
The Last Mac Pro - arm
http://eggfreckles.net/notes/macpro/
======
mhd
I kinda get why "regular" users are ditching PCs for mobile platforms, but
never quite got why developers are on the laptop bandwagon. Is coding in cafes
and visiting conferences that big a use case? Or is this another symptom of a
screwed work-life balance where using your work computer at home (i.e. in your
"spare time") is that important?

~~~
Tehnix
>Is coding in cafes and visiting conferences that big a use case

Is that really the only place you use your computer?

I'm a consultant, working part time at an office, and I am doing a masters and
generally just enjoy coding as a hobby. My use case is something like:

I develop on my couch, I develop at home, I develop on the train, I develop in
the dining room, I develop in my own room, I sometimes write some quick code
while on the bus during my commute, and I write code at my university. I also
bring this same computer to work and use it to develop there.

Oh, and I also sometimes enjoy gaming with my friends at their place, with the
same computer.

Why on earth would I restrict myself to a stationary computer when I can have
a portable one that I can take everywhere I want with no hassle?

In my circles the only people that have a stationary computer are people that
use it for gaming, and even then they still have a laptop on which they do
everything else.

~~~
falcolas
I personally can't imagine using my work-provided computer for anything other
than work. Too much potential for my employer to claim my hobby projects, for
viruses to compromise client IP, for otherwise perfectly legal activities done
on company property to terminate your employment.

The risk / reward ratio is just too high.

~~~
Zelmor
Virtualbox.

~~~
falcolas
Virtualbox doesn't solve the problem of performing non-work related tasks on a
corporate computer. It would help resolve some of the concerns about
sandboxing data, but only some.

~~~
Zelmor
It leaves no traces on the host, so your work is invisible. Just encrypt it
and there you go.

------
jdietrich
A lot of pro audio users are doggedly sticking with the Mac Pro. Some of them
don't want to lose billable hours by transitioning to Windows, others are
locked in because of Logic Pro.

Pretty much everyone I know uses a rackmount kit to turn the Mac Pro into
something resembling a proper workstation, with a Thunderbolt RAID array next
to it in the rack. It seems absurd to me that a "pro" computer costing as much
as a decent used car needs third-party accessories to be usable as a
professional tool. That cute little trash can turns into an 8u monster when
it's properly specced out.

The solution offered by Apple is to just daisy-chain everything off
Thunderbolt, which is almost hilariously awful in practice. The supposed
minimalism and elegance of the Mac Pro goes out of the window when there's a
rat's nest of cabling hanging out of it. It turns out that PCIe slots and
drive bays are a really neat way of expanding a computer.

[http://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacpro.html](http://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacpro.html)

------
overcast
I've given up hope of a replacement for my 2008 Mac Pro. I'm really not sure
what to do, once this thing inevitably seizes up. I've maxed the RAM, upgraded
all four bays to SSD, replaced the video card three times. And now I'm hacking
in the latest OS because it's no longer "supported".

I'd really like to know what they plan on accomplishing, by sticking it to the
people who are developing all the software for their flagship mobile devices.

~~~
ianai
I really think they decided the desktop is dead. They're assuming developers
are using MBPs.

~~~
hbosch
Apple has also catered heavily to the professional artist/creative field.
Large scale movie editing, massive audio projects, and especially 3D animation
or arch vis will definitely leave the Apple ecosystem if they kill the
desktop-grade Mac. Workflows in these fields are often pegged to the latest
hardware, and the GPU/CPUs in notebooks - not to mention storage, RAM, inputs
- aren't often up to the task. Not to mention, these sorts of projects are
rarely done "on-the-go" so portability isn't necessary.

Things like visual design, print design, and UX are not very heavy tasks and
could all be done without even a dGPU... but the entertainment industry, as
far as I know it, has been Mac heavy in the past. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Remote render farms are becoming more affordable, however.

~~~
lurkinggrue
I think apple had really stopped caring about the high end professionals. The
real shot over the bow was the nerfing of Final Cut.

The middle ground user is probably far more profitable and less of a headache
for them.

------
mark_l_watson
My 95 year old Dad has a Mac Pro and loves it. He does a lot of 3D animation
and general video work, and it meets his needs perfectly.

I understand that the Mac Pro is a tiny market though.

I also need a lot of compute resources for my work (deep learning and other
machine learning to support NLP) but I use large servers on Azure, GCP, AWS,
and OVH so a MacBook meets my needs.

Even for my Dad's use case, it might be better to use cloud compute resources,
but at 95 years old, he wants to stay with what he knows.

~~~
themihai
So this means that after all there is still a niche for Mac Pro....

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
There is a niche. It's not a big niche, but it's a niche.

And if the MacPro had been an updated cheesegrater instead of an ashtray, it
would still be selling into its niche.

There's a solid market for ancient but refurbed/updated cheesegrater Pros, and
an even bigger market for screamer dual-Xeon monster PCs.

Considering how few media power users like Windows, Apple should own the
latter. It's a shame Apple has turned its back on those users.

But I suppose the conclusion is right. Mac is now a dying brand, and Cook
wants to kill it off within the next five years or so - very likely taking the
soul of Apple with it.

------
CoolGuySteve
I wouldn't be surprised if the next Mac Pro is just an external graphics card
providing a setup like the Razer Blade Stealth.

Although it would be nice if there was a Mac with normal intel RAM and CPU
sockets.

------
PaulRobinson
The 2013 Mac Pro was never viable for almost anybody, and today it's even less
obvious what direction they're taking with it.

It looked gorgeous, and many people thought they were _the_ machine to have,
but once you prodded the specs a bit, it seemed over-priced, and they lack of
upgrades has meant it's just now a really poor buy.

Since they decided with the MBP lineup that touchbars were seemingly more
"pro" than decent chipsets and more RAM, I've started looking more earnestly
at getting out of the Apple ecosystem.

I have been eyeing up the iPad Pro for a while, but struggle to make the jump
because once I move out of Apple, everything will go: I'll move to an Android
phone, an Android tablet, and a Linux laptop.

I have already used Linux server-side (although am preferring to head towards
Lambdas and "pure Go" Docker containers more and more), all the while, but in
2006 I moved to OS X for my main workstation because it was the best Unix box
I could unpack from a box and just expect to work.

And then there is the household ecosystem. If I move, I'll be buying my family
non-Apple kit in future as well.

In my small office alone more than a dozen developers are considering the same
switch. That's $30k/year or more we spend collectively on Apple gear we're
going to shift off from. In one, small office.

Imagine how this scales. It's a mess. Maybe we're too small a market, maybe if
every dev with Apple kit in the World switched away Apple would barely notice
the shift, but they would within a few years.

They courted Unix devs back in the early 2000s. They know if they could get
the best professional developers onto Apple, they in turn would make great
software, which would then make the product lineup competitive. It worked.

As the exodus picks up pace, they'll only have a few years before they realise
there are only a handful of developers prepared to keep a Mac around, and the
collective innovation will move from OS X and iOS to Linux and Android. That
could be an interesting shift for those of us who are comfortable in both, but
I don't fancy going long on AAPL long-term.

A really great Mac Pro that is best in class out of the box, some really
amazing displays which Apple could make in ways that no other manufacturer has
pockets to match (and the ability to use third party displays, please!), an
MBP that at least holds it own, that can compete with the Dell XPS, it could
add up to keeping people in the loop, and others too.

The Mac Pro stagnation was the first sign that Apple had given up on their
traditional market. The MBP was an underline and an exclamation mark.

~~~
lookuptable2
Simply a difference in opinion here but I don't share any of your qualms with
the MacBook Pro. I simply like macOS too much to change to anything else.

~~~
nekopa
I have a question for you about macOS: Did they fix the thumbnail view shift
select issue?

I had a MBP for about a year in 2014-15, and one thing really surprised me (as
I got it for iOS dev and photography) is that if I had a finder window open in
thumbnail/icon view I couldn't click one icon and then shift-click another and
have everything in between selected. It just acts as though you'd click-
dragged a square selection area. You had to shift to list view to be able do
this. At first I thought it was me, as I was new to OSX at the time, so I went
a-googling and I found out that no, that was the intended behavior. I mean,
even linux has what I think is a standard UI behavior.

The interesting thing was going to the Apple support forums and seeing
hardcore Apple fans saying that this is the correct behavior, better than what
me and a _lot_ of other people expect and, especially for working with
directories of photos, needed.

------
barkingcat
My prediction is that if there is going to be a next Mac Pro, it will have 12
ports: All USB-C/thunderbolt only in the usb-c form factor. No power plug (and
thus self limiting the power draw to what usb-c can provide).

The power button will be removed in favour of a touch strip.

------
stiGGG
Just my 2 cents... At my last client they provided a computer for me, because
they don't want foreign clients in their network. I got a MacPro with 32gb ram
and lowest specs possible beside that. It was the first time i worked with the
trash can and it blowed my mind from the first minutes. WTF is this 3 year old
machine still fast. After this experience i understand why Apple seems to be
so lazy here. I will not say _nobody_ needs more performance, but i think 90%
of the self called pro users wouldn't notice a difference with an updated
hardware. Under the consideration that the whole MacPro target is group is
relatively small, it's completely understandable why this is not number one on
Apple's priority list.

------
al2o3cr
"Apple has proven they are no longer interested in making a computer for the
high-end professional"

[citation needed]

"Is updated I/O and the opportunity to buy a third-party 5K display enough to
sell us on a future Mac Pro?"

I dunno, is a tiny change in sheetmetal design and slight interior tweaks
enough to sell people on [future model of some car]?

Articles like this would be vastly improved if they updated their premise from
"APPLE IZ ABANDONING PROOOOOOZZ" to "Apple isn't making the gear we're hoping
for, here's our alternative pick and a summary of how it better meets our
needs".

~~~
ivraatiems
> "Apple has proven they are no longer interested in making a computer for the
> high-end professional" > [citation needed]

No, not really. They've said and done nothing to support this market since the
Mac Pro came out, therefore, it's reasonable to conclude they don't care about
it.

I think the premise is fine; if you like a company and you want them to
produce a product you'll use, there's nothing wrong with saying so.

It might be a futile effort, granted, but it's still legitimate.

~~~
IBM
Welcome to Apple post-Steve Jobs return. Apple smartly hasn't Osborne'd their
products since then and the mood swings of some Apple fans is unlikely to
change that.

>They've said and done nothing to support this market since the Mac Pro came
out, therefore, it's reasonable to conclude they don't care about it.

Yes except for the fact that they continue to sell them. Apple hasn't also
stated how long they'll continue to make and sell new iPhones for either.

~~~
ivraatiems
> Yes except for the fact that they continue to sell them. Apple hasn't also
> stated how long they'll continue to make and sell new iPhones for either.

Not a fair comparison - iPhones are updated every year. "We don't mind selling
you this" is not the same as "we are actively invested in this."

They are clearly NOT supporting the market with the Mac Pro they have now;
whether it is being actively sold or not isn't the point.

It's like Google's many many halfway-dead apps: people use them, they're
online, but no new development is happening.

~~~
IBM
Wait for supply chain rumors (if they even happen given its low volume and US-
based manufacturing) to find out if there's going to be a new Mac Pro. You're
not going to get any official information about Apple's roadmap from them.

Anyone actually in the market for a Mac Pro is probably aware that the Skylake
based Xeons won't be out until some time around WWDC.

------
draw_down
They should be embarrassed by how they have treated this model. It's
ridiculous.

------
frusciante19
Wow can you imagine the hand-wringing if they do come out with a Mac Pro next
year? Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

------
acquacow
Man, that looks like a website I made back in 2001...

~~~
arm
That’s kind of inevitable, considering that the website is pretending it’s
being displayed on a Newton MessagePad 2100, which was made back in 1997¹.

――――――

¹ —
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagePad#Newton_device_model...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagePad#Newton_device_models)

