Apple modular Mac Pro launch coming in 2019, new engineering group formed to guarantee fut...

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  • Reply 121 of 269
    fastasleepfastasleep Posts: 6,408member
    tipoo said:
    "Throughout, the idea of modularity was omnipresent. An iMac Pro with two iPad Pros hooked up to it allows for direct control, shortcuts and live access to the Logic manual all while you’re mixing a song on the main device. "

    Uh wait, you can do that? If not...Why not?! I always wanted tighter integration to use iPads to make Macs better. 
    With the Logic Remote app and an ebook, yes. 
  • Reply 122 of 269
    dysamoriadysamoria Posts: 3,430member
    All Apple has to do for modularity is look at the gamer's built PC industry!  They been doing this for at least 7 years and counting!  If Apple want to be cheap and be standardized.  But know Apple, everything will be proprietary and can only be purchased through Apple for the most profit.
    No, I ran AWAY from PC builds. All Apple need look at is the Mac Pro they shipped prior to the late 2013 model.
  • Reply 123 of 269
    tht said:
    I like the iMac design. I want it to get even thinner.
    I don't begrudge you your preference, but if I may ask purely out of curiosity, why do you want the iMac to be even thinner? What's the benefit? How is your use of it affected by its thickness?
    dysamoriamuthuk_vanalingam
  • Reply 124 of 269
    dysamoriadysamoria Posts: 3,430member
    macxpress said:

    onepotato said:
    God, I hope Jony doesn't have any input into the design of this machine. Otherwise we'll be seeing something that looks pretty and is totally unfit for pro use.
    You mean like the old Mac Pro tower that was also designed by Jony Ive's team? I'm sure you're the expert on what a Pro needs anyways. 
    And did he not design the late 2013 model that caused Mac Pros so much lost market share compared to the prior models?

    It's not like Jony Ive has remained changeless over the years. He seems to have lost his way with the obsessive thin design and minimalism BS. Clearly Apple lost their way with GUI design some time in 2013...
  • Reply 125 of 269
    avon b7avon b7 Posts: 7,624member
    avon b7 said:
    One of Apple's biggest historical failings has been communication (lack of it). They seem to be turning that around and it is very encouraging. I hope this propagates down the line.

    The part on workflow didn't make a lot of sense but you can't avoid marketing these days. Everything needs to be 'sold'.

    The takeaway here was the openness and doing it in a timely fashion. A big thumbs up.
    That’s not a failing, it’s a style decision. Jobs’ Apple chose to speak less. That isn’t good or bad on the face of it. 
    Are they mutually exclusive?

    Leaving your users in the dark on serious investment plans (for them) and seeing rife speculation as a result is not good for anyone. It's a failing even when it's a 'style decision'.

    We are not talking about someone asking Apple at a conference call if they plan to support touchscreen Macs at some point in the future. It is not about some possible feature but the future of an established model.

    No one with even the slightest intention of buying a Mac Pro responded with a 'meh' to this news. Every single potential purchaser (corporate or not) will have been grateful to see someone actively addressing the point. 

    Just keeping mum wouldn't have helped anyone.

    I fully agree that all the 'marketing' language that accompanied the statement was entirely unnecessary and made them look somewhat dumb but credit where credit is due. They made things clear and that was nice to hear.

    Over the last couple of years we have seen more instances of this. I hope it becomes the norm.
    edited April 2018 dysamoriamuthuk_vanalingam
  • Reply 126 of 269
    anomeanome Posts: 1,533member
    Talk abut slow training crawling geez.
    Read all about it!! 
    Apple is releasing a computer in about 20 months.

    Get rid of little timmy cookie and his slow motion minions.

    Bring back the Guy and let the good times roll again!

    Stop spamming the forums. If you have something useful to say, say it. 

    One more time with this juvenile outburst, and you're done.

    He could at least explain why he wants Guy Kawasaki back at Apple, and what he thinks that will do for them.

    Unless there's someone else he means when he says "the Guy", but no-one seems to be clear on who it might be.

  • Reply 127 of 269
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,858administrator
    anome said:
    Talk abut slow training crawling geez.
    Read all about it!! 
    Apple is releasing a computer in about 20 months.

    Get rid of little timmy cookie and his slow motion minions.

    Bring back the Guy and let the good times roll again!

    Stop spamming the forums. If you have something useful to say, say it. 

    One more time with this juvenile outburst, and you're done.

    He could at least explain why he wants Guy Kawasaki back at Apple, and what he thinks that will do for them.

    Unless there's someone else he means when he says "the Guy", but no-one seems to be clear on who it might be.

    Based on a previous forum comment, he is in fact talking about Kawasaki. Its' not the message. However, given his last six comments have been within three or four words from being a copy-paste job, I'm reaching the limits of my patience.
    edited April 2018 fastasleeppscooter63
  • Reply 128 of 269
    asciiascii Posts: 5,936member
    dysamoria said:

    It's not like Jony Ive has remained changeless over the years. He seems to have lost his way with the obsessive thin design and minimalism BS. Clearly Apple lost their way with GUI design some time in 2013...
    Steve Jobs was a famous minimalist. I remember reading in a biography that when people visited his house there would be nowhere to sit because entire rooms would have only one item of furniture (not sure if that's just urban legend or not). 

    And yet when he came back to Apple, and decided to trim down the product line, even he did not trim it down to only one computer, he created a grid of 4 computers. If the consumate minimalist didn't trim it down to one computer, he must have seen some fundamental differences between "pro" and "consumer" (which was one axis on his grid) and "desktop" and "laptop" which was the other axis.
    dysamoria
  • Reply 129 of 269
    dysamoriadysamoria Posts: 3,430member
    As to the article itself... this is good news. It's a shame this wasn't last year's news, though. Sigh. So much time lost to bad decisions at Apple.

    Didn't they already have a professional products team?? Did it get shuttered? Wouldn't surprise me, since Apple's famed GUI team was ignored when Ive wanted to make way for iOS 7's horrible redesign by using the print marketing group...

    So yet another full year to wait at least... Good thing I bought a used Mac to move off of my tiny MacBook Pro. I'm not sure if it will last another year, since it was a bad refurb of an already tightly-thermal-constrained design... but I'm hoping it does.

    Of course, by 2019/20, Apple will be forcefully pressuring me to buy a new phone and iPad to replace my iPhone 6s and iPad Pro (1st gen)...
  • Reply 130 of 269
    Soli said:
    [...] It's not about you. It's never about you. It's always about Apple's aggregate user base in terms of how much money a product can generate for the them.
    Acknowledged and understood. I thought my observation was universal and not tied to any personal preference. For example, the only way to even perceive the slim aesthetic is to sit beside the computer instead of in front of it. That applies to everyone, regardless of use case! :)

    As for the rest, I'll give you my car if you can show me evidence that Jony's thought process had anything to do with "Less material equals more nature" rather than just "Skinny looks cool." :)

    I'm gonna step away from the subject now, because i didn't really intend to bash the iMac. My point was just that design is a balancing act, and sometimes it seems like Jony's choices may be aimed more towards modern sculpture enthusiasts than content creators.
  • Reply 131 of 269
    SoliSoli Posts: 10,035member
    ascii said:
    dysamoria said:

    It's not like Jony Ive has remained changeless over the years. He seems to have lost his way with the obsessive thin design and minimalism BS. Clearly Apple lost their way with GUI design some time in 2013...
    Steve Jobs was a famous minimalist. I remember reading in a biography that when people visited his house there would be nowhere to sit because entire rooms would have only one item of furniture (not sure if that's just urban legend or not).
    If that's true, that makes him a pseudo-minmimialist, at best.  A real minimalist wouldn't have a bunch of extra rooms that have no utility. Hell, I'd say that Warren Buffet is more a minimalist for staying in the house he bought in 1958 for $31,500 with is valued today (at least from the last time I read about it) at only 0.001% of his personal wealth; but that's really not minimalism either, just being frugal. The yacht Jobs had built shows that he'd never really been a minimalist, only that he doesn't care for clutter, which isn't the same thing.
    edited April 2018
  • Reply 132 of 269
    michelb76michelb76 Posts: 612member
    A redesigned modular Mac Pro -- teased in April 2017 for professionals that want to upgrade faster -- won't ship until 2019, Apple declared on Thursday.

    The Mac Pro hasn't seen a major update since 2013.
    The Mac Pro hasn't seen a major update since 2013.


    "We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It's not something for this year," Apple's senior director of Mac hardware product marketing, Tom Boger, told TechCrunch. The executive added that Apple is informing people now since professional customers may be weighing whether to buy an iMac Pro or hold off a few more months.

    Apple's global marketing chief, Phil Schiller, confirmed that work is continuing on a standalone monitor. In fact the company has created a newly-disclosed group called the Pro Workflow Team, led by John Ternus and working in close cooperation with engineers. The company is hiring full-time and contracted artists to produce media projects that can be used to test Apple's hardware and software.

    "We've been focusing on visual effects and video editing and 3D animation and music production as well," said Ternus. "And we've brought in some pretty incredible talent, really masters of their craft. And so they're now sitting and building out workflows internally with real content and really looking for what are the bottlenecks. What are the pain points. How can we improve things. And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS, is it in the drivers, is it in the application, is it in the silicon, and then run it to ground to get it fixed."

    "We said in the meeting last year that the pro community isn't one thing," added Ternus. "It's very diverse. There's many different types of pros and obviously they go really deep into the hardware and software and are pushing everything to its limit. So one thing you have to do is we need to be engaging with the customers to really understand their needs. Because we want to provide complete pro solutions not just deliver big hardware which we're doing and we did it with iMac Pro. But look at everything holistically."

    The entire effort goes beyond the iMac Pro and the 2019 Mac Pro -- with external GPU technology springing from it. The Pro group as a whole is examining not only workflows of customers in detail, but also examining the culture of Apple's hardware development, and how the company makes decisions about what it builds and how it does it. And, the group is hiring.

    "We've gone from, just, you know, engineering Macs and software to actually engineering a workflow and really understanding from soup to nuts, every single stage of the process, where those bottlenecks are, where we can optimize that," said Boger. "Because we build the hardware the firmware the operating system the software and have these close relationships with third parties we can attack the entire stack and we can really ferret out where we are we can optimize for performance."

    When asked if the Mac Pro was intended for 2018, Apple denied that there has been any alteration in the roadmap. Additionally, Ternus and Boger made it clear that through the design process a "modular" approach is still the focus of the machine -- but didn't go into any large amount of detail about it.

    "I don't think that the timeline has fundamentally changed," said Ternus. "I think this is very much a situation where we want to measure twice and cut once and we want to make sure we're building a really well thought out platform for what our pro customers are doing today. But also with an eye towards what they're going to be doing in future as well. And so to do that right that's what we're focusing on."

    "There is absolutely a need in certain places for modularity." said Ternus. "But it's also really clear that the iMac form factor or the MacBook Pros can be exceptionally good tools."

    Apple's unexpected announcement in April of 2017 came after years of concern from professional users, many of whom believed that Apple had abandoned the pro market. In a meeting with journalists, Apple revealed that most professional users rely on the MacBook Pro or iMac, while the Mac Pro accounts for just a "low single digit" percentage market share.

    At the time, it promised an iMac with "server grade" components was coming in 2017, with the iMac Pro being announced at WWDC 2017, and shipping in late December.


    image


    "One of the good things, hopefully, with Apple through the years," Schiller said in April 2017, "has been a willingness to say when something isn't quite what we wanted it do be, didn't live up to expectations, to not be afraid to admit it and look for the next answer."

  • Reply 133 of 269
    fastasleepfastasleep Posts: 6,408member
    ascii said:
    bkkcanuck said:
    ascii said:
    I really like the idea of having their own internal group of artists whose workflow they can observe, rather than just relying on customer feedback. Should result in a tighter feedback cycle.
    It is good to have a group who will act as customers driving requirements - I just wish they had the equivalent for other science/AI professionals as well.  My guess is that they will be part hardware and part focused on working on ironing out remaining issues with workflow within Final Cut X.  
    Yep having some other professions would be good too.

    When I watch video reviews of the Macbook Pro from creative professionals a common complaint is that the lack of an SD card slot interferes with their workflow, because that's what their other gear uses. So if Apple are truly adapting their products to these people's workflows I wonder if the SD card will make a comeback? (presumably they would use this feedback in all their pro products, not just the desktops)
    And they could’ve just bought a card reader or small hub that has one and shut up and get their work done. 
    randominternetperson
  • Reply 134 of 269
    San WarzonéSan Warzoné Posts: 1unconfirmed, member
    Can't Apple just "blame" Intel for the delay??? The newest Intel Core i9 Coffee Lake chips wouldn't be good enough so Apple has decided begin to design their own processors in house...and then 2 or 3 years down the road they can contract an Asian fab company to manufacture them...and presto! A New MacPro Machine Right on Time for 2022!
  • Reply 135 of 269
    rogifan_newrogifan_new Posts: 4,297member
    dysamoria said:
    macxpress said:

    onepotato said:
    God, I hope Jony doesn't have any input into the design of this machine. Otherwise we'll be seeing something that looks pretty and is totally unfit for pro use.
    You mean like the old Mac Pro tower that was also designed by Jony Ive's team? I'm sure you're the expert on what a Pro needs anyways. 
    And did he not design the late 2013 model that caused Mac Pros so much lost market share compared to the prior models?

    It's not like Jony Ive has remained changeless over the years. He seems to have lost his way with the obsessive thin design and minimalism BS. Clearly Apple lost their way with GUI design some time in 2013...
    You think nobody else inside Apple had a say on the Mac Pro design? You think Ive just walked in one day and said hey Mac engineering the new Mac Pro is going to be a trash can, deal with it. Um, I don’t think it works that way. Also Craig Federighi said they didn’t design around a shape. When Phil Schiller got up on stage and said can’t innovate my ass it’s pretty clear Apple thought this was the future of pro computing. The design was built around that.
    randominternetpersonmacxpress
  • Reply 136 of 269
    michelb76michelb76 Posts: 612member
    They are overthinking this so much, it hurts. Also good luck if your ‘workflow’ doesn’t fit the ones they interviewed. For many, many pro’s, a beefy hackintosh has sufficed. They could have rolled out a much nicer, simpler system, instead of rethinking how I’m supposed to work, according to Apple. 

    Is it the OS, is it in the drivers, is it in the application, is it in the silicon, and then run it to ground to get it fixed.”.
    Laughable quote. Sounds like they are optimizing for their own apps. Are they rewriting large parts of osx? Are they working with nvidia to get decent drivers for once? Have they fixed APFS performance?

    Am I expected to go and buy an imac pro with 2 ipad pros? Or a macbook with multiple egpu’s? What pro does that if they have access to better and cheaper alternatives?  Wtf. 
  • Reply 137 of 269
    ascii said:
    bkkcanuck said:
    ascii said:
    I really like the idea of having their own internal group of artists whose workflow they can observe, rather than just relying on customer feedback. Should result in a tighter feedback cycle.
    It is good to have a group who will act as customers driving requirements - I just wish they had the equivalent for other science/AI professionals as well.  My guess is that they will be part hardware and part focused on working on ironing out remaining issues with workflow within Final Cut X.  
    Yep having some other professions would be good too.

    When I watch video reviews of the Macbook Pro from creative professionals a common complaint is that the lack of an SD card slot interferes with their workflow, because that's what their other gear uses. So if Apple are truly adapting their products to these people's workflows I wonder if the SD card will make a comeback? (presumably they would use this feedback in all their pro products, not just the desktops)
    I hear this a lot too, and my question is whether using an outboard card reader is really such a big inconvenience that it even warrants mention, much less outweighs the pile of benefits the latest MacBook Pros offer? I get it... the dongle for my primary app only comes in a USB-A format, but if a $9 adapter is all it takes to enjoy the benefits of every single port being an Everything port, resisting seems self-destructive.
    fastasleep
  • Reply 138 of 269
    SoliSoli Posts: 10,035member
    As for the rest, I'll give you my car if you can show me evidence that Jony's thought process had anything to do with "Less material equals more nature" rather than just "Skinny looks cool." :)
    1) I don't know what "less material equals more nature" means.

    2) I don't know that Ive was the chief designer and engineer of the iMac.
  • Reply 139 of 269
    bitmodbitmod Posts: 267member
      Either that or they are working with totally new non Xeon hardware.  
    This seems the most plausible.

    I think to make a truly modular computer, it requires an entirely new bus system - one that will play nice with everyone. This would require a new shell. 

    Say hello to OS XI - 2019?
  • Reply 140 of 269
    thttht Posts: 5,421member
    I didn’t like that narrative... “Not this year”, “understanding from soup to nuts” [still?], “internal workflows with real content” sound like bla bla bla to my ears.

    Long live iMac Pro.
    tht said:
    Those quotes from Apple sound horrible. They should have just said the Mac Pro will be available in 2019, and left out these weird statements or rationale, which sound devoid of sense to me. Designing for workflows? That’s what drove them down the 2013 Mac Pro route.
    So it wasn't just me then. Was that rambling nonsense an example of what happens when a marketing drone has nothing to spin?

    Still. I'm very, very, happy to see Apple opening up a little on the communication side, allowing corporate and institutional customers some fodder for planning.

    It’s not nonsense per se, it’s the implications of what the comments mean if they are being sincere. They said they hired “professional users” to essentially help design this new Mac Pro and have now formed a pro workflow team or group to that effect.

    That implies:

    1. Apple gave the 2013 Mac Pro a try. It was something different, targeted. They didn’t see much success with it, and instead of doing the work to keep it updated or make it more attractive to buyers, they let it die and had no interest in replacing it. Also means whatever decisions and research they did to design the 2013 Mac Pro was wrong. Every organization has a brain fart, that’s the way it breaks sometimes, but they didn’t even do the work to update it. You would have to conclude they were planning on abandoning the market.

    2. The iMac Pro is or was intended to retain many of the customers in the Mac Pro workstation market. It was a cheap way to do it as they didn’t need a new assembly line. Retooling some, but not a new assembly line.

    3. Inside Apple, they don’t understand what people use pro level machines for, and it necessitates bringing outside people into the company to make sure they got it right. That sounds tremendously odd for a computer company who should have users doing this very same work inside the company. It’s plain rediculous for a computer company to not understand what computers, every shape and size, are used for. I’m not sure they are being sincere here, who knows. Don’t confuse marketing with advertising or press communications. A product manager’s job at Apple is to understand why and how a product is used. To not understand workstations is a serious fuckup.

    I’m guessing that if it wasn’t for VR and neural network computing hitting the market in 2016, Apple would have officially abandoned the Mac Pro market in 2016. They must have thought the market was only for gamers or enterprise workstations, something they have no interest in. But VR and neural networks hit at the heart of their content creation specialty, had no products in their lineup that could be used for it, and so they had to do a U-turn and spin up efforts for a workstation level machine again.

    It would be interesting to find out when the iMac Pro started. If it was late 2016, the iMac Pro and TB3 eGPU support were started to retain customers who needed GPU compute performance that none of Apple’s market offered, and put their foot into the door for VR and GPU compute stuff. The Mac Pro May have been pushed to 2019 because the same group of people had to get the iMac Pro out the door in 2017 even.
    fastasleepcornchippscooter63
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