Bottom line - Apple's primary product is their iOS platform (iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch/Apple TV). The Mac produce line is inconsequential. In terms of the Mac product line, the portables are where the sales are. Desktop machines (of which the Mac Pro constitutes only a small fraction) are not important.
If Apple discontinued the Mac Pro tomorrow, most people wouldn't notice (although those that would notice, are the ones who frequent this site). If Apple discontinued the entire Mac line tomorrow, a few more people would notice, but they would still be an insanely profitable company.
But there's no need to take my word for any of this. All of these numbers are publicly available in Apple's SEC filings and press releases.
This is very silly. IOS currently lacks the tools to operate a standalone platform. If you're suggesting they develop them for Windows or Linux, that takes time, beta releases, and transition plans. That could not happen tomorrow. Did you (mistakenly) think your comment was clever simply because you can read bar graphs?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
Apple can never discontinue the entire Mac line until you can develop iOS apps under iOS. This is a fairly file-centric task with lots of source code files and text and would require a terminal. If the UI changed on plugging an iPad into a large display, it can be done but I think in the near term, we will more likely see Apple trying various things to keep their product lines profitable enough to justify making them.
They could get rid of the desktops eventually but they all have a target audience. The Mac Pro audience is the smallest and shrinking in share relative to the others so is by far the most likely to go first but we'll see what they do next year. Tim Cook's word usage was interesting:
"Although we didn’t have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at today’s event, don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for later next year.
We also announced a MacBook Pro with a Retina Display that is a great solution for many pros."
You notice he never said there was a new Mac Pro coming next year, just a product aimed at the same audience. Time will tell what form it takes. It's a very long time to wait for an update though and I suspect technology developments in the mean-time will make it clearer what's coming:
I'm not reading into it AT ALL. The problem I'm currently facing is that Windows is starting to make more sense in terms of features and available hardware. I'll probably just procrastinate the decisions again, but corporate speak regarding may release product X within 12 months means nothing to me. He's just trying to reassure people. CEOs do this at times. As you mentioned, they need development hardware, and this has to accommodate a large range of developers. Beyond that if they just canceled that many lines overnight, the bad PR would hit their idevice sales too. The last thing I'd like to mention is that the person you responded to apparently doesn't think 15% of revenue is significant for a large corporation. That alone should tell you something.
You notice he never said there was a new Mac Pro coming next year, just a product aimed at the same audience. Time will tell what form it takes.
Would it not be amusing if it were a high-end xMac?
It would - it could just be an iMac with the display panel ripped out. The 21.5" 2.8GHz quad-i7, 512MB 6770M GPU. Take $200 off for the panel and it's $1499.
You can see the excessive margins in the Mac Pro when you compare it to this as the spec is around the same, likewise performance. The Xeon isn't the expensive part so something between the iMac design and the Mac Pro design is sucking up $1000 and I don't think it's the components.
Well it has to be one of a limited number of scenarios:
- they update it without a new design with Haswell/Ivy Bridge Xeons
- they discontinue the line in favour of a 6-core iMac or similar
- they redesign it significantly
If it was the first, they'd have updated it with Sandy Bridge Xeons and brought Thunderbolt and USB 3 along for the ride.
If it was the second, I don't think Tim Cook would have said anything.
This points to number 3. We already know the potential issues with Thunderbolt and a PCI GPU and Haswell is supposed to be quite low-power so I think the redesign will be quite radical and The Mac Pro's last (its burial suit, really) - in a decade, it will have no place.
Would it not be amusing if it were a high-end xMac?
That would be funny and probably distressing for many. Being a Proponent of the XMac concept I never really haves seen it as a replacement for the Mac Pro. XMac in my mind is very much a Midrange Desktop Mac (MDM). Of course that means different things to different people, but the general concept is a bit more performance and capability relative to the Mini.
In any event I just have this feeling Cook is talking about a very high performance machine. Instead of an incremental Sandy Bridge E update I suspect that they will be engaging one or more of Intels MIC chips. It would be really pathetic for them to deliver yet another plain old Sandy Bridge E machine in 2013, at best it would be ten months late.
It would - it could just be an iMac with the display panel ripped out. The 21.5" 2.8GHz quad-i7, 512MB 6770M GPU. Take $200 off for the panel and it's $1499.
You can see the excessive margins in the Mac Pro when you compare it to this as the spec is around the same, likewise performance. The Xeon isn't the expensive part so something between the iMac design and the Mac Pro design is sucking up $1000 and I don't think it's the components.
That would rightly put Pros off the Mac for good.
What I find perplexing is that you look at the CPUs as a measure of a machines performance, mostly in respect to single thread performance. While that might fly for a limited set of users, the people that really need the Pro architecture are probably laughing their asses off over the idea.
Well it has to be one of a limited number of scenarios:
- they update it without a new design with Haswell/Ivy Bridge Xeons
- they discontinue the line in favour of a 6-core iMac or similar
- they redesign it significantly
You seemed to have summed up the three most likely vectors.
If it was the first, they'd have updated it with Sandy Bridge Xeons and brought Thunderbolt and USB 3 along for the ride.
Yep! The fact that a simple rev of the machine to Sandy Bridge E didn't happen implies that something else is up.
If it was the second, I don't think Tim Cook would have said anything.
This gets ruled out by default because Pro users would have a very hard time accepting the current iMac design.
This points to number 3.
I have to believe this is the only reasonable choice. The big question is what do they actually have planned. I'm leaning towards very high performance in what would be a new generation of hardware.
We already know the potential issues with Thunderbolt and a PCI GPU and Haswell is supposed to be quite low-power so I think the redesign will be quite radical and The Mac Pro's last (its burial suit, really) - in a decade, it will have no place.
Now this is where I have problems. I really don't see machines like the Mac Pro going away. I see dramatically different physical hardware but the concept of a desktop workstation computer isn't going anywhere. Apple does need to become more realistic with respect to marketing such hardware as at time the are immensely proud of their machines.
In a nut shell Intel doesn't have anything in the conventional processor pipeline that will really make the majority of power users happy. As much as you want to believe that the latest whiz bang processor from Intel is all people will need the reality is just the opposite. Many professionals would love to have what amounts to supercomputer power on their desk, if it could be had at a reasonable price. The demand for that power will not slow either as it will make practicle new industries and allow others to become far more competitive. In a nut shell there is more going on in the world than editing video.
If Apple knows what is good for them, they will not follow some of the same business practices that Nintendo has. Nintendo alienated their biggest fans by trying to appeal to casual gamers with these singing and dancing fluff games. I don't think Apple is dumb enough to alienate the pro market. Call me a dumb optimist.
It would - it could just be an iMac with the display panel ripped out. The 21.5" 2.8GHz quad-i7, 512MB 6770M GPU. Take $200 off for the panel and it's $1499.
You can see the excessive margins in the Mac Pro when you compare it to this as the spec is around the same, likewise performance. The Xeon isn't the expensive part so something between the iMac design and the Mac Pro design is sucking up $1000 and I don't think it's the components.
Well it has to be one of a limited number of scenarios:
- they update it without a new design with Haswell/Ivy Bridge Xeons
- they discontinue the line in favour of a 6-core iMac or similar
- they redesign it significantly
If it was the first, they'd have updated it with Sandy Bridge Xeons and brought Thunderbolt and USB 3 along for the ride.
If it was the second, I don't think Tim Cook would have said anything.
This points to number 3. We already know the potential issues with Thunderbolt and a PCI GPU and Haswell is supposed to be quite low-power so I think the redesign will be quite radical and The Mac Pro's last (its burial suit, really) - in a decade, it will have no place.
Typically with workstations, you can get higher margins for the top end hardware. At the lowest level the configuration is complete crap. A 6 core imac would still need a different logic board/socket type. Haswell isn't rumored to change this. They're still capping consumer cpus at 4 cores. I kind of wonder how high they'll go with the Xeons per chip. Will it become like the ghz thing where eventually ghz for the sake of more ghz stops really moving the design forward like in the Pentium 4 era. I'm still not sure they'll skip Ivy Bridge E seeing as the chipset won't really change. They'll have to scrap something or cut a cycle short if they intend to catch up, especially with the potential for future delays given how many things have migrated onto the cpu package.
By the way, by not reading into it, I mean that it's still corporate speak and I can't assume that the promise of a future product will mean anything significant to me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winter
If Apple knows what is good for them, they will not follow some of the same business practices that Nintendo has. Nintendo alienated their biggest fans by trying to appeal to casual gamers with these singing and dancing fluff games. I don't think Apple is dumb enough to alienate the pro market. Call me a dumb optimist.
I'm not sure it would affect their balance sheets that much, but you are talking about very loyal users.
By the way, by not reading into it, I mean that it's still corporate speak and I can't assume that the promise of a future product will mean anything significant to me.
This is something everybody should keep in mind Mac Pro or not. Many of us are waiting to see what Apple does with the desktop line up. We could get anything from bumps to machines nobody wants to buy. One should not assume that a future product will meet their expectations or needs.
I really don't see machines like the Mac Pro going away. I see dramatically different physical hardware but the concept of a desktop workstation computer isn't going anywhere.
Intel's roadmap should be the following. That might be the limit of where they can go with electronics.
With a factor of 2 jump at each step plus the Haswell step next year, 2021 should bring in chips around 24x faster than Ivy Bridge. IGP technology should jump by similar, if not better, amounts and be able to do standard x86 processing. This will in many cases double standard x86 processing power we see today as GPUs aren't used for this so we are looking at 48x in 9 years.
This is at the same power levels we see now. So, imagine a Mac Mini 24-48x faster than we have today, with 50Gbps+ Thunderbolt ports, 1Tbytes of SSD coupled with 128GB ReRAM. There's the Mac Pro and it'll be even smaller than the Mini is now.
Of course, long before this point, Intel will be low enough power to get into mobile devices in the mainstream so a lot of people will only be using an iPad-like device.
Certainly due to the low power nature of the chips, they can build workstations with 4x Xeons inside but hardly anybody would buy them.
Many professionals would love to have what amounts to supercomputer power on their desk, if it could be had at a reasonable price. The demand for that power will not slow either as it will make practicle new industries and allow others to become far more competitive. In a nut shell there is more going on in the world than editing video.
I don't see the demand being all that high. Obviously everyone wants to keep making money, I doubt Apple or Intel want to be selling the cheapest devices/components they make but that's what is happening already. If the demand is high, the price is low and vice versa. Xeons will get to the point where they ship in such low volumes and are so expensive that Intel might even stop making them or at least bring the design into more mainstream components.
This is very silly. IOS currently lacks the tools to operate a standalone platform. If you're suggesting they develop them for Windows or Linux, that takes time, beta releases, and transition plans. That could not happen tomorrow. Did you (mistakenly) think your comment was clever simply because you can read bar graphs?
...
The discontinuation of the Mac hardware line is not at all silly. Apple has limited resources. Their hardware development resources should be assigned to their more profitable product lines (iPhone/iPad) not the Mac. Keep in mind that percentage of Apples income that comes form the Mac has been steadily declining.
As to iOS lacking the tools to develop for iOS, there are many solutions.
The easiest solution is to allow the Mac to run on some non-Apple PC's. As it is, Mac OS-X goes out of it's way to make sure that it is running on genuine Apple hardware. Removing this check is an easy solution to allowing iOS development on other platforms.
Another solution involves noticing that iOS is really Mac OS-X, with a different user interface. There is no technical reason why they couldn't release full Mac OS-X for the iPad. Pair a bluetooth keyboard and a bluetooth mouse to an iPad running OS-X, and you have a very tidy development environment.
The truth is that Apple doesn't need the Mac. This doesn't mean that they are killing off the Mac line tomorrow, but they are certainly moving towards morphing the Mac from being a general purpose computer to a desktop iPad. Their goal is to blur the line between desktop and iPad. In a few years it may still be called a Mac, but it will bear little resemblance to the full featured, and expandable computers we are used to.
The Mac Pro is clearly not a part of this vision. Apple is not going after the high end professional that needs massive amounts of computation.
If Apple knows what is good for them, they will not follow some of the same business practices that Nintendo has. Nintendo alienated their biggest fans by trying to appeal to casual gamers with these singing and dancing fluff games. I don't think Apple is dumb enough to alienate the pro market. Call me a dumb optimist.
Apple's biggest fans buy iPads and iPhones. They don't buy Macs. You make a good case for morphing the Mac into an oversized iPad. I suspect that Apple makes more profit from an $850 iPad then from a $1,000 MacBook Air.
The Pro market may be Apple's traditional fan base, but they are now just a tiny blip in Apple's current market.
If Apple cared about the high end market, we would still have an X-Serve.
I'm not sure it would affect their balance sheets that much, but you are talking about very loyal users.
True however you don't want to alienate your longtime supporters. Nintendo hasn't gone under yet because they still make several decent titles though there's now a split between casual and hardcore whereas back in the NES, SNES, and even N64 days there was no line. Casual and hardcore alike loved the original Super Mario Bros. for example.
To me Apple shouldn't blur the line because I feel everyone loving these iPhones and iPads is not permanent. It's just what's hot right now. Put a good focus on that, put a good focus on the computers, etc.
Apple's biggest fans buy iPads and iPhones. They don't buy Macs.
No, we don't.
I guess it depends on how you define "Biggest Fans".
If you define it as the people who spend the most money on Apple products, it's clearly the iPad and iPhone customers.
If you define it as the people who have the strongest positive feelings about Apple, then we have moved away from the realities of a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company.
This is something everybody should keep in mind Mac Pro or not. Many of us are waiting to see what Apple does with the desktop line up. We could get anything from bumps to machines nobody wants to buy. One should not assume that a future product will meet their expectations or needs.
I wouldn't say nobody wants to buy them. Apple has been increasing their margins on such machines so buying them at similar price points is difficult. We hear about Intel's chip pricing, but the main shifts there have been at the high end, and they have adjusted their pricing downward at times way more than Apple. The last "refresh" was just a refresh in a sense that they adjusted the line for current Intel price points relative to their prior margins at the time of hardware release. 2008 to 2009 they went from 2 expensive cpus to 1 cheap one in their base configuration. Nehalem was a step up in parallel computing, but that basically lined up flat growth for many tasks. The next was a tick year, so most of your increases were on the ultra high end, again meaning more expensive. An 8 core at that point is $800 more than 2 years prior even with all of the adjustments made to lower building costs (single backplane with different daughter boards), and those cpus were each a bit over half the cost of the ones used in 2008. 2012 was just a pricing adjustment. Some of those cpus dropped $400-600 retail. Other components dropped in price on the retail market. They just attempted to bring it slightly back toward reality to postpone the real work, and their plans may have changed multiple times in there. Obviously we don't know what they're planning, and it's not feasible for a CEO to release details about unannounced products. It was more of just a reassurance that they're working on something. As for me, I may be spending a lot less time working on my own system, meaning that my concerns are diminished.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
Intel's roadmap should be the following. That might be the limit of where they can go with electronics.
With a factor of 2 jump at each step plus the Haswell step next year, 2021 should bring in chips around 24x faster than Ivy Bridge. IGP technology should jump by similar, if not better, amounts and be able to do standard x86 processing. This will in many cases double standard x86 processing power we see today as GPUs aren't used for this so we are looking at 48x in 9 years.
This is at the same power levels we see now. So, imagine a Mac Mini 24-48x faster than we have today, with 50Gbps+ Thunderbolt ports, 1Tbytes of SSD coupled with 128GB ReRAM. There's the Mac Pro and it'll be even smaller than the Mini is now.
Of course, long before this point, Intel will be low enough power to get into mobile devices in the mainstream so a lot of people will only be using an iPad-like device.
Certainly due to the low power nature of the chips, they can build workstations with 4x Xeons inside but hardly anybody would buy them.
I don't see the demand being all that high. Obviously everyone wants to keep making money, I doubt Apple or Intel want to be selling the cheapest devices/components they make but that's what is happening already. If the demand is high, the price is low and vice versa. Xeons will get to the point where they ship in such low volumes and are so expensive that Intel might even stop making them or at least bring the design into more mainstream components.
I don't count on such gains. Real gains never look as pretty as what you have on paper. As to Intel, you're ignoring the use of such Xeons in servers and the accompanying margins on chipsets/board hardware which tend to be higher than cpus themselves. The increasing cost ceiling has always been at the level of cores per die for the sake of more cores. It'll cap out much like the ghz thing although I don't know where they'll go next with it. As for right now, the gains have been large enough if you look at more than just Apple. Anyway speculating on future devices is pointless. Look at the difference in power when comparing something like the mini to 1980s graphics workstations. The hardware and software solution is always balanced around what is available. As to "pro" solutions, much of the time it's just that they're aiming at markets that will pay more to solve problems that are not otherwise reasonably solvable with current solutions. Again I'm not talking about Apple specifically here. As to Intel, they take a lot of flack on their pricing, yet their margins are roughly equivalent to those seen by Apple. Their chip fabrication is also excellent, and they're one of the manufacturers that can actually absorb the costs of these constant die shrinks. Pretty soon die shrinks won't be a suitable method of achieving gains, just like the strategy of long pipeline + high clock speed fizzled during the Pentium 4 era.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mfryd
The discontinuation of the Mac hardware line is not at all silly. Apple has limited resources. Their hardware development resources should be assigned to their more profitable product lines (iPhone/iPad) not the Mac. Keep in mind that percentage of Apples income that comes form the Mac has been steadily declining.
As to iOS lacking the tools to develop for iOS, there are many solutions.
The easiest solution is to allow the Mac to run on some non-Apple PC's. As it is, Mac OS-X goes out of it's way to make sure that it is running on genuine Apple hardware. Removing this check is an easy solution to allowing iOS development on other platforms.
Another solution involves noticing that iOS is really Mac OS-X, with a different user interface. There is no technical reason why they couldn't release full Mac OS-X for the iPad. Pair a bluetooth keyboard and a bluetooth mouse to an iPad running OS-X, and you have a very tidy development environment.
The truth is that Apple doesn't need the Mac. This doesn't mean that they are killing off the Mac line tomorrow, but they are certainly moving towards morphing the Mac from being a general purpose computer to a desktop iPad. Their goal is to blur the line between desktop and iPad. In a few years it may still be called a Mac, but it will bear little resemblance to the full featured, and expandable computers we are used to.
The Mac Pro is clearly not a part of this vision. Apple is not going after the high end professional that needs massive amounts of computation.
I never suggested Apple was in the HPC market. I suggested that they don't have a stable set of development tools outside of OSX. This can take years of development for proper stability, and they have internal developers that work on Xcode and their self published applications using Macs. This is not an overnight transition. If they took away Macs tomorrow, even if that 15% is an accurate figure, it would still hurt given that not all of these sales would be reclaimed in the form of ipads. If it cripples the functionality and drives enough users away from Apple entirely, it would hurt way more. Note I didn't say it would last forever. I said your grandiose idea that Apple could cancel it tomorrow or next month and liquidate existing stock is just one of those speculative comments driven by marketing kool-aid rather than an insightful thought process.
I wouldn't say nobody wants to buy them. Apple has been increasing their margins on such machines so buying them at similar price points is difficult. We hear about Intel's chip pricing, but the main shifts there have been at the high end, and they have adjusted their pricing downward at times way more than Apple. The last "refresh" was just a refresh in a sense that they adjusted the line for current Intel price points relative to their prior margins at the time of hardware release. 2008 to 2009 they went from 2 expensive cpus to 1 cheap one in their base configuration. Nehalem was a step up in parallel computing, but that basically lined up flat growth for many tasks. The next was a tick year, so most of your increases were on the ultra high end, again meaning more expensive. An 8 core at that point is $800 more than 2 years prior even with all of the adjustments made to lower building costs (single backplane with different daughter boards), and those cpus were each a bit over half the cost of the ones used in 2008. 2012 was just a pricing adjustment. Some of those cpus dropped $400-600 retail. Other components dropped in price on the retail market. They just attempted to bring it slightly back toward reality to postpone the real work, and their plans may have changed multiple times in there. Obviously we don't know what they're planning, and it's not feasible for a CEO to release details about unannounced products. It was more of just a reassurance that they're working on something. As for me, I may be spending a lot less time working on my own system, meaning that my concerns are diminished.
I don't count on such gains. Real gains never look as pretty as what you have on paper. As to Intel, you're ignoring the use of such Xeons in servers and the accompanying margins on chipsets/board hardware which tend to be higher than cpus themselves. The increasing cost ceiling has always been at the level of cores per die for the sake of more cores. It'll cap out much like the ghz thing although I don't know where they'll go next with it. As for right now, the gains have been large enough if you look at more than just Apple. Anyway speculating on future devices is pointless. Look at the difference in power when comparing something like the mini to 1980s graphics workstations. The hardware and software solution is always balanced around what is available. As to "pro" solutions, much of the time it's just that they're aiming at markets that will pay more to solve problems that are not otherwise reasonably solvable with current solutions. Again I'm not talking about Apple specifically here. As to Intel, they take a lot of flack on their pricing, yet their margins are roughly equivalent to those seen by Apple. Their chip fabrication is also excellent, and they're one of the manufacturers that can actually absorb the costs of these constant die shrinks. Pretty soon die shrinks won't be a suitable method of achieving gains, just like the strategy of long pipeline + high clock speed fizzled during the Pentium 4 era.
I never suggested Apple was in the HPC market. I suggested that they don't have a stable set of development tools outside of OSX. This can take years of development for proper stability, and they have internal developers that work on Xcode and their self published applications using Macs. This is not an overnight transition. If they took away Macs tomorrow, even if that 15% is an accurate figure, it would still hurt given that not all of these sales would be reclaimed in the form of ipads. If it cripples the functionality and drives enough users away from Apple entirely, it would hurt way more. Note I didn't say it would last forever. I said your grandiose idea that Apple could cancel it tomorrow or next month and liquidate existing stock is just one of those speculative comments driven by marketing kool-aid rather than an insightful thought process.
According to Apple, in Q1 2012 about 14.2% of total revenue was from Mac sales (http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q1fy12datasum.pdf). My understanding is that Macs have a lower profit margin then iPhones/iPads. My guestimate is that less than 10% of Apple's profit's are from the Mac. Future growth is expected to come from iPhone/iPad sales into new markets (China). The percentage of revenue attributed to the Mac is expected to decline.
There is no technical requirement that iOS development be done on Apple branded hardware. This is merely a policy decision on Apple's part. Current iOS development tools require OS-X. OS-X is quite capable of running on non-Apple computers. It is only Apple's policy that limits it to Apple hardware. Should Apple discontinue the Mac, I would expect them to lift this restriction and allow OS-X to run on non-Apple hardware.
Even the low-end iMac is powerful enough for iOS software development. The Mac Pro is not necessary for iOS development.
I stand by my statements that the Mac Pro has no place in Apple's current product line. Yes, there are many users who need this type of machine, but these users are no longer in Apple's target market. Apple doesn't need the Mac, so Apple certainly can afford to lose the smallest segment of the Mac market (power users). Apple's strength is providing a simple solution that a non-techie can use. Complaining that these machines aren't suitable for power users is like complaining that automatic transmissions aren't ideal for race car drivers.
I don't think Apple will discontinue the Mac. I think Apple will "evolve" the Mac into a desktop version of the iPad. It will be unsuitable for power users, and ideal for the general public.
Put a faster processor into a mini, replace the HD and optical drive with a SSD, add a few more Thunderbolt ports, and you have Apple's ideal high end machine. It's small, powerful, and probably glued shut. Demands for expansion are answered with the mantra "Thunderbolt". It will be the fastest machine Apple makes. I suspect this is the machine Tim Cook was hinting at.
Yes, it won't be the best solution for many people, but it will be an excellent solution for most people.
I believe apple is working on full integration between the mobile iOS devices and the desktop OS macs..
Imagine a future where you can transfer calls from your mac to your iPhone or iPad on the go and vice versa. where you can pick up whatever you were working on at home, on you iOS device through cloud storage...(provided the mobile device has the power for the task.
The future of Apple is looking to be a fully integrated between iOS and OS devices. Not to move away from desktops but to bring the 2 lines(mobile, desktop) even closer together.
Intel's roadmap should be the following. That might be the limit of where they can go with electronics.
2013 (22nm) - 2014/15 (14nm) - 2016/17 (10nm) - 2018/2019 (7nm) - 2020/2021 (5nm)
With a factor of 2 jump at each step plus the Haswell step next year, 2021 should bring in chips around 24x faster than Ivy Bridge. IGP technology should jump by similar, if not better, amounts and be able to do standard x86 processing.
This is all well and good but doesn't change anything. Think about it, how much faster is Ivy Bridge compared to an 80286 or even a 486. Faster hardware just enables a future of more complex software.
This will in many cases double standard x86 processing power we see today as GPUs aren't used for this so we are looking at 48x in 9 years.
This is at the same power levels we see now. So, imagine a Mac Mini 24-48x faster than we have today, with 50Gbps+ Thunderbolt ports, 1Tbytes of SSD coupled with 128GB ReRAM. There's the Mac Pro and it'll be even smaller than the Mini is now.
As I've said before you focus to much on raw performance and not the overall system. The Mini never has been and never will be a performance leader relative to other contemporary machines.
Of course, long before this point, Intel will be low enough power to get into mobile devices in the mainstream so a lot of people will only be using an iPad-like device.
Certainly due to the low power nature of the chips, they can build workstations with 4x Xeons inside but hardly anybody would buy them.
I don't see the demand being all that high. Obviously everyone wants to keep making money, I doubt Apple or Intel want to be selling the cheapest devices/components they make but that's what is happening already. If the demand is high, the price is low and vice versa. Xeons will get to the point where they ship in such low volumes and are so expensive that Intel might even stop making them or at least bring the design into more mainstream components.
Again you miss the point. It is certainly possible for a future Mini to equal today's Mac Pro in raw CPU power. That means little because at that future date the Pro will still be a more capable platform. In a nut shell you are spinning your wheels in the mud here as the platforms aren't comparable.
I believe apple is working on full integration between the mobile iOS devices and the desktop OS macs..
Imagine a future where you can transfer calls from your mac to your iPhone or iPad on the go and vice versa. where you can pick up whatever you were working on at home, on you iOS device through cloud storage...(provided the mobile device has the power for the task.
The future of Apple is looking to be a fully integrated between iOS and OS devices. Not to move away from desktops but to bring the 2 lines(mobile, desktop) even closer together.
Yes, the future Mac won't need a big local HD, as your files will be stored in iCloud. A local SSD for cache will be more than good enough.
No need for an optical drive as new software and media come from the App store and iTunes store.
The future Mac will be as user serviceable as an iPhone, iPad or Mac Book Retina - i.e. sealed shut.
Today's mobile devices have enough horsepower for the average consumer's needs. The high end user will need more horsepower for a better gaming experience. No need for expansion slots.
There is no place for a Mac Pro in Apple's roadmap.
According to Apple, in Q1 2012 about 14.2% of total revenue was from Mac sales (http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q1fy12datasum.pdf). My understanding is that Macs have a lower profit margin then iPhones/iPads. My guestimate is that less than 10% of Apple's profit's are from the Mac. Future growth is expected to come from iPhone/iPad sales into new markets (China). The percentage of revenue attributed to the Mac is expected to decline.
The ipad release at the end may have carried sales to some degree there. The ipad 2 was also released in a couple countries just prior to that if I recall correctly. Anywhere you have new growth for something like that, it is big. You should be looking at a year as a whole. Looking at it only quarter by quarter is just a placate the idiot shareholders kind of thing. Anyway I'm not suggest that they aren't a lower percentage. I would've predicted that back when the ipods were big and iphone rumors started (I wouldn't have predicted this big, but the Macs grew quite a bit too). You're assuming that I'm unable to examine other factors here. Addressing the limited resources comment, limitations on resources don't actually mean much unless they feel the idevices are performing below their true potential. Regarding hackintoshes, they aren't the same. If I ever switch to Windows, I will dual boot hackintosh, but it's not the kind of thing I would rely on. There are plenty of things that can break such an installation. If you ever read their forums you'll see that. It's more of a hobby thing. It's more likely that they'd port such tools to something like Windows or Linux. Either way you are talking about a very long testing cycle, planned transitions. They are not just going to say "it's over guys" tomorrow. That would shock the system considerably and offset their sales further than you're willing to believe on PR alone. Apple likes to keep you trapped in their system on every device, so I don't see this happening just because they're outpaced. They'd need a day where enough people only use an ipad. This means better bigger/better storage connectivity, longer battery life, etc. Your rant about the cloud is still a decade or more away if they expect it to perform seamlessly, aside from the security concerns.
Anyway you're a very silly person in that you're consuming marketing materials without really thinking about their details. Let's assume the ipad really sells every unit they can make. Will devoting all of the Mac's resources starting tomorrow change sales? Even if manufacturing capacity is a non - issue, will giving it a bigger team really help or will it bloat the team? The way you describe it is such a bean counter mentality.
This is all well and good but doesn't change anything. Think about it, how much faster is Ivy Bridge compared to an 80286 or even a 486. Faster hardware just enables a future of more complex software.
you can see the 2001 G4 Powerbook at the bottom scoring 0.08. A 2012 15" Macbook Pro scores between 6 and 7. Even with a score of 6, that's 75x faster in 11 years (2^6 = 64x).
Even comparing the mighty 2003 G5 tower, the retina MBP is as fast as 10x dual-core G5s (2^4 = 16x).
It's true that some tasks increase in complexity and we've moved to 1080p as a standard format and will move to 4K in some cases but how many people will really move to 4K in the mainstream? Nobody because nobody complains about 1080p lacking clarity. 1080p is the end for home cinema.
As I've said before you focus to much on raw performance and not the overall system. The Mini never has been and never will be a performance leader relative to other contemporary machines.
It is certainly possible for a future Mini to equal today's Mac Pro in raw CPU power. That means little because at that future date the Pro will still be a more capable platform.
But why would Apple still make them? It's the same situation today with someone offering you a 50" TV for $300 or a 60" TV for $600. How many people will opt for the 60" TV just because it's bigger? Not many, because price is also a factor.
The amount of people who need 48x the current Mini vs 24x the current Mini will be so small that it won't be worth them making the faster machine when they can just as easily sell them 4x Minis or more.
When computers get to that level of performance, it will end up being more cost-effective to have them in the cloud because hardly any individual needs that power 24/7 but server farms can keep them churning away 24/7 and compute units will cost next to nothing.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by mfryd
Bottom line - Apple's primary product is their iOS platform (iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch/Apple TV). The Mac produce line is inconsequential. In terms of the Mac product line, the portables are where the sales are. Desktop machines (of which the Mac Pro constitutes only a small fraction) are not important.
If Apple discontinued the Mac Pro tomorrow, most people wouldn't notice (although those that would notice, are the ones who frequent this site). If Apple discontinued the entire Mac line tomorrow, a few more people would notice, but they would still be an insanely profitable company.
But there's no need to take my word for any of this. All of these numbers are publicly available in Apple's SEC filings and press releases.
This is very silly. IOS currently lacks the tools to operate a standalone platform. If you're suggesting they develop them for Windows or Linux, that takes time, beta releases, and transition plans. That could not happen tomorrow. Did you (mistakenly) think your comment was clever simply because you can read bar graphs?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
Apple can never discontinue the entire Mac line until you can develop iOS apps under iOS. This is a fairly file-centric task with lots of source code files and text and would require a terminal. If the UI changed on plugging an iPad into a large display, it can be done but I think in the near term, we will more likely see Apple trying various things to keep their product lines profitable enough to justify making them.
They could get rid of the desktops eventually but they all have a target audience. The Mac Pro audience is the smallest and shrinking in share relative to the others so is by far the most likely to go first but we'll see what they do next year. Tim Cook's word usage was interesting:
"Although we didn’t have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at today’s event, don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for later next year.
We also announced a MacBook Pro with a Retina Display that is a great solution for many pros."
You notice he never said there was a new Mac Pro coming next year, just a product aimed at the same audience. Time will tell what form it takes. It's a very long time to wait for an update though and I suspect technology developments in the mean-time will make it clearer what's coming:
http://technewspedia.com/futurology-intel-cpus-sky-lake-have-an-igp-based-on-larrabee/
I'm not reading into it AT ALL. The problem I'm currently facing is that Windows is starting to make more sense in terms of features and available hardware. I'll probably just procrastinate the decisions again, but corporate speak regarding may release product X within 12 months means nothing to me. He's just trying to reassure people. CEOs do this at times. As you mentioned, they need development hardware, and this has to accommodate a large range of developers. Beyond that if they just canceled that many lines overnight, the bad PR would hit their idevice sales too. The last thing I'd like to mention is that the person you responded to apparently doesn't think 15% of revenue is significant for a large corporation. That alone should tell you something.
It would - it could just be an iMac with the display panel ripped out. The 21.5" 2.8GHz quad-i7, 512MB 6770M GPU. Take $200 off for the panel and it's $1499.
You can see the excessive margins in the Mac Pro when you compare it to this as the spec is around the same, likewise performance. The Xeon isn't the expensive part so something between the iMac design and the Mac Pro design is sucking up $1000 and I don't think it's the components.
Well it has to be one of a limited number of scenarios:
- they update it without a new design with Haswell/Ivy Bridge Xeons
- they discontinue the line in favour of a 6-core iMac or similar
- they redesign it significantly
If it was the first, they'd have updated it with Sandy Bridge Xeons and brought Thunderbolt and USB 3 along for the ride.
If it was the second, I don't think Tim Cook would have said anything.
This points to number 3. We already know the potential issues with Thunderbolt and a PCI GPU and Haswell is supposed to be quite low-power so I think the redesign will be quite radical and The Mac Pro's last (its burial suit, really) - in a decade, it will have no place.
That would be funny and probably distressing for many. Being a Proponent of the XMac concept I never really haves seen it as a replacement for the Mac Pro. XMac in my mind is very much a Midrange Desktop Mac (MDM). Of course that means different things to different people, but the general concept is a bit more performance and capability relative to the Mini.
In any event I just have this feeling Cook is talking about a very high performance machine. Instead of an incremental Sandy Bridge E update I suspect that they will be engaging one or more of Intels MIC chips. It would be really pathetic for them to deliver yet another plain old Sandy Bridge E machine in 2013, at best it would be ten months late.
What I find perplexing is that you look at the CPUs as a measure of a machines performance, mostly in respect to single thread performance. While that might fly for a limited set of users, the people that really need the Pro architecture are probably laughing their asses off over the idea. You seemed to have summed up the three most likely vectors. Yep! The fact that a simple rev of the machine to Sandy Bridge E didn't happen implies that something else is up. This gets ruled out by default because Pro users would have a very hard time accepting the current iMac design. I have to believe this is the only reasonable choice. The big question is what do they actually have planned. I'm leaning towards very high performance in what would be a new generation of hardware.
Now this is where I have problems. I really don't see machines like the Mac Pro going away. I see dramatically different physical hardware but the concept of a desktop workstation computer isn't going anywhere. Apple does need to become more realistic with respect to marketing such hardware as at time the are immensely proud of their machines.
In a nut shell Intel doesn't have anything in the conventional processor pipeline that will really make the majority of power users happy. As much as you want to believe that the latest whiz bang processor from Intel is all people will need the reality is just the opposite. Many professionals would love to have what amounts to supercomputer power on their desk, if it could be had at a reasonable price. The demand for that power will not slow either as it will make practicle new industries and allow others to become far more competitive. In a nut shell there is more going on in the world than editing video.
If Apple knows what is good for them, they will not follow some of the same business practices that Nintendo has. Nintendo alienated their biggest fans by trying to appeal to casual gamers with these singing and dancing fluff games. I don't think Apple is dumb enough to alienate the pro market. Call me a dumb optimist.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
It would - it could just be an iMac with the display panel ripped out. The 21.5" 2.8GHz quad-i7, 512MB 6770M GPU. Take $200 off for the panel and it's $1499.
You can see the excessive margins in the Mac Pro when you compare it to this as the spec is around the same, likewise performance. The Xeon isn't the expensive part so something between the iMac design and the Mac Pro design is sucking up $1000 and I don't think it's the components.
Well it has to be one of a limited number of scenarios:
- they update it without a new design with Haswell/Ivy Bridge Xeons
- they discontinue the line in favour of a 6-core iMac or similar
- they redesign it significantly
If it was the first, they'd have updated it with Sandy Bridge Xeons and brought Thunderbolt and USB 3 along for the ride.
If it was the second, I don't think Tim Cook would have said anything.
This points to number 3. We already know the potential issues with Thunderbolt and a PCI GPU and Haswell is supposed to be quite low-power so I think the redesign will be quite radical and The Mac Pro's last (its burial suit, really) - in a decade, it will have no place.
Typically with workstations, you can get higher margins for the top end hardware. At the lowest level the configuration is complete crap. A 6 core imac would still need a different logic board/socket type. Haswell isn't rumored to change this. They're still capping consumer cpus at 4 cores. I kind of wonder how high they'll go with the Xeons per chip. Will it become like the ghz thing where eventually ghz for the sake of more ghz stops really moving the design forward like in the Pentium 4 era. I'm still not sure they'll skip Ivy Bridge E seeing as the chipset won't really change. They'll have to scrap something or cut a cycle short if they intend to catch up, especially with the potential for future delays given how many things have migrated onto the cpu package.
By the way, by not reading into it, I mean that it's still corporate speak and I can't assume that the promise of a future product will mean anything significant to me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winter
If Apple knows what is good for them, they will not follow some of the same business practices that Nintendo has. Nintendo alienated their biggest fans by trying to appeal to casual gamers with these singing and dancing fluff games. I don't think Apple is dumb enough to alienate the pro market. Call me a dumb optimist.
I'm not sure it would affect their balance sheets that much, but you are talking about very loyal users.
This is something everybody should keep in mind Mac Pro or not. Many of us are waiting to see what Apple does with the desktop line up. We could get anything from bumps to machines nobody wants to buy. One should not assume that a future product will meet their expectations or needs.
Intel's roadmap should be the following. That might be the limit of where they can go with electronics.
2013 (22nm) - 2014/15 (14nm) - 2016/17 (10nm) - 2018/2019 (7nm) - 2020/2021 (5nm)
With a factor of 2 jump at each step plus the Haswell step next year, 2021 should bring in chips around 24x faster than Ivy Bridge. IGP technology should jump by similar, if not better, amounts and be able to do standard x86 processing. This will in many cases double standard x86 processing power we see today as GPUs aren't used for this so we are looking at 48x in 9 years.
This is at the same power levels we see now. So, imagine a Mac Mini 24-48x faster than we have today, with 50Gbps+ Thunderbolt ports, 1Tbytes of SSD coupled with 128GB ReRAM. There's the Mac Pro and it'll be even smaller than the Mini is now.
Of course, long before this point, Intel will be low enough power to get into mobile devices in the mainstream so a lot of people will only be using an iPad-like device.
Certainly due to the low power nature of the chips, they can build workstations with 4x Xeons inside but hardly anybody would buy them.
I don't see the demand being all that high. Obviously everyone wants to keep making money, I doubt Apple or Intel want to be selling the cheapest devices/components they make but that's what is happening already. If the demand is high, the price is low and vice versa. Xeons will get to the point where they ship in such low volumes and are so expensive that Intel might even stop making them or at least bring the design into more mainstream components.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hmm
This is very silly. IOS currently lacks the tools to operate a standalone platform. If you're suggesting they develop them for Windows or Linux, that takes time, beta releases, and transition plans. That could not happen tomorrow. Did you (mistakenly) think your comment was clever simply because you can read bar graphs?
...
The discontinuation of the Mac hardware line is not at all silly. Apple has limited resources. Their hardware development resources should be assigned to their more profitable product lines (iPhone/iPad) not the Mac. Keep in mind that percentage of Apples income that comes form the Mac has been steadily declining.
As to iOS lacking the tools to develop for iOS, there are many solutions.
The easiest solution is to allow the Mac to run on some non-Apple PC's. As it is, Mac OS-X goes out of it's way to make sure that it is running on genuine Apple hardware. Removing this check is an easy solution to allowing iOS development on other platforms.
Another solution involves noticing that iOS is really Mac OS-X, with a different user interface. There is no technical reason why they couldn't release full Mac OS-X for the iPad. Pair a bluetooth keyboard and a bluetooth mouse to an iPad running OS-X, and you have a very tidy development environment.
The truth is that Apple doesn't need the Mac. This doesn't mean that they are killing off the Mac line tomorrow, but they are certainly moving towards morphing the Mac from being a general purpose computer to a desktop iPad. Their goal is to blur the line between desktop and iPad. In a few years it may still be called a Mac, but it will bear little resemblance to the full featured, and expandable computers we are used to.
The Mac Pro is clearly not a part of this vision. Apple is not going after the high end professional that needs massive amounts of computation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winter
If Apple knows what is good for them, they will not follow some of the same business practices that Nintendo has. Nintendo alienated their biggest fans by trying to appeal to casual gamers with these singing and dancing fluff games. I don't think Apple is dumb enough to alienate the pro market. Call me a dumb optimist.
Apple's biggest fans buy iPads and iPhones. They don't buy Macs. You make a good case for morphing the Mac into an oversized iPad. I suspect that Apple makes more profit from an $850 iPad then from a $1,000 MacBook Air.
The Pro market may be Apple's traditional fan base, but they are now just a tiny blip in Apple's current market.
If Apple cared about the high end market, we would still have an X-Serve.
No, we don't.
No, that's not an indication of anything at all. If Apple cared about the server market, we'd still have an XServe.
True however you don't want to alienate your longtime supporters. Nintendo hasn't gone under yet because they still make several decent titles though there's now a split between casual and hardcore whereas back in the NES, SNES, and even N64 days there was no line. Casual and hardcore alike loved the original Super Mario Bros. for example.
To me Apple shouldn't blur the line because I feel everyone loving these iPhones and iPads is not permanent. It's just what's hot right now. Put a good focus on that, put a good focus on the computers, etc.
Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by mfryd
Apple's biggest fans buy iPads and iPhones. They don't buy Macs.
No, we don't.
I guess it depends on how you define "Biggest Fans".
If you define it as the people who spend the most money on Apple products, it's clearly the iPad and iPhone customers.
If you define it as the people who have the strongest positive feelings about Apple, then we have moved away from the realities of a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
This is something everybody should keep in mind Mac Pro or not. Many of us are waiting to see what Apple does with the desktop line up. We could get anything from bumps to machines nobody wants to buy. One should not assume that a future product will meet their expectations or needs.
I wouldn't say nobody wants to buy them. Apple has been increasing their margins on such machines so buying them at similar price points is difficult. We hear about Intel's chip pricing, but the main shifts there have been at the high end, and they have adjusted their pricing downward at times way more than Apple. The last "refresh" was just a refresh in a sense that they adjusted the line for current Intel price points relative to their prior margins at the time of hardware release. 2008 to 2009 they went from 2 expensive cpus to 1 cheap one in their base configuration. Nehalem was a step up in parallel computing, but that basically lined up flat growth for many tasks. The next was a tick year, so most of your increases were on the ultra high end, again meaning more expensive. An 8 core at that point is $800 more than 2 years prior even with all of the adjustments made to lower building costs (single backplane with different daughter boards), and those cpus were each a bit over half the cost of the ones used in 2008. 2012 was just a pricing adjustment. Some of those cpus dropped $400-600 retail. Other components dropped in price on the retail market. They just attempted to bring it slightly back toward reality to postpone the real work, and their plans may have changed multiple times in there. Obviously we don't know what they're planning, and it's not feasible for a CEO to release details about unannounced products. It was more of just a reassurance that they're working on something. As for me, I may be spending a lot less time working on my own system, meaning that my concerns are diminished.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
Intel's roadmap should be the following. That might be the limit of where they can go with electronics.
2013 (22nm) - 2014/15 (14nm) - 2016/17 (10nm) - 2018/2019 (7nm) - 2020/2021 (5nm)
With a factor of 2 jump at each step plus the Haswell step next year, 2021 should bring in chips around 24x faster than Ivy Bridge. IGP technology should jump by similar, if not better, amounts and be able to do standard x86 processing. This will in many cases double standard x86 processing power we see today as GPUs aren't used for this so we are looking at 48x in 9 years.
This is at the same power levels we see now. So, imagine a Mac Mini 24-48x faster than we have today, with 50Gbps+ Thunderbolt ports, 1Tbytes of SSD coupled with 128GB ReRAM. There's the Mac Pro and it'll be even smaller than the Mini is now.
Of course, long before this point, Intel will be low enough power to get into mobile devices in the mainstream so a lot of people will only be using an iPad-like device.
Certainly due to the low power nature of the chips, they can build workstations with 4x Xeons inside but hardly anybody would buy them.
I don't see the demand being all that high. Obviously everyone wants to keep making money, I doubt Apple or Intel want to be selling the cheapest devices/components they make but that's what is happening already. If the demand is high, the price is low and vice versa. Xeons will get to the point where they ship in such low volumes and are so expensive that Intel might even stop making them or at least bring the design into more mainstream components.
I don't count on such gains. Real gains never look as pretty as what you have on paper. As to Intel, you're ignoring the use of such Xeons in servers and the accompanying margins on chipsets/board hardware which tend to be higher than cpus themselves. The increasing cost ceiling has always been at the level of cores per die for the sake of more cores. It'll cap out much like the ghz thing although I don't know where they'll go next with it. As for right now, the gains have been large enough if you look at more than just Apple. Anyway speculating on future devices is pointless. Look at the difference in power when comparing something like the mini to 1980s graphics workstations. The hardware and software solution is always balanced around what is available. As to "pro" solutions, much of the time it's just that they're aiming at markets that will pay more to solve problems that are not otherwise reasonably solvable with current solutions. Again I'm not talking about Apple specifically here. As to Intel, they take a lot of flack on their pricing, yet their margins are roughly equivalent to those seen by Apple. Their chip fabrication is also excellent, and they're one of the manufacturers that can actually absorb the costs of these constant die shrinks. Pretty soon die shrinks won't be a suitable method of achieving gains, just like the strategy of long pipeline + high clock speed fizzled during the Pentium 4 era.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mfryd
The discontinuation of the Mac hardware line is not at all silly. Apple has limited resources. Their hardware development resources should be assigned to their more profitable product lines (iPhone/iPad) not the Mac. Keep in mind that percentage of Apples income that comes form the Mac has been steadily declining.
As to iOS lacking the tools to develop for iOS, there are many solutions.
The easiest solution is to allow the Mac to run on some non-Apple PC's. As it is, Mac OS-X goes out of it's way to make sure that it is running on genuine Apple hardware. Removing this check is an easy solution to allowing iOS development on other platforms.
Another solution involves noticing that iOS is really Mac OS-X, with a different user interface. There is no technical reason why they couldn't release full Mac OS-X for the iPad. Pair a bluetooth keyboard and a bluetooth mouse to an iPad running OS-X, and you have a very tidy development environment.
The truth is that Apple doesn't need the Mac. This doesn't mean that they are killing off the Mac line tomorrow, but they are certainly moving towards morphing the Mac from being a general purpose computer to a desktop iPad. Their goal is to blur the line between desktop and iPad. In a few years it may still be called a Mac, but it will bear little resemblance to the full featured, and expandable computers we are used to.
The Mac Pro is clearly not a part of this vision. Apple is not going after the high end professional that needs massive amounts of computation.
I never suggested Apple was in the HPC market. I suggested that they don't have a stable set of development tools outside of OSX. This can take years of development for proper stability, and they have internal developers that work on Xcode and their self published applications using Macs. This is not an overnight transition. If they took away Macs tomorrow, even if that 15% is an accurate figure, it would still hurt given that not all of these sales would be reclaimed in the form of ipads. If it cripples the functionality and drives enough users away from Apple entirely, it would hurt way more. Note I didn't say it would last forever. I said your grandiose idea that Apple could cancel it tomorrow or next month and liquidate existing stock is just one of those speculative comments driven by marketing kool-aid rather than an insightful thought process.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hmm
I wouldn't say nobody wants to buy them. Apple has been increasing their margins on such machines so buying them at similar price points is difficult. We hear about Intel's chip pricing, but the main shifts there have been at the high end, and they have adjusted their pricing downward at times way more than Apple. The last "refresh" was just a refresh in a sense that they adjusted the line for current Intel price points relative to their prior margins at the time of hardware release. 2008 to 2009 they went from 2 expensive cpus to 1 cheap one in their base configuration. Nehalem was a step up in parallel computing, but that basically lined up flat growth for many tasks. The next was a tick year, so most of your increases were on the ultra high end, again meaning more expensive. An 8 core at that point is $800 more than 2 years prior even with all of the adjustments made to lower building costs (single backplane with different daughter boards), and those cpus were each a bit over half the cost of the ones used in 2008. 2012 was just a pricing adjustment. Some of those cpus dropped $400-600 retail. Other components dropped in price on the retail market. They just attempted to bring it slightly back toward reality to postpone the real work, and their plans may have changed multiple times in there. Obviously we don't know what they're planning, and it's not feasible for a CEO to release details about unannounced products. It was more of just a reassurance that they're working on something. As for me, I may be spending a lot less time working on my own system, meaning that my concerns are diminished.
I don't count on such gains. Real gains never look as pretty as what you have on paper. As to Intel, you're ignoring the use of such Xeons in servers and the accompanying margins on chipsets/board hardware which tend to be higher than cpus themselves. The increasing cost ceiling has always been at the level of cores per die for the sake of more cores. It'll cap out much like the ghz thing although I don't know where they'll go next with it. As for right now, the gains have been large enough if you look at more than just Apple. Anyway speculating on future devices is pointless. Look at the difference in power when comparing something like the mini to 1980s graphics workstations. The hardware and software solution is always balanced around what is available. As to "pro" solutions, much of the time it's just that they're aiming at markets that will pay more to solve problems that are not otherwise reasonably solvable with current solutions. Again I'm not talking about Apple specifically here. As to Intel, they take a lot of flack on their pricing, yet their margins are roughly equivalent to those seen by Apple. Their chip fabrication is also excellent, and they're one of the manufacturers that can actually absorb the costs of these constant die shrinks. Pretty soon die shrinks won't be a suitable method of achieving gains, just like the strategy of long pipeline + high clock speed fizzled during the Pentium 4 era.
I never suggested Apple was in the HPC market. I suggested that they don't have a stable set of development tools outside of OSX. This can take years of development for proper stability, and they have internal developers that work on Xcode and their self published applications using Macs. This is not an overnight transition. If they took away Macs tomorrow, even if that 15% is an accurate figure, it would still hurt given that not all of these sales would be reclaimed in the form of ipads. If it cripples the functionality and drives enough users away from Apple entirely, it would hurt way more. Note I didn't say it would last forever. I said your grandiose idea that Apple could cancel it tomorrow or next month and liquidate existing stock is just one of those speculative comments driven by marketing kool-aid rather than an insightful thought process.
According to Apple, in Q1 2012 about 14.2% of total revenue was from Mac sales (http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q1fy12datasum.pdf). My understanding is that Macs have a lower profit margin then iPhones/iPads. My guestimate is that less than 10% of Apple's profit's are from the Mac. Future growth is expected to come from iPhone/iPad sales into new markets (China). The percentage of revenue attributed to the Mac is expected to decline.
There is no technical requirement that iOS development be done on Apple branded hardware. This is merely a policy decision on Apple's part. Current iOS development tools require OS-X. OS-X is quite capable of running on non-Apple computers. It is only Apple's policy that limits it to Apple hardware. Should Apple discontinue the Mac, I would expect them to lift this restriction and allow OS-X to run on non-Apple hardware.
Even the low-end iMac is powerful enough for iOS software development. The Mac Pro is not necessary for iOS development.
I stand by my statements that the Mac Pro has no place in Apple's current product line. Yes, there are many users who need this type of machine, but these users are no longer in Apple's target market. Apple doesn't need the Mac, so Apple certainly can afford to lose the smallest segment of the Mac market (power users). Apple's strength is providing a simple solution that a non-techie can use. Complaining that these machines aren't suitable for power users is like complaining that automatic transmissions aren't ideal for race car drivers.
I don't think Apple will discontinue the Mac. I think Apple will "evolve" the Mac into a desktop version of the iPad. It will be unsuitable for power users, and ideal for the general public.
Put a faster processor into a mini, replace the HD and optical drive with a SSD, add a few more Thunderbolt ports, and you have Apple's ideal high end machine. It's small, powerful, and probably glued shut. Demands for expansion are answered with the mantra "Thunderbolt". It will be the fastest machine Apple makes. I suspect this is the machine Tim Cook was hinting at.
Yes, it won't be the best solution for many people, but it will be an excellent solution for most people.
I believe apple is working on full integration between the mobile iOS devices and the desktop OS macs..
Imagine a future where you can transfer calls from your mac to your iPhone or iPad on the go and vice versa. where you can pick up whatever you were working on at home, on you iOS device through cloud storage...(provided the mobile device has the power for the task.
The future of Apple is looking to be a fully integrated between iOS and OS devices. Not to move away from desktops but to bring the 2 lines(mobile, desktop) even closer together.
Again you miss the point. It is certainly possible for a future Mini to equal today's Mac Pro in raw CPU power. That means little because at that future date the Pro will still be a more capable platform. In a nut shell you are spinning your wheels in the mud here as the platforms aren't comparable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eucsstamticc
I believe apple is working on full integration between the mobile iOS devices and the desktop OS macs..
Imagine a future where you can transfer calls from your mac to your iPhone or iPad on the go and vice versa. where you can pick up whatever you were working on at home, on you iOS device through cloud storage...(provided the mobile device has the power for the task.
The future of Apple is looking to be a fully integrated between iOS and OS devices. Not to move away from desktops but to bring the 2 lines(mobile, desktop) even closer together.
Yes, the future Mac won't need a big local HD, as your files will be stored in iCloud. A local SSD for cache will be more than good enough.
No need for an optical drive as new software and media come from the App store and iTunes store.
The future Mac will be as user serviceable as an iPhone, iPad or Mac Book Retina - i.e. sealed shut.
Today's mobile devices have enough horsepower for the average consumer's needs. The high end user will need more horsepower for a better gaming experience. No need for expansion slots.
There is no place for a Mac Pro in Apple's roadmap.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mfryd
According to Apple, in Q1 2012 about 14.2% of total revenue was from Mac sales (http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q1fy12datasum.pdf). My understanding is that Macs have a lower profit margin then iPhones/iPads. My guestimate is that less than 10% of Apple's profit's are from the Mac. Future growth is expected to come from iPhone/iPad sales into new markets (China). The percentage of revenue attributed to the Mac is expected to decline.
The ipad release at the end may have carried sales to some degree there. The ipad 2 was also released in a couple countries just prior to that if I recall correctly. Anywhere you have new growth for something like that, it is big. You should be looking at a year as a whole. Looking at it only quarter by quarter is just a placate the idiot shareholders kind of thing. Anyway I'm not suggest that they aren't a lower percentage. I would've predicted that back when the ipods were big and iphone rumors started (I wouldn't have predicted this big, but the Macs grew quite a bit too). You're assuming that I'm unable to examine other factors here. Addressing the limited resources comment, limitations on resources don't actually mean much unless they feel the idevices are performing below their true potential. Regarding hackintoshes, they aren't the same. If I ever switch to Windows, I will dual boot hackintosh, but it's not the kind of thing I would rely on. There are plenty of things that can break such an installation. If you ever read their forums you'll see that. It's more of a hobby thing. It's more likely that they'd port such tools to something like Windows or Linux. Either way you are talking about a very long testing cycle, planned transitions. They are not just going to say "it's over guys" tomorrow. That would shock the system considerably and offset their sales further than you're willing to believe on PR alone. Apple likes to keep you trapped in their system on every device, so I don't see this happening just because they're outpaced. They'd need a day where enough people only use an ipad. This means better bigger/better storage connectivity, longer battery life, etc. Your rant about the cloud is still a decade or more away if they expect it to perform seamlessly, aside from the security concerns.
Anyway you're a very silly person in that you're consuming marketing materials without really thinking about their details. Let's assume the ipad really sells every unit they can make. Will devoting all of the Mac's resources starting tomorrow change sales? Even if manufacturing capacity is a non - issue, will giving it a bigger team really help or will it bloat the team? The way you describe it is such a bean counter mentality.
If you check out:
http://www.cbscores.com/
you can see the 2001 G4 Powerbook at the bottom scoring 0.08. A 2012 15" Macbook Pro scores between 6 and 7. Even with a score of 6, that's 75x faster in 11 years (2^6 = 64x).
Even comparing the mighty 2003 G5 tower, the retina MBP is as fast as 10x dual-core G5s (2^4 = 16x).
It's true that some tasks increase in complexity and we've moved to 1080p as a standard format and will move to 4K in some cases but how many people will really move to 4K in the mainstream? Nobody because nobody complains about 1080p lacking clarity. 1080p is the end for home cinema.
But why would Apple still make them? It's the same situation today with someone offering you a 50" TV for $300 or a 60" TV for $600. How many people will opt for the 60" TV just because it's bigger? Not many, because price is also a factor.
The amount of people who need 48x the current Mini vs 24x the current Mini will be so small that it won't be worth them making the faster machine when they can just as easily sell them 4x Minis or more.
When computers get to that level of performance, it will end up being more cost-effective to have them in the cloud because hardly any individual needs that power 24/7 but server farms can keep them churning away 24/7 and compute units will cost next to nothing.