Who is the Mac Pro going to be for?

[Boil]

Woz looks like he is thinking "I bet they are gonna

There's a more specific story / explanation for why Aperture didn't benefit from iOS device growth, and remain the core photography product / technology, and that is that Apple has a very, very odd way of maintaining & developing applications.

Apple doesn't do top-down management and resource assignation for individual apps, directing people to work on things where they're needed - managers compete with each other to attract talent within the organisation.

Aperture died, because the programers who worked on it, and the managers who were in charge of it left the company, and noone volunteered, or applied for the positions available to replace them.

Photos.app was an independently developed app, from a different group / programme manager that had nothing in common with the Aperture team or codebase.

So what you are saying is we need a brave band of rebel coders within Apple to bring Aperture back from the dead, like a phoenix rising from the ashes...?!?

 

[mattspace]

So what you are saying is we need a brave band of rebel coders within Apple to bring Aperture back from the dead, like a phoenix rising from the ashes...?!?

A "Pro Mac" pirate flag representing making a set of hardware and software that doesn't have to limit itself to the need to protect other hardware lines, or reinforce codependence with other software & hardware strategies would certainly be nice, but no, we don't need Apple to resurrect Aperture. I don't think anyone in serious photography would want to trust their future to the fickleness of Apple, or even in apple-os-only apps again.

Anyone doing anything serious is going to roll their own technological stack, so it doesn't really matter how good Apple's tech is, it's only ever going to be dumb pipes between the storage and display.

We really need a tablet that can run macOS apps, so we can take Capture One mobile, without having to use Windows.

 

[sigmadog]

As long as it has a 3.5 headphone jack, I'm good.


Kidding, because too many pages of idle speculation is boring.

 

[AidenShaw]

As long as it has a 3.5 headphone jack, I'm good.

I won't buy if it doesn't have a 1/4" headphone jack.

 

[Manzanito]

No. At the above video's 5:00-6:00 mark talks about 4K display and new version of Final Cut Pro X. "You can be this guy" was a 3 4K screen FCPX set up. Not Aperture. FCPX is still quite healthily getting updates at this point in time. That is what happened.



As far as Aperture ... that more so got dropped for the order of magnitude number higher photographers on iOS devices. Apple went with where the photographers were growing. The advanced software augments to pictures features were pushed into the "cameras' and far more got on the Metal (and custom silicon ) track quicker.

Well, you are right, it wasn't at wwdc. I could have sworn by the life of me that's when it happened but it wasn't. My memory is not what it used to be, and almost 6 years have gone by. It was during the iPad event in october of 2013. Please go to 35:55. That's were Phil mentioned the new version of aperture. Granted, he could be referring to the then unreleased 3.5 version of aperture, but the way he said it made me thing it was more than a point update.

Not that it matters anymore, it didn't make sense for apple to continue development of aperture and they decided to can it, but I still stand by my point. No matter what apple says when they introduce the next Mac Pro, trust has to be earned.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

There's a more specific story / explanation for why Aperture didn't benefit from iOS device growth, and remain the core photography product / technology, and that is that Apple has a very, very odd way of maintaining & developing applications.

Apple doesn't do top-down management and resource assignation for individual apps, directing people to work on things where they're needed - managers compete with each other to attract talent within the organisation.

Aperture died, because the programers who worked on it, and the managers who were in charge of it left the company, and noone volunteered, or applied for the positions available to replace them.

Photos.app was an independently developed app, from a different group / programme manager that had nothing in common with the Aperture team or codebase.

Interesting story on Aperature. It's kind of pathetic that all that is between a product we like and it's total catastrophic failure is a disgruntled employee. Seems like some pretty atrocious management IMO.

Good management would have more than 2 people be a complete point of failure for an important product. And what is this "no one volunteered" business. You work for apple. When someone tells you DO THIS, you DO THIS or you get fired. This stuff would NEVER fly with Jobs. He would have fired 10 people and their relatives just to make the point.

 

[caner0]

Long time lurker - first time poster to MacRumors. Read all the 17 pages of the discussion and wanted to add my 5 cents. I am a consultant in IT industry and I have a small virtualization lab in my home. Usually these type of workloads means more than 10 virtual machines are running simultaneously, so it means you need to have a lot of cores and RAM, and this requires to have a big loud expensive rack mount server or workstation.
I bought a second hand Mac Pro 6,1 and upgraded it - very happy because it is silent for my home and well-performing, but at the end I have almost hit the limit and can not upgrade it more. It is running headless and 7&24.

I am pretty sure that there is a niche market for enthusiast like me, just needs a powerful server filled with CPU cores and RAM's. I could not care less for GPU's (if possible I wish I can even remove one GPU on mine to reduce power consumption).

What we need here is flexibility, every professional who is target audience for Mac Pro has their own needs. This is the problem with Apple's product management - to reduce complexity they make very broad generalizations, and this is what you get with MacPro 6,1 - nobody is happy to use this overpriced trash can. If it was upgradable, I am pretty sure that I will be %100 happy to go this route.

 

[amedias]

I am pretty sure that there is a niche market for enthusiast like me, just needs a powerful server filled with CPU cores and RAM's. I could not care less for GPU's (if possible I wish I can even remove one GPU on mine to reduce power consumption).

It is a niche, but a very small one.

The majority of us in that niche use rack mount HP or Dell kit, the even smaller niche of those of us that use towers tend to use HP ML series servers, or Z series workstations, or Dell or Lenovo.

Within that tiny niche the even smaller number of us that need to virtualise MacOS mostly do so with a patched ESXi install, *nix/KVM or Unraid, rather than running on Apple hardware to comply with the licensing restriction.

I think pretty much everyone is using type 1 hypervisors for this kind of situation, I don't know many who go type 2 for proper labs so not many using MacOS as a host OS other than hackintoshers.

Having said that I have a few 5,1s in an ESXi cluster but I think I'm an oddball...I don't think we are the target market for the Mac Pro, even if we might perhaps buy one for that use case.

 

[pl1984]

It is a niche, but a very small one.

A good tower design, such as that used for the cMP, can satisfy a wide variety of end users needs. Apple doesn't have to design to specific target markets. All they need to do is make a general use design and each niche can use it.

 

[amedias]

A good tower design, such as that used for the cMP, can satisfy a wide variety of end users needs. Apple doesn't have to design to specific target markets. All they need to do is make a general use design and each niche can use it.

I absolutely agree! But I don't think that's what we're likely to get ;-)

 

[christof69]

Well I hope it looks nice.