I don’t get the part about some photographers and editors doing work that’s so sensitive that their names can’t be used to say that they’re buying a Mac Pro. Really? My own company did work for the NY Police Department, the fire department, and the FBI, among others. While the work was sensitive enough that we had to train FBI agents on the basics of operating our Kodachrome machine, we weren’t told that we couldn’t say that we did work for them.
Because lawyers enforcing conflict of interest and other contractual clauses can be jerks, mostly.
While I appreciate your own life experience, there are other sensitive cases. The incidence of these just seems to be escalating as the years tick on, given the prevalence of social media and whatnot.
Nobody is asking them to divulge their work. After all, if people know these guys well enough to ask them about their use of a Mac Pro in their work, that means people know what their professions are, and I really don’t see why they just can’t just come out and say they will use it. Lawyers or not, and I’ve dealt with more than a few in my businesses, don’t seem to have anything to do with that. It’s not like these people are working for the government in capacities that doesn’t allow people to know that they’re photographers and editors. We know they are. Right in a public article.
I don’t get the part about some photographers and editors doing work that’s so sensitive that their names can’t be used to say that they’re buying a Mac Pro. Really? My own company did work for the NY Police Department, the fire department, and the FBI, among others. While the work was sensitive enough that we had to train FBI agents on the basics of operating our Kodachrome machine, we weren’t told that we couldn’t say that we did work for them.
I don't get that either. Photography sensitive? 'kay...
What I also don't understand is the following: The CPU doesn't outperform the horsepower of the GPU, is that true? With the multi-GPU option, with the Afterburner card, allegedly outperforms the 28-core CPU. But then I read this:
A photographer who wished to remain anonymous is working on sensitive projects uses some of those Adobe products. He said that the new Mac Pro was appealing because of "raw horsepower" in his workflow. "Not having to wait while rendering [is key]," he said, "especially since Adobe makes minimal use of GPU processing in Lightroom and Photoshop."
Michael Trauffer, senior video editor for a large post production facility, also hopes to see improvements with software.
"The Keynote mentioned that Adobe is one of the software providers that is on board with the new Mac Pro," he says. "I'm hoping that their software will finally be able to take advantage of all of that horsepower that is being made available. Premiere Pro doesn't [currently] utilize multiple GPU when playing/editing."
So, maxing out the GPU option isn't going to help people running Adobe sw much(?)
Or am I misunderstanding the CPU vs GPU and Adobe software here?
I understand the same as you. For video the GPU is important, not so much for photo processing. Maybe we'll both be corrected.
Let’s be honest for a second, the new Mac Pro and XDR Display is not a good value if someone isn’t working at a Marvel Studio.
Wrong.
A freelance creative video editor who has a good reputation and works with big ad agencies and clients can charge hundreds of dollars an hour.
How many of those ad "creative" freelancers that charge several hundreds of euros per hour do you personally know? Exaggeration? Definitely yes imho.
I live in a relatively small town, in a relatively low COL area of the US and most creative freelancers I know are charging well over $100/hr. I don't know where you live, but I know in the bigger towns & definitely in the cities creative rates are well over $200/hr for experienced creative professionals. I think you might be underestimating how many skilled, sought-after, independent creative professionals are out there.
What percentage of prospective Mac buyers are "high end users"? And is that percentage high enough to justify the development time and expense spent on the Mac Pro?
For the sake of "tech trickle down" I am pleased this wickedly expensive machine exists. But one cannot help but view it far more as a PR stunt that shows the world Apple's design capability than it's ability to sell these machines in meaningful numbers.
You are way outside of your lane and have no concept of what affordable is to businesses who need these machines and have been waiting a long time. $15,000 to $20,000 or more for a computer is nothing to even be concerned about if you need the horsepower. It's no stunt and if there was one it was keeping the pros waiting for a computer they can grow with and hoping they would not jump ship to HP or Dell.
I was reading that the lack of Nvidia support is a deal breaker for some when it comes to the Mac Pro. I can't imagine that you couldn't build a comparable PC with Nvidia cards for less than the price of a Mac Pro. But then there's the OS. That matters for some. For others, it's the tools that matter.
For some reason, Nvidia just lacks in developing drivers for Apple. That's where the disconnect is. If Nvidia would just write the drivers to take advantage of Core ML, I think that's where Nvidia needs to be able to be an option for Apple. If Nvidia wrote the necessary drivers to support Core ML for Apple, then they could offer their cards for Apple customers and Apple can then add their PCi cards as options.
It's not Apple's fault as much as it's Nvidia's fault. Nvidia should write the drivers for their own cards for optimal performance.
What percentage of prospective Mac buyers are "high end users"? And is that percentage high enough to justify the development time and expense spent on the Mac Pro?
For the sake of "tech trickle down" I am pleased this wickedly expensive machine exists. But one cannot help but view it far more as a PR stunt that shows the world Apple's design capability than it's ability to sell these machines in meaningful numbers.
They obviously have enough to continue developing high end Macs. Most PC mfg's don't sell that many high end workstations either, so it's not like high end workstations from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and a variety of small players are selling tons of these types of systems either. Maybe combined of all PC mfg.'s, they might sell a decent amount. BUT, for one company, Apple probably sells as many as any of their competitors. they might not sell as many as ALL of their competitors combined, but they probably sell as many as any of the other 3 major PC mfg.'s. What's the percentage of high end machines sold by Dell, HP, Lenovo, when their average selling prices are half of Apple's? They sell mostly $200 to $400 desktop and laptop computers. Apple doesn't go after that low end, no profit market...
I don’t get the part about some photographers and editors doing work that’s so sensitive that their names can’t be used to say that they’re buying a Mac Pro. Really? My own company did work for the NY Police Department, the fire department, and the FBI, among others. While the work was sensitive enough that we had to train FBI agents on the basics of operating our Kodachrome machine, we weren’t told that we couldn’t say that we did work for them.
Because lawyers enforcing conflict of interest and other contractual clauses can be jerks, mostly.
While I appreciate your own life experience, there are other sensitive cases. The incidence of these just seems to be escalating as the years tick on, given the prevalence of social media and whatnot.
Nobody is asking them to divulge their work. After all, if people know these guys well enough to ask them about their use of a Mac Pro in their work, that means people know what their professions are, and I really don’t see why they just can’t just come out and say they will use it. Lawyers or not, and I’ve dealt with more than a few in my businesses, don’t seem to have anything to do with that. It’s not like these people are working for the government in capacities that doesn’t allow people to know that they’re photographers and editors. We know they are. Right in a public article.
Because they don't want to be named, or aren't allowed to be named by any one of an assortment of legal hangups. Simple as that. AI as a whole has a large amount of sources like this, across the the entire spectrum of Apple-using folks.
I was reading that the lack of Nvidia support is a deal breaker for some when it comes to the Mac Pro. I can't imagine that you couldn't build a comparable PC with Nvidia cards for less than the price of a Mac Pro. But then there's the OS. That matters for some. For others, it's the tools that matter.
The obsession with NVidiais a joke. They offer very little for most users.
The real problem is that far too many think this will be a fast machine but the reality is AMD trounces most Intel solutions these days. We aren’t talking modest numbers here but rather almost 2X performance. An informed buyer will not be going Mac Pro for performance.
$5,000 workstation among $1,000,000 equipment is like a drop of water in a bucket. I think people forgot this is an investment not for browsing internet or play online game. Investment returns profit. A $5,000 investment might returns $100,000 in its lifespan.
I wonder how many high end users would have bought the Mac Pro but won't because they need to do ray tracing, AI training or CUDA compute but can't because Apple won't allow them to install NVIDIA GPU's in the "modular" "professional" computer? I also wonder how many would have been sold if the trash can had been been a real pro modular computer? I bet most of the professionals left the platform over the past decade out of simple necessity.
Why can’t you do ray tracing without an NVidia GPU?
...Because you CAN. This is one reason I’m pissed that this thing is out of my price range. 3D rendering is what contributed to killing my first MacBook Pro. I swore I wouldn’t do heavy GPU+CPU loads on a compact machine ever again.
I just want to say something about the price, and maybe bring back some memories for those who’ve been around a while. I remember the day, as clear as if it were yesterday, when John Jurewicz (author of UltraVision) showed up at work one morning with his new Compaq 386 portable. A cool $12k+.
Completely irrelevant. Technology has progressed a LOT since then. There’s not nearly as much groundbreaking being done with this new Mac Pro machine to warrant this kind of comparison.
We deal with PHI data that can't go on AWS or any outside servers. Some of our machines are 768GB RAM, the previous workstation limit, as virtualized instances as mentioned will take a heck of a lot of memory relative to their need for CPU. That bit seems to be throwing off a lot of people online who can't imagine needing 1.5TB in a single workstation. We were already maxing out older platforms.
AWS is HIPPA compliant and will sign a BAA. There’s no reason you can’t put PHI in the Amazon Cloud. You’re incorrectly limiting your organization’s IT options if you aren’t evaluating cloud options. There may be other reasons not to use AWS, but HIPPA and PHI is not one of them.
That's the leaking DoD for you. I worked for a long time at a DOE facility and or classified data was never allowed on external-managed servers. If DOE along with DoD is allowing classified data (secret to DOE is not the same as secret to DoD so I'm lumping everything that's non-unclassified into classified) on non-government servers in non-government-secured computing facilities then I have to wonder who's taking liability for loss of data. This was never allowed when I was working. The use of term "cloud" is something we were using ever since we had out first servers in operation.
These are the long-term consequences of killing off in-house expertise in government and pushing it into the private sector (which is publicly owned by gamblers, so, not really private). The government has lost so much expertise and capability as a result of forcing outsourcing to the private sector.
I still think there is a spot for a tower that is not so heavily biased to the extreme end of the spectrum.
Like the pros in the article, I want one for a longer life cycle and user upgradeability. Those who held on to the Cheesegrater and upgraded it over time still have a fairly nice computer.
I don’t get the part about some photographers and editors doing work that’s so sensitive that their names can’t be used to say that they’re buying a Mac Pro. Really? My own company did work for the NY Police Department, the fire department, and the FBI, among others. While the work was sensitive enough that we had to train FBI agents on the basics of operating our Kodachrome machine, we weren’t told that we couldn’t say that we did work for them.
I don't get that either. Photography sensitive? 'kay...
What I also don't understand is the following: The CPU doesn't outperform the horsepower of the GPU, is that true? With the multi-GPU option, with the Afterburner card, allegedly outperforms the 28-core CPU. But then I read this:
A photographer who wished to remain anonymous is working on sensitive projects uses some of those Adobe products. He said that the new Mac Pro was appealing because of "raw horsepower" in his workflow. "Not having to wait while rendering [is key]," he said, "especially since Adobe makes minimal use of GPU processing in Lightroom and Photoshop."
Michael Trauffer, senior video editor for a large post production facility, also hopes to see improvements with software.
"The Keynote mentioned that Adobe is one of the software providers that is on board with the new Mac Pro," he says. "I'm hoping that their software will finally be able to take advantage of all of that horsepower that is being made available. Premiere Pro doesn't [currently] utilize multiple GPU when playing/editing."
So, maxing out the GPU option isn't going to help people running Adobe sw much(?)
Or am I misunderstanding the CPU vs GPU and Adobe software here?
Adobe has never used the CPU properly. With my 2012 Mac Pro, with 12 cores and 12 virtual cores, PS lags. Most of the time it only uses a few. Very erratically too. The gpu can lag because it’s not being fed enough information to fully take advantage of all the streams, etc. memory speed plays a big part too. Hopefully adobe will finally do better with cores. Adobe hasn’t ever lived up to its promise to take full advantage of all cores. That goes back almost 25 years. When opening and closing files, it’s just used one core, and one stream. Very slow and inefficient.
I still think there is a spot for a tower that is not so heavily biased to the extreme end of the spectrum.
Like the pros in the article, I want one for a longer life cycle and user upgradeability. Those who held on to the Cheesegrater and upgraded it over time still have a fairly nice computer.
I'm one of those: MP5,1. Runs flawlessly. Yup, stuck on 10.13....but I have no interest in Handoff and the like. (in fact, I usually turn off all new stuff Apple adds to the OS)
I have zero need for the massive power the latest MP brings, but would love to be able to get a Cheesegrater successor. For me, the new Mac Pro isn't that.
Adobe has never used the CPU properly. With my 2012 Mac Pro, with 12 cores and 12 virtual cores, PS lags. Most of the time it only uses a few. Very erratically too. The gpu can lag because it’s not being fed enough information to fully take advantage of all the streams, etc. memory speed plays a big part too. Hopefully adobe will finally do better with cores. Adobe hasn’t ever lived up to its promise to take full advantage of all cores. That goes back almost 25 years. When opening and closing files, it’s just used one core, and one stream. Very slow and inefficient.
Very informative! That's what I understood from reading an article or two (I'm not an 'Adobe user') Tnx
$11k to get started on this duo puts it out of reach of probably 50% of professionals. Maybe 75%.
There are a lot of professional users who could benefit from a lower spec'd entry model, and great Apple display that is maybe a tad less great.
As a guy I watch on You Tube says about unusual, and sometime expensive tools:
”You may not need it most of the time, but when you need it you REALLY need it.”
the same thing here, if you don’t need it, no point in complaining about cost. But if you need it, then cost isn’t a problem.
i can’t seem to get You Tube videos linked to here, but look up Marques Brownlee on You Tube. I’ve known him for some time. Very bright and talented guy. He’s now got almost 10 million subs. He’s a high end videographer, mostly, who shoots with an 8k RED. He’s got a high end version of the new Mac Pro. Go to his channel and see his latest video. It’s an initial review of the machine. See how someone who DOES need this feels about it.
so rendering a 5 minute 8k video takes 20 minutes on the new high end version of the 16” Macbook Pro. 10 minutes on a high end version of the iMac Pro, and 4 minutes on the high end version of the new Mac Pro. If you’re doing Tv work, this will save hours of rendering alone. Worth it? You bet.
$11k to get started on this duo puts it out of reach of probably 50% of professionals. Maybe 75%.
There are a lot of professional users who could benefit from a lower spec'd entry model, and great Apple display that is maybe a tad less great.
As a guy I watch on You Tube says about unusual, and sometime expensive tools:
”You may not need it most of the time, but when you need it you REALLY need it.”
the same thing here, if you don’t need it, no point in complaining about cost. But if you need it, then cost isn’t a problem.
i can’t seem to get You Tube videos linked to here, but look up Marques Brownlee on You Tube. I’ve known him for some time. Very bright and talented guy. He’s now got almost 10 million subs. He’s a high end videographer, mostly, who shoots with an 8k RED. He’s got a high end version of the new Mac Pro. Go to his channel and see his latest video. It’s an initial review of the machine. See how someone who DOES need this feels about it.
All we need now is the 10M subscribers to make the purchase viable.
Kidding with you Mel. I like Brownlee a lot too. His opinions are usually pretty well considered.
Comments
I live in a relatively small town, in a relatively low COL area of the US and most creative freelancers I know are charging well over $100/hr. I don't know where you live, but I know in the bigger towns & definitely in the cities creative rates are well over $200/hr for experienced creative professionals. I think you might be underestimating how many skilled, sought-after, independent creative professionals are out there.
I'm not sure what else you're looking for, here.
...Because you CAN. This is one reason I’m pissed that this thing is out of my price range. 3D rendering is what contributed to killing my first MacBook Pro. I swore I wouldn’t do heavy GPU+CPU loads on a compact machine ever again.
Like the pros in the article, I want one for a longer life cycle and user upgradeability. Those who held on to the Cheesegrater and upgraded it over time still have a fairly nice computer.
Adobe has never used the CPU properly. With my 2012 Mac Pro, with 12 cores and 12 virtual cores, PS lags. Most of the time it only uses a few. Very erratically too. The gpu can lag because it’s not being fed enough information to fully take advantage of all the streams, etc. memory speed plays a big part too. Hopefully adobe will finally do better with cores. Adobe hasn’t ever lived up to its promise to take full advantage of all cores. That goes back almost 25 years. When opening and closing files, it’s just used one core, and one stream. Very slow and inefficient.
There are a lot of professional users who could benefit from a lower spec'd entry model, and great Apple display that is maybe a tad less great.
I have zero need for the massive power the latest MP brings, but would love to be able to get a Cheesegrater successor. For me, the new Mac Pro isn't that.
Very informative! That's what I understood from reading an article or two (I'm not an 'Adobe user')
Tnx
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro
Just 1-2 weeks delivery time :-)
”You may not need it most of the time, but when you need it you REALLY need it.”
the same thing here, if you don’t need it, no point in complaining about cost. But if you need it, then cost isn’t a problem.
i can’t seem to get You Tube videos linked to here, but look up Marques Brownlee on You Tube. I’ve known him for some time. Very bright and talented guy. He’s now got almost 10 million subs. He’s a high end videographer, mostly, who shoots with an 8k RED. He’s got a high end version of the new Mac Pro. Go to his channel and see his latest video. It’s an initial review of the machine. See how someone who DOES need this feels about it.
so rendering a 5 minute 8k video takes 20 minutes on the new high end version of the 16” Macbook Pro. 10 minutes on a high end version of the iMac Pro, and 4 minutes on the high end version of the new Mac Pro. If you’re doing Tv work, this will save hours of rendering alone. Worth it? You bet.
Kidding with you Mel. I like Brownlee a lot too. His opinions are usually pretty well considered.