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What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

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Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#191

Post by simonh »

UltraViolence wrote: post #61
klelatti wrote: post #49

Just looking at the economics of the Mac Pro based on sales of the machine itself doesn't quite capture the full picture. An Apple Silicon Mac Pro could have many roles: - A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. This in turn could enhance the Apple / Mac brand for a certain group of users. - An aspirational product for users who think that they might need more power in the future.…

This will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business. The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.

Apple’s Mac business has been highly profitable relative to its PC competitors for several decades now. Their habit of consuming the lions share of the profits in an industry, from a small fraction of the sales, started with the Mac and was extended to the iPod and then the iPhone.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#192

Post by sangnoir »

formerly_proven wrote: post #106
akelly wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't want you to know this but they do their mechanical and electrical design on Windows PCs (using Siemens NX and OrCAD respectively)

Hardly surprising because I don't think there's even one piece of high-end CAx software for Mac.

Why Is it that the Mac Pro has so little Pro software available for it? Could it be the neglect? AV software used to be Apple's tentpole for Pro's, until they decided Prosumers were more profitable and lost mindshare of actual Pro's as a result (see the great migration after the releasee of the first Final Cut Pro X)

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#193

Post by coredog64 »

girvo wrote: post #52
ksec wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? Which is the question I have been asking since 2015 . From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap. >but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip…

Silly idea: could they put a M-series processor connected to a Xeon as a coprocessor to get the “benefits” of both wrt. adding their NPU stuff? Would that even make any sense?

Sun used to sell PCI cards with a complete Intel computer on them. You'd use your Sun workstation for the hard stuff, and then you'd let the P3/Celeron running Win2k handle Outlook or whatever other Win32-only software you needed.

I saw a lot of new-in-box examples cheap on eBay prior to Sun's implosion, so I suspect they weren't particularly popular and were primarily targeted at a few important customers that had some box to tick.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#194

Post by klelatti »

ajross wrote: post #182
klelatti wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, performance has been a key part of Apple’s branding for decades from Power PC (don’t disagree with your point on G4 though) through Intel in the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro and now on iPhones and M series Macs. Edit - this is a comment about branding ie how Apple presents itself not actual performance.

I think the marketing of performance has always been a subthread. But the actual machines have always been merely "good enough". The 68k macs lagged PCs significantly. PPC had a brief moment where it was faster than 486/P5 devices but then got demolished by P6+ cores, to the extent that Apple had to switch to Intel themselves. Then for almost two decades they shipped what amounted to the same silicon as high end wind…

> I think the marketing of performance has always been a subthread.

Exactly the point I made.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#195

Post by simonh »

coldtea wrote: post #111
KyeRussell wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s…so long ago. The Apple with a two trillion dollar market cap and a spaceship campus is not the Apple of that era. The wider market and world aren’t what they were then, either. It doesn’t mean very much at all.

Doesn't matter. Those things can go in the span of a few years. Remember when Blackberry was king? Pepperidge Farm remembers!

The problem they had was that they sold individual standalone products, not platforms. There was very little to keep a user with the same vendor other than liking the next product. A platform is a different beast completely, and once a platform or set of platforms gets established at scale in a market, it’s almost impossible for a new entrant to compete with it.

This is because platforms have three advantages. The first is a user’s sunk investment. I own hundreds of pounds worth of iOS software, and even the free software I use took an investment of time and effort to learn. Plus I now have considerable assets in those file formats and storage systems. Switching to a new platform would be expensive in money and time. The second advantage is network effects, my whole family is on the same platform, so is my company and many of my friends using the same services. The third advantage is the ecosystem. There is a plethora of software and services available for iOS that a new entrant won’t have, many offered by third parties. In competing with iOS and Android you’re not just competing with Apple and Google, but also the entire ecosystems of companies that complement them. These three advantages also apply to Android and its users.

This is why even Microsoft could not break into the modern mobile smartphone platforms market, they were too late. Android and iOS had critical mass in all three areas. Google was incredibly lucky they managed to get Android up to being a viable platform before Apple had the entire mobile platform market sewn up. Fortunately the Android team at the time knew the new game they were playing when they saw the iPhone announcement, and realised they were in a race against time for survival.

This is also why the desktop is dominated today by the same platforms it was in the 90s. Mac and Windows. Arguably we could extend that to the 80s with Mac and DOS. That’s around 3 decades of stability. The mobile market in its current form was established around 12 years ago. I would not be at all surprised if the mobile market is still dominated by Android and iOS in another 20 years. There are incredibly powerful forces driving this.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#196

Post by dhosek »

philistine wrote: post #151
sylens wrote: post #76

Apple’s high end desktop strategy has been confusing to me for several years now. They made a big deal out of the iMac Pro, even though that seemed like an obvious quick fix for power users since the new Mac Pro wasn’t ready at the time. However, I never understood why Pros would want to pay more for an an all-in-one they couldn’t self service or upgrade when they probably already had monitors they preferred using. T…

In 2006, computing was less generous. A music producer probably needed a Mac Pro for their workflow to be efficient. Since then, Intel has massively reduced the delta between laptop and desktop chips. Coupled with the increase in computing ability of our processors while most tasks do not increase their needs (that music producer does not need more computing than in 2006) and desktops slowly faded to nothing but the…

The MBP was plenty sufficient for most music production tasks even in 2004 when I got my first one. If I were running a pro studio with a 32+ channel mixing desk, I could see needing more, but I was able to manage 16 channels of live recording and at least 64 channels of live mix on my 2004 TiBook.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#197

Post by llampx »

I don't see a reason the Mac Pro has to have a more powerful CPU than the Mac Studio. For example the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air also share the same CPU at certain levels.

The difference could be in expandability (PCIe slots) and RAM if they are able to either move the RAM off-die or have a NUMA architecture.

Interesting to speculate though. So far they also haven't launched a multi-socket product, maybe that's what the Mac Pro could launch with.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#198

Post by kergonath »

solarkraft wrote: post #60
esskay wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XServe would probably be pretty popular with the recent shift to ARM based servers for their lower power consumption. The problem would be their insistance for them to run full blown macOS instead of a dedicated Linux based server OS.

I think there's a chance they'd give you a thin iOS-based server OS (think watchOS or tvOS) with Hypervisor.Framework and let you choose what you run on it.

That could actually be very exciting.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#199

Post by klelatti »

SirGiggles wrote: post #180
klelatti wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, performance has been a key part of Apple’s branding for decades from Power PC (don’t disagree with your point on G4 though) through Intel in the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro and now on iPhones and M series Macs. Edit - this is a comment about branding ie how Apple presents itself not actual performance.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say efficiency instead? It's to my understanding that the latest offerings from both AMD and Intel are competitive in regards to synthetic benchmarks at the cost of higher power consumption.

> keep part of Apple’s branding

I made no comment about actual performance.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#200

Post by abrawill »

formerly_proven wrote: post #106
akelly wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't want you to know this but they do their mechanical and electrical design on Windows PCs (using Siemens NX and OrCAD respectively)

Hardly surprising because I don't think there's even one piece of high-end CAx software for Mac.

Just out of interest; which ones would you consider high-end?
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