Apple Goes Semi-Pro (Part One)

http://www.cringely.com/2010/06/apple-goes-semi-pro-part-one/

by rfreytag • 16 years ago

45 34 16 years ago

Actually a good story, I hadn't thought about this but yes, clearly, Apple is slowly abandoning the professional video/design market. If there is still a market there (not a sure thing), someone else could step in.

illumin83• 16 years ago

Not true. It would be nice to see some citation that Apple is dropping this market. Just because they don't advertise Mac Pros on the front page of Apple.com doesn't mean they are dropping support for the product.

jshen5• 16 years ago

Hm, it's rather hard to find citations for predictions of the future.

mitjak• 16 years ago

I'm going to back up this point by saying that Apple stopped developing Apple Shake years ago promising a new replacement for it, one that has never been released. No, Motion is not it.

Why would they buy out Nothing Real, sell the product pretty much unchanged for a few years, and then drop it altogether, when it was, at the time, a leading product in its niche?

pavlov• 16 years ago

Apple never promised a replacement for Shake. It was just the usual Apple rumor mill at work.

They bought Nothing Real for people and some technology. A few pieces from Shake were integrated into FCP and Motion, for example optical flow retiming (=smooth slowdown) and image stabilization ("SmoothCam").

jsz02• 16 years ago

I don't really see that myself. Apple released Final Cut Pro 7 and Logic 9 less than a year ago. Aperture 3 less than 6 months ago. It's kind of unreasonable to expect these apps to be updated every 6 months or something. In both cases there were a few major features and lots of clean-up which was definitely needed. Both are very mature applications so I wouldn't expect FCP8 or Logic 10 to radically change anything.

As for hardware -- even most professionals don't need Mac Pros. The high end workstation market just isn't what it used to be.

wazoox• 16 years ago

Hum, what about upgrading FCP to Cocoa and 64 bits, for instance?

starkfist• 16 years ago

It seems like they are. At the moment the only reason people use FCP is because it's the entrenched solution.

But the latest version of Premiere is actually better and is better integrated with the other adobe tools video producers use all the time.

commandar• 16 years ago

I know the most disappointing thing about WWDC this year, for me, was the nearly total absence of anything Macintosh from the keynote.

hexis• 16 years ago

"Nearly"? Off the top of my head, I don't remember anything about Macs at all in the keynote.

illumin83• 16 years ago

Here comes Cringely again, giving truly cringe-worthy predictions. His main prediction seems to be that there will be no more future Mac Pro releases because the iMac now has four cores and can run anything including Final Cut Pro.

He is totally wrong. There are still a huge number of video, audio, and design professionals that need the power of a Mac Pro and are willing to pay for it. Why would Apple intentionally drop this market? They've had a lot of success breaking into the movie business and taking over from expensive Avid video editing workstations; there is no way they would lose this market.

The high-end market definitely needs features like PCI-express slots to connect real hardware to, 8 cores or as many as you can throw at it, and lots of internal and external storage options. Hell, a lot of those Mac Pros are connected to Fiber channel storage arrays that store terabytes of media. And he is seriously predicting that we replace all of this with a USB 3.0 connection on our iMac? Get real.

jshen5• 16 years ago

"There are still a huge number of video, audio, and design professionals that need the power of a Mac Pro and are willing to pay for it. Why would Apple intentionally drop this market? "

Are we talking about the same company? Apple is known for focusing on a few things and ignoring others that many believe would be "profitable".

I think Cringley is making a significant point, apple may lose focus on what we think of as computers.

stcredzero2• 16 years ago

Is Apple focused on servers anymore? Is Xserve relegated to a back burner but still profitable? That may be your bellwether.

melling3• 16 years ago

Search for my down voted response on this page. It refers to another HN post where Steve says Apple will continue to make the best computers in the world, meaning he hasn't lost focus on that market.

Tamerlin2• 16 years ago

Not to mention, Apple nearly lost the market entirely during the g4 era, and sales in that segment of the market have been largely static since.

The big winner in that was actually Linux though, not Windows.

metageek• 16 years ago

"There are still a huge number of video, audio, and design professionals that need the power of a Mac Pro and are willing to pay for it. Why would Apple intentionally drop this market?"

They might, if they believe they can make more money investing the same resources in the iPad II.

However, I suspect that won't happen any time soon, because, as long as they're maintaining OS X, they can update the Mac Pro in their sleep. It's all standard technologies, in a pretty ordinary case. They could reduce the Mac Pro department to a handful of industrial designers and one engineer to turn the design into specs Foxconn can build, and still charge $2500 for it.

melling3• 16 years ago

Why is this story #3 on Hacker News? The guy is probably wrong about the Mac Pro. Of course Apple is going to lead the way with USB3. The HN story where Steve says Apple will continue to make the best computers in the world is more interesting.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1457680

Hoff• 16 years ago

Apple has a history of skating to where they think the puck will be.

That's not likely viewed as servers and even as desktops.

Likely mobile clients and clouds and ubiquitous communications.

The section of the D8 interview that Cringley has linked specifically targets how the enterprise market operates; hardly supporting the rest of the discussion in the article. Apple hasn't and doesn't aim at the enterprise market. Duh.

In that same D8 interview, Jobs comments on how his view of a migration away from traditional desktops gives him pause; it's been a familiar computing model for many years for many folks, though the replacement clients are clearly often better options. That he sees desktops around and available for the foreseeable future, but that they're not going to be the platform for the majority of users.

There will still be folks that need a desktop.

Video editing is one of those needs-a-desktop applications, but for how long? How long until you're either rendering on the client, or rendering on hosted services? And until then, yes, there will be boxes to deal with this.

The center of computing moved from IBM and UNIVAC mainframes in glass-walled raised-floor computing centers, to VAX superminis, to Unix workstations, to PCs running various operating systems to PCs running Windows, to bigger and denser data centers and more capable and more mobile clients and now-massively improved communications...

Welcome to computing.

Where's the puck headed?

Boxes for video editing?

I don't think so.

stcredzero2• 16 years ago

Apple has a history of skating to where they think the puck will be.

And a history of being right -- exactly what the shareholders would want.

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

I don't know if I'd say they have a particularly impressive history of "being right". There are some things they do right, and of course the last several years have been huge for Apple, but success now doesn't translate to historical success. They had a pretty hard time through the 90s, and I think that most of their stuff from that time was inferior to the competition.

jsz02• 16 years ago

What I wonder is whether that version will be more — or less — capable than the current? Remember how they’ve dumbed down iMovie? Expect more of the same.

I don't follow. iMovie is a consumer app. It's supposed to be simple and easy to use. Same goes with Garageband/Logic -- the last update to Logic released 8 months ago or so didn't simplify anything or remove features. I don't see why they'd go that route with FCP either. There's a big difference between a $500 pro app and a consumer app that comes for free with your new Mac.

though I’d much prefer Apple embrace eSATA, but probably not.

Maybe on desktops. eSATA is a terrible solution for mobile. It's storage only so you have to dedicate space to a single function port at the cost of more multi-function USB ports. The eSATA connector/port are not very rugged. I've never seen eSATA with power so in a mobile environment you'll have to track down 12V of power to use the eSATA port. There is apparently a spec for eSATA + power though I've never seen it in the real world. USB3 is just a much better solution at this point. (whenever Intel gets around to integrating it into a chipset we'll probably see widespread support)

jws• 16 years ago

I think the next new connector will be Light Peak and if the transceivers are inexpensive it will become "the" interface for all your devices.

If Light Peak is too expensive, then USB-3 will obviate eSATA in any event.

ehnus• 16 years ago

I just noticed that they don't even feature the Xserve on their main store page anymore.

Apple Goes Semi-Pro (Part One)

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