Apple Removes Personal Pickup for Thunderbolt Display

I wouldn't get your hopes up. The beta site is down but the Apple Store isn't. The store would be down by now if new hardware was incoming.

What if iOS and OS X announcement would be talked for 20 mins each? We would have enough time to talk about hardwares.......sigh.......so much for Debbie downer.

Ready to toss apples at them.

Come on you two, can't we at least wait a few hours to confirm if pessimism is necessary? :)

Maybe but I think the reason they do that is to get people excited.

Maybe....Maybe they're changing it up on us making us think that there is no hardware to be announced and secretly updates the store while we're distracted by Craig's luscious hair.

The hardware lineup is so out of date. If it isn't updated today, it's approaching neglect and disrespect.

Either update the lineup or cut the prices. I'm half surprised they can even source the parts for these anymore.

Maybe Apple has finally learned how to update the store without having to take the whole site down.

Maybe but I think the reason they do that is to get people excited.

I wouldn't get your hopes up. The beta site is down but the Apple Store isn't. The store would be down by now if new hardware was incoming.

What exactly was the reason to remove personal pickup?

Probably because its a low-volume seller, they don't want to maintain huge stocks and the logistics of direct selling are easier. Maybe there's a high return/no-show rate. Whether it is replaced or not, this isn't a product that is going anywhere. If had ever been selling like hotcakes they'd have updated it to match the iMac years ago.

Apparently their business model is best served by new phones than by, um, a $3000+ machine isn't three friggin' years old ('http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro').

Inconvenient truth: yes, it is. PC sales aren't making much money right now.

Seriously: if you want a kick-ass workstation for pro graphics or computational heavy lifting, you can order yourself up a Windows or Linux machine with exactly the permutation of hardware you want. The dealer may barely scrape a profit unless you buy finance or support from them - but that doesn't matter because they're not having to fund the development of their own OS and application suite or build their own motherboards and graphics cards. All hardware manufacturers provide Windows drivers by default, and between manufacturers and the open-source community, Linux is fairly well supported. In the good old days, DOS/Windows simply didn't cut the mustard for pro graphics/DTP/media and all the decent software was for Mac, so they had a huge advantage - these days, maybe macOS has some marginal advantages, but all the software supports Windows.

Meanwhile, more and more of the things that you needed a kick-ass workstation for 15 years ago can be handled by a half-decent laptop or by a cluster of black boxes somewhere on the internet.

Apple can't turn out a competitively priced tower system and make enough margin to fund macOS and not risk cannibalising iMac sales. The new Mac Pro was a brave attempt to create an alternative to the "big box of slots" for an era with fast external data connections - but with the drawback that Apple have to eat the development costs for any upgrade to the GPU boards etc.

To be fair, one of the selling points of the Mac Pro is stability/reliability of Xeon + parity-checked RAM + custom thermal design: Mac Pro users might be happier with waiting 48 hours for their render to finish vs. a bleeding edge system that did it in 40 hours but with a 10% chance of crashing or melting, while making a noise like a jet fighter.

No - Apple's problem is that its laptop line is getting stale, and there is still money in high-end ultraportables.

Well, I think the non-retina MacBook Pro is still a pretty useful machine.

Yes - that's part of Apple's (and the PC industry in general's) problem. Once upon a time, upgrading every 18 months gave you a night-and-day 100% performance increase. Now, upgrading after 3 years might give you a 20% higher cinebench score, which you won't notice c.f. your old machine with an SSD upgrade.