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John Siracusa perspective on Mac Pro Successor
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Apple has no issue with dumping products.”
Oh yeah. Let’s Shake on that.
[Jeremy Garchow] “An extremely modest MacPro refresh was made available at WWDC, not afterwards. “
Shirley, you jest! No. It wasn’t even extremely modest. It didn’t get close to that mark. It was a blundering, infinitesimal PR refresh that kind of took place. One that they had to apologize for on the same day.
[Jeremy Garchow] “shamed in to making a new MacPro? I don’t see it. “
The Developers were quite upset and very vocal about it. And, they have quite a bit more pull than video editors.
[Jeremy Garchow] “Since the decision was made to keep the older tech on the shelf, it seems to me that someone at Apple has a plan. “
Why? They kept Shake on the shelf for years, and they didn’t have a plan. They just knew, instinctively, that they couldn’t quite kill it, so they just let it languish and get long in the tooth.
[Jeremy Garchow] “What Apple was shamed in to doing was removing the blue “new” tag off of the MacPro on the Apple Store a day or two after WWDC.
“That’s for sure. And they should have been ashamed of it; it was a chiseler’s move.
[Jeremy Garchow] ” It allows doing more with less despite what Gallagher argues.”
Yeah, well we’ll just have to disagree about that.
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[Walter Soyka] “Apple has a whole lineup of really, really nice machines in their categories — except for their workstation, and it’s been this way for two years now.”
But it’s part of the PLAN, man! You have to see that, right? To think otherwise would be heretical.
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[Frank Gothmann] “I believe people here firmly overestimate the importance and success of TB. “
I heartily agree. We video folk happen to benefit greatly from it because of its data throughput capabilities, and tend to extrapolate that its design was somehow for us in the first place. It seems to me that Thunderbolt really came into existence as a bridge between the worlds of portable or modular computers and desktop computing. I believe the impetus behind Thunderbolt was to develop the ultimate docking solution, where you park your Air with a single connector and it functions like a desktop. The reality might just turn out to be that masses of people don’t really need or want that. WiFi might be enough for most users.
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I agree that Apple hasn’t shown a desire to have the absolute fastest tower. I mean, I don’t think they were ever in the ‘big iron’ market like SGI but I can’t look back at Apple’s history and agree that they’ve never wanted to have fastest off-the-shelf towers around (fastest in class, if you will). Maybe just the use of the word “never” is where I’m getting hung up. Dual CPU’s have been common on Mac towers for around a decade, the Mac Pros use Xeon CPU’s (intel’s workstation, not consumer, line of CPU’s), it wasn’t until the G3 era that Apple started skimping on the expansion slots, Apple claiming that the G5 at launch was the world’s fastest personal computer, etc.,. If Apple didn’t want to put out fastest in class towers I think they at least wanted to present themselves as having the fastest and, for the sake of this discussion (having a halo product), I think it’s a difference that doesn’t make a difference.
With all that being said I would not be surprised if Apple wants to ‘re-imagine’ the Mac Pro into a smaller form factor box that is expandable via optical ThunderBolt. I think Apple sees traditional towers as the new big iron machines and doesn’t want to compete in an increasingly shrinking marketplace full of very demanding customers.
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It will be relatively easy to tell if you’re wrong once the machine comes out.
Any substantive design or philosophy changes will mean that it’s been in the works well before WWDC 2012. You don’t turn around development on brand new hardware in a year.
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Hardly. How small a company do you think they are? They spend tons on development. They’ll have had all kinds of plans and prototyping to fall back on.
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Hardware design doesn’t work like that, you can’t just throw people and money at the problem and make it go faster. Just like with software design, after a certain point, more people doesn’t help.
If there’s no serious hardware design change, you might have a case to make. Otherwise, you’d be nuts to think they can design, prototype, finalize, set up overseas manufacturing lines, get them up to speed, and start manufacturing units in 12 months.
But if Apple had planned on ending the MacPro, then last year’s non-update makes no sense at all. And that’s beside the point that the well-connected Jim Dalrymple had already stated before WWDC that Apple wasn’t ending the MacPro line.
I think what we’ve had here, as others have mentioned, was an unfortunately confluence of timing and priorities for Apple.
Perhaps very similar to what happened with X, where it’s development cycle was artificially lengthened due to the mid-stream decision by Apple to abandon 64bit carbon.
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[Marcus Moore] “Hardware design doesn’t work like that, you can’t just throw people and money at the problem and make it go faster. Just like with software design, after a certain point, more people doesn’t help.
“I never said that it did. I said that they already had plans and prototyping to fall back on.
[Marcus Moore] “If there’s no serious hardware design change, you might have a case to make. Otherwise, you’d be nuts to think they can design, prototype, finalize, set up overseas manufacturing lines, get them up to speed, and start manufacturing units in 12 months.
“That’s not what I’m saying at all. They would have been designing and prototyping even while their interest was flagging. Your naive to think it is some sort of either/or situation, and that they wouldn’t have several available alternate plans to move on. They’ve been designing and prototyping alternatives for years. Look at the Macbook Pro variations that never showed up in production, but manage to appear some years later on eBay. They have a vigorous R&D department, and undoubtedly had many paths to choose from the day after they made the hint of an announcement. There were all kinds of rumors floating around two years ago about a radical design involving a much smaller Mac Pro. No doubt this came from material orders for prototypes, and the like.
[Marcus Moore] “But if Apple had planned on ending the MacPro, then last year’s non-update makes no sense at all. And that’s beside the point that the well-connected Jim Dalrymple had already stated before WWDC that Apple wasn’t ending the MacPro line.
“Yes, last year’s non-update was a hasty PR bungle that went sideways. Everyone around here talks as if Apple has a single mind, and doesn’t reverse or change directions. That’s just not true. There are all kinds of internal fights and clashing priorities. You are making far too many assumptions based on air.
[Marcus Moore] “Perhaps very similar to what happened with X, where it’s development cycle was artificially lengthened due to the mid-stream decision by Apple to abandon 64bit carbon.
“And there is one of many perfect examples of one side of Apple not knowing what another side is doing.
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[Chris Harlan] “I never said that it did. I said that they already had plans and prototyping to fall back on. “
If that’s true, then how committed could they have even been to EOL’ing the MacPro at all? If Apple had a plan to move out of this space, then they would have stopped designing next-gen towers years ago. And I’m no computer engineer, but I don’t think you can just pick up a, let’s say, 2010 design concept- pull it out of the box and pop next gen processors in it.
And honestly, I don’t think the tech backlash was THAT intense that it could account for a 24hr turnaround in Apple’s product development roadmap at the executive level.
Undoubtably, Apple should never have put a “NEW” tag on the MacPro after WWDC. It wasn’t an update or a refresh- it was them swapping out one component for another that wasn’t being manufactured anymore.
Apple’s biggest sins in the last few years [MacPro and X] hasn’t been what they’ve done, it’s how they’ve miss-positioned those things to their intended audience. Basically their PR has been crap.
As I mentioned before, weeks before WWDC, Jim D of the Loop made the statement that the MacPro wasn’t going away. Jim isn’t a rumour monger. He only speaks on stuff he has sources for. Perhaps Apple knew there was going to be backlash on the MacPro, so they wanted to get the word out that this internals switch wasn’t another sign that the product was waiting to die. That seems more logical to me than the 11th hour switch your suggesting.
[Chris Harlan] And there is one of many perfect examples of one side of Apple not knowing what another side is doing.
I think that’s a gross over-simplification of really complex issues. What’s the alternative? All Final Cut development stops while they dev team waits for the OS-level engineers to decide on Carbon vs Cocoa? I’m not sure what the rational ultimately was in 2010 to end 64 bit carbon development, but decisions like that take years to way the pros and cons of. It was a late-stage decision from all indications, and a far-reaching one. FCP just happened to be a program in the wrong stage of development when that happened. Or the best, if you like the result (which I do).
But overall I think that the product itself when released will answer a lot of questions as to what’s been going on with it’s development.
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[Marcus Moore] “Apple’s biggest sins in the last few years [MacPro and X] hasn’t been what they’ve done, it’s how they’ve miss-positioned those things to their intended audience. Basically their PR has been crap.”
I respectfully disagree.
No amount of PR could have papered over the unexpected workflow-shattering product cancellations and discontinuities we’ve seen in the last couple years.
Apple had been establishing trust from about 2000 to about 2010, and then they broke it — now they have to establish it again — with products, not PR.
[Marcus Moore] “I’m not sure what the rational ultimately was in 2010 to end 64 bit carbon development, but decisions like that take years to way the pros and cons of.”
From Daring Fireball’s The $64,000 Question [link]:
“One aspect of the saga that Nack sidesteps — perhaps for political reasons, or perhaps because he’s gracious — is the degree to which Apple pulled the rug out from under Adobe’s feet at WWDC 2007 last June. When Leopard was first announced at WWDC 2006 nine months prior, it included full 64-bit support for both Carbon and Cocoa.
“64-bit Carbon wasn’t promised to be coming “sometime”, like with, say, resolution independence. It was promised for 10.5.0. And it existed — developer seeds of Leopard up through WWDC 2007 had in-progress 64-bit Carbon libraries, and Adobe engineers were developing against them. Several sources1 have confirmed to me that Adobe found out that Apple was dropping support for 64-bit Carbon at the same time everyone else outside Apple did: on the first day of WWDC 2007.”
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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