With no announcements in sight for new MBPs and Apple pushing iPads as replacement for full laptops, are MacOS and Macbooks going to be discontinued in the near future? Will we end up programming on an iPad if we want to program for their products?
About 1000 days ago Phil Schiller said, "Can't innovate any more, my ass!" with the release of the Mac Pro. Regardless of whether it was innovative or not, that was pretty much the last time desktops were ever updated.
Apple could have released many upgrades to the MBP, especially considering what competitors with far less cash and fewer employees have accomplished in upgrade cycles every few months.
I don't think they are going to discontinue the MBP, but I do wonder what the plan is that they're executing. Do long cycles increase confidence among consumers that the machines will last a long time? Can they have low profit margins at the release date without worrying markets that they won't increase?
Just because they are pushing iPad Pro as replacements for full laptops doesn't mean people can realistically replace their daily workflows with iPads right now.
There is "Productivity" (Generic Office Productivity) and there there is Productivity (Making Industries Turn). No doubt they could have iPad Pro's do both, but by the time you've made the iPad Pro able to do Maya, Premiere Pro, Da Vinci Resolve etc, you've turned it into a desktop again.
They may very well try to do that, arguing the iPad Pro is a better platform that embodies the vision of how they'd like desktop computing to be, but that platform is years and years away.
Also worth realizing that Developers aren't the bulk of people using computers for "Productivity", our use case isn't the primary one. Not that I'd be happy if Apple decided to ignore it. That'd be really sad.
I don't follow the Apple's product news too much, but I was really hoping for the announcement of a new Thunderbolt display now that they have discontinued the current generation (which had been around since 2011).
I, too, worried about a new display. However, I recently purchased a Dell P2715Q[0] and I LOVE it. I think I like it even more than my Apple Cinema Display. The only thing it doesn't have (that I miss) is the integrated Apple MagSafe2 power supply and Thunderbolt bus. I guess that's 2 things. :/
Have the same display. I got an open box at MicroCenter for a crazy cheap price, like $360 I think.
Nice thing about Thunderbolt is that you could hook 2 up at 60hz. I know if I run 2 at 4k, one will be 30hz; haven't seen a good answer if I run at a lower res. 4k is too small anyways (when I had it paired with a TB, I was able to run both at 60)
I do miss the webcam, but am happy with USB 3 instead of 2. As for the integrated power, I miss that, but this monitor + an extra power adapter is still $300 or so cheaper than the TB. :-)
Not a chance. They'd lose 99% of the serious developers. I couldn't imagine doing app development without 5 terminals, photoshop, xcode, and a web browser open at the same time; running git, grep and a series of shell scripts invoking all kinds of unix tools and imagemagick and ffmpeg and so on. If iOS can ever deliver that then we've gone full circle back to macOS.
To be productive you need big monitors and overlapping windows and terminals and drag&drop, and beyond a physical keyboard you need a pointing device that doesn't require you to cover the things you are looking at with your fingers. And nobody wants to sit for 8 hours a day stretching their arms out to touch a monitor or crouch over a tablet on a table.
The way you imagine productivity works like that. The past is funny, because it seems like that way worked for us and so it should be good enough for anyone.
As I watch my kids using iPads regularly, I realize they don't really know anything at all about a 'desktop' or why its so complicated. We can argue well they need to learn how a computer works, its important etc etc. Maybe they don't for the most part and could just build on top of our knowledge base to get to the next place. We are the old people telling kids to get off our lawn.
That would limit their dev environment to making native apps for three device classes (tablet, phone, watch). It would neglect their massive presence in the web dev community among others. Along with probably eliminating them from the university student market (as much as they're in it now). And definitely eliminate them from the enterprise market (I can almost, but not quite, get one now at work, it'd be gone for good if I only had an iPad option).
iPads make good, portable devices for a lot of things. But it'd be a foul up of epic proportions to try to move their laptop/desktop users to it.
I have been trying to buy an Apple computer for a year now. I have had multiple issues that have blocked me from buying one, starting with the fact that there is no official Apple retailer in my country [1].
As Apple products are super-overpriced I think "Why not buy a computer with maxed specs?" this way I can counter the fact that I will have a discontinued computer in five years or so. Right now the rMBP 13" with maximum specifications (16GB RAM, 1TB Flash Drive, Core i7) costs around $2,700 + taxes, this is a lot of money but those specs are the minimum nowadays and I want to future-proof it, so I am kind of forced by my profession to buy it. Unfortunately, all shipping companies in my country have a limit of $2,000 per import so it is obvious that I cannot buy it online, I have to travel to the US.
Have you read /r/mac or /r/apple ? There is at least five posts every day of people complaining about issues with the keyboard, the display, the graphic card, the disk (mostly the disk utility reporting inaccurate information), and even the hinge. Most of these issues can be solved going to a "Genius Bar" and asking for a replacement. Cool, but I cannot do that in my country because there is no "Genius Bar". If I travel to the US to buy this over-priced computer and it comes with a defect I will have to come back to get a replacement; to prevent this I would need to stay in the US for a couple of weeks to check everything before going back to my country.
Another reason to buy the customized version, that way the money spent in flight tickets, hotel room, and local transportation will be worthy. I got the random number of $5,000 as my budget, and the devil knows I've been sitting on this money for several months waiting for Apple to release the goddamn redesign that they have been promising since last year.
I've started wondering whether the delay is not only because 1) The current products have been considered "good enough" in the face of intermediate processing / power requirement changes in succeeding chip lines...
But also because 2) Apple is making the move away from Intel to their own customized ARM processor.
The rumor's been around, before. But really, why else not bump the processor and maybe some subsystems, if and in lieu of a more major redesign?
P.S. This is just rampant, uninformed speculation pulled from my posterior. And I've no information and limited confidence as to whether such a move could be made sufficiently performant. Still, why not a bump or two, in this intervening time?
That would be a good move, to switch to ARM on all their devices. There are some very powerful ARM chips. If that's what they're doing, I can wait even a year or more!
Review the announcements at http://www.apple.com/pr/library/ - they often announce new Macs in their fall announcement, and generally never at the iPhone announcement.
Obviously I'm exaggerating my dislike of the new keyboard. They feel like crap. The travel is really low, so it's like typing on an ipad with bad feedback.
I think it is more likely Macbook moves to AMD or even ARM then killing it. There is actually a lot of room for Mac to grow, compared to iPhone. Percentage wise.
They've been slow about releasing new Mac products, no doubt the much larger cash cow has been a distraction, but I think they'd have to do a huge amount to make the ipad something that would satisfy all their app developers.
I am not an iOS dev, but I would certainly want git, bash, and emacs. I can see how a lot of people might be accustomed to making image content in photoshop or whatever...
A lot of other manufacturers are making very nice machines these days. Dell (though I'm not a fan) are very popular at my work. I prefer lenovo. But even Acer, Asus, HP are making high power beautiful devices which can run windows or linux.
On a side note, my 6 year old lenovo is beautiful, works perfectly after 6 years (I replaced the battery last year) and would probably still be competitive on weight/size today. It was $650cdn when I bought it. Two years later I bought a Macbook air to develop apps. It lasted less than two years, had two power boards and a power adapter replaced. It ended up in the garbage after spending more than $1200.
