Will there be a new Mac Pro in 2015?

[goMac]

Now we can agree on something. But you seem confused between the old marketing and the new marketing. It's a hit in the new market and somewhat of a disappointment in the old market. It happens.

And I never said tech didn't drive changes...just that you always need to consider the economics of things. And I think they get underestimated in these threads.

I don't see any factual evidence that it's a "hit" outside the pro market, besides some vague idea that because it's smaller, it must be for non pros. Or because it's marketed it must be for non pros? Or because people with a lot of money can buy them, it's for non pros?

To be honest, I haven't seen anything different in the marketing for the new Mac Pro than the old Mac Pro or the Power Macs. The Power Mac even had TV commercials just like the nMP.

 

[MacProCard]

I don't see any factual evidence that it's a "hit" outside the pro market, besides some vague idea that because it's smaller, it must be for non pros. Or because it's marketed it must be for non pros? Or because people with a lot of money can buy them, it's for non pros?

To be honest, I haven't seen anything different in the marketing for the new Mac Pro than the old Mac Pro or the Power Macs. The Power Mac even had TV commercials just like the nMP.

Well you certainly can believe what you want. That's fine with me. I never said it was for non pros either...just that it would appeal to some of them. That whole larger market concept that you seem to be struggling with. You don't have to be rich to buy a $2999 computer either.

But gosh, you've been saying they have to release the newer version any day or else..since April of 2014 I believe.

 

[goMac]

Well you certainly can believe what you want. That's fine with me. I never said it was for non pros either...just that it would appeal to some of them. That whole larger market concept that you seem to be struggling with. You don't have to be rich to buy a $2999 computer either.

But gosh, you've been saying they have to release the newer version any day or else..since April of 2014 I believe.

I believe in April I said that a new version was likely sometime between October and January.

It's February, so I still don't feel that bad.

As far as who the nMP appeals to, I don't think anything has changed. Non pros could buy the oMP too. For cheaper. : shrug : Look, I like the nMP, but I don't get this whole line of discussion the nMP was purposely redesigned to compete for the iMac crowd, especially with the Retina iMac being a thing. Can't even do 5k right now on the nMP.

 

[MacProCard]

I believe in April I said that a new version was likely sometime between October and January.

It's February, so I still don't feel that bad.

As far as who the nMP appeals to, I don't think anything has changed. Non pros could buy the oMP too. For cheaper. : shrug : Look, I like the nMP, but I don't get this whole line of discussion the nMP was purposely redesigned to compete for the iMac crowd, especially with the Retina iMac being a thing. Can't even do 5k right now on the nMP.

You can have overlapping markets. If you really think they did all this redesign and investment on the nMP, just for TB, just for the same market, just for doing business the same old way....I guess only in time will we see.

I see it representing change. A new way for Apple to do the nMP. A new market opportunity. Which means I think this thing will be updated every couple of years...or until there's a true competitor for this new form factor.

 

[Nosferax]

Cough FCPX. I disagree. I mentioned more than once I think they are looking to create a new market/new machine for crunching video data. Just like Microsoft/Sony did for video games to some extent. People think I'm crazy for it.

You sell FCPX only once to a customer for one machine. You sell many many games on a console. Most production house droped FCPX and went back to Avid and Premiere.

----------

I'm OK with being a little crazy. But, a computer that can crunch tons of video can also do a lot of other things as well. Another words, it also functions as a very very nice Mac/PC. So while the market is targeted at FCPX, it will appeal to others looking for a powerful Mac/PC that is small, quite and portable.

Point is it's not meant for everyone. Else they would have left it completely upgradeable. Nor do they have any plans to make it the fastest, latest, greatest or whatever. It's going to perform a couple of functions very well. And for those needing what it doesn't have...move along. Why is that so crazy?

It doesn't crunch tons of video more than any other computer with two GPU when using a gpgpu enhance encoder. In fact CUDA still is on top in that regard which the nMP can't use.

 

[prowlmedia]

Do you have a source for that? I've tried to find any public market stats on the Pro and haven't found anything reported about unit volume, let alone a breakdown of the type of users. In the cMP days, the truck analogy might have held, but the nMP may be more of a luxury SUV in terms of the range of what it's being used for.

Well no, didn't claim to, Its more of an assumption based on the fact that 90% of users wouldn't remotely think about buying one for home use. perhaps a few 4K screen owners?

But a buddy at the apple store in Covent garden has said it sells above expected demand and most people spec them up beyond the 2 stock models they have in store.

And no my truck analogy still holds. It's a business tool. An SUV is not... well unless you are an UBER driver or something But I get what you mean...

----------

Agreed. To my eyes it looks like Apple is easing out of the workstation business just like they eased out of the server business.

As I and a million other people have said before what do you think they are designing iOS devices / iMacs etc on? Well apart from the Billion plus they probably spent on design / tooling / USA Factory and jobs they have poured into the nMP. I am seeing them appearing in every studio I freelance for in London. and as a friend at the Apple store Covent Garden said ( and he doesn't say much!! ) They are selling a lot of them but mostly upgraded beyond stock - He's expecting them to start selling more variations in store soon. They only have 2 the 4core d300 + 6 core D500 with a few ssd variations.

They will always have a workstation device. Everything else hangs from that.

Servers were something different. They are incredibly Niche and are not replaced very often at all - so there was no repeat business - only building business and the problem is a server only needs decent file serving abilities... not an OS you use every day... so Linux is the winner.

 

[VirtualRain]

Will there be a new MacPro in 2015 ?

Agreed. To my eyes it looks like Apple is easing out of the workstation business just like they eased out of the server business.

I don't understand how you can say this? They just invested millions in 2013 on a new design and factory? And even though the new CPUs offer little to no added performance, it's too early to conclude they've forsaken an update this cycle. And even if they skip Haswell or choose an update cycle based on next-gen GPUs rather than Intel, it still doesn't mean they are easing out of the workstation market.

BTW, our dev team just bought a pair of Hex core nMPs as build machines... There's a huge market for powerful Macs in all kinds of different applications. And like the dev team, most couldn't care less about the refresh cycle timing... They just buy when they need em.

 

[koyoot]

Apple is not easing up Workstation business. They just adapting to new vision of it.

Imagine 50 GPUs from AMD, in a rack connected by thunderbolt to Mac Pro.

The system does not see them as 52 GPUs but ONE big GPU cluster. You have a clue on this forum that this is reality. The topic about external GPUs. Second thing is GPU in iPad Air 2 made from two GPUs. Only available thanks to Mantle/Metal API.

I said in this topic, that Mantle will be in future CUDA, DirectX, OpenGL, Direct3D in one single API.

If you will have a program that is optimized for Mantle you will be able to run it regardlessly of the platform you use. OSX, Linux, Windows, x86, ARM - it will not matter if you will have it optimized for Mantle.

 

[beaker7]

They'll probably get around to updating them to v3 Xeons about 3 weeks before the v4 Xeons ship.

 

[Nosferax]

Apple is not easing up Workstation business. They just adapting to new vision of it.

Imagine 50 GPUs from AMD, in a rack connected by thunderbolt to Mac Pro.

The system does not see them as 52 GPUs but ONE big GPU cluster. You have a clue on this forum that this is reality. The topic about external GPUs. Second thing is GPU in iPad Air 2 made from two GPUs. Only available thanks to Mantle/Metal API.

I said in this topic, that Mantle will be in future CUDA, DirectX, OpenGL, Direct3D in one single API.

If you will have a program that is optimized for Mantle you will be able to run it regardlessly of the platform you use. OSX, Linux, Windows, x86, ARM - it will not matter if you will have it optimized for Mantle.

Mantle is AMD and AMD is hemorraging money. Their future is less than certain long term. OpenGL and DirectX are competitor. Microsoft left the OpenGL consortium to start DirectX, I don't see them going back. CUDA is a well established product and those that use it are in no hurry to move their code to an unproven platform just like they're not rushing to migrate to OpenCL either.

 

[beaker7]

Mantle is AMD and AMD is hemorraging money. .

Aw come on they only lost $364 million last quarter, guided for continued revenue decline, and had their credit downgraded. What could go wrong?

 

[fuchsdh]

A world without a competitive AMD looks pretty poor for everyone involved; look at the quality of Intel and Nvidia now and imagine where they'll be if they don't have the fear of competition.

That said, while CUDA is fairly entrenched in some markets, it's not fair to say OpenCL hasn't made gains of one sort or another. Adobe allows you to use both CUDA and OpenCL acceleration, and they've unceremoniously dumped CUDA ray-tracing support in After Effects after less than three versions since it was introduced, meaning that there's no reason you *have* to use Nvidia GPUs now.

 

[beaker7]

Adobe allows you to use both CUDA and OpenCL acceleration, and they've unceremoniously dumped CUDA ray-tracing support in After Effects after less than three versions since it was introduced, meaning that there's no reason you *have* to use Nvidia GPUs now.

To be fair, they didn't dump CUDA from the raytracer out of some nVidia hate. They dropped it because it was crap and nobody used it.

 

[deconstruct60]

....
Personally if I were in the market for a Mac Pro I'd wait until the Watch event (surely there will be an event) to see if one gets introduced alongside the watch and/or the 12" Macbook Air. That's where I'd expect to see it introduced if one is going to be introduced before WWDC.

The Apple Watch event is likely going to be solely about the Apple Watch.
Apple's "new category" products typically get very focused special "launch" events. For example the iPad was all about just that product ( minus the Carl Sagan section where bag about the billions and millions of the iOS ecosystem. )

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/27/live-from-the-apple-tablet-latest-creation-event/

The iPhone has to share abit because it was a Macworld keynote ; not a specially scheduled Apple one. But it too was dominated by iPhone.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/live-from-macworld-2007-steve-jobs-keynote/

[ There was more AppleTV stuff there than anything Macintosh. ]


Most likely Apple is going to spend a huge chunk of time covering the same stuff they did in the last time talked about the Apple Watch. There are probably some integration with iPhone demos to do
with newer versions of iOS 8 and Apple apps. There will be more 3rd party software to talk about this time. That will consume another 20-30 mins.

I wouldn't hold my breath on any Watch -> Mac Continuity demo. It is probably going to be Watch - iPhone only for a while. Next up would be watch iPad.

Apple has alot of Watch tap dancing to do. Battery life a day if don't use apps ( lasts days if using it solely as a watch. ) Most of the event is solely going to be devoted to whipping people up into buying Watches. Watch only makes for a press product demo set up also. There are going to be hard questions as to "why" folks need to get a watch. Press corp distracted, even if only for 10 mins, by a one port Mac isn't going to get the Watch message out there.


The MBA 12" doesn't really fit that message. A Mac Pro even less so.

A "natural upgrade" Mac Pro will probably get what vast majority of "natural upgrade" Macs get .... a press release drop. If happens to coincide with WWDC or one of the now two Fall shindigs then an intro there, but otherwise just roll it out when it is ready.

If believe the folks who think this nMP is primarily just a FCPX machine then April ( NAB conference ) would be a more likely pr release date than the Watch's dog and pony show.

WWDC? Doubtful. Apple only really used the 2013 one to announce the end of the old version as much as the new. Nothing shipped then so had no material impact on buying a new one over the short term. For 2015, there is no component logistic train that gets uncorked in June for any major nMP part.


Jan-March make some sense ( e.g., waiting for a GPU to round out the upgrade mix ) By late April - Oct is likely a 'dead zone" (if can wait long at threshold of newer stuff for incrementally longer). Early 2016 would be another window where likelihood goes up again.

 

[burnsranch]

The Market for the nMP is video. If you look at the go pro market, the iPhone video market, you understand videos processing and storage at the consumer level is going to be the driving market.

I have 12TB of videos I use a nMP and FCPX to manage. If you design a system for average consumers to manage say 3TB of videos a year, nMP is the correct platform. If you look at $1200 dollars for Avid video software and $150 for FCPX, you can see how apple is going to own the consumer video market.

While they are dropping aperture, the real consumer market is not in editing photos, but the storage and database functionality. Once they provide a free photo video database for the consumer that works, the editing software will have to accommodate their systems. The bulk of the video and photo market will not really use editing features, but the data base functionality.

If I look at managing my video library off of a iMac with one TB bus, or a nMP with three TB buses, then nMP winds hands down.

If you look at the background rendering, there is no reason why that cannot be offloaded to another machine. There is also no reason why apple cannot tie two or more machines together via TB.

Take a police force with iPhone 6 video cameras. Put it in your shirt pocket and video all day. They walk in, plug n their iPhone to charge, the videos downloads is stored in the data base and they pick it up in the morning.
The home version might be the exact same hardware, only less of it.

The professional movie market will be a different market and lot of what they use will not be useful for the consumer market. The issue they will face, is every high school kid will have access to 80% of the video technology they have, and that will change the movie industry.

When you realize how big the consumer video market will be over the next five years the nMP might be the perfect platform.

 

[deconstruct60]

Mantle is AMD and AMD is hemorraging money.

Not really hemorrhaging money ... Q4 was -$365M buy ...

" ... First, they had yet another write down of their SeaMicro and ATI acquisitions, which they attribute to a decline in their stock prices. This cost them $233 million this quarter. .."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8913/amd-reports-q4-fy-2014-and-full-year-results

They overpaid for some stuff, but in reality that has already happened.
They are squeaking by. The write downs at this point might even help defer some taxes short term. They did have some time in 2014 though were the balance sheet was positive.

Their future is less than certain long term.

No company's future is certain long term. 30 years from now Apple could be a big hole in the ground. Nokia and Blackberry were mega smartphone vendors 10-15 years ago. Apple almost killed itself in the 90's.

AMD needs to get their "new" stuff out on time this year and not price the new & old stuff badly. If they do that they will likely limp into 2016. If the huge fixes they have scheduled for 2016 are bust then yeah... they are on even thinner ice.

OpenGL and DirectX are competitor. Microsoft left the OpenGL consortium to start DirectX, I don't see them going back.

Left? Errr..... Microsoft is still on the Contributors page...

https://www.khronos.org/members/contributors

Microsoft does alot of stuff. Some parts of MS has fingers in Linux, Android, and other things that are somewhat "Windows" and "Office" competitors.

The kool-aid I think this guy is drinking is that the "rewrite" of OpenGL that is coming, glnext, is going to be "Mantle".

http://www.tomdalling.com/blog/modern-opengl/opengl-in-2014/

http://techreport.com/news/26922/amd-hopes-to-put-a-little-mantle-in-opengl-next

Will borrow bits from Mantle? Probably. Will exactly be Mantle? Probably not.
Skewed too far to being just extremely thin veneer over AMD's GCN and Microsoft and Nvidia are going to clog up the vote (if not others also).

CUDA is a well established product and those that use it are in no hurry to move their code to an unproven platform just like they're not rushing to migrate to OpenCL either.

Even if there is an OpenGL "revolutionary" change with glNext that still won't turns apples into oranges. CUDA and OpenCL are in a different space than Mantle. ( even if turn Mantle into a Black Hole and suck in HSA http://www.hsafoundation.com/ into the event horizon along with several other APIs functionality areas. At some point bulking Mantle up will stop being Mantle. )

----------

Apple is not easing up Workstation business. They just adapting to new vision of it.

Imagine 50 GPUs from AMD, in a rack connected by thunderbolt to Mac Pro.

That's a bonehead small I/O pipe to that many cores. There isn't going to be a way to feed data to a broad spectrum of problems/models in that set up. Some narrow corner case batch job thing might work but that isn't going to buy much market.

The system does not see them as 52 GPUs but ONE big GPU cluster. You have a clue on this forum that this is reality. The topic about external GPUs. Second thing is GPU in iPad Air 2 made from two GPUs. Only available thanks to Mantle/Metal API.

Metal is not Mantle. They begin with "M", that doesn't make them same.


Metal works on the A7 GPUs. https://developer.apple.com/library...lity/OpenGLESPlatforms/OpenGLESPlatforms.html

This whole "only possible A8 series fused GPUs" stuff is hand wavy stuff.

 

[goMac]

The number of Mac Pros Apple actually sells, and the number of Mac Pros that "pros" think Apple sells have never really been in sync. The Mac Pro actually has always sold pretty well, while pros never seem to think it sells very well.

I don't doubt that with the Macbook Pro being such a great machine, tower/can Mac sales have been down over the last decade, but the Mac Pro still makes Apple money.

I've never understood the disconnect. Maybe it's because the Mac Pro is such a specialized machine people have a hard time imagining it sells well?

(That said, for years it's pretty much exclusively sold to pros. This isn't the Power Mac G3 days any more.)

I think what Apple envisions people need for a workstation has changed. Are they easing up? No. They're just not interested in things like dual socket workstations. The only way they'd change their minds is if nMP sales just got murdered, and people told them it was because it's only single socket. But I'm guessing they had the numbers of how many dual socket systems they sold before this, and it wasn't many.

 

[MacProCard]

The Market for the nMP is video. If you look at the go pro market, the iPhone video market, you understand videos processing and storage at the consumer level is going to be the driving market.

I have 12TB of videos I use a nMP and FCPX to manage. If you design a system for average consumers to manage say 3TB of videos a year, nMP is the correct platform. If you look at $1200 dollars for Avid video software and $150 for FCPX, you can see how apple is going to own the consumer video market.

While they are dropping aperture, the real consumer market is not in editing photos, but the storage and database functionality. Once they provide a free photo video database for the consumer that works, the editing software will have to accommodate their systems. The bulk of the video and photo market will not really use editing features, but the data base functionality.

If I look at managing my video library off of a iMac with one TB bus, or a nMP with three TB buses, then nMP winds hands down.

If you look at the background rendering, there is no reason why that cannot be offloaded to another machine. There is also no reason why apple cannot tie two or more machines together via TB.

Take a police force with iPhone 6 video cameras. Put it in your shirt pocket and video all day. They walk in, plug n their iPhone to charge, the videos downloads is stored in the data base and they pick it up in the morning.
The home version might be the exact same hardware, only less of it.

The professional movie market will be a different market and lot of what they use will not be useful for the consumer market. The issue they will face, is every high school kid will have access to 80% of the video technology they have, and that will change the movie industry.

When you realize how big the consumer video market will be over the next five years the nMP might be the perfect platform.

Amen. I see the same thing. Every kid with a 4k camera has the potential to be the next youtube sensation. But these guys feel threatened by this way of thinking.

IMO, Apple sees this as well and has positioned themselves nicely for the emerging market.

Nice post. Straight shooter with upper management written all over you.

 

[handsome pete]

The Market for the nMP is video. If you look at the go pro market, the iPhone video market, you understand videos processing and storage at the consumer level is going to be the driving market.

Except for the Mac Pro not being targeted at the consumer market.

The professional movie market will be a different market and lot of what they use will not be useful for the consumer market. The issue they will face, is every high school kid will have access to 80% of the video technology they have, and that will change the movie industry.

Every high school kid already has that and has for years. There has been no recent revolutionary breakthrough that will all of a sudden change the entire paradigm. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

When you realize how big the consumer video market will be over the next five years the nMP might be the perfect platform.

Again, this is not a consumer machine. Its certainly not priced like one.

Where is this great growth in the consumer market coming from? If you're talking about your average Joe and their iPhone, then the Mac Pro is not going to make a dent there. That's where better compression, better consumer hardware, and cloud services will have the most impact.

----------

Every kid with a 4k camera has the potential to be the next youtube sensation. But these guys feel threatened by this way of thinking.

You just have a strange impression that 4k is bringing something new to the table. Every kid with a camera has always had the potential to be the next YouTube sensation. 4k has nothing to do with that.

 

[prowlmedia]

... they've unceremoniously dumped CUDA ray-tracing support in After Effects after less than three versions since it was introduced, meaning that there's no reason you *have* to use Nvidia GPUs now.

To be fair, they didn't dump CUDA from the raytracer out of some nVidia hate. They dropped it because it was crap and nobody used it.

Er. Sorry guys can you point me to anywhere that mentions this? Far as I know Adobe only use CUDA in the raytracer - OpenCL is (or was) not compatible as it uses CUDA only libraries.

That said they are expanding OpenCL use and the raytracer / 3d part is the only bit that is only CUDA. And the open CL libraries are much more evolved now.

From a Adobe blog post
"A related request is that we add OpenCL acceleration for the ray-traced 3D renderer. That’s not going to happen. The ray-traced 3D renderer in After Effects is built using the OptiX library from Nvidia, which depends on Nvidia’s CUDA technology. However, this should not be interpreted to mean that we are opposed to OpenCL. Quite the opposite. When we on the After Effects team look at how we can improve performance, we look at technologies that can be used on a broad array of hardware, including OpenCL and OpenGL. There is just this one narrow, current instance in which we are dependent on a third party (Nvidia) for one feature, the ray-traced 3D renderer. Keep in mind that the ray-traced 3D renderer has a rather limited feature set compared with the 3D capabilities of Cinema 4D (now included with After Effects), which does not depend on any specific GPU technology at all."

As for no one using the 3d Raytracer ... It's used a lot in TV so no idea where you are getting that. Elements plug is is used a lot...

 

[Nosferax]

Not really hemorrhaging money ... Q4 was -$365M buy ...

" ... First, they had yet another write down of their SeaMicro and ATI acquisitions, which they attribute to a decline in their stock prices. This cost them $233 million this quarter. .."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8913/amd-reports-q4-fy-2014-and-full-year-results

They overpaid for some stuff, but in reality that has already happened.
They are squeaking by. The write downs at this point might even help defer some taxes short term. They did have some time in 2014 though were the balance sheet was positive.




No company's future is certain long term. 30 years from now Apple could be a big hole in the ground. Nokia and Blackberry were mega smartphone vendors 10-15 years ago. Apple almost killed itself in the 90's.

AMD needs to get their "new" stuff out on time this year and not price the new & old stuff badly. If they do that they will likely limp into 2016. If the huge fixes they have scheduled for 2016 are bust then yeah... they are on even thinner ice.




Left? Errr..... Microsoft is still on the Contributors page...

https://www.khronos.org/members/contributors

Microsoft does alot of stuff. Some parts of MS has fingers in Linux, Android, and other things that are somewhat "Windows" and "Office" competitors.

The kool-aid I think this guy is drinking is that the "rewrite" of OpenGL that is coming, glnext, is going to be "Mantle".

http://www.tomdalling.com/blog/modern-opengl/opengl-in-2014/

http://techreport.com/news/26922/amd-hopes-to-put-a-little-mantle-in-opengl-next

Will borrow bits from Mantle? Probably. Will exactly be Mantle? Probably not.
Skewed too far to being just extremely thin veneer over AMD's GCN and Microsoft and Nvidia are going to clog up the vote (if not others also).



Even if there is an OpenGL "revolutionary" change with glNext that still won't turns apples into oranges. CUDA and OpenCL are in a different space than Mantle. ( even if turn Mantle into a Black Hole and suck in HSA http://www.hsafoundation.com/ into the event horizon along with several other APIs functionality areas. At some point bulking Mantle up will stop being Mantle. )

----------



That's a bonehead small I/O pipe to that many cores. There isn't going to be a way to feed data to a broad spectrum of problems/models in that set up. Some narrow corner case batch job thing might work but that isn't going to buy much market.




Metal is not Mantle. They begin with "M", that doesn't make them same.


Metal works on the A7 GPUs. https://developer.apple.com/library...lity/OpenGLESPlatforms/OpenGLESPlatforms.html

This whole "only possible A8 series fused GPUs" stuff is hand wavy stuff.

According to the preface of my OpenGL Super Bible 6th edition, Microsoft left to start DirectX because they didn't believe in development by comitee.
I could be wrong, but that's what I remember reading. They may still drop cash on the OpenGL project, maybe as a way to silence accusation of monopoly like they got with internet explorer bundling, but I don't believe they are still contributing code like they did at the start.

----------

The number of Mac Pros Apple actually sells, and the number of Mac Pros that "pros" think Apple sells have never really been in sync. The Mac Pro actually has always sold pretty well, while pros never seem to think it sells very well.

I don't doubt that with the Macbook Pro being such a great machine, tower/can Mac sales have been down over the last decade, but the Mac Pro still makes Apple money.

I've never understood the disconnect. Maybe it's because the Mac Pro is such a specialized machine people have a hard time imagining it sells well?

(That said, for years it's pretty much exclusively sold to pros. This isn't the Power Mac G3 days any more.)

I think what Apple envisions people need for a workstation has changed. Are they easing up? No. They're just not interested in things like dual socket workstations. The only way they'd change their minds is if nMP sales just got murdered, and people told them it was because it's only single socket. But I'm guessing they had the numbers of how many dual socket systems they sold before this, and it wasn't many.

I admit that there is less of a need today for multi-cpu computers with the advent of distributed computing and render farms.

----------

Except for the Mac Pro not being targeted at the consumer market.



Every high school kid already has that and has for years. There has been no recent revolutionary breakthrough that will all of a sudden change the entire paradigm. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.



Again, this is not a consumer machine. Its certainly not priced like one.

Where is this great growth in the consumer market coming from? If you're talking about your average Joe and their iPhone, then the Mac Pro is not going to make a dent there. That's where better compression, better consumer hardware, and cloud services will have the most impact.

----------



You just have a strange impression that 4k is bringing something new to the table. Every kid with a camera has always had the potential to be the next YouTube sensation. 4k has nothing to do with that.

If it wasn't target at the general public, they've wouldn't have advertised it in theater and mass media. HP and Dell don't advertise their Workstation on TV or in mass media. You only ever read about them in trade publication.

 

[handsome pete]

If it wasn't target at the general public, they've wouldn't have advertised it in theater and mass media. HP and Dell don't advertise their Workstation on TV or in mass media. You only ever read about them in trade publication.

Tech companies advertise their enterprise solutions to the mass media all of the time. Aside from that small, very short-lived campaign, have you seen the Mac Pro anywhere besides the Apple site or trade publications/sites since? I don't doubt they're also trying to grab (or keep hold of) the prosumer, small business, freelancer, etc. But this thing is not aimed towards the general public.

 

[MacProCard]

Except for the Mac Pro not being targeted at the consumer market.



Every high school kid already has that and has for years. There has been no recent revolutionary breakthrough that will all of a sudden change the entire paradigm. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.



Again, this is not a consumer machine. Its certainly not priced like one.

Where is this great growth in the consumer market coming from? If you're talking about your average Joe and their iPhone, then the Mac Pro is not going to make a dent there. That's where better compression, better consumer hardware, and cloud services will have the most impact.

----------



You just have a strange impression that 4k is bringing something new to the table. Every kid with a camera has always had the potential to be the next YouTube sensation. 4k has nothing to do with that.

The number of 4k/HD video cameras is a growing market. Why not try to specialize for it? This shouldn't be that difficult for you to understand.

Some teenagers will want to drive a kia, some will want to drive a Ford. Some kids will want to edit their video on an iMac. Some will want to edit their video on a nMP.

 

[handsome pete]

The number of 4k/HD video cameras is a growing market. Why not try to specialize for it? This shouldn't be that difficult for you to understand.

I'm just pointing out the exaggeration going on regarding 4K. It's a small evolutionary step in the video industry. It brings virtually nothing to the table from the average consumer standpoint. Of course that doesn't mean it won't take off because manufacturer/marketers still need to keep selling those tvs, cameras, etc. And it will eventually find widespread adoption. But there's nothing revolutionary about it. And of course Apple's going to mention it. It's the video buzzword du jour.

Some teenagers will want to drive a kia, some will want to drive a Ford. Some kids will want to edit their video on an iMac. Some will want to edit their video on a nMP.

That's a far cry from the Mac Pro being some transcendent device that will help usher in a dramatic change in the industry. I get it. I was one of those kids who always wanted the biggest and best there was to edit my corny little videos. I bought more than I needed when I got my G5 back in the day. I bought more than I needed when I bought my first HD camera. There is always going to be people like me, especially evident on product specific discussion boards like this, but we're not the norm. The vast majority of the public has no need for a machine like this, nor is interested in one. Apple knows this.

Hell, I teach a few 3D modeling and animation courses and virtually none of the students I've taught work on personal desktops/workstations. They all have laptops, and when they get into the advanced classes they use the university labs.

 

[Nosferax]

Tech companies advertise their enterprise solutions to the mass media all of the time. Aside from that small, very short-lived campaign, have you seen the Mac Pro anywhere besides the Apple site or trade publications/sites since? I don't doubt they're also trying to grab (or keep hold of) the prosumer, small business, freelancer, etc. But this thing is not aimed towards the general public.

It is if you're in the market for a headless mac and the mini isn't up to your standards. You seem to think the nMP is something special, it's not. Since Apple computers carry an inflated price and status symbol, people with money to burn tend to overspend on apple product. The rich hipster won't get a lowly iMac when he can get a 12-core, D700 equiped nMP and get to brag about it. The same thing happened with the oMP also.