One thing I've always been curious about with ultra-resolution stuff like this:

Is there a substantive difference between editing in 8K and in say 720p?

Ie, could I edit my whole movie in downsized resolution, save all the transformations I've applied, then redo them all in 8K on a server someplace for the final product?

You're right; a lot of professional video editing that utilizes high resolution or heavily color corrected footage will first be rough cut with low resolution proxies, only substituting the full quality footage for final assemblies.

Back when REDs first came out, there was a lot of buzz from amateur and student editors who could get 1080/720 proxies of their freshly shot 4K footage almost instantly and hand it off to editors before production even wrapped. This had been the standard for many professionals doing off/online editing for a while, but getting access to that workflow for relatively cheap was the new, cool thing.

That's exactly how it's normally done - the offline editor works with low bitrate HD files, then gives the edit list to the online team who re-conform from the full resolution stuff.

There's always an impetus to get higher resolution and quality at the offline stage though, as people get used to improving technology. It wouldn't be outrageous to have a 4k offline now, because people with 4k TVs at home will say "Why can't we? I want to see everything!", even if it doesn't particularly enhance the editor's work.

It would still be done with lower bitrate files, because original 4k material from digital cinema cameras is beyond what most machines are happy with.

I would imagine that color correction, or anything involving pixel masks, would require full resolution. Cutting scenes and stuff might not, but I wouldn't be very surprised if there were cases when not having the full resolution would bite you.

The GP put double-quotes around pro's for a reason. Somebody needing to edit an 8k, 3D feature film is a pro. There are very few of these people compared to the number of people making videos for YouTube or what have you. Apple is a consumer products company today. Devoting a huge amount of resources to a machine that a handful of people working for big production studios is a bit silly.

In part, I think that's Apple's problem right now. 15 years ago, I could imagine Apple somehow building a device that was smaller, more usable and more powerful than any of their rivals. These days, they are just more expensive.

First of all no one is editing 8k right now.

No one is editing 3D right now, except a very tiny portion of the industry who are producing specialist films or blockbuster AAA movies with unlimited budgets.

By the time that those become standard and mass market, hardware will be at a place where laptops and iPads can handle the tasks.

4k is very much the standard right now, and almost any Mac right now can handle 4k editing (some better than others) and perhaps even the iPad Pro can handle it in stride.

So the realities of the market don't hold up to your fantasies of millions of people needing to edit 8k and 3D at the same time.

My 2014 15" rMBP isn't fast enough to edit 4K at acceptable latency (and it doesn't have enough storage, either). Your forecast seems profoundly optimistic.

I work in the world of video by day, but do lots of still image work as a hobby.

Even in the world of photography, there is no Mac that edits/filters/transforms/renders 30-40-megapixel Raw images without very noticeable latency. For fluidity and efficiency in what I do, I'd gladly take 10x performance over what exists today on the Mac.

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The app still has to reside on a box somewhere. Centralizing it in the cloud is a little absurd since only one user (the editor) would use it.

Depending on the studio, content is centralized, but for smaller studios, cloud-based storage is prohibitively expensive since they work with raw 8k/4k video files.

Contact gce for fatter pipe. Business line for those bubble pushers.