jasenj1

I use the 3.5mm jack every day. EarPods for listening to music & doing Skype teleconferences. And has been mentioned, it supports optical digital which I use every now & then.

Apple's problem is there are industry standard interfaces that use the 3.5mm connector, and there are billions(?) of devices out there that use these plugs. Dropping the 3.5mm connector in favor of something proprietary (or at least not widely adopted) would anger many, many consumers. Suddenly I can't just plug into the conference room sound system (many of which still have VGA!) or jack into a sound board, or swing by Walgreens on a trip to buy a set of earbuds because I forgot mine.

The 3.5mm jack does an important job conveniently and reliably. To remove it on a device as large as a laptop seems petty and cheap. It's already bad enough they removed the RJ-45 connector.

blastdoor said:

They are not in a position to turn up their nose at selling a lot more highly profitable Pro-computers, just because it's a relatively small market. Ugh... I could go on and on, but there's no point. It's just frustrating. 

The problem is, from a business/economics standpoint they are. The market for googaws like the iPhone & iWatch are orders of magnitude larger than the professional workstation market. The home & prosumer markets also dwarf the truly high-end professional market.

Way back when Apple was a niche player and grew (both in size & reputation) by bringing professional level capabilities to a lower price point. Now Apple is firmly entrenched in the mass-market and needs to paddle fast to keep their position there. There isn't enough money in the truly pro market for them to worry about anymore.

Which, again, is very sad. It's sad to think the 4k Blu-ray I will be buying in a couple years will be produced on a Windows machine rather than a Mac. That Apple will have no computer capable of viably, professionally, producing such products. OTOH, your daughter will be producing 1080p videos with amazing transitions, auto-closed captioning, color matching, 3D titles, and who knows what else, with her Barbies.

TurboPGT said:

Your profession is a prime example of many that, despite all the seeming "advances" over time, hasnt really changed much and is still doing the same basic tasks. It probably takes you the same amount of time to get something shipped today as it did 10 or 20 years ago, despite all the so called advances in technology. So when you are lamenting the speed of a 3D render, keep some perspective. 

Those "same" jobs that take the "same" amount of time are most likely orders of magnitude more complex than they were 10-20 years ago. Back then if you were doing jobs for TV you were doing NTSC (roughly 640x480 or 307,200 pixels per frame). These days you are probably doing 1080p (1920x1080 or 2 million pixels per frame), and now we have 4k (3840x2160 or 8 million pixels) coming on. If you can't see how just keeping up in such an environment requires constant upgrades to hugely more powerful systems, you are blind.

mario said:

The question isn't will they discontinue Mac Mini Pro, but will they discontinue the Macs altogether. Apple wants to be the dumb terminal company. Real computers are going to run in the cloud and be owned by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others.

Apparently, these days everyone thinks computing is so ridiculously hard that it should be left to mega corporations only, mere mortals should only use locked down appliances and fetch content from real computers in the cloud.

There is some truth to this. CPUs (and network bandwidth and storage) are so cheap that putting thousands of them in big warehouses and distributing their cycles amongst many different users is cheaper than owning those CPUs yourself and having them sitting idle most of the time. With virtualization there is almost no reason to know or care that this job is running on that CPU under my desk. Would you rather own a big cluster of CPUs to do your rendering or pay a couple dollars to have some cloud provider do the job much faster on a bigger cluster than you could ever afford?

Yes, there are still people who need local CPU power. But desktop machines are more and more becoming terminals into clouds - whether locally hosted or commercially hosted.

I don't think Apple wants to be "the dumb terminal company". They want to be the smart terminal company. A "terminal" in the modern sense has amazing computing power compared to what was available 10 years ago - with a fancy GPU, giant screen(s), video & speech capabilities. But the "real" computing (levels of computing considered insanely expensive several years ago) is now in the cloud.

TurboPGT said:

Don't expect Apple to make any 44 core Mac Pros. If that is what you're waiting on, move on.

Which is very sad. Because those kinds of systems are what professional content makers use these days. That is what a "professional workstation" class machine is. Apple used to make professional level workstations. Apple used to be a computer manufacturer for the high-end professional market. No more.

Professional printing used to require giant presses with very specialized computers and hardware. Apple blasted into that market with the LaserWriter and Mac. See this. Eventually laser printers became commoditized and Apple exited the printer market - it was now flooded with cheaper, faster, better(?), products from the likes of HP. (And, yes, I know that the truly professional print market still exists, but it is far smaller and more specialized.)  Later Apple made "workstation" class computers that brought the power of specialized, expensive machines to the masses. (See SGI.) Software like Final Cut allowed people to compete with expensive NLE machines. These days, the professional computing market has moved beyond where Apple can/wants to compete. Clusters of cheap CPUs & GPUs are used as rendering farms for everything from page layout to wedding videos to Hollywood movie special FX. Apple has/had some really cool tech for parallel processing (OpenCL) but they don't seem to have extended that to clusters of cheap CPUs on a network. Apple just doesn't want to compete in the "cheap processing unit" market. They'd rather build friendly, but powerful, home & lower-end pro machines with a great OS and user experience.

For us old-timers who remember when Apple stormed the walls of the creative professional markets, it is sad to see them fading away even as those previous "professional" capabilities permeate the home market.