{"id":35469,"date":"2022-04-06T16:37:47","date_gmt":"2022-04-06T20:37:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=35469"},"modified":"2022-09-22T08:15:06","modified_gmt":"2022-09-22T12:15:06","slug":"five-years-to-mac-hardware-turnaround","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/04\/06\/five-years-to-mac-hardware-turnaround\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Years to Mac Hardware Turnaround"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Rossignol<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Five years ago, the Mac lineup was in a bad state. Over three years had passed since Apple redesigned the Mac Pro with a sleek but constrained “trash can” enclosure, while the iMac, MacBook Air, and Mac mini had also gone years without updates.<\/p>

At the time, some users began to question whether Apple was still committed to the Mac, especially at the high end of the market.<\/p>

The criticism ultimately led Apple to hold a meeting with a small group of reporters, where it apologized to pro Mac users<\/a> and ensured that it remained committed to the Mac. In a rare and surprising move, Apple also pre-announced it was working on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro with a modular design, a new pro-level iMac, and a new pro display.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mac hardware has improved a lot. Software is still not in a good place. It needs better reliability\/quality and more capabilities. The quality issues seem to have started with the switch to annual releases. The limited capabilities seem to be a combination of sandboxing\/security concerns being weighted too heavily and designs\/code brought back from iOS unfairly limiting what the Mac versions can do.<\/p>\n\n

Nick Heer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Then, it was hard for me to recommend any<\/em> Mac to a friend; now, the Mac lineup is a question of what level of performance and excellence you desire. This press meeting felt like a turning point from one extreme to the other — eventually.<\/p>\n

High on my wish list of articles for someone with the right connections to write is a deeply reported look at the Mac’s doldrums. It cannot all be due to stagnation in Intel’s processor lineup around the same time, or any one individual. Something else happened — or, more likely, many somethings else.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Riccardo Mori<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

If the sheer raw power of computers has increased orders of magnitude in the last 30 years, the range of applications (in both senses) for a computer hasn’t increased or spread in a comparable way.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Apps that were previously good-quality, powerful, and versatile have been neutered and have become ‘just okay’ or ‘good enough’. The Utilities folder in Mac OS has been slowly but surely depopulated over time. iOS apps with an ingenious premise, like Music Memos, are being left behind as flashes in the pan. The consensus with iTunes was that Apple should have split it into different apps so that these could be better at handling specific tasks than the old monolithic media manager. Apple eventually did split iTunes into different apps, but forgot the second part of the assignment.<\/p>\n

Aperture overall was a better application than Adobe Lightroom when the two apps coexisted. Apple could have kept improving Aperture and kept making it better than Lightroom. Instead they gave up. We now have Photos as sole ‘sophisticated’ Apple photo tool. Which is neither fish (iPhoto) nor flesh (Aperture).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n