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The new Mac mini is almost certainly NOT coming
- Thread starter grcar
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Well I guess if enough people keep buying their consumer gadgets why bother with professional and semi professional Mac users after all they are possibly the most loyal and we all know how large corporations value and reward their loyal customers.
You have to order a keyboard (or supply your own) when you buy an iMac so those are probably safe for a while.
Make it thinner, so it can reek of innovation
Seriously though if its going to be usb-c give us at least 3-4 usb c slots
They might get away with that if they licensed the OS for use on dedicated hardware desktop bundles from other manufacturers.
That would keep serious power users happy and plugged into the Mac environment, and won't cost Apple any lost sales, because it is a market segment they are no longer competing in.
I'm starting to hate Apple more than I ever hated Microsoft.
It's more pity and frustration from me.
I mean what the hell are they doing all day?
It's amazing-all of those employees and all of that money and they can't produce a great desktop or keep improving them?
Pathetic
Pathetic
Of course they can produce a great desktop. But clearly they just aren't very interested in that market anymore.
The upsetting thing is their secrecy - they can't share any info at all besides "desktops are on our roadmap?" I need Jeff Bridges from Tron to teach me how to let go and find my zen.
I would like to see MacOS on particular hardware bundles. That would be good.
MacOS is a (bad) addiction. Wean yourself from it and you'll be free.
Are you kidding, it's the only thing I can see getting more development by Apple. They have to put their iWatch innerds(aka toolbar) on a keyboard for use on iMac.
Expect the new $400 keyboards to go on "sale", in a couple months.
According to Apple, a keyboard is included with the iMac…
https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/
Magic Keyboard
The redesigned Magic Keyboard comes standard with your iMac. It’s wireless and rechargeable
Here's the crazy part:
Apple won't license MacOS to allow anyone else build a better "Mac" than them... yet Apple isn't interested in making proper desktop Macs themselves either.
It's really a lose/lose situation.
I'm sure MacOS will go on... but it will only be available on thin all-in-ones and thin laptops.
If you need anything else... like a powerful tower or mini-desktop... you're screwed.
When they get hackintoshes working with the 1k series Nvidia cards, Apple is going to be missing out on a whole lot of pent up demand for Apple new hardware.
And they will have no one to blame, but themselves.
True!
It's funny that a guy with a NewEgg account can build an amazing machine...
...but Apple won't.
The number of people interested in that is very low, compared to the overall sales of macOS hardware.
Especially in the market that the MacMini defines: people that don't really care about the Intel roadmap (and the NVIDIA and AMD/ATI roadmap).
Of course, my 2012 will still be faster in multi-core benchmarks...
As for the workstation-market. I believe, Apple will quietly exit that.
Too much of the hardware in that market depends on "by-products" from servers - a product Apple has stopped selling for quite some time.
As said elsewhere, Apple can't license macOS. Their whole business-model relies on them being the only source of hardware for it. People should stop fantasizing about this.
I'm not really happy about all of this myself - OS X has nice apps and works very well for what it does well (it of course sucks at anything it wasn't designed to do). So switching back to e.g. Linux (what I use at work) wouldn't work too well.
I would miss syncing contacts and appointments, some 3rd-party apps only available on OS X (Omnigroup's mostly).
Well, but that's kinda the thing. An operating system becomes popular mainly if there are popular applications that run on it. But, popular applications are only ported to an operating system if it becomes popular. It is this catch-22 which has helped Windows last for so long.
Apple has used a number of different techniques over the years to try and keep its computers relevant. Dominating the desktop publishing market, pushing their computers into schools to get young people using them, and most recently switching the underlying system over to a BSD-based OS, providing an enormously powerful and flexible back-end to Apple's wonderfully friendly front-end.
But again, you've gotta constantly keep that cycle going. Apple has now more-or-less abandoned all the efforts it used to make to get creative people to create applications on OS X. The hardware now is so crippled that applications requiring significant CPU or GPU power just never appear any more. And so, popular applications are slowly disappearing from the platform. Which means, the OS is going to become less popular.
I think Apple is going to find this vicious cycle turning on it fairly quickly now. With creative types now abandoning the platform, other folks will also start to abandon it, and it'll take an enormous effort to avoid OS X simply sliding into irrelevance...
I don't deny that.
But this is the course Apple has taken now. I don't believe Apple has not heard the concerns of the users here. Schiller et. al. do read Twitter and they have their MVPs and acquaintances they talk to.
I'm sure they could build a desktop-Mac again, with a GPU. But how large is that market, actually?
The market for people who just want a pretty, neat, organized desktop with as little cables as possible is probably larger.
TB3 could help with that, in that we can actually power a desktop now from the display. A desktop without a dedicated GPU, of course...
But this is the course Apple has taken now. I don't believe Apple has not heard the concerns of the users here. Schiller et. al. do read Twitter and they have their MVPs and acquaintances they talk to.
I'm sure they could build a desktop-Mac again, with a GPU. But how large is that market, actually?
The market for people who just want a pretty, neat, organized desktop with as little cables as possible is probably larger.
TB3 could help with that, in that we can actually power a desktop now from the display. A desktop without a dedicated GPU, of course...
Certainly, that market is not going to be as large as the ones Apple has now tapped into. (Or, at least, not as profitable for now; Apple has been banking on the benefits of "creating" new markets, but those early-adopter profits don't last.)
Thing is, though, it's all linked together. There are advantages to an environment that has both consumer machines and developer machines running the same OS. Consumers know that if they really need more power in the future, they have a path to get it. Developers gain the advantage of building software within the system itself, without the overhead and complications of cross-compiling. Apple is now losing this advantage.
Nah, you're talking about the iMac now. There's no point at all to getting a Mini if what you really want is reduced cable clutter.
I would hope Apple is waiting for a shoe to drop with Thunderbolt graphics. That way, every Mac can be built with Intel Integrated Crapware graphics. If you want something better? Get an Apple Blunderbolt monitor with better graphics built in! Did I mention the new monitor will be PRETTY AND SHINY????
I would greatly like Apple to release Macs with innerds compatible to windows machines, that are also upgradeable.
I also USED to push Apple to my family members. Several families went Mac, because of me. I answered questions, and upgraded their machines, as their needs grew and the software/OS required - RAM and SSD. Now, I can no longer advise these families to continue with a Mac. What do you think those buying a 4gig ram, Mac mini are going to say, when the machine runs like crap, and will only get worse on every OS update?
Apple's desire to go with the lowest common denominator has its price. That price is short term gain, at the expense of long term customer commitment. You are hearing LOTS of push back from former evangelists, and that voice gets louder with each neutered update, or lack of update.
But don't worry, those voices will eventually quiet down, due to apathy and eventual abandonment.
Oh, is that why Apple is currently getting out of the standalone monitor business?
In any case, I've never taken a liking to Apple's standalone monitors in the past. The entire advantage, to my mind, of a standalone monitor is that you can move it from computer to computer (or even plug multiple computers into one monitor). Apple's inflexible designs make this nearly impossible with their monitors.
In any case, forcing data between the CPU and the GPU to cross a long wire increases the expense and decreases the maximum speed of a graphics card. Apple really, really needs to just give in and create a motherboard which supports a PCIe card slot. It isn't like you can't design such a machine elegantly; other companies do...