Will Apple abandon pro-users all together?

[John Davidson]

We just built a very unprofessional Core i7 iMac system with Lion, 16gb RAM, a Promise Pegasus 12tb. Compared to our similarly spec’ed out 8 core, the iMac is much faster. Compared to our current generation 12 core Mac Pro with 64 gb ram and 16tb mini-sas RAID, the iMac also wins at most tasks.

Beef up the iMac a little more and I won’t miss the Mac Pro at all. Maybe they’ll call it an iMac Pro. Not really feeling abandoned.

[Johnny Martin]

What are you running for software ? FC (x) or (p) ?

Any special hardware (aja, decks, etc) ?

[Rob Mackintosh]

If there is a market, and they can do something innovative, why leave the money on the table?

Nothing in Greg Joswiak’s recent talk on focus, simplicity, courage(?) and being the best precludes the development of a new workstation.

This excerpt from the FxPlug 2.0 SDK Overview is enlightening:

Users of Final Cut Pro X are looking to solve specific tasks rather than to apply particular effects. In general, you should avoid publishing long lists of parameters that are likely to confuse users and make completing their tasks harder rather than easier.
Advanced users who need more control will be able to either open your Final Cut Effect in Motion and edit it themselves, or create their own Final Cut Effects within Motion for their specific task. Remember, less advanced users will be overwhelmed by filters that are too complex and won’t generally need to control every parameter in a given filter.

Same goes for hardware. The current iMacs can be a workstation or home PC or a kiosk.
Motion is to FCPX what Thunderbolt accessories are to the iMac.

I’m sure there are advanced users pushing the iPad and iPhone to their limits.
They’ll take the high and low end user if they can get them, and with the minimum number of products.

I expect a “reinvention of the workstation” sometime in the next couple of years.
Just don’t be surprised if it’s branded Mac Mini Pro.

[John Davidson]

CS5, FCS3, & FCPX. The raid is fast. We have decks, but use the other rooms to lay back and digitize with. If we needed to though, we could get the Blackmagic Thunderbolt thing. Still getting used to a single monitor, but two 27’s on the 12 core feels too wide, so I don’t think it’s a big deal.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Chris Kenny]

Lion has been pretty rock solid for us, in heavy use on a Mac Pro that processes dailies and does client-supervised grading sessions in Resolve. Incompatibility with new OS versions is a longstanding issue, on all platforms, and it’s kind of silly to try to attribute this round of it to Apple somehow neglecting pro users.

With respect to the Mac Pro, my guess is there’s going to be at least one additional revision once Intel has new Xeons (though there’s now some doubt, perhaps, about whether Apple will use Sandy Bridge E5 or Ivy Bridge E3, as they might be coming out at about the same time, and the latter, while only single socket, is probably going to be faster for typical desktop workloads).

18 months after that, who knows? Eventually, towers are going to fill the market niche presently occupied by refrigerator-sized computers, or perhaps the desk-side SGI workstations some high-end creative pros used in the ’90s. At some point before then, Apple is going to stop making them, probably a couple of years before many people are really comfortable with that.

The truth is, iMacs and laptops really are becoming suitable even for high-end video work. Today’s MacBook Pros deliver similar CPU performance to 2008 Mac Pro towers, and Thunderbolt enables access to high-speed external storage and video I/O devices that previously would have required PCIe slots. Professional editing, even in uncompressed HD, is now very viable on MBP/iMac, and if Apple offers an Ivy Bridge mini that has both dedicated video and is quad core (right now you have to choose), that will be in the running as well.

We online indie feature films, mostly shot on Red and Alexa. A significant fraction of these films are primarily being edited on editors’ laptops. About the only thing we do that still strictly requires a tower is color grading, and it’s not hard to see that even that won’t be true anymore in two or three years.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Paul Jay]

Hdsdi in/out + uncompressed Hd over thunderbolt on imac or mac mini. Thats current apple reality.

Define ‘ pro ‘ technology please?

[Frank Gothmann]

And what’s the advantage of all that?
You get an iMac for 2.000 dollars. Then a TB Raid enclosure for 6 drives that will set you back another 1.800 (the same amount of drives you can easily fit into a proper modern workstation), two TB expansion chassis to have 4 pci slots (running at a 25 per cent speed), another box for video io and another one for dual-link ethernet. And possibly another one for…
So, you end up with up with 5 external boxes or more that have sit within a three meter range from your machine. Same cost, same size, same price, more clutter and a lot less performance than a modern workstation. And GPU and multiple monitors didn’t even come into play here.
And when I say “modern workstation” I don’t mean the current Mac Pro with it’s outdated architecture.
It’s a horrid scenario I certainly won’t persue.
I’d have to replace all the tried and tested gear that simply works, has zero compatibility issues, is backwards compatible with older machine and cross platform – buy everything again at a premium price to get 70 per cent less performance. Brave new world.

[Walter Soyka]

[Chris Kenny] “The truth is, iMacs and laptops really are becoming suitable even for high-end video work.”

Totally true. Autodesk is pushing Smoke on Thunderbolt iMacs and laptops [link].

You used to need a workstation just to get the throughput necessary for video I/O. Not anymore; computers have been following Moore’s law (roughly stated, doubling in power every 18 months) while the HD spec has been unchanged since the 1990s.

[Chris Kenny] “About the only thing we do that still strictly requires a tower is color grading, and it’s not hard to see that even that won’t be true anymore in two or three years.”

There are a few areas in our field that are processor- and bandwith-intensive: animation, mograph, effects, and compositing. Anyone doing these sorts of work will always benefit from the fastest machine available.

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

[Chris Kenny]

[Frank Gothmann] “You get an iMac for 2.000 dollars. Then a TB Raid enclosure for 6 drives that will set you back another 1.800 (the same amount of drives you can easily fit into a proper modern workstation), two TB expansion chassis to have 4 pci slots (running at a 25 per cent speed), another box for video io and another one for dual-link ethernet. And possibly another one for…”

More realistically, you buy a Thunderbolt RAID enclosure and a Thunderbolt video I/O interface, and that covers most pro video work. Maybe add a RedRocket in an external Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure if you’re working with that format. The Thunderbolt RAID is more expensive than internal storage, but probably cheaper than external SAS storage, and the Thunderbolt video I/O interface is probably the same price as a PCIe card serving a similar function. Either of these devices is far easier to move between machines within a facility, or bring on set, both of which are useful capabilities. And if being used with a laptop, there’s a lot of flexibility here. For instance, you can keep your online footage on an external RAID, with offline proxies on your laptop’s internal drive. Now you’ve got a solution that lets you edit sitting in the park if you feel like it, but can turn into a fairly serious online editing machine by plugging in a single cable at your desk.

[Frank Gothmann] “And when I say “modern workstation” I don’t mean the current Mac Pro with it’s outdated architecture.”

Err… current Mac Pros are using Intel’s latest. It’s not actually Apple’s fault (or a signal of neglect on Apple’s part) that Intel now seems to update its dual-socket workstation offerings last within a given processor generation. Actually, that’s probably Intel responding to some of the same forces that cause people to speculate about Mac Pro cancelation — high-end towers really are becoming increasingly niche items, and, in particular, dual socket machines are less necessary as the number of cores on each CPU (and general single processor performance) keeps rising.

[Frank Gothmann] “It’s a horrid scenario I certainly won’t persue. “

You might not “peruse” it, but in five years — certainly in ten — I’d be surprised if it weren’t just taken completely for granted. Pros used to routinely buy $10K+ systems just to run Photoshop, back in the days when 80 MB was a huge amount of RAM. These days, phones have way more RAM than that, and this typical Photoshop work is so easy for modern hardware that nobody thinks anything of pros in that field working on laptops. As hardware performance continues to increase, video will inevitably end up in the same place.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Frank Gothmann]

[Chris Kenny] “More realistically, you buy a Thunderbolt RAID enclosure and a Thunderbolt video I/O interface, and that covers most pro video work. Maybe add a RedRocket in an external Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure if you’re working with that format. The Thunderbolt RAID is more expensive than internal storage, but probably cheaper than external SAS storage, and the Thunderbolt video I/O interface is probably the same price as a PCIe card serving a similar function. Either of these devices is far easier to move between machines within a facility, or bring on set, both of which are useful capabilities. And if being used with a laptop, there’s a lot of flexibility here. For instance, you can keep your online footage on an external RAID, with offline proxies on your laptop’s internal drive. Now you’ve got a solution that lets you edit sitting in the park if you feel like it, but can turn into a fairly serious online editing machine by plugging in a single cable at your desk.”

No, external SAS is cheaper, faster and much more expandable. I posted about this earlier.
Also, I need shared storage for some machines, 10Gig Ethernet and Fibre for others. TB Expansion is PCIe 4x, so half the performance you get from a modern Raid, Fibre or 10Gig Controller.
AJA’s forthcoming TB solution only handles 8-Channel audio which is useless to me. I need 12 so I need a Kona 3.
I don’t want to move any devices in the facility. That’s the whole point of shared storage. And we don’t edit or do any other work on Laptops.
If you do, great. I don’t want to take either your Laptop or TB away. But I need and want PCIe and a tower. If it’s not on a Mac we’ll go elsewhere.

[Chris Kenny] “Err… current Mac Pros are using Intel’s latest. It’s not actually Apple’s fault (or a signal of neglect on Apple’s part) that Intel now seems to update its dual-socket workstation offerings last within a given processor generation. Actually, that’s probably Intel responding to some of the same forces that cause people to speculate about Mac Pro cancelation — high-end towers really are becoming increasingly niche items, and, in particular, dual socket machines are less necessary as the number of cores on each CPU (and general single processor performance) keeps rising.”

You are talking about CPU. I don’t. I am talking about no GPU variety, speedier PCIe (currently 1×16, 1×8, 2×4, it should be 16,16, 8,8) and preferably more slots, shared Firewire bus is a joke, no Esata and, yes, a TB port for the sake of it.

[Chris Kenny] “You might not “peruse” it, but in five years — certainly in ten — I’d be surprised if it weren’t just taken completely for granted. Pros used to routinely buy $10K+ systems just to run Photoshop, back in the days when 80 MB was a huge amount of RAM. These days, phones have way more RAM than that, and this typical Photoshop work is so easy for modern hardware that nobody thinks anything of pros in that field working on laptops. As hardware performance continues to increase, video will inevitably end up in the same place.”

I don’t care what might be in 5 or 10 years. I need to run a business today.
You are talking about editing. Again, I don’t. Try running 4k DPX files off your TB raid on a laptop for film restauration and let me know if one or two weeks difference in render time matter to you and your business.