Steve Jobs Once Considered Killing Apple's Pro Products

[the8thark]

It's not just about adding other PCIe cards but upgrading the computer's existing GPU. If the GPU is stuck in there, you need a new computer just for a new GPU! On my 2008 Mac Pro, I was able to bring the GPU up to 2013 standards simply by swapping the cards.

You need to think into the future. Sure the TB ports can't deliver a full gpu. Not enough bandwidth but you can do it to get a decent gpu power out of an external gpu hooked up via TB. With a Mac like the new MP you're not limited to making internal components to fir inside the system. You can use anything with a USB or TB or whatever port. Or get an adapter if you have some proprietary port on your external device.

I see where Apple is going with this MP. And I think the technology is quite not there yet. For external GPUs and the like. But forward thinking it defo is.

 

[iGrip]

Don't you mean Pros need Apple

Pros do not need Apple. There are plenty of alternatives, and many, many pros have already jumped ship.

just as Apple has frittered away its vast lead in cellphone and tablet market share, it is also frittering away its pro user base.

 

[subsonix]

Pros do not need Apple. There are plenty of alternatives, and many, many pros have already jumped ship.

just as Apple has frittered away its vast lead in cellphone and tablet market share, it is also frittering away its pro user base.

I tried to edit your post and turn the dial up even further as a sarcastic remark, but I couldn't. Kudos.

 

[vpro]

So glad Apple didn't cancel the 17" MBP. I guess he forgot to mention that one.

Good wisdom, exactly, the big shiny red fruit company never ever made any official word nor mention about axing the 17" MBP so we still have hope. It is simply in hibernation mode itself.

 

[theluggage]

I wonder how they do that, because in the best case scenario, Macs use the same hardware components as PCs.

There have been occasions - particularly with the early Intel Macs when this was (briefly) plausible because Apple was an "early adopter" of new Intel chips. It doesn't last. It may also be that Mac + Windows users tend to install Windows "clean" without all the bloatware that comes with pre-installed systems.

That being said, we all know that Apple has killed the Pro line a long time ago. In that market, you have to constantly throw out bleeding edge hard- AND software. And you have to build machines that can actually be customized and expanded.

Mainly, you have to stay ahead of all the other box-shifters who are assembling tower systems from generic components & pricing them as loss-leaders to secure more profitable service/support contracts, and who don't have to fund the development of their own OS from their hardware margins. On top of that, it is a shrinking pond - with more and more "pro" tasks falling within the capabilities of laptops and all-in-ones. That's a long, un-winnable, war of attrition that Apple has been slowly losing for the last 15 years or so.

Or, you can do something forward-looking, a bit risky that Dell won't be able to throw together from its parts bin on demand, and hope to open new markets.

Unless, of course, you don't mind having dozens of cables and external hard disks on your desk.

Why would you have dozens of cables and external hard drives on your desk? You'll just get yourself a nice external multi-drive HD enclosure (JBOD or RAID, depending on what you need) and be able to hot-swap disks without rummaging around under the desk.

Or you'll be using networked storage.

Or maybe you already have a ton of external hard drives on your desk (because your shared storage system is based on sneakernet) maybe accompanied by break-out boxes for audio, video etc., card readers, USB hubs and other things that you need at desk-level.

 

[Dirtfarmer]

huh? did you get fired? or are you not telling the whole truth?

i'm pretty sure if i hired you and said "buy a bunch of apple stuff and hook it up" ...then you said "i can't"

you're outta there.. of course it can be done.. plenty of other people can do it.

just kinda a bad attitude to have for the field (i'm assuming) you're in.

You didn't read my post.

My pros, like many pros, need workstation graphics in a portable computer. Apple makes no such product.

The Mac Pro is deprecated, and the "garbage can" one is a disposable joke.

Go on Apple.com and build me a portable or desktop workstation for running SolidWorks with moderate (100,000 part) assemblies. And FEA.

You literally can't.

 

[el-John-o]

Interesting that when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he told the company they needed to focus on the pro and education markets, the only markets they were strong in at the time.

To me, that means I'm not surprised he wanted to cut it. He was willing to cut the consumer products to focus on a strong pro market; so why wouldn't he consider cutting a weakening pro market to focus on a strong consumer market?

Yes, the pro market got Apple through the years. And yes, I would LOVE to see Apple continue to be an excellent pro supplier. But it's hard to say "They got them through the tough years" when the sales are down tremendously (even during regular update cycles). Fact is, Windows machines got better and many jumped ship. Apple got lucky that nobody was producing software as capable as what they produced on the Mac, and nobody was producing Hardware as good as Apple. Now we have somewhat comparable Windows hardware, and companies like Adobe are producing on both platforms. The pro users aren't loyal bastions standing guard over their beloved Apple, they too are businesses making the best decisions for their bottom line; which can include migrating to the Windows platform. They've been doing it for years, and I think Steve just smelled it far enough ahead to consider cutting it now.

People are jumping ship now because of long update cycles. 10 years ago, the PC's were so crummy people were still running Apple even when the major media organizations were writing Apple's obituary. Times change, businesses change. What worked then might not worked now.

Full disclaimer, I'm a "prosumer" user of Apple products. I use Final Cut Pro, would love one of the new Mac Pro's, etc. etc. I much prefer the Apple platform to my Windows machine that has some of the same (or similar) software. So I'm not saying "good riddance". I'm just saying "You should've seen this coming".

I think Apple is focusing now more on the 'prosumer' market. People who invest in a hobby, maybe make a little money on the side (like my wife whose full time job is real estate and commercial property management, but occasionally gets paid to photograph properties that some of her colleagues are selling or renting, but mostly it's a hobby and the side money helps fund the hobby). They are leaving the niche "Full blown professional" market to accessory makers and software developers. So many of the big firms are on their way out anyway. Using the older 30" Apple Cinema Displays because they hate the new glossy displays. Well, when it's finally time to upgrade or replace those displays, it'll be to Dell or HP; not Apple. Only a matter of time before the next desktop is a Windows machine. But, the pro market loves Apples consumer notebooks because they are light, fast, and have excellent battery life. So Apple will remain a staple, just not the dominant factor.

Just my $0.02.

 

[iGrip]

But yeah, if you're just web browsing and stuff like that, just get whatever's cheapest. Chrome in full screen mode is the same thing no matter what computer you're using.

Right now, I'm typing on my friend's Samsung Chromebook. It is exactly what you describe: full screen Chrome browser and nothing else. It was cheap, it is solidly made, it has good battery life and a nice keyboard. It was cheap.

It works great for what it is.

What it is ain't much, but it is what most people use a computer for. it is perfectly adequate for most people most of the time, and it is perfectly adequate for anybody much of the time. It is a great little web browser machine.

And it is cheap. Did I mention that?

 

[subsonix]

You didn't read my post.

My pros, like many pros, need workstation graphics in a portable computer. Apple makes no such product.

The Mac Pro is deprecated, and the "garbage can" one is a disposable joke.

Go on Apple.com and build me a portable or desktop workstation for running SolidWorks with moderate (100,000 part) assemblies. And FEA.

You literally can't.

Does it need to be portable and have a workstation class GPU? Any reason why you can not run SolidWorks on the new Mac Pro, it's got dual GPUs as standard.

 

[the8thark]

I never saw a program filled with that many bugs being launched in history before.

You've never seen A windows OS like vista or 98 or any EA game have you? FCPX just needed a few more features to become really good. Features that are slowly coming now. That is all. Yes many people still put the hate on FCPX. But I can see through that to what FCPX was. If I owned a studio that used that kind of software, I would defo plan to eventually use FCPX.

On a different note I do want to buy LPX (Logic Pro X) when I can afford it. I'm defo a prosumer and not a professional in this workspace. But for the price/feature set nothing beats it.

 

[donutbagel]

You need to think into the future. Sure the TB ports can't deliver a full gpu. Not enough bandwidth but you can do it to get a decent gpu power out of an external gpu hooked up via TB. With a Mac like the new MP you're not limited to making internal components to fir inside the system. You can use anything with a USB or TB or whatever port. Or get an adapter if you have some proprietary port on your external device.

I see where Apple is going with this MP. And I think the technology is quite not there yet. For external GPUs and the like. But forward thinking it defo is.

The problem is that even if an external GPU enclosure works, which it actually does if you're not using something super-powerful, it's very expensive. Since all the desktop GPUs are PCIe today and will probably stay like that considering that Apple barely influences the desktop PC market, I don't see the point of making the PCIe slots external rather than internal other than to save a little space. Video input cards are also PCIe.

It would make sense for Apple to include a card-holder box that connects with Thunderbolt to the Mac instead of making pros who need to upgrade the GPU or install another cards buy a really expensive box from some other company. If that would work with 1 or 2 TB cables going into the Mac, it would be a pretty cool solution.

 

[iGrip]

Guess Apple just wants to sell 10 gillion MacBook Airs and 100 million iPads instead and rake in the dough.

They are just like any other multinational corporation.

Are you surprised?

 

[djdj]

One could argue that the new Mac Pro isn't really a "Pro" machine at all, due to its lack of decent expandability.

Before anybody jumps down my throat for that statement, consider this... many Mac Pro users are video editors. Video editors who are serious about what they do buy expansion cards to process and render video more quickly than stock hardware can do. The Mac Pro does have Thunderbolt 2, but TB2 lacks the bandwidth to process modern video quickly enough.

When you do the math, the 20 Gbps of Thunderbolt 2 is enough to handle a single stream of 4K video, 30 fps, and 8 bits per pixel. But not much more. So if someone (1) shoots video at higher than 4K resolution, (2) edits video at greater than 8 bpp, (3) needs to process more than one video stream at a time (as you would during transitions, overlays, etc.), (4) shoots at more than 30 fps, or (5) wants to render at faster than real-time, TB 2 just doesn't have the bandwidth to get uncompressed video in and out of the computer anywhere near fast real-time. We'll have to go back to editing using proxies or seriously degraded video quality again.

And before anyone says that 4K, 8bpp, 30fps is plenty of resolution, consider this... the most popular camera for independent filmmakers (and even some Hollywood types) is the RED Scarlet, which already shoots at 5K, at 16 bits per pixel, at up to 60 fps, easily exceeding the available bandwidth of TB2. The RED Epic Dragon, which is now shipping, shoots at 6K, 16-bit, 60 fps. These are not extreme cameras that nobody can afford -- these are easily the most popular cameras used by indie filmmakers -- the very target audience of Final Cut Pro.

So effectively Apple has created a hardware limitation that is a serious problem before the computer actually ships.

As fast as Thunderbolt 2 is, it is still only 1/8 the speed of a PCI-e X16 slot. When the video pros figure all of this out, they're going to be pretty upset.

 

[subsonix]

Before anybody jumps down my throat for that statement, consider this... many Mac Pro users are video editors. Video editors who are serious about what they do buy expansion cards to process and render video more quickly than stock hardware can do. The Mac Pro does have Thunderbolt 2, but TB2 lacks the bandwidth to process modern video quickly enough.

You forgot to mention that it also have dual GPUs with 6GB vram, with bandwidth to spare.

 

[the8thark]

One could argue that the new Mac Pro isn't really a "Pro" machine at all, due to its lack of decent expandability.

I agree with you today. But the future is a different story. Apple is betting the MP house on a modular approach will catch on in the future. No one knows what the future will hold.

 

[RBR2]

True, but are you able to get around that and see that it's an incredibly brilliant and functional design? I'm not sure why nobody else has ever thought of it. If one of the primary problems with high-performance computers is the heat it produces, why not design the thing like a wind tunnel to maximize the amount of airflow moving heat out of the system? Seems obvious now that it's been revealed, but all these years, it's been boxes with fans inside which makes little to no sense.

Can you say "inflexible"?

It is true, however, that a product which is not only not upgradable, but difficult to repair is consistent with Apple's other product lines.

On more than a few occasions Steve said that Apple is a consumer product (hardware) company. I guess we will see how long Apple actually continues to support the user base that needs more than an iMac.

I still am of the opinion that Apple should have purchased Sun when the price was right and turned it into "the Mac Business Unit", allowing a mix of hardware and operating systems to be sold as a stand alone business. Allowing them to sell non-consumer hardware with the Mac OS would not have competed with Apple's core business of consumer products in any material way in my opinion.

It will be interesting to see whether the scientific community which uses a lot of Mac Pros at the present time will simply hold on to what they have until it is no longer useful at all or will adopt the new Mac Pro and wait to see if Apple actually continues the line. I suspect the latter course of action will prevail because of the investments in software (there is a lot of very custom UNIX software that has been created for this group) as much as anything. Eventually, they might get forced to change platforms though.

 

[Dudical]

Nope.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/horrors-linus-torvalds-calls-hfs-utter-crap/1278

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No, no it doesn't.

Okay, you got me there. OS X has a modern file system in comparison to NTFS.

What is it about "*nix" that you like? Usually when I see users talking about this, they have no idea what the real or perceived benefits (or lack thereof) would be.

I develop software, and at work I'm on Linux, and previously spent a lot of time on FreeBSD. A lot of my *nix love comes from the fact that I'm more comfortable with the tools and workflow of that kind of system. I like that I can do a fresh install of OS X, and there's a bash shell, Python, SSH, and a file system that doesn't have drive letters.

Do you know what UNIX really is, without Googling it? And if so, do you like that OS X is basically a weird version of it?

Yes and yes. Why are you getting weird about this?

 

[Dirtfarmer]

Does it need to be portable and have a workstation class GPU? Any reason why you can not run SolidWorks on the new Mac Pro, it's got dual GPUs as standard.

Aah yes, the classic Apple apologist mantra is "if Apple doesn't make it, you don't need it". They even said that about copy/paste!!

You can flex your personal life enough to do without the things that Apple doesn't think you should own. This is no big deal.

But business is sometimes less able to modify their expectations. Business' needs aren't always based on emotion; sometimes they are actually created by unchangeable external forces.

In our case, portable workstations were non-negotiable. We work on client sites and supplier sites almost as much as we work in the office -- never mind niceties like being able to open a model on evenings or weekends without having to drive to the office.

All tier-1 manufacturers offer a workstation configuration; it's actually not a big deal or that expensive.

I went with Dell M4700's and they haven't skipped a beat. They cost the same with workstation graphics and 32GB of RAM as a "retina" consumer laptop, and offer massively more features and performance. And a better warranty, and better service and support.

They're also durable in a business environment in a way that aluminum is not. I could post 10 pictures of heavily indented unibody MBP's, just from my scrap pile. Just from the VP and C-suite at my company; not exactly reckless or wasteful people. The aluminum just gets dents in it, period.

Apple's sole workstation is like buying a museum piece at 200% of retail price...maybe their prices are so high because they're antiques?

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/11/apple-offers-minor-processor-bump-to-mac-pro-line/

The only thing worse than their current workstation is their new one: that thing is spit in the face of the enterprise.

Of course, reading over this thread reminds me that the "secret" of Apple unceremoniously dumping the pro market has been out for years.

They were once the greatest change agent in the entire high tech world. Now they're a trinket company. That makes me sad.

 

[RBR2]

As it turns out Tim is not the enemy of the Pro user after all, and I think he is not the enemy of end users like me either. Unlike Mr Jobs, I think Tim Cook actually cares about the users.
I think he is actually good for Apple in this fairly difficult time. Apple is becoming more flexible (iPad updates, for example), but not desperate to a point where they start to show signs of fragmentation. The end user will still get great accessories just made for their device and their OS.
I think Tim can manage to get the Pro products running for some time to come.

You just might be right about Tim. He does seem to be encouraging more of a "look at things from the perspective of the end user" attitude than Steve did. It wasn't that Steve didn't have some great ideas, it's just that he always wanted things his way rather than looking at the people who would be using the product. This can get a bit toward the chicken and egg end of things when talking about completely new product categories though.

Who would ever have thought that the iPad would take off so? Apple certainly did not. I have been told by several Apple reps that the company was as surprised as anyone at the way the iPad sold, the uses to which it has been put and so on.

One example is that Tim is allowing Apple Store workers, on their own time, to be beta testers which should improve the dot zero release of products because engineers, for all the wonderful things they do, simply do not think like typical end users. Getting more input earlier from people removed from the engineering teams can only benefit the company and us.

Cheers

 

[0x0x0x0]

You forgot to mention that it also have dual GPUs with 6GB vram, with bandwidth to spare.

We have no idea what those GPUs are, but chances are that they are wired to 16 lanes each, which leaves 8 lanes spare (if you do the maths based on Apple's marketing spiel). Again, according to Apple's marketing the PCIe SSD runs at "upto" 1250MBps, which means you're going to have to sacrifice 2 lanes; this leaves 6 lanes. From those 6 lanes you need to hang 6 Thunderbolt v2 ports (I'm guessing they're just multiplexed ports, and not wired individually into the PCIe bus), Gigabit Ether x2, 802.11ac, and 4 USBv3 ports (and poss. bluetooth?)...

What "bandwidth to spare" are you talking about?..

 

[Oracle1729]

Well, it's going to be interesting to see what the smartphone camera does to those cheaper cameras.

Aside from the fact that you deilberately missed the point as you normally do in your blind devotion....I doubt Nikon is worried about losing SLR sales to smartphones, unless someone puts half a pound of glass in their phone lens. And people who think their smartphone is in the same league would never buy a bulky SLR anyway, so again no reason for Nikon to worry.

 

[flat five]

Can you say "inflexible"?

It is true, however, that a product which is not only not upgradable, but difficult to repair is consistent with Apple's other product lines.

one thing with the new mac that's not consistent with other apple products is this:

why is that there? why can users so easily gain access to the inside of a non-upgradable and non-serviceable machine?

 

[TMay]

Exactly, they tout this as a "Pro" machine and marvel at the trash can design....
A pro needs a lot more stuff than the "Can" provides naked, hence you end up with something that looks like the picture.

But, you can always buy longer cables and find a place to hide it

Actually, many pro's don't require huge data sets for their work, i.e. number crunching and graphic design, not video and audio. This is a well designed machine for that.

So thank you very much for a machine designed for my needs of MCAD and simulation, and I can still throw drives on if I do want a large data set or connect through my network to a Lenovo D20 that does have substantial storage.

 

[subsonix]

Aside from the fact that you deilberately missed the point as you normally do in your blind devotion....I doubt Nikon is worried about losing SLR sales to smartphones, unless someone puts half a pound of glass in their phone lens. And people who think their smartphone is in the same league would never buy a bulky SLR anyway, so again no reason for Nikon to worry.

I'm not deliberately missing the point, have we met before btw?

The point I was trying to make is, smaller cheaper cameras where the bulk of the market is, is likely feeling effects of smartphone sales, would you agree?

But anyway this is a side topic, I just wanted to leave a comment on what you said, never mind.

 

[iSee]

Unless I have the wrong end of the stick, Apple seem to be providing not so much raw software but building blocks, not sure if that is a positive or a negative. There is still some coding to learn but it seems everything is at a a much higher level than before.
ie they are moving away from the situation where you need a genius to create content and apps.

I haven't really seen that. Not sure if you mean the improvements to Objective-C like ARC, properties and blocks? To me those aren't high-level changes though. They provide standard and convenient implementations of some useful low-level patterns. But that mainly helps take care of repetitive, error-prone, menial programming tasks. And other languages and platforms provide answers to the same problems (though often different answers).

The Mac and iOS SDKs are large and comprehensive. While that helps developers build apps with greater functionality than would otherwise be possible, it doesn't exactly make it easy. You need to learn the conventions, quirks and best-practices for each new framework you use. And, again, the SDKs are at about the same level as other platforms.

I've been developing software for a long time and a lot has changed. Microsoft, Apple, Sun and many others have spent untold amounts of time building IDE's, tools, frameworks, OS's, UI tools, languages, etc., making software development "easier." But developing good software has never gotten easy. What happens is, a common problem emerges, various solutions compete, certain solutions seem to work well so then a vendor incorporates one or more of the solution into the platform they support, hopefully with such nice integration that the problem can be largely ignored by developers or at least is now easy to solve. This frees developers to focus on building software that better or more deeply solves the problem their customers have... When everyone reaches further, new problems--new common problems--emerge, and we go around again. (There are certainly variations on this cycle, I'm not trying to suggest this is the only development platforms move forward.)

The last things I saw that really seemed to click with people to actually make developing software easier were Hyper Card, HTML/Javascript, and those personal database programs. (People will say Logo, too, but I personally never really saw it. I was teachable, true, but I didn't see it leading to people developing software of any use that couldn't develop software before.) And time has largely passed those by. Well, except HTML/Javascript. But even there the bar has been raised... increasingly web pages are expected to be more sophisticated where your interactive web page needs jQuery, AJAX, plugings, minification, related server-side services, using LAMP or some other web stack and, BANG, we're right back to "not easy" again.

Well, that was a nice ramble. Sorry.