>Apple made a true pro machine, and now the pro-poseurs are pissed.
Well, there are also tons of people working professionally with video, audio, etc, that don't have the money to fork for a $6K starting price machine, but would like to work on a fast, extensible, desktop machine and a good external monitor by Apple.
The iMac comes with lackluster extensibility and a monitor that can't work as an external display 4-6 years later when you upgrade machines. The Mac Mini is a mini-PC with even less extensibility.
Those people are still very much professionals. In that, they have clients, make a living from working on their computers, and could very much use faster e.g. rendering time, or the ability to run more VST plugins, or more complex 3D scenes, etc, to make their work easier.
They are very pro, and very many. They just aren't high-end Hollywood studios, or the art department of Nike level pro.
And they still could very much use something more pro than an iMac/MBPr but less high end than a $6K starting price workstation.
Not only are these people not "the same dope who gets the M-Sport BMW 3 Series, or the DSLR with the Kit Lens" posers, but many of us have started building $3K-$4K dollar PC based workstations, where we run Premiere, Cubase, Creative Suite, etc, because Apple won't cater to our market.
Or will only sell us a $4K iMac machine with no capability to upgrade internal SSDs, glued RAM, a built-in not-reusable screen, and no ability to use our own pick of e.g. a high end Nvidia video card.
So there's that.
Is it ok that they are now shunned? The traditional Mac Pro of yore, catered to those exact people.
The pro posers can absolutely afford a $6k bauble. Actual creative pros (outside the SF/LA bubble)? Not so much. The $2k price difference between the base-spec Mac Pro and a fully-loaded PC workstation is a new (used) DSLR body to replace your beaten-up old 5dMkII, it's a couple of nice microphones, it's a set of LED softboxes, it's three months rent, it's a new engine for your van.
Some of those struggling creatives in the early stages of their career will go on to be the next Rankin, the next Steven Soderbergh, the next Rick Rubin. Apple are already losing those people due to the dismal price-performance ratio of their hardware. The opportunity cost of buying a new mac is just far too great when you're a creative on a budget. They're keeping the wannabe DJs, but they're losing the kid running a record label out of his mom's garage. They're keeping the Instagram influencers, but they're losing the kid who's scraping together the cash to make her first short film.
The lack of expandability on the iMac and Mac Mini is a really big deal for this demographic, who tend to buy used and tend to eke out the last few viable years from a product. In the short-term, closing off the used market makes perfect economic sense; in the long-term, you're also closing off a key route into your platform for users who would potentially be extremely loyal and go on to buy many generations of high-end machines.
In the long run, that could become an existential threat to Apple's computer brand. If they lose the next generation of creatives at a pivotal moment in their career, the whole house of cards could come tumbling down. If you've grown up seeing all the genuine creatives using PCs and all the clueless posers using Macs, is that $3000 MBP a status symbol you really want to be seen with?
I would argue that for the vast majority of use cases you are describing, even the non-pro iMac would perfectly fit the bill. Any iMac from the last few years that has TB3 for eGPU and fast external storage even.
Name one professional use case that would put a reasonably specced (i7+) iMac with eGPU to its knees, to the extent it really disqualifies it. In other words, a use case that doesn't involve editing raw 8K footage or rendering 3D feature films? A professional use case for someone who could afford $4K for a PC workstation that would fit the bill, but not $5K for an iMac Pro or $8K for a Mac Pro.
>Name one professional use case that would put a reasonably specced (i7+) iMac with eGPU to its knees, to the extent it really disqualifies it.
First, try to edit a large project with 4K video and you'll soon find out. Unless you transcode for hours, the machine will be on its knees, especially with multicam stuff.
Second, computing power is not a binary "down to its knees" / "manages to do it".
I always could use a faster machine (I can afford and upgrade eventually) as a pro, even when my current machine is not "to its knees"
If it does its rendering in, say, 4 hours, it's always welcome to be able to do it in 3 hours or 2 hours. Those are hours off of my time.
If PC-using pros can do it with their GPUs/memory/etc, why shouldn't Mac using pros be able to keep up? We do compete for the same jobs, you know.
Now add video FX rendering (e.g. after effects) with many nodes and layers, 3D rendering (which already can take days for a large project), and so on.
And lastly, the iMac with eGPU is still a hassle (no upgrade internal GPU, extra costs for the eGPU cage and cables, occasional eGPU-related glitches, etc). And it's still non memory upgradable, non CPU upgradable, non SSDs upgradable, and with a screen that can't be used as a standalone screen when you get past that machine.
So, no an "$5K for an iMac Pro" is not a replacement for an upgradable rig, that can take non-Apple-marked-up upgrades, and doesn't have to come with its own monitor.
What's the point in recommending that people buy an All-In-One-PC like the iMac when they'll have to litter their desk with a pile of cabled hardware that is known to live quite well inside of PC cases?
eGPU seems silly to me for a desktop. The graphics card works very well inside of the case, the monitor works better outside of it.
The assertion was that Apple does not have any computers for professionals that need a powerful machine, but not as powerful as a Mac Pro. This is obviously assuming they need or prefer macOS over Windows or Linux for whatever reason, otherwise they might as well just buy a regular PC.
The 'pile of cabled hardware' argument seems a little far-fetched by the way, since when do 'pro users' make a big deal out of having one or two external devices on their desk somewhere? Never heard anyone complain about that in real life.
I have this setup with a Mac Mini, the eGPU just sits behind the screen where I don't see it, and it's attached with a single TB cable + power that goes straight down into a socket. A nice benefit of this solution is that I can also use the GPU with my laptop if I would need to, by just plugging it in.
For external storage, if it doesn't get moved around you can e.g. attach it to the back of the screen, the screen I use has 4 USB-C ports at the back so I don't see why this would be worse than having the drive in a box under your desk. Or you could use a NAS with 10Gb ethernet. Plenty of options. There will always be someone who can't live with the fact that there isn't a box that has all the hardware under the desk, but that's hardly saying you cannot buy a decently powerful Mac at a small fraction of the cost of a Mac Pro.
>The assertion was that Apple does not have any computers for professionals that need a powerful machine, but not as powerful as a Mac Pro.
No, my assertion is that Apple does not offer a competitively priced mid-to-high end machine suitable for professional use.
The iMac will be acceptable for some users, but not for others, because it's one-size-fits-all. In most pro audio applications, the fan noise under load is simply intolerable - you can't trick it out with Noctua fans, you can't hide the hot bits behind an acoustic partition, you're just stuck with a couple of noisy blower fans in the middle of your working environment. Lots of other pro users have similar niche needs.
The lack of maintainability is a serious issue for pro users. If something goes wrong in your iMac, you can't just order a replacement part and get back in business by tomorrow morning. A repair that would take ten minutes on a commodity box is often a lengthy process requiring specialist tools on an iMac. That's tolerable if you can afford to have a spare machine on standby, it's tolerable if you can afford to just run down to the Apple store and buy a new one, but it's a dealbreaker if (like most creative professionals) you're struggling to keep the lights on. By contrast, the last mixing console I bought was supplied with a full set of schematics; it can be completely torn down with nothing more than a PH2 screwdriver and all the PCBs and internal connectors are clearly labelled.
Apple are presenting their users with the choice between an extremely expensive and blatantly over-engineered "pro" machine, or an all-in-one that wasn't really designed for professional use in any meaningful way. There's a gaping hole in the middle of their product lineup that ignores a very large proportion of actual creative professionals.
To be honest, a comparably loaded workstation from HP is 5000$ with a massive discount for preorder. The difference is that you can get a lowered specced one if so you want.
By the way : high end photo light cost a lot - like the new XDR monitor, they too need to give the user confidence is the final result (color correctness is a bug one).
A mac mini plus egpu would cost less then and iMac and have roughly similar performance. And if you go with VII, or a couple VIIs would get you better performance then a specced out iMac Pro for half the money. It would requires dongele-ing things off the machine but it gets you what you want.
Edit: Apple should offer a more elegent solution, but long term this is probably where most of the market is going. Most people don’t need as big a machine any more, and egpus offer 85% of the performance. I expect we’ll end up with people increasingly buying cpu units,gpu units, hard drive units.
>A mac mini plus egpu would cost less then and iMac and have roughly similar performance.
And you'd have the bother of the external cables for the egpu, the extra cost of the adapter cage, slightly less performance, and no SSD/memory/etc upgradability still. And a stifled box with worse cooling than a tower could offer (and thus more throttling).
A Mac Mini with an eGpu and external drives is the closest thing to a normal desktop machine in the Apple universe, but it still is a very inelegant solution compared to if Apple offered a desktop machine between the Mini and the Pro. Also, while the Mini got a nice upgrade, for a real desktop, the processor isn't ample - the iMac at least offers an 8-core i9.
I just have a thought. What about building a case for Mac Mini. Like you could put there Mac Mini, your drives, your GPU and then connect all that stuff via thunderbolt, all in a single enclosure. Also few fans to cool everything. Did someone make something similar?
Hehe, I was thinking the same. First of all, I am surprised that none of the eGPU housings do have some space for storage drives, either 2.5" SATA or for NVMe cards. But when one is at it, make a bay for the Mini too :). Which also shows why it is so annoying that Apple doesn't just basically offer the Mini motherboard in a larger box.
You could probably build an eGPU box with the same footprint as the 2018 Mini for stacking above it: it should be just possible to fit a small-form-factor GPU in that space. It would be a lot less unwieldy and weird-looking than plunking a normal full-sized eGPU next to the Mini.
The Sonnet Puck pretty much has that form factor (just not a matched case material) but tops out with an RX570 and uses MXM form factor cards so a bit less than ideal.
All true, but let's not accept the false premise going around that the Pro is a kind of humanitarian exception being generously administered by Apple for those who truly need it, a system that you're abusing if you expect PCI slots without being able to prove that they're strictly necessary for your work. "Admit it, you could probably get by with a performance-choked video card in an expensive eGPU bay squatting next to your $2000 Mac Mini if you really wanted to. You just aren't trying hard enough. If you really loved Apple you'd just do it and you wouldn't complain."
The problem is that 'extensible' is often used as code for "able to immediately upgrade to the spec I actually want while paying the least possible to Apple". Put me in that category, I always buy desktop macs with the minimum RAM and upgrade immediately.
The thing is, if you want an iMAC Pro with a top of the line CPU, card and hard drive you'll just have to buy it from Apple that way. There's no point complaining about it, that's just the way it is. You just have to make sure the spec you buy is the spec you will actually need and for very many creative professionals a well specced Mac Pro will be absolutely fine.
> The problem is that 'extensible' is often used as code for "able to immediately upgrade to the spec I actually want while paying the least possible to Apple".
Although on one hand that was a valid market segmentation strategy. Enthusiasts can afford the base spec model and upgrade it, and "Pros" (as defined by this new model - people with unlimited corporate expense accounts) will spec their machine with Apple so that it's warrantied and supported.
The total addressable market for the niche you described would generate less revenue for Apple than Lightening cables.
Also, I think you're wrong about the iMac Pro. And the fact that you're complaining about a FOUR to SIX year lifespan? I don't even expect a car to last 6 years in any meaningful shape.
>The total addressable market for the niche you described would generate less revenue for Apple than Lightening cables.
The total addressable market for that will be much larger, and with higher margins, than the current "Mac Pro". In fact, when they did their publicity thing in 2017, the paid lip service of catering to that very crowd.
Heck, they bothered to engineer a $999 stand that doesn't even fit the high end market for their new Mac Pro, and you consider the market of Pros looking for an extensible $3K-$5K tower Mac lacking?
Laughable.
>And the fact that you're complaining about a FOUR to SIX year lifespan? I don't even expect a car to last 6 years in any meaningful shape.
That's so wrong, I don't even know where to start.
1) Tons of pros use a 4 to 6 years old computer (or more). Even more so when the computer is extensible, and can be upgraded in e.g. 3 years with faster/larger SSDs/GPUs more memory and so on.
2) Not all pros are super-rich. Someone in the $100K+ bubble might not understand how the other half lives, but among pro users, creatives are the canonical struggling group, and the one that could really use a powerful and extensible mid-range (sub $6K) Mac Pro.
3) Tons of people would be fine to use a 4 to 6 year old monitor, or more, if it's a screen of the iMac quality. The fact that they paid good money for the iMac and can't use the screen as a screen, or that Apple doesn't serve one, is not just crappy for that crowd, but also a very bad move for the environment.
I don't doubt the stand is good, or the engineering and few units / no economies of scale makes it expensive.
I doubt it matters to anyone. Pro high end studios will use VESA mounts (and perhaps multiple monitors), and spare $899 per monitor (of which they'll get multiple).
And struggling small studios who just need one such monitor, will definitely skip the stand.
It's more for the rich high end guy, wanting to have a nice looking desk.
And you don't seem to have a clue how businesses work. I do not live in the Silicon Valley bubble, I don't even live in the US, but am self-employed.
Whatever I buy for my professional use, price only has to be justifiable from a business perspective over the period of the planned depreciation. I replace my Macbook Pro every 3 years and I pick the maxed out 13" model because for my use-case - that's the most convenient form-factor. 4k for that laptop is not an issue, but even if that would be considerably more, I doubt I'd think twice about it.
If the Mac Pro would be something that I could use in my line of work and improve my comfort and workflow, so there's no value for me there, but if there was, I would not hesitate at all. Certainly if there's also the commercial added business value of being able to work on and deliver 4k and 8k HDR footage and considering the negative impact of not being able to deliver that. 8k is probably debatable, 4k HDR these days would be an absolute must I imagine? Any rig able to handle that will require an investment, as long as that investment can pay itself off - it won't be a problem.
Now if you are in some profession and need these tools but can't afford them - then business-wise, you're not in a healthy situation.
Well, there are also tons of people working professionally with video, audio, etc, that don't have the money to fork for a $6K starting price machine, but would like to work on a fast, extensible, desktop machine and a good external monitor by Apple.
The iMac comes with lackluster extensibility and a monitor that can't work as an external display 4-6 years later when you upgrade machines. The Mac Mini is a mini-PC with even less extensibility.
Those people are still very much professionals. In that, they have clients, make a living from working on their computers, and could very much use faster e.g. rendering time, or the ability to run more VST plugins, or more complex 3D scenes, etc, to make their work easier.
They are very pro, and very many. They just aren't high-end Hollywood studios, or the art department of Nike level pro.
And they still could very much use something more pro than an iMac/MBPr but less high end than a $6K starting price workstation.
Not only are these people not "the same dope who gets the M-Sport BMW 3 Series, or the DSLR with the Kit Lens" posers, but many of us have started building $3K-$4K dollar PC based workstations, where we run Premiere, Cubase, Creative Suite, etc, because Apple won't cater to our market.
Or will only sell us a $4K iMac machine with no capability to upgrade internal SSDs, glued RAM, a built-in not-reusable screen, and no ability to use our own pick of e.g. a high end Nvidia video card.
So there's that.
Is it ok that they are now shunned? The traditional Mac Pro of yore, catered to those exact people.