Re: What if there is no new Mac Pro?

[James Mortner] "And where do you think "big-iron" machines are today ? Take a look at Baselight grading clusters, Flames or Smokes..."

They are being used in smaller and smaller numbers than they were a decade ago. Since Blackmagic purchased DaVinci how many users do you think are running Resolve on an off-the-shelf machine vs some monster with 16 GPUs in it? Now that Smoke is on OSX I wonder how many people will use it on an everyday Mac Pro? Sure, they won't get top end performance but if they could afford the top end performance they'd probably already have Smoke running in their shop.


[James Mortner] "Honestly, good enough ain't going to cut it round my area. People just dont have time to stare at operators waiting for renders etc"

And your area, like some of my areas, is a place Apple isn't going to cater too. I'd say they never really catered to it but the tools they offered were good enough, and inexpensive enough, that a lot of people didn't see the point in paying 10x the price for the performance difference. How many people opted to configure an entire FCP editing suite for less than the price of just an Avid Adrenaline? How many people opted to grade using Color (or FinalTouch before Apple bought it), Symphony or even FCP's 3-way CC because they couldn't afford to walk into a DaVinci suite that cost 6 figures?

There will always be a high-end niche that has the money, and the clients, to get the best & fastest gear out there. But it's a small niche and an ever shrinking niche. The constant march of technology ensures that. Sure, we'll find bigger things to throw at the machines (4k for example) but the landscape now has many shades of gray where as recently as 10yrs ago it was pretty black and white. A decade ago if I wanted to capture and spit out uncompressed video I was looking for a tower and some fast, expensive storage. Today any mac with ThB can do the job for a fraction of the price.


-Andrew

2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5)