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Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro will be shaped by workflows

198 points by jbegley 9y ago

random3 9y ago
While the article mentions a refresh of MacBook Pro, "Mac Pro" gets mentioned 36 times in the article while "MacBook Pro" is mentioned 8 times. I hope the refresh will not be about completely removing the underpowered "no touch bar" 13" MacBook Pro and instead adding an on-par configuration without the touch-bar-from-hell :/
homulilly 9y ago
Better late than never, I guess?
- k_sze 9y ago
  Except if they are too late. Take a look at the new Dell XPS 15” 2-in-1, with Intel Core i7-8705G (with AMD Radeon RX Vega M GH, 4GB of dedicated HMB2), e.g. That thing ticks most checkboxes of a pro machine, except for the “is a Mac” and “runs Mac-only software” ones. And I imagine that an upgraded version will come out in 2019. Honestly, I find both Windows 10 Pro and Ubuntu very usable nowadays. I don’t really find much reason to stick with a Mac anymore.
  - ssijak 9y ago
    Windows 10 is one giant malware/virus. The interface is terrible too, but that is a preference.
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      I don't run antivirus software, only ublock. I have literally not had a virus or malware infection in the last 10 years of pro use. And I use BitTorrent and Usenet frequently. Where/how are you getting all this malware?
      - zokier 9y ago
        Please don't feed the trolls.
  - zokier 9y ago
    > That thing ticks most checkboxes of a pro machine Except for little things like (workstation) Xeon CPU and pro graphics (Quadro or whatever ATi is calling their FirePros these days). If you want a actual pro system, check out Dells workstation line, e.g. Precision 7520. Sure, its not light and pretty like a XPS, but you can load it with fairly serious amount of stuff and as a cherry on top it comes with Linux support out of the box. Workstations are just a different class of computers.
    - zokier 9y ago
      Oh, and actual desktop workstations (which Mac Pro would be competing against) are yet another class. I just had some fun at Dell website, and you can configure a desktop system with dual Xeon Platinum (lol) 8180 CPUs. Those have 28 cores each. The memory configuration taps out at 12x32 GB. With 384 GB of RAM and 112 HW threads, you might be able to even run Atom and Slack simultaneously.
  - gurkendoktor 9y ago
    The XPS 2-in-1 has also dropped all useful (in the present) ports, reduced the keyboard travel, and messed up the arrow key area on their keyboards. I'm worried that the XPS line is trying too hard to be a MacBook; what if they want to make next year's model even thinner? Their "classic" XPS 15 looks fantastic, but I've read too many complaints about reliability and coil whine. I hope they keep iterating on it for a few more years.
crstinin 9y ago
Wait a minute, wasn't it supposed to be 2018?
- MBCook 9y ago
  They never said that, they only said it was not going to be in 2017. The article says this was always their timeline. If you believe that. But they never said 2018 and I remember people being very skeptic le that 2018 would happen last year when they first announced they were working on a new Mac Pro.
  - strictnein 9y ago
    Yeah, it was "not 2017" and now they're saying: > We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product By "transparent and open" I guess they meant wait a year to tell people it's going to be another year?
- miles 9y ago
  Their messaging was vague at best, leading to a number of articles like this one: https://web.archive.org/web/20170404192349/http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/new-mac-pro-2018-latest-rumours-release-date-uk-price-features-specs-3536364/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170404192349/http://www.macwor... > In April 2017 Apple invited journalists to its Product Realization Lab and made a series of announcements relating to the Mac line, revealing among other things that a minor update to the Mac Pro is imminent and a major revamp will arrive in 2018.
torstenvl 9y ago
So now, two questions: - Will the Mac Pro actually be Pro? - Will they ever bring back a Pro computer in a notebook form factor?
- rsynnott 9y ago
  What's non-'Pro' about the current 15" MBP that was 'Pro' about the previous design? They're practically the same. If you mean no SD card reader etc, it's my understanding that pro photographers tended to use a USB3/thunderbolt reader anyway, as the integrated reader was connected over USB2 internally and was far too slow for pro use.
  - command_tab 9y ago
    FWIW, the SD card slot in newer (but not newest, ugh) Mac models is connected via the PCIe bus and not USB.
    - rsynnott 9y ago
      Huh, really? I had a 2014 or something rMBP in work at one point; was almost certain it had a USB2 SD card reader. EDIT: According to Apple, all the laptops are USB2: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204384 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204384 Desktops are PCIe.
      - sigjuice 9y ago
        I have a 2015 MacBook Air and wanted the SD card reader to belong to a Linux guest inside VMWare Fusion (for dd'ing custom RPi images). I just couldn't get it to work. Then I found this article https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1035825 https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1035825 which says This issue occurs because the SDXC card slot included in newer Mac models is connected to the Mac using the PCIe bus and not using the USB bus that the original SD card slot uses.
  - BuildTheRobots 9y ago
    My 9 year old toshiba has a pci based SD card reader. The possibility for it to be internal and also offer reasonable speeds is not beyond the pale. Some of the top end cameras use both CF and SD, so sure, it doesn't cater for everyone, but SD has become so ubiquitous it seems odd it's missing.
endymi0n 9y ago
Still hoping for a professional MacBOOK, but Apple doesn't ever listen to their pro customers or do they?
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  ? Isn’t that a MacBook Pro?
  - torstenvl 9y ago
    You mean the one without a real keyboard or the one with only one port while plugged in?
    - s73v3r_ 9y ago
      The Macbook Pro has 4 total USB C ports. You can use any of them to charge, and still use all 3 of the others for whatever else needs doing. The keyboard is subjective.
      - matwood 9y ago
        > The keyboard is subjective. Yeah, I think if the keyboard didn't break from a spec of dust it would be fine.
      - electricslpnsld 9y ago
        > The keyboard is subjective. The feel of the keyboard is indeed subjective (I happen to like the feel of the keyboard on the new MacBook Pro), but in this case Apple genuinely built a buggy keyboard, so much so that people are writing songs about it [1]. [1] https://youtu.be/FdS3tjEIqUA https://youtu.be/FdS3tjEIqUA
        adanto6840 9y ago
        I ordered one and then returned it (for the first time ever after ~10 or so MBPs) -- ended up just purchasing a new refurb non-touchbar MBP, which is what it was replacing too. Largest reason for return: G key. 30% of the time = two Gs. 50% = 1 G. Remaining 20% = 0 Gs/no keydown whatsoever. Hah.
jphoward 9y ago
I wonder who the target market is, though? The iMac Pro can cost £5000, so I assume more performance and hence price than that? The only users who I can imagine willing to justify paying such a premium are those who feel they must remain at the cutting edge of performance and are willing to pay for it, but surely they will have left the Apple ecosystem by then? It's as if Apple are saying "we're making a computer for people who demand peak performance, but are willing to use cheap outdated hardware until we get round to it."
- rsynnott 9y ago
  I'd assume mostly people who want really hefty GPUs (and for whom eGPUs aren't an option). The iMac Pro won't help you there.
  - thirdsun 9y ago
    In the article it sounded as if they actually intend to achieve modularity fort the Mac Pro with eGPUs, or peripheral hardware in general. A mistake in my opinion.
- VonGuard 9y ago
  This is for Logic and Final Cut users who want to have the best and don't know enough about computers to understand they're being ripped off.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Or they bill $2-300/hour so they don't really care. If their tooling is on the Apple side, they don't really have the option of going for a high end PC.
    - wuliwong 9y ago
      There's actually even more to it than just not caring. There is also the marketing side of it. Recording studios will sometimes make choices to buy certain gear because of the name and recognized brand. Apple computers are certainly the recognized brand for digital recording.
humbleMouse 9y ago
Just make it a cool looking square and shove tons of hardware in it. The whole circle thing is such a bad design.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  So, in essence, a Borg cube.
  - jackhack 9y ago
    more closely related -- a NeXT Cube.
    - krylon 9y ago
      Well, they already tried that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube
      - jonhendry18 9y ago
        That had more in common with the trash can Mac Pro. The NeXT Cube had three NuBus expansion slots that accepted boards something like 11"x11". (There were actually four connectors on the backplane; one was used for the NeXT motherboard.) Granted, there weren't many boards produced for use in the Cube. There was NeXT's own i860-based color video card, the NeXTDimension. I think there was a third-party card with multiple i860s, and there was a 3rd party card with multiple Motorola 56001 DSPs.
- mseebach 9y ago
  The Apple Signature Box III.
- peatmoss 9y ago
  NeXT. Though the big aluminum desktops they made years ago were probably a high point for balance of beautiful and functional.
cJ0th 9y ago
The big question is: Will it still come with an Intel cpu?
- ovao 9y ago
  Almost assuredly.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  If Apple switches to some other CPU architecture, the Mac Pro will be the very last thing to change, assuming it does at all. The processors they've developed for iPhones and iPads are getting into laptop territory, but it's a big step from there to 2x 6-core Xeons.
- LgWoodenBadger 9y ago
  It will come with both (Intel and their own), which is why it's 2019. That's the only reason I can think of
prepend 9y ago
I bet it’s going to be a sphere on a stick. Like the original LEGO Death Star II. But if it had been completed all the way around. https://i2.wp.com/www.yuppiegadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Lego-Death-Star-II-10143-1.jpg?fit=500%2C450&ssl=1 https://i2.wp.com/www.yuppiegadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
- majewsky 9y ago
  What about the existing trashcan design, but instead of plugging in a monitor and mouse and keyboard, the trashcan's surface is just one single touch screen? That's much more user-friendly, you don't have to mess with cables at all anymore.
  - prepend 9y ago
    Good point on user friendly. But I don’t think that’s really what they’re going for. Sphere on a stick would be cool to mount on a walk so it looks cool and then have wireless video (or video through the stem) so you just remote into it from your local network from tablets or light notebooks as terminals.
- jonhendry18 9y ago
  Take the existing trashcan design, make it three times as tall, and have the top be somewhat thicker. And have two more rounded cylinders at the bottom adjacent to the main cylinder.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
Reading this it had me reminiscing about Sun back in its heyday as a workstation vendor. Sun used to do this stuff, they would bring in a partner who had some critical application and the Sun engineering team and the partner's engineering team, and some "power users" of the tool would all work through what it would take to make the tool work better on a Sun Workstation than any other workstation. Sun engineering got a collection of bugs, features, and investigations that would come out of those exercises. When my wife was at Xerox they were doing similar sorts of studies for document preparation and presentation. You could do that when the workstation cost $25,000, (in 1990 dollars!) I'm not sure how viable it is when the workstation is less than $5,000. That said, I really miss using software products where that level of thought has gone into its design. The three 'creative' apps I use (other than writing code) are drawing, schematic capture/board layout (EDA), and writing. All systems that benefit from people investing in how the flow of these things work, and all of which have degraded over time.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  What drawing apps do you use, on what devices, and what is worst about those apps to you?
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    On my PC I use Corel Draw, on the iPad Autodesk Sketchbook, Touch Draw, or the Notes application, on the Surface its usually Sketchbook but I've also got Sketchable, and on Linux Inkscape. The worst thing is the linkage between knowing what you want to do and assembling the right tools to do it in the app you're looking at. Most of my drawing is technical in nature (systems, small components, software architectures, Etc.)
- TrainedMonkey 9y ago
  The world is bigger and wealthier today. You sell significantly more workstations which translates into way higher profit.
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
Lapsa 9y ago
what on earth is "promunnication"?
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Professional+communication?
kylehotchkiss 9y ago
Yay, a Mac made to run JS development tools.
GiorgioG 9y ago
From 2007 to 2016 I was all-in on OS X / MacBook Pros / iMacs for work (software dev.) Since then I've gone back to a Dell XPS 15 and a custom-built AMD Threadripper machine. As much as I like the Mac hardware, I could no longer justify the cost. The XPS is a nice machine and (no touchbar - it's a feature) and my custom-PC is a monster. Windows 10 with all its warts is plenty serviceable especially now with it's Linux Subsystem (primarily because I prefer to use bash as my shell.) I guess I'm no longer part of their target market for their computer systems.
- asciimo 9y ago
  > Linux Subsystem Wat.I just went googling after reading this comment and at first glance, it looks like this is an officially supported method to run GNU apps in a Windows terminal? Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI?
  - cthalupa 9y ago
    >Wat.I just went googling after reading this comment and at first glance, it looks like this is an officially supported method to run GNU apps in a Windows terminal? It's hardly limited to GNU apps. Most of your Linux applications should work fine on it. I've had no problem with all sorts of non-GNU releases when I use it on my desktop. >Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI? No, it is a Linux userland on top of the NT kernel with an emulation layer written to handle all of the syscalls. It works well. The only really glaring issue is ConEmu and related Windows terminal ecosystem is still hot garbage compared to any Linux or OSX terminal.
    - wyoung2 9y ago
      > The only really glaring issue is ConEmu and related Windows terminal ecosystem is still hot garbage compared to any Linux or OSX terminal. ...and that bites you in a surprising number of ways. I recently tried porting some software that runs just fine under Ubuntu-on-x86 to Ubuntu-on-WSL, and I found three different failure modes in the console/pty mechanism before I gave up. I then tried running it under Cygwin and it ran correctly out of the box. Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to try to run a program like GNU screen under WSL, but the core problem isn’t any specific application. Any program that does anything even moderately tricky with ptys is likely to fail under WSL.
drawkbox 9y ago
Mac Pro cheese graters going away was a bad move and a missed opportunity by Apple, today they already lost the power pro users and they had them for a while. Most Mac Pro users have moved back to PC, or iMac's/minis just for iOS/macOS related dev, with most work being done on PCs. Apple had a window where developers needed a heavy Pro Mac for iOS, nix development like python/ruby/etc, even Unity dev back when it was only on Mac (2007-2010 ish), it was also great to have a Mac after the 2006 Intel processor move as it was the sexiest nix and great for developers from 2006 on, but those days are over. Somewhere in 2013, they just moved on from the cheese grater and Pro market that included developers and content creators. Now they want to regain it? There was so much momentum squandered here and hearing Tim Cook repeat "Post-PC" and Apple messaging that desktops were like trucks, only developers need them, caused them to move on, so did the pro users and developers. Apple even watered down their developer laptops and Macbook Pros, 17" screens were relegated to being 'lapzillas' and Apple went only mainstream. Content creators and programming were not something they focused on anymore after the iPhone took over, eventhough those influencers were always the focus. I thought they would use the iPhone and iOS/macOS platforms to get more people on their desktops as well, instead they went the other direction. We used to be Mac Pro heavy now we just have iMacs/minis for the last mile or iOS/macOS export and testing with performance heavy beefy PCs for most of the day to day work. Additionally, taking your jet engine/trashcan new Mac Pro or iMac to the mall for repairs instead of just popping in a new video card or drive also sucks. Developers can get two performance PCs for the price of one Mac Pro. Usually you can get more power out of both as well since Mac Pros from 2011 on were 1-2 years behind. There is no getting back pro users such as devs/game devs that had switched over and have now gone back to Windows/PC.
- jjeaff 9y ago
  But how in the world are you going to manage without ecc memory? You might have a bit get flipped by a cosmic ray once every 5 years of 24x7 computing.
  - gruez 9y ago
    intel xeon e3 or amd
  - 9y ago
electricslpnsld 9y ago
> We’ve been focusing on visual effects Are any visual effects or animation shops still on macOS? I was under the impression that this world was mainly Linux (Pixar, Disney, Weta, ILM, etc, are all on Linux).
- jjeaff 9y ago
  The major studios are still using Maya, Photoshop, and other commercial software that doesn't work on Linux. They are using Linux for render farms and some custom software.
  - electricslpnsld 9y ago
    > The major studios are still using Maya, Photoshop, and other commercial software that doesn't work on Linux. Maya/Houdini/Modo/etc run on Linux (this is what Weta, Disney, and Pixar do). Creative Cloud definitely does not, which is a bit of a problem.
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      Are you sure? This page seems to indicate that Maya is not compatible with Linux. https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Operating-system-compatibility-for-Autodesk-Maya.html https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/troubleshooting/...
      - electricslpnsld 9y ago
        Positive — I used to develop Maya plugins on Linux. That page is perplexing!
        jjeaff 9y ago
        Oh, upon closer reading, that page just says it doesn't work on 32 bit linux. Why they are even including that is beyond me. Who is working on Maya with a 32 bit system?
kokey 9y ago
I'm really glad to see that Apple is paying attention again to what have been their long time core users. First with the new iPad for the education market and now revealing strategies for creatives in design and audio.
foobaw 9y ago
It will still take a while to penetrate the gaming market. A $3000 desktop can play most games at the highest settings right now including VR. A $3000 mac would be lucky if the games even supported OSX.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Why do you you think Apple is trying to enter the gaming market?
jnsaff2 9y ago
What I read from the article is that Apple is working on finding a few workflows and optimising the hell out of those instead of like creating an awesome general purpose computer for which only users imagination is the limitation. Which obviously is a very Appley thing to do.
krylon 9y ago
I do not need a Mac Pro, nor could I afford one if I wanted to (I do own one, though, albeit it is 11 years old, I got it preowned from a friend). But I wonder what the hell the people at Apple were thinking when they put put the "trashcan"-design. It looks awesome, I cannot deny it, and I imagine it is very convenient to handle. But something deep inside of me cringes when a computer in this price class has everything soldered on and has no real option to extend it. You cannot upgrade the CPU, the RAM, the GPU, nor can you install any additional PCIe cards.
- timc3 9y ago
  It wasnt that convenient when you wanted to put stuff inside it or rack it. Hence the thirdparty rack chassis market.
  - krylon 9y ago
    When I said "convenient to handle", I was thinking, small enough to sit on top of my desk, lightweight enough so I can carry it without breaking a sweat (the cheesegrater is really heavy!), that sort of thing.
- jonhendry18 9y ago
  I assume Jony Ive said "I'm so bored of boxes" and that was the end of the cheese grater.
  - gaius 9y ago
    It’s the ultimate rounded corner
whywhywhywhy 9y ago
I waited and waited and waited. I liked the design of the Trashcan but by the time I could afford one it was woefully out of date and I needed Nvidia GPUs for the rendering engine I wanted to use. In the end I moved my creative work over to PC and currently run a nice compact mATX PC built for GPU computing with two 1080Tis. Still cost me less than half the eventual iMac Pro and presumably this Mac Pro. If this had been released a few years back maybe I'd never have moved to PC but at this stage they'll have to be still supporting the new Mac Pro in 3 years before I even consider moving back at this point. Been a Mac only user for 15 years now, I didn't move away lightly, but now I've switched it'll be hard to convince me back.
- wuliwong 9y ago
  I wonder at what scale has this occurred? Has video editing industry moved away from Apple computers in a substantial way? They have managed to keep the music recording industry; a new macbook pro or imac is plenty powerful enough to be the heart of a recording studio.
  - ladzoppelin 9y ago
    Many people in the pro audio world have moved to Windows over the last 5 years. Apogee, who I think Apple paid to only support OsX at one time, now makes Windows drivers and officially supports both platforms. MOTU has been cross platform since like 2006. Logic is really the only audio product that does not support Windows but only because Apple killed the pc version in like 2004. Logic pc was amazing and might even still run on Windows 10.
    - timc3 9y ago
      Exactly.
    - wwweston 9y ago
      The main reason I'm not using Logic right now on my MBP is that it doesn't run on other platforms, and Apple's behavior over the last half-decade has convinced me that after almost two decades of knowing their platforms were the right choice for me, I can't trust their judgment when it comes to disruptive or dealbreaking changes to both hardware and software.
dmix 9y ago
> He stresses that it’s not just Apple’s applications that they’re testing and working to help make better. Third-party relationships on this are very important to them and the workflow team is helping to fix their problems faster too. This is great. Sounds a lot like Microsoft's recent change in culture away from using Windows as their worldview lens for everything to seeing their work as being platform agnostic (with non-Windows OS, mobile, IoT, watches, cars, etc).
rch 9y ago
It sounds like the next Mac Pro still won't handle ML workloads in a meaningful way, but it will have a keyboard with a touchbar that works with Garage Band. Pass.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  You might get external GPU support if you're trying to do ML.
  - rch 9y ago
    Then I'll stick with a laptop. Probably my first non-MPB in over a decade.
- ellisv 9y ago
  I disagree. Do you really want to be training large models locally? The effort for Apple to optimize the Mac for ML is not worth it (for anyone). The cloud is cheap and ubiquitous.
  - ericd 9y ago
    Which cloud provider? When I last ran the numbers, 1080 Ti cards paid for themselves pretty quickly vs Amazon's ML instances if you're using them regularly. Also, you never have to remember to shut off your instances. I've never done ML professionally, though, so it may be a totally different use case that you're thinking about.
nkkollaw 9y ago
I wonder what "pro" means to Apple anymore. The Macbook Pro is unarguably _not_ pro. Maybe anything above $4,000..?
qaq 9y ago
I have 2009 flashed to 2010 with 64GB RAM and modern GPU and SSD and to be honest I don't see a need to upgrade.
- drawkbox 9y ago
  Apple is going to EOL Mac Pros to 2011 via the next OS and have done for many of the older Mac Pros [1]. It is a shame because many can still run it just fine. I have a 2012 I got in 2013 which is our last Mac Pro and I am not going to be happy the day they do it. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624
  - qaq 9y ago
    At work we still run El Captain so I am fine using High Sierra for a few years at home :) hopefully by that time Ubuntu will be usable with multiple HiDPI displays.
  - overcast 9y ago
    My 2008 is running the very latest version of High Sierra without any issues. It's a very simple hack to make it work. So you can get more life out of it easily.
chris_wot 9y ago
If Apple say they want to look at workflows, and winkle out bugs, then I've got a good one - but incredibly specific to LibreOffice. If they get the LibreOffice git repository, then run: make sw.all eventually it will get to the unit tests and one of our exports kills the display server. Only happens if you run it on a iMac Pro 4K screen running max resolution. We know it's something we are doing around graphics, but for the life of us we can't work out what that is. But also: I would have thought killing the display server like this should be something that shouldn't be possible...
- majewsky 9y ago
  I'm making a guess that the explanation is going to be as hilarious as the infamous "LibreOffice cannot print on Tuesdays" bug, which ended up being a problem with file(1).
  - chris_wot 9y ago
    Almost certainly :-) For anyone who wants to find out about the above-referenced bug, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956
stcredzero 9y ago
Apple has had a long history of "innovation" which only has longevity in the form of museum pieces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G4
tibbon 9y ago
I switched to Apple product in 2002, because at the time they were absolutely better than Windows 2000 for my needs (mostly Protools, and eventually Logic 7). Windows at the time was a mess and poorly supported most pro hardware and vendors (specifically Avid) were slow to support releases. It really felt like the best platform. I had a nice G4 tower, and eventually used a G5 and then Mac Pro tower. Things generally just worked, and you could expand things as needed. Roll around to today, and it's a mess. Apple canceled a lot of their pro products. Aperture? Dead. Final Cut got nerfed pretty hard. Logic is still reasonably well maintained, but Ableton Live took over a lot for me. The hardware options aren't that great right now for my needs. Last week, I sold my 2011 Macbook Pro to a friend and switched all my audio stuff to my old Windows gaming system. Picked up a Firewire PCI-E card for $20 and I was in business. It's fast, has a ton of ram and is easily expandable. Windows 10 drives me nuts, but eh... I've still got three Macbook Pros for software development, and they are pretty great for that (minus the new keyboard, and that Tensorflow GPU has dropped OS X support). I don't think I'll be switching laptops anytime soon. But ugh, audio work on them just feels like an overpriced joke at this point. I really never thought I'd be saying it, but for photography and audio stuff, Windows seems to be the place right now!
- chrisper 9y ago
  Have you ever considered a hackintosh?
  - ellisv 9y ago
    I think a big part of @tibbon's complaint is the lack of pro software (from Apple).
- ellisv 9y ago
  > they are pretty great for that (minus the new keyboard, and that Tensorflow GPU has dropped OS X support). If you're training a model on your laptop, instead of a server, does it really matter? It doesn't seem likely that you'd want to deploy a model trained locally.
- cthalupa 9y ago
mistrial9 9y ago
happily using Mac OSX 10.7 on three or four machines today, and avoiding for years the variously awful MacOSX experiences of intrusive and superficial "improvements"; I believe I am not alone in this point of view. Hefty hardware is only part of the story here.
- eddieh 9y ago
  I thought holdouts were all on 10.6 aka Snow Leopard?
- jaxondu 9y ago
  If you develop iOS app, Apple is forcing you to use at least Sierra 10.12 for XCode 9 and the need to support iPhone X screen.
jnwatson 9y ago
I hate to admit this, but Apple should sell off its Mac division. They are simply not hungry enough. For the first time in 33 years, I no longer have access to a Mac. Apple doesn’t sell one that my employers nor myself want to buy. That it has taken so long to course correct would have sunk most companies. It is probably a couple percent hit on Apple revenue at most.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Wow, yes they've definitely lost their "eye of the tiger," haha. Doubt there is a Lenovo waiting in the wings, nor would they allow it, a shame.
namelost 9y ago
I wish Apple would just make their own ATX case (or any other standard *TX form factor), their own ATX motherboard with their TPM on it, and then use commodity components for everything else. I'd pay a huge premium for that product, but Apple is so far up their own ass trying to imitate themselves they can't see what their customers really need.
- wilsonnb 9y ago
  I find it likely that Apple knows what their customers need more than random people commenting on the internet know what Apple's customers need.
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    Obviously not, they haven't had a competitive product in the space for ~five years.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  They tried that in the past. It was one of the first things Jobs "fixed".
  - namelost 9y ago
    If you mean the clones, that's not exactly what I'm suggesting. I want Apple to continue building computers, but to use industry standard form factors, and to use as many commodity components as possible. They could get such a product out faster than 2019 and it would be better than whatever they will end up announcing. Instead we have to wait a year for Apple to figure out how to make a computer that is 'pretty' and 'innovative' enough for Apple, even when their professional customers don't give a toss how pretty or innovative it is.
    - jonhendry18 9y ago
      Or at least one computer in the lineup like this.
  - 9y ago
tambourine_man 9y ago
What are Pros supposed to do in the mean time? Keep buying PCs I guess. Why haven't they kept selling the cheese grater is beyond me. They are spending a fortune to understand what Pros need, while we have been screaming for the better part of the decade: lots of user accessible RAM, storage, PCI & GPU. How much would it cost R&D to update the Mac Pro? Teenagers can do it for peanuts, I'm sure the largest company in the freaking world could manage. If they were truly sorry or marginally “cared”, that's what they would have done years ago. I'm fine with them playing the “let's reinvent the Pro computer” game as a side project, they have this massive amount of money burning a whole in their pockets after all, but some of us need to work.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  Pros are supposed to buy an iMac Pro in the meantime, and then buy the modular Mac Pro Pro with all the pro trimmings - iPads for touch control, and such - when it all arrives next year. It's going to be interesting to see if they stick with Intel for the Pro. It's entirely possible they won't, especially given Intel's security issues. What that means for performance remains to be seen.
  - jbigelow76 9y ago
    It's going to be interesting to see if they stick with Intel for the Pro. Wouldn't the apps that the pro users dictate that to a large extent? If the truly "pro" apps don't get rebuilt against ARM then it would be like Apple never really released the Mac Pro if they ditch Intel so early into its return.
    - walshemj 9y ago
      I think they meant go AMD Reyzen2 or more likely Eypc (or possibly Rome.) Arm is not going to cut it in the dual Zeon workstation role
      - kevindqc 9y ago
        Aren't Apple developing their own CPUs?
ericd 9y ago
If they just make an expandable ATX/cheese grater style case with generous cooling and allow top Nvidia GPUs, I will pay a large premium for this. Ideally there would be the option for high end consumer gear (i7/i9, vanilla RAM) in addition to the Xeons/ECC/FBDIMMs that get so expensive so quickly, but two tiers with different architectures is probably too much to hope for.
alkonaut 9y ago
I just hope they don’t break any new ground with it. Zero. Just make a big tower that does excactly what a HP workstation tower would do, and match the price. No need for any Apple magic of any kind here. Don’t make a trash can, don’t make a touch bar.
- timc3 9y ago
  I hope you are one of the people that is consulting for them. This is exactly what is needed.
  - fludlight 9y ago
    Which is why Apple will do the opposite. Their business model is the old Henry Ford line "if I asked the customer what they wanted they would have said a faster horse". They think they know what you need better than you do. Sometimes this works really well, sometimes not. Get ready for an underpowered $10k pyramid whose only input is Siri.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  That makes zero sense from a business perspective. "I know, let's put out a boring commodity product that has no unique selling points, doesn't match our ethos, and has a tiny niche market. And we'll sell it at the same razor-thin margin that everyone else does!" That couldn't be further from Apple's way of doing business. If you want a cheap commodity tower, just buy one, but don't expect Apple to make one for you.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    Apples uniqueness here is their OS and the applications that run on it. That’s why people would buy a Mac over an HP. Only that. If they want pros to keep using Mac OS for video etc, then they need to have competitive hardware. Apples other concern is the developer side and the app ecosystem: high end build machines and developer workstations are also relevant for their actual business which is selling apps and phones. Computer hardware for professionals is just a boring service Apple needs to provide in order to support the rest of their business. It’s not even a visible product like a MacBook or an iMac- it’s designed to be hidden on the floor because it’s huge and noisy (the trash can was a failed attempt at working around that fact) Edit: to follow up on the “powerful machines are a boring service” idea: If Apple didn’t want to risk the brand damage of launching a boring product, they could simply license dell or hp to sell certain servers and workstations with Mac OS to let the highest end render machines and build servers etc run Mac OS. They could easily charge a 20% premium and people would be happy to buy them.
jdlyga 9y ago
The Mac Pro is a great piece of hardware. I'm using one at work. I put linux on it, and I use it for Qt development.
specialp 9y ago
Apple already lost the Mac Pro market when they made Final Cut Pro X, and stopped regularly releasing Mac Pros. They completely disregarded the professional market by killing functionality that was critical to the users. That combined with the lack of powerful hardware made a lot of the professionals go to PC and Avid. They addressed some of the issues in future releases but it was too late. Creators were pretty much the only people keeping Apple alive in the tough years and they abandoned them.
saagarjha 9y ago
Reading this article was really annoying. First, there were grammatical issues like these, which may have been intentional, but made understanding the article difficult: > I saw a bunch of them walking by in Apple park toting kit for an outdoor shoot on premises while walking > Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed. Then, I clicked over my Hacker News tab and when I went back, the content was replaced by another page (!). Apparently it was changed via JavaScript when I reached the bottom of the page. This is stupid and user-hostile.
- ng-user 9y ago
  I agree. When scrolling to the bottom of the article the last thing I expected was the entire content of said article to be replaced by headlines of other stories from TC. Viewing the article in portrait mode on desktop displays the main contents on the left 50% and complete whitespace on the right 50%. Overall the TC redesign is god-awful and has degraded usability substantially.
strictnein 9y ago
I'm honestly confused by what Apple is doing here. Maybe it makes sense to refine their software, but they're bringing in content creators to study their workflow to inform their hardware design? What?
- macintux 9y ago
  Some hardware questions I'd think working with content creators could help with (disclaimer: not a hardware guy)... Are external GPUs fast enough? What internal architecture do they need to make them so? How much L1/L2/Ln memory do they need for serious workflows? Is Thunderbolt <whatever> fast enough? How well do professional apps really scale with multiple CPUs? Benchmarks are one thing, seeing people use the software in production is something else. Anyway, just random speculation.
thirdsun 9y ago
I think Apple is needlessly re-inventing the wheel here. While their intent to analyze real world usage and optimize every detail by bringing in actual pro users is admirable, I‘d prefer them to use a simpler, more streamlined approach and have them release standard, state of the art hardware in a tasteful, quiet case and continuesly work on optimizations on the software side - a process that is required anyway and not exclusive to the Mac Pro, which makes me wonder why it should dictate the Mac Pro roadmap and schedule in such a significant way. Furthermore it‘s concerning that the article mentions modularity mostly in ways that involve external hardware and peripherals. If that turns out to be the approach Apple is considering, it sounds worryingly similar to an iMac Pro without the fanatastic display.
tptacek 9y ago
This is a lot of copy for some pretty simple updates: * 2019 release data * Modular architecture * Probably a heavy bet on eGPU and TB3 * iDevices as additional inputs
- pvg 9y ago
  Probably a heavy bet on eGPU and TB3 I'm not sure that's really about the Mac Pro itself - the article doesn't say that.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    I got the impression it was about the Mac Pro, but you're right, it doesn't say that, and it's kind of hard to tell.
- jonhendry18 9y ago
  "Probably a heavy bet on eGPU and TB3" I think the Trash Can was a heavy bet on Thunderbolt as well. Which wasn't terribly successful.
- IOT_Apprentice 9y ago
  Funny they want NOTHING to do with slots so that customers can add in multiple video cards or other ML cards from nVidia or AMD.
nottorp 9y ago
So they're optimizing for video/photo work. What about the rest of the "pro" users? They've given up on them?
- jonhendry18 9y ago
  Yes, what about developers, scientists, etc.
pkamb 9y ago
"Apple Performs Usability Testing"
kbd 9y ago
Please excuse the venting here for a minute. After "can't innovate anymore my ass" Apple released their architectural dead-end trashcan Mac Pro in _2013_ we have to wait until _2019_ for an update? What am I supposed to buy? I'm certainly not going to buy anything with a Touch Bar. It's 2018 and I had my job order me the 2015 Macbook Pro for my work computer so I could skip the Touch Bar and still have USB ports. What's going on at Apple?
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  Don't forget the keyboard on the new Macs, which is the other big reason not to get them (besides ports and touch bar).
  - JonLim 9y ago
    I really wish I could get the 2015 MacBook Pro with USB-C ports and Touchbar MBP size. As painful as it was to have to buy dongles and whatever else, having monitors + USB docks using USB-C has been pretty pleasant.
  - randyrand 9y ago
    I use a 2016 and recently used my friends 2015. Honestly, it felt amazing. I had to do a double take. The new keyboards sure do suck. Do they really think a 10% size difference is more useful than a good feeling keyboard? What are they smoking.
  - ggregoire 9y ago
    I felt like you about the keyboard but after using it for a while I have to admit I love it. Sometimes I have to use my old Macbook and the new one feels definitely better.
  - skellera 9y ago
    I had to do a demo on another dev's 2016 Pro in front of a client. It was embarrassing how many typos I was making. It's such a horrible feeling keyboard.
- dmitriid 9y ago
m3kw9 9y ago
ALL I need to know!
yolobey 9y ago
I think I'll be out of the Mac ecosystem soon. The writing is on the wall. I still don't like any Linux DE and I hate the eternal config hell I end up in, but the effort to have a functional Mac is starting to catch up to it. I'm still using a 2015 MBP and a Hackintosh desktop (Old Intel 3770k + Titan Xp) but this year was the first time after the 2006 release of the MBP that I bought a non-Apple notebook... I needed something to replace my 11" MacBook Air that I use for travel, and the new keyboards just aren't usable for me. Bought a Thinkpad X1C6... Great machine except a few baffling design decisions, and appears to be borderline impossible to Hackintosh for now - but the keyboard is my tool of the trade. I need a good one.
osteele 9y ago
“And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed.” This approach is reminiscent of Apple's approach to low-latency touch scrolling on the original iPhone; to Quicktime and MIDI a decade and a half before that; and, more recently, to the Apple Pencil. I knew executives at Palm who were frustrated by the challenges that both the tech stack and the organizational structure (Conway's Law) posed in the (failed) effort to reduce touch latency to where it felt physical. I know that it took Android many years to reach the point where objective observers described it as equally “buttery”. IMO this full-stack integration and optimization is one of Apple's core competences. It will be interesting to see what it leads to this time. The effort may be too late, but if the past predicts the future, it will not be too little too late.
vondur 9y ago
Jeez, just freaking put new components/IO in the old MacPro tower. That would make everyone happy and it could've been done years ago. This is ridiculous. I still have a 2010 MacPro tower. Still runs Ok, but CPU and NVME storage leave it really lacking.
deltron3030 9y ago
Will they enable workflows, or will they control workflows? That's what I'm asking myself, especially in the light of ditching Intel one year later. Controlling workflows would mean an iOS on steroids, or an appliance for pros. Yeah you could get certain stuff done faster if you follow best practices, but you might run into invisible walls.
ericzawo 9y ago
I wonder if they'll force users to purchase dongles for their new desktop machines, too.
redial 9y ago
Let's not kid ourselves, 2019 means December 2019, so...2020.
makecheck 9y ago
This process is a mistake for two reasons. The first is time. If they were ready to release a simple, expandable, better-everything box a few months from now, every single person who’s been chomping at the bit for a new pro Mac would buy it immediately. That would fix their market, gain them goodwill and give them plenty of time to explore what all these amazing professionals actually want to do, later. Second, this just doesn’t seem like the hardest list of requirements to guess. Heck, there are practically no constraints, not even price! It doesn’t have to be thin, it can guzzle power, they don’t have to compromise on any ports (put 4 of everything you can think of in, old and new). Theoretically they could build a slightly better box with some analysis but literally no one is asking for that gargantuan task to be done yet, at least not before 2022.
Corrado 9y ago
I think the new Mac Pro will be modeled after a stack of Mac Minis. Imagine being able to add processors just by stacking them up. Need more storage? Add a SAN module! Need a better GPU? Grab an NVIDA module! Hook them up with USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 and you're good to go.

198 points by jbegley 9y ago

While the article mentions a refresh of MacBook Pro, "Mac Pro" gets mentioned 36 times in the article while "MacBook Pro" is mentioned 8 times. I hope the refresh will not be about completely removing the underpowered "no touch bar" 13" MacBook Pro and instead adding an on-par configuration without the touch-bar-from-hell :/

homulilly 9y ago

Better late than never, I guess?

k_sze 9y ago
Except if they are too late. Take a look at the new Dell XPS 15” 2-in-1, with Intel Core i7-8705G (with AMD Radeon RX Vega M GH, 4GB of dedicated HMB2), e.g. That thing ticks most checkboxes of a pro machine, except for the “is a Mac” and “runs Mac-only software” ones. And I imagine that an upgraded version will come out in 2019. Honestly, I find both Windows 10 Pro and Ubuntu very usable nowadays. I don’t really find much reason to stick with a Mac anymore.
- ssijak 9y ago
  Windows 10 is one giant malware/virus. The interface is terrible too, but that is a preference.
  - jjeaff 9y ago
    I don't run antivirus software, only ublock. I have literally not had a virus or malware infection in the last 10 years of pro use. And I use BitTorrent and Usenet frequently. Where/how are you getting all this malware?
    - zokier 9y ago
      Please don't feed the trolls.
- zokier 9y ago
  > That thing ticks most checkboxes of a pro machine Except for little things like (workstation) Xeon CPU and pro graphics (Quadro or whatever ATi is calling their FirePros these days). If you want a actual pro system, check out Dells workstation line, e.g. Precision 7520. Sure, its not light and pretty like a XPS, but you can load it with fairly serious amount of stuff and as a cherry on top it comes with Linux support out of the box. Workstations are just a different class of computers.
  - zokier 9y ago
    Oh, and actual desktop workstations (which Mac Pro would be competing against) are yet another class. I just had some fun at Dell website, and you can configure a desktop system with dual Xeon Platinum (lol) 8180 CPUs. Those have 28 cores each. The memory configuration taps out at 12x32 GB. With 384 GB of RAM and 112 HW threads, you might be able to even run Atom and Slack simultaneously.
- gurkendoktor 9y ago
  The XPS 2-in-1 has also dropped all useful (in the present) ports, reduced the keyboard travel, and messed up the arrow key area on their keyboards. I'm worried that the XPS line is trying too hard to be a MacBook; what if they want to make next year's model even thinner? Their "classic" XPS 15 looks fantastic, but I've read too many complaints about reliability and coil whine. I hope they keep iterating on it for a few more years.

crstinin 9y ago

Wait a minute, wasn't it supposed to be 2018?

MBCook 9y ago
They never said that, they only said it was not going to be in 2017. The article says this was always their timeline. If you believe that. But they never said 2018 and I remember people being very skeptic le that 2018 would happen last year when they first announced they were working on a new Mac Pro.
- strictnein 9y ago
  Yeah, it was "not 2017" and now they're saying: > We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product By "transparent and open" I guess they meant wait a year to tell people it's going to be another year?
miles 9y ago
Their messaging was vague at best, leading to a number of articles like this one: https://web.archive.org/web/20170404192349/http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/new-mac-pro-2018-latest-rumours-release-date-uk-price-features-specs-3536364/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170404192349/http://www.macwor... > In April 2017 Apple invited journalists to its Product Realization Lab and made a series of announcements relating to the Mac line, revealing among other things that a minor update to the Mac Pro is imminent and a major revamp will arrive in 2018.

torstenvl 9y ago

So now, two questions: - Will the Mac Pro actually be Pro? - Will they ever bring back a Pro computer in a notebook form factor?

rsynnott 9y ago
What's non-'Pro' about the current 15" MBP that was 'Pro' about the previous design? They're practically the same. If you mean no SD card reader etc, it's my understanding that pro photographers tended to use a USB3/thunderbolt reader anyway, as the integrated reader was connected over USB2 internally and was far too slow for pro use.
- command_tab 9y ago
  FWIW, the SD card slot in newer (but not newest, ugh) Mac models is connected via the PCIe bus and not USB.
  - rsynnott 9y ago
    Huh, really? I had a 2014 or something rMBP in work at one point; was almost certain it had a USB2 SD card reader. EDIT: According to Apple, all the laptops are USB2: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204384 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204384 Desktops are PCIe.
    - sigjuice 9y ago
      I have a 2015 MacBook Air and wanted the SD card reader to belong to a Linux guest inside VMWare Fusion (for dd'ing custom RPi images). I just couldn't get it to work. Then I found this article https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1035825 https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1035825 which says This issue occurs because the SDXC card slot included in newer Mac models is connected to the Mac using the PCIe bus and not using the USB bus that the original SD card slot uses.
- BuildTheRobots 9y ago
  My 9 year old toshiba has a pci based SD card reader. The possibility for it to be internal and also offer reasonable speeds is not beyond the pale. Some of the top end cameras use both CF and SD, so sure, it doesn't cater for everyone, but SD has become so ubiquitous it seems odd it's missing.

endymi0n 9y ago

Still hoping for a professional MacBOOK, but Apple doesn't ever listen to their pro customers or do they?

BoorishBears 9y ago
? Isn’t that a MacBook Pro?
- torstenvl 9y ago
  You mean the one without a real keyboard or the one with only one port while plugged in?
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    The Macbook Pro has 4 total USB C ports. You can use any of them to charge, and still use all 3 of the others for whatever else needs doing. The keyboard is subjective.
    - matwood 9y ago
      > The keyboard is subjective. Yeah, I think if the keyboard didn't break from a spec of dust it would be fine.
    - electricslpnsld 9y ago
      > The keyboard is subjective. The feel of the keyboard is indeed subjective (I happen to like the feel of the keyboard on the new MacBook Pro), but in this case Apple genuinely built a buggy keyboard, so much so that people are writing songs about it [1]. [1] https://youtu.be/FdS3tjEIqUA https://youtu.be/FdS3tjEIqUA
      - adanto6840 9y ago
        I ordered one and then returned it (for the first time ever after ~10 or so MBPs) -- ended up just purchasing a new refurb non-touchbar MBP, which is what it was replacing too. Largest reason for return: G key. 30% of the time = two Gs. 50% = 1 G. Remaining 20% = 0 Gs/no keydown whatsoever. Hah.

jphoward 9y ago

I wonder who the target market is, though? The iMac Pro can cost £5000, so I assume more performance and hence price than that? The only users who I can imagine willing to justify paying such a premium are those who feel they must remain at the cutting edge of performance and are willing to pay for it, but surely they will have left the Apple ecosystem by then? It's as if Apple are saying "we're making a computer for people who demand peak performance, but are willing to use cheap outdated hardware until we get round to it."

rsynnott 9y ago
I'd assume mostly people who want really hefty GPUs (and for whom eGPUs aren't an option). The iMac Pro won't help you there.
- thirdsun 9y ago
  In the article it sounded as if they actually intend to achieve modularity fort the Mac Pro with eGPUs, or peripheral hardware in general. A mistake in my opinion.
VonGuard 9y ago
This is for Logic and Final Cut users who want to have the best and don't know enough about computers to understand they're being ripped off.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Or they bill $2-300/hour so they don't really care. If their tooling is on the Apple side, they don't really have the option of going for a high end PC.
  - wuliwong 9y ago
    There's actually even more to it than just not caring. There is also the marketing side of it. Recording studios will sometimes make choices to buy certain gear because of the name and recognized brand. Apple computers are certainly the recognized brand for digital recording.

humbleMouse 9y ago

Just make it a cool looking square and shove tons of hardware in it. The whole circle thing is such a bad design.

pmlnr 9y ago
So, in essence, a Borg cube.
- jackhack 9y ago
  more closely related -- a NeXT Cube.
  - krylon 9y ago
    Well, they already tried that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube
    - jonhendry18 9y ago
      That had more in common with the trash can Mac Pro. The NeXT Cube had three NuBus expansion slots that accepted boards something like 11"x11". (There were actually four connectors on the backplane; one was used for the NeXT motherboard.) Granted, there weren't many boards produced for use in the Cube. There was NeXT's own i860-based color video card, the NeXTDimension. I think there was a third-party card with multiple i860s, and there was a 3rd party card with multiple Motorola 56001 DSPs.
mseebach 9y ago
The Apple Signature Box III.
peatmoss 9y ago
NeXT. Though the big aluminum desktops they made years ago were probably a high point for balance of beautiful and functional.

cJ0th 9y ago

The big question is: Will it still come with an Intel cpu?

ovao 9y ago
Almost assuredly.
wlesieutre 9y ago
If Apple switches to some other CPU architecture, the Mac Pro will be the very last thing to change, assuming it does at all. The processors they've developed for iPhones and iPads are getting into laptop territory, but it's a big step from there to 2x 6-core Xeons.
LgWoodenBadger 9y ago
It will come with both (Intel and their own), which is why it's 2019. That's the only reason I can think of

prepend 9y ago

I bet it’s going to be a sphere on a stick. Like the original LEGO Death Star II. But if it had been completed all the way around. https://i2.wp.com/www.yuppiegadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Lego-Death-Star-II-10143-1.jpg?fit=500%2C450&ssl=1 https://i2.wp.com/www.yuppiegadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

majewsky 9y ago
What about the existing trashcan design, but instead of plugging in a monitor and mouse and keyboard, the trashcan's surface is just one single touch screen? That's much more user-friendly, you don't have to mess with cables at all anymore.
- prepend 9y ago
  Good point on user friendly. But I don’t think that’s really what they’re going for. Sphere on a stick would be cool to mount on a walk so it looks cool and then have wireless video (or video through the stem) so you just remote into it from your local network from tablets or light notebooks as terminals.
jonhendry18 9y ago
Take the existing trashcan design, make it three times as tall, and have the top be somewhat thicker. And have two more rounded cylinders at the bottom adjacent to the main cylinder.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

Reading this it had me reminiscing about Sun back in its heyday as a workstation vendor. Sun used to do this stuff, they would bring in a partner who had some critical application and the Sun engineering team and the partner's engineering team, and some "power users" of the tool would all work through what it would take to make the tool work better on a Sun Workstation than any other workstation. Sun engineering got a collection of bugs, features, and investigations that would come out of those exercises. When my wife was at Xerox they were doing similar sorts of studies for document preparation and presentation. You could do that when the workstation cost $25,000, (in 1990 dollars!) I'm not sure how viable it is when the workstation is less than $5,000. That said, I really miss using software products where that level of thought has gone into its design. The three 'creative' apps I use (other than writing code) are drawing, schematic capture/board layout (EDA), and writing. All systems that benefit from people investing in how the flow of these things work, and all of which have degraded over time.

ggg9990 9y ago
What drawing apps do you use, on what devices, and what is worst about those apps to you?
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  On my PC I use Corel Draw, on the iPad Autodesk Sketchbook, Touch Draw, or the Notes application, on the Surface its usually Sketchbook but I've also got Sketchable, and on Linux Inkscape. The worst thing is the linkage between knowing what you want to do and assembling the right tools to do it in the app you're looking at. Most of my drawing is technical in nature (systems, small components, software architectures, Etc.)
TrainedMonkey 9y ago
The world is bigger and wealthier today. You sell significantly more workstations which translates into way higher profit.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago

Lapsa 9y ago

what on earth is "promunnication"?

saagarjha 9y ago
Professional+communication?

kylehotchkiss 9y ago

Yay, a Mac made to run JS development tools.

GiorgioG 9y ago

From 2007 to 2016 I was all-in on OS X / MacBook Pros / iMacs for work (software dev.) Since then I've gone back to a Dell XPS 15 and a custom-built AMD Threadripper machine. As much as I like the Mac hardware, I could no longer justify the cost. The XPS is a nice machine and (no touchbar - it's a feature) and my custom-PC is a monster. Windows 10 with all its warts is plenty serviceable especially now with it's Linux Subsystem (primarily because I prefer to use bash as my shell.) I guess I'm no longer part of their target market for their computer systems.

asciimo 9y ago
> Linux Subsystem Wat.I just went googling after reading this comment and at first glance, it looks like this is an officially supported method to run GNU apps in a Windows terminal? Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI?
- cthalupa 9y ago
  >Wat.I just went googling after reading this comment and at first glance, it looks like this is an officially supported method to run GNU apps in a Windows terminal? It's hardly limited to GNU apps. Most of your Linux applications should work fine on it. I've had no problem with all sorts of non-GNU releases when I use it on my desktop. >Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI? No, it is a Linux userland on top of the NT kernel with an emulation layer written to handle all of the syscalls. It works well. The only really glaring issue is ConEmu and related Windows terminal ecosystem is still hot garbage compared to any Linux or OSX terminal.
  - wyoung2 9y ago
    > The only really glaring issue is ConEmu and related Windows terminal ecosystem is still hot garbage compared to any Linux or OSX terminal. ...and that bites you in a surprising number of ways. I recently tried porting some software that runs just fine under Ubuntu-on-x86 to Ubuntu-on-WSL, and I found three different failure modes in the console/pty mechanism before I gave up. I then tried running it under Cygwin and it ran correctly out of the box. Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to try to run a program like GNU screen under WSL, but the core problem isn’t any specific application. Any program that does anything even moderately tricky with ptys is likely to fail under WSL.

drawkbox 9y ago

Mac Pro cheese graters going away was a bad move and a missed opportunity by Apple, today they already lost the power pro users and they had them for a while. Most Mac Pro users have moved back to PC, or iMac's/minis just for iOS/macOS related dev, with most work being done on PCs. Apple had a window where developers needed a heavy Pro Mac for iOS, nix development like python/ruby/etc, even Unity dev back when it was only on Mac (2007-2010 ish), it was also great to have a Mac after the 2006 Intel processor move as it was the sexiest nix and great for developers from 2006 on, but those days are over. Somewhere in 2013, they just moved on from the cheese grater and Pro market that included developers and content creators. Now they want to regain it? There was so much momentum squandered here and hearing Tim Cook repeat "Post-PC" and Apple messaging that desktops were like trucks, only developers need them, caused them to move on, so did the pro users and developers. Apple even watered down their developer laptops and Macbook Pros, 17" screens were relegated to being 'lapzillas' and Apple went only mainstream. Content creators and programming were not something they focused on anymore after the iPhone took over, eventhough those influencers were always the focus. I thought they would use the iPhone and iOS/macOS platforms to get more people on their desktops as well, instead they went the other direction. We used to be Mac Pro heavy now we just have iMacs/minis for the last mile or iOS/macOS export and testing with performance heavy beefy PCs for most of the day to day work. Additionally, taking your jet engine/trashcan new Mac Pro or iMac to the mall for repairs instead of just popping in a new video card or drive also sucks. Developers can get two performance PCs for the price of one Mac Pro. Usually you can get more power out of both as well since Mac Pros from 2011 on were 1-2 years behind. There is no getting back pro users such as devs/game devs that had switched over and have now gone back to Windows/PC.

jjeaff 9y ago
But how in the world are you going to manage without ecc memory? You might have a bit get flipped by a cosmic ray once every 5 years of 24x7 computing.
- gruez 9y ago
  intel xeon e3 or amd
- 9y ago

electricslpnsld 9y ago

> We’ve been focusing on visual effects Are any visual effects or animation shops still on macOS? I was under the impression that this world was mainly Linux (Pixar, Disney, Weta, ILM, etc, are all on Linux).

jjeaff 9y ago
The major studios are still using Maya, Photoshop, and other commercial software that doesn't work on Linux. They are using Linux for render farms and some custom software.
- electricslpnsld 9y ago
  > The major studios are still using Maya, Photoshop, and other commercial software that doesn't work on Linux. Maya/Houdini/Modo/etc run on Linux (this is what Weta, Disney, and Pixar do). Creative Cloud definitely does not, which is a bit of a problem.
  - jjeaff 9y ago
    Are you sure? This page seems to indicate that Maya is not compatible with Linux. https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Operating-system-compatibility-for-Autodesk-Maya.html https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/troubleshooting/...
    - electricslpnsld 9y ago
      Positive — I used to develop Maya plugins on Linux. That page is perplexing!
      - jjeaff 9y ago
        Oh, upon closer reading, that page just says it doesn't work on 32 bit linux. Why they are even including that is beyond me. Who is working on Maya with a 32 bit system?

kokey 9y ago

I'm really glad to see that Apple is paying attention again to what have been their long time core users. First with the new iPad for the education market and now revealing strategies for creatives in design and audio.

foobaw 9y ago

It will still take a while to penetrate the gaming market. A $3000 desktop can play most games at the highest settings right now including VR. A $3000 mac would be lucky if the games even supported OSX.

saagarjha 9y ago
Why do you you think Apple is trying to enter the gaming market?

jnsaff2 9y ago

What I read from the article is that Apple is working on finding a few workflows and optimising the hell out of those instead of like creating an awesome general purpose computer for which only users imagination is the limitation. Which obviously is a very Appley thing to do.

krylon 9y ago

I do not need a Mac Pro, nor could I afford one if I wanted to (I do own one, though, albeit it is 11 years old, I got it preowned from a friend). But I wonder what the hell the people at Apple were thinking when they put put the "trashcan"-design. It looks awesome, I cannot deny it, and I imagine it is very convenient to handle. But something deep inside of me cringes when a computer in this price class has everything soldered on and has no real option to extend it. You cannot upgrade the CPU, the RAM, the GPU, nor can you install any additional PCIe cards.

timc3 9y ago
It wasnt that convenient when you wanted to put stuff inside it or rack it. Hence the thirdparty rack chassis market.
- krylon 9y ago
  When I said "convenient to handle", I was thinking, small enough to sit on top of my desk, lightweight enough so I can carry it without breaking a sweat (the cheesegrater is really heavy!), that sort of thing.
jonhendry18 9y ago
I assume Jony Ive said "I'm so bored of boxes" and that was the end of the cheese grater.
- gaius 9y ago
  It’s the ultimate rounded corner

whywhywhywhy 9y ago

I waited and waited and waited. I liked the design of the Trashcan but by the time I could afford one it was woefully out of date and I needed Nvidia GPUs for the rendering engine I wanted to use. In the end I moved my creative work over to PC and currently run a nice compact mATX PC built for GPU computing with two 1080Tis. Still cost me less than half the eventual iMac Pro and presumably this Mac Pro. If this had been released a few years back maybe I'd never have moved to PC but at this stage they'll have to be still supporting the new Mac Pro in 3 years before I even consider moving back at this point. Been a Mac only user for 15 years now, I didn't move away lightly, but now I've switched it'll be hard to convince me back.

wuliwong 9y ago
I wonder at what scale has this occurred? Has video editing industry moved away from Apple computers in a substantial way? They have managed to keep the music recording industry; a new macbook pro or imac is plenty powerful enough to be the heart of a recording studio.
- ladzoppelin 9y ago
  Many people in the pro audio world have moved to Windows over the last 5 years. Apogee, who I think Apple paid to only support OsX at one time, now makes Windows drivers and officially supports both platforms. MOTU has been cross platform since like 2006. Logic is really the only audio product that does not support Windows but only because Apple killed the pc version in like 2004. Logic pc was amazing and might even still run on Windows 10.
  - timc3 9y ago
    Exactly.
  - wwweston 9y ago
    The main reason I'm not using Logic right now on my MBP is that it doesn't run on other platforms, and Apple's behavior over the last half-decade has convinced me that after almost two decades of knowing their platforms were the right choice for me, I can't trust their judgment when it comes to disruptive or dealbreaking changes to both hardware and software.

dmix 9y ago

> He stresses that it’s not just Apple’s applications that they’re testing and working to help make better. Third-party relationships on this are very important to them and the workflow team is helping to fix their problems faster too. This is great. Sounds a lot like Microsoft's recent change in culture away from using Windows as their worldview lens for everything to seeing their work as being platform agnostic (with non-Windows OS, mobile, IoT, watches, cars, etc).

rch 9y ago

It sounds like the next Mac Pro still won't handle ML workloads in a meaningful way, but it will have a keyboard with a touchbar that works with Garage Band. Pass.

saagarjha 9y ago
You might get external GPU support if you're trying to do ML.
- rch 9y ago
  Then I'll stick with a laptop. Probably my first non-MPB in over a decade.
ellisv 9y ago
I disagree. Do you really want to be training large models locally? The effort for Apple to optimize the Mac for ML is not worth it (for anyone). The cloud is cheap and ubiquitous.
- ericd 9y ago
  Which cloud provider? When I last ran the numbers, 1080 Ti cards paid for themselves pretty quickly vs Amazon's ML instances if you're using them regularly. Also, you never have to remember to shut off your instances. I've never done ML professionally, though, so it may be a totally different use case that you're thinking about.

nkkollaw 9y ago

I wonder what "pro" means to Apple anymore. The Macbook Pro is unarguably _not_ pro. Maybe anything above $4,000..?

qaq 9y ago

I have 2009 flashed to 2010 with 64GB RAM and modern GPU and SSD and to be honest I don't see a need to upgrade.

drawkbox 9y ago
Apple is going to EOL Mac Pros to 2011 via the next OS and have done for many of the older Mac Pros [1]. It is a shame because many can still run it just fine. I have a 2012 I got in 2013 which is our last Mac Pro and I am not going to be happy the day they do it. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624
- qaq 9y ago
  At work we still run El Captain so I am fine using High Sierra for a few years at home :) hopefully by that time Ubuntu will be usable with multiple HiDPI displays.
- overcast 9y ago
  My 2008 is running the very latest version of High Sierra without any issues. It's a very simple hack to make it work. So you can get more life out of it easily.

chris_wot 9y ago

If Apple say they want to look at workflows, and winkle out bugs, then I've got a good one - but incredibly specific to LibreOffice. If they get the LibreOffice git repository, then run: make sw.all eventually it will get to the unit tests and one of our exports kills the display server. Only happens if you run it on a iMac Pro 4K screen running max resolution. We know it's something we are doing around graphics, but for the life of us we can't work out what that is. But also: I would have thought killing the display server like this should be something that shouldn't be possible...

majewsky 9y ago
I'm making a guess that the explanation is going to be as hilarious as the infamous "LibreOffice cannot print on Tuesdays" bug, which ended up being a problem with file(1).
- chris_wot 9y ago
  Almost certainly :-) For anyone who wants to find out about the above-referenced bug, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956

stcredzero 9y ago

Apple has had a long history of "innovation" which only has longevity in the form of museum pieces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G4

tibbon 9y ago

I switched to Apple product in 2002, because at the time they were absolutely better than Windows 2000 for my needs (mostly Protools, and eventually Logic 7). Windows at the time was a mess and poorly supported most pro hardware and vendors (specifically Avid) were slow to support releases. It really felt like the best platform. I had a nice G4 tower, and eventually used a G5 and then Mac Pro tower. Things generally just worked, and you could expand things as needed. Roll around to today, and it's a mess. Apple canceled a lot of their pro products. Aperture? Dead. Final Cut got nerfed pretty hard. Logic is still reasonably well maintained, but Ableton Live took over a lot for me. The hardware options aren't that great right now for my needs. Last week, I sold my 2011 Macbook Pro to a friend and switched all my audio stuff to my old Windows gaming system. Picked up a Firewire PCI-E card for $20 and I was in business. It's fast, has a ton of ram and is easily expandable. Windows 10 drives me nuts, but eh... I've still got three Macbook Pros for software development, and they are pretty great for that (minus the new keyboard, and that Tensorflow GPU has dropped OS X support). I don't think I'll be switching laptops anytime soon. But ugh, audio work on them just feels like an overpriced joke at this point. I really never thought I'd be saying it, but for photography and audio stuff, Windows seems to be the place right now!

chrisper 9y ago
Have you ever considered a hackintosh?
- ellisv 9y ago
  I think a big part of @tibbon's complaint is the lack of pro software (from Apple).
ellisv 9y ago
> they are pretty great for that (minus the new keyboard, and that Tensorflow GPU has dropped OS X support). If you're training a model on your laptop, instead of a server, does it really matter? It doesn't seem likely that you'd want to deploy a model trained locally.
cthalupa 9y ago

mistrial9 9y ago

happily using Mac OSX 10.7 on three or four machines today, and avoiding for years the variously awful MacOSX experiences of intrusive and superficial "improvements"; I believe I am not alone in this point of view. Hefty hardware is only part of the story here.

eddieh 9y ago
I thought holdouts were all on 10.6 aka Snow Leopard?
jaxondu 9y ago
If you develop iOS app, Apple is forcing you to use at least Sierra 10.12 for XCode 9 and the need to support iPhone X screen.

jnwatson 9y ago

I hate to admit this, but Apple should sell off its Mac division. They are simply not hungry enough. For the first time in 33 years, I no longer have access to a Mac. Apple doesn’t sell one that my employers nor myself want to buy. That it has taken so long to course correct would have sunk most companies. It is probably a couple percent hit on Apple revenue at most.

mixmastamyk 9y ago
Wow, yes they've definitely lost their "eye of the tiger," haha. Doubt there is a Lenovo waiting in the wings, nor would they allow it, a shame.

namelost 9y ago

I wish Apple would just make their own ATX case (or any other standard *TX form factor), their own ATX motherboard with their TPM on it, and then use commodity components for everything else. I'd pay a huge premium for that product, but Apple is so far up their own ass trying to imitate themselves they can't see what their customers really need.

wilsonnb 9y ago
I find it likely that Apple knows what their customers need more than random people commenting on the internet know what Apple's customers need.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Obviously not, they haven't had a competitive product in the space for ~five years.
pjmlp 9y ago
They tried that in the past. It was one of the first things Jobs "fixed".
- namelost 9y ago
  If you mean the clones, that's not exactly what I'm suggesting. I want Apple to continue building computers, but to use industry standard form factors, and to use as many commodity components as possible. They could get such a product out faster than 2019 and it would be better than whatever they will end up announcing. Instead we have to wait a year for Apple to figure out how to make a computer that is 'pretty' and 'innovative' enough for Apple, even when their professional customers don't give a toss how pretty or innovative it is.
  - jonhendry18 9y ago
    Or at least one computer in the lineup like this.
- 9y ago

tambourine_man 9y ago

What are Pros supposed to do in the mean time? Keep buying PCs I guess. Why haven't they kept selling the cheese grater is beyond me. They are spending a fortune to understand what Pros need, while we have been screaming for the better part of the decade: lots of user accessible RAM, storage, PCI & GPU. How much would it cost R&D to update the Mac Pro? Teenagers can do it for peanuts, I'm sure the largest company in the freaking world could manage. If they were truly sorry or marginally “cared”, that's what they would have done years ago. I'm fine with them playing the “let's reinvent the Pro computer” game as a side project, they have this massive amount of money burning a whole in their pockets after all, but some of us need to work.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
Pros are supposed to buy an iMac Pro in the meantime, and then buy the modular Mac Pro Pro with all the pro trimmings - iPads for touch control, and such - when it all arrives next year. It's going to be interesting to see if they stick with Intel for the Pro. It's entirely possible they won't, especially given Intel's security issues. What that means for performance remains to be seen.
- jbigelow76 9y ago
  It's going to be interesting to see if they stick with Intel for the Pro. Wouldn't the apps that the pro users dictate that to a large extent? If the truly "pro" apps don't get rebuilt against ARM then it would be like Apple never really released the Mac Pro if they ditch Intel so early into its return.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    I think they meant go AMD Reyzen2 or more likely Eypc (or possibly Rome.) Arm is not going to cut it in the dual Zeon workstation role
    - kevindqc 9y ago
      Aren't Apple developing their own CPUs?

ericd 9y ago

If they just make an expandable ATX/cheese grater style case with generous cooling and allow top Nvidia GPUs, I will pay a large premium for this. Ideally there would be the option for high end consumer gear (i7/i9, vanilla RAM) in addition to the Xeons/ECC/FBDIMMs that get so expensive so quickly, but two tiers with different architectures is probably too much to hope for.

alkonaut 9y ago

I just hope they don’t break any new ground with it. Zero. Just make a big tower that does excactly what a HP workstation tower would do, and match the price. No need for any Apple magic of any kind here. Don’t make a trash can, don’t make a touch bar.

timc3 9y ago
I hope you are one of the people that is consulting for them. This is exactly what is needed.
- fludlight 9y ago
  Which is why Apple will do the opposite. Their business model is the old Henry Ford line "if I asked the customer what they wanted they would have said a faster horse". They think they know what you need better than you do. Sometimes this works really well, sometimes not. Get ready for an underpowered $10k pyramid whose only input is Siri.
ryanwaggoner 9y ago
That makes zero sense from a business perspective. "I know, let's put out a boring commodity product that has no unique selling points, doesn't match our ethos, and has a tiny niche market. And we'll sell it at the same razor-thin margin that everyone else does!" That couldn't be further from Apple's way of doing business. If you want a cheap commodity tower, just buy one, but don't expect Apple to make one for you.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  Apples uniqueness here is their OS and the applications that run on it. That’s why people would buy a Mac over an HP. Only that. If they want pros to keep using Mac OS for video etc, then they need to have competitive hardware. Apples other concern is the developer side and the app ecosystem: high end build machines and developer workstations are also relevant for their actual business which is selling apps and phones. Computer hardware for professionals is just a boring service Apple needs to provide in order to support the rest of their business. It’s not even a visible product like a MacBook or an iMac- it’s designed to be hidden on the floor because it’s huge and noisy (the trash can was a failed attempt at working around that fact) Edit: to follow up on the “powerful machines are a boring service” idea: If Apple didn’t want to risk the brand damage of launching a boring product, they could simply license dell or hp to sell certain servers and workstations with Mac OS to let the highest end render machines and build servers etc run Mac OS. They could easily charge a 20% premium and people would be happy to buy them.

jdlyga 9y ago

The Mac Pro is a great piece of hardware. I'm using one at work. I put linux on it, and I use it for Qt development.

specialp 9y ago

Apple already lost the Mac Pro market when they made Final Cut Pro X, and stopped regularly releasing Mac Pros. They completely disregarded the professional market by killing functionality that was critical to the users. That combined with the lack of powerful hardware made a lot of the professionals go to PC and Avid. They addressed some of the issues in future releases but it was too late. Creators were pretty much the only people keeping Apple alive in the tough years and they abandoned them.

saagarjha 9y ago

Reading this article was really annoying. First, there were grammatical issues like these, which may have been intentional, but made understanding the article difficult: > I saw a bunch of them walking by in Apple park toting kit for an outdoor shoot on premises while walking > Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed. Then, I clicked over my Hacker News tab and when I went back, the content was replaced by another page (!). Apparently it was changed via JavaScript when I reached the bottom of the page. This is stupid and user-hostile.

ng-user 9y ago
I agree. When scrolling to the bottom of the article the last thing I expected was the entire content of said article to be replaced by headlines of other stories from TC. Viewing the article in portrait mode on desktop displays the main contents on the left 50% and complete whitespace on the right 50%. Overall the TC redesign is god-awful and has degraded usability substantially.

strictnein 9y ago

I'm honestly confused by what Apple is doing here. Maybe it makes sense to refine their software, but they're bringing in content creators to study their workflow to inform their hardware design? What?

macintux 9y ago
Some hardware questions I'd think working with content creators could help with (disclaimer: not a hardware guy)... Are external GPUs fast enough? What internal architecture do they need to make them so? How much L1/L2/Ln memory do they need for serious workflows? Is Thunderbolt <whatever> fast enough? How well do professional apps really scale with multiple CPUs? Benchmarks are one thing, seeing people use the software in production is something else. Anyway, just random speculation.

thirdsun 9y ago

I think Apple is needlessly re-inventing the wheel here. While their intent to analyze real world usage and optimize every detail by bringing in actual pro users is admirable, I‘d prefer them to use a simpler, more streamlined approach and have them release standard, state of the art hardware in a tasteful, quiet case and continuesly work on optimizations on the software side - a process that is required anyway and not exclusive to the Mac Pro, which makes me wonder why it should dictate the Mac Pro roadmap and schedule in such a significant way. Furthermore it‘s concerning that the article mentions modularity mostly in ways that involve external hardware and peripherals. If that turns out to be the approach Apple is considering, it sounds worryingly similar to an iMac Pro without the fanatastic display.

tptacek 9y ago

This is a lot of copy for some pretty simple updates: * 2019 release data * Modular architecture * Probably a heavy bet on eGPU and TB3 * iDevices as additional inputs

pvg 9y ago
Probably a heavy bet on eGPU and TB3 I'm not sure that's really about the Mac Pro itself - the article doesn't say that.
- tptacek 9y ago
  I got the impression it was about the Mac Pro, but you're right, it doesn't say that, and it's kind of hard to tell.
jonhendry18 9y ago
"Probably a heavy bet on eGPU and TB3" I think the Trash Can was a heavy bet on Thunderbolt as well. Which wasn't terribly successful.
IOT_Apprentice 9y ago
Funny they want NOTHING to do with slots so that customers can add in multiple video cards or other ML cards from nVidia or AMD.

nottorp 9y ago

So they're optimizing for video/photo work. What about the rest of the "pro" users? They've given up on them?

jonhendry18 9y ago
Yes, what about developers, scientists, etc.

pkamb 9y ago

"Apple Performs Usability Testing"

kbd 9y ago

Please excuse the venting here for a minute. After "can't innovate anymore my ass" Apple released their architectural dead-end trashcan Mac Pro in _2013_ we have to wait until _2019_ for an update? What am I supposed to buy? I'm certainly not going to buy anything with a Touch Bar. It's 2018 and I had my job order me the 2015 Macbook Pro for my work computer so I could skip the Touch Bar and still have USB ports. What's going on at Apple?

CydeWeys 9y ago
Don't forget the keyboard on the new Macs, which is the other big reason not to get them (besides ports and touch bar).
- JonLim 9y ago
  I really wish I could get the 2015 MacBook Pro with USB-C ports and Touchbar MBP size. As painful as it was to have to buy dongles and whatever else, having monitors + USB docks using USB-C has been pretty pleasant.
- randyrand 9y ago
  I use a 2016 and recently used my friends 2015. Honestly, it felt amazing. I had to do a double take. The new keyboards sure do suck. Do they really think a 10% size difference is more useful than a good feeling keyboard? What are they smoking.
- ggregoire 9y ago
  I felt like you about the keyboard but after using it for a while I have to admit I love it. Sometimes I have to use my old Macbook and the new one feels definitely better.
- skellera 9y ago
  I had to do a demo on another dev's 2016 Pro in front of a client. It was embarrassing how many typos I was making. It's such a horrible feeling keyboard.
dmitriid 9y ago

m3kw9 9y ago

ALL I need to know!

yolobey 9y ago

I think I'll be out of the Mac ecosystem soon. The writing is on the wall. I still don't like any Linux DE and I hate the eternal config hell I end up in, but the effort to have a functional Mac is starting to catch up to it. I'm still using a 2015 MBP and a Hackintosh desktop (Old Intel 3770k + Titan Xp) but this year was the first time after the 2006 release of the MBP that I bought a non-Apple notebook... I needed something to replace my 11" MacBook Air that I use for travel, and the new keyboards just aren't usable for me. Bought a Thinkpad X1C6... Great machine except a few baffling design decisions, and appears to be borderline impossible to Hackintosh for now - but the keyboard is my tool of the trade. I need a good one.

osteele 9y ago

“And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed.” This approach is reminiscent of Apple's approach to low-latency touch scrolling on the original iPhone; to Quicktime and MIDI a decade and a half before that; and, more recently, to the Apple Pencil. I knew executives at Palm who were frustrated by the challenges that both the tech stack and the organizational structure (Conway's Law) posed in the (failed) effort to reduce touch latency to where it felt physical. I know that it took Android many years to reach the point where objective observers described it as equally “buttery”. IMO this full-stack integration and optimization is one of Apple's core competences. It will be interesting to see what it leads to this time. The effort may be too late, but if the past predicts the future, it will not be too little too late.

vondur 9y ago

Jeez, just freaking put new components/IO in the old MacPro tower. That would make everyone happy and it could've been done years ago. This is ridiculous. I still have a 2010 MacPro tower. Still runs Ok, but CPU and NVME storage leave it really lacking.

deltron3030 9y ago

Will they enable workflows, or will they control workflows? That's what I'm asking myself, especially in the light of ditching Intel one year later. Controlling workflows would mean an iOS on steroids, or an appliance for pros. Yeah you could get certain stuff done faster if you follow best practices, but you might run into invisible walls.

ericzawo 9y ago

I wonder if they'll force users to purchase dongles for their new desktop machines, too.

redial 9y ago

Let's not kid ourselves, 2019 means December 2019, so...2020.

makecheck 9y ago

This process is a mistake for two reasons. The first is time. If they were ready to release a simple, expandable, better-everything box a few months from now, every single person who’s been chomping at the bit for a new pro Mac would buy it immediately. That would fix their market, gain them goodwill and give them plenty of time to explore what all these amazing professionals actually want to do, later. Second, this just doesn’t seem like the hardest list of requirements to guess. Heck, there are practically no constraints, not even price! It doesn’t have to be thin, it can guzzle power, they don’t have to compromise on any ports (put 4 of everything you can think of in, old and new). Theoretically they could build a slightly better box with some analysis but literally no one is asking for that gargantuan task to be done yet, at least not before 2022.

Corrado 9y ago

I think the new Mac Pro will be modeled after a stack of Mac Minis. Imagine being able to add processors just by stacking them up. Need more storage? Add a SAN module! Need a better GPU? Grab an NVIDA module! Hook them up with USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 and you're good to go.