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Mac Pro

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Re: Mac Pro

#531

Post by adolph »

milhous wrote: post #99
adolph wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like the good old Cube. Only the guts are in a triangle.

Yep, exactly my thoughts. Also, didn't Tim Cook say the mini was going to be manufactured in the US as well? And could it also be the case that the Mini will follow the Pro's form factor because it would save money in manufacturing an entirely separate low-margin unit? After seeing the Pro, I fantasized how fun it would be to have a desktop machine with several symmetric displays. My bet, the entry level Pro will be…

My bet is that Apple will be hard pressed to keep the current 2,500 base price. Three next generation Thunderbolt connectors, expensive Xeon processors, expensive ECC RAM, expensive PCIe flash disk. They basically took all the cheap, legacy and physically large stuff off the Mac Pro and folded up the remainder into a triangle that goes into a tube.

Can you believe that the old Mac Pro case and fundamental design was launched 10 years ago with the Power Mac G5?

Re: Mac Pro

#532

Post by mistercow »

tech-no-logical wrote: post #480
btown wrote: post #231

Copywriting and product-debate aside, that's some pretty impressive frontend presentation. From what I can tell from the minified JS, they're using Require.JS for code organization, their own jQuery-like utility toolkit they call Apple Core, fully pre-rendered text everywhere, and javascript that plays and pauses two copies of the HTML5 video, one backwards and one forwards, shuffling their opacities for seamless tra…

pity it does nothing in opera but show the can, and I wore out my mousewheel by scrolling to slide 2 in firefox. probably just tested in safari. preaching to their own choir I guess.

>probably just tested in safari. preaching to their own choir I guess.

I doubt they sell many Mac Pros to new customers, so it's not surprising that they wouldn't focus on making that part of the site work well for other browsers and platforms (although it did work fine under Chrome on Ubuntu for me).

Re: Mac Pro

#533

Post by mikeash »

beedogs wrote: post #511
seanp2k2 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Apple is betting the farm on Thunderbolt being the future, and I don't see that future materializing. How many Thunderbolt peripherals have y'all even seen in real life that weren't the Apple external monitor or a mini displayport display adapter? I feel like this is even less prevalent than Firewire was back in the 1394 glory days (it was/still is an excellent bus for running audio, due in no small part…

They're not "betting the farm" on it: they're locked into Thunderbolt because Intel sold them an end-to-end platform, from CPU to chipset to everything in between. That "everything in between" includes Thunderbolt; it's the reason you haven't seen the latest USB on a Mac in forever. Even in spite of a dearth of options, Thunderbolt was the only way to go on a Mac because Intel said so.

"it's the reason you haven't seen the latest USB on a Mac in forever."

Do I misunderstand what you mean by this? USB3 is rolling out on Macs and available on most of them today. (I think the Mac Pro is the only one currently lacking it.)

Re: Mac Pro

#534

Post by podperson »

adolph wrote: post #44
podperson wrote: post #7

The design seems pretty ugly to me, but it is functional. It's essentially a wind tunnel with all the circuit boards placed against it.

Just like the good old Cube. Only the guts are in a triangle.

And the Cube was slower than the midrange Power Mac of the day, and was encased in a thick plastic case, and -- worst of all -- had a capacitive power switch which would trip by itself in humid weather.

Re: Mac Pro

#535

Post by jarek »

sneak wrote: post #481
jarek wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno what laptop you're using - the screen failed on mine and I replaced it on my floor, not even a fancy workstation.

MacBookAir4,2 and MacBookPro10,1. I buy AppleCare and leave the screwdrivers to the Genius Bar. They have copies of them on all of the continents I travel between; I frequently do not. Furthermore, who wants to be in the laptop repair business? I push bits. For a few hundred bucks they'll fix anything that breaks and I can stop being the Maytag Man and get on with life.

I take it you do not visit Poland or Trinidad and Tobago often. Fair enough, to each for their own needs! But keep in mind the grandparent is not necessarily a high-flying high-paid bit-pusher like you, so your dismissal is still a little self-centered.

(Should I mention that it took two standard-size Phillips heads to replace my screen, the kind of sizes frequently found in a basic swappable-head screwdriver?)

Re: Mac Pro

#536

Post by stephen_g »

pavlov wrote: post #467
look_lookatme wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I can't see a serious video editor wanting one, but they're all jumping ship to get cheaper Wintel workstations" Is this actually the case? I don't know anything about that segment of the computing industry, but I just assumed that FCP was the industry standard.

FCP was never the only solution in the pro video editing market. Avid has been the traditional choice since the mid-'90s, but FCP was encroaching. Unfortunately the botched introduction of FCP X sent Apple back a decade in this market. FCP X was too different from 7, and it didn't even support many of the workflows that pros needed. Since users had to learn new software anyway, a lot of editors went to Avid or Adobe…

You'd be surprised how many pro editors are using FCPX now. With the updates it's got it's better than FCP 7 was.

Re: Mac Pro

#537

Post by mimiflynn »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #475
btown wrote: post #231

Copywriting and product-debate aside, that's some pretty impressive frontend presentation. From what I can tell from the minified JS, they're using Require.JS for code organization, their own jQuery-like utility toolkit they call Apple Core, fully pre-rendered text everywhere, and javascript that plays and pauses two copies of the HTML5 video, one backwards and one forwards, shuffling their opacities for seamless tra…

Ugh. I think it's beyond awful. Incredibly slow and in many environments (chrome-windows) effectively non-functional. I still haven't made it to the end because of how slow and unresponsive it is.

I'm using Chrome on Windows and it was fast for me. Worked as expected. Might be a connection issue?

Re: Mac Pro

#538

Post by coldtea »

Livven wrote: post #520
btown wrote: post #231

Copywriting and product-debate aside, that's some pretty impressive frontend presentation. From what I can tell from the minified JS, they're using Require.JS for code organization, their own jQuery-like utility toolkit they call Apple Core, fully pre-rendered text everywhere, and javascript that plays and pauses two copies of the HTML5 video, one backwards and one forwards, shuffling their opacities for seamless tra…

The site is really cool but to me feels too much like a fancy Flash page of old, just made with HTML. It's simply not as effective at presenting information as a traditional, scrollable webpage, for instance you can't use your browser's in-page search to look for keywords. Also it doesn't really work in the mobile browsers I've tried (works very poorly on iOS, falls back to a normal page on Android, doesn't show anyt…

>The site is really cool but to me feels too much like a fancy Flash page of old, just made with HTML. It's simply not as effective at presenting information as a traditional, scrollable webpage, for instance you can't use your browser's in-page search to look for keywords.

This makes the assumption that the raw details is the only information they want to convey.

Communication works in many levels. The presentation (form) level is just as important. The designed this way to communicate inside the very the design of the page ideas about the exclusiveness, high-techness (sic), etc of the product.

I'd say this implicit stuff is even more important to them than the actual raw information.

Re: Mac Pro

#539

Post by pavlov »

stephen_g wrote: post #536
pavlov wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FCP was never the only solution in the pro video editing market. Avid has been the traditional choice since the mid-'90s, but FCP was encroaching. Unfortunately the botched introduction of FCP X sent Apple back a decade in this market. FCP X was too different from 7, and it didn't even support many of the workflows that pros needed. Since users had to learn new software anyway, a lot of editors went to Avid or Adobe…

You'd be surprised how many pro editors are using FCPX now. With the updates it's got it's better than FCP 7 was.

I'm not saying FCP X is bad today, but the 1.0 release was an undisputed flop.

A lot of people jumped ship to Avid and Adobe rather than wait for FCP X to eventually improve. Convincing them to take another look at FCP X won't be easy.

Re: Mac Pro

#540

Post by [deleted] »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #466
astrodust wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea here is any video card you might want you can just plug in to a Thunderbolt 2 port. Six of those, which can be chained, is way better than having four internal slots.

Not quite. Note that Thunderbolt 2 can do 2x20G/bits/ per second, vs PCI-E v3 at 32G/bytes/ per second (on a 16x slot). Refs: - http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/19/pci-express-makes-the-3-0... - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pci_express - http://www.zdnet.com/intel-unveils-thunderbolt-2-7000016595/ - http://www.tomshardware.com/news/lucid-gpu-graphics-thunderb... - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-graphi…

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