I really don't get the love for the HP workstations here at all. They offer a subpar experience in price and performance to custom build PCs and lack the most focal point of using PCs - building a very customizable rig fitting perfectly with your needs.
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MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)
- Thread starter Mago
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Who comes to your office to fix your custom rig?
Now with HP Z ? HP has been running targeted sales campaigns against the new Mac Pro since it came out. Here is an article from 2014
http://www.computerdealernews.com/news/hp-guns-for-mac-market-with-latest-z-workstation-line/36295
Back when Apple was in update drift the last time ( 2011-2013) they were running the "are they dead" stuff through back channels. The 2012 release of "it is still alive" update was move to triage the situation.
Apple's "delight and surprise" approach to communicating about their upcoming products works when they actually so movement on a semi-regular basis. This "rip van winkle" show up every 3-4 years with something is a golden FUD opportunity for their sales competitors to beat the crap out of Apple's sales relationship with many of their customers.
Surface Pro 4 hammering on iPad is useful given that it looks like Surface Pro 5 isn't coming until 2017. (not quite as refresh lull as most of Apple's Mac line up but not on yearly pace either. )
Apple's stock was hyperinflated more so on expected iPad growth than anything in Mac. New Mac Pros (or even new MBP ) wouldn't change the overall effect much.
Apple has more cash on hand than Microsoft and HP combined. Microsoft wrote off a ~$8B loss getting pummeled in that cellphone market by "shot out of the sky" Apple. HP was sold off as a drag on profits. Apple can laugh off that $14B revised tax bill if it does come down to paying it in a year or two with no impact on operational investment constraints or debt issues or acquisition opportunities. So "falling out of the sky". Hardly.
The reality is that HP (and Dell , Lenovo/IBM ) had a much larger share than Apple in the workstation market back when Jobs was CEO too. Apple is smaller now, but it never was a major player in terms of numbers.
It isn't running the company that Apple is failing at as much as R&D. Ive's design group maniacal focus on the anorexic products has lead to overheated laptops and likely Mac Pros. The major "thin as possible" has Jobs connections also. The problem Apple seems to have is when to stop adding constraints to a specific release and let the technology catch up.
Again this has been set up in the Jobs era. Apple runs all of its industrial design through a relatively small group. It is a fixed sized group so it is a choke point. Everything screening through Jobs made sense for a much smaller company with a much smaller product mix. With macOS , iOS , tvOS and a diverse ecosystem in each one, funneling all of that through 1-2 people is going to run into problems.
Selling "last years" iPhone with more hobbled features.... straight out of the Jobs era. Apple sat too long on that strategy before getting to the iPhone SE ( smaller phone, lower price, current stuff). That whole "sell older stuff and crank the RDF field as an innovative company"... straight Jobs. That has leaked into the Mac division. "If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth — and get busy on the next great thing." -- Steve Jobs.
HP has been offering workstation systems for many years. I own a Z600 (which is two generations old and comparable to the 4,1 and 5,1 Mac Pros). Their current offerings are the Z440, Z640, and Z840. This looks to be a new addition.
How is it good for a company to just follow a competitor and keep bashing it? If it's so bad, why bother doing "similar" stuff and publicly trying to ridicule the competitor's products? To me it just looks sad, specially because they end up "copying" designs. But hey, that's just me.
Rights of marketing. A lot of people complaining about Mac Pro 6.1 because of the lacks of "features" that Z Workstation offers, would switch happily to that platform.
Speaking of HP:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10628/hp-announces-the-pavilion-wave-and-elite-slice-desktops
WTF?! nMP and Mini in disguise? Triangular shape?! Where did they get that?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10628/hp-announces-the-pavilion-wave-and-elite-slice-desktops
WTF?! nMP and Mini in disguise? Triangular shape?! Where did they get that?
At least there is an explicit ad campaign. Besides the PC bashing "Mac vs PC" stuff that Apple ran several years ago when was the last time Apple ran a substantive Mac ad campaign? Like over a decade and a half ago?
Apple's whole "Mac is cool, PC is bumbling" was the last thing Apple did of substance and now doesn't particularly doesn't do anything.
When your competitive is stumbling ( e.g., Windows Vista) it is easier to take that momentum and push it forward.
Like Siri coming to macOS after Cortana came to Windows?
Or OS X picking up resizable windows from any edge ... after Windows?
Or OS X defaulting to SMB as file sharing?
Or iPad tablet getting detachable keyboard after Surface tablet?
Apple copies more than a few things. When they have done it well they have put some useful iterative refinements on top.
Do they even have anything worth advertising? I am affraid no, because they were sleeping for last... 3 years. Only them know why, however.
Not really from Apple.
If look at the thermal and internal layout pictures here:
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/pavilion-wave/overview.html
The 2.5" drives ( HDDs) are on one side. The single motherboard with CPU , GPU , and SSD is another side. The 3rd side is the thermal system. There is no central code which the other sides mount to. There is a fan tangential to the air movement direction. Instead of the column being capped by wifi subsystem ... it is a speaker assembly.
This is as much an Amazon Alexa on steroids than it is a Mac Pro.
As for HP's NUC .... err the vast majority is are flat squat rectangles. It does seems to have Mac Mini like prices but
meeting room speakerphone , phone charger , etc.
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/elite-slice/overview.html
I'd be shocked if Apple had thought anything about meeting room dynamics or business VOIP desktops .
Because they're well built, solid, and have support for which you cannot get from a home built computer.
Apple hasn't explicitly advertised Mac since 2009. That is approximately 7 years ago. That last 3.5 years have been the 2nd half of that era.
The entire effort seems to be Apple Store and hipster paid product placement. That is it.
I've always just fixed mine myself. Replaced a power supply on a 5 year old machine this year. I did minor repairs on G5s and classic mac pro towers, too.
What specification are you unable to find? I'm able to build it with the Z840. In fact I can build it with even higher processor core counts if I wanted to (up to 44 cores / 88 threads).
Thats fine at home or if you're an independent but that will likely not be fine if you have any sort of corporate IT policy and infrastructure. There's a reason we don't build rigs in corporate land
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Since Apple sells premium products, they more than likely have a higher quality control. Average in all the failure rates within the PC market, I bet Apples failure rates fall at least at or bellow the industry standard. Even WITH any GPU failures.
Of course all this is just speculation as the computer market does not publish that information.
I know Apple doesn't "invent" a lot of stuff (they do hold a lot of patents though) but they take any tech, let it mature, and refine it.
And I wasn't saying HP copied the whole thing, instead they're going the same way, the way everyone complains the nMP is following. But since it's HP it's OK. Let's see how long it takes for their WS follow suit.
NUCs are a dime a dozen from the usual suspects, but these are a bit more refined.
On another note, does Apple really need that much advertising? Who uses Macs knows their stuff, and has a one stop shop to go to to find info. If you want a PC, there's a lot to choose from.
I honestly prefer they don't go about comparing to PCs or other devices looking ridicule and stay put. Leave that to the competition.
And I wasn't saying HP copied the whole thing, instead they're going the same way, the way everyone complains the nMP is following. But since it's HP it's OK. Let's see how long it takes for their WS follow suit.
NUCs are a dime a dozen from the usual suspects, but these are a bit more refined.
On another note, does Apple really need that much advertising? Who uses Macs knows their stuff, and has a one stop shop to go to to find info. If you want a PC, there's a lot to choose from.
I honestly prefer they don't go about comparing to PCs or other devices looking ridicule and stay put. Leave that to the competition.
My point wasn't wrt other manufacturers. It was to Apple itself.
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The difference is I can still buy any number of HP alternatives to these products because they haven't eliminated their alternatives. If Apple still offered a cMP type of workstation in addition to the nMP offering I doubt we'd see many complaints as buyers would be free to choose either.
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Maybe I'm missing something but what are you trying to say with this comment?HP vs Apple -->
