Larry Jordan on MacBreak Weekly: no MP update anytime soon

[MacVidCards]

Exact quote: "I asked if they are going to be able to commit to any hardware and they said no."

=

Thread title: "No MP update any time soon."

Again, thread title misleading.

I agree 100%, someone wants to start a thread that gets attention

Why not just claim to invent Cold Fusion?

Or set oneself on fire while chanting "we want what we want"?

Or just deliberately toss a flame into some gasoline and deliberately mis label a thread?

 

[deconstruct60]

If you listen a little earlier in the interview, Larry Jordan speculates that what could be holding up Apple is the possibility that they're trying to make a Fibre Thunderbolt connection to implement in the Mac Pro since right now their Laptop/iMac line is all copper thunderbolt.

For the immediate future all that fiber Thunderbolt is going to get you is longer connections. It will be the same speed.

That segment was more lamenting that couldn't do 4K editing over Thunderbolt because of bandwidth limitations. ( suspect implying trying to stream 2-3 4K streams together since there are several products at NAB that leverage 4K and TB). Faster Thunderbolt isn't coming for a couple of years 2014 according comments by Intel..

If waiting for faster TB there would still need to be an interim Mac Pro before it gets that speed bump.

Given there are 8x and 16x PCI-e slots in a Mac Pro it really isn't limited with moving data that fast if not kneecapping it by using TB. So not sure why they would wait.

 

[dagomike]

If you listen a little earlier in the interview, Larry Jordan speculates that what could be holding up Apple is the possibility that they're trying to make a Fibre Thunderbolt connection to implement in the Mac Pro since right now their Laptop/iMac line is all copper thunderbolt. And thus that would help make editing realtime "true" (lol) 4K a reality. That is the one thing I took away from the interview that offered any kind of real technical insight into what "could" be holding up Apple at the moment. All the rest is pure conjecture.

He doesn't have to have speculate. Look no further than Intel's roadmap. If there's still no new Mac Pros 3-6 months from now, THEN there's ample room to speculate.

 

[ClassObject]

Who cares?

 

[macpro2000]

Wirelessly posted

I think it's reasonable to speculate if something hasn't been refreshed for over two years. Do you think if they had never updated the original iPad they would be selling as well as they are today...I think not.

 

[nox-uk]

Exact quote: "I asked if they are going to be able to commit to any hardware and they said no."

=

Thread title: "No MP update any time soon."

Again, thread title misleading.

If you read that quote exactly - they are not commiting to any new hardware, no new iPhones, iPads nothing. This is obviously not the case - so should be completely ignored (unless apple now think we don't need any new iphones etc...)

All this speculation is getting out of hand. My glass is half full, not half empty - i'm looking forward to the next set of Mac Pro updates. They have an OS thats having a lot of work put into it at the moment, why would they reduce the number of machines that will run it.

Nox

 

[finchna]

Larry Jordan said he asked of some group of Apple reps/employees/execs the following (or some form of the following):


"Can you speculate on what hardware is coming?"

"Are they're going to be able to commit to any hardware?"


Saying no to those questions means nothing. There would be no speculation from Apple employees and they can not commit to anything.

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Different people can interpret the quote (or any quote) differently -- depends on what the meaning of "is" is...). My title is how I interpret what he meant. You see it another way, which is fair, and I see how it can be read differently. It's why I ended my initial post with "thoughts?" But my title isn't misleading unless you are only able to understand the literal. I did not put quotes around "no updates anytime soon." That would be misleading.

Actually it is misleading. It suggests that Larry Jordan said on MacBreak Weekly that there would be no Mac Pro updates anytime soon and the interview provides no data to back up that claim and Larry Jordan didn't say that.

How about just sharing what he said and not interpreting, extrapolating, guessing, divining, etc. when there's no data to support it?

 

[xgman]

Frankly I don't care what the title suggests. I just hope Apple somehow gets wind of the frustration and makes some sort of comment.

 

[tdar]

Frankly I don't care what the title suggests. I just hope Apple somehow gets wind of the frustration and makes some sort of comment.

Of course, being we are talking about Apple, they won't. I believe that if they did, we would have a whole new group of threads that would complain about the news they would provide. (think "TRUCK" vs "CAR")

 

[xgman]

Apple sometimes reacts, albeit very late and very vague, to certain issues that generate what they perceive as bad press. I am actually somewhat surprised that they are still 100% silent on this one. Not so much as a real hint of their intent or inside leak. Maybe it is a simple as they have yet to decide what to do. In any case, I don't see how making noise hurts the cause.

 

[thekev]

But he did not ask for a pre-announcement. He asked for a contractual commitment from Apple. Of course the answer is "no". There are only a few executives in the company that can commit Apple to a course of action. I doubt he was talking the upper inner circle.

If he wanted a weasel answer he should have ask a weasel question.
His exact question was "Can you speculate on hardware?". Of course the answer to that is no. It is explicitly against company policy to speculate in public on the record. This is equivalent to asking "are you willing to break your company's disclosure policy?". Let's see keep my career at Apple viable versus dribble some rumor ....

People read way too far into a one word answer. It's amazing how many threads we get due to tech trolling.

My thoughts are that the Mac Pro is actually about to be dead and Apple has in mind to bump the iMac spec a bit to ATTEMPT to compensate for the gap. If I'm right this is terrible news. Also, at this late stage of no word from Apple, doom and gloom notions are a reality. A single word from Apple can prevent this, but I really am thinking that in the "Apple knows best" philosophy, they want to move us to different "powerful" platforms. Keep in mind that in Apple's way of thinking, even an ipad is considered a "powerful" platform.

I think you're missing something here. In what way would they bump the imac? Thunderbolt specs aren't increasing anytime soon, and when you do see an increase, it may not be that great of one. It may take many revisions and generations for it to match what you can do today simply via pci cards. On bumping the imac, what would you do? The top cpu option is the second fastest in that socket type. The fastest is only slightly faster. Regardless of what you do, I doubt you'd notice the difference. It's a case of if the 2600k won't do the job, the 2700k isn't going to change that. On gpus, they're not going to fit a significantly hotter one in there. They currently use one that was designed for heavy laptops. Heat is likely to be a limiting factor there. I guess they could eventually ditch 3.5" drives and maybe force in 3x 2.5" drives, but that won't make a big difference today. It's unlikely that the controller could fully utilize that amount of drive bandwidth.

This is my point. What could you really bump without a drastic redesign? Also yeah Apple likes to use "powerful" as a buzz word, much like "retina".

I didn't rephrase. I took what he said on the show. Maybe he didn't mean to phrase it the way he did, maybe I'm misinterpreting what he means. But it's not a matter of "It is highly like he is not saying that." He said what he said. Did you bother to listen to the clip? I'm not sure how I'm being off topic but we'll just have to agree to disagree. I thought what he said was interesting given how long its been since we've seen an updated MP and also that the FCPX update will support Red. Obviously one isn't going to edit Red footage on an iMac. So why would a video pro get excited about Red support if their isn't going to be an updated machine to support it? Seems weird to me.

I guess you could try to edit it on an imac if you don't expect it to play back in real time, but it doesn't sound that fun.

Wirelessly posted

I think it's reasonable to speculate if something hasn't been refreshed for over two years. Do you think if they had never updated the original iPad they would be selling as well as they are today...I think not.

If you look at the PC workstation market, it's fairly stagnant too. Most of the time in workstations the available gpus are firepros and quadros. While they've seen a couple added in the last year or so, those have mostly been ultra expensive ones. Cpus are still the same Nehalem and Westmere options that they were a couple years ago. Some of the prices do fluctuate a bit, but not as much as their consumer oriented lines. In the case of Apple, you get a shorter standard warranty on their workstation models unless you opt to pay for Applecare, and you tend to pay more for single socket configurations. In dual socket configurations they're often middle of the pack as in other oems may charge more or less for comparable builds. Generally on the Windows side you have more options in terms of configuration, and Apple's gpu drivers sometimes suck.

It's just not that reasonable to speculate when nothing that interesting was available to update. At most you would have seen a disappointing gpu bump.

 

[xgman]

I think you're missing something here. In what way would they bump the imac? Thunderbolt specs aren't increasing anytime soon, and when you do see an increase, it may not be that great of one. It may take many revisions and generations for it to match what you can do today simply via pci cards. On bumping the imac, what would you do? The top cpu option is the second fastest in that socket type. The fastest is only slightly faster. Regardless of what you do, I doubt you'd notice the difference. It's a case of if the 2600k won't do the job, the 2700k isn't going to change that. On gpus, they're not going to fit a significantly hotter one in there. They currently use one that was designed for heavy laptops. Heat is likely to be a limiting factor there. I guess they could eventually ditch 3.5" drives and maybe force in 3x 2.5" drives, but that won't make a big difference today. It's unlikely that the controller could fully utilize that amount of drive bandwidth.

This is my point. What could you really bump without a drastic redesign? Also yeah Apple likes to use "powerful" as a buzz word, much like "retina".

I guess you could try to edit it on an imac if you don't expect it to play back in real time, but it doesn't sound that fun.

No one said that it would make sense, only that if that's the direction Apple wants to move, they will spin something to that end and expect us to fall in line.

 

[Photovore]

Apple sometimes reacts, albeit very late and very vague, to certain issues that generate what they perceive as bad press. I am actually somewhat surprised that they are still 100% silent on this one. Not so much as a real hint of their intent or inside leak. Maybe it is a simple as they have yet to decide what to do. In any case, I don't see how making noise hurts the cause.

The bestest reason to say nothing at all would be if they know they'll be announcing in the next few weeks anyway....

edit: by the way, re: the thread title, if someone asked me if I would "commit" to eating lunch tomorrow I would tell them "no", even if I fully intended to. AND, if someone asked me if I would "commit" to someone in another department within my company eating lunch tomorrow, Hah!

 

[24Frames]

I can't find any major vendor offering Intel E5-26xx based workstations globally, a few have them in the US, such as HP and Levano, but I haven't seen any in Europe.

If Apple actually launched updated Mac Pros with immediate availability in the next couple of weeks. Silent update alongside new MBP 15 perhaps. Then they could probably be the first out worldwide.

The iPad rollout maybe telling us something about Apple's plans too, it will be launched in 12 more countries on Friday 20th April and a further 9 on Friday 27th April. That could well mean that they plan to start updating the Macs in May and are getting the iPad rollouts out the way first. There is a limit to how many products Apple can update at anyone time due to the shipping logistics.

 

[ixodes]

Did anyone catch MacBreak Weekly yesterday or watch/listen to the podcast later?
Thoughts?

First off, thank you for this post. I usually check MacBreak Weekly, but I missed yesterday's.

As one who has used Mac Pro's professionally since inception, I truly hope they do not give up this iconic model.

That said, I am disappointed with the direction that Apple is taking OS X, and can't help but wonder if it's racing towards the demise of what we once enjoyed for both consumer, and professional level work.

Only time will tell.