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I think Apple are coasting on the brand perception that they built from back in the day. 10 years ago, Apple was genuinely ahead of competition in terms of reli

by xmprt 5y ago

I think Apple are coasting on the brand perception that they built from back in the day. 10 years ago, Apple was genuinely ahead of competition in terms of reliability but today other software and hardware manufacturers have caught up or surpassed them.

seph-reed 5y ago
At this point, the OS is the only thing I'm really hooked on. And ElementaryOS has been coming along fairly well, so I'm hopeful than in ~5 years they'll have something I can fully switch over to for my work computer. Right now, I just use it for my gaming/media pc.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Not just surpassed them, but when you compare Apples to apples, their professional hardware today is utter dogshit. The most glaring example I can think of is that the Mac Pro isn't built seemingly for anyone. For $6000 you can build a VFX workstation with an overpriced(!) top-of-the-line threadripper and RTX 3090 and 1TB Samsung SSD which performs more than 4 times faster than their $13,000 highest-end CPU configuration. So what has ended up happening? A lot of studios are simply buying high-end PC prebuilts or the studios are building their own systems now for desktop-side compute. For that price you get 256 GB and some AMD $150 equivalent graphics card, which is worse than what you'd get off some random laptop today.
- ehutch79 5y ago
  You're right, it wasn't built for everyone. and the kind of people it WAS designed for don't even blink at $10k
  - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    Even studios have budgets. I don't care about spending $6-15k for business hardware per inventory unit, plus you're not purchasing it frequently or in mass orders. The problem I and a lot of other firms have is the value you're getting for it. It's utter garbage, and has been all over the press for years now, so it's not exactly news. When big studios and little firms alike are complaining and asking, "Who exactly is this for?" It's clear they don't care about mass professional market consumption. And I'm talking about businesses that are going to spend over $6000 per desktop-compute unit. The organizations that I have seen are the only relevant customers are the ones who have deep Apple-centric workflows, and they're not buying a lot of the hardware. They might have under 10 units in the office at most. If the prices were more inline with what the rest of the hardware market looked like, I'd provide Mac Pros to each staff member because it would be a no-brainer.
    - ehutch79 5y ago
      I'm not really disagreeing with you on the value here. Just saying the target market is the kind of people who can just drop 10k+ and not care. 6k isn't realistically in the same price category.
      - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
        For our business, there isn't a difference in between $6 or $15k, but most businesses aren't spending more than $15k per desktop-side compute station even when we max out specs from our partner suppliers, because for that type of budget you can work with very large amounts of data that hit RAM limits on workstation motherboards, versus just large amounts of RAM on consumer motherboards.

by xmprt 5y ago

seph-reed 5y ago

At this point, the OS is the only thing I'm really hooked on. And ElementaryOS has been coming along fairly well, so I'm hopeful than in ~5 years they'll have something I can fully switch over to for my work computer. Right now, I just use it for my gaming/media pc.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

Not just surpassed them, but when you compare Apples to apples, their professional hardware today is utter dogshit. The most glaring example I can think of is that the Mac Pro isn't built seemingly for anyone. For $6000 you can build a VFX workstation with an overpriced(!) top-of-the-line threadripper and RTX 3090 and 1TB Samsung SSD which performs more than 4 times faster than their $13,000 highest-end CPU configuration. So what has ended up happening? A lot of studios are simply buying high-end PC prebuilts or the studios are building their own systems now for desktop-side compute. For that price you get 256 GB and some AMD $150 equivalent graphics card, which is worse than what you'd get off some random laptop today.

ehutch79 5y ago
You're right, it wasn't built for everyone. and the kind of people it WAS designed for don't even blink at $10k
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Even studios have budgets. I don't care about spending $6-15k for business hardware per inventory unit, plus you're not purchasing it frequently or in mass orders. The problem I and a lot of other firms have is the value you're getting for it. It's utter garbage, and has been all over the press for years now, so it's not exactly news. When big studios and little firms alike are complaining and asking, "Who exactly is this for?" It's clear they don't care about mass professional market consumption. And I'm talking about businesses that are going to spend over $6000 per desktop-compute unit. The organizations that I have seen are the only relevant customers are the ones who have deep Apple-centric workflows, and they're not buying a lot of the hardware. They might have under 10 units in the office at most. If the prices were more inline with what the rest of the hardware market looked like, I'd provide Mac Pros to each staff member because it would be a no-brainer.
  - ehutch79 5y ago
    I'm not really disagreeing with you on the value here. Just saying the target market is the kind of people who can just drop 10k+ and not care. 6k isn't realistically in the same price category.
    - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
      For our business, there isn't a difference in between $6 or $15k, but most businesses aren't spending more than $15k per desktop-side compute station even when we max out specs from our partner suppliers, because for that type of budget you can work with very large amounts of data that hit RAM limits on workstation motherboards, versus just large amounts of RAM on consumer motherboards.