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Apple has been steadily been abandoning the "creative pro" market for a long time. The two most recent indicators were dropping Final Cut Pro 7 for Final Cut P

Apple has been steadily been abandoning the "creative pro" market for a long time. The two most recent indicators were dropping Final Cut Pro 7 for Final Cut Pro X, which was not ready for professional editing at release. The new Mac Pro confirmed the move away from the pro market, since it only supported one CPU. For compressing feature films, dual CPUs are a must.

derefr 11y ago
> which was not ready for professional editing at release Some would argue that that sounds more like a project management failure than a change in market strategy—that they shipped a beta product as done, that someone screwed up somewhere, etc. I don't think so, though; I think Apple just made a correct call in shipping the "core" of the product early (in the same way most enterprise products get 'Early Access' releases) to allow actual professionals to start evaluating the architecture of the software and tailoring their pipelines to fit it. Professional-use software doesn't get used on day 1 of release; it gets played with by an internal pipeline infrastructure team for six months while the working craftspeople continue to use the stable pipeline. Handing out something that would be "patched into usefulness" at right about the same time it would actually be put into use makes sense, in strictly consequentialist terms, for both Apple and the professional studios—although Apple latching onto that release to do a bunch of marketing of their product as if it was usable for indies already, could be seen as a bit scummy. > since it only supported one CPU. For compressing feature films, dual CPUs are a must. This might not be the case right now (I don't know much about video encoding), but encoded video has keyframes, and effectively you can "chunk out" a set of raw frames to become a keyframe plus its successor interstitial frames, and then parallelize on those chunks, right? In which case, I'd expect Apple figured that even if CPU-based compression is currently en vogue for this use-case, it'd be obviated by GPU-based highly-parallel compression soon enough, making the dual GPUs a much more significant benefit and the single CPU a much less significant drawback. Tell me if I'm getting that wrong; I honestly have no idea.
- touchofevil 11y ago
  Final Cut X was really a huge disappointment to the professional editing community when it was released. It was missing features that made it unusable for professionals. For example, when it was released, it was not possible to export sound as an OMF or AFF (which is the format required for sending sound to a professional sound mixer). I saw it as an indication that Apple no longer needed to cater to the pro market (see also apple dropping Shake and the XServe and the Xserve RAID) now that Apple had the iphone, ipad, itunes, etc. As for compressing films, maybe GPUs will pick up the slack. But there are still other applications like Maya and After Effects that depend almost entirely on the CPU for rendering, so having dual CPUs makes a big difference. I don't really mind Apple leaving the pro market. Adobe Premiere has taken Final Cut Pro's place for most people I know. I just use Windows machines now for my video and graphics work.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  When FCP X shipped there were howls out of outrage from the video community. FCP 7 had made a name for itself as a solid professional solution. Then they changed it. Completely. And they didn't ship it as a beta for review. They shipped it as a finished product. The professional reaction was best summarised as "WTF is this shit?" It's kind of settled down now, but a lot of pro users have either moved elsewhere or continued with FCP 7. Meanwhile support software like Motion hasn't had a proper update since forever. New users have come on board, but they're mostly students, semipros, small-time boutiques, and YouTube dabblers. FCP X is certainly usable for pro work, but it has some incredibly obvious and annoying shortcomings that make it really hard to integrate into a commercial workflow. It's hard not to get the impression that Apple is trying to become a blingy toy factory, and not a cool computer company that makes cool tools for cool professionals. This is unfortunate, because by losing the cool Apple is also becoming less bling. It's starting to look like a middle-aged guy trying to dance with teenagers at a party - and nothing about that is good in any way. So - MacPro? Maybe not. It looks an update would push the cost over five figures. Considering that many pros are using standard software (i.e. Adobe CS) it's much easier and cheaper to get better and faster PC hardware. This is why killing FCP loyalty was a bad idea. If FCP had kept its user base, a MacPro would have sold itself. Nuking a strong software user base also killed demand for the hardware. MacPro sales are rumoured to be unspectacular - and this was easily preventable.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    > New users have come on board, but they're mostly students, semipros, small-time boutiques, and YouTube dabblers. True, but the new users might not be as great in number because the FCP X outrage had another effect. You noted the pros leaving it, but that also included a fair number of schools. FCP X is most definitely not FCP 7 so all the teaching material gets thrown. Also, FCP X is not really a pro app. If the school is going to buy all new books and build new class material why not go with software made by a pro company. They are already teaching other Adobe products so its not much of a jump to add Premiere. Its popular and integrates well. So, I'm not sure the up and coming student is really going to use FCP X. Once you switch to Premiere, your dependance on OS X starts to leave and the hardware on the Windows side is a whole lot better. I had a lifelong die-hard Mac user ask me about building a PC.
digi_owl 11y ago
Could be that they are seeing that few "pro" customers use their Mac as more than a front end for a Linux render farm these days.
- touchofevil 11y ago
  Macs have never been a good choice for render farm render nodes. The ideal render nodes are something like a dual twin supermicro box running linux or windows. In a 1U rackmounted server like that you can throw in 4 CPUs (and each CPU could have 18 cores if you are using E5-2699v3 cpus, so you'd get 72 cores in a single 1u server).

derefr 11y ago

> which was not ready for professional editing at release Some would argue that that sounds more like a project management failure than a change in market strategy—that they shipped a beta product as done, that someone screwed up somewhere, etc. I don't think so, though; I think Apple just made a correct call in shipping the "core" of the product early (in the same way most enterprise products get 'Early Access' releases) to allow actual professionals to start evaluating the architecture of the software and tailoring their pipelines to fit it. Professional-use software doesn't get used on day 1 of release; it gets played with by an internal pipeline infrastructure team for six months while the working craftspeople continue to use the stable pipeline. Handing out something that would be "patched into usefulness" at right about the same time it would actually be put into use makes sense, in strictly consequentialist terms, for both Apple and the professional studios—although Apple latching onto that release to do a bunch of marketing of their product as if it was usable for indies already, could be seen as a bit scummy. > since it only supported one CPU. For compressing feature films, dual CPUs are a must. This might not be the case right now (I don't know much about video encoding), but encoded video has keyframes, and effectively you can "chunk out" a set of raw frames to become a keyframe plus its successor interstitial frames, and then parallelize on those chunks, right? In which case, I'd expect Apple figured that even if CPU-based compression is currently en vogue for this use-case, it'd be obviated by GPU-based highly-parallel compression soon enough, making the dual GPUs a much more significant benefit and the single CPU a much less significant drawback. Tell me if I'm getting that wrong; I honestly have no idea.

touchofevil 11y ago
Final Cut X was really a huge disappointment to the professional editing community when it was released. It was missing features that made it unusable for professionals. For example, when it was released, it was not possible to export sound as an OMF or AFF (which is the format required for sending sound to a professional sound mixer). I saw it as an indication that Apple no longer needed to cater to the pro market (see also apple dropping Shake and the XServe and the Xserve RAID) now that Apple had the iphone, ipad, itunes, etc. As for compressing films, maybe GPUs will pick up the slack. But there are still other applications like Maya and After Effects that depend almost entirely on the CPU for rendering, so having dual CPUs makes a big difference. I don't really mind Apple leaving the pro market. Adobe Premiere has taken Final Cut Pro's place for most people I know. I just use Windows machines now for my video and graphics work.
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
When FCP X shipped there were howls out of outrage from the video community. FCP 7 had made a name for itself as a solid professional solution. Then they changed it. Completely. And they didn't ship it as a beta for review. They shipped it as a finished product. The professional reaction was best summarised as "WTF is this shit?" It's kind of settled down now, but a lot of pro users have either moved elsewhere or continued with FCP 7. Meanwhile support software like Motion hasn't had a proper update since forever. New users have come on board, but they're mostly students, semipros, small-time boutiques, and YouTube dabblers. FCP X is certainly usable for pro work, but it has some incredibly obvious and annoying shortcomings that make it really hard to integrate into a commercial workflow. It's hard not to get the impression that Apple is trying to become a blingy toy factory, and not a cool computer company that makes cool tools for cool professionals. This is unfortunate, because by losing the cool Apple is also becoming less bling. It's starting to look like a middle-aged guy trying to dance with teenagers at a party - and nothing about that is good in any way. So - MacPro? Maybe not. It looks an update would push the cost over five figures. Considering that many pros are using standard software (i.e. Adobe CS) it's much easier and cheaper to get better and faster PC hardware. This is why killing FCP loyalty was a bad idea. If FCP had kept its user base, a MacPro would have sold itself. Nuking a strong software user base also killed demand for the hardware. MacPro sales are rumoured to be unspectacular - and this was easily preventable.
- protomyth 11y ago
  > New users have come on board, but they're mostly students, semipros, small-time boutiques, and YouTube dabblers. True, but the new users might not be as great in number because the FCP X outrage had another effect. You noted the pros leaving it, but that also included a fair number of schools. FCP X is most definitely not FCP 7 so all the teaching material gets thrown. Also, FCP X is not really a pro app. If the school is going to buy all new books and build new class material why not go with software made by a pro company. They are already teaching other Adobe products so its not much of a jump to add Premiere. Its popular and integrates well. So, I'm not sure the up and coming student is really going to use FCP X. Once you switch to Premiere, your dependance on OS X starts to leave and the hardware on the Windows side is a whole lot better. I had a lifelong die-hard Mac user ask me about building a PC.

digi_owl 11y ago

Could be that they are seeing that few "pro" customers use their Mac as more than a front end for a Linux render farm these days.

touchofevil 11y ago
Macs have never been a good choice for render farm render nodes. The ideal render nodes are something like a dual twin supermicro box running linux or windows. In a 1U rackmounted server like that you can throw in 4 CPUs (and each CPU could have 18 cores if you are using E5-2699v3 cpus, so you'd get 72 cores in a single 1u server).