On Jun 13, 2012, at 11:23 AM, Jim Curtis wrote: I’ve never understood power users need for “small and light”.
"Power users" doesn't mean what it used to.
I saw an Apple ad on TV yesterday for the new MBP. They were running FCPX on it. This tells me that their definition of what constitutes "pro" has morphed. It now means "anybody with a camera and laptop." Just as "broadcast quality" and "HD" got hijacked by marketeers, so goes other once-meaningful terms.
People who "need" a MacPro has been reduced to people who use ProRes4444, uncompressed HD, Arri RAW and RED. That's a small fraction of the "pro" market. I'd guess that the rest of the "pro" market, which includes corporate producers, news gathering, marketing destined for the web, wedding and event videographers, and so on, is 90% of the total. For them, a laptop or iMac based equipment package will suffice.
We're going to need a new word to distinguish between what used to be "pro," and what is now "pro." Pro HD? Ultra-super Pro? I digress.
I'm starting to think that if you're in the desktop class, just forget about Apple. That's a dead end. They're catering to the 90%, and doing a swell job. A three-year product cycle is not good enough. Fire them.
If I were running Adobe, I'd consider dropping Mac support for the CS, except for maybe a dumbed down feature set line of iCrap apps. Clearly, there's money to be made there.
I don't know. Maybe I'm succumbing to what Seinfeld called "The Preemptive Breakup." Perhaps the companies that make Apple products worth having should dump Apple before Apple dumps them. That could be cutting off their nose to spite their face. But, investing in development costs for a dead end product could be a risk not worth taking. If there was justice in the world, Apple's intransigence communicating with their customers should cost them dearly.
Seems to me that investing in Windows hardware is a much safer bet for the Super Ultra Pro HD set.
The fact that the new Retina MBP is twice the geekbench score as my MacPro 1.1 (and 16GB versus 12GB RAM) tells me that what constitutes pro is drastically changing. But I am an editor primarily who does a lot of primarily 2D AE work. raytracing is neat in theory, but almost no clients want me to take the time to create 3D scenes much less get to the level of precision of Raytracing. If I can get a TB chassis for my MacPro hard drives, and an adaptor for my Matrox box, I'm not sure why I need a MacPro anymore for what I do which is primarily documentary, independent, and corporate video.
My sense is that the Apple roadmap is that eventually we won't need anything more than a laptop, or a little mac mini to do what we have always done with big boxes. Once Thunderbolt doubles or quadruples it's bandwidth you'll be able to put everything extra you need in a secondary chassis configured exactly to your needs (with corresponding savings). Have all the functional beefiness of a big box but also walk away with your essentials at the end of the day on your laptop.
Of course, if you need to work with 4K, 8K, whatever K, then you'll need a bigger "box" at least for a year or three. But that level of "pro" isn't ever going to amount to more than the tiniest percentage of users.
James
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