Why would I spend $2500 on a Mac Pro now when I know that I can buy a Mac Mini next year that costs half as much and is just as useful for most "Prosumer" purposes?
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Was (is) the Mac Pro a misstep for Apple?
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Why would I spend $2500 on a Mac Pro now when I know that I can buy a Mac Mini next year that costs half as much and is just as useful for most "Prosumer" purposes?
If you're a prosumer, that's great, and has always been true of the Mac Mini.
If you're a Pro, not so great. I have a Mini at my desk at work and it in no way feels like using a Mac Pro for the work I do. Very noticeable speed difference.
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This idea frequently resurfaces, I think it started when the xServe was killed off.
Bright folks suggested that Apple should give Oracle the license to offer OSX server products.
Very good points.
It could even affect those gadgets Apple is making so much money on.
Once people are on a PC, they may as well buy an Android phone instead of an iPhone.
Same goes for the iPad, even though there currently is no real competitor out there.
Desktops may even have a comeback. After all, all the many hard drives in one faster box with better graphics card, instead of this laptop, sitting amidst half a dozen external hard drives like a spider in the web... and being cooking hot.
There's no reason for this. Macs have the highest quality in every single line they compete with already. Not broken -> don't fix it.
Chrysler used five 6 cylinder engines to create a 30 cylinder tank engine for WWII M4 tanks.
http://www.allpar.com/history/military/arsenal-of-democracy.html
I'm looking at what happened between the tail end of his tenure at Apple before he resigned in '85 through the time he spent learning how to run a company with the creation of NeXT Computer, and his eventual return to Apple.
Specifically, I'm focusing on the fact the Mac lines at that time weren't making money due to a lack of updates (leading up to the '85 resignation). With NeXT, they made good hardware, but it wasn't a profitable venture either (Canon dumped another $30M into it in order to keep it afloat).
Now comparing this with his eventual return to Apple, it seems to me that he realized he needed to focus on products that would turn a profit, and did so with a vengeance. Even if his relationships between the BoD and shareholders were strained.
At least this is how I interpret his history...
Except the problem wasn't the XServe hardware. The hardware was great, best server hardware out there. The problem was OS X Server itself. OS X Server was so unreliable it meant a lot of admins could not consider it over Windows solutions.
I worked at a shop that frequently had to untask XServes with things and move it over to Windows servers. Towards the end, it got better, but it was still a PITA. Apple didn't seem to care, which is why most sys admins knew the XServe probably would be killed.
Just to add OS X Server was getting better until 10.6. Then my hopes were destroyed. Seemed rushed and I still have issues with 10.6 deployments to this day. And yes the HW was pretty crazy good for the price.
The reason is because Apple devotes 99% of their time to ios devices, and I suggest it in fact is "broken" at least from where we stand moving forward. They are trying so hard to merge the 2 that I believe they are in fact creating a deeper divide.
I remember the NeXT years, I had a cube and several slabs over the years. It was fun using what was basically OS/X, except in 1988
It's kinda surreal seeing the NS classes still showing up in the Cocoa frameworks circa Lion.
I agree 100% but I don't think his relationship was strained with shareholders, it's hard to be pissed off at someone who is basically printing you money and seems to almost always be right.
What I meant was it's very hard for me to imagine a minute in Steve's life where he sat down and thought to himself, "I have a duty to the shareholders." He loved Apple, but that was his baby. The shareholders were just lucky to be along for the ride. Probably 80% of the shareholders right now are hedge funds and wall street f*cks who are manipulating the stock anyway, Apple seriously needs to buy back some of their stock or do a stock split, their P/E ratio is ridiculously low. Anyhoo, wrong thread, wrong forum for this tangent, but Steve never showed anything but total contempt for Wall St.
I also agree that he axed products that weren't selling. There is no more cube, despite Steve obviously wanting a cube to exist. It's more like the iPhone was a tremendous risk that no sane computer company being run by someone interested in the bottom line would have taken. It wound up completely remaking Apple into the hugely profitable iCrap company that we're ranting about in the Mac Pro thread...
He took a lot of risks and spent a lot of money making products for markets that weren't really there before Apple entered and completely re-made them. Why? Because Steve Jobs wanted to, if you recall ancient history before the first iPhone launched, it's all, "they're doomed, it'll never work, you can't take on the cellphone industry," etc, etc, etc. There was a vote of absolute no-confidence, and RIM, Nokia, and Motorola will roOl the world forever.
Anyhoo, to veer back to the original title of this thread, was the Mac Pro a misstep for Apple...? Uhm, no. It was absolutely necessary at the time. As time goes by, it's becoming increasingly marginalized (obviously), but I'm confident we're gonna see at least One More Refresh. Perhaps the last.
Sort of true. As long as Jobs brought them money, which he did by the boatload, he had free reign over whatever he wanted to do. He could have punched every shareholder in the face whilst wearing a knuckle duster and they still wouldn't have had the balls to fire him. His charisma and they way he structured Apple and its board of directors gave him free reign over anything. Good when you have someone in charge who knows what they are doing, bad when you don't.
Tim Cook worries me. He might be the best operating officer in the world, but he's not a product guy. And you can't have someone who's not a product guy in charge of a company that is so devoted to products. It essentially leaves Jony Ive and Bob Mansfield in charge of the products. Which I feel is bad, because the design team and the engineering team are normally at each others throats, the design team creating something wacky and then asking the engineering team to make it work. Jobs role was to persuade the engineering team that it was possible to build what ever wacky idea the design team had made, and to also tell the design team to go back to the drawing board when they made something he felt sucked. Jobs might as well have appointed the CEO of some cola company as CEO of Apple in his absence..
Apple needs a strong charismatic leader, who is all about the product. Not just a Steve Jobs clone, someone new. Someone who has that legendary product intuition and flare for design, but also a numbers man and a man who can listen to its customers when it best suits the product.
I'm not sure I buy that. The board didn't love Jobs because he brought in tons of money. The board didn't have a choice because the first thing Jobs did upon taking over Apple was force the entire board to resign. They couldn't not like Jobs because they were all fired.
Apple is a bizzaro world where the board (who are the proxies of the shareholders) work for Jobs, not the reverse.
Cook is interesting, and I think on paper he is a good leader. My biggest concern is that he isn't enough of an ass. Apple is a company full of egos, and because Jobs had the biggest ego of them all, he could keep everyone in check.
That totally explains how Apple basically invented the ultrabook category with the MacBook Air, and manages to beat everyone else on price...
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Perhaps because he isn't we will finally see a product positioned between the mini and the Pro.
"Strained" was directed primarily at his relationship with the BoD.
In terms of shareholders, it's possible he could have seen it that way, but more likely a nuisance in a worst case scenario IMHO (i.e. time spent dealing with shareholders/their concerns directly, consumed time he would prefer to spend elsewhere).
I think he did.
Not in the same sense as other CEO's, but that he had to generate profits in order to keep the company viable. Now I realize that it can be argued that he learned this lesson only in the sense he wanted to keep "his baby" afloat, but I see the specifics with Canon in regard to NeXT as the differentiating factor.
Canon dumped a ton of money for a single investor into NeXT, and had they not done so, it likely would have vanished before Apple came in and bought it out, killing both NeXT, and I suspect Apple as well, as they were in trouble at the time (more than just a new OS was needed, but I'm thinking in terms of the timing in particular).
As a result, I think this helped him realize that at least some consideration for investors matters, as Canon helped save the OS created at NeXT, which in turn helped save Apple (gave him an appreciation for keeping investors pumping money in when needed or you're dead, which isn't likely to happen if you piss them off
).The iPhone development would have been monitored regularly as a means of determining if it had a real chance of being a successful product or not (up to RTM approval). Also, the initial investment probably isn't as high as you might think, as they weren't trying to create the entire wireless infrastructure needed to work with it (went with a single carrier in the US, using that carrier's existing wireless infrastructure, not develop one from scratch and become their own carrier).
Obviously they decided it went well...
As per being the only company that would have done this, this is where I see his interest in HP back when Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett were alive and running the company (emulation as he saw how they ran their company; and as the old saying goes, emulation is the sincerest form of flattery
). This is how I see things as well...
Too soon from a technical POV (performance) to cut it now, but likely in the near future (LGA2011 based Xeons = likely last MP's as we currently know them IMO due to the cost of DP CPUID's vs. their SP counterparts <same core count and clocks, particularly as you move up to faster clocks>). Considering both Intel's and Apple's margins, the final MSRP's would likely reach the point they surpass what enough buyers would/could spend (= too low of a sales volume to keep it a viable product line, which appears to have a negative growth rate already).
There are other ways to run a company successfully though (again, I can't help but think of HP when it's two founders were still running it).
My concerns with Tim Cook, is whether or not he has the ability to prognosticate future trends early enough to create products early enough to beat competitors to market. He's good at cutting manufacturing costs (creates it's own set of issues when it goes too far, such as QA/QC, which could also damage Apple's reputation), but that doesn't help much if the products sold don't get the attention of buyers and ultimately generate sufficient sales to keep a healthy bottom line.
I've got mixed feelings on this. The Mac should really be a stable product, no major changes. At this point they're just messing with perfection by trying to toy with it too much *cough*Lion*cough*. Cook seems to me like he'd be better for situations like that. Just keeping the Mac running well until iOS matures enough in 5-10 years.
iOS could be a mixed bag. He has the knowledge to secure parts, which is critical for that market, but I worry about product direction.
Again, my biggest concern is that he wouldn't step in and stop the iOS division from picking apart the Mac division. Scott Forstall's reputation as a team player has been less than glowing. Forstall has been reported to have a sour relationship with the head of Mac hardware design.
This. Wasn't Snow Leopard late because they pulled developers off it to work on iOS?
I think it's already been mentioned in the thread, but let's look at what happened to the original iPod team -- they were put into a bakeoff position against iOS and lost, and that means evisceration (Jon Rubenstein, et al).
Chances are it will happen again, in slower realtime speed, with iOS vs OSX, devices vs Macs.
In regard to your thinking, I do see a point with the software aspects, as I'm not aware of him having direct experience with the software side. He could get it right, or his not knowing how to deal with internal infighting, particularly in the area of software development, could cause a mis-step, or even a disaster.