Working Over the weekend…

[Walter Soyka]

I don’t disagree with you, Jeremy. Maybe I’m just more impatient. I needed to see some signs from Apple that they were still really committed to this market.

I think we’re dancing around an important point here on high-end Apple hardware: the sales are apparently too weak to justify the costs of keeping the systems current. Apple’s Mac Pro customers either aren’t important enough or demanding enough to compel Apple to remain competitive on performance in between Intel’s major microarchitecture releases. Apple releases a pretty competitive system every 1.5 years, and then they totally ignore it.

I guess that brings us to the hardware version of one of the original FCPX questions: who are these systems built for, anyway?

[Jeremy Garchow] “Apple has never favored the most blazing performance or hottest connection”

Ironic that a company known for innovation sells old technology in its high-performance system, no?

[Jeremy Garchow] “But it’s not really Apple’s style to do a refresh, then six months later the next generation comes out.”

Likewise, it’s not a performance-oriented customer’s style to buy a year-and-a-half old system.

[Jeremy Garchow] “Usb3 and 6gb Sata would require new chips/motherboards. BluRay is most famously “a bag of hurt” and is supported by third party these days anyway”

I couldn’t get away with telling my clients that they couldn’t have something they wanted because it would be inconvenient for me to produce. Rather than taking our money for added value, Apple just tells us we don’t really want these things — and we seem to accept it.

[Jeremy Garchow] “thunderbolt is stuck with the rest of it, but has made it across the other lines who have functioning processor lines. Let’s not forget Apple’s supply chain is rather solid. They have relatively limited product fragmentation.”

Thunderbolt launched sometime in February. That’s between 9 and 10 months on the calendar, so that’s five and a half years in computer industry time, right?

The saving grace for the TB-less Mac Pros has been the glacial launches of Thunderbolt peripherals. If Thunderbolt peripherals were more ubiquitous today, it would hurt a lot more to not have Thunderbolt available on the Mac Pro.

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

[Frank Gothmann]

Blu-ray may be a “bag of hurt” with regards to licensing and implementing technology for playback of encrypted movie discs; it would be no problem whatsoever to offer burners as a bto option.
Apple just doesn’t like the technology, also because it is in competition with their itunes store, so they choose to ignore it. Again, they are making the decisions for their customers and what they have to like and want.

And isn’t that also a bit the whole strategy behind the whole Mac Pro delays? “We don’t really want to drop them right here and now because people will complain, especially after the “Pro debate” (people have written about the outdated tower architecture more than one year ago, way before FCPX came out) but we really don’t like them anymore, they don’t fit our image and the markets we want to cater to so if we just wait long enough, let them sit there without updates, new technology, with performance falling behind… less and less people are going to buy a tower, some may go for an iMac or a Macbook Pro and then, when there’s really nobody buying them anymore, it makes perfect sense the drop them, announce lackluster sales, the majority will understand the reasoning and few will shed a tear”.
It’s pretty much the same thing we’ve seen in the past with the Xserve Raid, Xserves Shake etc.
When the Xserve was dropped they said “nobody’s buying them”. Does that mean nobody was/is buying server hardware anymore? Of course not. They just didn’t buy Apple’s servers. If they had been interested in those markets they would have asked why and improved their offerings.

[Kevin Patrick]

[Walter Soyka] “There are plenty of things Apple could have improved in a 2011 Mac Pro besides Sandy Bridge”

You’re correct.

If they are going to kill the Mac Pro, why haven’t they done so already?

It’s been a long time since any significant upgrade.
(My own early 2008 3.2 GHz 8 core, 24 GB RAM, 5770 and Quadro 4000 works pretty good)

Sales of Mac Pros are (without any real data) far below that of the rest of their line.

Not only can you not buy a Mac Pro in their hugely successful stores (and yes, I’ve bought a Mac Pro in one) but you can’t even buy small cheap graphics cards in their stores. (I tried)

FCS has been replaced by FCP X. Leaving user without necessary features to get their job done (which their competitors have) and looking elsewhere for what they didn’t replace.

They plan on supporting Video monitoring with FCP X in early 2012, which can be done with Thunderbolt. Already in all but a Mac Pro.

Their fastest iMac runs FCP X as fast as their fastest Mac Pro.
Mac Pro 3.33 GHZ, 24 GB RAM, 5870 GPU
iMac 3.4 GHz, 16 GB RAM, 6970 GPU
https://barefeats.com/fcpx01.html

Reading through all these discussions it appears there are some in this industry that could get by without a Mac Pro and some who cannot. So I think it’s fair to say not all users in this industry would leave Apple behind if they dropped a Mac Pro.

Apple’s not squeamish about dropping stuff. Dropping stuff without waring. Replacing stuff while leading users to believe the new version will be much better, when it’s not.

Apple knows people want a new Mac Pro. Of course they have people read forums where this is debated, especially their own Mac Pro forum. They read it, they just choose not to respond. They read all the rumors and speculation as well. Every company does. People have provided Apple feedback and even emails directly to senior management requesting a new Mac Pro.

They could drop the Mac Pro right now. I don’t think anyone would be surprised. I think those who have considered moving away from Macs (for a variety of reasons leading up to this point) have either decided that’s what they will do, or they are doing it. As this OP is doing this very weekend.

So, why haven’t they killed the Mac Pro?

My guess is (and has been for a while) that they plan on either bringing out a new Mac Pro, or something they feel will be a good enough replacement for one. Most likely they’ve been waiting on Intel. Now it appears they should be ready.

I see no other reason for them to keep the Mac Pro around, if they have no intention of every upgrading it again. Selling more computers that are planned for end of life means more consumers they’ll have to support for a longer period of time.

Then again, I could be wrong.

[Andrew Richards]

[Walter Soyka] “Thunderbolt launched sometime in February. That’s between 9 and 10 months on the calendar, so that’s five and a half years in computer industry time, right?

The saving grace for the TB-less Mac Pros has been the glacial launches of Thunderbolt peripherals. If Thunderbolt peripherals were more ubiquitous today, it would hurt a lot more to not have Thunderbolt available on the Mac Pro.”

I completely agree the lack of 6G SATA and up-to-date GPUs should not be tied to Intel’s roadmap, but Thunderbolt absolutely is. Thunderbolt is Intel tech and requires Sandy Bridge, and unless Apple were to drop the Xeon for a Mac Pro refresh, we have to wait for Sandy Bridge Xeons to get Thunderbolt on a Mac Pro.

Best,
Andy

[Tony West]

That sounds like a decent size house with enough cash to be able to toss out all those machines and get new ones. I’m glad they are doing well.

Unfortunately many big houses in my town have closed their doors over the years. Unable to make it.

When fcp came out freelance produces who needed the big house for everything started ruff cutting their own stuff. They would just come in for finishing work. (remember when we made window burns for producers? How old does that sound?)

As the price of cameras dropped they could nickel and dime the big house on that also.
I saw the writing on the wall for this years ago.

I can see X really appealing to small budget folks. The kind that couldn’t afford to come into that type of house or just didn’t want to.

Personal choices aside, I can’t really ignore the economic realities on the ground.

X has some work to do but I can’t see it going away for that price point and what it offers in these economic times.

Time will tell.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Frank Gothmann] “Blu-ray may be a “bag of hurt” with regards to licensing and implementing technology for playback of encrypted movie discs; it would be no problem whatsoever to offer burners as a bto option.”

We have to be honest with ourselves here, Frank. This is Apple. They aren’t going to offer an unsupported piece of custom hardware and say, “you figure it out”. BluRay is available on a Mac all through third party. Apple does have limited support burning in some of the pro video software, though.

[Frank Gothmann] “Apple just doesn’t like the technology, also because it is in competition with their itunes store, so they choose to ignore it. Again, they are making the decisions for their customers and what they have to like and want. “

Yeah, could be. iTunes will make them exponentially more money than a BluRay burner. Yeah, they made a decision, and it was probably a good business decision. I don’t know.

[Frank Gothmann] “And isn’t that also a bit the whole strategy behind the whole Mac Pro delays? “We don’t really want to drop them right here and now because people will complain, especially after the “Pro debate” (people have written about the outdated tower architecture more than one year ago, way before FCPX came out) but we really don’t like them anymore, they don’t fit our image and the markets we want to cater to so if we just wait long enough, let them sit there without updates, new technology, with performance falling behind… less and less people are going to buy a tower, some may go for an iMac or a Macbook Pro and then, when there’s really nobody buying them anymore, it makes perfect sense the drop them, announce lackluster sales, the majority will understand the reasoning and few will shed a tear”. “

Again, let’s be honest. If the MacPro truly brings no money, why sell it? Do you put a bunch of time, effort and resources in to your work and don’t get paid for it? Apple’s towers going back to the PowerPC era were never the fastest, most flexible machines. People would always complain that they couldn’t shove more than two PATA drives on the meager ata ribbon that shipped with Macs, but they could put a whopping four drives in their PC with two cd drives. This is still Apple. It has always been this way. I don’t know why it is so surprising.

[Frank Gothmann] “Does that mean nobody was/is buying server hardware anymore? Of course not. They just didn’t buy Apple’s servers. If they had been interested in those markets they would have asked why and improved their offerings.”

They just didn’t buy Apple servers. It’s really that easy. That was a market they decided not to compete in. The personal computing sector is a different story.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Kevin, that post was so serious it wasn’t even funny. Step it up a bit next time, eh? 😉

As far as the barefeats test, while valid, it shows results from a 6 core MacPro. Still, the results are interesting.

[Kevin Patrick]

[Jeremy Garchow] “results from a 6 core MacPro”

I saw that. It can skew the results for certain apps. Depending on how good the multi-processor implementation is. I would like to see how FCP X and Motion would compare if they used a 12 core version. I did send them an email asking if they could locate a 12 core and retest. No response.

In this next benchmark, they included After Effects. Here you can see the 6 core Mac Pro is noticeably faster than the iMac. Although I’m not sure if it’s the cores or more memory. The iMac had 16 GB while the Mac Pro had 24 GB. They should have bumped the iMac to 24 GB for an apples to apples comparison. (oh wait, did I just make a pun?) I would assume the delta would be even greater with 12 cores. I also asked Barefeats if they’d send me their test suite so I could run it on my 2008 3.2 GHz Mac Pro. I’d be interested to see how different it would be. Again, no response.

https://barefeats.com/macs11_01.html

Here’s another benchmark with After Effects comparing a 12 core to 8 and 6 core models. It is supposed to be the same Barefeats test suite. However, note that the 12 core is running at 3.33 GHz. They had a processor upgrade done by OWC. (they supply a link with info) An interesting option. I guess the idea is you buy the cheapest 2010 Mac Pro, used or even refurbished would be even better. Then send your CPU/Memory board to OWC and they swap out the CPU for you and add lots of cheap memory. Not an incredibly cheap CPU upgrade, but you can get pretty fast Mac Pro. It’s probably a much better option than heading down a Hackintosh path.

https://macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-MacProWestmere-AfterEffects.html

[Kevin Patrick]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Kevin, that post was so serious it wasn’t even funny. Step it up a bit next time, eh?”

First off, for those of you who are thinking about complaining about what I’m posting here I’d like to make two points.

1. My post is not off topic, as I am discussing FCP X.

2. Jeremy requested I step it up on the humor.

Here we go …

I was at Home Depot the other day and I parked over by the building’s Exit. Normally, I would just park by the building’s Entrance. I noticed they had reserved parking for FCS users. When I asked someone who worked there why they didn’t offer reserved parking for FCP X users he said, “Oh, they park over by the consumer Entrance. That way, when the shop here they feel like their a Pro. But we both know better, don’t we?”

It’s true. Check it out for yourself and post back here.

Kevin

[Frank Gothmann]

[Jeremy Garchow] “We have to be honest with ourselves here, Frank. This is Apple. They aren’t going to offer an unsupported piece of custom hardware and say, “you figure it out”. BluRay is available on a Mac all through third party. Apple does have limited support burning in some of the pro video software, though. “

Not true, you can read or burn bd-r right from the finder, the same way you’d burn a data dvd or cd. They just don’t support encrypted playback of movie discs but that is unrelated to the physical media as such. But Apple doesn’t like any optical media per se anymore. And if they consider it legacy it has to go. Again, I prefer to make my own decissions.

[Jeremy Garchow] “Yeah, could be. iTunes will make them exponentially more money than a BluRay burner. Yeah, they made a decision, and it was probably a good business decision. I don’t know. “

BD playback or burning data on bd-r is obviously not meant to be the exclusive alternative to the itunes store. I think you know where I am coming from. Choice, give people the freedom of choice to watch and listen to stuff they way they want to and how they want to, not exclusively the way Apple wants them to.

[Jeremy Garchow] “Again, let’s be honest. If the MacPro truly brings no money, why sell it?”

Again, brings me right back to my point regarding server hardware. More people would buy it if it wasn’t outdated and neglected. We would have bought two last month; we went with HP instead. And more of our machines will follow in the future.
The viral marketing that made Apple can also backfire. Not enough right now because our community is way to small but I am waiting to see their first big consumer product tank. One the brand isn’t cool anymore and hip crowd moves on… we’ll see.

[Jeremy Garchow] “This is still Apple. It has always been this way. I don’t know why it is so surprising.”

But I am not saying it is surprising. In fact, quite the oposite. It’s Apple doing what they have always done, just in a much more severe way because they can now afford to simply piss off a group of people which, 10 years ago, made up a good portion of their customer base. The creative crow used to benefit from their ways, not they are on the dry end and it’s consumer stuff all the way. It’s been pretty clear to me since the iphone and ipad. I am just surprised people still wonder wether Apple is still interested in pro users and creating specific hard- and software for their needs.
If they (ie. us) can make it work for them, either via 3rd party or workarounds, fine, let them swim along. But it’s not conceived, designed and built for their needs.