[Andrew Richards]

Nice, what do you have?

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Walter Soyka] “I think the comparison to the iMac is more than a little disingenuous. The iMac is luggable, but still requires power and a table. The GoBOXX is large and heavy, but still fundamentally portable by design, and can run off mains and on your lap.”

I was being slightly facetious there, but a portable workstation is not going to be used very often like a mainstream laptop. The battery life will be nearly useless for much more than moving from one power outlet to another. If a machine made of desktop components is used in anger and powered by a battery, it will last minutes, not hours. Realistically a mobile workstation is just a portable all-in-one form factor, and will usually be used at a work surface while plugged into power, simply out of necessity.

I don’t think lugging an iMac around is really a solution, but I also can’t really imagine serious mobile workstations being used for processor-intensive tasks without being placed in a location that would just as easily support an all-in-one desktop like an iMac.

Regardless, the closest thing you’ll ever get to a mobile workstation from Apple will be the 17″ MBP. Anything bulkier just isn’t their style and the potential market for such a machine is just too small to tempt Apple to sell into it. If 100,000 Xserve sales each year wasn’t worth keeping that product alive, tens of thousands of bulky, heavy, power-hungry, suitcase Macs would never meet Apple’s market volume standards.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Chris Jacek] “There is clearly a conscious choice toward small and light, over powerful. “

Nah, just status quo. Apple has never put the most powerful contemporary mobile GPUs into MacBook Pros. They have always used upper-middle range MGPUs that met their power consumption and thermal output requirements. They have also always pushed for thinner, lighter, and more battery life. From the Titanium PowerBook to today.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Chris Jacek] “Apple will not offer a similar product, not even as a BTO.”

Can’t really argue with that. Apple won’t sell a bulky but powerful folding screen desktop with only enough battery to keep it asleep in transit before needing to be plugged in again on the other side. Such a machine would certainly be great for a mobile pro workstation, but they’d sell so few of them it wouldn’t pass market muster for Apple (see Xserve for minimum required sales potential).

[Chris Jacek] “This was not the case in the past.”

I don’t ever recall Apple selling anything but the thinnest, lightest, most power efficient notebooks they could build at the time. If there weren’t mobile workstations from the likes of Dell and HP back then, that just means the market segment didn’t exist yet.

[Chris Jacek] “But isn’t this evidence that Apple is shifting away from the pro market? This is the type of computer that many pros want, and Apple chooses not to compete in this space.”

Is Apple moving away from the market, or is a slice of the market moving away from Apple? Seems to me this mobile workstation niche is a relatively recent market development and probably too narrow for Apple to pursue. I don’t read what is happening as Apple abandoning pros, I read it as Apple not chasing dragons in the form of hardware niches that won’t sell sufficient volumes to justify development (again, see Xserve).

They’d need to create a whole new segment of their product line to meet the specs you’d like to see, and that ain’t gonna happen for the sake of a few thousand potential sales.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Chris Jacek] “Aside from the dedicated graphics card that we discussed earlier, there are concerns like hard drive space. The SSD are awesome for speed, but not yet reaching practical video storage sizes. If you get to the point of having 1TB of total SSD storage, then it’s probably time to consider completely replacing spinning drives.”

I could see thinner MBPs adopting the stick SSDs the MBAs use and still having room for an HDD where the optical drive used to be. OWC sells a kit that let’s you do that now, in fact.

[Chris Jacek] “Also, there is not an upgrade option for graphics cards. The 17″ offers the stock card only, so you top-out at 1 GB, despite there being much beefier cards out there. In the past, you could BTO higher-end cards for a price. Usually a high price, but at least available.”

That just means they used to sell a 17″ with less GPU then the maximum they could stuff in there and still meet their targets for thermal output and power consumption. Note the 15″ options up to the stock GPU of the 17″. There are indeed higher end MGPUs, but they will run too hot and heavy for Apple to consider them for MBPs. Apple will not sacrifice thinness and battery life for a slightly more powerful GPU.

[Chris Jacek] “And there are absolutely no options for CUDA capable NVIDIA cards, so there is no chance of hardware acceleration for Premiere Pro. Of course, this could be argued as a competitive choice.”

You can thank Intel and NVIDIA for that. Until very recently, Intel would not license NVIDIA to support the Core iX chips on NVIDIA’s chipsets with their embedded GPUs like the 340M that Apple used on the later Core2 MacBook models. This might not technically preclude Apple from using dedicated GeForce MGPUs with Sandy Bridge CPUs. I don’t know if they’d be Thunderbolt compatible or not or if there is any other technical gotcha. I do know there was considerable political strife between Intel and NVIDIA last winter when the Thunderbolt MBPs were being finalized.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Walter Soyka] “I invite you to explore some of the “mobile workstation” offerings from PC manufacturers. They’re big, heavy laptops with serious onboard graphics, more memory slots, two hard drives instead of one, etc. Apple hasn’t had a product in this category in a long time, and they’ll get even further away from it if they Air the entire line.”

Like this? Apple will never ever make such a thing. I would argue they never have. Heck, if you don’t mind lugging another 8 lbs, you could carry around a 21″ iMac.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Chris Jacek] “I invite you to apply Occum’s Razor (given what we can observe the most logical explanation is usually correct) to the question of whether Apple has shifted their focus away from the professional market. I believe there is compelling evidence to support this notion. “

So what specific features do you fear will be dropped from a possible future thinner MBP that would make it a non-starter for pro video work and thus evidence to support the idea Apple is retreating from the pro hardware space? Do you also feel the current MBP offerings are lacking pro features?

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Chris Jacek] “There is absolutely no way an additional dedicated graphics card can fit into that form factor.”

I disagree. A thinner MBP in no way precludes the possibility of a dedicated GPU. Remember, the GPU in MBPs is on the board, not a separate card. It only requires some additional cooling considerations and slightly more horizontal real estate, which is available in the 15″ and 17″ MBP.

The things making the MBP “thick” are the optical drive, the 2.5″ form factor HDD/SSD, ports like the RJ45 and FW800, and last but not least the battery.

The optical drive is a goner. The storage could then be placed where the optical drive used to be and maintain the 2.5″ form factor. The battery will be thiner and wider like the MBA and live under palm rest and bottom half of the keyboard. Thunderbolt obsoletes the ExpressCard slot.

A thinner MBP won’t be as thin as the MBA, but there is room to trim if you redo the battery in the vein of the MBA, remove the optical drive, and reposition the 2.5″ HDD/SSD toward the hinge where the optical drive used to live.

I got froggy and did a mockup:

Not a huge difference, but as a happy MBA 13″ owner, I can tell you the slanted surface of the tapered chassis is much more comfortable to use.

Then again, they could go even thinner and taper at an angle closer to that of the MBA if they dropped the Gig-E and FW800 ports from the chassis and sold Thunderbolt adapters for them. I wouldn’t put it past them. Those ports are duplicated after all on the new Thunderbolt Display.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

-Conan the Barbarian

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

Aindreas, after that post you should change your COW avatar to this:

🙂

Best,
Andy