I work in Hollywood. The complaints are here too. But people are more concerned with upgrades and repairs. Loss of a machine for a few days/weeks for a repair is far more costly than anything else.

That said a lot of the industry is moving to the cloud anyway and doesn't require workstations. Some shops are entirely on Linux. Audio post/recording and editing are the last bastions of mac pro dominance, imo.

I do music and audio in Hollywood, and yup, the Mac Pro will never die here. Which is funny, because this machine isn't exactly for us, either -- a Xeon is often less favorable than an i7 or i9 in our world.

Isn’t there something to be said about a local powerful workstation though or has offloading things to the cloud gotten that good?

There is, but it's changing. Disclaimer, I'm on the audio side of things and my knowledge of video post is much more limited. Dedicated processors are bigger for us than cloud solutions.

Audio post/recording shops use Protools HDX systems [1] which are rackmount units holding a handful of DSPs connected to the PC with proprietary PCIe cards. The industry is moving towards ASPs as a whole, through products like Waves Soundgrid [2] and Universal Audio's UAD [3]. Of these, PT HDX has an API for developing 3rd party code to run on their hardware (it's proprietary however) and the SOUL [4] project is aimed at these kinds of solutions.

Dedicated audio processing units are about where GPUs were 25-30 years ago. Almost all proprietary, no shader languages, but CPU time is coming at a premium so we'll have to figure something out.

[1] https://www.avid.com/products/pro-tools-hdx [2] https://www.waves.com/soundgrid-systems [3] https://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators.html [4] https://github.com/soul-lang/SOUL

Now that's not to say that having a fast machine isn't important, it certainly is since a large chunk of DSP is not running on dedicated hardware (and that hardware is freaking pricy). But in most situations your audio processing is dominated by single threaded performance, which is why some people are irritated by the iMac Pro advertised as a pro workstation when it will thermal throttle on you under moderate load, and this new Mac Pro that hopefully has better cooling and a better processor will be a huge relief for users and developers who want more CPU cycles for our code.

With respect to cloud, some applications just simply can't use workstations. VFX stuff is mostly on distributed Linux systems these days because you can't put the power you need into a single box, or at least it's more effective to have people edit over 10Gbit connections through a terminal.

The rest of the cloud stuff is more about workflow than power, at least in the stuff I've seen most cloud applications are about synchronizing projects in the highly parallelized production pipelines used in Hollywood studios. NAB is littered with cloud workflow solutions every year.

Just wanted to say this is a super insightful reply! Thanks for taking the time to share.

Fascinating. Thanks for your reply.

If you're looking at kitting out an entire department with these or buying the equivalent rendering firepower in the cloud, the cost of a couple of leased lines and cloud interconnects are probably going to be the least of your worries.

I worked at two movie studios (Pixar, Weta Digital) and they were both almost 100% Linux with a smattering of Windows machines here and there. Apple stuff was mainly iPads for story boarding and that kind of stuff.

This is more for other readers as I'm sure you know this, but VFX / animation facilities are very different than other post-production functions like editing and sound, which almost always run on Macs. Final Cut and Logic are mostly the reasons for that (Blackmagic is making a real effort to change that though).

Well you forgot about ProTools which although I really dislike is even more important than Logic in post production. And Avid / Adobe on the video side. All of which will run on Windows and I am seeing increasing adoption of Windows in these places.

What were you using? Maya? Resolve? Fusion?

I work in hollywood (editing television/movie trailers)... at least our agency is editing off of imacs. I can't speak for others but shared storage (Avid Nexis) is very costly. We transcode to proxy material, cut with proxies, and then uprez/conform to hd, uhd, etc. No one, at least I can't think of any agencies, editing higher than 1080p. Hell you even end up editing in lores super compressed mp4 for some projects.

How many Hollywood media makers are there? As an Apple shareholder should I be excited to learn that they made a specialty computer for this demographic?

How many Corvette owners are there? As a GM shareholder should I be excited they made a car just for mid-life crises?

2015 was a banner year, nearly 35,000 sold in the USA. Only about 19,000 last year. Estimates from a number of years ago were of about $10,000 profit on each sale

So you're saying the Corvette is a flagship model that loses money for the parent company (unless their entire R&D is less than $20 million)

Perhaps that's what Apple sees in the Mac Pro as well.

Corvettes are good value when compared to the competition.

Because they’re sold at a loss?

Depends. In this analogy is GM’s only other offering a golf cart that requires an external engine to perform like a car?

There are a lot of Youtube stars who would jump at a Mac Pro if it meant they can turn around videos quicker. Time is definitely money in their industry as well.

Point is that "professional" is a lot broader than just a few big enterprises.

> Time is definitely money in their industry as well.

Paying $6k for what’s roughly $2k’s worth of regular consumer hardware is also money.

supporting the highest of the high end is beneficial for the platform overall. almost no one who needs this machine will sweat spending $15,000 on a configuration.

What's wrong with making a mass market Mac Pro? I mean, old Mac Pros were much more reasonably priced. It's not like inflation was that huge over recent years or computer components suddenly have much higher costs.

They want the mass market to buy the iMac Pro instead, which actually is reasonably-priced for what you get.

It looks reasonably priced only compared to this Mac Pro.

I don't see how "the target market will still pay for it" is justification for insane markups on commodity hardware.

I understand paying a premium for the R&D that would have gone into the case and cooling design, but to then go and put such dated hardware in it and still start at $6000.

what's dated about an unreleased Xeon? Or the just released Vega II Pro on 7nm?

I assume the base $6000 model will come with the 580x that was advertised on that page, not the Vega II.

What's high end about this offering apart from the price?

I once heard an opinion that if you see an ad in a place you often visit, then you are the target. If it's out of your reach now, you're supposed to be impressed and desire to get that thing some day. And complaining about the price is a form of admiration; would anyone complain (not ridicule) about something they think is useless?