I do indeed recall all the Mac clones.
Apple's OS has never been licensed except for a short time in the 1990s. It's not "now they protect their fiefdom" by any stretch of your imagination. The license always limited the use of MacOS, OSX, or macOS to use on Apple hardware except for that time in the 1990s when Apple opened it for license for use on Mac clones. That stopped when Steve Jobs returned to Apple.
The Clones were an attempt by some misguided CEOs to emulate the Microsoft model who did not grasp that Apple was a hardware company, not a software publisher. The experiment in clones was killing Apple as the clone makers started doing the same thing that Windows manufacturers do, compete in a race to the bottom of the price barrel to see who can cut prices better than the other at the expense of quality.
However, even today, for the most part, High End PC equivalents of their machines are generally comparably priced.... However in their latest incarnations, Apple’s been getting a little too full of its own self importance and made some stupid moves...
The last Mac Pro was a dud.. they bet on the wrong video system, and were left in the dust when the industry moved in a different direction and they had no way, thanks to stupidly putting style first, of adapting... hence FINALLY making this new one now....
I disagree. The 2013 Mac Pro is actually one of the most expandable Macs ever made, just not internally, but with a Thunderbolt accessory cage you can add multiple drives, cards, and a host of others of up to 64 accessory devices if you so desire. The internal graphic card in the Mac Pro is swappable for other cards. The processor is swappable for other Xeon processors, as is the memory. It will drive up to six 30" 5K monitors on the card that in it, and you can add more graphic cards. Just because they all don't fit inside the single round case does NOT mean it was not expandable.
The last incarnation of the Mac Mini, its starter Mac... was a bomb... insanely slow low end processors and stupidly soldering the ram to the MB for no other reason than to gouge users who might want more ram than the base offering.
You obviously have not used one. . . nor is your characterization correct. Only ONE of the Mac mini models is as you describe, the lowest cost Mac mini, with the 1.4GHz i5, 4GB RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. The other Mac minis sport 2.6Ghz or 2.8Ghz Intel i5s, 8GB of RAM, and either 1TB HD or a 1TB Fusion drive. Those are quite capable Macs.
The latest Macbook Pro’s are equally stupid... going fully USB-C, removing the SD reader as well as making the touchpad so ungodly big for no reason that typing on the devices is a frustrating chore, shows that Apple has been losing its way and doing things it thinks are cool just for the sake of it... not because folks desire it.
Again, you're wrong because you mischaracterize the port. It's a dual function port. Yes, its a USB-C port, but they also double function as high-speed Thunderbolt 3 ports as well which use the same connector. I've been using one of the MacBook with what you term the "ungodly big" touch pad and it is not a chore to type. The touch pad is quite useful. I don't think you've ever used one.
As for an SD card reader, if one needs one, they are as inexpensive as $12. Why add to the weight and size of the computer to include one for everyone if they do not need it?
So, HamiltonJay, you've really demonstrated you don't have a clue what you are talking about when it comes to modern Mac models in your criticism because you've missed the target in each of your claims.
Sorry, but I work on Macs daily, their lastest Macbook Pro is a solid swing and a miss..
“Apple’s OS has never been licensed except for a short time in the 1990s. It’s not “now they protect their fiefdom” by any stretch of your imagination. The license always limited the use of MacOS, OSX, or macOS to use on Apple hardware except for that time in the 1990s when Apple opened it for license for use on Mac clones. That stopped when Steve Jobs returned to Apple.”
That’s exactly what I said, they protect their fiefdom by software licensing.. you can’t run it legally on anything but their hardware. Not sure what you are trying to argue here, you are basically proving my point.
Sorry, but the Mac Pro was a dud my friend, they bet on the wrong video and left themselves no out.. and the industry left them behind.. you think otherwise, please go and do the research yourself, apple execs are on the record publicly on this...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-failure-admission
As to not using a Mac Mini... sorry my friend, but again you are WRONG. The last redesign of the Mac Mini was a bomb... a 1.4 GHZ Cpu on even the smallest desktops was feeble and pathetic, particularly for the price, and the decision to hard wire the memory to the board served no purpose whatsoever other than gouge consumers more $$ if they needed more than the base memory incarnation.
You can continue to claim I don’t use the equipment, because I offer criticism rather than glowing fanboy copulation to Apple, but the reality is Apple has blown it big time on many of its decisions since Jobs passed. The Macbook Pro is now anything but a PRO machine... if I need to carry 4 or 5 dongles to do my job, when I did it perfectly fine with your previous incarnation without any, thats a fail. And if I am having to spend copious amounts of time to stop what I am doing to keep hitting option z to undo the insanity that your touchpad decided I wanted to do, but did not because its the size of female opera singer after a big meal... That’s a fail.
You are welcome to your opinions to the contrary, but I work with this equipment daily, and I can back up every criticism I have with it. You can dismiss me as someone who doesn’t know what their talking about if you need to to save your ego, but its simply self delusion on your part.