Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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[Christian Schumacher] “Dell and HP design the chassi and the motherboard, don’t they? Just like Apple does?”
Not the kind of R&D necessary to make an all-in-one or a ultra-thin laptop, that’s all I meant. Or even a dense server for that matter. Seems to me towers require the least R&D of any form factor. So much of their design is modular to common dimensions, hence interchangeable PSUs and mobos.
[Christian Schumacher] “look at their iMacs, soon these will have soldered RAM chips in them.”
Recent iMacs have easier to service RAM than previous case designs. The RAM is easier to service on the Mac mini now versus the old paint scraper methods needed on the originals. The only Mac with hard soldered RAM is the Air, and that is understandable given the goals of the design. Everything else from Apple has been very friendly to RAM swaps in recent years.
[Christian Schumacher] “I grant you that, Apple R&D in mobiles is great, indeed. Mac Pro? Not so much.”
They decided they would not bother with midrange towers, so there wasn’t much for them to R&D while Intel lagged on releasing the E5, was there? What more could they do, specs-wise, with the Mac Pro on the Xeon 5000 series that they hadn’t already done? They aren’t going to put a lot of effort into revving a product in between generations of the CPU they use, they’re going to put the effort in when there are next-gen guts to put in it.
[Christian Schumacher] “You know, the GPU has been lacking. And I wonder if that is just an accident too or it has been planned for a while.”
I’ve been looking into the GPU issue. It all seems to center around BIOS vs EFI. To date, almost all GPU cards are flashed with firmware that only supports BIOS, while Macs all use EFI. The GPU OEMs would need to sell EFI-enabled GPUs to work on Mac Pros, and the Mac Pro market for third party GPUs hasn’t been big enough to justify unique hardware SKUs. However, Sandy Bridge controllers ship with EFI plus a BIOS emulator for legacy support. So we could be at a turning point where the next generation of GPUs ship with firmware support for both BIOS and EFI. From there they only need to release drivers for OS X. According to reports, the most recent NVIDIA drivers for Lion enable the GTX580 to “just work” in Mac Pros (albeit without support for showing the Apple EFI bootloader screen since the drivers only load after the OS boots).
One or the other of us will be eating crow very soon. The E5s are coming, and Apple will either ship a new Mac Pro or not.
Best,
Andy -
[Herb Sevush] “We are all spoiled by being able to hitch our wagons to mass produced commodities, and I believe it’s actually to be harder to do that in these new Ipad days for those of us who still need heavy iron. “
I totally agree. Given the apparent decline of the PC as we know it, heavy duty NLE work in five years may all take place on server hardware, and who knows what the OS landscape will look like by then. It seems like Windows is charging toward a unification of tablet and desktop UIs even faster than OS X is.
Best,
Andy -
GNU tar or LTFS on LTO-5 are starting to be used for deliverables in some places. You’re right though- for an individual, it is very difficult to justify a Cache-A compared to a drive and a card. Double the money is double the money. I’m sure Cache-A would sell their product for less if they could make money doing it. But when you consider that it is a server with a few TB of HDD and a $3K LTO drive in it, you can see how they arrive at their prices.
Best,
Andy -
[Rich Rubasch] “Someone needs to really come up with a truly cross platform, easy to manage, high capacity solution.”
These exist, Cache-A is one. But if you want it to cost $1,000, sorry. Frankly, for anyone who ever bought any sort of professional VTR, Cache-A is not that expensive by comparison.
Best,
Andy -
I don’t know why Apple has such poor support from AMD and NVIDIA, but I’ve seen speculation that with Windows 8’s move to ubiquitous UEFI support that getting GPUs compatible with Macs might be less of a problem. Whatever the case, I hope a Mac Pro with a standard PCIe GPU continues to exist and that we get something approaching parity with GPU support between OS X and Windows. Might be too much to hope for though.
Best,
Andy -
There is very little R&D necessary to take some parts from Intel or AMD and assemble them in an ATX chassis. Apple hasn’t ever bothered with 3000 series Xeon or Core series towers. It is clearly a market they aren’t interested in. Anyone can build a tower with parts from Newegg. If Apple’s R&D is so lousy, why can’t anyone compete with the MacBook Air, a product that actually requires some bespoke engineering?
I get that everyone is frustrated that Apple neglects towers, but this is nothing new. There is a new Mac Pro when there are new dual proc Xeons to put in it, that has been the pattern since 2006.
Best,
Andy -
And? The discussion heretofore was about whether the Mac Pro would see another rev and how the E5 Xeon is the key to all that. You seemed to be making the point that Sandy Bridge Xeons had been out a long time, as if that were the proof anyone needed to see Apple had already closed the book on towers.
Nowhere in this thread did I try to make any points about the performance of FCPX vs PPro or anything else. I bet PPro would scream on any CPU as long as it had an SLI stack of GPGPUs to call upon. It’s all about the CUDA.
Best,
Andy -
[Christian Schumacher] “Dell updated a workstation with Sandy Bridge Xeons a year ago. “
Those are single-socket E3 Xeons. They can’t be had in dual CPU boards. They are essentially Core i7s that support ECC RAM. Could Apple have done a single proc line of Mac Pros? I guess, but since the Mac Pro debuted, Apple has rolled with 5000 series Xeons, which the E5 is the successor to. There wouldn’t be very much to separate Thunderbolt i7 iMacs from E3 Mac Pros, performance-wise.
Best,
Andy -
[David Lawrence] “There clearly was a major fork in development at some point mid-stream.”
That fork was at WWDC 2007 when Apple suddenly nixed the 64-bit Carbon API plan. This is likely why FCP7 was so underwhelming compared to FCP6 and FCP5- FCP7 was going to be 64-bit, but the FCP team had the same rug pulled out from under them as Adobe and any other developers of apps that dated back to the OS 9 era. Mid-2007, Pro Apps all of a sudden had to punt on their plans for FCP7 and simultaneously start a ground-up re-write of FCP.
Adobe made it to 64-bit a year ahead of Apple because they rolled their own playback engine while Pro Apps waited for the full gestation of the AVFoundation APIs that were slated for 10.7 in 2010 but wouldn’t be in the hands of consumers till 2011 (they wound up getting added as private APIs in 10.6.7).
[David Lawrence] “Sequence.icns (still in 10.0.3) is proof.”
It could also be proof they had an evolving idea of how they would implement their goal of eliminating clip collisions and maintaining audio sync for video+audio clips versus just audio. Looking at that image, I see an attempt to do it with something resembling tracks, but with zones for different kinds of media. I don’t think that was necessarily a fully baked idea that got abandoned. I find it more likely that it is a step on the path that got us here, especially given its continued presence in the .app bundle.
[David Lawrence] “I’m also convinced the timing corresponds to AppleInsider’s article a year before release about the layoffs in Pro Apps.”
There was another very significant development disruption confounding FCP development following the death of 64-bit Carbon, and that was the false start of 64-bit QuickTime with QTKit and the development of QuickTime’s ultimate successor in AVFoundation and CoreMedia. As that shift took place from 2008-2010, the burden of handling much of the pro video codecs and processing was being shifted from the Pro Apps team to the CoreOS team. That doesn’t explain away the 40 layoffs, but it is reasonable based on what we now know about the APIs that FCPX calls to imagine a redundancy arising between the dev team on FCP and the dev team on OS X and iOS that was taking over responsibility for dealing with that significant component of what FCP does.
You could be right, I could be wrong, but I think my scenario is at least as plausible as yours.
Best,
Andy -
Dell: we’re no longer a PC company
That on the heels of HP’s flirtation with dropping PCs. HP has since replaced its CEO and retracted the plan to abandon PCs, but they are losing money on them rather badly either way. The only company seeing any solid growth in the PC business these days is… Apple!
I think there is a big difference between Apple’s avoidance of the big iron enterprise market and Apple abandoning the desktop workstation market. Regular joes don’t buy servers, but photogs, indie editors, designers, and developers buy Mac Pros.
I guess we’ll all find out which way the wind is really blowing in Cupertino very soon.
Best,
Andy