What is your definition of “significant numbers”? You know what they use in production based on what experience there?
Apple’s Mac market share is 7%-15% depending on year and country. Their use mirrors the market as a whole.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Mac Pro Enthusiasts Raise Concerns Over Upgrade Limitations of Apple Silicon
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Apple’s Mac market share is 7%-15% depending on year and country. Their use mirrors the market as a whole.
This has always been the crux of a lot of problems that Apple has had with 3D. Getting software on the platform isn't as hard as you want to make it seem. I mean, if I asked whether you wanted $1 or $2 for free tomorrow and every day after with your lunch you would know without question. The fact of the matter is that it's not free to port software
The Playstation has always been a proprietary OS computer platform for a niche that they have supported for decades and Sony has made BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS OF DOLLARS with it.
Generally speaking in a studio of 150-300 for like say feature animation there are 2-4 Macs for video editing and many times not even that as there could be Windows machines running Premiere or Resolve. That's often how it is.
As I pointed out, there are no examples of successful ports paid for by a platform company. There are many reasons for this:
- A company’s best engineers are not going to be interested in working on a project that is not strategic. If it was strategic, they would be doing it themselves, not as a work for hire.
- If the company does not see a need for port, they also are very unlikely to care about the resulting product. That means that these ports tend to be far behind the truly supported platform, making them not really competitive.
To make your example more accurate, if you offered me a $1 if I was willing to have lunch in your 3 Michelin Star restaurant, for which I would have to pay regular prices, I know that I would not. Just in the same way, paying for a port is not just about the cost of the staff, it is about all the other costs (including the intangible ones).
Yes, and if companies do not see a benefit themselves they will not do it. One can look at the games market to see how this works. Aspyr and others make money porting Windows and console games to macOS. They are not paid by Apple to do so, but do it because they make money on it. However, they tend not to release at the same time as the primary ports - often being several years later - and often do not get all the expansion packs and downloadable content.
This is fine for more casual gamers who do not want to bother getting a second computer on which to play games. They do not care that the games are behind, as long as there is a steady stream of them.
That does not work for software needed by people for work applications. One needs the current version with all the tools that one’s co-workers have.
Got it. How many field sales techs does Sony have selling that machine to its niche customers? Can I buy 24/7 field support from them for it? In what way does this demonstrate they have any experience in selling high-end engineering workstations? Lots of companies sell embedded systems, that does not quality or give them experience selling general purpose workstations.
I am curious as to why you think that Autodesk (AutoCAD, Fusion 360 and Maya), Maxon (Cinema4d and Redshift) , and The Foundry (Nuke and Modo) among others sell their software for macOS if no one uses it? While they might not have all their software ported, they have ported their flagship applications (and did so with no financial support from Apple).
This is False. Microsoft bought Softimage expressly for the purpose of porting XSI from IRIX to Windows after attempting to get Alias software on Windows and Alias told them to pound sand. Windows is the default platform of choice for all 3D software now. Apple acquired Macromedia's incomplete Windows based video editor and completed/ported it to Mac OS 9 as Final Cut Pro because Adobe wouldn't port all the features of the Windows version of Premiere to Mac OS 9. MacOS is the now the default platform of choice for all video editing software.
Most creative people that have been around a while are pretty familiar with these events. The fact is that it's down to leadership and prioritization that has determined that MacOS/Macs will not be consistently formidable in 3D and that they won't be a reliable hardware/OS partner to potential most professional 3D software publishers.
I was unclear, but it was a simple choice...regardless of lunch destination/quality/service at the end of the meal do you want a $1 on the table or $2? The choice is that simple initially for software publishers. All things being equal $2 will NEVER be less than $1. It's jut to say that the problem has never been with the developers or their interest in developing for more than one platform.
Nice segue into my next point. For a company that built the computer market for creatives to have any companies building professional creative tools flat out not build tools for that platform or not build the most performant complete tools for that platform means that that platform holder f**ked up.
I don't have anything against Apple Silicon, but to a software developer they know if 2 years from now if Apple hits a wall with GPU development because they've never done it before and virtually every GPU engineer worth their weight in salt will consider 2 or 3 other employers before Apple eventually forces Apple to go in another different direction with their graphics development the Pro 3D Creative publishers will have possibly wasted millions of dollars of development of software or features. That's not a scenario that is going to happen on the Windows side of things. Sony offering essentially the MacOS on equal hardware footing with Windows GPU choices would create a small tidal wave of change for a lot of very influential creative people.
From a business perspective the blueprint is 98% the same as they have to have staff that sell to retail distributors all over the globe. Also, beyond initial set-up and major hardware upgrades most support is in-house, or with individual software publishers for specific software. Creative workstations are not multi-million dollar hospital lab machines that only lab service techs are familiar with.
That's not really accurate.
First, there's no "the" Playstation. Each system is a completely different architecture.
Also, in 2002, Sony allowed Linux to be installed on the Playstation 2: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2
It's not practical, but it can be used.
Sony also allows you to install Linux on the Playstation 3 and unofficially on the Playstation 4: https://medium.com/linuxforeveryone/guide-pc-gaming-on-your-ps4-with-the-power-of-linux-3b0391fb2b2f
It's somewhat odd you neglected to mention that Foundry discontinued the industry standard 3D texturing /surfacing app Mari based on MacOS changes that limited/blocked functionality of the app and Mari was a high profile demonstration app for the Mac Pro 6,1.
Mac Workstation development has been quite light since 2011, until recently and all contemporary desktop options have been questionable for one reason or another. Macbooks sell well so a lot of professionals (like myself) will do the less demanding parts of projects on a laptop, but ultimately transfer it to a Windows workstation for further development and finishing. Many 3D creatives that prefer Macs work this way, but a Pro Mac Workstation that's compatible with modern day GPUs, a Mac workstation that doesn't cost as much as your car would be more preferable than a mixed OS environment for many of us.
Even if eventually all that stuff is ported to metal so many software features that are standard and rely on non-Apple GPUs makes it obvious if Apple cares at all about the highly influential customer group that Apple "should" just get customers what they need and if it's with Sony or similar, so be it. We should have all the options and if metal wins in the end that would be great but now the performance options are, as always, far too limited.
Apple dropped support for OpenGL, a spec for which the last release was 2017. The Foundry has not yet ported to Vulkan and so stopped supporting macOS. If they ever update to the current 3D graphics spec (as most have), adding support for macOS would be trivial. However, it is not odd at all that I did not list it, as I was not building a list of software that does not support macOS.
Just to clarify, when you say ”modern day GPU” do you actually mean nVidia GPU? Apple Silicon’s GPU is quite powerful and given the amount of memory it has available thanks to its unified memory architecture can do something that other discrete GPUs cannot. That is part of why it works so well with RedShift.
The Mac studio is quite a capable workstation and even fully configured is only $8,000. If you are driving a car that costs that much, you might want to consider an upgrade. I expect that a new Apple Silicon Mac Pro will start below that and extend a bit above that. Still well below the price of a reasonable car.
Again, if you mean nVidia GPUs why do you not just say that? If not, please tell me what features depend on non-Apple GPUs?
Apple clearly has no interest in supporting nVidia’s propriety software. If that is a requirement for you to be happy with a macOS system, understand that is never going to happen.
When you say “highly influential customer group” who do you think they influence? How many machines does the whole segment sell? How many of them are high end workstation class systems?
Software companies are exceptionally lazy. Look at how long it took for many of them to support 64-bit APIs. If Apple did not drop support for 32-bit code, many would still not have it. The best way for Apple to gain support for Metal is for it to build compelling systems. If they do so, companies will eventually support it. If they do not, they will not.
What always amuse me is that when Apple was selling systems that were updated every 18 months or so, and supported nVidia GPUs, less of this software was available for the platform. What got companies to port to macOS was its increasing market share. If Apple builds compelling machines and increases its market share overall, they will be interesting as a porting target.
Why would any company develop for a tiny niche within a tiny niche (macOS workstations that are incompatible with every other product that Apple sells)? It makes no sense and would only serve to fragment the market making any progress impossible.
My statement was:
Those were not ports paid for by a platform company, they were ports by the owner of the software. Peter Pathe (Blue) was the Microsoft exec who was responsible for the purchase of Softimage. His explanation as to why they purchased them, rather than paying them to port was that no ports paid for by a platform company had ever worked out. If Microsoft wanted that software on Windows they needed to own the company to ensure it was a compelling product.
Your examples demonstrate my point.
In contrast, AT&T, DEC, HP, SGI and others paid Microsoft, WordPerfect, Lotus and others for ports to their Unix workstations and computers and those were never successful.
In your fantasy world, in three years Sony releases an Intel based systems that runs macOS and uses nVidia GPUs. This system is incompatible with every machine Apple has made for 3 years (assuming they release a Mac Pro this year and stop selling the Intel one), and all but a tiny number they sold for the the preceding 5 years. Even assuming that Apple’s Silicon GPU is still slower than the fastest nVidia card (maybe true, maybe not). What company would want to port to that platform? It would have no installed base, would be incompatible with all the other macOS systems out there, as well as with every other platform. Sony would be starting with no customers given that they would have been out of the workstation business for 28 years and the consumer Windows PC world for 12 years. Anyone with any knowledge of history would be wary of such a product that has no natural champion within Apple (and many who would have a reason to want it to fail).
The only way Apple will gain support is to build compelling hardware of their own, that is compatible with their other machines as a family.
Sorry, your example is just false. Supporting two platforms that do not result in additional sales at a sufficient level does not generate more money, just more costs. If one’s competitors support a popular platform and one is losing sales to them, it makes sense to port. If they do not, there is no reason to bother.
Fortunately, there are enough companies that support macOS that if Apple had compelling hardware (Apple Silicon systems, not your fantasy niche system), others might be compelled to port.
The creative professionals that Apple initially targeted were not 3D graphics people but 2D graphic artists. The 3D market was owned by SGI and Sun Microsystems. Some of those companies then ported to the dominant OS company, Microsoft Windows, during the period when Apple was at its weakest.
Apple Silicon is the first chance that Apple has had to build a compelling family of products that is differentiated. Whether they will succeed remains to be seen.
The whole point of Metal is to make it so that people are not writing to the actual GPU, and that they can move to whatever hardware Apple ships without worrying about it.
Your argument is just as flawed on the GPU front as it is on the CPU front. Apple has been steadily improving their CPUs and GPUs for years, since their first A-series chips. This is not a new thing for them.
You are fixated on a straw man that does not exist and for which there is no compelling reason. You seem not to grasp that even if Sony and Apple both agreed with you that this was the greatest idea ever (despite all the obvious reasons it is not), it would be a minimum of two to three years before Sony could offer a product in the market. They would have to design a system and a case, build a sales and support organization, port software to hardware that has never existed before, etc.
This is not a trivial task. By that point Apple will be on its M4 processor and would likely be on a second generation of Mac Pro. Sony would have to be committing tens (or more likely hundreds) of millions of dollars on the bet that Apple will fail.
How is that a rational bet? If Apple Silicon fails, the Mac is not likely to be a compelling product and its market share will decline, not great reason to port to it. If it succeeds, all that money is wasted. No company is going to port with the hope that people buy these machines, so no porting work would even start before they sold a significant number of systems. However, without software no one will buy any of these. Your model just makes no sense at all.
High end workstations are not purchased through retail distributors, they are purchased through enterprise sales channels. Sony has not been in the market even for standard consumer grade Windows PCs for over 9 years already and by the time they could field these systems they would have been out of it for 12 years at a minimum.
Since these systems would be unique, Sony would have to build the support organization to handle them. They would have to do software support, but they would not be able to do it completely on their own, as they would not have full control of the software. Not a great recipe for success.
In your best case scenario, how many machines do you think they are going to sell? Do you think they would be 20% of the Mac market? Ten percent? How is this going to be a market that would interest any software company, given that any ports to this would have almost no overlap with the rest of the Mac market?
Curious what functionality you think it was missing that cost $2,000. (Not saying you are wrong, just curious what it is.)
What software do you use? What is your current system configuration?
The "make most of it external" part is what made it a terrible idea. Forcing expansion options to be external is what turned a supposed "workstation-class" computer into a glorified overpriced reincarnation of the Power Mac G4 Cube.
Given that we just got Apple's 3rd iteration of a mini-workstation:
- Power Macintosh G4 Cube -> Mac Pro (2013) -> Mac Studio
...Apple clearly wants this idea to be a good one.
Thunderbolt does make it a plausible idea, at least.
Apple hasn't even acknowledged or fixed the Mac Studio's intermittent noise issues. While I agree that the Studio is definitely the third iteration of the G4 cube, we can also be reminded that, just like the Cube and the Trash Can, there were accolades everywhere about Apple's "genius" designs with those two prior desktop lines as well.
Follow through is the question, absolutely.
Will an updated Mac Studio come out that bumps its capabilities and fixes issues, or will the Mac Studio join the last decade of flailing boutique one-off pro Mac desktops?
Time will tell.
I tend to agree with @LinkRS. The concept of external device expansion via Thunderbolt was valid, but the execution is what failed. If the release of the Mac Pro had been paired with a robust market of Thunderbolt accessories and expansion options, and if eGPUs had turned out to be a stable and reliable option instead of a mostly-unsupported, unreliable "bag of hurt" the fate of the trash can Mac Pro might have ended up very differently.
Apple made a big bet on Thunderbolt and then Apple and the industry at large both completely failed to support that bet with the ecosystem and software support that was needed to make it viable.
But it is...they didn't rewrite the OS from scratch for every single machine, that would have been prohibitive and they would have never made more than one console if they had to do that. There's essentially one PS OS for versions 1 and 2 and like 1 1/2 PS OS versions for versions 3-5 of the platform (on BSD...very, very similar to MacOS) which actually isn't all that different than MacOS having 1 foundation for versions 1-9 using different CPUs and then a different OS foundation for 10.00-10.15.
Curious what your current system is and what expansion you have in it?
Did you own a Trashcan? Do you own a 2019 Mac Pro?
It is simply irrelevant to your argument that Sony is ready to be a workstation vendor. Their games hardware division has none of the things needed to make them a reasonable company from whom people would want to purchase high end computers.
Let me make my point much more clear. Paid for by a third party platform company. It is not the phrase platform company that matters it is the phrase third party. Microsoft bought Softimage in order to ensure they had a great Windows port. They did not pay Softimage to port.
Unless you are now arguing that Apple should purchase AutoDesk, Parametric Technologies and The Foundry, your examples are simply more proof of why your strategy will not work.
Finally, when you are not arguing the clear meaning of the post, but arguing about the wording, I think it is clear that you have lost.
Last edited:
Sony sold their PC business over 9 years ago.
IBM sold their PC business over 18 years ago.
Would not be surprised to see more consolidation in the coming years with Apple sitting pretty in their top ~20% market share segment.
I do not own any modern Apple computer any longer. I was one of the unlucky professional types who Apple decided is no longer a customer base worth supporting. The last Apple computer I used for work purposes was an original Mac Pro, but I did have a number of Apple machines in my house over the years for home use, up until about 2015. Now the only one left is a G4 iMac that I use to run an aquarium screen saver in the back of my office for nostalgia and white noise purposes.
My current workstation is a 12-Core Ryzen 9 series with 64GB RAM and a current total of 16TB SSD storage (spread over 5 internal drives including two M.2 drives). I still have room for one more M.2 drive on the motherboard, a few open PCI slots, and two unused RAM slots. I do have numerous external devices, but those are devices that are meant to be external (audio interfaces, webcams, monitors, printers, mechanical keyboard, speakers). My computer nicely sits on the floor, out of the way, making absolutely no noise while I work through the day (hence why I have an iMac serving as a fancy white-noise generator). For my purposes, I need lots of CPU cores, lots of RAM, and lots of storage. GPU requirements are minimal (generally, I run upwards of 12-20 virtual machines at a time while developing enterprise systems and databases).
Apple made it clear when they released the Trash Can that they were no longer serious about serving the corporate professional market. I had high hopes for a good workstation solution when they announced development of the new Mac Pro, but was quite disappointed when the new Mac Pro came out.
To use a tired old car analogy: Apple used to build a nice reliable pick-up truck with the original Mac Pro (and the Power Mac G4 and G5 before it). They decided to replace it with a zippy convertible with an oversized engine when they released the trash can and tried very hard to convince people that they can get the same thing they had before by adding a trailer hitch. When that strategy failed, they decided to replace that with an 18-Wheeler.
Yes, and they exited the Unix Workstation business 25 years ago.
Their Windows PC business never had a high end (in terms of performance) line, nor one really targeted towards professionals. They made consumer PCs whose only claim to fame was they did not look like every other beige box at the time.
@Imhotep397 seems to think that Sony's trying to differentiate their machines based on looks makes them the perfect Workstation Vendor, although he has yet to explain what he thinks they would bring to the table or how he expects them to bring a new division online, design a new machine, port and optimize an operating system with which they have never worked and have a significant number in customer hands in less than 3 years.
It is a brutal business.
Likely to be true. Hard to differentiate when most companies simply sell equivalent machines that differ only in case and price.
Apple's approach of building unique machines that are optimized in every way for their OS, while building an OS that is optimized in every way for their hardware gives them an argument that they are different. It is why they take so much of the industry's profit.
Apple proving that a ARM laptop (& desktop) works and can be profitable is emboldening Qualcomm and other ARM SoC vendors to be a bit more aggressive with their on ARM laptop offerings.
R&D from SoC vendors that has a combined annual worldwide shipment of >1 billion smartphone/tablets will put a monkey wrench into x86 laptop sales.
Scaling up smartphone SoC to laptop and then desktop size will push down x86's PC share to ~20% in less than 20 years.
x86's sole strength would be legacy x86 hardware/software.
Pity the PC gamer or gear head who will experience price increases as volume of x86 parts decreases and economies of scale suffers.
x86 by then may one day be as relevant as mainframes during Y2K