@Peace Completely agree. With this coming out before NAB potentially in an effort to sway any efforts of folks looking to move to different platforms. Because they really are fooling themselves if the think people aren't looking if they haven't already jumped, timing is interesting.
Apple knows people are leaving Mac everyday. People come into Macs every day. That there is moment. There is movement all the time... it is not a new or unique or temporary event.
The timing is more so because there was really no even remotely credible reason for there not have been an update. Xeon E5 v4 systems are shipping. Yet another generation of new GPUs are shipping. The folks who bought AppleCare on their brand new MP back in Jan-Feb 2013 support coverage
has expired. The fact that Apple has is clusterf*cked in getting something out the door at this point is obvious to almost everyone.
For Apple to look over in the Mac development lab and see either a whole lot of nothing even remotely shippable or something that wasn't "insanely great enough" for their tastes. Who would they think they are fooling?
Having some "feedback" from NAB and then a tease of where they are heading with WWDC, which would be great for developers
Who has tickets to WWDC or is going to put alot of effort into watching online hasn't seen one of those 4 four articles posted or a news story pointing back to one of them? There are some but do they care. Anyone who as been looking for Mac Pro news for last 6-7 months this was an major eruption in the new cycle. Missed this ... where were you looking????
What tease... Apple isn't going to have anything substantive done in next two months. If they can't get a product out for minimally at least 8 months from now ... what they have now is mostly nothing worth showing in a dog and pony show. WWDC is strip club , burlesque show. That's dubious. It is not.
Apple getting up and saying "Hey guess what we are working on a Mac back in the lab that you'll never use this year". It is waste of seriously limited time. Why wouldn't Apple be in the lab working on a Mac?
What be more "pro" impact at WWDC that isn't solely about the still in early bake phase Mac Pro is :
What is Apple doing about GPGPU programming. Filling the OpenCL hole with what?
OpenGL ... long term plan?? Not Vulkan then what? Metal forever as a single viable long term option?
APFS doesn't work with Fusion Drive or RAID formats ... what's up with that?
better AI/NeuralNet libraries optimizations that work on the 100M already deployed macs.
better XYZ class librarary that could help my apps this upcoming Fall-Winter.
..... etc. etc.. There are very real software issues.
eGPUs ... not going to formally do at all in the future? [ it is a software issue about enabling hardware capability across a large swath of the mac ecosystem. ]
who may be looking to see what direction they are heading to take full advantage of the "vision" they have in mind.
How much of the macOS stack only work on the Mac Pro? This library only works on 1% of all Macs ... why would developers get excited about that?
I'd be more surprised if there was no word on the "Pro" front.
Prepared to be surprised other than the often repeated "We do care about Mac" , "We do care about Pros". Deep details not even close ...
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Your analogy has one huge fallacy.
You are like a guy you goes up to an orthodox jew or islamic person and say " You gotta eat this pork". And they say "no, thank you it is against my religion"
In this case the orthodox jew or islamic person came up to me. I didn't walk up to him.
No they did not. Apple did NOT come up to talk about details of the new Mac Pro. When pressed you can read in those transcripts you can see they
repeatedly refused to give up details. What Apple talked about was their understanding of some of the aspects of why the
current Mac Pro didn't do better than they hoped. It is a released system. The details of it, and it problems it has, they can relatively freely talk about. That is
not in conflict with standing corporate policy about talking about
future products.
There are some really super slim, vague generalities about the new system but are always in the context of of the old. "Well, we can't do big budget single card systems, now.". Did they commit to doing them in the future? Not really. It is an opportunity, not a commitment. Far more grounded here is "We know the folks in this space could bolt for other solutions". Implicitly they would probably like to keep them but at what costs and tradeoffs they don't say.
The main communication Apple was trying to make is that was along the lines of 'we are working on something'. They don't want to talk about the something at all. They want to talk about the fact they are actually working. The vast perception is that they are
not working on much of anything. That was really the meat of the discussion.
That is
exactly why the whole meeting was in a room with machine tools that grind stuff. We are grinding stuff here... really working hard.
Apple should have something but they don't. So that's the partial autopsy of the old Mac Pro design strategy. That is about the present and backwards; not forwards.
