fearless

Let's be clear on this Daniel, chatting to a Final Cut Pro user editing 5K H.264 does NOT constitute high end validation of the Mac platform. FCP X is optimised for current machinery, sure. It's the show pony for these machines.

But I'm ordering a projector worth $65K, I have a DaVinci panel that cost $30K, and my only-for-TV monitor was $12K from Flanders. My CPU/GPU combo will cost $10K+ if it's a new Mac Pro, and that's fine. But I want TB 3, this year's silicon, better-than-OpenCL graphics processing and the ability to chain stuff tidily in a rack box. Moving forward, that's clearly not about adding Nvidia 1080 cards into a 16-lane Cubix box on a 5,1 12-core - but until the Mac Pro does better, that's what I'll stick with, because a naked Mac Pro 2016 doesn't warrant the reinvestment - in new interfaces and limited GPU power.

Seriously, there's SuperMicro kit I could use running Arch that would eat a Mac on the things that matter (no, not nodes full of blurs, but temporal and spatial NR) but I'm a Mac guy. I like doing Mac things. Limiting the upper definition of "pro" users to FCP X speed cutters is to miss the point entirely.

9secondkox2 said:

All Apple needed to do was offer a MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM. 

THATS IT. 

And theyd fly fly off the preorder shelves. 

But instead we we get a stupid choice forced upon us with no option to choose one over the other. 

A quiet update ASAP with 32 GB BTO option or as a standard option would fix this.

The sooner the better. Next month would be great. 

Yep. And all they needed was Final Cut Pro 8 and a Mac Pro tower with TB and USB 3 and we'd have 6 of them by now. How many trashcans did we buy to replace our 3,1 and 4,1 towers? 0. What do we cut and finish on? Avid and Resolve. Occasionally Premiere, and Final Cut 7, still.

Yes! Kia ora, ANZ. Can't wait. 

I have a clutch of 4,1 Mac Pros, some upgraded to 5,1 standard. Also a bunch of 1,1s, a dead 2,1 (power supply/logic board) and a couple of 3,1s. All do sufficiently well, especially with Cubix outboard GPUs, to have never made the 2013 Mac Pro a compelling proposition. Maybe if we ran a lot of FCP X, but we've gone from there, sorry. So for us, actually, an Xserve rack form factor is much more pro-friendly than a design exercise for the desktop. I know Sonnet make rack mounts, but really, I'd rather just buy a Mac that does what we need, rather than research a bespoke parts bin. The 2013 Mac Pro was never a great fit.

This will be an interesting patent to watch unfold - in the professional/film space, Dolby already uses a very similar thing with their reference  PRM-4220 grading monitors - a lit, monochrome back layer, LED in their case, shining selectively through a masking LCD front layer. It's a wonderful thing, and massively enhances both contrast and colour accuracy - and it gets used on feature film and television projects in facilities where its $55,000 price tag is totally doable. So I'd be surprised if Apple can keep the field all to itself, with a staunch patent defender like Dolby already in the market with such a device, for the past five years or so...