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Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess

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41–50 of 53 posts

Re: Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess

#41

It's just that it's not worth $4,000 or even $3,000. The trashcan is cool, despite looking like a trashcan, but way too expensive for what you get. Something at that price needs to last, and permit upgrades. For what you get, and what you can do with it, it's not worth more than $1,000. Many Apple fans buy for status though, and Apple knows this, hence the watch. So, simply having the price tag as an ornament works f…

When it was released, the GPUs in the trash can cost more than its cheapest version.

The Apple watch is best smart watch ever made. Far better to spend $400 on a useful watch than $200 on a useless one.

Re: Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bring back the cheese grater!

That's really not a bad idea. The Macbook I'm using now looks pretty similar to the Macbook I was using when those towers were still in production - even the G5 version. I'm sure people are making FrakenMacs using this enclosure using old, broken Ebay'd enclosures and cheap off the shelf parts that creme the official Mac.

> I'm sure people are making FrakenMacs using this enclosure using old, broken Ebay'd enclosures and cheap off the shelf parts that creme the official Mac.

Yup. I was eyeballing these [1] for exactly that purpose...

[1] https://www.thelaserhive.com/product-category/g5conv/

Re: Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess

#43
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just bite the bullet and hackintosh. It's ridiculously easy. I put one together in an afternoon with parts I had lying around. It even had GPU acceleration for all those silly UI animations to run smoothly. There are lists of hardware that are guaranteed to work. I'm not a Mac guy so I scrapped the system, but as a bored weekend project it was fun. I had no issues installing updates, networking was fine etc.

I tried this a year or so ago, my only stumbling block was getting iMessage/iCloud working properly, which was very difficult, has that improved?

It's improved in that the causes of failure are now better understood. Getting it working means generating some UUIDs and things. e.g. https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/an-idiots-guide-to-imessa...

Re: Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess

#44
I think the article sums it up really well. And I doubt we'll ever see something as extensible as the cheese grater models again. Apple has convinced me by now they dont't want to make anything but throwaway appliances with fashion appeal.

Re: Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess

#45
post #11

I hope somebody at Apple can get it through their heads that a Mac Pro desktop doesn't need to be the thinnest, lightest box full of the most exotic parts with corners engineered to within fractions of a millimeter. It just needs to: 1. Run macOS 2. be fast as hell 3. be quiet 4. be reasonably priced 5. be somewhat expandable on the inside with RAM and disks 6. have a variety of external ports 7. be spec-bumped at le…

8. Be rackable (or at least, parallelepipedic) so the condition 5 holds.

Re: Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess

#46
post #23
post #11

I hope somebody at Apple can get it through their heads that a Mac Pro desktop doesn't need to be the thinnest, lightest box full of the most exotic parts with corners engineered to within fractions of a millimeter. It just needs to: 1. Run macOS 2. be fast as hell 3. be quiet 4. be reasonably priced 5. be somewhat expandable on the inside with RAM and disks 6. have a variety of external ports 7. be spec-bumped at le…

Just bite the bullet and hackintosh. It's ridiculously easy. I put one together in an afternoon with parts I had lying around. It even had GPU acceleration for all those silly UI animations to run smoothly. There are lists of hardware that are guaranteed to work. I'm not a Mac guy so I scrapped the system, but as a bored weekend project it was fun. I had no issues installing updates, networking was fine etc.

It's not really an option in enterprise environment though. If you run a company and have to use Macs, then none of the options available at the moment give you access to lots of power and/or expandability.

Re: Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess

#47

It's just that it's not worth $4,000 or even $3,000. The trashcan is cool, despite looking like a trashcan, but way too expensive for what you get. Something at that price needs to last, and permit upgrades. For what you get, and what you can do with it, it's not worth more than $1,000. Many Apple fans buy for status though, and Apple knows this, hence the watch. So, simply having the price tag as an ornament works f…

When it was released, the GPUs in the trash can cost more than its cheapest version. The Apple watch is best smart watch ever made. Far better to spend $400 on a useful watch than $200 on a useless one.

Problem: That GPU wasn't particularly desirable even back in 2013. Just because you can put in a needlessly expensive "workstation class" GPU doesn't mean it's worth it.

Re: Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess

#48
post #27

I just wish they'd admit the same for the latest Macbook Pro where they appear to be optimizing for things that pros don't care about and removing things they do care about!

The new Macbook Pro has record sales, so no.

You're right in that they won't admit they made a mistake because; in the short term, their decision made more money.

"Higher sales" is orthogonal to what software development professionals want.

They discontinued the Pro version and put the "Pro" name on a "consumer" version as far a software developers are concerned I think.

Re: Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess

#49
post #11

I hope somebody at Apple can get it through their heads that a Mac Pro desktop doesn't need to be the thinnest, lightest box full of the most exotic parts with corners engineered to within fractions of a millimeter. It just needs to: 1. Run macOS 2. be fast as hell 3. be quiet 4. be reasonably priced 5. be somewhat expandable on the inside with RAM and disks 6. have a variety of external ports 7. be spec-bumped at le…

Apple has trouble seeing themselves as sellers of commodity hardware like you describe - they never did, and there's a lot of pressure to innovate since Jobs left. Due to this, they try to innovate on form-factor, which is the aspect they have most control over the product design. The problem is that this is directly at odds with 4) price, 5) expandability and (to a certain extent) easy to 7) spec-bump every year. So…

> Apple has trouble seeing themselves as sellers of commodity hardware like you describe

Switching from PowerPc to Intel chips didn't seem to make them much of a difference.

Re: Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess

#50

It's just that it's not worth $4,000 or even $3,000. The trashcan is cool, despite looking like a trashcan, but way too expensive for what you get. Something at that price needs to last, and permit upgrades. For what you get, and what you can do with it, it's not worth more than $1,000. Many Apple fans buy for status though, and Apple knows this, hence the watch. So, simply having the price tag as an ornament works f…

When it was released, the GPUs in the trash can cost more than its cheapest version. The Apple watch is best smart watch ever made. Far better to spend $400 on a useful watch than $200 on a useless one.

Even if the $400 one is also useless?
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