Horace Dediu, on some remarkable business achievements of the Mac over time:
> – The product is in its 32nd year of market presence. A longevity that in unmatched by any other PC maker.
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> – Apple reached a top five position in the ranking of PC vendors. This was achieved for the first time only this year, far along in the evolution of the market.
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> – With about $23 billion in revenues per year, Apple places among the top four PC vendors in terms of revenue.
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> – With an estimated $5.5 billion in operating margin Apple is the most profitable PC vendor, capturing over 60% of the available PC hardware profits.
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> – The product has retained an average selling price of over $1200 for at least a decade. At the same time the average pricing of Personal Computers has more than halved.
Then, following some charts to lay out his thesis, Dediu gets to the heart of the matter:
> Mobile has been foreseeable as a disruption to computing a decade ago–at least to some of us.
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> And so what do you with the Mac?
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> To answer this we have to ask what exactly is the purpose of the Mac in the age of the Mobile device?
And:
> The same way keyboard shortcuts are hard to learn but pay off with productivity, touchbar interactions are fiddly but will pay off with a two-handed interaction model. They are not something you “get” right away. They require practice and persistence for a delayed payoff. But, again, that effort is what professionals are accustomed to investing.
>
> This is a leap forward and a big deal. For 32 years the UX model of the Mac has been two-handed typing with one handed gesturing. Now we have the option of two-handed indirect manipulation: one hand on the touchbar and one hand on the touchpad. Imagine you’ve been playing guitar with one hand for years and then someone lets you use your left hand. Holy cow.
This is a great read. Be sure to look at that third chart, the one that contrasts Mac, Windows, and iPhone sales.
For me, the key takeaway is this:
“The key to the Mac therefore becomes that which the iPad/iPhone isn’t: an indirect input device. The keyboard and mouse/trackpad are what define the Mac. The operating system, the apps, the UX, are all oriented around the indirect input method.”
For me, the Mac is the center of my digital universe. I’m writing this comment on my MacBook Pro because doing it on my iPad or iPhone would be much more cumbersome. Some of this is because I touch type and prefer a hardware keyboard to a screen keyboard or even dictation, and I prefer editing text in the Mac environment than the iOS environment, some of it is because the collection of applications I use work better on the Mac OS platform than the iOS platform, if they even exist at all on iOS and lastly and maybe most importantly some of it is because I’ve been a Macintosh user much longer than I’ve been an iOS user and am more comfortable with it.
I remain a Mac user first no matter what Apple seems to think about the iPad Pro being the future of personal computing.
Personally, I think at least a piece of the Mac’s declining share of Apple’s profits is simply that Apple hasn’t been updating the machines as often as they should and seems to be moving away from supporting Pro users who are the ones updating their machines with the most frequency.
Macs will never sell like iPhones but they didn’t sell like iPods either and in the days of the iPod Apple still updated the Mac with more frequency.
I don’t think we have to choose one or the other. I personally want to use both desktop and mobile. At this stage, the iPad Pro is a tantalizing thing with its Apple Pencil and Adobe’s enthusiastic support of it. I also like the iOS 10/Sierra synergy. My only point of stress now is the new MB Pro having only 16GB RAM and no update for the Mac Pro.
I’d say these last two could still be addressed by Apple in its own time. The next Intel processor promises to support 32GB, and why did Apple build a whole factory in Texas to assemble the Mac Pro if they were not going to keep it alive? My guess is that Apple is working on a significant update to it.
I used to be amongst the “dazzle me, Apple” crowd in regard to Macintosh developments. It’s the platform I cut my teeth on.
No longer, and I don’t know what’s changed.
Maybe the pressure’s off simply because I’m not focused on one device anymore. I love that I can choose between my Mac, my iPhone and my iPad and have a solid experience on each.
That highlights the reality that there’s a lot of sausage-making happening that critics don’t always acknowledge.
I love how he describes the input method with the Touch Bar and Track Pad. I’ve seen a lot of tech pundits over the past several days talk smack about the Touch Bar or claim what the DJ and Photoshop presenters in the announcement were doing with two hands was ridiculous and awkward. I wholeheartedly disagree, and I look forward to when the Touch Bar comes down to a lower priced model or an external keyboard for my Mini so I can use it.
My favorite line:
“[The Mac] will not morph into a touch device any more than a teen’s parent will become cool by putting on skinny jeans.”
wait till the critics see a saxophone…
What I’d like to see Apple do is the following:
1) Update the Mac Pro AND make it user upgradeable but with components either sourced from Apple or from certified 3rd parties (much like the MFi program for iOS accessories). That would let them upgrade the machine less often and would still enable power users to upgrade, say the GPU without all the compatibility issues that a wide-open plug and play model would come with.
2) Upgrade the Mini and keep it up to date. Consider its place in the line, though.
3) Same for the iMac.
4) ASAP, force the MacBook price to be entry level and discontinue the Air. Love theAir, but it only exists as a placeholder to have a reasonably priced laptop.
5) with 4, try to move the base Pro price back to $1299 and have reasonable steps up from there. As soon as it’s technically feasible (Looking at you Intel), enable the 15″ to go to at least 32gig of RAM.
That gives them a Pro desktop that can both be updated only every 2-4 years but which power users can self-upgrade, a powerful all in one desktop for the prosumer desktop users and a mini that works for people who either have external screens they like or don’t want Apple’s. Finally, it leaves the laptop line with a nice consumer level model for people who want a Mac but don’t want the size and weight of a Pro notebook and it creates a nice, but not silly step up to the MBP line.
So much whinging about the lack of new Macs. The sad truth is, there is not much reason to update them. Year over year increase in processing power is so small it’s no longer worth it. People talk about Intel’s Kaby Lake as if they has reinvented the wheel and Mac users were missing out big time but the advantage over the previous generation is so small it’s barely measurable. That won’t prevent the rest of the PC industry from advertising it heavily, of course, thanks to Intel’s marketing dollars.
Honestly, when I read that the Mac is supposed to be artificially limited to a 2006 interface, it just makes me want to buy my first Windows machine.
Here is the difference between iOS and Mac OS: other than the touchscreen, iOS apps are generally 10–20 years behind their Mac counterparts, in order to get the specific benefit of being lightweight. iOS is less-is-more, while Mac OS is more-is-more.
If you use a Mac with a pen like I have for 20 years, you see that most Mac apps like Photoshop and Illustrator and Final Cut and Logic barely use the keyboard because they are touch apps. We touch them with graphics tablets, MIDI controllers, video controllers. They are screaming out for the hardware interface from iPad Pro.
Keep in mind that pen computing is decades old on the Mac. Most of the applications for Apple Pencil are on the Mac. Photoshop and Illustrator and After Effects and Motion and Graphic and so many more use pen pressure. If you edit 8K video, that is like 2005 Photoshop, working with 8 megapixel photos. You need a more accurate way to make hi-res selections than a mouse.
And for touch, if you look at iOS as a music production system, it is a peer to Logic, Ableton Live, Pro Tools. There is 100x more music and audio software on the Mac. The idea that those apps don’t need multitouch is absurd. They do not use the keyboard — they use an audio mixer interface. Watch YouTube demos of Pro Tools and see a giant screen with a 32 channel mixer with 25 controls per channel and you see a tiny mouse cursor laboriously grinding over the screen, touching one control at a time, even though in music, we want to for example push 3 mutes on beat 1 of bar 17. So we plugin a $1000 hardware device with a ton of buttons and sliders on it and make a desktop workaround touch screen.
So the only difference is iOS is lightweight like a car and Mac OS is heavy duty like a truck. They both have pen graphics apps, they both have touch music and video apps, they both have text apps. If iPad needs a mechanical keyboard, then Mac needs touch and pen. They both need to advance as quickly as possible to the next generation of themselves. Audi invented a better power steering for their cars, and they brought it soon to their trucks, because what made a consumer happy for 1 hour of driving per day also helped the professional who is driving a truck for 12 hours.
Touch Bar? I’m not going to learn it. I’m not going to pay $500 for it, when I can get another iPad for that.
Instead of Touch Bar, they could have done a new subsystem in iOS and Mac OS so that when you put an iPad and Mac on the same desk, they are networked for MIDI and audio and data so that using an iPad as a workaround touch screen for Mac was less kludgey. And just ship a MacPad.
If you think of iOS graphics apps, they are mostly of the type that you use them to avoid hiring a pro graphic artist, or they are dedicated art tools for making a painting or drawing. The Mac graphics tools are the opposite: they have the features you only use of you are a pro graphic artist, and the tools enable you to make for example a sophisticated animated drawing. It is truly car versus truck.
So what I want is to buy 2 or 3 iPads for $1000 each, plus a MacPad Pro for $4000 or $5000, plus an iPhone and Apple Watch for another $1000. Yes, I need all of that. The iPad does not in any way replace my Mac, or I would no longer have a Mac right now after almost 7 years of iPads. I used to have a paper-to-Mac workflow and now it is an iPad-to-Mac workflow. You win, Apple. You win. I will even put up with the dongles if you will build-in the pen and touch because then I hardly need to plug anything in.
A lot of stuff that Apple is doing right now is disturbingly like 1986–1996. We complained about Mac stagnation in the early 90’s and were told to buy a Newton. If you look at 2007–2017, that is the same 10 years of zero Mac progress. Notice the best-selling MacBook Pro of this decade is the 2010 model, which sold through 2016, outselling the 2012 model that was supposed to replace it. Mac Pro is a kind of joke.
Imagine if Apple introduced the iPad in 2010 and announced at the same time that they were spinning off Mac Inc as its own company to serve pro computing needs. Do you really think that 7 years later Mac Inc would introduce the world’s only $4000+ notebook without touch and pen? Would Mac Inc decide that it is a good investment to redesign the mouse/trackpad 4 or 5 times this decade when it was already described correctly as being obsolete by Steve Jobs at the iPhone introduction? Apple Pencil is the mouse the Mac always wanted — more accurate than any other mouse, more artistic, more creative, smaller, and can run all pointing device functions in Mac OS — even pressure touch, which is like 20 years old.
The thing that really bothers me is the idea of someone spending $3000 to $4000 on a MacBook Pro and then to do graphics, instead of a $99 Apple Pencil, they have to buy a $1000 or $1500 Wacom Tablet and their MacBook Pro turns into a desktop computer you have to use at a desk. Creative Suite is more expensive than ever. PC’s are more expensive than ever. Ports are changing. Touch is all over. The pen needs to be a $99 accessory that uses built-in sensors in the screen. I want to give Apple the $1500 ?I usually give to Wacom.
Just give me something to spend my money on, Apple. Give me a 2017 Mac to go with my multiple 2017 iPads and other Apple products.
The stupidest part is you see tech bloggers talking about how Macs don’t need pens and they don’t realize that pens are 20 years old on the Mac and used by many millions of users. The issue is not do we need a pen — it is just why are the pen sensors not yet built-into the Mac screens like with almost every non-Mac computer in the world, including iPads?
Or maybe the stupidest part is when they say the Mac does not need touch when a) Wacom Tablets have touch for 5 years now and sold to mostly Mac users, b) we are 10 years into stopgap multitouch trackpads with gestures like Show The Desktop that will work just fine on multitouch screen, and c) now a Touch Bar is apparently needed for more touch.
Apple Pencil is the highest-resolution, most-accurate pointing device that Apple has ever made. Multitouch display with fingers comes second. Neither works with the Mac, where almost all the precision apps are. It is so absurd, it has to be that there is a MacPad coming soon, started during the same change of direction that got us iPad Pro. Please, tech bloggers, stop trying to tell us that we do not need to watch video on a display in our pocket simply because Apple doesn’t make one yet. (See iPod video circa 2004.)
HA! Or a theremin?