The problem is expensive does not mean competitive. As a UK original Mac user, who literally had the first Mac's brought over to the UK, I'm so disappointed at how Apple under Tim Cook has gone from its original concept to a fashion item with more interest in glitz than guts. For $50,000 any user needing power can easily get a power base much more powerful.
The Mac platform has been absolutely wonderful, originating from creative minds utilising Xerox original GUI ideas to make a machine users perform creative tasks with ease as the machine works for them, not the other way round. Now its been turned on its backside, with virtually every new OSX spending more time on glitz than functionality that really serves the user. Yes iPhones are pretty, iPhones are usable, but it should not mean that higher level computing, and creativity on the Mac range has to match the prettiness, with so much effort into emoji's and the like.
Apple has lost its way. The Mac Pro is similar to my old Mac Pro, which was a great machine, no doubt about it, but I don't need facilities to make it look pretty, colourful emojis as a fashion item, I just want a powerful machine that makes it easier and quicker to do the job better than anything else on the market, and I'm afraid the Mac line up has not done that for quite a while. Even the laptops are no longer really competitive products but fashion items.
A MacBook Pro will set you back around $1600, yet the WINTEL machines which I've emigrated from years ago, have comparative power machines for $400 with similar processing or better. Yes I could never go back to WINTEL, but I'm saddened by the route Apple takes. Takes too long to incorporate faster processors and components, in most cases designed NOT to be able to upgrade with the Mac Pro being the exception, but at what cost. Apple under Tim has in my opinion lost its direction. You only have to read MacRumours to see how much space is given to computing and creativity which is what led the Mac to be rightly a cult through ease of operation and enhanced workrate by it. Perhaps its time to separate the computing from the glitz of the iPhone.
Interconnectivity is fine, but how many high end music producers, video producers or creators use their iPhone to do it? If they did, then it makes a mockery of Mac Pro as the criterion required for both is so different yet most of time we see 'improvements' that are designed to dull down performance at the higher end from iMacs upwards to make them more and more glitzy and pretty. All takes computing power, all increases coding in the operating system, all leaving more potential for bugs.
