opinion

Adam Banks is angry about Apple’s direction

Allow us, Tim, to introduce ourselves. We’re your creative pro customers: the people who made the Mac cool. Back in the 1990s, Apple may not have been so big, but every glossy magazine office was full of Macs. Every photographer, every musician wanted one. Even the enigmatic new breed called ‘web designers’.

That’s what Apple stood for. Not just the tech, but the talent too. Sure, for all that talk of ‘the rest of us’, the Mac wasn’t for everyone. It was for the ones doing and making and being what others aspired to. Later, when Apple launched the iMac, the iPod, and then the iPhone, that’s what sold them. Not just being a little bit better than the competition, but standing for something.

Now, it’s all very well, Tim, to let the cachet of creativity rub off on your mass-market money-spinners. But those of us actually doing the creating still need the real tools. So what we wanted on 27 October was quite simple: Macs with the processing power to get our jobs done. And what did you give us? A Touch Bar. We couldn’t really miss that, Tim, because you devoted what seemed like an entire keynote to it. Fine, fine, fine, we thought, shuffling in our seats, a Touch Bar, great. Now what about the CPUs and GPUs? And then Phil Schiller mentioned the CPUs and GPUs, and they sounded kind of okay. Then we logged on to the Apple Store and found they started – started! – at £2,349 for the entry-level 15-inch without the upgrade options. The proper spec? £2,699. Add the higher CPU and GPU (still technically mid-range) and a 2TB SSD – because a hard disk is just one of the luxuries that won’t fit in your austerity-skinny chassis – and it’s over four grand. Sure, some of this is down to Brexit, but a lot of it isn’t. Some of it is a big fat margin, because that’s what you’ve taught your shareholders to expect. And some of it is about designing for everything except price and performance.

That extra memory we need, because 16GB just isn’t enough for some graphicsintensive apps? We can’t have it, because it would make the battery life too short. Thanks for explaining that, Phil, because we regularly go and sit for 12 hours where there’s no electricity supply. That’s a must-have. It’s way more important to us than ACTUALLY BEING ABLE TO WORK.

Tim, it’s not the 1990s. We don’t have money to burn any more. But we’re still here. Magazines and websites and apps and films and albums are still getting made. We want to make them on Macs. Do you want that too? Or do you really not get the difference between powering the world’s creative industries and watching an executive tweak a filter with a Touch Bar and say “Wow”?

We went to to the Apple Store and found the 15-inch started at £2,349