[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “They were more than competitive at the time, they didn’t have to rewrite their code from scratch. They chose to, and that choice is open to various interpretations.”

This is the simply not the case. Pre-X FCP was written directly on top of Carbon and QuickTime, two deprecated 32-bit APIs that would have made it effectively impossible to for Apple to modernize the app. There was no reasonable alternative to rewriting.

It’s true that Apple could have chosen to write a new app that worked more like the old one (and therefore allowed for more backwards compatibility), but it was fairly predictable that Apple would take the opportunity provided by a rewrite to try to do something new and interesting — that tends to be how Apple operates.

[Herb Sevush] “Oh, come on now, do I really have to go research and list the number of misleading names by major corporations, the only point of which is to increase sales. The rest of that paragraph was fine, but this is foolish.”

It makes no sense, given Apple’s larger pattern of behavior around FCP X, to believe Apple is lying about what market it targets.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Robert Brown] “What that does for them is to potentially make each device that much more powerful in the eyes of consumers/prosumers. Like if you could edit on your iPad it would be a nice selling point but not of much interest to many “pros” here or people who do this for a living.”

I entirely disagree with the sentiment that iPad-based editing is inherently a consumer feature rather than a pro feature. Why do artists carry sketchpads, even if their “real” work is oil paint on canvas? I think if there were an iPad version of FCP X, and a smooth workflow for moving edit decisions between that and the desktop version, a lot of pro editors would be interested in an ultraportable device with great battery life that they could just pull out anywhere to play with the edits they were working on. Especially for something like feature editing, where the editor gets really absorbed in a project, lives with the footage for quite a while, and might have an idea for how to cut a scene while on the subway, or falling asleep at night or whatever. Being able to just grab the iPad at those moments seems quite compelling.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Jacek] “I agree, but I think that supports the theory that Apple is trending away from power-users, pros, whatever you want to call them. There is clearly a conscious choice toward small and light, over powerful. “

This implies that the Apple of five or ten years ago would have made a different decision. I don’t think that’s true.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Andrew Richards] “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.”

And I think that’s a decent hint Apple will do precisely that. Getting rid of those thick ports is probably half the reason Apple pursued Thunderbolt in the first place.

It’s going to be entertaining to watch people claiming Apple doesn’t care about pros because they’ve replaced a couple of ports with a new port 10x as fast.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Jacek] “Frankly, I just decided to pick the one that bothered me most. I don’t have the energy to keep up with you. You incessantly try to defend Apple against EVERY SINGLE CRITICISM any person on this board has had. I chose to refute this one, because I think it best illustrates your fervent state of defensiveness against any comment made against the infallible Apple.”

In other words, you’re saying I’m not to be trusted because my position is too comprehensive. OK, then.

I’m still not sure what’s so obviously reasonable about accusing a company of outright lying about what market a product is intended for, and so “fervent” about disagreeing with such an accusation. Particularly given existing features and announced future features that make no sense if Apple is lying.

[Chris Jacek] “I think I could knock down at least half of your “significantly detailed” responses, but you’ve worn me down, so I guess I’ll just say “you win.” You’re right about everything, and we’re all part of the vast conspiracy.”

No, you’re all a bunch of people who have bought into a theory and are now fitting the facts to it. It happens all the time. No conspiracy is required here; all of the coordination between the “Apple is abandoning pros” folks has taken place in full public view.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Jacek] “It’s not an argument of the past. These mobile workstations are quite possibly the trend of the future for video professional, and Apple does not want to be a part of that. They want to redefine what video professionals are. If that redefinition is to sacrifice power for size and cool factor, then it is not a large leap of logic to assume that they are trying to appeal to a different group. It would be smart business.”

I don’t understand the case for these mobile workstations being the future trend for video professionals. This class of system has been around for quite a while, and seems to mostly appeal to the LAN party crowd. I’m not saying nobody uses them, but I’ve yet to see one on-set, and I’m on a fairly large number of sets.

Why would there be a trend toward bulkier laptops among video pros now, when MacBook Pros have really started to come into their own just in the last year, with Thunderbolt and quad core processors? What specific use cases are these bulkier machines better for? Not offline editorial, certainly. An 11″ Air can breeze through that these days. Not online editorial either; a Thunderbolt-enabled MacBook Pro can online uncompressed 1080p/2K with little difficulty. VFX work? There’s typically not much possibility to perform that in the field, since it’s usually rather meticulous work. Color grading? We’re probably within two years of real-time 1080p grading in Resolve on MacBook Pros.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Jacek] “Of all your arguments, Chris, this has got to be the most frustratingly naive. To offer this as evidence is basically saying “it’s pro because Apple said it’s pro.” Of course, Apple would NEVER mis-represent a product to gain exposure and credibility (this sentence is sarcasm). Who are you going to believe, Apple or you lying eyes? “

In any event, I believe the idea that Apple is effectively lying about FCP X to sell a few more copies to — Who again? Consumers don’t actually buy $300 software — is seriously implausible, and there simply is no requirement to believe this unless one has already bought into the “Apple doesn’t care about pros” meme.

[Chris Jacek] “Please, stop making excuses for every single concern people have. It makes it hard to take you seriously.”

You asked me to provide alternative explanations for Apple actions that you believe represent Apple abandoning the pro market, and to provide a positive argument for the idea that Apple was not doing this. I did so, in significant detail… and your response is to ignore everything except a single point and tell me you can’t take me seriously because I responded to all of your concerns?

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “Miniaturization comes at the cost of processing power, storage, or battery life.

Instead of a smaller, lighter computer, Apple could offer one at the same size, the same weight, and a lot more power. Personally, I’d prefer the former for my personal use and the latter for my professional use.”

Given that current quad-core MacBook Pros are as fast as 2008 8-core Mac Pros, I don’t really see the problem. Apple’s pro laptops have maintained largely the same form factor for a decade now — it seems like we’re actually overdue for another round of miniaturization.

Especially since Apple is probably going to continue to use the same processors and GPUs that would have been used anyway, and accomplish the space savings by moving to lower capacity but faster SSDs (arguable either way in terms of ‘pro’ use) and elimination of the internal optical drive (which takes up way too much space given how infrequently many users use it these days).

[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.”

Apple has never had a product in that category. Certainly not in the last decade, since the introduction of the Titanium PowerBook. This is another instance where people are making the argument that Apple is shifting directions by, essentially, misrepresenting Apple’s past direction.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Jacek] “Err, um, huh, um…. Wow, could you be more smarmy or condescending? “

I’m getting a little tired of the certainty people seem to have in a position supported by hilariously flimsy arguments.

[Chris Jacek] “Take a look at the higher end NVidea offerings, like the GeForce 540M and the laptops that contain them. Despite the (relatively) small form factor, I think the pragmatic implementation of the chip and necessary cooling does require a bit more space than what the thin form factor could manage.”

Your previous post said there was “absolutely no way” Apple could fit dedicated graphics into a slimmer case. This is simply not correct with respect to the sort of dedicated graphics Apple currently ships in MBPs.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Jacek] “Over recent years, Apple has EOLed several professional applications. In that same time, their hardware offerings (not even counting iPads and iPhones) steadily trended toward smaller, with fewer expansion options. They have had slower cycles on their most powerful machines. In addition, Apple’s major profit centers have shifted from computers to mobile devices, which speaks to motivation.”

See, this is exactly what I mean.

Apple has EOL’d several professional applications — Apple prefers radically sparse product lines. Their most successful product, the iPhone, consists of all of two models (one of which is just a previous year’s model that Apple has continued to produce), where some have a dozen or more models despite selling fewer phones.

Hardware offerings steadily trending smaller, with fewer expansion options — Welcome to the last 30 years of computer evolution. ’70s mainframes were entirely modular. Early personal computers had lots of expansion slots — most Apple II models had seven. Apple stopped making six slot towers in 1998 or 1999. Buying patterns over the last decade have consistantly moved toward laptops, and we may, over the coming decade, see a significant shift toward tablets. As hardware becomes more capable, the fraction of the market requiring expandability shrinks. We’re now at the point where internal expandability is irrelevant even to most video pros — it’s not required at all for offline editing, or even most online editing. We’re probably within two years of Resolve doing real-time 2K on laptops (with video I/O via Thunderbolt).

Slower update cycles on the Mac Pro — Apple updates the Mac Pro whenever Intel has a new round of suitable Xeons. Sometimes they even go out of their way to get new processors before they’r generally available, and it’s rumored they’re doing that with the coming Sandy Bridge updates as well. I have no idea what people could possibly expect from Apple here. Meanwhile, people appear to have forgotten that while the PowerMac G5 did get updated pretty often, it never managed to hit the 3 GHz target Apple/IBM originally promised.

Major profit centers shifting to mobile — So what? As I noted previously, people don’t apply this standard to other companies. NLE software isn’t a major profit center for Adobe, but somehow nobody seems to mention that, even in the context of advocating a move away from Apple for this very reason.

You try to invoke Occam’s Razor, but believing there must be a single overarching explanation for a bunch of separate facts that have fairly simple individual explanations isn’t applying Occam’s Razor — it’s conspiracy theory thinking.

You want an affirmative argument against Apple abandoning pros? I’ve already done that, but I’ll do it again:

– They’re still in the NLE market, despite having to rewrite their NLE from scratch to remain competitive.

– The latest round of MacBook Pros are extreme overkill for the non-pro market. They’re as fast as 8-core Mac Pros from 2008.

– Thunderbolt. Again, though Apple clearly hopes it will become a mainstream technology, it’s significant overkill for the consumer market.

– The gap between Apple’s towers and mainstream desktops is far larger now than at any point in the past (at least when they aren’t split over processor generations while Apple is waiting on Intel). In other words, Apple’s pro machines are substantially more pro than they used to be.

– Xsan is now integrated into Lion. Lion also, with Core Storage, lays the groundwork for a major overhaul of OS X’s file system architecture, with potential large benefits for video pros.

– OpenCL — originally created by Apple. If OpenCL were just a matter of allowing Apple itself to write GPU-accellerated software without tying itself to a single vendor, they wouldn’t have turned it into a cross-platform standard. It’s clearly intended to allow third-parties to write cross-platform GPU-accellerated apps more easily, and the main candidates for this capability are pro apps.

– FCP X has “pro” in the name, was introduced at an event for pros, and is portrayed by Apple by Apple has a pro product. There are many pro features already present in the app (such as 4K support, 4:4:4 support, 32-bit float processing, and the best built-in scopes of any mainstream NLE). Moreover, it’s clear that even before its real ease and the subsequent outcry, Apple always intended to add pro features like XML exporting.

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