I think Apple buying Nvidia would only further the Mac VS PC war. I'm tired of all the BS of hearing on both sides which is better and which sucks for whatever reason. I use macs. i like macs. If I wanted to use a PC i would
well...in all honesty, I don't think OS X performs all that well without at least a gig in my opinion. I was running up until this Jan, a B&W G3 300mhz w/ 1gig of ram, and it ran ok with 10.3.9 on it. Anything less would take things like just opening the sys prefs a number of seconds to open.
I run Tiger with 512 and I dont have any large problems. The only thing that ever annoys me is that occasionally the sound icon in the menubar takes a few seconds to open.
Why? Lots of Mac Pro's are used in areas where a graphics card is totally unnecessary. Say, for Photoshop.
Since Apple keeps leveraging the graphics card more and more in their OS and applications, they should also be including better stock cards in their systems.
And I can attest, after having been in that industry for quite a while, that most of those set-ups consist of 10 or less machines, with several dozen having between 10 and 100, and very few having substantially more than that.
Ok I'll frame it from a different perspective. Computer video post production is a fairly new market and has seen exponential growth in the last ten years. Whatever Apple's sales are today it started from zero five years ago. Filmed entertainment and broadcasting over all is an ever growing business.
When I was in film school seven years ago we had expensive Avid Xpress systems. With a few Adobe Premiere systems. Because of its limitations Premiere was primarily used for in-class assignments and editing practice. The Avid's were used for actually editing our important class projects. At that point everyone was editing on expensive Avid systems and there was little alternative option.
Since the introduction of FCP there has been a paradigm shift and its common today for film students to have laptops running FCP and Avid software. When no one had that when I was in film school a few years ago.
In the 1970's broadcast television used to consist of about 5 channels that broadcast content until about 12:00 AM. Today broadcast television has grown to around 500 channels on our cable box. Most of those channels show content 24 hours a day. It takes hundreds of post production facilities and hundreds of thousands of people to produce content for 500 channels that show content every day. Those numbers are increasing.
411 a film and television resource guide lists between LA and NY there are 692 individual post production facilities. This number does not include college television, government television, corporate in-house production, public access, and so on.
In a sense you can say this is a small number. But these facilities buy multiple expensive systems that add significant revenue. The number is much larger than it was 10 years ago and is only increasing.
Quote:
So, at the most a low few 10's of thousand sales a year. Even Apple acknowledges this.
Apple has successfully targeted media far more aggressively than it has target its gaming market. The reason for this is that media is a growing and lucrative market. I'm sure in raw numbers there are more PC gamers. But PC gaming has been on a slow decline since the late 90's. I do not believe PC gamers spend as much money or have the same future growth as video post production.
Quote:
How did Apple count their announced 500,000 Final Cut user base?
I'm not doubting you, it's pretty expensive stuff. How did Apple count their announced 500,000 Final Cut user base? Were they counting every sale since they bought the programs, were they counting eacy upgrade as a user too?
Everyone who buys the program is counted. Just how they figure out the number is speculation, but, I think that if they do what Adobe does, they only count new sales. Upgrades show which users are "live". So that a purchase of a ver. 2.5, for example, won't be counted as a "live" user.
But I can't be sure.
But, just like PS, not everyone who buys the program is a pro.
And many people don't use either program on a professional desktop. Many users have iMacs, or Powerbooks, and now Macbooks and MBP's.
Despite what we have been reading, PS, for example, works well under Rossetta, particularly under 10.4.8 which has speeded it up substantially. Just don't use 50Mb, or larger, files.
FCP, of course, now works VERY well in a MacBook, or iMac.
[QUOTE=donebylee (please let it be January)[/QUOTE]
Nope! Highly unlikely. Not enough time for developers, and Apple hasn't presented a version to them that is even close to being ready.
Wait, and be happy they took their time.
Here is a quote from Apple's Developer Connection's "Leopard Technology Series for Developers"
"Leopard is scheduled to ship in the spring of 2007, so there is time for you to start working with Leopard technologies well before your customers get Leopard in their hands. When you do so, you will be more able to provide your users with the latest and greatest features of Mac OS X sooner."
Ok I'll frame it from a different perspective. Computer video post production is a fairly new market and has seen exponential growth in the last ten years. Whatever Apple's sales are today it started from zero five years ago. Filmed entertainment and broadcasting over all is an ever growing business.
When I was in film school seven years ago we had expensive Avid Xpress systems. With a few Adobe Premiere systems. Because of its limitations Premiere was primarily used for in-class assignments and editing practice. The Avid's were used for actually editing our important class projects. At that point everyone was editing on expensive Avid systems and there was little alternative option.
Since the introduction of FCP there has been a paradigm shift and its common today for film students to have laptops running FCP and Avid software. When no one had that when I was in film school a few years ago.
In the 1970's broadcast television used to consist of about 5 channels that broadcast content until about 12:00 AM. Today broadcast television has grown to around 500 channels on our cable box. Most of those channels show content 24 hours a day. It takes hundreds of post production facilities and hundreds of thousands of people to produce content for 500 channels that show content every day. Those numbers are increasing.
411 a film and television resource guide lists between LA and NY there are 692 individual post production facilities. This number does not include college television, government television, corporate in-house production, public access, and so on.
In a sense you can say this is a small number. But these facilities buy multiple expensive systems that add significant revenue. The number is much larger than it was 10 years ago and is only increasing.
Apple has successfully targeted media far more aggressively than it has target its gaming market. The reason for this is that media is a growing and lucrative market. I'm sure in raw numbers there are more PC gamers. But PC gaming has been on a slow decline since the late 90's. I do not believe PC gamers spend as much money or have the same future growth as video post production.
I won't agrue those numbers. But they add up to the numbers I'm estimating, and that Apple has hinted to in the recent past. It's also been a number that's been bandied about in the industry.
If each of those pro houses has an average of say (on the rather generous side) 30 machines, that would come out to about 20.76 thousand machines.
Most of the pro houses are on the coasts, though some are in the hinterlands. If we want to double that number, again being generous, it comes out to 42 thousand.
I would say that is a lot. More than reality would dictate. Add some more for independents, and it might jump to 50 thousand. But lots of companies who use FCP are wedding companies, schools, etc. And they mostly use iMacs, or portables. In the field, pros use portables.
A much bigger use for Apple's workstations are for publishing, photography, and pro music applications.
Hmmm, I sell Macs to the gfx, print, photographic, and post industries for a living, and I am pretty sure more than a few thousand to a few tens of thousand production rigs are sold every year. There are a good number of organizations with dozens of Mac towers, and there are definitely thosuands of pro, Mac-based companies/organizations just in the Baltimore/DC/Northern VA areas my company caters to. If you add in Xserves and Xserve RAIDs, Apple is definitely selling a healthy number of high-margin units every year, quite a few more than I think you realize. The vast majority of systems sold in this category, I am guessing, are to Mom-and-Pop outfits that own 1 to 5 pro Mac towers that are used for some kind of production work. There are many thousands of these kind of people on the island of Manhattan at any given moment, much less the USA at large, much less the world at large.
Hmmm, I sell Macs to the gfx, print, photographic, and post industries for a living, and I am pretty sure more than a few thousand to a few tens of thousand production rigs are sold every year. There are a good number of organizations with dozens of Mac towers, and there are definitely thosuands of pro, Mac-based companies/organizations just in the Baltimore/DC/Northern VA areas my company caters to. If you add in Xserves and Xserve RAIDs, Apple is definitely selling a healthy number of high-margin units every year, quite a few more than I think you realize. The vast majority of systems sold in this category, I am guessing, are to Mom-and-Pop outfits that own 1 to 5 pro Mac towers that are used for some kind of production work. There are many thousands of these kind of people on the island of Manhattan at any given moment, much less the USA at large, much less the world at large.
I didn't say 10 thousand. I said in the low twn thousands, perhaps 50 thousand.
But so that we can end this earlier, I will grant even 75 thousand.
The point is that even if it were a absurd number such as 100 thousand, it is still a small number. Mac Pro, and Powermac sales this year together now ending Sept were about 500 thousand units. So, at most, by the most favorable numbers you can imagine, that would be no more than 20% of those sales. Likely much less.
I'm not talking about XServes. But Apple doesn't sell very many of those either, perhaps 50 thousand this year.
And we are talking about Video here. That's all. There are most definately not thousands of video production studios around the entire US, much less your area.
What you've done is to expand the discussion way beyond the one we were having. We do know, as we have already mentioned, that professional Macs are used for many things. That wasn't the discussion.
Geez...is it hard to believe that most Workstation purchasers are not playing Doom 3 on their boxes...at least not officially?
I have a Pro on my desk and I couldn't care less what card it has as long as its fully supports DX9in hardware and support the 30" monitor. The 7300 is just fine.
Gamers are important but how many are buying expensive rigs?
Geez...is it hard to believe that most Workstation purchasers are not playing Doom 3 on their boxes...at least not officially?
I have a Pro on my desk and I couldn't care less what card it has as long as its fully supports DX9in hardware and support the 30" monitor. The 7300 is just fine.
Gamers are important but how many are buying expensive rigs?
Vinea
Workstation users, sure. Not generally server users though.
Going by the sales of Alien, VooDoo, and other small makers, then tripling that number as a guess. I'd say possibly about 400 to 600 thousand a year. That's worldwide. It's just a guess.
That is true, but the bandwidth that a RAID takes isn't much compared to a gfx card. For example, Apple's Fibrechannel card is 4 lanes which is more than enough for 2Gbps each way. 10G networking could theoretically max out an 8 lane slot, 10G each way. Most of those slots in that machine appear to be four or eight lane slots to me, and there are a lot of them there.
Comments
well...in all honesty, I don't think OS X performs all that well without at least a gig in my opinion. I was running up until this Jan, a B&W G3 300mhz w/ 1gig of ram, and it ran ok with 10.3.9 on it. Anything less would take things like just opening the sys prefs a number of seconds to open.
I run Tiger with 512 and I dont have any large problems. The only thing that ever annoys me is that occasionally the sound icon in the menubar takes a few seconds to open.
Why? Lots of Mac Pro's are used in areas where a graphics card is totally unnecessary. Say, for Photoshop.
Since Apple keeps leveraging the graphics card more and more in their OS and applications, they should also be including better stock cards in their systems.
And I can attest, after having been in that industry for quite a while, that most of those set-ups consist of 10 or less machines, with several dozen having between 10 and 100, and very few having substantially more than that.
Ok I'll frame it from a different perspective. Computer video post production is a fairly new market and has seen exponential growth in the last ten years. Whatever Apple's sales are today it started from zero five years ago. Filmed entertainment and broadcasting over all is an ever growing business.
When I was in film school seven years ago we had expensive Avid Xpress systems. With a few Adobe Premiere systems. Because of its limitations Premiere was primarily used for in-class assignments and editing practice. The Avid's were used for actually editing our important class projects. At that point everyone was editing on expensive Avid systems and there was little alternative option.
Since the introduction of FCP there has been a paradigm shift and its common today for film students to have laptops running FCP and Avid software. When no one had that when I was in film school a few years ago.
In the 1970's broadcast television used to consist of about 5 channels that broadcast content until about 12:00 AM. Today broadcast television has grown to around 500 channels on our cable box. Most of those channels show content 24 hours a day. It takes hundreds of post production facilities and hundreds of thousands of people to produce content for 500 channels that show content every day. Those numbers are increasing.
411 a film and television resource guide lists between LA and NY there are 692 individual post production facilities. This number does not include college television, government television, corporate in-house production, public access, and so on.
In a sense you can say this is a small number. But these facilities buy multiple expensive systems that add significant revenue. The number is much larger than it was 10 years ago and is only increasing.
So, at the most a low few 10's of thousand sales a year. Even Apple acknowledges this.
Apple has successfully targeted media far more aggressively than it has target its gaming market. The reason for this is that media is a growing and lucrative market. I'm sure in raw numbers there are more PC gamers. But PC gaming has been on a slow decline since the late 90's. I do not believe PC gamers spend as much money or have the same future growth as video post production.
How did Apple count their announced 500,000 Final Cut user base?
That's interesting where did you see that number?
I'm not doubting you, it's pretty expensive stuff. How did Apple count their announced 500,000 Final Cut user base? Were they counting every sale since they bought the programs, were they counting eacy upgrade as a user too?
Everyone who buys the program is counted. Just how they figure out the number is speculation, but, I think that if they do what Adobe does, they only count new sales. Upgrades show which users are "live". So that a purchase of a ver. 2.5, for example, won't be counted as a "live" user.
But I can't be sure.
But, just like PS, not everyone who buys the program is a pro.
And many people don't use either program on a professional desktop. Many users have iMacs, or Powerbooks, and now Macbooks and MBP's.
Despite what we have been reading, PS, for example, works well under Rossetta, particularly under 10.4.8 which has speeded it up substantially. Just don't use 50Mb, or larger, files.
FCP, of course, now works VERY well in a MacBook, or iMac.
Nope! Highly unlikely. Not enough time for developers, and Apple hasn't presented a version to them that is even close to being ready.
Wait, and be happy they took their time.
Here is a quote from Apple's Developer Connection's "Leopard Technology Series for Developers"
"Leopard is scheduled to ship in the spring of 2007, so there is time for you to start working with Leopard technologies well before your customers get Leopard in their hands. When you do so, you will be more able to provide your users with the latest and greatest features of Mac OS X sooner."
http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/index.html
BLAZING FAST MAC PROS + CS3 UB AND I'M ALL SET!!!
Thats what I'm talking about right there!
Been waiting for this for awhile now. FINALLY time for the payoff!
Ok I'll frame it from a different perspective. Computer video post production is a fairly new market and has seen exponential growth in the last ten years. Whatever Apple's sales are today it started from zero five years ago. Filmed entertainment and broadcasting over all is an ever growing business.
When I was in film school seven years ago we had expensive Avid Xpress systems. With a few Adobe Premiere systems. Because of its limitations Premiere was primarily used for in-class assignments and editing practice. The Avid's were used for actually editing our important class projects. At that point everyone was editing on expensive Avid systems and there was little alternative option.
Since the introduction of FCP there has been a paradigm shift and its common today for film students to have laptops running FCP and Avid software. When no one had that when I was in film school a few years ago.
In the 1970's broadcast television used to consist of about 5 channels that broadcast content until about 12:00 AM. Today broadcast television has grown to around 500 channels on our cable box. Most of those channels show content 24 hours a day. It takes hundreds of post production facilities and hundreds of thousands of people to produce content for 500 channels that show content every day. Those numbers are increasing.
411 a film and television resource guide lists between LA and NY there are 692 individual post production facilities. This number does not include college television, government television, corporate in-house production, public access, and so on.
In a sense you can say this is a small number. But these facilities buy multiple expensive systems that add significant revenue. The number is much larger than it was 10 years ago and is only increasing.
Apple has successfully targeted media far more aggressively than it has target its gaming market. The reason for this is that media is a growing and lucrative market. I'm sure in raw numbers there are more PC gamers. But PC gaming has been on a slow decline since the late 90's. I do not believe PC gamers spend as much money or have the same future growth as video post production.
I won't agrue those numbers. But they add up to the numbers I'm estimating, and that Apple has hinted to in the recent past. It's also been a number that's been bandied about in the industry.
If each of those pro houses has an average of say (on the rather generous side) 30 machines, that would come out to about 20.76 thousand machines.
Most of the pro houses are on the coasts, though some are in the hinterlands. If we want to double that number, again being generous, it comes out to 42 thousand.
I would say that is a lot. More than reality would dictate. Add some more for independents, and it might jump to 50 thousand. But lots of companies who use FCP are wedding companies, schools, etc. And they mostly use iMacs, or portables. In the field, pros use portables.
A much bigger use for Apple's workstations are for publishing, photography, and pro music applications.
Hmmm, I sell Macs to the gfx, print, photographic, and post industries for a living, and I am pretty sure more than a few thousand to a few tens of thousand production rigs are sold every year. There are a good number of organizations with dozens of Mac towers, and there are definitely thosuands of pro, Mac-based companies/organizations just in the Baltimore/DC/Northern VA areas my company caters to. If you add in Xserves and Xserve RAIDs, Apple is definitely selling a healthy number of high-margin units every year, quite a few more than I think you realize. The vast majority of systems sold in this category, I am guessing, are to Mom-and-Pop outfits that own 1 to 5 pro Mac towers that are used for some kind of production work. There are many thousands of these kind of people on the island of Manhattan at any given moment, much less the USA at large, much less the world at large.
I didn't say 10 thousand. I said in the low twn thousands, perhaps 50 thousand.
But so that we can end this earlier, I will grant even 75 thousand.
The point is that even if it were a absurd number such as 100 thousand, it is still a small number. Mac Pro, and Powermac sales this year together now ending Sept were about 500 thousand units. So, at most, by the most favorable numbers you can imagine, that would be no more than 20% of those sales. Likely much less.
I'm not talking about XServes. But Apple doesn't sell very many of those either, perhaps 50 thousand this year.
And we are talking about Video here. That's all. There are most definately not thousands of video production studios around the entire US, much less your area.
What you've done is to expand the discussion way beyond the one we were having. We do know, as we have already mentioned, that professional Macs are used for many things. That wasn't the discussion.
I'm looking forward to a Mac version of this.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35383
Forget eight cores.
I'm looking forward to a Mac version of this.
heh... 16 processors in one board, nice!
heh... 16 processors in on board, nice!
how many pci-e lanes?
how many full x16 slots?
how many pci-e lanes?
how many full x16 slots?
Probably doesn't matter for the intended application(s).
how many pci-e lanes?
how many full x16 slots?
For that type of machine, as Programmer has said, it shouldn't matter.
It's for a server. Likely a lot of transactional calculation going on. The more cores the better for that. Lanes aren't as important.
I have a Pro on my desk and I couldn't care less what card it has as long as its fully supports DX9in hardware and support the 30" monitor. The 7300 is just fine.
Gamers are important but how many are buying expensive rigs?
Vinea
Geez...is it hard to believe that most Workstation purchasers are not playing Doom 3 on their boxes...at least not officially?
I have a Pro on my desk and I couldn't care less what card it has as long as its fully supports DX9in hardware and support the 30" monitor. The 7300 is just fine.
Gamers are important but how many are buying expensive rigs?
Vinea
Workstation users, sure. Not generally server users though.
Going by the sales of Alien, VooDoo, and other small makers, then tripling that number as a guess. I'd say possibly about 400 to 600 thousand a year. That's worldwide. It's just a guess.
Mac Pro Dual (Xeon 5100/5300)
base model dual-dual 2.66 $2499
better model dual-quad 2.33 $2999
best model dual-quad 2.66 $3499
2GB FB-DIMM RAM standard, ATI X1900XT (or newer) standard
Mac Pro Single (Conroe/Kentsfield)
base model dual 2.66 $1499
better model quad 2.40 $1699
best model quad 2.66 $1999
1GB DDR2-800 RAM standard, nVidia 7300GT (or newer) standard
@ MacWorld SF January 2007
You forgot quad-quad.
For that type of machine, as Programmer has said, it shouldn't matter.
It's for a server. Likely a lot of transactional calculation going on. The more cores the better for that. Lanes aren't as important.
Severs have hardware raid cards in them.
Severs have hardware raid cards in them.
That is true, but the bandwidth that a RAID takes isn't much compared to a gfx card. For example, Apple's Fibrechannel card is 4 lanes which is more than enough for 2Gbps each way. 10G networking could theoretically max out an 8 lane slot, 10G each way. Most of those slots in that machine appear to be four or eight lane slots to me, and there are a lot of them there.