[WOT] Warning - long winded discussion - was Re: Apple iPad announcement evokes yawn

[Richard MacLemale]

Can I agree to disagree too?  :)

I think that when people actually SEE the iPad 3 they'll get what the big deal is.  It's the best tablet screen you can buy as of right now.  But yeah, iPad 3 is an evolutionary not revolutionary product.  Heck in the K-12 market, the much bigger announcement was that the iPad 2 is going to be $399 for the general public.  So hopefully education can score package deals with an even better price.  This will be a big deal in the K-12 market.

Regarding the XServe vs. Mac Pro.  From our perspective (I'm basically a District level network admin for a large school district) Apple killing the XServe was a big deal.  It didn't necessarily run faster than the Mac Pro, but it had dual power supplies, fit in a rack mount, and was designed so that you could stock spare parts and very easily swap them out.  It was a great server for a data center, whereas the Mac Pro tower sucks - can't rack mount it (without using a shelf and taking up tons of space), no dual power supplies, harder to swap components out.  

Apple was stupid to discontinue the XServe because there are tons of data centers that require specs like "can be rack mounted" and "has dual power supply."  We run Moodle on 3 XServes - the next time we update our hardware we'll be switching to Linux because the XServe is gone and we need enterprise worthy servers.  The XServe was doing a good job getting Apple into IT shops and server rooms.  It was a foot in the door with the server nerds.  And now that's gone.  They looked at the spreadsheet but they should have looked further.  

They're doing the same thing with OS X Server.  They've taken out a lot of stuff that the education market was still using.

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Richard MacLemale
Music = http://www.richardmac.com
Programming = http://www.macandchee.se




On Mar 8, 2012, at 1:38 PM, Bob Sneidar wrote:

> I also seemed to have touched a nerve! :-) I wasn't relating gas prices to the apple event (a drastic oversimplification of what I was saying) I was relating an unstable economy that has all the signs of destabilizing even more (using the rising gas prices as one vector on the issue as an example, perhaps I didn't make that clear,) to the seemingly apparent unwillingness of Apple to produce any dramatically new products or technology into the market right now. And sure Apple is catching up. Why wouldn't they? After they released the revolutionary iPad, other companies one upped them. As is so often the case, Apple does the innovation and takes the chance. Once other companies see that there is a market they come along with Me Too products. No surprises there. If Apple didn't bring the iPad up to speed, they would be roundly criticized for THAT! 
> 
> The Xserve was never anything like a Mac Pro? Really? Sure they were different products optimized for different purposes, but nothing like?? Same chip set, same bus architecture, they used the same memory in Mac Pro's of the same chipset, etc. No high end graphics card true, and precious little space to put one, but still, nothing like is a bit of an overstatement, don't you think? There is nothing about the Xserve to prevent it from running the stock non-server OS X except perhaps the installer will refuse to run on it and that is something Apple decided to do, as far as I know. And you CAN run OS X Server on the Mac Pro. Really, the only thing to prevent someone from using an Xserve as a desktop computer is the horribly loud fans, and the (once) excessively high price tag on the OS. I run Parallels and up to 4 virtual machines running Windows on two of my Xserves. There is no software I can run on a Mac Pro that I cannot run on an Xserve. Nothing like is another drastic oversimplification in my opinion. 
> 
> Economic uncertainty IS a part of EVERY company's reality, ESPECIALLY companies who produce what amounts to luxury products to the consumer market. And I could argue just as easily that Apple's profits last quarter are due at least in part to them not overextending themselves by developing any radically new products until they are certain the economy is really recovering. I do agree however that there needs to be more done with Thunderbolt. It's way too expensive right now, and not a lot of peripherals are available that use it. I'm just not sure what Apple can do to change that. They cannot really twist the arm of the 3rd party hardware developers. 
> 
> Let's agree to disagree. 
> 
> Bob
>