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Why Apple should let HP build its workstations
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[Andrew Richards] ”
So let’s forget that Apple has nothing to gain from outsourcing a product they supposedly don’t want to make themselves. Let’s say they do it. What does an HP Z800 running OS X look like?It still has the same old OpenGL (this is an OS X problem, not a hardware problem)
It still has the same limited options for GPUs (if we are assuming EFI instead of BIOS for OS X)
It still won’t support Blu-Ray drives (not any more than a Mac Pro will today)
Same number of PCIe slots, same distribution of PCIe lanes as the Mac Pro today
Same number of HDD bays as the Mac Pro today
Same number of built-in NICs
More RAM slots (12 on the Z vs 8 on the Mac Pro)
One additional external 5.25″ bay vs today’s Mac Pro”No, no, some issues there:
– MacPros have full support for Blu-ray drives, ie. mount discs in finder, write to discs in finder. You just cannot view BD movies because copy protection scheme isn’t implemented in OSX. But as far as using the drives in the same way as you’d use any other blank optical media there is no issue. It is a purely political decission by Apple not to offer Blu-ray drives as a bto option.
– MacPros have four PCIe slots running at 16/8/4/4 lanes.
The z800 has one legacy PCI slots and 6 PCIe slots running at 16/16/8/4/4 so more expansion and faster
– You can add up to 9 internal drives in a z800. There are four at the bottom but are forgetting the expansion bays in the front for which you can get, from HP or elsehwere, hot-swap bays for additional five drives. And there are three of those 5,25 bays, not just one.
In addition to that, you have SATA and SAS headers on the mainboard (plus lots of them), a RAID chip on board including RAID5 as well as HP options for eSATA on USB3.
Of course, with the z820 things are a bit different. Even faster PCIe, USB3 built in etc. -
[Don Walker] “Anybody here been in the business long enough to remember the Ampex label on a SONY BVW-75 Betacam SP deck. Never understood that one either.”
It’s got Sony guts, man!
Best,
Andy -
[Frank Gothmann] “- MacPros have four PCIe slots running at 16/8/4/4 lanes.
The z800 has one legacy PCI slots and 6 PCIe slots running at 16/16/8/4/4 so more expansion and faster”Yeah I caught that myself and added an edit to the post while you were responding.
[Frank Gothmann] “- You can add up to 9 internal drives in a z800. There are four at the bottom but are forgetting the expansion bays in the front for which you can get, from HP or elsehwere, hot-swap bays for additional five drives. And there are three of those 5,25 bays, not just one.”
I said one additional bay, and that expansion chassis is not listed on the spec sheet I was reading.
[Frank Gothmann] “In addition to that, you have SATA and SAS headers on the mainboard (plus lots of them), a RAID chip on board including RAID5 as well as HP options for eSATA on USB3.
Of course, with the z820 things are a bit different. Even faster PCIe, USB3 built in etc.”Yes, fine, the Z is better workstation hardware owing to the additional slots and drive capacity. I was wrong on that. But I’m not wrong about OS X never being licensed and that it would not benefit Apple.
Best,
Andy -
Andrew,
You and I are clearly looking at this from two markedly different vantage points: you are an engineer and I am a marketer. You believe that Apple will release a new workstation and I believe that they will not.
What would a Z800 running OSX give me if it existed? It would give me (as a businessperson running a company) the feeling that I didn’t have to change out my whole company. But we are coming up on the year anniversary of last June’s culling of the herd, so maybe we are in for another shortly.
We’ll see, won’t we?
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine
A 2011 FOLIO: 40 honoree as one of the 40 most influential publishers in America
http://www.creativecow.netCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
“Be who you are and say what you feel because those that matter, don’t mind — and those that mind, don’t matter.” – Dr. Seuss
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[Ronald Lindeboom] “We’ll see, won’t we?”
We will, very soon. I’d say if we don’t have a new Mac Pro come NAB, then you can write it off and make your plans. And if we do get one, you’ll have a pretty clear picture of Apple’s attitude. If it is an all new form factor like Craig and I have speculated, I think that augurs well for the product having a long tail. If it is another G5 cheese grater with some Thunderbolt ports tacked on, then I’d be inclined to believe that would be the last Mac Pro we’ll ever get. Of course, even if there is a new one with an all new design, if it is lacking some key spec that is essential to your business, it won’t matter much to you.
Best,
Andy -
I would be very surprised to see Apple do this because they are a hardware company. Everything they do is to sell a piece of hardware. Want Lion for $29? You have to buy a Mac to run it. Want Shake at a wicked discount or a $30k color grading app added to the FCP Suite at no extra charge (old examples, I know)? No problem, just buy a Mac to run them. What access to iTunes and the iTunes store on Mac or Windows OS? No sweat, just buy one of our iDevices.
It’s why other companies have trouble competing because very few of them offer compelling hardware and compelling software/content. That’s why I think Amazon could be the closest competitor if they can smooth out some of the wrinkles w/the Fire. Apple doesn’t necessarily need it’s services to make money because they want you to get hooked on their hardware. While Amazon doesn’t necessarily need to make money selling hardware ’cause they want you to hooked on their services.
Bit of a tangent I know, but I don’t see how partnering with HP fits into Apple’s MO.
Sure, we would love it ’cause it could be the best of both worlds. But why would Apple love it?
-Andrew
2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5) -
[Andrew Kimery] “Sure, we would love it ’cause it could be the best of both worlds. But why would Apple love it?”
Bingo.
Best,
Andy -
I accepted a position teaching Digital Media Arts to High School Kids, at a charter school for at risk youth. Wow, do they have some great stories to tell.
Last night was the Career and Technology Educator’s Annual Budget proposal meeting, where all the district CTE teachers pitch their needs.
The teacher who presented before me teaches computer coding. She wanted Apple desktops because her students want to learn to make iPad apps.
I presented on cameras and computers: 3 Canon XA10HDs and 5 i5 iMacs with FCPX.
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“I think you are drastically understating the ‘effort’ part of the equation.”
Really? So, two companies that have hundreds of millions (or billions) of dollars in revenue, can’t do what one project is doing open source on basically no funding comparatively, and another project is planning to do after a 30k$ Kickstarter fund? And by that I mean support/port more than 2 platforms–I realize porting something from Linux, to OSX, could possibly be a bit simpler to do. Sorta.
“Avid/Adobe on Linux – unfortunately I can’t see that happening. Too much that would need to be tweaked to bring functionality on par with the other OSes, Apple would have to port Quicktime to Linux (and Quicktime is dead) etc. etc.”
As already pointed out here, DaVinci and Autodesk both figured it out, and surely their video dept. budgets are substantially less than Adobe’s or Avid’s.
“Not saying a Linux port wouldn’t be great, it might be, but it’s a really big effort and wouldn’t make a whole lot of business sense at this point for avid/adobe.”
There’s actually a decent demand, and that’s only absolute enthusiasts. No marketing or awareness at all. $1,250,000 in instant sales isn’t bad for nobody knowing about it.
Add getting the word out there that it’s now supported, onto the scores of professionals hating Windows 8, or those feeling abandoned by Apple but don’t like Windows, and I honestly don’t think it would take long (given our workflow codecs comes along with it–i.e. davinci, autodesk!) for it to become a workstation standard. Ubuntu is there now; you don’t have to be a software geek to figure Linux out anymore. Far from it; I personally think it out-Apple’s Apple in a lot of ways in terms of simplistic design and ease of use.
I don’t think people realize, particularly creative professionals since that’s the market we’re discussing, that trying Ubuntu takes like 15-30 minutes. Download, burn, and restart into the full OS, off the CD! I do this all the time for data or system recovery, it’s one of the best handyman tools to keep around the workstations just for those times you need it. Let’s see Windows and or OS X do anything like that, so easy and hassle free, that you can perhaps try out a new version of the OS or a new OS (for switchers) in 15 minutes, while keeping your current system totally in tact and only like 60 seconds away.
If something like Media Composer or Creative Suite was actually available on Ubuntu, there would be no down side to just giving it a test ride when you have a few hours free, and from there we’d see workstations converting to run Ubuntu full time very rapidly. It’s free, no OS licensing to deal with it, and it doesn’t require you investing in a bunch of new PC’s or whatever. Some of those workstations already have the option of shipping Linux, btw.
In a world where these 2 consumer driven companies are finally figuring how to make devices and platforms that cater toward consumers, I wonder why we’re relying on these 2 platforms anyway. As they dive further and further toward mobile computing that makes sense for playing video and checking Facebook… it seems to me that it does make “business sense” to consider developing for something that’s been better suited for the work all along.
Just my 2 cents I guess.
Cheers,
– weston
letter arrangements: PP CS5 AE MC MBS GVE FCP -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Not saying a Linux port wouldn’t be great, it might be, but it’s a really big effort and wouldn’t make a whole lot of business sense at this point for avid/adobe.”
I knew of a company that worked in the Open Source community and made some great products, serving companies like Sony Imageworks, Blue Sky, Tippett Studios and many others. They are now gone. Why? The very nature of the Open Source movement is non-commercial — read: no money in it. It seems that even the biggest and most successful companies are not up for paying for tools in the Linux world.
Big companies like Adobe have tried and failed in that market. Smaller companies such as the one I am referring to (I don’t mention their name only because I know how heartbroken they are and don’t want to rub salt into the wound) have also failed.
I tried Open Office for Mac, it was a kluge. Same with the GIMP. Neither tool is the equal of its commercial counterpart. Are they good? They are, but there is a reason that the vast majority of people are willing to shell out the money for their commercial counterparts.
The GIMP for Mac has been available for many years now but has failed to catch hold in the market. It has a tiny fraction of the image manipulation market.
I doubt we’ll ever see Avid or Adobe running in pure unadulterated Linux. While there are people who relish Open Source as both a concept and a movement (and who now have tools like Lightworks to use), the vast majority of people working for a living using these tools will continue to pony-up the duckets to buy commercial products.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine
A 2011 FOLIO: 40 honoree as one of the 40 most influential publishers in America
http://www.creativecow.netCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
“Be who you are and say what you feel because those that matter, don’t mind — and those that mind, don’t matter.” – Dr. Seuss
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