How come theses guys can do it before 2013?

[Chris Harlan]

[Andy Neil] “He had to know going into WWDC that a lot of people’s first question after the keynote was going to be, “Where’s the Mac Pro?”
“

I don’t know if he knew it going in, but he sure knew it going out.

[Robert Brown]

I think Apple’s strategy is completely puzzling. They need to send the message that they want professional business but I don’t think they are sending that at all. What do people want who are willing to pay the high price for this box? They want state of the art basically as well as not having to spend a lot of time tweaking the thing. And the design and quietness of the Macs are also big factors I think, as well as OSX of course.

But a big thing IMO is that Apple lost a huge edge. Back around ’04 remember that magazine add? It was a G5, with an Aja IO and you had an Avid killer for a lot less than what an Avid would cost and it looked pretty slick to boot. That was a very compelling reason to buy a Mac workstation regardless of how well it competed with whatever Windows box and was why I bought my first Mac.

Now it’s a different story. Now there are several NLEs to choose from with FCP not even being an appealing one for many. So now why are you going to spend extra money for a Mac? Especially when they can’t seem to send any coherent message about what they are going to do and when they don’t even need the business anymore. I think even if they do continue to update the MP it’s destined to become a smaller and smaller player and if they aren’t careful they could lose the dominance they have because let’s face it, they aren’t really making anything that anybody else can’t make. If they lose customer loyalty that could cost them big in a few years.

Robert Brown
Editor/VFX/Colorist – FCP, Smoke, Quantel Pablo, After Effects, 3DS MAX, Premiere Pro

https://vimeo.com/user3987510/videos

[Bernard Newnham]

“Not sure what ASUS means, but I agree that they are not simply going to cobble together new tech like thunderbolt into an existing tower design. If that were the case, they’d have released it last year.”

OK – Asus is one of the world’s major motherboard manufacturers, amongst other things. Foxconn is another, and they are the ones who build motherboards that are put in an expensive shiny box labelled Apple.

What Lance was demonstrating in his first post was that Asus are selling the P8Z77-V Premium, which is a motherboard that has a Thunderbolt socket. Despite all the chat here from Mac Pro users, this really isn’t a big deal in the outside world. If you look at the board, it has lots of connectors, and connections change and evolve all the time. You won’t see a parallel printer port any more, nor a serial port, because their day has gone. You rarely see Firewire ports any more – not that they were that common anyway. Things change quickly outside the world of Apple.

Asus won’t “cobble together new tech like thunderbolt into an existing tower” because they don’t make towers – but using that motherboard you could build – tomorrow, not 2013 – a machine with any Ivy Bridge processor, huge amounts of memory and a GTX6xx video card. Drives, SSDs etc to your endless choice.

If a manufacturer was to build a game changer, it would have to run the x86 instruction set and more, and also run significantly faster for the same price. It seems that the day might come when that could be possible using a RISC based processor like ARM. But not this week.

Bernie

[Lance Bachelder]

Thanks for “getting it” Bernard. I’ll be cobbling together a system in the coming weeks based on this board- incredible tech in this thing including mSATA which means I don’t need a spinning drive or an SSD for my system drive! I can ad a GTX680 and all the SATA6 drives I want for a system that can cut RED 4k natively! I need to do this sooner than later next year…

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California

[Bernard Newnham]

I have an SSD for the system drive in this machine. You notice the difference especially in startup time, but everything that uses the operating system goes significant;y faster. SSDs seem to get cheaper daily.

Be aware, though, that not every system can run OSX well – though I think that most can. Much knowledge on this can be found at https://tonymacx86.com/ , and there’s a good forum. With this new Asus board coming out, I expect a thread on its use will be there very soon.

Bernie

[Bobby Mosca]

Full Fiber-optic Thunderbolt? Not just the cable, but the whole kit and kaboodle.

That’s asking a lot, though. Late 2013 would still be early for such a thing, but TB should at least be on PCI 3 by then.

[Phil Hoppes]

[Robert Brown] “But a big thing IMO is that Apple lost a huge edge”

$109B in annual revenue last year and you say they’ve lost an edge???? Sorry but I just can’t take these kind of statements. Apple is moving away from the very high end and focusing on what brings them zillions of $$ in revenue every month. If your needs happen to fall into what they deem necessary to build in order to preserve those zillions that is great. Continue to use their products. If your needs don’t overlap what Apple makes in hardware and software then move on to what you need to get your work done to keep your customers happy. To criticize a company’s strategy simply because they have walked away from your specific needs might hold water if you could demonstrate that they’ve completely failed in the market because of such actions. As it is, Apple has broken just about every record and metric one can think of with their current strategy and product offerings. They are the envy of just about every manufacturing and retail outfit combined. I’d say their strategy is spot on working fantastic. I use their products for what works and where it does not, I use windows and Linux PC’s. All work happy together and work just fine.

IMHO

[Franz Bieberkopf]

[Lance Bachelder] “I’ll be cobbling together a system in the coming weeks …”

Lance,

I hope you’ll be posting about your experience, for the benefit of the forum.

Franz.

[Craig Seeman]

[Phil Hoppes] “Apple is moving away from the very high end and focusing on what brings them zillions of $$ in revenue every month.”

Moving away from very high end? That’s debatable. I think a laptop with the highest resolution display on the market with two Thunderbolt ports and two USB3 ports and a quad core i7 is at least near the very high end in professional mobile computing.

Apple is not moving away from computers. They’re working on expanding their computer market share. They’ve been successful at that. I expect they will continue to be but we’ll have to see what happens next year.

[Phil Hoppes]

In terms of a “traditional” open platform the new MBP is definitely moving away. Like Henry Ford said, “You can get a car any color you want as long as it is black”. I suspect that a new MacPro, if there even is one at all, is going to be quite similar. The already extreme lack of high end graphics card support already separates them from what I would classify as very high end.