I remember when I bought my first Mac. Lucky enough in having won a scholarship (through the hugely generous family of Helen Gregory), and with parents that offered to match whatever else I put in myself, I worked extra hours like crazy to amass a suitably decent sum of cash.

The problem was then how to spend it. Back then, Mac clones were commonplace and Apple itself looked shaky. Friends desperately tried to talk me down from buying a Mac, seemingly recommending every PC in existence as an alternative.

They had plenty of time to do so. Armed with a half-dozen Mac magazines, I pored over adverts and reviews, trying to figure out the best system for me, then a budding digital-oriented artist, blissfully unaware I’d later have to figure out some kind of career in order to earn money.

In the end, I plumped for the then new and cutting-edge PowerMac 8600/250AV. It was powerful and had video input, enabling me to store 320-by-160-pixel footage at a staggering 12 frames per second. Usefully, it also had a 1 GB Jaz drive, which I’d discover on the run-in to my degree show was possibly the least reliable storage system in creation.

The thing is, I could at the time have bought any one of a dozen machines that would have sufficed. Some would argue the level of choice was great; but I’d say the ‘choice’ was in reality confusion, with so much overlap between products that there was never any clear-cut system that made far more sense than any other. There was no need for so many options. Subsequently, I got more into technology and Apple, but also elegance within design, and was thrilled on hearing Steve Jobs talk about the four-quadrant product grid: one desktop and portable each for pros and consumers.

In today’s smartphone market, most companies are the Apple of old. They issue dozens of products, arguing that choice is great. But choice impacts focus, efficiency and support for companies. For consumers, it gives rise to the confusion I mentioned earlier, and the potential for buyer’s doubt. Tell someone about a great product and they’ll want it. Tell them about ten great products, all very similar, and they might buy nothing, in fear of making the wrong decision.

This is my concern when it comes to rumours regarding a huge iPhone. Reportedly, large phones are still relatively low sellers, and Apple’s taller screen for the iPhone 5 seemed an elegant way to increase screen area without making the device itself huge. Now the suggestion is Apple could make a huge version anyway.

I don’t see how this fits with a modern Apple, and it worryingly reminds me of the Apple of old. Perhaps it thinks it needs for commercial reasons to cast a wider net, but rather than someone wanting the latest iPhone and having to choose merely which capacity is best for them (a tough enough decision), adding another new model to the line-up forces another difficult decision. Placing it somewhat between the iPhone and iPad mini (the iPad mini sitting between the iPad and iPhone) seems borderline ludicrous.

Naturally, some people will nonetheless be find making such a decision, but others won’t; and many will during ownership of their device constantly wonder if they got it right, or whether they’d have been better off with an alternative—not a very Apple scenario, but one that perhaps we will all need to deal with over the coming years.

I caught up with some RSS over the weekend and read The Macalope tearing apart Peter ‘wuh?’ Cohan’s recent Forbes piece. Cohan is one of a number of people lacking a strong link with reality that reckon the best thing for the hugely profitable Apple to do right now would be to get rid of CEO Tim Cook and replace him with Jony Ive. That’s because Jony Ive knows how to design pretty things and Tim Cook, presumably, knows nothing at all. As noted by The Macalope, Cohan did at least note one tiny snag in his cunning plan:

It’s unclear whether Ive has the skills to manage Apple …

And The Macaope then added:

Sadly, this dumb argument that only under Steve Jobs could Apple innovate won’t stop being made until Apple reinvents another market. And, realistically, given the intellectual prowess and integrity of the people making it, it probably won’t even end then.

Nope. In fact, here’s precisely what’s going to happen if and when Apple produces an entirely new product line:

1. People will say it will be a total disaster (much like, say, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad proved to be).
2. People will yell “Steve Jobs would never have done that” until their throats are sore with agonising pain. And then they will type STEVE JOBS WOULD NEVER HAVE DONE THAT until their fingers are worn down to the bone. And then they will use eyebrow wiggles to signal to trained pets to communicate with humanity that Steve Jobs would never have done that. Because, you know, these people haven’t said that enough of late.
3. Apple’s new product will sell. In fact, it will sell what in technical terms is referred to as a ‘crap load’ of units.
4. Pundits will hammer the ‘warp reality’ button until they can spew words on to the internet that make some kind of argument that they thought Apple’s new thing would be a huge success all along.
5. The pundits will wait up to—but no longer than—90 days.
6. Apple will then be accused of not being able to innovate, having not revolutionised a new industry for two quarters running, despite having actually only done so a handful of times in its history.

Naturally, at points 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, AAPL will be down at least three per cent.

MacUser and others reported yesterday that the Mac Pro will no longer be sold in EU countries as of March 1. This is because the unit no longer complies with an EU regulation. Beyond all shadow of doubt, this shows the Mac Pro in its current form is dead. If it wasn’t, Apple wouldn’t abandon sales across Europe—it would update the unit. (Can you imagine Apple saying “we’re no longer selling iMacs in Europe as of March1”? No, neither can I.)

So what does this mean for the future? As per the linked piece, Apple CEO Tim Cook reassured a customer via email that Apple was “working on something really great for later next year” in the pro space, although whether that means the Pro space (as in Mac Pro) remains to be seen. When you look at Apple’s earnings, the Mac is now very much the minority platform compared to iOS. And when Apple breaks down sales of Macs, desktops are the minority share there, outnumbered by MacBooks. Within desktops, iMacs and Mac minis reportedly sell far in excess of Mac Pros. The Mac Pro is a niche within a niche within a niche, in a market—PCs—that also happens to be in decline.

Additionally, when you examine the rest of Apple’s range, the Mac Pro stands out like a sore thumb. It’s big and the units I’ve used and seen have a tendency to be quite noisy. It still looks quite nice, but also resembles the product of a bygone age. Apple’s laptops and desktops increasingly move towards appliance-like form-factors. Bar adding some extra RAM to the high-end iMac, they’re now sealed units, more resembling an iPad in that sense than a Mac of old. It’s therefore hard to see where a Mac Pro fits with today’s Apple and what a Mac Pro successor might be.

Developer Andrew Till responded to me on Twitter about this subject earlier today:

It’s what the Pro represents that’s most important. I use an iMac but I’d really worry about Apple’s direction if Pro died.

But what does the Pro represent? That Apple is still keen to embrace a high-end pro market, but not keen enough that it bothers to update its flagship ‘huge PC’ with any frequency? That it still cares for the top-tier of the pro market, when evidence suggests Apple’s far more interested in the next rung down: those pros who happily use an iMac (albeit, perhaps, one with a ton of RAM) or a Mac laptop to do their work. Perhaps in the same way Apple broke from its past with iOS, it’s time for it to break from its past in computing—from the time of the tinkerer and the Apple II.

Cook doesn’t seem to be the kind of person to lie, and so Apple must be working on something to address a pro market, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what’s revealed—especially for European pros who can’t or won’t work with other Macs, and who’ll be champing at the bit by that point. But I’d say it’s almost inconceivable that come WWDC, Apple will just unveil another tower, essentially mirroring its predecessor.

I don’t know, and neither does any other tech journo. Anyone who claims otherwise, unnamed sources or otherwise, is a lying git.

Yesterday, Apple announced the 128 GB iPad 4. I reckon it’s a good idea, giving those who need it extra storage capacity. In my post, I noted that Apple was (not necessarily intentionally) promoting a culture of discarding digital media, purely on the basis of how little heavy users could keep on a device. Although music, movies and TV are increasingly well catered for by the cloud, other content isn’t. Magazines can often (although not always) be redownloaded, but doing so is slow and could impact on capped broadband allocations; anyway, the advantage of digital is having a collection you can rapidly search, which is no good if most of the items aren’t immediately accessible. Elsewhere, apps and games continue to mushroom in size, due to devs doing increasingly complex things on iOS and also the demands of the Retina display. Years back, I thought iOS games approaching 500 MB were going a bit far; now, it’s relatively commonplace for titles to unpack to well over 1 GB. If you’re a keen gamer, you won’t just have one or two such titles on your device—you’ll have dozens, and you’ll be forced to delete some—including all your progress, unless you’ve manually backed it up.

What’s amazing is how few tech journalists get any of this. Tap! magazine deputy editor noted on Twitter that many of them are now making comparisons between the most expensive iPad option (the 3G 128 GB version) and the cheapest MacBook Air (which, note, lacks 3G):

If I am looking at the top-end iPad, then I’m clearly seriously in the market for an iPad. Switching to an entry-level PC won’t tempt me. “If you’re spending $800 dollars, why not spend $200 more?” …on something twice the weight that runs different apps on a non-Retina screen

It’s also extremely clear from some of those criticising Apple’s decision that they don’t use iOS all that much, presumably having dismissed it as a toy, unfit for any ‘real’ work (countered, of course, by the many companies now using iPads for real work in medicine, design, music, and so on). Bolton continued:

In one article, the author says they can kind of understand if you have loads of music or movies. Apps and games completely ignored. Lots of tech writers seem not to care about how people who actually use devices think, only about how the internet responds to announcements.

A big chunk of the tech journalism (and I use that word loosely) industry has yet to enact a much-demanded New Year’s resolution of thinking before typing, rather than just spewing their own opinion into your eyes as fact. Just because something isn’t for you, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s pointless or stupid, nor does it mean those considering buying it are crazy. To my mind, with the iPad increasingly used by all manner of professionals and consumers alike, it would have been inconceivable had Apple not bowed to the inevitable and offered a larger capacity. But then I actually use iPads rather than just write about them.