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New Macbook Pros to be “thin” ?
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[Chris Jacek] “I agree, but I think that supports the theory that Apple is trending away from power-users, pros, whatever you want to call them. There is clearly a conscious choice toward small and light, over powerful. “
This implies that the Apple of five or ten years ago would have made a different decision. I don’t think that’s true.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Jacek] “Apple will not offer a similar product, not even as a BTO.”
Can’t really argue with that. Apple won’t sell a bulky but powerful folding screen desktop with only enough battery to keep it asleep in transit before needing to be plugged in again on the other side. Such a machine would certainly be great for a mobile pro workstation, but they’d sell so few of them it wouldn’t pass market muster for Apple (see Xserve for minimum required sales potential).
[Chris Jacek] “This was not the case in the past.”
I don’t ever recall Apple selling anything but the thinnest, lightest, most power efficient notebooks they could build at the time. If there weren’t mobile workstations from the likes of Dell and HP back then, that just means the market segment didn’t exist yet.
[Chris Jacek] “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.”
Is Apple moving away from the market, or is a slice of the market moving away from Apple? Seems to me this mobile workstation niche is a relatively recent market development and probably too narrow for Apple to pursue. I don’t read what is happening as Apple abandoning pros, I read it as Apple not chasing dragons in the form of hardware niches that won’t sell sufficient volumes to justify development (again, see Xserve).
They’d need to create a whole new segment of their product line to meet the specs you’d like to see, and that ain’t gonna happen for the sake of a few thousand potential sales.
Best,
Andy -
[Chris Jacek] “There is clearly a conscious choice toward small and light, over powerful. “
Nah, just status quo. Apple has never put the most powerful contemporary mobile GPUs into MacBook Pros. They have always used upper-middle range MGPUs that met their power consumption and thermal output requirements. They have also always pushed for thinner, lighter, and more battery life. From the Titanium PowerBook to today.
Best,
Andy -
I think FCP X is the best indication of where they are headed due to the inflexible single screen display. It would make a lot of sense that they would be developing a version for iPad and a rigid UI would make sense for using the software on different single screen devices. Apple’s theme these days seems to be having multiple levels of devices that all can work together. Like my iPhone is somewhat in sync with my laptop and macpro.
What that does for them is to potentially make each device that much more powerful in the eyes of consumers/prosumers. Like if you could edit on your iPad it would be a nice selling point but not of much interest to many “pros” here or people who do this for a living.
I could easily see this happening if you look at everything they’ve done over the last few years, but who knows what they will do. It’s a secret.
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[Robert Brown] “What that does for them is to potentially make each device that much more powerful in the eyes of consumers/prosumers. Like if you could edit on your iPad it would be a nice selling point but not of much interest to many “pros” here or people who do this for a living.”
I entirely disagree with the sentiment that iPad-based editing is inherently a consumer feature rather than a pro feature. Why do artists carry sketchpads, even if their “real” work is oil paint on canvas? I think if there were an iPad version of FCP X, and a smooth workflow for moving edit decisions between that and the desktop version, a lot of pro editors would be interested in an ultraportable device with great battery life that they could just pull out anywhere to play with the edits they were working on. Especially for something like feature editing, where the editor gets really absorbed in a project, lives with the footage for quite a while, and might have an idea for how to cut a scene while on the subway, or falling asleep at night or whatever. Being able to just grab the iPad at those moments seems quite compelling.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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From what I hear from industry insiders, the form factor – laptop OR desktop – is increasingly trivial today to how computing will function in the future.
When power computing required a HUGE power supply, slots for large cards, and more slots for basic I/O functions like monitor drivers and external drive busses a tower was an advantage over a laptop. But that’s likely to change radically over the next few years.
I was talking to a Phil Hodgets a month ago and he was describing the effect that Thunderbolt will have in version 2 and 3 (on the existing Intel development roadmap) and how that has the potential to transform how computers will work in the future..
When info-pipe technology breaks down the need to have everything inches from everything else for pure speed of data transfer, the whole IDEA of what a computer is can change.
It likely becomes a modular concept where adding a couple of multi-core inexpensive MacMini’s can double or triple your processing power cheaply. Where the big screen on your desktop (with that thunderbolt port) just takes over from the laptop screen when it’s plugged in and becomes part of a system where bits SCREAM around wherever and whenever they’re needed.
The computer itself becomes more the “sum of it’s connected parts” rather than a physical BOX sitting somewhere.
Thinking has to change here folks. The future will NOT look like the present. Not in software – not in hardware – not in workflow.
That’s just how it is.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner
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What would be the PURPOSE of a dedicated graphics card in the CPU box in a world where you could link 24 (or 100 for that matter) – cheap CPUs together on a massive ThunderBolt data superhighway and control that stream from any connected laptop?
The only reason for a GPU was to OFFLOAD graphic raster processing from an overburdened CPU to improve performance. In a Thunderbolt wired world, you could likely buy a small box with a super GPU chip (if you wanted it) and put it in a closet 20 feet away – and every laptop in your facility could call it as necessary.
MASSIVE pipes change EVERYTHING. The location of nodes becomes unimportant when the data FLIES around an optical racetrack as fast as the one envisioned in the TB future roadmap.
Simple as that.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner
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You need a screen for an interface. You might LIKE 2, 3, or 4 screens for the way you work, but you NEED a screen.
You need a keyboard. You need a mouse. You might need a tablet or a trackball. All of these can work prefectly well via Bluetooth and so don’t need to be physically attached to anything.
You want to drive stuff with your iPad? More bluetooth.
Packaging this stuff into a tall box (tower) or a flat box (laptop)? It’s a matter of “convenience only” when you don’t need to house and cool a mass of adjacent components to achieve physical closeness to optimize data transfer.
You need storage. With Thunderbolt spec’d up to 100 TIMES the speed of Firewire 800 in it’s planned purely optical iteration – storage can be located anywhere on the net without penalty. Same with video processing (video “card”? – maybe, maybe not). Same with PROCESSERS for heaven’s sake. Want more? Buy cheap boxes with more and stick it in a closet.
Giant super fast pipes mean that the old concept of a CPU needing to be physically adjacent to the I/O busses for data throughput becomes functionally obsolete.
At that point, a laptop is just a node. The “computer” is the system you’re attaching to. More computers, with more cores, add to the AGGREGATE processing capability of the system.
The computer as “BOX?” Old thinking. Pick your sub-systems and plug them together – drive the result with your desktop keyboard or your laptop keyboard – doesn’t matter – because anything can talk to anything – lickity split.
Software in the cloud – hardware as “nodes” to enable it.
That’s the BIG change coming down the road, I’d bet.
Fun to imagine.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner
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[Bill Davis] “The computer as “BOX?” Old thinking. Pick your sub-systems and plug them together – drive the result with your desktop keyboard or your laptop keyboard – doesn’t matter – because anything can talk to anything – lickity split. “
It is pretty much happening now. I use Matrox MOX2 Mac connected to the PCI Express port to speed up encoding, I use Elgato connected to usb port too, Blu-ray on USB, card reader etc.
(I am using MBP 17″)
It is a terrible wiring mess. I am hoping to switch to the next version of Mac Pro so that all components are inside one box.
Daisy chain components sounds interesting but no difference to doing it inside the box. I.e. in the PC world where SLI / Crossfire is supported, users slap in GPU to beef up the power.
I don’t see Apple moving towards the mix and match world because the last thing Apple want is some user calls up and say certain combinations don’t work (i.e. what PC world has to endure).
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Ray -
As demoed by Vaio Zs + power dock configuration, an EXTERNAL DESKTOP CLASS GPU can be plugged into an ultrathin laptop, and it will be able to take its full power when needed. Such is only possible because of the extreme in-out bandwith of intel’s Lightpeak technology a.k.a. Thunderbolt. So there, as thin as the macbook can get, with thunderbolt all you need is a great cpu and ram config, you can easily plug in raid bays and gpu and 10 monitors and they will function as if its embedded in one desktop configuration. Thats the future.
Quobetah
New=Better
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