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 .
I think that "Pro Team" in house stuff is layered on top of the other feedback mechanisms they have. I have read elsewhere that Apple requires that product managers read a subset from the apple.com/feedback streams for their assigned products every week (or a even smaller per day ). if that feed beck mechanism becomes a rant fest then it will loose its effectiveness over time. Readers will start to self selection out things in part to filter out the noise ( "black helicopter folks have embedded mind control in your product" kind of stuff ).
I saw an article about new Final Cut Pro X and it stated ( I think with some Apple feedback) that FCPX had over million seats. So even if 1% does feedback there will be alot of stuff. One of the problems though is whether can get a high signal : noise ratio out of it.
People to people communication is just different than just bubbled up aggregated data. You actually need both to do highly effective market research.
For everything else, there should be a development team in-house familiar with real world demands .
It's not exactly rocket science .
Real world demands have more dimensions that most end users want to admit or are even aware of. Balancing implementation and other coupled factors with the user feedback which is often more than a bit skewed ( e.g, asking folks what is often used and then instrumenting the program to see what they actually do in many occasions turns out different. ). Just doctor doesn't just ask questions in an examination. they also measure some things themselves. but both parts are necessary.
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 .
Apple isn't going to give an precise timeline until have completed the engineering validation testing and have set up the production schedules. They don't talk about products in advance and these two April talks really haven't changed that policy all that much. Last year they said the dates were not in 2017. Now they are saying the dates aren't in 2019. It isn't trying to "set a date" they are far more so managing many folks unrealistic expectations.
Remember early in the week there was the Bloomberg story that said that "Mac Pro by 2019". Some folks are going to read that as Apple has to cross the deadline before 2019 starts. (before Dec 31st). Others are going to read that as after Dec 31st and perhaps almost never because vapourware.
This talk puts a border of after Dec 31, 2017 and before Jan 1, 2020. That is a correction for both the overly optimistic and the overly pessimistic crowd without pinning Apple to a tentative deadline they had not already set for themselves. Correcting the extremists on both sides is important because they generate a ridiculous amount of noise and FUD. That FUD is the short term problem.
Q1 2019 has been targeted ? I must have missed that one .
I'm saying that Q1 2019 is probably a target. Two reasons.
1. Apple in the article said that things were going pretty much on schedule so far. So they had planned that they would be working through most of 2018 to get this done. The informed guess on may part is that they gave themselves extra slop/slack time because restarting a substantive part of this from scratch. Another quarter would be reasonable. They should be able to cover a sizable amount of ground in 3 months of working hard even if they got thrown 3-4 curve balls earlier.
2. 18 months would be a very generously conservative window for this if actually working on this mostly full time. So April 2017 --- 18 months --> October 2018. if everything went perfectly that is time to ramp up the factory in November and deliver some product in December. But everything isn't going to go perfectly so add the extra Quarter. You arrive in Q1 2019.
Intel and AMD are looking to do something new in Q4 2018 so it would be more than prudent to push to out a quarter incase they screw up. Even if they blow their deadline by 5-10 weeks another Quarter will cover that.
if they were shooting for Q1 2019 and nothing had gone horrible wrong so far then Q1 2019 would still be doable. So their plan is in tact.
More likely seems a WWDC 2019 announcement , if that , and maybe a late 2019 release .
There is no rational reason for them to be shooting for WWDC in any year. This product is going to be 5 years behind schedule to most of the waiting customers come this December.
Five fracking years. Actively coupling your project to extraneous external factor is simply irresponsible. What the project planners should be doing is trying to
decouple this project so stuff that doesn't matter as much as possible. Not picking up extra cruft. It is going to be hard enough to get it out the door with adding to the load.
WWDC doesn't matter to the Mac Pro. It simply doesn't. The new Mac Pro won't be magically successful if released at WWDC and doomed to failure if not. That is just complete hooey.
If there was some major component or some major mechanism of macOS they needed that was tied to WWDC 2019 they absolutely could not decouple from then they could happen to arrive at June 2019. There isn't any. That isn't synced up with Intel's roadmaps. Not synced up with AMD either. There is nothing that is such a huge upside win to wait that long for.
In contrast, the much of the Mac Pro development could spin up on current Intel W and AMD gear and verify on engineering samples in Q3 ( since Intel/AMD shooting for Q4). CPU and GPU are moved out of the critical path since it mostly a derivative of the iMac Pro. ( going off and using components wildly different than the iMac Pro because it puts unnecessary stuff back onto the critical paths. )
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 .
SSDs haven't equated (or past ) HDDs but the price point is about at the level HDDs were in 2007-2008. People bought HDDs then for Mac Pros.
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 .
SSD for 2.5" isn't fast anymore. The vast majority of 2.5 SSDs are SATA based and that simply isn't "fast" anymore.
The primary purpose of the SATA SSDs is to be "very affordable" at this point; not fast.
There are a few high end SAS 2.5" SSDs but they tend to be very expensive because the game there is push them up into the multiple TB range. Speed still isn't the primary selling point. Capacity is (along with very deep pockets to pay for it).
The modern x4 PCI-e v3 SSDs smoke all the 2.5" SATA SSDs in terms of fast. The iMac has an "extra" x4 PCI-e that it doesn't use. It would make sense to make that something folks could just add a simple M.2 drive and have a top speed SSD that wasn't Apple's format hanging off the T2.
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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.
If Apple is targeting at Q1 2019 release they could still announce in Novemeber-December 2018. folks would know, but the people who needed to plan to buy something inside of 2018 would now also now that they won't be buying a upgraded Mac Pro inside of 2018. That is part of what the messaging was about. Telling folks doing 2018 fical planning that this was not it.
The new Mac Pro could fall as early as Q1 2019, but people won't be buying it with 2018 money.
Again I can't think of any rational reason why Apple would purposely add complexity to getting the project out that would require 24 month. You can make a 24 month project a 18 month project very often by just cutting extraneous stuff out of the project. Make it simpler and it will go faster. There is a "simple as possible and no simpler " slippery slope to that but 24 months screams that Apple is trying to do something "spectacular' rather than "right".
Or that they are just pissing around. They have a bunch of part timers on the Mac Pro and they just work on it in their copious spare time. That is the only way they get to 24 months. That is a complete lack of any urgency at all.
