Apple at WWDC: Sleek new iOS, death of the big cats, pint-sized Mac Pro Apple came out swinging at its detractors during its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote presentation in San Francisco, announcing a slew of new products including iOS 7, the next version of OS X, new MacBook Air notebooks, a "sneak peek" at the next-generation Mac Pro, and iTunes Radio - nee iRadio. "Can't innovate …
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I did not get into the details much as of yet, but even the casal observer will notice that…
• iOS 7 "borrows" quite a bit from the other kids, including Sailfish, WebOS, Symbian … (!)
• if people spend MEGABUX on a Mac Pro maybe they want to be able to stick their long, hard edged thingies in it. Or cram a number of them in a rack. Or stuff the thing full of platters. Or … well, do stuff pros do.
It's amazing how much the company lost the plot. This from a dyed in the wool Apple kid. And I don't give a damn about how they name the OS.
It looks like an HTC, S4 Blackberry 10 with a windows 8 simple theme. Also the lock screen is pretty much taken straight from he Nexus 7
Wonder when they will try to "Protect Innovation"
Also the no need to bump phone feature to share pictures is a short sighted way of trying to get around missing the NFC boat. Lets see that work in a no reception area :P
Oh good grief. If they had continued with the old design, you would have said "Apple is dead, they don't innovate, blah blah blah". Now they have a fresh coat of paint which follow Ive's design philosophy which, need I remind you, predates the designs you referenced, and you whine that "they don't innovate, blah blah blah". Why don't you crawl back under your Android rock...
The new Mac Pro is the iTrashCan... Looks just like my space-aged bin of 2006.
Also, having Apps in the background not have access to CPU, I hope to god you can disable this. Some of us multitask when things are churning, say we're compiling and don't want office chair sword fights (c.f. XKCD)
it's not the primary purchase criteria
Really? It's an Apple product - the aesthetics are supposed to be important. That's the only reason I have a Mac Pro rather than a plain old PC from someone like Dell (in my case it's a dual G5 that was decommissioned from work, but I did have the choice of that or a Hewlett Packard PC).
For a while now I have suspected that with Jony Ive at the helm of development (or whatever), we'd gradually see Apple steer more and more towards design for its own sake - not for the user. The Mac Pro certainly seems to confirm my suspicion. It looks like they have tried to convert the Pro into a consumer product, which is kind of missing the point, I'd say. Unless of course they are paving the way for something else ...
And iOS7 ... well, after skimming through the guidelines, I think it resembles the Windows Phone UI more than just a little bit, abandoning many things that I like about iOS in favor of, well, design. Perhaps when I get my fingers dirty I'll get to like it - after all, many things that seem odd in the UI guidelines are actually very well thought through with respect to usability - but right at this moment I'm confused as to which signals they are sending.
I don't see it as design for the sake of design. I get the feeling that the basic design premiss is the single thermal core. With one big chuck of aluminum extrusion that all of the cpu's and gpu's clamp on to, it minimizes the number of fans down to one and simplifies air flow through the enclosure. I would have preffered something square with the power button ON THE FRONT with a couple of USB and Thunderbolt connections along side so I could plug in stuff without trying to get around back damnit.
I am already migrating from an all-in-one configuration to having an external drive bay that I can swap drives with. I constantly need more storage as a photographer but I don't need every drive online all of the time. Lightroom lets me have a preview of my pictures and lets me know what drive they are on. If the drive isn't mounted, I can get it out and stick it in. That doesn't work with internal drives on my MacPro.
I've always like that most Macs are sufficiently featured that as general purpose machines they don't need a stack of expansion cards installed to be useful. Applications like high-end video that benefit from dedicated hardware will probably see the manufacturers putting that hardware into USB or TB boxes rather than cards. That should keep them viable longer than the ever shifting tide of card slot standards. At this year's NAB show in Las Vegas, there were loads of announcements of TB enable kit.
iOS7
a raft of improvements to such elements as multitasking, the Safari mobile browser, and Siri. Still no ability to change the default browser, no resizable widgets and still flat textureless boring icons.
"We just completely ran out of green felt," and idea's.
Siri gets an upgrade I actually like Siri, seems to understand me better that GNow.
Still no intelligent password control (if connected to known wifi turn off password). One positive - the makeover looks like a nice implementation of MS' TIFKAM.
Take the text away from the icons then say what each app does, only about 50% are obvious, and the itunes / music player are almost the same.
Actually, you know what I think one of the problems is?
Dishonesty.
If Apple had said 'We've made a business decision to kill the Mac Pro; we're withdrawing from that marketplace. But, we have this insanely cool new box which we're calling Mac Power; we feel many Mac Pro fans will love it' - well, that would have gone down a lot better.
Unlike Microsoft I do believe they know what they are doing. Clearly they have given this to the B team to design and manufacture and are just as likely to redesign next year as scrap altogether. I would like to know why though. Although a small market it does hold some prestige.
Bing! What are they thinking? I understand the whole let's sever all ties with Google stuff. Google is the best search provider by anyone's standards and Apple choose to use Bing just so they don't use Google.
As a committed Apple user, this is one more example of the inter company rivalry that is spoiling the customer experience. Steve Jobs would not have done this.
Not sure about the form factor, will make racking it interesting with the bottom-top cooling, those FirePro cards are likely to push the machine beyond my reach, they're $4000 a piece retail! Mega throughput.
Very sexy spec, looks wonderful too, not going to want to hide it on the floor.
I've been holding out for a new Pro for ages, will hopefully be able to finance one of these when they hit, my current machine just doesn't have the horsepower I need any more.
iOS 7 is certainly underwhelming. It's perhaps not a bad thing for usability to be a bastard son of Windows Phone and Android, but it must be mightily embarrassing to Apple, and ultimately it goes just that little bit further towards undermining the Apple Advantage.
The OSX naming strategy? I guess it's all part of saying "we're still that fun little company founded by Steve Jobs" - time will tell if that works.
The Mac Pro - well if it were a consumer-level product, it would be perfect, but I don't see it filling the Pro niche at all for all the reasons people have already given. As someone who does still need FireWire (for my film scanner) and a LOT of storage, this is utterly useless, even though I really like the look of it.
Whilst it would be absurdly overdramatic to say these announcements are the death knell of Apple, they certainly don't look like the actions of a company in the rudest of health.
"$30 for the TB<->FW adapter and a pro external RAID array?" - Blimey, that's a cheap raid array! ;)
You're right, except I don't really want external adaptors and unnecessarily externalised primary storage. What's outside is backup or network storage and remote from my workstation - works for space etc.
Personally, I don't see the problem with this.
If I'm gonna spunk many thousands on fast, massive storage etc for 4K processing - possibly a number of times more expensive than the Mac itself - I want it to be transportable away from Apple if I choose to do so. If the external connectivity cable/controller is as fast as an internal one, going external shouldn't be a problem, gives more flexibility, and it makes the array portable.
The only advantage of going internal would be access to the PCIe bus for storage, but the costs of scaling this sort of capacity would be prohibitive for 4K, so you'll look to localised editing anyway, but the raw stored on an array.
The only wrinkle is the video cards. Red Rocket is indeed out, but we'll just have to see how well the Fire Pro's do. I notice the brief wording doesn't highlight whether realtime 4K playback is possible. If it is, then the *new" 4K editors won't need to fork out on a RED. RED might even introduce a new breakout box if it can't do full playback. But by far the biggest issue is the non-standard video card form factor. Of all the new "lock in" technologies in the new Pro, this is the worst. Shame on you apple...
The thunderbolts ports mean that you can connect the pro to external NAS enclosures as you say anyone spending that amount of money on the pro machine is not going to skimp on storage. Plus a PCIe enclousure will allow you to use all the old cards that you may require. and I'm willing to bet big money that if enough pros are sold that the manufactures will build cards to fit the new format.Remember this cards sell for big bucks, not some £30 barely faster than integrated rubbish.
quite frankly the new design made me moist downstairs !
Paris becuase she also likes a bit thick black tube
Oh my god - things have changed - the sky has fallen in....
Lets compare my current Mac Pro (early 2008) with the current. I have a Mac Pro with all the slots and drive bays full.
2 ATI 5770 Graphics controllers take up all but one slot - and connects 4 monitors.
1 eSATA controller hooks up external HD drives.
(total of 5 cables).
New Mac Pro I will have the same configuration with 5 cables (no more cables unless I extend it further)
- 4 monitors hooked up through HDMI and Thunderbolt cables
- 1 external hard drive enclosure using a Thunderbolt cable.
While my current Mac Pro is maxed out, I could add another 31 more devices to the new Mac Pro. People arguing about loosing a slower internal bus for a faster external one.... are probably the same people that complained about the loss of their floppy drive, parallel port and serial port. Why are people arguing that they want to be more limited by the existing configuration?
But not in a respectful sense, and not really aimed at the new design, because that's all it is. Underlying functionality is exactly the same, (vertical cover flow thing really doesn't count). In fact there is no actual reason why the setup couldn't keep the old look and have the new look. Then have a switch to allow people to choose how it looks - or gods forbid, allow them to mix and match or add their own style.
But in the bigger picture it does give the 'commentators' something to chew the fat over on their various 'new media' sites. Thus providing revenue from adverts, and thus allowing them to feed their 'wealth' back into society. Yeh! for the current economy of gossip, scare mongering and general ill informed criticism.
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