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The almost predictable death of the Mac Pro line?
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| Fledz |
I think I know one entire person who has one. I know tonnes with the laptops but the desktop versions are virtually non-existent. Why bother? I guess to run OSX. If Apple allowed the use of OSX on non-Apple hardware, not one of these things would sell. Not one.
What do they do though? They can't just abandon a desktop version entirely. I think they will refresh it but it would be stupid to drop it entirely. |
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| orTofønChiLd |
| how long is it gonna take a for new mac pro jesus |
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| meriter |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fledz
the desktop versions are virtually non-existent. |
Not really. I wouldn't call the mac pros a consumer product, but every prepress department in the world is stocked with them and many professional designers use them for their home office. They aren't toys, and they're not a status symbol you can bring to your local trendy coffee shop. |
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| Looney4Clooney |
relatively speaking, non existent but anyone successful in music has one or two. I have yet to walk into any studio, either home project or big studio that didn't have the unmistakable mac pro tower box. If you are running a PC , you have financial issues. I think they are going to lose much cachet by forcing pros to use PCs. IVe said it before but you once could say unequivocally that if you were to walk into any studio, they would be running a mac pro. That is branding power I don't understand why they would forfeit. Even to sell the cheap stuff. Sony was once miles ahead of everyone else yet the name still implies quality.
And that is just audio. Video will go the same route. They are going to kill their brand. Being known as the company professionals use is the kind of branding money can't buy at least not short term. They are throwing away over a decade of hard earned credibility.
Even just having them and not making a profit on the actual machines is worthwhile. Being able to say you are the best and the best use your stuff is just not something money can buy and while they had it a year ago, it doesn't seem to be that important to them.
Ya , they don't make money, but what prompted people to start getting macs. Ask anyone that knows nothing about audio or visuals what professionals use, they will say mac. How do they know ? Mac never made adds that pushed this concept.
Anyways, mac. I will be switching to PC once they unveil their new turds. |
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| tehlord |
| Something else I was thinking as well, is that if they stop producing machines that studios will use then what's going to happen to Logic? I can't imagine people who buy iMacs and iPads are going to buy it in any great numbers so I suspect it's the nail in the coffin for that too. |
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| Storyteller |
What L4C said. Stopping production of the Mac Pro is like showing the big finger to the majority of media professionals (audio/video/online).
This is equivalent to stopping development on software such as Logic and Final Cut. These are used in lots of professional environments and are very much depend on raw performance (especially video-editing which is processing intensive, RAM intensive and requires a lot of HDD space). Mobile computers manufacturers still need to step up to be able to replace desktop computers fully.
I just think it's a nice rumour to keep the Applebrand in our heads for a little longer.
Edit: Seems Tehlord made had the same conclusion whilst I was writing my post :). |
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| Looney4Clooney |
its like poker. I honestly feel like they have their hand and we will find out. I hope they get all gay on Jobs and realize, hey , we are about the arts and not a money sucking corporate turd jobs hated. I'm sure shareholders would go along with that. Apple was always about thinking outside the box and that professional market is why they still exist.
Surely the film industry must have some sway on things. I mean isn't apple and pixar owned by the same people ? What ? you can't render your on our mac book anorexic ? Have you guys tried using that cloud thing we invested. its super cool. Garageband will be upgraded to basement studio, logic will become Adobe Soundbooth and despite all the bull, I still won't get a decent zombie killing game. |
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| DJ RANN |
| quote: | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney
Anyways, mac. I will be switching to PC once they unveil their new turds. |
Got money troubles, have we? :p
I don't buy it - I reckon we'll see a new revision of the mac pros early next year.
The problem for apple is that they cost a lot to make, they sell a fraction of the unit numbers compared to their other lines and mac pros have a longer replacement life than than other products.
Most studios I know get at least 4-5 years out of a mac pro, whereas most people replace their laptops every 3-4 years.
The other issue is that the production environment (and I'm talking about design/video/music/printing/media/etc) has drastically changed, in the same way pro audio has - you now have people knocking out professional standard works on laptops and imacs.
For instance, one of my close buddies is head designer at Sketchers and they just use the large imacs, where in previous years they had to use mac pros. A big part of that is the increased processing power that is available in "consumer" grade products such as the imacs and macbooks.
10 years ago, having a studio capable of producing a professional sounding track all from your laptop was not viable, and now I know at least a dozen producers who just have a MBP, a good audio interface and a pair of headphones (albeit getting docked with studio monitors and outboard when the get back home).
Now having said this, mac pro's are the defacto standard for protools, and every pro studio runs protools. Now that PTHD has gone native, people wanting to set up a pro studio for less, can do so if they have enough host CPU processing power, which the new Mac Pros will evidently deliver.
For applications where you need huge multiple drives (samples for composing, HD video compositing, etc), the Mac Pro has it's place bought and paid for.
It's not just wank factor that production houses have mac pros - it's because of stability. Sure our macs have crashed from time to time but it's a 30 second restart, to get it back on track and time is big money in a pro studio. I once watched one of the top score engineers walk out of a studio and take the rental somewhere else, due to stability issues taking his support engineers more than an hour to resolve. That two week rental cost the studio over $35,000 in lost business.
It's also the fact you can plug a drive in and not even think twice about getting a virus, or further, have to worry about keeping virus database definitions up to date, or that antivirus program sucking some of your available CPU power.
Bottom line, Mac Pros have their place until Apple can achieve the same goal with other products, which even though they are getting close, it's not quite there, especially in terms of storage and performance.
The new Mac Pros, will however be blisteringly fast - the new sandy bridges are benching ridiculous figures, and thunderbolt is like adding a turbo to the whole data bus architecture. |
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| Looney4Clooney |
| I actually revived my old PC from about 6 years ago and it is actually pretty ing fast. It was a monster at the time tho. 4 gigs of ram!!! a Lian Li case that was the bomb. 100% cracked software. lol. Some gave me a sonar project. What the is sonar. lol. |
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| tehlord |
I think the fact is that a cheap PC is most likely more than almost any home producer would ever need, which means that a Mac Pro is almost impossible to sell outside a professional studio. And that's a shrinking market for sure.
I specced a Pro last year without looking at the cost, just picking what i'd want for a kickass home DAW and it came to a ridiculous £11k. An almost identical spec (component for component) from a very reputable (ie expensive) specialised DAW builder was £4.5k. I really don't see why the Mac's are so expensive. They even charge at least double the norm for hard drives, memory etc. It's stupid. |
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| DJ RANN |
| quote: | Originally posted by tehlord
I think the fact is that a cheap PC is most likely more than almost any home producer would ever need, which means that a Mac Pro is almost impossible to sell outside a professional studio. And that's a shrinking market for sure.
I specced a Pro last year without looking at the cost, just picking what i'd want for a kickass home DAW and it came to a ridiculous £11k. An almost identical spec (component for component) from a very reputable (ie expensive) specialised DAW builder was £4.5k. I really don't see why the Mac's are so expensive. They even charge at least double the norm for hard drives, memory etc. It's stupid. |
But this is the old mac vs PC price comparison which doesn't work as you're paying partly for the OS features with mac - if you were just going to run windows on both, then you'd have an argument, but even then there's the point that macs are designed far better in terms both of form and function than top spec PC parts.
I mean just open up a mac pro and look at the quality of the materials and even how ing advanced just the case is. Now try to buy a PC case that matches that and you're parting with serious money. In fact all the expensive PC cases I've ever seen are all those LED laden gamer cases that look like souped up honda civics (i.e. lame).
With mac, and especially the mac pros, you're not getting great value in terms of processing, but if your criteria is in terms of design, stability, never having to worry about the thing again; then mac pros are excellent value.
For instance - we have at least a dozen Mac Pros at work. Not one of them has had a major issue in three years of constant (24h) use, except some weird video issue that turned out to be a faulty video card.
So when a studio room rents for $3k per day, that top spec mac pro pays for itself in three days of saved downtime.
Now calculate the saved time not having to do maintenance (at least 100 hours per year between the machines) that we would have to do with PC's, and then calculate the time saved when we need to go to a new OS (2-3 hours per machine for all software opposed to a day for a similar PC with all the win updates/patches/sotfware/drivers/etc). Now calculate up those man hours spent not ing about and the mac pros are cheap.
For home use, forget it, but if you're a pro, making money from production with limited time, they pay for themselves. |
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