Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Andrew Richards] “You’ve just made the case to cancel the Mac Pro. If no one needs something more powerful (and necessarily more expensive) than a single processor, then the top end iMac is all anyone needs. “
I’m not sure we’re quite there yet, and in any event CPU isn’t the only compelling advantage of the Mac Pro — internal expansion (particularly PCIe slots) is also important. (Though that probably won’t be true if Intel’s plans to ramp 100 Gb/s Thunderbolt pan out.)
[Andrew Richards] “Isn’t the demographic for the Mac Pro the professional Mac user who really needs the most computing power they can reasonably stuff into a mass-market box? “
I think the issue is that at some point, as CPU performance keeps increasing, dual socket towers won’t be any more “mass-market” than refrigerator-sized computers are today.
[Andrew Richards] “For decades, we’ve been able to do things with lesser boxes that used to take bleeding edge rigs only a few years earlier. What makes 2012 the year that our expectations plateau?”
I’m not sure it is 2012, but I don’t think it’s that far off. The market keeps shrinking. It used to be that practically every profssional Photoshop user had a compelling need to buy a high-end tower; now 2D bitmap editing just isn’t demanding enough for most of them to bother. Offline video editing has also basically followed this path, and online editing/color grading are going to follow shortly. When you can grade 4K in real-time on a laptop (probably within five years), how many people in our market will still care about owning a dual socket tower?
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Andrew Kimery] “Is it? Or is it just profitable enough because you have to own a Mac running at least 10.6.8 to use it? After all, Apple is a hardware company at heart. I know there are costs w/making a disc, packaging and shipping but I can’t imagine that aspect of it for a business the size of Apple is all that much.”
The reason the app store model enables lower pricing isn’t so much that it reduces distribution costs, but that it increases volume.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Andrew Richards] “The big difference is E3 does not support dual sockets (dual CPUs). The predecessor to the E3, the 3000 series, was never used in a Mac Pro. Apple could use it, but it would mean the Mac Pro (or whatever) would be going down-market from where it has been thus far.”
Although it’ll probably happen eventually. If Intel has a 12 core processor available in a couple of years, will Apple really still feel the need to make a dual processor (i.e. 24 core) machine? There’s a big price bump to go dual processor; at some point single CPU performance will be so high it won’t really make sense even for most of the Mac Pro’s demographic.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Phil Hoppes] “Sandy Bridge 8 core Xenon CPU’s are already out. I can buy them today”
Yes, but Apple needs more of them than you do; they have to wait for production to ramp further. Major Wintel OEMs aren’t generally shipping Xeon E5 systems yet either. It’s not all that uncommon for new Intel processors to be available to the enthusiast/DIY market a month or two before OEMs ship systems.
This doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a new Mac Pro, of course. Merely that the fact that there isn’t one yet isn’t evidence that there won’t be one.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Adobe has a similar systems in place with the AdobeID system. I have been downloading the CS starting with CS4, I believe.”
Yeah. For people who are already in the Adobe ecosystem. This is the key distinction. Users are in the platform vendor’s ecosystem essentially by default. If third parties want them in their ecosystems as well, that’s an additional hurtle users have to get over before buying/installing their apps. Many new users entering the market won’t do that; they’ll pick the path of least resistance, the obvious solution. If you’re a Mac user who wants to get into video editing and FCP X is the top paid app in the Mac App Store (as it has been fairly consistently), guess what NLE you’re probably installing?
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Herb Sevush] “No, what I’m saying is “one click” software distribution will not be limited to any current ap store. The distribution possibilities are endless, why do you think we/ve arrived at the end game?”
Err… you can’t do one-click installs unless you already have users’ billing information and you have installer infrastructure already on their computers. Operating system vendors have this (well, Apple has it, Microsoft will have it). Third-party developers who eschew OS vendor app stores are going to be at a disadvantage vs. those who have products and business models that work with them.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Herb Sevush] “We seem to be talking in circles here. Yes they take the opportunity to rethink totally new products, but FCP was not a new product. They *chose* to make it a new product because they *chose* to rethink it.”
FCP X was a totally new product because Apple had to rewrite it for technical reasons.
[Herb Sevush] “It was the market leader, it needed a 64 bit upgrade,”
This is misleading. There was no way to ‘port’ the existing FCP codebase to 64-bit, the way Adobe presumably moved Premiere Pro to 64-bit. Classic FCP was written directly on top of, and heavily tied into, Carbon/QuickTime APIs that will never be available in the 64-bit world. Yes, Apple did have the option of writing a totally new Cocoa app that was extremely similar to the old Carbon app (they did this with the Finder in Snow Leopard), but one way or the other the thing needed a rewrite, not an ‘upgrade’. Given Apple’s MO, it was predictable that they would take the opportunity to rethink some things.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[David Roth Weiss] “Sorry Chris, but you’re info is not up to date, at least per Adobe. If I sell you Production Premium today, I have the option of selling you the retail package or the download from Adobe. So, whatever benefit you just gave to X in that regard no longer applies.”
Selling downloadable apps from a web site (where users have to enter credit card information and download and navigate and installer) is not remotely the same thing as selling apps from an OS-integrated app store (which already has user billing information and from which an app can be installed with one or two clicks). The difference might seem trivial to tech-savvy computer folks, but it’s far from trivial, and so are its market implications.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[David Roth Weiss] “I don’t agree with most of your premises in the paragraph above Chris. Your appraisal of Smoke as a “high-end only” product is no longer accurate. “
It’s nearly 12 times the price of FCP X, and while its UI has been improved, most new users are still going to bounce right off of it. I would be seriously surprised if as many as 5% of editors routinely cut in Smoke three years from now.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Herb Sevush] “Oh, I see, you think the only changes coming down the pike will come from Apple. I’m going to guess that simplified “one click” software distribution is going to be commonplace soon, from everyone. Your so living in the past.”
If you believe Media Composer or Photoshop CS6 are showing up in the Mac or Metro app stores, you’re not aware of the restrictions Apple and Microsoft are imposing on developers. This would not be a trivial undertaking.
We’ve seen Adobe’s next big play in distribution — it’s ‘Creative Cloud’. They don’t want to join the Apple or Microsoft app store ecosystems, they want to go off and build their own thing. I’m sure their thinking is that their apps are sufficiently important and high-profile that they don’t need to benefits that come with being in a platform’s app store — but they’re creating an additional barrier for new users.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.