I just don't get it. How can you make a tool for the pro market with no thoughts about price/performance or upgradeability?
Apple seems to think that deviating from their consumer oriented design philosophy is anathema, even when dealing with pros.
Apple seems to think that deviating from their consumer oriented design philosophy is anathema, even when dealing with pros.
You can make ethical arguments about whether people ought to care, or whether the option should be available for the few people that do, but I just don't personally see a lot of people doing upgrades these days.
For businesses, the cost of paying someone to upgrade a fleet of machines isn't there compared to just depreciating them over 3 years instead of 5 and replacing them more often. For a lot of independent professionals and home users it's just not worth the effort. The machine works until it doesn't and then they buy a new machine, and this one will get resold on craigslist or eBay, or get handed off as a substantial upgrade to some less technical family member.
In graphic design I see this as a good solution for those shops, but video really has been leaving Apple.
After their meeting to set the record straight in April 2017 about Professional Hardware and Apple support for the industry with Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi they give people this? This is not what a workstation should be. It isn't upgradable GPU, and it is using ports again like the Pro of 4 years ago.
So, this isn't what they are releasing in response to that feedback or what they were discussing in that meeting.
I doubt we will go back to the old tower style similar to PC versions
Apple could have changed it rather easily.
What would be really awesome (at least for video) would be offloaded rendering for Linux. Doesn't macOS offer something like that that's used for Xcode?
I still remember watching Conan O' Brian and they lampooned it mercilessly with a rather long bit about it. I never thought I would see a late night comedian roasting Apple for their video editing software. You knew it had to be bad if it reached that level.
Here's the clip: https://youtu.be/vZXsI84nRMg
No serious pro should have only one high price asset.
When people went to 4K they bought new cameras and they upgraded their computers with more ram, bigger drives and new cards.
>One of the things I like about working at Apple was that Apple didn’t have a problem with starting over again - if that was the right thing to do. You don’t want to talk about ‘sunk cost.’ The effort you’ve put in in the past has gone. From now on, what is the best way to go forward? It doesn’t matter if we spent six months working on some feature. That doesn’t matter. Is it the right feature? If so, great, continue forward with it. If you don’t do that with a product and somebody else who doesn’t have the history, the legacy you’re trying to hold on to will jump in and take things out from under you.
...
>The very last conversation I had with Steve Jobs was right after the launch of Final Cut Pro X. I was getting ready to get on a plane to go to London to record the second set of movie trailers - we’d hired the London Symphony Orchestra [to perform the music that was going to be bundled with the next version of iMovie] - and Steve caught me at home: “What the heck is going on with this Final Cut X thing?” I said “We knew this was coming, we knew that people were going to freak out when we changed everything out from under them. We could have done this better. We should have. Final Cut 7 should be back on the market. We should have an FAQ that lists what this is all about.” He said “Yeah, let’s get out and fund this thing, let’s make sure we get on top of this thing, move quickly with releases…” and he finished by asking: “Do you believe in this?” I said “Yes.” He said “then I do too.”
[1] http://www.philiphodgetts.com/2012/04/some-final-cut-pro-x-d...
[2] https://www.cultofmac.com/478369/final-cut-pro-x-hits-massiv...
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AVID?p=AVID
[4] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/12/final-cut-pro-x-intro...
[5] http://alex4d.com/notes/item/back-to-1-0-randy-ubillos-inter...
Sure they've sold more copies with FCP X but it's not to professionals as far as I can tell, it's hitting the niche that Final Cut Express was at in the past.
This isn't a problem for Apple.
I am not going to buy one, but I suspect many people will love them. Really PRO is just a marketing term.
Though, 5k screen, 10Gbit Ethernet, 600$ graphics card, 1TB NVMe SSDs are also ~$600 etc that's far from a normal office desktop.
This seems to be what everyone forgets when airing their grievances towards Apple's "Pro" line.
It's unfortunate but the number of people that may dislike this because of a lack of upgradability, etc is probably smaller than the number of people that just want a cool looking "pro" computer and have money to burn.
If you feel offended by those comment, that's on you, no one is actually judging you.
So, modularity is useful just not not as important as people assume. Computers are also not getting faster as quickly so using the same computer for ~4 years is now completely reasonable. Spread out of that period these start at ~80$ a month. You might drop that price some, but not as much as you probably assume without sacrificing.
They might not be optimal, but it's a reasonable option.
Now it might be a true statement that "if you're a professional video editor working with lots of files and 4k video, the Mac Pro doesn't meet your needs" or "if you're a professional data scientist working on cutting-edge machine learning with CUDA, the Mac Pro doesn't meet your needs".
But "professional" is a broad term. Very broad. It's hard to imagine a broader term. Even if we restricted that to "IT professional" or "professional programmer", it's still a very broad range of needs within that statement. And the Mac Pro lacks a very specific set of things that "professionals" may need, depending on their profession.
I'm willing to bet the number of professionals who need a Unix machine with a nice GUI that's well-supported by major software vendors and also well-supported by the manufacturer with retail stores (including tech support) in every city of any size far outweighs the number of professionals who need anything specific the Macbook Pro or Mac Pro are missing. Why, then, are they not considered "professionals"? And what other machine meets those very broadly applicable requirements?
Or how about this one? I need a Unix machine with a serial port and an Ethernet port for my job, and I also need the machine to be lightweight because I travel constantly, it needs to be able to be held with one hand as I'm standing in a datacenter, and I need long battery life because I can't carry a ton of cables through the datacenter as I'm moving around. What meets my needs as a professional? Sure, my needs are very specific... so are the needs of this hypothetical gold standard "professional" who needs what the Mac Pro doesn't have. I certainly don't need a powerful video card. Guess I'm not a professional, then?
It's the constant gatekeeping of "Mac(book) Pro computers aren't made for professionals because I made up my own definition of professional and you're not in it" that really grinds me the wrong way. I don't need to upgrade my RAM because by the time I need more, my work will just buy me a new one. Guess that means I'm not a professional?
I think a diagram better explains what I'm trying to say.
What I feel like Apple's target audience was in the past with their 'Pro' lines:
What I feel like Apple's target audience is now with their 'Pro' lines:
It still meets the requirements of a lot of professionals, and a lot of professionals are still going to use them. I'm not trying to say 'whether or not you are a professional is directly related to whether or not you use a macbook pro'. It is just that apple seems to be slowly targeting their "pro" lines more towards the consumer who like pro stuff side to capture more of that market than they are trying to move toward the professional side to capture more of that market. Instead of getting more ports and longer battery life at the sacrifice of weight, we get things like the touchbar and ever thinner machines that have trouble living upto the battery expectations. For a bunch of professionals that doesn't matter, it isn't what makes a macbook pro fit their requirements. But there seems to be a very vocal segment of professionals who sit on that left most edge concerned that what apple calls 'pro' is moving further away from meeting their requirements than closer.
Edit: it might be more clear to say the green circle is people who find a macbook pro to meet their requirements.
Maybe clueless people will buy this as a consumer machine, but it's designed and marketed as a workstation.
Like, I justify my $3k laptop, because it's a quality piece of mobile hardware. Yet, I don't lug around my desktop everywhere.. The "quality" that I interact with is the OS and the keyboard/mouse, nearly nothing with the monitor/computer. So.. what am I getting for that $13k? It just feels so crazily over priced.. am I wrong?
Hell, my $3k laptop is blatantly overpriced imo, but I pay it because there's not many options on my personal ranked list. This however... I can't help but feel there are a ton of options. So I'm honestly asking, what am I missing here? Clearly they think that some people will feel $13k is reasonable.. but why, specifically, is it reasonable to those people?
The base hardware is just generally expensive.
That display panel, that motherboard, that case, that PSU, that graphics card, that memory, the CPU – would you expect to pay the bones of $14K?
From Amazon:
- 18-core Xeon $2,826.20
- 128GB of ECC memory from Kingston in 32 GB chunks $1,569.63
- can't find the GPU but the Vega Frontier Edition with 16GB is $999
- Samsung 850 EVO 4TB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD $1,469
- Apple's own 5K monitor is $1,350
$6K ???
[0] https://smile.amazon.com/INTEL-PROCESSOR-E5-2697V4-2-3GHZ-SM... [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Kingston-ValueRAM-2133MHz-KVR21R15D... [2] https://smile.amazon.com/Radeon-Vega-Frontier-Air-Retail/dp/... [3] https://smile.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-75E4T0... [4] https://smile.amazon.com/Apple-MK462LL-27-Inch-Discontinued-...
By the way, who’s gonna pay all those engineers who fit all those components in such a nice box?
- Buying that ECC RAM yourself: -600 USD
- Buying those NVMe SSDs yourself -600 USD
Enjoing your new, affordable workstation: priceless :)
I just find this user hostile to be honest, they would probably lose 0 customers over publishing board schematics and making the back pop off. Now in a few years, all you have is a pile of steaming metal, with no hope of ever repairing it (for any reasonable price) after Apple decides they're done with it. It's planned obsolescence for a market that should know better: pro's. I would think twice about rolling this out in an enterprise setting or any critical piece of infrastructure. It's a toy, an expensive one at that.
EDIT: typo
Although I would never provide a computer that wasn’t wiped that’s just good opsec and takes less than an hour to reimage anything.
Though, the image of the motherboard halfway down Apple's product page shows four slots. Might just need the tools to pry open the back.
> Additionally, Apple has confirmed to us that the RAM in the iMac Pro will not be user-replaceable. This shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise given Apple’s other recent products, but nevertheless it means users are stuck with however much RAM they purchase from Apple. Currently, the 27-inch iMac features user-upgradeable RAM, while the 21.5-inch model does not.
So instead of the hatch on the back you need to have it done at service center (or be very confident in your $5000 Mac disassembly/reassembly skills and not mind voiding the warranty). Not clear if you can supply your own RAM for them to install or if you pay Apple prices on it. ECC RAM isn't cheap either way, but I assume buying it from Apple would be even pricier. Maybe the independent authorized repair centers will take user supplied parts.
https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/941324098583511040?re...
It feels like a computer designed for trendy college students who want something faster than the mini-Macbook or made for web developers who don't use any external devices.
> “What we find is, across all of our Mac products, we have a lot of pros on MacBook Pro; we have a lot of pros on iMac; and we have pros on Mac Pro. And so, a number of years ago, when we talked about where we need to move all our products forward for pros, we knew we needed to, along with MacBook Pro – and doing a new Mac pro – that there’s an iMac need there. > "This time, we decided to push it further. We asked our engineering teams, 'Can you make an iMac Pro that’s truly designed for pros?' It really, inside, is a different computer.
> Phil Schiller[0]
Clearly, they missed the mark. But honestly, I just think their definition of "pro" is watered down.
That design does matter when the pros are creative professionals.