MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)

[deconstruct60]

I rather think that the iMac Pro was the intended replacement for the Trashcan Mac Pro but something happened that made them change their mind...twitter outcry from pros on Twitter, VR/AR who knows?

It is extremely unlikely it was social media (Twitter, these forums , etc). The April 2017 meeting/"pow wow" they had with reporters about the "Macs and the Pro space" was 2-3 months before the iMac Pro was introduced. Stories about the Mac Pro 2013 being going so long without update was an issue they were trying to control though. I wasn't a coincidence that the MP 2013 got a price cut around the same time as that meeting.

There were about 1-2 odd threads with odd matching of iMac with "Xeon" in these forum that got some attention, but not much.

AR ( augmented reality ) is a very unlikely primary driver. Apple has deployed AR apps on the iPhone. Ultra-extreme VR is trendy in the press but not a substantive base. The broader category of GPU computational 'horsepower' was probably an issue though. The iMac Pro would end up with essentially the same power limitations at the MP 2013 had. Where two GPUs was useful ( and there were MP 2013 customers happy in that camp) the 400-480W envelope of the iMac Pro (MP 2013) doesn't work as well. That isn't just "VR" but more computational horsepower for a variety of solutions. For example doubling that to 800-950W would capture another class of solutions.


They likely did get some feedback from the extremely small number of non disclosure customers they briefed on it. However, the notion that they completely didn't know they were 'missing' some of the former customer base with the MP 2013 and iMac Pro ... it is highly unlikely that happened. The number of folks who were still sticking around on 5,1's probably got clearer. They also probably tweaked some of the 27" iMac and MP 2013 users with the whole no RAM door thing too.

The other problem was component suppliers. AMD drifting off their long term GPU roadmap milestones was a problem for the MP 2013. Intel getting twisted up later was only yet another example. Apple needs a system where they make some high percentage of the design calls but has some flexibility when their projections of where things are gong is off (can't see 100% of the future). Thunderbolt gives them an out, but a couple of standard slots would be an even broader out if added on top of that baseline. I doubt they changed their minds on Thunderbolt. Just more pragmatic about what the scope of that is .

What they may have changed their mind on is just how small a percentage can they go. Is 2, 1 , or 0.5% of the Mac market worth being in. The iMac Pro really doesn't change that much.
[doublepost=1539956215][/doublepost]

...
And the belief that Apple's going to replace intel with ARM? It doesn't make sense. Apple knows their creative base, (a big chunk of who these machines appeal to), rely on programs like Logic, Adobe CC, Pro Tools etc... None of which are ready to run a full suite on iOS/ARM.

The full Adobe CC suite? No. Photoshop? already announced as coming in 2019.

An ARM SoC into the current MacBook shell would make sense. iPad Pro getting a USB Type C connector ( one and only one connector). MacBook with one and only one USB Type-C connector. They are about completely matched up. Apple has done the viability of a single general data port device. Rip the headphone jack off and put on a FaceID camera array and they'd be completely lined up.

Apple with an iOS iBook that went after the Chromebook and the sub $900 Windows 2-in-1s makes sense. Apple expanding "iPad iOS" into new spaces wouldn't be a surprise. They could use the shell of a Mac to go that way. ( some chromebooks and windows 2-in-1 largely share the almost the exact same chassis. )

The entire Mac line up top-to-bottom on ARM is lunacy. Apple splitting the Mac line up into two "halves" is highly dubious, but Apple has done some dubious things.

(Although Logic technically could, Apple are well aware that Logic users love their 3rd party AUs.) Switching everything else over to ARM however ....
Plus, why would they have just introduced the introduce the iMac Pro with Intel, only to overshadow it with a machine that appeals to the same exact sector but runs only on Arm? That just doesn't make sense...

I think there is a difference between the subset of the Mac market that the "industry analysts" care about and the whole Mac Market. It think they are looking for Apple to largely go 'laptop only" and shift to ARM. A mobile Mac skew of the world. That is most of the revenues and units shipments so that is all the "matters' ( to folks picking stock prices ).

If Apple was shifting everything over to ARM as the fantasy outlines, then the iMac Pro would shift over too. The new Mac Pro with more than one internal drive (some M.2 sockets) , a couple of standard slots , a substantially higher power supply and cooling budget, twice as many RAM DIMM slots, etc. wouldn't be "the same exact sector" even if keep the CPUs and GPUs largely the same ( but run in different thermal envelopes).

 

[filmak]

we dont go to other system because it is just not what we want. You can always get what you want, i know, but hey not trying is not geting you anywere.
had a hackintosh with windows 10 and tryied to give it a real try...
but it was just not a mac... even the „hight end“ gamer hardware stuff i used to built the hackintosh was cheap plastic crap nothing was reliable, it was geting the job done , but the user experience on the PC side was just plain pain.
Even the supermicro chassis I‘m using who‘s suposedly „high end servergrade“ hardware is just dirt cheap fabrication.
any one who have touched a X serve or a classic mac pro, knows how well crafted those machine were.
I wont switch to PC or unix, and I am a 100% sure that if apple dont give us the machine we want we will just launch a kickstarter project and built our own...

Yes valid points, but what options are left after so many years of no new hardware?
There will be a point that you won't be able to wait anymore, for some of us sooner or later, and you will have some projects to work on. HP Z series maybe?
[doublepost=1539957384][/doublepost]

We finally had to jump ship, and replaced a number of our 5,1 MPs with HP Z8s. A rather dramatic increase in CPU throughput.

Have you got used to the OS etc easily?

 

[Naimfan]

Have you got used to the OS etc easily?

Most DoD computers are windows anyway, and we mainly use them for data analysis. And it is, after all, simply an OS - it's not a religion, and it's not like W10 is THAT hard to use. Still on Mac for home and teaching.

 

[edgerider]

Yes valid points, but what options are left after so many years of no new hardware?
There will be a point that you won't be able to wait anymore, for some of us sooner or later, and you will have some projects to work on. HP Z series maybe?
[doublepost=1539957384][/doublepost]
Have you got used to the OS etc easily?

actualy in my field, a cMP with 128gb of ram, 4sm951 in raid 0 a 24 bay raid and 4 p4000 still do a lot.
I was about to shelf money on a Z8 wich is a far better hardware, and finally bought a set of xserve for 300€ and set them up as a pure media encoder render, and me being able to keep working on the cMP while the xserve get to do heavy lifting for hours, is actually more productive than waching a fast super computer work fast...
even if a Z8 is 4 time faster , I would still have to wait for it when doing an export... now i just send the export to media envoder on the xserve and keep working while it‘s done...
[doublepost=1539974344][/doublepost]

Yes valid points, but what options are left after so many years of no new hardware?
There will be a point that you won't be able to wait anymore, for some of us sooner or later, and you will have some projects to work on. HP Z series maybe?
[doublepost=1539957384][/doublepost]
Have you got used to the OS etc easily?

to me as I stated before, if apple dont give us what we want (a apple branded Z8) then i will explore the oportunity to launch a kickstarter campaign to have a custom eatx motherboard built with just a Imac Pro spected component for 1000€
If apple dont give us the machine we want , i can totally see people buying a 100% hackintosh-ready imac pro clone
with two integrated pcie 96 lane switch and 5 double width 16x slot and a external pcie x 16 slot on the i/o shield,
intel W processor slot, 8 ram slot, 4 thunderbolt port, 1 x 10gbe ethernet.
basicaly it is „just“ puting all we already have made working on a simple but yet all in one modular motherboard.

I dont think mac efi boot rom are this much of a secret and people like supermicro or asus, or gigabyte will not do such a product unless you order them
5000 motherboards and producing a motherboard with dual bios ( read two eprom with one a standard PC bios and one that can be flashed with a mac efi bios) shouldn‘t be that hard.

if you look how the let promise took the storage business from them, i dont think they would have a group of entousiast building those machine. if apple would have wanted to kill hackintosh or us fideling around with 4.1 and 5.1, they would have fighted this way harder.

the way I see it is : ok folks, keep doing your stuffs if it work, no matter what we can do the real machine when we want
if we see it is a sucess... if it fail any how we will keep selling 1500€ iphones...

you and me could easely have a so „hackintosh friendly“ computer built without arming apple because they own the operating system. remenber the clones saga back in the day when 9600 were so expensive and obsolete...

 

[shaunp]

Here's a thought. There are plenty of people who say things like 'The Pro market is diminishing', 'Apple only want to make products for the consumer', 'Most pro's have already switched', etc, etc, but what most people don't talk about is what Apple use internally. They are now a massive, massive company and forget those who are the public face of Apple and have us believe were are in a post PC era, what about the those who actually run the business, the 'Power Users' within Apple and those that support them? What do they use? I accept there are many in Apple who can run off an iMac or even a base-level MacBook, but what about those who require more and their own tech support department - those in the basement who run anything but a standard config. Are Apple saying these people don't exist, or that they could all make do with an iPad, or perhaps they all use ThinkPads as they actually have to get stuff done? I also wonder how many of their internal power users look at the Mac product line up and would actually spend their own money on these things if they had to. How many of them bring their own keyboard to work because the standard Apple keyboards are utterly crap. Maybe Tim, Jonny and co need to take a trip down to their own IT department, and also visit the guys running the icloud data centres while you are at it.

The home PC is a diminishing market because a tablet will do for the majority, it's instant on and they don't have to put up with Windows updates, but the pro market? I see more and more people on trains with laptops, and almost everyone has at least 2 screens on their desk now too. I work freelance and move between a lot of companies and I see the same thing everywhere - laptops and desktops and hardly any iPads, apart from those use to watch movies on the commute home. Post PC era my ass!

 

[Peace]

Here's a thought. There are plenty of people who say things like 'The Pro market is diminishing', 'Apple only want to make products for the consumer', 'Most pro's have already switched', etc, etc, but what most people don't talk about is what Apple use internally. They are now a massive, massive company and forget those who are the public face of Apple and have us believe were are in a post PC era, what about the those who actually run the business, the 'Power Users' within Apple and those that support them? What do they use? I accept there are many in Apple who can run off an iMac or even a base-level MacBook, but what about those who require more and their own tech support department - those in the basement who run anything but a standard config. Are Apple saying these people don't exist, or that they could all make do with an iPad, or perhaps they all use ThinkPads as they actually have to get stuff done? I also wonder how many of their internal power users look at the Mac product line up and would actually spend their own money on these things if they had to. How many of them bring their own keyboard to work because the standard Apple keyboards are utterly crap. Maybe Tim, Jonny and co need to take a trip down to their own IT department, and also visit the guys running the icloud data centres while you are at it.

The home PC is a diminishing market because a tablet will do for the majority, it's instant on and they don't have to put up with Windows updates, but the pro market? I see more and more people on trains with laptops, and almost everyone has at least 2 screens on their desk now too. I work freelance and move between a lot of companies and I see the same thing everywhere - laptops and desktops and hardly any iPads, apart from those use to watch movies on the commute home. Post PC era my ass!

So umm..All these people are pros ?

 

[AidenShaw]

And this also is why you are not the chief of anything at Apple.

...and we're exactly equal in that regard.
[doublepost=1539977797][/doublepost]

No one would in their right mind fire Jonathan Ive, least of all Apple. Steve Jobs made sure to point that out.

The Board of Directors could fire Jony at any time. They are not bound by anything that former CEOs put in place.

 

[aaronhead14]

Count me as another vote for Apple cancelling the MacPro

That's an odd phrasing. Are you saying that you WANT Apple to cancel the Mac Pro? Because that's what it means to vote--using your voice to say what you want.
If you DO want the Mac Pro to still be a thing, but you simply THINK it's not going to happen, then you should use phrasing that doesn't sound like you're cheering for the Mac Pro's demise. Apple employees do read these forums, you know. It's best to be clear about what we want and what we think.

Having said that, I believe the folks at Apple are intelligent and have recognized their mistakes, and have chosen to make a user-upgradeable Mac Pro to cater to professionals. It's 6 months away maximum. It's happening, and we should cheer for it, and keep encouraging Apple to support PCIe and other standard components.

 

[wildmac]

Let's be real here. the iMacPro is targeted at "light" design users. Plenty of these folk where I work. They do Premiere or Photoshop all day, they barely know how to plug in a card reader, and would generally die if they had to change platforms.

Then you have the hardcore design studio people, who are running 12 apps at once, and neither the DarthMacPro, or the iMacPro, really meet their needs. Neither is really expandable, and the iMacPro is underpowered for them.

Finally you have the hardcore 3D and video guys, and most of them have already gone PC already (or are working on very customized cMPs).

At best this month we get a MacMiniPro, which might meet the needs of the first group. The other two groups won't see anything from Apple for at least another year, and I'm very doubtful they'll ever see a sufficient offering. And even if they do, there's going to be such distrust, from both the target users, and the 3rd party hardware community, that the project might be DOA.

Myself, my DarthMac has a couple years left in it, unless the software I use stops supporting able because of the double-down on Metal.
[doublepost=1539979025][/doublepost]

Having said that, I believe the folks at Apple are intelligent and have recognized their mistakes, and have chosen to make a user-upgradeable Mac Pro to cater to professionals. It's 6 months away maximum. It's happening, and we should cheer for it, and keep encouraging Apple to support PCIe and other standard components.

It would be nice, but I've also lived with Apple screwing me over with the cancellation of Xserve and XRAID in the past. I don't trust them any longer to develop good solutions for anything beyond consumer devices.

 

[Peace]

Let's be real here. the iMacPro is targeted at "light" design users. Plenty of these folk where I work. They do Premiere or Photoshop all day, they barely know how to plug in a card reader, and would generally die if they had to change platforms.

Then you have the hardcore design studio people, who are running 12 apps at once, and neither the DarthMacPro, or the iMacPro, really meet their needs. Neither is really expandable, and the iMacPro is underpowered for them.

Finally you have the hardcore 3D and video guys, and most of them have already gone PC already (or are working on very customized cMPs).

At best this month we get a MacMiniPro, which might meet the needs of the first group. The other two groups won't see anything from Apple for at least another year, and I'm very doubtful they'll ever see a sufficient offering. And even if they do, there's going to be such distrust, from both the target users, and the 3rd party hardware community, that the project might be DOA.

Myself, my DarthMac has a couple years left in it, unless the software I use stops supporting able because of the double-down on Metal.
[doublepost=1539979025][/doublepost]

It would be nice, but I've also lived with Apple screwing me over with the cancellation of Xserve and XRAID in the past. I don't trust them any longer to develop good solutions for anything beyond consumer devices.

The first clue should have been when Apple Computer became Apple,Inc.

 

[wildmac]

The first clue should have been when Apple Computer became Apple,Inc.

Nah, my first clue was when I went to my 3rd (and final) MacWorld expo about 15 years ago. One of the iPod gens had just come out, don't remember which one, and 1/2 the show floor was dedicated to multicolored iPod cases from every plastics company in China. Never went to a MacWorld again.

 

[shaunp]

So umm..All these people are pros ?

Nope. Define 'Pro'. However the brands which are investing in pro tools (Lenovo, HP and Dell) are all increasing market share. If you look at typical Apple territory, HP have just launched a bunch of machines aimed at pro photographers. Dell and Lenovo keep increasing the specs of their workstation class laptops, and all three of them actually have desktop workstations. The general public don't buy these, but the people who create the content the general public use certainly do.

 

[kipwheeler]

Further, you'd cover the notion that the "clean lines" with which he [Ive] is obsessed to a fault, are merely a form of decorative ornament, that are precisely about design as how something looks, over how it functions. You'd then compare that to Ive's self-identification as a designer who is more concerned with function. Include quotes of Ive as he postures as a capital M form-follows-function Modernist, then compare that to his practice, showing how his work is decoration & ornament-happy form-dictates-function PostModernist in nature.

... The touchbar MBP may sell like hotcakes, but it's also the only current-tech macOS laptop you can buy, so it's success doesn't validate Ive's design choices. Maybe it's selling well because people want the touchbar, maybe it's selling well in spite of the touchbar, because people want a mac laptop with the most current processors, iCloud and other software stickyness, and the touchbar is just a parasitic technology that's along for the ride.

I like the touchbar myself, but you are spot on in your Modernist vs. Postmodernist comment in the nature of Ive's designs.

 

[zedsdeadbaby]

A good baseline of who Apple defines as "pro" is the current mac page...
Photography, programming, and music currently, I doubt these are arbitrary choices.

I don't code, and don't do photography with any authenticity so I won't make any claims I can't back up there... In terms of audio/video however....

Macs have no unique edge for video, (if anything this is where Windows has been winning for quite a few years now.)

Core audio does however give apple an advantage. A number of advantage in terms of stability and compatibility, but more importantly, unlike Microsoft Apple have their own discreet plugin standard with Audio Units. A standard that virtually very plugin developer supports now. (Even moreso than AAX.) And, just seeing Audio Units as a format under a 3rd part developers options is a massive advertisement for Apple.... Furthermore Logic is updated more aggressively than FCPX, and it's one of the 3 most popular choices for film and TV composers...

I really don't think Apple are fooling themselves with who the "pro" market is for them. And although I'm sure Apple would like to see FCPX make a resurgence, development of the two suggests that they're well aware that Logic's the breadwinner of the two for the moment...

 

[SillySammy]

I suspect that the whole "waiting for the new MacPro" will just be another installment of the play "Waiting for Godot".

That said, there are any number of high end PeeCee apps that would likely take advantage of a powerful desktop for a MacOS platform better than Windows.

Data Science and BI tools like Data Robot, ..etc. could leverage things like local TensorFlow and MXnet with docker or K8s running locally using the GPU before pushing to something like EMR, DataProc, HDI or Hadoop in general.

 

[barmann]

The full Adobe CC suite? No. Photoshop? already announced as coming in 2019.

The full Photoshop for iOS announcement is getting mentioned a lot lately .
People who work with PS, or other editing programs, on a certain level, might agree with me when I call it a marketing hoax .

Even if tablets ever became powerful enough and added usable connectivity for the required input devices and extrenal screens , Apple haven't exactly been busy making their tablets more integratable . To say the least ...

 

[shaunp]

A good baseline of who Apple defines as "pro" is the current mac page...
Photography, programming, and music currently, I doubt these are arbitrary choices.

I don't code, and don't do photography with any authenticity so I won't make any claims I can't back up there... In terms of audio/video however....

Macs have no unique edge for video, (if anything this is where Windows has been winning for quite a few years now.)

Core audio does however give apple an advantage. A number of advantage in terms of stability and compatibility, but more importantly, unlike Microsoft Apple have their own discreet plugin standard with Audio Units. A standard that virtually very plugin developer supports now. (Even moreso than AAX.) And, just seeing Audio Units as a format under a 3rd part developers options is a massive advertisement for Apple.... Furthermore Logic is updated more aggressively than FCPX, and it's one of the 3 most popular choices for film and TV composers...

I really don't think Apple are fooling themselves with who the "pro" market is for them. And although I'm sure Apple would like to see FCPX make a resurgence, development of the two suggests that they're well aware that Logic's the breadwinner of the two for the moment...

This is what get's me about Apple. They are clearly into photography, and see photographers as a key market, but then go and do things like ditch Aperture and replace it with the Photos app after they've let Adobe run off with their customers. They do know that LR and PS actually run faster on a PC and once you are in the app you don't really think about the OS? It just leaves the barn doors wide open for a migration from Mac to another platform.

Apple seem to enter a market, become really good at it and then walk away. Xserve and Xsan were interesting products, now discontinued. Aperture, great. Showed Adobe the way forward, now discontinued. MacBook Pro and Mac Pro, shows the market what desktop and mobile workstations should look like. They've now become 'iToys'.

 

[zedsdeadbaby]

This is what get's me about Apple. They are clearly into photography, and see photographers as a key market, but then go and do things like ditch Aperture and replace it with the Photos app after they've let Adobe run off with their customers. They do know that LR and PS actually run faster on a PC and once you are in the app you don't really think about the OS? It just leaves the barn doors wide open for a migration from Mac to another platform.

Apple seem to enter a market, become really good at it and then walk away. Xserve and Xsan were interesting products, now discontinued. Aperture, great. Showed Adobe the way forward, now discontinued. MacBook Pro and Mac Pro, shows the market what desktop and mobile workstations should look like. They've now become 'iToys'.

For photography and video definitely agree... They've made some really stupid moves that pushed a lot of people over to Windows. Although I'm no pro photographer Aperature's great example. Same with Final Cut... Before FCPX, FCP was a pretty big player in the video market. They completely screwed that up with FCPX, most editors I know who used FCP moved to Adobe/Windows...

Logic's the one thing they haven't screwed up though... Logic's also no joke...
These were all scored by Logic users: Game of Thrones, Mr Robot, American Horror Story, Gone Girl, The Girl with the Dragon tattoo, Social Network, House of Cards, Pacific Rim, The Avengers, Silent Hill 8 and 9, Dexter... (Obviously a drop in the bucket but you get the point...)

Film/TV scoring will never happen on an iOS device. None of the heavy duty scoring instruments like Kontakt, Omnisphere, Play etc could ever be used properly on any current version of a tablet, and no film composer in their right mind would rely on a tablet to run a DAW synced to picture. (That's not to say Apple couldn't screw it up like they have with photography and video.)

There's a few other things to consider though... Logic is one of the most fully featured DAWs available. It also costs 2-3 times less than all the other major players. If Apple were out to rake it in at every corner the price of Logic would've been inflated, but not only is it cheaper, the cost has gone down over the years. So, Logic is basically a loss leader in terms of its actual revenue, yet Apple spends the cash to Acquire Camel Audio a few years back and it's still developed to be competitive...

All signs should point to Apple putting Logic out to pasture in favor of Garage Band and ditching the high end computer line in favor of iOS, yet within the last year they've released their most powerful desktop and laptop to date.

I guess the point is that none of us understand why Apple continues to develop machines that other companies would have deprecated in favor of low cost high profit margin products like iOS. They obviously have a longterm strategy, and the last two machines indicate that workhorse computers are part of that strategy.

Software-wise it is all kind of strange and hard to make any sense of...

 

[mattspace]

but then go and do things like ditch Aperture and replace it with the Photos app after they've let Adobe run off with their customers...

Apple seem to enter a market, become really good at it and then walk away.

Aperture's story appears to be that the project leads, the people who really cared about it, left the company. Apple is full of people who want to "make their mark", so with a leadership vacuum for Aperture, and noone wanting to work on it, the inevitable result that Aperture was canned.

The problem, is that Apple doesn't seem to be able to pay people enough to do the grunt work - anything that's not "fun", or a specific person's pet project, tends to get neglected.

Aperture was a product of the time in which Apple had a corporate strategy - Consumer device and Consumer Software, Pro Device and Pro software for each category.

In 2005 you had: Consumer - iBook & iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and Pro - Powerbook & Aperture, FCP, Logic - easy to understand. But, there doesn't appear to have been anyone post-steve with a responsibility to ensure that structure carried forward, now it's just a melange of products with undefined boundaries, so in Photography's case, noone has said "we have to provide a professional DAM solution".

Realistically, Photos on the Mac only exists to allow you to see photos taken with i-devices, i'd be very surprised if it didn't eventually dump support for not-apple cameras.

 

[fokmik]

So can we expect for Mac Pro 7.1 on 30th ? or at least a sneak peek of it ?
[doublepost=1540112238][/doublepost]"While we’ll have to wait until 2018 to talk about the Mac Pro rebirth (“Want to do something great…that will take longer than this year to do,” said Schiller")
So, this kind of confirms for Sneak peek for the Mac Pro at the event ?!

 

[shaunp]

Aperture's story appears to be that the project leads, the people who really cared about it, left the company. Apple is full of people who want to "make their mark", so with a leadership vacuum for Aperture, and noone wanting to work on it, the inevitable result that Aperture was canned.

The problem, is that Apple doesn't seem to be able to pay people enough to do the grunt work - anything that's not "fun", or a specific person's pet project, tends to get neglected.

Aperture was a product of the time in which Apple had a corporate strategy - Consumer device and Consumer Software, Pro Device and Pro software for each category.

In 2005 you had: Consumer - iBook & iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and Pro - Powerbook & Aperture, FCP, Logic - easy to understand. But, there doesn't appear to have been anyone post-steve with a responsibility to ensure that structure carried forward, now it's just a melange of products with undefined boundaries, so in Photography's case, noone has said "we have to provide a professional DAM solution".

Realistically, Photos on the Mac only exists to allow you to see photos taken with i-devices, i'd be very surprised if it didn't eventually dump support for not-apple cameras.

That's why I think there needs to be perhaps even a separate division for the 'Pro' products as the target customers have different needs to the average consumer. For example most people doing a job don't care so much about what their computer looks like, but do care if it's fast enough, reliable, has all the right ports (so they don't have to carry dongles) and has some future proofing - i.e RAM, disks, etc can be added later. For smaller businesses it doesn't make sense to buy the max config on day 1, when you can expand it in years 2 or 3 and then replace in year 5, for example. Consumers on the other hand mostly go for what looks cool and that's where the current Apple design language works.
[doublepost=1540133275][/doublepost]

For photography and video definitely agree... They've made some really stupid moves that pushed a lot of people over to Windows. Although I'm no pro photographer Aperature's great example. Same with Final Cut... Before FCPX, FCP was a pretty big player in the video market. They completely screwed that up with FCPX, most editors I know who used FCP moved to Adobe/Windows...

Logic's the one thing they haven't screwed up though... Logic's also no joke...
These were all scored by Logic users: Game of Thrones, Mr Robot, American Horror Story, Gone Girl, The Girl with the Dragon tattoo, Social Network, House of Cards, Pacific Rim, The Avengers, Silent Hill 8 and 9, Dexter... (Obviously a drop in the bucket but you get the point...)

Film/TV scoring will never happen on an iOS device. None of the heavy duty scoring instruments like Kontakt, Omnisphere, Play etc could ever be used properly on any current version of a tablet, and no film composer in their right mind would rely on a tablet to run a DAW synced to picture. (That's not to say Apple couldn't screw it up like they have with photography and video.)

There's a few other things to consider though... Logic is one of the most fully featured DAWs available. It also costs 2-3 times less than all the other major players. If Apple were out to rake it in at every corner the price of Logic would've been inflated, but not only is it cheaper, the cost has gone down over the years. So, Logic is basically a loss leader in terms of its actual revenue, yet Apple spends the cash to Acquire Camel Audio a few years back and it's still developed to be competitive...

All signs should point to Apple putting Logic out to pasture in favor of Garage Band and ditching the high end computer line in favor of iOS, yet within the last year they've released their most powerful desktop and laptop to date.

I guess the point is that none of us understand why Apple continues to develop machines that other companies would have deprecated in favor of low cost high profit margin products like iOS. They obviously have a longterm strategy, and the last two machines indicate that workhorse computers are part of that strategy.

Software-wise it is all kind of strange and hard to make any sense of...

Talking Logic as an example there, not every Mac product needs to make a huge margin. It should be an enabler for those to create the content in the first place then everyone else can consume it on products that do make the margin and sell in volume. That's what I don't get about Apple and their attitude toward the Mac Pro. They don't need to reinvent the wheel on this one, as most people who buy these don't want a light and thin product they want one that works, and is fast and expandable. Basically a PC that can run Mac OS. It doesn't have to be the cheapest, and to be honest it would be worth paying more to have good levels of support over a generic PC and access to the Apple ecosystem. But that's all it needs to be. Same as the 2010 MBP form factor was great - it just needed better cooling. It had plenty of ports, there was access the internals and it had a matte screen. The 'Pro' products don't need to be complicated and shouldn't take 2-3 years to develop.

 

[aaronhead14]

That's why I think there needs to be perhaps even a separate division for the 'Pro' products as the target customers have different needs to the average consumer. For example most people doing a job don't care so much about what their computer looks like, but do care if it's fast enough, reliable, has all the right ports (so they don't have to carry dongles) and has some future proofing - i.e RAM, disks, etc can be added later. For smaller businesses it doesn't make sense to buy the max config on day 1, when you can expand it in years 2 or 3 and then replace in year 5, for example. Consumers on the other hand mostly go for what looks cool and that's where the current Apple design language works.
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Talking Logic as an example there, not every Mac product needs to make a huge margin. It should be an enabler for those to create the content in the first place then everyone else can consume it on products that do make the margin and sell in volume. That's what I don't get about Apple and their attitude toward the Mac Pro. They don't need to reinvent the wheel on this one, as most people who buy these don't want a light and thin product they want one that works, and is fast and expandable. Basically a PC that can run Mac OS. It doesn't have to be the cheapest, and to be honest it would be worth paying more to have good levels of support over a generic PC and access to the Apple ecosystem. But that's all it needs to be. Same as the 2010 MBP form factor was great - it just needed better cooling. It had plenty of ports, there was access the internals and it had a matte screen. The 'Pro' products don't need to be complicated and shouldn't take 2-3 years to develop.

AMEN!

 

[Aldaris]

While we’ll have to wait until 2018 to talk about the Mac Pro rebirth

Source?

I don’t remember that being said at either press round table discussion.

 

[ETN3]

It is extremely unlikely it was social media (Twitter, these forums , etc). The April 2017 meeting/"pow wow" they had with reporters about the "Macs and the Pro space" was 2-3 months before the iMac Pro was introduced. Stories about the Mac Pro 2013 being going so long without update was an issue they were trying to control though. I wasn't a coincidence that the MP 2013 got a price cut around the same time as that meeting.

There were about 1-2 odd threads with odd matching of iMac with "Xeon" in these forum that got some attention, but not much.

AR ( augmented reality ) is a very unlikely primary driver. Apple has deployed AR apps on the iPhone. Ultra-extreme VR is trendy in the press but not a substantive base. The broader category of GPU computational 'horsepower' was probably an issue though. The iMac Pro would end up with essentially the same power limitations at the MP 2013 had. Where two GPUs was useful ( and there were MP 2013 customers happy in that camp) the 400-480W envelope of the iMac Pro (MP 2013) doesn't work as well. That isn't just "VR" but more computational horsepower for a variety of solutions. For example doubling that to 800-950W would capture another class of solutions.


They likely did get some feedback from the extremely small number of non disclosure customers they briefed on it. However, the notion that they completely didn't know they were 'missing' some of the former customer base with the MP 2013 and iMac Pro ... it is highly unlikely that happened. The number of folks who were still sticking around on 5,1's probably got clearer. They also probably tweaked some of the 27" iMac and MP 2013 users with the whole no RAM door thing too.

The other problem was component suppliers. AMD drifting off their long term GPU roadmap milestones was a problem for the MP 2013. Intel getting twisted up later was only yet another example. Apple needs a system where they make some high percentage of the design calls but has some flexibility when their projections of where things are gong is off (can't see 100% of the future). Thunderbolt gives them an out, but a couple of standard slots would be an even broader out if added on top of that baseline. I doubt they changed their minds on Thunderbolt. Just more pragmatic about what the scope of that is .

What they may have changed their mind on is just how small a percentage can they go. Is 2, 1 , or 0.5% of the Mac market worth being in. The iMac Pro really doesn't change that much.
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The full Adobe CC suite? No. Photoshop? already announced as coming in 2019.

An ARM SoC into the current MacBook shell would make sense. iPad Pro getting a USB Type C connector ( one and only one connector). MacBook with one and only one USB Type-C connector. They are about completely matched up. Apple has done the viability of a single general data port device. Rip the headphone jack off and put on a FaceID camera array and they'd be completely lined up.

Apple with an iOS iBook that went after the Chromebook and the sub $900 Windows 2-in-1s makes sense. Apple expanding "iPad iOS" into new spaces wouldn't be a surprise. They could use the shell of a Mac to go that way. ( some chromebooks and windows 2-in-1 largely share the almost the exact same chassis. )

The entire Mac line up top-to-bottom on ARM is lunacy. Apple splitting the Mac line up into two "halves" is highly dubious, but Apple has done some dubious things.



I think there is a difference between the subset of the Mac market that the "industry analysts" care about and the whole Mac Market. It think they are looking for Apple to largely go 'laptop only" and shift to ARM. A mobile Mac skew of the world. That is most of the revenues and units shipments so that is all the "matters' ( to folks picking stock prices ).

If Apple was shifting everything over to ARM as the fantasy outlines, then the iMac Pro would shift over too. The new Mac Pro with more than one internal drive (some M.2 sockets) , a couple of standard slots , a substantially higher power supply and cooling budget, twice as many RAM DIMM slots, etc. wouldn't be "the same exact sector" even if keep the CPUs and GPUs largely the same ( but run in different thermal envelopes).

You know...Phil and Tim are on Twitter If you look back at the time before that April round-table meeting in 2017 the response from pros was massive...everybody wanted to know what the hell was happening to the Mac Pro which haven't (still) been updated since 2013 and if Apple is abandoning the professionals (those with a need for a Mac Pro at least). Remember they also discontinued Thunderbolt Display in 2016... At the meeting, it was clear that a new Mac Pro was something they just were starting on...(I bet they started a week before the meeting Just think about it, with all this negative response from the pros before the meeting and launch of the iMac Pro what kind of response do you think the iMac Pro would have gotten on launch? I would not be pleasant...

“We recognize that they want to hear more from us. And so we want to communicate better with them. We want them to understand the importance they have for us, we want them to understand that we’re investing in new Macs — not only new MacBook Pros and iMacs but Mac Pros for them, we want them to know we are going to work on a display for a modular system,” –Phil Schiller

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Source?

I don’t remember that being said at either press round table discussion.

And they really didn't they only said it would not be ready this year (2017) and therefore everybody thought that meant a release in 2018. They even had a extra meeting this year to clarify this and to butter us up a bit

“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community, so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It’s not something for this year.” In addition to transparency for pro customers, there’s also a larger fiscal reason behind it.

“We know that there’s a lot of customers today that are making purchase decisions on the iMac Pro and whether or not they should wait for the Mac Pro,” says Boger.

Roundtable 2017: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/04/apple-pushes-the-reset-button-on-the-mac-pro/
Oops we are not ready yet 2018: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/05/apples-2019-imac-pro-will-be-shaped-by-workflows/

 

[Aldaris]

And they really didn't they only said it would not be ready this year (2017) and therefore everybody thought that meant a release in 2018. They even had a extra meeting this year to clarify this and to butter us up a bit

That was the impression I was under.

Apple has only said “that it wouldn’t be ready this year” with no information/tease/preview promised to any timeline.