The Fog Thickens

[Chris Harlan]

[Craig Seeman] “I’ve noted elsewhere that Apple is actually a leading PC maker. They are ranked third in USA (about 6 or 7 world wide) and their sales are going up. MacPro is not their only PC. MacBook Pros, as I understand it, are at or near the top in laptop sales above $1000. iMacs probably the same for all in ones. This when most companies are experiencing declines . . . and towers from many manufacturers are suffering the steepest declines.
“

I agree with all of that. Macbook Pros have a future. iMacs too. And, I really hope you are right about some tough new iMacPro. Frankly, it makes sense to me that there should be a Mac Pro, even if its manufactured and sold at a loss. But I don’t think their head is there. Thin client has won big at Apple, and a big old workstation is the antithesis of that. I just see it being drummed out of their culture.

[Craig Seeman]

[Chris Harlan] “it makes sense to me that there should be a Mac Pro, even if its manufactured and sold at a loss.”

I’d argue that the halo effect works at both ends of the spectrum. Certainly Apple wants people who by iOS devices to move into the entire Mac ecosystem. It’s also important (IMHO) that each person who uses a MacPro (or an equally powerful replacement) may well have a MBP for portable use, an iMac for home/family use (and it may be more than one) and iPhones, iPod Touches, iPads for various family members. Pull the top end and some number of people may be using Windows and Androids within two years.

That said, I do think the tower is on the way out but that doesn’t mean the “pro” machine should be on the way out. I hope not.

[Chris Kenny]

Why did Lion start adding support for additional NVIDIA cards (like the 5xx series) all of a sudden, and even drop the requirement for Mac-specific graphics cards? This seems like an odd thing to do a few months before discontinuing the only machine with PCIe slots. So even if there isn’t a new tower form-factor Mac Pro, there’s probably going to be something. There were rumors a while back about a slightly smaller rack-mountable form factor, now that the Xserve is gone. That could he handy, and they could probably get away with dropping down to two drive bays and two 16x PCIe slots, now that they’ve got Thunderbolt.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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[Craig Seeman]

[Chris Kenny] ” So even if there isn’t a new tower form-factor Mac Pro, there’s probably going to be something. There were rumors a while back about a slightly smaller rack-mountable form factor, now that the Xserve is gone. That could he handy, and they could probably get away with dropping down to two drive bays and two 16x PCIe slots, now that they’ve got Thunderbolt.”

I agree. There’s going to be something. Your description is similar to my guess.
I’ve recently thought an iMacPro might be possible given rumors about anti glare monitors. It would obviously have to be a somewhat different form than the iMac though given dual proc Xeon and a user accessible 16x PCIe slot. Sir Jon Ive would have to do some miracle work though.

BTW the latest “Sherlock Holmes” clue that didn’t get much attention is that along with FCPX 10.0.4 update, Compressor was updated to use headless Macs in a QMaster cluster (previously not possible). So either Apple things people are going to use MacMinis with dual i5 to make encoder clusters (not really practical in my opinion) or there’s a more powerful headless Mac on the way which might just be Mini quad i7 as standard rather than server but obviously I hope for more.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
I would agree that there should be a reworked form-factor replacement top end TB Mac ‘Pro’.

BUT:
Buried deep in the MacRumors forum threads about the introduction of Sandy Bridge E5 Xeon chips is a passing mention of an Intel employee who had said that what was different this time round (2011-12) was that Apple engineers hadn’t shown up at Intel’s Xeon reference motherboard design dept – last time they came was to discuss the 2010 Westmere Xeon mobo changes.

Obviously as a rumour that is as dissmissable as Shane R’s ‘two sources’, but whilst NDA’s (and employment contracts) prevent people saying what is happening sometimes what isn’t happening can slip out. Maybe…:-(

Time will tell.

[Herb Sevush]

[Craig Seeman] “It’s actually smart business although maybe not great customer relations.”

I’ve never thought creating bad customer relations is good business, but then again I’m not Apple. On the other hand HP doesn’t seem to need to screw their customers to make a buck.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Mitch Ives]

[Joseph W. Bourke] “The real explosion happened in 1985, when Apple introduced the LaserWriter printer,”

I think you’ve got the date wrong. I had a LaserWriter with our five Lisa 2’s before the Macintosh came out, which debuted in 1984…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Lance Bachelder] “Sad that when the Adobe guy showed that now when you drop a clip on a new sequence it shows a dialog box almost exactly like FCP7 asking if you want to conform the seq to the media etc. and the crowd went nuts like this was new – kinda reminded of an old Apple NAB presentation.”

Wow, I had the same reaction… thought I was nuts…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill