Hewlett-Packard Seeks to Exploit Apple’s Inattention to Technical Professionals

Whether Apple intends to send the message or not, it appears to technical professionals that Apple isn’t catering to the technical professionals the way it has in the past. This has created opportunity in that market that Hewlett-Packard is consciously exploiting.

The Best Surprise is No Surprise

Apple keeps secrets for good reason. The PC market remains very competitive, and there are several companies who have been emulating Apple’s designs and coveting Apple’s image and success in the notebook market. Apple has a history of developing breakthrough designs that leave the competition gasping. But they’ve been catching up.

HP ZBook. 120 sent to NASA’s space station. Runs Linux.

That said, the enterprise and technical markets do need some occasional care and feeding when it comes to professional, mission critical equipment. Just as Apple’s product cycle can get out of sync with Intel’s, technical professionals engaged in design, research and computation need to depend on a long-term vision from their favorite computer supplier.

Over the past few years, signs of inattention to these markets have emerged from Cupertino. All this has been documented elsewhere, so I won’t rehash it in detail except to point to the long-awaited 2013 Mac Pro, Apple’s grand opening fanfare and then its subsequent abandonment: 1,000+ days of silence. The demise of apple.com/science and the absent attention to the eventually terminated, obsolete Thunderbolt display and the end of support for Aperture sent unmistakable messages that weren’t explained or remedied by new initiatives.

Hewlett-Packard Has Noticed

HP has had its ups and downs in recent years, but it remains a strong engineering company that caters to technical professionals. HP has a storied tradition in everything for technical professionals from handheld calculators to measurement and instrumentation to UNIX workstations to supercomputers.

Along the way, I have become aware of certain initiatives by Hewlett-Packard and have engaged the company in conversation about its initiatives. Perhaps the most visible sign so far was my long odyssey, looking for a new display for my Mac Pro culminating in a review of HP’s magnificent Z34c 34-inch display. See: “The Display You’ve Always Wanted For Your Mac: HP Z34c.”

HP’s amazing Z34c curved display. (3440 x 1440)

Further discussions have resulted in an affirmation that HP both recognizes the opportunity created by Apple and is eager to exploit it. My HP representative provided some insight. Note that the following statement may seem like market-speak, but that’s not the point. The point is that HP is hereby punctuating its interest in catering to technical professionals who feel abandoned by Apple, rightly or wrongly.

HP’s Z Family of professional workstation-class products is focused on meeting the needs of the world’s most demanding users. HP has a heritage of engineering excellence, and has been delighting customers with workstations innovations for more than 35 years.

Today, HP Z Desktop Workstations, ZBook Mobile Workstations, and Z Displays are used to design everything from running shoes and racecars to animated characters and deep-sea submersibles, as well as to manage research labs, mission-critical IT environments and billions of dollars of tradable securities. HP Z products are designed to meet the needs of some of the most compute-intensive industries, including animation, film/video editing, graphic design, CAD, architecture, photography, high-definition video, manufacturing, finance, healthcare, scientific imaging and oil and gas exploration.

At the beginning of the century, four key players manufactured traditional workstations: Silicon Graphics, Sun, IBM and HP. Today, HP is the only surviving and thriving workstation vendor of those four. In just a few short years, HP went from a distant second in the market to No. 1 in workstation shipments worldwide.

In support of this initiative, HP has developed, if you will, a reverse switcher site, called Mac to Z. Looking at that page’s comparison chart to a Mac Pro, it’s clear why a workstation like this has technical appeal.

Imagine 36 cores and 2 TB of RAM.

Next page: computing religion and the Mac’s future.

Computing Religion

Computational choice is almost a religion. Image credit: Shutterstock.

Another thing to note, and an important thing I’ve learned, is that technical professionals span a wide range from pleasantly ecumenical in their computing religion to downright grouchy and fanatic. For every researcher or IT mananager who grouses about how Apple doesn’t bend over for his/her needs, there are others who do fantastic, impressive work with whatever product Apple is shipping. I think a large part of that is due to the UNIX grace of macOS and its GUI, its BSD UNIX shell, and the legacy technical and scientific GUI tools that have been developed over the years.

Yet Apple’s focus on just that has faded.

One thing remains constant, however, and that’s the notion that technical professionals value the computational progression of their tools and the work they accomplish much more than than the jazz of constant consumer change. Apple’s penchant for moving the state of the art forward is a sacred task, but that has to be accompanied by at least a partial partnership. Partnerships can take the form of NDAs, soothing statements of commitment from Apple executives from time to time, Apple’s related web pages, steadfast product upgrades and even participation in appropriate technical conferences.

Preparing for the Mac Future

For now, I think it’s important to put Apple’s (presumed) forthcoming announcements into perspective. First, Apple knows its customers very well. If we indeed have an October 27th announcement (current rumor) that focuses on new MacBook Pros and (rumored) MacBook Air updates, it will no doubt go over very well. Apple customers who are in an upgrade cycle will be eagerly snapping up these new notebooks. And that, along with a new, fast iMac and some possible iPad refreshes, may be the end of it.

However, if another opportunity for Apple to reaffirm its general commitment to the design, creative, computational and technical professionals passes, with too much emphasis on the gadgetry of the MBPs and not much attention to high-performance computing, then the message will be clear. In response, companies like Hewlett-Packard will continue their emphasis with fabulous workstations (running Linux) and amazing options for displays.

Concept: MacBook Pro driving Apple 5K displays, Image credit 9to5Mac.

Finally, as a caution, Apple can always be counted on to go its own way and dream up fascinating new computing paradigms. One that I’ve seen involves the concept of a thin, lightweight MBP connected to 5K display (or two) with its own very high-end graphics card, driven by Thunderbolt 3 over USB-C connectors. That could appeal to certain professionals who are willing to invest in high-end displays for the desktop but still prize mobility. That would be sexy, but wouldn’t please everyone.

We won’t have to wait too much longer to see where Apple intends to take us with a new generation of Macs. However, as we know, Apple doesn’t try to be all things to all people. As a result, there will remain plenty of opportunity for Hewlett-Packard and others to appeal to a wide range of technical professional customers who think differently than Apple.

It’s always been that way and always will be.

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