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Varmann

macrumors regular
Jan 3, 2010
154
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It's the kind of thing that's built on hindsight. I'd agree that the 2000s were Apple's high point in terms of Mac hardware, and it's obvious to see why—if nothing else, having more hit products has divided Apple's attention since.

But Apple in the 2000s also had misses, like the Power Mac G4 Cube. Their pro towers had issues (speed dumped G4s, wind tunnel G4s, leaking G5s.) As mentioned earlier, even under Jobs the dedication to the Mac Pro heavily slipped. Mac OS X was rough the first couple versions, and people plain hated parts of it (the complaints about Big Sur's flat look are kind of hilarious in comparison to the fury that was debates about brushed metal!) They spent half the decade putting out new models that started out competitive and then became slower and power-inefficient than the competition. Final Cut Pro went from revolutionary to behind the technological curve remarkably quickly (many a suspenseful college coursework render I remember when you just had to hope the progress bar was lying, because you had no idea when the dang thing would be done.)

I always come back to Snow Leopard, an OS revision that has cemented itself in the Mac fan consciousness as arguably the pinnacle of OS X—and yet the thing was buggy as all hell when it launched. I remember the Apple Store filled with boxes they'd added point revision stickers to because you did not want to get stuck with 10.6.0 or .1. And half of its reputation for stability is just that it was around longer than planned because Apple had to pull resources from Lion.

We're pretty good at talking ourselves into remembering "golden ages" that didn't quite exist like we remember them.
I would say both yes and no to that. It is very easy to rewrite history, but the 2000-2010 was a bit different for me.

For me the "apparent Pro focus" was what made me jump back to Mac OSX in 2008, so it is certainly not hindsight for me. I had followed the gradually improving high end part of the mac line very closely for several years.

The combination of Leopard followed by Snow leopard, MacPro 3.1 (arguable the most bang for the buck Pro Mac ever released), Aperture (I am a dedicated hobby photographer), the close links to Linux, the rather easy integration with Windows, the testing of ZFS and loads of high quality third party equipment. My friends working with massive multiprocessor Linux clusters used Macs to control the systems due to the nice and stable interface. For me all that was enough to without hesitation make the jump back to Mac. It could certainly only get better from there :)
 

Schismz

macrumors 6502
Sep 4, 2010
343
395
I would say both yes and no to that. It is very easy to rewrite history, but the 2000-2010 was a bit different for me.

For me the "apparent Pro focus" was what made me jump back to Mac OSX in 2008, so it is certainly not hindsight for me. I had followed the gradually improving high end part of the mac line very closely for several years.

The combination of Leopard followed by Snow leopard, MacPro 3.1 (arguable the most bang for the buck Pro Mac ever released), Aperture (I am a dedicated hobby photographer), the close links to Linux, the rather easy integration with Windows, the testing of ZFS and loads of high quality third party equipment. My friends working with massive multiprocessor Linux clusters used Macs to control the systems due to the nice and stable interface. For me all that was enough to without hesitation make the jump back to Mac. It could certainly only get better from there :)

ZFS was a bit WTF happened here? Steve and Larry Ellison were friends, ZFS was actually present in some of the OS/X betas, and then it just vanished and it's taken however many years crawling forward for APFS to attain it's current iteration level (which is improving, but still).

Apple have had a very ambiguous relation to the "Pro" segment through their history.

The mid-90s was all over the place, I took some baby steps towards being a part time mac developer back then, but gave up due to the very sharp turns Apple expected their developers to take every year or so ("Opendoc", looking at you).

I would say the first decade in the 2000s was a high point for Apple in the Pro area. Power Mac and Mac Pro had an impressive line of models with yearly updates ending with the beloved workhorse 5.1. OSX was arguable the best "standard" OS out there, with many high end features and it could act both as a GUI for high end Linux as well as having very good integration with Windows. Xserve had a nine year long product line. Application like Final Cut, Aperture and Logic Pro showed that Apple certainly had ambitions to dominate the Pro segment.

I started my carrier 30+ years ago, in a segment of applied research that depend a lot on visualization of huge amounts of data. The first years we used dumb terminals connected to off site "super computers". In the 90s this very soon changed to SGI workstations. In the late 90s we changed to Linux. The Linux boxes was for the first decade of the 2000s very capable workstation with 4 displays. However the data amount grew much faster than the computer capacity and for the last decade we have gone full circle back to "dumb Linux terminals" (HP mini desktops) displaying WMS graphics generated on off site servers. I guess something similar is true in other areas.

Maybe the "trashcan" was a result of a pretty good interpretation of trends in the "professional segment"? It only failed with the execution. As it turned out it was something inbetween, too expensive for a dumb terminal and too limited for a self contained workstation. The 2019 MacPro might be a "dinosaur" aimed for a rather small segment that still do a lot of heavy work locally on workstations.

Edit: spelling

I went from Apple ][ and DOS to ProDOS ;-) to leaving Apple when the "Macintrash" became Apple's sole focus, while the ][ with yes, OMFG, slots, was their cash cow paying for everything else, and I wandered over to Amiga, SGI, Suns, and then "returning" to Steve Jobs @ NeXT. I eventually ended up back at Apple when the Mac stopped being OS 9, NeXT took over Apple, and NeXTSTEP showed up with a facelift as OS/X.

Nearly everybody I know uses an Apple device as their personal device to work on <whatever> locally, or in the cloud. Whether someone needs a Mac Pro workstation or a MacBook is enough, is highly dependent on what they're doing. I'm quite happy with Mac Pro 2019.

The single thing I wanted to point out as someone who has owned and used Xserves -- and still have some left sitting in rack -- is that both NeXTSTEP and OS/X were terrible as servers. Really simple basic things just did not work because nobody ever fixed the bugs. NeXTSTEP in no reasonable way worked as a server back in the late 80s and 90s, if you wanted something that just worked, use SunOS or Solaris; in the 2000s that'd be Linux, *BSD, whatever, but Apple (and NeXT before them) have always been relatively atrocious at making their OS' work as a server; it is not some great loss to the "pro market" that Xserve is gone ... really, it's not ;-)

This is all geeking out on the actual tech. Over in that mythical place called "the real world" my stock went up with iPod, then iTunes Store, then that iPhone thing pumped it into the stratosphere, iPad, services... everything we're rambling about in this thread "the pro market" is basically a history lesson/rap session for those of us who lived through those epochs of time ... but over in 2021 the entire "pro market" is a rounding error in terms of Apple's Market Cap & Share Price.
 
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Varmann

macrumors regular
Jan 3, 2010
154
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Apple probably have a better understanding of the actual Pro market than we have.

The "professional world" is all about doing the work you are good at as efficient as possible.
It is certainly not about having the biggest heaviest workstations and upgrade them to the max every 6 months. Most tech businesses in my area of expertise tries to minimize the size of their IT department, it costs a lot and is not a "productive" part of the business. Having loads of workstations is seldom the most efficient solution today. Instead off load number crunching to a big server, or even better, an off site server someone else administrates.

The "classical" use case with a big room full of busy people each one with a Macpro under their desk has or is disappearing, and not because people switch to windows workstations. Heavy workstations is a smaller and smaller niche product today.

That said, the 2019 Macpro is a well crafted product and probably fills its niche nicely.
 
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fuchsdh

macrumors 68020
Jun 19, 2014
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It's mostly "pros" complaining that Apple isn't catering to them with their "pro" machines, when a) Apple's "pro" moniker has always just meant high-end rather than specifically targeting professional use cases, and b) professional ultimately just means you make money using the gear, and there's a ton of different ways different professionals use it. Someone who makes their video content on an iMac for Youtube isn't less professional than the wedding photographer or less professional than the motion graphics artist or less professional than the guy writing software. There's value in offering flexible products that can appeal to a large swath of those users, but there's also no magical world where you can cater to them 100% as Apple and not suffer in some other way.

Macrumors is often a fun community, but it's absolutely not representative of anything in the real world, as any enthusiast forum is a very skewed sampling of people.
 

JMacHack

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Mar 16, 2017
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On the topic of “pro” use cases, my experience is in desktop publishing (and from the comments, I have been at it for a lot shorter time).

From my understanding Apple and the Mac have always been strong in that area. The machine I use at work now is a 27” iMac, but was previously a 4,1 Mac Pro.

In this specific case, an iMac is perfectly fine. I don’t need a lot of gpu horsepower, and having the high resolution and color accuracy is more important. A Mac Pro 2019 would be overkill.

Prior to that though we always used Power Macs. The iMac just wasn’t powerful enough to run the progams I guess.

I think the market has changed and pushed slotboxes into further niches.
 
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InuNacho

macrumors 68010
Apr 24, 2008
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In that one place
On the topic of “pro” use cases, my experience is in desktop publishing (and from the comments, I have been at it for a lot shorter time).

From my understanding Apple and the Mac have always been strong in that area. The machine I use at work now is a 27” iMac, but was previously a 4,1 Mac Pro.

In this specific case, an iMac is perfectly fine. I don’t need a lot of gpu horsepower, and having the high resolution and color accuracy is more important. A Mac Pro 2019 would be overkill.

Prior to that though we always used Power Macs. The iMac just wasn’t powerful enough to run the progams I guess.

I think the market has changed and pushed slotboxes into further niches.
So I sold my souped up 5,1 in favor of a Mac Mini i7 2018 earlier this year because Apple offered no other reasonable replacement. Am I happy, no. The Mini is littered with issues related to HDMI and TB3.
I already had 2x Dell Ultrasharps I was quite comfortable with and didn't want to switch to an iMac due to the projected higher cost and differences in my screens. I've always been frugal about my computing and have tried to extend their livelihood for years.

I feel Apple dropped the ball by not giving the independent Pro/semi-Pro a computer they can afford and can be somewhat user serviceable at reasonable specs.

Instead of giving us another 90's Tacoma we got a Cybertruck.
 

ZombiePhysicist

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May 22, 2014
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It's mostly "pros" complaining that Apple isn't catering to them with their "pro" machines, when a) Apple's "pro" moniker has always just meant high-end rather than specifically targeting professional use cases, and b) professional ultimately just means you make money using the gear, and there's a ton of different ways different professionals use it. Someone who makes their video content on an iMac for Youtube isn't less professional than the wedding photographer or less professional than the motion graphics artist or less professional than the guy writing software. There's value in offering flexible products that can appeal to a large swath of those users, but there's also no magical world where you can cater to them 100% as Apple and not suffer in some other way.

Macrumors is often a fun community, but it's absolutely not representative of anything in the real world, as any enthusiast forum is a very skewed sampling of people.

Says who? You? Yea, I disagree. It's very representative and has many people that do earn a living from their machines. As well as enthusiasts. It's a well rounded and highly representative group. And everything done that the general consensus around here has been against, has been not only a mistake, a provable mistake, and one that apple has done about faces on. The trashcan Mac being one glaring example.
 
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hans1972

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Apr 5, 2010
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But you do see trucks (commercial vehicles) and plenty of SUVs. The Trashcan seems like the equivalent of expecting a commercial contractor to show up for work with a Porsche Macan.

"Ok, so you couldn't bring the ladder - but at least it has a winch somewhere, right? Right??"

In Europe you would see vans being used much more than trucks, like a Ford Transit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Transit) or even smaller vehicles like a panel van (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel_van). Also this vehicle would be provided by the employer.

Plummers, electricians, carpenters, masons, craftspeople, catering would probably use some kind of van. The only professions where I have seen a lot of trucks are construction and farming.
 
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fuchsdh

macrumors 68020
Jun 19, 2014
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Says who? You? Yea, I disagree. It's very representative and has many people that do earn a living from their machines. As well as enthusiasts. It's a well rounded and highly representative group. And everything done that the general consensus around here has been against, has been not only a mistake, a provable mistake, and one that apple has done about faces on. The trashcan Mac being one glaring example.
That you say this despite the demonstrated terrible track record the hivemind here has is hilarious.

Apple would have immediately cancelled the iPod in shame for the apparent wisdom shown here, for one :p
 
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mattspace

macrumors 68040
Jun 5, 2013
3,344
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In Europe you would see vans being used much more than trucks, like a Ford Transit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Transit) or even smaller vehicles like a panel van (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel_van). Also this vehicle would be provided by the employer.

Plummers, electricians, carpenters, masons, craftspeople, catering would probably use some kind of van. The only professions where I have seen a lot of trucks are construction and farming.

The trade van is a "truck", in the Jobsian metaphor. It's a completely customisable, user-reconfigurable, available-as-a stripped-out bare-bones-shell professional vehicle, designed for the needs of professionals. It's not a consumer vehicle, with which professionals make-do, as the scraps of economies of scale by carmakers focussing all their resources on consumer vehicles.
 

ZombiePhysicist

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May 22, 2014
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That you say this despite the demonstrated terrible track record the hivemind here has is hilarious.

Apple would have immediately cancelled the iPod in shame for the apparent wisdom shown here, for one :p

Because the Mac Pro section needs to know a lot about consumer market, and I look to the iPod section to know a lot about the Mac Pro. ?

So yea, youre still wrong. Try again.
 
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jasnw

macrumors 65816
Nov 15, 2013
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One thing that really bugs me about Macs in general and the Mac Pro in particular has been mentioned a couple of times in this thread: a complete lack of a roadmap. Apple's hyper-paranoiac focus on product secrecy translates into their Mac customers being unable to plan for the future other than hoping that something they will be able to use is out there. And that whatever Apple does come up with, it will be compatible with what the customer is currently doing and planning to be doing in the future. It's just cross your fingers and hang on for Mr Cook's Wild Ride. This may be a great way to run a fashion business, but it's hell on people trying to plan for their IT infrastructure future.
 
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InuNacho

macrumors 68010
Apr 24, 2008
2,001
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In that one place
One thing that really bugs me about Macs in generate and the Mac Pro in particular has been mentioned a couple of times in this thread: a complete lack of a roadmap. Apple's hyper-paranoiac focus on product secrecy translates into their Mac customers being unable to plan for the future other than hoping that something they will be able to use is out there. And that whatever Apple does come up with, it will be compatible with what the customer is currently doing and planning to be doing in the future. It's just cross your fingers and hang on for Mr Cook's Wild Ride. This may be a great way to run a fashion business, but it's hell on people trying to plan for their IT infrastructure future.
I got my 5,1 at a post production house clearing sale in LA in 2013 shortly after the trashcan came out. Drove all the way from the Bay to pick it up and it was totally worth the price I paid.

Back then I could see what Apple was going for, they were somewhat confused as was the rest of the market as to where GPU technology was going to go. It seemed like we might be going multiple GPU route and that the future would be Thunderbolt and fast external disks.
I can completely understand it, they wanted a seamless "1 Port to rule them all" before USB C and Gen 1/2 came along.

You'd have your "PRO Brain computer" connected to a Thunderbolt drive array and have the multiple displays evened out across multiple GPUs.

Of course this never really came to fruition with the Semi/Single Pro audience. Apple figured wasn't worth bothering with us anymore. The stopgap iMac Pro didn't help either.
 

Varmann

macrumors regular
Jan 3, 2010
154
71
One thing that really bugs me about Macs in generate and the Mac Pro in particular has been mentioned a couple of times in this thread: a complete lack of a roadmap. Apple's hyper-paranoiac focus on product secrecy translates into their Mac customers being unable to plan for the future other than hoping that something they will be able to use is out there. And that whatever Apple does come up with, it will be compatible with what the customer is currently doing and planning to be doing in the future. It's just cross your fingers and hang on for Mr Cook's Wild Ride. This may be a great way to run a fashion business, but it's hell on people trying to plan for their IT infrastructure future.
Certainly a main culprit for medium and bigger businesses who want to control their IT spending and spread it over several years. My company change about 1/4 of the computers every year, then it is important that the changes from one year to another is incremental and predictable.

2000-2010 Apple was secretive but still had a rather regular yearly upgrade cycle in the high end Mac line, even during the Intel switch. The last decade was somewhat of a rollercoaster, 5.1 -> Trashcan -> long wait -> Imac Pro -> MacPro 2019 -> something with Apple silicon.... wild speculations about the specs.
 

fritzzzzzz

macrumors member
Jun 16, 2020
47
13
Very simple - if you think Mac Pro 2019 is not pro enough: 1) you are not really pro who needs to run the machine like scientist (compose few hundred 1TB IMAGES FROM THe space or not a CG professional to run a scene taking 2 weeks. 2) you just simply cannot afford the machine but you want it real bad. Pricing comparison is completely useless - does PC run final cut ? Does Mac run the app that only in PC ? That really depends on what you need
 
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H2SO4

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Nov 4, 2008
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The Mac Pro’s of recent have been odd beasts and left to languish with no real spec bumps or discounts. I would hope to see that change with the move to Apple silicon as they will no longer be tied to intel or AMD. Maybe a larger range of specifications and pricing, but who knows.
Wouldn’t every Wintel box out there have the same issue then?
 

H2SO4

macrumors 603
Nov 4, 2008
5,832
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Very simple - if you think Mac Pro 2019 is not pro enough: 1) you are not really pro who needs to run the machine like scientist (compose few hundred 1TB IMAGES FROM THe space or not a CG professional to run a scene taking 2 weeks. 2) you just simply cannot afford the machine but you want it real bad. Pricing comparison is completely useless - does PC run final cut ? Does Mac run the app that only in PC ? That really depends on what you need
Surprising you’re running something tied to CUDA. Are you not a pro?
 

arche3

macrumors 6502
Jul 8, 2020
407
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10 to 20k for a decent spec 7 1 is certainly affordable for someone making a living using it.
 

H2SO4

macrumors 603
Nov 4, 2008
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Very simple - if you think Mac Pro 2019 is not pro enough: 1) you are not really pro who needs to run the machine like scientist (compose few hundred 1TB IMAGES FROM THe space or not a CG professional to run a scene taking 2 weeks. 2) you just simply cannot afford the machine but you want it real bad. Pricing comparison is completely useless - does PC run final cut ? Does Mac run the app that only in PC ? That really depends on what you need
That’s a load of rubbish.
What you mean is that it doesn’t fit YOUR definition of what and how people should use THEIR machines.
 
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fritzzzzzz

macrumors member
Jun 16, 2020
47
13
That’s a load of rubbish.
What you mean is that it doesn’t fit YOUR definition of what and how people should use THEIR machines.
This is not definition. It is a fact what pro means - not youtuber not comparing 5 mins video export with M1. If you are not pro and you afford Mac Pro that is great cause won’t reply a post like you did . I think my statement is petty much cover what you are going to say so yea
 

H2SO4

macrumors 603
Nov 4, 2008
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This is not definition. It is a fact what pro means - not youtuber not comparing 5 mins video export with M1. If you are not pro and you afford Mac Pro that is great cause won’t reply a post like you did . I think my statement is petty much cover what you are going to say so yea
What does 'Pro' mean, pray tell us all?
 
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