twolf2919

robin huber said:

twolf2919 said:

They may be 3 years behind in technology, but they're ahead on price.  Until a follow-up to the Vision Pro is significantly cheaper - like  under $1k - it won't gain mass market appeal.

I doubt that price is the most relevant variable. Like the iPhone, it will ultimately be utility. It’s “better” mousetrap, not “cheaper” one. 

Ultimately, maybe not, but we don't know what its future functions - or price - will be.  I'm just going by what the Vision Pro is right now - a $3500 niche item of limited utility.  Nobody (in a mass market sense) will buy it for that price.  They may for under $1k.
Comparisons to iPhone are really not appropriate: the iPhone had immediate, easy to see utility for day-to-day life as soon as it came out.  It combined a phone and a web browser, both functions that were already important in people's lives - but in a better package than anyone else.  The Vision Pro has no immediate important function as of now - yet it costs three times more than the original iPhone did in today's dollars.

graphicsguy said:

The more I think about and hear about the Vision Pro, the more I'm convinced it's going to be another massive hit. I was thinking about how back in 1994 when I bought a lowly Powerbook 520 for $2250. That's about $5K today. And I was just a 25 year old wanting this cool new thing -- a laptop. And I was just getting by waiting tables at the time, so that was a huge % of my money going to that purchase. It's laughable how much more the VP will be able to do for the money. They'll have no trouble selling them. 

I don't see the analogy.  In 1994, when you spent the equivalent of $5k today, you purchased something that immediately made your day-to-day life more productive by letting you do word processing, spreadsheets, gaming, maybe even surf the nascent World Wide Web.  The Vision Pro doesn't do that.  Yes, it'll make some narrow set of activities more pleasurable - e.g. having a more immersive movie experience - but in no way will it make your day-to-day life more productive.  At least not initially.

They may be 3 years behind in technology, but they're ahead on price.  Until a follow-up to the Vision Pro is significantly cheaper - like  under $1k - it won't gain mass market appeal.

godofbiscuits said:

I call BS. I'm a developer.  There are far less than 10M Apple developer accounts total, while there are between 1 and 2 BILLION iPhones in use.  It's not Xcode that keeps the Mac relevant. It's that computers are still relevant, and that laptops are the most popular/useful form factor, and that Apple's are the most versatile and well made.

Why would you call it BS based on what you said?  It's obvious that the apps written for those 2B iPhones (as well as however many iPads there are out there) were written on Macs.  So whether it's 1 or 10m or 1B developers - they all used Macs.  And they're 100% necessary for those developers.  What's more relevant than 100% necessity?

 But I do think the author is being a bit narrow-minded for sure.  I'm also a developer who uses a Mac.  And I don't write iPhone or iPad apps - I develop Java apps as well as web apps and the Mac is simply the best development tool available.  The only Apple-specific 'Xcode' tool I ever really use is notarytool (to sign my app installers on Mac).  Being UNIX based, most of, if not all, the tools available to Linux users are available right out of the box on Macs too.  But on top of that, it's got a great *and consistent* GUI - something Linux, after 30 years  of existence, still hasn't managed - and a good breadth commercial software offerings.  And one never has to worry about this driver and that driver not working on a Mac.

mikethemartian said:

I would like to see a comparison where someone performs the same physics 3D simulation with a dataset larger than 192GB with a maxed out 2023 Mac Pro vs a maxed out 2019. Based on past experience I would expect the 2023 to crash once the memory usage gets close to the max.

Count me naive, but I'd love to know what single simulation requires an in-memory dataset that large.  Not saying they don't exist - I'm just interested in what they are.  And whether they're typically done on a desk-side machine vs. on a supercomputer (e.g. weather modeling).

In general, I think I agree with analysts/posters who think Apple lost sight of who the prime users for their Mac Pro are: video/CGI folks who use the Mac to make movies, ads, etc.  Those folks, I imagine, don't care too much about the base price of the Mac Pros they buy - they care they can get ever more photorealistic CGI done quickly.  I'm pretty sure they bought plenty of external graphics cards to go into their Pros.  But now they can't.  They either make do with what's in the new Pro - or find an alternative.