When he dispatched all the extraneous and confusing Mac models in the 1990s, Steve Jobs split the lineup into two camps — the consumer Mac and the professional Mac. This was best exemplified by the iMac and the Power Mac. The notebooks became iBooks and PowerBooks. The distinctions were obvious.

Even after the first Intel-powered Macs arrived in 2006, the lineup remained relatively simple. Desktop models consisted of the Mac mini, the iMac and the Mac Pro. Notebooks included the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. It was pretty clear which products fit a particular market, and, even with the addition of the Mac mini, which debuted in 2005.

This is quite unlike the situation in PC land, where manufacturers usually have dozens of models and categories of products. From name alone, it’s usually not possible to see where they fit even if you find them in a specific place on a manufacturer’s site. With Dell you have an Inspiron and XPS, with several variations of Inspirons depending on its purpose. The work notebook is the Latitude. But obviously there’s nothing in these names that explains their focus. You have to know, ask, or check the site to grok the fine distinctions. Worse, different model names are divided even further in ways that appear to represent the type of notebook as defined by a Series number, such as 3000 Series, 5000 Series and 7000 Series.

I haven’t begun to include the Education Series and the Rugged Series. Well, at least the latter’s purpose is defined by its title. The rest of the lineup remains a confused, cluttered mess.

Compared to that, anything Apple does is simplicity personified despite the occasional lapses.

So Apple didn’t rest on its laurels as notebooks began to assume a larger portion of Mac sales. In 2008, the MacBook Air arrived. It was the first thin and light notebook and thus influenced PCs for years. Indeed, Intel’s UltraBook reference design was heavily influenced by the MacBook Air.

I still remember how Steve Jobs demonstrated how the Air could fit into a slim envelope, and some notebook cases of that sort were soon released.

So the Mac notebook lineup soon coalesced into three lines. The MacBook Air, the MacBook and the MacBook Pro, but the MacBook, with the exception of one legacy model, was mostly supplanted by the MacBook Air — until 2015, when all bets were off.

The 2015 MacBook was thinner and lighter than a MacBook Air, had a single USB-C port plus a headphone jack, a slimmer keyboard, and had the advantage of a Retina display. It was only available in one model, with a 12-inch display, listing for $1,299. So those who wanted the cheapest Mac notebook, or a model with a little more connectivity without dongles, stayed with the MacBook Air, which started at $899.

But the MacBook was also launched as a harbinger of the future, and that future has begun to arrive.

So the 2016 MacBook Pro is also thinner and lighter, but doesn’t scrimp on CPU horsepower. Meant as a professional notebook, its touchstone feature is the Touch Bar, a context-sensitive display that replaces the function keys. It’s also a political statement, again demonstrating Apple’s belief that a Mac’s display shouldn’t have touch capability. There will be no 2-in-1 Mac, and if you want a touchscreen, there’s always an iPad or an iPhone.

The MacBook’s focus is also becoming clear. It is the MacBook Air replacement; in turn, the MacBook Air is on its way out, with only the 13-inch model still available for $999. The 11-inch MacBook Air, formerly listing for $899, has been transitioned strictly to the educational market.

If the MacBook follows the MacBook Air, it will be several hundred dollars cheaper in a year or two. The MacBook Pro will also become cheaper, and thus Apple will have returned to just a pair of notebook models, each with a strictly defined focus.

Back to the way things were in the 1990s when Jobs simplified the lineup.

Now when it comes to desktops, beginning in late 2009, the iMac took on both consumer and business tasks. A well-equipped 27-inch iMac, now equipped with a 5K Retina display, can serve the needs of the majority of professional users except for a small subset who still require the power of the Mac Pro. In turn, Apple has said nothing of its future, and a full slate of Xeon chips has yet to be announced for the Kaby Lake seventh generation processor family from Intel. So maybe there will be a minor refresh with faster parts next year.

The Mac mini? I still see a need for one, but with a declining PC market, sales may not be enough to justify its existence. But it’s not that Apple is going to tell us. On the other hand, a simple processor upgrade wouldn’t be expensive to do, and the mini has gotten a decent reception in the low-end server market.

There are still predictions that Apple is slimming down the notebook line in anticipation of eventually phasing out Macs. But I don’t see that happening for quite a number of years. Such a plan would not explain all the development that went into creating the Touch Bar and slimming the MacBook Pro.

Typical of any new product, there will be questions and criticisms. So the Late 2016 MacBook Pro costs a lot more than its predecessor. Is that a good idea, considering that Mac sales have been dropping in recent quarters? Is Apple looking for short-term gains, are there development costs to recover? To add to the confusion, Apple VP Philip Schiller says Apple does not produce products to a price — something that’s hard to believe — but that they are sensitive to the issue.

But maybe not sensitive enough.

Now lest we forget, the first iMac with 5K Retina display retailed for $2,499. Today, a similar 2015 model, with enhanced color, retails for $1,999. So Apple reduced the price by $500 in a single year; there’s also a $1,799 model with slower parts, and a regular hard drive, rather than the Fusion Drive.

What this indicates that a refreshed version of the iMac with a state-of-the-art display became 20% cheaper in a single year. That happened at a time when Mac sales were still increasing, ahead of a declining PC market. So it didn’t happen just because Apple needed to sell more computers. Apple found a way to make them cheaper, and passed the savings along to customers.

So there is a prediction that the MacBook Pro, particularly the versions with Touch Bar, will come down in price by the fall of 2017. How much? Well, perhaps the prices will come close to the former level. But does that mean that people who buy them now are paying an early adopters tax?

I will assume there are two years of development costs to recover, plus building up mass production of new components. But I’m making no guesses about profit margins, nor on whether Apple really and truly wants to gouge customers who can’t wait another 12 months or so.

Another argument is that these MacBook Pros are using last year’s Skylake processors, the six generation parts, rather than the new Kaby Lake processors. However, the quad-core processors aren’t shipping yet, so that explains why Apple didn’t use them in the high-end model. Would it have made sense to use the dual-core Kaby Lake chips on the 13-inch MacBook Pro? Possibly not, since it’s not that they are so much faster as to make a real difference to most users, except those obsessed with benchmarks.

Yet another complaint is the revelation that the two Thunderbolt 3 ports on the right side of the smaller MacBook Pro run slower than the left side. A secret plot on the part of Apple to cheat customers? No the limitation of the dual-core Skylake processors, which support 12 PCI-e lanes, thus explaining the side-to-side difference. The quad-core chips on the 15-inch MacBook Pro supports 16 PCI-e lanes, meaning that the Thunderbolt 3 ports on both sides run at full speed.

The choice of chips also explains why Apple supports LPDDR3 memory, resulting in a maximum of 16GB RAM on the new models. Schiller has explained that using any other RAM technology to allow for 32GB RAM would result in reduced battery life. But that doesn’t differ from previous models. Pros who expect 32GB on a MacBook Pro will have to wait for a future generation that natively supports LPDDR4.

These limitations, dictated by the chip architecture, can be used as ammunition that, not only is Apple overcharging for its new notebooks, but it’s deliberately limiting performance. As you see, that’s not quite true.

What is obvious is that Intel’s ongoing delays in releasing new processors in quantity has certainly hurt Apple’s progress  in updating Macs. As to the Mac Pro, Apple might be waiting for new chips there too. So far, the Kaby Lake version of the Xeon, E3 1200 v6, has only been announced in four-core versions, and Apple wants 8-core and 12-core. So even if a refresh is coming, it may not arrive until the spring. So far, nothing has been announced about the Mac Pro’s future.

In fact, it may be that there will be another series of Mac updates to accompany the Mac Pro, including the Mac mini, iMac, and the MacBook. It’s very possible the latter will benefit from the third year of production, and take a $999 retail price, thus becoming the true replacement for the MacBook Air. That was sort of obvious when it was first announced, but it was too expensive.

Don’t forget that the MacBook Air cost several hundreds more when it first came out. In 2010, a 13-inch MacBook Air was priced the same as today’s Macbook — $1,299, and that represented a substantial price reduction from its predecessor.

There’s also a published report about alleged tepid demand for the new MacBook Pros. That might be true, but if you buy one of the models equipped with a Touch Bar, as I write this, prepare to wait four to five weeks, compared to two to three weeks right after last week’s announcement. That changed in just six hours, so somebody is ordering them. Sure, nobody outside of Apple and its manufacturing partners know how much stock is available, or whether there are problems ramping up production. But slipping delivery dates, meaning you may have to wait until early December to get one, seems promising for its ongoing success.

Moreover, in a recent interview, Schiller said, “And we are proud to tell you that so far our online store has had more orders for the new MacBook Pro than any other pro notebook before. So there certainly are a lot of people as excited as we are about it.”

But if I had any interest in buying one to replace my 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro, I’d definitely wait till next fall to check the prices of the 2017 refresh.

So at one time, there were hopes that Apple really planned to make a difference in your living room. When Steve Jobs told his biographer about discovering or inventing a “magical” interface that would set all things right with your TV experience, many believed he was talking about an Apple TV set.

Indeed, the media freakout may have extended to rival tech companies, as there were reports that Lenovo planned to introduce a smart TV set in the Asian market. I never heard more about it, but I would imagine it was meant as a defense against an expected move by Apple, perhaps with the hope the set would be sold worldwide eventually.

It didn’t matter in the end. Apple decided not to build TV sets. Maybe it’s because the market is old, saturated, and Apple couldn’t find place in which to make a difference. It’s hard to say that it’s an underserved or ill-served market.

That takes us to the fourth-generation Apple TV.

Introduced last year, it was more expensive, but not equipped in any way that would deliver superior picture quality than its predecessor. It did more things, had a different — and whether it’s better is debatable — remote, with Siri support. There’s a growing app ecosystem, with 8,000 selections so far, and a large portion of these are TV apps from different networks and services.

Missing was support for 4K TV sets, which are ending up in more and more homes. This feature is already available from Amazon and Roku, so where’s Apple? True, those products don’t support the wider color gamut feature that will deliver a visible 4K difference if you have a set with support for the HDR feature. I actually expected Apple would offer such an update for this year, but the Apple TV is unchanged. Well, at least you don’t have a gadget that’s destined to be obsolete. Maybe next year.

But dealing with thousands of apps can make your experience far more confusing than it would be on your DVR, where you manage one app and one interface. Apple’s solution appears to be the TV app, introduced at last week’s media event that was otherwise focused in the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. It will also be available for the iPhone and the iPad.

So the TV app is meant to abstract many TV apps, so you have a single hub or portal from which to access your favorite shows and movies. You can use Siri to find what you want, by name or type of content. Shows can be suggested to you too, so it greatly simplifies your TV experience. In passing, you can already access lots of content from one interface on a Roku.

But Apple’s living room scheme demonstrates typical hubris.

To direct your entire TV experience, you have to use your Apple TV for everything. It’s not a matter of switching between this gadget and your cable/satellite set-top box. If you’re a cord cutter, you’ll feel more comfortable with this setup, but that’s only a minority of users so far.

But here’s the “real” deal breaker: You see, there’s no support for two of the largest TV streaming services, and that’s Amazon Instant Video and, worse, Netflix. But Apple and Amazon haven’t been on the same page for a while. You can’t even buy an Apple TV at Amazon, although I did see gear from Google and Roku over there. But it stands to reason that if Amazon won’t sell the product, there would hardly be support for Apple’s TV app. Amazon Instant Video remains unavailable for Apple TV.

But what about Netflix?

So it appears that Netflix won’t be included in the TV app either, and that can be a deal breaker, since it’s probably the most important streaming service of all. Netflix offers original programming that’s the envy of the industry. From “House of Cards” to “Luke Cage,” there are brilliant shows with great production values and top-draw acting that have spawned a new habit — binging. So instead of watching an episode every week as with most traditional series fare, you can access all the episodes in a season at the same time. You can watch them one after another, until you tire of the process, and pick up the next day or the next week to continue.

I love it!

One theory has it that Netflix doesn’t want to share audience figures, which they would be doing, in part, by allowing the TV app to access their content. It may not give Apple all the figures, but some numbers would be available. On the other hand, I suppose Apple could make a deal with Netflix to keep the numbers confidential and not access that data directly in calculating usage. Doesn’t seem so hard to me.

The other theory is that Netflix doesn’t want to anonymize itself by having content included in a single app as part of a list of available shows. It doesn’t want to cede control of its interface and content to a third-party that’s a potential rival. All right, that makes sense.

But Apple is bringing tons of business to Netflix, so maybe the two parties can strike a deal. Without TV app support, people might overlook some of the treasures offered by Netflix simply because they don’t want to bother dealing with yet another app.

Either way, Apple is taking baby steps. It is still far from actually conquering the living room, and that may not even be the company’s goal anymore.

AT&T must be looking real hard for extra cash from customers to pay for its planned merger with Time Warner. So I receive regular emails inviting me to upgrade a two-year-old iPhone 6. I might even consider it, though having my phone bill drop by $30 or so a month if I keep the current hardware is undeniably attractive. In fact, that appears to be the dilemma confronted by many iPhone owners. If their equipment is working nicely — and iOS 10 runs great on an iPhone 6 — is there any reason to buy something new?

Forget about the “missing” headphone jack, which really doesn’t impact a whole lot of people. But what about being water-resistant? What about the improved camera? Is it worth the inconvenience of an iPhone 7 Plus to be able to take delectable portraits? Oh, and I got to talking to a new owner of an iPhone 7 Plus at the checkout counter of the local Sam’s Club the other day. We exchanged devices for a moment — I figured I’d be better off if he decided to run away — and I was happy never to have considered one. It’s just too large for my needs.

In any case, on Saturday morning, I received a call from a long-time client — someone who long ago deserted me for the free service from an Apple Genius Bar — who asked if I’d help him set up an iPhone 7. But he reminded me that he didn’t really need my services. He could go to the Apple Store if he ran into difficulty, but wasn’t it worth the free lunch to be about to report about setting up one?

Continue Reading…