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I would like to highlight just how much Apple is focusing on their customers and use cases right now. It seems that they're targeting products to what their pro
by areoform 5y ago
I would like to highlight just how much Apple is focusing on their customers and use cases right now. It seems that they're targeting products to what their professional customers actually want. And in this case, it's a 3.7" little thing that can process 18 streams of 8k video (fully specced out). That's kinda crazy, and they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there.
Bravo Apple. I'd love to see what they have in store for designers and programmers next.
- rkuykendall-com 5y ago> what they have in store for [...] programmers They just (November) released the best MacBook Pro since 2015. Original keyboard back. Escape key back. Utility keys back. Mag-Safe back. HDMI back. SD card back. Headphone jack back. And all with a brand new M1 Pro chip.
- rconti 5y agoIt's insane how boldly (for Apple) they focused on ports and cables. I can't remember a previous demo video that showed so many ugly cables hanging out the back of the machine. They've finally realized it's a selling point!
- ilamont 5y agoMy jaw hit the floor when I saw USB A ports. If only it had multiple HDMI ...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- brailsafe 5y agoWhat would you use multiple HDMI ports for? Do you exclusively use HDMI only screens/tv?
- ilamont 5y agoSo I don't have to use a dongle for a second screen. They break, come loose, and sometimes don't work with Apple equipment.
- radlad 5y agoNo need for a dongle. Thunderbolt/USBC-DisplayPort cables exist.
- runjake 5y agoI do this, and it supports 144 hz.
- girvo 5y agoI do this, and sadly it won’t do 4K at 144hz, at least not with my Intel MacBook. Maybe the M1 can do it?
- FireBeyond 5y agoBecause Apple broke DSC right back at Big Sur, and hasn't bothered to fix it (at least for Intel) ever since.
- drorco 5y agoI haven't yet seen screens with USB-C support that have refresh rates higher than 60hz, unfortunately.
- runjake 5y agoThey did better with the limited space they have — they included a bunch of multi-functional USB-C ports that can be used with dongles for additional HDMI ports!
- assttoasstmgr 5y agoAre you referring to the front panel which is about 3.5" high x 7.7" wide and about 90% an empty blank face?
- yupper32 5y ago"With the limited space they have"? They chose how much space they had to work with...
- dylan604 5y agoBecause nobody outside hardcore computer nerds wants a beige box tower with 14 drive bays sitting on their desk. People want quite little boxes that gets work done without having to have dedicated room for loud machines.
- assttoasstmgr 5y agoThere is plenty of room for a second HDMI port (or mini DP) especially if they went to a vertical configuration for HDMI.
- dylan604 5y agoSo your opinion is that you want it. My opinion is I don't. HDMI is much more limiting. Say that you're a manufacturer trying to keep an eye towards wants new vs supporting what's old, what decisions do you make to support new and retro without increasing the costs? At some point, having backseat decision makers giving input results in the car designed by Homer. Of all of the things I've personally railed on Apple about in the past as well as others, their most recent HW offerings have been a great compromise. They've brought back some USB-A, SD card reader, HDMI, etc. They realized they've gone too far in certain areas, but some how they had a come to Jeebus meeting that reigned them back in.
- G3rn0ti 5y ago> My jaw hit the floor when I saw USB A ports. Don‘t forget the headphone jack!
- jdminhbg 5y agoI don't think there are any Macs that don't have a headphone jack, with the possible exception of the Mac Pro.
- kemotep 5y agoThe current model Mac Pro at least supports add-in PCIe cards. So you are only 1 sound card away from having as many headphone and other audio jacks that you want.
- xinnar 5y agoFWIW the current Mac Pro has a headphone jack. It's at the top to the left of the USB-A ports. https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/
- arvinsim 5y agoSo much for the "people don't use headphone jacks anymore" argument for the phones.
- iainmerrick 5y agoBut (to be picky) why is it on the back??? I mean, if you're going to break with Apple tradition and have visible ports on the front, seems like you'd want the headphone jack to be one of them.
- littlecranky67 5y agoProbably because Studio/Professional Headphones come with long coords by default.
- 5y ago
- bowmessage 5y agoso brave!
- assttoasstmgr 5y agoAnd yet none on the front. So your shoebox full of thumb drives are useless and you have to plug them in from behind. Just to be clear yes I know USB-C thumb drives exist but they are next to useless because their whole purpose is to shuttle files between devices. Devices that likely don't have USB-C yet.
- scns 5y agoI gifted a thumb drive with USB A on one side and USB C on the other.
- dev_tty01 5y agoYes, these are great. Highly recommended.
- dylan604 5y agojust connect that USB-A hub you know you already have and plug in all the USB-A thumb drives you can fit.
- assttoasstmgr 5y agoApple is one of the world's biggest proliferators of e-waste through indirect means. No charger with the new phone huh? Well it's USB-C cable won't fit your old charger or computer either. USB-A is the de-facto standard for thumb drives. Are we all just supposed to throw them away overnight because Apple blessed us with computers without USB-A ports? Or, they'll sell you a dongle for $19 which can be had on Aliexpress for $0.75. Would it have killed them to throw an extra USB-A 3.x port on the nearly empty front panel? It carries nearly the same signals as USB-C minus power delivery. No, this was a purely aesthetic decision. Apple could design a brick PC with no ports besides power and people would still pleasure themselves into a coma at the thought of spending $2k on such a grotesque monstrosity.
- dylan604 5y agoOkay, so don't give them your business. I'm sure you're protest with your wallet will have Apple contemplating their "0 thought applied to their decision" for the next go round. If you are willing to buy a $0.75 anything from Alibaba and trust it with your precious data, you do you. As I've already suggested, you more than likely already have everything you need in a drawer, on your desktop, etc that will allow multiple USB-A devices to connect through a single port.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago> If only it had multiple HDMI They have multiple TB4 ports. I'm not sure if their USBC ports are video-compatible. If you get the ultra, then the front ones are TB4, as well.
- jollybean 5y agoOn that kind of device it doesn't cost them much and those features are more appreciated. It's not much of a war. On the laptops it becomes a bit more of a design conundrum. I'd imagine they have different leadership teams, and, Jobs + Ive are both gone. So there's that.
- nouveaux 5y ago> they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there I think they're blowing all their competitors out of the water with the price point. It's not just a 10-20% difference in price anymore.
- throwaway894345 5y agoAnd you can tell because they were marketing their products in relation to older Apple products rather than other manufacturers.
- NorwegianDude 5y ago$8k for 128GB RAM, 8 TB solid state storage and 22 trillion ops/sec isn't exactly a bargain. I do however image that the performance per watt will be really good.
- cj 5y ago> $8k for 128GB RAM, 8 TB solid state storage Maybe not, but 32GB RAM + 512GB SSD for $2k is a pretty competitive price point.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agoa 512 gb ssd is kinda inexcusable in a machine that costs more than $1000 1tb of ssd is only around $100.
- gigatexal 5y agoBut ssd is not 100 usd gumstick from of the shelf it’s integrated and sports speeds of 7.4GB/s at the top end. Shrug
- brailsafe 5y agoNo, it's a $200-400 gumstick that you can get off the shelf https://www.newegg.com/seagate-2tb-firecuda-530/p/N82E16820248198 https://www.newegg.com/seagate-2tb-firecuda-530/p/N82E168202...
- yewenjie 5y agoWait, how and why did Apple suddenly become cost-effective?
- gtm1260 5y agoSince M1 pretty much.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
- codyb 5y agoApple’s been fairly cost competitive for a while now. That’s an old trope, lots of their new stuff is similarly priced or in some cases cheaper than their competitors. Given the longevity and resale value, they make great machines.
- londons_explore 5y agoApples stuff has been cost competitive since the M1 came out... Although it's partly because there isn't much else in the same performance envelope, so there isn't much to compare to.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agouh, performance/power-consumption/volume combined, perhaps. But there are plenty of systems that can easily beat the apple M1 systems on a purely performance basis, both before they came out, and since. Especially true if you're working on CPUs not GPUs.
- ggreg84 5y agoWhen the M1 was released... a year ago... You could buy a 900$ laptop with a better CPU than any laptop out there. 20 hours battery life (almost 3x any other laptop out there). Silent (no fans). With a great screen, a great keyboard, lightweight, well built, etc. Basically a machine that was more than 2x cheaper of competing laptops at 2500 $ or more, yet had more than 2x of everything.
- MuffinFlavored 5y agoNot only that... > 20-Core CPU > 48-Core GPU > 32-Core Neural Engine for $3,999 is that kind of like... a bargain?
- JohnTHaller 5y agoI have a 10-core CPU with a performance advantage of 23% over an M1 Max in Cinebench R23 (AMD 5800x) and a 1,280 CUDA core GPU (GTX 1060 6GB) that cost a little over $1,000 US total. UPDATE - Sorry, I originally listed this as a 5900x by accident. I need more sleep.
- abakker 5y agoWhich one?
- JohnTHaller 5y agoI have an existing GTX 1060 6GB I already had from before insane prices. And I bought an HP Omen 30L 5800x that someone had purchased to pull the video card from.
- e4e78a06 5y agoCinebench R23 is a worst case scenario for M1 because it doesn't have high core utilization and sits in L2 cache. If you look at a broader set of benchmarks (SPEC) then M1 Max in laptop form is competitive anywhere from a 5800x to a 5950x.
- andreime 5y agomeanwhile geekbench is affected by ram speed
- yborg 5y agoYour setup is also probably 5x larger and uses 100W more power. It's a question of priorities.
- drcode 5y ago"Creatives" don't want a stylus or touchscreen to do their creative stuff?
- wmf 5y agoWacom
- hughrr 5y agoAlso the impressive things for me are it’s actually really cheap, as in bargain territory, and you don’t have to piss around with HP sales drones to actually get one like the Z series.
- nextos 5y agoThis is very interesting because PC workstations have been stagnating for quite long! It'd be cool to be able to bring medium-sized tasks back from clouds to personal computers. The CPU performance is impressive but I wonder how well it'd fare against say an AMD ThreadRipper or a dual socket system with an equivalent price? It'd be also interesting to see a deep learning benchmark against Nvidia. Branding and RAM limits suggest this is geared towards video processing, but might also be useful for some other domains.
- rfoo 5y agoDepending on your use case. Assuming no video editing (since this is HN), for equivalent performance I guess they can't beat their rivals on price. Different story for power tho.
- dylan604 5y agoWhy does HN mean no editing? I'm a dev and video editor and get a lot of work done with dev tools that would take in ungodly amount of time to do as a human.
- geerlingguy 5y agoThere are a few people who frequent HN who do quite a bit of video and multimedia work ;)
- MisterTea 5y ago> This is very interesting because PC workstations have been stagnating for quite long! How have they stagnated?
- twoWhlsGud 5y agoLook at https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certified/sr/workstations/precision-desktops https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif... or the HP equivalent - they're still equipping them with Xeon's from 2 1/2 years ago. So pretty stagnant.
- lquist 5y agoWhy are they doing this? Trickle down effects for their mass market products? There is no way that the prosumer market is big enough to justify this distraction for Apple even if it used to be their core business line.
- kube-system 5y agoMore margin than ever now that they're just gluing ARM processors together instead of buying Xeons from Intel?
- madeofpalk 5y agoI would imagine: - it's easy for them to make - some of their customers need them - prevents people switching to windows for high-even pro machines, which would influence their other computer purchases
- btown 5y agoYep, this is the requisite "hey Hollywood I know we haven't thought about your studio needs in a while, here's a bone that reminds you why Apple is the industry standard" play.
- rsynnott 5y agoSo, you'd think, and that's certainly what I was thinking when watching the thing... but they teased a future Mac Pro announcement at the end. This is a mid-level machine, apparently (similar to the old iMac Pro, I suppose).
- spfzero 5y agoApple's market share has always been a small slice of the overall PC market. In a way, they never did "mass market". While the prosumer market may be a small proportion of the overall market, it could be very significant, for Apple, relative to the market Apple addresses. Plus, I think a lot of people who would not normally call themselves a "prosumer" will want, and purchase these.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoJony Ive leaving was a massive improvement for Apple.
- hughrr 5y agoThis. So much this. Getting what we need not what Jony says we needed.
- kube-system 5y agoJony contributed what he could. I think Apple is better off for having had him for a period of time, but that time has passed.
- vaxman 5y ago"Jony" was reportedly there forever and still influences the joint and previously had designed bathroom fixtures. To his credit, I think he did okay until the transition to magnesium and "al-u-min-ium" (lol) All he had to do was drill some fucking holes in his designs and they wouldn't have become component ovens. But also Apple was a bit of a struggling hardware company when that happened and this was an effective means of generating revenue from the loyal UX devotes, so I'm not sure this was entirely unintentional, at least until they got burned by trying to hold nVidia to the actual thermal specs.
- scyzoryk_xyz 5y agoThis. He brought along the kind of design philosophy that was very much needed in devices. But that philosophy became the new normal, and pushing it to it’s purest level did not end up being what everyone wants. Products and needs evolve and change. Saying bad things about the man is nasty especially considering his gentle nature. Especially that we really actually don’t know who is exactly responsible for what in that world.
- r00fus 5y agoThat time passed 5+ years before he actually left. I will forever look at the 2016 MBP and remember his legacy.
- WheelsAtLarge 5y agoI think over all the designers that focused on how the products looked have lost the tight grip they had over them. For years, look was more important than function. It was probably a good thing since it helped make the company become what it is today. But giving engineering a bit more control is givings us some very functional products. Very cool.
- aldanor 5y agoI really wish they focused on bigger displays too. For music/video production having at least 2x27'' screen size is crucial. But two is kind of weird because you can't centre any app. And there is kind of too much...
- wyclif 5y agoI've never understood why 2x27" is supposedly "crucial" for music/video production. I had two large monitors for a while; eventually I went back to one slightly larger monitor because I found it was more comfortable and ergonomic to be staring at a single surface perpendicular to my eyes.
- aldanor 5y agoNote that I mentioned "2x27'' screen size", not "2x27''". I would very much prefer if they just just glued two 27'' studio displays together, effectively making it a single 32:9 10K 49'' screen.
- thirdsun 5y agoPersonally, I want sharp displays with high pixel density. Multiple 5k / 27" displays offer that, a larger 4k or 5k display does not.
- SZJX 5y ago> Bravo Apple. I'd love to see what they have in store for designers and programmers next. What would you say the programmers specifically need though. A laptop instead of a workstation?
- qbasic_forever 5y agoBeautiful high resolution and crisp text rendering. I want looking at a dense page of code to look as beautiful and comfortable as reading a magazine. A comfortable keyboard and trackpad are a must too. Give me as much battery life as possible--at least a day or more. Performance, memory, and storage are less of a bottleneck these days and today's higher end specs are generally good enough.
- egypturnash 5y agoI want looking at a dense page of code to look as beautiful and comfortable as reading a magazine I am trying to imagine what a page of code laid out by a professional designer would look like and I can hear a million programmers screaming bloody murder in my head about the thoughtful use of whitespace, proportional-width fonts (even though they are ones chosen to clearly differentiate between confusing characters like 1/I and 0/O), and the occasional change in font size for... what is the source code equivalent of a subhead, anyway? Comments?
- alwillis 5y agoI am trying to imagine what a page of code laid out by a professional designer would look like and I can hear a million programmers screaming bloody murder in my head about the thoughtful use There are beautiful programmer fonts nowadays that look amazing on Apple's high resolution screens. There are several GUIs for Vim/Neovim that take advantage of the GPU and the text rendering abilities of modern computers in general and Macs in particular [1]. And once you get used to seeing your code this way, it's hard to go back. [1]: https://github.com/neovide/neovide https://github.com/neovide/neovide
- AlanYx 5y ago
- whiteboardr 5y agoThis. I don’t care if a laptop is a tad thicker, or the aesthetics would allow the device to sit in a museum - Ive helped make them desireable objects, the iPhone provided the scale and momentum and Apple silicon in macs at last allows for focus on actual usability. This set of kit will pave the way for a revolution in how we think about computing. Indeed, Bravo!
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoRevolution? What revolution? NN's for everything? Something else?
- whiteboardr 5y agoYou will see.
- skybrian 5y agoI don't know, "18 streams of 8k video" doesn't seem terribly customer-oriented? Is it something anything anyone really needs or understands other than "that's very fast?" How much video can you watch at a time? I also don't see how the size of a desktop computer matters, other than as a fashion statement.
- etchalon 5y ago… it's not for consumers. It's for their customers. Which are video editors.
- kayoone 5y agoit's not a consumer product, video editors can utilize multiple streams of video in many usecases. The iMac and the Macbook Air are the consumer products with enough performance for 99% of users.
- rsynnott 5y agoThis generally isn't aimed at consumers; the much cheaper Mac Mini and iMac would be more appropriate there. It's for creative professionals (and to some degree programmers, though I really wish they'd make a similar-sized chip with less silicon budget spent on GPUs and more on CPUs...)
- newaccount2021 5y ago
- gaws 5y ago> It seems that they're targeting products to what their professional customers actually want. A $2,000 machine to handle editing, processing and posting video ~content~ on YouTube.
- thirdsun 5y agoQuite the condescending tone. You could have stopped at video content. Or just content. I don't see how the platform that serves and broadcasts said content is relevant to the value or performance of the device it's made on.
- gaws 5y agoYou're right. I should've included other places for posting ~content~: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok.
- caeril 5y ago> customers actually want Almost. The hardware looks fantastic all-around. But the hostility to running an actually-usable OS like Linux is a huge stumbling block. Their users having to rely on the herculean efforts of the Asahi project, et. al, is shameful for the world's largest company.
- thfuran 5y agoThey're never going to try to make it easy to avoid their ecosystem and that's not shameful for their company. If it's shameful for anyone, it's the US regulators who have allowed the largest companies in the world to continue vertically integrating.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago> I'd love to see what they have in store for designers and programmers next. We're not really their target audience. Back when they had a rack server, they had something that looked good to us, but we're not really the ones that will buy a maxxed-out Studio. It's an interesting machine. It definitely is aimed at folks that would get Pros, beforehand. With the hint dropped at the end of the Studio presentation, I suspect that they may announce some crazy Pro, in the coming months.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago>We're not really their target audience. It's really interesting, because I'd estimate there are 10x more programmers than "video professionals". I could be extremely wrong though.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoYes, but not so many that choose Apple, as their platform. Of those that do, they like laptops (like me). They are the target for the MacBook Pros. Creatives, on the other hand, probably have a 50% or more Apple platform user base, and also like fixed workstations. I used to run a dev shop for a photographic equipment manufacturer, and the Apple platform (even relying on the users having beefy workstations), was quite important.
- neor 5y agoThey are doing a great job. 180 turnaround from the company that wanted their products to look clean above usable. Only downside to me is that in such relatively expensive hardware they should have doubled all storage options. Starting at 512GB for the entry spec and 1TB for the high end spec is rather low.
- dylan604 5y agoThey still look clean though even after making them useable. I'm really glad to see that the mea culpa they pulled when admitting the trashcan was a really bad idea wasn't just a bunch of platitudes. They've actually released good products after that. That last MacPro was interesting, but they still had custom dedicated GPUs that again had no replacements.
- indemnity 5y agoI suspect storage is one of their high margin profit knobs. They do a great job of pricing it just a little bit more than their target market would prefer to pay, but they grin and bear it, especially if it is not upgradable later. I sprung for the 2TB M1 Max...damn did I resent the premium I had to pay for 2TB, but I paid it in the end.
- canuckintime 5y agoApple still doesn’t want to allow expandable internal storage. That’s my core requirement for a pro/sumer desktop
- chii 5y agowouldn't a prosumer actually opt for a NAS with fast gigabit or better network speed?
- canuckintime 5y agoFor a prosumer there’s only so much you can offload to iCloud or NAS and eventually these machines, which are typically owned for a long time, do run out of space. Apple added back expandable internal storage for the Mac Pro and I hoped they would relent here too
- kruxigt 5y ago
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoI would also never buy such a machine. Still, in 25 years of owning my own computing resources, I have never actually expanded the internal storage of the 6-8 systems I've built.
- kalleboo 5y agoIME, expandable storage in Macs was mainly used as a run-around around the Apple Tax on their storage options - buy the base model and upgrade the storage yourself for 1/3rd the price. I always thought it was a fair trade-off. Pro users who care more about stability/support can pay the Apple Tax, and enthusiasts on a budget can DIY it and get a better machine for less. It feels like greed to cut off that path. It was also way more important in the day of spinning disks - so many machines from that era got a new lease on life by having the HDD replaced with an SSD. Imagine if HDDs had somehow been soldered in...
- locusm 5y ago
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoWhile I could be wrong, I think the Mac Studio may be their "desktop aimed at designers and programmers" -- get the M1 Max instead of Ultra, bump the SSD up to 1TB and the RAM to 64G and it's $2600. By no means cheap, but not the wheeze-inducing iMac Pro prices or the second-mortgage Mac Pro ones. The caveat is whether they're going to bring out an Apple Silicon-based "big iMac" that's a more direct replacement for the iMac I currently have. I'm not really optimistic about that possibility now that they've shipped the xMac, er, Mac Studio, but never say never.
- fliptables 5y agoI got the impression that this Mac Studio and their new 27" studio display form a replacement for the iMac and iMac Pro 27" Overall I like the idea, because years after buying an iMac I still have a nice monitor, permanently attached to a (now) slow computer that I can't upgrade. With this approach I only need to replace the Mac itself as its age or my needs catch up with it.
- arvinsim 5y agoI am actually at a loss at who the M1 Ultra is aimed for.
- chaostheory 5y agoIf they were actually listening, they would have a more affordable, configurable Mac Pro like the old refrigerator models. I don’t care about compactness for a desktop model. I also don’t like components being soldered like it was an appliance instead of a computer. If it wasn’t for Mac OS, and the fact that the alternatives suck more; I would have been gone last generation.
- enoch2090 5y agoAs a programmer, data scientist and macOS user, I have to say I'm just annoyed by Apple these years. They've built a preset of users who may use their products, on that list are "Creative producers", etc. I'm not saying creative works aren't important - I personally enjoy poems, movies and photography very much. But just imagine how many MacBook Pros and other products Apple sell each year - does the world need that much creative producers, so we can indulge ourselves in Tiktok and other things? This is crazy. And I also feel excluded from their potential customer.
- kanbara 5y agohow does the targeting for creatives hinder the machines usage for programming? macs are among the best computers for coding and data science. huh?
- numpad0 5y agoidk, like having no considerations for data integrity? Because like single 1-bit error in a 2-hour movie file just don’t matter, though it might for like, molecular biology research. idk tho.
- pjmlp 5y agoThat has always been their target market since forever, even developer tools on Mac OS classic were eventually outsourced to Code Warrior and PowerPlant C++ framework.
- EveYoung 5y agoEveryone in my data science team is using MacBook Pros right now. At least in a corperate environment, I don't know why you would even want to train models locally. We either do it in the cloud (Databricks / SageMaker) or remote into on-premise workstations for research & experiments.
- abdulhaq 5y agoApple aren't just selling a tool, they're selling a lifestyle. Apple customers like to feel part of that artist/architect/film producer vibe, with the expensive weird glasses and green trousers. That's the marketing pitch and has been for two decades. The current Apple product engineers grew up on that marketing diet and came to believe that that was really who they should design the product for.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoIt feels like they're catching up; there was a long lull where they seemed to focus entirely on iphone, with the occasional macbook because they needed devices to make apps for iphone on. I mean their bread and butter will still be the iphone and co, but I'm glad they seem to have moved away from min/maxing for whatever brings in the most money.
- jwr 5y agoI'm annoyed at how narrow their concept of "use cases" is. I mean, are there really so many "pros" that need 18 streams of 8k video? Seriously? That's where all the money is? How does the market support so many "creative pros"? Meanwhile, I know that Fusion 360 is going to suck as it always does, with its crappy slow graphics and clunky UI, and my docker containers will run dog slow.