- The word “mistake” was not uttered, but this is about as close as we’re going to get to Apple admitting they miscalculated with the current Mac Pro’s concept. One word that was uttered, however, was “sorry”. Here’s Schiller, after being asked whether they already had an external design in mind for the next-gen Mac Pros:
We’re not going to get into exactly what stage we’re in, just that we told the team to take the time to do something really great. To do something that can be supported for a long time with customers with updates and upgrades throughout the years. We’ll take the time it takes to do that. The current Mac Pro, as we’ve said a few times, was constrained thermally and it restricted our ability to upgrade it. And for that, we’re sorry to disappoint customers who wanted that, and we’ve asked the team to go and re-architect and design something great for the future that those Mac Pro customers who want more expandability, more upgradability in the future. It’ll meet more of those needs.
Fuck 'em. That little catastrophe is four fuckin' years old now and you're just now thinking "maybe we ought to try and retain some of our pro users"?
- Federighi: “I think if you use Xcode downloads as a metric, it’s possible software developers are actually our largest pro audience. It’s growing very quickly, it’s been fantastic.”
If you've ever found something in Linux that claims to run in OS X, you've downloaded XCode.
- or examples of the type of software that the current Mac Pro isn’t well-suited for, Federighi mentioned VR: “Those can be in VR, those can be in certain kinds of high end cinema production tasks where most of the software out there that’s been written to target those doesn’t know how to balance itself well across multiple GPUs, but can scale across a single large GPU.”
It's almost as if Media Composer and Symphony were being optimized to run on PC. I know this: I'm running 16 cores at performance easily three or four times better than the hottest Mac Pro available and the rig cost me $3k out the door. Not only that, but right next to me is a nine (9!) year old mac pro that runs faster than the current $7k mac pro. By the time the new ones come out, the fucker will be ten.years.old. And maybe computer technology sits still more than it used to but I have an eight core virtualized server chip capable of clocking to 4.5GHz and it cost me less than a thousand dollars eighteen months ago. If I wanted that kind of performance in MacVille I'd be out $25k.