Former Mac Dev Slams Apple's 'Bloated' Pricing

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You know things are bad when even former Apple employees are pissed over pricing. Normally these guys are thrilled to pay tons of money for upgrades like an "inconsequential processor clock bump." ;)

The specs for the "new" Mac Pro had hardly changed, except for a tiny, inconsequential processor clock bump. Still no Thunderbolt, still no USB 3.0, no SATA III or RAM speed improvements - it seems like it's stuck in time in 2010. The only thing that's still high-end about it is the bloated price.
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They should honestly just kill the Mac Pro. Why didn't they give it these "essential" upgrades -- well, they aren't selling enough of the overpriced, underpowered machines in the first place.
 
I'm surprised that someone who used to work for Apple is only just figuring out that Apple products are generally more expensive than the competition.
 
SkribbelKat said:
I'm surprised that someone who used to work for Apple is only just figuring out that Apple products are generally more expensive than the competition.
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Depends on the product. The Mac Pro certainly is one of Apple's least competitively priced products.
 
Apple's mishandling of the Mac Pro seems to be a serious strategic misstep.... and unless there is this grand plan to move completely away from real desktop OS computing for all, even developers, I can't help but feel like Apple's alienation of Pro desktop users is gonna bite them in the ass down the road...
 
SkribbelKat said:
I'm surprised that someone who used to work for Apple is only just figuring out that Apple products are generally more expensive than the competition.
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I don;t think they're pissed about that....I think they're (rather reasonably) pissed that Apple is selling a box of 3 year old components in a 10 year old enclosure for an MSRP today that gets you LGA2011.

Try pricing a 2x Xeon macine with ECC memory. Back when 1366 was knew it was actually competitive in the workstation class in pricing.
 
I suspect the real new Mac Pros are coming sometime later. The reason they havn't been updated in two years is Intel took two years to update from Gulftown. The replacement Sandy Bridge-E Xeons just went on sale. I suspect the LGA-2011 designs just were not ready quite in time.
 
siliconnerd said:
I suspect the real new Mac Pros are coming sometime later. The reason they havn't been updated in two years is Intel took two years to update from Gulftown. The replacement Sandy Bridge-E Xeons just went on sale. I suspect the LGA-2011 designs just were not ready quite in time.
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This, in addition to there being no server motherboard, and only the very first consumer motherboard has been announced that supports their Thunderbolt port.
 
Or the major design improvements went to the new retina model. I suspect this was a proof of concept prior to transitioning the entire lineup to retina.

I didn't here this "dev" team bitching about the Mac Pros.
 
brucedeluxe169 said:
I can't help but feel like Apple's alienation of Pro desktop users is gonna bite them in the ass down the road...
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Perhaps but mobile is so much a bigger deal for Apple these days. I really don't see how a product that's tiny in sales that's not been compelling for years now would really matter.
 
next-Jin said:
Or the major design improvements went to the new retina model. I suspect this was a proof of concept prior to transitioning the entire lineup to retina.

I didn't here this "dev" team bitching about the Mac Pros.
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lol need my morning coffee
 
This guy has no understanding of tech life expectancy. His workstation is Enterprise (I would consider server level) equipment. That kind of equipment does not get refreshed often. The lifespan of most equipment of that nature is usually 5 years (maximum) before it gets refreshed. And even in that case, a 8-core 16GB workstation is extremely powerful by today's standards. He's just QQing that his beloved golden apple let him down.


As far as the MBP...

Aside from the screen, it's all the same hardware in comparison to other laptops. Flash storage is just a fancy way of saying it has an SSD in it. In all actuality, if you currently have a MacBook Pro 2nd Gen Intel i7 with an SSD, you will actually see very little performance increase at all. The performance increase from 2nd Gen i7 to 3rd gen is less than a 10%. Memory specs has a slight bump from 1333 MHz to 1600 MHz... 8GB of memory is overkill unless you're in heavy multimedia production.

I also think we were gimped on the screen resolution progression. Companies were building LCD screens better than "1080p" for a long time, then they decided to stop production and go with cheaper panels and say "Oh 1080p screens... it's HD!" and people bought into the marketing gimmick. Now that movie production companies will be recording in 2k+ format, screen resolution wars are going to resume. I'd say in about 5 years we'll be seeing 2k and 4k screen formats being the norm. 1080p is almost 10 years old and in tech terms that is ancient.
 
This whole "new" Mac Pro deal seems like Apple had plans to update it at WWDC but the hardware was just not ready yet.
 
brucedeluxe169 said:
Apple's mishandling of the Mac Pro seems to be a serious strategic misstep.... and unless there is this grand plan to move completely away from real desktop OS computing for all, even developers, I can't help but feel like Apple's alienation of Pro desktop users is gonna bite them in the ass down the road...
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Actually it seems pretty obvious that the desktop Macs are going away. Apple wants everyone using laptops (you know, before they force you onto an iOS device permanently in a few years). If you want a desktop, well that's what that thunderbolt display is for. Hook all your normal desktop peripherals to it and plug it into your Macbook Pro and bam, instant desktop. And I have no doubt that the Apple faithful will hem and haw over it before they actually hop on the bus because they're all too deep in the kool-aid.

That new "retina display" Macbook pro does look nice though...
 
Dwango said:
Actually it seems pretty obvious that the desktop Macs are going away. Apple wants everyone using laptops (you know, before they force you onto an iOS device permanently in a few years). If you want a desktop, well that's what that thunderbolt display is for. Hook all your normal desktop peripherals to it and plug it into your Macbook Pro and bam, instant desktop. And I have no doubt that the Apple faithful will hem and haw over it before they actually hop on the bus because they're all too deep in the kool-aid.

That new "retina display" Macbook pro does look nice though...
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Except that Mac Pro was never a "desktop" it was an enterprise workstation. You don't use Xeons and ECC memory on desktops.
 
Update: A MacRumors reader writes in to share an email he received from Apple CEO Tim Cook after he asked about the future of the Mac Pro:
Our pro customers are really important to us...don't worry as we're working on something really great for later next year.
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Look's like we will be waiting even longer, almost 2014.....
 
My (actual) question is: How many large businesses that use enterprise-level servers actually use Apple / OSX in the first place?

My guess is very few.
 
Dwango said:
Actually it seems pretty obvious that the desktop Macs are going away. Apple wants everyone using laptops (you know, before they force you onto an iOS device permanently in a few years). If you want a desktop, well that's what that thunderbolt display is for. Hook all your normal desktop peripherals to it and plug it into your Macbook Pro and bam, instant desktop. And I have no doubt that the Apple faithful will hem and haw over it before they actually hop on the bus because they're all too deep in the kool-aid.

That new "retina display" Macbook pro does look nice though...
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The MacPro isn't a desktop mac. It's an professional workstation. The iMacs are the desktop macs and they aren't going anywhere.
 
MavericK96 said:
My (actual) question is: How many large businesses that use enterprise-level servers actually use Apple / OSX in the first place?

My guess is very few.
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Probably every major college campus in the USA for starters...if you're in audio production, you were locked into using OSX for years due to ProTools only leaving platform exclusivity a year or two ago. Dunno about other fields, but many were locked into the "You're in _______ field, the tool of choice is an OSX system".
 
You have to admire Apple for pulling this off :)

Pricing team at Apple are probably rolling to work in Ferraris. Meanwhile, the geeks in the labs are hating work each day knowing its profits over innovation.
 
Maybe without Jobs around to reinforce it, the Reality Distortioin Field is finally crumbling?
 
One problem with getting higher resolutions - they will require more bandwidth and with mobile companies trying to cap usage, that will be a major problem
 
heatlesssun said:
Depends on the product. The Mac Pro certainly is one of Apple's least competitively priced products.
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MacBook Pro's have gotten better as of late.

In 2006 a 15" MBP would have been 3 times as expensive as an equivalently speced PC laptop.

Today, they are only about double the price.

Moving in the right direction, but still pretty ridiculous.
 
Zarathustra[H];1038826814 said:
MacBook Pro's have gotten better as of late.

In 2006 a 15" MBP would have been 3 times as expensive as an equivalently speced PC laptop.

Today, they are only about double the price.

Moving in the right direction, but still pretty ridiculous.
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I was talking about the Mac Pro the workstation, not the MacBook Pro the laptop. As rare instance of Apple product naming that's a bit confusing.
 
heatlesssun said:
I was talking about the Mac Pro the workstation, not the MacBook Pro the laptop. As rare instance of Apple product naming that's a bit confusing.
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I know you were. I was just pointing out that other products they sell have improved.
 
Hell at my work we still have Pentium 4's and the "good" workstations have quad core Xeon's, but based off Core 2 Quads....thats 5 years old. We are only just now deploying Win 7 and upgrading from IE 6.

But for what were doing they do their job. Business's, well the frugal ones, are not like consumers. If they don't have to upgrade they won't. Mostly because while you can afford to drop $1000 on 1 computer, dropping that much money on a couple hundred at a time is alot harder to justify.
 
Zarathustra[H];1038827839 said:
I know you were. I was just pointing out that other products they sell have improved.
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Apple does a very good overall of updating its hardware and the Retina displays have certainly be received as a great upgrade. The Mac Pro being of course completely the opposite for whatever reason.

Honestly, I just don't think Apple cares about that market anymore, certainly people that weren't tied to OS X have moved on by now in the workstation market.
 
It's surprising they don't put even the slightest bit of effort into maintaining their professional consumer base. Apple focus is very clearly on the consumer market now, but that's no reason to just give up on the professional customer. Maybe pay them less attention, but this reeks of straight up abandonment.
 
Q1DM6 said:
also, lol:
http://9to5mac.com/2012/06/12/apple-rescinds-new-mac-pro-is-no-longer-new/#more-194894
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LOL @ this quote:

The blogosphere jumped online to gobble up the notebooks, where they finally discovered the Mac Pro’s minor spec-bump listed under the familiar “new” notation. Since then, the Cupertino, Calif.-based Company has been under-fire for displaying the machinery as new when it only boasts a few slight changes.
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Yeah, because Apple has never done anything like that before... :rolleyes: :p
 
Wow, three years to update their top line workstation/desktop system. It really doesn't mean much to them anymore.
 
RIPATI said:
It's surprising they don't put even the slightest bit of effort into maintaining their professional consumer base. Apple focus is very clearly on the consumer market now, but that's no reason to just give up on the professional customer. Maybe pay them less attention, but this reeks of straight up abandonment.
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We dropped Macs about a decade ago in my dept. All of the design software is available on Windows so there was no need to stick with Apple for designers. Don't know about Final Cut Pro equvients since I don't dabble in that.

Plus, the IT dept didn't know how to work on the Macs. We always had a PC next to our Macs for outlook and other corp stuff :D
 
Lol, you made my day with that statement! They say President Lyndon Johnson, too, also had his version of a "Reality Distortion Field".

Zarathustra[H];1038826800 said:
Maybe without Jobs around to reinforce it, the Reality Distortioin Field is finally crumbling?
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I swear I saw on Engadget yesterday that the new MBP has usb3, thunderbolt, and I'm assuming ddr3 1600
 
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