I think their focus has been on mobility for some time now. Very few people actually need the added horsepower a desktop platform can offer due to the relaxed power and space budget. I've been working from laptops exclusively since 2003 or so.

lol why would i be disappointed? Just use a laptop and dock it to a monitor when needed.

Why would anyone need a desktop in this day and age? Moore's law means the things that desktops used to do 5 years ago, laptops do now.

The compute requirements for photo editing, for example, haven't changed in 5 years. But the processors and systems (IO, displays, etc..) keep getting faster. It's only natural that laptops would cannibalize desktops. And phones/tablets will cannibalize laptops in a few years.

Can I suggest you learn something about a domain before commenting on it?

Photo editing can be hugely resource intensive. Camera RAW files have been getting larger over time, and all but the simplest edits demand an SSD, a fast processor, and at least 32GB of memory. 128GB isn't unusual for commercial work.

You can get by with less, but sooner or later - usually sooner - you run out of RAM and your machine starts thrashing.

Many Photoshop features are hardware-accelerated, so having a good graphics card makes a significant difference to editing speed.

3D animation definitely needs a good graphics card. So does video editing.

Audio doesn't, but it needs as much raw processor power as possible. I know DJs/producers who are running dual 12-core Xeon systems for their mixes, and adding PCI DSP cards on top.

Surface Studio looks very nice, but it fails to tick most of these boxes. The reality is there's a significant market for creative power users willing to pay good money for multicore server-grade towers for their work.

Neither Apple nor MS are paying attention to this market. The Mac Pro is an underpowered curiosity now, and Surface Studio has - sadly - been hobbled by greed and penny pinching.

MS definitely is not paying attention to the high-end workstation market. They are paying attention to the trends of interaction and new interfaces that technology is allowing us. The product here is the new styles of content creation and the accelerated pace of current content creation via the form factor and accessory knob thing. If you have needs that demand extreme resources, you can probably afford to have remote rendering or processing using all of the myriad of wonderful networking technologies that have advanced so much.

It can't be an effective interaction device and a server-level resource at the same time. Anyone who is enough of an enthusiast to require a dual Xeon workstation is clearly not who MS is targeting with a single product. Leave the multicore server-grade towers to HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. because there's nothing to innovate there - you just throw hardware, bought at market price, into a box. What is MS supposed to innovate on there if all you care about is specs/$ and ignore the design and use-case?

This is a very niche market. As laptops get more and more capable, it'll be an even narrower niche.

I love to have just as much power I can. I'd love to have a multi-CPU POWER9 loaded with a couple terabytes of RAM and a couple flash cards attached to a fast bus, but I wouldn't know what to do with it.

Yah none of what you said matters to actual photography pros or graphic designers.

Camera raw files haven't been increasing in size faster than Moore's law.

They can get by fine with a laptop. The Mac Pro is overpowered for them.

> The Mac Pro is overpowered for them. I'm not sure if you are trolling?

Moore's law has slowed down btw and is predicted to end in 4-6 years (2020 - 2022) as it would be physically impossible to shrink transistors any further /unless/ there is a change from the current silicon CMOS technology.

In fact, manufacturers are no longer even targeting the doubling of transistors anymore! Instead they are focusing speeding them up.

I'm not sure if you're being facetious but for those of us who enjoy playing video games a desktop is the best choice. If you don't care about portability, why not get something that is by far more powerful, cheaper, customizable, and future-proof?

You're in the wrong discussion if you think gaming has any relevance to this line of laptops. People that own Macbook Pros don't play games seriously. Gaming is strictly for Windows devices, as it's largely an afterthought in the Mac world.

> Why would anyone need a desktop in this day and age?

This is what I was responding to.

Yes, but the context of the thread is graphics design.

Gaming on Mac is rapidly approaching parity with Windows, ironically helped a lot by Linux and Valve

Are there many more studios outside of Blizzard that are developing for OS X? I hadn't realized there were more devs working with it. Every other game I know of that has Mac support is usually running in some WINE equivalent which isn't great.

So we have Blizzard and Source engine, who am I missing?

Ahaha ahaha... No, no it's not. I can't imagine you play any 'serious' games. Hell, even WoW, a game which is well supported by the developer on OSX, plays like crap on my $2600 MVP.

Going by my recently played list on Steam

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197998185123/games/?...

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition: Win

Team Fortress 2: Win/Mac/Lin

Factorio: Win/Mac/Lin

Rocket League: Win/Mac/Lin

Particle Fleet: Emergence: Win/Mac/Lin

SHENZHEN I/O: Win/Mac/Linux

Oil Rush: Win/Mac/Linux

Castle Crashers: Win/Mac

Tropico 5: Win/Mac/Linux

Literally every game I've played recently except ONE supports Mac

Obviously I'm not a "serious" gamer :)

Well, I should have worded that better, shouldn't have been so dismissive. By 'serious' I meant 'resource intensive'. I don't know all of those games, bit the games I do know are definitely not very taxing on a GPU (aside from Skyrim, but what settings are yo uplaying it at? Does that seem worth it for the price tag?)

I don't think you'd argue that a mac is a good gaming rig from a performance / $ perspective (or any other perspective really).

CS GO worked good enough on Mac and Linux last time I checked

Define 'good enough'. These aren't inexpensive machines. In the context of gaming, $2600 is far too much to pay for a laptop that gets ~30fps at medium settings.

...you're joking, right? What a ridiculously narrow view.