Professional users — especially those in creative fields — that have long relied on Macs as Apple's ever-faithful followers have had much to be disappointed by in Apple's latest product releases. The Mac Pro helped alleviate some concerns over Apple's commitment to professional users, but the lack of updates to that line since its launch, the lack of larger or more RAM-crammed MacBook Pros, and the lack of iMac updates altogether bring Apple's commitment to its most loyal user-base into question. Will Apple CEO Tim Cook's recent words be enough to persuade macOS lovers to stay the course?
"The Pro area is very important to us," Cook said during a shareholder-meeting Q&A in Cupertino today. In typical Apple vagueness, he continued, "The creative area is very important to us in particular."
While these are incredibly non-specific comments about Apple's product pipeline for the professional market, Cook gave a more reassuring statement following these:
Don't think something we've done or something that we're doing that isn't visible yet is a signal that our priorities are elsewhere."
With Apple now going on several years without significant updates to its professional desktops, many would be right to question the company's goals for professional products. However, Cook's statements today were the most telling, however vague they may still be and however little we may still know. Naturally, there seems to be something that Apple has done and perhaps yet another "something" that Apple is doing that simply "isn't visible yet."
For the professional Mac users out there, are these comments enough to keep you going? If your attitude is a more patient one, does this give you hope for the near future, regardless of whether you were considering a switch? Or do you foresee more unfulfilled promises? Let us know your thoughts.
[via MacRumors]
Apple Laptops in particular are getting very underpowered. Cameras and Videos are starting to need very powerful computers to process them. I've noticed alot of people moving back to Windows because they can buy the gaming Laptops and Desktops. I'm someone who went the other way on a Desktop. I moved from Dell to Apple. The iMac is beautiful but I was very disappointed with the software. Overly complicated, simple tasks weren't straight forward, to many things hidden by default a very poor interface overall. Windows 10 is not brilliant by any means but it is really easier to use than Mac OS. It really surprised me as iPads and iPhones are very well done (so good its hard for Apple to improve and change the look of - so new phones don't seem that better). Apple I think are at a tipping point. They are so big they could collapse inwards as they are short products to drive them forward. They should have stayed at the prestige end - best most powerful laptops / desktops, still room for slim / lightweight mobile products.
There are professionals and professionals. For me, "pro" equipment is expandable and upgradable. Any serious film maker should consider getting real live server-grade equipment, that will allow for adding RAM, storage and GPU power. For all photographers and amateurs video maker, that trash can is still powerful enough for all their needs... except their ego.
I find this very interesting as Apple builds a workstation class machine with a server grade CPU (Intel Xeon) and limits its flexibility by making it air cooled in order to get a "cool" design while charging an arm and a leg for it. Yes it has SLI but only supports two cards. Yes it has internal storage options as long as you don't want to use SATA/SAS/FC because there are no PCIe slots for cards. Only two Gigabit Ethernet ports limits your network flexibility and as long as you don't mind cables all over the place you can have external storage using Thunderbolt, just like the SCSI Macs or 32-bit SPARC machines of old or a single or dual connection using the Gigabit ports using Link Aggregation.
In regards to the performance issues people are seeing with Lightroom and Photoshop, has anyone done anything to spread the I/O across physical devices? If the application is CPU bound, what happens if you run it on a system with more cores or for that matter more physical processors?
Hewlett Packard has a section of their website dedicated to people wanting to transition from Macs to HP workstations:
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations/mac-to-z.html
If you want scalability options you go with PC based workstations, you want cool design, buy a Mac. If you are serious about finding your performance bottlenecks you might want to look at this:
http://www.brendangregg.com/USEmethod/use-macosx.html