I am looking to take the leap and go totally Apple/Mac as I have migrated from an iPod touch 64 to iPhone 32 to iPad2 64 and have loved everything about them. While continualy upgrading windows desktops to more and more disapointments. I currently have a Dell XPS 8300 Intel i7 2600 3.4GHz 12G Ram 2T 7200 HD Radeon 1G 5700 HD running win7 64. and have had nothing but trouble with it - even worse than other lesser machines... I think my best bet for a machine to do what I want (I sometimes really push it - not always) would be a Mac Pro... although some other advice I have gotten was that an iMac would be better for me. I like the iMac but the only thing that worries me is I want to keep this machine a long time and it seems the iMac would be hard to upgrade whereas the Mac Pro looks like it would be rather simple. I have seen some pictures of the inside and it looks like a very functional work of art! Then there are the rumors that the Mac Pro and iMac are due to be upgraded very soon... but I can't wait a long time I need a machine I can work with yesterday... if you know what I mean.. Any help would be greatly apprecieated and if I am on the wrong forum for this advise please let me know... Now after surfing these forums and Macrumors I amm getting nervous; there is so much speculation in both directions. It seems that this forum is sounding like apple is trying to push folks toward a laptop as their workhorse machine. laptops are fine for what they are made for - mobility, but I have an iPad2 that does just fine for that. and I have tried using one for my only machine and it just doesnt work for me. one think is that I dont like a small monitor at my desk and when I tried hooking up another larger monitor I couldn't see it all because of the laptop being open then I hooked up another keyboard and shut the laptop then I had wires and junk scattered all over my desk. very irritating for me. I dont really care for the iMac all in one design, the mac mini is not powerful enough, and there really are no other options if they do away with the mac pro... I am getting at my wits end... and as excited as I was about my decision at first I am getting very disappointed in Apple.... Thanks
As for your second point. It was pretty interesting when I attended a '3D Class' around eight years ago. Lots of '1 gighz' PEE CEE 'workstations'... One day, this girl came in with a 'PowerBook' (as they were then...I think...) and ran the 3D program in question much faster and rendered much faster than the desktops! I couldn't believe (at the time) how quick it was to model and render on the laptop.
Back then PowerPC really did have a few advantages over the i86 world. Well at least for specific genre of software.
Quote:
Not so long ago, Apple boasted that the G5 could handle audio this and Photoshop actions that in x seconds...and do Mathematica algorithms twice as fast as a Pentium 4 etc.
Today. Many years after the transition to Intel...we have machines that can blitz G5s to melted marshmallows...in laptops and desktops from consumer to prosumer.
There is still bleeding edge software that will challenge any hardware you through at it. Just because an architecture handles yesterday's tasks very well doesn't mean it is suitable for tomorrows.
Quote:
For a majority of creative types, I'd guess a quad core i7 with 4-8 gigs of ram with a reasonably recent GPU is more than enough.
That really depends upon how you classify creative types. Somebody doing research into genetics or new drugs may very well find such a machine only suitable as a terminal.
Quote:
You're paying an awful lot extra for that 2nd socket when maybe a Raid and more memory may better serve you.
Or faster I/O to secondary storage. This is a significant shortcoming these days and is why I would love to see Apple address this in the Pros replacement in a forward looking way. SATA really should be looked at as end of life for boot/app drives.
Quote:
By the time you get 6 and 8 core iMacs (who knows..?) in the next few years with even more ram and who knows what else...maybe even bigger screens to create an iMac Pro (you never know...
It really doesn't matter how many cores Apple puts into the iMac, if you can't configure it to your needs it is the wrong machine.
Quote:
...it's not like the quad or 6 core Pro shames the iMac in any way. The iMac i7 quad core was all over the six core Pro in Aftereffects (a program that is apparently hard going?)
IMacs shame is its lack of configurability, terrible serviceability and the built in screen.
Quote:
Apple have just sheared the laptop line to two models.
This makes the desktop line all the more bemusing. 3 desktop models when you're selling millions more laptops? Surely by the laptop reckoning, a desktop model gets dropped.
The Mac Pro hardly qualifies as a desktop in most peoples minds. The iMac is in a category all of its own so all Apple really has is the Mini for a desktop solution. Now don't get me wrong the Mini is excellent for what it is, but many find it very constrained. So really they have one desktop machine.
As to portables I think your counts are way off. They have the laptops, iPads and other iOS devices.
Quote:
I'm not sure why Apple intro'd the Mini at all in retrospect. (An almost good idea when it was about £395...but it's very pricey now with no monitor, keyboard etc.) They'd have been better served by driving the iMac down to the £595 entry level mark. (They got close with £695 before the ginormous 2008 HIKE!) And drove the Pro down to £995 to £2000 single cpu topping out at dual cpu at the top end. Two models. Job done.
Mini pricing is perplexing but if you judge it against other laptops using the same technology it isn't that bad. Yes I said laptops as that is the hardware it is built with.
Sadly it looks like AMD missed its chance to put Fusion into the Mini, that would have allowed for better pricing and actually better performance for many users. This based upon the signifance of GPU hardware in supporting modern user needs.
Quote:
As it is...the desktop line seems neither one thing nor the other.
If we cast our minds back. The iMac started off as the 'entry' machine. The Pro had the upper end. They tried (and failed) to put the Cube in the middle. (What they did was have a more limited machine at the same price as the Pro. Big mistake.)
Apple never seems to learn. The debut of the Cube was a huge disappointment for me back then. In the end it kept me out of the fold for a number of years.
Quote:
Still. I don't mind the top end iMac now. With a 27 inch monitor and a decent GPU and an i7 it's a whole new ball game.
If it serves your needs go for it. I just think far to many iMac sales are due to people being disappointed with everything else Apple offers. Apples sales of desktops is absolutely flat in the USA which to me is a sign that the halo effect is wearing off. It is a WTF moment for many desktop shoppers.
Quote:
I think Jeff is on the money re: Apple's direction.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Mabe that is their direction but the failure of the desktop line has more to do with the hardware than many are willing to accept. Apple created this situation through neglect and a gross misunderstanding of why people buy desktops in the first place. Apple may very well ride the mobile wave but they are passing up on a huge amount of opportunity.
Mabe that is their direction but the failure of the desktop line has more to do with the hardware than many are willing to accept. Apple created this situation through neglect and a gross misunderstanding of why people buy desktops in the first place. Apple may very well ride the mobile wave but they are passing up on a huge amount of opportunity.
I think they're just taking whatever sells well and riding it as far as possible. Keeping a lot of cash on hand means they can buy into other things if necessary. The goal seems to be to make the lives of people revolve around Apple products wherever possible. They sell devices that aren't really interchangeable with non Apple products thus limiting choice once you start to integrate Apple products so it becomes a matter of what fits best within the product array provided by a single company. It's actually pretty incredible how well they've done. I don't spite them for that. They claim to want to focus on product lines where they feel they can make a difference which is really just corporate rhetoric. They have a number of mature product lines with good followings. These should see proper updates, and we need some machines that are competitive in terms of offering the best possible hardware rather than only what people on here feel is good enough for the mainstream consumer. The laptop gpu thing seems to be a sticky issue as killing that in favor of intel's offerings just to thin out hardware would alienate many different groups of users and leave them without a lot of differentiation between their two laptop categories.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemon Bon Bon.
Bullseye on both points.
As for your second point. It was pretty interesting when I attended a '3D Class' around eight years ago. Lots of '1 gighz' PEE CEE 'workstations'... One day, this girl came in with a 'PowerBook' (as they were then...I think...) and ran the 3D program in question much faster and rendered much faster than the desktops! I couldn't believe (at the time) how quick it was to model and render on the laptop.
Not so long ago, Apple boasted that the G5 could handle audio this and Photoshop actions that in x seconds...and do Mathematica algorithms twice as fast as a Pentium 4 etc.
Today. Many years after the transition to Intel...we have machines that can blitz G5s to melted marshmallows...in laptops and desktops from consumer to prosumer.
For a majority of creative types, I'd guess a quad core i7 with 4-8 gigs of ram with a reasonably recent GPU is more than enough.
You're paying an awful lot extra for that 2nd socket when maybe a Raid and more memory may better serve you.
I've tried to explain some of this before. Claims of performance under the G5 were greatly overstated just like all of the 64 bit garbage and about how much ram it could effectively use. Apple was just holding onto markets there that it had owned for years. The photoshop actions thing was a lie. Perhaps they were testing against earlier Pentium 4s that were lacking in ram.
On ram you're kind of mistaken here, but it's a common mistake. OSX and Windows can both operate with a sub optimal amount of ram. A lot of applications were bumping up against the 32 bit wall for years, which meant that you ensured your workflow worked within its limits whether that meant turning things off, using raid or at least fast drives with minimal excess data for boot volumes or scratch disks, or whatever else. Given the current cost of ram, it's easier just to load it up and let the system handle as much as possible within ram rather than swap space. You also don't have to make quite as much effort to manage your settings in many applications. Photoshop is one where in the next version the potential ceiling could raise again if they assign more functions to 32 bit as they did with 16 long ago. If you're working with mixtures of photographic and cg output, 32 bit floating point formats can be quite advantageous given the extreme range that they can hold. It's not that you see all of it simultaneously. It's simply there if you need it, and it's excellent for compositing. Nuke is still way ahead of them in that regard. I don't use it (I wouldn't get enough use out of it to justify the $5k or so), but I still wish Adobe was more like The Foundry in terms of adding powerful features .
On the topic of 3d I'm not sure what application you were using. Many of them ran primarily under Windows or Linux with the OSX releases prior to the Intel transition having been really gutted comparatively. I owned a powerbook too. They were not powerful. They were terribly slow. The core2 duo macbook pros were the point where it felt like laptops were starting to keep up with the push for power from software. Even then the integrated gpu models were too slow in anything requiring OpenGL.
3d is an area that's actually evolved quite a bit with machine hardware. Since I mentioned the previous 32 bit limit, consider that meant much more restrictive polycounts or texture resolutions. Many things that had to be mapped years ago can be represented by geometry today. Scanline as a general concept looks like it's going to fade out from rendering. There's still a lot to be said for efficiency, but that's an area where the advancements in computer hardware change the way people are able to work. That's a point that's commonly misunderstood especially when it comes to topics like how long people own a desktop or workstation. If they make a living from it, a new purchase is typically made when it allows them a smoother workflow or the new software with whatever settings won't run on the old one. A 20% change in benchmarks doesn't always mean much of anything. It can be a lot of things. It could be a gpu requirement in terms of what supports a certain OpenGL version or Mercury playback in the case of NVidia. It could be that you want more cpu power because the old one is starting to choke. It could be ram because you're tired of hiding things and closing out applications to ensure that everything runs stable. I think you need to consider the difference between can run on and runs smoothly on. They can be quite different in specs. A macbook pro isn't necessarily that bad in terms of cpu power. I can still choke the gpus, and (many) previous Apple laptop issues make me concerned about trusting one as a primary machine.
Anyway I'd still like to know what program it was. I can't think of any that ran better on a powerbook than Windows, even if the powerbook was newer than the Windows box. I'm not sure if you realize just how much of that was unavailable on the mac prior to the intel transition including many things that only ported basic versions.
Steve at his best. Apple really put some effort in with the case. That was an awesome update for the Pro. It was an engineering marvel. State of the art.
For a majority of creative types, I'd guess a quad core i7 with 4-8 gigs of ram with a reasonably recent GPU is more than enough.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
That really depends upon how you classify creative types. Somebody doing research into genetics or new drugs may very well find such a machine only suitable as a terminal.
Depends on how much they need. iMacs 2010 and later can use 32 gigs of RAM. A 16GB RAM kit costs $95 at OWC, there's little excuse to make do with less if there is any memory constraint at all. I'm curious if such specialized scientific software is even available for Macs. I would bet that the cost of the software is much higher than the hardware needed to run it.
Depends on how much they need. iMacs 2010 and later can use 32 gigs of RAM. A 16GB RAM kit costs $95 at OWC, there's little excuse to make do with less if there is any memory constraint at all. I'm curious if such specialized scientific software is even available for Macs. I would bet that the cost of the software is much higher than the hardware needed to run it.
RAM constraints could still be an issue. We use clusters of Mac Pros running 64 GB, and are still sometimes restricted by memory.
Back then PowerPC really did have a few advantages over the i86 world. Well at least for specific genre of software.
There is still bleeding edge software that will challenge any hardware you through at it. Just because an architecture handles yesterday's tasks very well doesn't mean it is suitable for tomorrows.
That really depends upon how you classify creative types. Somebody doing research into genetics or new drugs may very well find such a machine only suitable as a terminal.
Or faster I/O to secondary storage. This is a significant shortcoming these days and is why I would love to see Apple address this in the Pros replacement in a forward looking way. SATA really should be looked at as end of life for boot/app drives.
It really doesn't matter how many cores Apple puts into the iMac, if you can't configure it to your needs it is the wrong machine.
IMacs shame is its lack of configurability, terrible serviceability and the built in screen.
The Mac Pro hardly qualifies as a desktop in most peoples minds. The iMac is in a category all of its own so all Apple really has is the Mini for a desktop solution. Now don't get me wrong the Mini is excellent for what it is, but many find it very constrained. So really they have one desktop machine.
As to portables I think your counts are way off. They have the laptops, iPads and other iOS devices.
Mini pricing is perplexing but if you judge it against other laptops using the same technology it isn't that bad. Yes I said laptops as that is the hardware it is built with.
Sadly it looks like AMD missed its chance to put Fusion into the Mini, that would have allowed for better pricing and actually better performance for many users. This based upon the signifance of GPU hardware in supporting modern user needs.
Apple never seems to learn. The debut of the Cube was a huge disappointment for me back then. In the end it kept me out of the fold for a number of years.
If it serves your needs go for it. I just think far to many iMac sales are due to people being disappointed with everything else Apple offers. Apples sales of desktops is absolutely flat in the USA which to me is a sign that the halo effect is wearing off. It is a WTF moment for many desktop shoppers.
Mabe that is their direction but the failure of the desktop line has more to do with the hardware than many are willing to accept. Apple created this situation through neglect and a gross misunderstanding of why people buy desktops in the first place. Apple may very well ride the mobile wave but they are passing up on a huge amount of opportunity.
I'd argue all Apple's machines have a lack of configurability. But that's how they do things from top to bottom. Even the Pro (purportedly an expansive machine...) but the GPU might as well be soldered onto the M/Board for all the good it does. You have 'standard' average card or a premiumly priced card version of the PC market. Whhooop. That's some choice.
Give the iMac a Raid and some more ram and it thumps the 4/6 core models for value and performance.
Sales of desktops flat? *Shrugs. By what metric? Apple sold 4 million laptops because that's the way things are going. Those are Apple sales. 1 million desktops. If most of those are iMacs it's doing pretty well historically compared to the 'Candy' iMac's Halo High. How many Minis sold? Pros? If they got 250K sold between them they've done well. Apple don't do break outs. But if they iMac sold 650-750k it's doing very well for a single desktop/model.
What did the 'Candy' iMac sell at it's peak in any given quarter? 544k? Back when Apple well selling 1 million units per quarter (or less!) that was good then. The market has changed greatly since then in terms of portability vs desktop.
Factor in that the price of the mini and it's improvements (in my eyes...) were relatively modest. Same for the iMac bar the top end model (which took me by surprise.)
Mini vs laptop? May as well get entry Air.
All the people I know who have the iMac love it. Any Pro user paying for a dual processor model for nearly £3000 may not see it that way. But that fact is the iMac is no longer the 13 inch Candy iMac. I think the screen is good. Sure, it's not quite as subtle as my old CRT Trinitron but it's good for an LED. Sure, you can pay a fortune for a screen. And if you have your own screen you're limited to a Mac Mini, Laptop or a Pro. I see the argument for an x-Mac. Nobody was more disappointed that the Cube 'got it wrong' (Apple Hubris moment...) than me...but I don't see the evidence that a separate desktop will be added to 3 models of desktop.
4 desktops? Not happening. My numbers aren't off. Apple have shaved the laptop line to Pro and Air. They've canned the Macbook entry model. As far as Macs go. Two portable lines.
Augmented by the iOS devices.
Desktop. It's a little odd to have 3 models. But I can't see them dropping the Mini. The iMac. They're getting most desktop sales from there. I no longer see the 'built in' screen as any more of a problem than it would be for a laptop. It's been fine. 24 inch model took a while to adjust to. Massive. I never liked the look of a lot of ugly 3rd party monitors really. Apple are about the whole widget. Most of their kit from laptop to iOS include a screen. The Mini and Pro do not. A minority....with diminutive sales. Yes. It's a bitch to get into. So is an iPhone. So is a laptop. Apple want you to buy new kit. It's not as if the original Mac was hyper accessible? Most towers are crap inside compared to the state of the art Pro.
As for configure. To what? I can add a Raid and a decent 2 gig Vram GPU with 16 gigs of ram. I don't see any shame in that. It's not like the Pro, the Mini or the Laptops have a vast array of options at Apple.
It leaves us with what they are going to do to inject life into the Pro. Price. Redesign.
Can't wait until Apple updates the Mac line. I hope the Pro drops 1st. I want to see what they're going to do.
The Mini had the 'shroud' of death rumour around it. But it got a tweaked design with thunderbolt and an i7 option. Much better than was.
AMD? They seem to have signalled they're going to entry the ultra mobile space. Expect reasonably competitive desktop cpus cheaper...but beat Intel? I doubt it anymore. They've taken a beating since Core Duo/2/i7 onwards. Recent desktop benches show promise. But they haven't stormed ahead. And Ivy bridge is yet to hit. The GPUs are very competitive. The Fusion seems reasonable. Will they get Apple's business? Doubt it. Never say never, I guess.
Apple desktops are expensive also. Typified by the Mini and the 2008 price hikes in the UK which left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. (I bought a top of the line iMac from 'last years' model a few years ago and got £200+ off it. It made the price reasonable.)
I personally feel the laptops are better value even though I don't like them.
eg Air. Mini. *Looks at the tables at the Apple stores. Which train is Apple riding? That doesn't make the desktop line perfect or not in need of work. But it's good enough perhaps for most consumers/prosumers.
Hmm....
Apple are selling more Macs than ever before. 5 million plus. They must be doing something right. I don't like the high prices or think the desktop line is perfect. But we'll see what Apple do this year. I don't expect any desktop surprises. Perhaps Apple feels the iMac is now at the position to satisfy most customer's needs desktop wise. (Not all. But most consumer and prosumer. Nobody says that extends to Earth Sim Science or 80 layer 600dpi movie posters or a week render. But since when do Apple do niche any more? And those needs are niche. Tiny compared to the mainstream consumer/prosumer Apple is now targeting.)
'Typical' PC Gamer Tower types I've spoken to...an ex-friend of mine seems to find the iMac limiting.
Shrugs.*
He's paid a total of £2700 to keep his i7 tower up to date...with another GPU purchase. Uses it for gaming.
Might as well have got a HD tv and PS3. My mileage. And a top end iMac with dual boot into Windows. Far better value all round.
Especially if you're putting the latest gpu through a tiny 20 inch monitor. Doesn't make sense to me.
Desktops. You pay the Apple premium due to the fact that Apple 'lost' the desktop wars. But with Airs and iOS devices, Apple have got in first, bought up all the components and are showing how to fight the fight on a new battle field. They're winning. Handsomely.
They're giving the consumer decent power with sexy slim design at a reasonable price. I can price a tower much cheaper than an iMac. But do I want to Windows? Nah. I prefer the 'disease' or 'sexy beast Mac OS X.'
I think they're just taking whatever sells well and riding it as far as possible. Keeping a lot of cash on hand means they can buy into other things if necessary. The goal seems to be to make the lives of people revolve around Apple products wherever possible. They sell devices that aren't really interchangeable with non Apple products thus limiting choice once you start to integrate Apple products so it becomes a matter of what fits best within the product array provided by a single company. It's actually pretty incredible how well they've done. I don't spite them for that. They claim to want to focus on product lines where they feel they can make a difference which is really just corporate rhetoric. They have a number of mature product lines with good followings. These should see proper updates, and we need some machines that are competitive in terms of offering the best possible hardware rather than only what people on here feel is good enough for the mainstream consumer. The laptop gpu thing seems to be a sticky issue as killing that in favor of intel's offerings just to thin out hardware would alienate many different groups of users and leave them without a lot of differentiation between their two laptop categories.
I've tried to explain some of this before. Claims of performance under the G5 were greatly overstated just like all of the 64 bit garbage and about how much ram it could effectively use. Apple was just holding onto markets there that it had owned for years. The photoshop actions thing was a lie. Perhaps they were testing against earlier Pentium 4s that were lacking in ram.
On ram you're kind of mistaken here, but it's a common mistake. OSX and Windows can both operate with a sub optimal amount of ram. A lot of applications were bumping up against the 32 bit wall for years, which meant that you ensured your workflow worked within its limits whether that meant turning things off, using raid or at least fast drives with minimal excess data for boot volumes or scratch disks, or whatever else. Given the current cost of ram, it's easier just to load it up and let the system handle as much as possible within ram rather than swap space. You also don't have to make quite as much effort to manage your settings in many applications. Photoshop is one where in the next version the potential ceiling could raise again if they assign more functions to 32 bit as they did with 16 long ago. If you're working with mixtures of photographic and cg output, 32 bit floating point formats can be quite advantageous given the extreme range that they can hold. It's not that you see all of it simultaneously. It's simply there if you need it, and it's excellent for compositing. Nuke is still way ahead of them in that regard. I don't use it (I wouldn't get enough use out of it to justify the $5k or so), but I still wish Adobe was more like The Foundry in terms of adding powerful features .
On the topic of 3d I'm not sure what application you were using. Many of them ran primarily under Windows or Linux with the OSX releases prior to the Intel transition having been really gutted comparatively. I owned a powerbook too. They were not powerful. They were terribly slow. The core2 duo macbook pros were the point where it felt like laptops were starting to keep up with the push for power from software. Even then the integrated gpu models were too slow in anything requiring OpenGL.
3d is an area that's actually evolved quite a bit with machine hardware. Since I mentioned the previous 32 bit limit, consider that meant much more restrictive polycounts or texture resolutions. Many things that had to be mapped years ago can be represented by geometry today. Scanline as a general concept looks like it's going to fade out from rendering. There's still a lot to be said for efficiency, but that's an area where the advancements in computer hardware change the way people are able to work. That's a point that's commonly misunderstood especially when it comes to topics like how long people own a desktop or workstation. If they make a living from it, a new purchase is typically made when it allows them a smoother workflow or the new software with whatever settings won't run on the old one. A 20% change in benchmarks doesn't always mean much of anything. It can be a lot of things. It could be a gpu requirement in terms of what supports a certain OpenGL version or Mercury playback in the case of NVidia. It could be that you want more cpu power because the old one is starting to choke. It could be ram because you're tired of hiding things and closing out applications to ensure that everything runs stable. I think you need to consider the difference between can run on and runs smoothly on. They can be quite different in specs. A macbook pro isn't necessarily that bad in terms of cpu power. I can still choke the gpus, and (many) previous Apple laptop issues make me concerned about trusting one as a primary machine.
Anyway I'd still like to know what program it was. I can't think of any that ran better on a powerbook than Windows, even if the powerbook was newer than the Windows box. I'm not sure if you realize just how much of that was unavailable on the mac prior to the intel transition including many things that only ported basic versions.
Old workstations will get beaten by newer laptops.
Just look at the G4 450 in my living room vs a dual core iMac. That's what ten years will do to you, I guess. Even a few years.
Laptops have closed the gap. That's where the focus is now. It's a massive market.
If you're 'right on the edge.' The Pro might be it. But how many? Wizard suggests 50K or less? (Paraphrasing.)
As for the G5 benches, Apple played the card they got dealt. It gave the P4 with netburst archi a bloody nose. But it did concede clock speed. Which meant Apple probably did pick their bench marks. Ergo the howls of derision following it's debut from 'PEE CEE' buyers. *Shrugs. If it had been clock for clock it would have been beyond doubt, I'd guess. It was a respectable chip. Now consigned to history.
I remember the program. Lightwave. And yes. Before you chirp in...the Mac version has perhaps been behind the PC version (just like Mac Maya lagged to some degree...) But shrugs* again. During the dark G4 mhz years...was there anybody left that didn't storm for the exit when Apple was in trouble?
There's still Mac 3D people. Still Mac Photoshop users. Final Cut users. How big the rump is? Depends on how you see the creative market. Does that count everyone from the Mini to the Pro? On Laptops as well? Just Pro buyers?
Just those who can buy super duper 'Photoshop' from another company software at the Houdini/Xsi/Maya high end?
As per the quote. The 3D course had workstations that were a few years old. Verses a G4 1 gig plus (1.4 gig G4 I think...) The 'workstations' had little ram relative to these days, poor screen update (relatively weak GPU) and the renders took ages. The PB G4 smashed them. Sure it wasn't a level playing field. Is it ever? Sure, my example is anecdotal. And I had to go home to a 'so-so' Athlon PC to continue my homework on. The kit was old on the course. Or wasn't brand new. But computers age badly. Ergo buy a new iMac every 3 years and I'll be happy. My needs aren't your needs.
I remember being at the Bournemouth NCCA for 3D in 2000/2001. Dual Pentium 500s/1 gig Pentiums. My Athlon was 800 mhz at the time. Cost me £2k. About. Xsi. In Beta. The course leaders plumped for that vs Maya. The students on the Programmers course got Maya. Learning 3D has never come naturally to me. I like Lightwave though. My needs can't justify a £3-4k Mac Pro that will do the render in a minute less. I don't need to render things over a week. Apple do offer a top end iMac now that more than gives me what I want due to the fact they priced the Pro insanely wiht each revision over the last ten years (and no doubt pushed more of the faithful pros over to the dark side.)
I take your point that 3D is on another planet right now. But how concerned are Apple with that market or ever have been? Mac Render farms? Look at Apple and Open GL cards vs PC Open GL cards?
Wizard's frustration is palpable and I have some sympathy with him. At least historically. But if you gave me a fully loaded iMac i7 8 gigs of ram and 2 gigs of Vram I'd be in heaven. It's telling that Apple are now able to offer such a high end iMac. Maybe that fits 'most' of their creative demographic now. Ball park 650-750k iMacs sold vs 50k Pros? (Just guessing.)
(Maybe the Pro has a dam bursting surge of Pros buyers waiting for Sandy Bridge?)
My point being. There's an uber duber high end that Apple doesn't seem overly concerned about. Sure. Intel have sat Sandy Bridge. But Apple could have offered more ram, better gpus as standard, given us a more compact pro with better value but no. It languished for the want of a cpu for almost 2 years? Year and a half? After that sort of treatment to it's 'Pro' customers I'd be surprised if there are still lights on in the building.
Pros have been using laptops for a decade now for their mobile activities anyway, and now there are quad core options, and pretty soon enough, hexacore, etc.
The latest Intel Xeon processors have up to 10 physical cores. Pros may do graphic design work on laptops, but the heavy 3D rendering is done on desktop towers or rack mounted servers. If running Handbrake for 10 minutes causes a MacBook Pro to heat up and the fans to run loudly at full speed, what chance does it have at running rendering and computation jobs that take a week or longer to complete?
Now that Mac OS Lion and Lion Server are supported under virtualization, I would like to see Apple start making 2U or even 3U rack mounted servers with dual or even quad 10 core processors. They should also make a deal with VMware to bring ESXi and all the admin tools to the Mac. Mac users in many companies are already demanding native Mac versions of VMware admin tools such as Vshpere Client to manage their VMware servers and clusters, but VMware has been unresponsive. The situation could improve if Apple stepped in.
'Typical' PC Gamer Tower types I've spoken to...an ex-friend of mine seems to find the iMac limiting.
Shrugs.*
He's paid a total of £2700 to keep his i7 tower up to date...with another GPU purchase. Uses it for gaming.
Might as well have got a HD tv and PS3. My mileage. And a top end iMac with dual boot into Windows. Far better value all round.
Especially if you're putting the latest gpu through a tiny 20 inch monitor. Doesn't make sense to me.
Desktops. You pay the Apple premium due to the fact that Apple 'lost' the desktop wars. But with Airs and iOS devices, Apple have got in first, bought up all the components and are showing how to fight the fight on a new battle field. They're winning. Handsomely.
Yes, Apple hasn't cared much about desktop games in a decade, it's always been a different market segment. Especially as that's the last refuge of computer users that still assemble their computers from interchangeable parts. I don't think a PS3 can compare with a computer rig these days. PCs can be hooked up to TVs, so I don't know why anyone would stick with a 20" screen for games.
I'd like a Mac Pro with two E5-2687W processors in a 4U rack mount along with a Thunderbolt RAID in another rack mount enclosure. A couple big blue LED fans and all the I/O ports on the front powering three 27" Cinemas.
I'd argue all Apple's machines have a lack of configurability. But that's how they do things from top to bottom. Even the Pro (purportedly an expansive machine...) but the GPU might as well be soldered onto the M/Board for all the good it does. You have 'standard' average card or a premiumly priced card version of the PC market. Whhooop. That's some choice.
I really do wish that you would block out any thoughts related to GPUs when talking about machine configuarability. GPUs aren't even in most peoples thoughts when discussing accessibility. It is almost like nobody in this forum has never added an Ethernet card to a PC or other fast I/O device.
Quote:
Give the iMac a Raid and some more ram and it thumps the 4/6 core models for value and performance.
An often repeated but senseless statement. IMac has none of the features of a Mac Pro nor desktops in general.
Quote:
Sales of desktops flat? *Shrugs. By what metric? Apple sold 4 million laptops because that's the way things are going.
Apples! Desktop sales are flat in the US.
Quote:
Those are Apple sales. 1 million desktops. If most of those are iMacs it's doing pretty well historically compared to the 'Candy' iMac's Halo High. How many Minis sold? Pros? If they got 250K sold between them they've done well. Apple don't do break outs. But if they iMac sold 650-750k it's doing very well for a single desktop/model.
Considering the size of the market those would be pathetic numbers.
Quote:
What did the 'Candy' iMac sell at it's peak in any given quarter? 544k? Back when Apple well selling 1 million units per quarter (or less!) that was good then. The market has changed greatly since then in terms of portability vs desktop.
The market is always changing. However the demand for desktops will not go up in smoke anytime soon.
Quote:
Factor in that the price of the mini and it's improvements (in my eyes...) were relatively modest. Same for the iMac bar the top end model (which took me by surprise.)
The Mini is effectively the only desktop Apple has. It really isn't a bad machine but the design is long in the tooth. I'm not talking about the box here but rather the hardware architecture.
Quote:
Mini vs laptop? May as well get entry Air.
Maybe if you like laptops. However the AIR is only really passable as. A second computer.
Quote:
All the people I know who have the iMac love it. Any Pro user paying for a dual processor model for nearly £3000 may not see it that way. But that fact is the iMac is no longer the 13 inch Candy iMac. I think the screen is good. Sure, it's not quite as subtle as my old CRT Trinitron but it's good for an LED. Sure, you can pay a fortune for a screen. And if you have your own screen you're limited to a Mac Mini, Laptop or a Pro. I see the argument for an x-Mac. Nobody was more disappointed that the Cube 'got it wrong' (Apple Hubris moment...) than me...but I don't see the evidence that a separate desktop will be added to 3 models of desktop.
As many know I limp along on a 2008 MBP. Just today I was taking to a 61 year old woman where she brought up the idea that she needed to by a new iMac. Mind you a late 2009 iMac, not exactly an old machine. The old lady needed more speed!
Now I have no idea what she does that requires better performance. It does highlight different tolerances to performance
Quote:
4 desktops? Not happening. My numbers aren't off. Apple have shaved the laptop line to Pro and Air. They've canned the Macbook entry model. As far as Macs go. Two portable lines.
Nothing was shaved, they transitioned their customer space to new technology. Apple traditionally has had two lines of Laptops. At this point they have 5 distinct products which is fairly decent. Desktop wise the have one plus the iMac and Pro neither of which is a traditional desktop.
Quote:
Augmented by the iOS devices.
Desktop. It's a little odd to have 3 models. But I can't see them dropping the Mini. The iMac. They're getting most desktop sales from there. I no longer see the 'built in' screen as any more of a problem than it would be for a laptop. It's been fine. 24 inch model took a while to adjust to. Massive. I never liked the look of a lot of ugly 3rd party monitors really. Apple are about the whole widget. Most of their kit from laptop to iOS include a screen. The Mini and Pro do not. A minority....with diminutive sales. Yes. It's a bitch to get into. So is an iPhone. So is a laptop. Apple want you to buy new kit. It's not as if the original Mac was hyper accessible? Most towers are crap inside compared to the state of the art Pro.
As for configure. To what? I can add a Raid and a decent 2 gig Vram GPU with 16 gigs of ram. I don't see any shame in that. It's not like the Pro, the Mini or the Laptops have a vast array of options at Apple.
What ever your needs are. I'm not sure why you are having such an issue with this concept. Have you never walked into a manufacturing plant, lab or other non office facility and seen PCs driving huge amounts of I/O.
Quote:
It leaves us with what they are going to do to inject life into the Pro. Price. Redesign.
Can't wait until Apple updates the Mac line. I hope the Pro drops 1st. I want to see what they're going to do.
Actually so do I. The Pros replacement could come next week.
Quote:
The Mini had the 'shroud' of death rumour around it. But it got a tweaked design with thunderbolt and an i7 option. Much better than was.
It is pretty much the same a good basic machine. TB has done little for the machine.
Quote:
AMD? They seem to have signalled they're going to entry the ultra mobile space. Expect reasonably competitive desktop cpus cheaper...but beat Intel? I doubt it anymore. They've taken a beating since Core Duo/2/i7 onwards. Recent desktop benches show promise. But they haven't stormed ahead. And Ivy bridge is yet to hit. The GPUs are very competitive. The Fusion seems reasonable. Will they get Apple's business? Doubt it. Never say never, I guess.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Fusion is actually very power efficient and has resulted in very nice laptop models. You do give up CPU performance but in some tasks Fusion can be extremely competitive with Intel hardware when the GPU is leveraged. At the very low end Zacate based systems are out performing competitive Intel hardware.
Will Apple go the AMD route? If they did it would be in select machines. It would very much depend upon what Apple wants to build but one needs to understand that not all Apple hardware platforms are barn burners. Do realize though that Intel has effectively fumbled with Ivy Bridge, it could be well after July before an IB suitable for the AIRs appears. It may become an issue of marketing that pushes Apple to buy Fusion.
As for your second point. It was pretty interesting when I attended a '3D Class' around eight years ago. Lots of '1 gighz' PEE CEE 'workstations'... One day, this girl came in with a 'PowerBook' (as they were then...I think...) and ran the 3D program in question much faster and rendered much faster than the desktops! I couldn't believe (at the time) how quick it was to model and render on the laptop.
Not so long ago, Apple boasted that the G5 could handle audio this and Photoshop actions that in x seconds...and do Mathematica algorithms twice as fast as a Pentium 4 etc.
Today. Many years after the transition to Intel...we have machines that can blitz G5s to melted marshmallows...in laptops and desktops from consumer to prosumer.
For a majority of creative types, I'd guess a quad core i7 with 4-8 gigs of ram with a reasonably recent GPU is more than enough.
You're paying an awful lot extra for that 2nd socket when maybe a Raid and more memory may better serve you.
By the time you get 6 and 8 core iMacs (who knows..?) in the next few years with even more ram and who knows what else...maybe even bigger screens to create an iMac Pro (you never know...
...it's not like the quad or 6 core Pro shames the iMac in any way. The iMac i7 quad core was all over the six core Pro in Aftereffects (a program that is apparently hard going?)
The 6 core should still outperform the imac by a fair margin in After Effects. Some of the barefeats tests suggested around 30% on many tasks. It does tax the gpu somewhat, so the superior options there are nice. GPUs in general are a weird topic. They aren't quite as simple to understand as cpu options. By the way, 4GB of ram sucks. It would be awful with Lion. It wasn't even fun years ago. I had a G5 with 4GB of ram years ago. Even then I generated massive page files. You just didn't gain much from going significantly higher because the applications themselves were 32 bit (and 64 bit applications weren't even fully supported until Snow Leopard) so they were unable to directly address more than 3GB of ram or so per application. Given that the limit no longer exists, you can gain quite a lot from 16 or 32GB of ram depending on your work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Haggar
The latest Intel Xeon processors have up to 10 physical cores. Pros may do graphic design work on laptops, but the heavy 3D rendering is done on desktop towers or rack mounted servers. If running Handbrake for 10 minutes causes a MacBook Pro to heat up and the fans to run loudly at full speed, what chance does it have at running rendering and computation jobs that take a week or longer to complete?
Now that Mac OS Lion and Lion Server are supported under virtualization, I would like to see Apple start making 2U or even 3U rack mounted servers with dual or even quad 10 core processors. They should also make a deal with VMware to bring ESXi and all the admin tools to the Mac. Mac users in many companies are already demanding native Mac versions of VMware admin tools such as Vshpere Client to manage their VMware servers and clusters, but VMware has been unresponsive. The situation could improve if Apple stepped in.
Heh.. I'm not going to get into the concept of ESX on OSX. I recall most of the admin tools running under OSX, but Apple doesn't have any real servers to be certified. Macbook pros might be okay for rendering stills. With complex animations it might run too hot to be left that way for many hours. Intel has different suggestions for operating temperature if the machine is going to be active more than 8 hours a day.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemon Bon Bon.
I remember the program. Lightwave. And yes. Before you chirp in...the Mac version has perhaps been behind the PC version (just like Mac Maya lagged to some degree...) But shrugs* again. During the dark G4 mhz years...was there anybody left that didn't storm for the exit when Apple was in trouble?
There's still Mac 3D people. Still Mac Photoshop users. Final Cut users. How big the rump is? Depends on how you see the creative market. Does that count everyone from the Mini to the Pro? On Laptops as well? Just Pro buyers?
Just those who can buy super duper 'Photoshop' from another company software at the Houdini/Xsi/Maya high end?
As per the quote. The 3D course had workstations that were a few years old. Verses a G4 1 gig plus (1.4 gig G4 I think...) The 'workstations' had little ram relative to these days, poor screen update (relatively weak GPU) and the renders took ages. The PB G4 smashed them. Sure it wasn't a level playing field. Is it ever? Sure, my example is anecdotal. And I had to go home to a 'so-so' Athlon PC to continue my homework on. The kit was old on the course. Or wasn't brand new. But computers age badly. Ergo buy a new iMac every 3 years and I'll be happy. My needs aren't your needs.
I remember being at the Bournemouth NCCA for 3D in 2000/2001. Dual Pentium 500s/1 gig Pentiums. My Athlon was 800 mhz at the time. Cost me £2k. About. Xsi. In Beta. The course leaders plumped for that vs Maya. The students on the Programmers course got Maya. Learning 3D has never come naturally to me. I like Lightwave though. My needs can't justify a £3-4k Mac Pro that will do the render in a minute less. I don't need to render things over a week. Apple do offer a top end iMac now that more than gives me what I want due to the fact they priced the Pro insanely wiht each revision over the last ten years (and no doubt pushed more of the faithful pros over to the dark side.)
I take your point that 3D is on another planet right now. But how concerned are Apple with that market or ever have been? Mac Render farms? Look at Apple and Open GL cards vs PC Open GL cards?
Wizard's frustration is palpable and I have some sympathy with him. At least historically. But if you gave me a fully loaded iMac i7 8 gigs of ram and 2 gigs of Vram I'd be in heaven. It's telling that Apple are now able to offer such a high end iMac. Maybe that fits 'most' of their creative demographic now. Ball park 650-750k iMacs sold vs 50k Pros? (Just guessing.)
(Maybe the Pro has a dam bursting surge of Pros buyers waiting for Sandy Bridge?)
My point being. There's an uber duber high end that Apple doesn't seem overly concerned about. Sure. Intel have sat Sandy Bridge. But Apple could have offered more ram, better gpus as standard, given us a more compact pro with better value but no. It languished for the want of a cpu for almost 2 years? Year and a half? After that sort of treatment to it's 'Pro' customers I'd be surprised if there are still lights on in the building.
I admire people for their loyalty.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Maya was behind for years. The OSX version also transitioned to 64 bit and got some features a year after the PC version. The same thing happened with Photoshop where CS4 was a 64 bit program under Windows as they initially planned for 64 bit Carbon. The 64 bit and Cocoa transitions were reversed in the release cycle. I don't think either of us has reliable sales figures there. I've seen tons of mac pros here, but that doesn't mean anything relative to total sales. It is understandable for sales to be low on such an extended cycle. The same is probably true for other oems. I still think you should consider the value in ram. More ram slots is one of the few things I like about the imac over a laptop. Photoshop keeps expanding 32 bit workflows. After Effects and Nuke have 32 bit linear workflows available. Since you mentioned 3d, ram is very helpful if you're using construction history or viewing with high resolution textures in your viewport. The 64 bit transition there and in programs like zbrush enabled quite a lot that you couldn't accomplish with 4GB of ram. Anyway I'm going off track.
Yes, Apple hasn't cared much about desktop games in a decade, it's always been a different market segment. Especially as that's the last refuge of computer users that still assemble their computers from interchangeable parts. I don't think a PS3 can compare with a computer rig these days. PCs can be hooked up to TVs, so I don't know why anyone would stick with a 20" screen for games.
I don't think it's a case of a PS3 comparing to a PC 'rig' on paper. To the casual gamers eye the PS3 is still a force to be reckoned with and looks fantastic on a 50 inch Plasma. I bought my Mum a PS3, Batman Arkham and a went halves to get her a 50 inch Panasonic. Looks the business. (She's been a console veteran as far back as the Megadrive! N64. Gamecube...Wii.. PS1, 2 and now 3!!!)
In contrast, I don't know anybody who has a rig hooked upto the TV. It certainly isn't a common feature amongst the everyday gamers I know who are either tapping on iPods or Dads who want some R and R on an x-Box.
Tell a lie. I know one girl. Online Morg buddy. She bought a 6k gaming rig (she'd been saving up for years...) and hooked it upto a 50 inch LCD, I think...with gaming chair, console...controls...etc...probably surround sound...PC was at least quad core (for that price it had better be..) with a SLI graphics Nvidia thing going down. Think she got it from Scan computers.co.uk. Anyhow. She bought it so she could play the Old Republic which is the latest Morrg flavour of the month. But she's pretty hard core gaming wise. She works hard then gets home and canes it for hours in a straight line. I don't see her as a typical gamer in the era of the 'casual' gamer which has Tsunami'd the 'traditional' fraternity of gaming.)
The last time I was that devoted to gaming was when I had a c64 and lost two years of my life! :P
(Give me BoulderDash Construction Kit anyday.)
It has been muted...by some that the 'gaming developers' are holding back the latest PCs because the 'engines' are on consoles as well (which are getting on a bit now...but I still think I don't see many current PC games that can eclipse eg 'Heavy Rain' on the PS3 which looks stunning.) I'm not so sure the PS3 has been pushed to it's limits yet. I don't see a new gen of consoles until 2013. The PS3 and xBox seem to be doing well still especially with the relatively recent price cuts. Vs paying £500 for the latest Ati card? *shrugs.
By the time the iPad3 hits and certainly with a 'Rogue' powered iPad4 I doubt the 'casual' gamer will care much for PC tower rigs or PS4s. (Though 'some' might. There will still be a market for consoles. Just like there's a market for PS Vitas or 3DSs, right? )
By the time the iPad3 hits and certainly with a 'Rogue' powered iPad4 I doubt the 'casual' gamer will care much for PC tower rigs or PS4s. (Though 'some' might. There will still be a market for consoles. Just like there's a market for PS Vitas or 3DSs, right? )
Haven't we heard that before? Consoles and especially PCs will always be a few steps ahead of handheld devices. Maybe with the iPad 4 you'll be able to get titles as good in quality as PS360 games. You'll still be controlls limited as I mentioned before, but ok, say Apple allows a third party controller. But then, console and PC hardware will have jumped ahead too. The developers of this demo say its possible only on 2 terraflop + cards (for reference, the 7970 is over 3tf):
Haven't we heard that before? Consoles and especially PCs will always be a few steps ahead of handheld devices. Maybe with the iPad 4 you'll be able to get titles as good in quality as PS360 games. You'll still be controlls limited as I mentioned before, but ok, say Apple allows a third party controller. But then, console and PC hardware will have jumped ahead too. The developers of this demo say its possible only on 2 terraflop + cards (for reference, the 7970 is over 3tf):
Each successive generation of consoles has enjoyed bigger revenues and a bigger pool of consumers, I doubt the next will be different.
Apple have dealt a smashing, side winding blow to Sony and Nintendo in portability. Nintendo posted losses for the 1st time in? Sony aren't rolling in money either?
Things are different this time. Sure they are.
When even Sony people are talking about whether there will be a PS4 or whether it's needed you know that market is looking vulnerable.
The iPad hasn't even got started yet...and the old timers are breathing hard and sweating like pigs.
As for the physical controllers. Not an issue for 200 million iPad/iPHone/iPod touch owners who are doing very well without physical buttons.
That was a criticism in the early days. But with hundreds of thousands of apps (most of the games!) now in the App store, who cares? A few maybe.
Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AACv...eature=related
Bullseye on both points.
As for your second point. It was pretty interesting when I attended a '3D Class' around eight years ago. Lots of '1 gighz' PEE CEE 'workstations'... One day, this girl came in with a 'PowerBook' (as they were then...I think...) and ran the 3D program in question much faster and rendered much faster than the desktops! I couldn't believe (at the time) how quick it was to model and render on the laptop.
Back then PowerPC really did have a few advantages over the i86 world. Well at least for specific genre of software.
Not so long ago, Apple boasted that the G5 could handle audio this and Photoshop actions that in x seconds...and do Mathematica algorithms twice as fast as a Pentium 4 etc.
Today. Many years after the transition to Intel...we have machines that can blitz G5s to melted marshmallows...in laptops and desktops from consumer to prosumer.
There is still bleeding edge software that will challenge any hardware you through at it. Just because an architecture handles yesterday's tasks very well doesn't mean it is suitable for tomorrows.
For a majority of creative types, I'd guess a quad core i7 with 4-8 gigs of ram with a reasonably recent GPU is more than enough.
That really depends upon how you classify creative types. Somebody doing research into genetics or new drugs may very well find such a machine only suitable as a terminal.
You're paying an awful lot extra for that 2nd socket when maybe a Raid and more memory may better serve you.
Or faster I/O to secondary storage. This is a significant shortcoming these days and is why I would love to see Apple address this in the Pros replacement in a forward looking way. SATA really should be looked at as end of life for boot/app drives.
By the time you get 6 and 8 core iMacs (who knows..?) in the next few years with even more ram and who knows what else...maybe even bigger screens to create an iMac Pro (you never know...
It really doesn't matter how many cores Apple puts into the iMac, if you can't configure it to your needs it is the wrong machine.
...it's not like the quad or 6 core Pro shames the iMac in any way. The iMac i7 quad core was all over the six core Pro in Aftereffects (a program that is apparently hard going?)
IMacs shame is its lack of configurability, terrible serviceability and the built in screen.
Apple have just sheared the laptop line to two models.
This makes the desktop line all the more bemusing. 3 desktop models when you're selling millions more laptops? Surely by the laptop reckoning, a desktop model gets dropped.
The Mac Pro hardly qualifies as a desktop in most peoples minds. The iMac is in a category all of its own so all Apple really has is the Mini for a desktop solution. Now don't get me wrong the Mini is excellent for what it is, but many find it very constrained. So really they have one desktop machine.
As to portables I think your counts are way off. They have the laptops, iPads and other iOS devices.
I'm not sure why Apple intro'd the Mini at all in retrospect. (An almost good idea when it was about £395...but it's very pricey now with no monitor, keyboard etc.) They'd have been better served by driving the iMac down to the £595 entry level mark. (They got close with £695 before the ginormous 2008 HIKE!) And drove the Pro down to £995 to £2000 single cpu topping out at dual cpu at the top end. Two models. Job done.
Mini pricing is perplexing but if you judge it against other laptops using the same technology it isn't that bad. Yes I said laptops as that is the hardware it is built with.
Sadly it looks like AMD missed its chance to put Fusion into the Mini, that would have allowed for better pricing and actually better performance for many users. This based upon the signifance of GPU hardware in supporting modern user needs.
As it is...the desktop line seems neither one thing nor the other.
If we cast our minds back. The iMac started off as the 'entry' machine. The Pro had the upper end. They tried (and failed) to put the Cube in the middle. (What they did was have a more limited machine at the same price as the Pro. Big mistake.)
Apple never seems to learn. The debut of the Cube was a huge disappointment for me back then. In the end it kept me out of the fold for a number of years.
Still. I don't mind the top end iMac now. With a 27 inch monitor and a decent GPU and an i7 it's a whole new ball game.
If it serves your needs go for it. I just think far to many iMac sales are due to people being disappointed with everything else Apple offers. Apples sales of desktops is absolutely flat in the USA which to me is a sign that the halo effect is wearing off. It is a WTF moment for many desktop shoppers.
I think Jeff is on the money re: Apple's direction.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Mabe that is their direction but the failure of the desktop line has more to do with the hardware than many are willing to accept. Apple created this situation through neglect and a gross misunderstanding of why people buy desktops in the first place. Apple may very well ride the mobile wave but they are passing up on a huge amount of opportunity.
Mabe that is their direction but the failure of the desktop line has more to do with the hardware than many are willing to accept. Apple created this situation through neglect and a gross misunderstanding of why people buy desktops in the first place. Apple may very well ride the mobile wave but they are passing up on a huge amount of opportunity.
I think they're just taking whatever sells well and riding it as far as possible. Keeping a lot of cash on hand means they can buy into other things if necessary. The goal seems to be to make the lives of people revolve around Apple products wherever possible. They sell devices that aren't really interchangeable with non Apple products thus limiting choice once you start to integrate Apple products so it becomes a matter of what fits best within the product array provided by a single company. It's actually pretty incredible how well they've done. I don't spite them for that. They claim to want to focus on product lines where they feel they can make a difference which is really just corporate rhetoric. They have a number of mature product lines with good followings. These should see proper updates, and we need some machines that are competitive in terms of offering the best possible hardware rather than only what people on here feel is good enough for the mainstream consumer. The laptop gpu thing seems to be a sticky issue as killing that in favor of intel's offerings just to thin out hardware would alienate many different groups of users and leave them without a lot of differentiation between their two laptop categories.
Bullseye on both points.
As for your second point. It was pretty interesting when I attended a '3D Class' around eight years ago. Lots of '1 gighz' PEE CEE 'workstations'... One day, this girl came in with a 'PowerBook' (as they were then...I think...) and ran the 3D program in question much faster and rendered much faster than the desktops! I couldn't believe (at the time) how quick it was to model and render on the laptop.
Not so long ago, Apple boasted that the G5 could handle audio this and Photoshop actions that in x seconds...and do Mathematica algorithms twice as fast as a Pentium 4 etc.
Today. Many years after the transition to Intel...we have machines that can blitz G5s to melted marshmallows...in laptops and desktops from consumer to prosumer.
For a majority of creative types, I'd guess a quad core i7 with 4-8 gigs of ram with a reasonably recent GPU is more than enough.
You're paying an awful lot extra for that 2nd socket when maybe a Raid and more memory may better serve you.
I've tried to explain some of this before. Claims of performance under the G5 were greatly overstated just like all of the 64 bit garbage and about how much ram it could effectively use. Apple was just holding onto markets there that it had owned for years. The photoshop actions thing was a lie. Perhaps they were testing against earlier Pentium 4s that were lacking in ram.
On ram you're kind of mistaken here, but it's a common mistake. OSX and Windows can both operate with a sub optimal amount of ram. A lot of applications were bumping up against the 32 bit wall for years, which meant that you ensured your workflow worked within its limits whether that meant turning things off, using raid or at least fast drives with minimal excess data for boot volumes or scratch disks, or whatever else. Given the current cost of ram, it's easier just to load it up and let the system handle as much as possible within ram rather than swap space. You also don't have to make quite as much effort to manage your settings in many applications. Photoshop is one where in the next version the potential ceiling could raise again if they assign more functions to 32 bit as they did with 16 long ago. If you're working with mixtures of photographic and cg output, 32 bit floating point formats can be quite advantageous given the extreme range that they can hold. It's not that you see all of it simultaneously. It's simply there if you need it, and it's excellent for compositing. Nuke is still way ahead of them in that regard. I don't use it (I wouldn't get enough use out of it to justify the $5k or so), but I still wish Adobe was more like The Foundry in terms of adding powerful features
On the topic of 3d I'm not sure what application you were using. Many of them ran primarily under Windows or Linux with the OSX releases prior to the Intel transition having been really gutted comparatively. I owned a powerbook too. They were not powerful. They were terribly slow. The core2 duo macbook pros were the point where it felt like laptops were starting to keep up with the push for power from software. Even then the integrated gpu models were too slow in anything requiring OpenGL.
3d is an area that's actually evolved quite a bit with machine hardware. Since I mentioned the previous 32 bit limit, consider that meant much more restrictive polycounts or texture resolutions. Many things that had to be mapped years ago can be represented by geometry today. Scanline as a general concept looks like it's going to fade out from rendering. There's still a lot to be said for efficiency, but that's an area where the advancements in computer hardware change the way people are able to work. That's a point that's commonly misunderstood especially when it comes to topics like how long people own a desktop or workstation. If they make a living from it, a new purchase is typically made when it allows them a smoother workflow or the new software with whatever settings won't run on the old one. A 20% change in benchmarks doesn't always mean much of anything. It can be a lot of things. It could be a gpu requirement in terms of what supports a certain OpenGL version or Mercury playback in the case of NVidia. It could be that you want more cpu power because the old one is starting to choke. It could be ram because you're tired of hiding things and closing out applications to ensure that everything runs stable. I think you need to consider the difference between can run on and runs smoothly on. They can be quite different in specs. A macbook pro isn't necessarily that bad in terms of cpu power. I can still choke the gpus, and (many) previous Apple laptop issues make me concerned about trusting one as a primary machine.
Anyway I'd still like to know what program it was. I can't think of any that ran better on a powerbook than Windows, even if the powerbook was newer than the Windows box. I'm not sure if you realize just how much of that was unavailable on the mac prior to the intel transition including many things that only ported basic versions.
I miss groundbreaking stuff like this in the Pro (well, it was the Power Mac then)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AACv...eature=related
Steve at his best. Apple really put some effort in with the case. That was an awesome update for the Pro. It was an engineering marvel. State of the art.
Lemon Bon Bon.
For a majority of creative types, I'd guess a quad core i7 with 4-8 gigs of ram with a reasonably recent GPU is more than enough.
That really depends upon how you classify creative types. Somebody doing research into genetics or new drugs may very well find such a machine only suitable as a terminal.
Depends on how much they need. iMacs 2010 and later can use 32 gigs of RAM. A 16GB RAM kit costs $95 at OWC, there's little excuse to make do with less if there is any memory constraint at all. I'm curious if such specialized scientific software is even available for Macs. I would bet that the cost of the software is much higher than the hardware needed to run it.
Depends on how much they need. iMacs 2010 and later can use 32 gigs of RAM. A 16GB RAM kit costs $95 at OWC, there's little excuse to make do with less if there is any memory constraint at all. I'm curious if such specialized scientific software is even available for Macs. I would bet that the cost of the software is much higher than the hardware needed to run it.
RAM constraints could still be an issue. We use clusters of Mac Pros running 64 GB, and are still sometimes restricted by memory.
Back then PowerPC really did have a few advantages over the i86 world. Well at least for specific genre of software.
There is still bleeding edge software that will challenge any hardware you through at it. Just because an architecture handles yesterday's tasks very well doesn't mean it is suitable for tomorrows.
That really depends upon how you classify creative types. Somebody doing research into genetics or new drugs may very well find such a machine only suitable as a terminal.
Or faster I/O to secondary storage. This is a significant shortcoming these days and is why I would love to see Apple address this in the Pros replacement in a forward looking way. SATA really should be looked at as end of life for boot/app drives.
It really doesn't matter how many cores Apple puts into the iMac, if you can't configure it to your needs it is the wrong machine.
IMacs shame is its lack of configurability, terrible serviceability and the built in screen.
The Mac Pro hardly qualifies as a desktop in most peoples minds. The iMac is in a category all of its own so all Apple really has is the Mini for a desktop solution. Now don't get me wrong the Mini is excellent for what it is, but many find it very constrained. So really they have one desktop machine.
As to portables I think your counts are way off. They have the laptops, iPads and other iOS devices.
Mini pricing is perplexing but if you judge it against other laptops using the same technology it isn't that bad. Yes I said laptops as that is the hardware it is built with.
Sadly it looks like AMD missed its chance to put Fusion into the Mini, that would have allowed for better pricing and actually better performance for many users. This based upon the signifance of GPU hardware in supporting modern user needs.
Apple never seems to learn. The debut of the Cube was a huge disappointment for me back then. In the end it kept me out of the fold for a number of years.
If it serves your needs go for it. I just think far to many iMac sales are due to people being disappointed with everything else Apple offers. Apples sales of desktops is absolutely flat in the USA which to me is a sign that the halo effect is wearing off. It is a WTF moment for many desktop shoppers.
Mabe that is their direction but the failure of the desktop line has more to do with the hardware than many are willing to accept. Apple created this situation through neglect and a gross misunderstanding of why people buy desktops in the first place. Apple may very well ride the mobile wave but they are passing up on a huge amount of opportunity.
I'd argue all Apple's machines have a lack of configurability. But that's how they do things from top to bottom. Even the Pro (purportedly an expansive machine...) but the GPU might as well be soldered onto the M/Board for all the good it does. You have 'standard' average card or a premiumly priced card version of the PC market. Whhooop. That's some choice.
Give the iMac a Raid and some more ram and it thumps the 4/6 core models for value and performance.
Sales of desktops flat? *Shrugs. By what metric? Apple sold 4 million laptops because that's the way things are going. Those are Apple sales. 1 million desktops. If most of those are iMacs it's doing pretty well historically compared to the 'Candy' iMac's Halo High. How many Minis sold? Pros? If they got 250K sold between them they've done well. Apple don't do break outs. But if they iMac sold 650-750k it's doing very well for a single desktop/model.
What did the 'Candy' iMac sell at it's peak in any given quarter? 544k? Back when Apple well selling 1 million units per quarter (or less!) that was good then. The market has changed greatly since then in terms of portability vs desktop.
Factor in that the price of the mini and it's improvements (in my eyes...) were relatively modest. Same for the iMac bar the top end model (which took me by surprise.)
Mini vs laptop? May as well get entry Air.
All the people I know who have the iMac love it. Any Pro user paying for a dual processor model for nearly £3000 may not see it that way. But that fact is the iMac is no longer the 13 inch Candy iMac. I think the screen is good. Sure, it's not quite as subtle as my old CRT Trinitron but it's good for an LED. Sure, you can pay a fortune for a screen. And if you have your own screen you're limited to a Mac Mini, Laptop or a Pro. I see the argument for an x-Mac. Nobody was more disappointed that the Cube 'got it wrong' (Apple Hubris moment...) than me...but I don't see the evidence that a separate desktop will be added to 3 models of desktop.
4 desktops? Not happening. My numbers aren't off. Apple have shaved the laptop line to Pro and Air. They've canned the Macbook entry model. As far as Macs go. Two portable lines.
Augmented by the iOS devices.
Desktop. It's a little odd to have 3 models. But I can't see them dropping the Mini. The iMac. They're getting most desktop sales from there. I no longer see the 'built in' screen as any more of a problem than it would be for a laptop. It's been fine. 24 inch model took a while to adjust to. Massive. I never liked the look of a lot of ugly 3rd party monitors really. Apple are about the whole widget. Most of their kit from laptop to iOS include a screen. The Mini and Pro do not. A minority....with diminutive sales. Yes. It's a bitch to get into. So is an iPhone. So is a laptop. Apple want you to buy new kit. It's not as if the original Mac was hyper accessible? Most towers are crap inside compared to the state of the art Pro.
As for configure. To what? I can add a Raid and a decent 2 gig Vram GPU with 16 gigs of ram. I don't see any shame in that. It's not like the Pro, the Mini or the Laptops have a vast array of options at Apple.
It leaves us with what they are going to do to inject life into the Pro. Price. Redesign.
Can't wait until Apple updates the Mac line. I hope the Pro drops 1st. I want to see what they're going to do.
The Mini had the 'shroud' of death rumour around it. But it got a tweaked design with thunderbolt and an i7 option. Much better than was.
AMD? They seem to have signalled they're going to entry the ultra mobile space. Expect reasonably competitive desktop cpus cheaper...but beat Intel? I doubt it anymore. They've taken a beating since Core Duo/2/i7 onwards. Recent desktop benches show promise. But they haven't stormed ahead. And Ivy bridge is yet to hit. The GPUs are very competitive. The Fusion seems reasonable. Will they get Apple's business? Doubt it. Never say never, I guess.
Lemon Bon Bon.
I personally feel the laptops are better value even though I don't like them.
eg Air. Mini. *Looks at the tables at the Apple stores. Which train is Apple riding? That doesn't make the desktop line perfect or not in need of work. But it's good enough perhaps for most consumers/prosumers.
Hmm....
Apple are selling more Macs than ever before. 5 million plus. They must be doing something right. I don't like the high prices or think the desktop line is perfect. But we'll see what Apple do this year. I don't expect any desktop surprises. Perhaps Apple feels the iMac is now at the position to satisfy most customer's needs desktop wise. (Not all. But most consumer and prosumer. Nobody says that extends to Earth Sim Science or 80 layer 600dpi movie posters or a week render. But since when do Apple do niche any more? And those needs are niche. Tiny compared to the mainstream consumer/prosumer Apple is now targeting.)
Lemon Bon Bon.
Shrugs.*
He's paid a total of £2700 to keep his i7 tower up to date...with another GPU purchase. Uses it for gaming.
Might as well have got a HD tv and PS3. My mileage. And a top end iMac with dual boot into Windows. Far better value all round.
Especially if you're putting the latest gpu through a tiny 20 inch monitor. Doesn't make sense to me.
Desktops. You pay the Apple premium due to the fact that Apple 'lost' the desktop wars. But with Airs and iOS devices, Apple have got in first, bought up all the components and are showing how to fight the fight on a new battle field. They're winning. Handsomely.
They're giving the consumer decent power with sexy slim design at a reasonable price. I can price a tower much cheaper than an iMac. But do I want to Windows? Nah. I prefer the 'disease' or 'sexy beast Mac OS X.'
To me. Worth paying the extra for. To a degree.
Lemon Bon Bon.
They don't know about Appleinsider forums...Mac Pros don't interest them.
That's the 'new Apple market. Has been for a while.
You can walk into any store and see what Apple now is.
It sure isn't a desktop company by any stretch. And the attention to the desktop focuses on the iMac and Mini.
The x-Mac seems obvious. So why don't Apple want to build one? It makes them more like PC Towers. They're moving away from that.
It's like the classic side on Dell tower vs iMac picture. Wires. Not wires. And that was years ago.
Lemon Bon Bon.
I think they're just taking whatever sells well and riding it as far as possible. Keeping a lot of cash on hand means they can buy into other things if necessary. The goal seems to be to make the lives of people revolve around Apple products wherever possible. They sell devices that aren't really interchangeable with non Apple products thus limiting choice once you start to integrate Apple products so it becomes a matter of what fits best within the product array provided by a single company. It's actually pretty incredible how well they've done. I don't spite them for that. They claim to want to focus on product lines where they feel they can make a difference which is really just corporate rhetoric. They have a number of mature product lines with good followings. These should see proper updates, and we need some machines that are competitive in terms of offering the best possible hardware rather than only what people on here feel is good enough for the mainstream consumer. The laptop gpu thing seems to be a sticky issue as killing that in favor of intel's offerings just to thin out hardware would alienate many different groups of users and leave them without a lot of differentiation between their two laptop categories.
I've tried to explain some of this before. Claims of performance under the G5 were greatly overstated just like all of the 64 bit garbage and about how much ram it could effectively use. Apple was just holding onto markets there that it had owned for years. The photoshop actions thing was a lie. Perhaps they were testing against earlier Pentium 4s that were lacking in ram.
On ram you're kind of mistaken here, but it's a common mistake. OSX and Windows can both operate with a sub optimal amount of ram. A lot of applications were bumping up against the 32 bit wall for years, which meant that you ensured your workflow worked within its limits whether that meant turning things off, using raid or at least fast drives with minimal excess data for boot volumes or scratch disks, or whatever else. Given the current cost of ram, it's easier just to load it up and let the system handle as much as possible within ram rather than swap space. You also don't have to make quite as much effort to manage your settings in many applications. Photoshop is one where in the next version the potential ceiling could raise again if they assign more functions to 32 bit as they did with 16 long ago. If you're working with mixtures of photographic and cg output, 32 bit floating point formats can be quite advantageous given the extreme range that they can hold. It's not that you see all of it simultaneously. It's simply there if you need it, and it's excellent for compositing. Nuke is still way ahead of them in that regard. I don't use it (I wouldn't get enough use out of it to justify the $5k or so), but I still wish Adobe was more like The Foundry in terms of adding powerful features
On the topic of 3d I'm not sure what application you were using. Many of them ran primarily under Windows or Linux with the OSX releases prior to the Intel transition having been really gutted comparatively. I owned a powerbook too. They were not powerful. They were terribly slow. The core2 duo macbook pros were the point where it felt like laptops were starting to keep up with the push for power from software. Even then the integrated gpu models were too slow in anything requiring OpenGL.
3d is an area that's actually evolved quite a bit with machine hardware. Since I mentioned the previous 32 bit limit, consider that meant much more restrictive polycounts or texture resolutions. Many things that had to be mapped years ago can be represented by geometry today. Scanline as a general concept looks like it's going to fade out from rendering. There's still a lot to be said for efficiency, but that's an area where the advancements in computer hardware change the way people are able to work. That's a point that's commonly misunderstood especially when it comes to topics like how long people own a desktop or workstation. If they make a living from it, a new purchase is typically made when it allows them a smoother workflow or the new software with whatever settings won't run on the old one. A 20% change in benchmarks doesn't always mean much of anything. It can be a lot of things. It could be a gpu requirement in terms of what supports a certain OpenGL version or Mercury playback in the case of NVidia. It could be that you want more cpu power because the old one is starting to choke. It could be ram because you're tired of hiding things and closing out applications to ensure that everything runs stable. I think you need to consider the difference between can run on and runs smoothly on. They can be quite different in specs. A macbook pro isn't necessarily that bad in terms of cpu power. I can still choke the gpus, and (many) previous Apple laptop issues make me concerned about trusting one as a primary machine.
Anyway I'd still like to know what program it was. I can't think of any that ran better on a powerbook than Windows, even if the powerbook was newer than the Windows box. I'm not sure if you realize just how much of that was unavailable on the mac prior to the intel transition including many things that only ported basic versions.
Old workstations will get beaten by newer laptops.
Just look at the G4 450 in my living room vs a dual core iMac. That's what ten years will do to you, I guess. Even a few years.
Laptops have closed the gap. That's where the focus is now. It's a massive market.
If you're 'right on the edge.' The Pro might be it. But how many? Wizard suggests 50K or less? (Paraphrasing.)
As for the G5 benches, Apple played the card they got dealt. It gave the P4 with netburst archi a bloody nose. But it did concede clock speed. Which meant Apple probably did pick their bench marks. Ergo the howls of derision following it's debut from 'PEE CEE' buyers. *Shrugs. If it had been clock for clock it would have been beyond doubt, I'd guess. It was a respectable chip. Now consigned to history.
I remember the program. Lightwave. And yes. Before you chirp in...the Mac version has perhaps been behind the PC version (just like Mac Maya lagged to some degree...) But shrugs* again. During the dark G4 mhz years...was there anybody left that didn't storm for the exit when Apple was in trouble?
There's still Mac 3D people. Still Mac Photoshop users. Final Cut users. How big the rump is? Depends on how you see the creative market. Does that count everyone from the Mini to the Pro? On Laptops as well? Just Pro buyers?
Just those who can buy super duper 'Photoshop' from another company software at the Houdini/Xsi/Maya high end?
As per the quote. The 3D course had workstations that were a few years old. Verses a G4 1 gig plus (1.4 gig G4 I think...) The 'workstations' had little ram relative to these days, poor screen update (relatively weak GPU) and the renders took ages. The PB G4 smashed them. Sure it wasn't a level playing field. Is it ever? Sure, my example is anecdotal. And I had to go home to a 'so-so' Athlon PC to continue my homework on. The kit was old on the course. Or wasn't brand new. But computers age badly. Ergo buy a new iMac every 3 years and I'll be happy. My needs aren't your needs.
I remember being at the Bournemouth NCCA for 3D in 2000/2001. Dual Pentium 500s/1 gig Pentiums. My Athlon was 800 mhz at the time. Cost me £2k. About. Xsi. In Beta. The course leaders plumped for that vs Maya. The students on the Programmers course got Maya. Learning 3D has never come naturally to me. I like Lightwave though. My needs can't justify a £3-4k Mac Pro that will do the render in a minute less. I don't need to render things over a week. Apple do offer a top end iMac now that more than gives me what I want due to the fact they priced the Pro insanely wiht each revision over the last ten years (and no doubt pushed more of the faithful pros over to the dark side.)
I take your point that 3D is on another planet right now. But how concerned are Apple with that market or ever have been? Mac Render farms? Look at Apple and Open GL cards vs PC Open GL cards?
Wizard's frustration is palpable and I have some sympathy with him. At least historically. But if you gave me a fully loaded iMac i7 8 gigs of ram and 2 gigs of Vram I'd be in heaven. It's telling that Apple are now able to offer such a high end iMac. Maybe that fits 'most' of their creative demographic now. Ball park 650-750k iMacs sold vs 50k Pros? (Just guessing.)
(Maybe the Pro has a dam bursting surge of Pros buyers waiting for Sandy Bridge?)
My point being. There's an uber duber high end that Apple doesn't seem overly concerned about. Sure. Intel have sat Sandy Bridge. But Apple could have offered more ram, better gpus as standard, given us a more compact pro with better value but no. It languished for the want of a cpu for almost 2 years? Year and a half? After that sort of treatment to it's 'Pro' customers I'd be surprised if there are still lights on in the building.
I admire people for their loyalty.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Pros have been using laptops for a decade now for their mobile activities anyway, and now there are quad core options, and pretty soon enough, hexacore, etc.
The latest Intel Xeon processors have up to 10 physical cores. Pros may do graphic design work on laptops, but the heavy 3D rendering is done on desktop towers or rack mounted servers. If running Handbrake for 10 minutes causes a MacBook Pro to heat up and the fans to run loudly at full speed, what chance does it have at running rendering and computation jobs that take a week or longer to complete?
Now that Mac OS Lion and Lion Server are supported under virtualization, I would like to see Apple start making 2U or even 3U rack mounted servers with dual or even quad 10 core processors. They should also make a deal with VMware to bring ESXi and all the admin tools to the Mac. Mac users in many companies are already demanding native Mac versions of VMware admin tools such as Vshpere Client to manage their VMware servers and clusters, but VMware has been unresponsive. The situation could improve if Apple stepped in.
'Typical' PC Gamer Tower types I've spoken to...an ex-friend of mine seems to find the iMac limiting.
Shrugs.*
He's paid a total of £2700 to keep his i7 tower up to date...with another GPU purchase. Uses it for gaming.
Might as well have got a HD tv and PS3. My mileage. And a top end iMac with dual boot into Windows. Far better value all round.
Especially if you're putting the latest gpu through a tiny 20 inch monitor. Doesn't make sense to me.
Desktops. You pay the Apple premium due to the fact that Apple 'lost' the desktop wars. But with Airs and iOS devices, Apple have got in first, bought up all the components and are showing how to fight the fight on a new battle field. They're winning. Handsomely.
Yes, Apple hasn't cared much about desktop games in a decade, it's always been a different market segment. Especially as that's the last refuge of computer users that still assemble their computers from interchangeable parts. I don't think a PS3 can compare with a computer rig these days. PCs can be hooked up to TVs, so I don't know why anyone would stick with a 20" screen for games.
I'd argue all Apple's machines have a lack of configurability. But that's how they do things from top to bottom. Even the Pro (purportedly an expansive machine...) but the GPU might as well be soldered onto the M/Board for all the good it does. You have 'standard' average card or a premiumly priced card version of the PC market. Whhooop. That's some choice.
I really do wish that you would block out any thoughts related to GPUs when talking about machine configuarability. GPUs aren't even in most peoples thoughts when discussing accessibility. It is almost like nobody in this forum has never added an Ethernet card to a PC or other fast I/O device.
Give the iMac a Raid and some more ram and it thumps the 4/6 core models for value and performance.
An often repeated but senseless statement. IMac has none of the features of a Mac Pro nor desktops in general.
Sales of desktops flat? *Shrugs. By what metric? Apple sold 4 million laptops because that's the way things are going.
Apples! Desktop sales are flat in the US.
Those are Apple sales. 1 million desktops. If most of those are iMacs it's doing pretty well historically compared to the 'Candy' iMac's Halo High. How many Minis sold? Pros? If they got 250K sold between them they've done well. Apple don't do break outs. But if they iMac sold 650-750k it's doing very well for a single desktop/model.
Considering the size of the market those would be pathetic numbers.
What did the 'Candy' iMac sell at it's peak in any given quarter? 544k? Back when Apple well selling 1 million units per quarter (or less!) that was good then. The market has changed greatly since then in terms of portability vs desktop.
The market is always changing. However the demand for desktops will not go up in smoke anytime soon.
Factor in that the price of the mini and it's improvements (in my eyes...) were relatively modest. Same for the iMac bar the top end model (which took me by surprise.)
The Mini is effectively the only desktop Apple has. It really isn't a bad machine but the design is long in the tooth. I'm not talking about the box here but rather the hardware architecture.
Mini vs laptop? May as well get entry Air.
Maybe if you like laptops. However the AIR is only really passable as. A second computer.
All the people I know who have the iMac love it. Any Pro user paying for a dual processor model for nearly £3000 may not see it that way. But that fact is the iMac is no longer the 13 inch Candy iMac. I think the screen is good. Sure, it's not quite as subtle as my old CRT Trinitron but it's good for an LED. Sure, you can pay a fortune for a screen. And if you have your own screen you're limited to a Mac Mini, Laptop or a Pro. I see the argument for an x-Mac. Nobody was more disappointed that the Cube 'got it wrong' (Apple Hubris moment...) than me...but I don't see the evidence that a separate desktop will be added to 3 models of desktop.
As many know I limp along on a 2008 MBP. Just today I was taking to a 61 year old woman where she brought up the idea that she needed to by a new iMac. Mind you a late 2009 iMac, not exactly an old machine. The old lady needed more speed!
Now I have no idea what she does that requires better performance. It does highlight different tolerances to performance
4 desktops? Not happening. My numbers aren't off. Apple have shaved the laptop line to Pro and Air. They've canned the Macbook entry model. As far as Macs go. Two portable lines.
Nothing was shaved, they transitioned their customer space to new technology. Apple traditionally has had two lines of Laptops. At this point they have 5 distinct products which is fairly decent. Desktop wise the have one plus the iMac and Pro neither of which is a traditional desktop.
Augmented by the iOS devices.
Desktop. It's a little odd to have 3 models. But I can't see them dropping the Mini. The iMac. They're getting most desktop sales from there. I no longer see the 'built in' screen as any more of a problem than it would be for a laptop. It's been fine. 24 inch model took a while to adjust to. Massive. I never liked the look of a lot of ugly 3rd party monitors really. Apple are about the whole widget. Most of their kit from laptop to iOS include a screen. The Mini and Pro do not. A minority....with diminutive sales. Yes. It's a bitch to get into. So is an iPhone. So is a laptop. Apple want you to buy new kit. It's not as if the original Mac was hyper accessible? Most towers are crap inside compared to the state of the art Pro.
As for configure. To what? I can add a Raid and a decent 2 gig Vram GPU with 16 gigs of ram. I don't see any shame in that. It's not like the Pro, the Mini or the Laptops have a vast array of options at Apple.
What ever your needs are. I'm not sure why you are having such an issue with this concept. Have you never walked into a manufacturing plant, lab or other non office facility and seen PCs driving huge amounts of I/O.
It leaves us with what they are going to do to inject life into the Pro. Price. Redesign.
Can't wait until Apple updates the Mac line. I hope the Pro drops 1st. I want to see what they're going to do.
Actually so do I. The Pros replacement could come next week.
The Mini had the 'shroud' of death rumour around it. But it got a tweaked design with thunderbolt and an i7 option. Much better than was.
It is pretty much the same a good basic machine. TB has done little for the machine.
AMD? They seem to have signalled they're going to entry the ultra mobile space. Expect reasonably competitive desktop cpus cheaper...but beat Intel? I doubt it anymore. They've taken a beating since Core Duo/2/i7 onwards. Recent desktop benches show promise. But they haven't stormed ahead. And Ivy bridge is yet to hit. The GPUs are very competitive. The Fusion seems reasonable. Will they get Apple's business? Doubt it. Never say never, I guess.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Fusion is actually very power efficient and has resulted in very nice laptop models. You do give up CPU performance but in some tasks Fusion can be extremely competitive with Intel hardware when the GPU is leveraged. At the very low end Zacate based systems are out performing competitive Intel hardware.
Will Apple go the AMD route? If they did it would be in select machines. It would very much depend upon what Apple wants to build but one needs to understand that not all Apple hardware platforms are barn burners. Do realize though that Intel has effectively fumbled with Ivy Bridge, it could be well after July before an IB suitable for the AIRs appears. It may become an issue of marketing that pushes Apple to buy Fusion.
Bullseye on both points.
As for your second point. It was pretty interesting when I attended a '3D Class' around eight years ago. Lots of '1 gighz' PEE CEE 'workstations'... One day, this girl came in with a 'PowerBook' (as they were then...I think...) and ran the 3D program in question much faster and rendered much faster than the desktops! I couldn't believe (at the time) how quick it was to model and render on the laptop.
Not so long ago, Apple boasted that the G5 could handle audio this and Photoshop actions that in x seconds...and do Mathematica algorithms twice as fast as a Pentium 4 etc.
Today. Many years after the transition to Intel...we have machines that can blitz G5s to melted marshmallows...in laptops and desktops from consumer to prosumer.
For a majority of creative types, I'd guess a quad core i7 with 4-8 gigs of ram with a reasonably recent GPU is more than enough.
You're paying an awful lot extra for that 2nd socket when maybe a Raid and more memory may better serve you.
By the time you get 6 and 8 core iMacs (who knows..?) in the next few years with even more ram and who knows what else...maybe even bigger screens to create an iMac Pro (you never know...
...it's not like the quad or 6 core Pro shames the iMac in any way. The iMac i7 quad core was all over the six core Pro in Aftereffects (a program that is apparently hard going?)
The 6 core should still outperform the imac by a fair margin in After Effects. Some of the barefeats tests suggested around 30% on many tasks. It does tax the gpu somewhat, so the superior options there are nice. GPUs in general are a weird topic. They aren't quite as simple to understand as cpu options. By the way, 4GB of ram sucks. It would be awful with Lion. It wasn't even fun years ago. I had a G5 with 4GB of ram years ago. Even then I generated massive page files. You just didn't gain much from going significantly higher because the applications themselves were 32 bit (and 64 bit applications weren't even fully supported until Snow Leopard) so they were unable to directly address more than 3GB of ram or so per application. Given that the limit no longer exists, you can gain quite a lot from 16 or 32GB of ram depending on your work.
The latest Intel Xeon processors have up to 10 physical cores. Pros may do graphic design work on laptops, but the heavy 3D rendering is done on desktop towers or rack mounted servers. If running Handbrake for 10 minutes causes a MacBook Pro to heat up and the fans to run loudly at full speed, what chance does it have at running rendering and computation jobs that take a week or longer to complete?
Now that Mac OS Lion and Lion Server are supported under virtualization, I would like to see Apple start making 2U or even 3U rack mounted servers with dual or even quad 10 core processors. They should also make a deal with VMware to bring ESXi and all the admin tools to the Mac. Mac users in many companies are already demanding native Mac versions of VMware admin tools such as Vshpere Client to manage their VMware servers and clusters, but VMware has been unresponsive. The situation could improve if Apple stepped in.
Heh.. I'm not going to get into the concept of ESX on OSX. I recall most of the admin tools running under OSX, but Apple doesn't have any real servers to be certified. Macbook pros might be okay for rendering stills. With complex animations it might run too hot to be left that way for many hours. Intel has different suggestions for operating temperature if the machine is going to be active more than 8 hours a day.
I remember the program. Lightwave. And yes. Before you chirp in...the Mac version has perhaps been behind the PC version (just like Mac Maya lagged to some degree...) But shrugs* again. During the dark G4 mhz years...was there anybody left that didn't storm for the exit when Apple was in trouble?
There's still Mac 3D people. Still Mac Photoshop users. Final Cut users. How big the rump is? Depends on how you see the creative market. Does that count everyone from the Mini to the Pro? On Laptops as well? Just Pro buyers?
Just those who can buy super duper 'Photoshop' from another company software at the Houdini/Xsi/Maya high end?
As per the quote. The 3D course had workstations that were a few years old. Verses a G4 1 gig plus (1.4 gig G4 I think...) The 'workstations' had little ram relative to these days, poor screen update (relatively weak GPU) and the renders took ages. The PB G4 smashed them. Sure it wasn't a level playing field. Is it ever? Sure, my example is anecdotal. And I had to go home to a 'so-so' Athlon PC to continue my homework on. The kit was old on the course. Or wasn't brand new. But computers age badly. Ergo buy a new iMac every 3 years and I'll be happy. My needs aren't your needs.
I remember being at the Bournemouth NCCA for 3D in 2000/2001. Dual Pentium 500s/1 gig Pentiums. My Athlon was 800 mhz at the time. Cost me £2k. About. Xsi. In Beta. The course leaders plumped for that vs Maya. The students on the Programmers course got Maya. Learning 3D has never come naturally to me. I like Lightwave though. My needs can't justify a £3-4k Mac Pro that will do the render in a minute less. I don't need to render things over a week. Apple do offer a top end iMac now that more than gives me what I want due to the fact they priced the Pro insanely wiht each revision over the last ten years (and no doubt pushed more of the faithful pros over to the dark side.)
I take your point that 3D is on another planet right now. But how concerned are Apple with that market or ever have been? Mac Render farms? Look at Apple and Open GL cards vs PC Open GL cards?
Wizard's frustration is palpable and I have some sympathy with him. At least historically. But if you gave me a fully loaded iMac i7 8 gigs of ram and 2 gigs of Vram I'd be in heaven. It's telling that Apple are now able to offer such a high end iMac. Maybe that fits 'most' of their creative demographic now. Ball park 650-750k iMacs sold vs 50k Pros? (Just guessing.)
(Maybe the Pro has a dam bursting surge of Pros buyers waiting for Sandy Bridge?)
My point being. There's an uber duber high end that Apple doesn't seem overly concerned about. Sure. Intel have sat Sandy Bridge. But Apple could have offered more ram, better gpus as standard, given us a more compact pro with better value but no. It languished for the want of a cpu for almost 2 years? Year and a half? After that sort of treatment to it's 'Pro' customers I'd be surprised if there are still lights on in the building.
I admire people for their loyalty.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Maya was behind for years. The OSX version also transitioned to 64 bit and got some features a year after the PC version. The same thing happened with Photoshop where CS4 was a 64 bit program under Windows as they initially planned for 64 bit Carbon. The 64 bit and Cocoa transitions were reversed in the release cycle. I don't think either of us has reliable sales figures there. I've seen tons of mac pros here, but that doesn't mean anything relative to total sales. It is understandable for sales to be low on such an extended cycle. The same is probably true for other oems. I still think you should consider the value in ram. More ram slots is one of the few things I like about the imac over a laptop. Photoshop keeps expanding 32 bit workflows. After Effects and Nuke have 32 bit linear workflows available. Since you mentioned 3d, ram is very helpful if you're using construction history or viewing with high resolution textures in your viewport. The 64 bit transition there and in programs like zbrush enabled quite a lot that you couldn't accomplish with 4GB of ram. Anyway I'm going off track.
Yes, Apple hasn't cared much about desktop games in a decade, it's always been a different market segment. Especially as that's the last refuge of computer users that still assemble their computers from interchangeable parts. I don't think a PS3 can compare with a computer rig these days. PCs can be hooked up to TVs, so I don't know why anyone would stick with a 20" screen for games.
I don't think it's a case of a PS3 comparing to a PC 'rig' on paper. To the casual gamers eye the PS3 is still a force to be reckoned with and looks fantastic on a 50 inch Plasma. I bought my Mum a PS3, Batman Arkham and a went halves to get her a 50 inch Panasonic. Looks the business. (She's been a console veteran as far back as the Megadrive! N64. Gamecube...Wii.. PS1, 2 and now 3!!!)
In contrast, I don't know anybody who has a rig hooked upto the TV. It certainly isn't a common feature amongst the everyday gamers I know who are either tapping on iPods or Dads who want some R and R on an x-Box.
Tell a lie. I know one girl. Online Morg buddy. She bought a 6k gaming rig (she'd been saving up for years...) and hooked it upto a 50 inch LCD, I think...with gaming chair, console...controls...etc...probably surround sound...PC was at least quad core (for that price it had better be..) with a SLI graphics Nvidia thing going down. Think she got it from Scan computers.co.uk. Anyhow. She bought it so she could play the Old Republic which is the latest Morrg flavour of the month. But she's pretty hard core gaming wise. She works hard then gets home and canes it for hours in a straight line. I don't see her as a typical gamer in the era of the 'casual' gamer which has Tsunami'd the 'traditional' fraternity of gaming.)
The last time I was that devoted to gaming was when I had a c64 and lost two years of my life! :P
(Give me BoulderDash Construction Kit anyday.)
It has been muted...by some that the 'gaming developers' are holding back the latest PCs because the 'engines' are on consoles as well (which are getting on a bit now...but I still think I don't see many current PC games that can eclipse eg 'Heavy Rain' on the PS3 which looks stunning.) I'm not so sure the PS3 has been pushed to it's limits yet. I don't see a new gen of consoles until 2013. The PS3 and xBox seem to be doing well still especially with the relatively recent price cuts. Vs paying £500 for the latest Ati card? *shrugs.
By the time the iPad3 hits and certainly with a 'Rogue' powered iPad4 I doubt the 'casual' gamer will care much for PC tower rigs or PS4s. (Though 'some' might. There will still be a market for consoles. Just like there's a market for PS Vitas or 3DSs, right?
Lemon Bon Bon.
By the time the iPad3 hits and certainly with a 'Rogue' powered iPad4 I doubt the 'casual' gamer will care much for PC tower rigs or PS4s. (Though 'some' might. There will still be a market for consoles. Just like there's a market for PS Vitas or 3DSs, right?
Haven't we heard that before? Consoles and especially PCs will always be a few steps ahead of handheld devices. Maybe with the iPad 4 you'll be able to get titles as good in quality as PS360 games. You'll still be controlls limited as I mentioned before, but ok, say Apple allows a third party controller. But then, console and PC hardware will have jumped ahead too. The developers of this demo say its possible only on 2 terraflop + cards (for reference, the 7970 is over 3tf):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSXyztq_0uM
Each successive generation of consoles has enjoyed bigger revenues and a bigger pool of consumers, I doubt the next will be different.
Haven't we heard that before? Consoles and especially PCs will always be a few steps ahead of handheld devices. Maybe with the iPad 4 you'll be able to get titles as good in quality as PS360 games. You'll still be controlls limited as I mentioned before, but ok, say Apple allows a third party controller. But then, console and PC hardware will have jumped ahead too. The developers of this demo say its possible only on 2 terraflop + cards (for reference, the 7970 is over 3tf):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSXyztq_0uM
Each successive generation of consoles has enjoyed bigger revenues and a bigger pool of consumers, I doubt the next will be different.
Apple have dealt a smashing, side winding blow to Sony and Nintendo in portability. Nintendo posted losses for the 1st time in? Sony aren't rolling in money either?
Things are different this time. Sure they are.
When even Sony people are talking about whether there will be a PS4 or whether it's needed you know that market is looking vulnerable.
The iPad hasn't even got started yet...and the old timers are breathing hard and sweating like pigs.
As for the physical controllers. Not an issue for 200 million iPad/iPHone/iPod touch owners who are doing very well without physical buttons.
That was a criticism in the early days. But with hundreds of thousands of apps (most of the games!) now in the App store, who cares? A few maybe.
Lemon Bon Bon.