Nice to see a new Mac Pro, but no one has mentioned price. The "entry level" Mac Pro from 2006 was $2199 and $2999 in 2013 (the last update). Even the top-of-the-line "trashcan" Mac Pro was ~$6500 with 12 cores.
I don't doubt the hardware is top-notch again, but an 8-core machine (I get it's Xeon), with a 256GB SSD and 32GB of RAM with a nice graphics card for $6000 is ludicrous. Is the new case and a "revive" worth the 100% price increase for a base model? Or has Apple come to revelation that pro's will pay any price?
Sidenote - 6k monitor is beautiful but $5000? The live stream I'm following jokingly mentioned the stand is $1000 extra (is that true?). Have we truly moved into $1/ pixel territory?
> Sidenote - 6k monitor is beautiful but $5000? The live stream I'm following jokingly mentioned the stand is $1000 extra (is that true?). Have we truly moved into $1/ pixel territory?
To be fair that's 6kx3k. So $1 buys 3000 pixels (more if you use the cheaper VESA stand option). The sound in the auditorium when $1000 for the stand was announced was priceless.
The live stream I'm following jokingly mentioned the stand is $1000 extra (is that true?).
Yup, it was on the screen and the presenter spoke the number without even cracking a smile. Must have practiced in the bathroom mirror for hours to pull that off.
Somehow I doubt they'll be selling $1000 monitor stands in a few years.
I can't quite believe they were saying someone would turn one of the monitors 90 degrees to write code. Why anyone would spend $6k on a monitor to write code is beyond me.
Are you saying developers don't code in portrait mode? I personally prefer it. I have two monitors side by side, both in portrait mode. The one on the left has the IDE. It is nice being able to see so much code at once without needing to scroll. The monitor on the right has my browser on the bottom half of the screen and what other tools I need on the top half. It is much much better than having two monitors in horizontal mode (which is what I used for years).
I read it as “(most) developers will have little need to spend $6000 on a 6k monitor just to code”. It’s not that developers aren’t the target market for a vertical monitor - it’s that they’re not the target market for a $6000 super-duper-dynamic-range 6k monitor.
Because they make $100K-$300K per year, they stare at their monitor every day for 8-10 hours or so, and they want to have the best quality?
People buy $30K and $50K cars when they could do their job with $15K one just fine. And they put them in the garage most of the time. This is something they'll actually use the hell off...
I have a fairly narrow monitor as my second orientated vertically to write code in. I can see more and horizontally it just didn’t work.
It’s fairly easy to configure in the Mac and Linux control panels so i doubt I’m unique.
Regardless I’m not in the market for a 6k monitor (1$ per k)
There are developers here who make 200-600K per annum. So they can buy these monitors. Of course they can choose not to but it wouldn't be such a big deal for them.
I am a developer, I make roughly in the middle of that range and I own the business so expensing it is straightforward. It's the value proposition that doesn't stack up from my perspective.
The value proposition is for video and 3D pros, where equivalent accurate monitors can cost tens of thousands.
"However, there is a class of users that is currently buying an Eizo monitor for $5,000 to get professional-class image quality, and Apple’s display is so much better that it’s not even close. There are also people who buy Sony reference monitors that cost more than $40,000—and Apple’s display is basically a match for them in terms of quality. By these standards, the Pro Display XDR is either a breakthrough in terms of quality or a staggering breakthrough in terms of price." [1]
But if you're a coder and like nice things and money's no issue, then, why not...
The stand attachment seems really nice though. Would've been a steal at around a $499 price point but obviously that isn't Apple's game.
Did you not see that it attaches magnetically, and that you can basically rotate it in any direction and also "pull" and "push" it without a lot of physical exertion? It seems pretty interesting. Sure, it's definitely a little pricey, but it isn't just a "stand" in the same way that a plastic DELL monitor is mounted on a "stand."
200K-600K doesn't quite yet put one in the category of "I'm know I'm getting bent over a barrel, but I have so much money I don't give a shit that I'm going to have anal tearing in the morning." It's enough to do that for a few things that one finds important, but not everything. If, OTOH, you impulse-buy Ferraris, this might go well on your desk at home.
I’s argue the primary device you interact with 8+ hours per day should qualify for “things you might care about”. Together with chair and desk, monitors should be THE priority for any smart developer.
(Note this doesn’t mean that this screen is not overpriced. Not all developers need 6k, a 4k screen already renders butter-smooth text at the correct resolution. This screen is for photographers, print professionals and moviemakers, imho.)
My point is that a developer is spending (give or take) $4K extra for utility they don't need (my argument being that $2K should get a dev all the monitor they'll ever need). A well-paid developer can afford to do that once in a while, but they have to be choosy, maybe spend that $4k of extra utility you don't need toward upgrading the BMW to the "M" version you'll never put to full use on public streets. Buy that Colnago bicycle you'll never be in good enough shape to put to full potential.
But blow $6K on a monitor when $2K will do? Nah, you need a multi-million dollar exit for that kind of diamond-crusted iPhone silliness. The rest of us wage-slave devs making only $250K/year make do with 5K monitors that are more than good enough.
>But blow $6K on a monitor when $2K will do? Nah, you need a multi-million dollar exit for that kind of diamond-crusted iPhone silliness.
Err, I know a few people making $200K and up, routinely spending similar money for BS like Leica cameras + lenses (and they're not pro photographers), or hi-fi amplifiers. Not to mention furniture and fine art.
There are mid-of-the-market headphones people buy that are $500k -- and those are not even considered expensive.
6K for a great monitor, which could even be the last one you'll ever need to buy is a bargain compared.
I fall in this camp but I would never drop $6k on a monitor that provides such a marginal benefit over dual 4k monitors with an ultra high end VESA arm for a fraction of the price. It's outrageous.
More lines viewable at a time. Most places have line length limits and they're well below full screen width. There are people I've worked with who enjoy reading and writing code on a vertical orientation.
That's something new to me. I though people want more horizontal tabs/columns. Scanning a very "tall" display(like this 32" one) doesn't seem very comfortable to me.
The ability to understand code at a macro level improves the more code you are able to see at once, because scanning with your eyes is more efficient than scrolling can ever be. So using a portrait orientation for your monitor does make sense.
I love stacking terminals in a vertical monitor. I usually keep some code in tall columns as well if the project has longer files. It's great when it suits what you're doing, but I had my doubts like you as well.
The shape of screens has been traditionally determined by 1) video applications (as video pros were willing to pay premiums, hence setting standards for the market to follow) and 2) the form of keyboards (laptops must be wider than taller).
Developers have had to fight this trend by figuring out screen-splitting hacks, whjen their natural workflow is inevitably shaped by Western text, so fundamentally vertical at scale.
If you step back, you'll see that vertical layout makes more sense than the horizontal one.
(And please don't call grown-up professional women "girls". It makes you look bad.)
It is actually really common to have several monitors, at least one of which is vertical in order to have one dedicated "code-reading" screen. When I worked at a large investment bank, most technology people had this set-up, at least in my own experience/recollection. When the monitor is vertical, and you have one file of code that has a few thousand lines, it becomes much more practical to have 1/10th of the code in your view immediately, as opposed to 1/25th and needing to reconstruct the hierarchy of the application's codebase in your immediate mental memory
my code is almost always taller than it is wide, so a vertical monitor lets me see more at once. I try to avoid having a dozen levels of indentation because IMO it hurts legibility regardless of monitor orientation. Also handy for terminal output and documentation.
There's at least 4 out of ~15 people in our office with one or more vertical monitors. I wouldn't buy a $6,000 monitor for it, but your standard few hundred dollar Dell office monitor pivots for a reason.
I feel like the misguided dongle philosophy has somehow been extended all the way to this. The idea that the stand is a separate price is just crazy to me, that it's a thousand dollars, absurd.
> Or has Apple come to revelation that pro's will pay any price?
Hasn't that always been the case? The price is surprising because Apple had basically abandoned the pro audience and has even started losing some of the prosumer audience with all the keyboard/touchbar shenanigans on the MacBook Pro. But the "pro" in the Pro lineup did have meaning at one point and this appears to be a return to that. It is clearly an attempt to recapture that pro market and the Mac Pro isn't the least bit targeted at the average home user. Although I am sure plenty of home users will buy the things just because.
> The all-new Mac Pro starts at $5,999 and will be available to order in the fall. Pro Display XDR starts at $4,999, the Pro Stand is $999 and the VESA Mount Adapter is $199.
> an 8-core machine (I get it's Xeon), with a 256GB SSD and 32GB of RAM with a nice graphics card for $6000 is ludicrous
Machine on itself may be, but the software? Let me offer from music production perspective.
For instance, Logic Pro X costs $200 - and has more value than even the fullest edition of Ableton Live (at least, for me), which costs $800. And Windows Pro is $200 against a free OS X, so the cost difference just for audio production is $800 already. And if you compare the quality of ASIO4ALL with it's OS X counterpart, I'm not sure how to put monetary value on it, but it just shows that it's not about the hardware...
I have recently outgrown my 2014 macbook and didn't want to buy neither a modern one, nor a trashcan mac, so I moved to Windows machine. Now, with modular Mac Pro design back, I know that I can finally build the workhorse I want.
The screen is very competitive, comparable screens in the audiovisual industry regularly go for 10,000$ or more. The screen actually looks like a bargain tbh knowing about HDR 4K screens im not even sure there’s anything in the same ballpark. And knowing Apple I expect them to have done this well - iPads were known around pro audiovisual production circles as one of the few consumer level screens where you could approve final Color correction on - because they were so Color accurate they were up there with pro screens.
In the Mac Pro I have no idea but in audiovisual again there’s a reason Macs are king - ProRes. Doesn’t matter how much thy price their pro machines, production companies around the world will gobble them up because they still own the most efficient video codec known to the industry - very fast encoding times and excellent compression.
Most movies and TV shows you watch today are still recorded in ProRes in high-level low-compression modes such as 4444 or XR.
> I don't doubt the hardware is top-notch again, but an 8-core machine (I get it's Xeon), with a 256GB SSD and 32GB of RAM with a nice graphics card for $6000 is ludicrous.
I tried pricing out a Dell workstation with comparable features (though still not as fast in any spec), and it came to just under $8000.
> Have we truly moved into $1/ pixel territory?
6K means 6000 pixels wide, not total. It's roughly $1 per column of 3384 pixels.
For high end displays, that price is nothing new. In 2004, the Apple Cinema Display was 2560x1600 at $3299 (accounting for inflation: $4463 in 2019 dollars), or $1.29 (2019: $1.74) per column of 1600 pixels.
Over the 6 years that Apple sold it, the price dropped from $3299 to $1799.
My understanding is the monitor is a genuine technological marvel that competes with pro-grade stuff that costs in the tens of thousands of dollars. The $1000 stand is pretty funny, though.
Well they want to make it look that way but they simply lie. Before anything else they compare a LED display with an OLED display and I doubt Sony pro display users even consider this Apple "X-price" display. Their comparison checklist is pathetic or better said: misleading.
If you need more pixels you may consider Dell's 8K display(which makes more sense for 8k streams that were demoed anyway) which is also cheaper, though it lacks HDR. But there are plenty 4K HDR displays so Apple's display is nothing new to say at least.
What about Sony's infinite contrast? I wonder why they didn't mention it...at best this is an overpriced monitor with different trade-offs(i.e lower resolution than dell, hdr, higher price etc) but has little to do with Sony pro displays. They compare a consumer led display with a pro oled to justify the ridiculous price.
Sony's "infinite contrast" is on their OLED screens and is a marketing gimmick for consumers that graphic professionals can see straight through. Plus OLED has problems with accurate color representation over time along with screen burn-in. The infinite contrast talks about OLED's ability to turn off pixels if they're black, but if they're very very dark grey the argument falls to pieces.
OLED is great for consumers. This isn't a consumer device. Dell's screen is great for the existing graphic design world. Apple's new screen is better.
I'm honestly baffled by your statement that this is a consumer display. I have absolutely no idea what gave you that opinion, especially considering the price. It absolutely is not. You can make the argument that the stand and VESA mount are overpriced (they are) but the monitor itself exists in a world that desperately needs it.
Just listen to yourself! In a few words you said that the $40.000 pro monitor that Apple used as reference in their comparison is a marketing gimmick for consumers while this Apple LED is what pro users actually need. You know that Sony offered LEDs before the upgrade to OLED, right?
How is this 6K display better for 8K content than Dell's 8K monitor? You know you can get HDR on plenty of 4K displays, right?
It's a LED, has HDR but lower resolution than Dell's flagship. To sum it up it's just a an overpriced LED with different trade-offs. Sony is really in a different league. Apple used it just to justify its non-8K overpriced LED.
Maybe you should look at the Pro displays instead of some consumer TVs?
Btw Apple said other lies there too(i.e that Sony sells only small<17"> pro displays).
You may also wonder why Apple put an OLED display on its flagship phone instead of a LED one.
Prediction: next Apple display will be OLED and they will make it sound like they invented it or are first to use this tech...just like they did with Apple TV 4K(even if 4K was already old/common tech at that time)
I'm not sure why I would look at the Pro displays. I don't know anything about displays, I only know that you misread or mischaracterized the comment you were replying to.
You said the comment you were replying to said that a pro monitor was a marketing gimmick for consumers. But that's not what the comment said.
Apple hardware has always been ludicrously overpriced compared to competition, nothing new there. They charge what the market will bear. You don’t complain about the price of a Lamborghini, you either pay it or you don’t.
The 1k stand is funny though. It’s the hardware equivalent of $200 t-shirts (yes, they exist - go check the various Prada, YSL etc): you know it’s not worth it, they know it’s not worth it, but you buy it anyway just so that people will know you have so much money that you can overpay for trash.
So they brought back the cheese grater Mac Pro. Now, was that so hard? Let the shutting up and money-taking begin...
However, watching them demo the new one is just a painful reminder of what an over-priced bad idea the trashcan was, and we had to put up with that shit, and the apologetics to go with it, for six years. Demo's not done, but I'm hoping I don't have to listen to Ive's smooth British accent telling me it's the best, we really mean it this time. Get the person that slayed the management dragon to get this thing built and let them do the voice-over.
The trash can Mac Pro was definitely a machine for my very specific niche (dev x FOSS x music x gamedev x some other use cases well suited for big-ish RAM + many CPU cores + good IO in a small mostly silent form factor). I did not care a single second that it was not upgradable, just that it was not updated by the time I set out to buy one (which I did not because of that). It was definitely more like a Mac Mini Pro.
I had the old big silver Mac Pro, and while in theory it was all a standard graphics card slot, in reality you had to pay an extra ~$100 to get the "apple" version of any video card.
I accidentally bought the wrong one once, spend like 2 weeks trying to like flash the firmware over, gave up and re-sold it on craigslist at a loss and bought the right one.
It looks on their page like it will support standard PCIE but there is a distinct lack of Power headers so I Imagine their new 2x PCIE interface thingy is what they're pushing.
Feeling a bit “everything old is new again”. So they’re finally making a “real” power desktop again, and the big thing about iPadOS is a multi-window feature that we’ve basically had since Windows ‘95... even the macpro design looks like a direct riff on their own 20-year-old “cheesegrater”.
I mean, I’m obviously happy (although i’ll likely never be able to afford a macpro). But all the rivers of (digital) ink spent on the “paradigm shift” of iOS-like forms and conventions now look pretty silly.
Sign in the Apple is a great idea for users. I can see developers not wanting to adopt it due to loss of customer data. I'm curious to see how adoption plays out.
I think its a big deal that they're able to capitalize on the user data abuses of Google and Facebook by making a single sign in service simply because "we wont give everyone your entire contact list when you click this button."
One thing I'm missing is a decent way to monitor your data plan[0]. Even my previous Windows Mobile 10 (formerly Windows Phone) had this.
[0] Yes, there is something, but it doesn't reset automatically. It doesn't limit. It doesn't notify. It is not more useful than the packet count of the TCP/IP properties in Windows.
This is a good example of how the consumer pays for so-called "competition" between service providers. The practical effect is that they collude to fix prices and never work with downstream/upstream companies to provide obvious features like the one you're asking for.
There was something on a slide of iOS13 about a "low data mode". I am curious what that might be and if they'll revamp how you monitor your data usage.
There are also rivals to that sony monitor in the $4000 range for reference hardware. It's extremely misleading. It is a really nice display though, but $5k is a painful price point. I would have preferred a retina 27" with those features, 4k is more than enough.
Everything is overpriced. Everything they've done has been overpriced for years. They're a marketing company first, selling overpriced iThings because they're status symbols to people with poor judgment and too much money.
Probably user-agent plus better translation of touches into mouse events.
To some extent, though, I'm having a hard time understanding how this is useful. Most sites are responsive these days, and it's been a long time since I remember getting a separate mobile site on an iPad. They showed Google Docs as an example, but even if you could use the desktop version of Docs on an ipad, it seems like it would be really uncomfortable to do so (and I though that was the whole reason for not making a touchscreen mac in the first place)?
This is what I don't really get about "request desktop site" or this kind of announcement... I don't know the last site I saw that serves different layouts based on browser agent, it's all based on screen size and resolution. Unless Apple is spoofing a higher resolution on an iPad, I don't see what will change.
That being said, on Bootstrap (and Bootstrap-like sites) turning the 2018 base model iPad on its side will give you a col-md layout which is usually enough to trigger the desktop size.
Will the new desktop site mode actually enable Safari features that mobile Safari does not support? I can actually name a few sites that don't work in mobile Safari because the browser doesn't support features those apps need (AWS Cloud 9 is one) but I don't think just requesting a desktop site would actually make those sites usable.
The Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR certainly seem to deliver on what "everyone" has been asking for over the past few years. Those prices are in another solar system to consumers so we will without question hear a lot of moaning that Apple are over-charging and such which isn't really true. The reality is that kind of performance is way beyond what a consumer would need and those prices are perfectly in line with similar devices.
Some nice additions iOS/iPadOS (Am I the only one who is irked it isn't iPhoneOS, iPadOS, etc??) that certainly makes the iPad Pro a more Pro device.
I bought and returned an iPad Pro back in February because iOS was a huge limiting factor. I said at the time "iOS on iPad Pro is two years behind the Pro hardware" and I stand by that but it seems iOS 13 with bring that down to one year behind the hardware.
Hopefully in 2020 we will see iPadOS mature to the point that the iPad Pro is a true professional device.
Info on macOS Catalina was basically zero though. Some new apps to replace iTunes which we have known about for months now. Sync moving into Finder. The only interesting thing was Voice Control which is think is superb. I always champion accessibility so seeing Apple expand voice control is great. I feel they can improve the experience as there was a lot of needless filler words but it is a great step.
Some interesting improvements to Safari on iOS/iPadOS but no word on what, if anything, is changing with Safari on macOS? With their new extension model coming into effect with Safari 13 I was hoping to see Apple say something about improvements to adblocking/tracking as we will be losing access to Unlock Origin which is a huge blow and I am unsure if I will be able to use Safari without it tbh.
Sidecar will be nice although it is a damn shame that the iPad Pro screen will be the better screen with its beautiful 120Hz Pro Motion display compared to the lower resolution 60Hz one in the MacBook Pro. Hopefully we will see Pro Motion screens in next years MacBook Pro!
For me personally the most interesting new feature is "Sign-in with Apple" and their unique email forwarding service. I have always refused to use the Google sign-in but with what Apple showed I think I would use Sign-in with Apple. At least for new services that I am unsure about at first. For all Apple's faults I respect that they do take users privacy seriously.
So with the exception of macOS news I thought it was a very strong keynote that positions Apple well for the next few years providing they deliver on their words with the Mac Pro! The only mistake was mentioning the price for the new display accessories. $999 for a stand wasn't going to go down well and the audible groan was amusing.
Now to check out the actual developer news over the next few days :)
> no word on what, if anything, is changing with Safari on macOS?
Probably because the WebKit team is doing it's own thing and releasing stuff when it's ready.
Their blog is pretty interesting to read[0], at least when new changes are happening.
This monitor the "Pro Display XDR" is to glossy for hours of coding imho. That is, you don't need 6k for coding either, so that's probably not their audience.
While Apple has been pretty good with privacy, there are long been rumored exploits in apple hardware (iirc snowden talked about it) used by state intelligence agencies.
Providing this capability gives an additional vector to be exploited.
It also may be implemented less securely in other devices, as other manufacturers see the market appeal, leading to more invasive tracking.
And, while I generally trust Apple, I don't like the idea that Apple can lock me out of my device should they choose too.
I work for Novartis. We did cure a couple of cancers using bespoke technologies that don't scale particularly well. The prices are ludicrous ($250-500k), but then it does take a team of scientists weeks of time per patient and its a single treatment... but it doesn't cure diabetes.
Is it really that hard to imagine? There are a significant number of computer users out there who want to do things like use Facebook, check their email, order stuff from amazon, do a bit of web browsing, watch a bit of Netflix, read a book… a tablet covers those use cases in a form factor that’s a bit more convenient and portable than a laptop, and with a bigger canvas than a smartphone.
I get that they might not fill a niche for everybody, but it’s not hard to see the use-cases, right?
I don't doubt the hardware is top-notch again, but an 8-core machine (I get it's Xeon), with a 256GB SSD and 32GB of RAM with a nice graphics card for $6000 is ludicrous. Is the new case and a "revive" worth the 100% price increase for a base model? Or has Apple come to revelation that pro's will pay any price?
Sidenote - 6k monitor is beautiful but $5000? The live stream I'm following jokingly mentioned the stand is $1000 extra (is that true?). Have we truly moved into $1/ pixel territory?