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What if there actually IS a new Mac Pro?
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Good question. At work we run MacPros, mostly the 3 to 4 year old dual processor 4 core machines, connected to Xsan via fibrechannel. So we need CPUs with 2 ethernet connections, FC card and either a Blackmagic or Aja card.
At home I run a 2011 iMac 27 with 2 X 3 GHZ CPU, SSD boot drive, and a Promise 6 drive raid. The system is incredibly fast and does everything I need it to.
So my choice down the road will be:
1) Update the work machines with New MacPros, if they are compatible with all of our legacy i/o cards. I’d need to know that these machines could run FCP7 as well as Avid
2) Update to iMacs with Thunderbolt peripherals, not sure how well daisy chaining will work with lots of peripherals. But I’m very happy with the performance of these machines, especially with SSD boot drives.
3) Update to Dell PCs as we’ll be switching to Avid eventually.
Each choice has good and bad sides. If there was an FCP8, this would be a no-brainer and I’d stick with MacPros. But eventually we’ll switch to Avid and so we need to look at all of our options including (shudder) PCs.
Cheers
John
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[Herb Sevush] “The idea that X is going to drive those sales, on the other hand, is too funny for words.”
Do you really thing FCPX won’t have a noteworthy portion of the market in 2 years when people are faced with upgrades assuming they want to take advantage of FCPX’s state at that point. That you are so certain that FCPX user base will be insignificant underestimates Apple’s FCPX development capabilities especially given the current speed of development. It may not “replace” legacy but the market itself is changing rapidly as is FCPX itself. That market, even if it’s not as big as legacy’s peak, may be a very big target for Apple. If it updates MacPros (or it’s replacement) faster, it may well be more valuable to Apple.
I’m grossly oversimplifying for clarification but if FCPX only has 1/2 the market share of FCP legacy had but triples the rate of Mac upgrades then Apple is actually selling more computers even though there’s a smaller market share.
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[Craig Seeman] “Do you really thing FCPX won’t have a noteworthy portion of the market in 2 years when people are faced with upgrades assuming they want to take advantage of FCPX’s state at that point. That you are so certain that FCPX user base will be insignificant underestimates Apple’s FCPX development capabilities especially given the current speed of development.”
Given the abysmal overall quality of FCPX to date, I wouldn’t bank on the development capabilities of the current Pro Apps team. Don’t forget that while FCPX was released only eight months ago, it’s been under development for probably at least two years longer than that. Apple needs to get Pro Apps quality control in much better shape if this software is going have any future.
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
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[David Lawrence] “Given the abysmal overall quality of FCPX to date”
This is not given IMHO. It still have rough spots but it’s quite capable these days.
[David Lawrence] “t’s been under development for probably at least two years longer than that.”
As would any proper professional product before it’s released to the public. Some would argue it could have used another six months or so but, compared to any other software NLE I can remember, post public release updates have been frequent and significant. The expeditious updates might mean issues are slipping through but it’s “damned if you , damned if you don’t” at least for people in this forum.
I’ve had more catastrophic issues with some of the FCP legacy updates than what I’ve experienced with FCPX.
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[Bill Davis] “Perhaps because actual new functional capabilities generally follow the development curve of the hardware capabilities? At some point, designing for the way hardware “used to be” means limiting your reach.”
I don’t think I was very clear, Bill. We agree on this. I understand that FCPX was built on entirely new technologies. I think Craig had to upgrade his Radeon HD 2600 because it’s now a very old card and doesn’t support current technologies like OpenCL, not because Apple artificially limited the list of supported graphics cards to force him to buy new hardware.
That said, Craig’s point about Apple refusing to qualify the 5770 as compatible with older Mac Pros — even though it is compatible by design — still stands.
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 -
[Craig Seeman] “Do you really thing FCPX won’t have a noteworthy portion of the market in 2 years when people are faced with upgrades assuming they want to take advantage of FCPX’s state at that point.”
Two points.
First I don’t think the current X market is as large as you think. I think a large part of this audience is made up of those editors curious enough to give it a try at it’s initial low cost. I don’t think a large portion of them will stay with it. We’ll know when the next paid version comes out, If I’m right sales numbers will go down significantly.
Second and more importantly the current editors who love and use X for their paying jobs, people like Tony West and Bill Davis, don’t use a Mac Pro. Half of their argument for the wonderfulness of X is how well it performs on a MBP. I think X will have a larger market on the Ipad than it will ever have on a Mac Pro. Most of the market for workstations have been driven from the Apple camp like they were vermin. It’s been 8 months now and poor Jeremy, your Mac Pro demographic incarnate, who loves the entire X concept, is sounding more and more despondent because of how unstable X is. He’s being driven, unwillingly, into the arms of Adobe.
So no, while it’s possible ( but I doubt it ) that FCPX sales in the future might drive Imac and MBP sales, the idea that they will drive Mac Pro sales is plain silly. PPro will sell a hell of a lot more Mac Pros for Apple than X will, which is why I have some hope that the market for MPs will be big enough to sustain itself.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
I’m using a MacPro and while I did upgrade my MacBookPro, FCPX wasn’t the sole or primary reason. I certainly had no motivation to replace my aging MacPro with a new (but aging by design) MacPro for FCPX. I do think things will be different two years from now though. My current intro in a MacPro replacement certainly goes beyond FCPX. I’m not limiting the issue to the current state of FCPX because after this MacPro update, which may not be driven by FCPX, may be followed by another one in a couple of years and by then Avid and Premiere users on the Mac may be in decline. Whether or not FCPX drives MacPro sales, I believe that is Apple’s intent. Apple really has very little reason to be in the NLE business outside of driving computer sales.
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[Bill Davis] “I want Apple to surprise me.”
I used to want surprises from Apple, too. Now I’m more specific — I want good surprises.
[Bill Davis] “Every other manufacturer on the planet starts from what the new “generation” of components (busses, processors, drives, etc) do – then simply boxes them up with different name badges, case designs, and maybe an eye to the failure rating of the particular batch of parts they pick out to use.”
To do otherwise means you have to be better at microprocessor design, fabrication, and integration than Intel is. That’s a tall order. Intel won in the marketplace by providing better-performing products at reasonable prices, and no other company, including AMD, DEC, IBM, Motorola, and Sun, have been able to dethrone them in 30 years of trying.
Further, sticking with Intel designs and other industry standards provides compatibility. If Apple were to step away from Intel hardware, not only would they lose Thunderbolt, they’d also force third-party developers to recompile (at best) and rewrite (at worst) their code for a new architecture, or be forced into emulation a la Rosetta.
Apple did buy PA Semi a few years ago, but their expertise seems to be optimizing for low power consumption. While the performance they get at low power levels is impressive, that doesn’t necessarily make them a good candidate for competing with Intel’s Xeon processors, and performance is presumably still important to anyone considering a workstation.
[Bill Davis] “Apple is unique since they, more than most, invent, spec, and manufacturer MORE of their own solutions in more areas than most companies. So they have a chance to innovate rather than exclusively increment their machines.”
Apple is an outstanding designer and marketer. They do have quite a bit of highly innovative in-house engineering. However, they also do a lot of integration — buying technologies off the shelf, or buying out companies for their technologies — and using them in their products.
Does Apple actually manufacture anything anymore? Don’t they use contract manufacturing exclusively now?
[Bill Davis] “Thunderbolt has the promise to change everything. If we ever get to TB level 3 (all optical) – with 100 times the throughput of current buss speeds – then everything changes. Anything hung on the TB chain acts as if it’s bolted directly to the processor. So the requirement for one box to hold everything disappears.”
I’ve argued this point with others, too. Thunderbolt is a very cool technology, but it’s still just an expansion bus, and with Intel’s current architecture and roadmaps, it will remain an expansion bus. It’s not at all like bolting anything directly onto the processor.
I think another flaw in this reasoning is that it assumes that all progress on all other interconnects will stop while Thunderbolt alone progresses. Intel’s QuickPath Interconnect technology — the system that actually connects the CPU(s) to the I/O controllers or routing hubs on the motherboard — is immensely faster (by design and necessity) than Thunderbolt. PCIe 3.0 is here, and PCIe 4.0 is under development. I see no reason to believe that development on these other fast interconnects will stop.
I don’t mean to try to minimize the impact that Thunderbolt will have. Fast external expansion is a big deal. However, as long as internal interconnects remain faster than external ones and remain segregated by design within the system, there will be performance advantages to keeping some things within the box.
These things will be less and less important for straight-up video editorial, which is now becoming less reliant on the CPU and more reliant on disk and GPU throughput. My world includes 3D rendering and compositing, where things like CPU performance and memory bandwidth are serious constraints.
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 -
[Craig Seeman] “Apple really has very little reason to be in the NLE business outside of driving computer sales.”
Agreed; we’re just disagreeing on …
a) which computers they’re trying to sell with X, and
b) the prospects of FCPX meeting those aims.
[Craig Seeman] “I’m not limiting the issue to the current state of FCPX because after this MacPro update, which may not be driven by FCPX, may be followed by another one in a couple of years and by then Avid and Premiere users on the Mac may be in decline.”
I’m not looking that far down the road. My interests aren’t theoretical, I’m buying something in May and the best solution would be a new MacPro that matches my criteria. If I were to venture a guess the next system I would buy after that would be running Linux, but again, I’m not trying to look around the next turn, it’s all I can do to see the road in front of me.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Craig Seeman] “What business/profit motive would Apple have in continuing to make a Xeon class machine? It’s only worthwhile if they can increase revenue. Either they move more units or create a “compelling” situation for more frequent replacement. Do you see another business model viable to Apple? Do they have a business motive to produce basically the same box with the addition of a couple of Thunderbolt ports? I don’t mean this rhetorically, please do explain.”
I don’t think that Apple’s really in position to encourage workstation replacement on their own. Apple is entirely dependent on Intel’s continuing microarchitecture advances for the big performance gains and new technologies that drive workstation replacement. If Apple takes away expansion, they take away a big part of the Mac Pro’s value proposition.
Let’s look at Thunderbolt again for a moment.
Editors used to buy workstations because PCI expansion was the only way to get video I/O and high-performance RAID systems. Those are the folks who still have 2006 or 2008 Mac Pros in service. People who bought workstations for performance are likely on a shorter replacement schedule, because even a fully-loaded 2008 Mac Pro provides poor computational performance by modern standards.
Thunderbolt means that customers who bought Mac Pros just for expansion can now buy an iMac instead. That will result in fewer Mac Pro sales. However, Thunderbolt offers little for customers who bought Mac Pros for computational performance. Even though total Mac Pro sales will likely decline, the average refresh period could get dramatically shorter as the higher proportion of remaining power users chase performance.
On the other hand, with Thunderbolt and good-enough performance for many customers coming from iMacs, cannibalized Mac Pro sales may ultimately encourage Apple to kill the line, just like they did with XServe. Further, Apple hasn’t offered speed-bump updates or high-performance graphics/GPGPU cards, so Apple’s interest in performance-oriented customers is questionable.
I think it’s clear that Apple is not playing offense in the workstation market anymore. They are playing defense, doing the bare minimum necessary to offer machines to users like you and me who need high computational performance.
I doubt that Apple would actually enter the workstation market today if they weren’t already in it. They may be hesitant to blatantly abandon the creative, development, and scientific research niches that depend on Mac Pros, but I don’t seem them doing anything to stop attrition.
Look at me — if you had asked me four years ago if I’d have a workstation provided by HP under my desk, I’d have laughed. If you’d asked me that this time last year, I might have thoughtfully nodded. Ask me about it today, and I might try to sell you one.
That’s in part why I started this thread. I’m curious to figure out what’s in it for Apple. I’d like to understand their business model and value proposition better. I know why I used to buy Apple workstations, and at this point, I’m not sure I have any compelling reason to continue doing so. I’d like to learn why other people are still choosing Mac Pros, and what value they see coming from Apple.
Could it just be the halo effect? My 3 Apple workstation purchases over the last 10 years have been accompanied by 2 iMacs and 9 laptops. Of course, that was before the post-PC era, and now Apple may get all the halo they need from iPhones and iPads.
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
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