So Shane Ross was right all along re:Mac Pro

[Kevin Patrick]

[Shane Ross] “they updated the hardware to make it “Moutain Lion Ready””

They did? Sorry, I’m just now catching up. I didn’t realize that.

I can see the New label on the Mac pro in the Apple Store.

Interesting that there isn’t a New on the iMac. Even more odd.

I would guess the iMac is getting an upgrade prior to Mountain Lion and the Mac Pro isn’t?

But, why upgrade the Mac Pro if you’re killing it off?

[Shane Ross] “HA HA! Sorta.”

Sorry. I thought it was.

[Oliver Peters]

Or maybe this is simply a result of “learning” from the FCP 7 EOL experience.

There’s a segment of the market that still needs these machines and isn’t ready to transition to iMacs or some iMac successor. So continue to make the machine the serves the purpose with minor performance bumps, without wasting Jon Ivie’s time to redesign something that may be killed in a year or two anyway. Apple isn’t interested in courting the enterprise market, which is why they don’t care about making a rackmount machine. But for now, they still want to be viewed as a “pro” computer company. Having a tower in the line-up serves that purpose.

Eventually the sales will reach a threshold that triggers the kill switch and then we’ll all go to iMacs, Hackintoshes or Windows on HP or Dell.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Gary Huff]

[Oliver Peters] “Or maybe this is simply a result of “learning” from the FCP 7 EOL experience.”

I think so. It’s going to turn off the people who would otherwise buy one, sell off a few more units, and once a certain threshold is hit for a certain length of time, they will (quietly) remove its entry from the Apple Store.

Since they recalled units (supposedly), it will be interesting to see if brick-and-mortor Apple Stores actually get any of these, or if Apple is just slowly dumping its remaining stock.

[Tim Wilson]

[Gary Huff] “[Oliver Peters] “Or maybe this is simply a result of “learning” from the FCP 7 EOL experience.””

What do you think is the lesson that the FCP 7 EOL experience teaches?

Because to me, it’s that Apple EOL’d FCP in 2007, in the sense that that was the last real release. 2009 was the post-EOL maintenance release. Two years later, the real new thing.

That’s when we learned that FCP 7 was in fact zombieware….but you might have been able to tell earlier if you hadn’t been fooled by incremental forward motion.

So by this math, Mac Pro was EOL’d a while ago, we’ve got incremental forward motion, and we’re marking maintenance releases until the real new thing.

Is that what you’re thinking? Because without being a wiseass (this time), I’m curious: can you be more specific about what YOU think the lesson of FCP 7 is?

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Oliver Peters]

[Tim Wilson] “‘m curious: can you be more specific about what YOU think the lesson of FCP 7 is?”

I believe they realized that they made a mistake in prematurely EOL’ing FCP7 without an adequate replacement for some folks. So they quietly allowed it to continue to be sold. In fact, a friend recently bought 40 NEW seats of FCS/FCP7 for customer installations. I believe they know it was the wrong decision they made at that time, but simply didn’t anticipate the continued ill will.

So if you look at the tower market, there continues to be some market for exactly that machine (Mac Pro). Call it old technology if you like, but if you have an installation based around networks, SANs, PCIe cards, etc. and need to add a few more of the same, then all the Thunderbolt connections and iMacs in the world are totally useless to you.

There’s very little new internal cost to Apple to simply continue to make the same machine for a while and bump up performance incrementally. While they do that, they can: A) wait for the demand to simply die off, or B) develop a replacement that might meet the needs (sort of) of that market. Let’s say there is a machine in 2013. Does anyone seriously believe it will include PCIe slots? Or at least the same number as there is now (still inadequate for many)?

If they publicly kill the Mac Pro, then they walk away from a segment of the market that feels Apple still needs to be in the game as a “professional computer manufacturer” in order to be taken seriously. At this point in time, NOT having a tower is detrimental to the big picture. It’s not about volume or gross sales but rather perception.

The lesson is that transition time is important to professional customers if you expect to keep them. And keeping them is important for the perceived marketing value of having them as customers.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com