What Pro Computing Could Be

If it took you two years to get that far, you may want to find some less stressful topics to ponder. Also, please enlighten me: what exactly is Microsoft's previous investment in "pro hardware"? And what "pro software" has Microsoft been investing in in the past that targets "video editors, 3D modelers, audio engineers, data scientists"?

WTF? This article is almost literally "The MacBook sucks, my friend agrees and we've been throwing around buzzwords and then we stopped"

Seriously: there's no coherent thought in this "article". I don't even know what these so-called "professionals" are missing in the author's view.

" fast machines with plenty of memory and myriad ways of moving data in, out, and around them." – Well, yeah, fast is great. But it's not Apple's fault that CPU speeds are stagnating. It's simply approaching physical limits, as well as CPUs having reached a level of performance where people prefer to invest resources into power efficiency.

AS one of those so-called "data scientists" I'll also let you in on a trade secret: the stuff I do on a notebook could comfortably run on a phone. It's a text editor, a browser, and ssh. That's because we don't do number crunching on a notebook. It's a cluster, or sometimes a workstation with a couple of GPUs.

Everybody also seems to miss that we've seen an actual leap in notebook performance: SSDs had a huge impact because HDDs were (by far) the limiting factor for almost all workloads.

Regarding the "myriad ways to move data around" – no thanks. Now I'd consider it quite failure to ever have actual data on a notebook. But I'd guess even if you're working on local data, USB 3.1 and thunderbolt are probably what you'd want to use?

"Pros don’t quit because their tools are suboptimal."

Yeah, they do. Give someone a shovel and ask them to dig a tunnel.

"That’s practically the definition of “professional” – a pro gets the damn thing done."

No, the definition of a professional is "getting paid", which, by the way, separates them from your little thought experiment. Alternatively, "professional" is slang for a prostitute, which actually does fit your definition of "getting the damn thing done", so maybe I've been reading this wrong.

"That cycle of dependence, along with the need for stability and predictability in one’s tools, makes product incrementalism the norm in pro computing."

I still don't know what "pro computing" is, but surely "pros" are today using the same operating systems as "non-pro" are? So the non-professional computing is also moving incrementally, right? Then I don't get why you're trying to derive some sort of causality ("need for stability...") that's specific for one of the two segments when they move in parallel.

"It should be no surprise as to why nobody has attempted the sort of ground-up overhauling of pro computing that we mapped out: it’s expensive, slow, and risky to do something big, new, and different."

Or maybe it's just stupid. Because our tools are pretty good (being the product of actual professionals "getting the job done") and there's no reason to throw them out for unnamed pie-in-the-sky fantasies.

This sums up perfectly my thoughts about Apple hardware right now. I am annoyed by the fact that I won't be able to connect any of my devices to the new MacBook Pro, but I'll buy one anyway, because I need to get things done to earn money.

I also agree that the pro market is ripe for disruption (again). Interestingly enough, Apple began its rise to stardom from the pro segment, which it is now abandoning. Foolishly, I think, because it's a relatively easy disruption path for the next company.

"Getting the job done" is the pretty important aspect for me here. And the reason why I've (again) bought a new MacBook. I am a freelance software developer. I can use all the tools I need on a Mac and they work fine. I generally don't care about hardware or software failures - maybe I was lucky, but my previous Macs never disappointed me in the last years. I don't have to spend time configuring drivers or fighting updates.

Another aspect is the look and feel of a Mac. When I am onsite at clients, giving presentations or acquiring jobs, it makes a huge difference if I have a Mac or Dell/HP/Lenovo/whatever notebook standing on the table. People, especially managers, mostly value appearance more than competence - sad but true.