Some background
Let me give you some background who we are and what we do. I love the mac and have had Apple computers at home since 1985 beginning with a Mac 512 (predecessor of Mac+) which I still own as well as a Macintosh SE which was followed by a Mac II. Then came the dark ages of Apple where nothing good really happened and I got more and more interested of the demo-scene of Amiga’s and PC’s, this is where innovation really happened. If you wanted to do 3D modelling, gaming, interactivity applications and so on DOS/Windows was the platform for students, enthusiasts and budget pros. Meanwhile Apple was stuck on their Motorola/PPC-platforms and Linux emerged during the mid-90s. I was one of many tech enthusiasts that had LILO or any other boot loader installed to be able to switch between Windows and Linux in order to run 3D applications, development tools, games, mp3 compressors or whatever need there was – no one ever even discussed using a Mac. It was a lost platform.
Jobs revival
Then Jobs returned, at this time I was done with educations and was working at a company who was doing print, 3D, photography, video editing. This was before photos and videos was entirely digitalized so we had a mix of pretty tech-savvy people and more traditionally working but very knowledgeable crew. Jobs showed the new Mac OS X which was what the market needed since Windows 95/98/NT really started getting a bit outdated. That was innovation on the level we wanted (and needed) and soon enough lots of programs was rewritten to work natively on OS X, great! We were still short on 3D software but this is where Windows, Solaris, Silicon Graphics and other platforms really had the advantage anyhow so we were stuck with two or more platforms.
Market changes
When the market crashed after the new millennium started I was more and more focusing on development, Microsoft released .NET in late 2002 and it suited me just fine. Meanwhile I was also programming a lot of websites in PHP and was working with some print so my life consisted of having one Mac and at least one PC of some sort. When the Macs came out with Intel cpu’s in 2006 I decided to get rid of any non-apple computer. They were expensive, yes, but the quality and performance was really good, also the emulators for Windows environments went extinct and instead became virtualization software with a minimum overhead from Mac OS.
That kept on until 2014 when I bought my first Surface Pro 3 and virtualized all my environments to a server rack I keep in our house, and some in Azure.
– Wait now, you got rid of your Macs and replaced them with servers and a Surface?
Sort of, I had been building up a serious server farm since 2012 and was getting more and more interested by the hybrid models of Windows Server and Azure. During a time when Apple decided to not build any more servers and more or less stop the development of their server OS, and if that wasn’t enough the quality of their stuff wasn’t bleeding edge anymore, it was mainstream. Their phones don’t have better battery life; their computers don’t have better graphics or CPUs or chipsets or whatever spec you are looking at. At least not from a developers view. And Mac OS, ha, what have they done? The quality of it is so random you never know what you will wake up to the following day. Now if you don’t have to spend seven to eight hours a day working and performing your best behind a keyboard you may not notice the difference but I surly did. 2012 to 2014 was a couple of years with much suffering.
It’s a matter of which user and market segment you are looking at. A normal user will probably never max out a high-end product from the top market segment, but power users will. And as a professional geek high-end computer tormentor I expect that the best products of the most expensive market segment will hold what’s promised.
Mac Pros (the computer)
– But then why not buy a Mac Pro?
Sure, that’s within the budget. The Pro model I would like would cost about 9000 USD in Sweden, that’s still fine. However, if Apple keeps in their secret club that very well may work for the consumers but it is a very much disliked behaviour amongst professional users. We need to be able to plan our business, plan upgrade cycles and we do not want to spend 9000 USD on computers that are three years or more old. What if I bought a Mac Pro in 2013 and it got stolen, broke down or whatever happened to it. Am I supposed to purchase the exactly same computer three years later for the same price, that seems like a very bad deal to me. I just need to know what they are cooking up in their lab, or not cooking up for that matter.
Phones
iPhone, legendary stuff right. The thing is that just as with Mac OS you never know what phone you will have tomorrow. Also headphones, and what about that lightning plug when USB-C is on the market, and battery life, and durability, and… No, it is not the best phone out there, the OS is really great when it’s stable but then you never know and it is a very monolithic world Apple has going on there.
Innovation
What about innovation. The best innovation Apple could offer at the moment are openness and choice, something Apple used to believe in and practice but both Apple and Google has left that scene to Microsoft.
A great example of Apples current path is for you to try to debug an iOS Safari browser on anything else than a Mac. Have fun!
Oh yeah, and those events. I still like to watch them cause hey, who knows. Maybe they decide to sober up and do something great again.
Lucky for me I do have Edge on Windows 10, combining Win10 and OS X users we reach about 30% of the market. Great decision Apple!
What about that wife
She’s a photographer, a laptop can’t handle the stress of Photoshop all day long when running gigabyte sized files. We were thinking of buying a Mac Pro but she read the specs and realized the craziness herself. We don’t even know if Apple ever will release a new Mac Pro, so why buy one now?
We ordered a 6500$ Dell Workstation instead with better specs than any Mac Pro ever had. It is pretty good looking to and it is upgradable for many years to come. And Windows 10 is coming along really great, it is far from ready yet but we think it is way more predicable than the feature of Mac OS and Microsoft is much more innovative.
Ergo
Let’s sum it up
- Focus on consumer grade products
- unpredictability on high-end products
- overall quality/price ratio
- lack of innovation
Thanks for everything Apple but we’ve come to an end
Best wishes from us
