Again you do not understand how halo's work. Most people have no idea who their representatives in congress are, what they stand for, what they do, yet they are very influential.
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MP 7,1 Mac Pro 8.1 - WHAT IF...
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Again you do not understand how halo's work. Most people have no idea who their representatives in congress are, what they stand for, what they do, yet they are very influential.
If there's a ChatGPTGod up there, please, make it stop.
The iPhone is Apple's flagship product, the Mac Pro is Apple's halo product, but Apple may intend for the AR/VR headset to become their new halo product; regardless, iPhones & Mac laptops are where the hardware sales numbers are...?
LOL. No, way too much focus is NOT on 3D performance, as that's very much a giant portion of what this thread is about. That will continue to be the focus because that is literally the what if that I desire and created this thread for. I'm always down for hearing opinions but getting tired of people coming on a thread begging for power to compete against a 4090 in GPU 3D performance and telling us that's not what it's about lol. It's literally what it's about.
We all love our MacBook Pro M series performance...that has absolutely zero to do with what is needed to replace a 2019 maxed out Mac Pro, more amongst anything being...GPU 3D performance.
I actually agree with this, because it's one of the most productive use cases I have for my current VR and I've always envisioned this happening with super solid AR glasses. Quest Pros can do it, but not to the clarity and depth I thin the Apple Glasses will.
That's fair to say. And I'm basically in the same camp currently. Still heavily leaning on my 7.1 until I pull the trigger on the Puget or Apple pulls the trigger on the 8.1.
I couldn't even open the article...as in my hands actually wouldn't allow me to based on the stupidity of the title alone lolol.Proof that Macworld has gotten more and more stupid and irrelevant over time. Full of puffed egos and empty of intellect, insight and talent. I officially cancelled them with this and block them in all my news sources moving forward. Irrelevant blather…sound and fury of coward, sold out, wannabe losers:
Does Apple even need to make a Mac Pro anymore?
Between the limited upgradability of Apple Silicon and the power of Mac Studio, a Mac Pro doesn't seem to have a place anymore.www.macworld.com
It's always mind-blowing to me that people forget how much money they have. This is a company that is plausibly debating BUYING Disney. You know how rich you have to be to buy the company that owns the world? lol.Seriously, you people make it seem like apple is still that garage-based startup that is hungry for cash.... When that could be further from the truth.
The fact of the matter is -- apple has so much market share (let me remind you they are the most valuable company on earth, even as I type this the stock price is growing), and money stockpiled that they can literally afford to play around with developing whatever machine they want. Whether that means some gimmicky VR goggles that probably won't sell all that well or the Mac Pro itself.
These arguments are moot, because of the current situation that apple is in today -- it is not the apple of 1997.
They are no longer that garage-based startup that is hungry for cash, where every single decision they make impacts them significantly, nor are they anywhere near bankruptcy -- far from it.
At this point, they make so much money from iPads, iPhones, Macbooks, and they have so much more money stockpiled that they can afford to keep the Mac Pro around, even if they don't profit highly from it, but instead, as Zombie mentioned, it can continue to be their Halo product showcasing their ultimate potential.
I am tired of reading posts and articles from closed minded individuals who believe that, "because they're a business" apple absolutely cannot do anything daring....
Don't even get me started on the sad selfish individuals with the "I don't need it, so nobody else should either" mentality...
Please, wake up.
Building a Ferrari of a Mac Pro can literally be an inside hobby for these guys that they never sell and it wouldn't dent their budget.
Hmm I'm not sure about that. the 2019 Mac Pro was plastered EVERYHWERE on the internet, in commercials, and all of social media. 100's of YouTubers bought them and did a good 2 dozen videos a piece all about it.
But you have to understand, you are on a thread created by someone who ultimately is NOT satisfied with the Mac Studio. That's the entire point behind my creation of this thread...I want MORE. And he didn't say anything that would warrant getting a ban so if it was you that did it last time, please refrain from reporting him or trying to get him banned. He didn't attack you or anyone personally. He just expressed an opinion, same as you.
If using a Mac sure, though a higher proportion use Windows - https://appleinsider.com/articles/2...ut-not-mac-or-apples-home-devices-study-finds
Fair point, though I imagine it figured higher in your YT / social media feed than most. And the big splash was mostly just Apple announcing to Mac creative pros they were back in the workstation game after a very long absence.
The thing is, whilst the MP2019 was the fastest Mac, it was only mid-high end in the broader PC workstation market. Their one-size-fits-all desktop approach means that whilst the higher-end variants were price-comparable with HP etc., the lower-end ones were very poor value - and if you wanted really high-end i.e. dual CPUs, that wasn’t possible at all. The lack of Nvidia and Threadripper support, whilst expected, was unfortunate as well.
Where the MP2019 does act as an Apple / Mac flagship is in it’s superb industrial design, to a level unseen in PC workstations. It has a very clean internal layout and virtually silent operation. This is certainly admirable, but unlikely sufficient to tempt Windows users from their Nvidia GPUs.
Although caught by unfortunate timing (stuck with expensive and poorly-performing Intel in an era of resurgent AMD) the 2019 Mac Pro is nevertheless a symbol of Apple over-charging. It’s arguably most famous for starting at £6K with an RX580, with £400 wheels and a £1K monitor stand.
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I am fairly convinced that the 2019 Mac Pro was initially never in Apples plan. If you look back to 2013 they transformed the Mac Pro into the thrashcan and four years later they released the iMac Pro. But before the launch of the iMac Pro there was a couple of things going on. 1. There was a growing concern and outcry that the Mac platform was beeing stagnated and that iOS/iPads where the future and 2. the pro community where not happy either. A lot didn`t like the limited form factor of the Thrashcan and then there was the lack of updates for years that created a lot of negative feedback from the Pro communities. So if Apple had just launched the iMac Pro as the replacement for the Thrashcan Mac Pro I think things would get ugly with a lot of negative feedback and bad publicity. I think Apple realized this too at some point before the launch and hence the «Mea Culpa» sitdown in 2017. I bet they decided to make and start active developement of the 2019 mac pro not long before that meeting.
This also makes the pricing sensible from Apples point of view since they know this is going to be a low volume and short lived product with Apple Silicon in developement at that time. Those developement and engineering cost has to come in one way or the other...
As for the Apple Silicon Mac Pro it´s going to be very interesting to see what they end up with. And even more important who is it going to be for? The Mac studio covers 80-90% of the graphic/motion design and video editing needs.
I think the only way a new Mac Pro is going to survive as product (also in 10 years time) is to grow, and the only way I see that happening is to seriously tap in to the 3D market.
Even if most development for the Reality headset will happen on Windows, Apple will want a Mac that can do it in their lineup. And I don’t think the Studio will cut it.
That is a strategic need and currently the only good argument for a Mac Pro with spectacular GPU resources. Selling them at a loss would be acceptable because they support another product category.
Competing with RTX cards or Wintel boxes on price/performance for their M chip or corresponding compute units is not likely going to happen considering Apple history.
I forgot, are there references to AMD GPU in MacOS versions for ASi?
Also, Apple's headset is the primary interface for driving the Apple Car, which is likewise totally a legitimate product, and coming Real Soon Now™.
Errr. probably not. Even more so if the Headset itself isn't really cracking a substantive return on investment. At $3K Apple isn't going to sell that many. If there are any profits there, then they are highly likely going to be folded back into paying for the 6+ years of R&D backlog and whatever the R&D overhead going forward. If there actually are two SoC packages , sizable RAM and SSD capacity , 4K displays , and highly effective eyetracking sensors on this , then the bill of material costs here are not where near the "sell loss leader if off the shelf chips " that Facebook and others are selling. If the second SoC is custom only to the headset ... once again not going to be cheap in the unit numbers likely being used here.
Arm flapping about "thick profits" from subscription software is on flakey ground if legally Apple has to let in 3rd party app stores. Subscription services could a substantial hit. (e.g., in part why haven't seen a Roku/FireTV price busting AppleTV dongle surface. )
So to pile a money losing MP on top of thin profit goggles , doesn't make much sense. The hand waving argument in the gaming console world has been loose money on the system and gain it back with high priced, high margin games. And the development systems there aren't being sold at a major loss.
And Apple's consumer glasses... I strongly suspect many folks here are grossly overestimating the general computational horsepower that is going to be in those. Little indications that Apple wants the glasses to compete in the gaming VR space at all. ( the lighter lens screens are likely what is being used in the mixed reality AR/VR headset that has a relatively much higher weight limit, but the AR/VR headset is lower weight targets than its competitors. ). To hit the weight and power constraints that are iPhone or less in power/battery it is pretty likely Apple is going to push even more system contextually critical functions into specialized fixed function or minimally into specialized cores like NPU and image processors. It won't be who has access to the largest , heaviest , brute force hammer. It will be who has access to the specialized libraries you need to run in that smaller envelope. ( these big brute force GPUs aren't beating apple on high end ProRes work done with modern M-series. Similar issues. )
Even if Apple does a mid range mixed reality headset... while dialing back the bill of material costs the processing power is going to stay exactly the same. If trying to cut $500-1000 of stuff, is that going to work? [ On a Mac M-series systems if you chop $400-600 off the entry price for a system to you land back on the same class SoC. Not really. ]
I meant that a strategic decisions take in a broader perspective than making money on a single product. No one know of Apples VR/AR ideas and sales projections. We have not seen a product yet so how the community can draw firm conclusions about its supposed failure makes no sense at all. Apple could start with 360 degree endless screen for 2D content where everything is in focus wherever you look. Who would not want that? People apparently shell out $5000 for a 32 inch screen, why not 3000 on an endless screen?
True, but I was talking about strategy of MP. I think that MP will not survive without being part of the bigger Apple picture because the MP customer base is shrinking as many if not most are fine with MBP. Apple has currently no competitive advantage in the high end market so without strategic dependence to other Apple products, it will be killed. Supporting AR/VR glass development is one possible strategic dependence. Are there other?
The 3D market is just not one that Apple realistically has any hope of courting. It's the province of high-end desktop PCs running Nvidia graphics cards - pretty much the antithesis of what Apple manufacturers.
Almost no-one is going to base their professional practice around a platform with sporadic and inconsistent workstation updates, with an OS that's less performant in 3D than Windows / Linux, from a vendor who hates Nvidia, refuses to support any graphics API other than Metal, and never discusses future roadmaps. For all these reasons, the Mac is a second-class citizen when it comes to 3D renderer support. Even if Apple changed their attitudes tomorrow (which they won't, as these strategies directly benefit higher-priority areas of their business), it would take years for developers and users to begin trusting Apple.
It's also hard to see how Apple would ever be price-competitive in this market. That may not be a concern for big VFX houses like ILM, but those types of companies mostly (and increasingly) use Linux anyway (https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQIdp38Y/view).
Real-time rendering with game engines is becoming increasingly important for film / TV, but the Mac's being left behind there too (a feud with Epic over iOS App Store royalties likely doesn't help either). Few companies have traditionally used Macs for games development, because there's not much of a Mac games market. Another victim of Apple's refusal / inability to make affordable desktops with high-powered GPUs.