Our sound guy is PISSED at the lack of update. Seriously, incredibly pissed. I've honestly never seen him this angry before. He'd been counting down the days till WWDC and a long overdue update. There are three major pieces of software he uses on his Mac that he swears by. It sounds like they have all just released or are about to release Windows versions.
I'm beginning to wonder if this is a trend? Apple is clearly focused on iOS and consumer/prosumer and not professional. I certainly don't blame them. Is the future of professionals going to be Windows? Even for lifelong Mac die hards? It seems plausible imo.
Except there's not really a premium Windows platform to compete with the overall integration that a high-end Mac and Mac OS X offers.
If you can get the same performance out of, say, the new MacBook Pro plus a couple Thunderbolt displays and a Thunderbolt RAID, the pros can just move in that direction.
Notice that there was no iMac update at all today; Apple might be planning to release a new high-end iMac to better serve the old Mac Pro crowd.
I have 2008, 8 times 2.8 GHz core, 32 GB of RAM Mac Pro with SSD for boot drive. That thing is still faster than latest and greatest 17'' Macbook Pro when it comes to doing actual work, like compiling, transcoding video etc (rather than running benchmarks, where newer CPU in the laptop gets about 15% higher score). And the Mac Pro does all this without breaking a sweat. The cooling solution in the large case with huge slow rotating fans means Mac Pro stays quiet and cool under serious multi-hour load.
17'' Macbook Pro gets all huffy and puffy after just a minute of actual work and stays pretty loud and too hot to hold on lap during entire compiling/transcoding session.
So, no currently, you can't replace Mac Pro with a laptop, nor with iMac (I have a couple of latest 27'' iMacs as well, and it's pretty much the same story).
I don't think this will change any time soon. The box size of Mac Pro will always be able to contain more cool, quiet computing power than any laptop.
True, not everyone needs this kind of computing power. It seems Apple's target audience most certainly does not. Majority of them need an appliance running on a phone/tablet it seems.
I really doubt you can get the same performance out of a MacBook Pro. Professional media software (audio or video) takes a -lot- of power. Trying to run through a big multi-track synth setup would probably bring a MBP to it's knees.
I mean for one thing, despite all the awesomeness that is Ivy-Bridge, I still do not think that Intel can cram in the same level of performance into a 35W chip that use to go into a 90W platform just 2-3 years ago.
> I really doubt you can get the same performance out of a MacBook Pro. Professional media software (audio or video) takes a -lot- of power. Trying to run through a big multi-track synth setup would probably bring a MBP to it's knees.
With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there.
Video is mostly offloaded on to GPU's these days. The MBP GPU is definitely a big step down from what you can get on a desktop, but you can always get a dedicated bit of hardware that you attach to your MBP to get that job done. The real killer on video has traditionally been I/O. With SSD's and Thunderbolt, you have some alternatives.
> I still do not think that Intel can cram in the same level of performance into a 35W chip that use to go into a 90W platform just 2-3 years ago.
With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there.
Not true. Try running a really complicated Logic set with a lot of virtual instruments on a low-end machine and watch it grind to a halt. In the last year we've seen new virtual instruments that bring analog emulation to a new level but they can eat as much as half of my Macbook Air's CPU playing a single note. Extrapolate this to a professional mix with as many as a hundred tracks and you can see why some people still need a real computer.
This is true, there is still a gulf in performance requirements between something that needs to run a browser and angry birds and something that will be used for high end gaming (or game dev) and stuff like Music, CAD , Video creation.
Assuming that we can keep cranking the moore's law handle in one way or another people will always find a way to use that extra power even if the rate of return is somewhat logarithmic there is always a wow factor in something that is better even if only by a marginal amount.
The question I guess becomes how much of this can we move to the cloud? If the math for the virtual instruments in this example could be run inside a data centre and then streamed to the computer , perhaps some of the need for high end local hardware is alleviated.
Of course this will be cyclical , we move to a world where software is something that is paid for by the month and after a while of paying lots of different monthly fees for different apps somebody will start offering people a "local cloud" that will look like a great deal because you only pay once.
If the math for the virtual instruments in this example could be run inside a data centre and then streamed to the computer , perhaps some of the need for high end local hardware is alleviated.
Music is a particularly difficult case because latency is an absolute killer. If your response time is over about 10-20 milliseconds people will start to complain. You could farm out offline rendering I suppose but so far it's a lot easier to build a big beefy workstation and freeze tracks to audio if necessary on the local disk.
> Try running a really complicated Logic set with a lot of virtual instruments on a low-end machine and watch it grind to a halt.
Barking up the wrong tree, mate. Obviously he won't try it, because he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about - and certainly never heard of Logic.
> Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition
Highly polyphonic physical modeling synthesis is more CPU intensive than compression... then you start adding on many instances of complicated reverb effects, some effects that require fft/ifft passes, autotune, &on and on, all with realtime constraints (not to mention all of the copying of buffers and context-swapping that goes on with the way these systems are designed)... and you get a high-cpu monster pretty quickly.
Moore's Law doesn't apply to this situation because you aren't comparing CPUs designed for the same market and purpose. A low-power laptop CPU might very well be a year or more behind its desktop brethren.
Yes, it might be. It tends not to be behind several years behind though, particularly given the CPU's in a MBP.
The memory bandwidth, # of cores, fixed point and floating-point computational characteristics of MBP's are not that different from their desktop brethren (smaller, but they tend to be proportional). Bottom line is chewing half the power still puts you ahead after a couple of iterations of Moore's Law.
If your problem is bigger than that, or requires specialized hardware, it tends to make sense to support external hardware and/or distributed computation, in which case the MBP's limitations tend to matter far less.
With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there.
> With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there.
Don't do much audio work, do you? Between softsynths and DSP effects on 32+ tracks, professional-level audio workstations will eat all of the processing power available on pretty much any modern CPU and ask for more.
The real problem is that the most popular Linux distribution (Ubuntu) and one of the two most popular window managers (Gnome) are going in exactly the same direction as Apple and Windows. These two projects are so busy emulating what Apple and Windows do, they can't see that they're going to go right off the usability cliff for desktop users.
That, more than anything either Apple or Microsoft does is what worries me about desktop Linux. We have met the enemy and he is us.
As a strangely pertinent anecdote: I've been a Windows "poweruser" for a long time, and have never used much of Linux. I never had a real need for it. But I've been doing rails development lately and Windows kept getting in the way, and so many people are using OSX and I can't afford a Mac... so I tried Ubuntu.
I'm using 12.04, and it's the first significant amount of time I've used spent with Ubuntu. I can say that a month in, I'm digging it. It beats Windows for me in a number of ways but I actually like the level of ui polish -- it's smoother than Windows. (That and it renders fonts far better than Windows, for some reason).
Rails on Ubuntu is also far, far easier. Terminal beats every pretend version on Windows, rvm and bundler work the way they're supposed to, and I really like gedit more than Notepad++.
gedit is available on Windows too. If you really want to harness the power of Linux, run Vim. You'll see at least an order of magnitude in productiviy improvement.
I've heard this a lot -- in fact in a recent Stack Overflow "best rails IDE's" thread, Vim was near the top of recommended answers. I've been using gedit with a few add-ons installed to make working with rails a little easier.
I also grabbed RubyMine but I haven't spent any significant time there yet as I already have the terminal->gedit workflow down and fighting through RubyMine modal menus to setup BitBucket git pushing started to get old quickly. Terminal is easy. I just push.
What does Vim offer that gedit doesn't? I guess I don't understand the main difference.
I would really like to get some code suggestions/completion features, certainly not a need but I think it would help cut down on my occasional stupid mistake.
I keep hearing this. I can do basic Vim (i.e use it as a standard text editor) but for "serious" programming tasks I mostly use Eclipse.
What advantages other than freeing up screen room and RAM would I get from using Vim over eclipse that would give me an "order of magnitude" productivity increase?
I know vim has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but there are also quite a few in eclipse.
Well, to be fair, it depends on whether you're willing to spend a week or so getting the hang of it. That level of investment isn't necessarily for everyone (even developers).
No. There are monetary and performance gains for using Linux on servers and embedded products. As a result, OEMs have a financial incentive for making sure those products run Linux well. No such incentive exists for desktops.
Apple incorporates the cost of OS X into selling hardware. Windows' licenses are effectively free for OEM manufacturers.
Dell is the only major OEM I know of that offers a Linux laptop and I'd guess that division is in the red. The original Asus EEE PC was Linux only and spawned the netbook revolution, but Linux only did not last very long once the market took off and Microsoft intervened.
I believe some countries require vendors to supply the computer with an OS installed; in this case not needing to include a half-assed version of Windows Home Underwhelm Experience can help them cut away those 10% of $300 low-end models. There's a reason many netbooks come with linux and it's not user-friendliness.
Additionally, more and more governments pass laws that require their institutions to use linux or open source, or choose bidders that do. Then you have an incentive for a company which wins such a bid to use linux on umpteens of desktops.
Those are just two incentives. There are probably more.
OEMs get paid for pre-installing bloatware onto machines which can add up to $40+ per machine. Offering Linux costs them money (in addition to R&D, support, training, marketing, etc).
That begs the question, what is the future of the desktop?
It's not a knock on Linux, but if the mass market moves to tablets and smartphones (not sure if you count laptops as desktops), owning the desktop is going to be like owning the mainframe market. It doesn't disappear but it's not what it once was either.
Video game audio. He does all of our audio work. Sound effects, voice over, music composition, etc. I asked him what audio he used and his answer was Pro Tools, Digital Performer, and Peak. He's got a super top of the line Mac Pro that's only 2 years old and he's been salivating at the prospect of an upgrade for a long time.
He was extra pissed that the new machines don't even have Thunderbolt. He has many hundreds of gigabytes of audio libraries on a variety of external storage devices and just having Thunderbolt would be a pretty decent productivity improvement.
You can never have enough processing power when you're editing and re-rendering videos.
Hell, I find lightroom able to use all the CPU I can throw at it when I muck around with ~400 photos that I shoot in a day.
I have no doubt that video work can easily use all the CPU/memory you throw at it: imagine rendering a finished video in five different formats and resolutions in the background, while you're editing/tweaking your next project in the background.
Probably the ones who have 32gb of memory for their photoshop scratch buffer. There's still quite a few of these types of professionals. You just can't put that much memory in the Macbook Pro. Processor speed is probably less of an issue compared with memory capacity.
Because 32GB is the supported max for the lower end Mac Pro. The higher end ones support up to 64GB officially, 64GB and 96GB respectively are the actual maximums.
All of the above. Audio, video, 3D. Any pro level design. Even print design.
Having a Mac Pro with lots of storage and big monitors when you're working on a 300 page book with 300GB of photos is much less annoying than poking along with a laptop.
It's not just the speed, it's also the usability. Eg, a comfortable trackball and a nicer keyboard. Sure, you can add those to a laptop, but then you have a kludge.
How is that a kludge? You have to add them to a Mac Pro exactly the same. And you can just stick all of your "desktop" stuff on a USB hub and call it a docking station...
Audio professionals editing large surround sessions with lots of plugins and lots of tracks for one (plus you need 3-4 or more PCIe slots to stick Pro Tools or similar DSP cards in). These need as much horsepower as you can throw at them.
Video professionals doing rendering or compositing, ditto.
Not to mention the video cards available, plus being able to throw four full size drives directly on the SATA bus.
What everyone else said, plus the fans. Man, there are times I actually think about a Mac Pro as a humble Rails developer. If I fully parellelized my test suites it might even be worth the money.
Why is he pissed? I assume he has custom sound hardware anyway, what can't he do with the last gen Xeon he can with the latest gen Xeon? It's Xeons...in a box. Most editors (video/sound) would be provided with fibre storage links from an all-in-one vendor, whilst it might be nice to see thunderbolt on a mac pro, you can't put infiniband on an imac...
Audio folks like to have as much power as possible - it allows them to pile on plugin after plugin without much fuss.
Every bit of CPU power gained from an upgrade is promptly put to use in doing audio processing .. and I would imagine that this Audio guy is probably using Pro Tools or Logic, and has reached the ceiling for what he can do without upgrading to a faster CPU.
Fact is, Mac Pro's are no longer the really best solution for a high-end audio/studio situation - sure, they look good as furniture, but for the same price you can get 2x the number of plugins running on self-built hardware. This matters in the audio business.
(Disclaimer: My DAW is a Linux machine. It rocks. I also have a portable DAW: Macbook Pro. It also rocks.)
I read recently that the Mac Pro accounts for less than %2 of Apple's Mac sales.
Since thunderbolt basically is a PCI express cable, there's nothing to stop people from building external cases that can hold PCI express cards, like the Mac Pro can. Since thunderbolt is becoming prevalent across the line, I can't really see a need for the Mac Pro so much anymore.
True it is nice in some situations to put all your hard drives and all your PCI cards in one box, but at %2 of the total sales (by units) the big old tower is less relevant these days.
The other thing the Mac Pro had was the highest end of Intels CPUs. If the sales aren't making the engineering effort worth it, then the answer Apple's intending people to take may be a high end iMac.
I edit a lot of HD in Final Cut X on my 2 year old Macbook Pro, and background rendering seems to have no trouble keeping up. I've not really felt CPU constrained in awhile with HD.
A wire is a commitment, an adapter is a training wheel. The intent is for you to grow out of needing it. Apple's guesses about what you'll eventually stop needing have been pretty good so far (e.g. ditching floppy drives, going to USB-primary early).
Those were really early decisions. What about Mini DisplayPort/Thunderbolt? I still rather had DVI on my Mac Mini. What about Ethernet? Anyone who needs it in a wired company is likely stuck with it.
And one more ugly piece of plastic that many people ruin their Macs with - USB 3G sticks, because no Mac series can hold a SIM card, even though Apple has successfully pushed for a more compact standard.
So 3g radios magically work through sim cards now? I actually think not including CDMA/GSM protocol of the year antennaes is a better future proofing move.
The radios typically included in new laptops are pretty sophisticated, with the right firmware, one card works on pretty much any network in the world.
Future proofing a box with a non-user replaceable battery? They don't want future proof, they just have other gadgets to sell to the people that want mobile connectivity.
> Future proofing a box with a non-user replaceable battery
My battery lasts 6 to 7 hours and is more than two years old. I can't remember the last time I had to stay six hours straight without having a plug nearby long enough to pump up some serious juice (and remember, charging is non-linear, the first 80% come up in a blink). Swapping batteries is a niche, yet it's the standard in PC land. I'd rather have a couple more hours in a thinner enclosure than twice but at the cost of lugging around a bulkier design, along with the second battery. Plus recharging two batteries is a chore.
In general this is true, but there's at least one thing you never grow out of needing: more storage. And until now the mac pro is the only one with expandable internal storage. On top of that most apple software[1] don't deal well with network storage, so it's twice as bad for some users.
[1]especially time machine and aperture but a lot of others as well
It's improving the base model look and size for the majority at the cost of adapters for the outliers. Apple has always been consistently designing for mass market appeal for the past decade. If you are an outlier, Macs are not for you.
What is the opposite of "If you are an outlier, Macs are not for you"? Is it, "If you are average, you should buy a Mac"? That doesn't sound like a very good marketing tactic.
No, it doesn't, but the quality of the "opposite" is rarely a relevant indicator – if you tried to recruit people into the pro-choice movement, you'd have a far harder time if you called it the "anti-life" movement.
I also think it's funny that Apple marketing switched so strongly from "Think Different, personalise your stuff" to "You will all be the same, abandon choice"
then the answer Apple's intending people to take may be a high end iMac.
Maybe, but the 3.4GHz i7 - currently the highest CPU in the iMac range - still comes in at 2-3x slower than the highest end current Mac Pro CPU.. and there are E5 Xeons out there already faster than those.
Oh Goad, magma is so SHIT. We've had one of their offerings in the 2000's and it smoked a high-end piece of hardware when it died. Cause? Very shitty chinese psu that went up in flames on its own. It was just after warranty, so they didn't take it back. In retrospect reminds me of this:
I'm beginning to wonder if this is a trend? Apple is clearly focused on iOS and consumer/prosumer and not professional. I certainly don't blame them. Is the future of professionals going to be Windows? Even for lifelong Mac die hards? It seems plausible imo.