Editorial: What will Apple do with the Macintosh?

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  • Reply 81 of 198
    charlitunacharlituna Posts: 7,217member
    gwmac wrote: »


    People that need a Mac Pro NEED a Mac Pro and the iMac will never be a good substitute for me.

    Key words being 'for me'. Your needs are yours. They don't equal every one else. Nor does your opinion of how to fill our needs. Some of us find our Linux and unix render farms to be way better than even a tricked out Mac Pro and have for quite some time. So we will keep using them and you can keep your Mac Pro
  • Reply 82 of 198
    charlitunacharlituna Posts: 7,217member
    Marvin wrote: »
    Tim said the people at Apple don't see a convergence between iOS and OS X.

    That's not completely true. The two are already based off the same core software, just with appropriate UI features for each style. And all this iCloud etc is a kind of convergence.

    All Timmy doesn't seem interested in is putting the exact same software on everything with the same UI, a la Microsoft Windows 8
  • Reply 83 of 198
    solipsismxsolipsismx Posts: 19,566member
    charlituna wrote: »
    That's not completely true. The two are already based off the same core software, just with appropriate UI features for each style. And all this iCloud etc is a kind of convergence.

    I'd say the same core is evidence of a cleaving and the tying of apps through services via iCloud is a connecting, but I wouldn't say they are being combined as they are clearly distinct entities that we both agree are not likely to be wrapped into one giant fail like Windows RT.
  • Reply 84 of 198
    E
    gwmac wrote: »
    People that don't own a Mac Pro just don't get it. And as far as those silly benchmarks, that means nothing it actual daily use. Try some some video rendering for example and compare the results when all 12 cores are being used in a Mac Pro. Finally we can also use off the shelf video cards. Apple are notorious about not offering the latest or fastest video cards as an option. I recently bought a new Nvidia for my Mac Pro and it screams. I will never be interested in an iMac and certainly not a Mini. I enjoy the speed and expansion possibilities a Mac pro affords and I also have two very nice 30" monitors. The iMac is a fine computer for people in that market but I have all 4 hard bays used with drives from 2 to 3TB in size and even that isn't enough space. I have an external quad bay Firewire 800 enclosure daisy chained to another dual bay enclosure. I realize I am not typical and most people don't need over 10TB of storage like me but for those of us that do the iMac is not a great option. 

    People that need a Mac Pro NEED a Mac Pro and the iMac will never be a good substitute for me. It is like asking Corvette owners to just make do with a Chevette instead since they are both Vettes after all. 

    Everything this man said is 100% spot on.
  • Reply 85 of 198
    What is it that requires a Mac Pro other than movie editing? I see that Dell and HP sell monster machines with Xenon processors. There are movie editing programs that work on Windows and Linux.


    Just this month Red Shark released its Lightworks movie editing program for Linux. It is a program that seems to be on par with anything from Avid or Adobe.  It's even set up to create 3D movies, AND IT'S FREE!


    Can't real scientific work be accomplished by racks of servers linked together? Since other manufactures fill the gap in the high end market maybe Apple can just forsake it once and for all instead of slapping together something every three years. Let the movie editing and design work go to other brands. Apple can stick to its iOS world and expand it enough to just dump the laptops in a year or so.


    It seems that Apple is mostly concerned with cutting edge performance only on consumer devices. Even so, they're not always out in front.


    Why haven't they taken Keynote and all of the iWorks programs to much higher levels of performance? So many people here admit that the Microsoft Office suite is better than iWorks that it must be true. It seems that Apple really isn't interested in making the iWork "experience" better. They just want it good enough to get people to buy an Apple device. With all of their talent you would think that by now they would have created an office suite that would blow away Office or at least equal it. I bet it is easier to innovate in software than it is in hardware. When will Apple ever get off its butt and create a cohesive office suite that will put the last nail in the coffin of Microsoft? I don't think they have it in them or they would have done it years ago.  


    LibreOffice will eventually be as good as Microsoft Office and the iWork suite will be a second runner up.


    Apple makes great entertainment devices. That is why they will enter the TV market. The Mac Pro will have one last hurrah and then it will be gone. The only reason we know this is because Tim Cook said that a new Mac Pro was coming this year. It will be the last one.

     

    Macs are very stable and powerful, that's why they're used in the movie world. They buy a ton of Mac Pros. Filmmaking puts more demand on these computers than almost anything else and pushes innovation forward in computing power and efficiency. There's other computers in use in the film post world, and they're plenty powerful, but they're not as good as macs in terms of stability.
  • Reply 86 of 198
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member


    Originally Posted by charlituna View Post

    Never an argument for those that know how to properly position their lighting.




    Guess they're not pros at that, huh. image

  • Reply 87 of 198
    Am I care? No. One of graphic data doesn't make any sense by the way. How is profit nonsense? I mean that it is really bigger than all top 5 PC vendors? You got to be kidding me? Apple Mac is dead. Look at worlds elect share. It is sill less than 4-5% max for decades.
  • Reply 88 of 198
    asciiascii Posts: 5,936member


    Even though Apple took Computer out of their name, they're still a computer company: it's possible to regard their whole product lineup as a single line of computers, from pocket-sized(iPod Touch) to workstation-sized (Mac Pro).


     


    And the entire lineup is client-side devices: the fact that they discontinued their server line doesn't necessarily mean the Mac Pro is next on the chopping block, they've always been stronger on the client side than the server side.

  • Reply 89 of 198
    saareksaarek Posts: 1,520member
    "But Apple can't afford not to maintain a presence at the top of the PC performance hill"

    Apple gave up any type of performance presence that they had by 2011. Their lack of concern for their professional users is simply insulting.
  • Reply 90 of 198
    s.metcalfs.metcalf Posts: 972member
    Great editorial and comments...

    What's clear from the picture and looking at my 2010 Mac Pro is how good it still looks for a 10 year-old design! It's hardly aged at all and no other desktop manufacture has built anything that comes close in design aesthetics, elegance and build quality. It's a real testament to Ive and Apple's industrial design magic.

    Personally I'd be happy if they kept the current design but finally gave us the updated Xeons, IO technology and graphics that power users have been desperately wanting, however it's pretty clear they will offer a redesign, not least to keep the European regulators happy. The challenge for Apple will be offering something that equals or beats the current design and still looks good in 10 years just the way the previous one did.

    However, I'm a bit unsure if and/or how much Apple might or should strip away from the current "everything internal" philosophy, thereby turning it into a more node-based product as has been hypothesised here. Just because Thunderbolt 1/2 can support external connections that are as good as internal does that really mean they should force customers to add bits and pieces externally, each requiring their own power supplies and massively clogging up the desk? The Mac Pro may be a tank but it allows me to have the rest of my desk relatively free of clutter with ugly peripherals.

    Sure I bet not many people use all the PCI slots, but I think rather than offering several sizes Apple went with a one-size fits all and a "they're there if you need them" approach. You mightn't even realise what you need down the track and you might be kicking yourself if you bought a 2-slot Mac Pro but find you want a third internal slot later. I also think Apple can't ditch both optical drives yet. Optical media is still too important and useful for video professionals, though it seems that Apple is at war with optical and wants to ditch it as soon as possible. In that case I'm not really looking forward to having to connect an ugly external optical drive.

    So I think they will find a way to trim it down slightly (and make rack storage more space-efficient) but I don't think we'll get the hypothetical xMac or Mac Mini on steroids. That's still a completely different product category that Apple has thus far decided to avoid rather than fragment its Mac Mini and iMac customer base. I do think Apple should make an xMac, but not as a Mac Pro replacement.

    I would like to see Apple make the xMac but also continue making a big workstation with dual sockets for massive performance and storage. I'm a customer for the later more than the former but I can see plenty of people that can't afford or want a Mac Pro but want better than a Mac Mini with its integrated graphics and the ability to drive a screen of their choice.
  • Reply 91 of 198

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by gwmac View Post


    People that don't own a Mac Pro just don't get it. And as far as those silly benchmarks, that means nothing it actual daily use. Try some some video rendering for example and compare the results when all 12 cores are being used in a Mac Pro. Finally we can also use off the shelf video cards. Apple are notorious about not offering the latest or fastest video cards as an option. I recently bought a new Nvidia for my Mac Pro and it screams. I will never be interested in an iMac and certainly not a Mini. I enjoy the speed and expansion possibilities a Mac pro affords and I also have two very nice 30" monitors. The iMac is a fine computer for people in that market but I have all 4 hard bays used with drives from 2 to 3TB in size and even that isn't enough space. I have an external quad bay Firewire 800 enclosure daisy chained to another dual bay enclosure. I realize I am not typical and most people don't need over 10TB of storage like me but for those of us that do the iMac is not a great option. 


     


    People that need a Mac Pro NEED a Mac Pro and the iMac will never be a good substitute for me. It is like asking Corvette owners to just make do with a Chevette instead since they are both Vettes after all. 



     


    Quote:

    Originally Posted by elliots11 View Post



    E

    Everything this man said is 100% spot on.


     


     


     


     


     


    Totally agree.


     


    And aside from the video industry, there are plenty of scientific researchers who would love to have an OS X based supercomputing workstation on their desktop, having to deal daily with problems for which the iMac, as excellent a product as it is for its intended market, would (and should) be considered a toy in comparison. Perhaps some folks simply don't appreciate the extreme compute resource requirements of some of today's outstanding computational grand challenges, such as numerical general relativity codes to simulate black hole collisions and gravitational wave generation, realistic simulations of which can easily consume sustained teraflop processing rates for days, hundred of Gigs - if not a terabyte - of RAM, and massive bandwidth. An iMac isn't even an option in this context. 


     


    Of course many scientific problems are already being tackled by modular GPU hardware approaches, and this must surely be properly supported by future Apple pro hardware. It's a rather sad state of affairs that nVidia's website doesn't even mention OS X support for its Tesla K20 cards (which now offer over a teraflop of double-precision floating point performance): just for Windows and various flavours of Linux. I'd like to see Apple offer a serious route to a real "desktop HPC platform". From some manufacturers' marketing (including Apple's in the past!) one might think we're already there, but I would define this as a single (though possibly modularly extended), relatively small form-factor machine on which known difficult scientific problems can be viably addressed. Ie the ground between workstation and entry-level big-iron HPC (ie up to say $100k).  Sure it'll never be the size of an iMarket, but there other factors, such as prestige, involved.


     


    While linked academic clusters and the cloud offer some solutions in this field today, the prospect of running custom codes at will on private hardware remains attractive (especially with competition to be the first to detect gravitational waves heating up in the next few years). Imagine a centre announcing that one of its researchers had used a Mac Pro to run waveform analysis on signals received by a gravitational wave detector, which finally confirmed the existence of one of the remaining predictions of Einstein's theory. Nobel prize for him, priceless kudos for Apple!


     

  • Reply 92 of 198
    danielswdanielsw Posts: 906member
    gazoobee wrote: »
    Possibly just me being grouchy then.  I don't see how the question was really answered at all though.  

    This means you didn't read (nor understand) the whole article.

    I hate "question mark article titles", too, but DED is no cheap hack, and he DID answer his own question at the end of this article!

    What will Apple do with the Mac?

    For one thing, I LOVE my new iMac with its quad-core processor, huge beautiful non-glare display, no optical drive (which I rarely used on my previous machine, sleek thin-edged design, and the best-ever-designed access to the RAM of ANY Mac I've ever owned, into which I put 32 GB!

    A very wise man once said that it's a waste of breath to try to explain something to someone who doesn't just get it on his own. So I was very pleased to see DED come to the same conclusion as I when he spoke of the possibility of a modular Mac Pro which Thunderbolt makes possible: a small chassis without big fans or card slots, but with a lot of (SD?)RAM slots, with OPTIONAL external expansion card boxes, inter-connected via (OPTICAL) Thunderbolt.

    They could even use the Mini form factor and make these boxes stackable and inter-connected via cable-less iOS-style dock plugs.

    I'll go further out on a limb to say that they're waiting to also announce that the new modular Mac Pro is manufactured in the US.

    They simply had to wait for all the logistics to comes together.

    The timing couldn't have been better, either, what with the collapse of cheapo Windoze boxes, the Zune-style failure of Surface, and the Windoze 8 blunder.

    The new modular Mac should enjoy its own Phoenix-like resurrection from the flames.
  • Reply 93 of 198
    misamisa Posts: 827member
    sessamoid wrote: »
    I think the Mac Pro is the most likely product to have its manufacturing moved to the US. Cook stated last year they had planned to move a whole product line to the US for manufacturing, a comment that seems to have been forgotten by the tech press in the rush to proclaim the doom of the company.

    Nah, it's more likely to be made in the US because of BTO configurations that necessitate quick turn around times. This is OK.

    However as for the future of the Mac Pro, what myself any many others would like to see is a return to the G3/G4 type of Mac/MacPro that was one step between the iMac/Macintosh and where the current Mac Pro is in terms of customization. What we instead got was a MacMini that basically a headless laptop (albeit a VERY GOOD one, but not upgradeable) that can replace most sub-800$ desktops easily, and a Mac Pro that is priced so far out of the market that only businesses that are creating content can justify it... and NO UPGRADEABLE VIDEO PARTS.

    What we need is a Mac Pro that starts at the same configuration as the highest end iMac, and each model up, doubles the CPU/GPU core count without doubling the price. Thereby making the appropriate "see more power, for less price"

    It would be nice to have seen Xgrid work out better, where you could stick maybe a dozen macmini's together to get the same power as 4 mac pro's, but this would unlikely have worked in practice due to different processing speeds. I'd like to see it revisited still because compressing h.264 video CAN be done this way.
  • Reply 94 of 198
    sennensennen Posts: 1,472member

    Quote:


    Just this month Red Shark released its Lightworks movie editing program for Linux. It is a program that seems to be on par with anything from Avid or Adobe.  It's even set up to create 3D movies, AND IT'S FREE!



     


     


    When you make your livelihood from something, you simply can't rely on these kind of tools.

  • Reply 95 of 198


    Originally Posted by edwardryu View Post



    Am I care? No. One of graphic data doesn't make any sense by the way. How is profit nonsense? I mean that it is really bigger than all top 5 PC vendors? You got to be kidding me? Apple Mac is dead. Look at worlds elect share. It is sill less than 4-5% max for decades.


     


    Read the article linked: http://www.asymco.com/2013/04/16/escaping-pcs/


     


    "The real problem for the PC vendors is not that they have such low margins–they’ve had low margins for decades. It’s that the volumes which made up for low margins are disappearing."


     


    That's how. Apple's Mac volumes have grown steadily since the move to OS X. PC volumes have declined over that time, with the decline picking up speed recently as iOS and Android devices have cut sharply into sales of low-margin PCs.

  • Reply 96 of 198
    Apple's foundation and heritage (80's and 90's) all comes from the high-end computer users who were attracted to the Mac platform. Photographers, graphic artists and other creative professionals in my circle of friends all used a Mac and in the big picture it had a trickle down effect on their more affordable machines. When I invested in Apple in 1997 at $7/share Apple had a half percent of the computer market, I thought certainly they could have own one or two percent of the market and I'd double my money, my point is keeping the Mac Pro is keeping a solid foundation and it too will have a trickle down effect. Apple needs to have a king of the hill work horse computer, letting any other computer company have this market would be an insult to Apple in my opinion.
  • Reply 97 of 198
    tailstails Posts: 35member


    Few professional need a Mac Pro these days, most have switched to iMac or even Mac Mini. I know many people who work in desktop publishing and a Mac Mini is enough for their processing needs. After all apart from certain filters, Photoshop does not use more than 2 cores on many tasks. If you are doing lots of rendering, need PCI-e slots, or need a lot of RAM to work with huge files, you need a Mac Pro. Otherwise buy an iMac and upgrade it every year instead of buying a Mac Pro and upgrading every 4 years. 


     


    That being said, I love my Mac Pro and I'll buy a new one when Apple releases a new one. 

  • Reply 98 of 198
    They will need the Mac so that all us developers can write apps for iOS! :)
  • Reply 99 of 198
    steven n.steven n. Posts: 1,229member
    bsenka wrote: »
    I don't know anyone who has gone the iMac route who didn't regret it. The issue is not the horsepower, it's the screen.

    Just the opposite in my experience. With one exception, all were thrilled specifically with the display. I found the calibration to be good out of the box and very good after Eye One calibration.
  • Reply 100 of 198
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    gwmac wrote:
    as far as those silly benchmarks, that means nothing it actual daily use. Try some some video rendering for example and compare the results when all 12 cores are being used in a Mac Pro.

    The benchmarks do use all the cores. The video rendering benchmarks are more consistent but show roughly the same results:

    http://www.barefeats.com/wst10.html

    The 2012 MBP and iMac score around the 8-core 2.8 and 3.2 Mac Pro level. The really expensive Mac Pros are up to double the speed but that extra performance is not significantly more productive in every case. If it takes 20 hours to edit together a sequence and it takes a Mac Pro 30 minutes to render it, an iMac, MBP or Mini would take an hour or so. You only save half an hour. It's not always worth paying the extra money for.

    When it comes to GPU computation, it's even less of a difference because the 680MX is closer to the highest-end GPUs than the CPUs:

    http://www.barefeats.com/imac12p2.html

    They test Da Vinci Resolve performance and After Effects. That's not to say anyone should choose a lower performance machine for the sake of it but it means that a MBP or iMac are suitable alternatives to the Mac Pro now for even the highest-end processing and that's great because they are cheaper and the MBP is portable.

    When you take SSDs into consideration, Mac Pros still only have SATA 3G vs SATA 6G in the iMac/Mini/MBP so you don't get the full performance out of them unless you use up one of the PCI slots.

    Upgradability is usually considered a plus for the Mac Pro but it's a negative for Apple. It doesn't do Apple any favours putting a new GPU in say a 2009 Mac Pro. It just means Apple hasn't had any money for 4 years and the GPU can make it last another 2-3 years or more. Apple has a reason to prevent that and encourage people to buy a new machine.
    I would think the Mac Pro would be well served by having 3 separate Thunderbolt full bandwidth controllers on-board so that they aren't shared to match 3 PCI-E 3.0 full x16 slots support on the card to allow for a triple GPGPU or a dual and then a CAD based separate third card specifically for CAD/CAM.

    The Mac Pro doesn't currently have 3 x16 slots free. The Mac Pro right now has one x16 with a GPU in it, one x16 and two x4s free. Multiple high-end GPUs has never been a requirement for the Mac Pro because it only has a 300W supply limit on the slots, which means you get just one high-end card. GPUs don't have to be run over Thunderbolt, any revision would have a GPU internally using 16 lanes. Even with 2 Thunderbolt ports, they replicate the 2 x4 slots in the current Pro. With Thunderbolt being plug and play and chainable, it's not essential to have more than two unless all the peripherals use the bandwidth at the same time in the same direction.
    mstone wrote:
    The single task environment is not the primary target market for a new Mac Pro. We do a lot of multitasking with our Mac Pros and I can't wait to get my hands on the new version.

    It depends what the single task is. If someone only runs Maya, that's a single task and is a target for a Mac Pro. Similarly if you run Maya and After Effects, Photoshop etc, a MBP or iMac are suitable for it.
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