Apple is struggling to build Mac Pro based on its own silicon
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
The gist:
The new high-end Mac Pro with Apple silicon is behind schedule, and you can blame changes to the company’s chip and manufacturing plans.
> an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 — without any other upgrades
That would be a very niche market compared with the lower end devices.
If the M2 Extreme is to the M2 Ultra what the M1 Ultra is to the M1 Max, namely that it's just two chips pasted together, then the M2 Extreme might start with 128 GB of RAM (Max: 32 GB, Ultra: 64 GB). That alone is a $1000+ upgrade to the current Mac Pro.
I wonder if it's just more of a 'it's not where the market is' thing. Working in tech and creative industries even previous to the garbage can there was a dramatic shift in people just opting into laptops instead of desktops. With only the people with really demanding workflows sticking with the desktops. Now I mostly only see mac desktops in video production contexts (editing stations, compositing/effects, 3d.. maybe you'd also see that in high end audio production as well).
As offices have changed over the years with more hot desking etc. it's hard justifying a desktop machine... not to mention the pandemic. So maybe apple made a conscious decision. Keep the mac mini to serve a lower end mostly stationary workforce or for installation type work, kill the whole middle-to-lower-highend desktop line and cater to a high end 'studio' workstation.
The boss blinked and said something along the lines of "we're not spending that kind of money for your system" and I pointed out that with 16gb of ram but otherwise base config, it was about the same price and a much better deal performance-wise than a Macbook Pro. Xeons versus an intel mobile i5, and the widest/fastest memory bus around at the time? No contest.
The water-cooled ones were an absolute shitshow...Apple was pushing the edge too hard on that. AIO coolers are still kinda hit-or-miss (the good, well-made ones are fine.)
That's also because they didn't bother updating it for years. Just like the previous trashcan model.
I don't really understand how Apple gets away with that. The people that spend this kind of money to get top of the line hardware are the same ones that are ok buying 4-year-old hardware at introduction price???
Apple MacBook Pro 13in Core i5 Retina 2.7GHz (MF840LL/A), 8GB Memory, 256GB Solid State Drive (Renewed) $379.99
I wanted a 90's era Powerbook so bad. The 2015 is a great machine in 2022. Over the years I heard the elders say it: buy used on the cycle if you can't afford the newer gen. It's really true. And I rarely hear someone who buys the expensive loaded kit complain, even 10 years later. This is how they get away with it. I think I must have learned Linux attempting to rescue my Windows systems, haha. Now I want to rant about Darwin...
If Apple believed it has to sell it for 10k for the single reason of avoiding Mac Studio canibalization, and at the same time Apple believed 10k is too high for the customers, then Apple would kill the product.
> The company made the decision because of both the complexity and cost of producing a processor that is essentially four M2 Max chips fused together. It also will help Apple and partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. save chip-production resources for higher-volume machines.
Apple's foothold in video production is a delicate thing and it seems prone to disruption by a player able to offer a macOS comfort with generic x86 prices.
edit: removed wrong part
I doubt it would be all that cheap.
TSMC is said to be charging $20k for a 3nm wafer, and initial yields for a large die size made on a brand spanking new process node wouldn't be expected to be great.
When you're charging $1,000 for a monitor stand, all prices are arbitrary.
The target market for that screen are buying the VESA mount, but Apple didn't include the VESA mount and added it as an add-on, I'm not sure why; meaning the "$600 Monitor stand upgrade" - which is basically to prevent people buying it as a monitor unless they're going for "Luxury" - became $1,000.
The Pro Display XDR is competing with $40,000 screens for tv/movie production- and studios that use displays like that swap them out quite often because they lose their calibration; they have rows of VESA mounts.
It's like buying one of those artic polar watches that can go to 150M that's gold plated.
The gold plating is not helping you in that situation, whoever is buying the gold plated edition of that watch is buying it as a fashion accessory, not as an expedition watch.
If they want to part with their money: let them.
You can buy it with nothing, with a relatively cheap VESA adapter, or a stand for desktop use cases.
The high-end display market is niche; using such a display with a stand to sit on a desk is even more niche. It's a very low volume stand but it also has to be relatively good in both form and function so that people don't whinge that they got what feels like a flimsy $300 monitor's stand for their $5k monitor.
Who buys the stand? Unusual pro uses where they're better off with a stand than a VESA mount; and people who are just looking for the highest end "fanciest" monitor ever.
You make a clear case, except paying 20% of the cost of the device for a stand that sits on the desk seems ridiculous to me.
Heck, I can't remember the last monitor I had that I kept the stand - it goes back in the box, and into storage until the warranty expires and then it goes in the trash. The Monitor goes on a VESA mount arm.
This chatter about VESA mount arms and if you buy them or not is irrelevant. The price of the monitor stand as stated by Apple what is being discussed.
If it seems ridiculous, don't buy it-- most of us would be using a monitor arm for a monitor like this.
It has a nice 4 bar linkage, bearings, etc. It's intrinsically not cheap and is made in extraordinarily low quantities.
* Apple realistically needs to provide a stand, even though most users in their target market won't use it
* The target market is already small/niche
* The stand has to be relatively nice
* All in all, this means low quantity, high quality == very high cost.
Wrong advertising makes it a differentiated good?! I bet you believe the BS about holding your iPhone wrongly, too.
Apple is a real cult.
Why? Did they force you to buy one? I keep telling you the target market for these; A: doesn’t need a stand & B: wouldn’t use it if it was included.
It’s for people cosplaying as high end video production people; or playing into the “fashion” side of Apple.
Why are people so up in arms about Apple trying to be a tech company and a fashion company? Evaluate their products coldly and if they have value to you then buy them, if not: don’t.
That stand by all rights has no value to anyone: but the same is true of SUPREME clothing or those trendy Fendi handbags.
Get over yourself, it’s all just tools; and a $5k monitor that can do the job of a $40k one is a good value to someone. Just not to you, and that’s fine.
I also don’t need to buy a $3,000 phone skin. But people buy that shit too.
That itself is marketing spin. It's not like studios are throwing away their reference monitors for the apple display. You can design anything to compete; winning is the important bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtd7UzLJHrU
You're crying about another company existing?
Why do you do that? Does it offend you that people choose things that aren't to your values?
This is the same kind of weird bigotry that homophobes use. Who cares? Why does it offend you so much?
The market of high end computers? Apple definitely does not have a monopoly there. Bringing in US medicine is not really a relevant arguement.
That almost-doubling from the already insanely expensive machine could push it past a breaking point for a lot of current customers though, I don't know.
Oddly enough, the one I played with felt slower than the Mac Studio.
The Mac Studio is faster than the 2019 Mac Pro.
https://www.macrumors.com/guide/mac-studio-vs-mac-pro-buyers...
When the Mac Pro came out it was the fastest Mac that existed, but those Intel Chips were already dated and were being roundly beaten by AMD chips of the era.
The "killer feature" was the encoding acceleration card, but a faster variant is available inside Apple Silicon.
I'm not sure where the cut-off is, but I think the M1 Max (Not ultra) is also faster than the Mac Pro 2019.
It still can have 1.5 TB of RAM.
all the workflows I can conceive of right now would struggle to use more than 128G of RAM, but I am open to ideas.
I can think of a few, but they all involve terabytes of data sitting on local storage. At the terabyte sizes, it starts to take more time to transfer the data to the cloud instance than to process it with a beefy workstation.
I traded it in for a microphone.
Oh, okay.
That's not how it works with computer prices.
For example, in 2012 the 13-inch MacBook Pro started at $1699. In 2022 it starts at $1299.
EDIT: since I can't respond - I meant the latest and greatest in that size class. Back then we had that 13" and the 15" rMBP. Now we have the 14" and 16" M1. The 13" MBP is a low cost entry w/ a legacy chassis.
I don't disagree computer costs can fluctuate, but generally where there are leaps forward in design and capability they do go up in price, perhaps not keeping inline w/ inflation though.
How about an iMac, which started at $1299 in 2012 and starts at $1299 in 2022?
Last I checked for a few thousand USD you could have 64 CPU cores with 128 threads, 128 gigs or more of RAM, and one or more top tier GPUs.
That said, the Mac Studio still doesn't quite enable everything to be loaded on one machine, so the PC farms are still in use; worse, the primary software used to utilize those PC farms, Vienna Ensemble Pro, isn't yet Apple Silicon native, so...for the time being, the Mac Studio still isn't quite ready for prime time. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro would likely enable finally moving to using a single machine running macOS with the CPU performance and amount of RAM needed, so you best believe that film composers will move to it in droves once it comes out, whatever the price, as VEP being native or not will no longer be a factor.
Source: was a fairly successful film composer myself until I developed an ear condition called Hyperacusis, now working as a programmer writing custom tools for my peers, and as a tech consultant designing their rigs.
And sure enough, that is a real workflow! Thanks for the knowledge.
I have 12tb of storage, nvme ssd and an optical burner!
I’ve put this machine together over a few years and total cost is 3k Aud.
They’re still great value, this machine can still run drivers for hardware from 2005 (with FireWire!). I can run any os from snow leopard to big sure. I can put a Thunderbolt card in it. I can put most GFX cards.
I have a laptop for my performances, but in the studio, this thing is a beast and I hope it works for quite a few more years as a replacement will be very expensive.
This "$10K is too expensive" line doesn't fly. Right now, just upgrading a Mac Pro processor can push the price over $13K. Again, so what? I'm certain there were more than a handful $50K configured 2019 Mac Pros sold. This kind of thing is expensive for the individual, but for a business it's merely a commodity. $50K is cheap because it couldn't even pay the salary of one developer for a year, and the Mac Pro is useful for at least a few years, so cost is more like $16K/yr. That's an absolutely nothing business expense.
Profitability isn't sufficient for a company like Apple. It has to be the best use of these resources - it needs to be more profitable than dedicating the team to work on something else at Apple.
In todays dollars that’s $85,000 for a high end graphics production workstation to $27000 for a low end.
Kids these days are spoiled.
I didn’t say it was too expensive, I said it was a niche product - resources are tight at Apple, and it looks like we’re heading into a recession so they are concentrating on the products that sell in the millions rather than others
The Cortex X3 at TSMC N4 used in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 clocked at 3.26Ghz gets you about ~1500 GB5 Single Core at ~4W.
The Apple A16 on the same TSMC N4 clocked at 3.6Ghz gets you about ~1900 GB5 Score using ~5W.
The Cortex X3 is much smaller in die size, and only just started optimising specifically for AArach64. Compared to Apple which is on their forth or fifth iteration. I would not be surprised if the Cortex X4 breaks the 1800 barrier using under 5W. Compared to a few years ago Apple SoC vs Snapdragon where single core performance differ by more than 2x. The projected difference between the two will be less than 20%.
The more interesting question would be, what happens when Cortex X4 and Cortex X5 reaches these sort of performance, which is good enough to be used in PC and only cost a a few dollars per core in licensing?
So it's amazing to see the bread and butter catch up, what we really need are those other blocks available under license from someone akin to ARM.
There are plenty to choose from. Samsung or Mediatek didn't invent all the stuff in their SoC, and neither did Apple. GPU IPs are available from ARM ( Mali ) and IMG ( PowerVR ). FPGA form Lattice which Apple are using. DSP and other 5G modem solution from CEVA. There are plenty of options to choose from. And as far as I am concern, none of them are as far ahead, or as difficult to overcome than CPU design.
Are they still using their Technology and IP [1]. Yes.
[1] https://www.imaginationtech.com/news/imagination-and-apple-s...
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-ha...
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/apple-m2-die-shot-and-archite...
I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet their industry’s computation on the whims of a company like Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and loves to shut out integrations?
When it's time to upgrade the old stuff, the process happens again, and the previous gear more or less entirely retired..
Interestingly, there is historic reasons that apple has disproportionately been successful with creatives and its not the marketing of MacBooks to hapless poets. Some of it is just "photoshop was first available on a Mac so other software was first made for a Mac".
Early Macs were historically faster and more capable due to using POWER chips, which made them desirable for performance oriented work. It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here) [1]. Other unique advantages Macs supposedly have: the first color monitor (def better for creative work).
Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors, so any creative would want to use a system that cared about what they cared about. Even today, apple advertises their very expensive "reference grade" monitors. I'm not a creative, so I don't know how truly the apple monitor fills that purpose. The aesthetic and big $5k monitor (which works best with a Mac) was claimed to replace a $30k small and ugly reference monitor, which would leave lots of budget to splurge on a Mac Pro.
--- [1] https://www.techjunkie.com/apples-1999-power-mac-g4-really-c...
The Studio XDR display is not a replacement for a reference monitor and Apple ended up back pedalling on claiming it was. I don't know why you think what it looks like matters, or the size as they are a professional tools.
I used Photoshop on Irix running on an SGI, and the SGI back in the day was way more powerful than anything Apple produced for serious tasks (not sure it was a better Photoshop machine though).
AFAIK the class was mostly used for computer graphics courses. For OpenGL stuff written in C, they were quite beasts. For everything else, it was still Irix.
Of course, when the room was used in the evenings, it was mostly for bzflag LAN melees.
"Rendering each frame took 8,000 thread hours, or the combined power of 3,000 vCPUs in the cloud for an hour."
"“we couldn’t architecturally expand our data center because that would require infrastructure that would go to the city council, and we all know what it’s like to go through local government," he said.""
Or edit? The cloud makes 0 sense for most of video production.
Did they really care about color? The original Mac didn't have color (it didn't get color until about System 7?) I think they chose higher-resolution over color. It's the same with the NeXT I believe, higher-resolution is more important than color.
According to this MacOS got OS-level color management in 1993, and Windows wouldn't get it for another 4 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management#Operating_sys...
According to Wikipedia, the Macintosh II [1] came out in 1987, System 4.0, with 256 colors--for the equivalent of $17,000. I doubt color calibration is much use with 256 colors (although apparently the Mac II support 16.7 million colors but you could only use 256 of them), but I can't find anything on when color calibration was supported.
They went through Motorola 65XX -> 68XX -> 68XXX -> Power PC -> Intel.
That portion before Power PC was a long time, 18 years.
The US government classified the G4 as a "supercomputer" and banned their export. Apple tried to make hay of this, but it hurt them, and within months Apple was lobbying to lift the ban.
The higher up in the food chain you get with production the less these machines are used as general purpose computing boxes and the more they just run one task (be it color grading, compositing, editing, sound editing & foley).
Yes, you can use Windows/Linux PCs, and they make more sense for a lot of 3D work and certain other tasks but at the end of the day Apple macOS and hardware just make sense and the cost is not a problem.
What kept Apple alive in this market was 1) Pro Tools, 2) their own suite of applications like Final Cut Pro and Logic, 3) the 2006 Mac Pro that finally delivered everything users had hoped for — latest Intel CPUs, Windows compatibility, enough fast PCI slots for everyone. It was really the best of both worlds and became the x86 media desktop to beat. (In typical Apple fashion, the 2013 Mac Pro swung too far the other way towards Apple-specific integration and was an abysmal flop with massive heat problems and non-upgradeable GPUs stuck in the past.)
In the end SGI tried to enter the Windows NT market with its own system that had a unique GPU with unified memory and also used SGI's own firmware instead of a PC BIOS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation
Despite the GPU, it wasn't competitive with cheaper, more standard x86 hardware.
NT wasn't a GUI on DOS. NT was different, not based on DOS in any way. Dave Cutler brought his pet project NT (which was technically Digital IP) with him when he left Digital. NT was new and entirely unrelated to any other project at Microsoft.
All these factors together largely eliminated Unix workstations from most of their native markets (3D visualization, CAD, CAE, media) so that category of system just ceased to exist in the mid 2000s.
It was an odd strategy from a company that obviously had no future and nothing left to offer. At the time, I had built up so much animus against SGI for their outrageous pricing and unbelievably annoying FlexLM software licensing that it was amusing to me. Their god damned MIPS Pro compiler spent more cycles checking its license file than actually compiling a small C file. And the FlexLM system was so badly written that it did nothing to stop piracy and any user could trick it into overwriting any file on the system. They claimed to patch it, but never actually fixed it. At least they open-sourced XFS. That was nice of them.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/nasa-gets-sgi-2048-core-itaniu...
The video game industry is so huge that whatever hardware benefits from it, it will eventually crush the professional competition.
If AI is possible today, it's because billions have been invested in making our computers beasts at multiplying matrices.
A single voodoo2 in a pentium2 absolutely trounced the Octane, so my gaming eventually moved to pc and stayed there.
Plus since virtually all the animators used Windows at home and where very comfortable with it, the need for support and hand-holding was much less than with Irix.
You probably know this but a reminder: it was a double whammy of scale (network effect): SGI was selling to roughly three markets (video production, high end CAD, and midrange number crunching). NT was selling to anybody, and despite its multi-architecture support, Intel was selling to the same people. This threw off cash both of them could invest in improving their offering.
There is a good argument, though I don't know how good, for Apple to do an SGI with the Mac Pro. Its main value would be a "halo" effect: make the argument that Apple is so technically great that the people with the hardest problems turn to them, so you can too. Also Apple helps bring you the stuff you like, movies and music and such. That was an important argument back when Apple was lagging. If this argument still makes sense it might even worth doing so at cost or even a small loss paid for by the marketing department. But the green eyeshade side of Apple's planning hates that kind of excuse for good reason.
The Mac Pro has some minor benefits in being a practical way to push the design envelope in ways that will later trickle down, though as this article points out it requires investment in areas not otherwise critical, or even important to the company.
The switch to the NT platform in Windows XP was incredible. Of course, a lot of that was lost in teh beginning with the "Fisher Price" UI, and the massive rise of malware, but by SP2 most of these issues were resolved... Windows XP SP2 was one of the most stable and long lasting consumer OS of probably all time.
I wonder if Microsoft could have switched to NT for its consumer OSes earlier, and if so, how much better Windows based computing for most people would have been. Combine that with the Longhorn disaster, and MS lost so many years of precious development time.
It had the new kernel that could compete with (and even outperform) commercial Unix for workstation use, and also the new GUI from Windows 95 which meant it was both familiar and had an enormous range of apps easily available.
Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS, but it was also objectively better as a total package than Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and everything else. Open source Linux desktops were still very early.
Windows 2000 (a.k.a. NT 5) was still good and a much more practical desktop OS than the first Mac OS X which had absolutely horrendous performance. Somehow Microsoft managed to squander this lead by focusing on consumer Windows XP and their own endless .NET API turf wars that ended up destroying the credibility of the Windows platform.
The issues were that Windows NT needed much more RAM than consumer Windows at a time when RAM was still extremely expensive, and only a subset of the hardware that would work under consumer versions of Windows had drivers for Windows NT.
However, NT (and especially Windows 2000) was night and day better than Windows 9x.
Microsoft bought Softimage, one of the top competitors to Maya at the time. They charged iirc $4k or $8k and a PC to run it would run $4k-$5k
Softimage is long gone but it's what Valve used for the Source Engine and Half Life 2
[0] With the exception of the lower end UNIX workstations which were still better, yet a tad bit more expensive compared to the commodity PC hardware.
This was true early on, as in, early 90s-ish. But in the second half of the decade the balance shifted significantly and by the late 90s, Unix workstations could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being slower. I was doing sysadmin grunt work for a studio at the time and beige boxes ran circles around later generation Octane and Onyx machines.
They were also a nightmare to maintain by then. The market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement process for peripherals like keyboards and the like, we let people buy their own shit and reimburse them within some limit.
Yes, this is true enough as the situation was incomparably better with commodity PC's, with upgrade components and peripherals.
But to be fair, any branded PC was exactly the same, e.g. memory sticks they required were not compatible with the affordable or reasonably priced commodity ones (sometimes even across different models from the same PC vendor), expansion cards (even if made by a third party) also had to come from the same vendor etc, and everything that was branded came with an exorbitantly priced component price list. Compaq was notorious (and nearly universally hated) for requiring special SIMM's that could only work in Compaq PC's and only in a specific model. Procurement loathed those. IBM, HP and Dell were just the same. Then, there was RAMBUS trying to corner and lock everyone into their über-expensive memory chips and stuff (which, luckily, faltered and the company went bust). Again, I am talking about the desktop PC's not the servers.
The situation only changed after the market got flooded with cheap Taiwanese made PC's that could be easily and cheaply upgraded, so the big brands feeling the market force and pressure had no choice, eventually budged and stopped adding proprietory control pins to their memory sticks and stuff.
And of course the huge number of people buying x86 hardware meant PC hardware manufacturers could afford big R&D budgets that allowed them to surpass the workstation CPUs and GPUs in performance.
One cool thing in MacOS that Windows can't do is aggregates of audio devices/interfaces.
MacOS has easily the best Audio subsystem across MacOS & Windows.
In Linux we have JACK, which is as good as MacOS (if not better honestly).
But then Linux suffers from having very little commercial support and worse than that, a lot of problems with hardware video encoding.
Windows doesn't have any problems encoding video, but it has a terrible filesystem (which is forced on you) that causes problems for the insanely large files that you must work with on video production and in addition: the audio subsystem is the worst of all three platforms.
Linux could be a contender, if someone threw $100M USD at the problem, but getting adoption for a linux solution would be hard because the Apple stuff works "fine" and movie productions are more time constrained than cost constrained.
And now we have Pipewire which is not only better, but can also pretend it's Jack for compatibility.
I'd go as far as to say Pipewire made connecting to my Bluetooth headphones more reliable on Linux than on Windows, though neither audio stack is particularly good.
screams in terror
The ideas are great, the realization is jackshit. Sooo much finicky crap that partly also depends of whether your sound output is special enough to work well with it. And trying to make it play nice with pulseaudio is another nightmare.
Pulseaudio itself also suffers massively from UI problems, pretty much all non-basic use cases is either mess with configs or "just run a bunch of commands on runtime or every time your USB interface reconnects". Jack at least gets that part right
Trying to get some audio interface to be connected properly was... an experience, it just showed in system as one stereo input (it was 2 mono inputs) and 4.0 output (it had 4 separate outs) so there was a good deal of pulseaudio fuckery to run to just split it properly
> Linux could be a contender, if someone threw $100M USD at the problem, but getting adoption for a linux solution would be hard because the Apple stuff works "fine" and movie productions are more time constrained than cost constrained.
I wonder if someone figuring out how to run the usual tools via Wine/Proton and somehow integrate nicely with pipewire would've been enough...
It is a prime example of short-sighted “just rewrite it then!” Style Behaviours in FOSS and continues to be brought up in conversations about subsystem replacements (such as systemd).
Pipewire is a good replacement, but pulseaudio is to JACK what windows movie maker is to Final Cut.
It doesn’t deserve to be brought up when talking about professional solutions.
ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default and needed to fuck around with dmix gave way to endless problems with various software, and the fact dmix was still working subtly different than "real" device also reared its ugly head in many "pro audio" apps.
It was being developed.
People jumped on Pulseaudio and made it the default before it was finished because the ALSA contributers wanted to do it in a way that was either going to work for embedded or be optional in a reasonable way, IE; they were trying to do it right, took too long, and it got replaced with something much worse that did the job.
Which, happens unfortunately frequently.
The FreeBSD folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's fix it". And did. And they're still on that while Linux is headed into its third major audio shake-up in the same time span (OSS -> ALSA -> PulseAudio -> PipeWire).
Corporate money and contribution go to: storage, network, scheduler. Anything desktop related doesn't get any love. I bet that PR for EoL drm-kmod from linux still not merged.
It was then that I decided whoever was responsible for it had no software-architectural taste whatsoever. I didn't yet know his name. His work since then hasn't changed my mind.
Yes... it is possible. No, it's not something I ever want to do ever again.
Why do we need `open()` anyway?
(this is sarcasm, the OS exists only to solve app problems).
I've still never cared and don't know why I should. What am I missing? I've used systems with that, but never bothered to try using it because... why would I? Every media player has a volume control, YouTube has a volume control, every game has a volume control (usually multiple, for different types of sound), and 99% of the time I just want everything at about the same level anyway. The last thing I want to do is have another place a given program could have its volume set or muted or whatever, so then I have another place to look when it's not doing what I want. One per-program (built in to the programs) and one global is quite enough.
I'm not too sure how this is handled on other platforms, but pre-PA the in-app volume control would often modify the global mixer, rather than implement an in-app mixer/attenuator, which is definitely not what you usually want. In most Linux apps these days, those controls manipulate and are synchronized with the PA mixer, so there's still only one actual mixer, they are the same control. I assume that other OSes also do per-stream mixing in a similar manner, and just choose not to expose the mixer for whatever reason.
As much as people complain about PulseAudio it's always worked well for me, and from what I've seen of Windows and macOS alternatives, it's more featureful and usable out of the box.
that does not surprise me at all, unfortunately.
> One cool thing in MacOS that Windows can't do is aggregate of audio devices/interfaces.
it does come at the cost of latency & jitter: fundamental issues that ultimately stem from having two separate audio clocks. and it's not really a specific limitation of windows, which tend to use ASIO for low-latency audio. there's nothing stopping a an aggregate ASIO driver from being written, i just can't imagine it'd be that useful, indeed, i've only ever used the macOS aggregate device a handful of times, mostly only to try it out.
It was a lot of CLI fuckery, not a pleasant experience... and of course pulseaudio can't just remember it, need to be re-applied after every USB reconnect.
Can be done with UDEV but not exactly something random user would know how to do.
Some of us didn't need it, software at the time allowed us to record and mix from and playback to different audio hardware devices simultaneously already. I remember doing that in Windows ME with some audio editing software.
Public beta this month, though. https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=422724
Do they? Last I heard, most of the industry uses Linux render farms...
Smaller studios use Windows/Mac a bit more (boutiques use Macs the most), but the removal of the Xserve and the lack of competitiveness in the MacPro for several years have shifted some away from Mac.
How do they deal with HDR content? As far as I know it's not supported yet and the colour management is lacking, which seems like a big problem for today's content.
Linux can support it, just not every display server/application (yet)...
Something that either needed final cut (and the rather good final cut studio) or photoshop.
But final cut has been somewhat overtaken by adobe (or was when I was leaving the industry) and blackmagic fucking with the entire software stack by making resolve and fusion free(ish)
There are some niche bits like cinesync that allows remote viewing of footage securely and colour accurately that might still need a mac.
Apart from laptops, apple have lost the VFX market pretty well.
That said, everyone I hear who uses Final Cut Pro today seems to prefer it over any other editor. You can flawlessly edit multiple 4k color corrected video streams on an $800 fanless MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, and get 10+ hours of battery life while doing it. Nobody else can touch that.
I'm pretty certain the industry standard has always been Avid Media Composer, even if today and for years nearly all of the market share is Final Cut Pro X with the minority remainder split between Premier Pro and Da Vinci. Most of the choices being made out there are, "do I want Media Composer or FCPX?" And FCPX is a lot less expensive, so that's how it goes.
Animation and visual effects for large studios are all Linux based usually. Smaller studios vary between Mac and windows.
Edit houses tend to be primarily Mac based.
There’s very little that competes with macOS and Apple hardware though.
Take color accuracy and EDR. Linux and windows aren’t great for extended dynamic range while working, and especially if you’re using a laptop for mobile reviewing, very few laptops support the accurate display space most macs ship with.
Macs also provide a lot more software compatibility than Linux for things like the Adobe suite of products.
Combine that with out of the box support for many codecs, accelerated ProRes workflows and the ubiquity of airplay+airdrop, macs are very favoured for creative use cases.
Maybe something like;
- Mac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Watch
And you can get them in:
- Mini, Max or just "normal size"
With your choice of:
- M?, M? Pro, M? Ultra
Running
- MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS
We've already got a "mini" iPhone (SE), MacBook (Air), Mac. Plus the normal sized ones; 14" for the laptops and studio for the Mac, and then max being 16" laptops, or a tower mac, and the 12.9" tablet etc. Same for the watch too, and the iMac has played around the 21/24/27 sizes already.
Perhaps I just don't understand the product differential requirements from branding / marketing perspectives.
Anecdotally it seemed very popular, and loved by the people who bought one. Perhaps the numbers said otherwise, because otherwise I have no idea why they didn't reintroduce it as an M1/M2 machine.
Perhaps, and this is maybe just being hopeful, they're waiting for the even better efficiency of the M3 etc before reintroducing it because they want to do it, but absolutely nail it when they do without any battery life compromise. After all, they already ran the market demand test, so this would make sense if so. If that turns out to be the case I'll almost certainly buy one.
I loved mine, and put a couple of hundred thousand miles in carrying it (even wrote a lot of code in Emacs, but I remember the days when every compile was an excuse to stand up and get coffee, so the speed didn't matter to me).
AFAICT its target market was actually Asia, same as with the ultralight (for its time) Powerbook 2400c which was actually built by IBM Japan. But it didn't sell as well as expected even there.
Here are their sizes for comparison:
MacBook Air 11" 300 mm x 192 mm x 17 mm 1,08kg
MacBook 12" 280,4 mm x 196,6 mm x 13,2 mm 0,92kgThen we can say things like "2022 was (not) a good MacBook-year".
On the other hand, compared to just about every other computer/tech company out there I find it by far the easiest and most sane. Is the 15" MSI GE67 better or worse than the 15" MSI Bravo 15? And where does the MSI GP67 fit into the whole picture?
Compared to Apple's/Steve Jobs' own standards, yes.
In some cases, it's complicated by being TOO SIMPLE: e.g. try figuring out iPad versions.
I think people confuse Steve's simplicity with Apple's previous need to pare down product lines to cut costs and avoid bankruptcy.
There are a zillion iPhone models at every possible price point because more than half of the USA buys iPhones.
But on the other hand you need to be a bit of an expert to compare the different series of iPad.
And who can forget that the first iPad with Retina display was called “the new iPad” and the follow up was called “iPad with Retina display”. Talk about cluster fuck naming!
I wanna say Apple is doing better than the competition but worse than they used to, but they have a few fuckups from a decade ago that a bigger than anything they’ve got going on now, so maybe they’re not clearly doing worse.
So to answer your question: Is apples naming getting complicated? Inconclusive.
I read an estimate from a French firm that Mac Pro volumes are orders of magnitude lower than Power Mac volumes were two decades ago; are they doing anything about it?
The gap between laptop and desktop with today's M1 MBPs is much more narrow for sure.
Macbooks (Airs, at least) and iPads are still huge in education.
[0] Yes I know HDR is not much of a thing currently on social media, but apple tends to invest tech wise to where they see the market going, and do it earlier. Removing the floppy drive early is an indicator of this, and they realize it's a bit of a chicken & egg thing.
Apple cannot compete with $200 Chromebooks. Not without compromising the whole reason you'd choose Apple in the first place. It's a game of razor-thin margins and those aren't Apple's thing.
> Why not $thing?
Apple is focused on services, not hardware or software unless it boosts their services.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/382136/quarterly-segment...
History shows that a very large chip made on a process node that has just come online isn't going to have a good initial yield, and 3nm wafers are said to be fairly expensive.
>One wafer processed on TSMC's leading edge N3 manufacturing technology will cost over $20,000 according to DigiTimes
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-will-charge-20000-per...
That's with 20x general compute cores, 32x neural engines, and 64x GPU cores, 128GB RAM, and 8TB of storage. I guess it's probably useful for 8K video workloads, but not much else.
If the article is right and they're targeting a $10k base price for the Extreme version of the chip, then they better get it VERY right for it to be worth the effort, and I wouldn't expect many customers to be lining up regardless.
I was thinking similarly. Not Mac, but $4-5k will get you an extremely well specced Dell/HP workstation suitable for nearly anything. Staying under $5k can also make it easier to push it through finance where higher price premiums typically require more paperwork.
No argument there, but a line is drawn somewhere on ease of purchasing and it usually falls short of $10k.
I would really not recommend comparing to home built machines. Studios tend to lease from Dell/HP and those workstations will often be in the 10k+ range.
I also wonder, does the SEC track trades placed by Mark Gurman and those who republish (collectively a bandwagon of such) pronouncements of analysts?
Sounds awesome; thanks for clarifying above, too.
The M-series chip makes sense because you can share it between mobile and desktop machines. The A-series and the M-series are very closely related. Once you start to enter the high-end server market you have to add more IP, change the processor interconnect, topology, and increase the transistor count on the IP you already developed. This leads to the necessity to design another line of processors which needs additional design, verification, validation, software development, etc that you won't be able to share with your profitable chips. You then need to ask, is there really a market for this?
When Apple used 3rd party CPUs they outsourced the cost of that server development work, the 3rd party Intel already had a large market for their Xeon class chips so development costs were spread across customers. The business made sense. Let's face it, the Pro side of the business is tiny relative to the mobile market and it does not make business sense.
SOC with soldered memory, yet still expandable.
https://twitter.com/sroussey/status/1512934509540360195?s=20
When I went to the site it had no ads on it thanks to Opera's built in ad-block.
Curious if any HNers in the know could spill such info with a throwaway
So build a two part design: a rack form factor with a storage fabric and a lot of processors combined with a super mac studio for display and control, all connected with 10 GB. The investment would be immense compared to the market (not just in hardware but with the end user tools) and hard for most companies to develop software for.
The only upside for Apple with this approach would be that their cloud back end could benefit from this development.
It's the classic Innovator's Dilemma: I don't see this market being worth investing in at all for a company like Apple.
While I can’t speak definitely how much rendering is done in the cloud, I can speak to how much general IT spend is done in the cloud from someone who should know…
https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas...
Disclaimer:Jassy is my skip*7 manager
And that's the point of the cloud metaphor (starting from the original Internet protocols paper from Cerf et al): you don't care. It doesn't mean "a computer somebody else owns"
You seem to be confusing cloud with “public cloud”, but private (and hybrid) cloud is very much a part of the modern understanding of cloud.
If you are relying on the farm to provide interactive rendering , the speed of the connection isn’t an issue. it’s not that much data to send over since studios sync the assets, so you’re usually only needing to sync attribute values and pixel data back and forth.
The issue is that you need dedicated cores for it on the farm.
When a show is going all out, those farms are saturated for usage. If a lighter asks for interactive use, they’re either waiting or you’re constantly having to reserve systems for them. That wait time is the latency I mean.
In which case why not just buy them the higher spec hardware?
Only thing is at that point it makes sense to have either a monster PC somewhere out of sight or cloud resources, so whatever hook they come up with would at least need to appear like it usefully alters the workflow, because it's going to be really expensive relative to an out-of-sight PC.
It really begs the question of who the Mac Pro is really for anymore? If you need that amount of power you're probably better off with a MacBook and an external compute resource like above, or even just an eGPU (I know, the ARM chips don't support them, but you could just buy used Intel SKUs in a pinch).
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/09/06/sonnet-mac-studio-rack-...
Thunderbolt changes the upgradability by just plugging stuff in as needed. Only RAM is a concern this way.
While having power on the desktop is great, for real compute use cloud resources.
For a more specific example, music producers liked the fact you could have over a terabyte of RAM on the Mac Pro. This allows keeping their entire library of VST plugins loaded into memory, meaning they never have to wait to load plugins into their project.
If file size is a bottleneck for you then you'll see better performance computing locally, especially if you can cache workloads in DDR5 before saving to the filesystem.
Not to mention single external support…
Consumers Pro users are likely to look aside on the external IO issues, but it’s doubtful that actual studios would.
You can't hit anywhere near "line rate" with usb 3.1/3.2, though an Intel Mac will gladly do so with the same _exact_ drive. You will experience write stalls and other performance problems. I don't have a usb4 drive to test by I wouldn't hold your breath.
I do not have a Thunderbolt 3 device to test. Google tells me it's a problem: https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/18/m1-mac-thunderbolt-4-ports-sp...
Expect _at most_half the advertised speeds and feel lucky if you achieve them.
EDIT:
From the article I linked: I just noticed they suggest try connecting my drive to a Thunderbolt 3 dock first. LOL, ok, I'll give this a try.
This is false in my experience. I bought a Thunderbolt 3 to Dual NVMe M.2 SSD enclosure (Sabrent EC-T3DN), set up the SSDs in a RAID 0 array, and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test benchmarked that configuration at 2,500 MB/sec read and write. That's very close to the maximum real-world usable bandwidth for TB3¹.
¹ https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2019/20190128_1352-unde...