[Chris Kenny]

[Andrew Kimery] “A key difference of course being that all software and hardware is designed specifically for that game console. No one is going to optimize software to the point that it that only runs on a 2013 Mac Pro Tube.”

No to the point that it only runs on this machine, obviously, but certainly pro app developers will test quite a lot on these systems, and the consistency they’ll bring for graphics, high-speed external disk I/O, etc. will mean more users running on systems more similar to those that developers are using. That does bring real benefits — it’s always been one of the Mac’s benefits in pro use cases, and this system extends that.

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[Chris Kenny]

[John Sellars] “But isn’t external I/O limited to TB 2.0 speeds? Still half the speed of external PCI-e.”

But fast enough for 4K. That means (at least as it’s relevant to this industry) it’s really only going to be a bottleneck for external GPUs. So the big question is going to be, how well will Resolve run with the on-board GPU options? They’re AMD, so no CUDA, which is less than ideal, but I imagine Blackmagic will invest some work into optimizing for these systems since they’ll clearly become the standard choice for high-end Resolve work on the Mac platform.

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[Chris Kenny]

I’m reasonably certain the GPU is not upgradable, which to be honest is the only thing that really bothers me about this system. Other than that, it looks like it packs a really amazing amount of power into a tiny (and, with that unified thermal system, probably bizarrely quiet) package. We were essentially forced onto Wintel for Resolve by last year’s lack of a Mac Pro update, but if this thing delivers solid Resolve performance (the lack of CUDA is a bit of a concern there, but I’ve seen some good numbers for Resolves OpenCL support), we’ll be moving that back to the Mac.

Some people here are looking at all the detrimental aspects of this sort of ‘workstation appliance’ approach, but I think there are some real positive aspects as well, beyond just form factor. One big one is that this will provide a very clear set of hardware for developers of pro apps to target and test with. In many respects, this will be like getting all of the consistency and reliable advantages of a turn-key system, without having to pay turn-key hardware prices. As someone who has lost a fair bit of sleep over the years to flaky hardware/software combos, that’s hugely appealing.

Of course, I haven’t seen the price yet.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Cameron Clendaniel] “For an incredibly expansive suite of software that has a great track record, for people that are presumably making a living off of it I don’t understand the angst over $50/month.”

For folks who weren’t on Master Collection, and were skipping the occasional upgrade, Creative Cloud is about twice the annual price, with no ability to skip upgrades based on how compelling the new features are, and software that stops working if you stop paying. It’s hard to spin that as a great deal.

It just seems like there isn’t any compromise here. Creative Cloud could have been win-win. Adobe could have looked at the average annual revenue they were getting from all Creative Suite customers (on any edition of the suite), and priced Creative Cloud say, 20% over that number. This still would have been a big win for Adobe, because it would have gotten them more evenly distributed revenue (instead of a burst when they ship each upgrade), and more annual revenue (that 20%, plus they’d be selling exclusively direct and consequently keeping the retailer’s markup). It’s true that they wouldn’t have gotten revenue from selling non-upgrade copies, but the flip side there would have likely been additional customers — I bet a properly priced subscription would make piracy less attractive, for one thing.

This deal also would have been a huge win for customers — those who do keep pace with every Master Collection upgrade would have paid less than under the previous system. Those who historically haven’t used Master Collection or kept pace with upgrades would pay more than they used to, but they’d be getting more — Master Collection + all upgrades, at a lower price than they’d have previously been able to get those things. Plus, of course, the lack of an up-front cost would have been great for new customers.

This option would have likely been so attractive that Adobe could have even continued offering the old pricing model for those who wanted it, and most people would have ended up on Creative Cloud anyway.

But instead Adobe seems to have basically sat down and said “OK, it our wildest fantasy, how would this work?” They came up with “How about if every single Creative Suite customer were on the upgrade treadmill for the most expensive edition of our suite, forever, with no way to ever get off?” And here we are.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Tim Vaughan] “There is talk, though I’ve not confirmed or have positive proof, that in the future there will be various levels/tiers offered rather than access to all the programs. I do hope this to be the case, as I’d personally rather only pay for what I need and use. We have that with Production Premium, or Web…, and it’s great as we aren’t paying full price for the programs we just don’t need. “

This is something that’s not being discussed as much as it probably should be.

If one imagines a Production Premium user who perhaps skips every third upgrade, and tends to buy upgrades from retailers that provide, say, a 10% discount off list price (not uncommon), then Creative Cloud — through which Adobe offers no option equivalent to Production Premium, offers no way to skip upgrades, and sells only direct — is over twice the annual price. That’s a little crazy.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Greg Andonian] “If you ask me, everyone who thinks Apple is waiting on some sort of new technology before they upgrade the Mac Pro is only kidding themselves. 20 Gigabit Thunderbolt sounds amazing, but It’s been, what- three and a half years now or something? That’s AT LEAST two full refresh cycles! Surely they could throw SOMETHING appealing together in the meantime…”

I think this sort of logic misses quite how, well, crazy Apple is in some respects. With no apparent solution to the Xeon/Thunderbolt problem, most companies in Apple’s position would indeed have just gone on updating ‘traditional’ Mac Pros. But Apple isn’t most companies. Holding a product off the market for a couple of extra years because it doesn’t match up with your new vision of exactly what that product should be is not something that can be dismissed in Apple’s case.

If they were going to cancel the Mac Pro, they’d have said so. That’s what they did with the Xserve. They haven’t said so here (in fact, Cook has said the opposite), so they’re up to something in this market. When it will show up, what it might be, and whether everyone will be happy with it, it’s hard to say. But they’re absolutely up to something.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Richard Cardonna] “Anyone that can afford it will buy Adobe Anywhere, and anyone that has Adobe Anywhere will never use any other editing software other than what Adobe provides – even if they hate it – because Adobe Anywhere is just too important of a product. Once your facility owns Adobe Anywhere, everyone can do everything, all at full media resolution, on a laptop sitting at Starbucks Coffee. “

‘Anywhere’ is an odd beast. It’s true that it hypothetically will enable people to edit at Starbucks. But for many types of projects, you can already do that without any kind of centralized server — today’s high end and even mid-range laptops are more than capable of doing local rendering at a very good pace, and you can store dozens or hundreds hours of proxy footage on an easily portable hard drive. ‘Anywhere’ ironically isn’t really all that appealing in terms of letting users edit from more places. Rather, it’s useful specifically to users who need to collaborate with each other in particular types of ways, which are relevant to some projects/workflows, but not really relevant at all to others.

As for “You can be in Iraq with a WiFi Connection and can access your company server’s 4K media and edit it over WiFi”, there are two major problems with that. One is that I’m highly skeptical that random Iraqi Internet connections (or random hotel room Internet connections in the US, for that matter) are really going to be up to streaming high quality video. The second is, aren’t you editing video in Iraq because you’re shooting video in Iraq? If you want to cut using ‘Anywhere’ via a server in the US, you have to first get all the video you shot back to the US. Even for CNN, with routine access to satellite transmission, it seems like it would be a lot more cost effective to edit content locally and transmit finished pieces than to transmit every frame of every clip and edit using ‘Anywhere’.

And if you don’t have routine access to satellite transmission, what are you going to do? Upload a few hundred gigs of raw footage over that random Iraqi WiFi? Good luck. The workflow I’d adopt in this kind of scenario would be to edit locally and upload something like a Blu-ray quality H.264 encode of the final output. No particular requirement for ‘Anywhere’ there.

[Richard Cardonna] “So, will Adobe take over the world? I think so.”

Given Anywhere’s current requirements, initial adoption isn’t going to happen that rapidly, so competitors likely have several years to respond.

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[Chris Kenny]

[David Mathis] “There is also the fact that there was no big announcement of what Apple has planned for Final Cut Pro X down the road which leaves me to believe there will only be updates for the time being.”

Those ‘updates’ have brought many very significant features. Apple hasn’t really gotten much credit for this, because most of those features were willing in functionality that people believe should have been present in the first version. But now that many of those gaps are filled, if Apple continues to push out updates of similar scale every 3-4 months (which appears to be the plan), this seems vastly preferable to Apple holding back features for a big release every 12-24 months.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Brent Cook] “I wonder what they’re going to do with the logo. I’m not sure changing the 0 to a 1 would look right. It would lose much of its epicness.”

They should just use this, from Futurama.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Oliver Peters] “In Anywhere, that’s where the Mercury Streaming Engine comes in. All compositing of multiple streams is done at the server. “

Right, I get that this is how Adobe’s model works. I’m just speculating on models that don’t require that much specialized central infrastructure, since that requirement seems problematic for many projects where collaboration would otherwise be useful.

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