UrbaneLegend

@elijahg @Sanctum1972 You've both hit the nail on the head and pointed out the real issue, Tim 'Pipeline' Cook and what an inordinately awful CEO he is.

Cook is a bean counter with absolutely no feel for products and appears to have zero ability to see through the sort of BS that lead to the release of the Trashcan. Cook can only see as far as the incredible profits that the iOS devices are making with the Apple SoCs and can only see the Mac line up on ARM to unleash yet more shareholder value. Nothing else really matters as long as the majority of the company's products shift to ARM ASAP.

It's likely that the iMac Pro and Mac Pro will be the only Intel based Macs by the end of 2021 and if they don't sell they'll be EOLed. The EOL of OpenGL and OpenCL last year and now the iPadOS experiment all point to the convergence of Mac and iOS devices getting closer to the pointy end. Think of the efficiencies of scale combined with Apple's performance advantage on ARM and they could rule the new hyper mobile device future. You might be looking at not a return to being a Trillion dollar company but a 2 Trillion dollar company with every bit of hardware made in house.

Combine the above backdrop with the hyper competitive PC hardware market that the Mac Pro is going to be released into and would anyone really spend $15k on a Mac Pro that Apple may only support for a few short years? How long will Apple keep the BTO selection of GPU modules up to date and competitive with the mass produced PC market? What if the Mac Pro only sells in the low thousands what motivation would there be for Apple to keep the hardware of the Mac Pro current? Hear professionals talk about Apple and you'll hear them say after the FCP/FCPX debacle and the Mac Pro no show that they've lost confidence in Apple as a partner as they can no longer be trusted to not go missing in action. What if you sink $15k into the Mac Pro and it's Apple's last Mac Pro?

Most of us have lived through the PPC to Intel move and when Apple moves to a new chip architecture that becomes the focus. Any ambitious Apple engineers won't want to be left behind supporting the old Intel architecture they'll be heading for ARM product development. All the Apple marketing will be about ARM and the bright new future of ridiculous profit levels. I loved Jobs' ability to go from telling everyone PPC was faster than Intel until the day he announced Intel Macs which was a 'screamer' and we never heard of PPC ever again.

The Mac Pro is clearly a forum success, the people who will never need or use one seem absolutely sold on it but is there a single professional creative user on this forum that is going to go all in on the new Mac Pro and order one as soon as it hits the Apple store? If there is I'd love for you to explain why it makes sense from a financial and hardware perspective. Anyone?

Sanctum1972 said:

That's why I knew what you said was true.

Thanks Sanctum1972.

When I begin in 3D it was on the Amiga with Lightwave and quickly went from there to PC and a DEC Alpha. Early on the big budget guys has SGIs the rest of us were building custom PCs. I dropped out of 3D and went into compositing which where I bought my first Mac. The first Intel based MBP as Apple were offering a really good deal for Shake and everyone in high end compositing was using Shake (on Linux PCs not Macs) and I needed to learn it. All the VFX studios were PC based by then save for the finishing departments who were use turnkey Autodesk systems and Davincis. No Macs anywhere other than audio post production.

I started my own company and then bought an 8 core MP then a couple of years later bought a second 2010 model. While slightly more expensive than a PC the costs were not crazy and for the build quality they were excellent value for money, the best desktops ever built. I got back into 3D again with motion graphic work and with Cinema 4D where at the time was a 50/50 split between Mac/PC users. But in my professional circle literally everyone was Mac based and running C4D AE FCS etc etc. As I said everyone now is PC based.

I have noticed a change happening in Audio Postproduction studios. At one time it was absolutely guaranteed that Macs would be in every studio across the land in the UK. I never saw anything else. But the more I get out and visit studios I'm seeing PCs take their place. This would be absolutely unheard of a decade ago. I've also seen a move to the PC in editing suites too, the bungled release of FCPX has had a profound effect on Mac usage in TV editing bays gone is Final Cut and replaced by Premiere Pro and PCs. Amazingly Prem Pro is more popular than Avid now.

This is only anecdotal evidence of what I'm seeing in the places I go but in my own bubble there has been a huge move away from Macs in parts of the industry that were once, if not dominated, very well represented with Macs. The clowns at Cupertino who thought innovation was the Trashcan with zero upgrades for nearly 7 years have a lot to answer for.
 

@cgWerks

I rather doubt you have the necessary chops for the level of condescension that was flowing through every paragraph of your reply. I have over 20 years working in animation at all budget levels and have the temerity to run my own motion graphics studio. I speak from experience.

You are justifying that Apple's brand new not even released yet top of the Mac range should ship with a 3 year old GPU and 256GB SSD. I am embarrassed for you. Apple requires people like you to maintain their reality distortion and repeat their cliched marketing talking points.

I love the fact that you quoted Dave McGavran marketing quote, because the Redshift developers themselves are altogether far more circumspect about Redshift and Metal. They make no promises about performance and only 'hope' to be as fully featured as the current CUDA version. I've been a Redshift user for nearly 2 years and I'm well up to speed on what the actual developers themselves have said constantly about Metal support but that wouldn't make great copy for Apple marketing quotes.

From the C4D plugin developers at Greyscale Gorilla who have all switch to PC from Mac in recent years.
"From a hardware perspective, it’s exactly what I feared it would be. Underwhelming and overpriced. With no NVIDIA support, which everyone feared, it is not really going to win over anyone in the professional 3D space. But hey, it comes with wheels."

https://greyscalegorilla.com/2019/06/thoughts-new-mac-pro-3d/

Maxon have ProRender running on Metal and it is ridiculously slow, if Redshift ends up as bad as this then no one will be interested and it will have been a complete waste of developers' time.

I rather think the sour grapes are all yours pal, I get that you've bought into the Apple bubble and it must be tough to find out that actuality is vastly different, every single one of my close work colleagues has ditched the Mac over the last 5 years, yeah every single one of us were Mac Pro users. Some jumped soon after the Trashcan was released others like me hung on and hung on but couldn't wait any longer. Not a single one of my colleagues is the slightest bit interested in the Mac Pro, it misses every single mark, it's not fit for purpose.

The people who will care about ZombieLoad and the rest of the Intel microcode security issues are the people you claim won't need a half decent GPU because they're running a 'high-performance database' your words.. In the real world Hyperthreading is being turned off in exactly these workloads. Get a clue.

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.

blastdoor said:

I have that 32 core threadripper, and I would not advise anyone to get it. Half of the cores lack a direct path to memory, and that really hurts performance. In some cases, you’re better off getting two 16 core systems. In other cases, you’re better off getting Intel.

Another reason Intel might be better for MacPro workloads is AVX512, which is a modern day AltiVec.

The Zen 2 architecture overcomes many of the limitations of previous generation of Threadripper and comes with massive core increases and IPC gains.

I've lost count of the number of colleagues in the 3D community who have bought 1st and 2nd Threadrippers and have anything other than deep praise for them. We're all looking forward to the next Threadripper release and anyone who'd rather have a 28 core Xeon that will have to have its multithreading turned off for security over a 48 core or 64 Threadripper is nuts.


Apple's own advice to mitigate against ZombieLoad is to turn off multithreading. AMD processor unaffected!