Apple Suddenly Cares About the Mac Again. Is That the Right Call?

On the question of what the next personal computer will be, Apple still has no answer.

Apple has just done two rare and out-of-character things.

Last week it gathered a small group of reporters at its Cupertino headquarters and raised a single subject: a new Mac Pro is coming. The desktop machine had not been updated since it launched in 2013.

Phil Schiller, the senior vice president who runs Apple's marketing and the App Store, said Apple had "rethought" the Mac Pro's design and would deliver a next-generation machine to "meet the future needs of Mac Pro buyers who want upgradability and expandability."

By Schiller's account, the new Mac Pro will be modular, letting users pick their own processors, graphics cards and other parts, and it will come with a new display. The Mac Pro still on sale finally got a small refresh, mostly to the CPU and GPU; the case and the ports are unchanged.

What makes this odd is that Apple said the new machine is coming "not this year." Right — Apple cannot even promise it will come next year.

Thom Holwerda, an OS News editor who attended the event, cited people familiar with the matter as saying the new Mac Pro project was only decided on a few weeks ago, and that the machine will arrive in 2019 at the earliest.

In the 20 years since Steve Jobs returned, this is the first time Apple has announced a product it cannot ship within a year.

Apple guards its secrets and rarely previews anything. Previews make people hold off on what is already in the shops, and they drain the excitement out of the eventual launch.

There have been two exceptions: the first iPhone, shown six months before it went on sale, and the Apple Watch, which took seven months to go from announcement to shelves.

Even those are nothing like the Mac Pro. The iPhone and the Apple Watch were finished products by the time they were shown — there were working prototypes, renderings and ad films, and the point of announcing them early was to make sure Apple was the first to tell you what its new product looked like. This time we have not even seen a drawing.

The second rare thing: Apple apologized in public for a product.

At the event, Schiller said: "The Mac has an important, long future at Apple... We're sorry for the pause in upgrades and updates."

Apple almost never admits publicly that something is wrong with a product. The last time was 2012, when the newly released Apple Maps produced a run of bizarre errors and often simply did not work. Tim Cook eventually published an open letter of apology and told people to use other mapping apps.

The change looks improvised and rushed, and the immediate reasons are plain: years of sluggish Mac updates, and the beating last year's MacBook Pro took over its ports.

Together the two moves send a new signal. The Mac, pushed down the list of priorities for years, matters again — even though more than 60% of Apple's revenue now comes from phones.

Is that the right call?

On the Mac, Apple has turned 180 degrees

For several years Apple kept demoting the Mac.

The MacBook Pro went three years without an update before last year's model. The MacBook Air's shape has not changed since 2010, and it got nothing last year. The Mac mini has been pushed to the margins entirely.

MacRumors, a site that tracks Apple products, runs a "buyer's guide" covering the six Mac lines on sale. Only one is rated "buy now" — the Mac Pro, which just got its small refresh. Four are rated "don't buy."

The rest are off the list mainly because their last updates came so long ago.

How many days since each Mac was last upgraded?

168 days

MacBook Pro

359 days

MacBook

548 days

iMac

766 days

MacBook Air

910 days

Mac mini

Users have every reason to suspect Apple was planning to abandon the Mac.

Even before its big 2016 refresh, the MacBook Pro did not get a new CPU every year, though Intel shipped a new generation of processors annually. From 2012 to 2014 the most expensive 15-inch MacBook Pro used the same graphics chip throughout.

The MacBook Air, the mid-range machine that drove years of Mac growth, has looked the same since 2010; its last processor upgrade was in 2015, and the only other changes were USB 3.0 and more memory. The screen is still not Retina. It looks less like a redesign than like Apple swapping in newer parts while buying components for everything else.

Worst off, of course, is the Mac Pro, the machine aimed at people who want a powerful personal computer. When it launched in 2013, the neat cylinder drew cheers. The common complaint then was that Apple without Jobs could no longer innovate — the proof being that Samsung had big-screen phones while Apple clung to the small 5 and 5s. On stage, in front of hundreds of reporters, Schiller said: "Can't innovate my ass!"

After that launch, the most powerful computer in the Mac family never got another upgrade. Intel released one processor generation after another; Apple's website went on selling a Mac Pro whose parts were three years old.

Ben Evans, a well-known technology analyst and a partner at the venture firm a16z, said after Apple's Mac event late last year that the Mac Pro did not merely look like a trash can — by now it was one.

The financial numbers tell the same story.

Over the past year the Mac brought in 10% of Apple's revenue, one-sixth of what the iPhone brought in. Six years ago the Mac line could still post unit growth above 30%. Now it is shrinking.

Mac owners also hold on to their machines longer than iPhone owners do. Schiller said the Mac has "close to 100 million" active users.

But Apple sold only 18.48 million Macs last year. That works out to one replacement every 5.4 years.

According to a Citibank report, iPhone owners are also holding on longer, but the cycle is still 2.6 years.

Worse, Apple had been handing the "productivity tool" job to the iPad. It gave the big iPad Pro a keyboard and a stylus, and Cook said that with one you "don't need a computer."

Now the Mac matters again. In December, Cook said: "Some folks in the media keep questioning whether we're still committed to desktops. If there's any doubt about that, let me be clear: the desktop is very strategic for us. No one should question that."

But the personal computer market itself has changed.

The PC market has stopped growing, and people will pay less and less for a computer

This is not a growing market. Worldwide PC shipments have fallen for five straight years, and most of what does sell is cheap.

Average selling prices keep dropping — that is the business HP, Dell and Lenovo are in. IDC put Apple fifth in shipments for the first three months of this year; the top four, Lenovo, HP, Dell and Asus, together shipped more than 60% of the market. HP grew 13% over those three months.

Even so, some jobs still need a computer.

As smartphones swallow more everyday tasks, the personal computer is turning into an office machine, pure and simple. The commercial market — the computers you see in offices and service counters — is still growing. Reports from Gartner and IDC say consumer and commercial machines are moving in opposite directions, even though the market as a whole is shrinking.

Microsoft said last year that more than 85% of the global Fortune 500 use its Office suite, and that Office has more than 1.2 billion users counting mobile — more than there are iPhone users.

That number is unlikely to shrink soon. Walk into almost any company and you see rows of computers. Work that means hours of typing is not moving to tablets any time soon.

But for most people these are tools for typing text and fixing spreadsheets. You open one during working hours and, off the clock, throw it as far as you can.

They are what calculators and filing folders used to be. Everyone has to use one; almost nobody loves one; and neither the company nor the user wants to spend much on it. Each machine lasts for years, which is precisely why the PC market has stopped growing.

When the redesigned MacBook Air arrived in 2010, the Mac was briefly the best value in computing. For about three years, brand and looks aside, no Windows laptop could match the Air on price, performance, weight, battery life and reliability taken together.

In fact, having neglected design for years and done little but swap in whatever parts Microsoft and Intel put out, most so-called thin-and-light laptops lost to the Air on every one of those counts.

• 13-inch MacBook Air: 1.7 cm thick, 1.32 kg, 13-inch screen, 1440 x 900, US$1,299.
• ThinkPad X201: 3.5 cm thick, 1.6 kg, 12.1-inch screen, 1280 x 800, US$1,625.

That is history. PC makers have learned to design again.

Before Apple's late-2016 refresh, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1, the Dell XPS 13 and the HP Spectre all offered tighter designs and more performance for less money.

• 13.3-inch HP Spectre: 1.04 cm thick, 1.11 kg, 13.3-inch screen, 1920×1080, US$1,170.

Take away Apple's name, its design and macOS X, and there is little reason left to choose the Air, and you need a push to buy the Pro — most people have always used Windows and never picked up the habit of macOS.

A phone is with you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. An office machine is not, and most people will not pay more for small improvements to one.

Set HP's current flagship Spectre beside a comparably specified MacBook Pro and it costs nearly half as much.

If the 2010 MacBook Air could not talk most people into switching, winning over office users now will be harder still.

Over the past year, among the top five PC makers, only HP grew — 20%, on the strength of its enterprise business. Everyone else, Apple included, shrank.

The education market in Europe and the US, once Apple's, is slipping too.

The product with the momentum now is the Chromebook. Google licenses the cloud-based Chrome OS to PC makers; its advantages are that it is cheap and easy to roll out in bulk.

Chromebook sales in education passed the Mac as early as mid-2015. By 2016, more than half of the US K–12 education market ran Chrome — mainly on price.

The people still willing to spend big on a computer are mostly Apple users already. That market will not get bigger

One of the few PC categories still growing is the gaming machine.

JPR's 2016 figures show gamers around the Pacific Rim increasing their spending on gaming PC hardware by more than 6% a year, with the low end shrinking and the high end rising.

Gamers want faster CPUs and GPUs, and ideally hardware they can configure themselves. The Mac has refused all of that for years, and most demanding games no longer support it. Players have already concluded that you cannot game on a Mac, and that impression will be hard to undo.

It is also a small market. Gaming laptop shipments in 2016 came to 4.5 million units, under 3% of all laptops — not big enough for Apple to bother with.

One group may want Macs badly: software engineers. Figures from last year's WWDC put the number of iOS developers alone at 13 million. They are already on Apple's side.

Software engineers are one of the few groups who genuinely love their work computers. Walk into almost any internet company today — even Google, Apple's long-standing rival — and you will see whole rows of Macs. Apple also ships its iOS development tools only on the Mac, and getting around that is a nuisance.

Because the iPhone captured the top 20% of consumers, internet companies tend to build the iPhone app first. As long as that holds, the Mac keeps the developers.

The other profession that has followed Apple for decades — designers, and publishing — is far smaller. Adobe's software has about 12.8 million users, plenty of them on Windows.

Unless Cook gives up his pursuit of fat margins, what is left for the Mac is developers, designers and the handful of people still prepared to spend real money on a personal computer.

That market is not going to grow.

For the Mac's most loyal users, Apple's problem may be that it thinks too hard

That the new Mac Pro is at least two years away also suggests the design and engineering teams are genuinely stretched.

Chief Design Officer Jony Ive's industrial design group has shaped every piece of Apple hardware for 20 years. It is famously small — just over 20 people — and it handles the industrial design of every product line.

So its capacity is finite. Look back at the important design changes of the past decade and a two-year rhythm appears: in most cases each line gets one significant redesign.

Take 2010, the last year Jobs was fully active: nearly every Apple product got a substantial industrial redesign, as if rushed to arrive while he could still see it. In 2011, apart from the iPad 2, everything kept the previous year's shape.

Now, on top of phones, watches, tablets and computers, the design team has more to worry about: cars, the Apple Store, Apple Park — plus a design book that sells for thousands of yuan, and every detail of the new Apple Stores, down to the planters the trees grow in.

For a team that small, squeezing out time to rework the Mac and deliver the Touch Bar MacBook Pro was already hard.

But the recent quarrel shows that Apple's most committed users, the developers, do not like the Touch Bar, and do not like a desktop that gets no faster.

John Siracusa, the well-known technology blogger who wrote Mac OS reviews for 15 years, said on a recent show: "Improving performance isn't boring." The closer the new Mac Pro gets to the old tower — the kind of case you use when you build a PC yourself, and what the Mac Pro looked like before 2013 — the better it will serve the people who buy it.

Apple cares more about a breakthrough in the shape of the thing, and will sacrifice performance to get one. The two sides define boring differently.

Now, when Apple says it takes the Mac seriously again, what it talks about is still redesigning the Mac Pro — a new modular design, for instance.

Maybe Apple will produce something that suits developers. But can Ive then stand the boredom, leave the shape alone and honestly raise performance every year?

Or will Apple slip back into one big upgrade every three years and nothing in between? If so, it will lose the Mac's most loyal users in the end.

Finally, Apple still does not seem to know what the personal computer will become

For a while, Apple appeared to have a plan for the future of the personal computer: let the iPad take over from the Mac.

Schiller once explained in a CBS 60 Minutes interview that with every new product Apple tries to absorb as much as it can of what the previous one did.

The Apple Watch means you look at your watch less. The iPhone means you need the iPad less. The MacBook means you no longer need a desktop.

Taking over daily office work was the iPad's assignment — and office work is what personal computers are mostly for.

Schiller's words: "The iPad's job is to be so powerful that you never need a notebook. Hey, why do I need a notebook? I can add a keyboard to it! It can do everything."

Meanwhile Apple was making the iPad into the new productivity tool. After the iPad Pro arrived in 2015, Apple called it a computer outright in its advertising.

The iPad Pro's screen reached 12.9 inches, bigger than most Macs; with a keyboard and a stylus it is nearly a laptop.

What Apple now pushes hardest in education is the iPad, not the Mac. It has built iOS apps that teach children to code, and it offers schools complete packages and discounts.

Once the generation raised on touchscreen phones grows up, working on a tablet should feel obvious. Nobody will have to be told why the operating system differs from a phone's, or why the screen cannot be touched.

But Apple has hesitated over making the iPad the next personal computer.

The 12.9-inch iPad Pro, released at the end of 2015, has not been updated since. The new iPads Apple has released are a cheaper 9.7-inch iPad Pro whose smaller screen suits office work less well, and a low-priced iPad that takes no stylus and has no keyboard to go with it.

On the software side, last year's iOS 10 did almost nothing to make the iPad better for work.

Apple treats the iPad Pro the way it treats the Mac: ship a generation, then leave it alone.

In the early 1980s, a personal computer meant typing commands one line at a time. Anyone who used DOS remembers. Everything went through the keyboard.

In 1984, Apple launched the Mac with a mouse in the box — a breakthrough in how people and machines talk to each other.

The expensive Mac changed the habits of a very small group and got people used to the idea of a mouse. Changing everyone else's habits fell to Microsoft.

Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0 in 1985 to a poor reception. Versions 2.0 and 3.0 flopped as well. Failure by failure, Microsoft improved it and finally shipped Windows 95. From 1995 on, the mouse was the standard way to control a personal computer, and the world got used to dragging one around a simple, legible interface.

Working out that the mouse and the graphical interface mattered was one thing; getting everyone to accept them took Apple and Microsoft 11 years.

Now, whether Apple means to reinvent the Mac or to make the touchscreen iPad the next personal computer, neither effort has run more than two years before stalling.

To change how hundreds of millions of people work, that is not enough.

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image from Pixabay