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Apple 'Questioning' the Future of its Mac Pro Line?

NickFalk said:
Wow!
I had no idea it was even possible to be this conservative and claim to care about art. It's like claiming that novels written with word processors are inferior to those written using a fountain pen. It's not the tools* that defines art.

*And yes, that's meant as a double-entendre
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Yup. Art is art. Art is an undefinable thing that means a thousand different things to a thousand different people. It doesn't matter how it was made, or what was used to make it. The only thing that matters is the end result.

Wow. I think I'm turning into a hippie. Guess I gotta go out and buy a hookah now.
 
Dnix said:
I don't think they could just axe the workstations, even if it's a "niche" market compared to their toy devices.

Linux or other UNIX Systems have the stability, just nowhere near the software or support. Or friendliness, for that matter. That would mean a huge amount of the Pro market going to...Windows. :eek:

I think Apple would have to be crazy, to just let that happen.
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That's what I was thinking.

Even if Mac Pro workstations sell a fraction of what iMacs and MBPs sell... the fact that Mac Pros can command $5,000-$10,000 a piece must mean something in the long run.
 
Renzatic said:
Parnassus done in 3D. That's fairly impressive. Just about any classical sculpting example will prove your "limits of true expression" wrong.
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Architecture? Sculpture? Holographic displays? Those spherical 3D displays? There are some fantastic 3D efforts out there.

Creativity really does have no limits. Hrm.. oh yea, there's nano-art XD
 
This news doesnt bother me a bit. I always thought Mac Pro was way to expensive anyway.
I think Apple should focus on making the imac and mini mac much more powerfull and upgradable instead.
 
charleswhalley said:
You cannot be serious - the iMac's are good but they are way slower than the mac pro and no way to upgrade them. so is 25% of mac sales not good enough.
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The Mac Pro is nowhere near 25% of Mac sales.

kustardking said:
Art is not a personal definition, it is an actual thing that is agree upon, not construed by a lone mind.
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Do you realize how stupid that sentence makes you sound? Wow.
 
SomeSwede said:
If they kill off the Mac Pro i will probably never buy a new Mac since it is the last usable computer they make.
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If you're serious, you're talking out of your posterior. Or you've never actually tried a Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, iMac, or Mac Mini. My guess is both.
 
The article states that no-one (including enterprises) is buying them anymore, so why keep them? As long as they have something else to offer to businesses, they should be fine.
 
rellimie said:
Back in the day the main benefits to the MacPro were the expansion slots, dual processor, extra hard drives, and dual processors.

Now days with iMacs coming with quad cores, 16 GB of ram, and terrabytes of hard drive space, and thunderbolts ability to add external storage, and an expansion slot chassis; I think this is an obvious move. Add a duel processor option to the iMac and there you go. The only people this will hurt is the people that use Mac OSX Server as the MacPro and MacMini is the only server hardware they currently offer.
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People who need that sort of horsepower (that includes me) also need a great deal of cooling performance. I also dislike the displays of the iMac for professional use. I would also need at least 2 hard drives built in.
 
rellimie said:
Back in the day the main benefits to the MacPro were the expansion slots, dual processor, extra hard drives, and dual processors.

Now days with iMacs coming with quad cores, 16 GB of ram, and terrabytes of hard drive space, and thunderbolts ability to add external storage, and an expansion slot chassis; I think this is an obvious move. Add a duel processor option to the iMac and there you go. The only people this will hurt is the people that use Mac OSX Server as the MacPro and MacMini is the only server hardware they currently offer.
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I agree - so, as long as they release an iMac with 4xHDD bay, 64 GB RAM, 12-cores, 2x gfx-cards and user-interchangable parts, we won't really miss it much :D
 
I own a Mac Pro which was my first Mac after years of PC ownership, and I invested in it because I wanted to run Logic Pro on a machine with a good amount of power, and I also wanted something that resembled a familiar PC in that I could upgrade the hard drives and memory in easily.

One corner of Apple's market is the pro sector and it would be an abandoning of Apple's principles to stop releasing a machine like the Mac Pro, IMO.

Just because the Mac Pro is a relatively small part of Apple's revenue these days still doesn't mean it's insignificant in absolute terms.

Fair enough killing of the XServe or whatever that was if no-one was buying them but it's clear that an awful lot of people care more about their Mac Pros which they like and use on a daily basis.
 
Interesting news.

Although it won't come as a surprise to many. I was in the market for a Mac Pro for its expandability and proper desktop graphics cards. Its not all bad news I guess. If they release an iMac that is equipped with the option for user upgradeability maybe in a smaller form factor then that would be pretty sweet. To put it into context Im looking at a gaming PC to play the latest BF3. Thats all I want the PC for. I dont want to have to purchase an iMac on top of it just so I can everyday compute.

Perhaps the expandability of the TB port will bring in the high end graphics that we crave as seen on some of the Sony laptops. Apple need to satisfy the gamers market so they can jump fully onto the hardware. I know we will need Windows to play such games but Apple can and should deliver the option for a really high end graphics.
 
iMac, 2 CPU option

The sensible thing to do is remove the cd/dvd drive from the current imac 27" and add and extra cpu 2x quad setup would be excellent as premier imac for those in the video editing and high end market.
 
kustardking said:
By the by, "by my definition" is exactly the problem. Art is not a personal definition, it is an actual thing that is agree upon, not construed by a lone mind.
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Hey. You ninja edited on me. Didn't see this bit.

Okay. Two well established art critics look at a Jackson Pollock Painting. One guy sees a window into a tortured soul. The other sees it, and thinks some old drunk with a chip on his shoulder held his brush over the canvas, and let the DTs do all the work.

Who's right?

Vincent Van Gogh. When he was alive, everyone thought he was some crazy old man who, when he wasn't busy cutting off his ears to impress chicks, painted horrible pictures no one in their right mind would find any value in. Now we consider him one of the Grand Masters.

Was his work crap back in the day, and only suddenly become art once we recognized and appreciated it, or was it always unappreciated art?

Once you can answer these two questions for me, then you can tell me the established definition of art.

Also Mac Pros.
 
iCole said:
The article states that no-one (including enterprises) is buying them anymore, so why keep them? As long as they have something else to offer to businesses, they should be fine.
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No one is buying them any more because they have not been upgraded for a long time and the pricing no longer makes sense. I have no intentions of buying an Apple computer in 2011 without a Thunderbolt port and SATA III. It would be silly, especially considering the cost of this asset. It's hardly rocket science to work out why it's not selling. People are expecting a refresh and waiting for it. The refurbs are selling like hot cakes though.

The strategy that Steve Jobs implemented when he returned to apple in 1997 was one of four quadrants. Portable home user, portable professional, desktop home user, desktop professional. I find it hard to believe that they would turn their back on this since it has worked quite well for them.

The Mac Pro was actually the antithesis of everything that Jobs believed in and wanted. It's not thin and it can be opened and tinkered with (in limited ways) by the user. I can just picture the designers and engineers having a "debate" about it with him, but I think the beautiful design won him over in the end. Now that he is gone I think the Mac Pro has even more of a future than it did before. Of course, this is just pure speculation.
 
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End of the line?

Depressing news indeed if this was to happen - but as others have said i think a lot of us have forseen this possibility - as apple's sucess with ios and the consumer market has skyrocketed, so has the focus of its attention.

One of the biggest things that freaked me out was that FCPX was demoed on an imac... it turned my stomach.

I still run a macpro 1,1 for work, ram is maxed out, cpu's are upgraded, 4HDDs, new GPUs and all my pie cards are occupied - i just couldn't have done that in an imac.

Part of me suspects the end could be coming but there is a part that says that apple must surely realise that having a 'pro market' is still very inportant - if they loose the creative industry (the way they are behaving at the moment with releases such as fcpx they are going the right way about it) then for me they will loose a good chunk of what makes apple 'apple' and a lot of the 'cool' factor, which sounds daft but i think is probably worth a lot of £££

I see macs everywhere with work, nobody is using a imac. you would have a huge amount of very pissed of graphic designers, editors, photographers, videographers, animators etc if the only option was an imac.

Hell i'll run a Hackintosh before I run an imac for work. Its just not an option.
 
I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying that Apple's vision of the future of computing, even power computing, is mobile.

It'll make a lot of people unhappy, but it's bound to happen, sooner or later.
 
There will be suitable replacement for the Mac Pro before they drop the line. What I see coming is:

  1. Huge developments in parallel processing, full scalability of OS code from 1 to 48 cores.
  2. An external CPU power pack breadbox via Thunderbolt featuring additional CPUs and a PCIe-Slot.
However, I'm depending on this product for my everyday work. There are non PCIe-Versions around, but I'm in no mood to trash a perfectly good card, and shell out $1500 bucks again!

[brag]I just got me 48 GB RAM for my Mac Pro.[/brag]
 
isophia said:
Depressing news indeed if this was to happen - but as others have said i think a lot of us have forseen this possibility - as apple's sucess with ios and the consumer market has skyrocketed, so has the focus of its attention.
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Fully agree. But do updates really cost them that much as long as they don't redesign the Pro casing ?

How much in R&D would Apple really need to spend for a "boring" Pro update ?

Just by adding some TB ports, higher RAM ceiling, the new Ivy/Sandy Bridge processors (and maybe USB 3, but Apple probably won't do that) most potential customers would be happy.
 
Ratpack1961 said:
Macs began as a pro level, non consumer based computer.
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You sure about that?

Wikipedia said:
The Macintosh project started in the late 1970s with Jef Raskin, an Apple employee, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer.
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Macintosh-Turns-26-2.jpg
 
Look at Nokia, guess they wished they had a Nok Pro to fall back on;)
Just because Apple is the hit at the moment in that industry dosen´t mean that will last even a decade.
Please don´t abandon the Mac Pro
 
Unfortunately the mac pro gives the user choice, and longevity in the product, apple dont like either of these, can only see one outcome.
 
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