Marco Arment: “After two years, the Mac Pro was ‘updated’ today, sort of: now we can choose slightly faster two-year-old CPUs at the top end, and the other two-year-old CPU options are cheaper now. That’s about it. No Xeon E5 CPUs, no USB 3, no Thunderbolt. They’re even shipping the same two-year-old graphics cards. Same motherboard, slightly different CPU options from 2010. That’s it. The message is clear: Apple doesn’t give a shit about the Mac Pro.” Paint, red, scout, girl.
Maybe I’m a bit too curious for my own good, but I thought this would be the huge advantage in switching to intel chips : no excuse for not using the latest and greatest chips.
I’m sure the profit margins have only gone up on using those parts. So what gives? Are they that lazy, or that greedy?
Although the profit margin has increased, it isn’t a notable difference. Xeon’s don’t drop in price by more than 10% over their lifetime for NIB parts.
Apple’s high-end users are victims of Apple’s success with phones and tablets. Although the absolute revenue from Mac Pro sales is likely increasing the relative contribution towards revenue is dropping like a rock. Apple, like any well-run company, invests resources in areas that benefit them the most. There is, however, great danger in becoming overly dependent on a single market segment. If for nothing other than reasonable diversification Apple should continue to invest in machines geared towards content creators (and not just content consumers).
Sadly, if you read books such as Innovator’s Dilemma, you will realize how incredibly difficult it will be to make this happen. There is great inertia that must be overcome.
I was also greatly disappointed by the Mac Pro update and will continue hackintoshing along for my large memory needs working on stitched panos.
Ironically, the OSx86 scene could save Apple from themselves.
Whenever I read your posts I can’t help but read them in Spock’s voice in my head… it adds weight to everything you say.
😀
Edited 2012-06-12 18:52 UTC
It’s largely down to the maturing of the market…
A few years ago, you bought the most powerful system you could afford because a more powerful system made day to day things tolerable, let you do some things that were totally impractical on lower end hardware and provided a machine that would take a bit longer to become totally obsolete.
Now, for 99% of users a lowend piece of hardware is more than adequate to their needs… Only a small number of enthusiasts and specialist users require the high end equipment.
Right but that also means a cheaper Ivy Bridge desktop processors are probably better suited to most peoples needs than Xeon.
There may have been a time where a couple Xeons on a motherboard was big deal but now with multi core CPU’s and hyperthreading paying all that extra money for a Xeon work station seems silly.
Unfortunately for Apple they don’t offer anything else in that segment because the iMac mini doesn’t have much of a graphics card or dual monitor support out of the box.
In my case, I would be okay with the 6 to 8 cores of a single socket but need massive amounts of memory. Having 12 to 16 slots allows me to get sufficient capacity using 8GB DIMMs. Frankly, the Mac Pro having only 64GB capacity is a bit lame. The 2010 generation of Intel Xeon motherboards generally had 192GB capacity. (2 sockets x 3 channels/socket x 2 slots/channel x 16GB DIMM/slot = 192GB).
All of the technologies necessary to build an updated Mac Pro are also available on non-Apple machines (including Thunderbolt). Apple should not need to dedicate as much engineering effort today as would have been required two years ago. They should consider simply partnering with SuperMicro to OEM them a board with some extra IO headers for FireWire 800 and ThunderBolt and shove it in the current case.
This is just another chapter in the Apple’s war against general purpose computers. They will slowly kill their old “desktop” product line, and OSX, in favor of iOS and more restricted hardware.
Apple knows all too well that their tablets will soon become a competition against their own laptops as ARM processors get more powerful. And they don’t want keep competing product lines.
The dead blow in Apple’s old product line will be when they address the problem of how to productively develop software on a tablet while keeping all restrictions of that platform for the end users.
Apple has the most popular laptop on the market – indeed most of Apple’s models are in the top 10 best selling laptops. Apple just introduced yet a new laptop which Thom and everyone is raving about. Apple has the best selling all in one desktop computer in the iMac.
And to assuage concerns about the Mac Pro Tim Cook today replied to some random persons email.
All these computers run Mac OS X (a *NIX derivative), Linux, and various version of Windows, NetBSD, and probably some other BSD’s if your into that sort of thing.
Let’s also add that Apple actively develops Mac OS X for said computers which is updated far more often and at a much lower cost them the only other consumer grade OS – Microsoft Windows. Apple just announced that $20 will get you an upgrade for as many machines as you own.
But hey, why bother with the facts and shit, right? Let’s just go with FUD to play to the peanut gallery.
PS. The MacPro update was totally half assed as Thom said but it’s more likely to do with the fact that it just does not make enough money for Apple to redesign the thing more often then some conspiracy theory.
Edited 2012-06-12 04:35 UTC
So you want facts?
What about the amount of Mac OS X with failed QA, like the cleartext passwords from last month?
In which markets is Apple selling so hot laptops? Here in many European countries I usually visit, I seldom see Mac laptops being used.
If you watch Dutch television you’re very likely to spot some Apple logo’s, mostly laptops. And this isn’t product placement in some series, but ones that are actually used.
I must admit most people I know with a laptop don’t have a MacBook, but they do have very crappy Acer ones. Crappy because they keep breaking down. But they were cheap.
Apparently many Dell tech people use MacBooks.
I have 2 MacBooks, but don’t use them so much anymore since I have an iPad.
The problem with that statement is most people compare a Macbook to the cheapest possible PC notebook. (why?)
Ofcourse the cheapest possible PC notebook won’t be nearly as fast or nearly as reliable or nearly as sturdy. It’s like a third of the price, so you get a third of the value, or even less since it’s the cheapest possible, meaning the crappiest possible. Compare a PC notebook with the same price as a Macbook, and things get more interesting. In that segment you can choose from either hardware with way more power than the Mac, or a sturdy, reliable chassis, or a nice design, or in many cases a pretty nice mix of everything. Many people praise the new Macbook Pro with Retina Display. But the damn thing cost a shit-tonne of money, so _ofcourse_ it’s going to have a nice display. Anything less would be insane. There are PC notebooks with insanely high resolution displays aswell, but they also cost alot of money.
Edited 2012-06-12 17:01 UTC
I think the people for which the retina MacBook is intended have loads of money. They’re most likely photo and video professionals.
The only thing your buying is the display, it’s just a ordinary MacBook Pro otherwise.
It’s the same as with the first MacBook Air. IIRC it was even more expensive and the only thing you would buy was less weight and less size. The only people that would tend to buy it were people who fly a lot, meaning they probably had money too.
Yea, although that won’t stop my annoying collegue from going on and on how “Apple innovated again! PC’s suck!”, etc..
I often think work would be more fun and nicer if you didn’t have any co-workers.
For example I do system administration and my work would be great without users! I could redesign the entire system without people complaining or nor understanding stuff.
Yesterday I had one who claimed that all her files were gone. She was trying to open an Excel file using Word. It’s great story swapping ammunition with other IT people, but when it happens it’s very annoying!
I know that feeling all too well.
Sometimes I wish I could just be left alone in a room, doing some programming or admin work or something, and not have to deal with the actual users/customers/annoying coworkers.
One can dream..
We have a lot of traffic in The Netherlands, but when it’s a holiday period the roads aren’t so busy… yet life goes on. I therefor think most people are actually useless. Get rid of them and we get rid of traffic jams!
Haha, brilliant!
The sad thing is, there is probably a pretty high degree of truth to that.
Sometimes things go/work better when certain people are away. We all probably know a couple of those.
This is certainly the case for IT. If there are no managers or directors all is fine. If they are present you waste a lot of time explaining stuff and convincing them that what they want makes no sense and why your idea does.
I’m pretty sure a few skilled people can replace loads of unskilled once. A bookkeeping department of 4 unskilled people can be run by 2 who are.
Alas in my country it’s hard to fire people, even if they are totally useless and as stupid as someone who is very stupid.
Yea, it’s the same in Sweden..
It’s very hard to fire someone, you need a very good reason. Unfortunately stupidity is in most cases not one.
Macbooks are very unreliable
True, but they are still cheaper than Macs when comparing overall technical specs.
Just check this Lenovo ThinkPad W520 mobile graphics workstation. It has the same price range as Apple’s offerings, yet it offers the double the juice in computing power and connectivity.
http://tinyurl.com/cgfcvvp
And you’re still falling for small print… it’s easy to have best selling laptops (within PR-delineated area of interest) when you count all variants under one or few; what with other manufacturers are different models…
And how conveniently you steer clear of some nice thing about Windows, like that you need less to update: a major release (or sometimes even two) previous to current one, and all is still perfectly fine – with that OS just minimally upping in the first place the price of inexpensive machine, whole (lower) costs you just ignore (of course Apple can lure you with that PR of low license price, they get their larger cut somewhere else – you yourself often gloat that Apple has decisively highest profit margins, that they rip you off better, but seemingly you can;t connect the dots when this could end up uncomfortably)
With OSX, devs quickly jump on requiring latest releases for no good reason, despite much smaller changes; Apple abandons them quicker, too.
All for a system with worse support – if you want to do many things, you still have to get that Win license.
Could you be… twisting facts to suit you, to sound nicer?
Edited 2012-06-19 00:18 UTC
Honestly? I wouldn’t be surprised if now that Jobs is gone Cook ends up dropping the pro line entirely. it simply isn’t a big profit margin item and the cost to update the line, especially now that Intel has slit the throat of Nvidia and run them out of the chipset business, is simply not worth the effort expended.
Mark my words in a year or so Cook will proclaim the iPad 5 “The new mac” and other than a couple of consumer units macs will simply be phased out. With the consumer line frankly he can use ancient chips and nobody will care, because for consumers Intel has been insanely overpowered for several revs now. This is the opposite of the pros, who NEED the fastest chips they can get for content creation and media manipulation.
Even though I’m not an Apple guy I do feel bad for the pros, nobody likes spending a ton of money only to get support yanked out from under them, but when they turned FCP into iMovie and killed the Apple Server most pros should have seen the writing on the wall. It was Jobs that liked Apple being “The machine where movie magic is made” while Cook simply hasn’t shown any care about that side at all.
This is just apple trying to kill the computer as we know it. They sell consumer goods, they want you to have a device to listen to music, one to browse the web and another one to use as a phone. All made by them.
The MacbookPro with retina display is the new Mac Pro. What a joke. Trading Xeon cpus and ECC memory for standard consumer parts that are “good enough”.
Indeed. Looks like I will be building a SuperMicro X9 hackintosh to go along with my current X8 hackintosh. The X9DA7 looks pretty good to me.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9DA7.cfm
Edited 2012-06-12 01:03 UTC
May I ask a question? Other than simply hatred of all things MSFT what EXACTLY does a Hackentosh give you over Windows, especially in the professional workstation line?
It isn’t like the new FCP is better than similar software on Windows, in fact we’ve seen many jumping ship because the lack of features like tape support made the new FCP inferior to what they could get with Windows, and Win 7 Pro is not only rock solid stable but the X64 version can hold IIRC 192Gb of RAM which is more than all but the super wealthy could ever afford to put in a single unit, so why?
I’m honestly curious, because looking at the specs of that board its a fricking monster and one would think if you were sinking the insane amount of cash that you are into a machine such as that you’d want your OS and software to be supported whereas with a Hackentosh you are totally on your own. Because no matter how much you pay for your pro software nobody is gonna open a support ticket if you run into a problem on a hackentosh. Finally there is the matter of software down the line and it appears Cook really isn’t interested in pro users for Apple anymore so most likely all the pro users and thus software innovation will be on the Windows side from now on, so how does spending all that money only to put a hacked OS make any sense?
Good questions. I am primarily a *nix user, Linux specifically, but also many other *nixes due to my job, which involves nearly every modern UNIX variant. I am a command-line junkie, but I also need certain pieces of commercial software, primarily bits from Adobe. This limits my choices to Windows and Mac. Between the two, I find that Macports gets me closer to my ideal than Cygwin. The way I use OS X looks more like I was using Linux than Mac OS X. I make very little use of the mouse. Its not the ideal, which would be for Adobe software to all run natively on Linux (which would rock beyond belief), but for the time being it floats my boat.
I make use of quite a few custom programs and scripts in my work. Porting them to work on Mac OS X required very little effort. I have previously attempted to port to Cygwin and Windows and found the task much more painful.
Agreed, no one would take a support ticket from a Hackintosh. Thankfully, I have multiple real Apple machines (Macbook Pro, iMac) that I can verify any issue on. If it doesn’t repro, then indeed I would be in a bind. Thankfully that hasn’t happened yet.
I will still get a MacBook Pro 10,1 because my MacBook Pro 6,2 with its paltry 8GB RAM and dual-core CPU makes build and stitch times rather unpleasant (between 5 and 15 minutes, depending on the project).
Question, have you tried Powershell? if you are a CLI junkie PS would probably be more what you are looking for than Cygwin as its designed OOTB for server and desktop management and from what I’ve been told (I’m no longer in corporate IT thank God) is quite easy to script for and gives good access to the Windows APIs. Don’t know how easy it’d be to convert scripts from one to the other but if you’d like a more bash like prompt and the ability to run apps I tripped over this that looks promising..
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/224166/bash-like-prompt-in-Powe…
It just seems to me, and i could be wrong, that if you are doing the high end pro work that such a monster desktop would be naturally built for a dual boot with Windows for the pro software and Linux for the day to day (Or even using something like Wubi or CoLinux to simply run Linux in Windows) would probably be the smarter move long term than running a Hackentosh because watching cook I really get the feeling he just doesn’t like the Pro market like Jobs did and with more and more pros switching to the Windows side for the more cutting edge pro software that Apple may not have the software you need to work for that much longer.
Like I said i hate to see it happen, i know how much money pros invest in their tools and had to support some NOS Win2K boxes for a couple of years while the graphics artists got weaned off Xres for Photoshop and Corel, but sadly it looks like going forward Apple is really gonna be a consumer product more than anything and I’ve found that for at least graphic arts and engineering that Win 7 pro actually makes a pretty solid platform to build on for a workstation.
Thanks for the link.
Yes, I have tried PowerShell. I have tens of thousands of lines of scripts I have developed over the last decade+. I simply do not have the time to port a huge system designed to configure and execute every program I use regularly, such as compilers, across AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X (and Tru64 and IRIX).
Famous quote: “Its easier to port a shell than to port a shell script.” -Larry Wall
If I could just bend Windows a bit more it might be acceptable. Maybe I will create a framework to make it behave exactly like a UNIX system for my scripts.
Semi-random moderately off-topic remark:
I must admit that I actually enjoy using PathFinder as a graphical file management tool. It is the only graphical file management tool I have ever enjoyed using. For f***s sake why can’t any OS vendor include a decent graphical file management tool with features like multiple file move and rename using regular expressions, dates, etc and file stacks you can push and pop from.
I agree with your comments about Cook. I am worried he thinks like chrome dome (Ballmer). I may end up having Windows again someday, but honestly with the way 8 is shaping up even that may be rubbish for someone with a 5120×1600 desktop.
BTW, I am not in IT. I create tools for high-speed loading and analysis of temporal (time series) data.
Thanks for your reply.
Edited 2012-06-14 06:16 UTC
This is the main reason, while I like Apple’s design and NeXTStep’s reincarnation as Mac OS X, I just care about Windows and UNIX systems at home/work.
It looks like some newer parts. Non-update because they don’t care.
That was disappointing. I were planning to switch my main development box from old MBP to MacPro, but now I’m it seems like I’d have to just get new laptop.
Or at last to give a try to hackintosh.
I guess most people don’t see the difference. The Xeon E5 CPUs begin with “E5-26xx”, not the two-year-old “E56xx” series!
And there is a big difference…
“Paint, red, scout, girl.” – I don’t know what this means. No seriously, I really don’t… Could someone explain, please? Thom?
Sorry for the off topic…
Answered here: http://www.osnews.com/thread?515046
Thanks.
+1 me too – i was actually reading through the comments almost entirely to find this question asked and answered. now i find it only asked… anyone want to enlighten us?
Answered earlier in the comments by Priest. He referred us to http://www.osnews.com/thread?515046.
Why all the panic, a simple look a the macbook pro with retina display, shows 2 thunderbolts and 2 usb3 ports. http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/
And the RETINA display, thats a big selling point in my book, i don’t own a macbook, but the retina display is a reason why i might reconsider.
Mac Pro, not MacBook Pro. You know those workstations that a lot of media companies have sunk sizable investments into?
A worried customer has asked Tim Cook about the Mac Pro.
Tim Cook answered:
“Our pro customers are really important to us…don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for later next year.”
So there will be something new coming for Pro users, but we’ll have to wait till 2013.
“We’ve got something great for all our pro customers… We are stopping production of the Macbooks. The iPad is the future of computing.
Trust us.
Well, you don’t have the choice anyway. Suck it.”
Not just next year, but “later next year”. Which I interpret as “December 31st, 2013”, being an optimist an all. 😉
well, I plan on buying one in 6 months, it is good to hear the graphics card is not changing. the rumor is that the update with have nvidia, I have lost lots of laptops to the furnace hot nvidia’s quite frankly I dont want to game that much to melt my laptop down. that is the main reason I want to go with APPLE because the hardware is more durable
I pretty much doubt that e-mail is legit.
http://www.osnews.com/story/26061/Apple_gives_iOS_6_sneak_preview_u…
http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/
Nevermind… not too into Macs. I mistook 2 different products
Also the 17″ Macbook is consigned to history.
If Cook genuinely has a pro option in the works, might Apple be unifying on a single ‘development/pro’ Mac and the rest are just consumer goods.
I am a computer enthusiast, my house runs Windows, Mac, Linux and BSD. I have purchased about 6-8 laptops over the last five years. I have not purchased a desktop. I probably never will again. It’s all laptops for content creation, and tablet/phone for consumption. I realize there is a VERY small percentage of people who require monstrous desktops with 64-256GB of ram. I really wouldn’t expect any consumer-oriented company to put a whole lot of R&D into the desktops. This is where the niche companies come in.
Uhhh…why? you LIKE being stuck with a speed limited MOBILE CPU, less memory, slower HDDs, less ability to upgrade (if you can at all) and generally paying more for less?
Because THAT is the laptop in a nutshell. it will ALWAYS be slower than the desktop, ALWAYS cost more money for less speed, and will ALWAYS be optimized for battery life above all. if you are not constantly out and about it simply makes no sense to purposely hamstring yourself like that, not when that $450 desktop i just put together for my oldest boy could drink the milkshake of a $1500 laptop while making it cry. The performance difference between mobile parts and desktop parts isn’t even funny anymore, its like putting your HS football team against the Denver broncos and expecting them to survive for more than 5 minutes, it just doesn’t make sense.
I can see having a laptop or netbook for when you need mobile computing, heck i have a netbook myself because its so handy to have a computer that can go anywhere, weighs practically nothing, and gets over 6 hours on a charge even when playing 720p video. But I’d be the first to admit that the netbook with its low power dual core and 5400RPM HDD simply can’t hold a candle to my hexacore, its not in the same ballpark, its not even the same sport. so i just don’t get why you’d want to cripple yourself other than some sort of unfounded snobbery when it comes to laptops.
I just don’t need a desktop AND a laptop. I don’t buy Apple laptops, so for about $500 I can get a good dual-core laptop with 4-8gb of Ram. I use to use desktops as media servers, but a $50 Roku box does that now. YMMV
For me, the Mac Pro is necessary for IO. No laptop is going to ship with 4 drive bays. Not everyone can role with a laptop.
I definitely agree, but in terms of market, I think those like you that need a desktop for daily use are a shrinking target.
No Xeon E5 CPUs, no USB 3, no Thunderbolt. They’re even shipping the same two-year-old graphics cards
You gotta be effin kidding me
It probably has more to do with no integrated graphics on Xeon. This would be required to make DisplayPort through Thunderbolt works the best.
Otherwise, it would be messy to do that via third-party graphics, likely requiring a weird cabling system. OSX also has a method for using graphics chips in a manner similar to nVidia’s Optimus, which may also indicate that future Mac Pros will use exclusively nVidia chips, unless Apple’s implementation is generic enough to work with any add-in board.