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Mac sales up, iPod sales down.
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Great point.
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[Walter Soyka] “My bad — I misread your other post and thought you were suggesting that Apple would keep Mac Pros around because they were more profitable than other lines. Sorry about my misunderstanding!”
No, they would keep them around because they are still selling them, and making a profit. I wish we had the granular numbers.
[Walter Soyka] “I don’t want to see Thunderbolt replace PCIe on the Mac Pro, but I do want to see it on the Mac Pro. It’s the network effect — the value of Thunderbolt (and therefore Thunderbolt peripherals) increases as it more devices support it.
Craig Seeman keeps pointing out how nice it will be to move TB devices (storage, video capture, whatever) from machine to machine as needed. He’s right, but Thunderbolt isn’t much of a connection standard if it doesn’t come standard.”
It’s true. I just don’t want it to hobble the MacPro’s overall speed. It will be nice to plug PCIe cards in as needed on separate machines, like a Red Rocket for example. Or hook my MacBook Pro up to SAN via Fibre instead of Gigabit Ethernet.
[Walter Soyka] “Are you really arguing that Apple ought to leave Thunderbolt off a future Mac Pro because it wouldn’t be necessary?”
Not if slows down the whole machine to 4x (which I don’t think it will). No, I’d rather have Thunderbolt + PCIe and dedicated GPU. If I had to choose, I’d choose PCIe & GPU instead of a Thunderbolt only MacPro. Sorry for the confusion.
[Walter Soyka] “Bringing this back to your original post, I absolutely agree with you that the Mac platform as a whole is still significant to Apple, and that all the talk about the Mac Pro is speculation at this point. None of us know what Apple will do until they do it.
My point was that the Mac Pro is a much, much smaller part of the Apple pie (ha!) than the Mac platform as a whole, or than their sizable mobility business. Also, the Mac Pro doesn’t seem to fit in well with the their overall consumer-cloud-entertainment-mobility strategy, so there is a real basis for the speculation.”
Absolutely. It’s too bad the full LightPeak technology, isn’t available today. We could just leapfrog to the next generation. Modular computing seems to be a very cool idea, but without the full thunderbolt bandwidth, it seems a little too early to jump straight to a thunderbolt society.
As always, thanks for the discussion.
We seem to be in our own corner of the building on this one!
Jeremy
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Why I think MacPros need Thunderbolt. (especially if you use a MBP)
#1 – Pegasus enclosures. I maybe wrong, is there anything else on the market that give 12TB with Raid 5 @ ~800MBps speed for 2 grand. (I have not priced SAS in a while so they maybe getting close.
#2 When (if) more small-fast TB drives come out and used on the field you will need TB on your desktop system.
#3 New Apple monitors, which also give you another hub, but the hub is not that big of a deal for MacPro.
#4 Ability to use one video device on desktop or Laptop.
#5 It will give Apple an open door to reduce the PCI slots and form factor in MacPros. (this is an opinion)
I think TB is a given, it is a good thing and if they can put it into a MacMini it not hard to roll it into a MacPro price wise but I agree it is a much bigger deal for the MBP and iMac products.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “As always, thanks for the discussion.”
Likewise. I always enjoy and learn from these.
[Jeremy Garchow] “We seem to be in our own corner of the building on this one!”
Maybe more people will jump in if I say something incendiary?
How about if I start referring to Thunderbolt 10G as iThunderbolt, and Thunderbolt 100G as Thunderbolt Pro?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Walter Soyka] “Maybe more people will jump in if I say something incendiary?”
Or.
FCPX is the great gift to all editors ever, everywhere, forever!
[Walter Soyka] “How about if I start referring to Thunderbolt 10G as iThunderbolt, and Thunderbolt 100G as Thunderbolt Pro?”
I was wondering what they would call Thunderbolt 100G. Light Peak would seem a very fitting term for that, but alas, it must not be catchy enough.
I do like your naming scheme, though. iBolt and ‘Bolt Pro for short!
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