11 ms·

Our sound guy is PISSED at the lack of update. Seriously, incredibly pissed. I've honestly never seen him this angry before. He'd been counting down the days ti

Our sound guy is PISSED at the lack of update. Seriously, incredibly pissed. I've honestly never seen him this angry before. He'd been counting down the days till WWDC and a long overdue update. There are three major pieces of software he uses on his Mac that he swears by. It sounds like they have all just released or are about to release Windows versions. I'm beginning to wonder if this is a trend? Apple is clearly focused on iOS and consumer/prosumer and not professional. I certainly don't blame them. Is the future of professionals going to be Windows? Even for lifelong Mac die hards? It seems plausible imo.

blueprint 14y ago
To confirm, what kind of professionals are you talking about for whom a new Macbook Pro isn't going to be fast enough?
- burrokeet 14y ago
  Audio professionals editing large surround sessions with lots of plugins and lots of tracks for one (plus you need 3-4 or more PCIe slots to stick Pro Tools or similar DSP cards in). These need as much horsepower as you can throw at them. Video professionals doing rendering or compositing, ditto. Not to mention the video cards available, plus being able to throw four full size drives directly on the SATA bus.
- veemjeem 14y ago
  Probably the ones who have 32gb of memory for their photoshop scratch buffer. There's still quite a few of these types of professionals. You just can't put that much memory in the Macbook Pro. Processor speed is probably less of an issue compared with memory capacity.
  - fratis 14y ago
    Why not just use a top-of-the-line iMac with 32GB RAM? It's not officially supported, but it does work.
    - paxswill 14y ago
      Because 32GB is the supported max for the lower end Mac Pro. The higher end ones support up to 64GB officially, 64GB and 96GB respectively are the actual maximums.
- luser001 14y ago
  You can never have enough processing power when you're editing and re-rendering videos. Hell, I find lightroom able to use all the CPU I can throw at it when I muck around with ~400 photos that I shoot in a day. I have no doubt that video work can easily use all the CPU/memory you throw at it: imagine rendering a finished video in five different formats and resolutions in the background, while you're editing/tweaking your next project in the background. Remember these are professionals.
- rpedroso 14y ago
  People in the business of video editing are one example. They need/use more RAM and processing power than you can get on any new model of Macbook Pro.
- twog 14y ago
  I imagine he is talking about sound engineers. Also, he is talking about the Mac Pro (the desktop) not the Macbook Pro, the laptop.
- dasil003 14y ago
  What everyone else said, plus the fans. Man, there are times I actually think about a Mac Pro as a humble Rails developer. If I fully parellelized my test suites it might even be worth the money.
- forrestthewoods 14y ago
  Video game audio. He does all of our audio work. Sound effects, voice over, music composition, etc. I asked him what audio he used and his answer was Pro Tools, Digital Performer, and Peak. He's got a super top of the line Mac Pro that's only 2 years old and he's been salivating at the prospect of an upgrade for a long time. He was extra pissed that the new machines don't even have Thunderbolt. He has many hundreds of gigabytes of audio libraries on a variety of external storage devices and just having Thunderbolt would be a pretty decent productivity improvement.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    Funnily enough, Peak has just become a dead product as BIAS are out of business: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/06/bias-makers-of-peak-cease-operations-mac-audio-editor-alternatives/ http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/06/bias-makers-of-peak-ce...
- ktizo 14y ago
  FX artists for digital cinema. 4K takes nearly half a gig a second uncompressed.
- gallerytungsten 14y ago
  All of the above. Audio, video, 3D. Any pro level design. Even print design. Having a Mac Pro with lots of storage and big monitors when you're working on a 300 page book with 300GB of photos is much less annoying than poking along with a laptop. It's not just the speed, it's also the usability. Eg, a comfortable trackball and a nicer keyboard. Sure, you can add those to a laptop, but then you have a kludge.
  - jcromartie 14y ago
    How is that a kludge? You have to add them to a Mac Pro exactly the same. And you can just stick all of your "desktop" stuff on a USB hub and call it a docking station...
    - gallerytungsten 14y ago
      With a Mac Pro, you can stick the original keyboard in a closet. With a laptop, you'd have two keyboards, plus a trackball and a trackpad.
Bud 14y ago
Except there's not really a premium Windows platform to compete with the overall integration that a high-end Mac and Mac OS X offers. If you can get the same performance out of, say, the new MacBook Pro plus a couple Thunderbolt displays and a Thunderbolt RAID, the pros can just move in that direction. Notice that there was no iMac update at all today; Apple might be planning to release a new high-end iMac to better serve the old Mac Pro crowd.
- icegreentea 14y ago
  I really doubt you can get the same performance out of a MacBook Pro. Professional media software (audio or video) takes a -lot- of power. Trying to run through a big multi-track synth setup would probably bring a MBP to it's knees. I mean for one thing, despite all the awesomeness that is Ivy-Bridge, I still do not think that Intel can cram in the same level of performance into a 35W chip that use to go into a 90W platform just 2-3 years ago.
  - cbsmith 14y ago
    > I really doubt you can get the same performance out of a MacBook Pro. Professional media software (audio or video) takes a -lot- of power. Trying to run through a big multi-track synth setup would probably bring a MBP to it's knees. With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there. Video is mostly offloaded on to GPU's these days. The MBP GPU is definitely a big step down from what you can get on a desktop, but you can always get a dedicated bit of hardware that you attach to your MBP to get that job done. The real killer on video has traditionally been I/O. With SSD's and Thunderbolt, you have some alternatives. > I still do not think that Intel can cram in the same level of performance into a 35W chip that use to go into a 90W platform just 2-3 years ago. You might want to check out Moore's Law.
    - mbetter 14y ago
      > With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there. Don't do much audio work, do you? Between softsynths and DSP effects on 32+ tracks, professional-level audio workstations will eat all of the processing power available on pretty much any modern CPU and ask for more.
nirvana 14y ago
I read recently that the Mac Pro accounts for less than %2 of Apple's Mac sales. Since thunderbolt basically is a PCI express cable, there's nothing to stop people from building external cases that can hold PCI express cards, like the Mac Pro can. Since thunderbolt is becoming prevalent across the line, I can't really see a need for the Mac Pro so much anymore. True it is nice in some situations to put all your hard drives and all your PCI cards in one box, but at %2 of the total sales (by units) the big old tower is less relevant these days. The other thing the Mac Pro had was the highest end of Intels CPUs. If the sales aren't making the engineering effort worth it, then the answer Apple's intending people to take may be a high end iMac. I edit a lot of HD in Final Cut X on my 2 year old Macbook Pro, and background rendering seems to have no trouble keeping up. I've not really felt CPU constrained in awhile with HD.
- petercooper 14y ago
  there's nothing to stop people from building external cases that can hold PCI express cards, like the Mac Pro can. Such a thing has been announced: http://www.magma.com/thunderbolt.asp http://www.magma.com/thunderbolt.asp then the answer Apple's intending people to take may be a high end iMac. Maybe, but the 3.4GHz i7 - currently the highest CPU in the iMac range - still comes in at 2-3x slower than the highest end current Mac Pro CPU.. and there are E5 Xeons out there already faster than those.
  - icefox 14y ago
    Very cool, but wow I wasn't expecting the price to be at almost a grand.
  - cheatercheater 14y ago
    Oh Goad, magma is so SHIT. We've had one of their offerings in the 2000's and it smoked a high-end piece of hardware when it died. Cause? Very shitty chinese psu that went up in flames on its own. It was just after warranty, so they didn't take it back. In retrospect reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZDh8z9UDTo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZDh8z9UDTo Please, please don't use magma. It's for your own good.
millzlane 14y ago
Definitely a trend. I wonder if the iPhone will see a micro SD card reader? I don't think so. It would render their good, better, best model useless.
petercooper 14y ago
Is the future of professionals going to be Windows? Which itself is going super-consumery with Windows 8..
- zokier 14y ago
  I believe that professionals are now excepted to skip every other version. Windows 7 is the new XP. I bet we will be seeing it for a long time.
beedogs 14y ago
I say the future of desktop software is going to involve Linux, finally. Both Windows and OS X are becoming walled-garden tablet-centric shitfests.
- dockd 14y ago
  That begs the question, what is the future of the desktop? It's not a knock on Linux, but if the mass market moves to tablets and smartphones (not sure if you count laptops as desktops), owning the desktop is going to be like owning the mainframe market. It doesn't disappear but it's not what it once was either.
- chao- 14y ago
  As a Linux desktop user, I want to agree with you. As a Linux desktop user, I'm not sure that I can.
  - beedogs 14y ago
    I think if we just keep saying it, it'll happen eventually.
  - idleloops 14y ago
    We live in hope...
    - tuananh 14y ago
      haven't we been living in hope in the last decade?
      - idleloops 14y ago
        I'd dare say: longer!
  - quanticle 14y ago
    The real problem is that the most popular Linux distribution (Ubuntu) and one of the two most popular window managers (Gnome) are going in exactly the same direction as Apple and Windows. These two projects are so busy emulating what Apple and Windows do, they can't see that they're going to go right off the usability cliff for desktop users. That, more than anything either Apple or Microsoft does is what worries me about desktop Linux. We have met the enemy and he is us.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
astrodust 14y ago
What the hell does your sound guy want, exactly? A 64-core system that uses 6000W of power simply to boot?
cheatercheater 14y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092880 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092880 > Is the future of professionals going to be Windows? No.
mathnode 14y ago
Why is he pissed? I assume he has custom sound hardware anyway, what can't he do with the last gen Xeon he can with the latest gen Xeon? It's Xeons...in a box. Most editors (video/sound) would be provided with fibre storage links from an all-in-one vendor, whilst it might be nice to see thunderbolt on a mac pro, you can't put infiniband on an imac...
- seclorum 14y ago
  Audio folks like to have as much power as possible - it allows them to pile on plugin after plugin without much fuss. Every bit of CPU power gained from an upgrade is promptly put to use in doing audio processing .. and I would imagine that this Audio guy is probably using Pro Tools or Logic, and has reached the ceiling for what he can do without upgrading to a faster CPU. Fact is, Mac Pro's are no longer the really best solution for a high-end audio/studio situation - sure, they look good as furniture, but for the same price you can get 2x the number of plugins running on self-built hardware. This matters in the audio business. (Disclaimer: My DAW is a Linux machine. It rocks. I also have a portable DAW: Macbook Pro. It also rocks.)
jcromartie 14y ago
What does your sound guy need that a top-end MBP with Thunderbolt storage wouldn't handle?

blueprint 14y ago

To confirm, what kind of professionals are you talking about for whom a new Macbook Pro isn't going to be fast enough?

burrokeet 14y ago
Audio professionals editing large surround sessions with lots of plugins and lots of tracks for one (plus you need 3-4 or more PCIe slots to stick Pro Tools or similar DSP cards in). These need as much horsepower as you can throw at them. Video professionals doing rendering or compositing, ditto. Not to mention the video cards available, plus being able to throw four full size drives directly on the SATA bus.
veemjeem 14y ago
Probably the ones who have 32gb of memory for their photoshop scratch buffer. There's still quite a few of these types of professionals. You just can't put that much memory in the Macbook Pro. Processor speed is probably less of an issue compared with memory capacity.
- fratis 14y ago
  Why not just use a top-of-the-line iMac with 32GB RAM? It's not officially supported, but it does work.
  - paxswill 14y ago
    Because 32GB is the supported max for the lower end Mac Pro. The higher end ones support up to 64GB officially, 64GB and 96GB respectively are the actual maximums.
luser001 14y ago
You can never have enough processing power when you're editing and re-rendering videos. Hell, I find lightroom able to use all the CPU I can throw at it when I muck around with ~400 photos that I shoot in a day. I have no doubt that video work can easily use all the CPU/memory you throw at it: imagine rendering a finished video in five different formats and resolutions in the background, while you're editing/tweaking your next project in the background. Remember these are professionals.
rpedroso 14y ago
People in the business of video editing are one example. They need/use more RAM and processing power than you can get on any new model of Macbook Pro.
twog 14y ago
I imagine he is talking about sound engineers. Also, he is talking about the Mac Pro (the desktop) not the Macbook Pro, the laptop.
dasil003 14y ago
What everyone else said, plus the fans. Man, there are times I actually think about a Mac Pro as a humble Rails developer. If I fully parellelized my test suites it might even be worth the money.
forrestthewoods 14y ago
Video game audio. He does all of our audio work. Sound effects, voice over, music composition, etc. I asked him what audio he used and his answer was Pro Tools, Digital Performer, and Peak. He's got a super top of the line Mac Pro that's only 2 years old and he's been salivating at the prospect of an upgrade for a long time. He was extra pissed that the new machines don't even have Thunderbolt. He has many hundreds of gigabytes of audio libraries on a variety of external storage devices and just having Thunderbolt would be a pretty decent productivity improvement.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Funnily enough, Peak has just become a dead product as BIAS are out of business: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/06/bias-makers-of-peak-cease-operations-mac-audio-editor-alternatives/ http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/06/bias-makers-of-peak-ce...
ktizo 14y ago
FX artists for digital cinema. 4K takes nearly half a gig a second uncompressed.
gallerytungsten 14y ago
All of the above. Audio, video, 3D. Any pro level design. Even print design. Having a Mac Pro with lots of storage and big monitors when you're working on a 300 page book with 300GB of photos is much less annoying than poking along with a laptop. It's not just the speed, it's also the usability. Eg, a comfortable trackball and a nicer keyboard. Sure, you can add those to a laptop, but then you have a kludge.
- jcromartie 14y ago
  How is that a kludge? You have to add them to a Mac Pro exactly the same. And you can just stick all of your "desktop" stuff on a USB hub and call it a docking station...
  - gallerytungsten 14y ago
    With a Mac Pro, you can stick the original keyboard in a closet. With a laptop, you'd have two keyboards, plus a trackball and a trackpad.

Bud 14y ago

Except there's not really a premium Windows platform to compete with the overall integration that a high-end Mac and Mac OS X offers. If you can get the same performance out of, say, the new MacBook Pro plus a couple Thunderbolt displays and a Thunderbolt RAID, the pros can just move in that direction. Notice that there was no iMac update at all today; Apple might be planning to release a new high-end iMac to better serve the old Mac Pro crowd.

icegreentea 14y ago
I really doubt you can get the same performance out of a MacBook Pro. Professional media software (audio or video) takes a -lot- of power. Trying to run through a big multi-track synth setup would probably bring a MBP to it's knees. I mean for one thing, despite all the awesomeness that is Ivy-Bridge, I still do not think that Intel can cram in the same level of performance into a 35W chip that use to go into a 90W platform just 2-3 years ago.
- cbsmith 14y ago
  > I really doubt you can get the same performance out of a MacBook Pro. Professional media software (audio or video) takes a -lot- of power. Trying to run through a big multi-track synth setup would probably bring a MBP to it's knees. With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there. Video is mostly offloaded on to GPU's these days. The MBP GPU is definitely a big step down from what you can get on a desktop, but you can always get a dedicated bit of hardware that you attach to your MBP to get that job done. The real killer on video has traditionally been I/O. With SSD's and Thunderbolt, you have some alternatives. > I still do not think that Intel can cram in the same level of performance into a 35W chip that use to go into a 90W platform just 2-3 years ago. You might want to check out Moore's Law.
  - mbetter 14y ago
    > With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there. Don't do much audio work, do you? Between softsynths and DSP effects on 32+ tracks, professional-level audio workstations will eat all of the processing power available on pretty much any modern CPU and ask for more.

nirvana 14y ago

I read recently that the Mac Pro accounts for less than %2 of Apple's Mac sales. Since thunderbolt basically is a PCI express cable, there's nothing to stop people from building external cases that can hold PCI express cards, like the Mac Pro can. Since thunderbolt is becoming prevalent across the line, I can't really see a need for the Mac Pro so much anymore. True it is nice in some situations to put all your hard drives and all your PCI cards in one box, but at %2 of the total sales (by units) the big old tower is less relevant these days. The other thing the Mac Pro had was the highest end of Intels CPUs. If the sales aren't making the engineering effort worth it, then the answer Apple's intending people to take may be a high end iMac. I edit a lot of HD in Final Cut X on my 2 year old Macbook Pro, and background rendering seems to have no trouble keeping up. I've not really felt CPU constrained in awhile with HD.

petercooper 14y ago
there's nothing to stop people from building external cases that can hold PCI express cards, like the Mac Pro can. Such a thing has been announced: http://www.magma.com/thunderbolt.asp http://www.magma.com/thunderbolt.asp then the answer Apple's intending people to take may be a high end iMac. Maybe, but the 3.4GHz i7 - currently the highest CPU in the iMac range - still comes in at 2-3x slower than the highest end current Mac Pro CPU.. and there are E5 Xeons out there already faster than those.
- icefox 14y ago
  Very cool, but wow I wasn't expecting the price to be at almost a grand.
- cheatercheater 14y ago
  Oh Goad, magma is so SHIT. We've had one of their offerings in the 2000's and it smoked a high-end piece of hardware when it died. Cause? Very shitty chinese psu that went up in flames on its own. It was just after warranty, so they didn't take it back. In retrospect reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZDh8z9UDTo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZDh8z9UDTo Please, please don't use magma. It's for your own good.

millzlane 14y ago

Definitely a trend. I wonder if the iPhone will see a micro SD card reader? I don't think so. It would render their good, better, best model useless.

petercooper 14y ago

Is the future of professionals going to be Windows? Which itself is going super-consumery with Windows 8..

zokier 14y ago
I believe that professionals are now excepted to skip every other version. Windows 7 is the new XP. I bet we will be seeing it for a long time.

beedogs 14y ago

I say the future of desktop software is going to involve Linux, finally. Both Windows and OS X are becoming walled-garden tablet-centric shitfests.

dockd 14y ago
That begs the question, what is the future of the desktop? It's not a knock on Linux, but if the mass market moves to tablets and smartphones (not sure if you count laptops as desktops), owning the desktop is going to be like owning the mainframe market. It doesn't disappear but it's not what it once was either.
chao- 14y ago
As a Linux desktop user, I want to agree with you. As a Linux desktop user, I'm not sure that I can.
- beedogs 14y ago
  I think if we just keep saying it, it'll happen eventually.
- idleloops 14y ago
  We live in hope...
  - tuananh 14y ago
    haven't we been living in hope in the last decade?
    - idleloops 14y ago
      I'd dare say: longer!
- quanticle 14y ago
  The real problem is that the most popular Linux distribution (Ubuntu) and one of the two most popular window managers (Gnome) are going in exactly the same direction as Apple and Windows. These two projects are so busy emulating what Apple and Windows do, they can't see that they're going to go right off the usability cliff for desktop users. That, more than anything either Apple or Microsoft does is what worries me about desktop Linux. We have met the enemy and he is us.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

astrodust 14y ago

What the hell does your sound guy want, exactly? A 64-core system that uses 6000W of power simply to boot?

cheatercheater 14y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092880 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092880 > Is the future of professionals going to be Windows? No.

mathnode 14y ago

Why is he pissed? I assume he has custom sound hardware anyway, what can't he do with the last gen Xeon he can with the latest gen Xeon? It's Xeons...in a box. Most editors (video/sound) would be provided with fibre storage links from an all-in-one vendor, whilst it might be nice to see thunderbolt on a mac pro, you can't put infiniband on an imac...

seclorum 14y ago
Audio folks like to have as much power as possible - it allows them to pile on plugin after plugin without much fuss. Every bit of CPU power gained from an upgrade is promptly put to use in doing audio processing .. and I would imagine that this Audio guy is probably using Pro Tools or Logic, and has reached the ceiling for what he can do without upgrading to a faster CPU. Fact is, Mac Pro's are no longer the really best solution for a high-end audio/studio situation - sure, they look good as furniture, but for the same price you can get 2x the number of plugins running on self-built hardware. This matters in the audio business. (Disclaimer: My DAW is a Linux machine. It rocks. I also have a portable DAW: Macbook Pro. It also rocks.)

jcromartie 14y ago

What does your sound guy need that a top-end MBP with Thunderbolt storage wouldn't handle?