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).
Marvin your numbers are so inflated at times. Let's compare a Quad G5 to the 2011 quad imac cpu. It's a popular cpu in Windows computers as well as past that point the cost goes up considerably, and we're comparing quad to quad. Obviously it was a newer feature then. It's become quite normal in desktops and many notebooks. G5 quad is at 2.5. I7 2600k is as high as 3.41 under Windows (imac is a little lower there). G4s were never that fast anyway. They were lagging and Intel showed some enormous growth around the Core2 era where they ditched the direction of the pentium 4s. That isn't a guarantee. It's been tapered off since then. Anyway stop inflating numbers. I like your posts, because you find cool links. It's just that you project your imagination onto past data at times in a very biased manner. Beyond that, mobile devices are becoming more capable for a lot of things, but Apple doesn't necessarily aim them at these markets. If they did, they would be designed with different priorities in mind.
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 think the numbers for the Mac look better when examining the full year, please post those numbers. Calling me silly because you don't like Apple's recent SEC filings doesn't seem helpful.
I assume that by "Hackintosh" you are referring to a non-Apple computer running a patched and unsupported version of the Mac OS. I am not suggesting that such a configuration is reliable. What I did suggest was that Apple has the option of allowing the Mac OS to run on non-Apple hardware. This is not an all or nothing situation. Apple would not need to guarantee that OS-X run on every conceivable configuration. Apple could choose to limit OS-X to certain configurations. This is not without precedent. The next version of OS-X has certain requirements, and won't run on some of the older Intel Macs.
I do agree that Apple is unlikely to pull the plug on the Mac tomorrow. More likely they will kill off the Mac Pro, and morph the rest of the product line into desktop versions of the iPad. Once Xcode is ported to the iPad, they no longer need Mac OS-X. Porting Xcode to iOS isn't as hard as many think. Under the hood, iOS and Mac OS-X are the same.
If you think the numbers for the Mac look better when examining the full year, please post those numbers. Calling me silly because you don't like Apple's recent SEC filings doesn't seem helpful.
I assume that by "Hackintosh" you are referring to a non-Apple computer running a patched and unsupported version of the Mac OS. I am not suggesting that such a configuration is reliable. What I did suggest was that Apple has the option of allowing the Mac OS to run on non-Apple hardware. This is not an all or nothing situation. Apple would not need to guarantee that OS-X run on every conceivable configuration. Apple could choose to limit OS-X to certain configurations. This is not without precedent. The next version of OS-X has certain requirements, and won't run on some of the older Intel Macs.
I do agree that Apple is unlikely to pull the plug on the Mac tomorrow. More likely they will kill off the Mac Pro, and morph the rest of the product line into desktop versions of the iPad. Once Xcode is ported to the iPad, they no longer need Mac OS-X. Porting Xcode to iOS isn't as hard as many think. Under the hood, iOS and Mac OS-X are the same.
I'm aware of the ability to certify hardware. I still said it would take time to make such changes if they wanted to do them. Looking at a single quarter is incredibly short sighted for any company that has no real cash flow or financing problems. They aren't worried that they won't be able to finance further endeavors. At this point it's just a placate shareholders thing. I'm not digging up the last several quarters, but the enthusiast sites all reported it was a record low for the Macs when they posted roughly 15% of revenue having come from the Mac line. It was a big enough dip in pecentage to be newsworthy, but again one thing outpaced the other. Regarding the mac pro, I'm becoming less attached to its future. Their recent rehashing of the line which wasn't really an update suggests that they're working on some kind of replacement, not that I'm planning on it. If that was it, they would have most likely canceled it unless they feel that changes in the coming year will get more prior mac pro purchasers to buy something like imacs instead. If everything I require ran under Debian or Fedora, I would have switched long ago. Both are quite stable. I still think Apple wants the majority of their customer base to use only Apple computing products whenever possible. I've been wondering how long it will be until the ipad is a functional standalone device much like a laptop today. Cloud storage is not going to entirely remove the need for local storage, especially if you are away from Wifi or mobile service. Anyway the direction of Apple probably seems obvious given the Appleinsider narratives, but the people running any company of that size will pay attention to more than the obvious trends. By the way, how familiar are you with some of the technical limitations of the idevices? I've noticed complaints regarding limitations in resolution with some of the painting apps and other things. People do not seem to understand that it contains limited memory and it lacks the ability to use the storage system as a virtualized extension of the memory system. I still kind of wonder what Apple will do in terms of future IO on these devices. It would be cool if they could handle greater tasks, but I don't know where Apple sees that in their timeline.
Marvin your numbers are so inflated at times. Let's compare a Quad G5 to the 2011 quad imac cpu. It's a popular cpu in Windows computers as well as past that point the cost goes up considerably, and we're comparing quad to quad. G5 quad is at 2.5. I7 2600k is as high as 3.41 under Windows (imac is a little lower there). G4s were never that fast anyway.
I don't think you're reading the score columns, those are the clock speeds. Quad G5s were 2.5GHz, the i7 2600k is 3.4GHz. The scores are G5 quad = 2.01, i7 2600k = 8.1. 2011 iMac is 6.8.
This is a jump of just 6 years so 2^3 = 8x expected but you're comparing a $3300 quad G5 to a $2200 iMac. The equivalent would be the dual 2.3GHz G5, which scores 0.8. So the 2011 $2200 iMac is 8.5x the speed of the 2005 $2500 dual 2.3GHz G5.
The numbers aren't inflated at all, Intel has satisfied Moore's Law pretty well so far.
So allow me to retort:
"It's just that you project your imagination onto past data at times in a very biased manner."
I'm looking at the facts of how quickly computers have progressed. 75x in 11 years is not fiction. I'm sure we all used hard drives that were measured in MBs and RAM measured in KB. These have jumped up 1000x over the same period.
So, either something catastrophic will happen to halt Intel's progress over the next decade or we can expect more of the same. You can very well argue that processing tasks will be orders of magnitude more intense but I don't see it happening in the mainstream. 1080p comes over the internet in real-time now, GPUs can do run-time displacements and photoreal shader processing, consumer hardware can edit 4K footage, mobile phones can record and edit 1080p.
We all get it, you don't want a future without the tower because that's your perception of what it takes to be a professional. In the mean-time, technology will continue the change without your consent.
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 buy iPads, iPhones... and Macs, both desktop and notebook. Updated a MacPro to an iMac last summer and love it (the SSD and display- 27" versus 23") made it a very good update for the money).
Here's to hoping they do come out with at least an iMac level machine without display that is capable of being linked into a small cluster. Doesn't need a superdrive, but that should be an option of those who do need it. I need BluRay and DVD, so I have to have an external drive anyways.
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.
there are a few problems with this. First; nobody is going to trust the cloud with mission critical information. The risk is so high that it verges on stupidity. Second; latenancy is a big problem with the cloud. Third; many computer tasks have been significantly speed up dispute to SSD's, this has enlightened users to a significant bottle neck, so I don't see them accepting a big regression here.
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.
I hope not. Granted I love my iPad but it would be hard to accept a desktop machine that is not reasonably repairable.
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.
I tend to disagree here, slots may become more important as technology moves to solid state devices. Future Mac may need slots to simply allow for secondary storage expansion.
There is no place for a Mac Pro in Apple's roadmap.
Todays Mac Pro probably not. There is room though for a more powerful machine. The arguments that discount the need for the Pro always seem to come from people who's most demanding task of the day is running Safari! You have to realize that there is a whole class of users out there that won't have enough performance for years to come. The fact that some groups of users now find things like the Mini and iMac suitable for their work only highlights the fact that computer technology is on a more rapid development path than other industries.
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).
That performance delta was my whole point. Even back in 2001 you had people going Gaga over computer performance and actually wondering why people would need more performance.
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.
What does that have to do with computers and software?
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.
I actually believe that you think your arguement is something new, yet I've heard the same line of reasoning well into the past. Yet the uses for computers continue to expand and software continues to become more demanding. Your point might have value if Tetris was the last game ever made, Numbers the last business app ever made and Final Cut the last whatever.
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.
Let's just say I disagree. Disagree to the point of trying to avoid excess laughter. Nobody that needs a computer for their core business needs is going to rely upon cloud computing.
I don't think you're reading the score columns, those are the clock speeds. Quad G5s were 2.5GHz, the i7 2600k is 3.4GHz. The scores are G5 quad = 2.01, i7 2600k = 8.1. 2011 iMac is 6.8.
This is a jump of just 6 years so 2^3 = 8x expected but you're comparing a $3300 quad G5 to a $2200 iMac. The equivalent would be the dual 2.3GHz G5, which scores 0.8. So the 2011 $2200 iMac is 8.5x the speed of the 2005 $2500 dual 2.3GHz G5.
The numbers aren't inflated at all, Intel has satisfied Moore's Law pretty well so far.
So allow me to retort:
"It's just that you project your imagination onto past data at times in a very biased manner."
I'm looking at the facts of how quickly computers have progressed. 75x in 11 years is not fiction. I'm sure we all used hard drives that were measured in MBs and RAM measured in KB. These have jumped up 1000x over the same period.
So, either something catastrophic will happen to halt Intel's progress over the next decade or we can expect more of the same. You can very well argue that processing tasks will be orders of magnitude more intense but I don't see it happening in the mainstream. 1080p comes over the internet in real-time now, GPUs can do run-time displacements and photoreal shader processing, consumer hardware can edit 4K footage, mobile phones can record and edit 1080p.
We all get it, you don't want a future without the tower because that's your perception of what it takes to be a professional. In the mean-time, technology will continue the change without your consent.
I think Marvin is the one that doesn't get it. My point anyways is this: unless something changes at Apple the Mini will always be marketed as a low end low performance machine relative to what is available at the time. Further it will alway be possible to shove more performance into a larger box. I expect this to remain true as long as Apple keeps a similar product matrix. If they have too Apple will shrink the Mini even more to maintain a performance delta between it and a higher performance machine.
Now I understand that you are trying to say people won't need the performance possible in a higher end machine as the Mini in ten years can handle everybodies needs. This I'm also rejecting because you don't and frankly can't know what peoples computing needs will be in ten years time. In 2001 if you tried to tell people that they would be running around witha pocket computer running a UNIX variant to handle much of their daily needs they would have said you are nuts. Even the idea of near realtime video processing on the desktop would have been hard to accept by many.
Beyond that Apple is pretty much proving you wrong with respect to 1080P and the like. The technology might not be here today, but retina screens are changing people perceptions of what is acceptable resolution. In time such screens will be expected for many areas where they are not now, it is just a matter of becoming economically viable.
I don't think you're reading the score columns, those are the clock speeds. Quad G5s were 2.5GHz, the i7 2600k is 3.4GHz. The scores are G5 quad = 2.01, i7 2600k = 8.1. 2011 iMac is 6.8.
This is a jump of just 6 years so 2^3 = 8x expected but you're comparing a $3300 quad G5 to a $2200 iMac. The equivalent would be the dual 2.3GHz G5, which scores 0.8. So the 2011 $2200 iMac is 8.5x the speed of the 2005 $2500 dual 2.3GHz G5.
The numbers aren't inflated at all, Intel has satisfied Moore's Law pretty well so far.
So allow me to retort:
"It's just that you project your imagination onto past data at times in a very biased manner."
I'm looking at the facts of how quickly computers have progressed. 75x in 11 years is not fiction. I'm sure we all used hard drives that were measured in MBs and RAM measured in KB. These have jumped up 1000x over the same period.
So, either something catastrophic will happen to halt Intel's progress over the next decade or we can expect more of the same. You can very well argue that processing tasks will be orders of magnitude more intense but I don't see it happening in the mainstream. 1080p comes over the internet in real-time now, GPUs can do run-time displacements and photoreal shader processing, consumer hardware can edit 4K footage, mobile phones can record and edit 1080p.
We all get it, you don't want a future without the tower because that's your perception of what it takes to be a professional. In the mean-time, technology will continue the change without your consent.
That may be the first time I've ever chosen the wrong column like that. I was pretty tired that day, although I should have caught that error. I was trying to compare similar core counts. The following year when they were both on Intel, you could have a quad for $2000. The IBM architecture lagged behind Intel significantly, at least in its implementation. Okay imac was 6.65 and G5 was 2.01. The early $2k mark mac pro did a bit better. I can't find the 2.00 mac pro on cinebench. It's a little better than 1/3 according to geekbench. I've already mentioned I don't care about the tower. I care about how things work, not how they look.
Your point might have value if Tetris was the last game ever made, Numbers the last business app ever made and Final Cut the last whatever.
Except I'm not suggesting Tetris is the benchmark. I'm suggesting that a photoreal real-time engine running at 1080p, among other things is making higher-end resources as close to irrelevant as necessary. Just because the argument may have been used 10 years ago and it turned out we had a way to go, doesn't mean it will always be the case.
I understand that you are trying to say people won't need the performance possible in a higher end machine as the Mini in ten years can handle everybodies needs. This I'm also rejecting because you don't and frankly can't know what peoples computing needs will be in ten years time.
Assuming we can't know what people's needs will be, you similarly can't know for certain that the tower form factor or Mac Pro will remain.
In 2001 if you tried to tell people that they would be running around witha pocket computer running a UNIX variant to handle much of their daily needs they would have said you are nuts. Even the idea of near realtime video processing on the desktop would have been hard to accept by many.
Exactly, so why is it so hard to accept that when desktops can handle 4K footage now that phones can't do the same in 10 years and therefore make the desktop irrelevant? Are we going higher than 4K?
We humans are the limit of technology. Technology exists to serve our needs and our needs are not infinite. We have simple pleasures like spending hours watching inane disposable TV shows and predictable movies that are already packed to breaking point with CGI, filming our families in mundane situations and sharing them with other mundane families. We already play games that offer the experience of interactive movies in terms of quality.
Where exactly is personal computing going that will require more than 24x the power of the current Mini?
retina screens are changing people perceptions of what is acceptable resolution
Ok, that's a fair point but that only needs a couple of iterations in processing power. We are at retina-level now so we're not going higher. Beyond this, the high-end machines get less and less relevant as you are targeting the same quality bar.
it will alway be possible to shove more performance into a larger box. I expect this to remain true as long as Apple keeps a similar product matrix.
You seem to be making the assumption that cheaper products won't make them as much money and yet the cheapest computing devices Apple sell actually make the vast majority of Apple's profits.
Apple would find it far easier to convince 100 people to buy a $500 Mini as 1 person to buy a $2500 Pro. If they sold affordable 3rd party displays in the Apple Store, they'd do a better job at it too.
there are a few problems with this. First; nobody is going to trust the cloud with mission critical information. The risk is so high that it verges on stupidity. Second; latenancy is a big problem with the cloud. Third; many computer tasks have been significantly speed up dispute to SSD's, this has enlightened users to a significant bottle neck, so I don't see them accepting a big regression here
The general public has shown an overwhelming preference for convenience over quality. Cell phones don't have nearly the reliability or sound quality as a land line, yet people are dropping their land lines for cell phones.
People are happy watching low quality video on cell phones.
Streaming video, and DVD's are lower quality then broadcast video, yet people are happy with them.
Trusting data to the cloud may be stupid, but it's absolutely convenient.
The trend will be to less local storage, rather than more. This may not be a good idea, but it's the way the market is going. Apple's most popular laptops have less storage capacity than those form 2 years ago. SSDs are faster and more convenient then traditional hard drives. People are happy to give up capacity for convenience (particularly when they are offered cloud storage).
Apple discontinued the Apple TV with 160GB of storage. The current model has 8GB of storage, and your music and videos are now stored in Apple's iCloud.
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.
Ah, it pretty much has been my experience that whatever the rich guys and video snobs are buying today I'll end up having in my living room in some form or another. Sony just released a 4K home theater projector for $26K. Toshiba just launched a 55" 4K (3840x2160) HDTV for $9500 in Japan. LG is releasing a 84" 4K 3D OLED for $10K later this year.
Sony and LG are looking at UltraHD 4K blu-rays and the current Sony BDP-S790 BluRay player actually upscales to 4K.
You best school them that 1080p is the end for home cinema because Sony, LG and Toshiba evidently didn't get the memo.
I personally have a 100" TV and I can tell you it's not too big or too expensive (total cost $1500ish)...just not very consumer friendly at the moment. When the display technology allows for $2000 direct view (vs projected) 100" 4K TVs folks will buy them because it will really be like in a theater vs a large TV.
I can also tell you that 1080p isn't high enough resolution...because I hate sitting in the back row of a movie theater. Which is what the HDTV spec currently replicates.
And for sports...well...it's pretty bad ass and a boatload of huge TVs are sold every year around the super bowl. Never underestimate the sell value of a bigger e-peen especially when you get to watch football on it.
It doesn't seem like they do, does it? I'm also troubled by their arrogant attitude towards slower selling products, which seems to be "if it's not selling well, then it must be the market's fault". Apple needs to consider that maybe a slow selling computer line needs to be improved rather than axed. Furthermore, Apple needs to understand that while elite high end gear may have lower sales, it still adds to Apple's reputation and influences sales of other lines. The 17" MacBook may not have shifted many units, but I'll bet the attention it garners in cafes leads to more sales of the 15" MacBooks.
Take a car like the Dodge Viper: it isn't supposed to be a huge revenue stream, it's designed to showcase Dodge's engineering chops and build their reputation. With computers this is even more important, because the "power users" who buy Mac Pros and 17" MacBooks have a lot of influence over other people's buying decisions. They're the one's people go to for help when it comes time to get a new computer. This was the genius behind Mac OS X: it put Macs in the hands of hardcore Unix geeks, and instantly boosted Apple's street cred in serious computing environments. Apple just doesn't seem to get it anymore. They can coast on their success for years, but if they don't take care of the high end pro market, Mac will once again lose regard among serious computer users, and when Joe Sixpack asks his smart brother in law what computer to get, he'll be told "don't get a Mac if you want to do anything besides email and pr0n surfing."
I don't think so, that was in the G4 era and when state of the art graphics looked like this: Faces were mapped to flat polygons, lighting was flat, characters pivoted on a single point, resolution was low, polygon count was low.
Compare that to what we have now: Computers and software are content creators. When content consumption peaks in resources, content creation is easier.
As time goes on, the argument just becomes more relevant.
Except I'm not suggesting Tetris is the benchmark. I'm suggesting that a photoreal real-time engine running at 1080p, among other things is making higher-end resources as close to irrelevant as necessary. Just because the argument may have been used 10 years ago and it turned out we had a way to go, doesn't mean it will always be the case.
Well, someone better tell Ellison to bail out quick before people catch on.
Assuming we can't know what people's needs will be, you similarly can't know for certain that the tower form factor or Mac Pro will remain.
Exactly, so why is it so hard to accept that when desktops can handle 4K footage now that phones can't do the same in 10 years and therefore make the desktop irrelevant? Are we going higher than 4K?
We humans are the limit of technology. Technology exists to serve our needs and our needs are not infinite. We have simple pleasures like spending hours watching inane disposable TV shows and predictable movies that are already packed to breaking point with CGI, filming our families in mundane situations and sharing them with other mundane families. We already play games that offer the experience of interactive movies in terms of quality.
Where exactly is personal computing going that will require more than 24x the power of the current Mini?
I kind of think that the overdone CG will eventually become another dated look considering that the newness wore off some time ago. Regarding the concept of normal mapping and limited polygon counts in games, what makes you think that has changed? They still have to optimize them for the lowest overhead possible. The capabilities of the last generation just go into current portables (ipad, vita, etc.). Suggesting that they can't improve further is silly. If that was the case, NVidia's discrete gpu business would be bankrupt. I would expect discrete gpus to disappear before you hit hard limits there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Junkyard Dawg
It doesn't seem like they do, does it? I'm also troubled by their arrogant attitude towards slower selling products, which seems to be "if it's not selling well, then it must be the market's fault". Apple needs to consider that maybe a slow selling computer line needs to be improved rather than axed. Furthermore, Apple needs to understand that while elite high end gear may have lower sales, it still adds to Apple's reputation and influences sales of other lines. The 17" MacBook may not have shifted many units, but I'll bet the attention it garners in cafes leads to more sales of the 15" MacBooks.
Take a car like the Dodge Viper: it isn't supposed to be a huge revenue stream, it's designed to showcase Dodge's engineering chops and build their reputation. With computers this is even more important, because the "power users" who buy Mac Pros and 17" MacBooks have a lot of influence over other people's buying decisions. They're the one's people go to for help when it comes time to get a new computer. This was the genius behind Mac OS X: it put Macs in the hands of hardcore Unix geeks, and instantly boosted Apple's street cred in serious computing environments. Apple just doesn't seem to get it anymore. They can coast on their success for years, but if they don't take care of the high end pro market, Mac will once again lose regard among serious computer users, and when Joe Sixpack asks his smart brother in law what computer to get, he'll be told "don't get a Mac if you want to do anything besides email and pr0n surfing."
I think that is somewhat of a dated concept. Unless you're talking about the 50 and older crowd, most of these people were exposed to computers and electronics when they were young enough to accept them as a normal part of living. You do not need to be a geek to make typical computer purchasing decisions. We are not talking about configuring the traffic shaping policies of a large server. We're talking about buying electronics that are aimed at the average consumer.
You seemed to have summed up the three most likely vectors.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
I am afraid you are in denial. Someone should put the Mac Pro on a death watch. The rate at which Apple are failing to update it will make it increasingly irrelevant even if the company does not formally kill it immediately. When the sales continue to plummet, Apple will say that they had no choice but to discontinue it.
I believe you are correct in your belief that there will be a continuing need for desk side computers (they don't belong on the desk top). It is just that the future of those machines is not with Apple. Many of Apple's original core of graphic artists and photographers have already moved on because of the delay in getting a 64-bit Creative Suite on the Apple platform. I see more people making the change as well. We can only wish that Adobe steps up and offers a Solaris or Linux version of Creative Suite/Photoshop and so on. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.
I am afraid you are in denial. Someone should put the Mac Pro on a death watch. The rate at which Apple are failing to update it will make it increasingly irrelevant even if the company does not formally kill it immediately. When the sales continue to plummet, Apple will say that they had no choice but to discontinue it.
It is on a death watch! I fully expect it to be replaced with something better!!!
I believe you are correct in your belief that there will be a continuing need for desk side computers (they don't belong on the desk top). It is just that the future of those machines is not with Apple.
That would be very sad as Apple has the best OS for the technical user right now. I'm not sure why you beleive Apple would completely abandon this market.
Many of Apple's original core of graphic artists and photographers have already moved on because of the delay in getting a 64-bit Creative Suite on the Apple platform. I see more people making the change as well. We can only wish that Adobe steps up and offers a Solaris or Linux version of Creative Suite/Photoshop and so on. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.
Really what is it about this forum that people here believe that Mac Pro users are only interested in graphics and creative suite? Seriously, all of the Mac Pro creative suite users could die tomorrow and nobody would care.
I am afraid you are in denial. Someone should put the Mac Pro on a death watch. The rate at which Apple are failing to update it will make it increasingly irrelevant even if the company does not formally kill it immediately. When the sales continue to plummet, Apple will say that they had no choice but to discontinue it.
I believe you are correct in your belief that there will be a continuing need for desk side computers (they don't belong on the desk top). It is just that the future of those machines is not with Apple. Many of Apple's original core of graphic artists and photographers have already moved on because of the delay in getting a 64-bit Creative Suite on the Apple platform. I see more people making the change as well. We can only wish that Adobe steps up and offers a Solaris or Linux version of Creative Suite/Photoshop and so on. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.
What would possibly justify porting to Solaris? Fedora could make sense. A lot of VFX software runs on that kernel. If they can find interest for however many seats and that allows them to move forward, you could see something like that. Unfortunately I think the code base is too old and messy to do this in an efficient manner. You'd probably prefer ubuntu, but I doubt there are enough people who would buy it that way. Anyway those applications actually run quite well these days under Windows if you watch your graphics hardware. They're even better supported in some areas. Adobe always gets blamed, and they can be annoying, but if you've read some of their responses, certain things such as 10 bit frame buffers are unavailable due to Apple not supporting them. I didn't see a fast migration on the 64 bit thing. Setting up under an entirely different OS with different file systems can be an issue. While 64 bit Creative Suite can handle some things much much faster, that relates more to larger files. The story is pretty old there, but Apple initially planned to support 64 bit Carbon. Adobe claimed they were waiting on porting to Cocoa due to a lack of maturity in Xcode for dealing with large applications. Apple dropped Carbon. Adobe split up their updates. Now if you look at the history of some of the applications Apple has maintained in house, they were not 64 bit rewrites at that time either.
Regarding death watch on the mac pro, if they were going to just kill it, this probably would have already happened. It's likely that the most recent move was just procrastination. It was a pathetic excuse for an update, but some of the silly comments regarding clearing out old parts are just silly. That can be done by just sunsetting the machine without adding new processor skus.
Really what is it about this forum that people here believe that Mac Pro users are only interested in graphics and creative suite? Seriously, all of the Mac Pro creative suite users could die tomorrow and nobody would care.
You miss several points. First, Apple's neglect and fights with Adobe have resulted in the loss of what was once an important customer base. I am aware of a fair number of technical useers in the scientific and medical community who, if forced will leave the platform, but would much prefer to remain. They would have to find a solution elsewhere...a unix or linux box most likely.
I don't take Tim's statement as meaning anything in particular. If forced to guess, I would say that it means there will be one more Mac Pro. Apple's commitment to the continuation of the Mac Pro lineup is still in question. I don't think it has much of a future because it is following in the footsteps of the X-Serve in terms of not being kept up-to-date and declining sales. Apple has failed to step up and give assurances that there will be Mac Pros in the future. The fact of the matter is that Apple have dropped enough hints about the lack of sales to lead to a conclusion that there is not much of a future for it.
If the machine that Apple releases as the next Mac Pro is not substantially better than the existing one, who would want it. The current one is outdated and has been for some time.
Wow ! That's very good news for us and i can not wait for this.
Marco Arment, creator of InstaPaper, called the tiny update a “good way to clear out parts and keep selling to a few desperate buyers for a bit longer without any real investment” on his blog. We called it a “kiss-off” update in our WWDC coverage.
But apparently it was neither, and after a disgruntled Mac Pro fan sent an email to the big man himself (Tim Cook), the unthinkable happened. Not only did Tim Cook respond, but he leaked previously unknown information. This is not Apple’s way, but we’re hardly complaining.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
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).
Marvin your numbers are so inflated at times. Let's compare a Quad G5 to the 2011 quad imac cpu. It's a popular cpu in Windows computers as well as past that point the cost goes up considerably, and we're comparing quad to quad. Obviously it was a newer feature then. It's become quite normal in desktops and many notebooks. G5 quad is at 2.5. I7 2600k is as high as 3.41 under Windows (imac is a little lower there). G4s were never that fast anyway. They were lagging and Intel showed some enormous growth around the Core2 era where they ditched the direction of the pentium 4s. That isn't a guarantee. It's been tapered off since then. Anyway stop inflating numbers. I like your posts, because you find cool links. It's just that you project your imagination onto past data at times in a very biased manner. Beyond that, mobile devices are becoming more capable for a lot of things, but Apple doesn't necessarily aim them at these markets. If they did, they would be designed with different priorities in mind.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mfryd
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.
(but mostly for all your posts in this thread)
ha ha ha ha
And I thought that Marvin, Dave and TS were the ultimate freaks in this forum!
Now they have their D'Artagnan.
Good Lord, we're doomed!
Quote:
Originally Posted by hmm
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 think the numbers for the Mac look better when examining the full year, please post those numbers. Calling me silly because you don't like Apple's recent SEC filings doesn't seem helpful.
I assume that by "Hackintosh" you are referring to a non-Apple computer running a patched and unsupported version of the Mac OS. I am not suggesting that such a configuration is reliable. What I did suggest was that Apple has the option of allowing the Mac OS to run on non-Apple hardware. This is not an all or nothing situation. Apple would not need to guarantee that OS-X run on every conceivable configuration. Apple could choose to limit OS-X to certain configurations. This is not without precedent. The next version of OS-X has certain requirements, and won't run on some of the older Intel Macs.
I do agree that Apple is unlikely to pull the plug on the Mac tomorrow. More likely they will kill off the Mac Pro, and morph the rest of the product line into desktop versions of the iPad. Once Xcode is ported to the iPad, they no longer need Mac OS-X. Porting Xcode to iOS isn't as hard as many think. Under the hood, iOS and Mac OS-X are the same.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mfryd
If you think the numbers for the Mac look better when examining the full year, please post those numbers. Calling me silly because you don't like Apple's recent SEC filings doesn't seem helpful.
I assume that by "Hackintosh" you are referring to a non-Apple computer running a patched and unsupported version of the Mac OS. I am not suggesting that such a configuration is reliable. What I did suggest was that Apple has the option of allowing the Mac OS to run on non-Apple hardware. This is not an all or nothing situation. Apple would not need to guarantee that OS-X run on every conceivable configuration. Apple could choose to limit OS-X to certain configurations. This is not without precedent. The next version of OS-X has certain requirements, and won't run on some of the older Intel Macs.
I do agree that Apple is unlikely to pull the plug on the Mac tomorrow. More likely they will kill off the Mac Pro, and morph the rest of the product line into desktop versions of the iPad. Once Xcode is ported to the iPad, they no longer need Mac OS-X. Porting Xcode to iOS isn't as hard as many think. Under the hood, iOS and Mac OS-X are the same.
I'm aware of the ability to certify hardware. I still said it would take time to make such changes if they wanted to do them. Looking at a single quarter is incredibly short sighted for any company that has no real cash flow or financing problems. They aren't worried that they won't be able to finance further endeavors. At this point it's just a placate shareholders thing. I'm not digging up the last several quarters, but the enthusiast sites all reported it was a record low for the Macs when they posted roughly 15% of revenue having come from the Mac line. It was a big enough dip in pecentage to be newsworthy, but again one thing outpaced the other. Regarding the mac pro, I'm becoming less attached to its future. Their recent rehashing of the line which wasn't really an update suggests that they're working on some kind of replacement, not that I'm planning on it. If that was it, they would have most likely canceled it unless they feel that changes in the coming year will get more prior mac pro purchasers to buy something like imacs instead. If everything I require ran under Debian or Fedora, I would have switched long ago. Both are quite stable. I still think Apple wants the majority of their customer base to use only Apple computing products whenever possible. I've been wondering how long it will be until the ipad is a functional standalone device much like a laptop today. Cloud storage is not going to entirely remove the need for local storage, especially if you are away from Wifi or mobile service. Anyway the direction of Apple probably seems obvious given the Appleinsider narratives, but the people running any company of that size will pay attention to more than the obvious trends. By the way, how familiar are you with some of the technical limitations of the idevices? I've noticed complaints regarding limitations in resolution with some of the painting apps and other things. People do not seem to understand that it contains limited memory and it lacks the ability to use the storage system as a virtualized extension of the memory system. I still kind of wonder what Apple will do in terms of future IO on these devices. It would be cool if they could handle greater tasks, but I don't know where Apple sees that in their timeline.
I don't think you're reading the score columns, those are the clock speeds. Quad G5s were 2.5GHz, the i7 2600k is 3.4GHz. The scores are G5 quad = 2.01, i7 2600k = 8.1. 2011 iMac is 6.8.
This is a jump of just 6 years so 2^3 = 8x expected but you're comparing a $3300 quad G5 to a $2200 iMac. The equivalent would be the dual 2.3GHz G5, which scores 0.8. So the 2011 $2200 iMac is 8.5x the speed of the 2005 $2500 dual 2.3GHz G5.
The numbers aren't inflated at all, Intel has satisfied Moore's Law pretty well so far.
So allow me to retort:
"It's just that you project your imagination onto past data at times in a very biased manner."
I'm looking at the facts of how quickly computers have progressed. 75x in 11 years is not fiction. I'm sure we all used hard drives that were measured in MBs and RAM measured in KB. These have jumped up 1000x over the same period.
So, either something catastrophic will happen to halt Intel's progress over the next decade or we can expect more of the same. You can very well argue that processing tasks will be orders of magnitude more intense but I don't see it happening in the mainstream. 1080p comes over the internet in real-time now, GPUs can do run-time displacements and photoreal shader processing, consumer hardware can edit 4K footage, mobile phones can record and edit 1080p.
We all get it, you don't want a future without the tower because that's your perception of what it takes to be a professional. In the mean-time, technology will continue the change without your consent.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mfryd
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 buy iPads, iPhones... and Macs, both desktop and notebook. Updated a MacPro to an iMac last summer and love it (the SSD and display- 27" versus 23") made it a very good update for the money).
Here's to hoping they do come out with at least an iMac level machine without display that is capable of being linked into a small cluster. Doesn't need a superdrive, but that should be an option of those who do need it. I need BluRay and DVD, so I have to have an external drive anyways.
Todays Mac Pro probably not. There is room though for a more powerful machine. The arguments that discount the need for the Pro always seem to come from people who's most demanding task of the day is running Safari! You have to realize that there is a whole class of users out there that won't have enough performance for years to come. The fact that some groups of users now find things like the Mini and iMac suitable for their work only highlights the fact that computer technology is on a more rapid development path than other industries.
Let's just say I disagree. Disagree to the point of trying to avoid excess laughter. Nobody that needs a computer for their core business needs is going to rely upon cloud computing.
I think Marvin is the one that doesn't get it. My point anyways is this: unless something changes at Apple the Mini will always be marketed as a low end low performance machine relative to what is available at the time. Further it will alway be possible to shove more performance into a larger box. I expect this to remain true as long as Apple keeps a similar product matrix. If they have too Apple will shrink the Mini even more to maintain a performance delta between it and a higher performance machine.
Now I understand that you are trying to say people won't need the performance possible in a higher end machine as the Mini in ten years can handle everybodies needs. This I'm also rejecting because you don't and frankly can't know what peoples computing needs will be in ten years time. In 2001 if you tried to tell people that they would be running around witha pocket computer running a UNIX variant to handle much of their daily needs they would have said you are nuts. Even the idea of near realtime video processing on the desktop would have been hard to accept by many.
Beyond that Apple is pretty much proving you wrong with respect to 1080P and the like. The technology might not be here today, but retina screens are changing people perceptions of what is acceptable resolution. In time such screens will be expected for many areas where they are not now, it is just a matter of becoming economically viable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
I don't think you're reading the score columns, those are the clock speeds. Quad G5s were 2.5GHz, the i7 2600k is 3.4GHz. The scores are G5 quad = 2.01, i7 2600k = 8.1. 2011 iMac is 6.8.
This is a jump of just 6 years so 2^3 = 8x expected but you're comparing a $3300 quad G5 to a $2200 iMac. The equivalent would be the dual 2.3GHz G5, which scores 0.8. So the 2011 $2200 iMac is 8.5x the speed of the 2005 $2500 dual 2.3GHz G5.
The numbers aren't inflated at all, Intel has satisfied Moore's Law pretty well so far.
So allow me to retort:
"It's just that you project your imagination onto past data at times in a very biased manner."
I'm looking at the facts of how quickly computers have progressed. 75x in 11 years is not fiction. I'm sure we all used hard drives that were measured in MBs and RAM measured in KB. These have jumped up 1000x over the same period.
So, either something catastrophic will happen to halt Intel's progress over the next decade or we can expect more of the same. You can very well argue that processing tasks will be orders of magnitude more intense but I don't see it happening in the mainstream. 1080p comes over the internet in real-time now, GPUs can do run-time displacements and photoreal shader processing, consumer hardware can edit 4K footage, mobile phones can record and edit 1080p.
We all get it, you don't want a future without the tower because that's your perception of what it takes to be a professional. In the mean-time, technology will continue the change without your consent.
That may be the first time I've ever chosen the wrong column like that. I was pretty tired that day, although I should have caught that error. I was trying to compare similar core counts. The following year when they were both on Intel, you could have a quad for $2000. The IBM architecture lagged behind Intel significantly, at least in its implementation. Okay imac was 6.65 and G5 was 2.01. The early $2k mark mac pro did a bit better. I can't find the 2.00 mac pro on cinebench. It's a little better than 1/3 according to geekbench. I've already mentioned I don't care about the tower. I care about how things work, not how they look.
I don't think so, that was in the G4 era and when state of the art graphics looked like this:
[VIDEO]
Faces were mapped to flat polygons, lighting was flat, characters pivoted on a single point, resolution was low, polygon count was low.
Compare that to what we have now:
[VIDEO]
Even before real-time engines could achieve that quality, they were doing high quality cinematics so they could see there was more to come:
[VIDEO]
Computers and software are content creators. When content consumption peaks in resources, content creation is easier.
As time goes on, the argument just becomes more relevant.
Except I'm not suggesting Tetris is the benchmark. I'm suggesting that a photoreal real-time engine running at 1080p, among other things is making higher-end resources as close to irrelevant as necessary. Just because the argument may have been used 10 years ago and it turned out we had a way to go, doesn't mean it will always be the case.
Well, someone better tell Ellison to bail out quick before people catch on.
Assuming we can't know what people's needs will be, you similarly can't know for certain that the tower form factor or Mac Pro will remain.
Exactly, so why is it so hard to accept that when desktops can handle 4K footage now that phones can't do the same in 10 years and therefore make the desktop irrelevant? Are we going higher than 4K?
We humans are the limit of technology. Technology exists to serve our needs and our needs are not infinite. We have simple pleasures like spending hours watching inane disposable TV shows and predictable movies that are already packed to breaking point with CGI, filming our families in mundane situations and sharing them with other mundane families. We already play games that offer the experience of interactive movies in terms of quality.
Where exactly is personal computing going that will require more than 24x the power of the current Mini?
Ok, that's a fair point but that only needs a couple of iterations in processing power. We are at retina-level now so we're not going higher. Beyond this, the high-end machines get less and less relevant as you are targeting the same quality bar.
You seem to be making the assumption that cheaper products won't make them as much money and yet the cheapest computing devices Apple sell actually make the vast majority of Apple's profits.
Apple would find it far easier to convince 100 people to buy a $500 Mini as 1 person to buy a $2500 Pro. If they sold affordable 3rd party displays in the Apple Store, they'd do a better job at it too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
there are a few problems with this. First; nobody is going to trust the cloud with mission critical information. The risk is so high that it verges on stupidity. Second; latenancy is a big problem with the cloud. Third; many computer tasks have been significantly speed up dispute to SSD's, this has enlightened users to a significant bottle neck, so I don't see them accepting a big regression here
The general public has shown an overwhelming preference for convenience over quality. Cell phones don't have nearly the reliability or sound quality as a land line, yet people are dropping their land lines for cell phones.
People are happy watching low quality video on cell phones.
Streaming video, and DVD's are lower quality then broadcast video, yet people are happy with them.
Trusting data to the cloud may be stupid, but it's absolutely convenient.
The trend will be to less local storage, rather than more. This may not be a good idea, but it's the way the market is going. Apple's most popular laptops have less storage capacity than those form 2 years ago. SSDs are faster and more convenient then traditional hard drives. People are happy to give up capacity for convenience (particularly when they are offered cloud storage).
Apple discontinued the Apple TV with 160GB of storage. The current model has 8GB of storage, and your music and videos are now stored in Apple's iCloud.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
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.
Ah, it pretty much has been my experience that whatever the rich guys and video snobs are buying today I'll end up having in my living room in some form or another. Sony just released a 4K home theater projector for $26K. Toshiba just launched a 55" 4K (3840x2160) HDTV for $9500 in Japan. LG is releasing a 84" 4K 3D OLED for $10K later this year.
Sony and LG are looking at UltraHD 4K blu-rays and the current Sony BDP-S790 BluRay player actually upscales to 4K.
You best school them that 1080p is the end for home cinema because Sony, LG and Toshiba evidently didn't get the memo.
I personally have a 100" TV and I can tell you it's not too big or too expensive (total cost $1500ish)...just not very consumer friendly at the moment. When the display technology allows for $2000 direct view (vs projected) 100" 4K TVs folks will buy them because it will really be like in a theater vs a large TV.
I can also tell you that 1080p isn't high enough resolution...because I hate sitting in the back row of a movie theater. Which is what the HDTV spec currently replicates.
And for sports...well...it's pretty bad ass and a boatload of huge TVs are sold every year around the super bowl. Never underestimate the sell value of a bigger e-peen especially when you get to watch football on it.
It doesn't seem like they do, does it? I'm also troubled by their arrogant attitude towards slower selling products, which seems to be "if it's not selling well, then it must be the market's fault". Apple needs to consider that maybe a slow selling computer line needs to be improved rather than axed. Furthermore, Apple needs to understand that while elite high end gear may have lower sales, it still adds to Apple's reputation and influences sales of other lines. The 17" MacBook may not have shifted many units, but I'll bet the attention it garners in cafes leads to more sales of the 15" MacBooks.
Take a car like the Dodge Viper: it isn't supposed to be a huge revenue stream, it's designed to showcase Dodge's engineering chops and build their reputation. With computers this is even more important, because the "power users" who buy Mac Pros and 17" MacBooks have a lot of influence over other people's buying decisions. They're the one's people go to for help when it comes time to get a new computer. This was the genius behind Mac OS X: it put Macs in the hands of hardcore Unix geeks, and instantly boosted Apple's street cred in serious computing environments. Apple just doesn't seem to get it anymore. They can coast on their success for years, but if they don't take care of the high end pro market, Mac will once again lose regard among serious computer users, and when Joe Sixpack asks his smart brother in law what computer to get, he'll be told "don't get a Mac if you want to do anything besides email and pr0n surfing."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
I don't think so, that was in the G4 era and when state of the art graphics looked like this:
Faces were mapped to flat polygons, lighting was flat, characters pivoted on a single point, resolution was low, polygon count was low.
Compare that to what we have now:
Computers and software are content creators. When content consumption peaks in resources, content creation is easier.
As time goes on, the argument just becomes more relevant.
Except I'm not suggesting Tetris is the benchmark. I'm suggesting that a photoreal real-time engine running at 1080p, among other things is making higher-end resources as close to irrelevant as necessary. Just because the argument may have been used 10 years ago and it turned out we had a way to go, doesn't mean it will always be the case.
Well, someone better tell Ellison to bail out quick before people catch on.
Assuming we can't know what people's needs will be, you similarly can't know for certain that the tower form factor or Mac Pro will remain.
Exactly, so why is it so hard to accept that when desktops can handle 4K footage now that phones can't do the same in 10 years and therefore make the desktop irrelevant? Are we going higher than 4K?
We humans are the limit of technology. Technology exists to serve our needs and our needs are not infinite. We have simple pleasures like spending hours watching inane disposable TV shows and predictable movies that are already packed to breaking point with CGI, filming our families in mundane situations and sharing them with other mundane families. We already play games that offer the experience of interactive movies in terms of quality.
Where exactly is personal computing going that will require more than 24x the power of the current Mini?
I kind of think that the overdone CG will eventually become another dated look considering that the newness wore off some time ago. Regarding the concept of normal mapping and limited polygon counts in games, what makes you think that has changed? They still have to optimize them for the lowest overhead possible. The capabilities of the last generation just go into current portables (ipad, vita, etc.). Suggesting that they can't improve further is silly. If that was the case, NVidia's discrete gpu business would be bankrupt. I would expect discrete gpus to disappear before you hit hard limits there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Junkyard Dawg
It doesn't seem like they do, does it? I'm also troubled by their arrogant attitude towards slower selling products, which seems to be "if it's not selling well, then it must be the market's fault". Apple needs to consider that maybe a slow selling computer line needs to be improved rather than axed. Furthermore, Apple needs to understand that while elite high end gear may have lower sales, it still adds to Apple's reputation and influences sales of other lines. The 17" MacBook may not have shifted many units, but I'll bet the attention it garners in cafes leads to more sales of the 15" MacBooks.
Take a car like the Dodge Viper: it isn't supposed to be a huge revenue stream, it's designed to showcase Dodge's engineering chops and build their reputation. With computers this is even more important, because the "power users" who buy Mac Pros and 17" MacBooks have a lot of influence over other people's buying decisions. They're the one's people go to for help when it comes time to get a new computer. This was the genius behind Mac OS X: it put Macs in the hands of hardcore Unix geeks, and instantly boosted Apple's street cred in serious computing environments. Apple just doesn't seem to get it anymore. They can coast on their success for years, but if they don't take care of the high end pro market, Mac will once again lose regard among serious computer users, and when Joe Sixpack asks his smart brother in law what computer to get, he'll be told "don't get a Mac if you want to do anything besides email and pr0n surfing."
I think that is somewhat of a dated concept. Unless you're talking about the 50 and older crowd, most of these people were exposed to computers and electronics when they were young enough to accept them as a normal part of living. You do not need to be a geek to make typical computer purchasing decisions. We are not talking about configuring the traffic shaping policies of a large server. We're talking about buying electronics that are aimed at the average consumer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
You seemed to have summed up the three most likely vectors.
Quote:
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.
Quote:
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.
Quote:
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.
Quote:
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.
I am afraid you are in denial. Someone should put the Mac Pro on a death watch. The rate at which Apple are failing to update it will make it increasingly irrelevant even if the company does not formally kill it immediately. When the sales continue to plummet, Apple will say that they had no choice but to discontinue it.
I believe you are correct in your belief that there will be a continuing need for desk side computers (they don't belong on the desk top). It is just that the future of those machines is not with Apple. Many of Apple's original core of graphic artists and photographers have already moved on because of the delay in getting a 64-bit Creative Suite on the Apple platform. I see more people making the change as well. We can only wish that Adobe steps up and offers a Solaris or Linux version of Creative Suite/Photoshop and so on. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.
It is on a death watch! I fully expect it to be replaced with something better!!! That would be very sad as Apple has the best OS for the technical user right now. I'm not sure why you beleive Apple would completely abandon this market.
Really what is it about this forum that people here believe that Mac Pro users are only interested in graphics and creative suite? Seriously, all of the Mac Pro creative suite users could die tomorrow and nobody would care.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RBR
I am afraid you are in denial. Someone should put the Mac Pro on a death watch. The rate at which Apple are failing to update it will make it increasingly irrelevant even if the company does not formally kill it immediately. When the sales continue to plummet, Apple will say that they had no choice but to discontinue it.
I believe you are correct in your belief that there will be a continuing need for desk side computers (they don't belong on the desk top). It is just that the future of those machines is not with Apple. Many of Apple's original core of graphic artists and photographers have already moved on because of the delay in getting a 64-bit Creative Suite on the Apple platform. I see more people making the change as well. We can only wish that Adobe steps up and offers a Solaris or Linux version of Creative Suite/Photoshop and so on. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.
What would possibly justify porting to Solaris? Fedora could make sense. A lot of VFX software runs on that kernel. If they can find interest for however many seats and that allows them to move forward, you could see something like that. Unfortunately I think the code base is too old and messy to do this in an efficient manner. You'd probably prefer ubuntu, but I doubt there are enough people who would buy it that way. Anyway those applications actually run quite well these days under Windows if you watch your graphics hardware. They're even better supported in some areas. Adobe always gets blamed, and they can be annoying, but if you've read some of their responses, certain things such as 10 bit frame buffers are unavailable due to Apple not supporting them. I didn't see a fast migration on the 64 bit thing. Setting up under an entirely different OS with different file systems can be an issue. While 64 bit Creative Suite can handle some things much much faster, that relates more to larger files. The story is pretty old there, but Apple initially planned to support 64 bit Carbon. Adobe claimed they were waiting on porting to Cocoa due to a lack of maturity in Xcode for dealing with large applications. Apple dropped Carbon. Adobe split up their updates. Now if you look at the history of some of the applications Apple has maintained in house, they were not 64 bit rewrites at that time either.
Regarding death watch on the mac pro, if they were going to just kill it, this probably would have already happened. It's likely that the most recent move was just procrastination. It was a pathetic excuse for an update, but some of the silly comments regarding clearing out old parts are just silly. That can be done by just sunsetting the machine without adding new processor skus.
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Originally Posted by wizard69
Talk about unwarranted negativity!
Really what is it about this forum that people here believe that Mac Pro users are only interested in graphics and creative suite? Seriously, all of the Mac Pro creative suite users could die tomorrow and nobody would care.
You miss several points. First, Apple's neglect and fights with Adobe have resulted in the loss of what was once an important customer base. I am aware of a fair number of technical useers in the scientific and medical community who, if forced will leave the platform, but would much prefer to remain. They would have to find a solution elsewhere...a unix or linux box most likely.
I don't take Tim's statement as meaning anything in particular. If forced to guess, I would say that it means there will be one more Mac Pro. Apple's commitment to the continuation of the Mac Pro lineup is still in question. I don't think it has much of a future because it is following in the footsteps of the X-Serve in terms of not being kept up-to-date and declining sales. Apple has failed to step up and give assurances that there will be Mac Pros in the future. The fact of the matter is that Apple have dropped enough hints about the lack of sales to lead to a conclusion that there is not much of a future for it.
If the machine that Apple releases as the next Mac Pro is not substantially better than the existing one, who would want it. The current one is outdated and has been for some time.
Wow ! That's very good news for us and i can not wait for this.
Marco Arment, creator of InstaPaper, called the tiny update a “good way to clear out parts and keep selling to a few desperate buyers for a bit longer without any real investment” on his blog. We called it a “kiss-off” update in our WWDC coverage.
But apparently it was neither, and after a disgruntled Mac Pro fan sent an email to the big man himself (Tim Cook), the unthinkable happened. Not only did Tim Cook respond, but he leaked previously unknown information. This is not Apple’s way, but we’re hardly complaining.