Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro will be shaped by workflows

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/05/apples-2019-imac-pro-will-be-shaped-by-workflows/

by jbegley • 8 years ago

198 346 8 years ago

techcrunch.com

homulilly• 8 years ago

Better late than never, I guess?

k_sze• 8 years ago

Except if they are too late.

Take a look at the new Dell XPS 15” 2-in-1, with Intel Core i7-8705G (with AMD Radeon RX Vega M GH, 4GB of dedicated HMB2), e.g.

That thing ticks most checkboxes of a pro machine, except for the “is a Mac” and “runs Mac-only software” ones.

And I imagine that an upgraded version will come out in 2019. Honestly, I find both Windows 10 Pro and Ubuntu very usable nowadays. I don’t really find much reason to stick with a Mac anymore.

ssijak• 8 years ago

Windows 10 is one giant malware/virus. The interface is terrible too, but that is a preference.

zokier3• 8 years ago

That thing ticks most checkboxes of a pro machine

Except for little things like (workstation) Xeon CPU and pro graphics (Quadro or whatever ATi is calling their FirePros these days).

If you want a actual pro system, check out Dells workstation line, e.g. Precision 7520. Sure, its not light and pretty like a XPS, but you can load it with fairly serious amount of stuff and as a cherry on top it comes with Linux support out of the box.

Workstations are just a different class of computers.

gurkendoktor• 8 years ago

The XPS 2-in-1 has also dropped all useful (in the present) ports, reduced the keyboard travel, and messed up the arrow key area on their keyboards.

I'm worried that the XPS line is trying too hard to be a MacBook; what if they want to make next year's model even thinner?

Their "classic" XPS 15 looks fantastic, but I've read too many complaints about reliability and coil whine. I hope they keep iterating on it for a few more years.

crstinin• 8 years ago

Wait a minute, wasn't it supposed to be 2018?

MBCook• 8 years ago

They never said that, they only said it was not going to be in 2017. The article says this was always their timeline.

If you believe that.

But they never said 2018 and I remember people being very skeptic le that 2018 would happen last year when they first announced they were working on a new Mac Pro.

strictnein3• 8 years ago

Yeah, it was "not 2017" and now they're saying:

We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product

By "transparent and open" I guess they meant wait a year to tell people it's going to be another year?

miles• 8 years ago

Their messaging was vague at best, leading to a number of articles like this one:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170404192349/http://www.macwor...

In April 2017 Apple invited journalists to its Product Realization Lab and made a series of announcements relating to the Mac line, revealing among other things that a minor update to the Mac Pro is imminent and a major revamp will arrive in 2018.

torstenvl2• 8 years ago

So now, two questions:

- Will the Mac Pro actually be Pro?

- Will they ever bring back a Pro computer in a notebook form factor?

rsynnott6• 8 years ago

What's non-'Pro' about the current 15" MBP that was 'Pro' about the previous design? They're practically the same.

If you mean no SD card reader etc, it's my understanding that pro photographers tended to use a USB3/thunderbolt reader anyway, as the integrated reader was connected over USB2 internally and was far too slow for pro use.

command_tab• 8 years ago

FWIW, the SD card slot in newer (but not newest, ugh) Mac models is connected via the PCIe bus and not USB.

BuildTheRobots• 8 years ago

My 9 year old toshiba has a pci based SD card reader. The possibility for it to be internal and also offer reasonable speeds is not beyond the pale.

Some of the top end cameras use both CF and SD, so sure, it doesn't cater for everyone, but SD has become so ubiquitous it seems odd it's missing.

awiesenhofer• 8 years ago

was far too slow for pro use

I read this every time it comes up on HN yet every single one of the five photographers in our shared office laments nothing more than the missing card reader.

If it was so slow why not just upgrade it to a USB3/PCIe-connected reader? and being a 'pro' device why didn't they do that already when USB3 became available?

aarmenaa2• 8 years ago

- Escape button is on the touchbar

- Touchbar at all

- Battery reduced from 99 whr to 76 whr

- Lost magnetic charging port

- Lost every other useful port

- Keyboard generally considered worse

I currently have a 15" mid-2015 MBP, and I use the DisplayPort, HDMI, and USB-A ports on a daily basis. Losing the ports doesn't bother me too much, but similarly priced or cheaper laptops don't ask me compromise there. On the other hand the battery life, touchpad, and keyboard will be absolutely stellar or I'm not buying it, especially in this price range. Again, others ask me to compromise less. While Apple still has the best touchpads in the industry, others are catching up. Meanwhile, Apple has regressed in several ways

redial2• 8 years ago

An SD reader connected over USB2 is better than no SD card reader. If they cared they would have made it PCIe, but instead they took it away in a move that benefited only Apple. No pro benefited from the removal of the sd slot. It didn't make the machine cheaper, or faster, and in fact it made it harder and more complicated to use. And then they had the audacity to charge more for it.

endymi0n• 8 years ago

Still hoping for a professional MacBOOK, but Apple doesn't ever listen to their pro customers or do they?

BoorishBears9• 8 years ago

? Isn’t that a MacBook Pro?

torstenvl2• 8 years ago

You mean the one without a real keyboard or the one with only one port while plugged in?

slig2• 8 years ago

He probably wants a portable Mac that the user can upgrade RAM/SSD/battery with a non fluffy keyboard. Yeah, that ship has already sailed.

prepend4• 8 years ago

16gb ram isn’t very pro.

jdietrich2• 8 years ago

By comparison with high-end mobile workstations, it's a toy.

A maxed out Macbook Pro has 16GB of non-upgradeable, non-ECC RAM and a GPU with 4GB of vRAM and a Passmark score of 3,553.

Lenovo will sell me a machine with 64GB of socketed ECC RAM and a Quadro P5000 with 16GB of vRAM and a Passmark score of 10,281.

The Macbook Pro doesn't have built-in LTE. It has a non-removable battery. It throttles badly under sustained loads. It has chronic issues with display calibration. If you want a useful selection of ports, you'll need a bag full of fragile and easy to lose dongles. They've only just rolled out eGPU support and there's still no official support for Nvidia GPUs. There's no 17" option. It has that damnable butterfly keyboard.

Yes, the Macbook Pro is very thin and lightweight, but Apple have made a lot of performance and usability tradeoffs to get there. That doesn't sound very "pro" to me.

IOT_Apprentice3• 8 years ago

No. The MacBook Pro as implemented is a prosumer machine at best. A Pro machine would have higher end components at the BTO level. 1) larger size for greater battery capacity, 2) Xeon-D as an option, 3) 32-64 Gig of RAM, 4) High end graphics, 5) better keyboard. User replaceable drive, and memory. Apple has the capital to build a Halo laptop, just as they do for phones. They simply chose not to.

jphoward• 8 years ago

I wonder who the target market is, though? The iMac Pro can cost £5000, so I assume more performance and hence price than that? The only users who I can imagine willing to justify paying such a premium are those who feel they must remain at the cutting edge of performance and are willing to pay for it, but surely they will have left the Apple ecosystem by then?

It's as if Apple are saying "we're making a computer for people who demand peak performance, but are willing to use cheap outdated hardware until we get round to it."

rsynnott6• 8 years ago

I'd assume mostly people who want really hefty GPUs (and for whom eGPUs aren't an option). The iMac Pro won't help you there.

thirdsun2• 8 years ago

In the article it sounded as if they actually intend to achieve modularity fort the Mac Pro with eGPUs, or peripheral hardware in general. A mistake in my opinion.

VonGuard• 8 years ago

This is for Logic and Final Cut users who want to have the best and don't know enough about computers to understand they're being ripped off.

seanmcdirmid4• 8 years ago

Or they bill $2-300/hour so they don't really care. If their tooling is on the Apple side, they don't really have the option of going for a high end PC.

jayd16• 8 years ago

If you do any iOS work you need macs as build machines because of Apple's lock in. Spending the money on an iMac is just a waste of a monitor and if you're already spending the money on the hardware you might as well get something that can do render jobs as well. You need GPUs for that.

andrei_says_2• 8 years ago

I think this is where Hackintosh comes in. You can buy top of the line, macOS-compatible hardware for 1/3 of the Apple premium.

It takes effort to set up, but not that much.

mulmen5• 8 years ago

To me the value of a Mac is not macOS. It’s having a complete device solution that just works.

I don’t want to fight with my workstation all the time. I want to use it to do... work.

jackhack3• 8 years ago

Perhaps this is part of the reason why Apple is moving away from Intel chips to some of their own creations?

ovao2• 8 years ago

I simply cannot imagine running something like that in a professional context. For me, "maybe this next update will install correctly" is a non-starter.

For consumers who just really want to run macOS, I can see the appeal.

atonse3• 8 years ago

This is a myth that keeps going and going.

A Core i7 is not the same as a Xeon. ECC memory matters. The Apple premium simply isn't that much higher.

I also wanted to add that the cost of a person's time eclipses the cost of hardware (especially with computers). As a business, I simply wouldn't risk having days of downtime from a bad update, just to save $2,000 for something that's used for years, when the lost time in paying a creative person's salary will eclipse that.

gervase• 8 years ago

This solution is fine for individual developers, or even small shops / startups, but it would never fly in a more corporate environment. Coincidentally, those environments are also the most likely to drop $5K+ on a development machine without batting an eye.

jonknee2• 8 years ago

Not even close to true:

https://www.cultofmac.com/485914/imac-pro-pricetag/

mjamesaustin• 8 years ago

The Mac Pro doesn't include a monitor, so I can see it starting at less than the iMac Pro.

walshemj4• 8 years ago

err no not if they do it right they will be offering the top of the line Xeons and one or two hefty GPU cards.

The new imac pro has the entry Level xenon and still throttles after 10 min.

limeblack• 8 years ago

I wonder who the target market is, though?

Schools for sure. The staff believes that Macs are better and have bough trash cans to replace the cheese graters.

humbleMouse• 8 years ago

Just make it a cool looking square and shove tons of hardware in it. The whole circle thing is such a bad design.

pmlnr• 8 years ago

So, in essence, a Borg cube.

jackhack3• 8 years ago

more closely related -- a NeXT Cube.

mseebach• 8 years ago

The Apple Signature Box III.

peatmoss2• 8 years ago

NeXT.

Though the big aluminum desktops they made years ago were probably a high point for balance of beautiful and functional.

wlesieutre4• 8 years ago

IIRC the NeXT boxes were actually magnesium.

microtonal2• 8 years ago

Though the big aluminum desktops they made years ago were probably a high point for balance of beautiful and functional.

This. I think existing and potential future Mac Pro users would be perfectly happy with a cheese gater that has 2018 innards (ok, they could make it Space Gray).

When it comes to Pro hardware, I think that Apple has lost the balance between aesthetics and functionality. The trash can Mac Pro is a good example of this - it's beautiful, overheating all the time and not extensible. So is the new MacBook lineup, they are beautiful. But really? 1 USB-C port on the MacBook 12" and 2 USB-C ports on the MacBook Pro Escape? I don't know of any MacBook 12"/Pro user who doesn't dislike the port selection.

jonhendry1815• 8 years ago

They could have taken the old cheese grater Mac Pro case, put in some non-embarassing hardware, made it "space gray", called it the "Mac Pro Monolith", and released it this year with ads tied into the 50th anniversary of Kubrick's 2001.

Instead in 2020 we'll probably get something like the desktop computer version of the RED camera system, and priced to match. Something that Apple's very very VIP consultants can use and afford but which doesn't meet anyone else's needs or budgets.

cJ0th• 8 years ago

The big question is: Will it still come with an Intel cpu?

ovao2• 8 years ago

Almost assuredly.

wlesieutre4• 8 years ago

If Apple switches to some other CPU architecture, the Mac Pro will be the very last thing to change, assuming it does at all.

The processors they've developed for iPhones and iPads are getting into laptop territory, but it's a big step from there to 2x 6-core Xeons.

LgWoodenBadger• 8 years ago

It will come with both (Intel and their own), which is why it's 2019.

That's the only reason I can think of

prepend4• 8 years ago

I bet it’s going to be a sphere on a stick. Like the original LEGO Death Star II. But if it had been completed all the way around.

https://i2.wp.com/www.yuppiegadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

majewsky3• 8 years ago

What about the existing trashcan design, but instead of plugging in a monitor and mouse and keyboard, the trashcan's surface is just one single touch screen? That's much more user-friendly, you don't have to mess with cables at all anymore.

prepend4• 8 years ago

Good point on user friendly. But I don’t think that’s really what they’re going for.

Sphere on a stick would be cool to mount on a walk so it looks cool and then have wireless video (or video through the stem) so you just remote into it from your local network from tablets or light notebooks as terminals.

jonhendry1815• 8 years ago

Take the existing trashcan design, make it three times as tall, and have the top be somewhat thicker. And have two more rounded cylinders at the bottom adjacent to the main cylinder.

ChuckMcM2• 8 years ago

Reading this it had me reminiscing about Sun back in its heyday as a workstation vendor. Sun used to do this stuff, they would bring in a partner who had some critical application and the Sun engineering team and the partner's engineering team, and some "power users" of the tool would all work through what it would take to make the tool work better on a Sun Workstation than any other workstation. Sun engineering got a collection of bugs, features, and investigations that would come out of those exercises. When my wife was at Xerox they were doing similar sorts of studies for document preparation and presentation.

You could do that when the workstation cost $25,000, (in 1990 dollars!) I'm not sure how viable it is when the workstation is less than $5,000.

That said, I really miss using software products where that level of thought has gone into its design. The three 'creative' apps I use (other than writing code) are drawing, schematic capture/board layout (EDA), and writing. All systems that benefit from people investing in how the flow of these things work, and all of which have degraded over time.

ggg9990• 8 years ago

What drawing apps do you use, on what devices, and what is worst about those apps to you?

ChuckMcM2• 8 years ago

On my PC I use Corel Draw, on the iPad Autodesk Sketchbook, Touch Draw, or the Notes application, on the Surface its usually Sketchbook but I've also got Sketchable, and on Linux Inkscape.

The worst thing is the linkage between knowing what you want to do and assembling the right tools to do it in the app you're looking at. Most of my drawing is technical in nature (systems, small components, software architectures, Etc.)

TrainedMonkey• 8 years ago

The world is bigger and wealthier today. You sell significantly more workstations which translates into way higher profit.

mixmastamyk4• 8 years ago

Not to mention Apple is overflowing with profit. Their failures around the pro market in the last decade have not been about resource constraints but poor vision and execution.

They could have put out a cheese-grater with fresh Intel chips every year like clockwork, but they were too cool for that. And the failure is all the more striking when they continue to "crush it" in other categories.

gumby• 8 years ago

You could do that when the workstation cost $25,000, (in 1990 dollars!) I'm not sure how viable it is when the workstation is less than $5,000.

I think it work because the customer spend is of comparable magnitude. Back in the mid 90s you might have a couple of dozen game devs working on $2000 PCs with a few $45K Onyx machines used for back end rendering or part time use of a few artists = ~$200K. Or (in my case) you only had a couple of AI developers but each had a pair of $50K 3650s = ~$200K. Or your prop traders had a $25K Sparcstation on their desk and one at home, but the rank and file just had a Bloomberg terminal.

Now you have much larger teams with more uniform machines (+ some cloud resource). The total institutional spend is probably higher in constant dollars.

Speaking of which it will be interesting to see if Apple is able to push some of their APIs into the cloud so you can develop on a mac pro and dynamically push the heavy lifting into an apple rendering cloud. This article just talked about scaling ios <-> Mac Os <-> MacOS+iOS+eGPU (nice!) but left out "<-> cloud". That's where editing on iOS could really shine: chop up / assemble your downsampled rushes on your tablet and then stream them to the AppleTV at your bosses' office. Remember Peter Jackson used to bring his to LA every week on an iPod in his pocket.

Cthulhu_2• 8 years ago

I think there might be some people interested in a 25K machine, but only if it really improves their workflow; don't think adding more money / processing power does much for most people, maybe for 3d rendering but they have specialized hardware for that, which gives them more raw bang for their bucks than Apple could do.

I'm wondering if it'd be viable to have a 'compute unit' shared by multiple users. i/o would probably be a bottleneck, so maybe have it link up macs via usb-c? It might help with e.g. compile times (which last time I did iOS development, two years ago, was kinda slow (>1 minute for our app, CPU bound)).

But that's probably too specialized a thing. Apple wants to sell units by the million, not the hundreds (if that). Which is why they discontinued the mac pro and the 17 inch MBP.

andromeduck• 8 years ago

Something like the dxg-1/dxg-2?

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-2/

wintercharm2• 8 years ago

I remember those old Sun Blade processors. They were absolutely beastly, provided you had to know-how to extract parallel performance from them :D

jacquesm• 8 years ago

The only reasons I spent that kind of money on workstations back then were that I wanted my desktop to be Unix and I wanted good 3D graphics performance. The only way to get those in one compact box was to make a deal with SGI.

These days I get astoundingly better performance than whatever that low volume hardware did back then out of a $700 desktop with a $800 graphics card and a $500 monitor.

$5000 is probably still too high, unless you see the Apple product line as your only option.

Lapsa• 8 years ago

what on earth is "promunnication"?

saagarjha8• 8 years ago

Professional+communication?

kylehotchkiss• 8 years ago

Yay, a Mac made to run JS development tools.

GiorgioG3• 8 years ago

From 2007 to 2016 I was all-in on OS X / MacBook Pros / iMacs for work (software dev.) Since then I've gone back to a Dell XPS 15 and a custom-built AMD Threadripper machine. As much as I like the Mac hardware, I could no longer justify the cost. The XPS is a nice machine and (no touchbar - it's a feature) and my custom-PC is a monster. Windows 10 with all its warts is plenty serviceable especially now with it's Linux Subsystem (primarily because I prefer to use bash as my shell.)

I guess I'm no longer part of their target market for their computer systems.

asciimo• 8 years ago

Linux Subsystem

Wat.I just went googling after reading this comment and at first glance, it looks like this is an officially supported method to run GNU apps in a Windows terminal? Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI?

cthalupa2• 8 years ago

Wat.I just went googling after reading this comment and at first glance, it looks like this is an officially supported method to run GNU apps in a Windows terminal?

It's hardly limited to GNU apps. Most of your Linux applications should work fine on it. I've had no problem with all sorts of non-GNU releases when I use it on my desktop.

Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI?

No, it is a Linux userland on top of the NT kernel with an emulation layer written to handle all of the syscalls.

It works well. The only really glaring issue is ConEmu and related Windows terminal ecosystem is still hot garbage compared to any Linux or OSX terminal.

GiorgioG3• 8 years ago

Here's a link on how to get Linux GUI going: (edit - better link) http://blog.sqlyog.com/how-to-add-a-gui-to-the-new-bash-cons...

always_good• 8 years ago

I could justify the cost that whole time until the 2017 Macbook Pro. Or was it the 2016 that moved to the tiny-action keyboard switches?

My 2017 MBP is less than 6 months old and two keys don't attach to the switch anymore. They literally come off with my finger as I type. They aren't broken, the C-clamps are still intact. They have just widened enough with wear such that they don't clamp anymore.

It's so bad that I use my 2014 Macbook Air when I need to do a lot of typing.

Most of the people I know IRL are having the same issues with their newer model Macbooks, especially my developer friends since we of course tend to be harder on our keyboards.

So you aren't missing anything.

GiorgioG3• 8 years ago

My daughter's 2016 12" Macbook's space bar only works on a hard key press. I have AppleCare on it, but taking it to either Apple Store in our area is a ridiculous hassle. Drive 30+ minutes, service will take a minimum of 2-3 hours (at least that's been my experience with our phones.) I feel that Apple used to have a competitive advantage in that I could bring my devices in, have them serviced in a reasonable amount of time while I wait (an hour?)

My dad had is IPhone 6+ battery replaced under the $29 plan. 6+ week wait for the battery. They call, the battery is in, dad shows up at 11:30am on a weekday, it'll be ready by 3pm. He shows up at 3, and it takes until nearly 4 o'clock to get someone to get the device back out to him. I'm reaching the point where I may as well go with Dell/Samsung because shipping a device in is guaranteed to be less of a hassle than the "Apple Store Genius Bar" experience.

wwweston3• 8 years ago

I guess I'm no longer part of their target market for their computer systems.

I've seen the phrase "not part of their target market" deployed at developers and particular users with increasing frequency for years.

Seems inevitable that eventually people will go somewhere else.

prolikewhoa2• 8 years ago

Dell XPS laptops are very high quality and a definite suitable replacement for a Macbook Pro if you can justify getting rid of OSX. XPS laptops are also fully Linux supported out of the box.

drawkbox5• 8 years ago

Mac Pro cheese graters going away was a bad move and a missed opportunity by Apple, today they already lost the power pro users and they had them for a while.

Most Mac Pro users have moved back to PC, or iMac's/minis just for iOS/macOS related dev, with most work being done on PCs.

Apple had a window where developers needed a heavy Pro Mac for iOS, nix development like python/ruby/etc, even Unity dev back when it was only on Mac (2007-2010 ish), it was also great to have a Mac after the 2006 Intel processor move as it was the sexiest nix and great for developers from 2006 on, but those days are over.

Somewhere in 2013, they just moved on from the cheese grater and Pro market that included developers and content creators. Now they want to regain it? There was so much momentum squandered here and hearing Tim Cook repeat "Post-PC" and Apple messaging that desktops were like trucks, only developers need them, caused them to move on, so did the pro users and developers. Apple even watered down their developer laptops and Macbook Pros, 17" screens were relegated to being 'lapzillas' and Apple went only mainstream. Content creators and programming were not something they focused on anymore after the iPhone took over, eventhough those influencers were always the focus. I thought they would use the iPhone and iOS/macOS platforms to get more people on their desktops as well, instead they went the other direction.

We used to be Mac Pro heavy now we just have iMacs/minis for the last mile or iOS/macOS export and testing with performance heavy beefy PCs for most of the day to day work. Additionally, taking your jet engine/trashcan new Mac Pro or iMac to the mall for repairs instead of just popping in a new video card or drive also sucks.

Developers can get two performance PCs for the price of one Mac Pro. Usually you can get more power out of both as well since Mac Pros from 2011 on were 1-2 years behind. There is no getting back pro users such as devs/game devs that had switched over and have now gone back to Windows/PC.

jjeaff13• 8 years ago

But how in the world are you going to manage without ecc memory? You might have a bit get flipped by a cosmic ray once every 5 years of 24x7 computing.

gruez• 8 years ago

intel xeon e3 or amd

cullenking• 8 years ago

Switched to a threadripper 1950 and used ecc memory and an nvme drive. Fastest computer I could build at the moment, cost less than half of a worse Mac,even with a 34 inch curved widescreen. Plus I got to go back to awesomewm. Finally I don't hate my dev environment. Feels good to get back to my pre-2013 roots.

protomyth3• 8 years ago

An article of frequency of errors http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory-2

tnorgaard• 8 years ago

According to this IBM study [2]/Wiki article [0], the probability is much higher - per the study with 128GiB of memory it is every 1h 25min.

There was an anecdote[1] about a Power Mac cluster at a university, which basically couldn't get past boot because the memory errors was so frequent.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#Effect_on_electroni... [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-s... [2] http://www.pld.ttu.ee/IAF0030/curtis.pdf

wilsonnb2• 8 years ago

How many game devs actually used Mac Pros instead of Windows machines?

drawkbox5• 8 years ago

Not a ton, but for iOS games you have to export at least on an Apple machine. At our studio most people had PCs but people working on iOS/Unity games had Mac Pros and iMacs solely or in addition to PCs.

There was also a window where Unity was only available on Mac from 2007-2010 where lots of Macs were purchased by game devs.

Also making Linux/Apple/web games there was a little blip for a while where Macs were making inroads especially after going Intel processors. OSX is arguably the sexiest nix compatible machine and is quite fun/efficient for development.

Overall game devs have always used PC as the main for desktop, but with mobile and iOS taking over handheld gaming in 2007, game studios all had to buy them.

Now, most end up just getting a few iMacs or Mac Minis to export on and debug otherwise much of the game dev work is done on PCs.

Apple truly lost game devs, but also other content creators like video editing/production, graphic designers, photographers, audio production and more. These professionals were always the focus of Apple, amazing they just let those people wander off as they are also influencers. I even see lots of devs going from Macbook Pro to Surface Pros now because their main machines are back to PC, that could eventually start causing people to switch from iPhone to Android/Samsung/Google as well.

stiGGG• 8 years ago

caused them to move on, so did the pro users and developers

Wasn't there a statistic from github recently, that 75% of the PRs created in 2017, were done from Macs? They are bigger in the market for devs then ever before, the thing is, that the majority of this peer group is totally fine with a MBP. I see this whole new MacPro story more as a marketing campaign, the driving factor behind this is not the demand from the market, it's only for their long-term reputation.

drawkbox5• 8 years ago

Yeah Apple still owns the laptop market but even their latest Macbook Pro wasn't really, more mainstream. Mac is still a better development environment because it is nix based for most things webdev related and iOS appdev mobile related.

At far as desktops though, even creative/advertising agencies are moving to PC for 3d, photography, graphic design, audio production, video production and more. These were always the target market of Apple but they lost many.

Apple iPhone lost ground to Android and laptops may also do so starting with development. I see many devs that went from Mac to PC desktop go from Macbook Pros to Surface Pros but that is just starting. Eventually it could also start switching people from iPhone to Android/Samsung/Google hardware as well as the hardware has caught up.

Apple being a hardware company, it is strange they did not take more advantage of the desktop inroads they were making in 2006+ with Intel and iOS development.

Cthulhu_2• 8 years ago

"fine", yes, but it could be a lot better still. I'd sacrifice the small size and touch bar and such for a faster cpu, or a docking station (like the plan they had for a new display, which included its own discrete graphics card to help power the 5K display - actually there was an article recently saying Apple now supports external gpu's, so that might still be a thing), or a better keyboard, bigger screen, etc.

(and personally, yes I'm stuck with a laptop due to work atm. Wouldn't mind having an office or fixed work place with an imac pro though)

tedivm• 8 years ago

Yeah but most of the people using OSX aren't really thrilled about it. I'm typing this on a 2012 MBP- there's not much that's pushing me to upgrade to their latest machines.

opencl3• 8 years ago

Wasn't there a statistic from github recently, that 75% of the PRs created in 2017, were done from Macs?

No, there wasn't. Github posts lots of stats but nothing about OS shares.

electricslpnsld4• 8 years ago

We’ve been focusing on visual effects

Are any visual effects or animation shops still on macOS? I was under the impression that this world was mainly Linux (Pixar, Disney, Weta, ILM, etc, are all on Linux).

jjeaff13• 8 years ago

The major studios are still using Maya, Photoshop, and other commercial software that doesn't work on Linux. They are using Linux for render farms and some custom software.

electricslpnsld4• 8 years ago

The major studios are still using Maya, Photoshop, and other commercial software that doesn't work on Linux.

Maya/Houdini/Modo/etc run on Linux (this is what Weta, Disney, and Pixar do). Creative Cloud definitely does not, which is a bit of a problem.

mixmastamyk4• 8 years ago

Maya does too, all major vfx software runs primarily on Linux these days. Photoshop is another animal where the vast majority of users are in other fields on mainstream platforms.

kokey• 8 years ago

I'm really glad to see that Apple is paying attention again to what have been their long time core users. First with the new iPad for the education market and now revealing strategies for creatives in design and audio.

foobaw• 8 years ago

It will still take a while to penetrate the gaming market. A $3000 desktop can play most games at the highest settings right now including VR.

A $3000 mac would be lucky if the games even supported OSX.

saagarjha8• 8 years ago

Why do you you think Apple is trying to enter the gaming market?

jnsaff2• 8 years ago

What I read from the article is that Apple is working on finding a few workflows and optimising the hell out of those instead of like creating an awesome general purpose computer for which only users imagination is the limitation.

Which obviously is a very Appley thing to do.

krylon3• 8 years ago

I do not need a Mac Pro, nor could I afford one if I wanted to (I do own one, though, albeit it is 11 years old, I got it preowned from a friend).

But I wonder what the hell the people at Apple were thinking when they put put the "trashcan"-design. It looks awesome, I cannot deny it, and I imagine it is very convenient to handle.

But something deep inside of me cringes when a computer in this price class has everything soldered on and has no real option to extend it. You cannot upgrade the CPU, the RAM, the GPU, nor can you install any additional PCIe cards.

timc34• 8 years ago

It wasnt that convenient when you wanted to put stuff inside it or rack it. Hence the thirdparty rack chassis market.

krylon3• 8 years ago

When I said "convenient to handle", I was thinking, small enough to sit on top of my desk, lightweight enough so I can carry it without breaking a sweat (the cheesegrater is really heavy!), that sort of thing.

jonhendry1815• 8 years ago

I assume Jony Ive said "I'm so bored of boxes" and that was the end of the cheese grater.

gaius2• 8 years ago

It’s the ultimate rounded corner

whywhywhywhy2• 8 years ago

I waited and waited and waited. I liked the design of the Trashcan but by the time I could afford one it was woefully out of date and I needed Nvidia GPUs for the rendering engine I wanted to use.

In the end I moved my creative work over to PC and currently run a nice compact mATX PC built for GPU computing with two 1080Tis. Still cost me less than half the eventual iMac Pro and presumably this Mac Pro.

If this had been released a few years back maybe I'd never have moved to PC but at this stage they'll have to be still supporting the new Mac Pro in 3 years before I even consider moving back at this point.

Been a Mac only user for 15 years now, I didn't move away lightly, but now I've switched it'll be hard to convince me back.

wuliwong3• 8 years ago

I wonder at what scale has this occurred? Has video editing industry moved away from Apple computers in a substantial way?

They have managed to keep the music recording industry; a new macbook pro or imac is plenty powerful enough to be the heart of a recording studio.

ladzoppelin• 8 years ago

Many people in the pro audio world have moved to Windows over the last 5 years. Apogee, who I think Apple paid to only support OsX at one time, now makes Windows drivers and officially supports both platforms. MOTU has been cross platform since like 2006. Logic is really the only audio product that does not support Windows but only because Apple killed the pc version in like 2004. Logic pc was amazing and might even still run on Windows 10.

timc34• 8 years ago

What are you basing that on? There is plenty of Windows now being used in audio. I use a MacBook Pro 2017 QuadCore, and still off loading audio work to a PC. The laptop uses the fan really heavily. Granted the i7 iMac is pretty damn good, but still you need up with lots of things hanging off it.

It also depends on the music you do and the plugins you run.

dmix• 8 years ago

He stresses that it’s not just Apple’s applications that they’re testing and working to help make better. Third-party relationships on this are very important to them and the workflow team is helping to fix their problems faster too.

This is great. Sounds a lot like Microsoft's recent change in culture away from using Windows as their worldview lens for everything to seeing their work as being platform agnostic (with non-Windows OS, mobile, IoT, watches, cars, etc).

rch2• 8 years ago

It sounds like the next Mac Pro still won't handle ML workloads in a meaningful way, but it will have a keyboard with a touchbar that works with Garage Band. Pass.

saagarjha8• 8 years ago

You might get external GPU support if you're trying to do ML.

rch2• 8 years ago

Then I'll stick with a laptop. Probably my first non-MPB in over a decade.

ellisv3• 8 years ago

I disagree. Do you really want to be training large models locally? The effort for Apple to optimize the Mac for ML is not worth it (for anyone). The cloud is cheap and ubiquitous.

ericd2• 8 years ago

Which cloud provider? When I last ran the numbers, 1080 Ti cards paid for themselves pretty quickly vs Amazon's ML instances if you're using them regularly. Also, you never have to remember to shut off your instances.

I've never done ML professionally, though, so it may be a totally different use case that you're thinking about.

nkkollaw• 8 years ago

I wonder what "pro" means to Apple anymore.

The Macbook Pro is unarguably _not_ pro. Maybe anything above $4,000..?

qaq2• 8 years ago

I have 2009 flashed to 2010 with 64GB RAM and modern GPU and SSD and to be honest I don't see a need to upgrade.

drawkbox5• 8 years ago

Apple is going to EOL Mac Pros to 2011 via the next OS and have done for many of the older Mac Pros [1]. It is a shame because many can still run it just fine. I have a 2012 I got in 2013 which is our last Mac Pro and I am not going to be happy the day they do it.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624

qaq2• 8 years ago

At work we still run El Captain so I am fine using High Sierra for a few years at home :) hopefully by that time Ubuntu will be usable with multiple HiDPI displays.

overcast• 8 years ago

My 2008 is running the very latest version of High Sierra without any issues. It's a very simple hack to make it work. So you can get more life out of it easily.

chris_wot2• 8 years ago

If Apple say they want to look at workflows, and winkle out bugs, then I've got a good one - but incredibly specific to LibreOffice.

If they get the LibreOffice git repository, then run:

  make sw.all

eventually it will get to the unit tests and one of our exports kills the display server. Only happens if you run it on a iMac Pro 4K screen running max resolution.

We know it's something we are doing around graphics, but for the life of us we can't work out what that is. But also: I would have thought killing the display server like this should be something that shouldn't be possible...

majewsky3• 8 years ago

I'm making a guess that the explanation is going to be as hilarious as the infamous "LibreOffice cannot print on Tuesdays" bug, which ended up being a problem with file(1).

chris_wot2• 8 years ago

Almost certainly :-)

For anyone who wants to find out about the above-referenced bug, see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956

stcredzero• 8 years ago

Apple has had a long history of "innovation" which only has longevity in the form of museum pieces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G4

tibbon2• 8 years ago

I switched to Apple product in 2002, because at the time they were absolutely better than Windows 2000 for my needs (mostly Protools, and eventually Logic 7). Windows at the time was a mess and poorly supported most pro hardware and vendors (specifically Avid) were slow to support releases.

It really felt like the best platform. I had a nice G4 tower, and eventually used a G5 and then Mac Pro tower. Things generally just worked, and you could expand things as needed.

Roll around to today, and it's a mess. Apple canceled a lot of their pro products. Aperture? Dead. Final Cut got nerfed pretty hard. Logic is still reasonably well maintained, but Ableton Live took over a lot for me.

The hardware options aren't that great right now for my needs. Last week, I sold my 2011 Macbook Pro to a friend and switched all my audio stuff to my old Windows gaming system. Picked up a Firewire PCI-E card for $20 and I was in business. It's fast, has a ton of ram and is easily expandable. Windows 10 drives me nuts, but eh...

I've still got three Macbook Pros for software development, and they are pretty great for that (minus the new keyboard, and that Tensorflow GPU has dropped OS X support). I don't think I'll be switching laptops anytime soon. But ugh, audio work on them just feels like an overpriced joke at this point.

I really never thought I'd be saying it, but for photography and audio stuff, Windows seems to be the place right now!

chrisper3• 8 years ago

Have you ever considered a hackintosh?

ellisv3• 8 years ago

I think a big part of @tibbon's complaint is the lack of pro software (from Apple).

ellisv3• 8 years ago

they are pretty great for that (minus the new keyboard, and that Tensorflow GPU has dropped OS X support).

If you're training a model on your laptop, instead of a server, does it really matter? It doesn't seem likely that you'd want to deploy a model trained locally.

cthalupa2• 8 years ago

As someone who uses a MBP as a daily driver laptop: Windows has been a better platform for a lot of the photography software for over a decade. Photoshop and Lightroom just work a ton better on Windows and have since right before the CS days.

But the native terminal, etc, has won me over as a *Nix person for a long time. I don't like Linux desktop interfaces at all, and the new Windows linux/bash stuff hasn't been compelling or integrated enough for me to want to switch (ConEmu and all of the terminal stuff being garbage is a big issue). I'll be sticking with a MBP and OSX for my laptop and work related stuff, but I don't understand why anyone would still be using OSX for a photography workflow. It's just so much more polished on Windows.

wyoung22• 8 years ago

Lightroom just work[s] a ton better on Windows

That’s not my experience, at least with Classic.

Mine is a Mac house. My parents, though, are long-time Windows users; I only managed to get my parents to run a single iMac, which they gave away as soon as they could financially justify it.

I tell you that because that is where my cross-platform Lightroom experience comes from: almost all Mac, with occasional mentoring/support sessions under Windows at the parents’ house. With Lightroom on Windows, I’ve repeatedly observed:

1. Windows’ brain-dead default-mandatory file locking prevents perfectly reasonable operations, simply because Lightroom is busy working with one or more files in the background. Advisory locking as is default on POSIX type systems allows many things that Windows refuses to allow by default. (E.g. Rename a parent folder while a file in that folder is open for writing. Who cares, the FD is still valid!)

2. Lightroom can take a long time to shut down when it gets busy, as it too-frequently does. On the Mac, the app icon remains marked “running” while Lightroom grinds away, trying to figure out how to shut down, but on Windows, the app icon disappears from the task bar almost immediately, but Lightroom.exe remains running in the background, so that it is not obvious why reopening the program fails for minutes at a time.

(And why reopen? Because relaunching Lightroom often solves slowdown problems, and has for years upon years, which is a separate rant.)

3. Some plugins simply won’t run on Windows, at least not without dragging along a bunch of compatibility junk. Anything that depends on ExifTool, for example, requires dragging over a whole Perl environment just to run the plugin. If you have multiple plugins dependent on ExifTool, as I do, each one usually comes with its own Perl environment. Compare macOS, where at worst you have the CPAN module alone, and at best, it might simply require that you install ExifTool separately, that being a reasonable user requirement on an OS like macOS.

If your comment was referring to GPU acceleration and such, Adobe’s recent focus on that isn’t helping me anyway. Almost all of my problems with Lightroom’s speed are in the Library module, not the Develop module, where GPU acceleration doesn’t help much anyway.

mistrial9• 8 years ago

happily using Mac OSX 10.7 on three or four machines today, and avoiding for years the variously awful MacOSX experiences of intrusive and superficial "improvements"; I believe I am not alone in this point of view. Hefty hardware is only part of the story here.

jaxondu• 8 years ago

If you develop iOS app, Apple is forcing you to use at least Sierra 10.12 for XCode 9 and the need to support iPhone X screen.

eddieh• 8 years ago

I thought holdouts were all on 10.6 aka Snow Leopard?

jnwatson2• 8 years ago

I hate to admit this, but Apple should sell off its Mac division. They are simply not hungry enough.

For the first time in 33 years, I no longer have access to a Mac. Apple doesn’t sell one that my employers nor myself want to buy.

That it has taken so long to course correct would have sunk most companies. It is probably a couple percent hit on Apple revenue at most.

mixmastamyk4• 8 years ago

Wow, yes they've definitely lost their "eye of the tiger," haha.

Doubt there is a Lenovo waiting in the wings, nor would they allow it, a shame.

namelost2• 8 years ago

I wish Apple would just make their own ATX case (or any other standard *TX form factor), their own ATX motherboard with their TPM on it, and then use commodity components for everything else. I'd pay a huge premium for that product, but Apple is so far up their own ass trying to imitate themselves they can't see what their customers really need.

wilsonnb2• 8 years ago

I find it likely that Apple knows what their customers need more than random people commenting on the internet know what Apple's customers need.

mixmastamyk4• 8 years ago

Obviously not, they haven't had a competitive product in the space for ~five years.

pjmlp3• 8 years ago

They tried that in the past.

It was one of the first things Jobs "fixed".

namelost2• 8 years ago

If you mean the clones, that's not exactly what I'm suggesting. I want Apple to continue building computers, but to use industry standard form factors, and to use as many commodity components as possible.

They could get such a product out faster than 2019 and it would be better than whatever they will end up announcing. Instead we have to wait a year for Apple to figure out how to make a computer that is 'pretty' and 'innovative' enough for Apple, even when their professional customers don't give a toss how pretty or innovative it is.

jonhendry1815• 8 years ago

I think perhaps they mean something like the Intel-based developer boxes offered to Mac software developers, between the announcement of the move to Intel and the offical release of Intel Macs. It was basically a not very fancy motherboard with an Intel CPU, in a G5 PowerMac case with a different arrangement of fans.

tambourine_man• 8 years ago

What are Pros supposed to do in the mean time? Keep buying PCs I guess. Why haven't they kept selling the cheese grater is beyond me.

They are spending a fortune to understand what Pros need, while we have been screaming for the better part of the decade: lots of user accessible RAM, storage, PCI & GPU. How much would it cost R&D to update the Mac Pro? Teenagers can do it for peanuts, I'm sure the largest company in the freaking world could manage. If they were truly sorry or marginally “cared”, that's what they would have done years ago.

I'm fine with them playing the “let's reinvent the Pro computer” game as a side project, they have this massive amount of money burning a whole in their pockets after all, but some of us need to work.

TheOtherHobbes• 8 years ago

Pros are supposed to buy an iMac Pro in the meantime, and then buy the modular Mac Pro Pro with all the pro trimmings - iPads for touch control, and such - when it all arrives next year.

It's going to be interesting to see if they stick with Intel for the Pro. It's entirely possible they won't, especially given Intel's security issues.

What that means for performance remains to be seen.

jbigelow76• 8 years ago

It's going to be interesting to see if they stick with Intel for the Pro.

Wouldn't the apps that the pro users dictate that to a large extent? If the truly "pro" apps don't get rebuilt against ARM then it would be like Apple never really released the Mac Pro if they ditch Intel so early into its return.

Redoubts• 8 years ago

They could at least spec bump the trash can. Thermal design issues aside, performance per watt has only gotten better for the design they already had, right?

dfabulich• 8 years ago

They said they can't spec bump it. https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will. We designed a system with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture. That that was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialize to fit that as broadly as we hoped.

JustSomeNobody• 8 years ago

No, they're spending a fortune redefining what "Pro" means in order to make everyone feel like they're a pro and need pro hardware.

gutnor• 8 years ago

What are Pros supposed to do in the mean time? Keep buying PCs I guess. How much would it cost R&D to update the Mac Pro?

I hope/think that Apple is thinking that bringing back the cheese grater or in other word a PC running MacOS is not going to be enough to bring back the pro. They need to come back with something that has something unique.

The TrashCan failed but you can see where Apple was going. A small, silent, powerful machine infinitely customisable on the fly via TB.

So of course if failed and this attempt has a good chance to fail too. I'm not quite sure that Apple has in its DNA the deep understanding of the type of Pro that are not content with either the iMac Pro or MBP in the same fashion they get the consumer sphere. It is just that for a long period of time the intersection between the 2 world was large but are now diverging. Perfectly happy for me to be wrong though.

sangnoir• 8 years ago

I hope/think that Apple is thinking that bringing back the cheese grater or in other word a PC running MacOS is not going to be enough to bring back the pro.

Before they can think of "bringing back the pro", they need to stop the bleeding: pros who need to upgrade this year have no choice but to go PC. An upgraded cheese-grater would have been a good stop-gap while they go back to the drawing board on their 2019 product.

s2g• 8 years ago

They need to come back with something that has something unique.

Why?

ropeadopepope3• 8 years ago

They need to come back with something that has something unique.

That would be MacOS itself. That's all they need to bring a huge number of Pros who bailed on the entire Apple ecosystem back into the fold.

robbyt• 8 years ago

The margins are too thin on a boring desktop PC. If they spec bump the cheese grater, that will cannibalize the ground-breaking new Mac Pro. Same reason why they won't put it out this year, they don't want to cut into the imac pro sales.

rbanffy3• 8 years ago

A crappy PC with a best-in-class 5K monitor can easily get more expensive than an iMac Pro.

lancewiggs• 8 years ago

Steve would have unreasonably said get it shipped by June 2018.

And it would have shipped.

ericd2• 8 years ago

If they just make an expandable ATX/cheese grater style case with generous cooling and allow top Nvidia GPUs, I will pay a large premium for this. Ideally there would be the option for high end consumer gear (i7/i9, vanilla RAM) in addition to the Xeons/ECC/FBDIMMs that get so expensive so quickly, but two tiers with different architectures is probably too much to hope for.

alkonaut5• 8 years ago

I just hope they don’t break any new ground with it. Zero. Just make a big tower that does excactly what a HP workstation tower would do, and match the price. No need for any Apple magic of any kind here. Don’t make a trash can, don’t make a touch bar.

timc34• 8 years ago

I hope you are one of the people that is consulting for them. This is exactly what is needed.

fludlight2• 8 years ago

Which is why Apple will do the opposite. Their business model is the old Henry Ford line "if I asked the customer what they wanted they would have said a faster horse". They think they know what you need better than you do. Sometimes this works really well, sometimes not.

Get ready for an underpowered $10k pyramid whose only input is Siri.

ryanwaggoner4• 8 years ago

That makes zero sense from a business perspective.

"I know, let's put out a boring commodity product that has no unique selling points, doesn't match our ethos, and has a tiny niche market. And we'll sell it at the same razor-thin margin that everyone else does!"

That couldn't be further from Apple's way of doing business.

If you want a cheap commodity tower, just buy one, but don't expect Apple to make one for you.

alkonaut5• 8 years ago

Apples uniqueness here is their OS and the applications that run on it. That’s why people would buy a Mac over an HP. Only that. If they want pros to keep using Mac OS for video etc, then they need to have competitive hardware.

Apples other concern is the developer side and the app ecosystem: high end build machines and developer workstations are also relevant for their actual business which is selling apps and phones.

Computer hardware for professionals is just a boring service Apple needs to provide in order to support the rest of their business. It’s not even a visible product like a MacBook or an iMac- it’s designed to be hidden on the floor because it’s huge and noisy (the trash can was a failed attempt at working around that fact)

Edit: to follow up on the “powerful machines are a boring service” idea: If Apple didn’t want to risk the brand damage of launching a boring product, they could simply license dell or hp to sell certain servers and workstations with Mac OS to let the highest end render machines and build servers etc run Mac OS. They could easily charge a 20% premium and people would be happy to buy them.

fludlight2• 8 years ago

Ignoring the GP, most of the comments in this thread are people begging for an overpriced commodity tower. People are happy to pay the Apple premium, but they expect the latest specs.

toufka2• 8 years ago

And yet that product is absolutely critical for them to keep selling their iPhones, iWatches, and iEverythings.

They might not make a single dollar on the sale of the pro machines - and it would still be worth every dollar of engineering put into the project to keep the devs happy in order to keep their other markets healthy.

walshemj4• 8 years ago

And a proper freaking keyboard and mouse

jonhendry1815• 8 years ago

Sadly that doesn't to be the case. People want the cheese grater Mac Pro, with modern internals. Maybe Apple could offer it in gray and gag rose gold. Just make it the dependable cheese grater. They could have done that years ago.

But no. It's going to end up being the desktop PC equivalent of a RED camera system, with a price to match.

jdlyga• 8 years ago

The Mac Pro is a great piece of hardware. I'm using one at work. I put linux on it, and I use it for Qt development.

specialp• 8 years ago

Apple already lost the Mac Pro market when they made Final Cut Pro X, and stopped regularly releasing Mac Pros. They completely disregarded the professional market by killing functionality that was critical to the users. That combined with the lack of powerful hardware made a lot of the professionals go to PC and Avid. They addressed some of the issues in future releases but it was too late.

Creators were pretty much the only people keeping Apple alive in the tough years and they abandoned them.

saagarjha8• 8 years ago

Reading this article was really annoying. First, there were grammatical issues like these, which may have been intentional, but made understanding the article difficult:

I saw a bunch of them walking by in Apple park toting kit for an outdoor shoot on premises while walking
Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed.

Then, I clicked over my Hacker News tab and when I went back, the content was replaced by another page (!). Apparently it was changed via JavaScript when I reached the bottom of the page. This is stupid and user-hostile.

ng-user• 8 years ago

I agree.

When scrolling to the bottom of the article the last thing I expected was the entire content of said article to be replaced by headlines of other stories from TC.

Viewing the article in portrait mode on desktop displays the main contents on the left 50% and complete whitespace on the right 50%.

Overall the TC redesign is god-awful and has degraded usability substantially.

strictnein3• 8 years ago

I'm honestly confused by what Apple is doing here. Maybe it makes sense to refine their software, but they're bringing in content creators to study their workflow to inform their hardware design? What?

macintux• 8 years ago

Some hardware questions I'd think working with content creators could help with (disclaimer: not a hardware guy)...

Are external GPUs fast enough? What internal architecture do they need to make them so?

How much L1/L2/Ln memory do they need for serious workflows?

Is Thunderbolt <whatever> fast enough?

How well do professional apps really scale with multiple CPUs? Benchmarks are one thing, seeing people use the software in production is something else.

Anyway, just random speculation.

thirdsun2• 8 years ago

I think Apple is needlessly re-inventing the wheel here. While their intent to analyze real world usage and optimize every detail by bringing in actual pro users is admirable, I‘d prefer them to use a simpler, more streamlined approach and have them release standard, state of the art hardware in a tasteful, quiet case and continuesly work on optimizations on the software side - a process that is required anyway and not exclusive to the Mac Pro, which makes me wonder why it should dictate the Mac Pro roadmap and schedule in such a significant way.

Furthermore it‘s concerning that the article mentions modularity mostly in ways that involve external hardware and peripherals. If that turns out to be the approach Apple is considering, it sounds worryingly similar to an iMac Pro without the fanatastic display.

tptacek2• 8 years ago

This is a lot of copy for some pretty simple updates:

* 2019 release data

* Modular architecture

* Probably a heavy bet on eGPU and TB3

* iDevices as additional inputs

pvg• 8 years ago

Probably a heavy bet on eGPU and TB3

I'm not sure that's really about the Mac Pro itself - the article doesn't say that.

tptacek2• 8 years ago

I got the impression it was about the Mac Pro, but you're right, it doesn't say that, and it's kind of hard to tell.

jonhendry1815• 8 years ago

"Probably a heavy bet on eGPU and TB3"

I think the Trash Can was a heavy bet on Thunderbolt as well. Which wasn't terribly successful.

IOT_Apprentice3• 8 years ago

Funny they want NOTHING to do with slots so that customers can add in multiple video cards or other ML cards from nVidia or AMD.

nottorp• 8 years ago

So they're optimizing for video/photo work. What about the rest of the "pro" users? They've given up on them?

jonhendry1815• 8 years ago

Yes, what about developers, scientists, etc.

pkamb• 8 years ago

"Apple Performs Usability Testing"

kbd2• 8 years ago

Please excuse the venting here for a minute.

After "can't innovate anymore my ass" Apple released their architectural dead-end trashcan Mac Pro in _2013_ we have to wait until _2019_ for an update? What am I supposed to buy? I'm certainly not going to buy anything with a Touch Bar. It's 2018 and I had my job order me the 2015 Macbook Pro for my work computer so I could skip the Touch Bar and still have USB ports.

What's going on at Apple?

CydeWeys• 8 years ago

Don't forget the keyboard on the new Macs, which is the other big reason not to get them (besides ports and touch bar).

JonLim• 8 years ago

I really wish I could get the 2015 MacBook Pro with USB-C ports and Touchbar MBP size.

As painful as it was to have to buy dongles and whatever else, having monitors + USB docks using USB-C has been pretty pleasant.

randyrand• 8 years ago

I use a 2016 and recently used my friends 2015. Honestly, it felt amazing. I had to do a double take. The new keyboards sure do suck.

Do they really think a 10% size difference is more useful than a good feeling keyboard? What are they smoking.

ggregoire• 8 years ago

I felt like you about the keyboard but after using it for a while I have to admit I love it. Sometimes I have to use my old Macbook and the new one feels definitely better.

skellera2• 8 years ago

I had to do a demo on another dev's 2016 Pro in front of a client. It was embarrassing how many typos I was making. It's such a horrible feeling keyboard.

dmitriid• 8 years ago

Yup. And "we painted ourselves into a thermal corner with this non-upgradable yeah can", so while you wait we give you a non-upgradable iMac Pro with the same thermal problem.

wintercharm2• 8 years ago

The new iMac Pros are a good stopgap for pro users on the Apple platform.

They are nice machines with plenty of performance. With 4 Thudnerbolt ports, you have some expandability.

kbd2• 8 years ago

They're powerful machines for sure. I just can't see myself buying a "desktop" machine that's non-upgradeable and has an integrated monitor. It's basically a big laptop.

jonhendry1815• 8 years ago

If only the 2013 Can Pro used normal PCIe connectors for the GPUs. Then you could bungie cord a couple of new GPU cards on the outside of the can, connect them using PCIe risers and cables, and power them off an external PC power supply instead of using the Can's power supply.

m3kw9• 8 years ago

ALL I need to know!

random3• 8 years ago

While the article mentions a refresh of MacBook Pro, "Mac Pro" gets mentioned 36 times in the article while "MacBook Pro" is mentioned 8 times. I hope the refresh will not be about completely removing the underpowered "no touch bar" 13" MacBook Pro and instead adding an on-par configuration without the touch-bar-from-hell :/

yolobey• 8 years ago

I think I'll be out of the Mac ecosystem soon. The writing is on the wall. I still don't like any Linux DE and I hate the eternal config hell I end up in, but the effort to have a functional Mac is starting to catch up to it.

I'm still using a 2015 MBP and a Hackintosh desktop (Old Intel 3770k + Titan Xp) but this year was the first time after the 2006 release of the MBP that I bought a non-Apple notebook... I needed something to replace my 11" MacBook Air that I use for travel, and the new keyboards just aren't usable for me. Bought a Thinkpad X1C6... Great machine except a few baffling design decisions, and appears to be borderline impossible to Hackintosh for now - but the keyboard is my tool of the trade. I need a good one.

osteele• 8 years ago

“And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed.”

This approach is reminiscent of Apple's approach to low-latency touch scrolling on the original iPhone; to Quicktime and MIDI a decade and a half before that; and, more recently, to the Apple Pencil.

I knew executives at Palm who were frustrated by the challenges that both the tech stack and the organizational structure (Conway's Law) posed in the (failed) effort to reduce touch latency to where it felt physical. I know that it took Android many years to reach the point where objective observers described it as equally “buttery”. IMO this full-stack integration and optimization is one of Apple's core competences. It will be interesting to see what it leads to this time. The effort may be too late, but if the past predicts the future, it will not be too little too late.

vondur• 8 years ago

Jeez, just freaking put new components/IO in the old MacPro tower. That would make everyone happy and it could've been done years ago. This is ridiculous. I still have a 2010 MacPro tower. Still runs Ok, but CPU and NVME storage leave it really lacking.

deltron3030• 8 years ago

Will they enable workflows, or will they control workflows? That's what I'm asking myself, especially in the light of ditching Intel one year later. Controlling workflows would mean an iOS on steroids, or an appliance for pros. Yeah you could get certain stuff done faster if you follow best practices, but you might run into invisible walls.

ericzawo• 8 years ago

I wonder if they'll force users to purchase dongles for their new desktop machines, too.

redial2• 8 years ago

Let's not kid ourselves, 2019 means December 2019, so...2020.

makecheck• 8 years ago

This process is a mistake for two reasons.

The first is time. If they were ready to release a simple, expandable, better-everything box a few months from now, every single person who’s been chomping at the bit for a new pro Mac would buy it immediately. That would fix their market, gain them goodwill and give them plenty of time to explore what all these amazing professionals actually want to do, later.

Second, this just doesn’t seem like the hardest list of requirements to guess. Heck, there are practically no constraints, not even price! It doesn’t have to be thin, it can guzzle power, they don’t have to compromise on any ports (put 4 of everything you can think of in, old and new). Theoretically they could build a slightly better box with some analysis but literally no one is asking for that gargantuan task to be done yet, at least not before 2022.

Corrado• 8 years ago

I think the new Mac Pro will be modeled after a stack of Mac Minis. Imagine being able to add processors just by stacking them up. Need more storage? Add a SAN module! Need a better GPU? Grab an NVIDA module! Hook them up with USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 and you're good to go.

Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro will be shaped by workflows

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