MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)

[barmann]

Really hard to tell at this point. A pro team is a pretty significant move by Apple, and shows they really are interested in getting back in to the pro market.

That doesn't mean they are guaranteed to be successful, and it doesn't mean they won't push everyone to iMac Pros if they think they can get away with it.

But it's a start.

I think if people knew how bad the voices for the pro market were at Apple they'd be more excited about a pro team.

I agree to a point , there might be good intentions at Apple's re. the pro market .

But when you are looking for honest customer input, you usually don't hire a bunch of them and give them a room in your ivory tower .
Whose Bread I Eat, His Song I Sing, and all that .

Either way, my take on the recent revelations - if you want to call it that - is that Apple not only has nothing in the pipeline, but does not even have a pipeline .
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The HP Z and Dell Precision offer every possible configuration with every possible component known to man. Their towers are designed to accommodate every imaginable piece of hardware in every imaginable combination. That is why they can easily throw in a new motherboard every six months and keep stuff up to date.
Apple can't do that. I mean, they could if they wanted to, but that is not their way, and would we really want them to? I like that they narrow down the choices so I don't have to. Even when they boasted about more than a million configurations for the Mac Pro, the actual hardware choices were limited compared to the PC workstation market.
I like that they redesigned the internals of the G5/cMP for each generation, even when they could have just slapped in the new components and be done with it. But that's not how Apple does it.

So no, they're never gonna make an HP Z or Dell Precision, as in a standard (ATX) chassis that will allow you to easily switch parts on a regular basis, and update the machine every six months.

I can only speak for myself, but that's precisely what I want Apple to do for the next MP .
A well made box, with a number of factory options for those who like their choices being made for them (...), and unprecedented compatibility and expandability for 3rd party components .

As for the Apple (Mac) way, I'm tired of hearing about that nonsense .
What way would that be exactly ?

A (mostly) great OS, but too lazy to invest in 3rd party driver etc. support .
Great hardware for the most part, but removing ports and usability in general with every generation .
Design hickups like the above , keyboards , tcMP etc. , which don't get addressed for years .
Usually competitive, but never on top .
A seperate line of (iOS) products that don't interface properly with the main OS after a decade .

So the Apple way is what - we don't do that, we don't care, good enough, you don't need that, shareholders are happy - have them eat cake ?
It's an ecosystem, stupid, not that we are too cheap and lazy to give you options we have to develop, support and play nice with other people to make happen ?

There might have been an Apple way at some point, no such thing today .

 

[singhs.apps]

But when you are looking for honest customer input, you usually don't hire a bunch of them and give them a room in your ivory tower .
Whose Bread I Eat, His Song I Sing, and all that .

In short, paid up yes men.
Hopefully that bunch contains some outsiders not beholden to Apple and asked to stress the prototypes, break them or bring them to their knees as often as realistically possible.

 

[Joe The Dragon]

In short, paid up yes men.
Hopefully that bunch contains some outsiders not beholden to Apple and asked to stress the prototypes, break them or bring them to their knees as often as realistically possible.

well back with the 2013's some media arts schools did get to test them and they just when out and got as many of the older Mac pros as they could.

 

[singhs.apps]

well back with the 2013's some media arts schools did get to test them and they just when out and got as many of the older Mac pros as they could.

Seriously?!!

 

[deconstruct60]

I agree to a point , there might be good intentions at Apple's re. the pro market .

But when you are looking for honest customer input, you usually don't hire a bunch of them and give them a room in your ivory tower .
Whose Bread I Eat, His Song I Sing, and all that .

That's what Apple did over 10 years ago. From what was said in the article this is different. The folks are being hired to do a project with Apple tools (and sign an NDA about Apple's tech they may see). Most of "in industry experts" are only temporarily hired. Those contractors do some very realistic project that takes some time and they interact with Apple. Some Apple employees observe and interact with this contract employee. From that interaction Apple gets requirements and information they can roll into bug fix priority queues.

Yes, if there were permanently captured and only ask questions about what features do/don't work , etc. outside the context of doing real projects, then that effectiveness would fade over time. If they were hired as sales liaisons ( closer to what Apple did before ) it would have very similar myopic inducing effects over time. (e.g., your hired sales liaison loves Avid Media Composer. .... over time that one viewpoint if allowed to do all the major driving of features will indirectly create an Avid clone. 'what we need is a clone of the thing that I like'. )

What Apple needs is to bring in a set of experts to do projects who have varying styles and approaches over time. If just stick to one person after a while what will pick up is that experts quirks. If you do "email" or short interaction surveys again if sample from the same set of folks over and over again you the quirk signal-to-noise ratio will go down.

There is a talent that is needed on the Apple end to separate the wheat from the chaff or it is like panning for gold. Gathering effective and clear requirements is a skill. If Apple hands that off to a Stanford/Harvard/Northwestern MBA guy who been highly trained in marketing sales and no requirements skill set development then what they'll get is a mess. A slightly different set of problems if handed to a software manager who is too far deep in the code.

In short, it takes a team with a mix of talents.


[ Why doesn't Apple just go out to projects and collect requirements. Same reason why the fllm/music/etc folks don't want to send in their IP to Apple to mess around with. Apple doesn't want to send their IP under development out to a set/studio/etc with random people not covered by NDA.

They should "get out " more. That would augment what they are doing with these 'in house' project requirement captures. ]

Either way, my take on the recent revelations - if you want to call it that - is that Apple not only has nothing in the pipeline, but does not even have a pipeline .

A likely Mac Pro has multiple components that can be worked on in parallel. Neither of these talks (last April or this one ) was ever intended to reveals any details of the product under development. Most of Apple is talking about isn't specifically about the product parameters and far more about what their effort and approximate time expectation is.

If Apple is targeting Q1 2019 then certainly is something in pipeline. From where Apple was last April Apple never was going to make anything Q1-Q3 in 2018. That folks yelping that was possible and a reasonable expecation were blowing tons of smoke and deception.
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I was just pointing out machines that shipped after 1997.

You equally point at laptops that Apple shipped in 2004 and 2006. Is Apple going to ship a new one of those exact physical parameters in 2018 ? How likely is it that Apple would ship a laptop in 2018 with a 2.5" HDD in it? Technology has changed since 2004-2008. Apple changes with it.


The desktops are evolving along the same forces as the laptops. If Apple started from scratch on a new Mac Pro in 2016-17 they'd pick up the tech that was current and provision for what probably be available going forward. Some of that stuff from 2004-2008 isn't going to make the cut.

The second point is that neither one of those two systems pictured got rolled out in less than 12 months on their first iteration. With a pipeline of active designs being worked on in parallel you can get 18 month products to pop out the end of the pipeline at roughly 12 month intervals. ( Apple does it with the iPhones and SoC designs). If the pipeline is completely empty getting that first one to come out the back end will take time.

Those pictures covey the notion that this is all 80-90% "copy and paste" as far as getting all of that pipeline and skill set reconstituted. It isn't.
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They build Macs for people who will buy them.
....
And that is why there is still a Mid-2013 Mac Pro for sale. They may only shift a couple thousand a week, but it's still a couple of thousand that are generating over $1000 of profit per unit.

At this point the MP late 2013 (not mid) is a special case placeholder. It is closer to the iPod Touch than it is any normal Mac in the line up. I doubt there is any new production of MP 2013 units.

A couple thousand per week would be > 52K/year. You are way past wishful thinking that Apple is selling that many. It is probably closer to something at best at 100's per week range (and in some weeks likely closer to the 10's per week) which is less than 10K. Apple probably can't get decent contract factories to run that slow. So they probably ordered up a single short run last year and are ( quite outside of Apple norms) sitting on an inventory that "just enough" to bleed out over 12 months. My guess that if Apple gets to point close to running and still 6+ months away from a new Mac Pro that they'll just announce the end of the MP 2013 sales and just go 5+ months of folks waiting to pre-order.
( Pretty sure they planned out the time so the overlap is much smaller than 6 months. But they won't start the production line up again if way off. )

A Mac that sells in the less than 20K per year run rate is extremely unlikely to be viable even at a price point double the size of the average Mac. The Macs that are easily viable run in the several 100's of thousands per year range and the Mac Pro is no where near that now and hasn't been for probably close to a decade.

 

[askunk]

Apple, I have a hint for you: the reason why you still have people being able to wait for your f&%$£g mMP is precisely because the cMP was an upgradeable machine, with third-party components.

 

[CWallace]

A couple thousand per week would be > 52K/year. You are way past wishful thinking that Apple is selling that many. It is probably closer to something at best at 100's per week range (and in some weeks likely closer to the 10's per week) which is less than 10K.

Apple has said the Mac Pro represents "the low single-digit percentages of quarterly Mac desktop sales" and was the second-most popular desktop after the iMac family. They have also said that desktops make up 20% of Mac sales.

Over 2017, Apple sold almost 4 million desktop Macs. At 2%, that would be around 1700 a week. At 3%, that would be around 2500 a week.

On the flip side, this is why Apple does not update the Mac Mini. Its sales probably are in the hundreds per week.

Apple probably can't get decent contract factories to run that slow. So they probably ordered up a single short run last year and are ( quite outside of Apple norms) sitting on an inventory that "just enough" to bleed out over 12 months.

I can believe that Apple has done "last call" manufacturing runs for products like the Mac Mini, the Mac Pro, the iPad Mini and the MacBook Air and one of the reasons they are still around is Apple is trying to eliminate that stock. That Apple did a significant price cut on the Mac Pro supports this, IMO.

My guess that if Apple gets to point close to running and still 6+ months away from a new Mac Pro that they'll just announce the end of the MP 2013 sales and just go 5+ months of folks waiting to pre-order.

Makes sense.

A Mac that sells in the less than 20K per year run rate is extremely unlikely to be viable even at a price point double the size of the average Mac. The Macs that are easily viable run in the several 100's of thousands per year range and the Mac Pro is no where near that now and hasn't been for probably close to a decade.

Hopefully Apple stays away from this forum then, as with all the carping about how this new Mac Pro is going to suck and everyone is already on PC workstations and Hackintoshes they may come to the conclusion they can't sell enough to make it worth the effort.

 

[Mago]

I think, we should blame to Cook, the iMac Pro and AMD/Cryptominig on the new mMP delay:

1. The iMac Pro is no secret isnt seling as expected mostly due most PRO wait for the mMP.
2. AMD instead to begin to manufacture Its new Canis GPUs (moreless 1:1 on nVidia GTX1080i/P100) it moved canis to Intel 10nm and the contracted dies from GloFo assigned to extra Vega batches, required due massive Cryptomining demand
3. Cook (yes Cook) following his warehouse keeper mind, opted to dissapear the mMP from Mac Users, to push iMac Pro demand and clean unsold stocks.

That's all.

So likely at year's end we will see a mMP with AMD Canis GPU ready to ship in january.

 

[vailr]

No valid reason for Apple to re-invent the wheel.
Just officially license HP to sell macOS pre-installed on their line of Z workstation machines: problem solved. Even if only as a "stop gap" solution until Apple's own design (including maybe with: PCIe 4, TB4, etc.) is ready.
And make the new Mac Pro available in time for 2018 WWDC, instead of 2019.
It's not like most of the mMP components wouldn't be made in China or some other Asian location, pretty much the same as HP's product components.

 

[goMac]

In short, paid up yes men.
Hopefully that bunch contains some outsiders not beholden to Apple and asked to stress the prototypes, break them or bring them to their knees as often as realistically possible.

I dunno. Like I've said before, in the 200Xs Steve Jobs was driving that because he was involved in Hollywood and owned Pixar. Now that Steve is gone and Pixar and Apple aren't linked, where is Apple going to get that input on what they should do next? Apple is both secretive and the companies they want feedback from are secretive as well.

It's not perfect but it's better than what they were doing before.

 

[deconstruct60]

Apple has said the Mac Pro represents "the low single-digit percentages of quarterly Mac desktop sales" and was the second-most popular desktop after the iMac family. They have also said that desktops make up 20% of Mac sales.

You are still fooling yourself. It is extremely likely Apple was doing two things. One, very generously rounding up. So if the Mac Pro was 0.15% of Mac sales you round up to the nearest whole integer. That would give you 1%. Which is a single digit. Single digits implies you are dealing with whole integers. With whole integers everything from 1x10^-50 to 0.999999 is 1% if you round up to the nearest whole integer.


The second thing was motivating that extraordinary rounding procedure base on older years where the Mac Pro line wasn't so dismally out of date where it still was closer to normal rounding rules and still in the 1% range by being close to 0.8% and 0.9% which when rounded up are also still single digits. And even older history where perhaps in the 2-4% range (but that has been a relatively long while). The core issue is the pond has been growing bigger. What you won't find anywhere is that the growth of the Mac Pro subsegment has been keeping up with the rest of the ecosystem.

Not sure where you are getting the "second most popular desktop" from. And frankly even if it was outselling the relatively even more comatose Mac Mini , that isn't saying much. Apple's desktop sales pretty much are the iMac ... just plain stop.

Over 2017, Apple sold almost 4 million desktop Macs. At 2%, that would be around 1700 a week. At 3%, that would be around 2500 a week.

Single digit means that 1 is just as viable as 2. The reality you be trying to ground in is how a four year old technology system that a large chunk of the historic Mac Pro user base didn't want selling at 100K run rates? It isn't.

On the flip side, this is why Apple does not update the Mac Mini. Its sales probably are in the hundreds per week.

Which is probably roughly the same rate as the Mac Pro which is why the both haven't gotten put on the 'high priority' upgrade list.

That Apple did a significant price cut on the Mac Pro supports this, IMO.

The significant price cut is far more likely to indicate that sales are bad and going down. It doesn't indicate at all they had a very healthy single percentage. It is an indicator that they had a unhealthy 'single digit' percentage. Very basic supply/demand dynamics would indicate that the highest price systems have the lowest demand.


Given that Apple only rarely does price cuts is indicative that this probably pretty bad.



P.S. I think one difference between Jobs and Cook is that Jobs tended to round down. So 0.95% would be rounded to 0% and the product would get " Steve'd ". Nobody is buying it so kill it. It seems in the current era there are some factions that want to say "well if we did a better job it would be higher so let's give it another shot" and another faction that is hard core ready to "Steve it " and move on to 'better" options. That's way there is this weaving back and forth between important and then rip van winkle mode.

 

[goMac]

You are still fooling yourself. It is extremely likely Apple was doing two things. One, very generously rounding up. So if the Mac Pro was 0.15% of Mac sales you round up to the nearest whole integer. That would give you 1%. Which is a single digit. Single digits implies you are dealing with whole integers. With whole integers everything from 1x10^-50 to 0.999999 is 1% if you round up to the nearest whole integer.

I think it's probably around 2-3% of desktop Mac sales. Who knows how the tcMP changed that, but I think that's what I heard around towers.

The Xserve back in the day was somewhere just under 100,000k units a year at it's peak. The tower Mac Pro likely sold a lot more than that, so you could do the math from there.

I'd guess, at least with the cMP, Apple sold 200,000-300,000 units a year.
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Cook (yes Cook) following his warehouse keeper mind, opted to dissapear the mMP from Mac Users, to push iMac Pro demand and clean unsold stocks.

Not likely.

So likely at year's end we will see a mMP with AMD Canis GPU ready to ship in january.

Definitely not happening. I don't think we'll see an announcement until WWDC 2019. If we're lucky, it'll ship closer to WWDC than December.

 

[CWallace]

As Apple does not break down sales by class, much less model, we are all speculating and I accept that.

I can also accept that the Mac Pro and the Mac Mini sell only a couple of units a day and Apple is just burning through the remaining stock before declaring them End of Life. Frankly, that narrative supports my belief that the iMac Pro was meant to replace the Mac Pro as Apple's most powerful computer because they can leverage all the infrastructure and most of the parts used on the 5K model so even if the model itself sells at a low "run rate", it's mostly part of a model with a far higher "run rate" so it is worth at least offering, even if this means it may end up not being worth updating if it sells poorly like the Mac Pro and Mac Mini do.

Which of course makes me wonder why Apple is doing a new Mac Pro if sales are so poor. Even if it sees strong initial sales just due to pent-up demand, it would need a much higher "run rate" than the iMac Pro to justify keeping it, much less updating it.

 

[fendersrule]

Apple would be fools to make the mistake of using the iMac Pro as a replacement for the Mac Pro.

Any computer that begins to throttle itself during heavy lifting tasks (gaming, rendering, whatever) is not a real workstation-class machine. That's not acceptable. Every second for rendering counts.

For a prosumer? Fine.

 

[goMac]

I can also accept that the Mac Pro and the Mac Mini sell only a couple of units a day and Apple is just burning through the remaining stock before declaring them End of Life. Frankly, that narrative supports my belief that the iMac Pro was meant to replace the Mac Pro as Apple's most powerful computer because they can leverage all the infrastructure and most of the parts used on the 5K model so even if the model itself sells at a low "run rate", it's mostly part of a model with a far higher "run rate" so it is worth at least offering, even if this means it may end up not being worth updating if it sells poorly like the Mac Pro and Mac Mini do.

Mac Pros sell well to institutions. You have a bunch of organizations ordering a 100 or 200 at a time, that adds up. Individual orders aren't as much. I'd be more generous than a few a day. But I've been places that ordered a lot of Mac Pros.

Again, I don't know if any of this applies to the nMP. The cMP sold pretty well though.

 

[barmann]

That's what Apple did over 10 years ago. From what was said in the article this is different. The folks are being hired to do a project with Apple tools (and sign an NDA about Apple's tech they may see). Most of "in industry experts" are only temporarily hired. Those contractors do some very realistic project that takes some time and they interact with Apple. Some Apple employees observe and interact with this contract employee. From that interaction Apple gets requirements and information they can roll into bug fix priority queues.

Yes, if there were permanently captured and only ask questions about what features do/don't work , etc. outside the context of doing real projects, then that effectiveness would fade over time. If they were hired as sales liaisons ( closer to what Apple did before ) it would have very similar myopic inducing effects over time. (e.g., your hired sales liaison loves Avid Media Composer. .... over time that one viewpoint if allowed to do all the major driving of features will indirectly create an Avid clone. 'what we need is a clone of the thing that I like'. )

What Apple needs is to bring in a set of experts to do projects who have varying styles and approaches over time. If just stick to one person after a while what will pick up is that experts quirks. If you do "email" or short interaction surveys again if sample from the same set of folks over and over again you the quirk signal-to-noise ratio will go down.

There is a talent that is needed on the Apple end to separate the wheat from the chaff or it is like panning for gold. Gathering effective and clear requirements is a skill. If Apple hands that off to a Stanford/Harvard/Northwestern MBA guy who been highly trained in marketing sales and no requirements skill set development then what they'll get is a mess. A slightly different set of problems if handed to a software manager who is too far deep in the code.

In short, it takes a team with a mix of talents.


[ Why doesn't Apple just go out to projects and collect requirements. Same reason why the fllm/music/etc folks don't want to send in their IP to Apple to mess around with. Apple doesn't want to send their IP under development out to a set/studio/etc with random people not covered by NDA.

They should "get out " more. That would augment what they are doing with these 'in house' project requirement captures. ]

I agree with you, but if those are the possible scenarios to get Apple an understanding of what is going on right now, and has been going on in recent years, it would suggest they are completely out of touch not only with pro customers, but most Mac customers - and have been for years .
I trusted Apple to be not quite as unprofessional and indifferent, but it seems now they might well be .

And you don't do in-house customer research .
You collect information through customer support and market research .

Maybe if you get close to a working prototype , you contract outsiders for their input, who oviusly will be bound by an NDA .
For everything else, there should be a development team in-house familiar with real world demands .
It's not exactly rocket science .

A likely Mac Pro has multiple components that can be worked on in parallel. Neither of these talks (last April or this one ) was ever intended to reveals any details of the product under development. Most of Apple is talking about isn't specifically about the product parameters and far more about what their effort and approximate time expectation is.

The latest article has yet more random observations and a vague 2019 launch time .
The multiple components part of the article was mainly about people diddling around with MBPs, eGPUs and iPads .
It'd be nice if they got it working, but neither do I hold my breath nor do I give a toss .

If Apple is targeting Q1 2019 then certainly is something in pipeline. From where Apple was last April Apple never was going to make anything Q1-Q3 in 2018. That folks yelping that was possible and a reasonable expecation were blowing tons of smoke and deception.

Q1 2019 has been targeted ? I must have missed that one .
More likely seems a WWDC 2019 announcement , if that , and maybe a late 2019 release .

You equally point at laptops that Apple shipped in 2004 and 2006. Is Apple going to ship a new one of those exact physical parameters in 2018 ? How likely is it that Apple would ship a laptop in 2018 with a 2.5" HDD in it? Technology has changed since 2004-2008. Apple changes with it.

Since this is about the MP, I can assure you that mass storage is still on spinners for the most part .
SSDs have not come down in price as predicted by so many to make them a viable alternative for everything .
Even SSDs in 2.5" are the standard still for fast storage, because the little buggers are the most flexible form factor in any work environment .

Laptops are different in that respect .

 

[CWallace]

Apple would be fools to make the mistake of using the iMac Pro as a replacement for the Mac Pro.

Any computer that begins to throttle itself during heavy lifting tasks (gaming, rendering, whatever) is not a real workstation-class machine. That's not acceptable. Every second for rendering counts.

According to every review and end-user report I have seen (and they are in the scores), the iMac Pro does not throttle itself and the fans are only audible if you put your ear right next to the vent (and even then, they are quiet).

So Apple seems to have gotten the thermal headroom correct.

 

[singhs.apps]

where is Apple going to get that input on what they should do next? Apple is both secretive and the companies they want feedback from are secretive as well.

It's not perfect but it's better than what they were doing before.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for apple having non employees, with real world expertise who are the target for its systems.

I merely meant that hopefully apple ( and even the contracted professionals ) are aware that it can very easily turn into biased opinions. That apple should always have a regular influx of new people with different ( but objective) ideas who aren’t influenced by the jazz of working at Apple while giving feedback ( or get involved in petty politics - a very common occurrence). In fact I hope apple, for each industry, is also considering three or more groups working virtually siloed off from each other... so that common patterns are easily established.

That said, the article seemed to be like trying to convince the management than a true professional talk if you know what I mean. We would be seeing a lot more industry jargon in that article otherwise. ( ‘there are many types of pros’... that’s twice in a row. We all get there are many types of pros. Why is Apple repeating it ? Or even that it has hired professionals who use their systems to help identify pain points ( again why is that news ? It’s worrisome that apple is actually talking about what is essentially standard industry practice.. we call it alpha/beta testing.)

Maybe it was for the benefit for the journalist covering that meeting, or something got lost in translation ( but then the article might have some pre approval clause with apple so maybe not )

Or maybe Steve jobs was the BS filter in that company.

 

[CWallace]

Mac Pros sell well to institutions. You have a bunch of organizations ordering a 100 or 200 at a time, that adds up. Individual orders aren't as much. I'd be more generous than a few a day. But I've been places that ordered a lot of Mac Pros. Again, I don't know if any of this applies to the nMP. The cMP sold pretty well though.

I can only guesstimate based on what the Apple executives said at the April 2017 meeting. As pessimistic as I am about what "low single digit percentages" translates into Mac Pro sales, deconstruct60 seems to be even more so.

And if the sales are as pessimistic as the low-end estimates offered, I don't understand why Apple is investing the resources they are in making a new model unless 2014 and 2015 Mac Pro sales were in the hundreds of thousands and then collapsed over time due to lack of upgrades or the iMac 5K encroaching on it in performance and setting a new "high bar" with a Mac Pro (so it would have to be not just well beyond the 5K iMac, but also the Mac Pro) would revitalize sales back into the millions per year.

 

[barmann]

I dunno. Like I've said before, in the 200Xs Steve Jobs was driving that because he was involved in Hollywood and owned Pixar. Now that Steve is gone and Pixar and Apple aren't linked, where is Apple going to get that input on what they should do next? Apple is both secretive and the companies they want feedback from are secretive as well.

It's not perfect but it's better than what they were doing before.

They sell millions of computers and don't get feedback ?
A company has to actively ignore its costumers to not listen to what they get in feedback, and to not have a department in place that is dealing with the matter .
Can you imagine how much Apple spends on market research on their silly little iphones ?

If Apple were in touch at all with people in the industries using Macs, big or small, they'd get so much of that information they wished they'd never asked ...

 

[CWallace]

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for apple having non employees, with real world expertise who are the target for its systems.

I merely meant that hopefully apple ( and even the contracted professionals ) are aware that it can very easily turn into biased opinions. That apple should always have a regular influx new set of people with different ( but objective) ideas who aren’t influenced by the jazz of working at Apple while giving feedback ( or get involved in petty politics - a very common occurrence). In fact I hope apple, for each industry, is also considering three of more groups working virtually siloed off from each other... so that common patterns are easily established.

In his article, Panzarino notes that he feels that Apple was for too long following a path in where they believed their computers were addressing the needs of "professionals" when in fact they were not. So they were suffering from "biased opinions" due to their own cultural insularity.

He now feels that Apple is addressing this with this new approach that engages with people and companies outside of Apple who should be approaching this with a different and fresher view. The key will be if Apple listens to them and takes their feedback to heart, but I get the feeling they will.

 

[goMac]

That said, the article seemed to be like trying to convince the management than a true professional talk if you know what I mean We would be seeing a lot more industry jargon in that article otherwise. ( ‘there are many types of pros’... that’s twice in a row. We all get there are many types of pros. Why is Apple repeating it ? Or even that it has hired professionals who use their systems to help identify pain points ( again why is that news ? It’s worrisome that apple is actually talking about what is essentially industry practice.. we call it alpha/beta testing.)

I think Apple would have been better off if they had said what they are working on. It would help with people deciding on the Mac Pro. The story even mentions stuff like PCIe slots without Apple saying anything. Saying "there will be another Mac Pro" at this point doesn't really help anything.

Although that may be because they still don't have firm plans.

Or maybe Steve jobs was the BS filter in that company.

Jobs was a BS generator, his BS was just the best in the business.
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They sell millions of computers and don't get feedback ?
A company has to actively ignore its costumers to not listen to what they get in feedback, and to not have a department in place that is dealing with the matter .
Can you imagine how much Apple spends on market research on their silly little iphones ?

If Apple were in touch at all with people in the industries using Macs, big or small, they'd get so much of that information they wished they'd never asked ...

I mean, have you seen the new MacBook Pro?

 

[fendersrule]

Linus has tested the iMac Pro. He states that "The cooling cannot handle full loads after too long". Linus tested equivalently-built PC a long side with it and found that much of the time, the iMac Pro produced below it.

Actually, every link I run across shows that performance drops during heavy workloads:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/12/29/video-does-the-imac-pro-get-too-hot-when-under-load

Not staying at turbo speeds is nothing new for any design and isn't "throttling" but that links shows that over time, the CPU pretty much stayed only at its base clock speed and wasn't capable of turbo'ing after too long. And you can bet that the GPU is throttling its ass off since Vegas are not efficient. Their before/after graphics score showed a drop from 1831 to 1667 which supports this notion.

"Just like with most previous Macs, Apple chooses to run their machines as quiet as possible, even if it means running the components very hot and having to slow them down. We expect these applications will be updated to support the iMac Pro, allowing you to set the fans to ramp up earlier and run faster."

Not saying that there's something "wrong" with the thermals nor am I saying that the iMac Pro isn't impressive from a thermal standpoint, nor am I saying that it won't be good for some work station uses (prosumer) but you can't argue that performance is being traded off with noise. Not acceptable for an actual workstation, like the cMP was.

 

[CWallace]

Or maybe Steve jobs was the BS filter in that company.

Jobs was a BS generator, his BS was just the best in the business.

He served both roles, frankly.

They sell millions of computers and don't get feedback? If Apple were in touch at all with people in the industries using Macs, big or small, they'd get so much of that information they wished they'd never asked ...

I mean, have you seen the new MacBook Pro?

Well the MacBook Pro is now the best-selling family in the whole line-up so somebody seems to like them.

 

[goMac]

He served both roles, frankly.

Kind of. Everyone still remembers when he called web apps the "sweet solution" for iOS app development. Hard to tell if that was his BS or if we was exporting someone else's.

I mean, he had problems with people who were clearly idiots. But smart people can still do stupid things.

Well the MacBook Pro is now the best-selling family in the whole line-up so somebody seems to like them.

Honestly, I like mine well enough. But the GPU should be better, the display should be higher res, and it needs a few more ports. It's good enough, but not great. Definitely doesn't not feel like a pro class laptop.