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Is this why the new Mac Pro has been taking so long?
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Tim Cook sent a crystal clear message a bit ago with the world and Wall Street all watching.
A) Pro users matter to Apple
B) Creatives particularly.Good enough for me.
I make my living communicating via video – and I’m having absolutely no issues doing so via the current Apple hardware and software.
I’ll be DELIGHTED if something faster and newer arrives someday.
But I’m just not living in gear or capabilities “frustration” at present, so that “commitment message” is plenty for me. If others are struggling and pining for faster boxes or renders or struggling against huge noise reduction requirements, I’m sorry. But I’m just not. My work is getting to the screens it needs to get up to reliably and smoothly.
I get that there are those who need or want to pass 8k uncompressed 20 camera streams around. But it’s not most of us. Most of us face communication challenges that are more modest. And certainly no more complex than what the folks doing multi-million dollar budget commercials and traditional movies are doing just fine day in and day out on the same software, so I just don’t feel bereft of capability.
Maybe I’m just funny that way. But it was an enjoyable 2016 on my system. All work and no payments!
So I’m good for now.
That’s all.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Tangier Clarke] “Hopefully we’ll no soon what Apple is up to.”
My own take is that the Mac Pro will survive for political reasons, because it’s the only US-assembled Apple product. Good leverage. However, I doubt it will survive past one more rev. OTOH, it would be nice to have the full blown guts of an iMac in a Mac Mini package. The Sonnet rack-mount Mini package performs really well with macOS Server. Of course, that’s for general use, not editing or rendering.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Bill Davis] “A) Pro users matter to Apple
B) Creatives particularly. “Except that none of this means anything related to the Mac Pro. As the rest of your post illustrates quite well. Apple makes other products that work well enough for pros. Although as I responded to Tangier, I do believe the Mac Pro has a little more life to it. If that means another 3 years, then that might be all that’s needed, given the acceleration of all computing products.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
And then there’s something like this:
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Nice machine indeed. Not ready to leave macOS though. I agree Oliver. I think the MacPro isn’t gone yet. Sure is a funny thing to go from stated “…can’t innovate my ass” to hearing crickets in the Apple winds passing over their halo machine.
Is it really as simple as perhaps Intel isn’t meeting their timetable causing an Apple delay? Could there be something else yet unexpected?
I haven’t felt this uncertain about Apple desktops (and I use ‘desktops’ intentionally since “pro” is an increasingly moving target) in quite a while.
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[Bill Davis] “Tim Cook sent a crystal clear message a bit ago with the world and Wall Street all watching.”
Nothing is crystal clear with Apple. ????
Flash storage, video on mobile devices, streaming music services, e-readers/digital books, smaller iPads, bigger iPhones, etc., all things denounced by Apple… right up until the point Apple decided to dive into those market segments. And as we’ve seen with X and the nMP, even when Apple makes a definitive sounding statement the actual product might not be what you were expecting (or wanting or needing).
Maybe Apple really has been waiting years for low power GPUs to come to market at the same time as an Intel CPU with an onboard ThB 3 controller… Or maybe they’ve just been waiting to see if demand dips so far down that they can just let the MP drift into the night.
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[Bill Davis] “So I’m good for now.
That’s all.”
You may have mentioned that before
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[Bill Davis] “A) Pro users matter to Apple
B) Creatives particularly. ”If I had the misfortune to believe this means Apple wants to make hardware for pro users I would be much the poorer. I saw the writing on the wall for Apple producing both software and hardware that does the work I need long ago. Its now 8 years since I bought anything from Apple. They are way behind the game in hardware both in performance and cost effectiveness. If you think they care then judge those quotes by what is comparatively on offer.
Good luck if a laptop with soldered in 16 gigs of RAM and an under powered graphics card works for you. Setting the bar pretty low for Pro. I get that editing seems like the alpha and omega to some here. Don’t be dissing those that need real render and RT performance to do their jobs with big fat RAW files. There comes a time when proxy meets reality.
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Innovation hasn’t been their problem. It’s the follow up/follow through that is suspect.
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https://BretFX.com FCP X Plugins & Templates for Editors & Motion Graphics Artists -
[Andrew Kimery] “For a lot (I dare say most) of the people that need to edit on a somewhat regular basis a ‘normal’ desktop or laptop is adequate.”
This was true before widespread use of 4k cameras. The nMP was released in 2013, and probably some design work done in 2012. In 2012 few people envisioned that by 2017, 4k acquisition would be this widespread. Back then people thought the limited 4k distribution and playback infrastructure would diminish the need for 4k acquisition and editing, leading to slow adoption.
What happened is 4k has become the “new color”. Content producers with no immediate plans for 4k distribution still shoot 4k to improve shelf life, plus editors like the compositional flexibility. Today, inexpensive drones, GoPros, even cell phones are shooting H264 4k. This happened much faster than most people anticipated.
This has greatly impacted editing. Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine that was like quicksilver on 1080p is sluggish on 4k. Even FCPX on the highest-end iMac can struggle. Compute-intensive effects on 4k material are maddeningly slow, and they can be laggy even on a nMP.
The near term answer is use proxy. That’s fine but it knocks us back to the pre-Mercury era when everything must be transcoded before editing. Editing camera-native content with no transcoding was pretty nice. As shooting ratios skyrocket, we need camera native editing more than ever. Yet we are increasingly knocked back to transcoding due to 4k performance issues.
I’ve seen countless cases where recreational editors are mystified at why their computer became so slow at video editing — “it’s only a GoPro/iPhone/DJI clip”, they say.
If we want similar editing performance (without transcoding) on H264 4k as we had on 1080p, this takes a lot more hardware muscle on both CPU and GPU sides.
If Apple knew this was going to happen back in 2012, and if they weren’t going to release an updated nMP until 2017, they might have designed the nMP differently with more upgrade options. If people can’t get the performance they need on a Mac platform, they’ll just use Windows. Whenever the updated nMP and iMac are released, a lot of people will buy them because this time the video editing workload as truly changed and the additional performance is needed. This assumes they haven’t already given up and moved to Windows.
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