karmadave

I believe Apple’s R&D expenditures are better spent inventing cool, new stuff instead of doing another ‘heart transplant’ on Macintosh...

Every few months one of these types of editorials appears on AI. I call the same BS every time. Apple doesn’t need to use ARM in Mac. It’s not gonna shift their marketshare in any direction. Instead they are focused on making iPad more ‘Mac-like’. Witness the upcoming version of iPadOS. 

All this makes for interesting hypotheticals, but it’s a non-starter IMHO...

KITA said:

chasm said:

cynegils said:

ZDNET did an interesting breakdown of the costs for the lowest end Mac Pro. Not surprisingly, they conclude it is super overpriced.

Once again for the dim ones in the back — a BOM breakdown does not represent the actual cost of a product. Any product.

By way of illustration, please do find me a workstation that is as close as possible to the Mac Pro in specs, ports, and software, and yet priced far below the base cost.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Most workstations from the big three come with minimum 3 years of on-site warranty included (for ~$140 extra it can go to 5 years next day service), loads of ISV certifications and NVIDIA RTX Quadro graphics options. 

They also typically can cost companies 10%~20% less than what Dell/HP/Lenovo's websites show and are actually on the market today, and not in a few months when new and refreshed models are due.

Apple is not even close to offering that type of value.

Thank you for getting it! Most people have no idea about the Workstation market. I made many of the same points when the new Mac Pro was introduced. In addition to Nvidia graphics, the major workstation vendors also offer a Dual CPU option and more drive slots + RAID. The Mac Pro is definitely an impressive piece of engineering, but it lacks features available on PC workstations and is pricy. Maybe Apple is re-visiting the price and decided that the ONLY way to bring the price down was to move manufacturing to China.  

macplusplus said:

saarek said:

I wish Apple would just sort out their issue with nVidia. Not knocking ATI Radeon's here, but it would be nice to have the choice and it's Apple causing the block, not nVidia.

Simply not true. This is Nvidia who don’t allow their processors to be programmed at the “Metal” level. Apple as a computer producer has right to access and control a processor using up to the most granular elements of the processor’s instruction set. As such, Nvidia is a consumer company. It produces some consumer graphics cards, mostly for gaming, mining and alike. It is not an “OEM partner” to Apple like Intel, AMD, or Samsung.

Interesting observation. I wasn't aware of Nvidia's restrictions. However, I have to take exception with your statement that 'Nvidia is a consumer company'. While it's true that they produce GPU's for the consumer gaming market a big thrust of their business is Commercial applications such as EDA, MCAD, and most recently AI/ML. In fact they are a leading OEM to companies such as HPE, Dell EMC, Cisco and others. My customer choose their GPU's over AMD almost 10:1. Just an observation...

Apple is NOT abandoning x86 architecture for Mac! More likely you will see iPad get faster with more Mac-like features. The the upcoming versions, of iPadOS and MacOS are very similar and are only likely to become more so over time. That's why Apple is continuing to invest in it's own ARM designs.