[Frank Gothmann]

“Advanced internal architecture” – it’s delusional to think that you can cramp the functionality and flexibility of a tower into an iMac or Mini.
For a lot of cards there is not even a Thunderbold equivalent or adapter anounced. Also, calling a choice of fast gpus and fibre connectivity “old crap” is just stupid and ignorant.

Glad to hear three meters of cable is enough for you. Screw the rest of the community including larger companies for which it isn’t, right?
No, I don’t get the PCs for free. But I pay less for them than for the current Macpro and I DON’T have to buy any new hardware if a new Macpro or whatever may follow was TB only to get the same functionality that I already have and for which I already paid top dollar.

[Frank Gothmann]

That’s exactly what I mean. People are very much invested in what makes sense for Apple and their balance sheet rather than what makes sense for their business. I don’t care if Apple is at the top of the modern business world as long as they are profitable. World domination for Job’s mignions is not something I am interested in. I care about my business, my balance sheet, my customers and their needs.

[Frank Gothmann]

Irrelevant because I can “choose” to buy HP, I don’t have to. I can go with any tower I like, from any manufacturer I like, and if I want I can get individual components and build my own machine according to my liking, needs and budget. Same if I just have to replace or upgrade a component. Nobody is dictating anything to me, what I should and shouldn’t use and how to use it.

[Frank Gothmann]

I don’t have to buy those “stupid cards and extra shit” (all of which is extremely useful to me and not stupid at all) because I have already bought it. I just need to take it out of the Macs and put it into the HPs. Done.
I’d have to buy tons of new gear and adapters (most of which don’t even exist yet) if we had to go the Thunderbolt route and would take ten times longer for certain tasks than a proper workstation.
Then, even if all those adapters interfacing with Thunderbolt were available, given the cable length limitation of Thunderbolt in its current copper incarnation, I’d have 100TB of storage sitting three meters away from me. Great! I may as well put a hoover right under my desktop. Plus everybody else who is accessing a shared storage solution would have to sit in a 6meter radius from. We may as well tear the entire office down and build everything from scratch.
But, as you’ve said, I can always access my media from the cloud, right? I wanna see you accessing 2K DPX files from the cloud. Brilliant idea.

The cost of switching to Windows for us is zero, zilch, plus freedom of choice, cheaper prices for hardware and components plus it is future proof.
The cost of switching to a Thunderbolt enabled Mac solution is in the tens of thousands of dollars with issues and problems all over the place plus a moody and completely unpredictable company behind all this that may pull the plug whenever they feel like it.

[Frank Gothmann]

Well, the writing’s been on the wall for some time.
The current Macpro isn’t selling because it is essentially the type of machine Apple said they’d never build. High-powered CPUs in an otherwise unbalanced system that has been neglected and abandoned just like the rest of the non-consumer aspects of their business. We’ve been holding out to upgrade for over a year now and have considered moving away from the Mac altogether after FCPX.
Frankly, I don’t want to wait any longer so after 20 years it’s farewell Apple. We placed an order for two HP z800 this morning.
Media Composer is cross platform, we have Adobe licenses for Win, FCPX is utterly useless to us.
Moving to Windows puts us in a much better and much more flexible position with tons of options to choose from.

Using an iMac or a Mini type of machine is just crazy. Bye-bye Cuda, video io obsolete, fibre cards obsolete, esata cards obsolete, raid cards obsolete. Would have to buy everything again for TB if and when it will be available and then Thunderbolt storage doesn’t work under Bootcamp (plus tons of other issues as well). If the internal drive craps out or something else break… off goes the entire machine for repairs for weeks and you cannot even get the drive out to access your local data.
And, just as a side note, what has become almost as annoying as Apple’s attitude in recent years is the ever-increasing number of Mac users who whitewash everything this company does. I’d be curious to learn what on earth Apple has to do to get on the bad side of some of these people.