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Just looking at the economics of the Mac Pro based on sales of the machine itself doesn't quite capture the full picture. An Apple Silicon Mac Pro could have ma
by klelatti 4y ago
Just looking at the economics of the Mac Pro based on sales of the machine itself doesn't quite capture the full picture. An Apple Silicon Mac Pro could have many roles:
- A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. This in turn could enhance the Apple / Mac brand for a certain group of users.
- An aspirational product for users who think that they might need more power in the future.
- A means of keeping companies that need a small number of powerful machines in the Apple camp.
- A proving ground for technology that ultimately makes its way into volume products.
All of these factors could make the product justify its development costs even if actual sales are small. I doubt that the highest end models of some premium car brands recoup their development costs but their value to the brand offsets those costs.
- UltraViolence 4y agoThis will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business. The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.
- jb1991 4y agoIs the Mac actually unprofitable? I don’t think that’s true.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- physPop 4y agoAmazing mac haters still exist in 2023. The products have proven themselves in the market and with developers. Ignoring that is head-in-the-sand behavior. edit: 2023!
- jb1991 4y agoWhat I find most surprising is that people think the computer industry is somehow immune from the most basic of human qualities: choice. It's perfectly fine if some people don't choose or don't like Apple products. Just as it is perfectly fine for some not to want to use Linux or buy Windows. It's just choice. How silly that for some it is a strange, almost religious, war.
- andrekandre 4y ago> It's just choice. my unscientific opinion, but i feel like people unconsciously associate validation of other (products, lifestyle etc) with an invalidation (ego) of their own choices... they are personalizing things...
- devwastaken 4y agoThat will be really difficult to do considering apple needs macs to develop iPhone. Apple dogfoods it's own hardware, that's why it's the best.
- eloisant 4y agoIf Apple decides that the Mac has to go, it won't be that hard to port their development tools to Windows or Linux.
- ngcc_hk 4y agoNot really as it is not their philosophy. Ipad OS is the one.
- akelly 4y agoApple doesn't want you to know this but they do their mechanical and electrical design on Windows PCs (using Siemens NX and OrCAD respectively)
- formerly_proven 4y agoHardly surprising because I don't think there's even one piece of high-end CAx software for Mac.
- sangnoir 4y agoWhy Is it that the Mac Pro has so little Pro software available for it? Could it be the neglect? AV software used to be Apple's tentpole for Pro's, until they decided Prosumers were more profitable and lost mindshare of actual Pro's as a result (see the great migration after the releasee of the first Final Cut Pro X)
- abrawill 4y agoJust out of interest; which ones would you consider high-end?
- klelatti 4y agoFor the foreseeable future the development costs of the Mac Pro will be a rounding error on Apple's P&L. More of an issue now and in the coming years is bandwidth to do work on low volume products. They may be happy to spend the money but diverting key staff who could be working on a volume product, say the next iPhone SoC, that's a tougher call.
- coldtea 4y agoThe Mac are what sustained Apple pre- and post-Jobs, when it WASN'T YET about "unprofitable vanity products". If the iPhone goes down, the Macs are exactly what Apple still has going for them...
- KyeRussell 4y agoThat’s…so long ago. The Apple with a two trillion dollar market cap and a spaceship campus is not the Apple of that era. The wider market and world aren’t what they were then, either. It doesn’t mean very much at all.
- coldtea 4y agoDoesn't matter. Those things can go in the span of a few years. Remember when Blackberry was king? Pepperidge Farm remembers!
- JKCalhoun 4y agoNokia, Blackberrys ... it turned out that having a world class OS was more important than perhaps anyone at the time knew. My surprise is that Android is the "other one" and not Windows Phone.
- lelanthran 4y agoWhy are you surprised, you said it yourself: > it turned out that having a world class OS was more important than perhaps anyone at the time knew. Microsoft never fully committed to a phone OS because workable tablets might have demolished the desktop market.
- zozbot234 4y agoMicrosoft actually had workable tablets by the mid-2000s. With Windows XP Tablet Edition. Then they wasted time and effort trying to push a crappy tablet UX (Windows 8) to desktop users.
- matwood 4y agoEvery company in existence would love to have a $38B/year revenue (along with I'm sure great margins) vanity product like the Mac.
- Damogran6 4y ago"Apple is Dooomed!" Google: 8,310,000 results in 0.38 seconds NOBODY has transitioned to an other architecture like Apple has, nor has the industry been kicked in the shorts as many times as by apple. (wholesale inclusion of GPU in the OS, migration from Motorola, to Power PC, to Intel, to Arm to X Efficienty + Y Performance Cores...and nobody wrings as much out of the ARM architecture as Apple. It's 'the same OS' from the watch, TV, Airpods to the Mac Pro. There is no cost cutting the top end because it's ALL the same Platform. The Top end is the same as everything else with an additional parlor trick.
- yesenadam 4y ago> "Apple is Dooomed!" Google: 8,310,000 results in 0.38 seconds For the phrase "Apple is Dooomed!", including similar results, I get only 4 pages of google search results. For "Apple is Doomed!", including similar results, I get 31 pages.
- icedchai 4y agoPerhaps it was sarcasm, and not meant to be taken literally.
- Damogran6 4y agoYou're missing the point. Apple's decisions and methods have been criticized for longer than many HN viewers have been alive. The OP is making a claim that Apple's decisions are unwise [i]despite the fact that it's the most profitable company evar[/i] cite: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apple-3-trillion-market-cap-first-us-company/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apple-3-trillion-market-cap-fir... What chance can anyone else have if the Mac Pro is doomed if iPhone sales dip?
- simonh 4y agoApple’s Mac business has been highly profitable relative to its PC competitors for several decades now. Their habit of consuming the lions share of the profits in an industry, from a small fraction of the sales, started with the Mac and was extended to the iPod and then the iPhone.
- alberth 4y agoDoes the Mac Studio not address all those points?
- JohnTHaller 4y agoA similarly priced Windows PC is expandable and upgradeable while also being faster than a Mac Studio.
- brookst 4y ago. . . and much louder, and much bigger, and running Windows. Macs have never been about highest possible performance at any price point. But there is a niche where people want a very fast computer that is quit and not too ugly (and who can find their apps on macOS).
- JohnTHaller 4y agoSorry, I don't think I was clear earlier. I blame post-Covid fatigue. I meant it more as a comparison to the Mac Pro (based on parent/grand parent comments). The Pro is expandable and upgradeable. And it - at least when introduced - was always basically the most desktop workstation you could buy short of sticking a server farm under your desk. The Studio is none of those things. So, while an equivalent Windows machine in the same pricing on a Studio can easily trounce a Studio, when thinking of what the next Mac Pro would theoretically deliver, there would be no equivalently priced Windows machine to trounce it. More like equal it but on Windows.
- zitterbewegung 4y agoThe Mac Studio is what the Trashcan Mac Pro tried to do. Only through efficiency will you get something that almost gets everything right of what the trashcan tried to do. Putting two GPUS in a tight spot and the limitations of the time basically doomed it to failure but now we have much better data rates and better iGPUs.
- gumby 4y ago
- ajross 4y ago> A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. The danger there is what if it isn't? Apple's riding high right now but what if AMD or Qualcomm or whoever takes the next crown? This is one of the things that almost killed the company back in the G4 days. Jobs would be up there on stage essentially lying to our faces about the "Personal Supercomputer" when any of us could look at the literally-twice-as-fast Coppermine boxes on our desks to see the truth. Computers and technology are ephemeral and quirky. Apple's brand isn't and has never been[1] about selling "chips" or "computers". They sell "modes of interaction". [1] The last pure-tech play from Apple was the Apple II+.
- klelatti 4y agoHmmm, performance has been a key part of Apple’s branding for decades from Power PC (don’t disagree with your point on G4 though) through Intel in the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro and now on iPhones and M series Macs. Edit - this is a comment about branding ie how Apple presents itself not actual performance.
- SirGiggles 4y agoWouldn't it be more accurate to say efficiency instead? It's to my understanding that the latest offerings from both AMD and Intel are competitive in regards to synthetic benchmarks at the cost of higher power consumption.
- martinald 4y agoThe other problem with Apple is just how expensive the RAM/SSD upgrades are now. I've got a Mac Mini M1 as soon as it came out. I recently got a Ryzen PC, 6 core 5600G w/ 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Cost approx £500. Upgrading the M1 spec from 256GB SSD to 1TB (£400) costs basically the same as the entire PC I bought. I'm impressed with the 5600G, it is super cool and quiet compared to what I was expecting and the 32GB of RAM makes much more of a difference to performance than the extra CPU perf of the M1. It's really a bit ridiculous that Apple is still selling products with a base config of 8/256. I'm pretty sure that hasn't increased since I got the retina macbook pro in 2012 unless I'm mistaken?
- brookst 4y agoYes, exactly. Add two more: a prestige product that motivates top talent, and senior management likes these products. Halo cars like Corvette Z06 are exactly the right analogy. They sell at most 8000/year; there is no way it’s profitable as a line item. But it gets made for all of those indirect reasons.