What I would do if I were Tim Cook
I love Apple products. I have been using them for my entire professional career, but recently I feel as though Apple have let me down.
It is hard to deny that their focus has shifted away from the computer hardware business and towards the mobile device business.
This is understandable, as this is where the bulk of their income now comes from, but their computer hardware used to be the best on the market, and if revitalised, I believe it could significantly contribute to their bottom line once again.
With that in mind, if I were Tim Cook, this is what I would do!
Add function keys to the MacBook Pro, get rid of them on the MacBook
In my opinion, Apple simply have this backwards. One of the primary reasons somebody will purchase a pro Laptop is to do professional work.
Whether you are coding, editing photos, editing videos or doing some other form of professional work, I would wager that the tools you use to do so make good use of the function keys.
I would go further and bet that you are able to effectively use these tools without looking at the keyboard.
For example, if my web app isn’t running properly, I can quickly open up my browsers developers tools and be stepping through Javascript in seconds, without having to look down at the keyboard.
This is partly because I have memorised where the keys are, but also because those keys have a physical presence on the keyboard. I know where the F10 key is, for example, and I get the haptic feedback of pressing down on it to jump to the next line of code.
The touch bar is a lot of fun when I am talking to my friends on Facebook or sending a fun tweet which requires an emoji. It’s a bit useless when I want to do some serious work.
Bring back the 17" MacBook Pro
The new MacBook’s are nice, but they are still somewhat awkward to use in an enterprise environment.
The obsession with making the MacBook as thin as possible had a casualty. Ports. I can no longer just walk into a boardroom and plug my MacBook into the big screen to give a presentation without a dongle. Nor can I rock up to a co-working space and plug into the ethernet.
Another casualty has been battery life. Some of the early models of the new MacBook Pro suffered from particularly bad battery life, but this turned out to be due to a software glitch, which Apple has since resolved.
Still, it is hard to deny that if you had more space for a bigger battery, you would get more battery life.
There is definitely a market for a bigger, portier, MacBook Pro. I am proposing:
- 17" form factor
- 2 USB-C Ports
- 1 USB 3.1 Port
- 1 HDMI 2.0 Port (for that sweet 60hz 5K)
- Ethernet port
Kill the Mac Mini. Embrace the NUC
If you have the disposable income (and the inclination) I highly recommend picking up a NUC.
With the NUC, Intel have essentially picked up where Apple left off with the Mac Mini. These tiny little workhorses are the perfect successor, and I believe that if Apple where to try and create a new Mini today, they would essentially be wasting time, R&D and resources reinventing a wheel that Intel have mastered.
Instead, they should license macOS on the NUC. The NUC has a narrow enough and predictable range of hardware that doing so wouldn’t be that much of an engineering effort, and they would be providing great value to the many Mac Mini owners currently sitting, looking over at their current Mini, wondering how much longer before it putters out.
Ditch the iMac
From a technical perspective, the iMac was never that powerful. It’s dirty little secret was always that it basically contained the motherboard of a MacBook slapped onto a highish resolution monitor. The hard drive and ram would then be soldered on. If anything broke, you were screwed.
They look great in an office, but they aren’t good value for money.
The MacBook is now capable of driving a 1440p/4k/5k monitor should you need one, and the MacBook Pro can confortable drive two over USB-C.
Apple recommends the very nice 5K LG UltraFine monitor, which is a great choice (assuming they fix that WiFi issue).
A MacBook, MacBook Pro, or Intel NUC hooked up to one or more high quality monitors is better in every way than the iMac.
Introduce a new Mac Pro
There are a lot of professionals out there who rely on the Mac Pro. Some of them do high resolution video editing, some do heavy duty software development, some need to run lots of VM’s at the same time. These are just examples, there are many people out there using the Mac Pro for all sorts of reasons.
They all have one thing on common. They need more power than anything else in the Mac lineup, and they don’t want to move to Windows, or another Unix/Linux variant. They want to continue to use macOS. Sometimes this is because they rely on software only available on macOS, a lot of the time it is because they just prefer it.
Many of these people are still rocking their old 2013 Mac Pro. You can still purchase these from Apple. They still pack a punch power-wise, but are ridiculously overpriced considering what you can purchase from other vendors for the same amount of money.
If your 2013 Mac Pro dies, purchasing a replacement today is not a smart business decision, considering how much they cost.
Many more of these people have built hackintoshes. A hackintosh is basically a PC you build yourself usinf off the shelf parts, and then install a patched, unlicensed version of macOS onto.
The upside of this is that you can build something more powerful than anything Apple is selling, for less money. The downside is that your copy of macOS isn’t supported by Apple, or licensed.
A small update from Apple could replace a device driver and screw up your system, which could then take days to fix and get everything working again.
Using a hackintosh is therefore also not a smart business decision.
We need a new Mac Pro which supports:
- DDR4 Ram
- Xeon E7 processors
- mSATA
- Capacity for multiple 3.5" drives
- Capacity for multiple graphics cards
Apple may make the bulk of it’s money from mobile devices these days, but it is within their interests to still take care of the professional market.
After all, it is the people who have been using Apple computers for decades and who today write Apps and Software for the iPhone, iPad and iWatch, and Apple really should provide them with the right tools for the job.
