I REALLY hate this excuse. MANY companies with a fraction of the workforce Apple has, can do much more. The truth is, Apple has purposely de-prioritized the Mac and purposely diverted resources from the Mac. There are more people working at Apple now, than there were when the iPhone and Mac were both being working on simultaneously(2008-2013) - Heck look at the shiny new HQ UFO.
Apple is a function matrix organized company. Just because there are more folks working there doesn't necessarily mean all of the function units got bigger. (for example, could add more function units .... e.g., car electronics , different cameras without necessarily making the OS kernel team any bigger).
One of Apple's dual edge swords has been the relatively fixed sized they have kept the industrial design team ( Ive and his merry band of elves). It gets them design language consistency across the whole product line. However, it is also a choke point. When they sent Ive off doing custom furniture/knobs/doo-dads for the new spaceship even more so.
Personally, I think the Mac team just basically needs their own industrial design team. ( or Ive's division needs a radical shift in approach.... which seems unlikely personality wise. ). Trying to put the whole company through 20-40 folks is a choke point at the size Apple (and iOS product families) is at now.
There are companies that throw far more money at much broader development, but how many get a better return on investment? Going to Apple with an argument of "you should use the tactics your competitors use to earn half as much money as you do now" isn't going to get much traction. Apple needs to better figure out how to scale what they are good at.... not ape what everyone else is in PC market is doing.
People are leaving ship, and the diehards who kept the company afloat in the VERY lean years - '96-'02 are the ones have left, on their way out, and/or advising friends and family to leave the sinking Mac ship.
This too seems a bit dual edged..... those folks don't seem to have adjusted to not being the center of resource allocation. At one point early on the Mac team 'hid' a Sony person even though Jobs had passed on the Sony 3.5" drive. ( it was the wrong call by Jobs, so they went around him. ). It is probably harder to get something out the door if the Industrial design team won't allocate resources but it isn't impossible. Have to go MacGuyver and simply work with what you've got. The Mac Mini and Mac Pro are just plain comatose. that is likely just lack of resource assignments. It is highly likely there was something that could have been done to shift/reallocate/etc those resources over a multiple year span is truly pressed for it.
The folks who want to build boxes with slots don't fit anymore. Likewise the ones who want to work on the "hottest product in the company"..... Again that is a mismatch at this point with the reality of where the Mac is at in long term lifecycle.
New "green field" projects inside of Apple seem to be able to break-out and run. Not sure if Macs can do a complete internal 'reboot' to a 'green field' status but the path the product managers are on isn't working coloring inside the lines are deeply entrenched now.
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... It may have blind sided Apple who would expect newer CPU's to be faster AND have a lower TDP or at least the same TDP. And if that would have been the case we likely would have seen small changes that most everyone would embrace like you mention.
I certainly wouldn't expect the successors of todays CPUs to use more power 4 years from now. Sure ~25% faster at a 8% higher TDP is better overall (comparing Apples use of 4771 and 6700K) but really limits Apples options for the future.
Sigh, this have been covered in several threads before. Intel moved some of the power management features onto the CPU package. That is
not an overall net increase in system TDP. it is just moving part of the TDP off the board and onto the CPU package. The CPU package has far more than just a CPU in it at this point. For the Mac laptop and desktop units there is a GPU and several other un-core functions present there now also.
Yes Apple needs to make some adjustments, but the notion that Intel hugely backsliding on system TDP is deeply flawed. Apple gets NDA access to the adjustments Intel is doing so the notion that they were 'blind sided' by the changes is pretty weak.
In the iMac adding a bit more curve to the back could add quite a bit of space for a larger heatsink probably. Doing away with HDD entirely could give a ton of room. Or only offer then higher end CPU's with SSD so it can be manufactured with better cooling capacity. I'm just shooting these ideas from the hip, I realize there is a lot more too it from design to marketing to revenue (a 1500 dollar CPU option because it requires an SSD is a tough sell).
Part of the iMac's problem is that disconnect of fanatically trying to hide the vents from view. Because hidden behind the pedastal arm they are trying to put all the hot air out the middle of the back. Making that middle incrementally taller isn't going to help alot when there hot air drifting up to the top of the container. The disconnect in part is trying to pull warm-to-hot air down to expel it. The other components not in short distance to exhaust. The exhaust is tangential to the what the internal flows are going to trend to.
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I am waiting for a new iMac, but have noticed a big tear in apples computer plan.
Is there a tear in Apple's plan?
Steve Jobs:
"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."
-- Fortune, Feb. 19, 1996
When Microsoft (and mainstream PC industry) is busy shooting themselves in the foot ( Vista or extremely stuck-in-the-mud, 'race to the bottom' system designs ) Apple is happy to challenge MS. When MS has their stuff together and on a mission .... it seems a significant block of executives at Apple seem to circle back to this sermon by Jobs.
