Sanctum1972

UrbaneLegend said:

Sanctum1972 said:

But what you said confirms what I've been hearing over the years. Although, I think this Mac Pro's hardware design was a step in the right direction but the price/specs seem a bit off kilter to me. I can understand if the employee's company or agency can foot the bill and buy them for the work. But when it comes to a one man operation or a small business, that's a big expense to deal and invest in. 

AMD's 16 core Ryzen will be out in the Fall at $750 which will out perform all Mac Pros up to 16 core. You could build two 16 core Ryzen workstations for a similar price to the base Mac Pro. What computer systems will freelancers and small studios buy? Yeah, not the Mac Pro. Big studios don't buy Mac Pros anyway, they'll continue buying PCs.

I know someone is going to say yeah but that PC can't take 1.5TB RAM and it doesn't have 7 PCIe slots. I don't need more than 64GB for my 3D scenes and I only need space for 2-3 GPUs, the new x570 Motherboards have everything including Thunderbolt 3 so to me there's nothing compelling from an expansion point of view with the Mac Pro.

I've never minded spending a bit more to get the Mac Pros in the past but this new one is being released into a world where price/performance has never been better andd the pricing looks horribly wrong, it's off by a country mile.

Agreed. The interesting thing is that it has been going on for almost a decade now, even years when it comes to creatives working with PCs as their main tool of choice. For example, I've a very old friend of mine that I grew up with in Ohio who went to art school in the 1990s ( I attended the same place a couple years after ) and he majored in Industrial Design although he dropped out. In our school, they had Silicon Graphics workstations in a basement lab for this kind of work relating to industrial design and animation if I recall right. The other lab down the hall were mostly Macs focused on 2D work on Photoshop, Director ( siimilar to Flash ), Website creation using HTML, and so on with the use of Wacom tablets ( the originals with white color tones ) as this room was for the Computer 101 and 102 courses which I remember well. And then there's a third lab in another building for graphic design and other functions which were all Macs.

This was at the time when Photoshop was becoming a huge paradigm shift in our school and digital art was becoming a thing. The Graphic Design majors had access to QuarkXPress and had some Photoshop experience leaving the Illustration students ( my major ) out in the cold. Fortunately, the school recognized the problem and allowed us to get a free class on Photoshop and Illustrator with the help of an older student who volunteered his time. We got lucky. 

My old friend dropped out of the school and moved to Michigan to get some 3D modelling experience. When he came back, staying at his mom's new house they moved to, I noticed he was working on 3D models using Lightwave ( It might've been that or Maya ) with a Windows PC. This surprised me at the time. Then, some time later I lost track of him as he went on to move out of the country to NZ to eventually work at WETA doing CGI work for the LOTR film doing some sequences and the Shelob scene in particular. I'm going to believe this was all done on a high end Windows PC hooked to a server. 

Then he moved on to another gig in South Korea and then eventually co-found the Mudbox app for 3D artists as a alternative to ZBrush and the like. He was more of a 3D artist than me but his work process was fascinating. When he finally sold Mudbox to Autodesk, he worked under them for a while and then moved on to do AR/VR work currently. I lost track of him between those years of him at LOTR and when he moved to Toronto which he finally submerged and contacted me out of the blue to catch up. We did a little iOS game project, where I did some storyboarding for him at the time, which never came to that platform and went to Steam. I don't think it's there anymore. It was right there that when we did some Skype calls, I could literally see his studio workstation filled with a couple of Windows machines and at least one Power Mac. He showed me everything through the video calls on how Mudbox, Maya, ZBrush and all that worked. It was very enlightening and especially on his reasons why he used a PC for this line of work. 

That's why I knew what you said was true. For his work, he would rely on a PC for that but I don't know if he would use the new Mac Pro, however he might just to build out an experiment to test out AR/VR service offerings. He had been a bit vocal about Apple's AR offerings and was hoping to see more traction in the glasses department but that's another story .