Apple Mac team loses attention more than before

In an internal memo circulated yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook reaffirmed the company's commitment to the Mac in general and the Mac desktop in particular. Apple's desktops haven't been updated for years, and the Mac Mini and Mac Pro haven't been refreshed even longer. The lack of updates has prompted speculation and scrutiny among the press and the wider Apple enthusiast community.

Though that memo was circulated to the press, its intended audience was Apple's employees. Cook specifically tries to address doubts among Apple's teams about the Mac's importance:

If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.

Those lines are especially interesting in light of a long report from Bloomberg today that indicates the Mac is "getting far less attention than it once did" inside the company. There are some rational explanations for this, as we've written before: Intel releases new chips less frequently than it once did, and when it does launch new products, they tend to bring only incremental improvements over their predecessors. The Mac also represents less of Apple's revenue than it did even five or six years ago—it usually generates somewhere between 10 and 12 percent of Apple's revenue, compared to 60 percent or more for the iPhone. But persons "familiar with the matter" detail to Bloomberg a few organizational changes that have negatively impacted the Mac and delayed some products past their originally planned ship dates.

Meetings between Mac engineers and Jony Ive's design team, once a weekly occurrence, have reportedly become less frequent since Ive delegated some of his day-to-day tasks to other employees last year. When developing new designs, the modern-day Apple is also apparently more willing to develop and test multiple ideas at the same time. This divides engineers' efforts and slows things down.

The 12-inch MacBook, for instance, was originally slated to ship in 2014 instead of 2015, but the team had to divide its efforts to develop both the current thin, light model and a "less ambitious" and slightly heavier version of the same concept. A problem with the redesigned batteries for the new MacBook Pros meant that they needed to be replaced, and engineering attention was diverted from other Macs to fix the issue. The problem with the redesigned batteries could account for the mediocre battery life that some users are reporting in the new models; the original batteries would have been molded to fill every nook and cranny inside the MacBook Pro's chassis à la the 12-inch MacBook, potentially increasing overall battery capacity.

Finally, the report says there is no longer a dedicated team working on macOS—just one big team developing both macOS and iOS. The software that ships on the more profitable devices usually gets most of the attention. This could also explain why the iPad only seems to get specific consideration in fits and starts; it got major new features like Split View in iOS 9 last year but few exclusive improvements in iOS 10 this year.

All of these problems have allegedly led to the departure of Mac engineers to other teams within Apple and at other companies.

Though the Mac isn't as important to Apple's bottom line as it once was, the computers are still foundational to Apple's ecosystem. The Google Play app store has caught up to Apple's in many ways, but it's still common for high-profile apps and games like Super Mario Run to either come to iOS first or be iOS-exclusive. That development still needs to happen on Macs. Efforts like iOS 10's Swift Playgrounds app suggest that Apple is working on developer tools like Xcode for the iPad, but nothing has been officially announced or released yet. It's in Apple's best interests to keep those developers and other professional audiences happy with consistent refreshes and with high-end, high-performance desktops like the Mac Pro.

Internal problems or no, Apple is still working on new Macs for next year. iMacs with USB-C ports (which are likely to be Thunderbolt 3 ports, as well) and new AMD GPUs based on the Polaris architecture are reportedly in the pipeline, as are refreshed versions of the MacBook and MacBook Pro with Intel's next-generation "Kaby Lake" processors. Apple is "exploring" options for a Touch Bar-enabled desktop keyboard. But there are no specific predictions about the Mac Mini or Mac Pro. Whether those computers will be refreshed, soldier on as they are, or be discontinued entirely is anybody's guess.