3 ms·

Might their professionals market segment (designers, video editors, 3d artists, and so on) still be using thunderbolt and LAN storage? This was the case ~7 year

Might their professionals market segment (designers, video editors, 3d artists, and so on) still be using thunderbolt and LAN storage? This was the case ~7 years ago when I worked adjacent to these sorts of users. Video files are huge and expensive in time and money to transit with cloud storage providers.

kridsdale1 3mo ago
I do 8k video editing on a Mac Studio. Files are often multiple TB (raw camera capture which I have to encode to ProRes). Moving this kind of bandwidth is absolutely what I have to do and Apples’ bad networking is a blocker I’ve discovered.
geerlingguy 3mo ago
Apple used to even sell Xserve RAID and SAN software specifically to cater to the higher end users who needed fast networked storage (research, broadcast, media). They kinda hit a standstill on the networking side as they moved to the trash can Mac, and I think that had killed momentum towards any high speed IO besides the Thunderbolt ports moving forward. I was hopeful they'd keep the Mac Pro going into the M-series era but after one version... it's gone.
xp84 2mo ago
I'm sure they are, but there just aren't that many of them. When you include only real professional "Hollywood" people plus the elite tier of YouTubers who can easily afford to drop $10,000 on a computer (The 'Mac Pro' target market, in other words) we're talking about a tiny niche to Apple. Both within the "Mac" segment, and even more so when compared to the company's overall portfolio that includes iPhone. So, it seems that Tim Cook decided at some point that while it's nice to make $5,000 in profit from a Mac Pro sale every day or two (okay, I kid, I'm sure they sell a bit more than 365 a year), even if they hang those "pros" out to dry completely and they defect to Windows, Apple would be better off spending their time focusing on ways to make the MacBook Air and Neo more attractive or profitable because they move orders of magnitude more units of those. Note: I don't like this, but my feelings have nothing to do with it, I think it's just a classic Tim Cook Numbers-first business decision

kridsdale1 3mo ago

I do 8k video editing on a Mac Studio. Files are often multiple TB (raw camera capture which I have to encode to ProRes). Moving this kind of bandwidth is absolutely what I have to do and Apples’ bad networking is a blocker I’ve discovered.

geerlingguy 3mo ago

Apple used to even sell Xserve RAID and SAN software specifically to cater to the higher end users who needed fast networked storage (research, broadcast, media). They kinda hit a standstill on the networking side as they moved to the trash can Mac, and I think that had killed momentum towards any high speed IO besides the Thunderbolt ports moving forward. I was hopeful they'd keep the Mac Pro going into the M-series era but after one version... it's gone.

xp84 2mo ago

I'm sure they are, but there just aren't that many of them. When you include only real professional "Hollywood" people plus the elite tier of YouTubers who can easily afford to drop $10,000 on a computer (The 'Mac Pro' target market, in other words) we're talking about a tiny niche to Apple. Both within the "Mac" segment, and even more so when compared to the company's overall portfolio that includes iPhone. So, it seems that Tim Cook decided at some point that while it's nice to make $5,000 in profit from a Mac Pro sale every day or two (okay, I kid, I'm sure they sell a bit more than 365 a year), even if they hang those "pros" out to dry completely and they defect to Windows, Apple would be better off spending their time focusing on ways to make the MacBook Air and Neo more attractive or profitable because they move orders of magnitude more units of those. Note: I don't like this, but my feelings have nothing to do with it, I think it's just a classic Tim Cook Numbers-first business decision