
Andy Hertzfeld on the Demise of the Mac Pro  - wyclif
https://plus.google.com/u/0/117840649766034848455/posts/StKLcccP4ny
======
chrischen
Supposedly Tim Cook has said that updates for "pro customers" are coming next
year.

[http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/11/david-pogue-new-imacs-
an...](http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/11/david-pogue-new-imacs-and-mac-pros-
coming-probably-in-2013/)

"Our pro customers are really important to us...don't worry as we're working
on something really great for later next year." - Tim Cook

~~~
tinnhope
That's what Apple was promising for years before the FCP update and look how
that turned out.

~~~
DannoHung
I thought most of the FCX grouses had been responded to.

~~~
abruzzi
Some points, yes. Unfortunately, at least for my they have stated that they
won't be bringing back the features that kill it for me (tape support.)

~~~
batista
Tape's probably still used for a lot of work and will for some time, but it
will be like bringing back the floppy disk:

[http://collider.com/film-camera-production-ended-arri-
panavi...](http://collider.com/film-camera-production-ended-arri-panavision-
aaton/120103/)

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/the-silver-screen-
no-...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/the-silver-screen-no-more-
distribution-of-film-to-cease-by-2013-in-the-us/)

------
bonaldi
I read that Intel is no longer manufacturing the CPUs the Mac Pro used, so
Apple had to do an unscheduled upgrade, which would explain this horrible
spec-bump.

------
brunorsini
You guys are totally missing the point. Although I'm typing this on a new
Chromebook that does an amazing job at serving me the web I still need to run
Pro Tools, which really does require a lot of hardware once projects become
complex enough. Although a huge percentage of what we currently do with
computers can effectively be accomplished on top of rather modest hardware,
what is left is of critical importance: video/audio production,
computationally intensive research, etc.

It can be argued that one could just do those things on Windows / Linux
instead, but that is a pretty poor solution for anyone who is already used to
Mac OS X or who owns other Apple hardware such as their Thunderbolt display.

~~~
gouranga
I think the support status of OS X hardware (and software) is reason enough to
switch to Windows or Linux for anything computationally intensive. They seem
to throw it away at a whim.

Dells Precision machines are cheap, last a LONG time and always bang up to
date. Never will you worry about being left behind.

Windows 7 is supported until 2020! Linux is supported until whenever you want
it to be (you have the source).

Being used to something doesn't really cut it if you ask me.

------
davweb
Apparently someone has had a reply to an email sent to Tim Cook promising a
bigger upgrade to the Mac Pros next year.

[http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/11/david-pogue-new-imacs-
an...](http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/11/david-pogue-new-imacs-and-mac-pros-
coming-probably-in-2013/)

------
grecy
I posted this in the other thread, and I've been thinking about it more
overnight.

Yes, this was a pretty "lame" update.

At this point, there are two things Apple could be doing:

1\. The Mac Pro is EOL. Dead. Gone.

2\. The Mac Pro is alive and well, and they're working on a new model.

Now, if the truth is option #1, why would they release this "lame" update now?
There is no reason to. When they wanted to kill the xServe, they just killed
it. Done.

I think the more likely scenario is option #2, but for whatever reason, they
have not been able to build an Ivy Bridge/USB 3/Thunderbolt beast to their
liking yet. At D10, Tim Cook clearly said they don't build things to
"arbitrary schedules, or price points... they just build the best products
they can". So a few months ago when it became clear the "new" Mac Pro was not
going to be ready any time soon, they green-lighted this "lame" bump, to hold
over until the new beast is actually ready.

I think this "lame" update shows a heartbeat for the Mac Pro, as a hold-over
until something newer is actually ready to go prime-time.

(The difficulty I always think of is will the Thunderbolt port(s) be on the
gfx card, or the motherboard? Hmmm)

~~~
jonhendry
I bet they're tired of the shape and are trying to figure out how to do
something different.

Ideally they'd come up with something that could somehow work better in either
rack mount or desktop usage.

------
dr_
Software keeps getting more nimble. Storage is moving to the cloud. There's
really nothing super surprising about this move. No one had heard of
thunderbolt a year ago and now all of the sudden it's a necessity?

The large majority of consumers will probably be impressed by the next gen
Mac. That is the direction the entire line will be heading in and Apple
clearly wants to make the differentiation clear, instead of marginally
different and making people indifferent between the NGMBP and MBP.

These are not just creative decisions, they're marketing decisions, and so far
Schiller hasn't done much wrong.

~~~
reitzensteinm
It's notable because creative professionals were once a very important market
for Macs, and yet now Apple isn't even pretending to care about them.

And creative professionals always could use more power. Even a current top of
the line PC isn't enough.

Updating a Mac Pro from Westmere to Sandy Bridge E is absolutely trivial
compared to creating the next MacBook Air. You can even do it at home with a
Hackintosh - they are almost entirely commodity PCs in the same old boxes
they've been in for years.

And yet it hasn't been done.

~~~
dr_
Wouldn't creative professionals, at least those working in design and video,
be pleased with the Retina display? Where else are they going to find a
display of this caliber to work with?

~~~
abruzzi
Yes, but it's on a 15" screen. I haven't had a 15" screen on my desktop since
1994. Resolution is important, but for many tasks, so is size. The new MBP has
a 2880x1800 screen, the old Apple 20" display had a 2560x1600 screen. So,
while the MBP has a few more pixels, it's not that many more pixels.

Having seen neither, I can's speak to quality issues on the two screens.

------
netcan
I hope this doesn't mean Apple are moving away from people in the creative
industries. They'v gotten good at making stuff for grandmothers, five year
olds, yuppies and programmers etc. etc. That's really impressive and they did
a great job.

But I think their roots in the creative industries were always one of the
contributing factors to the quality of their stuff. The idea that a mac is
_for_ doing things like video editing and music production is IMO a proxy for
making it good at other things too.

~~~
Shivetya
Who is to say that the domain of people in creative industries are restricted
to users of Mac Pros.

Creativity is not bound by hardware.

~~~
netcan
Nobody. Creative people use all sorts of things.

As a product though the Mac pro targets (not exclusively or exhaustingly) a
section of creative professionals: designers, music industry people, video
editors. The design choices & margins produce a price that basically targets a
'need what they need regardless of price' segment. They've been doing so for a
long time. In the Apple dark ages these people were a big chunk of mac users.
You can still see the vestiges of this heritage in modern macs, eg iLife:
Consumer versions of what their professional (in that space) users use.

------
jonhendry
Seems like there are a few different, not-necessarily overlapping use cases
for Mac Pros.

There's the people who need lots of CPU. There's the people who need lots of
RAM. There's people who want lots of fast disk. There's people who need to use
specialized cards.

Trying to serve all at the same time dictates the shape of the machine. (For
example, reduce space for cards, and you can make a 1U rack mount.)

Thunderbolt opens up the possibility of replacing the Mac Pro with something
akin to a beefed up iMac or maybe a stretched shoebox-shape Mac Mini, with
high-end CPUs, lots of RAM slots, and basic graphics and disk, with external
Thunderbolt chassis available for disks or expansion cards.

If the main unit + disk chassis + card chassis cost the same as a similar Mac
Pro, this would be a significant savings for those customers who only need the
main unit and zero or one external chassis.

~~~
abruzzi
Unfortunately this is like a high end Commodore64: it starts simple but soon
you have a rats nest of cables separate power for all the external devices. I
want less cables not more. Also, I don't think thunderbolt cables can be
screwed in, so you run the risk that a cable could get tugged and pulled out.

~~~
jonhendry
I'm thinking like an 8-drive chassis, and maybe 3- and 6- slot card cages,
rather than lots of single-purpose external devices.

Rats nestery need not be too bad. Thunderbolt from the Mac to the drive
chassis, then thunderbolt daisy-chained to the PCI card cage chassis. Power
cords for the drive chassis and the PCI card cage chassis, if they can't be
powered by thunderbolt. (Naturally, how ratty the PCI card cage gets would
mostly be determined by what cards it contains and what are plugged into
_it_.)

Not sure what the cable length limits are, but it might be possible to spread
these out a fair distance, especially once optical-based Thunderbolt happens.
Being able to put the PCI cards close to what they're connecting to, with just
a single Thunderbolt cable running back to the computer, could be a cable
management win, versus snaking multiple cables to a computer.

I'm sure someone could come up with a screw-in variant of Thunderbolt, but
even so, I don't think Mac Pros have any screw-in connectors as it is, apart
from the video cables screwing into the video card(s).

Thunderbolt PCIe expansion boxes are already in the works, such as this $979,
3-slot one: <http://www.magma.com/thunderbolt.asp>

------
S_A_P
My issue with the lackluster update is that I purchase a computer to last me
~5 years. The last mac pro I purchased was the octocore mac pro. I use it to
run Logic, Reason and associated plugins, and find I can comfortably run 24-48
track projects quite easily so I havent really felt a pinch to upgrade. I have
16GB ram and 4 TB of disk space in it, so I think it still exceeds what most
desktop/laptops are capable of to this day. Back to the point, since I want my
purchase to last, it better have the current state of the art on the day of
purchase so that accessories and upgrades are easily added.

~~~
batista
> _I use it to run Logic, Reason and associated plugins, and find I can
> comfortably run 24-48 track projects quite easily so I havent really felt a
> pinch to upgrade._

24-48 track projects? With slight "freeze" of some heavy reverbs and such, you
could probably run those on a Dual Core MacBook Pro.

~~~
S_A_P
Absolutely, I have tons of headroom for more. However, just because I _can_
means I should :) Amplitube usually is the biggest CPU drain I use, and I dont
really freeze tracks that often.

------
PaulHoule
If you want a high-end machine, buy a PC.

I had to buy a laptop recently and chose a PC because I could get 32G of RAM
in a PC laptop. For my work, I need that much.

~~~
kalmsy
I want a high-end machine, and I want a Mac. Please stop telling people how to
spend, or how they should want to spend their money.

The Mac Pro is still a powerful machine. We just didn't get what we hoped for.

~~~
PaulHoule
Apple's the one that has strong ideas about how you should spend your money.
PC makers listen and deliver a diversity of products.

Now, I'll grant that Apple products have advantages in terms of stability
because there is less finger pointing when things go wrong -- you could get a
mac laptop that sleeps correctly about 3-4 years before windows laptops got it
right.

I don't see any real U.I. advantage on the Mac; if you try to put your photos
in a movie, for instance, the Mac will drive you absolutely up the wall
because it wants to make you look like a Shmuck who can't turn off the Ken
Burns effect.

------
scott_s
This is an honest question, not a criticism, to the people who are
disappointed with the Mac Pro offering: is a two-processor, 12 core machine at
3 GHz with 64 GB of RAM and 4 storage bays (up to 1 TB HDD, up to 512 GB SSD
per bay) not enough workstation for you? If not, what do you use your
workstation for, and what are your needs?

I ask because that seems like a hefty machine to me. The max specs on the Mac
Pro are almost as much as the development nodes in the cluster I have access
to, and those nodes host about 10 developers per node.

~~~
brunorsini
Thunderbolt is the #1 thing. Apple's own $1000 display is not supported by its
high end desktop computer, which is just absurd.

~~~
jonhendry
They still sell their other $1000 display, the display port version, which is
supported by the Mac Pros that they are selling.

~~~
brunorsini
True, but Thunderbolt is the newer technology. I recognize there might be some
bias going on here, but the truth is that buying a display port display right
now feels a bit like buying a S-VGA CRT to me.

~~~
jonhendry
I just recently bought the Display Port model. I just couldn't justify the
additional expense of upgrading my MacBook to a Thunderbolt-supporting model.

It wouldn't be as bad, if it could easily be daisy-chained off a Thunderbolt
monitor.

Unfortunately it appears that you need another Thunderbolt device after a
Thunderbolt monitor, before you can connect a display port monitor.

(ie, Thunderbolt Display -> Thunderbolt Hub -> DisplayPort Cinema Display)

------
Udo
As someone who hasn't been following the news in these last few days, I got
very depressed after reading this headline - which of course (silly me) turned
out to be complete and utter sensationalistic bullshit.

I agree the silent almost-not upgrade is not a good sign, but it may simply be
due to the release schedule of Intel's server chip. Anyway, the Mac Pro still
exists and it's still a good machine. By these standards I have an ancient
2008 Mac Pro and it's absolutely good enough for anything I can throw at it.

~~~
reaganing
It was true that the Mac Pro didn't receive any updates in the prior two years
because there simply wasn't a new Intel chipset to update to...

But Intel's Sandy Bridge Xeon chipset and new E5 processors have now been put
for a few months, with Dell's Precisions and other workstations now using
them.

~~~
Udo
Maybe there is a bigger update in the works and Sandy Bridge wasn't worth the
investment, so Apple is holding out for the next step. I don't know Intel's
roadmap. But I do know Apple has no problems throwing out products it deems
superfluous, so I've been worried about the Mac Pro's future for quite a
while. As a multi-screen kind of guy, I will definitely leave the platform
once the only upgrade path left is the iMac.

The headline wrongly suggests that the Mac Pro was canceled. It wasn't.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
"As a multi-screen kind of guy, I will definitely leave the platform once the
only upgrade path left is the iMac."

You can connect two external screens to an iMac, making a total of three
screens.

[http://gigaom.com/apple/new-27-inch-imac-supports-dual-
exter...](http://gigaom.com/apple/new-27-inch-imac-supports-dual-external-
display-output/)

~~~
Udo
I want my display and my computer separate. I want to connect non-Apple
displays. Sometimes I want more than three screens. I want to be able to
upgrade my graphics card, which I have done on my Pro 2 times. I'd love to be
able to chain an arbitrary number of Thunderbolt displays together trading
refresh rate for real estate but that's just not how it works, in fact it will
probably never work this way.

~~~
jonhendry
Buy a 3-slot Thunderbolt PCIe expansion chassis, fill it with top-end Mac-
compatible video cards, and connect it to a Mac Mini via Thunderbolt.

I think you can daisy-chain six of these Thunderbolt-PCIe boxes, which would
give you, what 36 monitors?

And not thunderbolt monitors, they'd be whatever the gfx cards you use
support, so probably DVI or HDMI or DisplayPort.

~~~
Udo
It's a good idea but the Mini isn't really in the same category as far as
processing power and memory capacity go. And this extension chassis is
ridiculously expensive for no reason. Still, it's a good alternative if/when
the Pro goes out.

~~~
jonhendry
Yes, as I note elsewhere, what might be nice would be a "MacMini Pro", with
appropriate CPUs, RAM slots, reasonable default graphics, and a couple hard
drive/SSD slots, in a sleek, compact box with adequate power supply and
cooling.

I'm sure Apple could produce extension chassis at a lower price point than 3rd
parties, if they wanted to, but I doubt they want to get into that business.

------
freyr
When people suggest Apple has an evil plan to impose the walled garden on our
laptops and desktops, and turn all of our computers into appliances, I roll my
eyes. But their neglect of the Mac Pro lends those arguments at least a little
bit of credence.

On the other hand, despite Apple's huge cash reserves, I'm sure their human
capital resources are limited. With iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks as wildly
successful as they are (and for good reason, IMO), it would be really, really
stupid not to allocate most of their resources to these products, and push for
the major updates there.

------
amurmann
I think we did not see new Mac Pros and new iMacs because Apple wants to
update them to use a retina display as well. I think it's more likely that
Apple expects the displays to be available soon than that Apple doesn't care
about these lines anymore. If Apple wants to update the big screens, it will
need to update the iMac and the Thunderbolt displays at the same time. Since
the MacPro should be able to use the Thunderbolt retina display, it probably
should be updated at the same time. I might be wrong that it's the screens
they are waiting for, maybe it's the graphics cards, but I am sure all those
product lines will be updated at the same time and they all will get Retina
and probably within the next 6 months.

------
freerobby
Looks like the Mac Pro is alive indeed.

[http://www.macworld.com/article/1167247/cook_apple_planning_...](http://www.macworld.com/article/1167247/cook_apple_planning_professional_mac_for_2013.html)

Quoting email from Tim Cook:

Franz,

Thanks for your email. Our Pro customers like you are really important to us.
Although we didn’t have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at today’s event,
don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for later next year. We
also updated the current model today.

We’ve been continuing to update Final Cut Pro X with revolutionary pro
features like industry leading multi-cam support and we just updated Aperture
with incredible new image adjustment features.

We also announced a MacBook Pro with a Retina Display that is a great solution
for many pros.

Tim

------
mrich
I wonder what Apple uses for development internally - I suppose they have
clusters for fast compilation. Sucks if you are an external developer who
needs to build large codebases, if this Mac Pro is the best you can buy.

------
protomyth
At this point, I wish Intel had a non-Xeon multi-socket capable chip. The Xeon
is serving two masters (enterprise server and pro workstation) and does a
really poor job of it.

Its a shame Apple will not release a non-Xeon Mac Pro.

------
rfugger
I think you mean "Mac Pro".

~~~
wyclif
I fixed it. See how pervasive Apple marketing is? ;-)

------
gringomorcego
Jesus christ, this sense of entitlement is fucking nuts.

Do you have a computer? Can it access the web? Is it less than 5 years old?
Congratulations, you have a pretty amazing computer that should be able to do
most things pretty reasonably.

I mean Jesus, some people make it seem like it's a personal attack when
corporations don't pander to all.

~~~
DrJokepu
Andy Hertzfeld's opinion is relevant because he was one of the key people
behind the original Macintosh released in 1984.

~~~
icebraining
For some background:
[http://folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&cha...](http://folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&characters=Andy%20Hertzfeld&detail=medium)

