6 ms·

This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end. Everybody throws the term around and no two

by cactus2093 6y ago

This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end. Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy machine, and there are professional programmers that just need a dumb terminal to ssh into a dev machine in the cloud. And then of course what the largest subset of people seem to mean is professional video editors or content creators. What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers? And then a lot of things that people also complain about like how replacing the wider variety of ports with usb c or thunderbolt is contradictory on a “professional” machine also don’t really make sense. Professionals can use dongles like anyone else. In fact many professionals will have more specific needs that require a single a way, for instance having a builtin sd card reader doesn’t help a professional photographer using cfexpress cards.

xenihn 6y ago
i spend 1/3 of my workday waiting for xcode to build
alasdair_ 6y ago
I’ll take a stab at the problem: an “actual professional” in this context is someone who makes their money by using the computer.
- stu2b50 6y ago
  That does include practically every white collar occupation at this point.
  - throwaheyy 6y ago
    I’d extend it to mean someone for whom the non-pro model is less sufficient (for example, they are using dev tools or video editing as opposed to Excel, Word and email).
    - stu2b50 6y ago
      That would exclude many programming positions, though, since really the old Air is perfectly fine for most SWE positions. Not optimal, but you can run iterm2, you can run a web browser, and you can run vim.
    - numpad0 6y ago
      I don’t think it’s necessarily good that people say Word or Excel is non-Pro tasks fit for cheap and “lite” computers.
      - throwaheyy 6y ago
        It’s a generalization, of course there are exceptions
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > someone for whom the non-pro model is less sufficient Given how powered up the Air has become, this is a thin envelope.
  - Nition 6y ago
    It seems like a reasonable definition to me as long as it's clear that "the computer" means that specific computer. e.g. In this definition, if you use a PC at your office and a laptop at home for non-work stuff, your work PC is being used by a "professional" and your home laptop isn't.
  - numpad0 6y ago
    I’ve seen a screenshot of someone in consultancy roles, an obvious professional by dictionary definition, trash talking hard and mean on some software developers for demanding computers that can build software, that however has no tangible merit in their eyes, like PowerPoint or Excel performances. There might be something interesting in divisions across different types of “Pro”.
- cactus2093 6y ago
  See, I think that is very far from the definition a lot of others have in mind. By your definition, probably 95% of professionals don't need any more power than a macbook air.
Iwan-Zotow 6y ago
> What in the world is an actual professional? Well, that is an easy question - actual professionals are people involved in making, marketing and distributing porno
radley 6y ago
Pretty sure content creators are the core of the Pro series. It's not uncommon to have multiple design apps open at the same time, along with team apps, multiple browsers each running multiple apps, and multiple monitors. And that's just web design. Now open your eyes and look around your room. Everything you see was designed by someone, most likely on a Pro.
- murderfs 6y ago
  Unlikely. Most CAD users are on Windows.
usaphp 6y ago
> What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers? I think it’s because youtubers like linustech etc are the type of people who review these laptops, they live in their bubble that only “real” professionals are those who edit videos.
buryat 6y ago
It's just a name, if you need long battery life, bigger screen, dedicated gpu, etc. then you choose appropriately. Who cares what the Pro means.
vmlinuz 6y ago
Of course there are specific niches, but it's pretty easy to answer in general: 'actual professionals' need some combination of two criteria - capacity and reliability/durability/usability. A device which can handle 'large' loads - be it CPU-bound, memory/storage-bound, or even screen size bound, and can be worked hard for 6-8-10-12 hours per day, 5-6-7 days per week without either the machine or the user breaking. The point is not a professional using a computer, it's a professional computer user - someone who doesn't just use a computer to do their work, but someone for whom the limits of the computer are the limits of the work they can do.
- Jetrel 6y ago
  To be fair, it's pretty outdated terminology. It comes from an era when computers were so genuinely slow that doing almost anything - even using page layout like Pagemaker, or setting up just a single track song in a DAW, had tons of render lag. Even spreadsheets would take significant amounts of crunch time to run their calcs, in the very early days. This meant that most work done on computers, with anything larger than a "toy/hello-world" dataset, was going to be painfully slow. That's why they called it "professional" - because you were actually using datasets large enough to burden the beast. Actually balancing a whole company's finances with a spreadsheet, rather than tallying up a little 10-item list. I want to emphasize that "majoritarian" aspect of it - it wasn't just a few specific kinds, it was a majority of ALL kinds of work. And that's changed. We're now at a point where only a tiny minority of tasks done on computers actually have throughput limits based on the computer rather than the operator.
greenknight 6y ago
My friends brother runs a landscaping business, purely off his iphone. He asked me for advice on how to get his iphone onto a laptop, like with an emulator or something. This was about a year ago, so the ARM mac stuff was just rumors at that stage, and I mentioned that it wasnt possible. Now, I can say hey if you get one of the new macbooks / mac minis, you can run your iphone apps natively. He probably will be one of their first customers. I wouldnt be surprised if there was a huge 'professional' market that is untapped. not the traditional professional market but the ones which want something as simple & familiar as a iphone, on a desktop.
- eloisius 6y ago
  Why bother with all that? Isn’t it easy enough to pair a keyboard and mouse to an iPad?
  - hydroxideOH- 6y ago
    Only since the most recent version of iPad software, before that connecting a mouse was either impossible or through a hacky accessibility system.
- connectsnk 6y ago
  Interesting. Just out of curiosity, can you let us know which apps he uses? I am guessing a CRM id one of those
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
Here is my definition: In this context, a professional is someone whose productivity is limited by the power of the computer. A developer compiling large code base on their computer. A person doing video editing. These are examples. And maybe “professional” is the wrong term, but I think that is what people are aiming for when they use that word in this context.
- atoav 6y ago
  In my experience in IT support there are very few people where this is actually the case. For most people their ability to use the computer is the blocker. This also involves the ability yo make sane file format/compression decisions if they work with graphics or video.
washadjeffmad 6y ago
We say the 'pro' in MacBook Pro hasn't stood for professional grade equipment in at least a decade, but for equipment for someone who considers themself to be a professional. People also regularly misplace their importance and prevalence in industry. For instance, you see more Linux than Mac in the big color and VFX houses. It's important to trust and value your tools, which is how prosumers generally feel about their Macs, and they do make nice frontends for the computers that perform the actual work.
nmlnn 6y ago
> What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers? They get outsized influence because they're the ones that make the shiny youtube reviews (using their video editing skills).
- rswail 6y ago
  In my experience, every teacher I know for the last 6-8 months.
mqrs 6y ago
"Pro" is really just a marketing misnomer for "premium".
jrobn 6y ago
YouTube has grown by triple digits. Those video “content creators”, from those just messing around to the professional film makers, are a huge opportunity for Apple to secure mind share in. Billions of views on YouTube. Billions of videos too. I suspect the M1 powered Macs will be hugely successful and very useful for multiple types of users.
- p1necone 6y ago
  I don't see these being very useful for video editing with RAM maxing out at 16gb. Maybe 1080p, but not 4k. (And the small storage, but that can be remedied with a NAS or other external storage, and then fast local scratch space only needs to be big enough for a couple of projects at a time)
  - threeseed 6y ago
    People are regularly doing 4K video editing on their iPhones and iPads. In particular with Luma Fusion.
  - kayoone 6y ago
    They have shown impressive performance with 6k and 8k ProRes footage, even ipad pros and latest iphones are pretty incredible when it comes to editing 4K video and exporting it faster than latest macbooks. With Thunderbolt it's also pretty easy to extend high performance storage.
    - p1necone 6y ago
      I assume there's some clever caching from fast storage + prerendering lower res footage to scrub through? I was going off normal recommendations for video editing on x86 desktops/laptops. But it makes sense they'd go the extra mile on the software end to make it work on phones.
nocubicles 6y ago
I for example use the computer to develop ERP systems. I have always around 10 Docker containers running with different versions of the ERP's. I also need to run SQL server natively on my machine. Also need to run VScode, Chrome, have few Excel's open, use Teams all day long, open Visual Studio from time to time and work with it etc.
derefr 6y ago
> What in the world is an actual professional? I would say that generally, a "professional" user of pretty much any tool, is someone for whom the tool's quality is a constraint on their professional productivity. A professional paint user is an artist. A professional telescope user is an astronomer—or a sniper. A professional typewriter user is a stenographer. A professional shoe user is an athlete. In all these cases, it's the quality and innovation in the tool, that's holding these professionals back from being even better at their job than they already are. Also, take special note of the case of the stenographer: professionals often require special professional variants of their tools, which trade off a longer learning curve for a higher productivity ceiling once learned. A stenographic keyboard takes years to learn, but all non-stenographic keyboards cap out at 150WPM, while stenographic keyboards allow those trained in their use to achieve 300+WPM. And to make one more point: a professional car driver isn't a race-car driver. A professional car driver is a chauffeur. Rolls-Royce's cars aren't famous for how luxurious they are to drive; they're famous for having all the amenities needed by professional drivers — chauffeurs — to allow them to efficiently cater to their clients' needs. Limousines are the same kind of "professional tools" that stenographic keyboards are: they increase chauffeuring productivity. > How did [video editing] become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers? Because all tech vloggers and most tech pundits — the people who review tech — edit videos as part of their jobs, of course ;)
- bawolff 6y ago
  I'm a professional programmer... hardware constraints aren't exactly the limiting factor when i use vim all day.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    You don't compile your code? Obviously it depends greatly on what kind of software you are writing, but at all my dev jobs, I eventually end up waiting for some amount of time while the CPU heats the room up. Notably, VIM is inevitably more gentle on my CPU than VSCode and similar.
    - 6y ago
alwillis 6y ago
Gruber addresses this in his latest post [1]. Short answer: Pro usually means nicer, not necessarily for professionals only. Think about it: the M1-based MacBook Air has better CPU and graphics performance than Intel-based laptops—including Apple’s—that are targeted at professionals. [1]: https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/one_more_thing_the_m1_macs https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/one_more_thing_the_m1_mac...
p1necone 6y ago
> What percent of the working population are video editors? Most of the working population could get away with using basically any computer - if you're marketing a computer as 'Pro' you're talking to a specific subset of that. (Or you're just banking on it working as aspirational marketing and don't actually care about professionals)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- EugeneOZ 6y ago
  ”Pro” doesn't implicitly mean ”Pro Video Editor”.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    I wasn't specifically referring to video editors (although the comment I replied to was), just anyone that needs/benefits from more powerful hardware to do their job. I was just calling out the idea that professionals being a small portion of literally everyone is a useful argument to make. How many markets aren't?
greggman3 6y ago
Regardless of the "Pro" meaning, my 2014 MBP is significantly faster than my top end 2018 Macbook Air. The MacBook Air was frustratingly slow. The most noticeable place was switching apps (like Cmd-Tab) and having it not keep up but there were plenty of other places. Pro to me = Provides more power. That's it. Looking forward to the next MBP
dang 6y ago
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065664.)
jamil7 6y ago
I share an office with quite a few “professional users” I guess you’d call them. There are directors and 3D graphics people using mac pro towers and I’m sure they’d fit the definition, in that performance is a significant bottleneck for them and their output is tied to their hardware.

xenihn 6y ago

i spend 1/3 of my workday waiting for xcode to build

alasdair_ 6y ago

I’ll take a stab at the problem: an “actual professional” in this context is someone who makes their money by using the computer.

stu2b50 6y ago
That does include practically every white collar occupation at this point.
- throwaheyy 6y ago
  I’d extend it to mean someone for whom the non-pro model is less sufficient (for example, they are using dev tools or video editing as opposed to Excel, Word and email).
  - stu2b50 6y ago
    That would exclude many programming positions, though, since really the old Air is perfectly fine for most SWE positions. Not optimal, but you can run iterm2, you can run a web browser, and you can run vim.
  - numpad0 6y ago
    I don’t think it’s necessarily good that people say Word or Excel is non-Pro tasks fit for cheap and “lite” computers.
    - throwaheyy 6y ago
      It’s a generalization, of course there are exceptions
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > someone for whom the non-pro model is less sufficient Given how powered up the Air has become, this is a thin envelope.
- Nition 6y ago
  It seems like a reasonable definition to me as long as it's clear that "the computer" means that specific computer. e.g. In this definition, if you use a PC at your office and a laptop at home for non-work stuff, your work PC is being used by a "professional" and your home laptop isn't.
- numpad0 6y ago
  I’ve seen a screenshot of someone in consultancy roles, an obvious professional by dictionary definition, trash talking hard and mean on some software developers for demanding computers that can build software, that however has no tangible merit in their eyes, like PowerPoint or Excel performances. There might be something interesting in divisions across different types of “Pro”.
cactus2093 6y ago
See, I think that is very far from the definition a lot of others have in mind. By your definition, probably 95% of professionals don't need any more power than a macbook air.

Iwan-Zotow 6y ago

> What in the world is an actual professional? Well, that is an easy question - actual professionals are people involved in making, marketing and distributing porno

radley 6y ago

Pretty sure content creators are the core of the Pro series. It's not uncommon to have multiple design apps open at the same time, along with team apps, multiple browsers each running multiple apps, and multiple monitors. And that's just web design. Now open your eyes and look around your room. Everything you see was designed by someone, most likely on a Pro.

murderfs 6y ago
Unlikely. Most CAD users are on Windows.

usaphp 6y ago

> What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers? I think it’s because youtubers like linustech etc are the type of people who review these laptops, they live in their bubble that only “real” professionals are those who edit videos.

buryat 6y ago

It's just a name, if you need long battery life, bigger screen, dedicated gpu, etc. then you choose appropriately. Who cares what the Pro means.

vmlinuz 6y ago

Of course there are specific niches, but it's pretty easy to answer in general: 'actual professionals' need some combination of two criteria - capacity and reliability/durability/usability. A device which can handle 'large' loads - be it CPU-bound, memory/storage-bound, or even screen size bound, and can be worked hard for 6-8-10-12 hours per day, 5-6-7 days per week without either the machine or the user breaking. The point is not a professional using a computer, it's a professional computer user - someone who doesn't just use a computer to do their work, but someone for whom the limits of the computer are the limits of the work they can do.

Jetrel 6y ago
To be fair, it's pretty outdated terminology. It comes from an era when computers were so genuinely slow that doing almost anything - even using page layout like Pagemaker, or setting up just a single track song in a DAW, had tons of render lag. Even spreadsheets would take significant amounts of crunch time to run their calcs, in the very early days. This meant that most work done on computers, with anything larger than a "toy/hello-world" dataset, was going to be painfully slow. That's why they called it "professional" - because you were actually using datasets large enough to burden the beast. Actually balancing a whole company's finances with a spreadsheet, rather than tallying up a little 10-item list. I want to emphasize that "majoritarian" aspect of it - it wasn't just a few specific kinds, it was a majority of ALL kinds of work. And that's changed. We're now at a point where only a tiny minority of tasks done on computers actually have throughput limits based on the computer rather than the operator.

greenknight 6y ago

My friends brother runs a landscaping business, purely off his iphone. He asked me for advice on how to get his iphone onto a laptop, like with an emulator or something. This was about a year ago, so the ARM mac stuff was just rumors at that stage, and I mentioned that it wasnt possible. Now, I can say hey if you get one of the new macbooks / mac minis, you can run your iphone apps natively. He probably will be one of their first customers. I wouldnt be surprised if there was a huge 'professional' market that is untapped. not the traditional professional market but the ones which want something as simple & familiar as a iphone, on a desktop.

eloisius 6y ago
Why bother with all that? Isn’t it easy enough to pair a keyboard and mouse to an iPad?
- hydroxideOH- 6y ago
  Only since the most recent version of iPad software, before that connecting a mouse was either impossible or through a hacky accessibility system.
connectsnk 6y ago
Interesting. Just out of curiosity, can you let us know which apps he uses? I am guessing a CRM id one of those

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

Here is my definition: In this context, a professional is someone whose productivity is limited by the power of the computer. A developer compiling large code base on their computer. A person doing video editing. These are examples. And maybe “professional” is the wrong term, but I think that is what people are aiming for when they use that word in this context.

atoav 6y ago
In my experience in IT support there are very few people where this is actually the case. For most people their ability to use the computer is the blocker. This also involves the ability yo make sane file format/compression decisions if they work with graphics or video.

washadjeffmad 6y ago

We say the 'pro' in MacBook Pro hasn't stood for professional grade equipment in at least a decade, but for equipment for someone who considers themself to be a professional. People also regularly misplace their importance and prevalence in industry. For instance, you see more Linux than Mac in the big color and VFX houses. It's important to trust and value your tools, which is how prosumers generally feel about their Macs, and they do make nice frontends for the computers that perform the actual work.

nmlnn 6y ago

> What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers? They get outsized influence because they're the ones that make the shiny youtube reviews (using their video editing skills).

rswail 6y ago
In my experience, every teacher I know for the last 6-8 months.

mqrs 6y ago

"Pro" is really just a marketing misnomer for "premium".

jrobn 6y ago

YouTube has grown by triple digits. Those video “content creators”, from those just messing around to the professional film makers, are a huge opportunity for Apple to secure mind share in. Billions of views on YouTube. Billions of videos too. I suspect the M1 powered Macs will be hugely successful and very useful for multiple types of users.

p1necone 6y ago
I don't see these being very useful for video editing with RAM maxing out at 16gb. Maybe 1080p, but not 4k. (And the small storage, but that can be remedied with a NAS or other external storage, and then fast local scratch space only needs to be big enough for a couple of projects at a time)
- threeseed 6y ago
  People are regularly doing 4K video editing on their iPhones and iPads. In particular with Luma Fusion.
- kayoone 6y ago
  They have shown impressive performance with 6k and 8k ProRes footage, even ipad pros and latest iphones are pretty incredible when it comes to editing 4K video and exporting it faster than latest macbooks. With Thunderbolt it's also pretty easy to extend high performance storage.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    I assume there's some clever caching from fast storage + prerendering lower res footage to scrub through? I was going off normal recommendations for video editing on x86 desktops/laptops. But it makes sense they'd go the extra mile on the software end to make it work on phones.

nocubicles 6y ago

I for example use the computer to develop ERP systems. I have always around 10 Docker containers running with different versions of the ERP's. I also need to run SQL server natively on my machine. Also need to run VScode, Chrome, have few Excel's open, use Teams all day long, open Visual Studio from time to time and work with it etc.

derefr 6y ago

> What in the world is an actual professional? I would say that generally, a "professional" user of pretty much any tool, is someone for whom the tool's quality is a constraint on their professional productivity. A professional paint user is an artist. A professional telescope user is an astronomer—or a sniper. A professional typewriter user is a stenographer. A professional shoe user is an athlete. In all these cases, it's the quality and innovation in the tool, that's holding these professionals back from being even better at their job than they already are. Also, take special note of the case of the stenographer: professionals often require special professional variants of their tools, which trade off a longer learning curve for a higher productivity ceiling once learned. A stenographic keyboard takes years to learn, but all non-stenographic keyboards cap out at 150WPM, while stenographic keyboards allow those trained in their use to achieve 300+WPM. And to make one more point: a professional car driver isn't a race-car driver. A professional car driver is a chauffeur. Rolls-Royce's cars aren't famous for how luxurious they are to drive; they're famous for having all the amenities needed by professional drivers — chauffeurs — to allow them to efficiently cater to their clients' needs. Limousines are the same kind of "professional tools" that stenographic keyboards are: they increase chauffeuring productivity. > How did [video editing] become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers? Because all tech vloggers and most tech pundits — the people who review tech — edit videos as part of their jobs, of course ;)

bawolff 6y ago
I'm a professional programmer... hardware constraints aren't exactly the limiting factor when i use vim all day.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  You don't compile your code? Obviously it depends greatly on what kind of software you are writing, but at all my dev jobs, I eventually end up waiting for some amount of time while the CPU heats the room up. Notably, VIM is inevitably more gentle on my CPU than VSCode and similar.
  - 6y ago

alwillis 6y ago

Gruber addresses this in his latest post [1]. Short answer: Pro usually means nicer, not necessarily for professionals only. Think about it: the M1-based MacBook Air has better CPU and graphics performance than Intel-based laptops—including Apple’s—that are targeted at professionals. [1]: https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/one_more_thing_the_m1_macs https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/one_more_thing_the_m1_mac...

p1necone 6y ago

> What percent of the working population are video editors? Most of the working population could get away with using basically any computer - if you're marketing a computer as 'Pro' you're talking to a specific subset of that. (Or you're just banking on it working as aspirational marketing and don't actually care about professionals)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
EugeneOZ 6y ago
”Pro” doesn't implicitly mean ”Pro Video Editor”.
- p1necone 6y ago
  I wasn't specifically referring to video editors (although the comment I replied to was), just anyone that needs/benefits from more powerful hardware to do their job. I was just calling out the idea that professionals being a small portion of literally everyone is a useful argument to make. How many markets aren't?

greggman3 6y ago

Regardless of the "Pro" meaning, my 2014 MBP is significantly faster than my top end 2018 Macbook Air. The MacBook Air was frustratingly slow. The most noticeable place was switching apps (like Cmd-Tab) and having it not keep up but there were plenty of other places. Pro to me = Provides more power. That's it. Looking forward to the next MBP

dang 6y ago

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065664.)

jamil7 6y ago

I share an office with quite a few “professional users” I guess you’d call them. There are directors and 3D graphics people using mac pro towers and I’m sure they’d fit the definition, in that performance is a significant bottleneck for them and their output is tied to their hardware.