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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

The current Mac Pro design seems like such a massive misstep in product design, it will be really curious to see if they will walk it back, or just drop the pro market completely.

I wonder what thinking lead to that product. Did they think the pro market would be worth it to them to keep investing in keeping the product up to date and then it turned out not to be worth the investment? Although, even before then the Mac Pro was only updated sporadically... Was it all just Jony Ive design hubris? Who is the Mac Pro designed for?

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> Was it all just Jony Ive design hubris? Who is the Mac Pro designed for?

Apple consistently chooses form over function, but they don't usually let the scales tip this far. The last time they fucked up this bad was the Mac Cube, but back then Apple was proactive enough to kill the Cube within 6 months. It really surprises me that Apple hasn't come out with something to replace the current Mac Pro.

Microsoft realized that the niche creative-type markets that Apple has historically owned tend to be broad-market influencers, and they've started to target them with products like the Surface Pro and Surface Studio.

Competition is great, and it will be interesting to see if Apple will rise to it or fade away.

The Cube didn't replace the Power Mac. It was sold in addition to it. If you compared them on specs alone the Power Mac was cheaper and faster so literally the only reason to buy the Cube was because it looked nice. (Or maybe because your desk was really small.)

The current Mac Pro replaced the old Mac Pro, though. That's the difference. If you don't like it, your only other choices are iMac (built in monitor) or Mac Mini (horrifically underpowered).

Apple could kill the Cube without consequence, but the current desktop Mac lineup is so limited there is no alternative.

[quote] iMac (built in monitor)[/quote]

It's not the built in monitor that's the problem, is the overheating with the assorted noise and possibly thermal throttling if you use it for something that actually maxes out the CPU/GPU.

Well, and the lack of expandability. While the portable MacBook Pro equivalents are about the same thing (look at Dell XPS 13 pricing), Apple right now has nothing for developers/power users on the desktop side.

> with the assorted noise and possibly thermal throttling if you use it for something that actually maxes out the CPU/GPU.

Yeah it's worth pointing out that the trashcan runs silent at full pelt, while the iMac sounds like a jet engine.

Keep this in mind when you imagine a row of 10 3d/video artists rendering away all day.

> Apple consistently chooses form over function, but they don't usually let the scales tip this far.

Does it? For example, in the laptop space, Apple has consistently shipped the largest batteries of any notebook without an external battery pack.

They used to anyway. Back in the day when their laptops were good.

Like mid2015 back in the day?

That's 9.5 internet years, so yes.

What about that wireless mouse and how you had to have it on it's back to charge it?

Or the apple pencil?

That's not true.

The 2016 13" MBPs have between 49.2 and 54.5 watt-hours.

The XPS 13 9360 has 59 watt hours, for one.

> Apple consistently chooses form over function

Like the latest MacBook Air with only one port, which means you need to carry it with a hub dangling from it like a freshly used condom?

How is that good form?

Minor correction, but it's the Macbook with one port, not the Air. The Air that is still available has two USB and one Thunderbolt port + an SD slot and the Magsafe connector and so on.

And quite honestly, the single port Macbook isn't a completely horrible idea, Apple is just trying to push a new standard like they always do. It's an entry level computer that does just the basics. How many peripherals are necessary on a computer with those specs? You certainly can't do any games on it, most printers nowadays have a wireless function to connect to, it has Apple's trackpad which is pretty darn good for navigation, else it has Bluetooth for external mice, which can be had for very cheap now with good performance.

I'm all for more options; I don't have a Macbook because my old 2012 Macbook Air feels about right to me in terms of minimalist form with enough function to still do what I want. But I can see how you'd work with a Macbook without running into issues with the port. The majority of the time I use my laptop is just having it plugged in, or I have it when I'm traveling and don't want a bunch of stuff plugged in anyways.

Apple's idea isn't far off from how most people use the laptop.

I like being able to plug in a thumbdrive without mucking about with my power cable.

Or plug in to a monitor without mucking about with my power cable.

Or... Just about anything, really. I don't get the choice of a single port over 2 or 3, besides they wanted to push a "unified" (read: confusing) standard but didn't have the board room to operate 2+ of the ports (eg, if they had two, you probably couldn't charge from both).

Then get an Air or a Pro. Or a Dell, or a Lenovo. There are these things called market segments. For some people the MacBook is a great design. For others, it isn't. No developers were harmed in the making of this laptop.

> Then get an Air or a Pro. Or a Dell, or a Lenovo

Exactly! And that's the entire premise of the original article, people who used to be highly satisfied Apple customers are leaving for other, more suitable hardware after feeling that Apple is neglecting their needs.

I did.

And steered others to do similar, because I don't want to have to troubleshoot the USB-C mess for friends and family.

It won't make or break Apple, but that's 3 or 4 less laptops they've sold. And I don't think I'm the only one making that choice.

Having only a single port on one side is indeed a horrible idea; and the MacBook is in no way an entry-level machine (at well over a thousand dollars). Try and step out of the RDF.

I'm not really sure why it's automatically reality distorting when the majority of my use time with my current laptop that has more ports than the newest MacBook is almost exactly in line with apple's idea with the single port.

My needs certainly aren't everyone's, and I've never claimed as such. But really, with the specs on the current MacBooks what else are you going to be doing besides Facebook and some movies? I'm not even confident it can play some high quality YouTube videos much less higher quality rips.

With the price, this is how they've always operated; their initial adopters always pay a premium to be first, and the second or third iteration is accompanied with a price drop and design changes to address initial complaints. The MacBook Air gen1 was filled with issues. The update handled all of these pretty gloriously.

Having a MacBook myself, I haven't found any problem only having one port. It's an excellent computer in general use, and very portable.

But I agree it's not at all entry level, this is a a luxury computer. It's an exceptionally well made machine. Their best product IMO.

It's not for everyone, sure. But it's great for me.

An entry level computer that provides just the basics... for 1300 dollars.

Seems like almost assuredly they will just drop it.. basically I can't imagine any engineer at Apple that is or was working on it is super excited about something that probably made a grand total of like 50 million USD during the mac pro lifetime compared to like 80 billion on iPhone sales per quarter...

Considering Apple's significant profits and cash in the bank... Apple is well-suited to fund a loss-leader products that bolster their cachet in the professional community -- putting their platform on the front-lines of culture creators.

Furthermore, today's demanding professional are tomorrows Joe Schmoes: having the hearts and minds of pioneers would them better see what's coming on the horizon. It just seems silly not to invest money to keep the power-user niches happy.

I think this is a very interesting perspective. If I understand correctly, your argument is that a Mac Pro product need not be a direct profit maker so long as it perpetuates Apple's position as a top end computer manufacturer. Have I understood correctly? Or are you perhaps prognosticating a change in market demands rendering such a product less relevant?

You got it. It's a strategy employed by the automobile industry as well: high-end loss leaders that "signal the brand" and cultivate loyalty among enthusiasts.

Apple's claim is staked on high-margin products, so it needs an elite cachet much more than say... Xiaomi or Dell. And you can signal that to consumers with one-of-a-kind high-end products that operate on the absolute cutting-edge of various creative, technical, and scientific niches.

Porsche for instance isn't earning any money with their LMP1 race cars. They need them to sustain the illusion that they're a sports car company, despite the majority of their sales being SUVs (Cayenne, Macan) and sedans (Panamera).

That, plus also the effect that people in the market for pro computers tend to be infleuntial. They creatd software and influence the purchasing decisions of others.

> Apple is well-suited to fund a loss-leader products that bolster their cachet in the professional community

They could do this, but they have yet to prove that they will do it. Ever since Jobs, Apple has been hyper fixated on focused, profitable product lines. The Pro is out of step with that, and I bet with laptops making up the bulk of their computer sales, we'll start seeing them move away from the iMac too.

My only guess right now is that they still feel they need the Pro to maintain their computer business, but I fear they are slowly becoming just a gadget company and will forget their roots.

I wish Apple management folks read the sentiment here. Because, I believe if not for Apple, the industry wouldn't have progressed this far, at least in the build quality department (We had Sony, Dell and IBMs pro laptops but they never had the combination of price/build quality/looks nailed).

I think its a bad idea to drop things based on how excited your engineers are. If you go that route, then plenty of companies producing boring software and industry specific products will just die.

Yea totally agree in general -- in this case I just mean that its so obvious right now how much focus Apple puts on their money making products that engineers at Apple would see the writing on the wall and they too would not be that interested in pushing the product forward -- likely the people who worked on it if they were smart tried to bail out of that group long ago. So if both the management and the engineers both don't want to work on something, then both the money and effort is dropped on the product and its dead. When Jobs was alive, people could get Jobs to approve it as a pet project and they would get money and people on it and it would move along. But nobody seems to be pushing those pet projects at Apple anymore.

You got the point.. all Apple want to its pro line is having enough computing power to develop apps for mobile... For Apple, developing laptops systems/applications is not economically interesting anymore. All said, Apple wants pro developers as long as you are a mobile pro developer.

That's incredibly short sighted. This way they will lose many of their pro users which might not matter. But then they will tell their friends when asked what to buy to not get a Apple computer. I believe pro users is what made Apple big and it's a large part of what their success stand on.

I think - sadly - you're right about this.

There doesn't seem to be anyone at Apple speaking for creatives any more. Certainly no one who gets really excited about working with musicians, artists, film directors, and so on, almost as an equal.

Cook has the mindset of an accountant who is a media and trinket consumer, not the mindset of an inventor with creative aspirations. Likewise the rest of the executive team.

To be fair, there aren't many people like that around. But it would cost Apple virtually nothing to host some product focus groups with creative talent to ask "What do you want...?"

Totally agree. It's like the company actually decided to stop standing for something real.

The Mac Pro design itself is great - Xeon CPU, dual GPUs, infinite storage expandability via Thunderbolt 2.. the problem is that they never upgraded it. The GPU is 4 years old now, for example.

A new version every year, and space for multiple internal SSDs, would have made it desirable.

However, Apple is now milking the old glory and failing to build tomorrow's glory. It's the classic beam counter mistake. It's probably time to short Apple soon.

Yeah. It was awesome when it came out...

Right, you either choose an integrated design, and commit to expending the resources to keeping it upgraded right there on the bleeding edge, or you build an expandable machine and let your customers do that work for you.

But even before the integrated Mac Pro, they regularly let it go two years between updates of the pro model. They must have known when designing the machine that they wouldn't be keeping it up-to-date and that it would quickly become obsolete?

Apple also has the issue of trying to align their releases to their PR schedules. When a component (like a CPU generation) slips, it really messes with their update cycles (see: MacBooks). This doesn't matter so much to consumer devices, but pros are more sensitive to this, and letting pros upgrade their machines mitigates this to some extent.

Even when it was new, the GPU was a problem for me. Now it's both a problem and old, which is not a good combination.

Except the GPUs were crap even on release. And there are like 3 applications that can use both? So unless you were in that niche, you'd end up paying a ton of money for two dubious GPUs of which you could only use one.

If you want a pc with the design of Mac Pro (actually better in my opinion) look at the samsung Art pc Pulse. It is the same concept, but way smaller (about half the size), modern specs, I think you can upgrade at lest the ram (not sure about ssd though) and for the specs the price is OK.

Actually, photos do not do much justice to it. In real life it is way more impressive. The upper part looks like it floats on a colorful aura. The design is an obvious copy of Mac Pro, but they made it way better.

> The current Mac Pro design seems like such a massive misstep in product design

Seriously? Perhaps I'm biased because I own one, but it's pretty much the most awesomely-designed desktop computer ever IMHO, at least from a hardware/cooling/looks perspective. The real problem, I thought, is that Apple seems to have left desktops behind to rot

Sure, it's pretty, and if you want an completely un-upgradeable appliance, it's probably wonderful.

The point is, most professionals upgrade the same computer multiple times over it's life, particularly for fast-moving components (the GPU, in this case).

Making them basically completely impossible to upgrade significantly reduces the long-term value of the mac pro.

The thing is that they could be upgraded if Apple had released new GPU or SSD cards since the current Mac Pro launched.

Alternatively they could have used industry standards in the first place, certainly for the internal SSD connection.

It doesn't help that they've also failed to keep either their openGL, openCL or Metal drivers competitive either.

Upgrading components has never been a Macintosh thing. Arguably because simply upgrading 1 component just exchanges 1 bottleneck (graphics) for another one just behind it (motherboard or memory clock speed etc.) It's better and far more long-term cost-effective to simply upgrade the entire system at once IMO. I believe you're vastly overestimating the number of professionals who upgrade individual components (other than memory or hard drive which were always upgradable on Macs).

Why did they make the PowerMac G3/G4 series so easy to open you could do it with one finger if upgrading components "wasn't a Macintosh thing"? To dust the machine out?

Some pros expect to upgrade but many replace systems for simplicity: if you make money off of your computer, spending a few grand every couple of years just isn't that significant. If you have a 4 year old system break after years of heavy (i.e. heat-generating use) the downtime cost can quickly hit the same amount and it's less predictable compared to simply budgeting n-thousand a year as a business expense just like you do with a desk, coffee, etc.

The problem is that Apple has chosen not to put any resources into non-portable devices and so the problem isn't an expense but an absolute lack of options other than switching platforms.

I agree the hardware design is amazing. Product design is more than the hardware - it's where does this fit in in the market? Who's the customer? What's the roadmap?

Yeah. Those answers are apparently 1) Nowhere 2) A small band of die-hard enthusiasts 3) End-of-lifed :/

The Mac Pro is probably one of the last Apple products to have Jobs' fingerprints on it, too

I think from a design standpoint it was interesting, and might have been forgivable if there had been slightly more diversity in the GPU lineup and if they had kept it up to date.

The latter one is the big one. You can't just leave an unupgradable professional focused machine sitting on the shelf rotting.

The real problem is people aren't buying desktops like they used to, and as a percentage of Apple's revenue they're almost non-existent.

They're in a bit of a bind here. They can't cater to every niche need, they're not going to make these quirky, narrow-use spec machines. They can't compete on price compared to hand-built. They can't compete on performance compared to the ultra-high end workstations from other vendors.

Maybe if they opened up a limited licensing program for macOS on desktop machines to a handful of premium vendors that are willing to adhere to certain constraints they'd have a way out of this jam.

Jony Ive has become too senior to be effectively challengeable by more engineering types. That's why all the Mac hardware since he was elevated to his current position, always errs in favour of design at the expense of high end functionality.

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