Yes, on this site. We’re pretty technical around here.
Other sites may have more of the “it’s expensive therefore it’s better” attitude. That was my daughter’s justification for her iPhone - she wanted people to see her holding something very expensive, it is the same as jewelry to her.
Gone? I have one here that my company pays for. It cost $50 new and runs win8. Also a Microsoft Band v2 on my wrist that I got free. And I’m currently typing at a Win10 desktop. All this stuff just works - fluidly and seamlessly - when I connect it together with USB or Bluetooth. It also works seamlessly and fluidly with the Google system.
I think that if you buy into either the Windows or the Apple mindset it will all “just work” because you will have shaped your mind to fit the container. And there’s nothing wrong with that! - they are just tools, and if you are using them optimally there’s no shame.
I personally prefer the ROI of linux and that’s what I use on equipment I actually own. But people like me are not in anybody’s target demographic!
I got your point. The issue is at some point we have to simply say “The jury isn’t out anymore…judge has ruled.” Apple makes better products regardless of how some are ardent defenders of microsoft or android or whomever.
But like all things, Apple isn’t perfect and they have their flaws and issues too.
Indeed. I suspect that this is why “workstation remote access host card” is a configurable option. Not as bad as the hideous 40mm screamers in a 1U; but not a deskside option.
Bought a Retina 5k early 2016. Beauuuutiful screen! But I made a huge mistake. I got a fusion drive for it. Slow as a dog coming out of sleep, and sometimes the disk just sits and spins… egads, never again. SSD or nothing. No, I am not buying a $5000 machine. Just paid this one off, as of this month and I’m going to live with my mistake for at least 2 more years. It’s not a bad machine. But this fusion drive is awful.
Since I am not brand-loyal in any sense, I simply don’t ever have to say that.
Brandkeys says Apple continues to lead the world in laptop brand loyalty in 2017, so there’s no reason for them to offer their product at a competitive price. But making sure the machine is of very high quality will help them maintain that brand loyalty in the future, even though it’s unlikely to have any impact on sales in the present.
Either way I don’t care for their interface; it has too many completely counter-intuitive features for my liking, since I grew up on non-GUI machines that tried to expose the internals instead of cloaking them in elaborate metaphors, and I have grown accustomed to that and comfortable with it.
fair enough … i could have easily missed the market by an order of magnitude.
to your point … true pro machines are still (or have become) a “hobby” for apple as evidenced by the fact that mac pro is indeed years old tech and hasn’t been upgraded. while i havent owned the saving grace of mac pro is it can be upgraded by the user so not wholly dependent on apple for better performance.
the problem for me anyway is apple has moved away from supporting creative professionals so i’d be wary of investing in an ecosystem which no longer exists when there’s other viable choices.
5 or 10 years ago if you were editing video it was fcp or avid. most smaller shops were using fcp there was no choice other than a mac. want the sw got to buy the hardware. since a lot of the industry has moved away from final cut there’s no real need anymore to buy a mac … any of them … unless you really want one.
personally, i don’t like the direction apple’s been going in - i find myself less satisfied with each new device i buy - whether it’s an iphone, appletv or macbook so hard to imagine my next desktop purchase will be an imac let alone an imac pro.
out of kindness i’ve waited until the markets have closed since i’m sure this news will crush the stock:)
Having worked in the graphic design, video and photography field for about 20 years, I’ve never seen any creative shops that aren’t a sea of iMacs or Mac Pros. They’re still very much the industry standard.
Sadly, these won’t run the most recent macOS. Sure they’re way more modular than an all-in-one, but there is a point where continuing to replace the innards gives diminishing returns. Unless you’re really keen on soldering.
Problem one, there’s no such thing as a “true pro machine.” Professionals who need a computer to do their jobs range vastly in their requirements. Writers are “creative professionals,” surely, and all they need is a word processor. Photographers don’t need nearly as much CPU power as videographers. Artists using Photoshop don’t need nearly as many cores as video editors using FCP. Some people need the fastest, baddest GPU money can buy. OTOH, tons of old cheese grater mac pros can be had on craigslist and ebay with their original entry level (20 watt TDP) graphics cards in them, so clearly there are also lots of pros out there who don’t give a damn about GPUs.
Apple’s pro macs don’t make them a lot of money, but they are not a hobby. Hell, their entire ecosystem of apps relies on developers who want to buy pro macs for coding on. It’s like Ferrari or Mercedes building F1 race cars – they do it not because it makes them money directly, but because it’s good for the health and continued success of their company. Happy pro users make for happy brand evangelists whose word of mouth sells computers. Happy pro users are essential to the ecosystem synergy that keeps the whole Apple leviathan going.
The problem is twofold. On the one hand, Apple is a large corporation, and large corporations these days are run on profit/loss spreadsheets. And laptops, the lighter the better, are where the money is. So desktop computers go longer between updates because each update that involves changes to the logic board costs money, and the fewer units you sell, the harder it is to justify paying a team to do a refresh of the product. So you stretch out the time between redos of the product based on how much money you make off it.
The other prong is that, Apple is a secretive paranoid company. That’s the worst part of Jobs’s legacy. So you go longer and longer between updates, but you are allergic to telling anyone your plans. Result: the dwindling number of customers who buy your desktop macs think you have abandoned them and have ceased to care about them. And it doesn’t help that Apple’s internal organization has had some problems, resulting in missed deadlines and even more delays in updating the mac lineup.
And the final piece is that Apple has decided they are no longer interested in making computers (other than the Mac Pro) that can be upgraded. This has resulted in a lot of gnashing of teeth from nerds, but it doesn’t actually have much of anything to do with whether or not they are supporting creative professionals. If your computer is essential to your job, buying a maxed out machine instead of a basic machine that you will tinker with over time is simply the cost of doing business. The only group disserved by non-upgradable machines, really, are those who require the biggest baddest GPU they can afford – but those people are not going to be happy with anything other than a Mac Pro anyway, because every other Mac has at best a mobile GPU in it. Pros who require high end GPUs are the people who have been most severely hurt by Apple’s failure to get their act together and issue updates to the mac pro. And Apple has apologized to them and is making a new Mac Pro for them which will appear sometime next year.
That’s… seriously off base. Apple took their eye off the ball, because spreadsheets and because internal mismanagement and because secret reasons we may never learn of. But the ecosystem is definitely still in place and they are still making computers for and supporting creative professionals.
2009 cheese grater mac pros will not install Sierra or later. 2010 and 2012 cheese graters, will. Plus, the only hardware difference (other than default CPU and GPU) between the 2009 and 2010 cheese graters is in the firmware. if you trick a 2009 mac pro into updating itself to 2010 firmware, it will then happily install and run Sierra.
There’s quite the cottage industry on Ebay of people selling firmware and CPU tray upgrade kits for owners of 2009 mac pros. If you update the firmware, a 2009 mac pro can be upgraded from 4 to 6 cores per CPU socket.
eta: Forgot to say, 2012 cheese grater mac pros were simply a spec bump of the 2010 models with identical firmware.
Apple’s lineup is limited enough that these two statements don’t really have enough room to coexist comfortably: Take your own example of the cheese grater pros. Those used to show up in a wide range of GPU power because some people mostly leaned on the CPU and some didn’t. With the new pro; you’d better hope that your requirements are served by two moderately slow GPUs per CPU; because that’s the only configuration they sell; for reasons that amount to ‘because the thermal core is triangular’.
Apple’s inflexible approach has served them much better on the consumer side, where requirements differ more modestly; and their ability to keep genuinely awful configurations from being sold keeps the experience solid; but it’s about as bad as one could reasonably want for satisfying a group of customers whose needs are quite varied; and also sufficiently different(and sufficiently demanding) that there isn’t really a “good enough for everyone” configuration that can smooth over the differences without blowing the budget.
I did put a faster G4 in mine as well as some upgrade to the optical drive. Dont remember heat issues.
Each version seems to be “Now with less suck than before!”
One of the huge things for me has been that the operating system does not punish me and apple does not charge me extra for using multiple languages. I realize that may not be important to everyone but in my household it is essential.
Lots of BoingBoing people may be in the same boat of not being monolingual. Being able to effortlessly switch between languages/keyboard layouts (or right to left/left to right text) sounds small but its a really big deal if you need it.
As an extension to that, the OS/applications seem “smarter” about detecting the context of what language is being used in a document with multiple languages. At my last employer, home office was in France but I’m here in Tokyo and while many people sent emails written in English, theres three potential languages which might get into an email chain, each of which handles things like punctuation differently. If I’m replying to a mail and I’m writing in English where the previous message was French of Japanese, should the quotation marks look like «French» or 「Japanese」or “this”? Windows always followed what was in the previous mail whereas MacOS always follows the language I’m currently typing.
Another nice thing is how deep drag & drop goes and how it works even with the windowing/workspace arrangement features like Exposé and Spaces. Meaning I just dont really notice that the OS isnt getting in my way when I want to do something. Windows can almost do some of this but it takes more effort.
For some of us, the unix layer is a very big deal. MS did eventually catch up to the unix world and produced decent scripting tools and there have long been addons to Windows to achieve the same thing but I kind of like that I’ve got some tools that with very minor adjustments have migrated over 20 years between SunOS, Solaris, Linux, and now work happily in OSX.
From your examples it sounds like more like “I’m not accustomed to this”
My AAPL shares would disagree with your assessment.
I’ll just happily continue as an unreal professional then.
I dont think Windows Phone ever even had an official release here in Japan.
Pardon me for saying so but all your “reasons” seem like Slashdot or ZDNet copypasta. I read statements like this and wonder which “creative professionals”? All of them? Some of them? Some in a specific industry? The ones who live within a 9Km radius of the city center of Dublin?
You keep using these blanket generalizations as if they were world wide truisms.
You confuse configurability at time of purchase with upgradability after purchase. Turns out, only a very tiny sliver of people ever bother to do the second, and that includes creative professionals.
Apple has decided to do away with the second in many of their machines in order to reduce prices and enable them to make smaller, more portable computers. They also probably regard it as a bonus that they don’t have to pay for as many in-warranty repairs of amateur, botched upgrades.
I upgraded mine a few times and eventually had to put fans into it – after a certain point, the ‘chimney’ heat-sink just couldn’t keep up with the processors.
