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MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)
- Thread starter Mago
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That's funny because in the 80's their best selling machine, the Apple II serie had internal expansion slots!
First, that primarily had to do with price (of both system and software ); not slots. Second, the peak number per year happened right before the Mac was introduced. As Mac grew as a value proposition ( software ecosystem , peripherals, etc.) the Apple II trended downward.
"... Total Apple II sales for its 14-year run were about 6 million units, with the peak occurring in 1983 when 1 million were sold. ... "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series
The irony is also a bit funny too since holding up the Apple II in lofty status where the II gs was sold from 1985 until 1992. A 7 year run and folks are dying in this forum because of half that amount of time.
The majority if every major computer vendor now is laptops. There were no real laptops in the 80s and when most folks provided reasonable enough laptop choices that have large chosen the laptops. The market dynamics of the 80's weren't about broad consumer options of todays market.
Please, stop over analysing what everybody is saying... It makes you look like the glasses wearing smurf... It was a joke.
I have a very bad feeling about this show... (bookmark this comment)
The ghost of Steve Jobs:
"Tim, what are you doing with my company?"
"Tim, what are you doing with my company?"
the merged macOS iOS rumors mostly come from a whole bunch of arm flapping and what are primarily superficial factors.. There isn't much there.
Apple is trying (and mostly succeeding since it has grown to Mac like revenues ) in growing their app store and services business. It isn't that iPhone is most of the revenue, largely problem they have is in "where is the next" revenue growth coming from.
Relatively mundane iOS apps isn't it. macOS apps (non game ones) have a much higher average selling price. It isn't quite at the race-to-the-bottom state the iOS market is in.
Apple doesn't needs to cover every single mainstream PC form factor. Just a subset of the reasonably (for Apple) profitable ones. That "have to mimic every form factor in Windows market" is what is flawed. That would only be necessary if Apple was trying to shoot for >10% market share in terms of unit sales. They aren't. There isn't any good reason for them to either. Chasing the race to the bottom options isn't going to help them long term. ( at least 50% of the "box with slots" treads here have to do with a low-mid market 'xMac' far more than a Mac Pro price class systems. ).
The "draw and take pen notes" stuff that the Surface Pro covers is something that the iPad Pro can cover with a pretty high percentage. There are a few OS level and software app gaps to close but there is no 'show stopper" there (e.g., some evolution of Continuity/Handoff and refinements on split screen. ). Macs have done with with Wacom (and Cintiq) for less mobile setups. So Macs aren't entirely uncovered there either.
Even in the Windows PC side most vendors are using 2-in-1 convertibles to cover the Surface Pro. (along with the usual wide angle buckshot at the broad side of the barn approach to product line ups. ) It is not an exact hardware-to-hardware match.
Making Macs and making Mac Pros is not the same set. Apple dropped selling XServe and the number of Macs sold per year has gone significantly up. If looked at most of the tech porn sites in the Fall the "touchbar" Mac was a 'bad idea'. Actual sales to real people... actually quite high. The number of "doom and gloom" in this forum is indicative of at lot less the actual overall Mac market then most of those folks want to admit.
if they wanted to do the 5K support those MBP have .... yes they did. There is a limited number of DisplayPort outputs on the Intel iGPUs. The way Apple does the touchscreen did not consume a iGPUs output at all. macOS draws into a framebuffer and the CPU driving the touchpad copies the contents of the framebuffer out and using its own GPU (and associated output) to draw the screen on the touchpad screen. Sucking up one of Intel DP outputs to drive that relatively small screen is a whole lot of gross overkill.
It is a watch sized screen. A watch like GPU makes alot of sense. It isn't just fingerprint data too. The secure enclave to be used to push encryption keys away where rogue x86 software running on the Intel processor can't get to it at all.
So once commit to the touchpad about the size of a watch the reast just falls into place. Since have all of that other stuff adding the fingerprint sensor is just a minor, value add, extension. ( Security wise probably better that vaat majority of Windows PC with a fingerprint sensor. )
I think they like different tech gadgets for different reasons. Folks are also overlooking that part of Jobs gadget skew was in being CEO of Pixar ( and then following as Disney board member who had soft spot for all of the Disney Animator since the Pixar folks essentially did an internal take-over of that; i.e., still looking after Pixar. )
Jobs' interesting in what was going into the Pixar render farm or onto the desks of the workers at Pixar really wasn't an interest in his personal "daily driver" machine. I think some of Cooks comments come from what he does use as a "daily driver" (at work iPad and at home AppleTV and in workouts AppleWatch ).
Apple has an internal management training "university". ( two articles )
https://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/2...s-with-focus-on-missteps-of-apple-and-others/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/-inside-apples-internal-training-program-.html?_r=0
Some of Jobs' dogma has been incorporated into Apple. This isn't just "Cook is floundering" as much as Apple has been constructed/configured to follow some of the Jobs dogma. If this internal Apple university couldn't churn out folks who were tuned to and could work for Jobs, it probably would have lasted.
Jobs was wrong more than a few times. (quote from NYTimes article above ).
"... Mr. Jobs hated the idea of sharing the iPod with Windows, but he eventually acquiesced to his lieutenants. ..."
There was another article recently about him being dead set again the "Genius Bar" in the Apple store. Eventually he got tired about being bugged about it and let it through. Apple has never been one person critical. That is just way, way, way overblown.
Jobs was looking for iPod and then iPhone so he wasn't primarily focused on Mac. (that is just plain revisionist history).
There a fixed number of Mac products Apple will pursue. So if add another Mac product another is either going to slow down dramatically or get killed off. That is partially because Apple pragmatically caps the functional resources assigned. Shared designers , engineers, etc. ( Apple tries to remain a small company even as forced to grow. ).
There is a synchronization that folks would have to adjust to. The folks who saw the Mac Pro 2013 and just planned on some kind of "protest boycott" to produce another old form factor release in 2014-2015 were largely delusional. The printers didn't come back after they were canceled. The XServe didn't come back. The name of the MacBook might have been recycled but the entry laptop of that name akin to the iBook ... gone. MBP 17 ... gone. The broad mishmash of boxes with slots when Jobs came back? Axed and has never returned.
The Mac Pro went from 2010 to 2013 without a major update.
if you want to be profitable it is. Going through tons of expensive R&D effort when the vast majority of market isn't going to buy it doesn't make business sense. Intel and AMD cycles are getting longer. The GPU vendors rebadge the same general design for multiple years. The whole underlying infrastructure isn't moving very fast either. The is tons of arm flapping marketing in the general Windows PC market but that is far more driven by the extremely broad product line ups ( which doesn't drive healthier profit margins). If have 24 products and do 2 a month for a year you will have just updated the whole line. If just do 1 a month can cycle through line up in 2 years.
Big iron 100K-1M machines have longer cycles and those customers do just fine synching buying to those cycles.
The disconnect with the Mac Pro is that they cycle is different than the other Macs and certainly different from the iPhone.
The Cube died. It was more an homage to the NeXT Cube than something that made sense in Apple's Mac product catalog strategy.
The iPad Pro isn't a MBA replacement. If look at the last quarterly conference call.
"... Q from Steve Milunovich, UBS: iPad looked like it was going to turn positive, but it stayed negative, and ASP (average selling price) dropped. ...
Cook: .... On top of that on the ASP front, a year ago we launched the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Launch plus channel fill of that high-priced model bolstered the ASP in that quarter. "
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/01/31/q1-2017-results/
Imagine what iPad numbers would look like if there was no "Pro" models to boost up the average selling price? Pretty bad. The iPad is being squeezed hard by Chromebooks.
The Mac Pro doesn't have leverage on overall Mac revenues that the iPad Pro has on iPads. The numbers are way too small relative to the rest of the Macs and Apple is growing (or pretty close to treading water when the updates take too long) number of units sold.
tvOS is a App Store revenue generator. Taking a skim off of HBO/Netflix/Hulu/etc content subscriptions is a long term, stable revenue source. Yet another "iFart" app isn't. No way this is a mistake. You are vastly missing the big picture if you think so.
The watch is making money. The BS part of the watch was that $10K Gold version. It is now dead. Apple has made money back here (minus some of the yet to be delivered R&D on fitness sensors) . So it is hardly a mistake. If the electronics and battery tech get to point can merge phone capabilities into the watch (and still get more than day battery life time ) then this is a relatively young product. There is upside here just in deeper monetization of the iPhone market.
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Bottom line: There are many professionals that use Macs, and they're getting antsy for new hardware. I have a 2010 cheese grater that suits my needs for now, but I don't know how much longer it will be sufficient. Apple's competitors have stepped up their game, and Apple's been dragging their feet.
If Apple decides it doesn't need the pro market (which is fine I guess, they'll still exist as a profitable company), then pros will decide they don't need Apple. I don't know about other posters, but the thought of being forced back into the Windows ecosystem makes me retch.
To me it seems being forced is exactly what a lot of people here actually needs right now. Because its been years and people still complain and say "if not this wwdc or that date, im out" ...etc etc...Guess what, Apple don't care! ANd you'r never gonna see them care about the pros ever! Maybe you'll see a really disappointing new Mac Pro speed bump some day, after all this time, which they will keep another 10 years...Just switch all ready. There's no excuse for not being able to update a gpu and cpu in the Mac Pro with newer ones, maybe it cost them a tiiiiny bit of effort because they choose to make the pro machines with custom shaped hardware. ...but that's not an excuse, if that holds them back they shouldn't have made it that way in the first place... They don't even make these hardwares themselves for crying out loud, they buy it from others..., they just need to slap it in there. The fact that they don't bother, just proves they couldn't care less about the pros (despite what Tim says, because he pretends to care about everyone, as long as he wants them to be loyal to his wallet). I switched back to windows 6 months ago, I'm never EVER gonna let Apple control when I buy a professional machine again. And guess what, I'm enjoying this machine just as much as I did my $4000 Mac....and knowing I can make it more powerful whenever I want without having to buy a completely new machine, just makes me feel even better about my investment. And obviously I made a good choice, because nothing of importance has come out of Apple ever since.... Apple as a Pro Machine, good riddance!
Windows has managed to get progressively worse since 7, and before Microsoft either drops support or forces another update I decided to switch. Upgradeable hardware or not, it would take a lot for me to switch back.
And you're vastly underestimating the amount of effort needed by Apple to update the hardware eon something like the trashcan Mac Pro, since it's almost 100% proprietary design (though nothing is soldered, so technically it is user-serviceable).
how is this any less of a rant than my point of views?
ANd yeah, sure I understand, so fully excusable if it takes approx 5 more years until they give the Mac Pro any other update then...enjoy your apple ecosystem then
only the pro machine, I still use apple, but I actually have demands for my pro machines power.
Another take on the above:
I suspect the ones who truly are forced back into the Windows ecosystem by Apple's choices are a rather small group in reality. We have a fellow here in the thread boasting of his current workstation setup that Apple hardware has never been able to match - but in reality, I believe most people who need such power buy regular servers or even server farms with similar specs, using their workstation mostly for dry-runs of jobs that will run on the properly strong machines.
What you do have, and which Apple has not been able to do anything about, is the very large group of people who believe that newer is better no matter what.
At work a while ago, I had a group of users I was unable to get to grasp that the fastest available laptop for their workload was the previous year's model. Apple chose not to release a laptop when they couldn't get a newer-gen CPU with the same core count as the previous year and caught massive flak for that choice from the uninformed masses. Our regular supplier instead made the decision to go ahead and release an inferior product seemingly only to be able to increment their model numbers during that year, and only a few geeks ever mentioned it as a crappy move.
To return to workstations:
Yes, it sucks not to see proper updates, and it would suck even more to pay serious money for a product that got updated a month later, but I'm frankly a bit curious: what percentage of Apple's Mac Pro customers would actually see a real-life (not to mention monetizable) difference in performance from an updated model today? What about a year ago?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Apple's problem with the Mac Pro probably is psychological to a much larger degree than it is technical. Some power users could definitely benefit from an "Apple Z840", but that has to be a pretty small share of the whole.
I would still like an Apple pro desktop.
No one's saying it should be updated every month, but 4 years is too long. CPUs may have only made smaller incremental steps forward, but GPU power has grown by leaps and bounds.
Hell, Apple doesn't even sell the Thunderbolt Display, and is on Thunderbolt 3 right now, the current-gen Mac Pro doesn't have TB3 and only one HDMI port (compared to 6 TB2 ports). It needs an update in the worst way, and people are getting restless.
THe Mac Pro is 4 years old, a lot has happened since the Mac Pro came out. If you are doing 3d rendering, it is actually a big deal. THe maxed out mac pro is 12 core xeon processors. Today you get 18 core for less of a price than what apple charge for their outdated 12 cores. thats 6 cores more and 12 more threads for rendering. So if a render takes 30 mins per frame you save something like 10 mins per frame. For me all this matters, because previously with my mac I usually sent of renders to a farm and paid for every frame, now with a more powerful machine I only use a farm if I render animations, because my machine is fast enough to do it on its own. a 12 core mac could probably do "nearly" the same, but for the price tag its just not worth it, because then I could buy a PC twice as powerful for the same price.
ANd GPU is even in a worse state...
Windows 10 isn't bad.
None of us decided to kill the pci slot, or make the machine fit a small thermal envelope for the sake of form over function. Given the option, I would bet a majority of pro users just wanted a faster 5,1 still in the tower form.
If you stay with Apple, you're at the mercy of Apple. The question is, do they really care if the pro users stay?
That's not a fact; actually, the general sense is that Windows never looked better. Microsoft is on the right track for the first time and they managed to make a unified OS that is suitable for desktop, mobile and touch.
Who pointed a gun to their head and forced them to go with all this proprietary and underpowered nonsense ? It was their choice, hence it cannot be used as an excuse for the lack of upgrades. They alone created the problem in the first place.
Windows 10 is generally solid, but it still randomly barfs on occasion, so on a stability basis macOS is better in my personal experience. I also feel the UI is much better on macOS. Windows 10 is also still built on the same codebase as Vista, 7 and 8, though it hides the baggage of that a fair bit better.
I've used Windows since 98, I know that's a short amount of time for most people here, but nonetheless the peaks were easily at XP and 7 (You can see this because Windows 10 still doesn't have the market share Windows 7 does). I don't know where Windows is going, but I don't like it. I don't like being constantly bugged for updates until being forced to update, I don't like ad ******** in my start menu or file browser (and I don't care that there's a setting to turn it off, there will only be a setting there until they decide that you don't get a choice in the matter anymore, which they have done with telemetry), I don't like not knowing what driver will break in the next update, and I don't like the look, the window management, or the non-unix OS. I'm easily 10x as productive as I was using 7, and I don't have to find workarounds to do things that I want to do, and I don't play enough Windows-only games to justify using continually.
And if I didn't stay at Apple, I would be at the mercy of Windows (because I need to use stuff that isn't Linux-compatible). Truth be told Apple is still the more merciful master over Windows.
Someday Apple will regret their decisions to not support touch on laptops and desktops.
"Planet of the Apps" will go very badly for Apple, but they won't even realize it. Apple will attempt to glamorize the Apps business to restore the lost illusion that apps are a viable business. The show will fail because it's a concocted puddle of saccharine Flavor Aid puke barfed on Apple polished astro-turf. Anyone who has real business experience already knows this, but the show will expose the truth to nearly everyone else.
Apple won't have a clue as they gulp down a poison concoction of their own making. The Apple circle (jerk) campus will be renamed "Jonestown" when it is all over.
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The problem with Windows is indeed the legacy code it's been based on for decades.
You can still find really old files in recent versions.
I guess that might be changing though.
Still, I believe they're going the wrong direction when it comes to UI. But that's just me.
It seems AMD really made Intel move their a$$es.
Like I've been hoping, the nMP might feature SKL-W.
ES showing up for SKL Xeons v5 with - imagine that - 32 cores/64 threads, when it was reported earlier that it would max out at 28 cores (with the usual spares).
It's beginning to take shape, I'm confident the nMP lives on and it will be like I've been preaching.
[doublepost=1490044479][/doublepost]http://wccftech.com/intel-skylake-e5-2699-v5-32-core-geekbench-score-leaked/
You can still find really old files in recent versions.
I guess that might be changing though.
Still, I believe they're going the wrong direction when it comes to UI. But that's just me.
It seems AMD really made Intel move their a$$es.
Like I've been hoping, the nMP might feature SKL-W.
ES showing up for SKL Xeons v5 with - imagine that - 32 cores/64 threads, when it was reported earlier that it would max out at 28 cores (with the usual spares).
It's beginning to take shape, I'm confident the nMP lives on and it will be like I've been preaching.
[doublepost=1490044479][/doublepost]http://wccftech.com/intel-skylake-e5-2699-v5-32-core-geekbench-score-leaked/