Apple Says Its Sorry. No, Really (Premium)

In a blatant PR stunt that should please no one, Apple this week invited only the friendliest of bloggers to its Campus this week to assure them that they remain committed to the Mac.

Which is notable for a number of reasons. First, in that this is the first time it’s ever done such a thing. And because, were Apple actually committed to the Mac, it would never need to explain itself this way.

That this little soiree happened right on the eve of what is expected to be a massive iPad Pro announcement is obviously not coincidental: Apple is about to crap all over PCs of all kinds—including Macs—yet again.

But then Apple is a huge fan of collusion, and its reliance on these public mouthpieces to spread the word to its fans—God forbid anyone from Apple actually write a blog post—is quite telling. The list of publications that were invited reads like a lineup of Batman villains, a group so reliably pro-Apple it would be humorous if it didn’t really just happen.

As Brad noted earlier today, Apple is in a curious spot. Its iPhone business is a runaway blockbuster, a perennial blockbuster so big that it accounts for 70 percent of the company’s revenues. But that means the rest of its businesses have stalled or, in some cases, actually fallen. The iPad is now considered a disaster, with over three straight years of falling sales. The Apple Watch isn’t the hit that CEO Tim Cook so desperately needed to come out from under Steve Jobs’s shadow. Apple TV has sputtered in the market, with no 4K support and no amazing TV service, despite the promises. And the Mac?

Oh, the Mac.

Mac sales are so unexciting that they most closely resemble a flat line on a heart rate monitor, and they have been for years. Long eclipsed by even the iPad, the Mac is clearly on the backburner at Apple, as evidenced by the paucity of new releases over the past few years. Meanwhile, the firm has been churning out iOS devices like chiclets.

The issue here is two-fold. Apple rarely updates its major Mac product lines, leading to years of dead time between releases, pissing off its biggest fans. And lately, when it has updated a Mac—as with the high-profile MacBook Pro release from late 2016—it just pisses off its biggest fans.

I wrote about that latter debacle in Putting Apple’s New MacBook Pro in Perspective, noting, in effect, that those new MacBook Pro were wildly expensive, but at least they didn’t deliver the feature that Apple’s customers were asking for.

Yes, that was a joke.

“With the MacBook Pro, I see some decisions that are as provably dumb as they are user-hostile, especially when you consider the intended target market for this product,” I wrote back in December. ” I think Apple actually got caught up a bit in its own mythology, and felt that it could simply make any radical changes it could dream and have them be not just accepted but loudly applauded by its too-compliant user base. The reaction Apple has received so far is unprecedented. And I think the company is legitimately surprised.”

They remain surprised. Surprised by the continued, vocal complaints. Surprised by the traction that Microsoft has gotten from supposed Mac Switchers for Surface Book and, especially, Surface Studio. Surprised that its vision for the post-PC future isn’t in any way working out. That Mac users—gasp—would like to continue to use Macs. New Macs.

When Apple did finally update the MacBook Pro in late 2016 after four long years, it also declined to update almost all of the remaining Mac lineup. And those devices—the MacBook Air, the Mac mini, the iMac, and the Mac Pro—have likewise, to a one, not been updated in years.

But Apple is clearly most sensitive about its so-called pro users, because they were the audience that was burned by the MacBook Pro debacle, and because they spend the most money. And there is always the possibility that Apple will experience that thing that we talk about so much over here on the Windows side of the fence, that when you lose a customer to the other side, it’s a one-way trip.

And that could be problematic for Apple. To be clear, Apple’s biggest customer base is basically soccer moms, demographically, by which I mean “normal people.” But as with Microsoft and its Surface lineup, Apple relies on what I’ll call an aspirational halo to get butts into its retail stores. (Well, that an device support, which is why those people are really all there.) When its pro users start pushing back, vocally and without stop, Apple has a problem.

And, yes, Apple has a problem. It’s not cool anymore.

Actually, it’s kind of worse than that, isn’t it? After all, it’s biggest fans—its fans that spend more than all others—are now openly hostile to the company. What’s a beleaguered consumer electronics giant to do?

In the old days—e.g. when Steve Jobs ran the show—this would have involved a more subtle form of influence. Jobs was old-school, and he relished attention from old media publications like Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the like. So he would have spoken privately with beat reporters from those publications—face time being the most desired access—and would have seeded ideas for pro-Apple “keep the faith” editorials that readers would have believed came directly from the reporters’ pens.

Today, give Tim Cook some credit for latching onto the fake news phenomenon. He didn’t just skip the old-school media publications, he skipped prominent tech blogs like CNET and The Verge, too. Because you never know, those guys might have shown an ounce of credibility too.

What we got instead was a Baghdad Bob-like retelling of a fairy tale in which Apple hates disappointing its fans and really is working hard on new Macs.

“We’re sorry,” Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing allegedly told the small group of bloggers that attended the secret briefing. I know. I’d pay money to see Schiller try to utter those words without laughing.

What Schiller was apologizing for, by the way, was “what happened with the Mac Pro.” And he says that Apple is “going to come out with something great to replace it.”

Just not today. Or anytime soon. Not this year, in fact. (Apple will finally refresh the componentry in the current Mac Pro, however.)

For the record, Apple introduced the widely-mocked Mac Pro four years ago, in 2013. Beautiful but otherwise lacking, the Mac Pro was the super model of the PC world, but it was most frequently compared to a small trashcan or tissue dispenser, and not a futuristic super computer.

Also for the record, Apple has not updated this Mac, not once, since 2013. Which explains the apology, I guess. The story is that the Mac Pro was so amazingly ahead of its time that even Apple couldn’t figure out how to really improve on it. So it has to start over with yet another new design. (Free advice for Apple: Maybe a larger tower design would make sense. Just a thought.)

To smooth the messaging, Apple gave these guys access to a lab, which I assume was suitably impressive. And Apple executives put on their serious faces for photos, to show that they’re really sorry and really do care. I mean, look at these guys. Geesh.

Apple also highlighted the strength of the Mac business, which is approaching 100 million active users and is almost a $25 billion business. Which, I’ll note, only highlights how odd it is that Apple constantly terrorizes this same audience by never releasing new products and by over-emphasizing products like the iPad Pro that are meant to kill off the Mac.

“We want to be as transparent as we can, for our pro users, and help them as they make their buying decisions,” Mr. Schiller said, and I can only assume that he was laughing maniacally as he did so, because “transparent” and “Apple” are never used together in a sentence. “They invest so much in the Mac, we want to support them, and we care deeply about them. So that’s why we’re here.”

That’s why Apple was there. As for the audience that they were speaking to, they were there for a reason too. And that reason had everything to do with their inability or lack of desire in asking hard-hitting “why”-type questions. I’d start with this one: The pro audience is one thing, but what about the volume part of the Mac market? Why aren’t you being transparent about those other products too?

But then that’s why I’m not invited to these things.