News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs. Parent comment

Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by mantap on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @05:37AM (#23611699)
The Mac Pro was seen as an an assurance that Apple was going to support their Pro customers for the foreseeable future. It's not just the Mac Pro itself. It's the software and supporting hardware.

Also crucially, due to Apple's spat with NVIDIA, the Mac Pro doesn't support CUDA. This means software has to be modified to use Metal Compute to support the Mac Pro.

If you make pro software Apple just let off a huge signal that the future of the Mac Pro is at best uncertain. So maybe hold off on that Mac support for the next two years.

Apple is not going to make an ARM Xeon. The resulting computer would be so expensive after you amortise all the R&D to create a single workstation class CPU for it, that nobody would be able to afford it. All the Pros who bought Mac Pro got played hard.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by michelb on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @07:51AM (#23612664)
The Mac Pro serves such a tiny, tiny sliver of the pro market, I don't know if they got played. I mean, the big audio/editing/GFX studios that bought a Mac Pro will keep using them for years or swap to Windows if no powerful ARM Mac comes out. All the important pro software supports Metal by now.

Anything that isn't a Hollywood studio will have to use an ARM iMac.

Enthousiasts and semi-pro's that want a powerful, affordable and extensible Mac with state of the art discrete GPU's can probably get lost, as is the case right now.

Then again, Apple is now only bound by their own operations, so who knows what they have planned.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by imtringued on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @07:53AM (#23612677)
How did they get played hard? They got the latest model that is still supported by lots of software. The only way you get shafted is by buying the ARM Mac Pro which is something the owners of a x86 Mac Pro luckily avoided.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by mantap on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @07:31PM (#23621778)
It is only supported by software because Apple convinced big software developers to port everything to Metal. Apple no doubt made assurances to these developers that this was Apple's big re-entry into the Pro market and that they were in it for the long term.

Now, it turns out that Apple wants to complete a transition in 2 years... they are not keeping x86 around for the Mac Pro longer than that. It's not credible that Apple can just scale up their CPU into a workstation part. So if you are making pro software then you have to come to the inescapable conclusion that Apple is, in fact, not serious about the Pro market, and it's probably best to avoid expending further development resources on the Mac.

[ Parent | on HN ]