrote: post #90
shmerl wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty poor excuse. Apple has enough money to work on many things in parallel. So if they choke their browser development team, it means they are behind. Basically, it's barely important for them altogether.

What are you talking about ? It's not an excuse but deliberate design choices. That is why Safari is by far the best browser on the Mac.

It's a deliberate design choice to not dedicate resources to a project? And not assigning more resources to the project makes it better? Interesting.
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