By John Moltz

June 30, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: You can’t spell “Grimace” without “iMac”

Phil Schiller is ruining everything! And a tale of two Macs: one real that maybe shouldn’t be, the other not yet real that really should be.

Meaty paws make light work

What’s wrong with the App Store? Turns out it’s simpler than we thought.

In an interview with mobilegamer.biz, former head of App Store review Phillip Shoemaker laid the blame for the App Store’s faults at the hands of Phil Schiller.

”Phil just needs to get his meaty paws off the App Store.”

Shoemaker’s tone is incendiary enough for one to think that he might have a book coming out soon, but it’s never very hard to get a platform if you’re a former Apple executive and you have something bad to say about the company. Heck, half the time you don’t even have to have worked at Apple.

“AREA RANDO BELIEVES THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SHOULD BREAK UP CONTROL CENTER”

(That sounds like a joke, but then there’s the time The Wall Street Journal asked a standup comedian about Apple Pay.)

Of course, this doesn’t mean Shoemaker is really wrong about the App Store. Its appreciation of the zeitgeist does seem to be stuck in the late George W. Bush administration era. While it’s made small concessions over time, Apple still takes a large percentage of revenue, requires developers to jump through complicated and arbitrary hoops, and offers little recourse when it makes decisions other than going to the press, which the company has insisted “never helps”.

Phil Schiller does not operate in a vacuum. Point of fact, few humans operate in a vacuum for very long, let alone as long as Schiller has worked at Apple. He might be impeding progress on the App Store, but even if he completely retired tomorrow, it’s unlikely the company would make sweeping changes. Despite Tim Cook’s paeans for the App Store being where the customer meets the developer, it’s Apple that it’s really working for.

The Mac No

The Mac Pro reviews are in and… eh?

It certainly seems to be a fine machine. Very capable. Fast. Uh, shiny. Very shiny.

Just… why?

As The Verge’s Monica Chin put it:

“The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook”

It seems the MacBook Pro is such an exceptional machine for pros, providing all the speed they need along with portability, that the Mac Pro isn’t really needed. And there just isn’t that much advantage in paying thousands more for a Mac Pro when you can get the same processor in the Mac Studio.

Of course, at these prices, Apple doesn’t need to sell them to most professionals. It just needs to sell them to some professionals. Heck, if someone maxes out a Mac Pro, possibly just one professional.

The expandability offered by the Mac Pro is nice, but not worth the premium it used to command when it doesn’t allow you to add GPUs.

Why doesn’t the new Mac Pro offer GPU expansion? At least one reason is that since Apple no longer ships AMD GPUs in its systems (most importantly, the ones that sell in volume), AMD has no incentive to write drivers for macOS. And the company hasn’t had an Nvidia GPU in a Mac since almost a time before remembering.¹ It’s possible Apple could write the drivers itself, but then it’d have to spin up a group to do that. And a first step would be at least feigning the slightest bit of interest in doing so, all to support a capability on a Mac that few people buy to sell someone else’s GPUs. The small numbers the Mac Pro ships in probably aren’t worth the effort for anybody.

Apple may have checked a box with the new Mac Pro, but it’s a box not many people are going to open.

Big iMac

McDonald’s introduced a Grimace Shake this month (don’t worry, each shake only contains a minute trace of Grimace-based material), but it’s Apple that will be introducing a Big i-Mac, if the rumors are true.

(Look, you try to come up with three ledes every week.)

While discussing future products that may come after the first half of 2024, Mark Gurman said:

The company is also conducting early work on an iMac with a screen over 30 inches…

You read that right: over 30 inches. And unlike the Big Mac, which looks like it’s 8 inches tall in the ads but is only about three inches of coronary-inducing delight when you actually take it out of the box, “over 30 inches” means over 30 inches.

Gurman doesn’t go into any more detail than that, but “early work” would seem to indicate this machine is probably well more than a year away, so we could assume that the current 24-inch iMac will get refreshed before it appears, if it ever does.

A larger iMac does make sense in Apple’s lineup (probably more sense than the new Mac Pro). Sure, the 24-inch iMac is a whole real-life Big Mac’s worth of more screen real estate than the previous 21-inch iMacs, but Apple also discontinued its previous large adult son, the 27-inch iMac. When big-box stores are crammed with reasonably-priced TVs in huge dimensions and companies are literally giving away 55-inch TVs, people are simply used to larger screens now. Big screens are not just for pros anymore. Go big or go home, Apple.

[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]