
Why Apple doesn’t care about professional Mac users anymore (2016) - smacktoward
https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/why-apple-doesnt-care-about-professional-mac-users-anymore/
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setr
What I don't understand is that we treat these businesses as if they're human;
capable of only focusing on more or less one thing at a time. iphone's on
their mind, so obviously iphone is what you're going to get. Everything
targets the iphone.

But at the level of scale they're at, they should be far more than capable of
appealing to _both_ their current iphone market, and the older developer
market. They should be trivially capable of producing both types of laptops,
and researching both, and improving both.

They're magnitudes larger than the company they were; unless the cost of
targeting developers has increased by similar magnitudes, they should be
perfectly fine _also_ operating as they did 10 years ago, while doing what
they want with the iphone.

But somehow, they're not. Without splitting up the company, or creating a
microsoft-style internal group wars, it's not possible for them to focus on
multiple audiences simultaneously?

It doesn't make sense to me.

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jon_richards
One thing I found very strange when looking at Apple laptops was that they
only really had 2. They had 3 main models to pick from, but the air hadn't
been updated in so long that it was no longer the lightest option. The _air_.

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simonh
If a company doesn’t care about a product, they put minimum effort into it.
They don’t spend time and effort on new features and redesigns. They don’t
come out with a completely new body, new super low profile keyboard, new
cutting edge interfaces and a completely new unique customisable touchscreen
key strip using an embedded processor. All of these required the dedication of
considerable design and engineering resources.

I’m not even saying these were all good ideas. The keyboard has serious
reliability issues, a lot of people dislike the touchscreen key strip and
there are frequent complaints about the limited number and type of ports.

You can make an argument that Apple isn’t making laptops suitable for real pro
users, that the effort they are putting in is misdirected, but IMHO arguing
that any of this is due to a lack of interest seems to me to be ridiculous.
Apple put a ton of work into these laptops, but they missed the mark.

One possible reason for this is that the composition of their customer is
changing, its broadening beyond their traditional loyal fan base. The evidence
for this is that MacBook Pro sales are through the roof. These much maligned
devices ‘unsuitable for pro use’ are selling like hot cakes. So maybe Apple is
hitting the mark, it’s just not the mark their critics think it should be.

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scarface74
Some things have changed since 2016. The iMac Pro is getting rave reviews by
Mac pundits and power users and Apple changed direction and said there would
be a new Mac Pro.

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madengr
It's a notebook. Why would you do any sort of heavy computation on a notebook?
Now them not caring about desktops? Yes, that's a valid issue.

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LyndsySimon
> Why would you do any sort of heavy computation on a notebook?

For me - because a MacBook Pro is a $2-3k notebook, and it's not unreasonable
to think that I shouldn't have to buy a $3-4k Mac Pro to do things that I can
do without issue on my $500 Linux desktop.

There's also the fact that until ~2014, the MacBook Pro was a true desktop
replacement. The only real drawbacks to it compared to a desktop machine were
the price and the less powerful graphics card. Now? The MBP's specs are
significantly lower than comparably-priced machines.

FWIW, I have indeed moved more of my computing off my laptop. I have a gaming
desktop at home and I rent a VPS that I use for programming and scripts that
require significant resources. It's actually gotten to the point that I've put
my mid-2015 Retina MBP up for sale and have replaced it with a 6th-gen iPad.
The only thing I had to really "give up" for that move was a full-blown IDE on
my mobile device; I make do now with tmux and vim over MOSH.

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simonh
What on Earth can you do on a $500 Linux box you can’t do on a MacBook, other
than run Linux only software? The only thing I can think of maybe is something
that requires 32GB RAM, but surely you can’t get a system like that for
anywhere near $500.

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LyndsySimon
It has a much faster CPU and a decent discrete graphics card (a 1050 Ti).

Granted, I bought it on sale and the machine today would be ~$750, but the
real point I'm trying to make is that even that low-specced machine is
superior to my newer MBP for many things - like parsing large text files, or
pretty anything to do with encryption.

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t0mbstone
An article from 2016?

