[pier25]

Yeah Apple is missing a huge market opportunity there.

I've always wanted a tower mac but the new Mac Pro is not the machine for me. I just want the specs of an iMac on a tower.

A couple of years ago I ended up buying an iMac 5K since I needed to upgrade my old MBP and the Apple laptop landscape was so desolate. I'm very happy with it for dev and design work but I tried to use it for music production and it's not the machine for that. Cooling is bad for anything other than short bursts. Even at 30% of sustained CPU work for audio the fans turn on and are quite annoying. I ended up building a Ryzen Windows PC which cost me as much as an i7 Mini but is even more powerful than the base Mac Pro.

[ng7j5d9]

I feel like the problem is that it isn't a huge market opportunity (at least by Apple scale).

Checking out these graphs about Apple's revenues, apparently Mac revenues are pretty flat, while iPhone revenues continue to skyrocket (currently 5X Mac revenues!): https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/01/fun-with-charts-a-decade-...

So sure, a hobbyist-approved Mac desktop would please you and me and plenty of other geeks, but they'd also cannibalize their Mac Pro sales somewhat, and when it's all said and done, their Mac revenues would still probably be in the same ballpark. So, why do that when they can pour effort into new phones or TV services or AirPods or whatever?

The thing that worries me is that the hobbyist/geek is often the one who turns lots of others onto a technology. I'm probably where I am right now because my geek uncle passed down his used Mac to me and showed me Hypercard. And I'm pretty sure there are people who own Macs today that wouldn't if it not for me. I think appeasing the geeks is worth more than the direct profit or revenue that such a model would bring in, but in ways that aren't as immediately evident on the quarterly report.

[sixothree]

I feel like I exist in the "enthusiast" segment which Apple completely ignores.

[cstross]

What is the cost (for Apple) in straight up R&D dollars of building a new model of Mac? And how much does it cost them to tool up for manufacturing and create the logistic chain to put it in customers' hands?

Remember that Apple aims to sell a vertically integrated stack, all the way from their own cases, motherboards, and PSUs up through the OS and core apps. The point of this is to deliver a specific user experience that they control, and also to keep competitors out of their pool (they allowed licensed Mac clones circa 1994-96 and it didn't end well). While they still buy in CPUs from Intel and other components (RAM, video chipsets, SSDs, hard drives) from other suppliers, these are generally low-level components -- as low level as Apple can get -- and even then they're trying to build self-owned stacks so they're not dependent on anyone else (e.g. the A-series processors in the iPhone and iPad) -- a lesson they learned the hard way thanks to Motorola with the 68K and subsequently PowerPC architecture. (I'm guessing Tim Cook personally has bad memories of the failure to deliver a mobile G5 back in the day.)

Anyway ...

Developing a new machine from the ground up has got to cost in the tens of millions, at least. (Look at the sunk costs that went into the new Mac Pro, for example.)

Are there enough "enthusiast" customers with system-building interests out there to make such a beast net-profitable, after taking into account the brand dilution implication of stacking up too many SKUs (as they did in the Bad Old Days of the first half of the 1990s, before the Return of Jobs)?

I'm guessing they've done the calculation and concluded the answer is "no", at least for the time being.

[mantap]

I think this is backwards. Who is buying underpowered $6000 computers? An iMac in tower form factor would be popular because it's something people actually want.

The only people excited about the new Mac Pro are people already locked into the Apple ecosystem. It is a fundamentally backwards looking product that attempts to squeeze more money out of already captured customers. It is not likely to attract new customers to the Apple ecosystem.

[pier25]

> I'm guessing they've done the calculation and concluded the answer is "no", at least for the time being.

It's possible but I doubt it. Does Apple know how many of its iMac customers would prefer a tower? Or how many sales they've lost to hackintoshes?

[Terretta]

Yes, they do, in part because they opened up previously in the heyday of people building their own systems, and continue to engage deeply on the enthusiast asks right now contra-posed against their broader market understanding. Roughly, they figure out which enthusiast things will appeal to the larger market, and make it all work, fully integrated.

Per the curve shown in Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm”, HN exists largely on the left of the chasm, Apple is a trillion dollar company because it understood how to shift to the right of the chasm.

Visual explanation (.png):

https://smithhousedesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/smit...

[pier25]

> in part because they opened up previously in the heyday of people building their own systems

20+ years ago?

> continue to engage deeply on the enthusiast asks right now contra-posed against their broader market understanding

Is this speculation or you have concrete evidence of this claim?

> HN exists largely on the left of the chasm, Apple is a trillion dollar company because it understood how to shift to the right of the chasm.

It think it would be the opposite. Having a tower with macOS and consumer specs (no Xeon or ECC) would be pretty boring and conservative. I think that is one of the reasons Apple won't do it.

[Terretta]

> 20+ years ago?

Yeah. Back then lots of folks moonlit or ran local PC builder companies as small business PC builders and gaming PC builders. Before gateway and e-machines, and the like.

> speculation or evidence?

first hand knowledge

> think it would be the opposite

The curve is within a market. There are boring computers and exciting computers, workaday computers and toy computers, etc. Each has its curve.

Compare to automobiles, what gets shown at shows or on the track, what is limited edition, and finally what is high end then mainstream then outdated.

The high end buyers want them some of that enthusiast kit — without the high maintenance and visits to the mechanic.

That’s even true within a brand line, buyers want stuff they see getting played with over on the left of the chasm by competing enthusiasts, and they want their brand to adopt it too.

[sixothree]

The more I think about it, the more I conclude they just cannot afford to support tower or modular designs for the enthusiast market. Not only would they "lose" money from costly upgrades. But it would also become apparent the lack of driver support Macs have; especially as it pertains to video cards.

Maybe the Mac Pro will change the support issue and they will eventually be able to enter this market. But I believe their biggest fear is being compared to Windows or Linux which both have tremendous hardware support.

[mantap]

It's not just the enthusiast segment. It's the pro segment. Apple can't conceive of a professional who does anything other than edit videos or audio.

[lliamander]

Their marketing collateral for their XDR display shows it with some code on the screen. The notion that either the display or the Mac Pro itself makes any sense for a developer is laughable.

[Terretta]

You can test run an awfully large K8s platform in there ...

[mantap]

If you're running Linux anyway, you might as well buy a 3990X, get 64 cores instead of 28, and use the money you saved to go on vacation.

[tekknik]

you don’t buy a $6k base machine to swap the os to linux, the entire reason to buy a mac is macos. also there’s a lot of us who still don’t trust AMD procs. I personally don’t as the only CPU I’ve ever had burn up was a bulldozer while transcoding. I’ve never even had the slightest problem with Intel procs so until AMD somehow reproves themselves to me without me spending a dime (which obviously will never happen) I don’t even consider them when speccing out a new machine

[novok]

Nerds: Give us the xMac! Example from 2001 / 2005: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2005/10/1676/

Apple: NEVER!

[sneak]

Apple enthusiasts buy Macbook Pros or iMacs. There’s nothing wrong with integrated displays. In fact, it saves on a ton of cable mess, and they are usually worlds better than what you would plug a computer into anyway.

[pier25]

> There’s nothing wrong with integrated displays

What? There is a lot wrong with AIOs.

1) Cooling is atrocious

2) Dust problems

3) Very difficult repairs and almost impossible upgrades (with some exceptions such as RAM)

4) No internal expansion. You save a cable with the monitor but you add cables for everything you want to add.

5) Once some component dies you have a very expensive monitor that can't be used for anything.

6) Much like laptops, tablets, and smartphones it's an environmental disaster.

[Terretta]

Why don’t people complain that toasters aren’t expandable?

Apple builds appliances made from hardware and software.

[mantap]

There's everything wrong with integrated displays. You can't use it for dual displays. You can't upgrade the display withhout upgrading the computer. And if you get a bad case of stuck pixels, you need to carry the thing to a mall and pay out the behind for a replacement panel which requires complex surgery on the device.

[tekknik]

apple will send you a box to ship it back in