14 ms·

Mac Pro: Failure and Future

97 points by kawera 10y ago

pasta 10y ago
When I look around at the pro market that need fast machines I see people working with 3D/CAD, video and sometimes sound and pictures. At least here in The Netherlands almost all those people are working with Windows or Linux based software. So they already get a new video card once in a while and add memory and disk space when needed. I just think that the pro market for Apple became so small because normal computers are getting fast enough for most pro people. For example photo editing works fine on a Apple laptop even with very high resolutions and a lot of layers. So I can imagine that Apple just doesn't need a pro desktop anymore because the market became too small.
- blacksmith_tb 10y ago
  Realistically, that is probably the case, but people who are using macOS professionally are still willing to spend money on hardware with more performance, 'it can never be too fast' etc. My old 2010 Pro compiles node.js about 4X faster than a newer i7 iMac (and uses at least that much more electricity to do it, so that may not seem like a huge win, necessarily). It seems clear that the old Pro's flexibility and upgradability are essentially at odds with Apple's general direction towards soldered and glued products that are only extensible via Thunderbolt; I would be happy to see them move back towards more user-serviceable hardware, but I am not holding my breath. The question of whether that makes sense for their business is trickier, they do have deep pockets, so unless they lost money on the new Pro, it would at least provide bragging rights.
  - H1Supreme 10y ago
    I still use a Mac for audio work, but it's a Hackintosh. Last real Mac (aside from a Macbook) was a G5 Mac Pro. Which, was the last good Mac Pro ever made. As far as development work, I run it all on servers. Whether it's something cloud based, or my own Linux box at home, A low powered laptop SSHFS'd into a server is my preferred way of working.
    - dom0 10y ago
      > was a G5 Mac Pro. Which, was the last good Mac Pro ever made. Which wasn't even a Mac Pro. Interesting.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  Apple just pulled a self fulfilling prophecy. By ignoring the pro market demand for faster turnaround and bleeding edge performance they pushed everyone jumping ship faster; now that the market for the mac pro shrunk to a point the line is unprofitable the circle is complete. meanwhile the trillion dollar render/graphics/cad industry is gonna need something to keep up with the always increasing demand, and will simply look elsewhere.
  - selectodude 10y ago
    The render/graphics/cad industry is not 1.5 percent of world GDP.
    - santoshalper 10y ago
      If the market for pro workstations is more than a couple billion, I'd be pretty damn surprised.
    - radley 10y ago
      Maybe he's including feature films, game development, aerospace, and anything that requires bleeding edge tech.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - gdubs 10y ago
    The ultra high-end market has always been turbulent. Look at Silicon Graphics. They dominated for a good stretch, but then a wave of less expensive windows based machines (like Integraph) followed by commodity graphics-card powered PC boxes completely decimated that market. During that entire time Apple was always positioned in a niche. For a time it was desktop publishing, video editing, photography, audio. A lot of that had to do with loyalty of the developer community, who produced killer apps that only really ran on Apple hardware, as well as appealing to a customer base that deeply preferred Mac OS. But it's worth keeping in mind that the Mac Pro wasn't really ever dominate in certain high-end spaces like 3D. I mean, I'm pretty sure I remember hearing that the ID team at Apple was for a long time using non-apple hardware to run their CAD stuff until one day Ive and Jobs were like, 'this is unacceptable'.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  When I look around at the pro market that need fast machines I see people working with 3D/CAD, video and sometimes sound and pictures That's the market Apple have historically singled out, but it isn't the only "pro" segment. Another big one is software developers, who care a lot about compile and/or test time (and maybe having enough RAM to run a bunch of VMs...) -- and this apparent was recognised in the April meeting.
manmal 10y ago
If Apple really believe that they can replace MacBook Pros with iPads, I think they will be sorely disappointed. Apart from vim/emacs hackers and sysops that can get by with just a shell and keyboard, just about everybody needs a touch pad or a mouse to be productive, and more importantly, a proper desktop OS. Yes, app/context switching will become even faster, iPad screens can be made bigger, and long battery life is alluring; but how am I supposed to mix music without proper peripheral support, edit pro video without external storage mechanisms (or even file system access), or manipulate pictures without fine mouse/touchpad control? How will I develop apps without XCode or Android Studio, debug IE CSS bugs without a VM, or write actually useful scripts without a fully blown unix shell or rubygems etc?
- lloeki 10y ago
  > I think they will be sorely disappointed. Apart from vim/emacs hackers and sysops that can get by with just a shell and keyboard Hell what? Not even that works. Apart from the curios* I've seen no live use of anyone using an iPad instead of a MacBook. From custom window management to the simple fact that a hinge between the screen and the keyboard is just the perfect HID with a TUI. * yes it does work and some people seem to like it (to each his own) but every attempt I've seen just ends up turning an iPad into a frankenlaptop just to end up claiming "hey I work on an iPad, iPads are fine!", which they are, but I'd rather jack a car up with a jack rather than with a beam and a log.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    It all depends on what you do. Executive and field workforce people love the ipad. When I stood up our mobile team, a group of field auditors literally sent us cookies and brownies when we trashed their corporate crapbooks with iPads and VDI -- despite significant UI issues. As SSO has become better with iOS, people have gotten even happier. The instant ok and lower friction (yet secure) connectivity experience is huge. The biggest issue is legacy windows apps. But people come up with solutions for that as well. In one case, a guy wrote an access front end for a Windows workflow with giant buttons that were easy to click. Ugly as sin? Yes. But it worked.
mikejmoffitt 10y ago
"The A10 processor inside my iPhone is no less powerful than the Intel processor inside my MacBook" [citation needed]
- tyingq 10y ago
  My guess is that the author read this https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/16/12939310/iphone-7-a10-fusion-processor-apple-intel-future https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/16/12939310/iphone-7-a10-fus... Perhaps without understanding the full context.
  - munificent 10y ago
    The author of the article is this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e I could be wrong, but I imagine he still knows a thing or two about CPU architecture and performance.
    - tyingq 10y ago
      No, you're right, I missed that. He either has an old MacBook though, or is being a little cheeky.
- wmf 10y ago
  https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/12/will-apple-incs-a10x-catch-up-to-intel-corporation.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/12/will-apple-incs-a1... http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/14/geekbench-android-a10 http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/14/geekbench-androi... http://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad-pro-review/4 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad-pro-review...
  - mikejmoffitt 10y ago
    The first has results from Geekbench finding that "A10 Fusion has roughly the same single-core processor performance as Intel's top sixth-generation Core m processor". The second references Matt Mariska's misleading tweet: "Geekbench has the iPhone 7 beating the $6,500 12-core Mac Pro in single-thread." - Never mind that it's a $6,500 12-core Mac from over four years ago. This one gets regurgitated over and over. The third still illustrates performance edging close to the Core M series of processors.
jarym 10y ago
Apple imagined a world where everybody did all their work on iPads and the laptop was a relic from a forgotten age. We might get there one day, but NEVER while Apple maintains closed-garden approach to iOS. Apple allowed its 'Pro' lines (less so MacPro and more so MacBook Pro) to start catering to its biggest buyers - consumers who had lots of money and simply wanted 'the best'. And back in 2012-2013, the 'Pro' lines were really well regarded amongst professional users which re-inforced in the consumers mind that they were the best. Apple focussed on thinner and slicker looking devices and added gimmicks such as touchbar and cylindrical cases. Suddenly we find that the MacPro hasn't been updated in years (yes Mr Schiller CAN'T INNOVATE YOUR ASS indeed) and the MacBook Pro can handle the same amount of memory as it did over 3 years ago (battery you say Mr Schiller? Well most 'pro' users will sacrifice some battery life for performance and those that don't want to do that could have gone for regular MacBooks). The Pro lines aren't so well regarded anymore and Apple will watch slowly as those rich consumers who propped up sales dwindle. Maybe Mr Cook and co will wake up and actually realise they should rather just drop the pro line than consumerize it. iPads could have done so well in the pro space if they'd supported proper integration with Macs and could be used as extension devices rather than exclusively as replacement devices - but no - Apple had to try will a market that simply isn't there into existence.
- eropple 10y ago
  > iPads could have done so well in the pro space if they'd supported proper integration with Macs and could be used as extension devices rather than exclusively as replacement devices And indeed, the places I see iPads used most heavily are exactly those. You see it heavily in the audio industry: Logic Remote is really really good and all the other similar tools (Lemur, TouchOSC, etc.) have huge uptake. I'm in the process of building a video/CG overlay system for TV/streaming[1] and the best way to use the backend management system I've found while I'm trying to concentrate on something else is my old iPad 2. [1] https://github.com/bossmodecg https://github.com/bossmodecg
  - jarym 10y ago
    That looks really neat! will try to follow it on GH!
smacktoward 10y ago
The irony in this piece (which Gassée is classy enough to only point to obliquely) is that what pros are clamoring for is for an Apple that's less like Steve Jobs' Apple and more like Jean-Louis Gassée's. The trashcan Mac Pro came out after Jobs died, but in spirit it's a classically Jobsian product: fascinated with aesthetics and style, disinterested in performance and expandability. It's striking to look at, but required a whole bunch of increasingly painful compromises on the inside in order to make that visual statement possible. Which makes it a lot like the original Mac, which was also a Jobsian product. Its revolutionary industrial design makes the 1984 Mac a wonderful object to contemplate even today; it's like the Platonic ideal of the term "personal computer." But the original Mac was also hobbled in important ways to fit Jobs' vision; it came with just 128K of RAM (low even by the standards of the time), and no mechanism was provided for adding expansion cards or other upgrades inside the enclosure. (It took two years for Apple to come out with a version that included a SCSI port!) What the pros want, by contrast, is a Mac that puts functionality over aesthetics; it's OK by them if it's a big ugly box, if that big ugly box comes with cutting edge parts and can be stuffed full of RAM and drives and expansion cards. Which sounds a lot like Gassée's baby when he was in charge of product design at Apple, the Mac II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II The Mac II discarded the beautiful lunchbox form-factor of the original Mac completely, replacing it with... a big ugly box. But it was a big ugly box that was twice as fast as the lunchbox Mac, supported true-color graphics and had plenty of room for expansion, so the pros of the time loved it. The Mac II was the start of the long line of high-performance Macs that would make the Mac the go-to computer for people in creative industries. So when pro users complain about there not being a Mac for them anymore, this is what they're talking about. They want a modern Mac II. They want a Mac that's less Steve Jobs and more Jean-Louis Gassée.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Great point. The Mac Pro was pretty obviously this decade's G4 Cube. Ironically they didn't learn their lesson and thermal failure was still the Achilles heel. In their defense, Apple hits home runs with those kind of products. I worked in a computer store when the original iMac came out... the serious computer people thought it was a joke, but it sold like hot cakes.
LaSombra 10y ago
Why are there so many articles, mostly condescending or blatantly speculative, about all this Apple? I can't, for the life of me, understand this. They do what they do and that's it. Only Apple understands what Apple does. No one else. How is that not clear? Sorry for the rant.
- std_throwaway 10y ago
  People want Apple to be successful because they like(d) their products.
  - LaSombra 10y ago
    I want some companies to be successful but I won't be writing about them to death and speculate and pretend I know better, writing articles "teaching them" what they should focus on and etc. Really? Do you think it's reasonable the amount of people that seems to devote themselves to this?
  - chongli 10y ago
    I want Apple to be successful because all of their competitors' products have annoying quirks and reliability issues. Ultimately, I'd love to see a company actually try to compete with Apple on quality but it doesn't seem likely to happen.
- Eric_WVGG 10y ago
  Do you think it’s weird for an ex-CEO to have thoughts and opinions about a company he used to run?
  - GuiA 10y ago
    He's not ex-CEO; he was the exec heading the mac division. That was more than 25 years ago; any company would change a fair amount in that time.
    - Eric_WVGG 10y ago
jjawssd 10y ago
Check out this company that built their whole infrastructure around the Mac Pro. What a waste of capital. http://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros http://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros
- CPLX 10y ago
  I mean, they seemed happy with the results right?
  - jjawssd 10y ago
    That's right
panda88888 10y ago
This is what I want from Apple. Laptop: ultralights (MacBook. This can be all soldered), value (MBA, or even the old 13" MB unibody, somewhat upgradable), powerful (13"/15" MBP, ram and ssd upgradable with standard components) Desktop: all-in-one (slick design), value (smallish, somewhat upgradable), pro (flexible, upgradable) And the pro models really need some semblance of upgradability, especially desktop pro.
- nadim 10y ago
  In case anyone is actually reading this. 17mbp too please.
  - lj3 10y ago
    This! I loved my old lunch tray.
  - emptythought 10y ago
    I kept mine going for as long as i could until it was just blatantly too underpowered. I upgraded to the 15in retina(magsafe style, not the new one) and i'm still grumpy about the screen size downgrade. Where is the 4k 17in MBP? The old one was 1920x1200, it would be a perfectly obvious upgrade
  - FullyFunctional 10y ago
    +1 My 2006 17" MBP is still used daily (Ironically I'm writing this on an XPS 15 running Fedora 25)
- mrweasel 10y ago
  I can understand why people want their Macs to be upgradable, but how is Apple suppose to profit from it? Apple is very much a hardware company, so why would they make a computer that can be upgraded with standard components. Customers would just buy the cheapest option and upgrade with third party stuff. Sure they are absolutely losing pro customers, but does that really matter when they have the iPhones and high-end laptops? It's only the very high-end professionals that aren't able to make due with an Apple product anymore.
spcelzrd 10y ago
"Three senior execs sit down with five reliable (meaning no clickbait)" Not that these aren't great journalists, but Buzzfeed, Tech Crunch, and Mashable are no strangers to clickbait.
caycep 10y ago
I can't help but feeling there is a trap here, which is what Gassee seems to be getting at. Macs didn't become the default choice of "pros" due to out-and-out speed. You could always build a faster Windows box, and they have always been more configurable. Macs won via the usability factor - whether that was better OS support for certain things, better UI for certain things, or some new app or feature on OS X that made it possible to do a certain task for cheaper on consumer hardware that previously required expensive custom "pro-only" hardware to run. I mean, the whole Avid revolution was that you could do previously esoteric video editing on a Mac vs. buying some horribly expensive custom setup, and the same thing happened with Premiere, and then Final Cut Pro. The whole pattern isn't that Apple used to make expensive (relatively speaking) pro hardware that was faster than everyone else, it was because they democratized some pro function and everyone used it because it was just better. So why all the excitement for apple to make a "narrow" machine to "cater" to the pro market? That would be against what Apple has historically done. Apple can win the "pro's" over by making iPads or MacBooks able to do pro video editing that previously required a $10k windows/linux tower with dual video cards, not by making their own $10k tower with dual video cards. The whole point may not be that there is a pocket industry of "pros" upset at Apple, but that their function is being disrupted by young grads just out of film school doing their jobs on an iMac.
- radley 10y ago
  > Apple can win the "pro's" over by making iPads or MacBooks able to do pro video editing that previously required a $10k windows/linux tower with dual video cards WAT!?! Imagine editing an 8k, 3D feature film on an iPad Air. The "handheld" device would end up being a 12 lb behemoth with Gilliam-esque cable madness running to a single lightning port and optional (Red) branded oven mitts. Pro video editing (and FX, hello) requires massive power, storage, and peripherals - the more the better.
  - blowski 10y ago
    In part, I think that's Apple's problem right now. 15 years ago, I could imagine Apple somehow building a device that was smaller, more usable and more powerful than any of their rivals. These days, they are just more expensive.
kruhft 10y ago
I like my Mac Pro. It's more powerful than any MacBook I've used and gets stuff done. I find all the bad press and hate confusing. It's just a computer.
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  It's very expensive and ~five years old at this point.
  - kruhft 10y ago
    Nope, it wasn't cheap. But as an artifact, and me being a Computer Engineer, I'm impressed with it as a piece of hardware and design.
    - mixmastamyk 10y ago
      I was impressed when I first saw it as well. However since they say it can't be upgraded, I'd consider it a failure.
- ralusek 10y ago
  These are the two sources of confusion, and they are completely valid. Neither you "liking" your Mac Pro, nor it being "just a computer" address these completely valid concerns. 1.) Why is Apple not keeping this system in line with the state of technology? If it's targeted at professionals, why have they left their only option in that department 5 years behind in technology? 2.) Are they planning on making the next iteration upgradeable? For some time now, Apple has used third party silicon, interchangeable with that of any other system. Intel, AMD, nVidia. Professionals on any other platform can spend a couple hundred bucks and modernize their computer for 2-3 years. Isn't it therefore possible that the lack of sales in Mac Pro division aren't because of lack of interest or a small professional market, but because of a bad idea to make a proprietary desktop tower which locks down upgradeability?
- skocznymroczny 10y ago
  This is about Mac Pro, which is the spaceship looking like server hardware from Apple, not Macbook Pro, which is a notebook.
makecheck 10y ago
They can claim wrong assumptions about GPUs, etc. but the "form over function" of the Mac Pro redesign was obvious from the start. It is even extended to their infuriating web site: there are so many animations, endless scrolling while being fed painfully little information about the product, and no obvious link to something simple and useful like a white paper to communicate the important details about the machine. They have always assumed that people would be lured in by the interesting design and they make the real details hard to find. That is clueless. The top of the line product page should have stats front and center.
- larkost 10y ago
  The current MacPro was designed for one group of professionals: those using FinalCut Pro. Both the software and the dual video cards were tuned to each other, and at the time were a killer combination, faster than any other setup for that workflow. The two mistakes Apple made (and is referencing there) were that 1) the GPU market would follow down the same path as CPU's were and going with dual (slightly slower) GPUs would win out over single high-temperature GPUs so they would have good replacements to choose from down the line, and 2) other software would adapt to the 2 GPU strategy and FinalCut Pro would be the leader on a new wave of software using GPUs through things like OpenCL. Neither of these turned out to be true. GPU makers pushed hard into making single-card monsters (and it has worked well), and very few software titles have figured out (or even publicly attempted to figure out) how to make things use the second GPU on the MacPros.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    They also bet pretty heavily that the bandwidth of DisplayPort/Thunderbolt would make it possible to expand the capability of the machine through external modules. Not just hard-drives or displays, these were envisioned for external GPUs and more, that perhaps Thunderbolt might become as sensible a design decision as PCI-e. Ports are the new slots! That didn't work out. There are external GPUs today and they perform surprisingly well, but it's just not the same as having a card you can slot into your machine. The one thing that the Mac Pro was supposed to do well, it killed at though. Final Cut on that machine can chew through 4K video without issues. The problem is the people that want that machine want more than Final Cut.
DCKing 10y ago
> Considering the continued decline of classical PCs, I don’t think Apple can go all the way and design an Ax processor for high-end Macs. I think this is wrong. This is what the benchmarks say: - Apple A10 Fusion @ 2.35 GHz [1] / Geekbench 4 single-core: 3500 (typically) - that's 1489 points per GHz - Intel Core i7 7700 @ 4.20 GHz turbo / Geekbench 4 single-core: 5400 (typically) [2] - that's 1286 points per GHz - Intel Core i3 7100U @ 2.40 GHz (no turbo) / Geekbench 4 single-core: 3150 (typically) - that's 1312 points per GHz In clock-for-clock performance, Apple already is competitive with the highest end Intel performance. It's just a question on whether they can scale this up to a desktop chip with an appropriate amount of cores, clockspeed and I/O. Before you protest, Geekbench 4 is one of the few benchmarks that tests individual core speed while being fairly independent of I/O performance. Of course any desktop processor will easily outclass a mobile chip when it comes to I/O. It's not a perfect comparison for sure, but I think it shows that it's quite conceivable Apple will use their own chips in their next Mac Pro. [1]: This fails to take into account any potential 'turbo' functionality the A10 Fusion has - there is so little known about it that we don't if that exists or how much it boosts. [2]: I chose the non-K variety because the 7700K results on Geekbench typically seem to vary wildly due to its overclockability.
redm 10y ago
I've been using the new Mac Pro since 2015 and it's served me will without the need for upgrade... except for one thing. The primary disk being only 256GB causes me all kinds of issues. Everything wants to install and save there and there's no simple way to offload stuff to a secondary disk, so I'm constantly moving, symlinking, etc to keep enough space free so that my computer doesn't crash. Very annoying. This could, of course, be solved with software.
_ph_ 10y ago
While I can see that the can-like current design of the Mac Pro was a honest mistake in predicting the PC market, I am baffled how long it took them to recognize the mistake and take no action. They must have noticed it quite recently, so they did not care for the mac pro for years. The mac pro isn't important for Apple measured by the money it makes by its sales. It is important for keeping the mac line alive. It is the machine for all the people writing the software for iOS devices, and of course for all the mac hardware which does create the revenue for Apple. Also, it keeps the professionals on the mac platform. Even if Apple would sell the mac pro at a loss, it would be worth it for its role in the environment. It plays the same role for Apple, as all those photographers at the sports event for Canon and Nikon. There isn't much money to be made from them, but by their reputation, all the equipment is sold to the big public. In the mid-2000 years, the first sign of macs becoming popular was that at conferences, 80% would have an Apple laptop. They were leading the wave. But today, their market share is still high, yet, one can read more and more blog posts on how to switch to Linux or build a Hackintosh. I guess this is, what got the message at least partially to the Apple management. I am writing this on a 5k iMac, which I quite like (except: no video input, what were they thinking??). In a year or two I would be interested in upgrading to a mac pro, if its a reasonably versatile device. I don't need too much upgradability, but I would expect to be able to order it with a current high-end graphics card and proper internal storage. Otherwise, I might consider going back to Linux eventually.
angryteabag 10y ago
Generally speaking, I really like OSX/macOS. I am starting to grow a disdain towards Windows, with it's insistence on changing the default browser to IE + Bing on every update. Linux is great, but it just doesn't do it superficially for me. I can make it look great for screenshots, but as soon as I click a button or engage with the DE, the facade falls apart. macOS/OSX seems to be like a Linux distro with a very well developed desktop manager. The only problem is, I need to buy a Mac. Who the hell can afford that, holy sh*it
- avtar 10y ago
  I am starting to grow a disdain towards Windows, with it's insistence on changing the default browser to IE + Bing on every update. This did not happen when I installed Creators Update a few weeks ago. Firefox was still my default browser after updating.
5_minutes 10y ago
All my stuff is Apple hardware. But I went from an extremely happy client to an "okay" client: because of convenience, I don't want to start messing with Android (and having Google monitoring my like a little baby duck) and going back to Windows (hey some dissapointing "the grass looks greener on the other side"-stories) or Linux, where still, if your eye wants something, there's so many quite horrible inconsistent ugly things happening. So Apple is still the best choice for people like me who don't totally want to break their current workflow, simply because there's no convincing great alternative out there. But the credits, or forgiveness of all this is dwindling fastly. If I would've bought this new MBP for 3500 EUR from my own money, instead of it being a company laptop - rather than my personal one --, I would feel seriously cheated -- and probably would've gone for a Lenovo instead. Apple, under Jobs, made plenty of mistakes, but in the last years, he was pretty much spot on. In my eyes, Tim Cook, makes one mistake after the other. And it's not just the Mac Pro, but also the Mac Mini (which is a great computer-format), the audio jacks on the iPhone, the removing of the magsafe, dongle-life, etc. So there's plenty of reasons to say basically: let's bail from this mess. The problem is that the alternatives are not so much obviously better. GrumpyGamer's posts when compiling Thimbleweed Park for Windows were a pretty good reminder of staying away from Windows. ;)
- hota_mazi 10y ago
  > and having Google monitoring my like a little baby duck So instead, you prefer Apple monitoring you like a little baby duck?
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    I'm not particularly an Apple fan, but Apple isn't an advertising company fundamentally premised on profiling users. The business is far more aligned with user privacy than Google's, inherently. That said, Google seem to have some smarts about defending against high-level attacks, though also some very noteable failures. Remember, John Podesta's email phishing occurred on a Gmail account. And it's Gmail which secures the Traitor Puppet Fascist Donald John Trump's Twitter account password recovery.
  - ksk 10y ago
TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
Apple's problem is more subtle. The MacPro was a good choice for a tiny market niche - pro video editors and pro musicians. This is a market in which a $5k 10 core PC is considered an entry level machine. 3D houses and some music studios have racks of server-grade hardware that is far outside the reach of most mortals. There is a bigger market of users who like to label themselves pro, but are actually prosumer. It includes smaller music studios (home or not), design studios, serious hobbyists and dabblers, smaller video houses, academic music composers, and so on. Also many software developers. These users are not in the Hollywood league, and they typically have a limited budget. The old cheesegrater MacPro was a good fit for this market. It was also good enough, and expandable enough, to get some interest from the no-compromise pros. The new MacPro is too expensive for the prosumers, and poor value - and underpowered - for the no-compromise pros. I'm not yet convinced Apple understands this. Jobs understood it because his links with Pixar meant he could see first hand what Hollywood pros were using. I don't think the current management is as open to creative input from creative professionals at all levels. If I'm right, the 2018 Mac Pros will be open like PCs, but they still won't truly satisfy either type of user.
- fuzzywalrus 10y ago
  I'd beg to differ on the point of Pro-Video editors and musicians seeing as I've contracted for a few TV shows and am a hobbyist musician etc. It was a mediocre choice, if not poor choice: Generally a TV Show workflow (since FCP X killed its user base) an Avid centric base. Editors grab all their footage off a central server to edit the down converts (1080p). SSD is great for a boot drive but you'll need hefty internal storage. Now you need to buy an expensive external solution. Also for same goes for Digital Musicians or recording, although the storage demands are quite a bit less. The dual GPU setup was under-utilized and the consumer grade cards are far better for render assistance bang-for-buck. So much so that it was better just to upgrade GPUs with gaming cards. Notably, the Fire GLs are underperfomers for After Effects. Also Musicians get almost zero benefit from dual GPUs. It's unnecessary cost. Since in Hollywood TV, you are contract you, you bring your own hardware. When USB 3.0 took off, most of my editor friends just grabbed USB 3.0 cards and popped them into the computers. Mixing guys tended to have a lot invested in PCIe audio interfaces for ProTools. A few friends had MPEG4 encoder accelerators which were great for quick encodes for dailies. I'm not sure what fantasy world Apple was in that small size of the Mac Pro 2013 mattered but post-guys set up shop for weeks at a time, and its easier to cart one heavy tower followed by monitors than a small computer with a box of dongles and misc items. The friends I still keep in touch with in LA mostly have switched to Windows instead of going for the Mac Pro 2013. More bang for the book (time is money) and more performant. Anyhow, other than that I agree. just rerelease the 2012 with new innards and call it a day.

97 points by kawera 10y ago

pasta 10y ago

When I look around at the pro market that need fast machines I see people working with 3D/CAD, video and sometimes sound and pictures. At least here in The Netherlands almost all those people are working with Windows or Linux based software. So they already get a new video card once in a while and add memory and disk space when needed. I just think that the pro market for Apple became so small because normal computers are getting fast enough for most pro people. For example photo editing works fine on a Apple laptop even with very high resolutions and a lot of layers. So I can imagine that Apple just doesn't need a pro desktop anymore because the market became too small.

blacksmith_tb 10y ago
Realistically, that is probably the case, but people who are using macOS professionally are still willing to spend money on hardware with more performance, 'it can never be too fast' etc. My old 2010 Pro compiles node.js about 4X faster than a newer i7 iMac (and uses at least that much more electricity to do it, so that may not seem like a huge win, necessarily). It seems clear that the old Pro's flexibility and upgradability are essentially at odds with Apple's general direction towards soldered and glued products that are only extensible via Thunderbolt; I would be happy to see them move back towards more user-serviceable hardware, but I am not holding my breath. The question of whether that makes sense for their business is trickier, they do have deep pockets, so unless they lost money on the new Pro, it would at least provide bragging rights.
- H1Supreme 10y ago
  I still use a Mac for audio work, but it's a Hackintosh. Last real Mac (aside from a Macbook) was a G5 Mac Pro. Which, was the last good Mac Pro ever made. As far as development work, I run it all on servers. Whether it's something cloud based, or my own Linux box at home, A low powered laptop SSHFS'd into a server is my preferred way of working.
  - dom0 10y ago
    > was a G5 Mac Pro. Which, was the last good Mac Pro ever made. Which wasn't even a Mac Pro. Interesting.
LoSboccacc 10y ago
Apple just pulled a self fulfilling prophecy. By ignoring the pro market demand for faster turnaround and bleeding edge performance they pushed everyone jumping ship faster; now that the market for the mac pro shrunk to a point the line is unprofitable the circle is complete. meanwhile the trillion dollar render/graphics/cad industry is gonna need something to keep up with the always increasing demand, and will simply look elsewhere.
- selectodude 10y ago
  The render/graphics/cad industry is not 1.5 percent of world GDP.
  - santoshalper 10y ago
    If the market for pro workstations is more than a couple billion, I'd be pretty damn surprised.
  - radley 10y ago
    Maybe he's including feature films, game development, aerospace, and anything that requires bleeding edge tech.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gdubs 10y ago
  The ultra high-end market has always been turbulent. Look at Silicon Graphics. They dominated for a good stretch, but then a wave of less expensive windows based machines (like Integraph) followed by commodity graphics-card powered PC boxes completely decimated that market. During that entire time Apple was always positioned in a niche. For a time it was desktop publishing, video editing, photography, audio. A lot of that had to do with loyalty of the developer community, who produced killer apps that only really ran on Apple hardware, as well as appealing to a customer base that deeply preferred Mac OS. But it's worth keeping in mind that the Mac Pro wasn't really ever dominate in certain high-end spaces like 3D. I mean, I'm pretty sure I remember hearing that the ID team at Apple was for a long time using non-apple hardware to run their CAD stuff until one day Ive and Jobs were like, 'this is unacceptable'.
dasmoth 10y ago
When I look around at the pro market that need fast machines I see people working with 3D/CAD, video and sometimes sound and pictures That's the market Apple have historically singled out, but it isn't the only "pro" segment. Another big one is software developers, who care a lot about compile and/or test time (and maybe having enough RAM to run a bunch of VMs...) -- and this apparent was recognised in the April meeting.

manmal 10y ago

If Apple really believe that they can replace MacBook Pros with iPads, I think they will be sorely disappointed. Apart from vim/emacs hackers and sysops that can get by with just a shell and keyboard, just about everybody needs a touch pad or a mouse to be productive, and more importantly, a proper desktop OS. Yes, app/context switching will become even faster, iPad screens can be made bigger, and long battery life is alluring; but how am I supposed to mix music without proper peripheral support, edit pro video without external storage mechanisms (or even file system access), or manipulate pictures without fine mouse/touchpad control? How will I develop apps without XCode or Android Studio, debug IE CSS bugs without a VM, or write actually useful scripts without a fully blown unix shell or rubygems etc?

lloeki 10y ago
> I think they will be sorely disappointed. Apart from vim/emacs hackers and sysops that can get by with just a shell and keyboard Hell what? Not even that works. Apart from the curios* I've seen no live use of anyone using an iPad instead of a MacBook. From custom window management to the simple fact that a hinge between the screen and the keyboard is just the perfect HID with a TUI. * yes it does work and some people seem to like it (to each his own) but every attempt I've seen just ends up turning an iPad into a frankenlaptop just to end up claiming "hey I work on an iPad, iPads are fine!", which they are, but I'd rather jack a car up with a jack rather than with a beam and a log.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  It all depends on what you do. Executive and field workforce people love the ipad. When I stood up our mobile team, a group of field auditors literally sent us cookies and brownies when we trashed their corporate crapbooks with iPads and VDI -- despite significant UI issues. As SSO has become better with iOS, people have gotten even happier. The instant ok and lower friction (yet secure) connectivity experience is huge. The biggest issue is legacy windows apps. But people come up with solutions for that as well. In one case, a guy wrote an access front end for a Windows workflow with giant buttons that were easy to click. Ugly as sin? Yes. But it worked.

mikejmoffitt 10y ago

"The A10 processor inside my iPhone is no less powerful than the Intel processor inside my MacBook" [citation needed]

tyingq 10y ago
My guess is that the author read this https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/16/12939310/iphone-7-a10-fusion-processor-apple-intel-future https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/16/12939310/iphone-7-a10-fus... Perhaps without understanding the full context.
- munificent 10y ago
  The author of the article is this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e I could be wrong, but I imagine he still knows a thing or two about CPU architecture and performance.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    No, you're right, I missed that. He either has an old MacBook though, or is being a little cheeky.
wmf 10y ago
https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/12/will-apple-incs-a10x-catch-up-to-intel-corporation.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/12/will-apple-incs-a1... http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/14/geekbench-android-a10 http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/14/geekbench-androi... http://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad-pro-review/4 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad-pro-review...
- mikejmoffitt 10y ago
  The first has results from Geekbench finding that "A10 Fusion has roughly the same single-core processor performance as Intel's top sixth-generation Core m processor". The second references Matt Mariska's misleading tweet: "Geekbench has the iPhone 7 beating the $6,500 12-core Mac Pro in single-thread." - Never mind that it's a $6,500 12-core Mac from over four years ago. This one gets regurgitated over and over. The third still illustrates performance edging close to the Core M series of processors.

jarym 10y ago

Apple imagined a world where everybody did all their work on iPads and the laptop was a relic from a forgotten age. We might get there one day, but NEVER while Apple maintains closed-garden approach to iOS. Apple allowed its 'Pro' lines (less so MacPro and more so MacBook Pro) to start catering to its biggest buyers - consumers who had lots of money and simply wanted 'the best'. And back in 2012-2013, the 'Pro' lines were really well regarded amongst professional users which re-inforced in the consumers mind that they were the best. Apple focussed on thinner and slicker looking devices and added gimmicks such as touchbar and cylindrical cases. Suddenly we find that the MacPro hasn't been updated in years (yes Mr Schiller CAN'T INNOVATE YOUR ASS indeed) and the MacBook Pro can handle the same amount of memory as it did over 3 years ago (battery you say Mr Schiller? Well most 'pro' users will sacrifice some battery life for performance and those that don't want to do that could have gone for regular MacBooks). The Pro lines aren't so well regarded anymore and Apple will watch slowly as those rich consumers who propped up sales dwindle. Maybe Mr Cook and co will wake up and actually realise they should rather just drop the pro line than consumerize it. iPads could have done so well in the pro space if they'd supported proper integration with Macs and could be used as extension devices rather than exclusively as replacement devices - but no - Apple had to try will a market that simply isn't there into existence.

eropple 10y ago
> iPads could have done so well in the pro space if they'd supported proper integration with Macs and could be used as extension devices rather than exclusively as replacement devices And indeed, the places I see iPads used most heavily are exactly those. You see it heavily in the audio industry: Logic Remote is really really good and all the other similar tools (Lemur, TouchOSC, etc.) have huge uptake. I'm in the process of building a video/CG overlay system for TV/streaming[1] and the best way to use the backend management system I've found while I'm trying to concentrate on something else is my old iPad 2. [1] https://github.com/bossmodecg https://github.com/bossmodecg
- jarym 10y ago
  That looks really neat! will try to follow it on GH!

smacktoward 10y ago

The irony in this piece (which Gassée is classy enough to only point to obliquely) is that what pros are clamoring for is for an Apple that's less like Steve Jobs' Apple and more like Jean-Louis Gassée's. The trashcan Mac Pro came out after Jobs died, but in spirit it's a classically Jobsian product: fascinated with aesthetics and style, disinterested in performance and expandability. It's striking to look at, but required a whole bunch of increasingly painful compromises on the inside in order to make that visual statement possible. Which makes it a lot like the original Mac, which was also a Jobsian product. Its revolutionary industrial design makes the 1984 Mac a wonderful object to contemplate even today; it's like the Platonic ideal of the term "personal computer." But the original Mac was also hobbled in important ways to fit Jobs' vision; it came with just 128K of RAM (low even by the standards of the time), and no mechanism was provided for adding expansion cards or other upgrades inside the enclosure. (It took two years for Apple to come out with a version that included a SCSI port!) What the pros want, by contrast, is a Mac that puts functionality over aesthetics; it's OK by them if it's a big ugly box, if that big ugly box comes with cutting edge parts and can be stuffed full of RAM and drives and expansion cards. Which sounds a lot like Gassée's baby when he was in charge of product design at Apple, the Mac II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II The Mac II discarded the beautiful lunchbox form-factor of the original Mac completely, replacing it with... a big ugly box. But it was a big ugly box that was twice as fast as the lunchbox Mac, supported true-color graphics and had plenty of room for expansion, so the pros of the time loved it. The Mac II was the start of the long line of high-performance Macs that would make the Mac the go-to computer for people in creative industries. So when pro users complain about there not being a Mac for them anymore, this is what they're talking about. They want a modern Mac II. They want a Mac that's less Steve Jobs and more Jean-Louis Gassée.

Spooky23 10y ago
Great point. The Mac Pro was pretty obviously this decade's G4 Cube. Ironically they didn't learn their lesson and thermal failure was still the Achilles heel. In their defense, Apple hits home runs with those kind of products. I worked in a computer store when the original iMac came out... the serious computer people thought it was a joke, but it sold like hot cakes.

LaSombra 10y ago

Why are there so many articles, mostly condescending or blatantly speculative, about all this Apple? I can't, for the life of me, understand this. They do what they do and that's it. Only Apple understands what Apple does. No one else. How is that not clear? Sorry for the rant.

std_throwaway 10y ago
People want Apple to be successful because they like(d) their products.
- LaSombra 10y ago
  I want some companies to be successful but I won't be writing about them to death and speculate and pretend I know better, writing articles "teaching them" what they should focus on and etc. Really? Do you think it's reasonable the amount of people that seems to devote themselves to this?
- chongli 10y ago
  I want Apple to be successful because all of their competitors' products have annoying quirks and reliability issues. Ultimately, I'd love to see a company actually try to compete with Apple on quality but it doesn't seem likely to happen.
Eric_WVGG 10y ago
Do you think it’s weird for an ex-CEO to have thoughts and opinions about a company he used to run?
- GuiA 10y ago
  He's not ex-CEO; he was the exec heading the mac division. That was more than 25 years ago; any company would change a fair amount in that time.
  - Eric_WVGG 10y ago

jjawssd 10y ago

Check out this company that built their whole infrastructure around the Mac Pro. What a waste of capital. http://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros http://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros

CPLX 10y ago
I mean, they seemed happy with the results right?
- jjawssd 10y ago
  That's right

panda88888 10y ago

This is what I want from Apple. Laptop: ultralights (MacBook. This can be all soldered), value (MBA, or even the old 13" MB unibody, somewhat upgradable), powerful (13"/15" MBP, ram and ssd upgradable with standard components) Desktop: all-in-one (slick design), value (smallish, somewhat upgradable), pro (flexible, upgradable) And the pro models really need some semblance of upgradability, especially desktop pro.

nadim 10y ago
In case anyone is actually reading this. 17mbp too please.
- lj3 10y ago
  This! I loved my old lunch tray.
- emptythought 10y ago
  I kept mine going for as long as i could until it was just blatantly too underpowered. I upgraded to the 15in retina(magsafe style, not the new one) and i'm still grumpy about the screen size downgrade. Where is the 4k 17in MBP? The old one was 1920x1200, it would be a perfectly obvious upgrade
- FullyFunctional 10y ago
  +1 My 2006 17" MBP is still used daily (Ironically I'm writing this on an XPS 15 running Fedora 25)
mrweasel 10y ago
I can understand why people want their Macs to be upgradable, but how is Apple suppose to profit from it? Apple is very much a hardware company, so why would they make a computer that can be upgraded with standard components. Customers would just buy the cheapest option and upgrade with third party stuff. Sure they are absolutely losing pro customers, but does that really matter when they have the iPhones and high-end laptops? It's only the very high-end professionals that aren't able to make due with an Apple product anymore.

spcelzrd 10y ago

"Three senior execs sit down with five reliable (meaning no clickbait)" Not that these aren't great journalists, but Buzzfeed, Tech Crunch, and Mashable are no strangers to clickbait.

caycep 10y ago

I can't help but feeling there is a trap here, which is what Gassee seems to be getting at. Macs didn't become the default choice of "pros" due to out-and-out speed. You could always build a faster Windows box, and they have always been more configurable. Macs won via the usability factor - whether that was better OS support for certain things, better UI for certain things, or some new app or feature on OS X that made it possible to do a certain task for cheaper on consumer hardware that previously required expensive custom "pro-only" hardware to run. I mean, the whole Avid revolution was that you could do previously esoteric video editing on a Mac vs. buying some horribly expensive custom setup, and the same thing happened with Premiere, and then Final Cut Pro. The whole pattern isn't that Apple used to make expensive (relatively speaking) pro hardware that was faster than everyone else, it was because they democratized some pro function and everyone used it because it was just better. So why all the excitement for apple to make a "narrow" machine to "cater" to the pro market? That would be against what Apple has historically done. Apple can win the "pro's" over by making iPads or MacBooks able to do pro video editing that previously required a $10k windows/linux tower with dual video cards, not by making their own $10k tower with dual video cards. The whole point may not be that there is a pocket industry of "pros" upset at Apple, but that their function is being disrupted by young grads just out of film school doing their jobs on an iMac.

radley 10y ago
> Apple can win the "pro's" over by making iPads or MacBooks able to do pro video editing that previously required a $10k windows/linux tower with dual video cards WAT!?! Imagine editing an 8k, 3D feature film on an iPad Air. The "handheld" device would end up being a 12 lb behemoth with Gilliam-esque cable madness running to a single lightning port and optional (Red) branded oven mitts. Pro video editing (and FX, hello) requires massive power, storage, and peripherals - the more the better.
- blowski 10y ago
  In part, I think that's Apple's problem right now. 15 years ago, I could imagine Apple somehow building a device that was smaller, more usable and more powerful than any of their rivals. These days, they are just more expensive.

kruhft 10y ago

I like my Mac Pro. It's more powerful than any MacBook I've used and gets stuff done. I find all the bad press and hate confusing. It's just a computer.

mixmastamyk 10y ago
It's very expensive and ~five years old at this point.
- kruhft 10y ago
  Nope, it wasn't cheap. But as an artifact, and me being a Computer Engineer, I'm impressed with it as a piece of hardware and design.
  - mixmastamyk 10y ago
    I was impressed when I first saw it as well. However since they say it can't be upgraded, I'd consider it a failure.
ralusek 10y ago
These are the two sources of confusion, and they are completely valid. Neither you "liking" your Mac Pro, nor it being "just a computer" address these completely valid concerns. 1.) Why is Apple not keeping this system in line with the state of technology? If it's targeted at professionals, why have they left their only option in that department 5 years behind in technology? 2.) Are they planning on making the next iteration upgradeable? For some time now, Apple has used third party silicon, interchangeable with that of any other system. Intel, AMD, nVidia. Professionals on any other platform can spend a couple hundred bucks and modernize their computer for 2-3 years. Isn't it therefore possible that the lack of sales in Mac Pro division aren't because of lack of interest or a small professional market, but because of a bad idea to make a proprietary desktop tower which locks down upgradeability?
skocznymroczny 10y ago
This is about Mac Pro, which is the spaceship looking like server hardware from Apple, not Macbook Pro, which is a notebook.

makecheck 10y ago

They can claim wrong assumptions about GPUs, etc. but the "form over function" of the Mac Pro redesign was obvious from the start. It is even extended to their infuriating web site: there are so many animations, endless scrolling while being fed painfully little information about the product, and no obvious link to something simple and useful like a white paper to communicate the important details about the machine. They have always assumed that people would be lured in by the interesting design and they make the real details hard to find. That is clueless. The top of the line product page should have stats front and center.

larkost 10y ago
The current MacPro was designed for one group of professionals: those using FinalCut Pro. Both the software and the dual video cards were tuned to each other, and at the time were a killer combination, faster than any other setup for that workflow. The two mistakes Apple made (and is referencing there) were that 1) the GPU market would follow down the same path as CPU's were and going with dual (slightly slower) GPUs would win out over single high-temperature GPUs so they would have good replacements to choose from down the line, and 2) other software would adapt to the 2 GPU strategy and FinalCut Pro would be the leader on a new wave of software using GPUs through things like OpenCL. Neither of these turned out to be true. GPU makers pushed hard into making single-card monsters (and it has worked well), and very few software titles have figured out (or even publicly attempted to figure out) how to make things use the second GPU on the MacPros.
- astrodust 10y ago
  They also bet pretty heavily that the bandwidth of DisplayPort/Thunderbolt would make it possible to expand the capability of the machine through external modules. Not just hard-drives or displays, these were envisioned for external GPUs and more, that perhaps Thunderbolt might become as sensible a design decision as PCI-e. Ports are the new slots! That didn't work out. There are external GPUs today and they perform surprisingly well, but it's just not the same as having a card you can slot into your machine. The one thing that the Mac Pro was supposed to do well, it killed at though. Final Cut on that machine can chew through 4K video without issues. The problem is the people that want that machine want more than Final Cut.

DCKing 10y ago

> Considering the continued decline of classical PCs, I don’t think Apple can go all the way and design an Ax processor for high-end Macs. I think this is wrong. This is what the benchmarks say: - Apple A10 Fusion @ 2.35 GHz [1] / Geekbench 4 single-core: 3500 (typically) - that's 1489 points per GHz - Intel Core i7 7700 @ 4.20 GHz turbo / Geekbench 4 single-core: 5400 (typically) [2] - that's 1286 points per GHz - Intel Core i3 7100U @ 2.40 GHz (no turbo) / Geekbench 4 single-core: 3150 (typically) - that's 1312 points per GHz In clock-for-clock performance, Apple already is competitive with the highest end Intel performance. It's just a question on whether they can scale this up to a desktop chip with an appropriate amount of cores, clockspeed and I/O. Before you protest, Geekbench 4 is one of the few benchmarks that tests individual core speed while being fairly independent of I/O performance. Of course any desktop processor will easily outclass a mobile chip when it comes to I/O. It's not a perfect comparison for sure, but I think it shows that it's quite conceivable Apple will use their own chips in their next Mac Pro. [1]: This fails to take into account any potential 'turbo' functionality the A10 Fusion has - there is so little known about it that we don't if that exists or how much it boosts. [2]: I chose the non-K variety because the 7700K results on Geekbench typically seem to vary wildly due to its overclockability.

redm 10y ago

I've been using the new Mac Pro since 2015 and it's served me will without the need for upgrade... except for one thing. The primary disk being only 256GB causes me all kinds of issues. Everything wants to install and save there and there's no simple way to offload stuff to a secondary disk, so I'm constantly moving, symlinking, etc to keep enough space free so that my computer doesn't crash. Very annoying. This could, of course, be solved with software.

_ph_ 10y ago

While I can see that the can-like current design of the Mac Pro was a honest mistake in predicting the PC market, I am baffled how long it took them to recognize the mistake and take no action. They must have noticed it quite recently, so they did not care for the mac pro for years. The mac pro isn't important for Apple measured by the money it makes by its sales. It is important for keeping the mac line alive. It is the machine for all the people writing the software for iOS devices, and of course for all the mac hardware which does create the revenue for Apple. Also, it keeps the professionals on the mac platform. Even if Apple would sell the mac pro at a loss, it would be worth it for its role in the environment. It plays the same role for Apple, as all those photographers at the sports event for Canon and Nikon. There isn't much money to be made from them, but by their reputation, all the equipment is sold to the big public. In the mid-2000 years, the first sign of macs becoming popular was that at conferences, 80% would have an Apple laptop. They were leading the wave. But today, their market share is still high, yet, one can read more and more blog posts on how to switch to Linux or build a Hackintosh. I guess this is, what got the message at least partially to the Apple management. I am writing this on a 5k iMac, which I quite like (except: no video input, what were they thinking??). In a year or two I would be interested in upgrading to a mac pro, if its a reasonably versatile device. I don't need too much upgradability, but I would expect to be able to order it with a current high-end graphics card and proper internal storage. Otherwise, I might consider going back to Linux eventually.

angryteabag 10y ago

Generally speaking, I really like OSX/macOS. I am starting to grow a disdain towards Windows, with it's insistence on changing the default browser to IE + Bing on every update. Linux is great, but it just doesn't do it superficially for me. I can make it look great for screenshots, but as soon as I click a button or engage with the DE, the facade falls apart. macOS/OSX seems to be like a Linux distro with a very well developed desktop manager. The only problem is, I need to buy a Mac. Who the hell can afford that, holy sh*it

avtar 10y ago
I am starting to grow a disdain towards Windows, with it's insistence on changing the default browser to IE + Bing on every update. This did not happen when I installed Creators Update a few weeks ago. Firefox was still my default browser after updating.

5_minutes 10y ago

All my stuff is Apple hardware. But I went from an extremely happy client to an "okay" client: because of convenience, I don't want to start messing with Android (and having Google monitoring my like a little baby duck) and going back to Windows (hey some dissapointing "the grass looks greener on the other side"-stories) or Linux, where still, if your eye wants something, there's so many quite horrible inconsistent ugly things happening. So Apple is still the best choice for people like me who don't totally want to break their current workflow, simply because there's no convincing great alternative out there. But the credits, or forgiveness of all this is dwindling fastly. If I would've bought this new MBP for 3500 EUR from my own money, instead of it being a company laptop - rather than my personal one --, I would feel seriously cheated -- and probably would've gone for a Lenovo instead. Apple, under Jobs, made plenty of mistakes, but in the last years, he was pretty much spot on. In my eyes, Tim Cook, makes one mistake after the other. And it's not just the Mac Pro, but also the Mac Mini (which is a great computer-format), the audio jacks on the iPhone, the removing of the magsafe, dongle-life, etc. So there's plenty of reasons to say basically: let's bail from this mess. The problem is that the alternatives are not so much obviously better. GrumpyGamer's posts when compiling Thimbleweed Park for Windows were a pretty good reminder of staying away from Windows. ;)

hota_mazi 10y ago
> and having Google monitoring my like a little baby duck So instead, you prefer Apple monitoring you like a little baby duck?
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I'm not particularly an Apple fan, but Apple isn't an advertising company fundamentally premised on profiling users. The business is far more aligned with user privacy than Google's, inherently. That said, Google seem to have some smarts about defending against high-level attacks, though also some very noteable failures. Remember, John Podesta's email phishing occurred on a Gmail account. And it's Gmail which secures the Traitor Puppet Fascist Donald John Trump's Twitter account password recovery.
- ksk 10y ago

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago

Apple's problem is more subtle. The MacPro was a good choice for a tiny market niche - pro video editors and pro musicians. This is a market in which a $5k 10 core PC is considered an entry level machine. 3D houses and some music studios have racks of server-grade hardware that is far outside the reach of most mortals. There is a bigger market of users who like to label themselves pro, but are actually prosumer. It includes smaller music studios (home or not), design studios, serious hobbyists and dabblers, smaller video houses, academic music composers, and so on. Also many software developers. These users are not in the Hollywood league, and they typically have a limited budget. The old cheesegrater MacPro was a good fit for this market. It was also good enough, and expandable enough, to get some interest from the no-compromise pros. The new MacPro is too expensive for the prosumers, and poor value - and underpowered - for the no-compromise pros. I'm not yet convinced Apple understands this. Jobs understood it because his links with Pixar meant he could see first hand what Hollywood pros were using. I don't think the current management is as open to creative input from creative professionals at all levels. If I'm right, the 2018 Mac Pros will be open like PCs, but they still won't truly satisfy either type of user.

fuzzywalrus 10y ago
I'd beg to differ on the point of Pro-Video editors and musicians seeing as I've contracted for a few TV shows and am a hobbyist musician etc. It was a mediocre choice, if not poor choice: Generally a TV Show workflow (since FCP X killed its user base) an Avid centric base. Editors grab all their footage off a central server to edit the down converts (1080p). SSD is great for a boot drive but you'll need hefty internal storage. Now you need to buy an expensive external solution. Also for same goes for Digital Musicians or recording, although the storage demands are quite a bit less. The dual GPU setup was under-utilized and the consumer grade cards are far better for render assistance bang-for-buck. So much so that it was better just to upgrade GPUs with gaming cards. Notably, the Fire GLs are underperfomers for After Effects. Also Musicians get almost zero benefit from dual GPUs. It's unnecessary cost. Since in Hollywood TV, you are contract you, you bring your own hardware. When USB 3.0 took off, most of my editor friends just grabbed USB 3.0 cards and popped them into the computers. Mixing guys tended to have a lot invested in PCIe audio interfaces for ProTools. A few friends had MPEG4 encoder accelerators which were great for quick encodes for dailies. I'm not sure what fantasy world Apple was in that small size of the Mac Pro 2013 mattered but post-guys set up shop for weeks at a time, and its easier to cart one heavy tower followed by monitors than a small computer with a box of dongles and misc items. The friends I still keep in touch with in LA mostly have switched to Windows instead of going for the Mac Pro 2013. More bang for the book (time is money) and more performant. Anyhow, other than that I agree. just rerelease the 2012 with new innards and call it a day.