Egg Freckles

This week we learned a new Mac Pro isn’t coming until 2019. Clearly this revelation is a Apple public relations move designed to reign-in expectations prior to this year’s WWDC. But what makes this announcement so absurd is the guises that it is being made in the name of transparency while omitting any details describing the upcoming machine.

“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community, so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It’s not something for this year.” In addition to transparency for pro customers, there’s also a larger fiscal reason behind it.

“We know that there’s a lot of customers today that are making purchase decisions on the iMac Pro and whether or not they should wait for the Mac Pro,” says Boger.

This is why Apple wants to be as explicit as possible now, so that if institutional buyers or other large customers are waiting to spend budget on, say iMac Pros or other machines, they should pull the trigger without worry that a Mac Pro might appear late in the purchasing year.

It’s almost as if Apple is telling its pro customers to buy different company’s modular computer.

Pro Working Group

Instead of facts we got some spin about how Apple was setting up a “Pro Working Group” to find out what their professional customers need in a pro workstation computer.

“We said in the meeting last year that the pro community isn’t one thing,” says Ternus. “It’s very diverse. There’s many different types of pros and obviously they go really deep into the hardware and software and are pushing everything to its limit. So one thing you have to do is we need to be engaging with the customers to really understand their needs. Because we want to provide complete pro solutions, not just deliver big hardware, which we’re doing and we did it with iMac Pro. But look at everything holistically.”

Apple forming a pro computer steering committees in 2018 is pathetic. The last Mac Pro was released in 2013 and it was a design failure. Apple has had nearly four years to figure out what pros want. Are they just starting now?

The disclosure of the “Pro Working Group” smells like a smoke shield deployed to distract us from the fact Apple is still figuring out what professionals want. Professionals who used to count as some of Apple’s most loyal customers.

Apple’s inability to produce a computer their professional customers want in a reasonable time frame is a sign removing Computer from the company name in 2007 was the right decision.

This tweet by Dr. Drang best sums up Apple’s latest Mac Pro announcement.

Apple will be taking an extra year to design the only product in its lineup whose buyers don’t care about its design.

David Sparks:

Over the years, Apple Products have become increasingly less repairable. The latest teardown of the new iPad evidences this fact with photos of densely packed electronic components and copious amounts of glue. This led iFixit to give the new iPad a low repairability score.

I get that, but also don’t see it as big of a strike against the iPad as most people make it out to be. For years now, repairing these devices, even without the glue, has been no walk in the park. To make these devices small, they have to be dense, and things are locked together inside, so the contents don’t move around. This also leads to that sense of sturdiness you feel with an iPad in your hand.

I don’t believe a computer has to be less “sturdy” to be more “repairable”. The two do not go hand-in-hand. The 2008 MacBook Pro introduced the Unibody chassis which made it far more sturdy than its predecessors, while remaining just as repairable.

That being said I see what David is getting at: “The vast majority of us are not going to take a screwdriver to our iPads at any time, no matter how repairable it is.” … “we buy these devices to use them every day, not take them apart.”

Apple is trading repairability for experience. They are making their computers thinner, lighter, and smaller, but they are paying the price for those improvements in solder, glue, and proprietary components. With a few exceptions, Apple computers are getting more reliable with each new generation. As long as that trend continues consumers should continue buying Apple products.

Apple has an advantage over other computer companies when it comes to maintaining their computers. Their fleet of local Apple Stores and organized repair depots makes fixing issues fast for Apple consumers. That being said an expedited repair process doesn’t hold the same value for all people. Some customers prefer to perform repairs and upgrades themselves; often past the customary five to seven years Apple supports their own products. To those people I say “don’t buy Apple.” If you value repairability over experience Apple is no longer making a computer for you.