I'm betting on disappointment. Apple leadership is ignorant of, and isolated from, their pro users. Apple leadership isn't in need of professional computing themselves, so they'd have to listen to the wisdom of other people they don't respect enough to listen to. Share prices boomed on consumer fad devices, and that's all they care about. As far as they're concerned, they gave us a new Mac Pro and we refused it. So the lesson they will have learned is likely the wrong one: "there's no market for pro-grade Macs".
Tim Cook about the Mac Pro: "Can't innovate anymore, my ass!"
Such a flawed design and proof they are totally lost on how to serve the professional industry. A bad thing, since it will change perception of their brand. You need to support all verticals to have a healthy ecosystem in the long run.
Starting this year I'm buying PC's again for my team after sticking with iMacs for years. Reason: iMacs have slow GPUs (we're into VR) and are overpriced.
That being said, iMac is the best computer for home use. I'm a huge fan.
This is so much nonsense as to cause significant laughter. If you ran your business on iMacs, a mainstream desktop computer, the Mac Pro would have been a significant upgrade.
The only thing Apple did bad here is price it way to high.
At launch it was, what, $6,000 cheaper than a comparable PC workstation. People were shocked at how cheap it was.
That's not how I remember it.
When we were shopping for a new machine at work I lobbied hard for a Mac. Management had already switched to HP workstations for our Avid Nitris systems, having given up on Apple (probably a good choice in that case, as it took another year or two after that for Apple to update the Pro), so I had to demonstrate the vale of going with Mac. In the end it came down to me stamping my feet and holding my breath and whining "but I want a MAC!" because there weren't any other compelling reasons from an engineering standpoint. Price was comparable between various Mac Pro configurations and similar HP offerings.
Those guys fell victim to a marketing plot of Apple. ATI uses two trademarks for the graphic boards, "Radeon" and "FirePro". Technically, the two product lines differ in their firmware. The FirePro firmware allows the graphic boards to be used with specific high perfomance WINDOWS hardware drivers for some calculation-intense Windows programs. The graphic boards in the Mac Pro, according to my knowledge, do not allow using such Windows drivers. I.e., technically, they are Radeon, not FirePro Cards. Notably, wouldn't be of much value for MacOSX users anyway to be able to run Windows drivers.
Accordingly, a price comparison should be done with the Radeon cards, not the FirePro cards.
Still, the Mac Pro was initially fairly priced, imho, at least when recognising two features: -that each Thunderbolt port costs about USD100, i.e this alone makes the Mac Pro USD600 more expensive -that it runs MacOSX, which could be considered to be a value worth several hundred dollars.
I was in need of a workstation. I wanted a Mac because I love the OS. I needed the highest possible amount CPU Cores -> dual CPUs and I needed NVIDIA GPUs not ATI for Software reasons. Both not possible with the Mac Pro of 2013.
Seperate the iDevices from the Pro Hardware in terms of secrecy. Double or quadruple down on secrecy for iDevices for all I care. Just tell us what you are up to on the pro side of Hardware. No update or word about what will happen to the mac pro for over 3 years is an absolute impudence.
To comment on those who are critiquing altivec88 and as a fellow Pro Mac user, the issue is not that he can't run his business with the 2013 Mac Pro, but that the uncertainty of whether he should be using Macs in a pro environment at all is causing pro's a lot of stress, myself included. We can't tell if we should be waiting a few weeks when we need to add or replace a workstation, for Apple to finally give us a reason to happily continue using mac towers, or sadly switch to Windows when we need a new machine with high-end specs. Deep down we know that it isn't really that hard for Apple to do these things, so they probably just don't care anymore, and that makes pros everywhere feel... :-(
The critiques of altivec88 are totally clueless. I wonder if some of these people even have jobs.
- the lack of USB on the front means you are constantly spinning your machine around, or leaving it pointed cables-forward, which kind of defeats the entire purpose of making the front look clean
- 4 USB simply isn't enough. I am constantly pulling one to make room for USB keys and such. This would be better if the Apple keyboard had a USB3 hub, but it's not.
What's the problem with buying a USB hub or two together with an extension lead and leaving everything plugged in place?
Design decisions to emphasize size and silent running allowed me to place it on my desk rather than under it... probably not as important as expansion. You can't see the raid attached under the desk or the 2 power strips running the entire operation. More than one person has mistaken it as a trash can and dropped something into it.
if more than one person you work with thinks all that crap is plugged into a trash can that's inconviently sitting on your desktop behind your monitor...then your org needs help. the sort Apple cannot provide.
Fair enough, my clients are not the brightest. But it looks like a trash can from the front, my point being it is not the most aesthetically pleasing design. http://imgur.com/rlPdoDL
To comment on those who are critiquing altivec88 and as a fellow Pro Mac user, the issue is not that he can't run his business with the 2013 Mac Pro, but that the uncertainty of whether he should be using Macs in a pro environment at all is causing pro's a lot of stress, myself included. We can't tell if we should be waiting a few weeks when we need to add or replace a workstation, for Apple to finally give us a reason to happily continue using mac towers, or sadly switch to Windows when we need a new machine with high-end specs. Deep down we know that it isn't really that hard for Apple to do these things, so they probably just don't care anymore, and that makes pros everywhere feel... :-(
The critiques of altivec88 are totally clueless. I wonder if some of these people even have jobs.
He's given context, made plausible arguments and outlined his difficulties, coming from THIRTY YEARS of professional experience.
What are your credentials on this subject matter?
Not sure what you're trying to say -- do you understand my post was defending Altivec88?
I'm not sure what benefit there is to giving you my "credentials" since there's no way to verify. But fwiw, I have a PhD in economics and do a lot of simulations in R. I used Macs in undergrad and grad school, switched to PC in 1999 before getting my first job. I switched back to Mac in 2006. I bought a Mac Pro in 2009. I still own and use that Mac Pro, plus a 5k iMac.
Like Altivec88, I am heavily invested in the Mac. I don't want to switch. The 2009 Mac Pro was perfect for my needs, but the 2013 was not. I've been holding on, hoping Apple would come out with something better suited to my work. I'm somewhat fortunate in that I can get a Linux box and spin off CPU-intensive work to it, while using an iMac as my main machine. But I'd rather have a Mac Pro that does it all.
Are those "credentials" satisfactory to you? Am i allowed to defend Altivec88's point now?
Don't expect Apple to make any 44 core Mac Pros. If that is what you're waiting on, move on.
Which is very sad. Because those kinds of systems are what professional content makers use these days. That is what a "professional workstation" class machine is. Apple used to make professional level workstations. Apple used to be a computer manufacturer for the high-end professional market. No more.
Professional printing used to require giant presses with very specialized computers and hardware. Apple blasted into that market with the LaserWriter and Mac. See this. Eventually laser printers became commoditized and Apple exited the printer market - it was now flooded with cheaper, faster, better(?), products from the likes of HP. (And, yes, I know that the truly professional print market still exists, but it is far smaller and more specialized.) Later Apple made "workstation" class computers that brought the power of specialized, expensive machines to the masses. (See SGI.) Software like Final Cut allowed people to compete with expensive NLE machines. These days, the professional computing market has moved beyond where Apple can/wants to compete. Clusters of cheap CPUs & GPUs are used as rendering farms for everything from page layout to wedding videos to Hollywood movie special FX. Apple has/had some really cool tech for parallel processing (OpenCL) but they don't seem to have extended that to clusters of cheap CPUs on a network. Apple just doesn't want to compete in the "cheap processing unit" market. They'd rather build friendly, but powerful, home & lower-end pro machines with a great OS and user experience.
For us old-timers who remember when Apple stormed the walls of the creative professional markets, it is sad to see them fading away even as those previous "professional" capabilities permeate the home market.
To comment on those who are critiquing altivec88 and as a fellow Pro Mac user, the issue is not that he can't run his business with the 2013 Mac Pro, but that the uncertainty of whether he should be using Macs in a pro environment at all is causing pro's a lot of stress, myself included. We can't tell if we should be waiting a few weeks when we need to add or replace a workstation, for Apple to finally give us a reason to happily continue using mac towers, or sadly switch to Windows when we need a new machine with high-end specs. Deep down we know that it isn't really that hard for Apple to do these things, so they probably just don't care anymore, and that makes pros everywhere feel... :-(
The critiques of altivec88 are totally clueless. I wonder if some of these people even have jobs.
He's given context, made plausible arguments and outlined his difficulties, coming from THIRTY YEARS of professional experience.
What are your credentials on this subject matter?
Not sure what you're trying to say -- do you understand my post was defending Altivec88?
In fact, I did not, and misunderstood your post entirely. My sincere apologies.
The question isn't will they discontinue Mac Mini Pro, but will they discontinue the Macs altogether. Apple wants to be the dumb terminal company. Real computers are going to run in the cloud and be owned by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others.
Apparently, these days everyone thinks computing is so ridiculously hard that it should be left to mega corporations only, mere mortals should only use locked down appliances and fetch content from real computers in the cloud.
Just remember Mac Pro is for publishing and videomakers who require much more power than you can squeeze into Macbook
Yes, we are all aware of that.
But we are also all aware that there are lots of potential customers looking for high-end machines that are not publishing or producing video. People like statisticians, scientists, developers and outright power users.
Given that the list of changes need to make the machine suitable for all of these roles has no effect on its suitability for the two markets you mention, that it isn't more widely applicable is a crying shame. It's not like putting a second SSD slot in there, or adding a couple of USBs to the front, would somehow make it less suitable for video use.
To comment on those who are critiquing altivec88 and as a fellow Pro Mac user, the issue is not that he can't run his business with the 2013 Mac Pro, but that the uncertainty of whether he should be using Macs in a pro environment at all is causing pro's a lot of stress, myself included. We can't tell if we should be waiting a few weeks when we need to add or replace a workstation, for Apple to finally give us a reason to happily continue using mac towers, or sadly switch to Windows when we need a new machine with high-end specs. Deep down we know that it isn't really that hard for Apple to do these things, so they probably just don't care anymore, and that makes pros everywhere feel... :-(
The critiques of altivec88 are totally clueless. I wonder if some of these people even have jobs.
He's given context, made plausible arguments and outlined his difficulties, coming from THIRTY YEARS of professional experience.
What are your credentials on this subject matter?
Not sure what you're trying to say -- do you understand my post was defending Altivec88?
In fact, I did not, and misunderstood your post entirely. My sincere apologies.
Apology sincerely accepted -- I understand that it's easy to lose the thread sometimes on these debates.
The question isn't will they discontinue Mac Mini Pro, but will they discontinue the Macs altogether. Apple wants to be the dumb terminal company. Real computers are going to run in the cloud and be owned by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others.
Apparently, these days everyone thinks computing is so ridiculously hard that it should be left to mega corporations only, mere mortals should only use locked down appliances and fetch content from real computers in the cloud.
There is some truth to this. CPUs (and network bandwidth and storage) are so cheap that putting thousands of them in big warehouses and distributing their cycles amongst many different users is cheaper than owning those CPUs yourself and having them sitting idle most of the time. With virtualization there is almost no reason to know or care that this job is running on that CPU under my desk. Would you rather own a big cluster of CPUs to do your rendering or pay a couple dollars to have some cloud provider do the job much faster on a bigger cluster than you could ever afford?
Yes, there are still people who need local CPU power. But desktop machines are more and more becoming terminals into clouds - whether locally hosted or commercially hosted.
I don't think Apple wants to be "the dumb terminal company". They want to be the smart terminal company. A "terminal" in the modern sense has amazing computing power compared to what was available 10 years ago - with a fancy GPU, giant screen(s), video & speech capabilities. But the "real" computing (levels of computing considered insanely expensive several years ago) is now in the cloud.
Just remember Mac Pro is for publishing and videomakers who require much more power than you can squeeze into Macbook
Yes, we are all aware of that.
But we are also all aware that there are lots of potential customers looking for high-end machines that are not publishing or producing video. People like statisticians, scientists, developers and outright power users.
Given that the list of changes need to make the machine suitable for all of these roles has no effect on its suitability for the two markets you mention, that it isn't more widely applicable is a crying shame. It's not like putting a second SSD slot in there, or adding a couple of USBs to the front, would somehow make it less suitable for video use.
Exactly right.
Frankly, Apple should *own* the high end workstation market in all of the areas you mention and more. It's a huge missed opportunity. And it's ironic that they don't try here, given the origins of NeXT.
Put it this way -- suppose that in 1990 NeXT had the financial and technological resources that Apple has today. NeXT would have blown Sun, SGI, HP, et al out of the water. But now they've got the resources and they can't be bothered to lift a finger.
I understand that back in 2010 Apple had bigger fish to fry, so it made some sense to prioritize other markets.
But in 2016 Apple is not a growing company. They are not in a position to turn up their nose at selling a lot more highly profitable Pro-computers, just because it's a relatively small market. Ugh... I could go on and on, but there's no point. It's just frustrating.
Your profession is a prime example of many that, despite all the seeming "advances" over time, hasnt really changed much and is still doing the same basic tasks. It probably takes you the same amount of time to get something shipped today as it did 10 or 20 years ago, despite all the so called advances in technology. So when you are lamenting the speed of a 3D render, keep some perspective.
Those "same" jobs that take the "same" amount of time are most likely orders of magnitude more complex than they were 10-20 years ago. Back then if you were doing jobs for TV you were doing NTSC (roughly 640x480 or 307,200 pixels per frame). These days you are probably doing 1080p (1920x1080 or 2 million pixels per frame), and now we have 4k (3840x2160 or 8 million pixels) coming on. If you can't see how just keeping up in such an environment requires constant upgrades to hugely more powerful systems, you are blind.
They are not in a position to turn up their nose at selling a lot more highly profitable Pro-computers, just because it's a relatively small market. Ugh... I could go on and on, but there's no point. It's just frustrating.
The problem is, from a business/economics standpoint they are. The market for googaws like the iPhone & iWatch are orders of magnitude larger than the professional workstation market. The home & prosumer markets also dwarf the truly high-end professional market.
Way back when Apple was a niche player and grew (both in size & reputation) by bringing professional level capabilities to a lower price point. Now Apple is firmly entrenched in the mass-market and needs to paddle fast to keep their position there. There isn't enough money in the truly pro market for them to worry about anymore.
Which, again, is very sad. It's sad to think the 4k Blu-ray I will be buying in a couple years will be produced on a Windows machine rather than a Mac. That Apple will have no computer capable of viably, professionally, producing such products. OTOH, your daughter will be producing 1080p videos with amazing transitions, auto-closed captioning, color matching, 3D titles, and who knows what else, with her Barbies.
Comments
When we were shopping for a new machine at work I lobbied hard for a Mac. Management had already switched to HP workstations for our Avid Nitris systems, having given up on Apple (probably a good choice in that case, as it took another year or two after that for Apple to update the Pro), so I had to demonstrate the vale of going with Mac. In the end it came down to me stamping my feet and holding my breath and whining "but I want a MAC!" because there weren't any other compelling reasons from an engineering standpoint. Price was comparable between various Mac Pro configurations and similar HP offerings.
Those guys fell victim to a marketing plot of Apple. ATI uses two trademarks for the graphic boards, "Radeon" and "FirePro". Technically, the two product lines differ in their firmware. The FirePro firmware allows the graphic boards to be used with specific high perfomance WINDOWS hardware drivers for some calculation-intense Windows programs. The graphic boards in the Mac Pro, according to my knowledge, do not allow using such Windows drivers. I.e., technically, they are Radeon, not FirePro Cards. Notably, wouldn't be of much value for MacOSX users anyway to be able to run Windows drivers.
Accordingly, a price comparison should be done with the Radeon cards, not the FirePro cards.
Still, the Mac Pro was initially fairly priced, imho, at least when recognising two features:
-that each Thunderbolt port costs about USD100, i.e this alone makes the Mac Pro USD600 more expensive
-that it runs MacOSX, which could be considered to be a value worth several hundred dollars.
But USD2000 cheaper? No.
I wanted a Mac because I love the OS.
I needed the highest possible amount CPU Cores -> dual CPUs and I needed NVIDIA GPUs not ATI for Software reasons.
Both not possible with the Mac Pro of 2013.
Seperate the iDevices from the Pro Hardware in terms of secrecy.
Double or quadruple down on secrecy for iDevices for all I care.
Just tell us what you are up to on the pro side of Hardware.
No update or word about what will happen to the mac pro for over 3 years is an absolute impudence.
I'm not sure what benefit there is to giving you my "credentials" since there's no way to verify. But fwiw, I have a PhD in economics and do a lot of simulations in R. I used Macs in undergrad and grad school, switched to PC in 1999 before getting my first job. I switched back to Mac in 2006. I bought a Mac Pro in 2009. I still own and use that Mac Pro, plus a 5k iMac.
Like Altivec88, I am heavily invested in the Mac. I don't want to switch. The 2009 Mac Pro was perfect for my needs, but the 2013 was not. I've been holding on, hoping Apple would come out with something better suited to my work. I'm somewhat fortunate in that I can get a Linux box and spin off CPU-intensive work to it, while using an iMac as my main machine. But I'd rather have a Mac Pro that does it all.
Are those "credentials" satisfactory to you? Am i allowed to defend Altivec88's point now?
Professional printing used to require giant presses with very specialized computers and hardware. Apple blasted into that market with the LaserWriter and Mac. See this. Eventually laser printers became commoditized and Apple exited the printer market - it was now flooded with cheaper, faster, better(?), products from the likes of HP. (And, yes, I know that the truly professional print market still exists, but it is far smaller and more specialized.) Later Apple made "workstation" class computers that brought the power of specialized, expensive machines to the masses. (See SGI.) Software like Final Cut allowed people to compete with expensive NLE machines. These days, the professional computing market has moved beyond where Apple can/wants to compete. Clusters of cheap CPUs & GPUs are used as rendering farms for everything from page layout to wedding videos to Hollywood movie special FX. Apple has/had some really cool tech for parallel processing (OpenCL) but they don't seem to have extended that to clusters of cheap CPUs on a network. Apple just doesn't want to compete in the "cheap processing unit" market. They'd rather build friendly, but powerful, home & lower-end pro machines with a great OS and user experience.
For us old-timers who remember when Apple stormed the walls of the creative professional markets, it is sad to see them fading away even as those previous "professional" capabilities permeate the home market.
Apparently, these days everyone thinks computing is so ridiculously hard that it should be left to mega corporations only, mere mortals should only use locked down appliances and fetch content from real computers in the cloud.
But we are also all aware that there are lots of potential customers looking for high-end machines that are not publishing or producing video. People like statisticians, scientists, developers and outright power users.
Given that the list of changes need to make the machine suitable for all of these roles has no effect on its suitability for the two markets you mention, that it isn't more widely applicable is a crying shame. It's not like putting a second SSD slot in there, or adding a couple of USBs to the front, would somehow make it less suitable for video use.
Yes, there are still people who need local CPU power. But desktop machines are more and more becoming terminals into clouds - whether locally hosted or commercially hosted.
I don't think Apple wants to be "the dumb terminal company". They want to be the smart terminal company. A "terminal" in the modern sense has amazing computing power compared to what was available 10 years ago - with a fancy GPU, giant screen(s), video & speech capabilities. But the "real" computing (levels of computing considered insanely expensive several years ago) is now in the cloud.
Exactly right.
Frankly, Apple should *own* the high end workstation market in all of the areas you mention and more. It's a huge missed opportunity. And it's ironic that they don't try here, given the origins of NeXT.
Put it this way -- suppose that in 1990 NeXT had the financial and technological resources that Apple has today. NeXT would have blown Sun, SGI, HP, et al out of the water. But now they've got the resources and they can't be bothered to lift a finger.
I understand that back in 2010 Apple had bigger fish to fry, so it made some sense to prioritize other markets.
But in 2016 Apple is not a growing company. They are not in a position to turn up their nose at selling a lot more highly profitable Pro-computers, just because it's a relatively small market. Ugh... I could go on and on, but there's no point. It's just frustrating.
Way back when Apple was a niche player and grew (both in size & reputation) by bringing professional level capabilities to a lower price point. Now Apple is firmly entrenched in the mass-market and needs to paddle fast to keep their position there. There isn't enough money in the truly pro market for them to worry about anymore.
Which, again, is very sad. It's sad to think the 4k Blu-ray I will be buying in a couple years will be produced on a Windows machine rather than a Mac. That Apple will have no computer capable of viably, professionally, producing such products. OTOH, your daughter will be producing 1080p videos with amazing transitions, auto-closed captioning, color matching, 3D titles, and who knows what else, with her Barbies.