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John Siracusa perspective on Mac Pro Successor
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[Chris Harlan] “[Rick Lang] “Chris, what you say certainly could be true about the initial copper implementation of 10Gbps Thunderbolt but the vision from day one has been to move to optical 100Gbps Thunderbolt. That has to be for a different audience.
”Yes, they want the technology to be robust and have plenty of future potential. How long do you think it will be until you see that 100G TBolt? 100Gps isn’t a goal to reach, like getting to the moon; it’s room to grow, like expanding a Fwy.”
Haven’t we seen it all before? FireWire S1600 and S3200, the follow up to FW800: anounced 2007 with products expected to be shipped in 2008.
FireWire S800T another follow-up with higher speeds, then yet another one in 2009 which was supposed to boost speeds to 6.4 Gbit/s.
It was revolutionary, it did video and data, was usable for networking and in was supposed to go optical.
And its dead now because most people just didn’t care.——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
[Jeremy Garchow] “But even today, while the current crop of Retina MacBook Pros are fantastic machines, they aren’t customizable, “
I was only talking about Apple’s towers. The focus of the portable line has been about portability and size rather than shoving tower power into a laptop that weighed a ton and had less than an hour of battery life.
Overall I feel like overall we are closer in POV than not, but sometimes parsing shades of grey on the internet can make mole hill sized differences appear to be mountains.
Basically I think my point is even if Apple never offered “… the fastest, biggest, loudest, most expandable computers…” they offered something close enough that they felt comfortable marketing their towers as the fastest because they wanted the public to perceive their towers as the fastest. The point of the orignal article was how a halo product could enhance public perception of a whole company so whether Apple actually hit the mark or not is a difference that doesn’t make a difference in this instances as Apple wanted the prestige that having a top dog tower could bring.
With regards to halo products in general I think that Apple has certainly benefited from things like the iPod’s status in its early days and FCP Legend being used in major Hollywood productions. I think their purchase of Shake was also done in part to gain more professional cache and extend the halo FCP had created.
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All good points, Andrew.
Apple’s current halo is the iPhone.
Many people’s first Apple experience is an iPhone, then they go in and look at the shiny computers, and then they buy one.
Having a really screaming and new MacPro with 48 Xeons, 4 GPUs and an array of SSDs isn’t going to do that, at least at the volume that Apple likes to see.
I just don’t think it works that way anymore.
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I agree that the market has certainly changed and expanded. Mobile is where the big growth is while tower usage has shrunk and will continue to until it plateaus to just the people that actually need what towers have to offer. We are heading into a time when phones/tablets are the new laptops, laptops are the new desktops, iMacs are the new towers and towers are the new big iron machines.
Apple’s never been in the big iron business so I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mac Pro replacement is a ‘re-imagining’ of the what a tower computer could be. It would be inspiring to some, disappointing to others and shocking to all. ThB still being copper (and therefore not fast enough for speedy GPUs) is one thing that makes me think the next Mac Pro might basically stay the same but just get updated guts.
Today a fast tower isn’t a halo product for a typical consumer like it was in years past but I still think it is for professional users and aspiring professional users. That brings us back to the big question of the last few years… How much does Apple care about addressing the needs of the pro market?
-Andrew
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Having a really screaming and new MacPro with 48 Xeons, 4 GPUs and an array of SSDs isn’t going to do that, at least at the volume that Apple likes to see.
I just don’t think it works that way anymore.
“I agree completely. I think Apple does too.
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“Apple’s never been in the big iron business”
Hmm… Everyone seems to have selective amnesia on this one. If you define that as mainframes, then, no. OTOH, Apple quite prominently promoted its G5 as the fastest computer and was very instrumental in promoting the use of multiple Xserves in computing clusters. There were several universities running the top ranked supercomputers in the world based on such clusters. Then there’s the heavy investment in Xserve RAIDs. That’s where Active (now defunct I believe) came from. If you ever visited the Apple NAB booth in its peak, it was a perfect example of heavy iron running behind the scenes. For a long time, Apple had a very active enterprise sales team, which included both sales and engineering support. That’s why many network and large facility installations invested heavily in Apple technology. Not because the staff editors convinced management to buy FCP.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Exactly… there was a whole broadcast/enterprise team doing just that. And don’t forget the ad where it was illegal to export a Mac as it was too fast according to national security standards or something to that effect.
But along the way they discovered and delivered ipod, which got them into distribution, which made every man, woman and child in the world over the age of 5 a target customer for one or all of the products from iPod, to iPhone, tablet, notebook and 30% of content running through those devices. And once they got into distribution it didn’t really mater what system was used to create it, the more the merrier! 🙂
Apple realized early on, a lesson Avid finally did, that selling an editing system into recognizable studio feature film did nothing for those buying consumer editing systems.
Michael
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[Oliver Peters] “Apple quite prominently promoted its G5 as the fastest computer”
This is straight from the horses mouth, be sure to follow the asterisk: https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/06/23Apple-Unleashes-the-Worlds-Fastest-Personal-Computer-the-Power-Mac-G5.html
While Apple did have a server line, they don’t anymore.
They got out of big data.
The offered replacements? A MacMini, and a MacPro.
I have buddies running multiuser, live broadcast environments with a couple of MacMinis as the metadata servers, with data served over Thunderbolt and then out to Ethernet.
ToolsOnAir has TV Station in a Mac running content through Mac minis and ioXTs.
Perhaps, these smaller computers are fast enough to get things done these days.
Of course, if you’re talking about a 200 person operation, Thunderbolt won’t hack it, but in the 2-10 person compressed broadcast outfit? It’s a cakewalk.
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Frank, good point about the FireWire implementations that stalled after FW800. It did surprise me that FW3200 was never a priority of Apple. But I don’t know when Apple and Intel began discussing Thunderbolt and perhaps that was a factor in their abandonment of FireWire as the future looked better using Thunderbolt (at least in Apple’s perspective). I guess in half a year from now, we shall see if TB is moving ahead or coasting. I do agree the USB3 is everywhere today and is cheaper to implement. But I thought TB would be a superior technology.
And if TB does go optical, it will not be an easy transition for all those devices that used the ability of the copper TB to provide electrical power from the port for their external devices.
Rick Lang
iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB
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[Rick Lang] ” do agree the USB3 is everywhere today and is cheaper to implement”
Until Intel put USB3 on the motherboard it was a bit dicey in terms of the compatibility and speed results one got. You may want to talk to someone at Blackmagic about the Intensity Shuttle USB3 and Windows Laptop compatibility (or lack thereof).
It’s getting better though
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/detail/supportnotes/supportnote?sid=3947&pid=4042&snid=9712&isSDK=false&os=win
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