What will Apple do with the Macintosh?

[Marcus Moore]

Of course, here again we have another article that ignores that Thunderbolt has a ceiling of usefulness for expandability.

With Intel’s announcement about the new 20Gbps TB coming next year, would this new bandwidth allow for hefty GPUs, or is it still not enough?

[Shawn Miller]

[Oliver Peters] “Unfortunately for pro users there are three “sort-of” reliable, mainstream vendors: Apple, Dell and HP. Discounting a slew of no-name PCs, Hackintoshes and maybe Lenovo, this doesn’t bode well for companies that rely on that class of machine in the future. I suspect the iMac design model (as well as the HP Z1) might be something developers will increasingly embrace simply out of self-preservation.”

There are a few more players to consider, I think. Boxx, Promax and SuperMicro immediately come to mind. I don’t doubt that the market for high-end, Xeon based workstations is shrinking, but I do believe that smaller systems integrators will serve those who need that kind of power on the desktop for a long time to come. Just my opinion. 🙂

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Brett Sherman] “[Dennis Radeke] “$1M a year isn’t big enough for a multi-billion dollar a year company to get involved with. Extrapolate for a company the size of Apple…”

So Apple’s sucess is actually a detriment? Brilliant. Allow me to be skeptical with someone who has a vested interest in Apple abandoning the pro market with no inside information.

I just don’t see it this way. To me Apple’s success means they don’t have to worry about losing a small bit of money on the Mac Pro market.”

No, I see Dennis’ point. It reminds me of a course I was covering for a technology company a number of years ago. They were teaching some of their top folks how to use a tool that allowed them to do company wide OS deployment to 50,000+ seat organizations. I remember the comments of one instructor in particular; he said something to the effect of “Yeah, I know that these large scale deployments aren’t all that interesting. If I was an enterprising young guy, and I wanted to make a comfortable living with minimal effort, I would subcontract these small, million(ish) dollar desktop deployment jobs, and let the big guys like (company X) do the heavy lifting for the real work.”

You might be surprised at how uninterested very big companies can be in smaller sections of their business, ones that only represent a fraction of a fraction of their overall income. It isn’t just Apple either… “they” are all (understandably) like that.

Shawn

[Andrew Richards]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Hey, where have you been?”

I’ve been lurking on and off, but my work has taken me pretty far away from the world of post in the past year, so I don’t have the skin in the game like I used to.

Nice to know I’ve been missed though!

Best,
Andy

[Brett Sherman]

[Shawn Miller] ”
There are a few more players to consider, I think. Boxx, Promax and SuperMicro”

Boxx and Promax require others to manufacture motherboards. So if those companies find it unprofitable to make motherboards then they are SOL. SuperMicro makes motherboards but they require Intel to make the chipsets.

Now I don’t expect the industry to change that much in the next 5 years. After that I don’t know. The point is that that one company cannot control what happens in the entire industry.

[Shawn Miller]

[Brett Sherman] “Boxx and Promax require others to manufacture motherboards. So if those companies find it unprofitable to make motherboards then they are SOL.”

You can make that argument for any electronics integrator or manufacturer. Every electronic device you own has dependencies on suppliers somewhere down the chain.

[Brett Sherman] “SuperMicro makes motherboards but they require Intel to make the chipsets.”

To make Intel compatible motherboards, yes (obviously). But they also make AMD compatible motherboards. Would it surprise you to know that neither Intel or Supermicro makes every component in their system boards?

[Brett Sherman] “The point is that that one company cannot control what happens in the entire industry.”

Sorry, I don’t follow… I don’t think anyone was making that case, unless I missed something.

Shawn