[quote] They know their machines are fast enough to get your purchase <hr></blockquote>
Do they? They apparently have data I don't have access to.
Cos, I still haven't bought one of their 'half baked' upgrades.
Maybe us consumers DO in fact have access to data Apple doesn't have.
Lemon Bon Bon
[quote] so of course you're right. <hr></blockquote>
The consumer is always right.
[quote] I'm not saying that Apple shouldn't and won't address other price points, I'm just saying that their current leadership has been doing a good job of keeping the company profitable (or nearly so) in the current market and saying that they don't "get it" is rather presumptuous.
<hr></blockquote>
I don't think many people here could deny Apple's hardwork in many areas.
As a software company, Apple gets it.
On laptops. They, with the recent releases, and prices cuts, get it.
On desktops, Apple doesn't. They're horribly mediocre and overpriced. I'm happy with my presumption. So are alot of other wallet holding consumers. Waiting for the desktop line to look competitive. Y'know. Somewhere near the 'real world' in terms of prices, performance and breadth of options.
The 'power'Macs have a long way to go to. And if I had a dual gigger, I'd still say it.
As I understand it it is actually the open GL implementation and incompatability with the graphicards on the mac that causes the bad problems on maya.
I read somewere a statement from aliaswavefront support to a customer said something like: Were working with apple to resolve some compatibilityproblems...
Maya 4.5 (and Personal Learning Edition) on Mac OS X 10.2.3
Maya 4.5 cannot be run on Mac OS X 10.2.3 on systems with nVidia GeForce 4Ti (GeForce 4 Titanium) orÂ* nVidia GeForce 3. Attempting to run Maya on these systems will instantly crash or freeze Maya and may cause your Macintosh to crash.Â* Maya on systems with any graphics card with less than 32 MB of video memory (such as the ATI Mobility Radeon M3 or M6) will be extremely unstable.
At this time we know of no workaround and strongly recommend that you do not upgrade to 10.2.3 if you intend running Maya.
The same goes for another 3D animation tool Project:Messiah, a character rigging and animation tool for Lightwave and Maya has anoundsed that they are about to release a macversion. They have been "about" to release the macversion for over a year now.... still nothing.... I have e-mailed them several times asking for the release date. They alway respond something like: Were working with apple to... bla bla bla. Either they are bull shitting us or apple has thier thumbs stuck up their ass.
"... apps like Lightwave 7.5, Cinema 4D 8, Maya and Shake and Final Cut Pro, the '3D' market on the Mac has never looked better in terms of software..."
Yes and it would be a shame to loose it.
"I don't think so. Alias themselves say Mac sales are 25% of total Maya sales. Not bad for a 3D program that has barely been on the Mac for long."
If sales are so good why dont they release the full version of Maya (Unlimited) for mac?
"It's the cpu that's missing in action."
Thats what were talking about. And one would think that apple could be a little better at keeping up with the graphic card development.
what part about the [B}fact[/B] that Apple doesn't make the processors that they use don't you get. Apple has done a good job with what they have available on the processor side of things. Why the continuous "APPLE DOESN'T GET IT, APPLE COSTS TOO MUCH, APPLE SUCKS, ETC". It's boring Lemon Bor Bor
I think the proof that Apple DOES get it is their notebook line. The line simply "fits 100%" - and it shows that given the right equipment Apple sure knows how to find the sweet spot and develop a top notch product with a reasonable price point.
iPod is another example. Apple does not need a 3 GHz CPU for the iPod and they made a successful product.
With the PowerMacs (and e/iMacs) Apple has no real options but to try go the "ok a bit slower and a bit cost" route and make as much money off it as they can. Right now PowerMacs wouldn't sell much more if they were even priced at $1.200. Simply because Mac users who need one buy one and PC users who think they need "TEH POWAH!!" wouldn't buy a dual 1.0GHz anyway. So why not simply leave it as it is and not risk too much in terms of profit until Apple has a solution (1.6 GHz 7457 @200FSB or 970) around which a new strategy can be developed. Once they have a machine that will sell them more units, they can start adjusting.
<strong>If sales are so good why dont they release the full version of Maya (Unlimited) for mac?</strong><hr></blockquote>
How many people are buying Unlimited anyway? From what people tell me (people in the know, as in in contact with respectable 3D industry analyst monkeys) the 3D industry has a hard time selling their software - just look at the 2002 price drops on Maya, LightWave, etc. I'd guess Maya Unlimited enjoys sales so low that porting the complete suite to OSX simply makes no business sense (since people who would buy it run "real" 3D workstations).
<strong>So, have they 'got it' with 'power'Macs? Nope. They've clearly had it 'wrong' for a good few years in terms of price and performance. They could have cheaper towers with single cpu towers just under the current prices of the duals and push the over priced iMac2s where they belong, under a K. </strong><hr></blockquote>
Listen to yourself: It's worth a couple hundred bucks to you to have the performance cut by 80% or so? On a line that is already underperforming, by your lights?
Apple knows from prior experience that having a line with both singles and duals is confusing. Do you get the single 1.25GHz, or the dual 867? They've already been there, done that. The dual-processor strategy is firmly in place now.
Regardless of where you think it should be, the LCD iMac debuted at the lowest price Apple could manage. The margin, as Fred Anderson pointed out, was below 10%. They couldn't have introduced it under $1K without losing hundreds of dollars per machine. They might be able to with the next redesign, and I think they'll try, but it definitely was not happening this time last year.
[quote]<strong>They are certainly 'naive' if they are blaming 'disappointing' sales on Photoshop 7 and subsequently, Quark's non-appearance at the 'X' party. Perhaps it has something to do with half-baked upgrades.</strong><hr></blockquote>
And perhaps it has something to do with Photoshop's broken SMP support, which moots the PM's attempt to gain some measure of speed parity with dual processors. If a dual Ghz PM will only act sort of like a single GHz PM, it becomes that much less valuable to Photoshop users. Adobe went and wrote their own Quartz so that PShop on Windows would gain the advantage of Quartz on OS X - and PShop for OS X runs through both, a staggering, unecessary and entirely software-driven performance penalty. That, and PS7 is slow in a lot of other areas. Hardware performance is only as good as the software allows it to be. But if you want to buy a machine to run that software, it's still going to be markedly slower no matter how good the technology is underneath.
If you think Quark isn't a reason against upgrading, remember that Apple has agreed to sell machines well into this year that boot into OS 9 just for Quark users. They wouldn't have done that unless they knew they'd lose sales otherwise.
[quote]<strong>Still, enjoy your dual gigger, Programmer. I'm waiting for something other than a geriatric CPU.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Funny. I'm quite happy with my 450MHz 7400. A dual 867 would be an embarrasment of riches for me. You're stuck in the unfortunate position of doing work in a field where the G4 isn't very strong, but as you've pointed out, it's still captured 25% of Maya's market share in its supposed dotage, even though Maya itself wasn't multi-threaded for the first Mac version. Apparently there's something to be said for being able to run Maya in tandem with other graphics apps on the same workstation and farming out renders to something else when necessary.
Consider this, taken from a submission by NASA engineer Craig Hunter to Macintouch's <a href="http://www.macintouch.com/g4performance02.html"; target="_blank">reader report on G4 performance</a>:
[quote]
[another writer wrote:]
Craig Hunter was able to get a G4 Mac to beat out a Pentium machine purely by making use of Altivec extensions on the former. One thing he doesn't mention is that Altivec has no support for vectorized double-precision floating-point operations--it only does single-precision floating-point. There would be many real-world applications, including 3D visualization and modelling applications not unlike the example he uses, where the reduced floating-point precision would be unacceptable. Altivec would be useless for such applications.
<strong>Actually, Jet3D is about 99% double precision. I was able to reformulate a "key" vector algorithm into single precision to take advantage of AltiVec by properly non-dimensionalizing the computation and using some common sense. The rest of the code remains double precision as required (plus, there would be little to gain from converting the rest of the code to use AltiVec anyhow, never mind that it's impractical). </strong>
<strong>A lot of us in science and engineering use codes that were written in double precision because it's required, but an equal number of codes use double precision and don't really need it (or only need it in certain parts of the code). I believe that with a closer look at the codes and/or some careful reformulation of algorithms, it would be possible to use single precision more often and thus open up more potential applications of AltiVec. BUT, and this is always a big BUT, why go to all this trouble perfecting the code for G4/AltiVec if your code already runs fast on P4/Linux systems without any fuss? Sometimes it's just not practical. I got lucky with Jet3D; vectorization and optimization for AltiVec was relatively painless. Out of about 5000 lines of code, only 10 "key" lines of coded needed to be tweaked. There may be more cases like this out there.</strong>
[another quote by another writer:]
This discussion leaves out a critical point: price/ performance relation! We recently bought Siemens/ Fujitsu Pentium 4 machine for less than $ 2000. A comparable G4 Dual 1,25 GHz desktop costs almost twice the amount and is left in the dust when performing designing and number crunching tasks in 3D Animation. Remember it uses its 3.06 GHz power with every software compared to the PM G4s making use of only one 1.25 GHz CPU in most applications and the fact that there are only a few a few AltiVec aware Applications. So price/performance ratio is clearly in favour of the Pentium.
<strong>For applications that can take advantage of AltiVec, the G4 becomes extremely cost effective, especially when you consider the great desktop UNIX workstation role that OS X can serve (a single G4 OS X box replaced both an SGI workstation and an older G3 Mac on my desk). Even in clustering, where custom-built P4/Linux systems are the hot commodity right now, the G4 can be competitive with AltiVec (but I think its strong point is on the desktop). One thing to keep in mind about G4 vs. P4 comparisons for clustering are issues like power and heat. If you have to spend $10-15K to equip your office with industrial strength AC to handle the heat put out by P4 systems, the price/performance issue takes a serious turn. So there are lots of things to consider, and performance is only one small part. As a result, I use both Macs and PC/Linux systems in my daily work -- whatever is best and most cost-effective for the task at hand.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Note that in this case, the application in question uses 64-bit floating point heavily, and the G4 is still the better processor for the task. AirSluf has asserted before that a fair amount of the blame for poor 64-bit FP performance in 3D apps could be laid at the feet of lazy programmers.
Now, clearly, the overall tone of the report (which is good reading) is not so optimistic. But reading through, it's fairly clear that hardware performs as well as software allows it to, and the G4 is more sensitive to that then then P4 is. But the contention that the G4 is hopelessly antiquated and completely incapable of holding its own is false. There are a lot of other things to consider. Some will make the G4 look good. Some won't. Engineering is, after all, about tradeoffs.
That statement is simply wrong. Its wrong in so many ways that I can't even begin to write them down. The best I can do is by saying that an equally false statement is that "The consumer is always wrong". Either of those statements is an extreme oversimiplification of reality much like saying everything is black and white, true or false. Winning an argument vs losing an argument. If that's the kind of view you hold, there isn't much point in having a discussion.
"I'd guess Maya Unlimited enjoys sales so low that porting the complete suite to OSX simply makes no business sense (since people who would buy it run "real" 3D workstations)."
I rest my case about Maya sales...
If for "real 3D workstations" you are refering to silicon graphics and alike. Ive got news for you; that era is history. Todays 3D workstations consists of PC with proffesional 3D graphic cards (which mac lacks completely). Rendering is speed up in renderfarms which consists mostly of regular PC in a network
shareing the workload.
Lightwave hasn't gone down that much in price. Though they occasionally have really good salespromotions were the price is lowered to almost half its price for a short period of time.
Maya is no longer the golden boy of 3D. Now its softimage xsi which is not available on mac.
<strong>There are a lot of other things to consider. Some will make the G4 look good. Some won't. Engineering is, after all, about tradeoffs.</strong><hr></blockquote>
And it's pretty sad when engineering decisions are based on "how many GHz can we get out of it?" type of decisions, which are mostly the rule in the PC world. Quality engineering is going away fast and Apple is one of the few companies who still cares for good engineering (which is part of a good overall design). I would be extremely happy if Apple went with the 970 instead of some whacky x86 tech. At least the 970 will be a 64bit CPU that people can stack into tight cases, maybe stack 2, 4 or 8 of them into one case, even, and still not need an air condition system and heavy-industry strenght power supply. Well, SGI is gone, let's hope Apple stays.
<strong>If for "real 3D workstations" you are refering to silicon graphics and alike. Ive got news for you; that era is history. Todays 3D workstations consists of PC with proffesional 3D graphic cards (which mac lacks completely). Rendering is speed up in renderfarms which consists mostly of regular PC in a network shareing the workload.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I know SGI is history - they're focusing of single-image supercomputer systems now which is good - at least they can sell those. Clustered computers are perfect for rendering since they don't need any "supercomputer" specs, each can have it's own memory, own HD, own CPU and render it's single frame. And even this approach is running in danger of being replaced by rendering with graphics cards.
[quote]Originally posted by firelark:
<strong>Lightwave hasn't gone down that much in price. Though they occasionally have really good salespromotions were the price is lowered to almost half its price for a short period of time.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well it _did_ go down in price and they offer a cheap-o student version. 3DS Max is strong in the games industry, Lightwave in the broadcasting world.
[quote]Originally posted by firelark:
<strong>Maya is no longer the golden boy of 3D. Now its softimage xsi which is not available on mac.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yah, a|w spent too much money developing technology noone really needs. I think for bigger studios, formerly customers of a|w, it now pays more to have a few "simpler" apps for modelling and similiar tasks and write their own specialised software (like WETA, Pixar and others do) optimized for the special tasks and integrated into the workflow.
I think in the future people will be going away from the 1-app-for-all approach in 3D and will split their workflow over many tools, even more so than they already do, and none of them will really need Maya Unlimited.
And, yeah, I've been only hearing positive feedback about XSI.
Okay, maybe you guys can enlighten me on something. I don't see any vagueness in Apple's future hardware line - not now. IBM announced that the 970 is Altivec compatible.
Come on guys, Altivec compatible. What other kind of computer has anything to do with Altivec? if IBM were going to use the 970 just for themselves, why would they bother making it Altivec compatible, considering Altivec belongs to Motorola? It seems to me like this is one of those 2+2 things that you really don't need to make a leap of faith over. Or am I missing something really obvious?
Some of you seem to be worrying a whole lot about Apple hardware and not knowing how Apple's going to fix their current problems, even talking about the x86 chips. Why? Is it not supremely obvious that Apple will be using the 970? Or, again, am I just missing something?
And it should also be equally obvious that when Apple does start using the 970, it won't be saddled with the G4's bus limitations, or any of the G4's limitations for that matter.
Apple probably does get that the Power Mac sucks, and are prepared to sacrifice it for sales in other product lines (17"/19" iMac, PowerBook) this half.
Hopefully in 9 months time, it will become apparent from sales figures that Apple does get it.
<strong>Apple probably does get that the Power Mac sucks, and are prepared to sacrifice it for sales in other product lines (17"/19" iMac, PowerBook) this half.
Hopefully in 9 months time, it will become apparent from sales figures that Apple does get it.
Barto</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yep. This is the "year of the portable"* (dot, dot, dot) because next year will the year of the desktop.
And assuming the 970 will be on schedule for Fall and calendar Fall is the first fiscal quarter of 2004, well Fall 2003 will be "next year"... and then everything fits in place.
Screed
*This fiscal year we've already had two portable revisions: one minor, one major
This is the "year of the portable"</strong><hr></blockquote>
I would assume that really refers more to the fact that portable sales are increasing to skyrocket while desktop sales remain relatively flat. That's across the whole industry too.
Apple having a strong portable lineup increasingly offers them a chance to gain marketshare right now and I'd say that was just recognition of that fact for any analysts who were watching.
"Yes! The state treasury buys up Apple, bans PCs and gives away free Macs!"
I think that's Apple's best shot at mass market adoption!
I'm sorry, Amorph. I guess my tower/desktop line up 'example' didn't look too good in terms of the 'antiquated' examples I had to work with.
(...and of course it doesn't matter to me, Amorph. I'm waiting for a real desktop processor! )
...and hey, is it my fault that Apple can't build a competitive iMac2? That's their job, afterall... Maybe they can figure out why the iMac 2 hasn't been a roaring success.
Lemon Bon Bon
"Hopefully in 9 months time, it will become apparent from sales figures that Apple does get it."
Hmmm. 'We get it!' or 'We got it!' That could be the advertising campaign for the 970 POWERMacs.
Amorph, your point about the single is valid to a point. When Apple marketed the products you are refering to OS X was in its infancy, and there were few applications that could take full advantage of it. It was done for a very good reason, they didnt have enough of the high end processor to offer duals.
However based on where OS X is today, the number of carbonized applications, and the apparent good supply of the high end chips (1.25's), apple could do better at offering higher performance single processor computers with an equivelent speed of the high end duals. The people buying the high end models know what the duals will give them, and the software is out there now to support the extra expense of purchasing them today.
Based on this I would have to agree that Apple does not "get it" when it comes to desktops, and marketing. Apple has gone an entire year since the iMac was released without a speed increase. This is bad for sales for the iMac, which is marketed toward the least knowlageable Apple customers who are comparing them to PC's with both lower prices and faster processors. This is also the model that the Switch campaign is basicall geared toward. Apple could easily rectify this by boosting the speed of their processors, at least to 1 Ghz, though today it should be to 1.25 Ghz. They should also boost the memory speed to at least 133, though truth to tell that is about 12 months overdue, and they should boost it to 167 mhz. The memory slots should both be customer accessable becouse this makes for cautions from salesment like "you probably want to spend more today for the extra memory, becouse if not you will have to bring it in to add the memory." and takes away from the good press that they do get. It wouldnt hurt to add better graphics systems, and keep the monitor spaning turned on in these systems (it just costs Apple money to write the firmware to turn off this option which could be used to sell more of the computers). Apple could also do more, possibly adding a lower cost model with a smaller hard drive or less powerfull optical, a higher resolution LCD panel, faster hard drives, etc.
Another area that Apple dosnt "get it" in is with their monitors. Granted this is not a big sales area for Apple, but the price that they have has not kept up with the market, and although they have what is arguable the best looking monitors on the market, they are far to limited in application due to only supporting ADC. The first thing Apple has to do is lower the price to be more competative, posibly even selling them at a slight loss to make the PM's look more appealing (who else is buying them except PM owners?). They could also add a VGA port on to them. Why you ask? Well, the PM video cards support 2 monitors, but do not have to ADC ports, they sport an ADC and a VGA. So anyone wanting to add a second monitor to their PM system has to buy at least 1 non Apple monitor. This cuts down the design appeal of the Apple monitors.
And last is the PM's. Well, here I think that Apple is limited to the ability of Motorolla to produce a competative chip. Apple has, for the most part, done as good as they could with everything except price. They could do some better marketing on them to "sell" the virtues of MP systems over single processor systems. They could also cut production to a minimum, and give their customers, developers and investors better guidance of how they plan to fix the problem and when they expect to have the problem fixed. The comments from Jobs and Co. dont help sales of current models. They are only selling becouse people need them today, and anyone who dosnt "need" a computer will wait. The current systems dont offer a compelling reason, eg productivity gains, for a company to invest the in large scale upgrades of systems. They could also cut cost of these systems to make the price performance ratio better than it is today.
Now for anyone who dosnt believe that Apple could cut the cost of systems, and still make money, I believe that Apple stated in their financial statement that one factor in their current financial "success" was in lower component cost. They know the flood gates will open up on pro models will open up when the G4 problem is finally fixed, and they have the money to wait it out a bit longer. But if Jobs is ever to make good on his statement last year that he felt that Apple could double their current market share then they are going to have to get more agressive in achieving that goal than they have been in the last 12 months.
Comments
Do they? They apparently have data I don't have access to.
Cos, I still haven't bought one of their 'half baked' upgrades.
Maybe us consumers DO in fact have access to data Apple doesn't have.
Lemon Bon Bon
[quote] so of course you're right. <hr></blockquote>
The consumer is always right.
[quote] I'm not saying that Apple shouldn't and won't address other price points, I'm just saying that their current leadership has been doing a good job of keeping the company profitable (or nearly so) in the current market and saying that they don't "get it" is rather presumptuous.
<hr></blockquote>
I don't think many people here could deny Apple's hardwork in many areas.
As a software company, Apple gets it.
On laptops. They, with the recent releases, and prices cuts, get it.
On desktops, Apple doesn't. They're horribly mediocre and overpriced. I'm happy with my presumption. So are alot of other wallet holding consumers. Waiting for the desktop line to look competitive. Y'know. Somewhere near the 'real world' in terms of prices, performance and breadth of options.
The 'power'Macs have a long way to go to. And if I had a dual gigger, I'd still say it.
[ 01-18-2003: Message edited by: Lemon Bon Bon ]
[ 01-18-2003: Message edited by: Lemon Bon Bon ]</p>
As I understand it it is actually the open GL implementation and incompatability with the graphicards on the mac that causes the bad problems on maya.
I read somewere a statement from aliaswavefront support to a customer said something like: Were working with apple to resolve some compatibilityproblems...
Taken from alias wavefronts homepage:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Information for specific Mac OS X versions
Maya 4.5 (and Personal Learning Edition) on Mac OS X 10.2.3
Maya 4.5 cannot be run on Mac OS X 10.2.3 on systems with nVidia GeForce 4Ti (GeForce 4 Titanium) orÂ* nVidia GeForce 3. Attempting to run Maya on these systems will instantly crash or freeze Maya and may cause your Macintosh to crash.Â* Maya on systems with any graphics card with less than 32 MB of video memory (such as the ATI Mobility Radeon M3 or M6) will be extremely unstable.
At this time we know of no workaround and strongly recommend that you do not upgrade to 10.2.3 if you intend running Maya.
<a href="http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/Community/Support/qualified_hardware/QUAL/maya_45_osx.html"; target="_blank">Go here to read more</a>
The same goes for another 3D animation tool Project:Messiah, a character rigging and animation tool for Lightwave and Maya has anoundsed that they are about to release a macversion. They have been "about" to release the macversion for over a year now.... still nothing.... I have e-mailed them several times asking for the release date. They alway respond something like: Were working with apple to... bla bla bla. Either they are bull shitting us or apple has thier thumbs stuck up their ass.
"... apps like Lightwave 7.5, Cinema 4D 8, Maya and Shake and Final Cut Pro, the '3D' market on the Mac has never looked better in terms of software..."
Yes and it would be a shame to loose it.
"I don't think so. Alias themselves say Mac sales are 25% of total Maya sales. Not bad for a 3D program that has barely been on the Mac for long."
If sales are so good why dont they release the full version of Maya (Unlimited) for mac?
"It's the cpu that's missing in action."
Thats what were talking about. And one would think that apple could be a little better at keeping up with the graphic card development.
Karl
iPod is another example. Apple does not need a 3 GHz CPU for the iPod and they made a successful product.
With the PowerMacs (and e/iMacs) Apple has no real options but to try go the "ok a bit slower and a bit cost" route and make as much money off it as they can. Right now PowerMacs wouldn't sell much more if they were even priced at $1.200. Simply because Mac users who need one buy one and PC users who think they need "TEH POWAH!!" wouldn't buy a dual 1.0GHz anyway. So why not simply leave it as it is and not risk too much in terms of profit until Apple has a solution (1.6 GHz 7457 @200FSB or 970) around which a new strategy can be developed. Once they have a machine that will sell them more units, they can start adjusting.
Apple.
BigC, what's with you moaning about my 'bor bor'? The one liners are old, 'C'.
Lemon Bor Bor
PS. Xype for President.
[ 01-18-2003: Message edited by: Lemon Bon Bon ]</p>
<strong>If sales are so good why dont they release the full version of Maya (Unlimited) for mac?</strong><hr></blockquote>
How many people are buying Unlimited anyway? From what people tell me (people in the know, as in in contact with respectable 3D industry analyst monkeys) the 3D industry has a hard time selling their software - just look at the 2002 price drops on Maya, LightWave, etc. I'd guess Maya Unlimited enjoys sales so low that porting the complete suite to OSX simply makes no business sense (since people who would buy it run "real" 3D workstations).
Lemon Bon Bon
<strong>PS. Xype for President.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes! The state treasury buys up Apple, bans PCs and gives away free Macs!
<strong>So, have they 'got it' with 'power'Macs? Nope. They've clearly had it 'wrong' for a good few years in terms of price and performance. They could have cheaper towers with single cpu towers just under the current prices of the duals and push the over priced iMac2s where they belong, under a K. </strong><hr></blockquote>
Listen to yourself: It's worth a couple hundred bucks to you to have the performance cut by 80% or so? On a line that is already underperforming, by your lights?
Apple knows from prior experience that having a line with both singles and duals is confusing. Do you get the single 1.25GHz, or the dual 867? They've already been there, done that. The dual-processor strategy is firmly in place now.
Regardless of where you think it should be, the LCD iMac debuted at the lowest price Apple could manage. The margin, as Fred Anderson pointed out, was below 10%. They couldn't have introduced it under $1K without losing hundreds of dollars per machine. They might be able to with the next redesign, and I think they'll try, but it definitely was not happening this time last year.
[quote]<strong>They are certainly 'naive' if they are blaming 'disappointing' sales on Photoshop 7 and subsequently, Quark's non-appearance at the 'X' party. Perhaps it has something to do with half-baked upgrades.</strong><hr></blockquote>
And perhaps it has something to do with Photoshop's broken SMP support, which moots the PM's attempt to gain some measure of speed parity with dual processors. If a dual Ghz PM will only act sort of like a single GHz PM, it becomes that much less valuable to Photoshop users. Adobe went and wrote their own Quartz so that PShop on Windows would gain the advantage of Quartz on OS X - and PShop for OS X runs through both, a staggering, unecessary and entirely software-driven performance penalty. That, and PS7 is slow in a lot of other areas. Hardware performance is only as good as the software allows it to be. But if you want to buy a machine to run that software, it's still going to be markedly slower no matter how good the technology is underneath.
If you think Quark isn't a reason against upgrading, remember that Apple has agreed to sell machines well into this year that boot into OS 9 just for Quark users. They wouldn't have done that unless they knew they'd lose sales otherwise.
[quote]<strong>Still, enjoy your dual gigger, Programmer. I'm waiting for something other than a geriatric CPU.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Funny. I'm quite happy with my 450MHz 7400. A dual 867 would be an embarrasment of riches for me. You're stuck in the unfortunate position of doing work in a field where the G4 isn't very strong, but as you've pointed out, it's still captured 25% of Maya's market share in its supposed dotage, even though Maya itself wasn't multi-threaded for the first Mac version. Apparently there's something to be said for being able to run Maya in tandem with other graphics apps on the same workstation and farming out renders to something else when necessary.
Consider this, taken from a submission by NASA engineer Craig Hunter to Macintouch's <a href="http://www.macintouch.com/g4performance02.html"; target="_blank">reader report on G4 performance</a>:
[quote]
[another writer wrote:]
Craig Hunter was able to get a G4 Mac to beat out a Pentium machine purely by making use of Altivec extensions on the former. One thing he doesn't mention is that Altivec has no support for vectorized double-precision floating-point operations--it only does single-precision floating-point. There would be many real-world applications, including 3D visualization and modelling applications not unlike the example he uses, where the reduced floating-point precision would be unacceptable. Altivec would be useless for such applications.
<strong>Actually, Jet3D is about 99% double precision. I was able to reformulate a "key" vector algorithm into single precision to take advantage of AltiVec by properly non-dimensionalizing the computation and using some common sense. The rest of the code remains double precision as required (plus, there would be little to gain from converting the rest of the code to use AltiVec anyhow, never mind that it's impractical). </strong>
<strong>A lot of us in science and engineering use codes that were written in double precision because it's required, but an equal number of codes use double precision and don't really need it (or only need it in certain parts of the code). I believe that with a closer look at the codes and/or some careful reformulation of algorithms, it would be possible to use single precision more often and thus open up more potential applications of AltiVec. BUT, and this is always a big BUT, why go to all this trouble perfecting the code for G4/AltiVec if your code already runs fast on P4/Linux systems without any fuss? Sometimes it's just not practical. I got lucky with Jet3D; vectorization and optimization for AltiVec was relatively painless. Out of about 5000 lines of code, only 10 "key" lines of coded needed to be tweaked. There may be more cases like this out there.</strong>
[another quote by another writer:]
This discussion leaves out a critical point: price/ performance relation! We recently bought Siemens/ Fujitsu Pentium 4 machine for less than $ 2000. A comparable G4 Dual 1,25 GHz desktop costs almost twice the amount and is left in the dust when performing designing and number crunching tasks in 3D Animation. Remember it uses its 3.06 GHz power with every software compared to the PM G4s making use of only one 1.25 GHz CPU in most applications and the fact that there are only a few a few AltiVec aware Applications. So price/performance ratio is clearly in favour of the Pentium.
<strong>For applications that can take advantage of AltiVec, the G4 becomes extremely cost effective, especially when you consider the great desktop UNIX workstation role that OS X can serve (a single G4 OS X box replaced both an SGI workstation and an older G3 Mac on my desk). Even in clustering, where custom-built P4/Linux systems are the hot commodity right now, the G4 can be competitive with AltiVec (but I think its strong point is on the desktop). One thing to keep in mind about G4 vs. P4 comparisons for clustering are issues like power and heat. If you have to spend $10-15K to equip your office with industrial strength AC to handle the heat put out by P4 systems, the price/performance issue takes a serious turn. So there are lots of things to consider, and performance is only one small part. As a result, I use both Macs and PC/Linux systems in my daily work -- whatever is best and most cost-effective for the task at hand.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Note that in this case, the application in question uses 64-bit floating point heavily, and the G4 is still the better processor for the task. AirSluf has asserted before that a fair amount of the blame for poor 64-bit FP performance in 3D apps could be laid at the feet of lazy programmers.
Now, clearly, the overall tone of the report (which is good reading) is not so optimistic. But reading through, it's fairly clear that hardware performs as well as software allows it to, and the G4 is more sensitive to that then then P4 is. But the contention that the G4 is hopelessly antiquated and completely incapable of holding its own is false. There are a lot of other things to consider. Some will make the G4 look good. Some won't. Engineering is, after all, about tradeoffs.
[ 01-18-2003: Message edited by: Amorph ]
[ 01-18-2003: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
<strong>
The consumer is always right.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
That statement is simply wrong. Its wrong in so many ways that I can't even begin to write them down. The best I can do is by saying that an equally false statement is that "The consumer is always wrong". Either of those statements is an extreme oversimiplification of reality much like saying everything is black and white, true or false. Winning an argument vs losing an argument. If that's the kind of view you hold, there isn't much point in having a discussion.
[ 01-18-2003: Message edited by: Programmer ]</p>
I rest my case about Maya sales...
If for "real 3D workstations" you are refering to silicon graphics and alike. Ive got news for you; that era is history. Todays 3D workstations consists of PC with proffesional 3D graphic cards (which mac lacks completely). Rendering is speed up in renderfarms which consists mostly of regular PC in a network
shareing the workload.
Lightwave hasn't gone down that much in price. Though they occasionally have really good salespromotions were the price is lowered to almost half its price for a short period of time.
Maya is no longer the golden boy of 3D. Now its softimage xsi which is not available on mac.
<strong>There are a lot of other things to consider. Some will make the G4 look good. Some won't. Engineering is, after all, about tradeoffs.</strong><hr></blockquote>
And it's pretty sad when engineering decisions are based on "how many GHz can we get out of it?" type of decisions, which are mostly the rule in the PC world. Quality engineering is going away fast and Apple is one of the few companies who still cares for good engineering (which is part of a good overall design). I would be extremely happy if Apple went with the 970 instead of some whacky x86 tech. At least the 970 will be a 64bit CPU that people can stack into tight cases, maybe stack 2, 4 or 8 of them into one case, even, and still not need an air condition system and heavy-industry strenght power supply. Well, SGI is gone, let's hope Apple stays.
<strong>If for "real 3D workstations" you are refering to silicon graphics and alike. Ive got news for you; that era is history. Todays 3D workstations consists of PC with proffesional 3D graphic cards (which mac lacks completely). Rendering is speed up in renderfarms which consists mostly of regular PC in a network shareing the workload.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I know SGI is history - they're focusing of single-image supercomputer systems now which is good - at least they can sell those. Clustered computers are perfect for rendering since they don't need any "supercomputer" specs, each can have it's own memory, own HD, own CPU and render it's single frame. And even this approach is running in danger of being replaced by rendering with graphics cards.
[quote]Originally posted by firelark:
<strong>Lightwave hasn't gone down that much in price. Though they occasionally have really good salespromotions were the price is lowered to almost half its price for a short period of time.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well it _did_ go down in price and they offer a cheap-o student version. 3DS Max is strong in the games industry, Lightwave in the broadcasting world.
[quote]Originally posted by firelark:
<strong>Maya is no longer the golden boy of 3D. Now its softimage xsi which is not available on mac.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yah, a|w spent too much money developing technology noone really needs. I think for bigger studios, formerly customers of a|w, it now pays more to have a few "simpler" apps for modelling and similiar tasks and write their own specialised software (like WETA, Pixar and others do) optimized for the special tasks and integrated into the workflow.
I think in the future people will be going away from the 1-app-for-all approach in 3D and will split their workflow over many tools, even more so than they already do, and none of them will really need Maya Unlimited.
And, yeah, I've been only hearing positive feedback about XSI.
Come on guys, Altivec compatible. What other kind of computer has anything to do with Altivec? if IBM were going to use the 970 just for themselves, why would they bother making it Altivec compatible, considering Altivec belongs to Motorola? It seems to me like this is one of those 2+2 things that you really don't need to make a leap of faith over. Or am I missing something really obvious?
Some of you seem to be worrying a whole lot about Apple hardware and not knowing how Apple's going to fix their current problems, even talking about the x86 chips. Why? Is it not supremely obvious that Apple will be using the 970? Or, again, am I just missing something?
And it should also be equally obvious that when Apple does start using the 970, it won't be saddled with the G4's bus limitations, or any of the G4's limitations for that matter.
Didn't any of this occur to anybody else?
<strong>Didn't any of this occur to anybody else?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Uhm. Now that you mention it...
CLONING KILLS!
-----------
Apple probably does get that the Power Mac sucks, and are prepared to sacrifice it for sales in other product lines (17"/19" iMac, PowerBook) this half.
Hopefully in 9 months time, it will become apparent from sales figures that Apple does get it.
Barto
<strong>Apple probably does get that the Power Mac sucks, and are prepared to sacrifice it for sales in other product lines (17"/19" iMac, PowerBook) this half.
Hopefully in 9 months time, it will become apparent from sales figures that Apple does get it.
Barto</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yep. This is the "year of the portable"* (dot, dot, dot) because next year will the year of the desktop.
And assuming the 970 will be on schedule for Fall and calendar Fall is the first fiscal quarter of 2004, well Fall 2003 will be "next year"... and then everything fits in place.
Screed
*This fiscal year we've already had two portable revisions: one minor, one major
Barto for Veep!!
[ 01-18-2003: Message edited by: sCreeD ]</p>
<strong>
This is the "year of the portable"</strong><hr></blockquote>
I would assume that really refers more to the fact that portable sales are increasing to skyrocket while desktop sales remain relatively flat. That's across the whole industry too.
Apple having a strong portable lineup increasingly offers them a chance to gain marketshare right now and I'd say that was just recognition of that fact for any analysts who were watching.
I think that's Apple's best shot at mass market adoption!
I'm sorry, Amorph. I guess my tower/desktop line up 'example' didn't look too good in terms of the 'antiquated' examples I had to work with.
(...and of course it doesn't matter to me, Amorph. I'm waiting for a real desktop processor!
...and hey, is it my fault that Apple can't build a competitive iMac2? That's their job, afterall... Maybe they can figure out why the iMac 2 hasn't been a roaring success.
Lemon Bon Bon
"Hopefully in 9 months time, it will become apparent from sales figures that Apple does get it."
Hmmm. 'We get it!' or 'We got it!' That could be the advertising campaign for the 970 POWERMacs.
What do you think? I bagsy royalties...
[ 01-18-2003: Message edited by: Lemon Bon Bon ]</p>
However based on where OS X is today, the number of carbonized applications, and the apparent good supply of the high end chips (1.25's), apple could do better at offering higher performance single processor computers with an equivelent speed of the high end duals. The people buying the high end models know what the duals will give them, and the software is out there now to support the extra expense of purchasing them today.
Based on this I would have to agree that Apple does not "get it" when it comes to desktops, and marketing. Apple has gone an entire year since the iMac was released without a speed increase. This is bad for sales for the iMac, which is marketed toward the least knowlageable Apple customers who are comparing them to PC's with both lower prices and faster processors. This is also the model that the Switch campaign is basicall geared toward. Apple could easily rectify this by boosting the speed of their processors, at least to 1 Ghz, though today it should be to 1.25 Ghz. They should also boost the memory speed to at least 133, though truth to tell that is about 12 months overdue, and they should boost it to 167 mhz. The memory slots should both be customer accessable becouse this makes for cautions from salesment like "you probably want to spend more today for the extra memory, becouse if not you will have to bring it in to add the memory." and takes away from the good press that they do get. It wouldnt hurt to add better graphics systems, and keep the monitor spaning turned on in these systems (it just costs Apple money to write the firmware to turn off this option which could be used to sell more of the computers). Apple could also do more, possibly adding a lower cost model with a smaller hard drive or less powerfull optical, a higher resolution LCD panel, faster hard drives, etc.
Another area that Apple dosnt "get it" in is with their monitors. Granted this is not a big sales area for Apple, but the price that they have has not kept up with the market, and although they have what is arguable the best looking monitors on the market, they are far to limited in application due to only supporting ADC. The first thing Apple has to do is lower the price to be more competative, posibly even selling them at a slight loss to make the PM's look more appealing (who else is buying them except PM owners?). They could also add a VGA port on to them. Why you ask? Well, the PM video cards support 2 monitors, but do not have to ADC ports, they sport an ADC and a VGA. So anyone wanting to add a second monitor to their PM system has to buy at least 1 non Apple monitor. This cuts down the design appeal of the Apple monitors.
And last is the PM's. Well, here I think that Apple is limited to the ability of Motorolla to produce a competative chip. Apple has, for the most part, done as good as they could with everything except price. They could do some better marketing on them to "sell" the virtues of MP systems over single processor systems. They could also cut production to a minimum, and give their customers, developers and investors better guidance of how they plan to fix the problem and when they expect to have the problem fixed. The comments from Jobs and Co. dont help sales of current models. They are only selling becouse people need them today, and anyone who dosnt "need" a computer will wait. The current systems dont offer a compelling reason, eg productivity gains, for a company to invest the in large scale upgrades of systems. They could also cut cost of these systems to make the price performance ratio better than it is today.
Now for anyone who dosnt believe that Apple could cut the cost of systems, and still make money, I believe that Apple stated in their financial statement that one factor in their current financial "success" was in lower component cost. They know the flood gates will open up on pro models will open up when the G4 problem is finally fixed, and they have the money to wait it out a bit longer. But if Jobs is ever to make good on his statement last year that he felt that Apple could double their current market share then they are going to have to get more agressive in achieving that goal than they have been in the last 12 months.