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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Yes, 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.

> 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+.

Hmmm, 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.

Wouldn'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.

The 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?

> with a base config of 8/256

On a MacBook PRO no less.

> I'm pretty sure that hasn't increased since I got the retina macbook pro in 2012 unless I'm mistaken?

They were still using 128GB SSDs in the entry-level 13" MBP from 2015 (replaced by the touchbar MBP in late 2016, but not actually discontinued until sometime in 2017).

> keep part of Apple’s branding

I made no comment about actual performance.

But are you not implying it with original statement?

Apple has publicly stated during their keynotes (albeit with slides that present minimal information) the efficiency their CPU holds over the aforementioned companies. And that isn't even going into the mobile space where Apple still holds the crown when it comes to performance on synthetic workloads.

Revisiting the keynote where the M1 was introduced [1] at 8:48 Apple states that the M1 uses the world's fastest CPU, which ties back into your argument, but then at 9:51 talks about performance per watt.

Apple does it again when the M2 was announced [2] at 58:21.

This isn't to say your argument isn't a valid one, and I hope I didn't give the impression that it is wrong; the optics has, at least in my perspective, shifted towards preferring power efficiency over raw performance output. What with tech news of x86 CPUs and GPUs from Nvidia and AMD consuming more and more power the M1 and M2 sip power by comparison.

No one doubts the performance of Apple devices, it's mainly efficiency by which it does so that has everyone paying attention to it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AwdkGKmZ0I

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5D55G7Ejs8

I think the marketing of performance has always been a subthread.

But the actual machines have always been merely "good enough". The 68k macs lagged PCs significantly. PPC had a brief moment where it was faster than 486/P5 devices but then got demolished by P6+ cores, to the extent that Apple had to switch to Intel themselves. Then for almost two decades they shipped what amounted to the same silicon as high end windows laptops. MacBooks were "high performance", but not in a way that wasn't accessible to HP or Lenovo.

But all that relies on it not being a lie. If you lock your platform marketing not into merely "Insanely Great" but into the idea of Apple Silicon being best, then you need to make damn sure it actually is. And right now it is! But it needs to stay that way if you're going to bet the platform on it.

> I think the marketing of performance has always been a subthread.

Exactly the point I made.

You're talking about laptops. To me, a heavy computer user, the case is more important than CPU performance. There Apple has always been second-to-none. Lenovo has always been second but one look at their laptops and I want to fall asleep.

Does the Mac Studio not address all those points?

A similarly priced Windows PC is expandable and upgradeable while also being faster than a Mac Studio.

. . . 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).

Sorry, 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.

The 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.

Given that TB3 and TB4 provide PCIe, Apple has retained their strategy of expansion that way as opposed to add-in cards. That was the approach of the trashcan and it's been retained in the Studio.

It's a valid approach in theory but it seems pretty clear that the market hasn't embraced it. The most recent Mac Pro recognized that people weren't embracing it, but really, are there many (or any?) 3P cards that can be plugged into a Mac Pro?

Maybe much louder and maybe much bigger. Mac Pro's aren't exactly small either.

You can build/get quiet PCs too. Theres a whole PC accessory company called be quiet! even. And there's some very nice IMO cases that look better than the Mac Studio or Pro...

I'm not sure about faster anymore. You'll have to get your reactionary opinions up-to-date.

I screwed up and forgot to mention that this was more about the Mac Studio vs the Mac Pro and how they compare differently to the Windows side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34222220

My comparison is up to date as the top end chips from Intel and AMD and the top-end Nvidia GPUs handily outpeform the top-end silicon in the Mac Studio's highest end configuration. And for a lower cost. The Studio is a solid machine, but it doesn't have the same 'this is about as good as you can get without a server farm' performance of the top-end Mac Pro when it launched.

This 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.

Is the Mac actually unprofitable? I don’t think that’s true.

Amazing 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!

What 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.

  > 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...

That 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.

If Apple decides that the Mac has to go, it won't be that hard to port their development tools to Windows or Linux.

Not really as it is not their philosophy. Ipad OS is the one.

Apple doesn't want you to know this but they do their mechanical and electrical design on Windows PCs (using Siemens NX and OrCAD respectively)

Hardly surprising because I don't think there's even one piece of high-end CAx software for Mac.

Why 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)

Just out of interest; which ones would you consider high-end?

For CAD specifically I'd say "high end" are CATIA, NX and maybe Creo? SolidWorks and SolidEdge would form the tier below that.

For CAx in general it's difficult to say, because there's such a huge variety of software and every little niche has its own highly specialized (and usually very expensive) tools. I've never seen any of these support anything other than Windows and/or Linux. Some of them have Win32 GUIs and Linux is headless only (for running simulations), some are fully cross platform, some are Linux-only.

Most CAE engineers around here work on Linux, mainly because they prefer how easy it is to script and automate things and because the headless HPC/batch environment is of course also Linux. Meanwhile CAD and design only happens on Windows because CATIA is Windows only, like the various Autodesk tools used for CAID. From the late 80s to the early 2000s this place had a ton of UNIX workstations (SGI, HP, Sun) and even UNIX clusters (IRIX and SUPER-UX among others, the latter having virtually no representation on the internet today). There's also still IBM AIX systems around, as well as IBM mainframes. Not my department though.

Thanks for your answer! What makes it so that AutoCAD is not high end? Like what features does it lack or what workflows does it not support?

Suppose something like CATIA was available on Mac and offered lets say a performance benefit. Would you consider Mac? Or would you for example still need a whole other set of tools to be available as well for it to be even possible?

> There's also still IBM AIX systems around, as well as IBM mainframes. Not my department though.

Are you saying some people still use IBM mainframes for CAD/CAE/etc applications? If yes, that's unexpected yet intriguing information, and I'd love to know more.

Although maybe you were just stating the obvious that IBM mainframes survive in general even if no longer in this particular domain.

I have seen some posts on the Intel FPGA community forum about using Quartus Prime Pro (FPGA design software) on Apple Silicon. Apparently, it works, even though not officially supported.

I haven't had the time or the desire to take it for a spin yet, but I'd love to be able to compile FPGA designs on a nicely configured and quiet M2 system.

Siemens NX used to be available on macOS, up until about 5-6 years ago. However, Siemens found few customers were adopting it, so they discontinued it.

Apparently, one of the reasons for its lack of adoption, was lack of a native macOS GUI – instead it ran under X11. https://community.sw.siemens.com/s/question/0D54O000061xMQgS...

If Apple really cared about it, I'm sure they could have worked out some deal with Siemens to keep the macOS edition viable, even improve its UI to be native and more usable. It would require them to move away from viewing themselves just as a customer, into more seeing it as an investment into their own platform (making it viable for more use cases.) Sad to say, Apple doesn't seem to think like that much (or maybe some people there do, but not the people whose opinions really count)

For 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.

The 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...

That’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.

Doesn't matter. Those things can go in the span of a few years. Remember when Blackberry was king? Pepperidge Farm remembers!

Nokia, 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.

Why 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.

Microsoft 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.

>Microsoft actually had workable tablets by the mid-2000s. With Windows XP Tablet Edition.

The problem was that the "Windows XP Tablet Edition" was utter crap. A desktop OS and its mentality shoved into tablet form with modifications that fell way short of what was actually needed for that form. The iPad was the first tablet that got it right - and feel like a tablet meant for tablety things, as opposed to a PC without a keyboard and crippled in all sorts of ways.

I would put an emphasis on "workable". XP Tablet Edition was not that.

Windows XP Tabled Edition was to tablets as Windows 8 was to desktops and laptops: a solid (for its age) OS, but with an interface that was not adequate for that form factor. Using it on a tablet was just as annoying as using Windows 8 on a laptop. I hated it, my colleagues hated it -- I don't know anyone who didn't hate it.

> My surprise is that Android is the "other one" and not Windows Phone.

I'm not. Microsoft, with WP, copied the weak things from iOS (like being locked down, but also with very poor walled garden; single platform, Snapdragon reference design only), but not the strong ones. Android did it the other way, so I'm not surprised at all.

The problem they had was that they sold individual standalone products, not platforms. There was very little to keep a user with the same vendor other than liking the next product. A platform is a different beast completely, and once a platform or set of platforms gets established at scale in a market, it’s almost impossible for a new entrant to compete with it.

This is because platforms have three advantages. The first is a user’s sunk investment. I own hundreds of pounds worth of iOS software, and even the free software I use took an investment of time and effort to learn. Plus I now have considerable assets in those file formats and storage systems. Switching to a new platform would be expensive in money and time. The second advantage is network effects, my whole family is on the same platform, so is my company and many of my friends using the same services. The third advantage is the ecosystem. There is a plethora of software and services available for iOS that a new entrant won’t have, many offered by third parties. In competing with iOS and Android you’re not just competing with Apple and Google, but also the entire ecosystems of companies that complement them. These three advantages also apply to Android and its users.

This is why even Microsoft could not break into the modern mobile smartphone platforms market, they were too late. Android and iOS had critical mass in all three areas. Google was incredibly lucky they managed to get Android up to being a viable platform before Apple had the entire mobile platform market sewn up. Fortunately the Android team at the time knew the new game they were playing when they saw the iPhone announcement, and realised they were in a race against time for survival.

This is also why the desktop is dominated today by the same platforms it was in the 90s. Mac and Windows. Arguably we could extend that to the 80s with Mac and DOS. That’s around 3 decades of stability. The mobile market in its current form was established around 12 years ago. I would not be at all surprised if the mobile market is still dominated by Android and iOS in another 20 years. There are incredibly powerful forces driving this.

The Mac and the iPhone are like a 100ft yacht and a cruise ship tied together.

If the cruise ship sinks, the yacht might be a great help - or it might get pulled down with it.

Luckily, the cruise ship doesn't show any signs of sinking at the moment.

In my understanding of history it would be more accurate to write: The Apple II is what sustained Apple post- and pre-Jobs.

The Apple II was irrelevant at the timeframe I'm discussing (pre-Jobs being before Jobs came back in 1997 and post-Jobs being after Jobs return).

I'm not sure. I'd love to share your optimism because, perhaps like you, I am not a "phone guy" and I probably never will be.

Increasingly though it feels like those of us who prefer a laptop (or desktop machine!) over a phone are like HAMs ... or perhaps guys that like manual transmissions.

It seems more likely that it will be the Macs that go down, and not the iPhones a decade or so from now.

The Apple before being reverse acquired by NeXT was at the edge of bankruptcy, so Macs hardly sustained them back them to the point that they even got Microsoft's money to keep going.

They had sustained them for close to 20 years before that point of "edge of bankruptcy", and they soon grew into a great business post the colored Ive's iMac. It's only the iPod's phenomenal success that obscured their Mac unit, but the iMac and Powerbooks were already a big success when Jobs returned.

As for the "edge of bankruptcy" was due to a series of bad business decisions, not the Mac line itself. If anything, the Mac line and Mac customers was the only thing they still had going for them. It was the OS that was old and tired in an era of good enough Windows, Apple wasting resources in Copland, Newton and other endeavors without results, the blunder of allowing clones that ate into their Mac lunch, and so on.

Every company in existence would love to have a $38B/year revenue (along with I'm sure great margins) vanity product like the Mac.

"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.

> "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.

Perhaps it was sarcasm, and not meant to be taken literally.

Having to explain this to the local pedants is the most HN thing.

Your comment adds nothing to HN but mean-spiritedness.

You'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-fir...

What chance can anyone else have if the Mac Pro is doomed if iPhone sales dip?

People have not updated their opinions with regards to facts since 2008. It might actually be new information to that person that Apple is now the most profitable company in the existence of the human race.

Because they got lucky by being reverse acquired by NeXT.

History would have taken another path without that reverse acquisition and Microsoft's money injection.

TBF, I'm still a little sour they didn't go the BeOS route. I LOVED BeOS.

The reason Apple is so profitable is because of the iPhone. The Macs aren't bringing in all that much money and I'm postulating that Mac will lose a lot of market share because they ditched the x86 architecture.

Although revenue for Mac is still increasing (most likely because they're making even more profit by using their own CPU) the sales are already softening.

Apple’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.

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