I care a lot about the Mac, and I'm not sure what to think about the fact that Mac unit sales are down again.
The Mac has been growing for a long time, and they seem to have reached a plateau. I assume that's the reason why Macs have became absurdly expensive in the last few years -- when they can't grow unit sales, they need to grow revenue per unit.
The result is that Apple doesn't build the computer most of their potential customers want -- a $1000 Macbook. I understand that they don't care about the $300 netbook market, but not offering a decent $1000 laptop is a bad idea. It means they are going to loose consumers and students – there are decent alternatives at that price point. Or, people like me, who just keep using their old Macbooks because the high price of the new machines isn't worth the marginally improved performance.
Where does this lead us? I don't see how the Mac should grow from here, and as a Mac software developer that worries me. I want to be in a growing market, not a stagnant one. I'm probably going to be okay for the next few years, but is the Mac still going to be a worthwhile platform for a small software company in 10-15 years? I don't know.
I care a lot about the Mac, and I'm not sure what to think about the fact that Mac unit sales are down again.
Well, what do you expect people to buy? I'm sitting on a six year old MBP, having gotten rid of my 2009 iMac. New iMac? Meh, it might come to that, but I already have enough displays. Mac Mini to go with the display I already have? Surely you jest to suggest a four-year old model. Mac Pro? See: Mac Mini. Current laptops aren't an option unless I get desperate (i. e., current MBP dies tomorrow). I mean, I want a new Mac, there just isn't anything out there that makes me feel like I'd be getting an upgrade.
So my theory is that a lot of people are in the cycle I've been in for the last three years: "Meh, I'll wait to see what they have next year...<year passes>...Meh, I'll wait until...holy shit, is this thing really six years old?...<year passes>"
My Macbook is 4.5 years old by now. But why should I upgrade when their lineup is just plain bad? I've always loved their design and features. But they've stripped all of the good stuff from their lineup except for the design and OS. I want my port selection back, a proper keyboard, and a normal price tag again. I thought the original price was expensive, but it was worth it. It has only gone up because the cheaper models just aren't viable anymore, it's a complete rip-off imo.
I don’t get all the hate on the new MacBook Pros. I have a 2016 with TouchBar. It’s not a beast but it’s definitely faster compared to the 2015 model I replaced.
Apple replaced the best programmer's laptop on the market (their previous-gen MBP) with the MBP model that they sell now. It's not a bad laptop per se, it's just that it's not a programmer's laptop.
Apple sells the MBA which doesn't have enough pixel density to support tmux with multiple panes.
Apple sells the MB and the MBP with that execrable butterfly keyboard which is terrible for touch-typing for long periods.
There's nothing else anymore. They stopped selling that Ivy-bridge-era MBP model they were keeping around for serious touch-typists. Everyone I know who has one of these turkeys defends the keyboard, but then admits that, "anyways, I usually use an external keyboard anyhow." I need the built-in keyboard to be useable and Apple has given up on making those.
I'd buy a new programmer's laptop from Apple, but they just don't make those anymore. Apple took something we loved away from us - that's why the new MBP gets so much hate.
I'm not an expert in keyboard, I'm just a software developer that spends a bunch of time in front of a computer: I had some adjustment period to the new keyboard but now I'm used to it and it feels perfectly fine.
What is the problem with "touch-typists" and the new keyboard? Is the layout different in such a way that confuses you? Is it the lack of feedback from the touchbar?
If you're a vim user the touch bar mbp is pretty much a no-go. Most users just map capslock to escape and they're mostly okay, but if you're like me and like to map capslock to delete, then having to press escape on the touchbar just doesn't work. (i've tried to map some other key to escape, but haven't found anything that feels natural)
US users can map caps lock to esc an be fine with it, but pretty much the rest of the world uses more characters than english does. Many people use caps lock as a switch to the local keyboard layout. This way you can get the best of both worlds.
Yeah. But I found it didn’t make sense to me, my muscle memory is for my pinky to reach up. Hitting a flat surface was less weird than hitting caps lock.
I have a 2016 touchbar MacBook Pro. I’ve been learning vim, but I agree using escape is hard with the touchbar. I ended up mapping “jj” to escape. Seems to work well and keeps my fingers on the home row.
The keys don't have enough tactile feedback. That tricks (my) brain into hitting the keys harder because they instill less confidence. That's exhausting when typing for a few hours.
The ESC key issue isn't as bad - I have 'jk' remapped to ESC anyways. But the lack of feedback with the butterfly keys makes my hands feel like I'm setting myself up for repetitive stress injury.
The keyboard is just awful. Can anyone honestly say that they prefer the feel of the butterfly keys?
> Apple sells the MB and the MBP with that execrable butterfly keyboard which is terrible for touch-typing for long periods.
The MacBook and MacBook Pro's keyboards are markedly different. Sure, they're both butterfly, but MacBook Pro's keyboard is a lot more clickly/springy than MacBook's, which I can only describe as mushy. Have you tried using them for an extended period of time?
God I love my MacBook Air 2013 keyboard. I still think it’s tons better than the 2018 MacBook Pro crap. The MBP was given to me my the employer but I don’t quite enjoy typing. It’s like walking on grass vs walking on tarmac. One just makes your fingers so goddamn happy when you type. The MBP keyboard keys get stuck all the time. The spacebar get stuck at times! WTF! That’s just terrible engineering.
Steve jobs or whoever it was doing QA, I gotta say really had a knack for what is usable and makes the evokes a feel good emotion. The new macs nowadays look beautiful but horribly lack in usability in many ways. Steve Apple was very focused on usability. Aesthetics came later, now it’s the reverse.
Steve jobs or whoever it was doing QA, I gotta say really had a knack for what is usable and makes the evokes a feel good emotion. The new macs nowadays look beautiful but horribly lack in usability in many ways. Steve Apple was very focused on usability. Aesthetics came later, now it’s the reverse.
Agreed, and there's a name for this. It's 'bullshit'.
Making a laptop with a terrible keyboard to save 2-3mm of thickness when no one really cares about such extremes of thinness. That's bullshit.
Making a laptop with largely unsupported USB-C ports and nothing else. No transition-year with both new and old ports, just tossing the old ports out abruptly and making customers buy fucking dongles. That's bullshit.
Eliminating function keys for a gimmicky touch screen which almost no one will use on a day-to-day basis a month after buying the laptop. That's bullshit.
The MacBook Pro gets all the hate because is the only model even worth talking about...at this point if you buy a MacBook Air with its 4yo internals and 8yo screen you end up feeling they took you for a chump, so you buy a $2000 machine when you only needed a $1000 one but then the keyboard breaks.
hahaha my exact experience. 5 trips to the apple store and finally my 2017 13 inch pro is usable. I've had the battery, screen, and keyboard all replaced under warrantee. Easily the worst experience Ive had with an Apple product.
I do get angry when something breaks and I need to pay for a fix, obviously, but generally I'm a lot less annoyed when the company offers to fix something at no cost/under warranty/free replacement/whatever. Forgive and forget?
How about it not breaking in the first place? When people talk about their Macs with pride, the first thing you'll probably hear is "Apple has the best build quality".
A 2017 13" Macbook Pro should not require 5 service trips in its first year. Warranty or not, we're not talking about some $200 piece of crap that's made in China, we're talking about a premium laptop at a premium price.
I guess I’ve just never had to deal with, or see anyone else have to deal with repeated repairs. And yes, I agree that this isn’t a great look for Apple. But it’s better that everything’s fixed for free than the alternative.
after the second or third trip, they should have just given a new replacement one. 5 replacements (if I read that right) would be classified as a 'lemon' under car laws in many cases.
When it's getting repaired, you don't have access to that same laptop. For professionals, it's a waste of time and an interruption to our ability to output.
I bout a full spec XPS 9560, the second time my '16 MBP went in for repairs. The same generation CPU, the same storage (2TB) and double the RAM... and it's $1000 less than the full spec MBP.
I wonder how long before a lot more folks come to the conclusion that Apple premiums aren't worth paying anymore.
I have a 10yo Acer laptop that at the time cost me about 500$ which up to this day required no fix or trip to the repair shop.
If I had spent 4x the cash and still was forced to take the laptop to the shop 5 times to fix a myriad of design and production problems for a product that is marketed as high-end and professional-grade, I can assure you I wouldn't forgive, much less forget.
I guess I’ve just never experienced the kind of hardware failures that everyone else is mentioning, so I don’t have a lot of experience with how they actually occur. I’m not saying that they don’t happen, but I have no idea if these are early failures or the middle of the bathtub curve.
They are not building what people actually want. A modern macbook pro with F keys and a physical escape key instead of a Touchbar and ports that actually get used in addition to USB-c (USB, HDMI, maybe a memory card reader). They are so out of touch it's a joke. I'm not sure how they are managing to make each iteration of the Macbook Pro worse except for the actual specs.
Is that what people want, or is that what you want? I couldn't care less about a row of keys I never use, so I'm not sure you speak for everyone when you say what "people" actually want.
What this person wants is a home, end, forward delete, pgup and pgdn key on the keyboard, which the touchbar lets me have. Funny how what "the people" want manages to line up exactly with your expectations and doesn't match mine at all.
Exactly right. And I made the jump and bought a USB-C monitor which plugs right into the MBP and charges and connects video in the same connector (which is awesome). Then I bought the USB C to Lightning cable, which fast charges my iPhone. I wish Apple had gone with USB C for the iPhone instead of Lightning, but I think they are too deep in with Lightning at this point.
I have the HDMI/old-USB to USB C dongle, but I hardly ever use it these days.
I think that's what a lot of people want, at least in my circle of friends who have the Touchbar and they absolutely hate it, mainly because of the escape key, accidental touches of the touch bar being annoying, and it being a visual distraction (minor issue IMO, unless you work in lowlight conditions a lot).
I wish Apple would go back to the 2012 models and just refresh the internals.
The full size SD card slot is important to photo/videographers, a market that Apple seems to be taking for granted recently. The range of "professional" users that the Macbook Pro is actually appealing to seems to be getting narrower and narrower over time.
Can attest as a non-pro photographer (but as someone who cares a lot about photography), that the SD card built in is not that important. I tend to use a dock/reader anyway because most of my cameras use CF or mini SD. True, full sized SD cards are actually not used in any equipment I have now.
CF has always been used in high end bodies, but most of them still have a secondary SD card slot. And these days SD is fast enough to be used as the primary card and there are flagships like the Sony A9 that only take dual SD cards.
well... sprite wants it and I want it. and some colleagues want it too. So... "people" - yeah - "people" want it. Not just sprite.
There's not a lot I can do to register dissatisfaction with Apple's direction. I bought a 2016 mbp, then returned it (for a variety of reasons) - many of which have been beaten to death here in the last 18 months.
I use both the F-keys and Home, End, Insert, Delete, PgUp, and PgDown on my laptop. The two use cases can co-exist, but it seems Apple doesn't want to bother appealing to those who want both.
HDMI isn't dead and it pisses me off that they sacrificed it in exchange for any amount of thinness. I don't notice how things my laptop is day to day, but I definitely notice when I can't plug into a projector.
As a professional I encounter still too many VGA only projectors in clients offices, but HDMI is the dominating standard by far. So many people use TV in their conference room and that is not going to change any time soon. Getting rid of the HDMI port to save a few mm of thickness is just plain stupid.
I watched my boss buying a new MBP on day one. Months later I still laugh when I see him fiddling with adapters that never work reliably.
I'm yet to see a TV with USB C inputs. Unless of course , if you're suggesting dongle-hell as an alternative for all missing ports, in which case, whatever few mm you save in thin laptops are gained back and more by much fatter dongles you have to carry around (or forget).
That is not how Apple works, the reason they do such drastic changes like dropping support for floppy/cd drives, usb A ports is because they want to move the industry forward.
The keyboard fails are double the rate of the old model, which elevates it from "very rare" to "rare." The problem is that the repair was $700, so the folks to whom it happened (including myself) were very, very vocal.
I've had two of the new pros for the last ~year (one for work and one at home) and haven't had any keyboard issues on either. I don't doubt that it's a problem but it probably gets blown a little bit out of proportion
I’ve had a 2017 MacBook Pro in daily heavy use for a year now - no keyboard troubles.
Our IT Department anecdotally reports that about 15% of the 2016 models had issues, and fewer of the 2017 models. Nearly all of our 2500 employees have MBPs or iMacs of some sort.
I've heard similar reports from the IT department at my employer as well. However, on my personal computer (and I've seen similar with a few friends), I've had to have the keyboard repaired 3 times. This makes me suspect there's something that aggravates the issue, or that a lot of people use external keyboards (which a glance around the office suggests is true). The majority of the keys that have failed on my computer have been in the areas that get hot when the processor is under load.
Our sample size is smaller but we are closer to 40% with models needing multiple fixes. It doesn't help that most of our people are traveling with them and working in various environments. The few that uses them as desktop workstations (with external keyboard constantly plugged in) have a lot less issues.
Mine's a year and a half old now, no problems here. Works like a charm.
I should note that roughly 25% of that time has been on an external keyboard (Apple display, MBP lid closed), so it might not see as much use as others.
This is precisely why I like Apple. The fact that I got 5 years out of my last MBP was totally amazing. I used that computer at least 10 hours a day, every single day!
I don't care about saving $1k or $2k when it comes to a device I use that much. We're talking about a dollar an hour here. I've literally spent more money on coffee over that time.
I'm typing this post on an 11 year old Dell Latitude D830 running Ubuntu. 5 years is not some amazing lifespan for a laptop, especially these days with such incremental improvements in processors year over year.
Unless you're gaming on your laptop your requirements probably aren't that much higher than they were half a decade ago.
I have a 10 year old Dell Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz running Windows 10 being used as a Plex Server. It’s only slow when overtaxed because I haven’t bothered upgrading to 8GB of RAM or replace the hard drive with an SSD.
Luckily it has a gigabit Ethernet port so it can take full advantage of my gig internet.
My Asus UX31A is six years old and still going strong. It's a pity the RAM is soldered in at 4GB but certainly not worth replacing the entire laptop for it. And it wasn't top of the line - about $1300 as I remember.
Perhaps you just haven't really used a windows laptop recently and only remember the old days when Windows laptops really did only have a life span of about 3 years.
Not only do I occasionally game, I also have a DSLR that generates quite the stream of photos and videos to edit. I also run a bunch of VMs (including one of Ubuntu, my favourite dev environment), and I use photoshop and illustrator for the occasional design thing.
Me too.. but mostly just personal stuff. I use DarkTable and Gimp for that. I did this on a 13 year old machine running Linux. It is still running but I got my hands on a cheap NUC that I use nowadays. My machines are pretty much running 24/7 all year around..
My impression when it comes to Mac is that people don't want to pay ludicrous prices for repairs e.t.c.. anymore. Also that they can not upgrade because their current machine can't handle the new OS e.t.c..
The trick to avoiding this is to buy laptops with good displays in the first place. The D830 has a 1920x1200 display that is a little bit dimmer but just as readable today. It's not a retina display, but it looks just fine to me.
I was looking at laptops about 3 years ago and it was extremely hard to find ones that didn't use that cursed 1366x768 resolution.
>> The fact that I got 5 years out of my last MBP was totally amazing.
No, it's not.
A 15" _2011_ Macbook Pro with a quad core i7 is still more than usable today.
If you bought a Macbook Pro with a powerful CPU (i.e., CPU model not ending with a U), you should easily get 10 years out of it.*
[edit] * At least until Apple decides not to support it with OS upgrades, but you can always run the latest Windows on it. And Windows generally runs faster in Boot Camp on Macbook Pros than OSX does natively.
"you can always run the latest Windows on it. And Windows generally runs faster in Boot Camp on Macbook Pros than OSX does natively."
When did this happen? The last time I used Bootcamp, it seemed almost specifically designed to make Windows feel like a sub-par experience compared to OS X
Using a then-brand-new 2012 MBP with the latest version of OS X at the time (I believe Lion?) with Bootcamp. Some of the bizarre omissions I witnessed were
- A buggy BIOS implementation instead of EFI (rEFInd at least let me try and boot Linux under EFI)
- SSD set to run in IDE mode, instead of AHCI, resulting in utterly crippled performance (required issuing dd commands to the disk from within OS X to fix)
- No GPU switching. Only the Radeon card was enabled, leaving the system running insanely hot and guzzling battery
The final straw was when I ran some test VM's on it, and under a sustained load, had the CPU hit an eye watering 117 degrees celsius. Shutting it down almost immediately and then asking on tech oriented IRC channels I was in if this was a bug simply yielded dismissal from Apple acolytes at the time
"Oh it's DESIGNED to do that, the whole system is a huge heatsink!"
"Just make sure it's getting plenty of airflow, it's fine"
This is anecdotal - on my 2008 Macbook (not Pro) and on my 2011 MBP, Windows 8+ always felt snappier than the latest version of OSX (ymmv based on what you do). I have seen other people on HN report similar.
Getting 5 years out of a laptop isn’t particularly impressive, especially if your laptop can be upgraded. Perhaps it’s remarkable that a laptop that can’t be upgraded lasts that long, so congrats I guess.
I don't care about saving $1k or $2k when it comes to a device I use that much.
I said nothing about price. You don’t want to know the eye-watering numbers attached to that iMac I sold. And it’s great that you and I can get such life out of our machines. But in the context of the topic at hand, its not great that you and I sit on five year old machines because Apple makes nothing so compelling so as to make me say, “Shut up and take my money.” Because I own shares of AAPL, too.
My parents are still using the absolute garbage quality Acer gaming laptop I bought in 2009. The durability is awful, the design is not very pragmatic, the less said about software and drivers the better... But it's still working.
My thinkpad x220 is my work laptop since 2011, with a few upgrades (ssd, 16gb ram, battery, because you can actually upgrade it) it performs quite well to this day.
I have loved some of the Macs I owned, but I don't think that comment was meant as a compliment. It is unfortunate that so many people would rather limp by on 3-5 year old machines rather than paying for what Apple is selling new. The fact that they are able to limp by is better than the alternative — but I count myself among those who couldn't. My MBA gave out last year and I bought an MBP with a compromised keyboard. I wish it weren't so.
What I wouldn’t give for a ‘Macbook SE’- just like the iPhone SE, same model as a proven favourite, no touch bar, with new innards and lower price (I don’t even need the lower price actually) I would buy THAT in a heartbeat.
When it was released, it kind of was–it had essentially the internals of the flagship iPhone at the time (iPhone 6s), just in a smaller form factor. So think of it as what would be a 11" Retina MacBook Pro that was a clone of the early 2015 13" one internally, if one ever existed?
it befuddles me that they didn't do this after the success of the 2012 13in macbook, which soldiered on for YEARS of the retina models. They kept the 2015 15in pro for a year or two, but i really wish they'd actually just UPDATE the old style of machines and keep one around as a basic model.
i wonder if they think, unlike the SE, that it would actually vampire off too many sales from the high ticket models. what i wouldn't give for a 2015 style 8th gen CPU machine.
Macs used to be cool. The magnifying effect on the Dock was one of the coolest things when I first saw it a few years ago. Windows has completely caught up and I am happy using a PC with Windows Linux Subsystem. I still like shiny new things, but Mac isn't it anymore. I think Apple needs to put more shiny and new in their OS like the magnifying effect used to be. Spice things up a bit.
Yes, though I would like to buy their newest 15”. A better Air model would be more my style. Their prices are just way too steep. I’d rather have an ultraportable with just enough power for UI and a Linux box somewhere for my projects.
I hope they come out with a Mac Mini with similar CPU/memory options to the 13" MBP, like they used to (generation before the one they're currently selling). Using that with either duet display or the new Luna Display and one of the new iPad Pros would be great. And it would be almost as portable as the 15" MBP.
I care a lot about the Mac, and I'm not sure what to think about the fact that Mac unit sales are down again.
The Mac has been growing for a long time, and they seem to have reached a plateau. I assume that's the reason why Macs have became absurdly expensive in the last few years -- when they can't grow unit sales, they need to grow revenue per unit.
Well, what do you expect? They keep redesigning the hardware in authoritarian ways: Thou shalt not upgrade the memory yourself (RIP old Mac Pro aluminum tower); Thou shalt not have F and ESC keys; Thou shalt heretofore use USB-C and dongles or will be sent to dongle Hell (I think one of them only has 2); Thou shalt not have feedback on keys. Etc.
And in each of the Commandments there are those who rush to defend: "but I love the new keyboard, I remapped the ESC to Caps, and anyway I love the new garbage can design of the workstation, I prefer soldered memory".
There's enough space to have both. You know, like on 2015 model. Remove Thunderbolt 2 and Magsafe, add TB3/USB-C.
But don't make me look for dongle every time I want to plug in a mouse, USB stick, YubiKey or any other of literary thousands of USB-A devices.
The user experience of this device is objectively worse. It made me think less of Apple - they decided to constantly annoy me to earn more money on dongles.
And those new USB-A devices exist for a reason. There's a formal ban on female USB-C to male USB-A adapters because they're afraid of someone making an A to A cable with two dongles. So if you want to follow the spec, and want to support hosts that don't have a USB-C port, then all you can ship is a USB-A device.
Like any of the USB A male to male cables that you can use to transfer files between to machines, or the USB A female to female adapters you can use with one of these cables to create an extension cable? If they’re banned, I wouldn’t expect them to be as widely sold.
The male to male cable to transfer between machines probably has a device with two slave ports in it. There's EE reasons, as well as protocol reasons why just plugging two hosts into each other is a bad idea (and fixing that was most of the work behind USB OTG).
Female to female is fine, because there shouldn't be a host with a male end that isn't OTG.
And beyond that, there totally exist the banned adapters (C female to A male) but that has more to do with the fact that you can get anything from China, regardless of trademark infringement.
You mean the A to A cables that warn that you may damage your computer if you connect two computers? Or the A to A “cables” that are actually a tiny device that relays data between two computers?
The problem is that there isn't a lot of wiggle room in the USB-C spec to make a compliant plug thats attached magnetically rather than mechanically, and the contacts are recessed rather than surface contacts (so it has to be 'plugged in' rather than 'resting on')
Griffin sells a magnetic USB-C cable - that winds up being a magnetic dongle to a charging cable. Apple doing this would have been considered a hack against their design and would have required them to include a lower quality data-only cable rather than the data+charging USB-C cables they currently include.
Hm, USB-A and SD aren't proprietary, so I guess you're considering them legacy? SD certainly hasn't been replaced, and I've yet to see a memory stick that isn't USB-A. Ditto for hard drives, though I'm sure they exist.
I understand that thickness perhaps knocked out the USB-A, but the same can't be said for SD. And since the ultra-thin keyboard hasn't worked out that well, then perhaps the MBP is a little too thin for its own good?
Yeah, that proprietary sdcard technology has no place on the side of a new computer in 2018. Instead, we should use a generic USB-C hole which leads to cable which leads to this sdcard thing.
On one hand, my xps at work goes through to a dock that uses usb-c/tb3, everything goes through to the dock and nothing except the connector to my laptop. I get why they only had so little usb-c ports. I hope it wasn't as a decision to look "minimal" and thus less practical, meaning they took little is more a bit too literally.
Thing is, to take my work laptop home, I don't want to have to shell out for a dock just to use it at home too so on that hand, I'm happy the xps gives me options to not have to be reliant on a dock, as much as I love the use of a dock at work.
Honestly the worst one is the macbook, which is ostensibly the "macbook air with retina display" everyone was dreaming of, has ONE. We're never getting another macbook air, this is the path forward.
There's plenty of space for two, a prototype design with two ports even leaked a few years back
And yet one. It's not like the air even had a cornucopia of ports. It's not like i think it NEEDS them. But seriously, one port for everything?
I would already own one if it had two jacks, but that's just patently ridiculous. One port arguably is barely enough for a phone, much less a full on computer that's expected to be a device host for even just like, a flash drive.
I can only guess the reasons for this weren't the rational engineering-motivated ones.
I picture a meeting of a dozen folks, a powerpoint slide and statistics that show the two models (the four-USB-C version next to this "budget" single-port version). I picture a sort of an argument/pitch/"presentation" that suggests that a high percentage of folks -- consumers (or whatever they are called by marketing people) -- in the "Undecided" camp would lean to the more expensive version. Budgetary swing voters if you will who wouldn't accept a one-port world.
After that I picture some sort of final whitepaper (or whatever it's called), finally approved by someone in jeans who's higher up in the hierarchy of decision-making.
In Australia cost is a real problem. Wages have stagnated over the last 15 years, the AU$ has fallen, but Macs have gone up in price.
A new entry level 13" MBP 16/512 is A$2,819
Factor in increased discretional spending priorities for smart phones, smart home devices and gaming PCs or Consoles and you have a market problem.
It's not an argument that Macs are expensive as such, or dont represent good value. It's just that Macs are now very expensive for Australian consumers.
Anecodtally many workplaces will now provide employees with a laptop by default, so the need for a home computer is significantly reduced for some people. If you have a family, then a gaming PC or a console is what the Kids want, not a Mac.
I'm an Australian die-hard Apple (computer) user from my first personal computer being a Macintosh SE, to owning almost every single desktop Mac, and lots of the MacBooks, from then until I couldn't afford (justify) upgrading to the 5K iMac. I loved my last 27" iMac like it was one of my kids. That thing was a huge part of my life, and one of the most memorable PCs I've ever owned, so having to bail on Apple was deeply upsetting.
Friends convinced me to build a monster Linux desktop PC, which I've been using ever since and have grown to love it. BUT, I'd switch back to an iMac INSTANTLY if I could a) afford it, b) justify it, c) mentally get over the fact that they've broken decades of love and trust, and treat customers like shit while cranking out increasingly crap products then telling us we should still lick their feet and hand over our first born.
How about making a desktop computer that can actually... compete? I don't care if it's expensive if it's GREAT. I don't mind stuff not being perfect if it's cheap. I won't buy shitty products for premium money though.
Soldered internals, thinness and lightness over performance and quality, sky rocketing prices with snail-pace development, increasingly shittier support and corporate "personality" (? Not sure if that's the right word, but they're becoming easier to hate due to constantly dropping the ball, pissing customers off, releasing shit products, ignoring issues, etc).
I miss the old Apple. I'd love them to turn things around. Release a thicker heavier MacBook that actually performs really well, is built rock solid, and costs $1k USD, even if that means having fans and vents and stuff. Apple has incredible designers, I'm sure they can still make it look good. Release an iPhone SE2 with a modern-era camera, 128GB storage, and make it $500 USD. Release an actual Pro/Geek friendly desktop like the old days, something around $1500 USD, comparable to a mid-to-high (not extreme high end) modern gaming PC, so we can actually render videos and do WORK without it crumbling like the Colosseum every time you ask it to break a sweat.
Yeh my prices and specs probably aren't "correct" but the idea stands. Increase the performance and quality, drop the damn prices, and stop being such a depressing shadow of your former self. Your piles of cash don't make us love you, good products we can actually afford do.
I was an Apple user from the mid 80s starting with the Apple //c. Moved from a IIgs to a Mac SE and a bunch of Macs in-between before switching to Windows in 97 and back to Mac in 05. The most expensive Mac I ever bought was a Powerbook 170 which was a whopping $4K CAD (in 1991 dollars), even with a friend's Apple employee discount. I also had a couple of Newtons along the way.
The second most expensive Mac I ever bought was an early 2011 15" Macbook Pro (yeah, that one), and that didn't end well for me. It was the first laptop I ever had of any brand that just up and died. It happened just after my AppleCare lapsed, but before they issued the repair order. That soured me on Apple for good, and I haven't looked back since.
I don't miss the "old" Apple. In my mind, Peak Apple was 2012, pre-Retina Macbook Pro. Macs in 2012 were still relatively user serviceable while being reasonably compact.
The 27" 5k iMac is the best Desktop I've ever owned - don't think there's anything else that comes close to that build quality + form factor. Monitor is gorgeous and performance is fantastic.
Personally I consider the USD $1,799.00 starting price great value for the 27" 5K iMac, although as I hang on them for a few years I always get the CPU upgrade + SSD options and always buy RAM elsewhere (where it's much better value).
I'm also a late 2013 MBP hold out who was waiting for a great MBP option to upgrade to, but didn't find the latest MBP's was compelling enough to upgrade to so got a 5k iMac instead, glad I did.
I felt the same way when Apple discontinued the $499 Mac Mini. It's vital to the platform that "anyone can afford a Mac."
But since then, there's the iPad. Apple's line is "the Mac is a truck, but most automobiles aren't trucks." And I hate to admit it, but for web browsing and word processing, the iPad is just fine. I don't like it, but I get it.
Mac Mini's have utility. I have an office full of Mac Mini's, a dozen of them or so, and keep buying more.
I still love them for my team. I have it down to a routine now, I buy one of the cheaper ones from the Apple refurbished site for about $400-500 or so, and buy an SSD from Crucial on the same day.
When it shows up I swap out the unusably slow internal 5400rpm drive for the SSD. That's a little tricky but once you've done it twice you can do it again in 10-15 minutes no problem.
Then I get it all fired up. I have a bunch of Dell IPS 4k screens in various sizes and get a another used one or two from B&H if I need more.
I'm very happy with this workflow, but it's still a hack. It sure would be better if Apple just made more reasonable desktop machines.
I’ve had two Mac Minis. The higher spec G4 Mac Mini and the first Intel Mac Mini - a Core duo 1.66Ghz. Apple abandoned it relatively quickly but I put Windows 7 on it and my mom still uses it to this day as a secondary computer when she tutors.
I also recommended Mac Minis as single purpose computers. A non profit I volunteer for uses one for live-streaming with WireCast and s Black Magic box, one to control lights, and a third for Propesenter.
But when I spec out a Mac Mini with a decent processor and RAM, I’m paying as much as I would for s low end 21” iMac with much better specs.
Sorry, outdated knowledge. I know somewhere around 2010 they revamped the line to start at $799, I was under the impression they never dipped back down.
But modern pickup trucks are also very popular for personal use. You can get them with really nice interiors these days (compared to when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s). They're damned luxurious in comparison to the old days.
Last year I bought an iPhone SE from Walmart to replace my obsolete iPod touch. $140, tax included. Checking their site, it seems they still have it for a bit more, locked to their own prepaid brands.
The whole recent "what's a computer?" ad campaign kind of signaled that Apple believes we should be using more powerful iPads + keyboards instead of notebooks on a daily basis, right?
Anecdotally speaking, I have a couple friends in medical school right now and they do everything on their iPad + keyboard. My mom has used an iPad as her primary computer for the past 5 years. For a lot of people who primarily interact with their computer using PDF's, slideshows, a little email and video, I think that it is a totally respectable replacement.
I would be curious to see what percent of the market is people that want their computer to be doing things powerful enough to justify a computer more powerful than an iPad pro is.
Disclaimer: Obviously a $300 chromebook destroys an iPad in price but you know so do a lot of Android phones and people still pay the premium for iPhones because they are sexy[1].
I wouldn’t be all that surprised if the future of “personal” computing on non-phone devices (eg next 10-20 years) ends up looking like the Microsoft era, but with ChromeOS laptops in place of Windows, iPad/future large format iOS devices in the position of the Mac. I see a huge generation of kids in the US quite literally growing up with Chromebooks, it will be interesting to see if they keep using the platform as adults. The ease of switching device with ChromeOS is pretty remarkable really, the truest realisation of “the network is the computer” we’ve seen.
It’s pretty clear Apple don’t care hugely about losing marketshare in education as their recent still pretty expensive edu focused “cheap iPad” shows. They will enjoy what they always did, quality computing products for a small marketshare who are happy to pay high margins for it, leaving the other PC manufacturers to bloody battle over minuscule margins and hard to differentiate product.
I see a huge generation of kids in the US quite literally growing up with Chromebooks, it will be interesting to see if they keep using the platform as adults
But they're just using the Chromebooks to access Google Docs and Google Classroom for school work. The cloud ecosystem is what will matter more than the browser used to get there. Kids care even less about the hardware it's running on.
Except that iOS blows away ChromeOS and Google’s half assed approach refusing to have a competent approach to tablets...so maybe it’s a bit more than whatever that unnecessarily disclaimer is saying.
Depends. I think a Chromebook is ergonomically a better choice–the keyboard, while worse in quality, gets points just because it has travel can actually function on my lap. Plus you can slap Linux on it and get a nice lightweight machine that can actually do quite a bit. But for most people I think an iPad is a better choice, and personally I feel the same for myself–anything really advanced is better off on my Mac rather than on a crummy 11" (or really nice 10.5") screen.
This is so dumb, because on the one hand Apple refuses to do a touchscreen laptop because of gorilla arm, and then turns around and says you should replace your laptop with a device that you have to gorilla arm.
I think the more provocative question than "why are Mac sales down again" is: "how do people work? What IS work today?"
For me, I really truly cannot imagine working on anything other than a real computer. I need a lot of text and number input for really any kind of work. Anything that could be called work.
So what's happening with people? With the economy?
I can see a lot of people doing their work on their phones and tablets, without a real computer. Lots of email, presentations, videos, conferences, apps, maybe some report viewing, etc. This fits well for people in management, sales, service, and even some technical professionals that aren’t primarily computer focused (doctors, dentists, etc)
Marketing not so much (lots of spreadsheets), deep development or system admin also (though most of my sysadmin work can be done on an iPad with a terminal, I like the multi monitor displays on a real computer).
but those scores do not necessarily translate to real world experience.
the issue I take with Apple is they do have the ability to come in under 1k and provide a good product that they can profit from both in desktop and laptop lines but they don't choose to.
on product availability and innovation the last major update to iMac was the retina screens discounting putting a workstation CPU in the same chassis. the mini is just a disgrace but this also comes with the fact that they dropped their stand alone screens and people have been waiting for a 4k Apple branded screen.
I usually direct people to the 2014 and 15 ones of these, as someone still rocking a 2012. The newer ones run so much cooler and the GPU performance bumps were nice. They aren't even that much more used generally.
I can't get myself to replace mine unless it totally dies, but damn does it run super hot a lot of the time. And it has since it was brand new. It really does feel like there was an apex in there that we've gone downhill from though, and the 2012 was definitely higher up there than we are now.
I went from the top-spec 2012 rMBP to the 2017, and was surprised just how small the performance difference was. Most of it was in the GPU (e.g. the 2012 struggled to play a video on an external monitor while working). The 2017 gets a lot less hot/throttles down less often too.
All they need to do is keep the old form factor and update the internals. No redesigns. I've been waiting for a 11" Macbook Air with Retina screen, but I'll never get it. Many people would buy a cheese grater Mac Pro with updated internals, or a Mac Mini with updated cpu's.
My feeling is that they were so jealous of Steve Jobs legacy that they had to redesign everything to prove something, and screwed it all up in the process. Maybe it's like having a parent who is very famous and successful and having to live in their shadow.
Actually I really like my 2017 Macbook Air which I bought for $800. It may have old architecture but the system 'just works', mainly because of the OS (Windows 10 is far from being a decent dev platform). I primarily use it for coding, and for heavy tasks I delegate them to my PC running HyperV.
P.S. I don't really understand the obsession with getting the latest gen processors. Your main bottleneck is IO anyway if you don't do video encoding or some other CPU intensive tasks.
The question is why do you care if Mac sales are down? When the Mac was my primary computer in the 90s, I cared very much about Mac sales because if the Mac died, Apple died. But Apple doesn’t live and die by the Mac.
I doubt Apple will discontinue Mac sales in the foreseeable future.
I plan to rejoin the Mac fold next year and by the look of things, it will be a 5K iMac just because I want to do some Unixy things and you can develop anything on the Mac - iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows.
All of the third party software I care about is open source except for using MS Office occasionally, JetBrains Rider, and Plex. As long as the software support is there, I don’t care.
In the 90's I cared about Apple not dying because I loved the Mac. Apple dying or discontinuing the Mac are the same thing to me. I would be fine with an Android instead of an iPhone, the difference there just isn't that big to me. OTOH every time I try Windows it makes me want to throw the thing out the window.
The chances of Apple discontinuing the Mac without maturing iOS is slim. What I am saying is that In the 90s if the Mac wasn’t doing well, Apple was toast and there wasn’t going to be any Mac. Now, Apple’s existence is not dependent on the Mac and Apple can survive and keep producing Macs without the Mac being thier primary revenue generator.
Honestly, it doesn’t take much investment in the Mac to keep it. Apple is already on the path of merging the Mac underpinnings with iOS underpinnings. Any investment in iOS is an investment in the Mac. Intel does a lot of the heavy lifting with chip design and motherboard design.
You make a good point. I personally would love to see Mac sales crater. Just fall through the floor. That would hopefully nudge Apple to stop trying to use the product line as a design exercise in minimalist extremes.
All I want is a slightly thicker laptop, with some key travel, and a couple USB-A ports. Is that too much to ask for?
That's a thousand dollar for hardware that's years out of date. It's a terrible deal. You're going to be far better off buying a decent Windows laptop.
At risk of being a broken record here, that is why I got an XPS. Sub 1k for the 13" model I chose (not due to price, but form factor) and subjectively far better than my 2015 MBP for my use cases.
You might have been a bit lucky there. As we've discovered after making the mistake of buying one to try ourselves, the XPS series has also had plenty of problems.
We bought the Developer Edition, which is the official Linux model. The supposedly supported Linux has been throwing up error messages from moments after we first turned it on that have survived all software updates so far. The machine itself had some sort of battery failure after just a few months of occasional use, then an SSD that was corrupted to the point of being unbootable even when we had apparently recovered from those battery issues. More generally, the over-sensitive trackpad that has been widely criticised was an irritation for us as well, and the keyboard doesn't feel particularly good.
For a supposedly professional-grade laptop from a big name, that's obviously a long way short of the quality standards we'd expect. But then recent Macbooks have had their issues with both hardware and macOS, and we won't go near Windows 10 until Microsoft fixes the same complaints about updates and privacy that everyone keeps raising. Where's a business supposed to get professional-quality laptops that just work any more? :-(
Apple of recent has a habit of selling old Macs that you should not buy. For example, they sold the 2012 non-retina, DVD equipped, 13" Macbook Pro for four years(!) after it came out, for $1100.
New MBP have smaller batteries in relation to power consumption than the generation before. My new MBP also has shorter battery life than my Air and it runs much hotter. It has a dedicated gfx that is almost completely offset by its screen resolution compared to my Air in game benchmarks.
Also, notice that I wasn't complaining about battery life, so your response doesn't not address it.
The MacBook Pro line was just refreshed 2 weeks ago. I wonder if people were holding off on buying a new machine because of the keyboard issues (if people knew about those) or just the knowledge that new machines were likely to come soon.
If half the devs clinging to their 2012-13 rMBP with missing keys and wire-exposed MagSafe cables would just get with the program and upgrade, sales would go thru the roof.
I think they could start selling MacOS as a competitor to Windows. I realise this would limit some of the coolness and designer feel (and quality) you get from mac hardware, but hardware has become a lot more stable in the past decade or so. with their marketing, they could convince consumers to ditch windows and just put MacOS on their PCs for $X/month.
> I'm probably going to be okay for the next few years, but is the Mac still going to be a worthwhile platform for a small software company in 10-15 years? I don't know.
I think it is more important to measure its users usage shares, rather than unit sold market shares. For example, out of the 2 billion Mobile Phones sold in 2017, 1.3 billon of those are Smartphones, and 230 Million of those are iPhones. That is 230 out of 1300, or ~18%. However if we look at usage, there are close to 3 billion Smartphone users today, and according to Tim Cook's word in today's conference on iPhone user growth, we are looking at around 800M iPhone user, a 26% of the market. The iPhone user base is still growing, as it matches towards one billion iPhone users.
The Mac users bases last report were around 150 million, out of the estimated 1.5 billion PC in use. So 10% of total user base. The PC user base hasn't been growing at all, while the Mac user base keeps growing. I think the most important metrics to Apple, is how many users are leaving its ecosystem and how many users are entering it. It reported 60% of the Mac are sold to new buyers. So Apple is roughly adding ~10M Mac users per year.
I used to think Apple not caring about Mac was because they see Tablet / iPad ultimately as a replacement of Mac. But this hasn't happened. ( yet ) And it may take another 10 years before we know if Tablet could really take over. In the mean time I think it would be wise for Apple to keep the Mac growing, it needs at least 300M user base to make the ecosystem solid.
The thing that worry me most is Apple's inefficiency. With Steve Jobs, he manage to create so many thing with so little budget. Apple now take 7% of its revenue to R&D, the highest ratio it its history and it seems they don't have much to show for. Hopefully we will have MacBook SE and iPhone SE Plus this September.
It's a $330 "laptop". It's less of a general computing device, but there's plenty of software avail for it.
You and I may not think about it as a development laptop, but it does the majority of what the majority of cheap laptop owners want. I love the iPad for family members because it Just Works(tm) and I don't have to play IT for most of it (save the occasional force-quit app).
I could be very wrong here, but I'm not so sure Apple's customers want the $1000 macbook.
Many mac users (and perhaps apple users in general) are the type of people willing to pay up for the top-of-the-line, latest-and-great, spare-no-expense tech gadget.
I've seen this with companies giving their developers the maxed out mac + mac accessories.
I've seen this with individuals who view their mac laptop as the biggest most important usage of their time.
Where have you seen apple struggle because they were being undercut by competitors?
Schools. Chromebooks are now an option and the iPad just isn't a laptop.
We were buyers of a lot of Mac minis, iMacs, and laptops, but folks are starting to ask for Surfaces and the Intel NUCs are a good deal. At this point, the graphics arts people might get Windows boxes if Apple doesn't get their crap together as Adobe runs just fine either way. That would be a true shame.
That is a pretty good visualization. One of the things that really stands out is the growth in services. One way that has personally effected me has been with music on my iPad.
It has become harder and harder to have purchased music live on your iPad for playing. They have completely skewed what was their signature 'appliance app' (from the iPod of days gone by) from 'carry your music with you where ever you go' to 'portal to our pay per month music service'. Every time I upgrade IOS I worry about how much harder it will be to put my music on the device so that I can listen to it without being connected to a network or paying a monthly fee.
Don't worry - while the majority of users simply consume their music via streaming, local music ownership isn't going anywhere for music enthusiasts.
And as long as Apple allows alternative music players on iOS I'm not worried. I recommend Cesium to anyone using a local music collection: http://www.cesium-app.com/
It uses the same iTunes library as any other music app, including Apple's default music.app.
Sort of. But the "Average Mac selling price (4q average)" is an abysmal chart. The first-glance takeaway is, "Wow! The average Mac price has almost quadrupled recently!" when in reality it has increased about $150, or about 12% from two years ago.
I don't agree: this is one chart where starting the Y axis at 0 would be more misleading, not less.
By way of analogy, consider a chart of somebody's body temperature in Fahrenheit: if that fluctuates +/- 5 degrees it's a cause of significant concern, +/- 10 degrees is a medical emergency. But all of those changes would look small and insignificant on a 0-based chart.
It's the same situation here. The ASP of a Mac is never going to be even close to 0, so the Y-axis should span only the range of realistic values so we can really see how significant the recent upswing was in context.
This might make sense if the US had a territorial tax system, like much of the rest of the world. But the US rate applies to the global profits of US-based companies.
The mix of high rate and worldwide (non-territorial) taxation is why so many US companies end up being acquired by foreign companies. Then you don't have to pay US rates on your worldwide income.
How about not just raising taxes to raise taxes? The US isn't really effective with what they collect already (beyond more military), but hey let's slap some more pork belly on.
Cash on hand now upwards of $230B. Your average CNBC talking head would probably recommend a large acquisition soon. Names usually whispered about include: Uber, Tesla, Snap or Netflix. Or a content studio such as Comcast, Disney, or Fox.
But such advice ignores the gargantuan growth that cloud services are experiencing right now. Although iCloud, iTunes, ApplePay and the AppStore are almost solely focused on consumer internet and retail. It's conceivable that $APPL would make a push to deliver more SaaS offerings. Perhaps analagous to Adobe's Creative Cloud suite for profession digital content creators.
This nonsense goes on every year and these people just don't get Apple.
They are a company that resolves entirely around their culture and their ways of doing things. They even have their own internal university that teaches it to their managers. Apple makes a dozen or so acquisitions every year but they are almost always small companies whose cultures typically ends up being eliminated over time.
Buying a large company would make it impossible for this to happen and so I just don't see any of this happening. Not to mention the companies you listed there are completely ridiculous.
Apple doesn't acquire companies outside of their realm. They're not going to buy Tesla, or Sony, etc. They know what they do well. I don't see them spitting out TV's, either. That's something they could have easily done already.
There are sooooo many companies that offer a "university" - do they make you attend school for 4 years solely, working at most part-time? Just more marketing mumbo jubmo.
At the end of the day, PS Vue doesn’t offer anything compelling enough to acquire. A few subscribers and a bunch of licensing deals to broadcast TV over the Internet. Apple could get the same deals as Sony, Sling, Directv, Hulu, etc. Cable networks aren’t exactly being stingy about licensing.
Consider the other way around. Would Apple want to buy a decades-old consumer electronics company? Sony has been stagnant in my eyes, even before the NKorea hack.
IMO, This is an invalid, outdated view of Japanese culture.
Japanese companies, even large culturally important brands, get purchased by foreign entities. A controlling stake of Sharp was purchased by Foxconn two years ago, for example.
The selling point of Sony TV's is not just the panel but the processing, similarly to how Apple does not make it's own camera sensors, but it does do a lot of it's own procession to optimize your photos.
Yup and music / hollywood content library. It's a match made in heaven but Mr Cook is going to spend 1 trillion on paper stock before he does anything else...
As a shareholder, I'd say the best way to put this to use is to buy back shares. Although it's tempting to see them enter new product categories, I'd be afraid they would just blow money on things that ended up failing.
It's a tax efficient way to deliver value to shareholders. If you want to be an Apple shareholder, you'll definitely be happy owning a slightly larger piece of Apple. You may or may not want to own Netflix, but if you do you can already go and do that without Apple deciding for you.
The only M&A deals that I would want to see would be ones that help in their core business of selling technology to consumers. That would probably be companies no one has heard of that make and design components for future devices, semiconductor companies, etc.
The market is a more efficient mechanism to allocate capital than a single set of executives at a company.
As an Apple shareholder, you don't want Apple deciding where to invest your gains. You want those gains so you can decide where to invest them yourself depending on your risk profile , investment thesis, etc.
Because large acquisitions almost universally turn out to be disasters, whereas stock buybacks at an 18 P/E ratio is a 5.5% return if profits don't grow and higher if they do (which seems likely).
If I'm Apple I'm earmarking some money for AR development. ARKit is really solid and should get better w/ time. That can provide a nice launching point for developing AR glasses. If anyone can pull off tech glasses it's Apple.
John Gruber already made a remark about Mike Rockwell's title being "Head of AR/VR" when he interviewed him at WWDC. Even though Apple has no VR products.
Also, Apple Music has a much higher percentage of paid subscribers (90–95%) than Spotify (just over 50%), by virtue of not having a free tier. That probably means that Apple's music service isn't losing them money, unlike Spotify (or at least, isn't losing money as fast) -- Spotify's advertising revenue is only about 10% of their total.
So, I can't see a really good business case for that.
Labels have all the leverage, since the value of a streaming service is in having access to all music ever produced, so they will negotiate their way to approaching 100% of the excess that is left after paying for the overhead of running a streaming service.
Great conversation thread here. I will add my bit: I have been an Apple customer since buying serial number 72 of the Apple II (and worked writing software for 45+ years).
I love the iPad. I use Mac laptops for programming at work and my personal projects, but, I use my iPad for SSHing to my servers, reading, audio books, watch movies, research material for new books and technologies I want to learn, take online courses, write, etc.
Yes, laptops are great for writing code, but much of my thinking time is done with an iPad. When I retire, I can imagine just using a remote VPS for recreational coding with whatever can get decent screen space and a keyboard for a few SSH shells, and everything else could be an iPad.
IMHO the absolute best thing about Blink is that it lets you use caps lock as control. Since doing this remapping on my laptop it is now a part of my muscle memory but no bluetooth keyboards support this in hardware and iOS does not support it in software; Blink manages to support this in the app and it makes my SSH sessions and remote editing so much easier.
I meant that you’d think everything that comes out of Apple—including their finance division—would go through a central design and branding department, which would apply one central toolset to all inputs, regardless of what tools the originating division used.
This is certainly true in other companies that try their utmost to achieve a certain aesthetic at all times, e.g. Disney, IKEA, etc. The same companies that put their invoices, their products’ warranty cards, and probably the UX of their ERP system through their design process.
This is not an invoice, it's a financial document. Investors who read these are not impressed by fancy fonts or flowery graphics, the numbers on the sheet are the most important thing.
I’m not talking about fancy fonts or flowery graphics. More like having an eye for readability by correctly aligning the text in each column to allow scanning, having correct inter-rowset vs. intra-rowset spacing, and, even more important, working with the originating writers (in this case accountants) to ensure that textual columns are rephrased (but not in a way that changes their meaning!) if they take up so much space that they’re wrapping—and, in fact, reducing their size enough to ensure that a numeric or currency cell never wraps, which would perhaps even confuse an analyst into misreporting figures.
If you’ve ever seen the tables in a Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook, they’ve been put through this layout process. It’s nothing fancy—it’s just making sure that people can scan the bloody thing, and put their eye on the right numbers even with just a quick glance. It’s an attempt to reduce reading-comprehension errors, basically.
If you’d do it for a game with nothing on the line, why not do it for a company with perceived (and therefore real) equity value on the line?
How a newspaper, magazine, or book publisher works:
1. a writer creates content (which can sometimes just be figures like a table);
2. an editor reviews the content;
3. the editor passes the content to a layout artist + typographer to fit the text into one or more spreads, manually tweak padding and add page breaks where appropriate, and style it to fit the house style;
4. and then, crucially, the editor signs off on it again, ensuring that the layout process hasn’t changed or misconstrued the meaning or importance of the text.
This is likely exactly how e.g. Apple’s keynote presentations are made. It’s likely how their website and printed materials are made. It’s how any modern publishing workflow works, in fact. So why shouldn’t it be how their financial statements are made?
To do anything else is to invite error—both brand-messaging error, and semantic error. Whoever pasted the Excel sheet into Word and formatted it probably was probably doing so with much less oversight and auditing than a real publishing workflow would introduce. They could have introduced errors, not just of formatting, but of meaning (by e.g. cutting off a column of the report in the final PDF, even though the preview looked okay, because it went past the bleed of the margin.)
Financial people aren’t supposed to have to care about things like margin bleeds, and everything else that goes into preparing a “proper” PDF; that is the job of a publishing department. Financial people have an exacting eye for ledgers, but that doesn’t make them experts on editing non-tabular data. As soon as their tabular data is on a page, a publishing editor is what is needed to ensure the result is correct. And it is much better still if the publishing department is the one who puts the tabular data on the page. It is strange, to me, that Apple is not having them do it.
(All that being said, probably Pages wouldn’t be used, since Pages isn’t really an Apple-scale desktop-publishing software in the way that Keynote is an Apple-scale presentation software. Apple, internally, probably uses “real” desktop publishing software—Adobe InDesign, or Microsoft Publisher—for all this kind of work.)
That's impossible. Everyone keeps telling me that Apple is dying.
At this rate I imagine Apple could lock the doors of all of its stores and pull the plug on its website, and it would have enough cash to pay its employees for decades.
Apple has been said to be doomed as long as I can remember.
Somehow it’s great to be underestimated continuously. But on the other hand the stock takes the toll with a low PE ratio (compared to other tech stocks)
I think she/he was saying that a PE of 17 looks like growth has stalled, which is evidently not the case. All other tech companies have higher PE due to expected growth. With Apple it is always hindsight, since 15 years
>That's impossible. Everyone keeps telling me that Apple is dying.
It's the reverse of a pump and dump scam. It has happened every quarter for the last 21 years. I honestly think it was something SJ cooked up. It started happening just after he returned. My guess, he got John Dvorak in on the scam. That guy's 'beleaguered Apple' PCMag trolling was instrumental in driving the price down for years. Everyone would parrot it. Then, "bam" Apple produces a great quarter. I wonder if JD still does that schtick... You can make money without fail by buying on the dip before earnings announcements and selling on the news.
Without the business, 15 years would be a fair estimate for how long the cash would last, based on modest inflation adjustments on salaries, an average $100k to $125k cost per employee (all in), and either clearing their debt or just paying interest on it perpetually.
They'll probably burn $150b over ten years on employee costs, with 100,000 employees (present count). That's mostly ignoring the destruction of the stock itself, which would hit employee compensation and require higher salaries to offset.
Apple isn't a plucky start up, they're a tanker. They don't change directions quickly. Apple could start putting out rubbish hardware where even the most basic input devices don't work, not admit their mistake for 3 years, double down and roll that out on their entire product line and it would take years to impact sales & revenue.
By the time revenue starts dropping it's probably too late to fix.
>That's impossible. Everyone keeps telling me that Apple is dying.
When people say it's dying they're not talking about financials, and holding up how much money they made as a barometer of success doesn't mean anything.
Some people judge their success on how good the products are not how much money they make because lots of these people have been fans of the company even when it was doing bad financially.
All just seems like they have become what Jobs was describing here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM and holding up the bag of money when they have shipped an objectively poorly designed laptop for 3 years now just reinforces that for some of us.
You're buying a laptop for your college kid. Your choices: a thin laptop that requires $350 of accessories, a midrange laptop that is 4-5 years old, or a laptop that is expensive and has a defective keyboard.
Apple still relies on the MacBook, and specifically MacOS (of which the MacBook is the flagship product line), as a development platform for all of its other devices... Within Apple's current platform strategy, Apple does not have any alternative for the MacBook. So, it's currently not possible for the MacBook to go the way of the iPod...
> Within Apple's current platform strategy, Apple does not have any alternative for the MacBook.
They can open source or license OS X. Not within their current strategy, but that has to be one of their backup plans.
That said, slower sales doesn’t mean less users, because replacement times are just getting longer. I’m using a late 2016 MBP, and Apple isn’t expected to have a meaningfully better one until late 2022 or so.
Even the iPhones have really only changed cosmetically since the 6S came out three years ago. This year’s model will be the first one since then that will actually be noticeably faster.
> Even the iPhones have really only changed cosmetically since the 6S came out three years ago. This year’s model will be the first one since then that will actually be noticeably faster.
According to this link, the currently shipping iPhone is roughly 1.75x as fast as the 6S (Geekbench score of ~4200 vs. 2400):
The limiting factor of phone performance though is mainly modem quality though, and to a less extent RAM. A 1.75x increase in some CPU/GPU-bound benchmark is nice, but it's not going to make your web pages render that much faster in practice. Whereas the performance is going to increase dramatically once we get access to the new 600MHz spectrum, 4x4 MIMO, etc.
I think having no updated machine under $1000 for the last 3 or 4 years is the culprit and not the refreshed MacBook Pro, which starts at $1800 and has never been their best seller.
Isn't the whole market shrinking in an even faster rate? Besides that: there's nothing spectacular to upgrade to for people that have bought a MacBook Pro in the last 5-6 years. I don't think that's entirely Apple's fault.
I've been holding off buying the new Macbooks due to issues with the keyboard, CPU performance (which was fixed), and the absence of a non-touchbar 15" Macbook (biggest blocker for me).
Until they release a 15" non-touchbar version with a better keyboard, I'll stick to my 2012 rMBP, as I'm sure others (including people I know) are too.
Haven't actually thought about that. I'm holding out for as long as I can, and I think my 2012 will last me for at least another year. I'm hopeful that with next year's refresh they'll put out a 15" without the touchbar, or just the same 2012 MBP with the new chips and 32G RAM.
Clearly that ad campaign did such a great job burning into your mind you can't stop thinking about it. You really need to consider what's not paying rent in your thoughts that takes away from your active attention.
Good on Apple marketing though, it stuck hard and each time someone makes a cute comment like OP's, it's just free advertising for Apple.
I believe around $199 a share is when AAPL would become the first company ever to have a market cap of $1T. It could happen tomorrow. For reference, the first $1B market cap company was US Steel in 1901.
We have a website and mobile apps. We are watching our revenue not so slowly go from credit card based purchases with a 2.4% transaction fee, to iTunes/Google Play purchases with a 30% transaction fee. This makes a HUGE difference in overhead for a business, and is money directly funneled straight to Google and Apple's "services" divisions.
I don't think this is going to change or level off anytime soon. Everyone wants their cut, now Visa gets it AND google/apple get it :(
Well, if you're in the Apple ecosystem, App Store is where you're going to get your apps, iTunes is where you're going to buy, versus stream music, and who else to trust to fix your iDevices than Apple themselves? So where's the competition?
$4.7B in iPad sales. That's 4.7 BILLION. At nearly 10% of their revenues, the going-going-gone tablet category still has some legs. Who would have thunk?
/edited the numbers. I had mixed up the Mac and iPad revenue figures.
iPad sales should go through the roof later in this year.
The acquisition of Texture and the upcoming refresh with iPhone X style design should drive a lot of of users to look at iPads as a magazine replacement. Especially if it comes free as part of your existing Apple Music subscription.
?? Wasn't Samsung the first to produce $1000 phone last year, followed by Apple a few months later?
or if you are insinuating that everyone else is merely copying Apple's pricing strategy (or anything that is Apple), or just copy, copy, copy, Apple fanois website is that way --> Appleinsider.com
The iPhone is a beast and a market leader - that is known, and shown in these results.
The Mac however is in decline - Apple seem to have abandoned it in favour of their cash cow (as many on here have complained) and these results just further prove it.
iPhone Market share (~11%) and unit sales of iPhones are flat compared to last year on a no-growth market. Service and Mac sales seem to be dependent on iPhone sales.
Quarter by quarter Apple turns into a one trick pony where most income depends on the success of their smartphone market share of ~15 +- 4%.
If there were a novel approach to smartphones/mobile computing - Apple/iPhone would look a lot like RIM/Blackberry in 2010/2011 where sales and revenues (services) skyrocketed yet analysts were warning us. Yet there's to tech rising to kill smartphones. So Apple is safe for some years ahead.
The word welcome as if someone already has a trillion cap and welcome them. But in fact no one has done it, and even if they did by real dollar and for a short moment; There were one or two companies that touches the trillion market cap for a few hours / days and came back down. Apple may be the first one to truly worth it.
Major congrats to them and to the late Jobs. I'd be in the Ballmer category... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qycUOENFIBs Making telcos "subsidize" it, must be right there with the "pay just the minimum on your credit card" business wise. Brilliant.
Apple doesn't need to improve iTunes. They need to take it out back and shoot it.
What Apple should do....
- When you attach an iOS device to a computer, expose a file system (not the file system) with "folders" that represent each apps local storage and let you copy files back and forth instead of forcing you to use iTunes to copy files into the app's local storage.
- Enable you to buy media on the web (app, books, etc.) that automatically gets downloaded to your device (like Google). They are so close to doing that now.
- Create a simple iOS backup and restore program for ios devices.
- iTunes should only play and manage music and movies.
- Enable the creation of smart playlists on devices.
> - When you attach an iOS device to a computer, expose a file system (not the file system) with "folders" that represent each apps local storage and let you copy files back and forth instead of forcing you to use iTunes to copy files into the app's local storage.
That's pretty much how iCloud Drive works, except it's not over USB.
On the one hand I agree with you. On the other hand, the days when it really mattered are arguably in the past. I have a big physical music collection on iTunes and even I don't touch my collection in iTunes much any longer.
Because Apple's premier software play is learning from other people's code running via the app store (not competing it down), and their content IP play is running too rich to alter in motion.
Because Apple hasn't been a technical leader in many years. They've established their brand as a luxury brand and their products as a status symbol; all else is secondary, including to most of the users. Almost nobody arrives at a purely rational decision to buy an Apple product in 2018 when competitor products nearly universally have a lower ratio of price to (performance/quality/screen size/serviceability/etc). Like everything else Apple does today, this strategy is also unoriginal: Harley-Davidson was a major innovator way back in the day, but nobody but a Harley fanatic in the biker community will recommend you to buy a Harley today, because they're (outdated design/inefficient/unreliable/etc); despite this, they're the most recognized brand by non-bikers and Harley fans will ride it out with Harley-Davidson to the end.
Apple’s ecosystem just works. I’ve used this example before, but when I needed to buy my great grandma who lives in a poor country who never learned English or went to school, a device to video chat with all her (grand)children, it was a no brained to get an iPad mini.
It works every time she uses Facetime and there is no problem other than turning it off and on. Similarly, all the grandparents, uncles, aunts, they don’t want to spend time learning how to sign into various google accounts and services. They want to press a button and see their loved ones. So everyone has an iOS device. Because google couldn’t get it together and offer something that worked, and didn’t change names every two weeks.
Similarly, WhatsApp took instant messaging. It just worked, sharing contacts, pictures, video is dead simple.
Not to mention iOS devices last the longest by far and get security updates quickly and for a longer period of time. And the resell prices prove it. And you can quickly go to an a Apple store and get it fixed or replaced. Who cares if it’s specs are not the best, it just works for 90% of people.
In 2008 I bought a high end Dell laptop. It ended up running way too hot and it would freeze up playing some games. I got fed up with the Windows ecosystem and tried out a MacBook Air. It was easy to setup out of the box. No crap Ware was on the computer. For the first time I actually used a trackpad and it was good enough that I no longer use a mouse with Mac laptops. When I bought my next computer it was a breeze transferring over my settings and programs. Whenever I use a Windows machine the workflow is way worse from my perspective. I remember well the frustrations with using Windows that disappeared with using Mac OS. I won’t go back.
Apple has its own set of frustrations but none of them, in my experience, compare to the hell of dealing with Dell and Windows. Never again for me. I recommend to people to use Macs. I think it’s rational to use Apple products. My iPhone 6 Plus still gets updates and works well. My iPad Pro is better than any other tablet I’ve looked at.
I would say just the opposite. Dell laptops have single handedly made me never want to spend money on Apple laptops. They are cheaper with more versatile configurations.
I have no complaints about either the cheap Dells I’ve had over the years or the midrange ones - just always buy thier business line or from the Microsoft store.
I have a 2008 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell that’s going strong as my Plex server. It was one of the last great 15” displays with a 1920x1200 display.
My current work and personal laptops are midrange 2n1 Dells.
MacBooks just aren’t compelling to me and this is coming from someone who has an iPhone 8 Plus, an iPad, a 6S (without a sim) and 5 AppleTVs (2 free from DirectvNow). Not to mention I had two FrankenMacs in the past - an LCIi with a //e card and a PowerMac with a Dx/2-66 card and later two Mac Minis.
It's totally reasonable for someone to like Dell and want to stay with Windows. It's not for me though and my point to the OP was that it's not irrational to prefer Macs. I don't buy them for status symbol (at least not consciously). I've looked at Surface Pro and Surfacebook but I just can't get over how clunky Windows feels to get anything done. I especially hate the nagging to get a One Drive account.
I don't think of people who prefer Windows and Dell as status seekers or in otherwise derogatory terms. To each his own!
That’s not what I am getting at. Apple has never produced a mainstream compelling laptop - a laptop with decent specs with a decent screen at a competitive price.
When I was in the market for a laptop in 2016, all I wanted was a Core I7, with 8GB RAM, an SSD and a 1080p display. The closest Apple had was $1600. The Dell was around $800.
Even today, if I wanted a MacBook with those specs there is nothing. The MacBook Air has anemic specs and the MacBook Pros cost a lot more - and I would still want a 5K monitor.
Luckily, I don’t have a need for a personal laptop. I’m good with getting a 5K iMac. The cost of a good 5K monitor is $1300. The 5K iMac doesn’t seem excessive.
there have been about a dozen new hires at my work, each of them getting a new mac book and accessories to develop on.
multiply that by all of the new hires across the country and some of the lowest unemployment numbers in years and you've got a good set up for apple's hardware division to make a ton of sales last quarter.
...
but unfortunately, looking at their data, it looks like I was wrong: unit sales for macs fell by 13% compared to last year, and 9% compared to last quarter.
interesting.
Edit: downvotes because I made a prediction before looking at the reports then acknowledged I was wrong and didn't delete my post. Cool.
Windows is still something like 88% of the corporate computer market, with macOS at around 9%, last I checked. Most companies aren't purchasing Apple hardware for their employees.
Yeah, certainly they don't do it in Europe. I wonder how does it look in the US, I would imagine Macs are much more popular in corporations (?) and definitely startups.
Apple is making great money selling consumer products and services. It's time Apple uses some of that money to build better hardware for developers without considering immediate profits. We need MacBook Pros that are actually designed for professionals. No touch bar, better keyboard, better CPU and GPU. Consider it an investment on your developers.
I am a developer and I really love the new MacBook Pro.
The CPU is now on par with the rest of the industry, keyboard issues largely resolved and the TouchBar is incredibly useful for developers. Look at the recent update from IntelliJ to see some of the future potential. Contextual buttons that completely change depending on what is selected is something nobody could ever remember with Fn keys e.g. refactoring specific buttons when a method is highlighted.
Being a Linux kernel and OS developer for a defense company, vim has been my main editor for quite awhile, and I have no issues with the touch bar on my new 2018 MBP. For those that require the tactile feel, there's always remapping caps lock, as well as utilizing other key combos: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key
If muscle memory is that engrained within the user that he or she cannot utilize any of the aforementioned alternatives, nor adapt to the difference in feel of the touch bar, then your choices are either an older iteration of the hardware, or switch completely. Claiming that, "you don't use vim," if you enjoy the new MBPs is, however, off the mark, IMO.
Hundred times a day. The escape key is still there in the same position it's always been.
The rest of the TouchBar changes depending on context but the escape key remains fixed. So just like how I don't mind having soft-keys on my iPhone I don't mind it on my MacBook.
As an alternative, I personally love the keyboard of the 2018 Macbooks and I'm not sure I'm aware of dramatically better CPUs that could be put inside of them? Certainly my new 13" with the upgraded CPU is fantastic. I would like a better GPU, but I can use an external GPU if needed. The disk speed is I think literally unparalleled, the screen is fantastic, the touchpad is the best in class, the T2 chip provides great security... I quite like my upgrade from my early 2015 13".
They could focus on cooling, which would enable them to throttle the CPU less often. The recent firmware update helped with the throttling but it still runs extremely hot.
There is a reason for Apple's position though. Many/most of these MacBook Pros are being used in professional work environments which expect your laptop to be silent.
I've been in quite a few meetings with the fans going to 100% and it's incredibly disruptive. So whilst you have options to increase the fan speed the defaults are understandably kept quite conservative.
This is a fair point. At the same time, though, they have very few exits for hot air and could improve passive cooling by making the MBP slightly thicker (gasp!) and adding larger heat sinks.
Alternatively, they could add first-party support for fan-profile configuration. The needs of a dev or designer or video editor do not match the needs of an accountant or an executive. The ability to easily switch between profiles to match task would be extremely useful, I think.
A bigger chassis with a bigger/twin heatpipe and bigger holes to vent the heat from are completely silent ways to increase cooling performance. In fact they could even be utilized to make the fans even more silent depending on the workload.
Fair point. I've been in a conference room where I had a video going on my 2013 MBP with headphones in and the guy next to me asked me to stop whatever was running my fans so hard. Those things can get loud.
The most recent MBPs were being throttled after mere seconds of 100% CPU due to the poor heat management and poor fan profiles; Linus Tech Tips was able to go from sealed box to throttled CPU in under 20 minutes without even trying. A firmware update to address the fan profile issue improved this but it still has issues.
The MBPs were not really designed to handle the heat of an i9
This is fair. I don't have a ton of heat issues but they could allow me to easily bump fan speed earlier on in the process of heating up. Would be a welcome addition.
You can get a decent CPU for MacBook Pro but they charge you an arm and a leg. The same with storage. A fully loaded MBP costs $6,699. $3000 too much. I even would have been okey with the price if it wasn't for the touchbar. The touchbar just makes me want to break my laptop in half everytime I try to use an editor like vim that requires pressing escape.
Overall my main problem is that Apple is trying to make MBP a mainstream consumer product. It should be for the developers. Just leave this one be for the developers.
Yeah, but drop the 4TB hard drive for a 1TB hard drive, and you're down to $3,899.00, which is just about what you asked for - $2,800 less. That $3000 is just for the insanely large hard drive and, from what I've read, that price increase just about matches up with the rest of the market.
And the prices on the SSD don't just get you an off-the-shelf Samsung SSD from Amazon, we're talking the fastest SSDs on the market by an absolutely massive margin.
Which aren't in laptops anywhere so it's pretty irrelevant in this instance. It's also the case that the T2 chip is running real time encryption/decryption on reads and writes.
They should license the OS to Sony and Lenovo, or just wholesale license it to everyone. Give me Mac OS VMs that we can do our iOS builds on without it being a pain.
The Mac has been growing for a long time, and they seem to have reached a plateau. I assume that's the reason why Macs have became absurdly expensive in the last few years -- when they can't grow unit sales, they need to grow revenue per unit.
The result is that Apple doesn't build the computer most of their potential customers want -- a $1000 Macbook. I understand that they don't care about the $300 netbook market, but not offering a decent $1000 laptop is a bad idea. It means they are going to loose consumers and students – there are decent alternatives at that price point. Or, people like me, who just keep using their old Macbooks because the high price of the new machines isn't worth the marginally improved performance.
Where does this lead us? I don't see how the Mac should grow from here, and as a Mac software developer that worries me. I want to be in a growing market, not a stagnant one. I'm probably going to be okay for the next few years, but is the Mac still going to be a worthwhile platform for a small software company in 10-15 years? I don't know.