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Oh wow, reading that link was really useful. Thank you. They sound absolutely terrible at the moment to be honest!

by aogl 8y ago

dwaite 8y ago
What people tend to not realize is that Apple has flagship models (iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro) and secondary models (MacBook Air, Mac mini, Mac Pro). The flagship models used to be upgraded as technology came available, but are now typically upgraded yearly. There's a suspicion that Apple held back the hardware refresh from WWDC partially because they weren't ready w.r.t. the keyboard repair program announced today. MacBook Air is a zombie. I believe they want to kill it, but the retina MacBook is too expensive to replace it, and it sells extremely well (at high margins). The Mac mini is a zombie, or perhaps a bit of a square peg. It was meant as the desktop switcher computer, where you plug in your old PC K/V/M and go. Then it kinda sorta rebranded to be upgradable as a server circa 2012 (with products like xServe discontinued), before actually losing those higher end upgrade options in 2013. I think most people don't expect it to be usable as a pro desktop, but Apple has a huge gap there since their desktop focus is on the All-in-One iMac. So like the MacBook Air, the focus is on low cost and good margins, not technology. The Mac Pro they simply didn't predict the market well enough on. The GPU-heavy design they were going for and external peripherals might actually fly if it was coming out today, but general purpose computing didn't embrace using multithreading or OpenCL for getting better performance. So, the ability to use the power of the machine was a bit hit-or-miss depending on the application you were using. Worse, the thermal profile both had a max amount of power and required an even distribution of heat. GPU processing power and power consumption has scaled up due to the highly parallel nature, while Intel's power consumption has stayed relatively the same. The design didn't allow for them to swap out components for the newer ones that hit the market after release. iMac Pro is relatively new and likely a specialty product, although I imagine Apple to take it seriously. So probably not a predictable once-per-year release schedule, but I don't see a reason for that design to get silently shelved and the line to stagnate.

Oh wow, reading that link was really useful. Thank you. They sound absolutely terrible at the moment to be honest!

by aogl 8y ago

Oh wow, reading that link was really useful. Thank you. They sound absolutely terrible at the moment to be honest!

What people tend to not realize is that Apple has flagship models (iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro) and secondary models (MacBook Air, Mac mini, Mac Pro). The flagship models used to be upgraded as technology came available, but are now typically upgraded yearly. There's a suspicion that Apple held back the hardware refresh from WWDC partially because they weren't ready w.r.t. the keyboard repair program announced today. MacBook Air is a zombie. I believe they want to kill it, but the retina MacBook is too expensive to replace it, and it sells extremely well (at high margins). The Mac mini is a zombie, or perhaps a bit of a square peg. It was meant as the desktop switcher computer, where you plug in your old PC K/V/M and go. Then it kinda sorta rebranded to be upgradable as a server circa 2012 (with products like xServe discontinued), before actually losing those higher end upgrade options in 2013. I think most people don't expect it to be usable as a pro desktop, but Apple has a huge gap there since their desktop focus is on the All-in-One iMac. So like the MacBook Air, the focus is on low cost and good margins, not technology. The Mac Pro they simply didn't predict the market well enough on. The GPU-heavy design they were going for and external peripherals might actually fly if it was coming out today, but general purpose computing didn't embrace using multithreading or OpenCL for getting better performance. So, the ability to use the power of the machine was a bit hit-or-miss depending on the application you were using. Worse, the thermal profile both had a max amount of power and required an even distribution of heat. GPU processing power and power consumption has scaled up due to the highly parallel nature, while Intel's power consumption has stayed relatively the same. The design didn't allow for them to swap out components for the newer ones that hit the market after release. iMac Pro is relatively new and likely a specialty product, although I imagine Apple to take it seriously. So probably not a predictable once-per-year release schedule, but I don't see a reason for that design to get silently shelved and the line to stagnate.