Apple knows where the money is...

[Tesselator]

I've worked in product management for high-tech companies my whole career and I'm guessing with this last rev of the Mac Pro, Apple had some difficult decisions to make.

The 2008 MP was probably a money loser for them, given the slim margins they had, the down-turn in the market mid-fiscal year would surely have meant that the expected unit sales did not materialize to make that product line profitable. That alone might have been putting pressure on some to kill the product line. Just holding the status-quo wasn't an option since the 2008 MP margins were so slim... they needed a higher-margin product. Thank goodness for Nehalem. No product manager wants a product line that loses money.

I'm sure when they forecasted units sales for 2009 it looked equally as bleak as the latter half of 2008... The economy plus the niche appeal of the Mac Pro ensures the market is almost not worth pursuing. Their only reasonable choice if they were going to continue the Mac Pro line at all was to significantly increase margins to compensate for the dwindling unit sales.

Sounds like you really are in product management because you've swallowed the rhetoric and logic wholly. But you're working from the wrong end of the equation as so many analysts and management types do. The decisions they face are tough agreed but when you make your customers pay that's when chapter 11s and the often soon to follow 8s start happening. They need to open their minds, their practices, their policies, and tighten up their belts - not make their customer base pay for their lack of willingness to do so. I'm relatively certain I could step in and restructure it myself such that only a thousand or two pros would pay all the balances of the year's effort - for the MP line. I ain't no genius and I guess it's safe to assume they sell considerably more than a thousand or two units annually. I wouldn't need to raise prices above 2008 margin levels and at the same time I think the popularity of the line would increase. I generally see what you've said here as an excuse. I don't know if this is how Apple sees it or not but it's not a very good one either.

The target market for the Mac Pro is the professional content creation world, where inelastic demand is something that Apple can leverage... whether they price an 8 core workstation at $3K or $5K... doesn't matter to this target market... it won't materially affect demand. The only one's who are really impacted by this years price adjustment are the students and hardware enthusiasts. Demand from large studios and production houses is affected by the economy, not the price of the box.

The poorness of the excuses are expanding with this remark. It's not even how things work as I've experienced them. If you would like to focus on content creation to the exclusion of the business, medical, educational, military, architectural, IT, and etc. communities that's OK but you have to understand it first. If you work for Disney, Pixar, ILM, or even smaller houses like Pinewood, Zoic, and DD2, not to mention all the game development houses, in a salary position you have at least two machines at your command. You have the one(s) at work and you also have one(s) at home. You bought the one at home and yes the price mattered! Very often the home one is better than the one's at work. If you have a family you also purchased one for your wife and if the kids are old enough probably one for each of them too - thought those are usually lesser machines. This is not even considering all of the free-lancers and contract workers which make up a huge part of almost any production. And trust me, the day studios don't consider unit price for the machines they buy will be the day I have monkeys flying out of my ***. No matter the size (of the studios!).

Thus, perhaps it wasn't a brilliant decision on the part of product management to dramatically increase margins on this year's Mac Pro product line but it was likely a product line saving decision.

As long as the economy is in the tank, and Apple's big customers are not buying many 8-core workstations, you can expect the price to remain high.

At least that's how I see it.

Not brilliant is an understatement to be sure. The first rule is to always give the customer what they want. In a bad economy computerists want good low cost equipment - NOT average equipment at astronomical costs. If a company needs to retool or rethink some strategies in order to make that happen then that's what they need to do. I dunno if Apple MP prices will remain ridiculous or normalize in 2010 - that's on them. But I know basically how markets work and if they don't (and they don't have artificially inflated private relationships elsewhere) then we can expect no more MPs at all in the next few years. Sad as that sounds. I'm reasonably sure they're already going to eat their shorts on the 2009 MP line-up. I would hate to be them this year!

 

[CaptainChunk]

I would purchase a Mac Pro in a second if they were reasonably priced. I don't understand why they sell their hardware for so much money, a mac is a pc now.. you can build or buy a nice fast one for 6-700 dollars. You can build something much more powerful then the most powerful Mac Pro for 1500 or less.

More powerful at what? Gaming? Workstation-class PCs are expensive, too. For the most part, Nehalem Xeons account for a rather significant percentage of the overall system price. While it has become pretty obvious that the 2.26GHz 8-core model aims for a high profit margin, PC manufacturers are doing the exact same thing. A Dell Precision T7500 configured as similarly as possible to a base MP 2.26GHz Octad actually costs more, by a few hundred dollars. Dell workstations do come with 3 warranties, but once you level the playing field with AppleCare on the Mac Pro, you now have two machines that cost about the same.

People might jump in and argue that PC workstations at least offer more workstation-class graphics options... But I'd venture to say that 90% of workstation users wouldn't even benefit from Quadro and FireGL cards. I certainly wouldn't.

Apple never really has catered to the enthusiast market in their history. Otherwise, the 4-core Mac Pro wouldn't be a Xeon-class machine that's locked down to one processor. Equivalent Core i7 CPUs would have easily sufficed here. Most enthusiasts don't care about ECC memory support. But what happens when they all of a sudden have a $1,500 Core i7 tower? A lot of people would stop looking at iMacs, and that's the bread and butter of Apple's desktop line.

It's all marketing, man.

 

[Dreamail]

I might be one of the few people going against the trend here.
All my (Apple computer) life, since my PowerBook 100 (1991), I've only ever owned laptops.
And I've just ordered my very first Mac Pro. A huge step for me.

Ultimately I could no longer justify the price-performance discrepancy between a high-end laptop (2 concurrent threads) and desktop (16 concurrent threads).
Comparing a fully specced 17" MBP with a similar specced MP, for roughly twice the price you get 8x the performance. That's just way too much IMHO.
Apart from the fact that I do not really consider a 17" MBP very 'portable' anyway. Might as well get a desktop.


I don't think desktops will die out, even mainframes are still sold today, but for consumers it'll become a niche product: maybe some home servers or gaming rigs.

Even in the workplace I see most people eventually using a large(ish) tablet computer, perhaps with external keyboards.


From the consumer's point of view I think it's a multitude of factors that lead to the decline of desktops. Portability is not the whole picture nor only factor.

- 'How much computing power do you need for your most common tasks?'
Word processing kind of reached its plateau long ago, one doesn't really need a faster computer for yet even more unused features in Word.
Same goes for most spreadsheet uses, Internet and Email.
Home movies for a while required better hardware, but once a computer can handle consumer HD video editing, how much more do you need?
Once laptops reached this level of power, they will do.

- Prices
Laptops are always more expensive than desktops.
This fact limited adoption initially. But today even a 'low end' laptop is often powerful enough making laptops seemingly 'affordable' in general.

- Space and Design
Most consumer desktops were huge and ugly beige boxes. People hated them in their living rooms, or even bedrooms.
Both issues go away neatly with a laptop. Even the ugly ones can be folded away in an instant. Saves space and your place can look much neater in an instant.
I know many people who prefer laptops just for these two reasons. Portability and battery life as such is not really the issue for them, they never take their laptops outside their home.

- TV vs Internet
People gradually shift from passive TV watching to active Internet browsing. You'd be surprised how many do email and Internet browsing while watching TV.
That's where a laptop comes in very handy.

 

[Tesselator]

This is timely:

http://technologizer.com/2009/07/04/the-laptop-circa-1968/

Instead of listening to some gibbering fool with a blog why not look at actual reports based on real-world numbers? Something like this maybe:

http://www.etforecasts.com/products/ES_pcww1203.htm

Or even actual news like this:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/worldwide-pc-sales-could-still-grow-by-double-digits/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/162949/semiconductor_sales_slip_worldwide.html
and etc.


EDIT: Sorry BTW if that sounded harsh. I didn't intend it to sound bad... Just that there are some many opinion blogs out there founded on nothing but feelings. You know?

 

[awmazz]

Technically, Apple doesn't make any consumer desktops at all. The Mac Pro has 'workstation' written on its box to emphasise it's for power users, not consumers. The closest thing to a consumer desktop made by Apple in the last decade since the Performas of the 1990s is the Mac Mini. Merely a headless laptop or iMac to win over all those PC desktop users. Apple never even attempted to make a competitive consumer 'tower' like all the PC manufacturers.

Separate from the Apple II line of personal computers, the original all in one Macintosh had a handle on top for portability and Apple never made an expandable Mac 'desktop' until the Macintosh II in 1987. Two years later they released the Macintosh Portable, followed by all the Powerbook laptops. Then in 1998, the all in one iMacs reintroduced the classic all in one Mac format they began with (complete with a carry handle like the original Macs).

So that period of decline for Apple was actually when they *did* focus on Mac desktops for a brief 5 years between when they actually abandoned the all in ones after the Colour Classic II in 1993 and re-introducing them again as the iMac in 1998. At the same time, the consumer desktop market boomed with PCs with the advent of Windows 95.

So except for that rare 5 year period, Macintosh desktops have always been a secondary focus for Apple. A niche market for power users and mostly the art and publishing industries. Apple's consumer, education and general business market focus for Macs otherwise has always been compactness, portability and non-expandability. In short, Apple has never successfully focussed its Macintosh business plan on expandable consumer desktops, so there's really no news value in wondering if they'll focus their efforts elsewhere when they never did in the first place.

 

[Gonk42]

The Mac Pro is an inelastic product... in economics, this means that demand from their target market (creative design houses) is not affected by price. Sure, joe consumer and the average SOHO customer can no-longer justify a Mac Pro, but they are not the target market for this machine. If you are making good money with a Mac Pro, the difference between $3K and $5K is easy to absorb and just a cost of doing business.

I suspect that with the 2008 Mac Pro, initially the economic outlook (unit forecast) was good and the cost of goods was low enough that Apple felt they could price the product extremely aggressively to eat more of HP and Dell's piece of the pie.

But you are correct, the days of bargain pricing on Mac Pro's is probably over for the foreseeable future... leaving only the true pro's as customers.

Sadly I suspect that you are right. But the problem Apple may face is that they have to maintain a big enough user base for companies like Adobe to bother to update their Mac versions of software. Already the pc version of CS4 is more advanced than the Mac version.

A high priced mac pro may be acceptable (reluctantly) to pros who have a big investment in software and training in place but it will not be tempting to switchers from the pc world and gradually even pros may make the switch away from Apple if they think that support is diminishing. But I suspect that Apple are not that bothered. They would prefer to just sell consumer products but will keep a nominal pro presence because it would be bad PR to drop the line completely.

 

[Azrel]

Let's see, I have a choice for a home server of:

- Exprensive low-end Mac mini that must be upgraded, is hard to open, and that cannot house 3.5" hard drives.
- Much cheaper used dual PowerMac G5 where I can fit the 2 drives that I want, and that in addition is better suited for running PPC applications.

The choice is obvious

Why would I want a PPC tower that's a noisy, bulky machine that guzzles electricity?

The choice is obvious.

 

[doox00]

More powerful at what? Gaming? Workstation-class PCs are expensive, too. For the most part, Nehalem Xeons account for a rather significant percentage of the overall system price. While it has become pretty obvious that the 2.26GHz 8-core model aims for a high profit margin, PC manufacturers are doing the exact same thing. A Dell Precision T7500 configured as similarly as possible to a base MP 2.26GHz Octad actually costs more, by a few hundred dollars. Dell workstations do come with 3 warranties, but once you level the playing field with AppleCare on the Mac Pro, you now have two machines that cost about the same.

People might jump in and argue that PC workstations at least offer more workstation-class graphics options... But I'd venture to say that 90% of workstation users wouldn't even benefit from Quadro and FireGL cards. I certainly wouldn't.

Apple never really has catered to the enthusiast market in their history. Otherwise, the 4-core Mac Pro wouldn't be a Xeon-class machine that's locked down to one processor. Equivalent Core i7 CPUs would have easily sufficed here. Most enthusiasts don't care about ECC memory support. But what happens when they all of a sudden have a $1,500 Core i7 tower? A lot of people would stop looking at iMacs, and that's the bread and butter of Apple's desktop line.

It's all marketing, man.

Here is a system I just put together, all parts from newegg. Server/workstation class motherboard, dual xeon 2.26ghz 12gb ddr3 ecc ram, 1tb hdd etc etc Similar Mac Pro is 3900.00

 

[Inconsequential]

The Mac Pro case is at-least $300/400 IMO, its high quality Ally.
The PSU isn't a 1KW 85%+ like the Mac Pro one is.

And your missing Windows, so another, what is it, $150? there.

Ok so we are up to $2500, lets say $2400 to be fair, now 10% more is $2640.

So fair enough, apple has gone over the top with the pricing here.

However, now my issues are fixed, I have a quad Mac Pro that is SOLID.

I really, REALLY hope Apple don't drop the Mac Pro line. Plus I think they won't.

If they do I'll be buying a Octo 2.26 and dropping some 3.2Ghz+ 6 core chips in

 

[doox00]

The Mac Pro case is at-least $300/400 IMO, its high quality Ally.
The PSU isn't a 1KW 85%+ like the Mac Pro one is.

And your missing Windows, so another, what is it, $150? there.

Ok so we are up to $2500, lets say $2400 to be fair, now 10% more is $2640.

So fair enough, apple has gone over the top with the pricing here.

However, now my issues are fixed, I have a quad Mac Pro that is SOLID.

I really, REALLY hope Apple don't drop the Mac Pro line. Plus I think they won't.

If they do I'll be buying a Octo 2.26 and dropping some 3.2Ghz+ 6 core chips in

That case I listed is a solid heavy case as well, my pc I am on now is a P182.. very nice case. Not sure what retail mac pro apple cases cost but I am sure they are super inflated as well

I selected a pc power and cooling 750 because they are one of the best power supplies you can buy, super efficient and usually under rated.. you can change it to 1k watt one for a little more money though.

Point being.. Apple lower your prices on Mac Pros so I can buy one!!

 

[VirtualRain]

Sadly I suspect that you are right. But the problem Apple may face is that they have to maintain a big enough user base for companies like Adobe to bother to update their Mac versions of software. Already the pc version of CS4 is more advanced than the Mac version.

A high priced mac pro may be acceptable (reluctantly) to pros who have a big investment in software and training in place but it will not be tempting to switchers from the pc world and gradually even pros may make the switch away from Apple if they think that support is diminishing. But I suspect that Apple are not that bothered. They would prefer to just sell consumer products but will keep a nominal pro presence because it would be bad PR to drop the line completely.

You raise a good point... for most companies in the Mac Pro target market, particularly creative content houses, the Mac Pro hardware is just a portion of the investment... There's also the cost of the pro software (Logic, CS, or FCS, etc.) as well as the body to warm the seat in front of it ($5-10K/month) and the training that goes into that person. The cost of the Mac Pro hardware, while not insignificant, is still only a small portion of the cost.

I'm relatively certain I could step in and restructure it myself such that only a thousand or two pros would pay all the balances of the year's effort - for the MP line.

I really, REALLY hope Apple don't drop the Mac Pro line. Plus I think they won't.

I don't think so either, The Mac Pro and their pro software line address a very niche but lucrative market. Apple just can't afford to give away Mac Pro hardware at slim margins anymore.

 

[Tesselator]

Yeah, I have to admit, 2009 and late 2008 marks the period where 3rd party cases catch up to Apple's quality. I visited a store yesterday where there were well over 200 cases on display and you could power them on for the lights if and and the fans. Wow! I was impressed by 8 or 10 that were every bit the mil and quality of the MacPro case. More space inside too. 6 & 8 HDD, 2 to 4 ODD bays. But I wasn't buying so I didn't notice prices so much. I guess around $150 ~ $250. <shrug>

 

[Tesselator]

I knew someone would call me on that. LOL So, what? You think the product manager there now is super human? Or I'm just a retard?

Wait! Don't answer that!!!

 

[Eidorian]

Yeah, I have to admit, 2009 and late 2008 marks the period where 3rd party cases catch up to Apple's quality. I visited a store yesterday where there were well over 200 cases on display and you could power them on for the lights if and and the fans. Wow! I was impressed by 8 or 10 that were every bit the mil and quality of the MacPro case. More space inside too. 6 & 8 HDD, 2 to 4 ODD bays. But I wasn't buying so I didn't notice prices so much. I guess around $150 ~ $250. <shrug>

The Antec P180 has been out for years now. The revised version fixes a few issues the original had and it can be picked up for $79.99 if you know where to look.

You also have every other P Series case at your disposable. They're made for expansion and quietness. Even the mini version is built like a rock.

 

[Infrared]

The Mac Pro is an inelastic product... in economics, this means that demand from their target market (creative design houses) is not affected by price. Sure, joe consumer and the average SOHO customer can no-longer justify a Mac Pro, but they are not the target market for this machine. If you are making good money with a Mac Pro, the difference between $3K and $5K is easy to absorb and just a cost of doing business.

People say that sort of thing, but aren't competitive businesses
always trying to drive down costs?

 

[sushi]

while there is still a place for the Towers, they are growing increasingly more of a niche market as laptops become more than adequate for the vast majority of people's needs.

Agree.

The average consumer's needs are fairly limited:

• Browsing the web.
• E-mail.
• Word processing.
• Editing photos.
• Simple spreadsheets.
• Maybe a game or two.

Sure there are exceptions. But for the most part this is true. Many current Netbooks can handle these tasks, let alone a current PC or Apple laptop.

The average person simply does not need a desktop computer to accomplish what they need (want) to get done.

The Mac Pro case<snip>

After a quick review, to add:

The MP comes with 2.66GHz where as the example here is 2.26GHz. At those speeds, small increases cost a considerable amount.

RAM memory? If you use Apple's, you are a n00b or don't have any budget constraints.

 

[Infrared]

Instead of listening to some gibbering fool with a blog why not look at actual reports based on real-world numbers? Something like this maybe:

http://www.etforecasts.com/products/ES_pcww1203.htm

Or even actual news like this:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/worldwide-pc-sales-could-still-grow-by-double-digits/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/162949/semiconductor_sales_slip_worldwide.html
and etc.


EDIT: Sorry BTW if that sounded harsh. I didn't intend it to sound bad... Just that there are some many opinion blogs out there founded on nothing but feelings. You know?

No, that's quite all right. The article linked to from the blog
was way more interesting than the blog itself.

 

[JoeG4]

This point is fine and all, but then why doesn't apple make a laptop worthy of flagship status?

 

[Winni]

Why do you think apple really never went after the business sector. More numbers with consumers. More sales with consumers. I've been one of those who want, sometimes needs, the latest and greatest for the last 25 years. When you give a little device like the iPhone video editing (although small) capabilities, you don't need a mac pro. Those of use who do semi to pro editing will need the mac pro but our numbers are dwindling. Look at the home media centers like hp's. A box with a jbod setup. You can let devices like the apple tv or tivos do the encoding for tv's and such. Hate to say it but the desktop as we know it will change tremendously. The folks with the deep pockets will be the only ones able to afford these monster computers.

The real numbers are made in the enterprise market, NOT in the consumer market. There are reasons why Microsoft sells more copies of Windows in a month than Apple sells OS X licenses in a year. Just because Apple is successful with selling luxury consumer products does not mean that this is the place where the real money is made. It's a small niche and already saturated -- you can only sell so many bottles of Bulgari parfums.

Apple is not in the business sector for a number of reasons. One is that they don't have the required support channel for the enterprise market (and obviously don't want to invest into building one), the other is that they don't even have the required products (and don't invest into them either). The OS X client is not enterprise ready, and neither is the OS X server. Furthermore, they do not have any applications that are needed in the business sector.

It's also an image and marketing question. Steve Jobs stopped wearing ties when he gave up his original dream of being a serious player in the enterprise field and sold NeXT to Apple (just look at some old NeXT introduction videos that he made and how 'PC-like' he looked at that time).

Then there is some serious competition in that market that Apple never managed to defeat: Microsoft on the software side (and Microsoft's enterprise product portfolio blows Apple out of the water without even having to move for it) and then there are Dell, HP and a couple of other hardware OEMs who have everything from the desktop to the server batteries for data centers.

 

[Winni]

Apple just can't afford to give away Mac Pro hardware at slim margins anymore.

Well, they never have. The only reason why Apple's Mac Pros seemed cheaper than Dell Precision Workstations when the Intel Macs were introduced was because Apple put a graphics card into the Macs that alone was around 1,000 USD cheaper than the default graphics cards in the Dell machines. You just cannot buy a Dell Precision with a consumer graphics card, they only sell them with professional OpenGL accelerators. And the Dell also comes with three years on-site business support - a support option that Apple does not even offer. So much for Apple's marketing.

 

[Infrared]

The real numbers are made in the enterprise market, NOT in the consumer market. There are reasons why Microsoft sells more copies of Windows in a month than Apple sells OS X licenses in a year. Just because Apple is successful with selling luxury consumer products does not mean that this is the place where the real money is made. It's a small niche and already saturated -- you can only sell so many bottles of Bulgari parfums.

Apple is not in the business sector for a number of reasons. One is that they don't have the required support channel for the enterprise market (and obviously don't want to invest into building one), the other is that they don't even have the required products (and don't invest into them either). The OS X client is not enterprise ready, and neither is the OS X server. Furthermore, they do not have any applications that are needed in the business sector.

It's also an image and marketing question. Steve Jobs stopped wearing ties when he gave up his original dream of being a serious player in the enterprise field and sold NeXT to Apple (just look at some old NeXT introduction videos that he made and how 'PC-like' he looked at that time).

Then there is some serious competition in that market that Apple never managed to defeat: Microsoft on the software side (and Microsoft's enterprise product portfolio blows Apple out of the water without even having to move for it) and then there are Dell, HP and a couple of other hardware OEMs who have everything from the desktop to the server batteries for data centers.

Apple's greatest achievement is simply to have survived at all.

 

[doox00]

Apple's greatest achievement is simply to have survived at all.

thanks to the ipod/iphone

 

[Tallest Skil]

thanks to the ipod/iphone

Original iMac, actually.

 

[Tesselator]

Technically, Apple doesn't make any consumer desktops at all. The Mac Pro has 'workstation' written on its box to emphasise it's for power users, not consumers. The closest thing to a consumer desktop made by Apple in the last decade since the Performas of the 1990s is the Mac Mini. Merely a headless laptop or iMac to win over all those PC desktop users. Apple never even attempted to make a competitive consumer 'tower' like all the PC manufacturers.

Separate from the Apple II line of personal computers, the original all in one Macintosh had a handle on top for portability and Apple never made an expandable Mac 'desktop' until the Macintosh II in 1987. Two years later they released the Macintosh Portable, followed by all the Powerbook laptops. Then in 1998, the all in one iMacs reintroduced the classic all in one Mac format they began with (complete with a carry handle like the original Macs).

So that period of decline for Apple was actually when they *did* focus on Mac desktops for a brief 5 years between when they actually abandoned the all in ones after the Colour Classic II in 1993 and re-introducing them again as the iMac in 1998. At the same time, the consumer desktop market boomed with PCs with the advent of Windows 95.

So except for that rare 5 year period, Macintosh desktops have always been a secondary focus for Apple. A niche market for power users and mostly the art and publishing industries. Apple's consumer, education and general business market focus for Macs otherwise has always been compactness, portability and non-expandability. In short, Apple has never successfully focussed its Macintosh business plan on expandable consumer desktops, so there's really no news value in wondering if they'll focus their efforts elsewhere when they never did in the first place.

I love what you said here! It helps the point about Apple having an incomplete product line and:
It sounds so right - and "h i s t o r i c a l l y . . a c c u r a t e".

I wonder if it really is tho? For me personally it's not. I don't have the Apple product time-line in my head tho. I do have a closet full of "expandable desktops" from Apple though. There were 15 some models based on the motorola's 68000 architecture, then probably another 30 or so different products based on the PPC. All "desktops" and all had easy open cases with local bus card slots, RAM slots, and other special user accessible expansion areas. My own collection ranges from Mac II, IIfx, and IIci to the PowerMac 8xxx series of which I have 3 different models. I got all of my 10 or 12 powermacs for free too.

I guess we could look at something more official tho:
This is kinda neat but they're missing a LARGE number of models:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/176946/Apple-Product-Timeline-Map?autodown=pdf
If I look here I can see that Apple maintained a desktop or multiple desktop models from 1987 with the Macintosh II until present day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Macintosh_models
Of course for that to be correct we need to admit that a workstation (Mac Pro) is a desktop computer just with a higher internal spec. Otherwise it only applies from 1987 - 2006. So we have Workstation class desktops and Consumer grade or common desktops. Full towers probably classify outside of desktops simply for their form factor.
Here's another but this is based on the same data as the first one I think and missing many models: http://www.allofme.com/Timeline/Misc/621734/Apple_Products
This is maybe better but doesn't readily show dates or images: http://applemuseum.bott.org/

Oh well. I dunno what any of this means but it's fun to talk about and look at all the old and ancient macs.

 

[TheStrudel]

With regards to the completeness of 's product line, here's a factoid worth throwing in. One of the guys at Axiotron noted that  supports their modbook tablet endeavor, and remarks that their sales were expected to be in the hundreds of thousands - and that  will not make/release products that don't manage to sell in the millions. That sounded true at the time, and it also fits in with what I've read as the 's drive to focus instead of offer everything under the sun. They profit from most of their product lines, even the TV. Undoubtedly the Mac Pro makes less pure profit, but profit is profit. I don't think the division's running losses and they won't ignore profits. Our towers aren't going anywhere anytime soon, but don't expect that midrange tower as it is unlikely to sell in the millions. It has been noted that OS X isn't exactly the most friendly for hardware/gaming enthusiasts - the very market which likes those midrange towers.

More on marketing: I'd like to point out that  does not include numbers or anything otherwise hard to keep track of in product names. They're just Mac Pro, iMac, etc. They present an image of streamlined and simple which is irrelevant to professionals - because we represent maybe 5% of their business. If that. Keeping everything simple and identifiable is obviously a strategy and if you think that their product lines aren't carefully calibrated to maximize sales, I have a few bridges to sell you. They may not offer everything you want, but they're damn good at sales and marketing and you cannot deny that.