If I were a user in the music/film industry I would be worried if I depended on Apple.
Apple has shown pretty clearly they see themselves as a consumer electronics and services company above all. If all the "professional" users who rely on Logic or FC or Apple in general jumped ship, Apple wouldn't likely notice it in their bottom line (loss of mindshare not withstanding). They have no vested interest in catering to these users and have produced hardware intended for them as an afterthought. The high cost of hardware and absence of middle tier products that make sense for these users is just icing on the cake.
"Professional" users of Logic or FC have little leverage to affect the course of Apple one way or another (unlike a more focused company whose business model is catering to these groups).
On the other hand Apple pro users do have a long history of being abused by the company so they might be alright with it in the end.
To a first approximation, Apple only cares about video producers, software developers, publishers, and musicians, in their Mac strategy. In approximately that order.
The only reason developers are on that list, is because XCode is how software gets written for the rest of their platforms; the dominance of Macs as personal workstations for Valley-style development is only a side effect of that.
These users provide a halo for everyone else. A college student might spend an extra $1000 on their laptop because they want to moonlight on some beats, or have a YouTube channel, that sort of thing.
I remember seeing this disconnect when the new Mac Pro was released and many here dismissed it as too expensive. Someone who works in CGI came around to say that, no, $50,000 is a normal amount of money to spend on their workstations and that their company was ecstatic to be able to keep working with macOS.
Yeah, unless you’ve actually priced out business-class setups, the Mac Pro’s pricing seems crazy.
I’ve repeatedly found that the “Apple Tax” is at most something like $500: other companies tend to advertise configurations that I wouldn’t buy, and when I tweak them to match my requirements, their price is not notably different from a Mac
If you price like for like sure. My issue is usually that I almost never do. I usually fall into needing something akin to a mac mini but slightly bigger. The last mac pro I bought was a dual-G4 model when the gap between the mac pro and lower end models didn't seem so severe. (Although I obviously do not represent a sizeable demographic of the market).
For Apple, not catering to every particular consumer whim/need out there is just smart business. But for the consumer, that is just another weakness of the mac ecosystem.
If you include the iMacs (e.g. the iMac Pro), I think there aren’t really all that many gaps in the product line, spec or price wise. It’s mostly that you can’t necessarily get the machine you want in the form factor you’d like.
That's sort of a deal-breaker for a lot of use cases. Think of all those small corporate desktops out there which are beefier than a Mac Mini and wired to cheapo VGA-only 19" LCD monitors because finance isn't going to pay to replace a working screen. The iMac form factor is never gonna compete there.
And of course the neglected "I just want internal drives or expansion cards" demographic. I;m not sure if the cheese grater design fixes it, but with the trashcan Mac Pro, there were plenty of configurations where the equivalent Dell/HP/Lenovo workstation was one clean self-contained box stuffed with PCI-e cards and SATA/SAS drives, and the Mac Pro was an angry squid of Thunderbolt, USB, and power cables to feed an array of external drives and devices.
I understand that their brand is based on seamless design and we-make-the-decisions-for-you presentation, but it feels like there'd be an opportunity for them to use a small-scale clone program as a market research tool.
Have it sell the form factors that Apple won't. The long-whined-for xMac. Units with servicable/cleanable designs for embedded markets. A mini-ITX Mac mainboard you can fit into existing kiosk/appliance designs. A rebranded Toughbook running MacOS. Something in a huge rackmount/server cube case that you can fit with a dozen internal drives. Frankly, I'd envision it as a wholly-owned operation, that charges over-the-odds prices. If people are still willing to put their money where their mouth is, they can claim epiphany and make an Apple version of the same design. If not, they can declare the business a failure, shutter it in a year, and start over next time they want to trial a product.
>Someone who works in CGI came around to say that, no, $50,000 is a normal amount of money to spend on their workstations
You'd still be crazy to spend it on a Mac Pro unless you had very specific MacOS needs. Building a threadripper multi-Nvidia GPU PC is going to outperform it in any meaningful way with a modern CGI workflow.
OS starts to matter very little when it's a choice of seeing almost a finished image in almost real time which is what you get with CUDA backed rendering engines VS having to still chug away on CPU.
Both Linux and Windows still take a _lot_ more maintenance than macOS. If you have a room full of creative video artists, who are not techies, then you want them to have maximum productive up-time. You do not want to have to employ a small army of system support techies to keep those boxes running.
I used to work on a PC magazine in the West End of London. The mag was about Windows PCs, and was written on Windows PCs, but it was laid out on Macs. I supported both, and the servers and the network.
The PC side of things needed more than 10x as much support.
That's not materially different even today.
Secondly, it's not just about the boxes and their OS. It's also about the apps. A lovely fast sleek Linux distro is no use at all if it doesn't run the apps you need... and if those apps only run on one vendor's kit, or even just run best on that vendor's kit, then that is the kit you buy.
I get that but it is about performance when we reach the magnitudes GPU rendering is over CPU rendering.
This isn't 20% faster, it's the difference between seeing the image in almost finished form and interacting with it with real time responsiveness vs having to wait minutes for an image. [1]
I dunno I guess I've been around a lot of people who fall in the middle, that's a place that Apple doesn't cater to. By the middle I mean, small studios (one or a few people). Their high-end stuff certainly caters to higher-end professional markets.
What's more the way they've handled their software (Logic, transition to FC X) doesn't seem like professional users are foremost on their mind.
Most of high-end VFX is on Linux these days anyway... And a lot of the GPU stuff is CUDA, so nvidia only...
I know for certain that many VFX software companies aren't too happy about OpenGL being deprecated and Vulcan not being supported on recent MacOS releases.
IMO it's going to depend quite heavily on the demand for high-end VFX software on MacOS as to whether they bother with ARM ports if the MacPro does move over...
Speaking of VFX, while everyone here jumps of love with Vulkan, big names like OTOY are already using CUDA (for OctaneRender), because Vulkan does not provide what they are looking for.
(From my perspective) Apple needs to keep up the appearance of being a "pro" brand - a large part of their marketing to non professional users relies on it.
I'm currently in the market for a pro NLE. In the mockups I've seen of actual workspaces on some NLE websites, not a single Apple logo was seen (but other logos were).
Apple has shown pretty clearly they see themselves as a consumer electronics and services company above all. If all the "professional" users who rely on Logic or FC or Apple in general jumped ship, Apple wouldn't likely notice it in their bottom line (loss of mindshare not withstanding). They have no vested interest in catering to these users and have produced hardware intended for them as an afterthought. The high cost of hardware and absence of middle tier products that make sense for these users is just icing on the cake.
"Professional" users of Logic or FC have little leverage to affect the course of Apple one way or another (unlike a more focused company whose business model is catering to these groups).
On the other hand Apple pro users do have a long history of being abused by the company so they might be alright with it in the end.
Anyway, I'd be looking for an out if I were them.