I think Apple releases phenomenally great products and the industry follows in its wake, slowly saturating the market and maturing allowing Apple to shift its focus to the next under served user.
No questions about that, as a matter of fact I just bought an iPad Pro, which is positively awesome on so many levels. The iOS ecosystem is thriving, but I'm talking about the Mac ecosystem, not Apple as a whole.
So sure Mac laptops are great†, yet:
- Mac Mini not updated in years
- Mac Mini with four cores killed years ago
- Mac Pro not updated in years, after not being updated in years
- iMac Pro entry price is far north of 5k€
- iMac are stuck with 8GB, spinning rust, or fusion drives, which means no APFS. "stuck" because RAM and SSD upgrade prices are completely insane, which makes you enter iMac Pro territory.
- MacBook Air neither killed nor updated in years (seriously, that screen? I'm not asking for Retina at that price point but it's just objectively awful by every metric right now)
- Airport team has been reassigned/fired months ago.
- Airport devices are being killed (which is not a surprise given previous point) which is a shame in itself given how awesome they are.
- This means no official support for networked Time Machine, short of using macOS Server by buying one of the above desktop machines.
- Xserve died long ago, which means having a proper CI is hell††, running on either antiquated or unfit (hence overpriced and overspecced for the task) hardware.
- macOS team has been folded into a more general team, with iOS largely taking the fair share of it[0].
- This show a lot, especially compared to things that exist in both, like the Mac App Store is a joke[0], and OS updates being unreliable.
At that point, and despite Tim Cook proud announcements that they love the Mac, when taking a step back and looking at the big picture, although individual devices are nice, it sure looks like that ecosystem has growing holes and is proceeding through inertia. I'm eagerly awaiting future developments regarding the desktop/headless side of things over the coming years. As a thought experiment, that makes for interesting times to picture Apple without a Macintosh ten years down the road!
> and the industry follows in its wake, slowly saturating the market and maturing allowing Apple to shift its focus to the next under served user.
Privacy, reliability, ease of maintenance, hardware spec consistency, I can't find an alternative right now, the closest being getting a Lenovo laptop and some Android phone, and loading them up with ArchLinux and LineageOS, but that's high maintenance and still falls short on some of my use cases.
† Although I'm holding back the upgrade of my early 2013 13" rMBP because the MB I need doesn't exist (13", function keys + CPU w/ dual fans and 4 USB-C of the TouchBar one). A 2k€ machine from 2018 would basically be a downgrade (or at best even out) from my 2013 one, which is, somehow, a testament to how awesome my current machine is.
†† Leading to either you make-doing with your own hardware, or paying terrible price for cloud offerings. Seriously, Apple should allow virtualisation outside its own hardware for CI purposes.
