2013 Mac mini Wishlist/iMac wishlist - Page 7

 

Welcome to every computer ever made ever by any company ever.

Get off your kick.

Is it Apple pulling out or professionals pulling out of Apple? I want to say neither as there are a number of factors impacting the market for so called Pro machines. One factor is that laptops are often a "better" solution.

 

The Final Cut debacle suggests that Apple is pulling out.  That's the belief among the pro users I've spoken with, none of whom rely on a laptop as their primary content creation machine.  

Some people seem to like it now. I wouldn't need it often, and Premiere is part of Creative Suite. Due to those two things, I have no motivation to learn it.

 

My recollection was the original FCP was a bit buggy and incomplete as well.  And FCP X was pretty much rebuilt from the ground up and is up to 10.0.7.  The features added (or re-added back as the case may be) aren't consumer features either.

 

Who puts in that kind of effort just to pull out?

 

Plus Boris released their plugin pack not long ago.  At $995 I guess they are bullish that there will be enough pro users of FCPX to have made that effort worth while.

This is an extremely poor example if you ask me. Final Cut X may have upset a few immature video professionals but it should not have been a surprise to anybody that the software had received a major overhaul. It was pretty clear well before release that FCX was a total rewrite so anybody expecting a package that was exactly like the original FCP is frankly an idiot.

Now I'm not going to say that Apple handled the release of FCX well but that is a far cry from saying that they are giving up on professionals. The fact is the original FCP didn't get to the point it was instantly and was the result of multiple releases, FCX is following a similar path with missing features carefully being rolled in and other enhancements being made. Software of this type is more of a service than a product as it is never fixed functionality wise. Nope the reaction to FCX suggest that many people in the video industry are self centered, in mature and don't have a clue when it comes to the technology they use. It also suggests that they are not malleable and adaptable to changes in technology.
Yep, that pretty much supports my theory on these so called Pros. Mean while real professionals have adapted to and have learned to leverage FCX to their advantage. It is all about evolution where the ability to use tools speed along human evolution, in most cases, Of course even today you have humans that have trouble adapting to new tools and remain stuck to the tools of their youth.

The Mac Pro is an interesting case of neglect and circumstance that does make Apple look less than committed to the Mac Pro. However this doesn't mean they lack commitment to Pros. The reality is that video professionals are an extremely tiny portion of the Pro market. I suspect that 1% would be a stretch.

These sorts of software packages are never really complete. FCX was basically a total reset of the code base so in effect starting from ground zero. Considering that FCX never deserved the crap it got from the so called Pros out there. Beyond that the refactored FCX is in many ways a vastly improved Pro product that Pros with an open mind and a willingness to learn quickly discovered.
The flight from FCX has been greatly exaggerated. Many see it as a vastly improved product.

It isn't that simple. The $999 machine is marketed as a server thus no real need for GT3. This is in fact one of the issues I have with Apples marketing of the Mini as the server designation screws up tiering.

On the other hand GT3 graphics in a Mini would be fantastic. Cooling may be a problem but they need to address that anyways. Couple one of Hesse "H" series processors with a lot of RAM and you end up with an ideal Mini.

 

Hopefully not too ideal or we wont get it. :)

 

The only reason the mini lost discrete graphics was because it's become a CPU powerhouse.  The only things that the iMac does significantly better is anything GPU accelerated.

 

If the $799 2.3Ghz Core i7 Mini had the GT 630M I think a lot of folks wouldn't be buying the iMac.  Especially given the lack of supply.  Heck even as an extra $100 BTO option for the top end $899 2.6Ghz Core i7 model to push it to $999 and a lot of folks would be doing that over an iMac.

 

It's just one of those things that Apple does.  It's smart for them even if it is annoying.

That still doesn't make sense. Intel demoed Heaven at 17W and they said it was targeting Ultrabooks. Also why would the M line start at 37W when it only has GT2 but still offers dual-core?

A Q3 launch is late too, it was supposed to be April:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-haswell-cpu-processor,20042.html

"Haswell therefore arrives substantially later than originally anticipated and it appears that Intel's product cadence has become much more elastic recently. The original tick-tock model that was introduced in 2006 predicted die shrinks in uneven years and new architectures in even years. With the June launch date, Intel is about six months behind its own plan."

:applause: Intel, you've done it again. So nothing until WWDC basically.

Hardly, I'm not sure why this keeps coming up when there were clear problems that had to be addressed and major workflow changes. Every other program tries to work in native formats and that was the goal everyone was working towards. Apple instead decided everything should be transcoded to ProRes. Drop an hour long Motion JPEG clip into FCP 7 and you can edit it natively, chop it around and export to Motion JPEG, almost zero CPU usage and very fast. Do it in FCPX and it will try to transcode the entire thing to ProRes - even if you stop it doing that, your only export options are limited or you have to convert through Compressor. Sure it's an ideal world to use ProRes with fixed aspects as an edit codec and H.264 for delivery but we don't live in an ideal world.

This applies to consumers too. Apple makes an iPhone that lets you (for whatever reason) shoot video in portrait when it should really shoot widescreen video no matter how you hold the phone (and crop it horizontally on the portrait display for preview) but you can't edit that video easily because FCPX likes standard widescreen video formats.

Sure people can adapt to it just like people adapted to the many FCP 7 flaws but when people have legitimate concerns about software they base their entire careers around, it's not justified to say they are just being immature. Not allowing migrating old projects was a huge mistake and they've still just left it to 3rd parties.

People should be receptive to change and putting up immediate barriers before the change is presented is immature but there's no problem complaining about things they can and should fix. I'm not sure they fully appreciate how important Quicktime is to the media world.

 

I'd rather have the 630M over the HD4000...

There in is the problem, GPU acceleration is a lot more important than a lot of people realize.    All sorts of software can leverage the GPU and it isn't always clearly advertised.   That is probably the result of Apple providing a clean fall back mechanism.

 

As to being a CPU power house I don't buy into that either.   All of Apples 15" MBPs are faster.

 

As to the iMac, I see shipping times have slipped again, this makes me wonder what is up.    Apple admitted to a production problem at release but you would think that was addressed by now.   So is it a production issue now or a demand issue?    I was actually hoping for some news with regard to that today.

 

Dave

 

 

This is true but the reaction that we saw was more of one where people considered FCX to be engraved in stone never to change or evolve.

We don't know if Apple dropped the ball here. All we know is that shipments are slipping. Which could be an Apple screwup or a result or stronger than expected sales.

As to the 21" being inferior to the 27" isn't that up to the buyer to decide? Many would consider a 27" iMac to be too large.

More profits for Apple with all these new processors coming out every 6 months .It never ends.
 

It took FCP about 5 years to get to production quality. It was 2 years since the previous FCP update and they started off from a much more mature codebase. It's not really too far out for people to expect feature parity. The major workflow changes aren't trivial either. If you relied on iWork for example and there was an update that gave you almost all the functionality but you could only put your text in black, green or red colours, you'd be stuck.

The interface is fine and wasn't an issue. It's things like having to convert hours of footage for no reason, like not being able to open clips easily in 3rd party programs once you've made events (akin to editing photos in Photoshop once they've been put into iPhoto), like not being able to share edits easily because the metadata goes into the filesystem not into the project (and because there isn't a save as or export function), like being restricted to certain output formats, like not having imports/export for colour and audio correction (now fixed), like not having certain codec support (now fixed) and so on. When they make something better, they should get credit for it, when they make things worse, they need to know about it.

If Avid did that sort of thing, they'd be finished. Apple gets a pass because the users are dependent on Apple, not the other way round and they did make some good decisions. Avid's success entirely depends on their customers so they have to do what's in their best interests. It is interesting to see how they treated FCPX and Maps differently though. What happened with FCPX was way more important than a few names being out of place here and there.

They'd have to find a way to cut the price. They could if they used the desktop i7-3770T but I doubt they'd do that.

Applications used for work are generally more conservative in terms of their changes. One day they were selling FCP. The next FCPX couldn't even open the old files and FCP was taken off the market. It's an entirely new application either way, so there's no reason to just go along with it. It arguably takes roughly the same effort to switch to a competing package. Given that many of these guys may have already held Creative Suite licenses, Premiere was an obvious choice for many of them. The price of FCPX is cheap and Premiere can be part of a bundle. Those two are on roughly the same level of accessibility. Avid costs quite a bit more. Beyond that it's silly to label so many users by what you read online. Most of them just grumbled and either eventually came to use it or went with another package. The extremely verbal crowd was the minority there.

I remember you referenced other machines that used a low end gpu and similar cpu in that price range. It could happen, but I'd expect it to be more when quad core further infiltrates the line. That could happen with Broadwell.

 

Apparently you paid more attention to it than me. It looked like what they did with Aperture to me, at which point I had no interest in the application. It's the same thing there. It generates a large clunky library file where Lightroom can just leave a tiny XML in each folder.

The mini 2.6ghz benches really well for the price compared to the rest of the lineup. Stick even a crappy GPU in the mini that'll run Resolve and other GPU required apps and its a significant iMac challenger.

http://barefeats.com/imac12p2.html

Although I have an iMac, I'm still not completely satisfied with it.  I know that apple won't build an xMac similar to a smaller version of the MacPro, but I'd like to see a larger version of the MacMini (in addition to the current one) that would be as powerful as the iMac with the same components.  Connected with a 27" Cinema Display, this would be perfect for me.  

 

Possibly have one case larger than the current Mini, but with two versions - one with Mini components and one with iMac components.

 

Apple wouldn't have to continually make the iMac thinner and thinner and could cut out one step in building an iMac.

Edited by sequitur - 1/23/13 at 8:40am

 

I don't understand the distinction. How is this different from (or better, since it's a more complex setup) than the iMac?

It would be less complex for Apple to build and it could be tweaked more than the current iMac.

That much Ram in the Mini is ridiculous anyway.

Anyone needing 16GB, also needs a higher end Mac.

 

1.  More display choices.  

2.  Ability to share a display with the xMac mini and another computer.  

3.  Longer display life without all the iMac's hot components.

4.  Ability to upgrade drives without a complete teardown (assuming Apple pulled their head out of their arse when designing the xMac mini). 

5.  Ability to upgrade the computer without throwing out a beautiful 27" IPS display.

 

There are probably other advantages, but those are off the top of my head.  

 640K ought to be enough for the mini.

 

Stet.

 

You can do this now.

 

False.

 

It's a Mac Mini.

 

Which you don't have to do.

Maybe I misread the original question, I thought it was regarding the advantages of a desktop computer with an external display versus an all in one design like the iMac.

 

Of course many of the advantages apply to using a Mini with an external display, that was the point.  And yes, the hot components glommed onto the back of the iMac's display do indeed affect display longevity.  iMac displays lose their ability to calibrate correctly over time faster than dedicated displays in a studio environment.  A general rule of thumb with electronics is that higher operating temperatures decrease longevity.  Doesn't matter if it's in a pretty Apple case or not.

 

Dunno...they didn't bench the $799 one...

You can't say with 100% certainty that that is the case. For some users a Mac with a lot of RAM can be very useful. Further the Mini performs much better than at any time in the past.

It could for some uses though using the price delta to buy more RAM works out better for some users. An SSD thrown in the mix can alter the value in buying a CPU upgrade too. So for "most" users considering a faster processor should only be considered after fleshing out the system with other performance enhancing features.

Only chumps and fools buy RAM through Apple.  I can't believe this is even a discussion.