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The new Mac Pro: The audacity to say “Yes” in a design culture of “No”
- mgamache 9y agoI bet Apple with have the 'courage' to use proprietary connectors inside the case to limit user upgrade options.
- hartator 9y agoDon't get why you getting downvoted. The choice to pick an odd GPU connector internally wasn't justify over pci express.
- jsz0 9y agoImpossible to know since Apple rarely discusses those types of details to the public. They probably should talk about it more because otherwise people just speculate and the best reddit joke punchline is what people end up believing.
- WalterSear 9y agoI bet this will be a milquetoast also-ran of a device, as one would expect from a company forced to say 'Yes' by its users.
- khedoros1 9y agoDistinctive tool design is great, but only to the extent that it doesn't hamper its intended use as a tool. A company that only says 'No' to its users will end up running out of users, eventually. They'll buy the "milquetoast" that gets the job done.
- chiph 9y agoBring back NuBus! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus
- eddieh 9y ago> Many also use the optical audio inputs and outputs, and would appreciate the return of the line-in jack. Maybe some people want that, but real audio pros have dedicated hardware audio interfaces that connect over USB/FireWire/Thunderbolt/PCIe.
- themihai 9y agoor ethernet(avb, dante)
- voltagex_ 9y agoI've never used any pro audio equipment - wouldn't Ethernet be more of a pain than other connectors? You've normally got less Ethernet jacks than any other port on a machine.
- jdboyd 9y agoWith avb/Dante you get up to 128 channels of audio over Ethernet. If that isn't enough, you can add quite a few more give ports via thunderbolt.
- Sanddancer 9y agoIt may be a pain to only use one connector, but the protocol itself compared to a lot of external busses is a lot nicer. One of the big things ethernet gives is a lot lower latency. The ear is pretty latency-sensitive, with voice latency of 15 milliseconds being a threshold where most people can start noticing. Because of the polling nature of USB, you've got to wait for the bus to ask for data, which means you're going to have at least a couple of milliseconds of latency. Also, because Ethernet is a many-to-many protocol, you can do things like have the synchronization clock on the same connection as data, so you don't need to run a million clock cables along with your data cables.
- Dylan16807 9y ago> Because of the polling nature of USB, you've got to wait for the bus to ask for data, which means you're going to have at least a couple of milliseconds of latency. That's up to the driver. USB 2.0 can poll at up to 8kHz. USB 3 is harder for me to find exact numbers on but it has more flexible timing and can go even faster.
- vertis 9y agoNot directly related to the Mac Pro, but my 2014 MacBook Pro has annoyed me only having 2 USB ports. It feels like I need to plug in more than two devices every day. So I end up carrying around a USB hub. Which is just annoying. What is the benefit of having those sides of the computer be empty?
- kylec 9y agoWhat sort of scenarios require 3 or more USB ports simultaneously on the go? I can understand at a desk, but I'm having a hard time imagining a non-contrived scenario where you would need them regularly on the go.
- zepolen 9y agoMy use case: 1. Logitech mouse dongle 2. Disk/Stick 3. Phone I ended up buying a Bluetooth Logitech MX Master instead, best mouse ever.
- devonkim 9y agoI'm more upset that the two ports aren't on the same side of the laptop. This precludes use of portable hard drives that use two USB connections.
- saagarjha 9y agoI'm actually happy that Apple moved the USB ports away from each other. I used to have a non-Retina MacBook Pro and it was a royal pain to get two "large" USBs to fit at the same time.
- Dylan16807 9y agoI'd say the way to support those is having nice beefy power supplies for the ports, not having more of them.
- Espressosaurus 9y agoMouse, JTAG, serial connection to device under test, phone. Sometimes add a USB drive when taking measurements using test equipment. Useful either in the lab, or at a customer's site. Which is why I only own Apple products for play. For my personal usage: mouse, USB drive, phone.
- dbg31415 9y ago> Mac gamers need a high-speed/low-core-count CPU, the best single gaming GPU possible, and VR hardware support. So honestly, are there any real "Mac Gamers"? At this point I think everyone knows to just boot into Windows to play games... the hardware isn't amazing for gaming, but games run a lot better on Windows than they do on MacOS on Apple hardware. Feels like "Mac Gamers" debate was settled years and years ago... if you're serious about gaming, even like casually-serious, you wouldn't even consider running MacOS. It's sad... I remember playing Unreal back in the day on a Mac (one of the colorful case Macs) in college. The game ran so much better than it did on a PC... steam looked like steam, lighting looked better... everything was clearly better on a Mac than any PC I had seen / had access to. But when the latest generation of MacPro was new (ha, 2000 years ago at this point)... I fired up a game on it (running MacOS) to see how it compared... and I got better gaming performance on a $400 off-the-shelf-PC with a $250 graphics card added. What I would LOVE to see is just a Mac like the slightly older MacPro -- aluminum tower case. With lots of standard expansion slots so we could expand as needed (specifically video cards). I don't think games will ever be optimized for Macs the way they are for PCs, but I'd be happy just switching into Windows on the Apple hardware when I played games. --- Side note... anyone else play Escape Velocity? I got to thinking about "good Mac games" and that one stands out. Also most of the Marathon series (spiritual precursor to Halo). Hellcats stood out too for being advanced for the time... most everything else came out on PC first though I think. * EV Nova | Ambrosia Software, Inc. || http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/ http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/ * Marathon (video game) - Wikipedia || https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game) * Hellcats over the Pacific - Wikipedia || https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellcats_over_the_Pacific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellcats_over_the_Pacific
- jblow 9y agoIt's very sad. Halo was originally announced at MacWorld: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZ2yvWl9nQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZ2yvWl9nQ but history did not go that way....
- dbg31415 9y agoI totally forgot about this! Thanks for sharing. Halo demos at MacWorld 1999... Microsoft buys Bungie in 2000... Halo: Combat Evolved comes out exclusively on XBox in 2001... along with the launch of XBox. What would XBox be without Halo? * Microsoft Buys Bungie, Take Two Buys Oni, PS2 Situation Unchanged - IGN || http://www.ign.com/articles/2000/06/20/microsoft-buys-bungie-take-two-buys-oni-ps2-situation-unchanged http://www.ign.com/articles/2000/06/20/microsoft-buys-bungie...
- e28eta 9y agoUsually, when the "what we'd like to see in {iOS,macOS}++" articles come out, it's just a couple weeks before Apple announces the new features and I shake my head because it is already way too late for the feedback to reach Apple. In this case, if you believe the rumors that development on the new Mac Pro is still very early, it actually seems like articles like this and [1] might do some good. [1] https://carpeaqua.com/2017/04/09/a-software-developers-mac-pro/ https://carpeaqua.com/2017/04/09/a-software-developers-mac-p...
- obblekk 9y ago"""While minimalism is one aspect of one view of good design, it’s often overused, underconsidered, and misunderstood, resulting in products with surface-level appeal that don’t actually work very well because they were optimized for visual design and minimalism rather than overall real-world usefulness.""" -=-= this is a crisp characterization of the problem of silicon valley product design today. almost every redesign of major products brings a simpler, more beautiful design which ends up being less useful. i'm strongly in the boat that the purpose of design is to solve people's problems in ways that are hard to think of but easy to appreciate. in the way that a good symphony is hard to write but easy to recognize. -=-= in the 90s the design of mass products like AOL got too complex and it created an opportunity for people to enter the market with simpler designs which were more usable. but now we've gone too far. the designs are simpler than ever, but no longer in the service of greater usability. it's time to make tech product design less minimal, less simple, but more useful. -=-= the culture of designers is a core part of the cause of over pivot. it's elegant to list out a series of design principles (interface guidelines) and then reject every problem that can't be solved within those principles. it's elegant, but does not necessarily produce better product designs.
- tensor 9y agoDesign is all about solving user problems, not producing beautiful interfaces. If fact, if you tried to tell a UX designer that their job was to produce beautiful designs that didn't solve user problems they'd quit on the spot. The Mac Pro is not a simple nor minimal design. It's actually quite a complex design that is optimized for space over flexibility, arguably not good UX. The old Mac Pro, on the other hand, was a great design. It could be criticized as being too expensive, but it was configurable, and very easy to configure to boot. It perfectly met it's target audience. In summary, I don't think you understand the goals modern UX design and are wrongly assigning blame.
- tmd83 9y agoI think what he is saying a lot of modern designer really believes that or even if they say they do they don't practice it. Its not about what UX design was suppose to be but what UX designers often do today. There are definitely modern design that are simple and useful but there are also a lot that are more simple and beautiful at the cost of being useful.
- watertorock 9y agoLet's hope apple wakes up about the MacBook Pro too. The new model is not Pro at all and the touch bar is a nuisance.
- jbmorgado 9y agoThey just added a mostly superfluous "tab bar" that most of the users have just no use for... how's that for that Apple's brilliant minimalism the author of the article preaches about?
- mnm1 9y agoThe only way you're going to make a useful pro machine is to have one with standard parts that can be upgraded easily, something Apple absolutely refuses to do and has refused to do in any of its products for many years. That's why the last decent pro machine is 7 years old and why I'm not holding my breath for the next one. It's guaranteed to be proprietary like all the rest of their hardware these days. Making a pro machine is not that hard. It's by far the simplest type of machine because by definition it should be able to handle anything. Hobbyists and corporations alike have been building them for decades. The fact that Apple can't build the simplest type of machine says a lot about them as a company in 2017. None of it good. EDIT: Discussions around minimalism and design at this point are beyond irrelevant when Apple can't actually build a computer that serves pro users' needs. Those factors only come to play when you actually have the ability to build a proper product. Apple does not have that right now.