There are a lot of different types of professionals, with different types of needs. I would suspect that for the vast majority of the target demographic here, upgradability just isn't that important.

You can make ethical arguments about whether people ought to care, or whether the option should be available for the few people that do, but I just don't personally see a lot of people doing upgrades these days.

For businesses, the cost of paying someone to upgrade a fleet of machines isn't there compared to just depreciating them over 3 years instead of 5 and replacing them more often. For a lot of independent professionals and home users it's just not worth the effort. The machine works until it doesn't and then they buy a new machine, and this one will get resold on craigslist or eBay, or get handed off as a substantial upgrade to some less technical family member.

Who in Professional Video Editing world should trust Apple in regards to Hardware anymore? More and more video production is moving back to Windows and for good reason, hardware and Apple's handling of Final Cut Pro X years ago still scares everyone.

In graphic design I see this as a good solution for those shops, but video really has been leaving Apple.

After their meeting to set the record straight in April 2017 about Professional Hardware and Apple support for the industry with Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi they give people this? This is not what a workstation should be. It isn't upgradable GPU, and it is using ports again like the Pro of 4 years ago.

This was very far along when that April meeting occurred. Many people speculated that this was going to be their answer to the Pro market, but they took the feedback, held that meeting and promised to release a new "modular" Mac Pro.

So, this isn't what they are releasing in response to that feedback or what they were discussing in that meeting.

> but they took the feedback, held that meeting and promised to release a new "modular" Mac Pro.

What would be really awesome (at least for video) would be offloaded rendering for Linux. Doesn't macOS offer something like that that's used for Xcode?

however with modular people are reading too much into it. Apple more likely meant modular for them, as in being able to adjust to changes in technology where the previous Mac Pro could not be changed.

I doubt we will go back to the old tower style similar to PC versions

> the previous Mac Pro could not be changed.

Apple could have changed it rather easily.

> Apple's handling of Final Cut Pro X years ago still scares everyone.

I still remember watching Conan O' Brian and they lampooned it mercilessly with a rather long bit about it. I never thought I would see a late night comedian roasting Apple for their video editing software. You knew it had to be bad if it reached that level.

Here's the clip: https://youtu.be/vZXsI84nRMg

Pro people don’t upgrade parts, it costs too much time and is too risky. Pro people just upgrade the whole machine. And they don’t care if it costs $500 extra if it saves them a few hours of grief.

Pro people keep expensive machines running for a long time before they buy a new one. If one part goes bad, they'll buy a replacement part before they buy a new machine. So the machine has to be easy to service.

If one part goes bad, you send the machine to the shop for repairs and either loan a temp replacement or shuffle your work to other machines.

No serious pro should have only one high price asset.

What shop have you been to? Even the multi-million dollar shops have zombie rooms where they throw old out of warranty computers up to the ceiling. They will cannibalize two machines to make add to the render farm. I have seen them add memory switch out hard drives.

When people went to 4K they bought new cameras and they upgraded their computers with more ram, bigger drives and new cards.

Within a year of release FCP X surpassed FCP 7 seats [1]. In 2017 FCP X hit 2 million seats [2]. Now maybe everyone in Hollywood jumped ship after FCP X, but it's pretty clear that FCP X massively expanded the market for Apple. And looking at Avid's stock price over the past 5 years [3] it doesn't seem like their focus on "professionals" has paid off (no idea what Adobe Premiere's numbers are). Since FCP X launched, Apple has steadily iterated on it (with the last major update releasing today [4]). It's clear FCP X was a good move, not just from a business perspective, but technically as well; it performs much better on Macs than Premiere or Media Composer (search YouTube for comparisons). Randy Ubillos confirmed that in an interview after he retired [5]:

>One of the things I like about working at Apple was that Apple didn’t have a problem with starting over again - if that was the right thing to do. You don’t want to talk about ‘sunk cost.’ The effort you’ve put in in the past has gone. From now on, what is the best way to go forward? It doesn’t matter if we spent six months working on some feature. That doesn’t matter. Is it the right feature? If so, great, continue forward with it. If you don’t do that with a product and somebody else who doesn’t have the history, the legacy you’re trying to hold on to will jump in and take things out from under you.

...

>The very last conversation I had with Steve Jobs was right after the launch of Final Cut Pro X. I was getting ready to get on a plane to go to London to record the second set of movie trailers - we’d hired the London Symphony Orchestra [to perform the music that was going to be bundled with the next version of iMovie] - and Steve caught me at home: “What the heck is going on with this Final Cut X thing?” I said “We knew this was coming, we knew that people were going to freak out when we changed everything out from under them. We could have done this better. We should have. Final Cut 7 should be back on the market. We should have an FAQ that lists what this is all about.” He said “Yeah, let’s get out and fund this thing, let’s make sure we get on top of this thing, move quickly with releases…” and he finished by asking: “Do you believe in this?” I said “Yes.” He said “then I do too.”

[1] http://www.philiphodgetts.com/2012/04/some-final-cut-pro-x-d...

[2] https://www.cultofmac.com/478369/final-cut-pro-x-hits-massiv...

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AVID?p=AVID

[4] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/12/final-cut-pro-x-intro...

[5] http://alex4d.com/notes/item/back-to-1-0-randy-ubillos-inter...

Okay I'll add my anecdotal evidence, I work around the TV industry in the UK and nobody I've talked to uses final cut anymore. It's all either Avid or Premiere, with Resolve to do colour work on.

Sure they've sold more copies with FCP X but it's not to professionals as far as I can tell, it's hitting the niche that Final Cut Express was at in the past.

>Sure they've sold more copies with FCP X but it's not to professionals as far as I can tell

This isn't a problem for Apple.

They have a pro line of tablets.

I am not going to buy one, but I suspect many people will love them. Really PRO is just a marketing term.

Though, 5k screen, 10Gbit Ethernet, 600$ graphics card, 1TB NVMe SSDs are also ~$600 etc that's far from a normal office desktop.

> Really PRO is just a marketing term

This seems to be what everyone forgets when airing their grievances towards Apple's "Pro" line.

It's unfortunate but the number of people that may dislike this because of a lack of upgradability, etc is probably smaller than the number of people that just want a cool looking "pro" computer and have money to burn.

My rule of thumb lately has been that if something is marketed as 'Pro', it is usually intended for average joe who wants to feel pro, not to meet the requirements of people that are actually professionals.

My favorite thing about coming into these threads is constantly being told that I'm "not actually a professional" because I'm able to use a Macbook Pro for my job.

I'm not in any way saying that a macbook pro (or any 'pro' thing) can't/shouldn't be used by professionals, or that people that use them are not professionals. It is just that I find more often than not when 'Pro' is used to market something, the primary audience appears to be consumers that want have a pro feeling, regardless of whether or not it was designed primarily for the requirements of a professional. If you are a professional and a Macbook Pro fits your requirements, great! It just feels lately that the 'Pro' moniker doesn't mean it is specifically designed with professionals in mind as the primary audience.

"Being able to use a tool" does not mean that it's the best choice for you. People here are saying that these new "Pro" computers are actually really bad choices for Professional, mainly because of the lack of modularity and high price.

If you feel offended by those comment, that's on you, no one is actually judging you.

Most corporate computers are never upgraded. In part because computers are just not nearly as expensive as people seem to think.

So, modularity is useful just not not as important as people assume. Computers are also not getting faster as quickly so using the same computer for ~4 years is now completely reasonable. Spread out of that period these start at ~80$ a month. You might drop that price some, but not as much as you probably assume without sacrificing.

They might not be optimal, but it's a reasonable option.

I disagree. The idea that a Macbook Pro does "not... meet the requirements of people that are actually professionals" inherently says "if you're a professional, you don't use a Mac", and inversely, "if you use a Mac, you're not a professional". There is no reason to make that statement unless you are looking to strictly define who is and who is not considered a professional in your opinion, and that definition most certainly leaves a lot of people out in the cold.

Now it might be a true statement that "if you're a professional video editor working with lots of files and 4k video, the Mac Pro doesn't meet your needs" or "if you're a professional data scientist working on cutting-edge machine learning with CUDA, the Mac Pro doesn't meet your needs".

But "professional" is a broad term. Very broad. It's hard to imagine a broader term. Even if we restricted that to "IT professional" or "professional programmer", it's still a very broad range of needs within that statement. And the Mac Pro lacks a very specific set of things that "professionals" may need, depending on their profession.

I'm willing to bet the number of professionals who need a Unix machine with a nice GUI that's well-supported by major software vendors and also well-supported by the manufacturer with retail stores (including tech support) in every city of any size far outweighs the number of professionals who need anything specific the Macbook Pro or Mac Pro are missing. Why, then, are they not considered "professionals"? And what other machine meets those very broadly applicable requirements?

Or how about this one? I need a Unix machine with a serial port and an Ethernet port for my job, and I also need the machine to be lightweight because I travel constantly, it needs to be able to be held with one hand as I'm standing in a datacenter, and I need long battery life because I can't carry a ton of cables through the datacenter as I'm moving around. What meets my needs as a professional? Sure, my needs are very specific... so are the needs of this hypothetical gold standard "professional" who needs what the Mac Pro doesn't have. I certainly don't need a powerful video card. Guess I'm not a professional, then?

It's the constant gatekeeping of "Mac(book) Pro computers aren't made for professionals because I made up my own definition of professional and you're not in it" that really grinds me the wrong way. I don't need to upgrade my RAM because by the time I need more, my work will just buy me a new one. Guess that means I'm not a professional?

Sorry I didn't intend it to be a gatekeeping thing or trying to define who isn't or is a professional. I apologize it was poorly worded.

I think a diagram better explains what I'm trying to say.

What I feel like Apple's target audience was in the past with their 'Pro' lines:

https://imgur.com/a/ydLdE

What I feel like Apple's target audience is now with their 'Pro' lines:

https://imgur.com/a/dGI9R

It still meets the requirements of a lot of professionals, and a lot of professionals are still going to use them. I'm not trying to say 'whether or not you are a professional is directly related to whether or not you use a macbook pro'. It is just that apple seems to be slowly targeting their "pro" lines more towards the consumer who like pro stuff side to capture more of that market than they are trying to move toward the professional side to capture more of that market. Instead of getting more ports and longer battery life at the sacrifice of weight, we get things like the touchbar and ever thinner machines that have trouble living upto the battery expectations. For a bunch of professionals that doesn't matter, it isn't what makes a macbook pro fit their requirements. But there seems to be a very vocal segment of professionals who sit on that left most edge concerned that what apple calls 'pro' is moving further away from meeting their requirements than closer.

Edit: it might be more clear to say the green circle is people who find a macbook pro to meet their requirements.

I disagree. This is all workstation hardware. Even when people spend $6,000 on a gaming PC, they don't put ECC RAM, Xeons, and workstation GPUs in it. And if you read the page, it's clearly being marketed as a workstation rather than as a high-end computer.

Maybe clueless people will buy this as a consumer machine, but it's designed and marketed as a workstation.

If you dial all the knobs up to the max on the configure page the dollar value is an eye-watering $13,926.98

While I love my MacBook pro's for dev, if I needed beefy machines for work, presumably 3D graphics related, I can't imagine paying those prices. That is really, really rough. Especially considering that you could make a monster of a machine for $5k, let alone $13k.

Like, I justify my $3k laptop, because it's a quality piece of mobile hardware. Yet, I don't lug around my desktop everywhere.. The "quality" that I interact with is the OS and the keyboard/mouse, nearly nothing with the monitor/computer. So.. what am I getting for that $13k? It just feels so crazily over priced.. am I wrong?

Hell, my $3k laptop is blatantly overpriced imo, but I pay it because there's not many options on my personal ranked list. This however... I can't help but feel there are a ton of options. So I'm honestly asking, what am I missing here? Clearly they think that some people will feel $13k is reasonable.. but why, specifically, is it reasonable to those people?

Did you check to see what the $13K gets you? 18-core Xeon with 4.3GHz Turbo, 4TB SSD, 128GB of fast DDR4 w/ECC. The option price for the Xeon alone is almost as much as your entire laptop. Same with the SSD.

The base hardware is just generally expensive.

Oh it's a beast of a machine that you'll get for that wedge but I feel like they've rounded all the component parts up to the nearest $1,000 just because they can.

That display panel, that motherboard, that case, that PSU, that graphics card, that memory, the CPU – would you expect to pay the bones of $14K?

From Amazon:

   - 18-core Xeon $2,826.20
   - 128GB of ECC memory from Kingston in 32 GB chunks $1,569.63
   - can't find the GPU but the Vega Frontier Edition with 16GB is $999
   - Samsung 850 EVO 4TB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD $1,469
   - Apple's own 5K monitor is $1,350

That's $8K – which means that the motherboard (which Apple make design and source themselves), the case, the peripherals and cables, the assembly and testing, and software make up the other $6K …

$6K ???

[0] https://smile.amazon.com/INTEL-PROCESSOR-E5-2697V4-2-3GHZ-SM... [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Kingston-ValueRAM-2133MHz-KVR21R15D... [2] https://smile.amazon.com/Radeon-Vega-Frontier-Air-Retail/dp/... [3] https://smile.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-75E4T0... [4] https://smile.amazon.com/Apple-MK462LL-27-Inch-Discontinued-...

I’d argue that’s a totally reasonable margin on high end hardware.

By the way, who’s gonna pay all those engineers who fit all those components in such a nice box?

Not I. Even if I had that kind of money burning a hole in my pocket I think it would be better spent elsewhere.

- Replacing that 18-core Xeon with ThreadRipper 1950x: -2000 USD

- Buying that ECC RAM yourself: -600 USD

- Buying those NVMe SSDs yourself -600 USD

Enjoing your new, affordable workstation: priceless :)

Or repairability. And, before anyone mentions that it's impossible to fix SMD, it's totally doable. Just as an example, https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup click any of the board level repair videos. (and I mean, this is HackerNews, the ability to tinker with stuff or keep a historical/cultural legacy of these things for decades is pretty ingrained in the general "computer crowd").

I just find this user hostile to be honest, they would probably lose 0 customers over publishing board schematics and making the back pop off. Now in a few years, all you have is a pile of steaming metal, with no hope of ever repairing it (for any reasonable price) after Apple decides they're done with it. It's planned obsolescence for a market that should know better: pro's. I would think twice about rolling this out in an enterprise setting or any critical piece of infrastructure. It's a toy, an expensive one at that.

EDIT: typo

Pay the $169 and get 3 years of AppleCare. Easy.

AppleCare covers almost nothing. Any cosmetic thing they can find "out of warranty". And 3 years is not a lot for a machine that can cost up to $10k. Besides, they erase your data and it often takes weeks to fix (or even 1,5 months in case of my Macbook). They require you to give up your password (a nuisance to say the least if it doesn't boot at all to change it). And besides, there are a lot of places on earth where there is no certified Apple Dealer without a substantial drive or even flight. It just bugs me that a consumer electronic vendors have aggressively started implementing a model where it's no longer /your/ machine. You rent it, and with the flick of a switch they can brick it or decide to no longer support it. This icks me particularly because it's labeled a "Pro" machine.

None of this is true on any issue I’ve had with computers, phones or accessories. Always fast, always cover everything.

Although I would never provide a computer that wasn’t wiped that’s just good opsec and takes less than an hour to reimage anything.

Maybe it’s different in Europe. But I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with AppleCare. Except maybe for that time where they replaced a charger free of charge that literally caught fire.

Possibly. My experiences have all been from Australia.

It is AppleCare+, which is slightly better.

*lose

This is a midway solution, there are plans for the Mac Pro line: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/04/04/apple-updates-mac-pro-a...

They didn't have the time to put RAM slots in a "midway" solution?

Though, the image of the motherboard halfway down Apple's product page shows four slots. Might just need the tools to pry open the back.

Did this change for the iMac pro, ram has at least been user-serviceable on the latest iMacs https://9to5mac.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/ram-upgrade-comp...

That's correct: https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/05/imac-pro-ram-and-space-gray-a...

> Additionally, Apple has confirmed to us that the RAM in the iMac Pro will not be user-replaceable. This shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise given Apple’s other recent products, but nevertheless it means users are stuck with however much RAM they purchase from Apple. Currently, the 27-inch iMac features user-upgradeable RAM, while the 21.5-inch model does not.

Past the edit window, but apparently the RAM is in slots rather than soldered to the motherboard, meaning it can be so if you take the computer apart.

So instead of the hatch on the back you need to have it done at service center (or be very confident in your $5000 Mac disassembly/reassembly skills and not mind voiding the warranty). Not clear if you can supply your own RAM for them to install or if you pay Apple prices on it. ECC RAM isn't cheap either way, but I assume buying it from Apple would be even pricier. Maybe the independent authorized repair centers will take user supplied parts.

https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/941324098583511040?re...

ugh Apple is insufferable right now...

iMac Pro RAM is not user-serviceable: https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/05/imac-pro-ram-and-space-gray-a...

Pro in Apple-speak just means "deluxe" now.

Agreed. As a hobby software developer and long-time Mac person, the low end 13" MBP is a really great computer for me. But I can see how even the top of the line versions are lacking for a lot of professional uses.

It feels like a computer designed for trendy college students who want something faster than the mini-Macbook or made for web developers who don't use any external devices.

> "One of the things we’ve learned over the last few years is the depth of love and loyalty for macOS by our pro customers. And pro is a very large term. It encompasses many different people with different needs.

> “What we find is, across all of our Mac products, we have a lot of pros on MacBook Pro; we have a lot of pros on iMac; and we have pros on Mac Pro. And so, a number of years ago, when we talked about where we need to move all our products forward for pros, we knew we needed to, along with MacBook Pro – and doing a new Mac pro – that there’s an iMac need there. > "This time, we decided to push it further. We asked our engineering teams, 'Can you make an iMac Pro that’s truly designed for pros?' It really, inside, is a different computer.

> Phil Schiller[0]

Clearly, they missed the mark. But honestly, I just think their definition of "pro" is watered down.

[0]https://www.t3.com/features/phil-schiller-interview

It's just a fleeting term. It'll be Pro until it's not - then you need to buy a new one. Some pros are fine with that. Lots of them can write this stuff off, or request it from their employer. It's not much sweat off their back.

> their consumer oriented design philosophy

That design does matter when the pros are creative professionals.

It’s still technically serviceable, but you can’t just pop off the rear door line you can in the 27” iMac - you need to disassemble the machine instead.