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Comment by mikenew | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I'm surprised and glad that Apple has broken their vow of silence on ever talking about future products or plans. On the other hand, it's pretty clear from their talk that they are just now starting development on a new Mac Pro, and they're saying "not coming this year" makes it seem like they don't even want to commit to 2018.

They let the Mac Pro sit there for over 1200 days without a single update or price drop. It's hard to think that they weren't planning on just killing it. And they're apparently surprised that developers are buying non touch bar macbooks, which considering how many developers use vim just seems weird. It seems like it took a big outcry and actual sales numbers to make them realize their pro segment isn't happy, and considering you can't develop for iOS or in many cases macOS unless you own a mac, I just don't feel reassured.

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Throughout the article they kept trying to distinguish a certain subset of pro users without clearly defining how they see it. Final Cut Pro & Logic were mentioned, but there are definitely more applications that would benefit from more beefy pro machines. It's almost like Apple is using the wrong yard stick to measure their Pro market because they're asking the wrong questions.

"Do you use Final Cut Pro?" No, I use scikit-learn! No, I use vagrant & virtualbox to run 4 VMs No, I use Unity ...

> It's almost like Apple is using the wrong yard stick to measure their Pro market because they're asking the wrong questions.

I think we at HN are succumbing to a bit too much Omphaloskepsis[0], in that we [developers] feel that we are the 'Pro' users almost exclusively. This simply isn't the case. I do, however agree partly with your claim in that Apple is not using enough yardsticks. Apple have always defined their 'Pro' market by their pro-apps (as you and they mentioned, FCP, LCP, etc). There are a huge amount of creative professionals that need 'beefy' machines to do media-development work, and wouldn't be so bothered about losing their F-keys.

It's funny how Apple have always acknowledged their developers (in a big way) out-of-sight, but never really put them on the public pedestal that their 'artistic' users get. This is predominantly a fault of Marketing than anything else. Such thinking has clearly infiltrated top management, and I do hope they start getting their ideas inline with a more wholesome and comprehensive view of who their professional users really are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphaloskepsis

I bought a 2015 mbp a couple weeks after the 2016 mbps were announced. Apparently I was one of many! Apple increased the price $500 (dongles, the stupid touch bar) while stripping out stuff I use every day (magnetic charger, usb-A, good battery life) and giving me nothing in return (32g ram?). Also, they force a dedicated gpu, which I've had die; for both battery life and reliability, you're better off without. Meanwhile we had smarmy folks like Gruber carrying Apple's water and doing the "nobody really needs more than 16g ram" nonsense. (This from a man who, um, writes a blog. Yeah, those kilobytes of text must really push a computer to the limit.)

Until this announcement, I assumed, based on the neglect of the mac pro and mac os, that Apple was basically going to just run out the mac business. I had started trying to figure out what my next computer was going to be after a decade of macs, and was pretty bummed by the options.

Hopefully they're serious about this.

If they're looking for other things they could do, may I suggest doubling down on fixing mac os quality issues. And hey, maybe even hire the homebrew folks.

I am totally in the same boat, and totally agree with you though I haven’t bothered to even think about getting a new MBP in the last year, just going to use this 2013 model until it dies.

And I need a new workstation for more intensive workloads than any MacBook Pro can handle, and have been holding off on what to get.

They did hire the Homebrew folks. Max Howell, Homebrew's creator, was famously rejected by Google and then hired by Apple.

It's pretty presumptuous to assume you know what John Gruber does with his Mac. I suspect he might sometimes open an app other than BBEdit.

It wasn't presumptuous for Gruber to tell me what I need in a computer? OK then.

And I know mxcl works for Apple, but not on homebrew. The lead maintainer works, I think, at GitHub?

Edit: in fact, from the commit logs, mxcl doesn't seem to have been much involved in homebrew in years. It's a poor show for github to seemingly be more interested in helping make macs work well for developers rather than Apple, imo...

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/graphs/contributors

mxcl hasn't worked at Apple in quite a while.

I'm not sure Apple would ever give him marching orders on an open source project that he wasn't "much involved in...in years", including years before his Apple employment.

Why do people even need Apple to produce Mac Pro? If this is for developers, they can build their own, and probably do a better job for less money: it's just a PC with components that OSX has drivers for [1].

I also don't quite get what are they going to be spending all this time on, what kind of "designing" is going into it? Picking components on NewEgg and figuring out the shape of their Apple-branded case? :)

Seriously, unlike mobile/laptops, Apple has no competitive advantage in traditional desktop computing. They don't make CPUs, chipsets, GPUs, etc. And there's no battery to fiddle with, or a case to make thinner or a keyboard to mutilate.

[1] https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017#CustoMac_P...

1) Apple makes (or at least used to make) good hardware -- I'm typing this on a 2008 Mac Pro that is still going great for me.

2) I don't want to bother with these kinds of issues every time Apple puts out a point release:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/macos-10-12-4-update.2171...

I don't "need" Apple to produce a Mac Pro, but I'd certainly like them to, if it's a good box.

Sorry I wasn't being clear. I did not want to imply that Hackintosh situation should remain the same, I was thinking more along the lines of Apple publishing and maintaining a list of compatible devices with guaranteed long-term OSX support and call it a day.

There are plenty of fantastic motherboards, GPUs, power supplies and quiet and good looking cases to choose from, I only need a guarantee of future OSX support.

Ah, yeah, good question: why does Apple need to be the one to produce Mac Pro? I could only speculate. Wouldn't it cut significantly into their iMac and MacBook sales if they opened things up like that?

Typically it introduces a support and development burden, product fragmentation and a weaker brand. They tried it before (I had one of the Mac clones, it was just ok).

It would eat into their sales but the other side effects are worse, and they would have to look into creating a channel for being able to make money from MacOS.

There is a reason for a number of these boutique Windows workstation manufacturers as there value add is to provide a supported product out of known good tested configurations, because for someone that just wants a machine that works it’s still some effort and Microsoft still gets money for the Windows license.

Yes, it would. Apple experiemented with this in the mid 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone it didn't really work out.

I've been doing the hackintosh thing for a few years now. It sucks. Every now and then an update completely breaks it, and it's a crapshoot of disabling different kernel extensions, picking the right nvidia driver, or finding the revision of Clover that works for whatever reason. iMessage has been finicky since ever. My bootloader fails every other reboot for no reason I can figure out. The nvivia driver won't load unless I unplug one of my three monitors while it's booting.

I make my living off of iOS development, and I don't even want to think about the amount of time I've lost over the past few years because I had to debug my machine rather than work. Apple seems to be quietly tolerating the hackintosh community, but they need to provide real options for their developers. I'm tired of this unholy monstrosity of a computer that isn't supposed to exist. I'm not going to do it forever.

Sounds like your problem is OSX, not the computer itself.

The whole point of a Hackintosh is OSX.

I would wager that about a quarter of Mac Pro sales go to developers, at most. They sell tons more to 3D and CAD designers, scientists (the old NeXT was a favorite of theirs, you might recall), even musicians (who love the "trash can" because it's portable and quiet).

P.S. I'm one of those folks like you who spent his teens and twenties building gaming rigs, and around the time I turned 30 I realized this stuff wasn't fun for me anymore. I just wanted to plunk down some money and make "the computer problem" go away. I became more interested in what I was doing with computers than monkeying around with them in the garage. Don't dismiss developers who just want to buy a box and forget about it.

I recently built a custom uber-PC for music and machine learning.

10 cores, 64GB of fast RAM, 2TB superfast SSD, a 1080Ti graphics card, and it still costs less than a trashcan Mac with a much lower spec.

I hate Windows with a passion. Given the choice I would rather stay with macOS. And I would rather just buy something than stress about whether I'm wearing enough static protection bracelets not to nuke a £1500 processor.

But when the product I need literally doesn't exist - and apparently won't exist for at least another 12 to 18 months - it was a forced decision.

Did you use ECC RAM?

It's a lot like asking why people want a laptop that was "designed for Linux" rather than one that's just compatible with Linux. It's mostly a matter of vendor support—if it's the hardware vendor's responsibility to fix incompatibilities between OS $FOO and their hardware $BAR, then $BAR is going to run $FOO a lot better—especially whenever $FOO is updated—than it would if it was entirely just community support.

Hell, I would be satisfied with a short list of laptops that are known to be good with Linux, with all features working.

The Ubuntu list is so long and has so many caveats.

I've been using Dells for a long time now and haven't seen one that didn't run Linux flawlessly. Legend says one should avoid discrete GPUs.

Because when one does business it helps to stay within the law.

If you need a Unix system that runs adobe software you need a mac.

And lets face it building a hackintosh is 10x the risk of building a Linux desktop for very little benefit, especially if adobe pulls a valve and decide to support Linux for all of their platforms.

The problem for Apple is that they need to be in the officials of high profile professionals if they need to keep their brand as valuable as they are and that means they need to offer a high power Unix workstation with a high level of compatibility with the Linux and Java environments that exists on servers, render farms and HPC clusters. At the same time when their consumer vision is to try and kill cross platform compatibility and move away from their Unix legacy.

If apple stays on their current path there will be a day within a decade when someone goes to a science or web dev conventions and shows images of laptop uses without a single macbook in it and thats why the "pro" market matter to apple.

> And they're apparently surprised that developers are buying non touch bar macbooks, which considering how many developers use vim just seems weird.

I've never quite figured out the continued popularity of the ESC key for vim using developers. For a touch typing vim user on most modern keyboard layouts generating an ESC by hitting the ESC key is more movement than generating an ESC by hitting CTRL-[. This is especially so if you have a keyboard that puts the CTRL key where God intended it to be (immediately to the left of the 'A' key). With CTRL in that location, hitting CTRL-[ is just a small pinky movement on each hand away from home position.

In earlier times, ESC made a lot of sense. On the ADM-3A, for instance, CTRL was in the proper location next to 'A', and ESC was immediately above CTRL, and '[' was at the far right side of the top row (near where BACKSPACE/DELETE is on most current keyboards). On that layout ESC was way more efficient than CTRL-[.

And you can reach ESC just fine on the touchbar anyway, it just isn't tactile. It's not like its in the middle of the function row or something.

I use an HHKB2, which has CTRL in the correct location, and the ESC key is one row lower, being next to the 1 key. It's still too far to reach and CTRL-[ is absolutely the best way to go. Reaching even further on a standard keyboard is just awful.

> which considering how many developers use vim just seems weird

I am pretty sure it's still a very very small percent out of all the MacBook Pro buyers, and a lot of the vim users are quite happy with just remapping the each key and were doing that even before they got the touchbar. I think this whole buzz about missing esc key and fn row is just non relevant anymore and the vast majority of MacBook users myself included don't really care and enjoy a new great screen along with a better trackpad and battery life.

It's not that your majority likes the touch bar and doesn't use VI. It's that the influential developers who can work on whatever they want, or are trusted to pick platforms, will switch away from Macs. And that will be trouble in the long term.

Small segment, maybe. Influential folks making product decisions that impact popularity of Apple products though. Many of us don't want to remap keys on different machines. Esc is rote memory and easy for touch typists - why we ignore the tMB. Apple made a bad brand call that is symptomatic of bigger management problems.

>> has broken their vow of silence

I never understood how this silence helps any company (except in cynical way - we won't tell them when they'll get new model and how good it will be so they will clear our stock of soon to be 'old' models).

Have a look here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

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