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Comment by wisty | Hacker News Reader

OK, so it's not a Mac Pro. It's a Mac Mini Pro.

As long as it's not too expensive, it's exactly what a lot of prosumers might want (especially those who want to ditch their laptops for iPads and iPhones, and maybe a MBA for the road- a lot of people's MacBook Pros live on their desks). I can't see a serious video editor wanting one, but they're all jumping ship to get cheaper Wintel workstations (and at some point, studios will move the heavy lifting to some kind of local big-iron server).

I can see developers who want a slightly better machine buying it, and rich people, and photographers, and so on. If Thunderbolt expansions bring down the costs of upgrades (compared to buying the upgrades with Apple - not everyone likes to open their chassis) then it might be quite attractive.

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How about the entire graphic design industry? Finally a 'headless iMac' with balls. The MacPro allows me to attach my EIZO monitors. The iMac screens are consumer-quality, really. If you're looking for high quality screens (and OSX), the MacPro is the best. I am curious about the price-range.

Audio production and engineering as well. The more plugins that can be run in real time (rather than baked) the less overhead in managing the ever growing complexity of modern electronic music projects, especially with ever increasingly CPU hungry plugins. Take Diva[1] for example - amazingly resource intensive analog simulation, but it sounds incredible! Currently on my top-end-2011-era macbook pro I can only have one of these going dynamically and then must bake and unbake different channels as I continue to experiment. Being able to run a number in real time would really speed up the work flow.

[1] http://www.u-he.com/cms/diva

I'm guessing it will start somewhere between $2,500 to $3,500. It will be probably more than the top-end iMac. I can't see it being a lot more expensive than the current low-end Mac Pro.

It would be nice if they had a less expensive version, but this is Apple we're talking about.

At that price I'd jump in just to use it for web development and some video processing and OpenCL development.

But I suspect it will be a lot more expensive than that, especially here in the UK. I say it will probably start at $3,500 at the very minimum in the US and then with extra RAM and other upgrades it can go up to $6000 if not more.

This machine will typically come coupled to very beefy displays and external thunderbolt RAID drives and the whole set-up will average more than $10,000.

The Mac Mini is the low-end, cheapest mac. I see nothing low end, nor cheap about this one.

The small form factor just means there is less air inside than in your typical ATX tower. I really don't see your connection to Mac Mini.

You started off by citing his connection though. It's a small desktop. The reason he said Mac Mini _Pro_ was in reference to that high end spec you mention in your responce.

I can't see any way a 'prosumer' will be able to afford it considering what's going inside. I think these things are going to run $3000+, but maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe I'm mis-defining 'prosumer.'

Dual FirePro cards, mini PCI-E SSD, and up to a 12-core [single] CPU? I feel like this will start north of $3500, but they might have a cheaper base config. Maxed, it'll probably top $5k.

Sounds about right. It's nice to imagine them doing a version with a single socket and a nice-but-consumer-level GPU -- that would finally be a worthy embodiment of the mythical "xMac" -- but they've been actively disinterested in releasing a headless mid-range machine for years, and I can't see that changing now.

"a worthy embodiment of the mythical "xMac""

It would certainly look great next to whatever black non-apple monitor(s) or TV(s) you wanted to plug into it.

Looks like this version is single socket only.

"I can't see a serious video editor wanting one, but they're all jumping ship to get cheaper Wintel workstations"

Is this actually the case? I don't know anything about that segment of the computing industry, but I just assumed that FCP was the industry standard.

FCP was never the only solution in the pro video editing market. Avid has been the traditional choice since the mid-'90s, but FCP was encroaching.

Unfortunately the botched introduction of FCP X sent Apple back a decade in this market. FCP X was too different from 7, and it didn't even support many of the workflows that pros needed. Since users had to learn new software anyway, a lot of editors went to Avid or Adobe (Premiere is quite good nowadays).

Correct. At least a decade. Combined with the 'all-our-apps-for-50-bucks from Adobe has made a lot of studio's jump ship to Adobe Premiere. I mean what was Apple smoking? FCP wasn't even compatible with FCP.

I wonder if any of the damage done with FCP X has been made up for in the last two years since release. What's the word in the studios?

You'd be surprised how many pro editors are using FCPX now. With the updates it's got it's better than FCP 7 was.

I'm not saying FCP X is bad today, but the 1.0 release was an undisputed flop.

A lot of people jumped ship to Avid and Adobe rather than wait for FCP X to eventually improve. Convincing them to take another look at FCP X won't be easy.

While it's nice to have a great machine for editing photos, or writing software, it's more a "nice to have". As long as you don't run out of RAM, most of the time you aren't limited by CPU speed. And a lot of those tasks tend to be harder to parallelise, so having 12+ cores isn't a huge deal. Video editing is much more likely to be limited by CPU, and it parallelises nicely, so a better machine saves tonnes of time.

Have a look at the current options Apple is putting out. If you need something that's cheaper than what Apple puts out, or something that's bleeding edge, then you're out of luck. This is especially true with video cards.

Apple used to offer the best value workstations on the market. They got lazy, or maybe the Chinese / Taiwanese started undercutting IBM, Dell, and HP; which forced prices down to a point where Apple wasn't interested.

And Apple doesn't have a very predictable upgrade cycle. If you're spending $5,000 on a machine, only to see the next version come out a few months later, it's not going to be very fun. Nor is holding off upgrades, because you just don't know if a new model is around the corner.

Video requires a heap of grunt. Apple wasn't offering machines with enough grunt, or cheap enough machines. They looked at the cost of switching, vs the cost of sticking with Apple, and a lot decided to switch.

Dont know how much of this is true but i have recently seen this video which talks a bit about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TyswmRCdl8

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