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What if there actually IS a new Mac Pro?
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[Jeremy Garchow] “[Chris Harlan] “That’s an uncharacteristically silly thing for you to say. Yes, the 13″ Air is approved for use, but it is hardly good enough for the full range of Avid usage.”
Just reading what is says on the papers.
Someone must think it’s worth it at Avid to put it through the certification process.
“Hey, Id like one. But not as the only thing I’m editing with.
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[Andrew Richards] “In the case of FCPX, it isn’t arbitrary. Apple built FPCX around OpenCL”
The ATI 1900 supported OpenCL but the ATI 2600 did not?
Maybe I’m mistaken but . . .
https://wiki.vidblaster.com/index.php/Main_Page
Obviously the 1900 will result in no install now but that wasn’t the case with 10.0.0.Apparently the Intel HD 3000 isn’t OpenCL either but ti works.
OpenCL-capable graphics card or Intel HD Graphics 3000 or later
(bold emphasis added by me).So it’s apparently not “hardwired” to OpenCL.
It’s one thing when code for PPC isn’t code for Intel but otherwise these seem to be code based blocks based on detected hardware.
In other words in some cases they “code block” hardware they consider “unsupported” and in some cases they don’t such as MacPro 2008 running ATI 5770 although in the latter case performance is certainly reasonable compared to some of the “code blocked” GPUs.
There is a difference when a piece of hardware can’t run something vs a piece of hardware Apple feels no longer meets their idea of acceptable results and they, block the installation. Apple shouldn’t have to “support” what they don’t want to, but if something works good enough for the end user, they shouldn’t block the install. I know there are are FCPX users who managed to get it on unsupported systems by copying over the install from another system (thanks to self contained apps) and they’re OK with the modest performance they’re getting.
Engineer may decide what’s qualified but blocking the user who may be OK with working on an “unqualified” but functional system is coming from another place.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I ask because I don’t know, do other major computer/NLE/Plugin/hardware manufacturers provide roadmaps?”
Some do, some don’t.
HP has a bunch of product lines, but they released a WebOS roadmap in January. Here’s the press release.
The native tongue of big-balled business is PowerPoint….which of course tells you juuuuuust about everything you need to know, right?…so when you look at this, keep in mind that IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HUMAN LANGUAGE. It’s PowerPoint. https://www7.hp.com/openvms/pdf/openvms_roadmaps.pdf“>It’s SUPPOSED to look this ridiculous.
Ah, but before you actually ridicule, look more closely. For all that there’s a pile of disclaimers that it’s only a general picture, it’s actually pretty dang specific.
Because here’s the thing. You have a pretty good ideas about when the next iPhone is coming out, that it’s going to be AWESOME, and your inclination to buy. The rest is finesse.
But when you’re the one guy steering a billion-dollar ship’s IT, you need more than a pretty good idea. So yeah, this one “general” idea ppt gives more specifics than Apple will give you before the sun goes nova.
Hey, this one’s fun, regarding the EOL of an HP server.
Since November 2001, when HP announced discontinuance plans for the HP e3000 and MPE/iX, HP has worked proactively with customers worldwide to help these accounts plan and order final upgrades, software, or accessory purchases. A number of HP and partner programs are in place to assist customers with transitioning to HP-UX 11i, Microsoft Windows, or Linux on other HP systems.
That’s on the full-blown sub-site for the HP e3000 Transition Program, which begins with “A Message To The Community.”
Those heartless, soulless, putty-colored, Windows-loving business bastards! Why can’t they be more like Apple???
For real grins, here’s their roadmap press release after the Compaq merger: “Customers need to know which offerings we will have in which markets. And we wanted to be able to tell them on Day One of the new HP.”
See, this is how a computer company does it. Even if, as has been the case for HP, the roadmap can change pretty wildly, pretty quickly, you tell people reasonable stuff about what you want them to know. I found that document pretty fascinating.
I also like that they offer roadmap advice to other mouth-breathing business nerds like themselves. They published a whole series of white papers called “Develop A Financial Roadmap To The Cloud,” which point out that you can’t just make this stuff up. You have to have a plan, and that plan has to make you more money than it will cost you, or it’s not worth doing. Too bad the former CEO didn’t read any of that.
I’m obviously being a little tongue-in-cheek here, but I’ll end with a peek at Microsoft.
This very day brings updates to the 2012 roadmap posted by a third-party publisher in the channel partner game. When you look at it you’ll see that a number of products have had their product roadmaps updated this month. Again, compiled by a third party, but all sourced from Microsoft, making it an interesting exercise in roadmapping nevertheless.
Not that they had to be Kremlinologists to get the info. Microsoft publishes it. These guys make it easy to find in one place. Here for example is just one of MSFT’s own roadmap pages, for Windows Embedded.
You can find a ton of these with a couple of clicks.
As with one of HP’s roadmaps above, this next one may give you a knot in the pit of your stomach because it lacks the loving embrace you’re used to from Apple….and because, okay, you don’t like MSFT, that’s cool. And it might prompt you to laugh so hard you spit milk out your nose. But they’re making a statement about the life cycle of their products that you can do with what you will.
Every Windows product has a lifecycle. The lifecycle begins when a product is released and ends when it’s no longer supported or sold. Knowing key dates in this lifecycle helps you make informed decisions about when to upgrade or make other changes to your software.
Mock away at the clueless goons and vampire monopolists. And, facetiousness aside, this isn’t all that substantial…but this is how you do it when you believe that your choices have an effect on your customers, and you acknowledge that it matters to them.
Oh, and for grins, a guy in 2009 at MSFT’s equivalent of WWDC, rolling his eyes at them for saying that Windows 8 will come out around 2012.
Tell you what, if anybody here can post a slide showing Apple’s 3-year OS roadmap, I’ll buy you a real pony. Actually, I’ll buy you a real pony if you can show it to me in private. It’ll be just between you and me.
So to answer your question without being a wiseass Jeremy, I can come up with more examples of companies in other parts of the broadest meaning of “our industry” who are very open about their roadmaps, just as I can come up with companies whose lips are sealed tighter than a tomb. But HP and Microsoft seemed like good comparables to Apple’s place in the ecosystem, and couldn’t be more different in their approach.
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[Andrew Richards] “[Walter Soyka] “Perhaps the concern isn’t about the technical separation, but the ideological one: OS X must retain its philosophy of layered complexity, and must never inherit any of iOS’s locked-down design philosophy.”
iCloud is their bridge. Local for conventional filing, iCloud documents for the iOS filing model on the Mac.
“The thing with iCloud is that it rather spectacularly realizes Larry Ellison’s dream of thin client computing to a degree that makes me wonder what future role a PC might actually play in that environment. All this post-PC world could just be jargony stuff meant to fluff iPads. It could also be their actual game plan. I’ve always disliked the notion of thin client computing for being a bit totalitarian, and was happy to see it vanquished at the beginning of last decade. Or so I thought. Then came smart phones. And push. And now thin client looks to be winning. Or, maybe its won.
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Thanks, Tim.
So-
– a web based OS.
– The PowerPoint link isn’t working for me here.
– The EOL of a server, of which Apple has a similar EOL. Apple said by a MacPro or a mini(!).
– A giant merger at the turn of the century of which there’s no recent Apple comparison.
– A map for cloud based enterprise for which a space Apple isn’t competing.
– Windows 8 proposed 3 years in advance. Mountain Lion 3ish months. How far in advance does Microsoft release developer previews for testing? Again, I don’t know these things.
– And some other enterprise cloud offerings from Msoft.
Really, this is mostly enterprise. big, huge monster computing for big giant corporations with huge massive amounts of people and data. Like the Northwestern University’s med school IT system, or one small wing of GE. Blue chip.
Let’s dial it back a bit. I mean, as everyone has been saying, Apple is a consumer company, right?
Does Matrox, Aja, decklink have public roadmaps? Gtech, Sonnet, Sony, Arri, Canon, Panasonic, FSI, Elgato, Wacom, Cache-A, Noise Industries, Boris, Red Giant, TV Logic, anyone?
I’m not trying to be a wiseass either, but demanding a public roadmap and saying that “I won’t buy without one” is not a realistic situation, otherwise we wouldn’t purchase any gear as the paranoia would prevent any purchases.
Did anyone know that new HP all-in-one was coming? Or if/when the next Dreamcolor monitor is ever going to come out?
Unfortunately, big business is not open source.
And again, my usual disclaimer, I’m not aplogizing for Apple. The handling of the end of fcp7 and the beginning of fcpx has been very poor. People should be pissed off.
But if I switch to windows everything, is my future that much more secure because Microsoft said that there’s going to be the next version of their OS in three years? Ya got me….
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[Jeremy Garchow] “The handling of the end of fcp7 and the beginning of fcpx has been very poor. People should be pissed off.
But if I switch to windows everything, is my future that much more secure because Microsoft said that there’s going to be the next version of their OS in three years? Ya got me….”
Dude, you know I admire and respect you, but I feel like you’re mocking me because I gave you a thorough answer. You asked whether other companies have roadmaps, I gave you most of a dozen examples from an OS and a computer company off the top of my head, speaking directly to specific communities that do in fact have overlaps with ours.
Let’s start with the HP e3000, which you’re trying to tell me was blue chip. Nope: maximum capacity of 146 gigs in a 3.5″ form factor. You could fit 20 of ’em in a rack for a total of 3TB storage, but that’s it! Three terabytes is NOT blue chip — and yet HP provided years of warning that it was going to go away, and support after the fact.
In fact, even though HP announced a 5-year sunset, the e3000 lived on nearly NINE more years because there was demand to support it.
Sound familiar? No, it doesn’t. Apple doesn’t do that. Not five years warning for EOL, not five weeks, not five days. No public promise of future support explained on new, dedicated web portals designed for resellers, developers AND customers.
And Apple keep products alive because there’s demand? Are you kidding me?
You’re also minimizing the importance of the reveal re: Windows 8 in 2009. The point wasn’t that a new OS was coming in 2012. It’s that MSFT was offering specific guidance to developers AND consumers about what was IN that OS, and how to get from here to there.
They also posted a CONSUMER-directed page showing their roadmap for OS support and obsolescence over a period of years. Has Apple evealed plans for what’s coming years in advance? Offered lengthy public betas? No. Has Microsoft? Yes.
HP’s guidance on what to expect from the Compaq merger was replete with consumer information, all the way down to home wireless networking and Bluetooth. Dude, there was a Bluetooth roadmap! They even gave the REASONS for the way they merged stuff at the CONSUMER level. So it’s actually very, very easy to compare apples to Apples, even for consumers.
See why I think you’re straw-dogging me here? I feel like you’re trying to make it sound like I’m pulling stuff out of thin air that has nothing to do with anything like what Apple is doing. It’s just not true.
Last one. Your new Dreamcolor monitor comes with VGA to DVI cables. Not because this is a good idea — HP is adamant that it’s a BAD idea, and the documentation warns of the consequences…but it’s also not their job to MAKE you throw out all your old stuff, just because you want a single new component.
Think different, all right. This is very, very different from Apple.
THAT’s what you think about counting on. A multi-year roadmap for your OS. A specific description of the future support provided for that OS, and a schedule for when that support will end years down the line. Loooong public betas. Your computer company NOT forcing you to upgrade everything to upgrade one thing. Giving you long lead times before hardware EOL, and a support roadmap for afterward.
I’m not saying that Apple is evil for doing it their way. Hey, their ball, their rules. It’s working for them, and making their stockholders rich. It’s good for America.
But their kind of secrecy is by no means universal. The fact is that if you want open vendor partners, you choose Microsoft and HP. If you want closed, you choose Apple.
Ironic, eh?
Look, you have to decide which you trust more: what Apple isn’t telling you, or what MSFT and HP ARE telling you. I get why people choose the former, but I also get why more and more people are refusing to.
For the other companies you mentioned, you already know everything you need to know. For plug-in developers, roadmaps make no sense because plug-ins are designed to plug in to WHATEVER comes along — but what comes along is out of their hands. Blackmagic give a roadmap? Well, it depends who they buy or what pops out of Grant Petty’s head tomorrow, but it’s going to cost less, or do more for the same price, and generally work better than what’s available today. Hard drive vendors? Faster, smaller, cheaper. Etc, etc, etc.
THESE have zero comparison to Apple’s OS or machine plans. Microsoft and HP are EXACT comparisons.
For industrial design, though, I’m not aware of anyone giving roadmaps — not blenders or bathroom scales, certainly not cars or computers.
Of course, other than a brief wobble that led to one scurvy dog walking the plank, I see HP peeling off their consumer devices to focus on pro computer customers. How’s THAT for a compare/contrast scenario?
You can say that HP tried and failed at the device game, and I won’t argue. It doesn’t change the outcome. Consumer devices, fading. Investment in professional computing, doubling down.
Last note on that count: it wasn’t the enterprise who provided the largest input into the Z series workstations — it was media creation pros, which HP has talked about very publicly, based on the kinds of focus groups that Apple is proud of NOT doing.
You’ll decide whether or not the camel’s back has been broken, but whatever Apple machine you see next will provide no guidance from Apple regarding the future of the kind of professional computers and computing that you’re currently relying on.
PS. Sorry I bungled pasting the link for the VMS roadmap in the previous missive. So anyway, yeah, the PPT looks a bit of a mess, but it’s talking about the future of stuff like Java, Firefox, SCSI, 10gigE, SSL, LTO5, and lots of other things that we work with every day, even if not in the VMS environment. (Fortran? Really?)
And hey, to my earlier point about knowing roadmaps without asking, you can probably guess Apple’s roadmap for every single thing I just mentioned. I’m just saying, if you ask for roadmaps in the realm of OS and computers, even for consumers, I got companies with roadmaps, and I got companies without roadmaps.
https://h71000.https://www7.hp.com/openvms/pdf/openvms_roadmaps.pdf
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Hi
In my part of the net it has to be changed to this to get to the page- bessie don’t like those double-ewes – sheep v cows thing? 😉
http(colon)//h71000(dot)(three_double_ewes)7(dot)hp(dot)com/openvms/pdf/openvms_roadmaps.pdf -
Public Roadmaps are never good for business. Look at the gaming industry prefect example. Keep your future ideas away from the public.
On the Macbook Air, I could care less what I work on (remembering the Powebook G4) as long it works and gives me what I need. If it doesn’t I move on or figure it out.
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Perhaps we should just take the “FCPX” out of the forum name?
Steve Connor
“FCPX Agitator”
Adrenalin Television -
[Tim Wilson] “Dude, you know I admire and respect you, but I feel like you’re mocking me because I gave you a thorough answer. You asked whether other companies have roadmaps, I gave you most of a dozen examples from an OS and a computer company off the top of my head, speaking directly to specific communities that do in fact have overlaps with ours. “
Certainly not, Tim. I meant no disrespect at all. None. It was not my intention to mock you.
I greatly appreciate the answer and I’m glad you could actually come up with some examples.
I have never worked or relied on a roadmap, ever. In this day and age especially, a roadmap is limiting as not only do things change fast, but everything CAN change fast. Companies can retool and rethink faster than consumers can keep up. I’m not saying this is necessarily a good thing.
I am trying to make smart and level headed decisions like everyone else. If there are roadmaps out there, I’d like to see them. I don’t think they exist, I mean really exist. Sure, there are some plans, but they aren’t necessarily reliable.
2009 is different than today which will be different than 2015.
2001 – 2009, at least in windows land, was not that much different.
I think HP is a decently solid company. I have a DreamColor and people mocked me for it for being a computer monitor. Whatever.
But even HP balked earlier about not making PCs. They changed their ways, but Apple hasn’t quite balked yet.
Most things they have EOLd, they’ve announced. Final cut studio being the exception, but even then they had a replacement. I’m not saying its a suitable replacement, but it is a replacement via Apple’s eyes.
That’s all.
I’m really trying to find some reality in all of this. The speculation is cloudy.
Let me put this another way.
If I switch to windows and HP or Dell or Boxx, should my confidence automatically be recharged for the foreseeable editing future? If so, how?
Jeremy
Ps. That link must not work on shotty iDevice. I’ll check it on a real OS later.
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