-
New Macbook Pros to be “thin” ?
-
[Chris Kenny] “Err… huh? You realize laptops with dedicated graphics don’t typically have separate “cards”, right? It’s just an extra chip on the motherboard. “
Err, um, huh, um…. Wow, could you be more smarmy or condescending?
Take a look at the higher end NVidea offerings, like the GeForce 540M and the laptops that contain them. Despite the (relatively) small form factor, I think the pragmatic implementation of the chip and necessary cooling does require a bit more space than what the thin form factor could manage.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
[Chris Jacek] “I invite you to apply Occum’s Razor (given what we can observe the most logical explanation is usually correct) to the question of whether Apple has shifted their focus away from the professional market. I believe there is compelling evidence to support this notion. “
So what specific features do you fear will be dropped from a possible future thinner MBP that would make it a non-starter for pro video work and thus evidence to support the idea Apple is retreating from the pro hardware space? Do you also feel the current MBP offerings are lacking pro features?
Best,
Andy -
[Chris Jacek] ” In that same time, their hardware offerings (not even counting iPads and iPhones) steadily trended toward smaller, with fewer expansion options.”
Of course, this criticism could have been leveled at Apple many times in it’s history. Going from the highly expandable Apple IIe and Lisa to the original Macintosh, for example. Or going from the old Power Mac to the iMac and G4 Cube. None of them has heralded the demise of Apple’s high end offerings.
-
[Chris Kenny] “Honestly, I know some people are now absolutely determined to view everything Apple does through the lens of “Apple doesn’t care about pro users”, but I’m not sure how standardizing on SSDs 3-4x as fast as typical notebook HDDs, and (probably) dropping ExpressCard now that we’ve got Thunderbolt (which is 4x as fast) is supposed to represent Apple somehow shifting things toward “consumers”.”
Miniaturization comes at the cost of processing power, storage, or battery life.
Instead of a smaller, lighter computer, Apple could offer one at the same size, the same weight, and a lot more power. Personally, I’d prefer the former for my personal use and the latter for my professional use.
I invite you to explore some of the “mobile workstation” offerings from PC manufacturers. They’re big, heavy laptops with serious onboard graphics, more memory slots, two hard drives instead of one, etc. Apple hasn’t had a product in this category in a long time, and they’ll get even further away from it if they Air the entire line.
But all this is still speculative. I think the next round of hardware revisions will tell us a lot about the markets Apple intends to pursue.
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 -
[Chris Upchurch] “Of course, this criticism could have been leveled at Apple many times in it’s history. Going from the highly expandable Apple IIe and Lisa to the original Macintosh, for example. Or going from the old Power Mac to the iMac and G4 Cube. None of them has heralded the demise of Apple’s high end offerings.
“A fair point, though they did not really go from the Power PC to the iMac, but to the G3 Tower. If there had only be iMacs to replace Power Macs, it might have been a demise.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
[Walter Soyka] “I invite you to explore some of the “mobile workstation” offerings from PC manufacturers. They’re big, heavy laptops with serious onboard graphics, more memory slots, two hard drives instead of one, etc. Apple hasn’t had a product in this category in a long time, and they’ll get even further away from it if they Air the entire line.”
Like this? Apple will never ever make such a thing. I would argue they never have. Heck, if you don’t mind lugging another 8 lbs, you could carry around a 21″ iMac.
Best,
Andy -
[Andrew Richards] “So what specific features do you fear will be dropped from a possible future thinner MBP that would make it a non-starter for pro video work and thus evidence to support the idea Apple is retreating from the pro hardware space? Do you also feel the current MBP offerings are lacking pro features?”
Aside from the dedicated graphics card that we discussed earlier, there are concerns like hard drive space. The SSD are awesome for speed, but not yet reaching practical video storage sizes. If you get to the point of having 1TB of total SSD storage, then it’s probably time to consider completely replacing spinning drives.
I do believe that the current MBP line is lacking compared to its PC counterparts (note the mobile workstations already mentioned elsewhere in this thread). Also, there is not an upgrade option for graphics cards. The 17″ offers the stock card only, so you top-out at 1 GB, despite there being much beefier cards out there. In the past, you could BTO higher-end cards for a price. Usually a high price, but at least available.
And there are absolutely no options for CUDA capable NVidea cards, so there is no chance of hardware acceleration for Premiere Pro. Of course, this could be argued as a competitive choice.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
[Andrew Richards] “Like this? Apple will never ever make such a thing. I would argue they never have. Heck, if you don’t mind lugging another 8 lbs, you could carry around a 21” iMac.
“But isn’t this evidence that Apple is shifting away from the pro market? This is the type of computer that many pros want, and Apple chooses not to compete in this space. It could be argued that the industry is trending toward these mobile workstations. And you don’t even need to pay 3K for one, or even get one that big.
For under 2K, you can get an impressive 17″ laptop with 2-750Gig HDs, Blu-Ray burner, screaming graphic cards, etc.., under 10 pounds. That’s not much different than the original 17″ MPBs. And when it comes to editing/compositing performance, they outshine the current top MPBs, because Apple will not offer a similar product, not even as a BTO. This was not the case in the past.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
[Chris Jacek] “Over recent years, Apple has EOLed several professional applications. In that same time, their hardware offerings (not even counting iPads and iPhones) steadily trended toward smaller, with fewer expansion options. They have had slower cycles on their most powerful machines. In addition, Apple’s major profit centers have shifted from computers to mobile devices, which speaks to motivation.”
See, this is exactly what I mean.
Apple has EOL’d several professional applications — Apple prefers radically sparse product lines. Their most successful product, the iPhone, consists of all of two models (one of which is just a previous year’s model that Apple has continued to produce), where some have a dozen or more models despite selling fewer phones.
Hardware offerings steadily trending smaller, with fewer expansion options — Welcome to the last 30 years of computer evolution. ’70s mainframes were entirely modular. Early personal computers had lots of expansion slots — most Apple II models had seven. Apple stopped making six slot towers in 1998 or 1999. Buying patterns over the last decade have consistantly moved toward laptops, and we may, over the coming decade, see a significant shift toward tablets. As hardware becomes more capable, the fraction of the market requiring expandability shrinks. We’re now at the point where internal expandability is irrelevant even to most video pros — it’s not required at all for offline editing, or even most online editing. We’re probably within two years of Resolve doing real-time 2K on laptops (with video I/O via Thunderbolt).
Slower update cycles on the Mac Pro — Apple updates the Mac Pro whenever Intel has a new round of suitable Xeons. Sometimes they even go out of their way to get new processors before they’r generally available, and it’s rumored they’re doing that with the coming Sandy Bridge updates as well. I have no idea what people could possibly expect from Apple here. Meanwhile, people appear to have forgotten that while the PowerMac G5 did get updated pretty often, it never managed to hit the 3 GHz target Apple/IBM originally promised.
Major profit centers shifting to mobile — So what? As I noted previously, people don’t apply this standard to other companies. NLE software isn’t a major profit center for Adobe, but somehow nobody seems to mention that, even in the context of advocating a move away from Apple for this very reason.
You try to invoke Occam’s Razor, but believing there must be a single overarching explanation for a bunch of separate facts that have fairly simple individual explanations isn’t applying Occam’s Razor — it’s conspiracy theory thinking.
You want an affirmative argument against Apple abandoning pros? I’ve already done that, but I’ll do it again:
– They’re still in the NLE market, despite having to rewrite their NLE from scratch to remain competitive.
– The latest round of MacBook Pros are extreme overkill for the non-pro market. They’re as fast as 8-core Mac Pros from 2008.
– Thunderbolt. Again, though Apple clearly hopes it will become a mainstream technology, it’s significant overkill for the consumer market.
– The gap between Apple’s towers and mainstream desktops is far larger now than at any point in the past (at least when they aren’t split over processor generations while Apple is waiting on Intel). In other words, Apple’s pro machines are substantially more pro than they used to be.
– Xsan is now integrated into Lion. Lion also, with Core Storage, lays the groundwork for a major overhaul of OS X’s file system architecture, with potential large benefits for video pros.
– OpenCL — originally created by Apple. If OpenCL were just a matter of allowing Apple itself to write GPU-accellerated software without tying itself to a single vendor, they wouldn’t have turned it into a cross-platform standard. It’s clearly intended to allow third-parties to write cross-platform GPU-accellerated apps more easily, and the main candidates for this capability are pro apps.
– FCP X has “pro” in the name, was introduced at an event for pros, and is portrayed by Apple by Apple has a pro product. There are many pro features already present in the app (such as 4K support, 4:4:4 support, 32-bit float processing, and the best built-in scopes of any mainstream NLE). Moreover, it’s clear that even before its real ease and the subsequent outcry, Apple always intended to add pro features like XML exporting.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Chris Jacek] “Err, um, huh, um…. Wow, could you be more smarmy or condescending? “
I’m getting a little tired of the certainty people seem to have in a position supported by hilariously flimsy arguments.
[Chris Jacek] “Take a look at the higher end NVidea offerings, like the GeForce 540M and the laptops that contain them. Despite the (relatively) small form factor, I think the pragmatic implementation of the chip and necessary cooling does require a bit more space than what the thin form factor could manage.”
Your previous post said there was “absolutely no way” Apple could fit dedicated graphics into a slimmer case. This is simply not correct with respect to the sort of dedicated graphics Apple currently ships in MBPs.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up