I want the Mac Pro back. It was depreciated for no valid reason, and has plenty of technical opportunity to expand Apple's presence in the agent VM and inference hardware stack. If Apple is going to renege their stupid decisions, now is a great time to find a place for Apple Silicon in the trillion-dollar AI buildout.

The Mac itself still hasn't proven that it has a place in the future. It's not any more profitable than the iPad in revenue breakdowns, and doesn't come close to the install base of the iPhone. Compared to Windows PCs and Linux servers, Apple has entrenched the Mac as a second-class citizen for traditional computing. Instead of pushing to make macOS an unavoidable flagship operating system, Apple promotes insular API/SDK usage and seemingly leans towards a less-profitable B2C market segment. Tim Cook's obsession over service revenue caused Apple to forfeit the high performance ARM market, which is a shame, since Apple Silicon is quite competitive in ways that the Vision Pro and HomeView will never be.

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npunt 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That's never been Apple's market, B2B is not in their DNA, nor is winning absolute market share. You're asking them to go from being a company that is about something (great consumer experience) to a company that chases profit wherever it can find it.

Once they go down that path, they open themselves up to whatever technology changes and drifts happen in an entirely different market, which right now is going through a tectonic shift with AI. We don't even know what happens in that market in 1-2 years let alone 5 or 10 or more. The business cycles are different, the customers are different, the demands are different. How do you even begin to plan for that?

You're zeroing in on a technical advantage Apple currently has with silicon while ignoring the lack of advantage they have everywhere else in their operation. That'll never happen and it's the antithesis of a half century of company history.

As far as the Mac, it's the truck that does the heavy work so the other platforms like iOS are light [1]. That's been the guiding philosophy, the sandbox it plays within.

[1]: https://youtu.be/ZLEzEL35Iyc?t=2662

	▲	bigyabai 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hence why I conditioned it: > If Apple is going to renege their stupid decisions, now is a great time to find a place for Apple Silicon Apple's B2C obsession isn't smart. Their service revenue is quite literally deemed illegal and exploitative in several courts, they cannot rely on the App Store and iCloud-style tie-ins forever. The progress that they've made on the A-series chips goes largely unnoticed to a cohort of users that scrolls TikTok and Polymarket. The progress of the M-series chips has not moved the needle on macOS' market share even with 7 years of sales marked down. Right now, they're lining themselves up for the worst of both worlds; being shackled to low-margin B2C products that aren't legally allowed to ammortize costs with lock-in "ecosystem" services. Apple will be forced to make changes if the status-quo continues to punish their business strategy. So... why not lean into their strengths? iPhone customers will rarely notice fast single-core performance, but devops and enterprises will. Apple fundamentally supports expansion via PCI on Apple Silicon, and their SOCs demonstrably handle Linux, CUDA and Vulkan without any significant bottlenecks. The Mac Pro was 90% of the complete package for a particularly rich type of customer, and Apple refused to invest in the last 10% to uphold a pointless grudge. This stupid decision is why terrible ARM SOCs like Ampere and Grace have dominated the AI buildout even when Apple Silicon destroys them on-paper. Depreciating the Mac Pro is a solipsistic, insane decision that formally abandons Apple's attempts at dominating anything except the prosumer market. This isn't even an Xserve style slip-up, it's a radical steering decision that prevents customers like Pixar from even considering Apple Silicon for a server farm. > As far as the Mac, it's the truck that does the heavy work For now. Apple has laid the groundwork for what comes after, though: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/