But the Mac Pro was always for a highly niche market. Even the cheapest Intel-based Mac Pro is $6000. And that's with a pretty meager 8-core CPU that gets worse single-core and multi-core Geekbench scores than the M1 Max found in a $2000 Mac Studio.
Fair, but there's still a big difference between the base model currently costing $6,000 and a base model that will cost over $10,000. That's a 70% price hike.
It's possible that they're positioning the $4000 Mac Studio as the replacement for the entry-level $6000 Mac Pro, and the $10,000+ Apple Silicon Mac Pro is a replacement for the upmarket SKUs.
If the M2 Extreme is to the M2 Ultra what the M1 Ultra is to the M1 Max, namely that it's just two chips pasted together, then the M2 Extreme might start with 128 GB of RAM (Max: 32 GB, Ultra: 64 GB). That alone is a $1000+ upgrade to the current Mac Pro.
That “price hike” depends on how many people buy the base model. If 90% of customers were spending $10k+ anyway, it might make economic sense to just not offer a model at the $6k price point.
I wonder if it's just more of a 'it's not where the market is' thing. Working in tech and creative industries even previous to the garbage can there was a dramatic shift in people just opting into laptops instead of desktops. With only the people with really demanding workflows sticking with the desktops. Now I mostly only see mac desktops in video production contexts (editing stations, compositing/effects, 3d.. maybe you'd also see that in high end audio production as well).
As offices have changed over the years with more hot desking etc. it's hard justifying a desktop machine... not to mention the pandemic. So maybe apple made a conscious decision. Keep the mac mini to serve a lower end mostly stationary workforce or for installation type work, kill the whole middle-to-lower-highend desktop line and cater to a high end 'studio' workstation.
Yup. I asked for an OG intel cheese-grater at an old job.
The boss blinked and said something along the lines of "we're not spending that kind of money for your system" and I pointed out that with 16gb of ram but otherwise base config, it was about the same price and a much better deal performance-wise than a Macbook Pro. Xeons versus an intel mobile i5, and the widest/fastest memory bus around at the time? No contest.
The water-cooled ones were an absolute shitshow...Apple was pushing the edge too hard on that. AIO coolers are still kinda hit-or-miss (the good, well-made ones are fine.)
Yup. My 2006 Mac Pro (first gen intel mac pro, the original cheese grater tower) cost me under $3000. IIRC, that plus a 24" Dell display added up to $3k total, or $4400 in today's money.
> that gets worse single-core and multi-core Geekbench scores than the M1 Max found in a $2000 Mac Studio.
That's also because they didn't bother updating it for years. Just like the previous trashcan model.
I don't really understand how Apple gets away with that. The people that spend this kind of money to get top of the line hardware are the same ones that are ok buying 4-year-old hardware at introduction price???
underpowered and overpriced ;) This irks me a little bit from time to time. But right now we're in a sweet spot where used 2010-2020 Intel hardware can be had for pretty cheap:
Apple MacBook Pro 13in Core i5 Retina 2.7GHz (MF840LL/A), 8GB Memory, 256GB Solid State Drive (Renewed) $379.99
I wanted a 90's era Powerbook so bad. The 2015 is a great machine in 2022. Over the years I heard the elders say it: buy used on the cycle if you can't afford the newer gen. It's really true. And I rarely hear someone who buys the expensive loaded kit complain, even 10 years later. This is how they get away with it. I think I must have learned Linux attempting to rescue my Windows systems, haha. Now I want to rant about Darwin...
Why though? M2 Extreme would be cheaper for Apple than the current Mac Pro chips it buys from Intel.
If Apple believed it has to sell it for 10k for the single reason of avoiding Mac Studio canibalization, and at the same time Apple believed 10k is too high for the customers, then Apple would kill the product.
The implication in the article is that M2 Extreme would not be cheaper, but would cost substantially more than these Intel chips. It would also perform far better.
I don't think that implication is clear, but even so I don't understand why Gurman believes that. Apple margins improved with Apple Silicon transition.
Apple margins may have improved, but the M2 Extreme that Gurman posits would be a beast of a chip and much more expensive to produce:
> The company made the decision because of both the complexity and cost of producing a processor that is essentially four M2 Max chips fused together. It also will help Apple and partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. save chip-production resources for higher-volume machines.
I think the limit would be on the package rather than the chip itself; the Ultra is already two Max dies in a single package. I wonder if this means multiple-socket motherboards (historically used for SMP) are again viable for this class of systems.
Apple's foothold in video production is a delicate thing and it seems prone to disruption by a player able to offer a macOS comfort with generic x86 prices.
Isn’t that a decision Apple would have made years ago? I don’t think they can be years into design and still working on NRE in an effort to bring NRE down.
TSMC is said to be charging $20k for a 3nm wafer, and initial yields for a large die size made on a brand spanking new process node wouldn't be expected to be great.
The target market for that screen are buying the VESA mount, but Apple didn't include the VESA mount and added it as an add-on, I'm not sure why; meaning the "$600 Monitor stand upgrade" - which is basically to prevent people buying it as a monitor unless they're going for "Luxury" - became $1,000.
The Pro Display XDR is competing with $40,000 screens for tv/movie production- and studios that use displays like that swap them out quite often because they lose their calibration; they have rows of VESA mounts.
I think you missed the part where I mentioned that it's not really meant to be a bargain, the bargain is the screen. The "luxury stand" is purely a fashion accessory, because anyone who would actually buy the stand is not buying the screen for it's intended purpose (or at least from the target demographic).
It's like buying one of those artic polar watches that can go to 150M that's gold plated.
The gold plating is not helping you in that situation, whoever is buying the gold plated edition of that watch is buying it as a fashion accessory, not as an expedition watch.
Is the monitor stand advertised as a luxury good or as a basic necessity because maybe that is a source of confusion, especially if it's presented as a default accessory.
You can buy it with nothing, with a relatively cheap VESA adapter, or a stand for desktop use cases.
The high-end display market is niche; using such a display with a stand to sit on a desk is even more niche. It's a very low volume stand but it also has to be relatively good in both form and function so that people don't whinge that they got what feels like a flimsy $300 monitor's stand for their $5k monitor.
Who buys the stand? Unusual pro uses where they're better off with a stand than a VESA mount; and people who are just looking for the highest end "fanciest" monitor ever.
As has been stated ad nauseam (and you seem to be ignoring) it's a red herring. You instead spend $200 for the VESA adapter and put it on a monitor arm. Which is reusable for your next monitor (and the monitor after that, and the monitor after that etc. etc.)
Heck, I can't remember the last monitor I had that I kept the stand - it goes back in the box, and into storage until the warranty expires and then it goes in the trash. The Monitor goes on a VESA mount arm.
The bully always accuses the the victim of what they themselves are guilty of.
This chatter about VESA mount arms and if you buy them or not is irrelevant. The price of the monitor stand as stated by Apple what is being discussed.
In other words. If you buy it to put it on a desk, you are probably the equivalent of a suburban dweller buying a Ram 3500 pickup with dual rear wheels. So, it is better this stand looks good and expensive because that's the whole point of your purchase.
Call a spade a spade: a device that is designed to compete with other devices 4x the price has has an aggressively priced _optional_ “luxury” stand for idiots who want to brag, and you’re mad at Apple?
Why? Did they force you to buy one? I keep telling you the target market for these; A: doesn’t need a stand & B: wouldn’t use it if it was included.
It’s for people cosplaying as high end video production people; or playing into the “fashion” side of Apple.
Why are people so up in arms about Apple trying to be a tech company and a fashion company? Evaluate their products coldly and if they have value to you then buy them, if not: don’t.
That stand by all rights has no value to anyone: but the same is true of SUPREME clothing or those trendy Fendi handbags.
Get over yourself, it’s all just tools; and a $5k monitor that can do the job of a $40k one is a good value to someone. Just not to you, and that’s fine.
I also don’t need to buy a $3,000 phone skin. But people buy that shit too.
>a device that is designed to compete with other devices 4x the price
That itself is marketing spin. It's not like studios are throwing away their reference monitors for the apple display. You can design anything to compete; winning is the important bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtd7UzLJHrU
The Mac Pro is already in the extreme niche. The current Intel-based Mac Pro starts at $6000.
That almost-doubling from the already insanely expensive machine could push it past a breaking point for a lot of current customers though, I don't know.
When the Mac Pro came out it was the fastest Mac that existed, but those Intel Chips were already dated and were being roundly beaten by AMD chips of the era.
The "killer feature" was the encoding acceleration card, but a faster variant is available inside Apple Silicon.
I'm not sure where the cut-off is, but I think the M1 Max (Not ultra) is also faster than the Mac Pro 2019.
> I can't think of a workflow that would be better served on a local mac with 1.5TiB of ram
I can think of a few, but they all involve terabytes of data sitting on local storage. At the terabyte sizes, it starts to take more time to transfer the data to the cloud instance than to process it with a beefy workstation.
If you take into account that $6000 when the Mac Pro came out adjusted for inflation is now roughly $7000, then the price increase is “only” around 40%, or even less when the new Mac Pro is eventually released.
That's a poor example. The 14" is the true successor and that starts at $1999.
EDIT: since I can't respond - I meant the latest and greatest in that size class. Back then we had that 13" and the 15" rMBP. Now we have the 14" and 16" M1. The 13" MBP is a low cost entry w/ a legacy chassis.
I don't disagree computer costs can fluctuate, but generally where there are leaps forward in design and capability they do go up in price, perhaps not keeping inline w/ inflation though.
... and it's not like the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro or Studio machines are low end. They're blazing fast. It's very much a niche market since anyone demanding even more power can easily just build a Linux box with 2X the power for 1/4 the price or use cloud.
Yeah but what music production workflow needs the power of an “extreme” chip? The M1 Max and Pro (not to mention Ultra) are already practically overkill for the vast majority of musical workflows. Many producers work on plain M1 Airs as when everything has enough functional power, the lack of a fan becomes the most desirable feature.
Film composers. Absolutely absurd track counts, plus usually working in quad or 5.1. A majority of the big ones have long since moved to using multiple Windows machines, but most of them did so begrudgingly. For a long time, the usual choice was a Mac Pro, but the Xeons were never a great choice from a processing standpoint -- they just enabled the massive amounts of RAM needed for said absurd track counts, though ECC was an unnecessary added expense. Musicians tend to prefer macOS for a variety of reasons, and the Mac Studio is a breath of fresh air, finally giving us something we actually need.
That said, the Mac Studio still doesn't quite enable everything to be loaded on one machine, so the PC farms are still in use; worse, the primary software used to utilize those PC farms, Vienna Ensemble Pro, isn't yet Apple Silicon native, so...for the time being, the Mac Studio still isn't quite ready for prime time. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro would likely enable finally moving to using a single machine running macOS with the CPU performance and amount of RAM needed, so you best believe that film composers will move to it in droves once it comes out, whatever the price, as VEP being native or not will no longer be a factor.
Source: was a fairly successful film composer myself until I developed an ear condition called Hyperacusis, now working as a programmer writing custom tools for my peers, and as a tech consultant designing their rigs.
Yeah that actually makes a ton of sense. I almost added a flippant addendum to my post along the lines of “unless you’re running 1000 orchestral VSTs at once”.
And sure enough, that is a real workflow! Thanks for the knowledge.
It absolutely was for a long time. There’s a number of studios that even still have old PowerMac and cheese grater Intel towers chugging along in some capacity, and audio professionals were among the loudest to protest the “trash can” Mac Pro’s lack of expansion slots.
Not sure but two or three years ago I watched some videos from an audio engineer who migrated from the trash can to the 2019 cheese grater and he seemed pretty happy. He ditched several Thunderbolt enclosures and filled his tower to the brim with cards.
I’m still using a 2012 max pro upgraded to 2x 6 core 3.6ghz and 128gb ram.
I have 12tb of storage, nvme ssd and an optical burner!
I’ve put this machine together over a few years and total cost is 3k Aud.
They’re still great value, this machine can still run drivers for hardware from 2005 (with FireWire!). I can run any os from snow leopard to big sure. I can put a Thunderbolt card in it. I can put most GFX cards.
I have a laptop for my performances, but in the studio, this thing is a beast and I hope it works for quite a few more years as a replacement will be very expensive.
I would imagine it is at least a segment. While real-time audio is possible in Linux and other BSD aside from MacOS, the frustration comes when wanting to work with proprietary software. Since around Windows 10 many people have been satisfied with the latency of a beefy enough system, but an i5/8gb 2015 era Mac will still run real-time, inter-application as well as aggregate audio devices flawlessly. If you ever tried to work with audio in Windows leading up to this point... yeah. Anyway Bitwig is awesome and runs in Ubuntu with cheap PC hardware! Now if we could just get Native Instruments involved. Most class-compliant USB interfaces work in Ubuntu in my experience.
I don't really accept that. So what if it's $10K? Even if they doubled the price, so what? There are lots of firms that would outfit their studios with dozens of $20K Mac Pros. In 1996/7, the ANS/700, running a special version of AIX, was upwards of $25K. Not many were sold, and yet the ANS group was still profitable. Steve Jobs killed it along with A/UX in his return.
This "$10K is too expensive" line doesn't fly. Right now, just upgrading a Mac Pro processor can push the price over $13K. Again, so what? I'm certain there were more than a handful $50K configured 2019 Mac Pros sold. This kind of thing is expensive for the individual, but for a business it's merely a commodity. $50K is cheap because it couldn't even pay the salary of one developer for a year, and the Mac Pro is useful for at least a few years, so cost is more like $16K/yr. That's an absolutely nothing business expense.
And it is relatively less than what one would pay for, say, an sgi workstation years ago. Overall, I don't think it's the price that is off-putting for a pro.
> Not many were sold, and yet the ANS group was still profitable.
Profitability isn't sufficient for a company like Apple. It has to be the best use of these resources - it needs to be more profitable than dedicating the team to work on something else at Apple.
I don't think that was it. Jobs wouldn't tolerate any other UNIX at Apple except NeXTSTEP. He killed A/UX while still in negotiations for Apple to purchase NeXT. I don't even think Apple worked on those versions of AIX. IBM likely provided it under contract. ANS only ever ran AIX and NetBSD.
I didn’t say it was too expensive, I said it was a niche product - resources are tight at Apple, and it looks like we’re heading into a recession so they are concentrating on the products that sell in the millions rather than others
The talent behind M1 left Apple years ago, because they weren't giving enough stocks, bonuses. So, Apple is left with fixers. I don't expect Apple to bring another revolution in chips.
If they can make Qualcomm competitive with the Apple SoC's that would be great for everyone that isn't Apple, and by extension, the market as a whole. Here's hoping.
Most people on the Internet, inclusive but not limited to HN over estimated the lead Apple has.
The Cortex X3 at TSMC N4 used in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 clocked at 3.26Ghz gets you about ~1500 GB5 Single Core at ~4W.
The Apple A16 on the same TSMC N4 clocked at 3.6Ghz gets you about ~1900 GB5 Score using ~5W.
The Cortex X3 is much smaller in die size, and only just started optimising specifically for AArach64. Compared to Apple which is on their forth or fifth iteration. I would not be surprised if the Cortex X4 breaks the 1800 barrier using under 5W. Compared to a few years ago Apple SoC vs Snapdragon where single core performance differ by more than 2x. The projected difference between the two will be less than 20%.
The more interesting question would be, what happens when Cortex X4 and Cortex X5 reaches these sort of performance, which is good enough to be used in PC and only cost a a few dollars per core in licensing?
> what we really need are those other blocks available under license from someone akin to ARM.
There are plenty to choose from. Samsung or Mediatek didn't invent all the stuff in their SoC, and neither did Apple. GPU IPs are available from ARM ( Mali ) and IMG ( PowerVR ). FPGA form Lattice which Apple are using. DSP and other 5G modem solution from CEVA. There are plenty of options to choose from. And as far as I am concern, none of them are as far ahead, or as difficult to overcome than CPU design.
I have no horse in this race, and.. isn't there a lot of backroom reason to cast suspicion, fear, uncertainty and doubt on Apple about CPU and chip design?
I would take anything from SemiAnalysis with a heavy grain of salt. The author has a very biased view on companies and often states conjecture as fact. A lot of their numbers of company attrition are based on questionable extrapolation of a few high level employees that left.
That is so typical apple, penny pinching on compensation and worker experience with things like mandatory office commutes and charging for food. I've heard they've changed their tune recently at least comp wise, is that true?
Maybe that's true (I don't know one way or the other), but my personal opinion as someone who left Apple is that the majority of the best/most positively influential engineers were not staff+ and didn't have amazing comp.
I know someone who worked on the original M1, he's now at Google. He said they just booted macOS on the iPad's processor and it seemed to mostly work aside from some bugs, so they refactored that into a more complete solution for macOS-specific things that were broken.
> Mac Pro systems are often used for cinema and video production, and such workloads are getting more demanding as resolutions and color depths increase. And such systems not only need performance, but the also versatility and flexibility of a desktop PC, as they need to install a variety of add-in-cards, accelerators, advanced storage devices, and so on. To add these boards, a new Mac Pro would need advanced I/O, which is somewhat of a departure from Apple's SoC ideology that entails a very high level of integration.
I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet their industry’s computation on the whims of a company like Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and loves to shut out integrations?
My impression is that when they look to buy, they get whatever is the best fit for them at that moment.. (maybe biased by various "gifts" and such to the right people)
When it's time to upgrade the old stuff, the process happens again, and the previous gear more or less entirely retired..
These industries typically give so few shits when it comes to money that replacing a fleet of 100 2020 Mac Pros with 100 2022 Threadripper based machines is seen as a minor inconvenience at best. Apple provides good hardware at the moment ? Use Apple hardware. Apple can't let us plug in our Quadro cards on our VFX guys machines ? Buy a new workstation somewhere else, who cares ?
I think as tech got more standardized, we're seeing industries move away from this (eg. new movies use AWS as a render-farm instead of just buying powerful desktops for the office).
Interestingly, there is historic reasons that apple has disproportionately been successful with creatives and its not the marketing of MacBooks to hapless poets. Some of it is just "photoshop was first available on a Mac so other software was first made for a Mac".
Early Macs were historically faster and more capable due to using POWER chips, which made them desirable for performance oriented work. It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here) [1]. Other unique advantages Macs supposedly have: the first color monitor (def better for creative work).
Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors, so any creative would want to use a system that cared about what they cared about. Even today, apple advertises their very expensive "reference grade" monitors. I'm not a creative, so I don't know how truly the apple monitor fills that purpose. The aesthetic and big $5k monitor (which works best with a Mac) was claimed to replace a $30k small and ugly reference monitor, which would leave lots of budget to splurge on a Mac Pro.
Its more that the whole operating system was better for creative tasks, from font management to color management, as you touch upon, then the software started building on that.
The Studio XDR display is not a replacement for a reference monitor and Apple ended up back pedalling on claiming it was. I don't know why you think what it looks like matters, or the size as they are a professional tools.
I used Photoshop on Irix running on an SGI, and the SGI back in the day was way more powerful than anything Apple produced for serious tasks (not sure it was a better Photoshop machine though).
I don’t work at any big studio but as a long time designer I would say that creatives (generalizing here) care deeply about the aesthetics of everything around them. If I was going to build a studio to attract good creatives I would definitely pay for having aesthetic monitors (they would of course also need to function for the purpose).
The SGI Indigo ("Indy") workstations looked gorgeous back in their time. Our university had an entire computer class kitted out with them, and out-of-hours access was meted out ... sparingly.
AFAIK the class was mostly used for computer graphics courses. For OpenGL stuff written in C, they were quite beasts. For everything else, it was still Irix.
Of course, when the room was used in the evenings, it was mostly for bzflag LAN melees.
New movies don’t use aws. Don’t believe the marketing . None of the big vfx studios uses the cloud as their main render farm, mostly for bursts .. it’s crazy expensive
That doesn't surprise me at all. Just the entry level p3.xlarge is $2k USD a month. You'll be able to build your own in short order if you're actually using it all the time.
"It usually uses its data centers to process multiple films at the same time. With Avatar: TWOW, even the entire data center was not enough."
"Rendering each frame took 8,000 thread hours, or the combined power of 3,000 vCPUs in the cloud for an hour."
"“we couldn’t architecturally expand our data center because that would require infrastructure that would go to the city council, and we all know what it’s like to go through local government," he said.""
We use Google Drive shared drives for this since, and a lot of people don't know about this, their Shared Drives have no file size limit. They only limit it to the amount of files, which is 400,000 per drive. This way, you can upload as much as you want and don't have to worry about the file limit. However, I think this is only available on the Google Workspace accounts. We have the lowest tier and we can still use it. Hope this helps!
> Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors?
Did they really care about color? The original Mac didn't have color (it didn't get color until about System 7?) I think they chose higher-resolution over color. It's the same with the NeXT I believe, higher-resolution is more important than color.
It took a while for Apple to add color support, but when they did they were early out with proper color management in the whole chain from scanner to display to printer (ColorSync). IIRC when Adobe needed this on Windows for PhotoShop they had to re-implement it themselves (rather than relying on Windows)
And funny enough to this day color management on Windows is a terrible mess. Kind of incredible, feels like low hanging fruit for wooing creative users, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re dominant and can maintain that dominance through sheer inertia.
Given that color monitors were 16 colors at the time of the first Mac, color calibration wasn't going to be of much help. Most people were using green and black monitors, anyway, except for the labs with the amber VT320. The memory requirements for color were just too large to be affordable.
According to Wikipedia, the Macintosh II [1] came out in 1987, System 4.0, with 256 colors--for the equivalent of $17,000. I doubt color calibration is much use with 256 colors (although apparently the Mac II support 16.7 million colors but you could only use 256 of them), but I can't find anything on when color calibration was supported.
The black and white Mac monitors and software were carefully tuned to match the output of black and white offset printers, so yeah, they really cared about color before they even had color.
There was only a very slim window of time that the PPC was faster than x86 in real life besides synthetic benchmarks and even then they were hobbled by slower busses, slower graphic cards (if they had any at all) and an operating system that wasn’t fully native.
> It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here)
The US government classified the G4 as a "supercomputer" and banned their export. Apple tried to make hay of this, but it hurt them, and within months Apple was lobbying to lift the ban.
It's not based on the whims of a company, it's usually based on what runs the software they need to run well, and what the operators like working with and how well it integrates with the rest of the production line.
The higher up in the food chain you get with production the less these machines are used as general purpose computing boxes and the more they just run one task (be it color grading, compositing, editing, sound editing & foley).
Yes, you can use Windows/Linux PCs, and they make more sense for a lot of 3D work and certain other tasks but at the end of the day Apple macOS and hardware just make sense and the cost is not a problem.
During the late PowerPC era (2000-2005), Apple was at risk of losing this industry entirely. Every new professional content creation application was being built primarily for the Windows NT platform which had already successfully killed off SGI workstations and their proprietary Unix software stack. Intel and AMD CPUs were consistently delivering both better performance and pricing, despite the brief glimmer of hope from IBM's PowerPC G5 CPU in 2003.
What kept Apple alive in this market was 1) Pro Tools, 2) their own suite of applications like Final Cut Pro and Logic, 3) the 2006 Mac Pro that finally delivered everything users had hoped for — latest Intel CPUs, Windows compatibility, enough fast PCI slots for everyone. It was really the best of both worlds and became the x86 media desktop to beat. (In typical Apple fashion, the 2013 Mac Pro swung too far the other way towards Apple-specific integration and was an abysmal flop with massive heat problems and non-upgradeable GPUs stuck in the past.)
In the end SGI tried to enter the Windows NT market with its own system that had a unique GPU with unified memory and also used SGI's own firmware instead of a PC BIOS:
I think "NT", here, should more accurately read "the Wintel platform". NT bringing a "modern GUI" to DOS computers (as well as some RISC systems) and intel retaking some of the high end previously lost to Sun, Silicon Graphics, DEC, etc.
So yes: price, primarily.
NT wasn't a GUI on DOS. NT was different, not based on DOS in any way. Dave Cutler brought his pet project NT (which was technically Digital IP) with him when he left Digital. NT was new and entirely unrelated to any other project at Microsoft.
Traditional Unix workstation vendors made a bet for Itanium and against their own architectures, so in the late 90s / early 2000s their investment into their archs became minimal. But Itanium flopped and the Dotcom bubble burst. The latter impacted Sun a lot. At the same time x86 kept improving massively, mostly pushed by AMD, which also put AMD64/x86-64 in the market by the mid 2000s. Also in the same time frame nVidia and ATI created monolithic GPUs which started to perform better than the proprietary GPUs by SGI and HP. The last Unix workstations from HP actually had ATI or maybe nVidia COTS GPUs.
All these factors together largely eliminated Unix workstations from most of their native markets (3D visualization, CAD, CAE, media) so that category of system just ceased to exist in the mid 2000s.
I thought Itanium was just an HP thing? HP killed their own PA-RISC and DEC’s Alpha (which HP acquired via Compaq) in favour of Itanic, which left POWER (still holding on at IBM), SPARC (pretty much died with Sun), and MIPS (dunno, tbh).
SGI bet what little remained of the farm on Itanium and even sold a handful of Itanium-based supercomputers.
It was an odd strategy from a company that obviously had no future and nothing left to offer. At the time, I had built up so much animus against SGI for their outrageous pricing and unbelievably annoying FlexLM software licensing that it was amusing to me. Their god damned MIPS Pro compiler spent more cycles checking its license file than actually compiling a small C file. And the FlexLM system was so badly written that it did nothing to stop piracy and any user could trick it into overwriting any file on the system. They claimed to patch it, but never actually fixed it. At least they open-sourced XFS. That was nice of them.
For the record, I played a lot of Creeper CTF mod quakeworld on my Octane MXE. I don’t even want to remember what that machine cost me. Unfortunately, the impact graphics chipset the MXE used in a 4x SLI-like configuration had an issue with sub texture support that kept frame rates in the 20 FPS range.
A single voodoo2 in a pentium2 absolutely trounced the Octane, so my gaming eventually moved to pc and stayed there.
First cheaper hardware, and later simply better performance. I worked at a small animation studio around 1999-2003 and the sudden price/performance improvement that Windows on Intel + Nvidia all of a sudden offered was unlike any I've seen since. A Geforce 2 Ultra and dual Pentium IIIs stomped all over our SGI workstation at most workloads, at less than quarter of the price.
Plus since virtually all the animators used Windows at home and where very comfortable with it, the need for support and hand-holding was much less than with Irix.
You probably know this but a reminder: it was a double whammy of scale (network effect): SGI was selling to roughly three markets (video production, high end CAD, and midrange number crunching). NT was selling to anybody, and despite its multi-architecture support, Intel was selling to the same people. This threw off cash both of them could invest in improving their offering.
There is a good argument, though I don't know how good, for Apple to do an SGI with the Mac Pro. Its main value would be a "halo" effect: make the argument that Apple is so technically great that the people with the hardest problems turn to them, so you can too. Also Apple helps bring you the stuff you like, movies and music and such. That was an important argument back when Apple was lagging. If this argument still makes sense it might even worth doing so at cost or even a small loss paid for by the marketing department. But the green eyeshade side of Apple's planning hates that kind of excuse for good reason.
The Mac Pro has some minor benefits in being a practical way to push the design envelope in ways that will later trickle down, though as this article points out it requires investment in areas not otherwise critical, or even important to the company.
It's always strange to hear Windows being actually good in the 90s and early 2000s, but so much of that was the fact that the consumer oriented, DOS based OSes, were so poor.
The switch to the NT platform in Windows XP was incredible. Of course, a lot of that was lost in teh beginning with the "Fisher Price" UI, and the massive rise of malware, but by SP2 most of these issues were resolved... Windows XP SP2 was one of the most stable and long lasting consumer OS of probably all time.
I wonder if Microsoft could have switched to NT for its consumer OSes earlier, and if so, how much better Windows based computing for most people would have been. Combine that with the Longhorn disaster, and MS lost so many years of precious development time.
Windows NT 4.0 was tight in its time. (Despite the name, NT 4 was really version 2.0 of the NT operating system.)
It had the new kernel that could compete with (and even outperform) commercial Unix for workstation use, and also the new GUI from Windows 95 which meant it was both familiar and had an enormous range of apps easily available.
Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS, but it was also objectively better as a total package than Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and everything else. Open source Linux desktops were still very early.
Windows 2000 (a.k.a. NT 5) was still good and a much more practical desktop OS than the first Mac OS X which had absolutely horrendous performance. Somehow Microsoft managed to squander this lead by focusing on consumer Windows XP and their own endless .NET API turf wars that ended up destroying the credibility of the Windows platform.
> Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS, but it was also objectively better as a total package than Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and everything else.
The issues were that Windows NT needed much more RAM than consumer Windows at a time when RAM was still extremely expensive, and only a subset of the hardware that would work under consumer versions of Windows had drivers for Windows NT.
However, NT (and especially Windows 2000) was night and day better than Windows 9x.
The sad thing is that we remember that era and being used to fast user interfaces and applications even on the ancient hardware. Today's software is so sluggish and slow and all web based even when native toolkits are perfect. Makes me weep.
At the time a single seat of PowerAnimator, the predecessor to Maya, cost $50k-$60k. $30k was for the SGI machine to run it and the other half was the software license.
Microsoft bought Softimage, one of the top competitors to Maya at the time. They charged iirc $4k or $8k and a PC to run it would run $4k-$5k
Softimage is long gone but it's what Valve used for the Source Engine and Half Life 2
The same old story: the rise of «worse is better». UNIX workstations hardware was always miles and miles better[0], although it could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being exorbitantly priced. Coupled with highly aggressive and anticompetitive practices of Microsoft, the demise was inevitable and quick.
[0] With the exception of the lower end UNIX workstations which were still better, yet a tad bit more expensive compared to the commodity PC hardware.
> UNIX workstations hardware was always miles and miles better[0], although it could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being exorbitantly priced
This was true early on, as in, early 90s-ish. But in the second half of the decade the balance shifted significantly and by the late 90s, Unix workstations could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being slower. I was doing sysadmin grunt work for a studio at the time and beige boxes ran circles around later generation Octane and Onyx machines.
They were also a nightmare to maintain by then. The market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement process for peripherals like keyboards and the like, we let people buy their own shit and reimburse them within some limit.
> […] The market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement process for peripherals like keyboards and the like
Yes, this is true enough as the situation was incomparably better with commodity PC's, with upgrade components and peripherals.
But to be fair, any branded PC was exactly the same, e.g. memory sticks they required were not compatible with the affordable or reasonably priced commodity ones (sometimes even across different models from the same PC vendor), expansion cards (even if made by a third party) also had to come from the same vendor etc, and everything that was branded came with an exorbitantly priced component price list. Compaq was notorious (and nearly universally hated) for requiring special SIMM's that could only work in Compaq PC's and only in a specific model. Procurement loathed those. IBM, HP and Dell were just the same. Then, there was RAMBUS trying to corner and lock everyone into their über-expensive memory chips and stuff (which, luckily, faltered and the company went bust). Again, I am talking about the desktop PC's not the servers.
The situation only changed after the market got flooded with cheap Taiwanese made PC's that could be easily and cheaply upgraded, so the big brands feeling the market force and pressure had no choice, eventually budged and stopped adding proprietory control pins to their memory sticks and stuff.
Cheaper hardware, cheaper software, and PC vendors didn't try to force you into ludicrously expensive support contracts. All in all just way more customer friendly than the workstation companies.
And of course the huge number of people buying x86 hardware meant PC hardware manufacturers could afford big R&D budgets that allowed them to surpass the workstation CPUs and GPUs in performance.
Honestly this area is so frustrating technologically.
MacOS has easily the best Audio subsystem across MacOS & Windows.
In Linux we have JACK, which is as good as MacOS (if not better honestly).
But then Linux suffers from having very little commercial support and worse than that, a lot of problems with hardware video encoding.
Windows doesn't have any problems encoding video, but it has a terrible filesystem (which is forced on you) that causes problems for the insanely large files that you must work with on video production and in addition: the audio subsystem is the worst of all three platforms.
Linux could be a contender, if someone threw $100M USD at the problem, but getting adoption for a linux solution would be hard because the Apple stuff works "fine" and movie productions are more time constrained than cost constrained.
Pipewire still had its issues (mixing setups can easy cause weird sound issues) but it's much better than anything that came before it.
I'd go as far as to say Pipewire made connecting to my Bluetooth headphones more reliable on Linux than on Windows, though neither audio stack is particularly good.
> In Linux we have JACK, which is as good as MacOS (if not better honestly).
screams in terror
The ideas are great, the realization is jackshit. Sooo much finicky crap that partly also depends of whether your sound output is special enough to work well with it. And trying to make it play nice with pulseaudio is another nightmare.
Pulseaudio itself also suffers massively from UI problems, pretty much all non-basic use cases is either mess with configs or "just run a bunch of commands on runtime or every time your USB interface reconnects". Jack at least gets that part right
Trying to get some audio interface to be connected properly was... an experience, it just showed in system as one stereo input (it was 2 mono inputs) and 4.0 output (it had 4 separate outs) so there was a good deal of pulseaudio fuckery to run to just split it properly
> Linux could be a contender, if someone threw $100M USD at the problem, but getting adoption for a linux solution would be hard because the Apple stuff works "fine" and movie productions are more time constrained than cost constrained.
I wonder if someone figuring out how to run the usual tools via Wine/Proton and somehow integrate nicely with pipewire would've been enough...
Pulseaudio is so extremely over complicated that it took years of distro maintainers trying to wrangle it into a working default configuration for many people, and it was adopted because ALSA didn’t (but was going to) support multiple inputs to a single output.
It is a prime example of short-sighted “just rewrite it then!” Style Behaviours in FOSS and continues to be brought up in conversations about subsystem replacements (such as systemd).
Pipewire is a good replacement, but pulseaudio is to JACK what windows movie maker is to Final Cut.
It doesn’t deserve to be brought up when talking about professional solutions.
It really is amalgamation of "whatever works fine as default on Lennart Poettering's private laptop". Hell, I still remember where "sec, I need to restart pulseaudio" was common thing I've read from my colleagues any time they needed to run some voice chat app...
ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default and needed to fuck around with dmix gave way to endless problems with various software, and the fact dmix was still working subtly different than "real" device also reared its ugly head in many "pro audio" apps.
> ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default
It was being developed.
People jumped on Pulseaudio and made it the default before it was finished because the ALSA contributers wanted to do it in a way that was either going to work for embedded or be optional in a reasonable way, IE; they were trying to do it right, took too long, and it got replaced with something much worse that did the job.
Similar story for how ALSA came to exist, really. Linux folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's replace it" and made ALSA.
The FreeBSD folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's fix it". And did. And they're still on that while Linux is headed into its third major audio shake-up in the same time span (OSS -> ALSA -> PulseAudio -> PipeWire).
Saying this as FreeBSD user: FreeBSD didn't switch this many times because no one is working on a new thing. The community is already small, the community of people using it on desktop is even smaller. Developers that can work on any of this - almost doesn't exist at all.
Corporate money and contribution go to: storage, network, scheduler. Anything desktop related doesn't get any love. I bet that PR for EoL drm-kmod from linux still not merged.
I could never understand why it was adopted. It was written to solve problems that nobody faced. I still remember Fedora Core 2 (??) being useless with audio due to them adopting PulseAudio. I try to minimise my contact with any of Poettering's software as much as possible since then.
I still remember being shocked at the bloat. It sat there eating something like 100x the memory of my entire sound stack before that (granted, easy to hit a large multiple when the baseline is very low), with pretty frequent CPU spikes, all while no sound was playing. WT actual F. And the CPU use was straight-up vulgar when it was actually doing anything.
It was then that I decided whoever was responsible for it had no software-architectural taste whatsoever. I didn't yet know his name. His work since then hasn't changed my mind.
I thought to myself, I think I'll stream some Codewars challenges on Twitch. I have a Shure mic, a Sony ZV-E10, and some speakers for listening to music. Surely Linux can handle all this and pipe the audio into OBS...
Yes... it is possible. No, it's not something I ever want to do ever again.
Which is why every professional audio tool uses ASIO and every audiophile player is going to great lengths to avoid the audio mixer and uses things like kernel streaming.
Sort of? The kernel supports this and has forever, but the OS doesn’t ship with an app that exposes the capability. It’s super annoying. There are a number of third party apps, some free, some paid.
This was what everyone said was the reason for wrecking Linux with PulseAudio, all those years ago.
I've still never cared and don't know why I should. What am I missing? I've used systems with that, but never bothered to try using it because... why would I? Every media player has a volume control, YouTube has a volume control, every game has a volume control (usually multiple, for different types of sound), and 99% of the time I just want everything at about the same level anyway. The last thing I want to do is have another place a given program could have its volume set or muted or whatever, so then I have another place to look when it's not doing what I want. One per-program (built in to the programs) and one global is quite enough.
For me it wasn't so much the per-app/stream mixer but per-stream dynamic routing that was the important feature of Pulse (though I've moved on to PW now).
I'm not too sure how this is handled on other platforms, but pre-PA the in-app volume control would often modify the global mixer, rather than implement an in-app mixer/attenuator, which is definitely not what you usually want. In most Linux apps these days, those controls manipulate and are synchronized with the PA mixer, so there's still only one actual mixer, they are the same control. I assume that other OSes also do per-stream mixing in a similar manner, and just choose not to expose the mixer for whatever reason.
As much as people complain about PulseAudio it's always worked well for me, and from what I've seen of Windows and macOS alternatives, it's more featureful and usable out of the box.
> One cool thing in MacOS that Windows can't do is aggregate of audio devices/interfaces.
it does come at the cost of latency & jitter: fundamental issues that ultimately stem from having two separate audio clocks. and it's not really a specific limitation of windows, which tend to use ASIO for low-latency audio. there's nothing stopping a an aggregate ASIO driver from being written, i just can't imagine it'd be that useful, indeed, i've only ever used the macOS aggregate device a handful of times, mostly only to try it out.
I used it in Linux, but that's because it detected 2-in/4-out audio interface as just three stereo pairs and I needed to split those inputs off to mono.
It was a lot of CLI fuckery, not a pleasant experience... and of course pulseaudio can't just remember it, need to be re-applied after every USB reconnect.
Can be done with UDEV but not exactly something random user would know how to do.
The one time I've actually used an aggregate device, I synced the clock of one device to the other. It worked fine as far as I remember (it's been a couple of years).
"One cool thing in MacOS that Windows can't do is aggregates of audio devices/interfaces."
Some of us didn't need it, software at the time allowed us to record and mix from and playback to different audio hardware devices simultaneously already. I remember doing that in Windows ME with some audio editing software.
> I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet their industry’s computation on the whims of a company like Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and loves to shut out integrations?
Do they? Last I heard, most of the industry uses Linux render farms...
I guess I don’t really know and was kind of going off of the article. I sort of thought the industries heavily used Macs, but it does make sense that some use much more industrial setups.
Most of the high-end VFX/CG industry uses Linux for both workstations and render farm nodes. Some studios like Pixar allow a bit more flexibility to some artists in certain roles (generally those that don't work in the pipeline that much - i.e. concept artists) to use other software / OSs, but otherwise it's mostly Linux.
Smaller studios use Windows/Mac a bit more (boutiques use Macs the most), but the removal of the Xserve and the lack of competitiveness in the MacPro for several years have shifted some away from Mac.
> Most of the high-end VFX/CG industry uses Linux for both workstations
How do they deal with HDR content? As far as I know it's not supported yet and the colour management is lacking, which seems like a big problem for today's content.
ICC support works fairly well, and anyway, each DCC (Katana, Nuke, Houdini, RV, etc) has custom (normally via OCIO) colour profile support itself, so even if the OS' support isn't perfect, it doesn't really matter (as long as the graphics drivers can push the correct result out).
For movies (not sound) most macs are/were used for video editing or matte painting.
Something that either needed final cut (and the rather good final cut studio) or photoshop.
But final cut has been somewhat overtaken by adobe (or was when I was leaving the industry) and blackmagic fucking with the entire software stack by making resolve and fusion free(ish)
There are some niche bits like cinesync that allows remote viewing of footage securely and colour accurately that might still need a mac.
Apart from laptops, apple have lost the VFX market pretty well.
They did make a huge mistake with Final Cut Pro X. Professionals continued to use Final Cut Pro 7 until just a few years ago.
That said, everyone I hear who uses Final Cut Pro today seems to prefer it over any other editor. You can flawlessly edit multiple 4k color corrected video streams on an $800 fanless MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, and get 10+ hours of battery life while doing it. Nobody else can touch that.
Yeah, FCPX had massive growing pains but after a few years, it has matured to be eons better for a modern editing workflow than FCP7. It's sad they had to take so long to get there, a number of people switched to Premiere during that time, but there are still a huge number of individuals and studios who edit on FCPX today.
The main criminal thing they did IMO is offering no upgrade path, at all until very late. IIRC you couldn't even import FCP7 projects for two years or so after FCPX release.
> But final cut has been somewhat overtaken by adobe (or was when I was leaving the industry)
I'm pretty certain the industry standard has always been Avid Media Composer, even if today and for years nearly all of the market share is Final Cut Pro X with the minority remainder split between Premier Pro and Da Vinci. Most of the choices being made out there are, "do I want Media Composer or FCPX?" And FCPX is a lot less expensive, so that's how it goes.
Its funny, I knew that a lot of people used avid, and we had a number of them at the various companies I worked at. We even used to make plugins for it. But I never really saw them used that much. (thats very much not to say they were never used!)
It depends which part of the industry and which departments you’re talking about.
Animation and visual effects for large studios are all Linux based usually. Smaller studios vary between Mac and windows.
Edit houses tend to be primarily Mac based.
There’s very little that competes with macOS and Apple hardware though.
Take color accuracy and EDR. Linux and windows aren’t great for extended dynamic range while working, and especially if you’re using a laptop for mobile reviewing, very few laptops support the accurate display space most macs ship with.
Macs also provide a lot more software compatibility than Linux for things like the Adobe suite of products.
Combine that with out of the box support for many codecs, accelerated ProRes workflows and the ubiquity of airplay+airdrop, macs are very favoured for creative use cases.
I know the article mentions operational stuff like moving production to a different country and such, but I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with all the engineers that moved on from Apple to found startups and other companies that wanted a piece of the magic that Apple pulled with the M series chips..
Curious if any HNers in the know could spill such info with a throwaway
Maybe it's a gross oversimplification but I thought that while the next iterations of the A and smaller M SoCs were designed in California, the bigger M chips are developed in Israel where the team is much younger.
I think the brain drain story was way overblown. People are always coming and going on any team. Given how long hardware takes to design and plan, covid lockdowns are more likely to have impacted processors that should be coming out now.
Side question with the product and processor names; any one else finding Apple's product naming getting ... complicated? Can't we just have the product names based on size, and a moniker dictate its features + processor?
Maybe something like;
- Mac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Watch
And you can get them in:
- Mini, Max or just "normal size"
With your choice of:
- M?, M? Pro, M? Ultra
Running
- MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS
We've already got a "mini" iPhone (SE), MacBook (Air), Mac. Plus the normal sized ones; 14" for the laptops and studio for the Mac, and then max being 16" laptops, or a tower mac, and the 12.9" tablet etc. Same for the watch too, and the iMac has played around the 21/24/27 sizes already.
Perhaps I just don't understand the product differential requirements from branding / marketing perspectives.
The closest thing to a MacBook mini would actually be the 12-inch fanless MacBook that was always highly constrained by thermals on the Intel platform. It would be a lot more interesting on Apple Silicon, perhaps for the school education market that seems to mostly use Chromebooks these days.
it continues to baffle me that they haven't yet reintroduced this model. It was always an assumption of mine, perhaps incorrectly, that that model was a design/engineering experiment that was just the wrong side of the line on practicality but served as a market test for that form factor.
Anecdotally it seemed very popular, and loved by the people who bought one. Perhaps the numbers said otherwise, because otherwise I have no idea why they didn't reintroduce it as an M1/M2 machine.
Perhaps, and this is maybe just being hopeful, they're waiting for the even better efficiency of the M3 etc before reintroducing it because they want to do it, but absolutely nail it when they do without any battery life compromise. After all, they already ran the market demand test, so this would make sense if so. If that turns out to be the case I'll almost certainly buy one.
I thought the same thing (got one for a gf), but since the introduction of pointer support in iPadOS, I look at the kinds of things most folks with the 12” books do (word processing, light spreadsheets, web), and I think Apple is correctly betting that that market is going for iPads with keyboard/trackpad folios now.
>Anecdotally it seemed very popular, and loved by the people who bought one. Perhaps the numbers said otherwise, because otherwise I have no idea why they didn't reintroduce it as an M1/M2 machine.
I loved mine, and put a couple of hundred thousand miles in carrying it (even wrote a lot of code in Emacs, but I remember the days when every compile was an excuse to stand up and get coffee, so the speed didn't matter to me).
AFAICT its target market was actually Asia, same as with the ultralight (for its time) Powerbook 2400c which was actually built by IBM Japan. But it didn't sell as well as expected even there.
They kinda did? The M1 Air is basically a better version of the 12" skinny Macbook. It's fanless, has a slightly larger screen (13" vs. 12"), and swaps a single USB 3.1 Type-C port for two TB3/USB4 Type-C ports, while knocking $300 off the price and dumping the awful butterfly keyboard. The only downside is that it's a tenth of an inch thicker (0.16"-0.63" vs 0.14"-0.52").
Even smaller; there was an 11" Macbook Air discontinued in 2016. It was too slow for me, but I really like the form factor. Would like to see that return with AS.
On the other hand, compared to just about every other computer/tech company out there I find it by far the easiest and most sane. Is the 15" MSI GE67 better or worse than the 15" MSI Bravo 15? And where does the MSI GP67 fit into the whole picture?
As other mentions “airpod Pro gen 2” is still much, much simpler than whatever it is Sony is calling their earbuds.
But on the other hand you need to be a bit of an expert to compare the different series of iPad.
And who can forget that the first iPad with Retina display was called “the new iPad” and the follow up was called “iPad with Retina display”. Talk about cluster fuck naming!
I wanna say Apple is doing better than the competition but worse than they used to, but they have a few fuckups from a decade ago that a bigger than anything they’ve got going on now, so maybe they’re not clearly doing worse.
So to answer your question: Is apples naming getting complicated? Inconclusive.
For those people who use a high workstation, what is the typical price? I feel like people spending more than 10k on a machine must not be bothered, they want the performance
$10k is easily double what a beast workstation has traditionally cost. Yes, you've been able to configure Mac Pros or iMac Pros for similar prices in the past, but it's always been the ultra high-end with niche use cases, currently if you max out a Mac Studio you're up to around $10k.
That's with 20x general compute cores, 32x neural engines, and 64x GPU cores, 128GB RAM, and 8TB of storage. I guess it's probably useful for 8K video workloads, but not much else.
If the article is right and they're targeting a $10k base price for the Extreme version of the chip, then they better get it VERY right for it to be worth the effort, and I wouldn't expect many customers to be lining up regardless.
> $10k is easily double what a beast workstation has traditionally cost
I was thinking similarly. Not Mac, but $4-5k will get you an extremely well specced Dell/HP workstation suitable for nearly anything. Staying under $5k can also make it easier to push it through finance where higher price premiums typically require more paperwork.
Here (research lab doing computational materials science), we get a €8k workstation every three years or so. AFAIK there is no review from the accounting people below €15k. In any case, honestly, the expense is tiny compared to the salary and other costs of whoever is using it for 3 years (close to a quarter million overall).
10k is fairly normal for professional workstations when you factor in high memory Quadros and xeons.
I would really not recommend comparing to home built machines. Studios tend to lease from Dell/HP and those workstations will often be in the 10k+ range.
I regularly see people in the scientific and engineering fields spend more than 10k on a workstation without blinking. A company I work with that does antenna design for example dropped 12k (plus a bit more) on a workstation within the last year. No fancy video cards, just super beefy CPUs and tons and tons of RAM.
$employer procures workstations equipped with 64C Threadripper Pro + A6000 48GB GPUs for CG artists. They haven't said what they're actually paying but list prices of those machines are north of 15k. Devs get a similar setup except smaller GPUs.
Better to figure out long term production plans, i.e. “we need to get out of china bc the US/china relationship is deteriorating”, before committing to production. This is fine.
If they care for pro users (to keep the platform macOS alive), they need to develop it even if it’s a loss. If they lose most of their pro users, a lot of regular users may follow.
Eh, I disagree. The Mac Pro market is a tiny niche. I’ve been doing iOS and macOS development for more than a decade and I’ve never met someone with a Mac Pro, so I’m pretty skeptical of the idea that the macOS platform is in any way dependent on a tiny fraction of (mostly corporate) users being able to use macOS for their 8k video editing workflows or whatever.
Similar. The last MacPro I saw was a friends PowerPC cheese grater MP over a decade ago. Laptops were taking off with Intel's Core architecture, and I haven't seen an MP since.
If they really cared about this niche market I think they would need to rethink the problem. A lot of the important rendering is done in rendering farms (AKA cloud these days).
So build a two part design: a rack form factor with a storage fabric and a lot of processors combined with a super mac studio for display and control, all connected with 10 GB. The investment would be immense compared to the market (not just in hardware but with the end user tools) and hard for most companies to develop software for.
The only upside for Apple with this approach would be that their cloud back end could benefit from this development.
It's the classic Innovator's Dilemma: I don't see this market being worth investing in at all for a company like Apple.
You overestimate how much work is actually done in the cloud.
While I can’t speak definitely how much rendering is done in the cloud, I can speak to how much general IT spend is done in the cloud from someone who should know…
Not an external cloud, but those pixar movies are generated by big server farms. The cloud just resides in pixar's buildings, not amazon's.
And that's the point of the cloud metaphor (starting from the original Internet protocols paper from Cerf et al): you don't care. It doesn't mean "a computer somebody else owns"
That’s no more “the cloud” in modern parlance than the two servers sitting in a server room and arms throw away that we accessed via a green screen in the 90s,
Yes, but... I think a Studio can do 90% of the lifting, or you could do some server side rendering feeding the results back over a 10 G wired ethernet.
If you are relying on the farm to provide interactive rendering , the speed of the connection isn’t an issue. it’s not that much data to send over since studios sync the assets, so you’re usually only needing to sync attribute values and pixel data back and forth.
The issue is that you need dedicated cores for it on the farm.
When a show is going all out, those farms are saturated for usage. If a lighter asks for interactive use, they’re either waiting or you’re constantly having to reserve systems for them. That wait time is the latency I mean.
In which case why not just buy them the higher spec hardware?
Or just market bundles of Ultra studios for those customers with some niche zero-conf convenience feature as a hook.
Only thing is at that point it makes sense to have either a monster PC somewhere out of sight or cloud resources, so whatever hook they come up with would at least need to appear like it usefully alters the workflow, because it's going to be really expensive relative to an out-of-sight PC.
It really begs the question of who the Mac Pro is really for anymore? If you need that amount of power you're probably better off with a MacBook and an external compute resource like above, or even just an eGPU (I know, the ARM chips don't support them, but you could just buy used Intel SKUs in a pinch).
The old Intel Mac Pro is available in rack-friendly form factor. Alternately, people have racked Mac Minis, so I think Mac Studio's would be mostly the same?
Anyone that has hooked up a external drive to an M1 or M2 based notebook knows why: the performance of external devices dropped off a cliff with Apple’s own silicon.
Not to mention single external support…
Consumers Pro users are likely to look aside on the external IO issues, but it’s doubtful that actual studios would.
Can you tell me more about this? Are you unable to hit line rates, or are you just commenting about lackluster io options? I'm looking to add some M.2 storage via thunderbolt enclosure to my machine and would otherwise be expecting to be able to saturate the pcie lanes.
This regression I've personally tested and confirm:
You can't hit anywhere near "line rate" with usb 3.1/3.2, though an Intel Mac will gladly do so with the same _exact_ drive. You will experience write stalls and other performance problems. I don't have a usb4 drive to test by I wouldn't hold your breath.
> Anyone that has hooked up a external drive to an M1 or M2 based notebook knows why: the performance of external devices dropped off a cliff with Apple’s own silicon.
This is false in my experience. I bought a Thunderbolt 3 to Dual NVMe M.2 SSD enclosure (Sabrent EC-T3DN), set up the SSDs in a RAID 0 array, and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test benchmarked that configuration at 2,500 MB/sec read and write. That's very close to the maximum real-world usable bandwidth for TB3¹.
Are Mac Pros even a viable platform for professional users given the infrequency of upgrades of the platform? Intel Xeon W-3275M is more than 3 years old at this point. Can people with demand for so much compute even afford to not get modern hardware?
A lot of Mac Pro users are involved in high end media production. For those users, the power is beneficial so that you never have to wait for your computer.
For a more specific example, music producers liked the fact you could have over a terabyte of RAM on the Mac Pro. This allows keeping their entire library of VST plugins loaded into memory, meaning they never have to wait to load plugins into their project.
A very fast internet connection would be 4gbps symmetrical. A modern NVME can read ~5gbps. DDR5 supports up to 51GBs. PCIE6 has a symmetrical 128GBs connection.
If file size is a bottleneck for you then you'll see better performance computing locally, especially if you can cache workloads in DDR5 before saving to the filesystem.
True enough. My Dad, who is 101 and does video editing and animation as a hobby, seems to suffer from long rendering and other processing bottlenecks. I have mentioned using cloud resources, and he doesn' want the hassle. He does buy whatever best Pro box Apple has about every 3 years.
If Apple really cared about their pro users they would have launched an Intel Mac Pro update to fill the gap but they didn’t because they don’t. Pros were ready to jump ship after the disastrous iMac Pro was launched in April of 2017 which is why Apple held a round table discussion with members of the press in April 2017 to allay those fears by promising that a new modular Mac Pro was coming. Two years later in December 2019 Apple fulfilled their promise by releasing the Mac Pro. But between 2017 and 2019 Nvidia made serious gains over the competition which left the Mac Pro obsolete on launch. Fast forward 3 years later to today and the pro market has really started to abandon Apple in favor of machines running Nvidia GPUs. Apple is attempting to create an updated Mac Pro that will bring those pros back to the platform and to do that they have to compete with Nvidia and to do that they have to ramp up the GPU core count significantly which has been difficult delaying the product further.
The M-series chip makes sense because you can share it between mobile and desktop machines. The A-series and the M-series are very closely related. Once you start to enter the high-end server market you have to add more IP, change the processor interconnect, topology, and increase the transistor count on the IP you already developed. This leads to the necessity to design another line of processors which needs additional design, verification, validation, software development, etc that you won't be able to share with your profitable chips. You then need to ask, is there really a market for this?
When Apple used 3rd party CPUs they outsourced the cost of that server development work, the 3rd party Intel already had a large market for their Xeon class chips so development costs were spread across customers. The business made sense. Let's face it, the Pro side of the business is tiny relative to the mobile market and it does not make business sense.
I imagine that it has a lot to do with TSMC's 3nm being pushed back so far.
History shows that a very large chip made on a process node that has just come online isn't going to have a good initial yield, and 3nm wafers are said to be fairly expensive.
>One wafer processed on TSMC's leading edge N3 manufacturing technology will cost over $20,000 according to DigiTimes
What I don't get, is that Apple lost their foothold in both the creative market & education markets, and don't seem to be trying to address it. Why is the Mac Pro still the same price, three years after its release? Why not work with aeronautics, engineering, CAD, architecture vendors to port their apps to the Mac? Why not sacrifice hardware margins, now that they're moving into services?
I read an estimate from a French firm that Mac Pro volumes are orders of magnitude lower than Power Mac volumes were two decades ago; are they doing anything about it?
True, a lot of this moved to laptops for Innovator's Dilemma-reasons, but surely they have a plan to secure a more few niches, beyond FAANG software developers for the Mac, and students for the iPhone and Watch? The iPad was intended to dominate "what comes after PCs", but PCs never went away; and it just seems like Apple never course-corrected from that vision. That's what I'd like to see: a coherent vision for the future of computing. We haven't seen that since the failed post-PC thing in 2010.
True. I remember a video editing class in college and we had to use the cheese grater Mac Pro render our work. I don't remember all the details but I know I didn't want to try it at home on my white MacBook.
The gap between laptop and desktop with today's M1 MBPs is much more narrow for sure.
There is an unbelievable amount and diversity of software used in aerospace that is Windows only, from general mechanical engineering tools to highly specialized data acquisition and analysis packages, microcontroller interfaces, optics design, you name it. Getting all that to move over to a new platform would be an enormous undertaking for essentially no benefit on the part of the vendors. I suppose you could do it piecemeal if you really wanted to, but it's still an uphill battle in an industry where Windows is pretty solidly entrenched.
Gaming was super solidly entrenched on the Windows side. Valve put some muscle behind Wine and proton and that is no longer the case. I mean Apple even made Rosetta 2 for this silicon migration. If they really wanted it, it's totally within reach.
Gaming (on PC) is also full of people who care about Linux and escaping windows, so aside from Valve trying to get out from under Microsoft’s thumb, they have a dedicated user base to make their efforts worth it. The people and companies using engineering tools don’t really care about Linux.
On that front, it's funny to me that Google was so successful with Chromebooks, when Jobs called thin clients the future for decades yet failed to ever make one.
Thin client commoditizes your platform and reduces the benefits of owning the entire hardware and software stack. Even if you needed an Apple device to connect to an Apple mainframe, the application running on the mainframe could probably be replicated (but better and cheaper) by Google.
It's because those markets are tiny compared to the bigger markets that they focus the company on, which is why they slowly drifted away from their focus on it. The HDR [0] youtuber creator machine they created with the new macbook pro alone probably dwarfs them by several orders of magnitude for example.
[0] Yes I know HDR is not much of a thing currently on social media, but apple tends to invest tech wise to where they see the market going, and do it earlier. Removing the floppy drive early is an indicator of this, and they realize it's a bit of a chicken & egg thing.
Apple cannot compete with $200 Chromebooks. Not without compromising the whole reason you'd choose Apple in the first place. It's a game of razor-thin margins and those aren't Apple's thing.
> Why not $thing?
Apple is focused on services, not hardware or software unless it boosts their services.
The only thing it makes sense for them to care about is their iPhone business. It's been that way for a long time. The iPhone business makes more money than wearables, services, Mac, and iPad combined.
The only thing pro about it is single threaded performance, and even there it's not close to the best available, as Zen 4 and Raptor Lake surpass it. In other areas it's lacking. A Threadripper will destroy it in multithreaded performance with 64 cores and terabytes of RAM. A 4090 will blow it away in GPU performance.
I plan to do some ML, some VR games, and some compilation. Literally everything will be at least twice as fast as my current system, and some things will be 10x or more. I haven't upgraded in a while.
Not the exact same but I just built a machine for machine learning(tabular work mostly) using a Ryzen 9 5950X(16 core) and a 3060 GPU and the performance is stellar with Linux.
Avadirect. I haven't used them before, so I'm rolling the dice. I've had iBuyPower and CyberPowerPC machines at work and wasn't impressed, so I figured I'd try a different one. Unfortunately 4090s are sold out so the order is on hold.
Many houses dropped apple, not only because of price, but also OS capabilities and software availability. The system became too limited, so where you would see rows of mac pros, you prob now see PCs.
I presume dropping a few cores and replacing with PCIe lanes is what’s on tap. But man, the volume for that chip will be the smallest of any silicon, and the yield won’t be great.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadhttps://archive.ph/pxQam
The gist:
The new high-end Mac Pro with Apple silicon is behind schedule, and you can blame changes to the company’s chip and manufacturing plans.
> an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 — without any other upgrades
That would be a very niche market compared with the lower end devices.
If the M2 Extreme is to the M2 Ultra what the M1 Ultra is to the M1 Max, namely that it's just two chips pasted together, then the M2 Extreme might start with 128 GB of RAM (Max: 32 GB, Ultra: 64 GB). That alone is a $1000+ upgrade to the current Mac Pro.
I wonder if it's just more of a 'it's not where the market is' thing. Working in tech and creative industries even previous to the garbage can there was a dramatic shift in people just opting into laptops instead of desktops. With only the people with really demanding workflows sticking with the desktops. Now I mostly only see mac desktops in video production contexts (editing stations, compositing/effects, 3d.. maybe you'd also see that in high end audio production as well).
As offices have changed over the years with more hot desking etc. it's hard justifying a desktop machine... not to mention the pandemic. So maybe apple made a conscious decision. Keep the mac mini to serve a lower end mostly stationary workforce or for installation type work, kill the whole middle-to-lower-highend desktop line and cater to a high end 'studio' workstation.
The boss blinked and said something along the lines of "we're not spending that kind of money for your system" and I pointed out that with 16gb of ram but otherwise base config, it was about the same price and a much better deal performance-wise than a Macbook Pro. Xeons versus an intel mobile i5, and the widest/fastest memory bus around at the time? No contest.
The water-cooled ones were an absolute shitshow...Apple was pushing the edge too hard on that. AIO coolers are still kinda hit-or-miss (the good, well-made ones are fine.)
That's also because they didn't bother updating it for years. Just like the previous trashcan model.
I don't really understand how Apple gets away with that. The people that spend this kind of money to get top of the line hardware are the same ones that are ok buying 4-year-old hardware at introduction price???
Apple MacBook Pro 13in Core i5 Retina 2.7GHz (MF840LL/A), 8GB Memory, 256GB Solid State Drive (Renewed) $379.99
I wanted a 90's era Powerbook so bad. The 2015 is a great machine in 2022. Over the years I heard the elders say it: buy used on the cycle if you can't afford the newer gen. It's really true. And I rarely hear someone who buys the expensive loaded kit complain, even 10 years later. This is how they get away with it. I think I must have learned Linux attempting to rescue my Windows systems, haha. Now I want to rant about Darwin...
If Apple believed it has to sell it for 10k for the single reason of avoiding Mac Studio canibalization, and at the same time Apple believed 10k is too high for the customers, then Apple would kill the product.
> The company made the decision because of both the complexity and cost of producing a processor that is essentially four M2 Max chips fused together. It also will help Apple and partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. save chip-production resources for higher-volume machines.
Apple's foothold in video production is a delicate thing and it seems prone to disruption by a player able to offer a macOS comfort with generic x86 prices.
edit: removed wrong part
I doubt it would be all that cheap.
TSMC is said to be charging $20k for a 3nm wafer, and initial yields for a large die size made on a brand spanking new process node wouldn't be expected to be great.
When you're charging $1,000 for a monitor stand, all prices are arbitrary.
The target market for that screen are buying the VESA mount, but Apple didn't include the VESA mount and added it as an add-on, I'm not sure why; meaning the "$600 Monitor stand upgrade" - which is basically to prevent people buying it as a monitor unless they're going for "Luxury" - became $1,000.
The Pro Display XDR is competing with $40,000 screens for tv/movie production- and studios that use displays like that swap them out quite often because they lose their calibration; they have rows of VESA mounts.
It's like buying one of those artic polar watches that can go to 150M that's gold plated.
The gold plating is not helping you in that situation, whoever is buying the gold plated edition of that watch is buying it as a fashion accessory, not as an expedition watch.
If they want to part with their money: let them.
You can buy it with nothing, with a relatively cheap VESA adapter, or a stand for desktop use cases.
The high-end display market is niche; using such a display with a stand to sit on a desk is even more niche. It's a very low volume stand but it also has to be relatively good in both form and function so that people don't whinge that they got what feels like a flimsy $300 monitor's stand for their $5k monitor.
Who buys the stand? Unusual pro uses where they're better off with a stand than a VESA mount; and people who are just looking for the highest end "fanciest" monitor ever.
You make a clear case, except paying 20% of the cost of the device for a stand that sits on the desk seems ridiculous to me.
Heck, I can't remember the last monitor I had that I kept the stand - it goes back in the box, and into storage until the warranty expires and then it goes in the trash. The Monitor goes on a VESA mount arm.
This chatter about VESA mount arms and if you buy them or not is irrelevant. The price of the monitor stand as stated by Apple what is being discussed.
If it seems ridiculous, don't buy it-- most of us would be using a monitor arm for a monitor like this.
It has a nice 4 bar linkage, bearings, etc. It's intrinsically not cheap and is made in extraordinarily low quantities.
* Apple realistically needs to provide a stand, even though most users in their target market won't use it
* The target market is already small/niche
* The stand has to be relatively nice
* All in all, this means low quantity, high quality == very high cost.
Wrong advertising makes it a differentiated good?! I bet you believe the BS about holding your iPhone wrongly, too.
Apple is a real cult.
Why? Did they force you to buy one? I keep telling you the target market for these; A: doesn’t need a stand & B: wouldn’t use it if it was included.
It’s for people cosplaying as high end video production people; or playing into the “fashion” side of Apple.
Why are people so up in arms about Apple trying to be a tech company and a fashion company? Evaluate their products coldly and if they have value to you then buy them, if not: don’t.
That stand by all rights has no value to anyone: but the same is true of SUPREME clothing or those trendy Fendi handbags.
Get over yourself, it’s all just tools; and a $5k monitor that can do the job of a $40k one is a good value to someone. Just not to you, and that’s fine.
I also don’t need to buy a $3,000 phone skin. But people buy that shit too.
https://www.bellperre.com/uniq/
That itself is marketing spin. It's not like studios are throwing away their reference monitors for the apple display. You can design anything to compete; winning is the important bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtd7UzLJHrU
You're crying about another company existing?
Why do you do that? Does it offend you that people choose things that aren't to your values?
This is the same kind of weird bigotry that homophobes use. Who cares? Why does it offend you so much?
The market of high end computers? Apple definitely does not have a monopoly there. Bringing in US medicine is not really a relevant arguement.
That almost-doubling from the already insanely expensive machine could push it past a breaking point for a lot of current customers though, I don't know.
Oddly enough, the one I played with felt slower than the Mac Studio.
The Mac Studio is faster than the 2019 Mac Pro.
https://www.macrumors.com/guide/mac-studio-vs-mac-pro-buyers...
When the Mac Pro came out it was the fastest Mac that existed, but those Intel Chips were already dated and were being roundly beaten by AMD chips of the era.
The "killer feature" was the encoding acceleration card, but a faster variant is available inside Apple Silicon.
I'm not sure where the cut-off is, but I think the M1 Max (Not ultra) is also faster than the Mac Pro 2019.
It still can have 1.5 TB of RAM.
all the workflows I can conceive of right now would struggle to use more than 128G of RAM, but I am open to ideas.
I can think of a few, but they all involve terabytes of data sitting on local storage. At the terabyte sizes, it starts to take more time to transfer the data to the cloud instance than to process it with a beefy workstation.
I traded it in for a microphone.
Oh, okay.
That's not how it works with computer prices.
For example, in 2012 the 13-inch MacBook Pro started at $1699. In 2022 it starts at $1299.
EDIT: since I can't respond - I meant the latest and greatest in that size class. Back then we had that 13" and the 15" rMBP. Now we have the 14" and 16" M1. The 13" MBP is a low cost entry w/ a legacy chassis.
I don't disagree computer costs can fluctuate, but generally where there are leaps forward in design and capability they do go up in price, perhaps not keeping inline w/ inflation though.
How about an iMac, which started at $1299 in 2012 and starts at $1299 in 2022?
Last I checked for a few thousand USD you could have 64 CPU cores with 128 threads, 128 gigs or more of RAM, and one or more top tier GPUs.
That said, the Mac Studio still doesn't quite enable everything to be loaded on one machine, so the PC farms are still in use; worse, the primary software used to utilize those PC farms, Vienna Ensemble Pro, isn't yet Apple Silicon native, so...for the time being, the Mac Studio still isn't quite ready for prime time. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro would likely enable finally moving to using a single machine running macOS with the CPU performance and amount of RAM needed, so you best believe that film composers will move to it in droves once it comes out, whatever the price, as VEP being native or not will no longer be a factor.
Source: was a fairly successful film composer myself until I developed an ear condition called Hyperacusis, now working as a programmer writing custom tools for my peers, and as a tech consultant designing their rigs.
And sure enough, that is a real workflow! Thanks for the knowledge.
I have 12tb of storage, nvme ssd and an optical burner!
I’ve put this machine together over a few years and total cost is 3k Aud.
They’re still great value, this machine can still run drivers for hardware from 2005 (with FireWire!). I can run any os from snow leopard to big sure. I can put a Thunderbolt card in it. I can put most GFX cards.
I have a laptop for my performances, but in the studio, this thing is a beast and I hope it works for quite a few more years as a replacement will be very expensive.
This "$10K is too expensive" line doesn't fly. Right now, just upgrading a Mac Pro processor can push the price over $13K. Again, so what? I'm certain there were more than a handful $50K configured 2019 Mac Pros sold. This kind of thing is expensive for the individual, but for a business it's merely a commodity. $50K is cheap because it couldn't even pay the salary of one developer for a year, and the Mac Pro is useful for at least a few years, so cost is more like $16K/yr. That's an absolutely nothing business expense.
Profitability isn't sufficient for a company like Apple. It has to be the best use of these resources - it needs to be more profitable than dedicating the team to work on something else at Apple.
In todays dollars that’s $85,000 for a high end graphics production workstation to $27000 for a low end.
Kids these days are spoiled.
I didn’t say it was too expensive, I said it was a niche product - resources are tight at Apple, and it looks like we’re heading into a recession so they are concentrating on the products that sell in the millions rather than others
The Cortex X3 at TSMC N4 used in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 clocked at 3.26Ghz gets you about ~1500 GB5 Single Core at ~4W.
The Apple A16 on the same TSMC N4 clocked at 3.6Ghz gets you about ~1900 GB5 Score using ~5W.
The Cortex X3 is much smaller in die size, and only just started optimising specifically for AArach64. Compared to Apple which is on their forth or fifth iteration. I would not be surprised if the Cortex X4 breaks the 1800 barrier using under 5W. Compared to a few years ago Apple SoC vs Snapdragon where single core performance differ by more than 2x. The projected difference between the two will be less than 20%.
The more interesting question would be, what happens when Cortex X4 and Cortex X5 reaches these sort of performance, which is good enough to be used in PC and only cost a a few dollars per core in licensing?
So it's amazing to see the bread and butter catch up, what we really need are those other blocks available under license from someone akin to ARM.
There are plenty to choose from. Samsung or Mediatek didn't invent all the stuff in their SoC, and neither did Apple. GPU IPs are available from ARM ( Mali ) and IMG ( PowerVR ). FPGA form Lattice which Apple are using. DSP and other 5G modem solution from CEVA. There are plenty of options to choose from. And as far as I am concern, none of them are as far ahead, or as difficult to overcome than CPU design.
Are they still using their Technology and IP [1]. Yes.
[1] https://www.imaginationtech.com/news/imagination-and-apple-s...
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-ha...
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/apple-m2-die-shot-and-archite...
I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet their industry’s computation on the whims of a company like Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and loves to shut out integrations?
When it's time to upgrade the old stuff, the process happens again, and the previous gear more or less entirely retired..
Interestingly, there is historic reasons that apple has disproportionately been successful with creatives and its not the marketing of MacBooks to hapless poets. Some of it is just "photoshop was first available on a Mac so other software was first made for a Mac".
Early Macs were historically faster and more capable due to using POWER chips, which made them desirable for performance oriented work. It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here) [1]. Other unique advantages Macs supposedly have: the first color monitor (def better for creative work).
Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors, so any creative would want to use a system that cared about what they cared about. Even today, apple advertises their very expensive "reference grade" monitors. I'm not a creative, so I don't know how truly the apple monitor fills that purpose. The aesthetic and big $5k monitor (which works best with a Mac) was claimed to replace a $30k small and ugly reference monitor, which would leave lots of budget to splurge on a Mac Pro.
--- [1] https://www.techjunkie.com/apples-1999-power-mac-g4-really-c...
The Studio XDR display is not a replacement for a reference monitor and Apple ended up back pedalling on claiming it was. I don't know why you think what it looks like matters, or the size as they are a professional tools.
I used Photoshop on Irix running on an SGI, and the SGI back in the day was way more powerful than anything Apple produced for serious tasks (not sure it was a better Photoshop machine though).
AFAIK the class was mostly used for computer graphics courses. For OpenGL stuff written in C, they were quite beasts. For everything else, it was still Irix.
Of course, when the room was used in the evenings, it was mostly for bzflag LAN melees.
"Rendering each frame took 8,000 thread hours, or the combined power of 3,000 vCPUs in the cloud for an hour."
"“we couldn’t architecturally expand our data center because that would require infrastructure that would go to the city council, and we all know what it’s like to go through local government," he said.""
Or edit? The cloud makes 0 sense for most of video production.
https://vfxplatform.com/
Did they really care about color? The original Mac didn't have color (it didn't get color until about System 7?) I think they chose higher-resolution over color. It's the same with the NeXT I believe, higher-resolution is more important than color.
According to this MacOS got OS-level color management in 1993, and Windows wouldn't get it for another 4 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management#Operating_sys...
According to Wikipedia, the Macintosh II [1] came out in 1987, System 4.0, with 256 colors--for the equivalent of $17,000. I doubt color calibration is much use with 256 colors (although apparently the Mac II support 16.7 million colors but you could only use 256 of them), but I can't find anything on when color calibration was supported.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II
They went through Motorola 65XX -> 68XX -> 68XXX -> Power PC -> Intel.
That portion before Power PC was a long time, 18 years.
The US government classified the G4 as a "supercomputer" and banned their export. Apple tried to make hay of this, but it hurt them, and within months Apple was lobbying to lift the ban.
The higher up in the food chain you get with production the less these machines are used as general purpose computing boxes and the more they just run one task (be it color grading, compositing, editing, sound editing & foley).
Yes, you can use Windows/Linux PCs, and they make more sense for a lot of 3D work and certain other tasks but at the end of the day Apple macOS and hardware just make sense and the cost is not a problem.
What kept Apple alive in this market was 1) Pro Tools, 2) their own suite of applications like Final Cut Pro and Logic, 3) the 2006 Mac Pro that finally delivered everything users had hoped for — latest Intel CPUs, Windows compatibility, enough fast PCI slots for everyone. It was really the best of both worlds and became the x86 media desktop to beat. (In typical Apple fashion, the 2013 Mac Pro swung too far the other way towards Apple-specific integration and was an abysmal flop with massive heat problems and non-upgradeable GPUs stuck in the past.)
In the end SGI tried to enter the Windows NT market with its own system that had a unique GPU with unified memory and also used SGI's own firmware instead of a PC BIOS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation
Despite the GPU, it wasn't competitive with cheaper, more standard x86 hardware.
NT wasn't a GUI on DOS. NT was different, not based on DOS in any way. Dave Cutler brought his pet project NT (which was technically Digital IP) with him when he left Digital. NT was new and entirely unrelated to any other project at Microsoft.
All these factors together largely eliminated Unix workstations from most of their native markets (3D visualization, CAD, CAE, media) so that category of system just ceased to exist in the mid 2000s.
It was an odd strategy from a company that obviously had no future and nothing left to offer. At the time, I had built up so much animus against SGI for their outrageous pricing and unbelievably annoying FlexLM software licensing that it was amusing to me. Their god damned MIPS Pro compiler spent more cycles checking its license file than actually compiling a small C file. And the FlexLM system was so badly written that it did nothing to stop piracy and any user could trick it into overwriting any file on the system. They claimed to patch it, but never actually fixed it. At least they open-sourced XFS. That was nice of them.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/nasa-gets-sgi-2048-core-itaniu...
The video game industry is so huge that whatever hardware benefits from it, it will eventually crush the professional competition.
If AI is possible today, it's because billions have been invested in making our computers beasts at multiplying matrices.
A single voodoo2 in a pentium2 absolutely trounced the Octane, so my gaming eventually moved to pc and stayed there.
Plus since virtually all the animators used Windows at home and where very comfortable with it, the need for support and hand-holding was much less than with Irix.
You probably know this but a reminder: it was a double whammy of scale (network effect): SGI was selling to roughly three markets (video production, high end CAD, and midrange number crunching). NT was selling to anybody, and despite its multi-architecture support, Intel was selling to the same people. This threw off cash both of them could invest in improving their offering.
There is a good argument, though I don't know how good, for Apple to do an SGI with the Mac Pro. Its main value would be a "halo" effect: make the argument that Apple is so technically great that the people with the hardest problems turn to them, so you can too. Also Apple helps bring you the stuff you like, movies and music and such. That was an important argument back when Apple was lagging. If this argument still makes sense it might even worth doing so at cost or even a small loss paid for by the marketing department. But the green eyeshade side of Apple's planning hates that kind of excuse for good reason.
The Mac Pro has some minor benefits in being a practical way to push the design envelope in ways that will later trickle down, though as this article points out it requires investment in areas not otherwise critical, or even important to the company.
The switch to the NT platform in Windows XP was incredible. Of course, a lot of that was lost in teh beginning with the "Fisher Price" UI, and the massive rise of malware, but by SP2 most of these issues were resolved... Windows XP SP2 was one of the most stable and long lasting consumer OS of probably all time.
I wonder if Microsoft could have switched to NT for its consumer OSes earlier, and if so, how much better Windows based computing for most people would have been. Combine that with the Longhorn disaster, and MS lost so many years of precious development time.
It had the new kernel that could compete with (and even outperform) commercial Unix for workstation use, and also the new GUI from Windows 95 which meant it was both familiar and had an enormous range of apps easily available.
Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS, but it was also objectively better as a total package than Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and everything else. Open source Linux desktops were still very early.
Windows 2000 (a.k.a. NT 5) was still good and a much more practical desktop OS than the first Mac OS X which had absolutely horrendous performance. Somehow Microsoft managed to squander this lead by focusing on consumer Windows XP and their own endless .NET API turf wars that ended up destroying the credibility of the Windows platform.
The issues were that Windows NT needed much more RAM than consumer Windows at a time when RAM was still extremely expensive, and only a subset of the hardware that would work under consumer versions of Windows had drivers for Windows NT.
However, NT (and especially Windows 2000) was night and day better than Windows 9x.
Microsoft bought Softimage, one of the top competitors to Maya at the time. They charged iirc $4k or $8k and a PC to run it would run $4k-$5k
Softimage is long gone but it's what Valve used for the Source Engine and Half Life 2
[0] With the exception of the lower end UNIX workstations which were still better, yet a tad bit more expensive compared to the commodity PC hardware.
This was true early on, as in, early 90s-ish. But in the second half of the decade the balance shifted significantly and by the late 90s, Unix workstations could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being slower. I was doing sysadmin grunt work for a studio at the time and beige boxes ran circles around later generation Octane and Onyx machines.
They were also a nightmare to maintain by then. The market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement process for peripherals like keyboards and the like, we let people buy their own shit and reimburse them within some limit.
Yes, this is true enough as the situation was incomparably better with commodity PC's, with upgrade components and peripherals.
But to be fair, any branded PC was exactly the same, e.g. memory sticks they required were not compatible with the affordable or reasonably priced commodity ones (sometimes even across different models from the same PC vendor), expansion cards (even if made by a third party) also had to come from the same vendor etc, and everything that was branded came with an exorbitantly priced component price list. Compaq was notorious (and nearly universally hated) for requiring special SIMM's that could only work in Compaq PC's and only in a specific model. Procurement loathed those. IBM, HP and Dell were just the same. Then, there was RAMBUS trying to corner and lock everyone into their über-expensive memory chips and stuff (which, luckily, faltered and the company went bust). Again, I am talking about the desktop PC's not the servers.
The situation only changed after the market got flooded with cheap Taiwanese made PC's that could be easily and cheaply upgraded, so the big brands feeling the market force and pressure had no choice, eventually budged and stopped adding proprietory control pins to their memory sticks and stuff.
And of course the huge number of people buying x86 hardware meant PC hardware manufacturers could afford big R&D budgets that allowed them to surpass the workstation CPUs and GPUs in performance.
One cool thing in MacOS that Windows can't do is aggregates of audio devices/interfaces.
MacOS has easily the best Audio subsystem across MacOS & Windows.
In Linux we have JACK, which is as good as MacOS (if not better honestly).
But then Linux suffers from having very little commercial support and worse than that, a lot of problems with hardware video encoding.
Windows doesn't have any problems encoding video, but it has a terrible filesystem (which is forced on you) that causes problems for the insanely large files that you must work with on video production and in addition: the audio subsystem is the worst of all three platforms.
Linux could be a contender, if someone threw $100M USD at the problem, but getting adoption for a linux solution would be hard because the Apple stuff works "fine" and movie productions are more time constrained than cost constrained.
And now we have Pipewire which is not only better, but can also pretend it's Jack for compatibility.
I'd go as far as to say Pipewire made connecting to my Bluetooth headphones more reliable on Linux than on Windows, though neither audio stack is particularly good.
screams in terror
The ideas are great, the realization is jackshit. Sooo much finicky crap that partly also depends of whether your sound output is special enough to work well with it. And trying to make it play nice with pulseaudio is another nightmare.
Pulseaudio itself also suffers massively from UI problems, pretty much all non-basic use cases is either mess with configs or "just run a bunch of commands on runtime or every time your USB interface reconnects". Jack at least gets that part right
Trying to get some audio interface to be connected properly was... an experience, it just showed in system as one stereo input (it was 2 mono inputs) and 4.0 output (it had 4 separate outs) so there was a good deal of pulseaudio fuckery to run to just split it properly
> Linux could be a contender, if someone threw $100M USD at the problem, but getting adoption for a linux solution would be hard because the Apple stuff works "fine" and movie productions are more time constrained than cost constrained.
I wonder if someone figuring out how to run the usual tools via Wine/Proton and somehow integrate nicely with pipewire would've been enough...
It is a prime example of short-sighted “just rewrite it then!” Style Behaviours in FOSS and continues to be brought up in conversations about subsystem replacements (such as systemd).
Pipewire is a good replacement, but pulseaudio is to JACK what windows movie maker is to Final Cut.
It doesn’t deserve to be brought up when talking about professional solutions.
ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default and needed to fuck around with dmix gave way to endless problems with various software, and the fact dmix was still working subtly different than "real" device also reared its ugly head in many "pro audio" apps.
It was being developed.
People jumped on Pulseaudio and made it the default before it was finished because the ALSA contributers wanted to do it in a way that was either going to work for embedded or be optional in a reasonable way, IE; they were trying to do it right, took too long, and it got replaced with something much worse that did the job.
Which, happens unfortunately frequently.
The FreeBSD folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's fix it". And did. And they're still on that while Linux is headed into its third major audio shake-up in the same time span (OSS -> ALSA -> PulseAudio -> PipeWire).
Corporate money and contribution go to: storage, network, scheduler. Anything desktop related doesn't get any love. I bet that PR for EoL drm-kmod from linux still not merged.
It was then that I decided whoever was responsible for it had no software-architectural taste whatsoever. I didn't yet know his name. His work since then hasn't changed my mind.
Yes... it is possible. No, it's not something I ever want to do ever again.
Why do we need `open()` anyway?
(this is sarcasm, the OS exists only to solve app problems).
I've still never cared and don't know why I should. What am I missing? I've used systems with that, but never bothered to try using it because... why would I? Every media player has a volume control, YouTube has a volume control, every game has a volume control (usually multiple, for different types of sound), and 99% of the time I just want everything at about the same level anyway. The last thing I want to do is have another place a given program could have its volume set or muted or whatever, so then I have another place to look when it's not doing what I want. One per-program (built in to the programs) and one global is quite enough.
I'm not too sure how this is handled on other platforms, but pre-PA the in-app volume control would often modify the global mixer, rather than implement an in-app mixer/attenuator, which is definitely not what you usually want. In most Linux apps these days, those controls manipulate and are synchronized with the PA mixer, so there's still only one actual mixer, they are the same control. I assume that other OSes also do per-stream mixing in a similar manner, and just choose not to expose the mixer for whatever reason.
As much as people complain about PulseAudio it's always worked well for me, and from what I've seen of Windows and macOS alternatives, it's more featureful and usable out of the box.
https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/
that does not surprise me at all, unfortunately.
> One cool thing in MacOS that Windows can't do is aggregate of audio devices/interfaces.
it does come at the cost of latency & jitter: fundamental issues that ultimately stem from having two separate audio clocks. and it's not really a specific limitation of windows, which tend to use ASIO for low-latency audio. there's nothing stopping a an aggregate ASIO driver from being written, i just can't imagine it'd be that useful, indeed, i've only ever used the macOS aggregate device a handful of times, mostly only to try it out.
It was a lot of CLI fuckery, not a pleasant experience... and of course pulseaudio can't just remember it, need to be re-applied after every USB reconnect.
Can be done with UDEV but not exactly something random user would know how to do.
Some of us didn't need it, software at the time allowed us to record and mix from and playback to different audio hardware devices simultaneously already. I remember doing that in Windows ME with some audio editing software.
Public beta this month, though. https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=422724
Do they? Last I heard, most of the industry uses Linux render farms...
Smaller studios use Windows/Mac a bit more (boutiques use Macs the most), but the removal of the Xserve and the lack of competitiveness in the MacPro for several years have shifted some away from Mac.
How do they deal with HDR content? As far as I know it's not supported yet and the colour management is lacking, which seems like a big problem for today's content.
Linux can support it, just not every display server/application (yet)...
Something that either needed final cut (and the rather good final cut studio) or photoshop.
But final cut has been somewhat overtaken by adobe (or was when I was leaving the industry) and blackmagic fucking with the entire software stack by making resolve and fusion free(ish)
There are some niche bits like cinesync that allows remote viewing of footage securely and colour accurately that might still need a mac.
Apart from laptops, apple have lost the VFX market pretty well.
That said, everyone I hear who uses Final Cut Pro today seems to prefer it over any other editor. You can flawlessly edit multiple 4k color corrected video streams on an $800 fanless MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, and get 10+ hours of battery life while doing it. Nobody else can touch that.
I'm pretty certain the industry standard has always been Avid Media Composer, even if today and for years nearly all of the market share is Final Cut Pro X with the minority remainder split between Premier Pro and Da Vinci. Most of the choices being made out there are, "do I want Media Composer or FCPX?" And FCPX is a lot less expensive, so that's how it goes.
Animation and visual effects for large studios are all Linux based usually. Smaller studios vary between Mac and windows.
Edit houses tend to be primarily Mac based.
There’s very little that competes with macOS and Apple hardware though.
Take color accuracy and EDR. Linux and windows aren’t great for extended dynamic range while working, and especially if you’re using a laptop for mobile reviewing, very few laptops support the accurate display space most macs ship with.
Macs also provide a lot more software compatibility than Linux for things like the Adobe suite of products.
Combine that with out of the box support for many codecs, accelerated ProRes workflows and the ubiquity of airplay+airdrop, macs are very favoured for creative use cases.
When I went to the site it had no ads on it thanks to Opera's built in ad-block.
Curious if any HNers in the know could spill such info with a throwaway
Maybe something like;
- Mac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Watch
And you can get them in:
- Mini, Max or just "normal size"
With your choice of:
- M?, M? Pro, M? Ultra
Running
- MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS
We've already got a "mini" iPhone (SE), MacBook (Air), Mac. Plus the normal sized ones; 14" for the laptops and studio for the Mac, and then max being 16" laptops, or a tower mac, and the 12.9" tablet etc. Same for the watch too, and the iMac has played around the 21/24/27 sizes already.
Perhaps I just don't understand the product differential requirements from branding / marketing perspectives.
Anecdotally it seemed very popular, and loved by the people who bought one. Perhaps the numbers said otherwise, because otherwise I have no idea why they didn't reintroduce it as an M1/M2 machine.
Perhaps, and this is maybe just being hopeful, they're waiting for the even better efficiency of the M3 etc before reintroducing it because they want to do it, but absolutely nail it when they do without any battery life compromise. After all, they already ran the market demand test, so this would make sense if so. If that turns out to be the case I'll almost certainly buy one.
I loved mine, and put a couple of hundred thousand miles in carrying it (even wrote a lot of code in Emacs, but I remember the days when every compile was an excuse to stand up and get coffee, so the speed didn't matter to me).
AFAICT its target market was actually Asia, same as with the ultralight (for its time) Powerbook 2400c which was actually built by IBM Japan. But it didn't sell as well as expected even there.
Here are their sizes for comparison:
Then we can say things like "2022 was (not) a good MacBook-year".
On the other hand, compared to just about every other computer/tech company out there I find it by far the easiest and most sane. Is the 15" MSI GE67 better or worse than the 15" MSI Bravo 15? And where does the MSI GP67 fit into the whole picture?
Compared to Apple's/Steve Jobs' own standards, yes.
In some cases, it's complicated by being TOO SIMPLE: e.g. try figuring out iPad versions.
I think people confuse Steve's simplicity with Apple's previous need to pare down product lines to cut costs and avoid bankruptcy.
There are a zillion iPhone models at every possible price point because more than half of the USA buys iPhones.
But on the other hand you need to be a bit of an expert to compare the different series of iPad.
And who can forget that the first iPad with Retina display was called “the new iPad” and the follow up was called “iPad with Retina display”. Talk about cluster fuck naming!
I wanna say Apple is doing better than the competition but worse than they used to, but they have a few fuckups from a decade ago that a bigger than anything they’ve got going on now, so maybe they’re not clearly doing worse.
So to answer your question: Is apples naming getting complicated? Inconclusive.
That's with 20x general compute cores, 32x neural engines, and 64x GPU cores, 128GB RAM, and 8TB of storage. I guess it's probably useful for 8K video workloads, but not much else.
If the article is right and they're targeting a $10k base price for the Extreme version of the chip, then they better get it VERY right for it to be worth the effort, and I wouldn't expect many customers to be lining up regardless.
I was thinking similarly. Not Mac, but $4-5k will get you an extremely well specced Dell/HP workstation suitable for nearly anything. Staying under $5k can also make it easier to push it through finance where higher price premiums typically require more paperwork.
No argument there, but a line is drawn somewhere on ease of purchasing and it usually falls short of $10k.
I would really not recommend comparing to home built machines. Studios tend to lease from Dell/HP and those workstations will often be in the 10k+ range.
So build a two part design: a rack form factor with a storage fabric and a lot of processors combined with a super mac studio for display and control, all connected with 10 GB. The investment would be immense compared to the market (not just in hardware but with the end user tools) and hard for most companies to develop software for.
The only upside for Apple with this approach would be that their cloud back end could benefit from this development.
It's the classic Innovator's Dilemma: I don't see this market being worth investing in at all for a company like Apple.
While I can’t speak definitely how much rendering is done in the cloud, I can speak to how much general IT spend is done in the cloud from someone who should know…
https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas...
Disclaimer:Jassy is my skip*7 manager
And that's the point of the cloud metaphor (starting from the original Internet protocols paper from Cerf et al): you don't care. It doesn't mean "a computer somebody else owns"
You seem to be confusing cloud with “public cloud”, but private (and hybrid) cloud is very much a part of the modern understanding of cloud.
If you are relying on the farm to provide interactive rendering , the speed of the connection isn’t an issue. it’s not that much data to send over since studios sync the assets, so you’re usually only needing to sync attribute values and pixel data back and forth.
The issue is that you need dedicated cores for it on the farm.
When a show is going all out, those farms are saturated for usage. If a lighter asks for interactive use, they’re either waiting or you’re constantly having to reserve systems for them. That wait time is the latency I mean.
In which case why not just buy them the higher spec hardware?
Only thing is at that point it makes sense to have either a monster PC somewhere out of sight or cloud resources, so whatever hook they come up with would at least need to appear like it usefully alters the workflow, because it's going to be really expensive relative to an out-of-sight PC.
It really begs the question of who the Mac Pro is really for anymore? If you need that amount of power you're probably better off with a MacBook and an external compute resource like above, or even just an eGPU (I know, the ARM chips don't support them, but you could just buy used Intel SKUs in a pinch).
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/09/06/sonnet-mac-studio-rack-...
Not to mention single external support…
Consumers Pro users are likely to look aside on the external IO issues, but it’s doubtful that actual studios would.
You can't hit anywhere near "line rate" with usb 3.1/3.2, though an Intel Mac will gladly do so with the same _exact_ drive. You will experience write stalls and other performance problems. I don't have a usb4 drive to test by I wouldn't hold your breath.
I do not have a Thunderbolt 3 device to test. Google tells me it's a problem: https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/18/m1-mac-thunderbolt-4-ports-sp...
Expect _at most_half the advertised speeds and feel lucky if you achieve them.
EDIT:
From the article I linked: I just noticed they suggest try connecting my drive to a Thunderbolt 3 dock first. LOL, ok, I'll give this a try.
This is false in my experience. I bought a Thunderbolt 3 to Dual NVMe M.2 SSD enclosure (Sabrent EC-T3DN), set up the SSDs in a RAID 0 array, and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test benchmarked that configuration at 2,500 MB/sec read and write. That's very close to the maximum real-world usable bandwidth for TB3¹.
¹ https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2019/20190128_1352-unde...
While having power on the desktop is great, for real compute use cloud resources.
For a more specific example, music producers liked the fact you could have over a terabyte of RAM on the Mac Pro. This allows keeping their entire library of VST plugins loaded into memory, meaning they never have to wait to load plugins into their project.
If file size is a bottleneck for you then you'll see better performance computing locally, especially if you can cache workloads in DDR5 before saving to the filesystem.
The M-series chip makes sense because you can share it between mobile and desktop machines. The A-series and the M-series are very closely related. Once you start to enter the high-end server market you have to add more IP, change the processor interconnect, topology, and increase the transistor count on the IP you already developed. This leads to the necessity to design another line of processors which needs additional design, verification, validation, software development, etc that you won't be able to share with your profitable chips. You then need to ask, is there really a market for this?
When Apple used 3rd party CPUs they outsourced the cost of that server development work, the 3rd party Intel already had a large market for their Xeon class chips so development costs were spread across customers. The business made sense. Let's face it, the Pro side of the business is tiny relative to the mobile market and it does not make business sense.
SOC with soldered memory, yet still expandable.
https://twitter.com/sroussey/status/1512934509540360195?s=20
History shows that a very large chip made on a process node that has just come online isn't going to have a good initial yield, and 3nm wafers are said to be fairly expensive.
>One wafer processed on TSMC's leading edge N3 manufacturing technology will cost over $20,000 according to DigiTimes
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-will-charge-20000-per...
I read an estimate from a French firm that Mac Pro volumes are orders of magnitude lower than Power Mac volumes were two decades ago; are they doing anything about it?
The gap between laptop and desktop with today's M1 MBPs is much more narrow for sure.
Macbooks (Airs, at least) and iPads are still huge in education.
[0] Yes I know HDR is not much of a thing currently on social media, but apple tends to invest tech wise to where they see the market going, and do it earlier. Removing the floppy drive early is an indicator of this, and they realize it's a bit of a chicken & egg thing.
Apple cannot compete with $200 Chromebooks. Not without compromising the whole reason you'd choose Apple in the first place. It's a game of razor-thin margins and those aren't Apple's thing.
> Why not $thing?
Apple is focused on services, not hardware or software unless it boosts their services.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/382136/quarterly-segment...
I also wonder, does the SEC track trades placed by Mark Gurman and those who republish (collectively a bandwagon of such) pronouncements of analysts?
Sounds awesome; thanks for clarifying above, too.
Thunderbolt changes the upgradability by just plugging stuff in as needed. Only RAM is a concern this way.