Apple talk dramatic 2018 Mac Pro update amidst multiple controversies

[Cinegain]

Hey, if Apple is the thing that conforts you... power to you! Throw all reasoning out of the Windows.

It's like saying 'you need this car! It's fucking amazing!'... 'but uh... it isn't IKEA proof... and that's like the top most quality I'm looking for in a car'. Different folks, different strokes.

[EduPortas]

Last week I updated my sister's 2010 MacBook Pro with an solid state drive sold by OWC (assembled in Mexico, btw).

The machine has completely revived! It's now a monster.

Sadly, Apple lost a considerable amount of customers when they decided to hard-wire their components to their motherboard.

For me, that's when they crossed the Rubicon (I still use 2012 machines. Good enough for me)

[zetty]

1 hour ago, wolf33d said:

So you say that "because you are not frustrated with a current environment, why should you look elsewhere" and you tell my I am narrow minded? This is quite funny. 

With your thinking, you never move outside of your confort zone, never try something new, never evolve basically. I have the contrary thinking: always get out of my confort zone, and being not frustrated with something would never be a reason for me not to look elsewhere. 

I have lived and worked multiple years in 5 countries on 4 different continents, explored 40+ countries, explored all religions and most cultured and I have the same approach with what brings us here (tech and video): I have been in pocession of cameras from most camera manufacturers out there, used FCPX for months, Premiere Pro, and Resolve... I always give a try to what surrounds me. Exemples could go on but if anything you are probably a lot more narrow minded that I am, but thanks for the judgment and be happy on Winshit  

Jeez, should I now list the number of countries I lived in and my experiences of life to prove a point? :D

At the same time you are trying to imply that using a different OS is "moving out of your comfort zone".. Go figure. Your comfort zone must be pretty tight.

Narrow-mindedness doesn't stem from the fact that you have had broad experiences, it's from your notion that you universally know what's better for everyone, failing to acknowledge the different needs and approaches of other people. Clearly you didn't learn anything from your exploration of all religions..

[docmoore]

I am continually amazed at the lack of congeniality that is exhibited on this forum.

Ad hominem attack is the standard of the day ... disagree with me and I will make you look so low, so incompetent ...

Really guys it is all marketing ... find a platform that works for you ... shut your mouth and show your output.

Ideally if we were all sitting in a pub ... talking then the interchange would be perhaps a bit more civil. Should

be the same here ... 

Started with CPM moved to DOS then to Apple then to Windows then to Unix then to Windows then to Mac OS ....

It is all a window painted onto the reality of the hardware ... nothing more. You like Tomatoe I like tomatoh

But to assume you are my better because of your hardware ... knowledge ... sensibilities ... 

Would love to see a mature discourse on this site that did not degenerate into an immature attack that does nothing to

advance the knowledge of those who hope to be informed not entertained.

Just sayin ...

Bob

[Jimmy]

An Apple v Windows thread turning nasty.... Who'd have guessed :D

They are just tools

[Axel]

6 hours ago, docmoore said:

Ad hominem attack is the standard of the day ... disagree with me and I will make you look so low, so incompetent ...

Really guys it is all marketing ... find a platform that works for you ... shut your mouth and show your output.

Ideally if we were all sitting in a pub ... talking then the interchange would be perhaps a bit more civil. Should

be the same here ...

I actually know how it is when Windows and Mac users sit together. No evangelizing, just respect and acceptance for the other's system. Everybody around is fully aware that this is necessary. Don't frown or shake your head. Don't praise a friend's workflows either (despite your internal disagreement), even this poisons the communication, because people tend to be so touchy (why?) that they sense the false tone immediately and find it unbearably patronizing and dishonest. Keep your mouth shut (as you said). Tell outright that you don't participate in discussions about your or their OS or NLE preference. My New Year's pledge.

But then again, someone makes a remark (I won't repeat them, read above). Keeping my mouth shut isn't easy then. But I will. 

[BTM_Pix]

What I'd like Apple to do is produce an eGPU enclosure. Even a ready filled one if they want to maintain control.

There are new thunderbolt docks with gpu slots around now which are less hacky and considering the daft cost of typical thunderbolt docks they are decent value for money.

If Apple did one that was optimised for fcpx then I'd happily hand over my readies to them. It would be a bit of an old school offline/online edit paradigm but being able to do the edit on my macbook and then plug the eGPU in for the final render would suit me down to the ground. As would plugging it into my old macbook air and breathing some new utility out of that for the same purpose. 

But the other back to the old days thing that interests me is this Liquid Sky project branching off from gaming into video applications. In a nutshell Liquid Sky is cloud computing with crazy spec gpu computers. If it's good enough to satisfy gamers performance wise then it looks promising for our applications. For someone old enough to have written code on teletype that was then executed on the regional university mainframe at night so all the local colleges could share it's performance then remote rendering is definitely a nostalgic concept I could get behind! 

And it's that democratising aspect of it that's the intruiging point really of Liquid Sky for me in that it let's us access extensive and expensive back end power through whatever device we have to hand or can afford (playing top end games from cheap tablets while on the go is a major part of its pitch)

Sometimes we might not have access to the grunt we need for financial reasons but also for practical ones. I'm currently on a train and cutting together some stuff in imovie on the ipad for example. It has a two step convoluted way to get its projects into fcpx for finishing ut I'd love to be able to hit a button and be able to hand it off remotely and have it returned rendered to me. Doing the edit on the ipad is the most efficient thing for me to be doing the edit right now but the device lacks the horsepower to truly be an end to end solution but a cloud element would solve that.

Its that sort of stuff that Apple needs to do to keep everyone onside and offer a tightly integrated approach to recognising that we all not only have different needs but we all have different needs of those different needs at different times!

Truth be told, we're not ALL rendering all the time and we're all in different time zones so if 100 of us on here threw in £300 each instead of spending it on incremental individual upgrades we could build our own Liquid Sky render monster that we could share time on!!!

 

[Tim Sewell]

Mt two-pennorth - I use computers all day, every day (I'm a software developer). My last 2 machines have been Macbook Pros because that's the environment they use on my current contract (when I bought the first one, at the Apple Store in Covent Garden, they guy found out it was my first Macbook and asked me, as we headed for the till, if I was excited! - heh). My previous contract was in a Linux-based shop so I carried on using my 15" stuffed-to-the-gills Dell XPS (which is still going strong for my wife) that I had bought at the beginning of the previous Linux/Windows contract. They're just machines. FCPX is my NLE of choice at the moment because that's what runs best on the machine I have. Hopefully (I bought my new Macbook late last year - don't like the look of the new ones) my next job will require a Windows machine as you can just get a lot more grunt for your money. If I move house and get the space I'll probably build my own desktop for video/photo work. I can't really get excited about either system. You buy what's best for the job you're doing and you learn to use it.

[Kisaha]

Apple's systems are elitistic, closed and esoteric, and you can see the "defense" of the system from their Zealots reach middle ages proportions.

This closeness and lack of choices are not for me. There are thousands of different components you can put on a PC and build it on your own with just minimal knowledge of hardware and software, I found this more liberating than just buying something that others have choose for me, and make me pay 2 or 3 times the price for the same components, that I know how they cost, as they are the same ones I use for my PCs!!

I just wish Linux was a bit better, it is good enough for most things right now, but not so for our specialized work.

There will be other manufacturers and OSes down the line, I want to see this debate in 40 years, will any of those still be relevant?!

"Since 2013, devices running Android have been selling more than Windows, iOS and macOS devices combined."

Mobile devices: Android 87,8% - IOS 11,5% Almost 88% of the mobile devices users are stupid and brutes. We get it.

Desktop Gaming: 95,4% PC - 3.55% MacOS. Yes, just stupid, because game industry isn't like the biggest entertainment industry on the planet already. No, just primates play computer games. I agree.

Desktop/Laptop operating system browsing statistics: MacOS 11.20%, Linix 1.55%. What the rest of humanity use? Who cares? They are not MacOS users, burn in hell.

Apple is just an option. Choose whatever makes your life better, because most people's on the planet, ain't Apple. Oh, but maybe we are just so poor, we can't afford an iPhone, or iShit, so go look at my first sentence then, and read again.

[Shirozina]

2 hours ago, Jimmy said:

An Apple v Windows thread turning nasty.... Who'd have guessed :D

They are just tools

To many the Mac is a lifestyle choice bordering on a cult as a result of a highly effective product development and marketing strategy by Steve Jobs and despite Windows closing the distance with Windows 10 few would argue that there is a cult surrounding windows and the most you can say is that it gets the same job done but is cheaper and more customisable. Desktop workstation machines are now a very niche product reserved for professionals (who have to make rational price vs performance decisions based on multiple units in a studio multi user environment) as most people can carry out everyday tasks that once needed them on phones, tablets and laptops. Mac should be able to divert some resources to a project for a workstation but in today's environment it's difficult to say if it will succeed unless it can significantly leapfrog PC workstations in terms of performance rather than just offering a nice piece of industrial design and an alternative OS. As they are dependent on off the shelf Intel CPU's (not like the old days when they had Motorola offering something unique) and essentially offering the same internal architecture as a PC I can't see it happening myself. 

[cls105]

I own the current flagship iPhone but I hate Apple these days. So glad resolve and premiere are cross platform. I can't stand a company that refuses to share tech.  The lack of prores on windows sucks. We must spend our money on platform agnostic companies.  I just built an amd ryzen 1700 system for cheap. 300 for CPU, $100 mobo, $225 64gb ddr4 ram. I'm using my old 980ti and ssds. Media componer doesn't run so well on ryzen it so I'm thinking of going kaby lake 7700k ($300), and $150 motherboard.  Apple is the only company in the world that has convinced idiots that a modular system is bad.  I like Wozniak (he was actually techy), but Steve jobs was a salesman who sold koolaid to millions of people. Think different my ass, you can't even chose your own hardware like a gpu. 

If i edit at a production company it's usually on a mac.  These companies just don't care about performance anymore. A lot of these places are using iMacs and editing media on gigabit. And of course they disable spotlight on the network so you can't search for shit.  I totally prefer to edit on my cuda enabled windows box off ssds where I scrub through media like butter.  Mac is good for 1 thing now, you can export prores from tons of software.

[Sevak Dilanchian]

By the end of this thread I decided that if I'm being objective, my next machine should be a PC. Cool...oh, hang on, FCPX is the most important app on my machine.

[squig]

They're doing a pissy update after 4 years. LOL. So glad I decided against getting the trash can and bought a second hand 2010 6 core 333Ghz tower. I put a GTX 980, 12 terabyte raid 5, and 2x terabyte SSDs in it. It screams, and cost me half what the trash can and external raid array would've cost. My only regret is that I should've spent a bit more on a 12 core, After Effects rendering is CPU based. The trash can is cool, but it should've been introduced in addition to the towers.

[ND64]

Linux is out of question. For servers and cloud, its the best OS, but for pro photo/video works? No way. Even installing a GPU driver is ultimate IQ test. There was a slight hope for Android tablet or Chrome OS, but nobody even talk about them anymore. Besides, which one of software makers would spend millions of dollars on R&D to rewrite million lines of code for any alternative platform? 

[QMedia]

This is potentially great news. Apple has some very talented people on board, however their myopic behavior over the last few years is astonishing.

If Apple had been on their game, the announcement would have coincided with a product release within weeks not some vague "not this year" comment. Why it has taken Apple two years longer than it should to admit it screwed up the last Mac Pro is mind boggling given their talent and resources.

Imagine if Apple had announced a June release of a Mac Pro that is expandable, upgradable and state of the art powerful. Imagine single or dual AMD Naples CPU'S with 32 to 64 cores. Imagine multiple PCIE slots that can accommodate both Nvidia or AMD graphics cards, multiple M.2 slots, and yes a UHD burner to go along with the revamped version of DVD Studio Pro that can author UHD and Blu-ray disks.

Hopefully Apple will get back in the game this time. Thier relevance with pros depends on it. Every pro knows that Apple blew them off to chase consumer cash. There is no need to sugar coat it...

 

[Bioskop.Inc]

I want my ZX81 back! NOW!!!!!

[silvertonesx24]

2 hours ago, squig said:

My only regret is that I should've spent a bit more on a 12 core, After Effects rendering is CPU based. The trash can is cool, but it should've been introduced in addition to the towers.

That would have been a waste of money. Since Adobe removed multi-processing after CC 2014, good luck getting it to use more than 200% (out of 2400% possible) CPU. Maybe on a good day it'll use a third of the total CPU power.

[fuzzynormal]

3 hours ago, Sevak Dilanchian said:

By the end of this thread I decided that if I'm being objective, my next machine should be a PC. Cool...oh, hang on, FCPX is the most important app on my machine.

Hackintosh for you!

[karoliina]

I used to have Hackintosh. It was really fast with Blackmagic raw. However, every time I rebooted, I could not be sure if it will boot up again. Some silent Apple update, reboot, nothing works anymore. Have to go trouble shooting on command line on recovery mode and delete some kernel module (driver) files that had magically appeared after browsing workaround tutorials circa half hour. Then it booted. And same next time. Got tired of it. Genuine Mac boots every time if the hardware is not broken.

Of course, better choice with components could have resulted in more reliable Hackintosh. But I did not try that.

[squig]

7 hours ago, silvertonesx24 said:

That would have been a waste of money. Since Adobe removed multi-processing after CC 2014, good luck getting it to use more than 200% (out of 2400% possible) CPU. Maybe on a good day it'll use a third of the total CPU power.

Na, I'm still using CC 2014 for that very reason.