Apple's Objective Has Changed? My Dilema.

[dasx]

I think most people just don't get it. I just did. Apple was born with the idea of offering the best products, right now it just wants to make the greatest profit.

Apple no longer wants to be the reference for professionals, they just wanna sell. I bet that if they knew they could keep up the benefits just selling iphones for the rest of their lives... they would.

Now here's my dilema:
Two years ago I started to do some work in editing, kind of a hobby for which you sometimes get a little... tip. The thing started to be a little more real a couple of months later (I got to a point I could live off of it), so I bought a full-spec iMac 5K (16GB which I upgraded to 32GB).

It worked fine, specially at the beginning. Now I'm a heavy, VERY heavy FCPX user. I don't do pro (cinema) editing, don't get me wrong, but I maybe spend over 10h a day editing. Good stuff, I'm good at it, but nothing pro. I sometimes feel the iMac lacks some power:
1. After 2h of editing I need to reboot the application.
2. Computer gets to 100% used memory (half might be inactive) and system starts to fill up paging file.
3. Long projects with several audio/video tracks tend to stutter a little and I get a general feeling of struggle of the hardware to keep up. (For instance I press space to pause, and it actually takes like 2 seconds to stop...)

Several things. I wanted to get the new Mac Pro that I thought was gonna be announced this year. Well, GREAT.
As I said, I'm a FCPX user, I work like 12h+ a day on this, don't really have time to learn Adobe Premier, do I? If I thought I did, I think I'd be on windows already.

I guess I understand why you do it Apple, I just don't approve. Not that you care, of course.

 

[mrxak]

You're right that Apple has become a profit-focused company under Tim Cook. This article makes a pretty good case as to how and why that happened: https://steveblank.com/2016/10/24/w...allmer-and-why-he-still-has-his-job-at-apple/

 

[sigmadog]

I think most people just don't get it. I just did. Apple was born with the idea of offering the best products, right now it just wants to make the greatest profit.

Apple no longer wants to be the reference for professionals, they just wanna sell. I bet that if they knew they could keep up the benefits just selling iphones for the rest of their lives... they would.

Now here's my dilema:
Two years ago I started to do some work in editing, kind of a hobby for which you sometimes get a little... tip. The thing started to be a little more real a couple of months later (I got to a point I could live off of it), so I bought a full-spec iMac 5K (16GB which I upgraded to 32GB).

It worked fine, specially at the beginning. Now I'm a heavy, VERY heavy FCPX user. I don't do pro (cinema) editing, don't get me wrong, but I maybe spend over 10h a day editing. Good stuff, I'm good at it, but nothing pro. I sometimes feel the iMac lacks some power:
1. After 2h of editing I need to reboot the application.
2. Computer gets to 100% used memory (half might be inactive) and system starts to fill up paging file.
3. Long projects with several audio/video tracks tend to stutter a little and I get a general feeling of struggle of the hardware to keep up. (For instance I press space to pause, and it actually takes like 2 seconds to stop...)

Several things. I wanted to get the new Mac Pro that I thought was gonna be announced this year. Well, GREAT.
As I said, I'm a FCPX user, I work like 12h+ a day on this, don't really have time to learn Adobe Premier, do I? If I thought I did, I think I'd be on windows already.

I guess I understand why you do it Apple, I just don't approve. Not that you care, of course.

It's a pain in the butt when you're busy, but you should make the time to learn Premiere, since Apple thinks you only need a laptop for video work. Eventually, you won't have any Apple product to handle your work. What then? If you know Premiere by then, the switch will be relatively painless, I would think.

Good luck. My guess is lot of people are in the same situation as you.

 

[JimGoshorn]

I don't do video (at least at this point) but I agree with sigmadog. Dedicate part of each day to learning Premiere because you never know when Apple will screw up FCPX or just drop it all together (like they did with Aperture). I'm still on Mac (for now) but I have been transferring every document I have over to Microsoft apps (already using Creative Cloud so that's not an issue) in preparation for Windows (which looks justified given today's event). If there is any software I still need to use (and can't find equivalent), I am keeping the 2009 Mac Pro in case.

Cover your bases. Better to know more and prepare yourself than get caught all of a sudden not knowing what to do.

 

[Tesseract]

I mean... any company SHOULD be pursuing profit. That means they are doing well and can pursue more diverse and bigger projects with that profit. The bigger question is whether that pursuit is a dead end or not. Apple's focus internally might still be "innovation," but their dead end seems (to me) to be "innovation that markets well on social media." Social media is the land of short attention span dead ends. Phones do well there because thats all that people are using them for. Desktops? Yeah right. They have abandoned their actual professional market for years now with zero effort to get them back. It just seems to me that Apple is putting all their eggs into one basket currently. They have absolutely no idea what they are doing with their laptops. Its like they're clueless as to why anybody would even need a keyboard so "hey lets start turning the weird so-called 'keyboard' half of these thingies into an iPad since that thing is doing well."

Maybe I'm just delusional at this point, but it seems like Apple USED to be at least marginally more concerned with software and hardware when it came to productivity. Merging hardware and software interfaces that let you do stuff FASTER. Now it just seems like they are moving more and more towards the 'High-Class-Toys-For-Fancy-People' persona that they have always had a reputation for. If they're not careful they will have backed themselves into a deep corner with short-lived mobile entertainment devices as their only product.

This event was particularly disappointing because it showed us how out of touch Apple now is with people who need to use computers for anything more demanding than web browsing and word processing (hell, they are even starting to abandon that crowd by getting rid of pieces of the keyboard). It would be wise to start looking for other options if Apple keeps going in this direction.

 

[haysoos123]

Given that they just released a MAJOR update to FCPX and also included it in their onstage demos with the touch bar, FCPX isn't going anywhere. I too am disappointed that there was no Mac Pro update, but I don't think the Xeon chipsets with Thunderbolt 3 are out yet. My money would be that when those are out, we'll get the update. It will be nice in a couple of years when everyone is using USB-C/Thunderbolt 3. I actually also wanted a separate keyboard with touch bar, which is in the works I bet.

 

[fathergll]

I think most people just don't get it. I just did. Apple was born with the idea of offering the best products, right now it just wants to make the greatest profit.

Apple no longer wants to be the reference for professionals, they just wanna sell. I bet that if they knew they could keep up the benefits just selling iphones for the rest of their lives... they would.

Now here's my dilema:
Two years ago I started to do some work in editing, kind of a hobby for which you sometimes get a little... tip. The thing started to be a little more real a couple of months later (I got to a point I could live off of it), so I bought a full-spec iMac 5K (16GB which I upgraded to 32GB).

It worked fine, specially at the beginning. Now I'm a heavy, VERY heavy FCPX user. I don't do pro (cinema) editing, don't get me wrong, but I maybe spend over 10h a day editing. Good stuff, I'm good at it, but nothing pro. I sometimes feel the iMac lacks some power:
1. After 2h of editing I need to reboot the application.
2. Computer gets to 100% used memory (half might be inactive) and system starts to fill up paging file.
3. Long projects with several audio/video tracks tend to stutter a little and I get a general feeling of struggle of the hardware to keep up. (For instance I press space to pause, and it actually takes like 2 seconds to stop...)

What are you actually editing? You didn't give any details to your setup as far as footgage, media drives, iMac processor, video card....etc.

Several things. I wanted to get the new Mac Pro that I thought was gonna be announced this year. Well, GREAT.
As I said, I'm a FCPX user, I work like 12h+ a day on this, don't really have time to learn Adobe Premier, do I? If I thought I did, I think I'd be on windows already.

Why can't you get Premier and learn it? If you're a good editor then you will be able to learn it. Its not like learning a foreign language. Even just get the trial edition and spend just 30 mins a day on it for a month. You would be surprised how much you can learn.

 

[namethisfile]

I don't get the big deal of no new Mac Pro announce. Isn't the 2013 Mac Pro still viable? Is it like slow or something now?

Or are these ppl complaining that they have a "2009" Mac as an example and don't want to spend money on 2013 Mac Pro because it's old kind of just like spec-whores?

 

[mrxak]

I don't get the big deal of no new Mac Pro announce. Isn't the 2013 Mac Pro still viable? Is it like slow or something now?

Or are these ppl complaining that they have a "2009" Mac as an example and don't want to spend money on 2013 Mac Pro because it's old kind of just like spec-whores?

Professional Mac users are spec whores. Specs are needed to get real work done. Pro Mac users don't care at all about how thin something is. The 2013 Mac Pro was already outdated when it came out, and a 2010-2012 Mac Pro, with upgrades, is actually more powerful.

 

[JimGoshorn]

Why can't you get Premier and learn it? If you're a good editor then you will be able to learn it. Its not like learning a foreign language. Even just get the trial edition and spend just 30 mins a day on it for a month. You would be surprised how much you can learn.

I think that Adobe cut down to the demo time to just 7 days. Absolutely stupid considering the complexity of their software.

 

[ActionableMango]

I don't get the big deal of no new Mac Pro announce. Isn't the 2013 Mac Pro still viable? Is it like slow or something now?

Or are these ppl complaining that they have a "2009" Mac as an example and don't want to spend money on 2013 Mac Pro because it's old kind of just like spec-whores?

I don't think someone is unreasonable or a "spec-whore" to complain about paying today's prices for a 3 year old computer.

To put this in perspective, it's so many years old now that for the first time in Mac history anyone who leased them on the standard 3-year lease will be getting new replacements that... are the exact same computer they bought years ago. For the same price.

 

[MistrSynistr]

I don't get the big deal of no new Mac Pro announce. Isn't the 2013 Mac Pro still viable? Is it like slow or something now?

Or are these ppl complaining that they have a "2009" Mac as an example and don't want to spend money on 2013 Mac Pro because it's old kind of just like spec-whores?

Are you trolling? I don't have a mac pro nor would I get one updated or not, but obviously people are not going to spend 4 grand on a computer, that deals with ever changing and advancing technology, that is spec'd for 2013.

 

[namethisfile]

Are you trolling? I don't have a mac pro nor would I get one updated or not, but obviously people are not going to spend 4 grand on a computer, that deals with ever changing and advancing technology, that is spec'd for 2013.

No, I'm not trolling. The 2013 Mac Pro is a generations behind what's out now for the Intel x99 platform. I think x99 platform is based on Broadwell now. And, 2013 Mac Pro is based on Ivy Bridge. That's just two generations. Intel at best does 5 to 10% improvements each generation.

No, I'm not trolling. I genuinely want to know why the 2013 Mac Pro is not viable option to buy right now?

 

[mrxak]

No, I'm not trolling. The 2013 Mac Pro is a generations behind what's out now for the Intel x99 platform. I think x99 platform is based on Broadwell now. And, 2013 Mac Pro is based on Ivy Bridge. That's just two generations. Intel at best does 5 to 10% improvements each generation.

No, I'm not trolling. I genuinely want to know why the 2013 Mac Pro is not viable option to buy right now?

Well a few of us have tried to explain it to you but you just say that your needs are different, as if your needs are all that anyone could possibly have.

 

[phairphan]

It's viable, just an incredibly ill-advised purchase. While the processor is two generations old, it is simply outclassed by newer hardware. The processor in last year's iMac spanks the current base MP and gives the six-core MP a run for its money—at an incredibly lower price point.

Not all of this is Apple's fault. Intel's roadmaps and missed deliveries have not helped. The perpetually-behind-Xeon is Intel's fault. However, Apple made the decision to go with a single-processor, all-Xeon based design. This design choice had obvious drawbacks when the machine was announced three years ago.

And it's not all about the CPU. The GPUs in the MP were old tech when they were announced (based on 2011 designs, if I'm not mistaken). Now, three years later, they're seriously old tech. And you're stuck with them. The connection tech is entirely old at this point (HDMI 1.4, USB 3, TB 2). There were substantial updates to all of these connections a year, or more, ago. Apple's decision to abandon DP connections across its entire line has also placed it at a competitive disadvantage to other makers. The memory tech is also old at this point and was limited at the time of its announcement. Four memory slots for a workstation? The same as the iMac!? The SSD tech is also old. The SSDs in the last-generation MBP and the current iMac outperform the MP. Even the SSD in the 2014 Mac Mini might outperform the SSD in the 2013 Mac Pro (I'd have to double-check that one).

While Intel shares some of the responsibility for slow updates, Apple, through its design choices and three-year silence on its once-flagship product, is primarily to blame. Depending on usage, there are better options in the Mac family. Outside of the Mac ecosystem there are far superior options.

Viable? Yes. Wise? Not even close.

 

[ActionableMango]

I genuinely want to know why the 2013 Mac Pro is not viable option to buy right now?

Who says it's not viable? All the complaints I see are about the lack of desired features (slots and bays) and/or the age, cost, and resulting poor value. I don't think anyone is complaining that the Mac Pro is completely not viable at all.

If the only bar is that it runs FCPx, then a 2011 Mac Mini w/ 4GB of RAM is viable.

 

[namethisfile]

Who says it's not viable? All the complaints I see are about the lack of desired features (slots and bays) and/or the age, cost, and resulting poor value. I don't think anyone is complaining that the Mac Pro is completely not viable at all.

If the only bar is that it runs FCPx, then a 2011 Mac Mini w/ 4GB of RAM is viable.

Right. I think people are still residually complaining that they stopped making the Mac Pro Tower, which is different or the same than the no New Mac Pro announcement complaints.

I mean are people still holding on to hope that Apple will not only release a new Mac Pro. But, a new Mac Pro tower?

 

[ActionableMango]

Right. I think people are still residually complaining that they stopped making the Mac Pro Tower, which is different or the same than the no New Mac Pro announcement complaints.

I agree, I think there are two distinct groups:

• Complaining about slots and bays--in other words people who don't like the nMP design at all (that's me). We need to move out, and many are doing so.
• Complaining about bad value--that's people who like or accept the nMP, but want a new nMP instead of buying an old one at new prices. They literally want to buy a nMP, just not this old one, and not at this price.

 

[jeff7117]

I think most people just don't get it. I just did. Apple was born with the idea of offering the best products, right now it just wants to make the greatest profit.

Apple no longer wants to be the reference for professionals, they just wanna sell. I bet that if they knew they could keep up the benefits just selling iphones for the rest of their lives... they would.

Now here's my dilema:
Two years ago I started to do some work in editing, kind of a hobby for which you sometimes get a little... tip. The thing started to be a little more real a couple of months later (I got to a point I could live off of it), so I bought a full-spec iMac 5K (16GB which I upgraded to 32GB).

It worked fine, specially at the beginning. Now I'm a heavy, VERY heavy FCPX user. I don't do pro (cinema) editing, don't get me wrong, but I maybe spend over 10h a day editing. Good stuff, I'm good at it, but nothing pro. I sometimes feel the iMac lacks some power:
1. After 2h of editing I need to reboot the application.
2. Computer gets to 100% used memory (half might be inactive) and system starts to fill up paging file.
3. Long projects with several audio/video tracks tend to stutter a little and I get a general feeling of struggle of the hardware to keep up. (For instance I press space to pause, and it actually takes like 2 seconds to stop...)

Several things. I wanted to get the new Mac Pro that I thought was gonna be announced this year. Well, GREAT.
As I said, I'm a FCPX user, I work like 12h+ a day on this, don't really have time to learn Adobe Premier, do I? If I thought I did, I think I'd be on windows already.

I guess I understand why you do it Apple, I just don't approve. Not that you care, of course.

If you can edit, basic editing skills translate across most platforms. It might take a few weeks but cutting, splicing and performing edits is nearly the same in all major editors these days. Get a demo of Premiere and learn it. You're also gonna get more mileage out of a well built PC vs any Mac right now. Unless you really, really need to deliver Prores files, you can jump to Windows without too much trouble.

I'm in the same boat as far as hardware goes, and I'm switching to Windows. Some times you just gotta rip that band-aid off and start over.

 

[phairphan]

I think there are two distinct groups:

• Complaining about slots and bays--in other words people who don't like the nMP design at all (that's me). We need to move out, and many are doing so.
• Complaining about bad value--that's people who like or accept the nMP, but want a new nMP instead of buying an old one at new prices. They literally want to buy a nMP, just not this old one, and not at this price.

And I believe there is some overlap between these groups. Some users fall into both—dislike the new design and are willing to stomach it to stay in the Mac ecosystem, but are unwilling to pay top dollar for outdated tech.

I also have a sense that, the longer the MP sits without an update, some of the latter are realizing they could have mitigated some of the staleness and bad value factor if the former had gotten what it wanted design-wise.

 

[dasx]

OK, long post coming!

It's a pain in the butt when you're busy, but you should make the time to learn Premiere, since Apple thinks you only need a laptop for video work. Eventually, you won't have any Apple product to handle your work. What then? If you know Premiere by then, the switch will be relatively painless, I would think.

Good luck. My guess is lot of people are in the same situation as you.

I agree, but I barely have time to sleep right now. I work on my own, and when you run your own company and all the stuff is done by you... plus having your couple, friends, family... life in general... Spending 2h a day learning something I don't need to do right now is a luxury I can't afford.

I know I probably should, but still, if I have two hours to spend in that, I end up using them for something else that feels more critical, even spending those 2h watching TV with my girlfriend. I don't know if that makes any sense

This event was particularly disappointing because it showed us how out of touch Apple now is with people who need to use computers for anything more demanding than web browsing and word processing (hell, they are even starting to abandon that crowd by getting rid of pieces of the keyboard). It would be wise to start looking for other options if Apple keeps going in this direction.

You just need to watch the video demo, emojis. Hey kids, ask for a MBP, you'll be able to insert emojis flawlessly.

- Hey Random Video Editor, put a FCPX scrolling in there too, for the professionals watching.
+ Are there any left?
- Just in case.

Given that they just released a MAJOR update to FCPX and also included it in their onstage demos with the touch bar, FCPX isn't going anywhere. I too am disappointed that there was no Mac Pro update, but I don't think the Xeon chipsets with Thunderbolt 3 are out yet. My money would be that when those are out, we'll get the update. It will be nice in a couple of years when everyone is using USB-C/Thunderbolt 3. I actually also wanted a separate keyboard with touch bar, which is in the works I bet.

We'll keep reading rumors about it. Macrumors UK was it? They said an update is due to November. If nothing happens, then well, Intel will release something in February, or AMD in April... 2019 comes and Macrumors still says "Don't buy".

I don't know, I'll still probably wait since I can live with the "slowness" of my iMac, but if I'm on the fence, I know a lot others will just jump.

What are you actually editing? You didn't give any details to your setup as far as footgage, media drives, iMac processor, video card....etc.

Why can't you get Premier and learn it? If you're a good editor then you will be able to learn it. Its not like learning a foreign language. Even just get the trial edition and spend just 30 mins a day on it for a month. You would be surprised how much you can learn.

For the first question, 1080p and 4K, if that's what you're asking. Mainly 1080p as of now. I usually export directly to h264 highest settings in both, but I also have to do some exports to ProRes so I can save them for later edits. Usually two video tracks, two or three audio tracks and several effects to all. My Radeon is the whole day at 105º.

The iMac is the 5K from end 2014, i7 4GHz, 32GB DDR3, Radeon R9M295X, 512GB SSD. I have my library in a Lacie 6TB Thunderbolt RAID drive.

And the reason why I can't (right now) take premier and just learn it is above, replied about it to sigmadog: Time.

I don't get the big deal of no new Mac Pro announce. Isn't the 2013 Mac Pro still viable? Is it like slow or something now?

Or are these ppl complaining that they have a "2009" Mac as an example and don't want to spend money on 2013 Mac Pro because it's old kind of just like spec-whores?

The problem is that the nMP from 2013 has 2013 hardware in 2016. If that's not a problem for you, then add that its prize is higher than 2016 hardware. Get the maxed out Mac Pro and the Windows PC that can be built with that amount is just insane. If macOS was open to other hardware... omg.

If you can edit, basic editing skills translate across most platforms. It might take a few weeks but cutting, splicing and performing edits is nearly the same in all major editors these days. Get a demo of Premiere and learn it. You're also gonna get more mileage out of a well built PC vs any Mac right now. Unless you really, really need to deliver Prores files, you can jump to Windows without too much trouble.

I'm in the same boat as far as hardware goes, and I'm switching to Windows. Some times you just gotta rip that band-aid off and start over.

I guess you're right, still, I rely on several plugins and ways of working that I don't think can be just exchanged by some random option in Premier.

I completely don't know if this is true, this is just something a friend once said and since I didn't care I didn't ask about: Premier can't handle well video which doesn't have constant bitrate, and audio gets an awesome desync. My friend was telling how happy he was he had found handbrake to transcode before importing. The sole idea of transcoding 8h of 4K with handbrake to get CBR... damn.

Thanks to all who replied

 

[AidenShaw]

Given that they just released a MAJOR update to FCPX and also included it in their onstage demos with the touch bar, FCPX isn't going anywhere. I too am disappointed that there was no Mac Pro update, but I don't think the Xeon chipsets with Thunderbolt 3 are out yet. My money would be that when those are out, we'll get the update. It will be nice in a couple of years when everyone is using USB-C/Thunderbolt 3. I actually also wanted a separate keyboard with touch bar, which is in the works I bet.

Not really relevant, since the Xeon PCH chipsets in the MP6,1 don't support T-Bolt either.