BTW, how many internal boot drives can you put in an iMac, not partitioned? I know keyboard shortcuts and need no instruction. An iMac is not a substitute for a Mac Pro. Yes, I know, "Something really great is coming". Some of us have to budget in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars , and that is not too much to go on. Have you ever heard of the phrase "Business Plan"? BTW, I will never go to Windows, thus my ardor. No trolling here. And a new version of the OS every 6 months is just asking for bugs and sfw developers to respond "Apple broke it".
BTW, how many internal boot drives can you put in an iMac, not partitioned?
I have two drives in my 2011 iMac. Get rid of the optical drive and that's a third I can add. The 2012 iMac probably doesn't have the luxury of connectors or space for the third though.
BTW, I will never go to Windows, thus my ardor. No trolling here. And a new version of the OS every 6 months is just asking for bugs and sfw developers to respond "Apple broke it".
You say you're not trolling, but you say a new OS every six months? Because trolls tend to fudge the numbers. The real number is a year.
Yes, it's better not to conform to laws in such a large market as the EU. Better to take a principled stand than to chuck in some different fans and make EU sales.
/snark
I think it's a valid question to ask why it's unsafe. You have to open the machine to touch any fan blades, but they aren't very exposed and there's no way those can damage fingertips. They aren't sharp and they don't spin fast enough to cause abrasion. To keep children from opening the case, you can just put a Kensington lock on it, or an ordinary padlock. I'd say Mac Pro is an office computer rather than a home computer, concern over children running amok in an office seems out of place. It's not really a gamer computer, and iMacs cover most consumer needs very well.
As an aside, how do gamer computers get away with their GPU fans in the EU? It's the same card, that's the most exposed fan in a Mac Pro.
Hard to say. After all, Apple chose a server CPU for that workstation.
It's not simply a server CPU. Last I checked, it's a WORKSTATION and server CPU. In combination with a workstation chipset. Servers might use the workstation/server CPU with server chipsets. Under the Intel system, there are different chipsets for servers. This isn't hard. A rack-mount type server as a desktop is stupid. Try it sometime and you'll learn for yourself, it's because rack servers are fraking loud. Server rooms don't have to be quiet and so they aren't. It sucks for server room crews though, I can hear a server through a wall.
@JeffDM, quote: You say you're not trolling, but you say a new OS every six months? Because trolls tend to fudge the numbers. The real number is a year.
I was the exclusive Avid (video editing) dealer in Hawaii for many years. Installed around 150 Mac systems. Always worked. No troll here. Even once a year is too often unless they are just bug fixes. Even point updates, which can come many times in that period, can break things, both hardware and software. The new iMacs have no opticals, therefore no space for two drives, at least to my knowledge, I'm just not interested in thinner and unexpandable. I don't require a fashion object, but I do believe the current Mac Pro designed by Jony Ive ten years ago is still classically beautiful. Everything he does is. If Apple doesn't come out with a true expandable tower for the next Mac Pro, I'm going to snap up what's available now as a backup to my 5,1 2010 before they disappear, put in a powerful NVidia card, plenty of RAM, and 4 or more high speed HD's and/or SSDs, and hope they last me 'til I've finished all of the projects I have sitting and waiting for me that I have shot in the last 25 years, both SD and HD. Sold and still use one Windows based system. Never again. A true pain. I am one of many pros who are caught in this place. I hope Tim really comes through, truly.
Correction, there is space for two drives in the 2012 27" iMac, at least Fusion, which doesn't interest me for video. Changing anything in that department seems to require major (non-user) surgery to the display panel.
I was the exclusive Avid (video editing) dealer in Hawaii for many years. Installed around 150 Mac systems. Always worked. No troll here. Even once a year is too often unless they are just bug fixes. Even point updates, which can come many times in that period, can break things, both hardware and software.
So you don't care about being accurate as long as you can blame Apple for a problem they didn't cause, don't have and have no responsibility to fix.
True, one can use any x86 to run any x86-compiled apps. But the Xeon is primarily marketed for use in servers, as opposed to their Core i7 Extreme which offers different power management scaling to better fit most workstation use cases.
Maybe that is the perception, but Xeons do factor into most workstation-type computers. Only the very lowest tiers of workstations are not Xeons, or not Opteron if it's an AMD system.
Extreme has always been positioned as a gaming chip. Can you use it as a workstation? Sure, to an extent. But that's not the market segmentation that most computer makers use.
You're preaching to the converted on that one. I'm among the few here who support Apple's decision to drop XServe.
I'm more or less neutral on that. It doesn't affect me, and if Apple couldn't justify it, then I guess that's the way it is. I was just pointing out it's not necessarily a comparable category.
I was the exclusive Avid (video editing) dealer in Hawaii for many years. Installed around 150 Mac systems. Always worked. No troll here. Even once a year is too often unless they are just bug fixes. Even point updates, which can come many times in that period, can break things, both hardware and software. The new iMacs have no opticals, therefore no space for two drives, at least to my knowledge, I'm just not interested in thinner and unexpandable. I don't require a fashion object, but I do believe the current Mac Pro designed by Jony Ive ten years ago is still classically beautiful. Everything he does is. If Apple doesn't come out with a true expandable tower for the next Mac Pro, I'm going to snap up what's available now as a backup to my 5,1 2010 before they disappear, put in a powerful NVidia card, plenty of RAM, and 4 or more high speed HD's and/or SSDs, and hope they last me 'til I've finished all of the projects I have sitting and waiting for me that I have shot in the last 25 years, both SD and HD. Sold and still use one Windows based system. Never again. A true pain. I am one of many pros who are caught in this place. I hope Tim really comes through, truly.
1) Regarding your previous query of boot drives that number isn't so simple. The system can boot without any HDDs or SSDs connected. That is technically a boot drive but it's quite simple and you'll need to have another drive that it can pull the Restore Drive onto. if you already have this on say a HDD then your HDD has 2 boot partitions. If you have Boot Camp installed then that is a 3rd boot partition. If you have Fusion Drive setup, which in HW means you have the on-board SSD card + HDD then you still have three. You can also use Linux to create a virtually unlimited number of boot partitions on as many drives as you wish via Thunderbolt and USB, which include but are not limited to boot from an ODD.
2) First you said 6 months and now you say 1 year but you never explained why you were thinking it was 6 months in your previous post.
3) As for being 1 year your post comment assumes that an upgrade is a set number and/or complexity in changes that should always require x-number of years to work out bugs and whatnot but you haven't considered that a yearly update is doing smaller, more manageable changes that reduce the number of unknowns. Consider what the cost was for Panther to Tiger and what the cost was for Lion to Mountain Lion and consider that we haven't had a Mac OS X update since last October and you'll get an idea what more manageable updates can achieve.
I am one of many pros who are caught in this place. I hope Tim really comes through, truly.
Lots of people say things like "many pros" but relatively, the numbers are very small. We know for a fact that laptops sell in a ratio of about 70:30 vs desktops for all manufacturers and the iMac makes up the largest share of desktop Mac users. In the best case, the Mac Pro represents 5% of Apple's entire computer lineup, which is around 75,000 sales per month worldwide. The rest of the workstation market is closer to 3.5% of the total shipments.
Out of 1 million per quarter, that 22% share would give Apple 220k units per quarter worldwide, which matches up with the ~75k per month worldwide estimate above.
It's become apparent this group of individuals are however the best out of all computer users. Heroes you might say. Wealthy, skilled and should be held in awe at all times. They are no mere mouse-clickers, they are gods among men.
They need the best hardware yet hold onto it the longest. They don't like to make their systems unstable with upgrades and yet constantly demand Apple gives them new products. They don't buy the new products because their current machine is still going strong because they've upgraded it.
The Mac Pro (when updated) offers the possibility to get 3x the performance of the top iMac for 3x the price. It allows you to service it and upgrade parts yourself. Those are very obvious benefits. The problem is that not many people out of the already small Mac Pro audience can afford the higher-end models. Even if the majority are at least going for the DP models, which are double the speed at double the price, they don't outlast the iMac performance-wise for very long. There are options for 3rd party displays with both.
As time goes on, the traditional workstation machines still offer benefits but they are becoming less compelling to a lot of people. With the performance of consumer hardware now, SSDs and RAM sizes, a tower workstation is no longer a requirement for resource-intensive work.
In light of this, it's obvious that Apple doesn't need to keep building them. There wouldn't be a mass exodus of software developers and users if they did that. Just like the Mac Pro non-update last year, you'd hear a faint grumble and then nothing. They have chosen to put out an update this year. I suspect they will move manufacturing back to the US due to the low volumes. If they decide to stick with the same non-compliant hardware design and just drop in an update, they might even just sell the Mac Pro in the US with the ultimate intention of wrapping up the operation in a few years. I hope that's not what they do but they really have the choice to do anything they want with this line largely without consequence.
What I'd like to see them do is build a machine with a more mainstream design that will make it more compelling for buyers to upgrade the machine over a shorter period of time and that way, they'll have a reason to commit to a roughly yearly update cycle. It still won't be cheap, it still won't sell in large numbers and it will remain Apple's least important model but it will be maintained.
Nice graph. Once every four years is hardly constant demand. Yes we need some stability, but not ossification. What I am saying can be said in many fewer words than you used. We need a current technology workstation class Mac. It used to be important to the brand. Constant revamping of the OS combined with Apple's penchant for secrecy makes it difficult for developers of both hardware and software to hit a moving target. this stuff is not cheap. Of course Apple is in it for the profit. I, along with many, think that share price has become more important than user based "performance". I find that quite sad. If all you care about is selling widgets to the masses, then this strategy is understandable. I have a fond remembrance of an Apple with slightly more balance. But, that being said, I will never change brands. I can only hope that the "something great coming" is truly that. I don't mind a surprise, only a disappointment.
Out of 1 million per quarter, that 22% share would give Apple 220k units per quarter worldwide, which matches up with the ~75k per month worldwide estimate above.
Keep in mind these things must be taken in context. The figure isn't a small number on its own. It's trivial for Apple due to the size of the company at this point. Look at how many total machines they shipped annually in the early to mid 2000s. What annoys me when these discussions come up is the sheer amount of conjecture you project on them. Do you really think they're all used for 5+ years because of what you read in a forum? You can ignore those users unless you're thinking of people who upgraded 2009 machines to revision B 2010 versions. Some shops may keep machines in operation for a number of years, yet they're not always maintained for their original uses. It's common to buy new machines and cycle the older ones down to lighter duties rather than purchase several different grades or maintain the old ones to maintain access to archived data because the new ones can't access it for software reasons. Soft sales are to be expected at the moment. They said something was coming in 2013 and further clarified the quote as referring to the mac pro when the mac forums went in many wacky directions with the news. I expect they'll release something this year, then cancel it if sales do not rebound to an adequate level. I don't think they'll allow for any real overlap in specs. A typical LGA 1155 desktop would be something different to a lot of users, but Apple tries to keep things spaced as much as possible and frequently forces higher price points to buy into specific features. An example would be how only some configurations of minis and imacs could be ordered with fusion drives.
Quote:
What I'd like to see them do is build a machine with a more mainstream design that will make it more compelling for buyers to upgrade the machine over a shorter period of time and that way, they'll have a reason to commit to a roughly yearly update cycle. It still won't be cheap, it still won't sell in large numbers and it will remain Apple's least important model but it will be maintained.
This seems unlikely. I don't see them overlapping the imac. As you've personally pointed out before, they've slowly raised the entry pricing on their tower offerings over time as the imac has reached higher price points. There isn't anything more mainstream if they're sticking to the LGA2011 socket. If they drop to 1155 the offerings overlap with the imac. E3s provide 20 lanes instead of 16, but if thunderbolt really is a priority as so many people on here believe, you're back to i5/i7 imac internals as it would be slightly easier to implement due to the presence of embedded graphics.
Some of us need Xeons and high end graphic options. As long as we are embedding links, take a look at a "pro" (aren't we all, really?) whose main concern is photography. Video has even higher requirements. http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html#AppleCoreRot Not to say that I am this negative, but I think he has a point.
Some of us need Xeons and high end graphic options. As long as we are embedding links, take a look at a "pro" (aren't we all, really?) whose main concern is photography. Video has even higher requirements. http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html#AppleCoreRot Not to say that I am this negative, but I think he has a point.
He mentions a lot of things. File copying utilities have always been a requirement if you have to copy a lot of sensitive data between volumes. The finder crash issues are also nothing new. They're more common if you have driver problems of some kind. HFS+ has always been buggy. Disk Warrior is needed once again, especially with large volumes. These are typically things encountered when dealing with terabytes of data and external storage arrays. It probably represents the minority of users, which is why these things are ignored. The 10 bit color issue has come up before. I can't find the thread at the moment, but Adobe has stated Apple doesn't intend to support that as a feature. There are a lot of things that are less than ideal, but I don't see the situation improving. For photography unless you're dealing with processing thousands of raws at a time, the fastest quad or hex cpu is all you really need. You won't see much in scaling beyond that at the cpu level whether they label it Xeon or i7. I can say that having dealt with larger .exr and .psb files. Video is an entirely different story.
I forgot to mention thunderbolt doesn't support 10 bit color or displayport 1.2 at this point, so it's unlikely that it's a high priority at this point. If the imac display went to a 10 bit panel and thunderbolt gained displayport 1.2 support, they could add 10 bit paths. I'm sure they'd also advertise it.
Thanks for an intelligent post. Some of us do deal with terabytes. Those with greatest need for a powerful platform set the pace for the culture. When Apple gives up that position, they are on their way down. Kleenex. Done with this.
We need a current technology workstation class Mac. It used to be important to the brand.
It's not important to the brand now though and hasn't been for a while. The term 'workstation class' is a bit archaic now. It reminds me of how the Blackberries used to be marketed when they were the main smartphones. It was for the enterprise and big business and people needed hardware keyboards. Look what happened to that.
Keep in mind these things must be taken in context. The figure isn't a small number on its own.
It is small when it's worldwide and it's especially small when you think that it's the same number of non-iMac desktops they shipped over a decade ago. Zero growth in over a decade.
Those with greatest need for a powerful platform set the pace for the culture.
Could you explain that?
When Apple gives up that position, they are on their way down. Kleenex. Done with this.
Apple has never been more successful and the Mac Pro makes up such a small portion of their desktop sales which makes up a small portion of their Macs sales which makes up a small portion of their HW sales so that doesn't appear to be the case.
Feature films were and still are edited on Macs, mostly Avid, but they have platform equality on Windows. If things don't change the Mac won't be the a factor. Creators are abandoning the Mac, very reluctantly, for Windows workstations. I never will. Many of us are holding our breath. High end audio production is another leader. If you don't understand that artists lead the culture, you need to go back to school.
Comments
BTW, how many internal boot drives can you put in an iMac, not partitioned? I know keyboard shortcuts and need no instruction. An iMac is not a substitute for a Mac Pro. Yes, I know, "Something really great is coming". Some of us have to budget in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars , and that is not too much to go on. Have you ever heard of the phrase "Business Plan"? BTW, I will never go to Windows, thus my ardor. No trolling here. And a new version of the OS every 6 months is just asking for bugs and sfw developers to respond "Apple broke it".
I have two drives in my 2011 iMac. Get rid of the optical drive and that's a third I can add. The 2012 iMac probably doesn't have the luxury of connectors or space for the third though.
You say you're not trolling, but you say a new OS every six months? Because trolls tend to fudge the numbers. The real number is a year.
I think it's a valid question to ask why it's unsafe. You have to open the machine to touch any fan blades, but they aren't very exposed and there's no way those can damage fingertips. They aren't sharp and they don't spin fast enough to cause abrasion. To keep children from opening the case, you can just put a Kensington lock on it, or an ordinary padlock. I'd say Mac Pro is an office computer rather than a home computer, concern over children running amok in an office seems out of place. It's not really a gamer computer, and iMacs cover most consumer needs very well.
As an aside, how do gamer computers get away with their GPU fans in the EU? It's the same card, that's the most exposed fan in a Mac Pro.
It's not simply a server CPU. Last I checked, it's a WORKSTATION and server CPU. In combination with a workstation chipset. Servers might use the workstation/server CPU with server chipsets. Under the Intel system, there are different chipsets for servers. This isn't hard. A rack-mount type server as a desktop is stupid. Try it sometime and you'll learn for yourself, it's because rack servers are fraking loud. Server rooms don't have to be quiet and so they aren't. It sucks for server room crews though, I can hear a server through a wall.
See above reply.
@JeffDM, quote: You say you're not trolling, but you say a new OS every six months? Because trolls tend to fudge the numbers. The real number is a year.
I was the exclusive Avid (video editing) dealer in Hawaii for many years. Installed around 150 Mac systems. Always worked. No troll here. Even once a year is too often unless they are just bug fixes. Even point updates, which can come many times in that period, can break things, both hardware and software. The new iMacs have no opticals, therefore no space for two drives, at least to my knowledge, I'm just not interested in thinner and unexpandable. I don't require a fashion object, but I do believe the current Mac Pro designed by Jony Ive ten years ago is still classically beautiful. Everything he does is. If Apple doesn't come out with a true expandable tower for the next Mac Pro, I'm going to snap up what's available now as a backup to my 5,1 2010 before they disappear, put in a powerful NVidia card, plenty of RAM, and 4 or more high speed HD's and/or SSDs, and hope they last me 'til I've finished all of the projects I have sitting and waiting for me that I have shot in the last 25 years, both SD and HD. Sold and still use one Windows based system. Never again. A true pain. I am one of many pros who are caught in this place. I hope Tim really comes through, truly.
Correction, there is space for two drives in the 2012 27" iMac, at least Fusion, which doesn't interest me for video. Changing anything in that department seems to require major (non-user) surgery to the display panel.
Originally Posted by Jim W
I was the exclusive Avid (video editing) dealer in Hawaii for many years. Installed around 150 Mac systems. Always worked. No troll here. Even once a year is too often unless they are just bug fixes. Even point updates, which can come many times in that period, can break things, both hardware and software.
So you don't care about being accurate as long as you can blame Apple for a problem they didn't cause, don't have and have no responsibility to fix.
deleted
Maybe that is the perception, but Xeons do factor into most workstation-type computers. Only the very lowest tiers of workstations are not Xeons, or not Opteron if it's an AMD system.
Extreme has always been positioned as a gaming chip. Can you use it as a workstation? Sure, to an extent. But that's not the market segmentation that most computer makers use.
I'm more or less neutral on that. It doesn't affect me, and if Apple couldn't justify it, then I guess that's the way it is. I was just pointing out it's not necessarily a comparable category.
1) Regarding your previous query of boot drives that number isn't so simple. The system can boot without any HDDs or SSDs connected. That is technically a boot drive but it's quite simple and you'll need to have another drive that it can pull the Restore Drive onto. if you already have this on say a HDD then your HDD has 2 boot partitions. If you have Boot Camp installed then that is a 3rd boot partition. If you have Fusion Drive setup, which in HW means you have the on-board SSD card + HDD then you still have three. You can also use Linux to create a virtually unlimited number of boot partitions on as many drives as you wish via Thunderbolt and USB, which include but are not limited to boot from an ODD.
2) First you said 6 months and now you say 1 year but you never explained why you were thinking it was 6 months in your previous post.
3) As for being 1 year your post comment assumes that an upgrade is a set number and/or complexity in changes that should always require x-number of years to work out bugs and whatnot but you haven't considered that a yearly update is doing smaller, more manageable changes that reduce the number of unknowns. Consider what the cost was for Panther to Tiger and what the cost was for Lion to Mountain Lion and consider that we haven't had a Mac OS X update since last October and you'll get an idea what more manageable updates can achieve.
Pathetic response to many of the most loyal Apple customers.
Lots of people say things like "many pros" but relatively, the numbers are very small. We know for a fact that laptops sell in a ratio of about 70:30 vs desktops for all manufacturers and the iMac makes up the largest share of desktop Mac users. In the best case, the Mac Pro represents 5% of Apple's entire computer lineup, which is around 75,000 sales per month worldwide. The rest of the workstation market is closer to 3.5% of the total shipments.
Servers represent about 2 million per quarter worldwide:
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2031115
Workstations represent about 900k-1 million per quarter worldwide:
http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/the-workstation-market-still-looking-to-break-out-of-its-recent-doldrums/
The profits margins are much higher than lower-end machines but 85 million laptop and desktop sales per quarter vastly outnumber them.
This page also gives marketshare breakdown:
http://www.deskeng.com/virtual_desktop/?p=5233
Out of 1 million per quarter, that 22% share would give Apple 220k units per quarter worldwide, which matches up with the ~75k per month worldwide estimate above.
It's become apparent this group of individuals are however the best out of all computer users. Heroes you might say. Wealthy, skilled and should be held in awe at all times. They are no mere mouse-clickers, they are gods among men.
They need the best hardware yet hold onto it the longest. They don't like to make their systems unstable with upgrades and yet constantly demand Apple gives them new products. They don't buy the new products because their current machine is still going strong because they've upgraded it.
The Mac Pro (when updated) offers the possibility to get 3x the performance of the top iMac for 3x the price. It allows you to service it and upgrade parts yourself. Those are very obvious benefits. The problem is that not many people out of the already small Mac Pro audience can afford the higher-end models. Even if the majority are at least going for the DP models, which are double the speed at double the price, they don't outlast the iMac performance-wise for very long. There are options for 3rd party displays with both.
As time goes on, the traditional workstation machines still offer benefits but they are becoming less compelling to a lot of people. With the performance of consumer hardware now, SSDs and RAM sizes, a tower workstation is no longer a requirement for resource-intensive work.
In light of this, it's obvious that Apple doesn't need to keep building them. There wouldn't be a mass exodus of software developers and users if they did that. Just like the Mac Pro non-update last year, you'd hear a faint grumble and then nothing. They have chosen to put out an update this year. I suspect they will move manufacturing back to the US due to the low volumes. If they decide to stick with the same non-compliant hardware design and just drop in an update, they might even just sell the Mac Pro in the US with the ultimate intention of wrapping up the operation in a few years. I hope that's not what they do but they really have the choice to do anything they want with this line largely without consequence.
What I'd like to see them do is build a machine with a more mainstream design that will make it more compelling for buyers to upgrade the machine over a shorter period of time and that way, they'll have a reason to commit to a roughly yearly update cycle. It still won't be cheap, it still won't sell in large numbers and it will remain Apple's least important model but it will be maintained.
Nice graph. Once every four years is hardly constant demand. Yes we need some stability, but not ossification. What I am saying can be said in many fewer words than you used. We need a current technology workstation class Mac. It used to be important to the brand. Constant revamping of the OS combined with Apple's penchant for secrecy makes it difficult for developers of both hardware and software to hit a moving target. this stuff is not cheap. Of course Apple is in it for the profit. I, along with many, think that share price has become more important than user based "performance". I find that quite sad. If all you care about is selling widgets to the masses, then this strategy is understandable. I have a fond remembrance of an Apple with slightly more balance. But, that being said, I will never change brands. I can only hope that the "something great coming" is truly that. I don't mind a surprise, only a disappointment.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
Out of 1 million per quarter, that 22% share would give Apple 220k units per quarter worldwide, which matches up with the ~75k per month worldwide estimate above.
Keep in mind these things must be taken in context. The figure isn't a small number on its own. It's trivial for Apple due to the size of the company at this point. Look at how many total machines they shipped annually in the early to mid 2000s. What annoys me when these discussions come up is the sheer amount of conjecture you project on them. Do you really think they're all used for 5+ years because of what you read in a forum? You can ignore those users unless you're thinking of people who upgraded 2009 machines to revision B 2010 versions. Some shops may keep machines in operation for a number of years, yet they're not always maintained for their original uses. It's common to buy new machines and cycle the older ones down to lighter duties rather than purchase several different grades or maintain the old ones to maintain access to archived data because the new ones can't access it for software reasons. Soft sales are to be expected at the moment. They said something was coming in 2013 and further clarified the quote as referring to the mac pro when the mac forums went in many wacky directions with the news. I expect they'll release something this year, then cancel it if sales do not rebound to an adequate level. I don't think they'll allow for any real overlap in specs. A typical LGA 1155 desktop would be something different to a lot of users, but Apple tries to keep things spaced as much as possible and frequently forces higher price points to buy into specific features. An example would be how only some configurations of minis and imacs could be ordered with fusion drives.
Quote:
What I'd like to see them do is build a machine with a more mainstream design that will make it more compelling for buyers to upgrade the machine over a shorter period of time and that way, they'll have a reason to commit to a roughly yearly update cycle. It still won't be cheap, it still won't sell in large numbers and it will remain Apple's least important model but it will be maintained.
This seems unlikely. I don't see them overlapping the imac. As you've personally pointed out before, they've slowly raised the entry pricing on their tower offerings over time as the imac has reached higher price points. There isn't anything more mainstream if they're sticking to the LGA2011 socket. If they drop to 1155 the offerings overlap with the imac. E3s provide 20 lanes instead of 16, but if thunderbolt really is a priority as so many people on here believe, you're back to i5/i7 imac internals as it would be slightly easier to implement due to the presence of embedded graphics.
Some of us need Xeons and high end graphic options. As long as we are embedding links, take a look at a "pro" (aren't we all, really?) whose main concern is photography. Video has even higher requirements. http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html#AppleCoreRot Not to say that I am this negative, but I think he has a point.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim W
Some of us need Xeons and high end graphic options. As long as we are embedding links, take a look at a "pro" (aren't we all, really?) whose main concern is photography. Video has even higher requirements. http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html#AppleCoreRot Not to say that I am this negative, but I think he has a point.
He mentions a lot of things. File copying utilities have always been a requirement if you have to copy a lot of sensitive data between volumes. The finder crash issues are also nothing new. They're more common if you have driver problems of some kind. HFS+ has always been buggy. Disk Warrior is needed once again, especially with large volumes. These are typically things encountered when dealing with terabytes of data and external storage arrays. It probably represents the minority of users, which is why these things are ignored. The 10 bit color issue has come up before. I can't find the thread at the moment, but Adobe has stated Apple doesn't intend to support that as a feature. There are a lot of things that are less than ideal, but I don't see the situation improving. For photography unless you're dealing with processing thousands of raws at a time, the fastest quad or hex cpu is all you really need. You won't see much in scaling beyond that at the cpu level whether they label it Xeon or i7. I can say that having dealt with larger .exr and .psb files. Video is an entirely different story.
I forgot to mention thunderbolt doesn't support 10 bit color or displayport 1.2 at this point, so it's unlikely that it's a high priority at this point. If the imac display went to a 10 bit panel and thunderbolt gained displayport 1.2 support, they could add 10 bit paths. I'm sure they'd also advertise it.
Thanks for an intelligent post. Some of us do deal with terabytes. Those with greatest need for a powerful platform set the pace for the culture. When Apple gives up that position, they are on their way down. Kleenex. Done with this.
It's not important to the brand now though and hasn't been for a while. The term 'workstation class' is a bit archaic now. It reminds me of how the Blackberries used to be marketed when they were the main smartphones. It was for the enterprise and big business and people needed hardware keyboards. Look what happened to that.
It is small when it's worldwide and it's especially small when you think that it's the same number of non-iMac desktops they shipped over a decade ago. Zero growth in over a decade.
I also base it on the sales numbers and how Apple treats the lineup. What are you basing the opposite conclusion on?
Having a more mainstream design doesn't require overlapping the lines. Even their G4 towers had a more mainstream design to them.
Could you explain that?
Apple has never been more successful and the Mac Pro makes up such a small portion of their desktop sales which makes up a small portion of their Macs sales which makes up a small portion of their HW sales so that doesn't appear to be the case.
Spoken like a bean counter.
Feature films were and still are edited on Macs, mostly Avid, but they have platform equality on Windows. If things don't change the Mac won't be the a factor. Creators are abandoning the Mac, very reluctantly, for Windows workstations. I never will. Many of us are holding our breath. High end audio production is another leader. If you don't understand that artists lead the culture, you need to go back to school.
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