A great write up. I wonder, whether Apple just has gotten a bit to large for their current organizational structure. It worked, when Apple had no iOS devices to

A great write up. I wonder, whether Apple just has gotten a bit to large for their current organizational structure. It worked, when Apple had no iOS devices to care for and the attention was divided across much less products. Especially the signs of "sloppiness" point in that direction. At minimum, Apple should create senior positions overlooking individual product categories. Even the rather forgotten iPod business could be larger, if there was a small team focussed on the question: what can we do to make new products people want to buy? A friend was just missing a small (waterproof) iPod which works seamlessly with Apple Music for example The same with the Mac. It is understandable from the view of the company, that iOS is the bigger thing. But, as the article mentions, the Mac is a vital part of the Apple eco system. And the Mac Pro is a vital part of the Mac eco system. You need to support the professional developers to have all the applications for your "non-professional" customers. The best sign, that Apple was surprised by the public reaction to the new MacBook Pro was, that they reacted by reducing the dongle prices. It didn't seem to have thought that people would object at buying a collection of them at full prices. When I bought my G3 iBook, it came with the necessary dongles included. Besides the obvious conceptual issues with the current Mac Pro, the biggest sin was not to update its hardware regularly. Same for the Mac Mini. So there needs to be two things done: - set up senior people for each product to make sure that issues/development for that product/category gets the necessary attention, e.g. people who only care about the mac. - these people need to make sure that each product is updated in set cycles. The iOS devices as well as the operating systems are updated in a yearly cycle. Maybe not as strict as with the iPhone, this should be applied to all products. The releases might shift a bit on parts availability, but the Mac Pro and the Mini have missed several updates of CPUs/GPUs/other hardware. One more thing: while it is understandable that the retina MacBook only has soldered on parts, this is less understandable for the MacBook Pro, and not at all for the Mini, iMac or the Mac Pro. How can you design desktop machines like the iMac, where you have to unglue the screen to get to its internals? I still have my G5 iMac, and that was a nicely designed machine. A mac czar could tell upper management, where clever and efficient production methods stop and making a bad product starts...