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Quad Core iMacs. “Mac Pro who?”
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Interesting insight, thanks Walter.
Shawn
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Food to fuel the speculation:
Does anybody think that there may be no MacPro workstations in the future? We all as professionals look to our needs when we look at these buying choices. It begs the question; is Apple going to sell more iMacs and Laptops than Pro workstations? I’d say yes.
Rumor to the contrary here: https://www.macrumors.com/2011/04/21/apple-developing-narrower-rackmountable-mac-pro-prototypes/The new iMacs look compelling: https://www.apple.com/imac/
What does everybody think about the switch to AMD from Intel??“May you live in interesting times!”
Dan Daube
Director-Editorial Turner Studios Atlanta
Manager Multiple Systems-FCP 7.0.1 AJA Kona -
My main issue with the iMac had been connectivity, but Thunderbolt will change that, so it might be time to reevaluate.
FCP has historically underperformed on Mac Pros because its legacy architecture didn’t support multiple processors or 64-bit memory addressing. Since it seems that FCP X will address these, I’d expect that FCP X on a Mac Pro will be quite a bit faster than FCP X on an iMac. Whether it will be necessary for most workflows or whether it will be worth the cost difference are separate questions.
Other common apps like AE and C4D can still use the extra power in the Mac Pros, and apps like Resolve can use the extra bandwidth, so there is still a need for a “proper” workstation — but I agree with Walter that adding Thunderbolt will let the iMac make huge inroads in a lot of studios.
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 -
[Dan Daube] ” It begs the question; is Apple going to sell more iMacs and Laptops than Pro workstations? I’d say yes.”
They’ve been selling more iMacs and laptops than Mac Pros for years now. That’s no big surprise. Consumers want laptops and small desktops. Apple sells millions more of those computers than Mac Pros.
The Mac Pros are primarily used by pros, schools and laboratories.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media -
[Dan Daube] “What does everybody think about the switch to AMD from Intel??
“AMD supplies the graphics card. The CPUs are still Intel.
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[Dan Daube] “What does everybody think about the switch to AMD from Intel??”
As noted above, AMD is now the graphics card, looks like they purchased ATI or have licensed the technology since the cards have the same Radeon name.
Processors are all Intel i5.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media -
Apologies I mis-spoke (mis-typed) meant the AMD change from NVidia, not Intel in the new iMacs.
I’m posing the question though that while Apple in the past has had a “proper” Pro workstation do we think that will continue?
They got rid of XServes recently and as far as being concerned about others’ software running on their hardware, Adobe Flash is still not on their iOS devices. I wonder if they feel that the power in this level of system is enough for us “pros”?Dan Daube
Director-Editorial Turner Studios Atlanta
Manager Multiple Systems-FCP 7.0.1 AJA Kona -
This, once again, is the right move by Apple. The prices of the Mac Pros are prohibitive for anyone but companies doing significant work. The addition of TB is just what I wanted to make that move. The downsides are that I have always hated being tied to a machine with a built in monitor, and it’s wasteful environmentally. I already have two good monitors. The new processors are very fast, compared to the MPro I’m using. I personally don’t need more than 16GB RAM at this point.
So this is a good move from Apple. They continue to innovate in a very fast cycle on hardware. Now I wait to see what they’ve done to FCP. That’s the wild card. The new interface is too much like the changes which I really hated to iMovie (I used to use it for personal family work, no longer), and also to Apeture, which I promptly abandoned for Lightroom, and never looked back. They lost a loyal customer of a higher end product with that interface change.
Alf
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According to the iFixit teardown, the NIC is a Broadcom BCM57765B0KMLG, which supports jumbo frames. This corrects one of the biggest letdowns in the previous model.
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If you don’t like being tied to a monitor you may want to wait for the Mac Mini refresh. It will most likely be in June.
http://www.rapidlightproductions.com
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