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New Mac Pro
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I agree with your point about the transition to FCPX. It could and should have been done better.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1, Premiere Pro 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Avid MC, Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 8Gb SSD, G5 Quadcore PCIe -
[Andrew Richards] “Please, anyone, please post the roadmaps from any of Apple’s competitors. Over-eager marketers paper-launching the next rev of their products by a month or two is not a roadmap.”
You’re right. Intel publishes the Xeon roadmap, and all the workstation vendors are more or less dependent on that.
What people want isn’t a roadmap per se; they just want to know that Apple will continue to make workstations, because Apple is the only company making workstations that has any reason at all to stop.
The biggest difference that I see is that on the PC side, there’s a functioning free market.
No individual vendor matters. If HP stopped making workstations tomorrow (which they will not, because they make too much money at it), I could buy a ProMax, or a BOXX, or an ADK, or a Dell, or a Lenovo — or I could orer the parts and piece one together myself.
Intel doesn’t matter. If they decided to stop making server CPUs tomorrow (which they will not, because they make too much money at it), AMD would do a jig and ramp up production.
Even Microsoft doesn’t matter. When they tried to end Windows XP support, the market went berserk and actually forced them to extend it. If Windows 8 is an unmitigated disaster and Microsoft pulled an Apple and ended Windows 7 support, the entire free world would begin transitioning to Linux.
The point is this: on the PC side, I know that as long as someone who has money wants a workstation, someone who wants to make some money will build one and sell it to them. Apple thinks different.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “What people want isn’t a roadmap per se; they just want to know that Apple will continue to make workstations, because Apple is the only company making workstations that has any reason at all to stop.”
I think Apple faces an issue as a design innovator that PC manufacturers don’t. Apple may not be continuing the MacPro, They may be replacing it with a new design. Apple marketing may not want to call it a workstation. This does not mean Apple currently handles this well. but they may face issues when revealing anything about the future.
If, for example, gave a striped bare statement like, “we will continue using Xeon processors” there would be a firestorm of speculation because they didn’t use the name “MacPro” or the word “workstation.”
Generally PC manufacturers don’t face this. Some might even argue much of the design innovation comes from following Apple products.
Of course if Apple were simply to be updating the MacPro with minor changes they tend to just do so without any announcement at all. As to what is minor and major may well be interpreted by Apple’s marketing decisions. Lightpeak, now called Thunderbolt, seems to have been broadcast well in advance. On the other hand there’s been nothing official about USB3 support although many of us expect it.
Either way, Apple is not likely to announce major new designs nor are they likely to update minor feature changes.
Again I’m not saying this is the “right” or “best” way to handle it. It’s just that Apple decides to announce or not announce things for business reasons that don’t exist to the same extent on the PC side.
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[Steve Connor] “The ONLY thing they have done differently is EOL FCP classic and re-imagine their editing software and it’s this that has lead to all the “sky is falling” speculation.”
Steve, I respectfully disagree.
In my article FCPX and the Domino Effect [link], I laid out the series of things Apple has done to make me nervous.
It’s not just EOLing FCP Legend (and thank you for this phrase, Jeremy — I love it!). It’s their inconstancy and their shifting priorities.
They got into Shake, then got out of it. They got into Final Touch/Color, then got out of it. They got into Artbox/FCSvr, then got out of it. FCP Legend’s development stagnated over the last couple versions, and it fell woefully behind the competition in some key areas.
Apple has a horrible on-again, off-again relationship with NVIDIA, and it’s costing them in GPU computation. They got into storage and servers, then realized they weren’t good at it and it wasn’t where they wanted to be, so they left.
They have been nattering on about the post-PC world and raking in tons of cash on tablets. The apple.com/pro site has been a ghost town for almost three years. Thunderbolt was introduced well over a year ago now, and has been available on every computer Apple sells except the Mac Pro.
For me, the poor handling of the FCP/FCPX transition (far more than FCPX itself, which I have said from the beginning shows a lot of promise) was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In my opinion, the questions swirling around the fate of the Mac Pro are not all derived from Legend’s EOL, but rather from the sum of Apple’s actions over the last 4 years or so.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Could not agree with you more that the only roadmap is Intel. Paper releases don’t really count from PC manufacturers.
I was with you until the last two paragraphs. Not likely Microsoft will drop Windows 7 support soon. Eventually, maybe. But comparing the entire ecosystem of the OS to with what Apple did with an application, FCP 7, is a bit of a stretch. On the hardware side, the previous CEO of HP was going to drop PC’s altogether because of the low profit margin. Have to believe he was talking about workstations too, as the synergy to continue them without the enterprise/consumer PC’s would not be there. Now he is gone, but there must have been some reason for him to adopt that strategy. Linux for the average person, even fairly technically oriented, is an unlikely alternative.
I really don’t think Apple thinks different about the Mac Pro. They may have thought about dropping it for a moment (there are bean counters in every corporation) thus the pro community’s paranoia. Continuing it just makes too much sense. It doesn’t lose money, it makes it. They need a high end box for developers, pros that talk up the Mac (like us), and for their own use. I don’t think it is going away.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1, Premiere Pro 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Avid MC, Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 8Gb SSD, G5 Quadcore PCIe -
[Craig Seeman] “I think Apple faces an issue as a design innovator that PC manufacturers don’t.”
Apple has not innovated workstation design in a decade.
[Craig Seeman] “If, for example, gave a striped bare statement like, “we will continue using Xeon processors” there would be a firestorm of speculation because they didn’t use the name “MacPro” or the word “workstation.” “
There’s a firestorm of speculation anyway. Apple likes it, because they believe secrecy sells.
Do you thinking sharing a little more information would be a bad thing? If they made that Xeon announcement, they could still have had their swirling, demand-creating rumors, but we could have had a little reassurance that the future wasn’t all consumer class hardware, all the time.
[Craig Seeman] “Again I’m not saying this is the “right” or “best” way to handle it. It’s just that Apple decides to announce or not announce things for business reasons that don’t exist to the same extent on the PC side.”
Apple chooses to treat the professional market the same way they treat the consumer market. That’s their choice.
How we respond (both as a market making purchases and Internet heroes writing rants) is ours.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Walter, I think we’ve seen some key differences between much of what you mention on some recent circumstances.
Apple has always announced EOL and sometimes with very long periods to the final cessation of support.
FCP7 was pulled suddenly.The MacPro with the user base’s nervousness, had a longer interval than usual in this recent cycle although others have pointed out there were some fairly long cycles previously. There’s a very good chance that the external case design change may well be the most radical since. . . the case was introduced June 2003 I believe. When was the last time Apple kept a design, with only minor external changes, for so long?
Yet, without an announced EOL, as they did for all the other products EOLd if memory serves me, led some of us to believe that one way or another, something was coming. Personally I’d think only those gun shy from the sudden end to FCP7 were thinking that that history would repeat with the MacPro IMHO.
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[Jim Wiseman] “On the hardware side, the previous CEO of HP was going to drop PC’s altogether because of the low profit margin. Have to believe he was talking about workstations too, as the synergy to continue them without the enterprise/consumer PC’s would not be there. Now he is gone, but there must have been some reason for him to adopt that strategy.”
HP fired Apotheker. His curiosity about spinning off the PC division showed HP wanting to follow in IBM’s footsteps, dropping hardware to focus on services.
That was a deeply flawed strategy. HP’s PC business is really, really significant — a third of HP’s revenue. It’s a $40 billion business. It would be a Fortune 50 (that’s fifty, not a typo for 500) company all on its own.
Spinning the business off would probably have been suicidal for HP, which is why Apotheker was ousted and Whitman reversed the decision. When the spinoff discussions started, HP sales slowed, because customers were worried. HP ultimately listened to their customers and kept the unit.
That said, the HP PC division may well have thrived on its own. Again, look at IBM: Lenovo continues the Thinkpad tradition, building some of the best and most reliable laptops in the world, and they ship huge volume for it.
[Jim Wiseman] “Not likely Microsoft will drop Windows 7 support soon.”
Agreed — I was throwing out a hypothetical. Microsoft will almost certainly continue Windows 7 support through Windows 8 and into Windows 9. Supporting their customers is part of Microsoft’s value proposition.
[Jim Wiseman] “Linux for the average person, even fairly technically oriented, is an unlikely alternative.”
Another pure hypothetical, but why not? It’s not all command-line rocket science anymore. Straight-up Linux distros aside (though even they could be installed and run by non-geeks), Android is based on Linux, as is Chrome OS, and both systems are specifically built for non-geeks.
[Jim Wiseman] “I don’t think it is going away.”
I agree, but I don’t think it will be like the good ol’ days. I don’t think Apple will be expending the same effort on the professional segment that they did in say the late 90s or early 2000s, when their existence literally depended on it.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “Apple thinks different.”
Especially in the U.S. There was a fellow that posted here a while ago in which Apple was forced to license their OS to third party machines, I think it was in Germany.
Really, what we are talking about here, is an OS. Hardware certainly plays a role, but it does boil down to the OS, especially with cross platform applications. I know “once you’re in the app, it’s all the same…” well, awesome, but I do spend time in the Finder, I do not mind the AppStore at all as long as I am around the internet, I do not mind the cloning system (big for me), I do not mind the Terminal and disaster recovery of a Mac, I do not mind the ecosystem. It helps me support a business easier and with less stress in an already stressful environment. Perhaps that’s changing from the Windows side of things, I don’t know.
We have one dedicated Windows machine here, and now a bootcamped windows 7 MBP. Installing Windows was one of the most frustrating things I have done with an OS in a long time. Bootcamp (of course) was really easy, the rest was terrible. Many many downloading of updates that I have no idea if they are legit or not. The documentation, or instructions are very sparse. Managing DLLs seems like a kludge, reporting (crash reports) aren’t as helpful, and the whole system seems to go down when a crash happens, unlike the Mac where a program might go down. These are real considerations for me. So far, in my experience with Windows, it does not win for me. Sure, I’d figure out a way to manage all of that minutiae, but for now, I’ll stick with OSX. Windows has come a long way, it always has been a completely viable OS. This is true. But it’s just not something that I personally prefer. The developers I talk to seem to think that MacOS is a “superior” OS. It also makes their jobs easier. We all rely on developers whether we want to admit it or not.
Also, I think it has been proven, that the paranoia created by the EOL of some popular Apple applications should really be looked at separately from their hardware business. As far as hardware, there was zero indication from Apple themselves that they were going to EOL the MacPro. When they do truly EOL professional hardware, they make whitepapers, present exit strategies, and offer alternatives, although admittedly they might not be viable alternatives.
All of these decisions are huge and giant business decisions. Microsoft, it seems, is making a business decision with Windows 8. So is Apple with FCPX, and all of the OS changes that have been happening and will continue in the future. You don’t have to like them, and it might make you paranoid for one reason or another, that’s fine. There’s plenty of choices including a vast open source network if that is really your cup of tea, but none of these technology companies are standing still. Just as we are forced to adapt, so are they. It is all changing whether we like it or not.
Jeremy
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“That was a deeply flawed strategy. HP’s PC business is really, really significant — a third of HP’s revenue. It’s a $40 billion business. It would be a Fortune 50 (that’s fifty, not a typo for 500) company all on its own.”
But revenue doesn’t necessarily correlate with profit. Apotheker thought PC’s were not generating enough to hold on to. But now he is gone. Apple has the profit side going strong. Why? People really want their products and OSX.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1, Premiere Pro 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Avid MC, Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 8Gb SSD, G5 Quadcore PCIe
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