A little over one year ago, I purchased my first non-Apple PC in over 20 years. Just last month, I purchased my second small form factor (SFF) gaming system from Asus (ROG G20CB). This is an upgraded model of the G20AJ (still runs fine) that I had purchased for the increased performance; this newer model has a 6th generation Intel core i7-6700 (3.4GHz quad core), 1TB HD, 256GB SSD, 16GB of memory, and NVIDIA GTX 980 and cost just a little under 1,300 US.
I also purchased my first 4K/UHD display (a 24″ Asus gaming monitor with an IPS panel) for $300 just a few days ago. Fortunately, my display is near perfect (Asus isn’t known for having great quality control) and I am fairly pleased with this paired setup. Neither come anywhere close to Apple’s meticulous industrial design but they are still aesthetically pleasing in terms of not looking like complete eyesores and are also engineered well enough (especially the display which has far more articulation when it comes to adjustability) to get the job done where it is needed. Graphics performance wise, this setup just runs circles around any current shipping Mac desktop.
I suppose one could say that Windows 10 is huge negative but as I have mentioned before, I don’t really have issues with it. And considering how much I have not cared for some user interface design decisions in OS X (aka macOS) since Yosemite (10.10), I have become far more acceptant to the way the Windows user interface works.
The point of bringing this up is to illustrate just how much Apple has shifted away from their original core group of Mac using customers like myself that tended to purchase their higher end/higher margin computers. Safe to say, this particular demographic is no longer a priority focus of the company which is why users like myself, have been finding themselves actually shifting away from the Mac as a primary desktop.
The primary use of this system is mostly for games BUT I can see myself utilizing it a lot more often for other uses which normally has been the domain of my Mac. In recent years, I have found the need to occasionally jump through hoops to get certain tasks done when that workflow deviates from the way Apple prefers those processes to work. As I have written about before, Apple’s yearly operating system updates which ends up also quickly obsoleting some perfectly working applications, does not help any here. As I have always maintained, computers are first and foremost, tools. When that tool becomes more of an obstacle (requiring hoop jumping to accomplish what should be a simple task), there is a point where I will seriously evaluate that tools continued use.
So it really does look like my 2010 Mac Pro is the last desktop from Apple that will meet my needs since the all-in-one iMac (along with its use of mobile GPU’s), is a form factor that I have ruled out for reasons I noted in the before mentioned link in the introduction sentence. As a longtime Apple shareholder, I do understand this shift; as a longtime customer though, it is having seriously detrimental effects as to how much longer I will continue being a Mac user.
