Re: What if there actually IS a new Mac Pro?

[Craig Seeman] "Certainly Macs in general can remain compatible, regarding OS and various apps going back several years. When it came to FCPX it was under 3 years. To put it another way, will the new MacPro replacement you buy in 2012 be able to run FCPX in 2015. My guess (obviously just a guess) is no and it there many be no simple "unsupported" swap of the GPU (again my guess)."

Maybe. I don't think it is likely though. The hardware dividing line for FCPX is OpenCL-capable GPUs, and there would need to be some all-new, low-level, hardware-dependent APIs that 2015 FCPX requires in order for your projection to come true. I think that is unlikely. Not impossible, just unlikely.

Apple chose to draw a very modern line in the sand for FCPX's starting point, and that would serve them well for the decade they see as its codebase's lifespan. If they built FCPX atop older, less featured APIs, it would not be able to do all that it does (which was/is already fairly limited in the eyes of its critics).

Since FCPX is built on APIs that scale with hardware, there will be a strong incentive for users to give it the best Mac they can to get all the performance they can, but the minimum system requirements of 2011 will probably not expand much in terms of hardware requirements in the next few years. Hardware requirements for working with third party add-ons will carry their own restrictions, but that has always been true for any NLE.

I guess my bottom line is I don't think Apple has a more aggressive duty cycle in mind as a business model for growing the Mac. Growing the Mac comes at the expense of other PCs far more than it does from forcing existing users to upgrade so they can run a new app that won't work on a 3-year-old Mac.

Best,
Andy