Phil Hoppes
Forum Replies Created
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[Ronald Lindeboom] ” they can afford to partner with “controllable” vendors”
The question is why? When iOS approaches 85% to 95% of your revenue you kill off all of your OSX devices by making A10 16x Core iMac’s and Mac Air’s. Apple will then have killed Intel CPU’s in all of their devices so they have more control over the architecture. With Annobit’s acquisition they are on a roadmap to completely eliminate hard drives from their boxes so the only thing left in a vertical integration is display technology. With +$100B in the bank I don’t see that as a problem.
So why in the world would you continue to put resources in development of an OS that you no longer make platforms for? Which actually rings a bell… of course HP would buy it. Can you say Palm OS?
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We will see pigs flying and Rush Limbaugh working in a soup kitchen before Apple licenses OSX outside of Apple. Never, never, never going to happen.
Server market is growing because everyone is moving to cloud and/or off site computing resources. At the enterprise level what they are running is Oracle or SAP or something of that nature. Basically very intensive database applications. On the other end are the gazzilion servers used to pony up Facebook pages et. al. While neither of these are specifically related to the issues of the group on this board, you will all benefit from the momentum that these applications will drive.
I seriously wonder where workstations will be headed. In the past both because of the PC industry and Linux in particular, the previous workstation market completely collapsed and was replaced by PC’s. In my previous life working in semiconductors I started on mainframes then switched to Apollo workstations (at 60k a crack), moved on to Sun workstations and finally to Dell/HP PC’s and servers running Linux. The death knell for “traditional” workstations was obvious when I did an analysis for a company I worked for that “ONLY BUYS SUN” I was told. At that time for a paltry 250K I could purchase 5 Sun workstations with the combined performance of X or for 25K I could buy 5 Dell rackmount servers with the performance of 2X. Linux and high end PC’s killed the custom server market. Apollo who? Sun who? SGI who?
I look at what I’m using for my work today and things become interesting. I do a lot of 3D work and need lots of rendering resources. For the moment I have my own rendering servers as well as a good workstation and my MBP. There are companies that are offering cloud rendering capabilities but for my meager needs the overhead and cost is still too high. I expect that to change. It would not surprise me that in the future a moderately performing desktop with a good high speed connection to cloud resources will be all I need. For my 2 cents what is limiting me now more than anything is not iron it’s the horrible upload data rate to the internet. If I had upload/download speeds of 50Mbs at a reasonable cost I could dump all of those noisy, hot, expensive machines right now and just use the cloud when I need it.
From this note the direction. Less on the desktop, more on the web. I would switch to that in a nanosecond if it was available today at a reasonable cost but it’s not. That I believe is simply a matter of time however.
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Yuck it up. 76% of all revenue was iOS in 2011. They are laughing all the way to the bank.
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ROTFLMAO
Thanks Bill. That is a riot. Never were truer words spoken.
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Andy,
Your obviously a Unix wizard. I love it too. In my previous life as a chip designer I lived on Slowaris ( 😉 ) and RedHat. I have to agree that OSX is simply the best OS (unix) with a wonderful GUI. That being said, I had to capitulate to the Borg as I just got tired of having things brake or worse, certain software just is not available (Mari, Mudbox, Motion Builder) so I had to get a different system.
Best wishes and as I said for your sake and others I hope there is a full plate of Crow for me….
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Ok so I just did a price comparison to a 2×2.9Ghx MacPro with a 1tb Drive, 32gbram and the 5870 ATI card. I can build a system at Newegg for about 30% less including a 256gb SSD with 2×3.3Ghz Xenon Westmire CPU’s which should deliver close 15% overall better performance, so yes, my 50% less and 20% more is too inflated. I’ll take 30% less and 15% more all day long.
On the drivers, where pray tell, since every driver package I’ve ever gotten from AMD or nVidia are all bundled inside of installers, do I get the magic files that I need to replace?
In the end, we could do this all day long. You like MacPro’s and you feel a need to defend your position. I’ve moved on from MacPro’s and could not be happier. I still use a MBP for a portable solution and love it. I have a windows main workstation network with windows rendering servers (1U Asus rackmounts) and I use Deadline as a render manager. This is the slickest thing since slice bread and I do it at a fraction of the cost of buying off the shelf hardware. It works for me and makes my workflow efficient.
For your sake and the others that really want to continue to use MacPro’s I really hope that Apple does do a refresh for you. If they don’t I can see where a lot of people, again, are going to feel really screwed. Me, I could care less, as no matter what they do it won’t affect a thing I do.
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I don’t care who’s fault it is. I simply need to have the choice that if I want a Quadro 6000 card I can use it and know it is supported. Apple’s squabbles with either AMD or nVidia are not my problem.
And on drivers, I’ve neither the time nor the patience to use hacks to uninstall drivers in pieces. Takes me 2 minutes to do that task on a Windows machine and I 100% know what I did was done correctly as far as the OS is concerned.
Look I do love many of Apple’s products (MPB, iPhone, iPad) and use them daily but your trying to defend the lousy job they have done with their architecture WRT high end workstations and there is nothing worth defending. It’s plain to see that they throw no resources at it. Their designs as far as features and performance are mediocre at best and very lacking vs what else is available. I understand completely where Apple targets their resources and why, which is also why I gave up 2 years ago on them for my workstation needs. Should they grace the market with a MacPro upgrade, which I seriously doubt, I’m completely positive I’ll be able to build an equivalent machine for 50% less and it will perform 20% better.
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[Andrew Richards] ” I hope a Mac Pro with a standard PCIe GPU continues to exist and that we get something approaching parity with GPU support between OS X and Windows. Might be too much to hope for though.”
It will never be anywhere close to parity until I can uninstall a video driver on OSX and install a new one of a previous version WITHOUT doing a clean install of the entire OS. This, and their paltry lack of support for high end graphic cards is why my desktop workstation is and will continue to be Windows. I can put up with their lousy support on my MBP because there are specific tasks as well as software that I simply don’t or can’t run on my MBP so I just partition my work to know certain specific things have to be done on my workstation. It’s an aggravation but one I can put up with.
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Simply because a product is targeted and designed for one market does not mean someone from a different market won’t buy it. Products are classified as to what market they are design for. Apple products are targeted towards consumers. There is not an SQL server package from Apple. They dropped all of their server products. They don’t give a rat about supporting the enterprise market. If enterprise users want to buy their products they are not going to stop them but they are also not going to target their product design for them either.
A note. In my previous life before doing what I do now I was a chip designer serving the PC industry. I worked at companies that provided IC’s to Dell, HP and Apple for use inside of their computers. I can tell you unequivocally and without hesitation at no time did I ever hear anyone inside of Apple ever mention much less talk about needing any products to serve the enterprise market. They did not care then. They do no care now.
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[Craig Seeman] “Their target isn’t “consumer” so much as multipurpose.”
You can’t be serious? Ok, I stand corrected on the current price quote but I did do a comparison when the last update to MacPros came out and at that time there was a considerable difference especially when you factor that from HP and Dell both offered 3.3Ghz machines and Apple won’t and your graphics card selection is MUCH wider from HP or Dell. That being said, I’m a “build it myself” person when it comes to Windows machines so I really don’t care what HP and Dell offer I can pretty much make anything substantially better and substantially cheaper.
… but back to your “…target isn’t “consumer”…” Let’s just break down their revenue here. Ok… 109 Billion for last years revenue of which 108.8 Billion could be classified as consumer and being very gracious, 200Million was MacPros which I would not call consumer.
No…. I really think Apple is a consumer company.