So your suggesting Apple should target the professional and business market with a...... motherboard......?? Not sure how that will go down when they need support on it to keep their business going?...
Your idea would actually be the worst.
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So your suggesting Apple should target the professional and business market with a...... motherboard......?? Not sure how that will go down when they need support on it to keep their business going?...
Your idea would actually be the worst.
Apple would never do this for a variety of reasons, but one of the major ones is that it would result in the return of third-party clone Mac Pros which would be competing with the Mac Pro for an already (relatively) small number of sales.
How do you know that Apple doesn’t make money with a MacPro?
Besides, a Professional knows better than to tinker with hardware himself - too expensive (research, purchase, plug together, install etc.) and if something goes wrong, all component makers will put the blame on another component. Lots of (unpaid!) trouble to get warranty and replacement parts.
Also, providing third parties with a mere Motherboard is not Apple’s style. Too much risk of someone screwing up and tarnishing the valuable brand. Not to forget that Apple would miss out on some of the margin for a machine. Finally, allowing third parties to select hardware (such as Ram, storage, GPU etc.) would be a support nightmare in macOS, with all the problems Microsoft knows all too well.
And again: If a driver does not work properly or the hardware makes problems because the 3rd party chose cheap crap, the blame would more often than not be put on Apple (Microsoft can tell that story), thus tarnishing the brand.
So the chances for that to happen are going towards Zero - and imho rightfully so!
Besides, a Professional knows better than to tinker with hardware himself - too expensive (research, purchase, plug together, install etc.) and if something goes wrong, all component makers will put the blame on another component. Lots of (unpaid!) trouble to get warranty and replacement parts.
Also, providing third parties with a mere Motherboard is not Apple’s style. Too much risk of someone screwing up and tarnishing the valuable brand. Not to forget that Apple would miss out on some of the margin for a machine. Finally, allowing third parties to select hardware (such as Ram, storage, GPU etc.) would be a support nightmare in macOS, with all the problems Microsoft knows all too well.
And again: If a driver does not work properly or the hardware makes problems because the 3rd party chose cheap crap, the blame would more often than not be put on Apple (Microsoft can tell that story), thus tarnishing the brand.
So the chances for that to happen are going towards Zero - and imho rightfully so!
Selling a bare motherboard and copy of macOS to go with it is de-facto supporting third-party Macs. It is why Apple does not sell or license macOS to third party PC makers.
Even if Apple could somehow lock-out everything but a selection of parts, how does Apple cover technical support when they only made one component and it was not assembled by them? There will be lawsuits and bad press galore as people are denied service at a Genius Bar because they used a part not on the approved list or applied a firmware update Apple doesn't cover or an ESD discharge happened when you put it together and were not grounded.
One possibility would be building blocks that you can put together like LEGO. Apple would sell the modules either pre-filled or with standard slots/ports, such as e.g. SATA, PCIe etc.
Ridiculous wasn't the right descriptive word. "From an alternative universe" would probably be closer. Where Apple's grand "Steve' was Steve Wozniak, not Jobs.
Selling motherboards has never what the Mac has been primarily about. That Apple is reduced to selling just computer parts like Fry's or Newegg. That's not what the company set up to do.
Apple often doesn't mind folks tinkering at the edges and/or around the system the sell, but they are going to sell a "pull from the box " , working system. (maybe attach a monitor , keyboard, mouse but the essential core unit of the system just works out of the box). They aren't selling software ( with diversion of hardware) nor hardware ( with diversion of software). They are primarily set up to sell something that is effectively complete.
Where the Mac Pro fits into that space is that working system may be internally augmented. Another storage drive, different RAM DIMMs, another OS. But it won't start less than barebones.
The "tinker" bare bones mindset did a subtantive uptick when Apple switched over to using some general Windows PC market components. Apple's new end goal was generic, "drive to manically maximized commodity" parts. Not. Never were on that track at all. Higher level of market shared R&D sure, but commoditization as the primary end goal. That isn't a top goal.
The flawed notion that several key general market component were going to force Apple into a commoditization priority. Apple would be made to comply.
Mac has less than 10% of the classic PC form factor market. Every day Apple execs wake up 90% of folks don't buy a Mac and/or aren't on a Mac. Most people not being a Mac can't traumatize them. The goal is not to sell everything to everybody. That maximum market share mindset was a major contributor to driving them into the company into the ditch in the 90's. It isn't going to come back. It has basically been institutionalized there not to repeat that mistake again.
In that context, that is where 'ridiculous' has some merit as a description.
It wasn't amazing for the company in the 90's when they were doing something more closer to a more fully completely bare bones system.
Why should they sell a bare motherboard then in the first place? I don’t see the use case here. If you personally want to build your Hackintosh with original Apple parts, feel free to get a spare part and hack away.
Apple already taps into that market by having most (if not all) of their products manufactured by experienced manufacturers that don’t work exclusively for Apple.
However, too much competition is dangerous for Apple, as they need to justify their premium with something. By using only the same components as the competition, they’d get dragged into a price death spiral. Plus - most of the competition focuses on doing stuff cheap, while Apple’s approach is trying to focus on doing stuff well. That may require to divert at least partially from standard off-the-shelf stuff.
They proved pretty impressively that they can leapfrog competition that way with their Ax chips in the iOS area. I would not be surprised if they would try something similar in the Mac market. The problem there is Windows compatibility, the importance of which is difficult to estimate, without having Apple’s information about users using Windows on Macs.
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Not sure if that personal wish qualifies as proper use case. And regarding the 12 drives: Apple’s stance on this currently is to use external devices.
Maybe the nnMP will come a bit closer to your ideas, only that it is most probably not a bare motherboard, but a very compact central unit in some form, which can / has to be complemented individually.
A bare motherboard does have historical precedence, specifically the Apple I.
I suppose it's because of the lack of any meaningful information, but it is a complete waste of time to engage.
It is more likely that Tim Cook rides a white horse to my house to hand deliver a pre-released Mac Pro than it is for Apple to sell motherboards. The use case is: I want it to happen.
I suppose it's because of the lack of any meaningful information, but it is a complete waste of time to engage.
It is more likely that Tim Cook rides a white horse to my house to hand deliver a pre-released Mac Pro than it is for Apple to sell motherboards. The use case is: I want it to happen.
My gut feeling is that the most realistic prediction is disappointment.
I look at WWDC as a signal on if I should sell my iMac or not. It's up to Apple on if I trade it in to get another Mac as opposed to some PC monstrosity.
I look at WWDC as a signal on if I should sell my iMac or not. It's up to Apple on if I trade it in to get another Mac as opposed to some PC monstrosity.
It has the same chance as my theorized"Mac Pro LAB" (an tb3/wifi/by/A2 + EFI aic for STD Xeon servers) I could give both an absolute chance to occurs of ZERO.
while ehe first Mac ever was just an motherboard, it doesn't means jobs and woz build a business on selling DIY computers, it was just their Kickstart, what really build Apple was the Macintosh that small AIO many people loved, then later come the iPhone and everything changed (for worst IMHO).
On the rumours and filtering it's by our knowledge on Apple "logic", the next Mac pro should be either a revised and updated trashcan, or an trashcan/cheese grater hybrid with few concession on COTS updates/upgrades.
Besides the fact that “Pro user” is neither a properly defined nor a homogenous group - if that thinking dominated the past decades, today there would only be a handful of “pro users” worldwide and they’d be stuck with a humongous mainframe in a 3-story building.
A measly iPhone these days has more computing power than a supercomputer from the 80s. Even the Apple Watch probably outperforms most, if not all desktop computers from the 90’s.
“Pro” does not automatically equal “big” anymore, not these days and especially not with Apple, who sometimes use the term rather loosely.
And for the sake of completeness: It’s simply more resourceful and clever to deliver a small core unit which users can extend individually, than to throw lots of materials with a huge resource footprint at the users, and then most of them don’t even make use of it.
It won't happen, but imagine if Apple did sell the motherboards standalone. Companies like HP could buy up boards and build MacOS-based systems around them. Of course, Apple would also have prebuilt complete systems based around the same board.
Edit: Argh; didn't notice that there was another page in this thread! Looks like it's already been discussed.
There is no way Apple is going to ship PCIe 5.0 in the mMP, I doubt they will even ship PCIe 4.0. That said, the mMP needs a PCIe slot or they blew it.
There is no way that Apple is going to ship a bare motherboard either in fact custom metal-working and custom boards are their specialties. See the last 2 Mac Pros for examples.
The 2018 model did at launch, but Apple released a firmware update and that evidently took care of it. The 2019 model also seems to be generally fine based on the press I have read.
Of course, when Apple designed the current MacBook Pro chassis, Intel's roadmaps said the CPUs the 2018 and 2019 models would be using would be far cooler and on 7-10nm as opposed to the thermally-boosted 14nm heaters they're shipping today. Our Dell and Lenovo laptops with similar CPUs roast themselves even worse than our MacBook Pros since they have plastic chassis compared to the aluminum of the MBP and are therefore far worse at conducting heat away.