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A year ago, I visited the Apple campus in Cupertino to figure out where the hell the new Mac Pro was. I joined a round table discussion with Apple SVPs and a handful of reporters to get the skinny on what was taking so long. The answer, it turns out, was that Apple had decided to start completely over with the Mac Pro, introduce completely new pro products like the iMac Pro and refresh the entire MacBook Pro lineup.
[...] In that discussion a year ago, Apple SVP Phil Schiller acknowledged that pro customers, including developers, were hungry for evidence that Apple was paying attention to their needs. "We recognize that they want to hear more from us. And so we want to communicate better with them. We want them to understand the importance they have for us, we want them to understand that we're investing in new Macs — not only new MacBook Pros and iMacs but Mac Pros for them, we want them to know we are going to work on a display for a modular system," Schiller said.
[...] While there are no further details on the exact shape that the Mac Pro will take, Boger says they are still very much in the modular mindset. [...]What shape that modularity takes is another matter entirely, of course. I know some people have been pining for the days of internal expansion card configurations with standardized hardware — and maybe that is the way that this will go. But on Tuesday I also got a tour of the editing suites where Mac hardware and software is pushed to the limits, including extensive use of eGPU support, and a different vision emerges.
[...] All we currently know about the Mac Pro is that it's modular and that it's being shaped by the feedback from those pros in-house, as well as external conversations with developers and professional users.
[...] As a side note, by the way, I wouldn't expect to see any more info about Mac Pro at WWDC in June. Maybe Apple will surprise on that front, but I think for anything further about Mac Pro we're going to have to wait for next year.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/05/apples-2019-imac-pro-will-be-shaped-by-workflows/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday April 10 2018, @08:45AM (18 children)
So TFT announces "Apple's 2019 Mac Pro Will be Shaped by Workflows" and then the entire FS is a thoroughly mixed mayo made of 'listening customers' with 'modularity' with a pinch of 'different vision's and concludes with 'we don't know and it's likely will not get to know soon'.
So, mate... this is not a flow it's a flux state. It also has no work that matters into it, because there's no info in the conclusion.
Did anyone get what exactly is with that Mac shaping workflow?
Or why this unordered heap of words worth to be considered a story?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @09:33AM
hey. at least they said workflow and not cloudflow. stop complaining.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday April 10 2018, @09:45AM (2 children)
Either Apple are going to make the Mac Pro completely different, or they aren't
They may also be making it "modular" in the sense of "plug in an external card" or plug in *lots* of cards,
OR the author can't interpret internal Apple design terms, and just put them all into a word salad.
So.. did the author get *paid* for this article?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lentilla on Wednesday April 11 2018, @03:29AM (1 child)
"modular": as in: the base model will cost a reasonable amount of money. If you actually want to do anything, then you can choose from an eye-watering array of proprietary options to customise your Mac to arrive a jaw-dropping final price. And since no two Macs will be the same, and there is no way to upgrade them after a couple of years, the secondary market won't exist. Modular. Think different. It doesn't mean what everybody thinks it does.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday April 11 2018, @03:43AM
Well to be fair, most of the folks I know using Macs, funding ain't an issue... anecdotal of course.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday April 10 2018, @11:17AM (1 child)
I read some other articles about the 2019 Mac Pro last week, but did not submit any.
I think the gist was that they will probably continue to use Intel chips, no switch to ARM just yet. And that they were announcing it now so everybody knows it's not coming in 2018.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 10 2018, @12:05PM
Sweet. Short and to the point, thanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Oakenshield on Tuesday April 10 2018, @12:07PM (6 children)
That IS the story. Apple doesn't know what the hell they are doing anymore. After Jobs died, there is no vision, only throwing things and seeing what sticks. Change for change's sake.
Apple is engineering and workflowing themselves out of the desktop market. Does anyone choose Apple anymore for a particular strength other than it is not Windows?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 10 2018, @12:12PM (1 child)
Beat me if I know. I'm a Linux guy, using Windows daily because the company that pays me uses it.
Mac? Nope.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Tuesday April 10 2018, @12:36PM
I'm in the same boat. I run Linux 90% of the time at home (I dual boot) and have a Windows desktop at work. Although I do manage a bunch of Linux servers. The issue is that you never hear about Macs holding most of the market (or mind) share in any particular field anymore. Even the education field is (or has) migrated to Chromebooks or Windows. I do hear about users of Macs doing development work for other OSes in addition to the captive IOS work, but that's about it. Do Macs have a strength anymore? A coworker has one of the little flower pot Macs from a couple years ago, but he loves Apple. The number of Apple machines he supports in our building, I can count on one hand.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Tuesday April 10 2018, @01:43PM
Yes. The default modifier key is not control. This means that you can use the same shortcuts for copy and paste in the terminal as you do in every other application and control-c still means SIGINT. I wish other *NIX environments had done this instead of copying Windows' copies of the Mac shortcuts (DOS and early Windows used shift-insert, shift-delete and control-shift-delete for paste, copy and cut, they switched to control-c/v/x because the Mac used command-c/v/x).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Wednesday April 11 2018, @12:18AM
I still choose Apple. I will freely admit that a part of that is because I am used to the ecosystem, but some more objective reasons are:
- Build quality. My current iMac is over 5 years old and is still running solidly - no problems with any of the components. In my 25 years of Apple product ownership, I have had exactly one desktop machine die on me
- Ease of use. This is an area that Apple are starting to weaken in actually, but it's still much easier to set up and maintain a system than it is for *nix or Windows. I work with PCs for a living - I don't want to keep working once I get home. I particularly hate the way that Win10 applies updates and resets your device with no option to defer - a real pain in the ass
- Integration with iProducts. I prefer iPhones and iPads over Android devices (separate discussion). It's easier to keep music, photos, videos etc synchronized over the ecosystem. I suspect that this point is due to start weakening for me too, since I refuse to use iCloud to store my stuff on Apple's servers
- Less security holes. We can debate the reasons why forever. Yes, there are security holes in Apple products, but it's a much smaller target than Windows or Android.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 11 2018, @02:39AM
In the 1980's and early 1990's I was a Photolithographer editing images using film, by hand.
In about 1992 my boss bough a Mac because it was the future, and we laughed at it because we could do what it could do but much faster, which was what counted.
There were $million Unix workstations for image editing that could do some cool things, but they cost $1 million so were not common.
Eventually processing power caught up and the old hand skills became obsolete and the industry filled up with "Graphic Designers" paid minimum wage, but they all used Macs. The Graphics industry was one of Apples' most reliable customer bases.
Fast forward a few years and about the Win XP era the old place I no longer worked at had rows upon rows of Win XP machines, because they did what Macs did at 2/3rds the price.
I know plenty of "Designers" use Macs, but there has not really been a compelling reason to, as Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign and the rest all run fine on Windows.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday April 11 2018, @03:45AM
Umm the UX/UI/Graphic Designers at my workplace all still use Macs, I asked them why and most of the response was "because Windows is shit!"
So maybe you're right about Apple, maybe you're not, but doesn't seem it matters given the next best competition is utterly crap. Yes yes this year _will_ be the year of the linux desktop.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Tuesday April 10 2018, @12:10PM (3 children)
It's a 3years architecture (PC rather than x86) project headed by a mechanical engineer that's initially (last year) focused on assessing customers' needs in the graphics design market and exploring how existing eGPUs fit, or didn't/won't fit, in. That is, hardware-wise they're building everything around the GPU. Software wise they're designing UIs around industrial workflow (reducing clicks and the likes). They have everything from silicon to OS people around so depending on the benchmarks, they can design a whole new everything or just end up spit-polishing an x86.
Another thing that wasn't mentioned was any of that continuum nonsense Microsoft been railroading Windows into. So, they weren't looking into any of the VR and tablets toys. Only productivity.
That said, that was the state of the project last year before they've sought to hire an ARM linux dev last month.
Anyhow, the discrepancies between the message and the facts is what they were not certain of at the time. But the team's composition and choice of management is enough to clue you on where they (think) they're headed.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 10 2018, @12:26PM (2 children)
Uh, that's such a double-edges sword. After all, computers need to be interacted with to be useful.
Otherwise... the "intuitive design replaces dozens of keys with a single wheel" [theonion.com] is an option too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday April 10 2018, @01:49PM (1 child)
Just one popular example. Shortening mouse travel and contrasting UI elements are classics too. My impression from the conservative undertone is that they won't go for a whole new UI concept and will only go as far as gradually adding time-tested features like they did copy-paste history and workspaces.
The thing about this project is that 3 years is VERY long term. Too long to just repackage an x86 or spit-polish an existing UI. For a company the size if Apple, it's enough to do you own compute, graphics cores and SoC. It's enough to write your own new OS. It might even be enough to do both. So, I'm looking at their team makeup and trying to list the things I think they're trying do according to the workflow they've stated. Best I can make is that they're just exploring what can be done and how much of the current PC architecture they can leave behind starting with the ATX motherboard and/or the eGPU expansion slot going for a more embedded solution, to even dumping the x86 completely. That is, the team's composition doesn't smell like a new OS.
But it's all just my interpretation of the article. Some people read the exact opposite into it. And the time table is so far ahead I think they have plenty of time to change their minds or make some aggressive deal with Intel anyhow. So, meh...
compiling...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Tuesday April 10 2018, @03:35PM
And then they'll fuck it up. I recently gave up on Snow Leopard and every recent version of OSX sucks. In the new iteration of workspaces, when you do the expose thing you CANNOT move windows from one workspace to another in the icon view -- you have to go to the workspace where the window is, then grab it and move it where you want. Previously, you could be in any workspace and switch the iconized image of any application from any workspace to another. I had to spend $12 to buy a program to get useful workspaces back.
Or their is Preview -- used to be you could open a PDF and from the menu there was a "print this page" option. Gone. Now you have to go through the print dialogue and type in the page range, or open the sidebar and select the page you want in the sidebar, check an option to print that page, and then click OK. What the hell was wrong with the previous very convenient method?
It's so bad that for an older machine I use for my 3D printer, I eventually just said screw it, and installed Mint. Sooooo much more user friendly.
(Score: 2) by RedIsNotGreen on Tuesday April 10 2018, @06:57PM
The story is: Apple is working on a new Mac Pro, and it's coming in 2019.
Save up your money and don't buy anything else for now, or you'll be sorry!