elliots11

omasou said:

When Job's returned he greatly simplified the product lineup mess Sculley had created.

I would 100% like to see the MBP take on the MB form factor in terms of weight (today's battery is too large) and the MB take on the MBP's additional TB ports and drop the extraneous MBP ports, MagSafe, HDMI and most of all the memory card slot.

It use to be so easy to plug TB/USB C cables into my MBP but now I have to look at what I'm doing b/c I keep trying to plug into one of the other ports that I'll NEVER use.

The battery life and power of the current MacBook Pros has enabled me to do my work on a laptop which I could never do before.   I’ve had to travel a lot recently and I’ve been able to work while traveling which has enabled me to help some family members out without going broke.  

I can see the argument and it has merit, but I don’t know Apple Silicon has been around long enough for me to definitively agree.  I have a M1Max MacBook Pro with 64GB RAM.  Doing video projects with large RAW video files it rarely uses 32GB, which is definitely less than before, but that’s just one niche area of video work, there’s others. The only time it maxed it out was when the software had an error and ate up all the RAM.  Also Apple’s RAM is being used to replace VRAM so it’s doing double duty and it’s doing it well.  

The current Apple Silicon Mac Pro is the most phoned in product they’ve ever made.  A faction in Apple knows it too. I suspect there’s a group in Apple that was heavily involved in making the 2019 Mac Pro good, and there’s another faction that made the Mac Studio good (who previously failed with the Trash Can Mac Pro), that’s the group that wants to make the whole widget and not let anyone tinker around inside at all. That group probably pushed for soldered ram before Apple silicon made it necessary, soldered SSD’s and all that. And there’s legitimacy to both points of view, soldered is reliable. However I’m not buying a Mac Pro from the soldered RAM faction, and yet that’s what they made.  

mattinoz said:

Interesting they didn't compress the slot layout but all the cards they show only need a single width slot. So lots of air flow for no real reason. 

Still think GPU is on the way. 

Part of the case design may be that they'd already designed the case and wanted to save money on developing another one, would be a huge waste of money designing that complex case for just one generation.  
Re: GPUs, I'd love to see GPUs working on this, many would, and I bet we see something like it, but I'm not sure what form it will take.  It seems likely to be a software limitation that GPUs can't be used, and that could be overcome but it's not clear.  Right now the performance is solid on these Mac Pros, in a few years it won't be.  Obviously Apple would say buy a new one, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple created some kind of roadmap for aftermarket PCI compute units, perhaps made of GPUS that only do compute, later on down the line after the benefits of integrated ARM chips sort of age out and a discrete GPU in combination with the Apple Silicon would yield better results.  Or maybe Apple rolls their own Afterburner2 made of newer SOCs, there is precedent in the Afterburner1.  Or it may be that if it is a software limitation that a workaround is found, then depending on the quality and resilience of the workaround to Apple breaking it is would determine discrete GPU support.  Would really like to know more on how they're stopping it as it doesn't seem there's any physical reason it shouldn't be possible, even if the performance is poor.  Guess we'll see.

thadec said:

dennyc69 said:

I don’t buy it, Hollywood types use Mac Pro, the  Mac Studio fills the gap for lower prices groups of people who still want pro power. This a click bait article? Don’t make stuff up 

This is 15 year old stuff. "Hollywood types" switched to Linux ages ago. As dinosaurs are no longer roaming the earth, Mac Pro is most often used as a general purpose workstation that happens to run macOS. Such people have no use for a Mac Studio, which is engineered for audio, video and photo professionals and actually performs worse than similarly priced hardware for anything and everything else.

Hollywood is not a monolith, there's a lot of people using basically everything.  I know a production company that ran on Macs with FCP7 up until it stopped making sense to do so, and then switched to Windows and Premiere, and now may switch back to Mac again at least partially, they're presently testing the waters.  Windows is used by many, Linux is used as well in certain places, most render farms are probably Linux, but not everyone is on a render farm.  One place I know uses a custom fork of Linux, but not many companies do that kind of thing.  
A lot of Hollywood is freelancers, so a lot of editors on Adobe Premiere or Avid use Windows or Mac, a lot of people are switching to Resolve which pairs well with a Mac but also does runs on Windows and has a Linux version.  VFX artists are the same story.  Sound people same story.  What makes Macs appealing to Hollywood types is reliability, ease of use, and ProRes compatibility.  There's also a consistency to them.  Power / capability also matters a lot, I wasn't able to really do my job on a laptop before, but now I can thanks to M1 Max.  So Hollywood types not using Macs is simply not true, I use one every day and there's a lot of people like me.  And they also bought the 2017 iMac Pro in droves, so it's nothing new.

Everyone in Hollywood who knows about computers is aware of and talking about Apple's chips and what they're up to, and a lot of us are buying them.