I'm happy that Apple is still addressing the pro market, but it's unfortunate they missed so badly using Intel Xeon CPUs instead of AMD Epyc CPUs for this generation. The additional cores and PCIe bandwidth would be massively useful, especially if they could shave some serious money off the price at the same time.
One request though? Under the photo of a seriously ridiculous Wall Street journal headline, there is some significantly unfortunate language. Can we change that please? I come here for Apple news. Not to be assaulted by foul language. It takes away from what is otherwise a fantastic article. Thank you.
How are you being “assaulted”?
I am mixed about the usage in that caption. On one hand, I’m an adult and I’m happy to see no-bullshit language. On the other hand, it doesn’t look “professional”. But then these unnecessarily defensive and verbose editorials don’t look like professional writing either.
At the very least, it should mean we commentators can use the same language and not be called out by anti-adult-language TOU.
@hmurchison ; surely a bit over reacting there, don’t you think?
the abandoned products you are mentioning were hardly that great and not much more than distractions.
XServe came at the end of an era that was wiped out by blades, dedicated nas builders and epic scale cloud farms that go so far now to design and build their own modules.
Aperture and ibook creator were both clearly place holder solutions to promote the use of their platforms, not the applications themselves. same goes with reality composer in 2019. final cut is a platform thankfully.
iBooks Author was one of the BEST pieces Apple has written in a decade. Again it so popular with some educators that they run their on Conference on a product that is updated less than the defunct Apple Airport Utility app/router. The incredulity of a "hardly great" application generating such independent interest for the last 5-6 stands. iBooks Author was an incredible piece of technology that couldn't mitigate the needs of the big publishers like Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill to churn out profits by shipping new versions of expensive textbooks. iBooks Author was an excellent chance to engage the next generation with new multimedia learning tools and Apple found that oligarchs were too well entrenched and engorging themselves upon the teet of education. I understand why they abandoned Powerschool and iBook Author. Education is a very difficult nut to crack but what we're concerned here is the "effort"
As for Xserve no Blades didn't affect Apple nor any other Server vendor. I was an HP Storage Champion when we were selling the Blade system probably 1/20 as compared to your bread and butter ProLiant 3 and 5 series. Blades were great for companies that needed really high density, virtualization and had already understood they wanted a SAN network. Xserve products were not affected in any way by Blades but rather HP, Dell and other companies primary focus is biz sector.
I'm really curious as to why Aperture was killed. That's another product in which if Photogs "got it" and loved the work flow they were obsessed with it. It's easy to do the math and come to the proper conclusion that Apple made the "right" decision to focus heavily on iOS. The follow up question is "now that they've reached a sort of plateau will they focus again on other areas and deliver competent solutions that they actually stick with?"
I still have the feeling that Apple would rather that all Mac users just switch to using iPads.
In some ways it makes sense. Marketing/release planning is still vulnerable to Intel's stumbles. With the A-series chips, Apple is in complete control of the release cycle and the company's marketing objectives. If Apple made its own widget, that's in the company's best interests. There are also manufacturing efficiencies such as shipping a product with a single glass panel as opposed to regional variations in physical keyboard layouts (ex US English vs. UK English vs. AZERTY, vs. French Canadian, etc).
On the other hand, there are those of us that simply don't view iOS as a desktop replacement.
Obvious professions are:
* Software developers (developing both for Apple products and for other platforms)
* Anybody who types a lot (developers, transcriptionists, journalists, technical writers, self publishers, etc)
Then there's weirdness like the touchbar and the low-travel keyboard of the late 2016 MacBook Pro models. Both moves sharply contradict overall PC industry standards and have caused much controversy (personally, I hate them both [neither is defective] and they're both major reasons I'm shopping for a Linux friendly laptop).
I think Apple's stuck between a rock and a hard place and I'm not sure if they've figured out what they want to do.
Well written as usual. Unfortunately the crowd that incessantly clamors for the slotted tower of olden days at a consumer level price will not be convinced even though they have had the Hackintosh option for years now. It’s a shrinking niche as pointed out but that niche is angry and vocal so we have to put up with all the bullshit about it.
And that was the village idiot comment of the day!
Apparently the shoe fits on you. And I see your fellow choir members have already started to chime in, beating the dead horse again and again.
Actually I think most are done beating that horse after Apple threw every macOS Server user out to fend for themselves on other platforms. The only bit they threw at people was a mediocre "migration" paper that did not even cover some of the most important services.
Current trash-can users probably feel the same way too. – If they still exist.
Timmy should be ashamed of himself, and they way the company have handled a large number of customers who used to be all-Apple shops.
The last "golden age" of business & Macintosh was really 2002-2012.
We adopted the Xserve, Xserve RAID, Final Cut Pro hit its stride. OS X Server was robust & capable. Workstations were highly capable and upgraded routinely. Apple had a concrete answer to the frustrations of "creatives" in a Windows environment.
We had a decade of adoption & delight & plans for business growth along with Apple, and then over the past 7 years have watched support be pulled out from under that foundation that was built for a decade.
Now we sit with 100s and 100s of TBs of fibre arrays, an aging 2012 MacPros loaded with 128 GB of RAM & dozens of internal TBs of storage. Cylinders that, while weren't server material, made great workstations. A "Server" that we had to stop updating a few years ago because Apple decided the majority of server tasks are not necessary, and now the monumental task of either budgeting for the expense of migrating to something brand new.
The frustration stems from businesses investing in what seemed like a commitment, but what turned out to be a fling.
Well written as usual. Unfortunately the crowd that incessantly clamors for the slotted tower of olden days at a consumer level price will not be convinced even though they have had the Hackintosh option for years now. It’s a shrinking niche as pointed out but that niche is angry and vocal so we have to put up with all the bullshit about it.
And that was the village idiot comment of the day!
Apparently the shoe fits on you. And I see your fellow choir members have already started to chime in, beating the dead horse again and again.
Actually I think most are done beating that horse after Apple threw every macOS Server user out to fend for themselves on other platforms. The only bit they threw at people was a mediocre "migration" paper that did not even cover some of the most important services.
Current trash-can users probably feel the same way too. – If they still exist.
Timmy should be ashamed of himself, and they way the company have handled a large number of customers who used to be all-Apple shops.
The last "golden age" of business & Macintosh was really 2002-2012.
We adopted the Xserve, Xserve RAID, Final Cut Pro hit its stride. OS X Server was robust & capable.
We had a decade of adoption, and then over the past 7 years have watched support be pulled out from under that foundation that was built for a decade.
Now we sit with 100s of TBs of fibre arrays, an aging 2012 MacPro loaded with 128 GB of RAM & dozens of internal TBs of storage. A "Server" that we had to stop updating a few years ago because Apple decided the majority of server tasks are not necessary...
The frustration stems from businesses investing in what seemed like a commitment, but what turned out to be a fling.
Absolutely! Apple simply cannot be trusted for long term business any more, and it is hurtful to witness.
Blah, Blah, Blah Daniel... For all the money Apple generates from Mac sales you would think they could offer an option in the middle ground between the Mini and the Pro. Dell, HP and the rest can sell LOADS of different product lines and still make a profit. A Mac user has only one place to go to buy a Mac and Apple offers severely limited choices. Imagine if BMW offered only the 1 Series, 2 Series, and the 7 Series. That's the state of desktop Mac options.
I'm sick reading you banging on about how smart and profitable Apple is. As you say, the Mac division on its own would be a Fortune 500 company. When did they last truly innovate? Have you seen some of the recent PC hardware? It might not all be perfect but they try. Apple design for me has been getting lazy for years. The whole trash can Mac Pro was possibly the worst bit of design in Apple's history. All the users wanted was a powerful box they could stick under their desks, maybe fit some cards into for specialist pro tasks, and not really think about at all. Instead, they got something that's beautiful to look (well at least until it has wires spewing out all over the place) but not much more useful than a Mac Mini for professional tasks. It's then left for years without a single update. Absolutely crazy for a Fortune 500 sized outfit.
The new Pro looks amazing but it's targeted at a very small niche audience. I and a lot of people like me need something bigger than a Mini and smaller than a Pro. A Mac Middle if you will...
100%
I’m in complete agreement and am in exactly the same place. At this point, we are hanging out in the wrong place. This site is all about making a living on Apple’s success and promoting Apple for that end.
The commentators and the editorial authors are anxious stock-holders, apologists, and believers, not critical thinkers. Every time one of these belabored editorials is posted, most people just sign on with agreement while then bashing the so-called Apple-Haters. I see very little Apple hate. I see some people with critical thinking and a love for what Apple used to do well. I see them making reasonable comments about the short-sighted decisions of today’s Apple... and a swath of believers who will defend Apple at all costs simply because Apple has a lot of money right now.
Lots of money does not mean today’s Apple leadership are infallible. It means their predecessors got lucky on the market with some of their good work, like the iPhone, which is being chipped away every time a new release comes out loaded with regressions, thanks to current Apple leadership.
Apple's Mac Pro architecture also leverages lots of economies of scale with the high-end PC market: certainly, PCIe, Intel processors, and other standard components from SATA drive options to Thunderbolt 3 and its USB-C ports. From that perspective, it's not prohibitively expensive for Apple to deliver a new high-end Mac Pro, as many of the costs have already been paid for.
There are remaining expenses that are new and custom to this machine. Apple built bespoke aspects of a modern PC that no other PC has, including supercharged MPX system expansion and a somewhat conventional PC design with a very unconventional number of PCIe lanes. Apple appears to have custom-designed its motherboard chipset, rather than using off the shelf parts. And of course, the new Mac Pro gains unique benefits from Apple's T2 chip, which originated from Apple's iOS silicon work and has already been paid for by previous generations of Macs.
So it would be a mistake to view today's Mac Pro only through the lens of previous Apple Pro products, like the Xserve or earlier Mac Pros. Apple is a wildly different company than it was even just seven years ago. There is, however, another factor related to the new Mac Pro that serves as a "negative cost" for developing the new machine. In other words, the existence of the Mac Pro creates or induces something that benefits Apple elsewhere, that it wouldn't be able to get without the Mac Pro existing as a product. The next segment will take a look.
Does anyone care to speculate on what this other factor that serves as an additional "negative cost" is?
Surely it's got to be the investment into Apple News+, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, as well as into Xcode 11 and SwiftUI = the software that drives the publishing, entertainment, and gaming industries on the Mac and iOS, etc.
A better analogy for a market category is not servers, but "workstations". Many companies got big with servers until they didn't, like DEC, Sun Microsystems, etc., and Linux had something to do with that. Also, many companies like MIPS & SGI went ballistic with workstations, until they didn't, and Windows-on-Intel had something to do with that. Isn't the market for the Mac Pro (besides for Final Cut Pro) the market for whoever runs Maya, or science R&D for bioengineering, neural nets, climate physics modeling, quantum chemistry, etc? As long Apple hardware keeps pace with others, and there remain MacOS versions of the apps ...
If it’s as good as some of the pros if heard salivating over it, then it will sink or swim on its merits. It’s a truck. A very expensive high quality one. There are actual truckers out there who are very proud of their rigs, get the best money can buy, and keep it it sparkling clean. There are others for whom their rig is just a means to an end, keeping it running is all that matters. If there is enough return for Apple in terms of prestige, whether it pays for itself or even if it is a loss-leader, they may decide to keep it going. If not, they won’t. Seems to me big iron is going the way of the typewriter. I may be full of it, but there it is.
Always amusing to read people cite the Xserve as proof that Cook/Apple doesn’t get it. But Jobs on the Xserve: "Hardly anyone was buying them." That’s why they ‘lost interest’.
If people aren't buying it's probably because you don't have a compelling product, not that there's no market worth pursuing.
But that isn’t what’s claimed. Bemoaners cite the Xserve as a compelling product that Apple just...abandoned, without reason. Jobs said the reality was there wasn’t much business for their server. The reality is Apple knows its markers better than its critics do, and know when the category isn’t worth their effort. HP and Super Micro may specialize in rack servers, but that isn’t Apple’s niche.
...Seems to me big iron is going the way of the typewriter. I may be full of it, but there it is.
It highly depends on the definition and also on the business.
Hosted environments are great, but try pricing out the AWS (insert other host here) costs of carrying 500+ TBs of data. Even if the storage made sense, the price of a 16 Gb/s connection to them is outlandish compared to a fibre channel network & SAN.
Apple's crystal ball is the best in the biz, and there is really only one reason Apple is expanding into this space -----> content creation for creatives. They actually stated this when they made the announcement. As AR/VR will be the "next big thing" (Tim has stated this many times) whomever controls its production will be the leader and Apple wants to own that space. That space includes not only hardware/software but distribution which is why Apple is launching AppleTV+ on November 1st.
The workstation will be tailored to optimize Apple's creation workflow, which will be optimized to allow all of Apple's devices/platforms to provide the very best AR/VR experience for its customers.
<snip>As AR/VR will be the "next big thing" (Tim has stated this many times) whomever controls its production will be the leader and Apple wants to own that space. That space includes not only hardware/software but distribution which is why Apple is launching AppleTV+ on November 1st.
The workstation will be tailored to optimize Apple's creation workflow, which will be optimized to allow all of Apple's devices/platforms to provide the very best AR/VR experience for its customers.
AR and VR are so massively overhyped. VR has been "just around the corner it'll go mainstream" for the last half-decade. Augmented Reality has a very limited scope.
I believe Machine Learning and AI have a glimmer of hope but at this point on not sure Apple really sees the puck let alone where it's going. That being said they still need some powerful hardware that can ready to take on the next big hit whenever it comes.
Comments
I am mixed about the usage in that caption. On one hand, I’m an adult and I’m happy to see no-bullshit language. On the other hand, it doesn’t look “professional”. But then these unnecessarily defensive and verbose editorials don’t look like professional writing either.
At the very least, it should mean we commentators can use the same language and not be called out by anti-adult-language TOU.
iBooks Author was one of the BEST pieces Apple has written in a decade. Again it so popular with some educators that they run their on Conference on a product that is updated less than the defunct Apple Airport Utility app/router. The incredulity of a "hardly great" application generating such independent interest for the last 5-6 stands. iBooks Author was an incredible piece of technology that couldn't mitigate the needs of the big publishers like Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill to churn out profits by shipping new versions of expensive textbooks. iBooks Author was an excellent chance to engage the next generation with new multimedia learning tools and Apple found that oligarchs were too well entrenched and engorging themselves upon the teet of education. I understand why they abandoned Powerschool and iBook Author. Education is a very difficult nut to crack but what we're concerned here is the "effort"
As for Xserve no Blades didn't affect Apple nor any other Server vendor. I was an HP Storage Champion when we were selling the Blade system probably 1/20 as compared to your bread and butter ProLiant 3 and 5 series. Blades were great for companies that needed really high density, virtualization and had already understood they wanted a SAN network. Xserve products were not affected in any way by Blades but rather HP, Dell and other companies primary focus is biz sector.
The last "golden age" of business & Macintosh was really 2002-2012.
We adopted the Xserve, Xserve RAID, Final Cut Pro hit its stride. OS X Server was robust & capable. Workstations were highly capable and upgraded routinely. Apple had a concrete answer to the frustrations of "creatives" in a Windows environment.
We had a decade of adoption & delight & plans for business growth along with Apple, and then over the past 7 years have watched support be pulled out from under that foundation that was built for a decade.
Now we sit with 100s and 100s of TBs of fibre arrays, an aging 2012 MacPros loaded with 128 GB of RAM & dozens of internal TBs of storage. Cylinders that, while weren't server material, made great workstations. A "Server" that we had to stop updating a few years ago because Apple decided the majority of server tasks are not necessary, and now the monumental task of either budgeting for the expense of migrating to something brand new.
The frustration stems from businesses investing in what seemed like a commitment, but what turned out to be a fling.
100%
I’m in complete agreement and am in exactly the same place. At this point, we are hanging out in the wrong place. This site is all about making a living on Apple’s success and promoting Apple for that end.
The commentators and the editorial authors are anxious stock-holders, apologists, and believers, not critical thinkers. Every time one of these belabored editorials is posted, most people just sign on with agreement while then bashing the so-called Apple-Haters. I see very little Apple hate. I see some people with critical thinking and a love for what Apple used to do well. I see them making reasonable comments about the short-sighted decisions of today’s Apple... and a swath of believers who will defend Apple at all costs simply because Apple has a lot of money right now.
Lots of money does not mean today’s Apple leadership are infallible. It means their predecessors got lucky on the market with some of their good work, like the iPhone, which is being chipped away every time a new release comes out loaded with regressions, thanks to current Apple leadership.
Surely it's got to be the investment into Apple News+, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, as well as into Xcode 11 and SwiftUI = the software that drives the publishing, entertainment, and gaming industries on the Mac and iOS, etc.
big with servers until they didn't, like DEC, Sun Microsystems, etc., and Linux had something to do
with that. Also, many companies like MIPS & SGI went ballistic with workstations, until they didn't,
and Windows-on-Intel had something to do with that. Isn't the market for the Mac Pro (besides
for Final Cut Pro) the market for whoever runs Maya, or science R&D for bioengineering,
neural nets, climate physics modeling, quantum chemistry, etc? As long Apple hardware
keeps pace with others, and there remain MacOS versions of the apps ...
Hosted environments are great, but try pricing out the AWS (insert other host here) costs of carrying 500+ TBs of data.
Even if the storage made sense, the price of a 16 Gb/s connection to them is outlandish compared to a fibre channel network & SAN.
Apple's crystal ball is the best in the biz, and there is really only one reason Apple is expanding into this space -----> content creation for creatives. They actually stated this when they made the announcement. As AR/VR will be the "next big thing" (Tim has stated this many times) whomever controls its production will be the leader and Apple wants to own that space. That space includes not only hardware/software but distribution which is why Apple is launching AppleTV+ on November 1st.
The workstation will be tailored to optimize Apple's creation workflow, which will be optimized to allow all of Apple's devices/platforms to provide the very best AR/VR experience for its customers.
AR and VR are so massively overhyped. VR has been "just around the corner it'll go mainstream" for the last half-decade. Augmented Reality has a very limited scope.
I believe Machine Learning and AI have a glimmer of hope but at this point on not sure Apple really sees the puck let alone where it's going. That being said they still need some powerful hardware that can ready to take on the next big hit whenever it comes.