The end of the year has been unkind to Apple. Probably because Apple has done a lot of things this year interpreted as slights by user communities. Even among technical crowds and the tech press, often generally supportive of what Apple does.
Apple's main accomplishments of the year are, in no particular order:
- New WatchOS and Watch hardware
- Making iPhone users angry by removing the headphone jack
- Introducing a true successor to the iPhone 5S and dramatically mis-estimating the demand
- Introducing the 9.7-inch iPad Pro hot on the tail of the 12.9-inch version
- Introducing questions as to whether the 12.9-inch iPad Pro had been delayed, and creating a situation where neither is a clear leader
- Because the 12.9-inch iPad Pro has more RAM, but the 9.7 inch version has a better display by far
- Leaving any discussion of updated Macs until the very end of the year, at which point new MacBook Pros with controversial new connectors
- Failed to say literally anything about the entire rest of the Mac lineup
Apple has generally been unkind to the Mac over the past several years. It has been worse this year. Some of this has been a relatively natural progression of Apple's relentless search for sleeker computers and better integration. Some of it has been questioned over the years of course. The best examples I can think of are the removal of the optical disk drive in the iMac and the new change to USB Type C ports.
I'm usually fine with Apple's changes, but a lot of them feel like they're being done somewhat capriciously by a company that has had a little too much success predicting the future. I've argued before that some of the changes Apple has pushed over the years are damaging to users. Floppy diskettes were fine, I don't specifically mourn the loss of the optical drives, but it's starting to feel like Apple's doing things specifically to spite its users.
I think there's a few problems with it. I don't think Apple is truly contemptuous of its users, despite all appearances to that idea. I think the problem is that Apple massively mis-judged excitement for the new Touch Bar feature (as with Force Touch on both iOS and Macs) and in a presentation about a machine whose base price ranges from $1799 to over $4000, it seems tone deaf to spend literally any time talking about the machine's ability to do predictive text input (on a keyboard where people can easily train themselves to type at over 100 words per minute) and easily select from different emoji.
USB Type C is absolutely the future and annoying though it may be, I don't think Apple is wrong to jump all in on it. I do think that the pricing of the machines is wrong, and that Apple was probably wrong to leave the entire 2015 MacBook Pro lineup in place at their existing prices. (Perhaps to drive the point home, Apple should have discontinued the 2015 MacBook Pros and dropped the price on the 2012 MacBook Pro, the MD101LL/A, that was still on sale until the keynote.)
A lot of these things aren't inherently bad, but drama surrounding the MacBook Pro, combined with continued poor messaging has caused additional drama. On top of all of this, Apple has been almost utterly silent about the rest of the entire Mac platform.
The silence has probably been the worst. It is mostly well understood that Apple is, in a lot of ways, at the mercy of its suppliers for things like new generations of processor and graphics card. This is especially relevant in the Mac Pro, which is using 2012's finest Ivy Bridge-EP processors and also probably 2012 or 2013's finest AMD GPUs, Apple skipped Haswell and Broadwell for no discernable reason, so the hope is that now that AMD has Vega GPUs, Apple will update the Mac Pro to use those and the Skylake-EP CPUs due out a little later in the year.
Old and a little slow though it may be, the Mac Pro is still considered to the most capable Mac. It holds the most RAM, has the most ports, and it has that dual GPU configuration, if you use that kind of thing. It's a very good computer, but it only truly effectively serves one of Apple's many constituencies.
Chuq von Rospatch suggests of the Mac Pro and a potentially re-balanced MacBook Pro that prioritizes performance and capacity over thinness and battery life that it should be considered as a strategic machine. It should be the ultra-high end machine that makes video editors and developers of varying kinds happy to be able to buy. The argument here is that these are the people who influence the opinion of others and help them choose Macs. Without those folks, there are fewer people running around specifically evangelizing the Mac.
Technical users (and even people who power-use specific apps, but may not power-use the whole system) are often implicitly tech support for others around them, and in addition to influencing opinions, they influence recommendations for new technology purchases because it's easier to support the thing they use.
I have personally been disillusioned with Apple for a long time, although they are making extremely compelling hardware and their software (what little they still make, but Mac OS X specifically) is now better than it has been for several years. I sometimes find myself wondering exactly how many Macs I've encouraged or dissuaded over the years. I normally tell people that Windows computers are perfectly fine and if they already know Windows there's no specific need to get a Mac. Would I have said those things if I'd been using Macs?
To make things worse, Apple now has messaging trouble with the iPad. The 9.7-inch iPad Pro shipped only a few months after the 12.9-inch model, with a tremendously upgraded display, but with only ("only") 2 gigs of RAM. There continues to be consternation about whether or not the iPad, any model, deserves the "pro" tag. This is mostly the same crowd saying that Apple should stop selling the MacBook Pro under the "Pro" label. I'm mixed. It's clear that "Pro" has meant "nicer" for a while now. Apple advertises the iPad Pro hardware as being capable of a lot of very intense computing tasks. 4k video editing and photography chief among them, especially with the newly improved displays and more memory.
The trouble is that Apple has done a poor job shepherding the iOS ecosystem into something that can truly do this work. Perhaps Apple has something up their sleeves, but they've been saying this for years, and I've been writing about it for years, and as far as I can tell, network connectivity will never really catch up with demands on using iCloud/OneDrive/GoogleDrive storage for large data files.
An attentive version of Apple would realize that workflow and multi-tasking are important and build machines that cater to the needs of certain customers. It doesn't even need to be a big 2-socket, slots and disks workstation (although there are many who would buy that product, even if they did not strictly "need" it) – Apple just needs to say something about the Mac.
Almost more importantly than opinion-makers is the fact that a system like the Mac Pro is needed for the best experience when doing Mac and iOS development work. I don't know how Apple builds Mac OS X, but the logical choice would be to use some kind of Mac for the job. The Mac Pro makes the most sense, and if that's what Apple is doing, it would make sense that Apple has motivation to update the machine.
Granted, it could very well be that Apple is using servers from some other vendor to compile Mac OS X components, thus side-stepping the very issue that Mac users have, which is that there is nothing better than the Mac Pro for a lot of work, and building a non-Apple Mac "works" but is not at all a solution for people outside of Apple doing similar work, or different but just as demanding work.
The more I think about it, the more I think that there may be some room to re-balance what the Macintosh platform looks like. I think that there's room to re-position both the Mac mini and the Mac Pro upward. Apple could (maybe even "should') build a Mac mini that is a little bigger (perhaps even using desktop bits) and a new Mac Pro to sit above the current one with a little more configuration flexibility.
Another option may be to build both the Mac mini and the "Mac" on the same board platform, with the "Mac" coming in a taller enclosure that allows a better CPU and a discrete graphics card (basically 27-inch iMac specs) and replace the Mac Pro with a bigger, more flexible machine entirely.
The first step however is doing literally anything to acknowledge that the Mac is an important product, and announce some kind of plan to do literally anything with the veritable pile of 3-or-more year old products still being sold today. The MD101LL/A was a great joke and at a lower price point could have continued to make sense, but the 2013 Mac Pro is just sad.