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TLDR version: nothing about DAM, just bashing 

 

cheers  :)

 

DAM? - Didn't all talked 100 times before about DAMs and image file managers etc. here in the forum (Bridge, Pixave, Lyn, XNView, ... and so on). :) 

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However, related to the last years and Apple hardware, honestly the only real Pro computer from Apple was IMO that older Mac Pro Desktop Tower model, which was service friendly and easy to customize/enhance due to it's overall good Tower PC like architecture. Every thing else here instead was just more or less just something design wise consumer oriented, designed from the beginnings with restricted hardware component enhancement capabilities, so to say mostly solid soldered or just glued together components.

 

Haven't you heard that the "Classic Cheesegrater" has since been replaced by the much superior and even more customizable "Hackintosh"?  :D

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However, related to the last years and Apple hardware, honestly the only real Pro computer from Apple was IMO that older Mac Pro Desktop Tower model, which was service friendly and easy to customize/enhance due to it's overall good Tower PC like architecture.

Apple is thinking outside the box -- literally. Now that we have very fast external interfaces, particularly Thunderbolt 2 & 3 (developed by Intel, not Apple), the idea that everything should go into one big, noisy box is beginning to look a bit antiquated.

 

This is in no way just an "Apple thing" -- PC makers like Dell, Asus, HP, & Lenovo all offer a variety of Thunderbolt equipped models, as do motherboard makers like ASRock (who I had never heard of but claims to be the #3 OEM PC mobo maker on the planet). All of this stuff is targeting the high end, pro market, not the consumer one.

 

How much of a game changer this really will be remains to be seen but for example consider how much you could cram into one of those older 'cheese grater' Mac Pros or a big box tower PC vs. all the things MacWorld connected to the newer 'trashcan' Mac Pro in their crazy Mac Pro Daisy Chain Challenge & how it performed. Or check out some of the videos of the demos Intel was showing at NAB 2015, like this one about Thunderbolt 2 networking. If you do any pro level audio work, you already know that out-of-the-box audio processing is the only way to go, so what the MOTU guy said about their Thunderbolt based products may interest you.

 

People have been bashing Apple for things like this for years, but as often as not, they are just the 'kick starter' for what later becomes real, game-changing industry trends, in both the pro & consumer markets. If your idea of a "pro" computer is limited to a big, noisy box with everything crammed inside it, I am not going to tell you you are wrong about that -- everybody is entitled to their own opinion about such things -- but like so much else in the computer world, it is not a "one size fits all" kind of thing, whether you are a pro user or not.

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Haven't you heard that the "Classic Cheesegrater" has since been replaced by the much superior and even more customizable "Hackintosh"?  :D

 

Yeah recently read an article (in some Mac & I mag) about these who build up their own "Hackintosh" etc. I would not have thought that it is such a popular sport and adventure game, to tickle out more power and performance out of OSX. :D

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Apple is thinking outside the box -- literally. Now that we have very fast external interfaces, particularly Thunderbolt 2 & 3 (developed by Intel, not Apple), the idea that everything should go into one big, noisy box is beginning to look a bit antiquated.

 

This is in no way just an "Apple thing" -- PC makers like Dell, Asus, HP, & Lenovo all offer a variety of Thunderbolt equipped models, as do motherboard makers like ASRock (who I had never heard of but claims to be the #3 OEM PC mobo maker on the planet). All of this stuff is targeting the high end, pro market, not the consumer one.

 

...

 

Pro market? LOL  - One looks from the other here and only few of them have really good or promising own ideas, which are not part of the nowadays more overall consumer oriented mainstream. - But since we talked about pro working horse computers and not design wise consumer boxes, there is lately sadly nothing from Apple which really addresses this professional hardware segment I mean instead. Everything they build the last years is made pretty much unupgradeable hardware wise and gets worser and worser in this regard. That's nothing I call for the Pro segment trendy if the CPU/GPU, memory and batteries are glued and sealed together, rare unusual screws are conciously used and seal broke indicators are especially placed into cases to show that somebody broke these and opened a box himself, since he might tried to upgrade some of the weaker components in that thing. - What's the trendy pro thing here in this regard?

 

Most of that is still more trendy consumer hardware related things here, small flat beauty boxes, which are closed unupgradeable systems and instead only can be upgraded via external wired or connected accessories. Don't mix the term pro here with what the consumer industry is going to tell you is very pro future-proof upgradable hardware here. Honestly, if you can't see any difference between that older Apple Cheesegrater and an iMac etc. we don't need to discuss any longer about that pro hardware market theme here, it's then fruitless!

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It's all true though.  I even have a Newton 2000 in a cupboard somewhere to prove it.

 

I must still have a MP130 somewhere here flying around on the roof and some Newton software and CD collections etc. :)

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Don't mix the term pro here with what the consumer industry is going to tell you is very pro future-proof upgradable hardware here.

So in your opinion the yearly NAB Show is now all about consumer products & not pro ones? 

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I don't know what the NAB show is or ever have heard about that one, where I live we go instead to CeBIT and look at the booths of the vendors there!

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I don't know what the NAB show is or ever have heard about that one, where I live we go instead to CeBIT and look at the booths of the vendors there!

NAB stands for the National Association of Broadcasters, a trade association and lobby group in the United States founded in 1922. The annual NAB show in Las Vegas typically draws over 100,000 professionals working in video, motion picture, sound, gaming, online publishing, VR, & related industries. This year over 1700 vendors are expected to showcase their latest products & services.

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We already had CeBiT here, with ~3.300 (or something like this) world wide vendors from mostly every professional IT and research domain! - But things are overall going back here for such events, since costs are very high for exhibitioners and some of them (...the big industry guys) do nowadays also always their own home events here.

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I thought you might have at least heard of NAB because it has been in existence for so long. Anyway, the show is for professionals & most of the gear shown is high end stuff too expensive to sell in consumer markets. If you check out some of the videos from the link for the 2015 show, you will see that there are very few traditional tower PCs on display. Mostly, they demonstrate the power of large peripheral systems & fast Thunderbolt 2 interfaces to do things that would be difficult or impossible to do in a single box.

 

Because Thunderbolt supports multi-lane PCI Express, things like GPU's & just about anything else using the PCI interface can be integrated into external devices, making it ideal for things like massive high speed storage arrays, pro video & audio subsystems, & very fast low latency networking.

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No just heard from some of these here the European media reports more about. Also most important hardware nowadays anyway comes from and is mainly produced in Asia, so I follow hardware related more first hand news from Digitimes and services like that.

 

BTW these shows visually well what I meant in terms of being more pro oriented and easy upgradeable hardware vs trendy not upgradable hardware design.

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The old Mac Pro was and still is a much better investment here for power users, where you can exchange/upgrade nearly everything in a service friendly manner. - No glues, fixed solderings, extern cable hick-hack and the like.

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@v_kyr (with apologies to everyone who has no interest in this tl;dr geeky post):

 

I knew what you meant about the old Mac Pro being easily user upgradeable & why you think it is a better investment than the new one, but there are some things you may have not considered.

 

To begin with, the new one will outperform the old one, even if you spend a ton of money on upgrades for the old one. That is because there are some bottlenecks in the old one's internal architecture you can't upgrade around, like its significantly slower memory (1333 MHz vs. 1866 MHz) & its slower 3 Gbps SATA 2 (not even 6 Gbps SATA 3!) internal drive interface. The new one uses a much faster 4 lane PCIe interface instead. So, yes, while the old one has four drive bays vs. the new one's single (& user upgradeable) 'blade' PCIe Flash Storage, it will never come close to the internal storage I/O performance of the new one.

 

The old one's system bus may also be somewhat slower & less capable. I think it isn't capable of fully supporting "Ivy Bridge" or later Intel CPU's, but am not sure about that. Maybe someone familiar with the differences between the Intel QPI & DMA interconnects can shed some light on that?

 

But beyond that, consider GPU performance & display/resolution capabilities. The old one has two very capable 16-lane PCI Express 2.0 slots, which support a variety of high end GPUs (the other two slots are just 4-lane so they can't run high end GPUs at full speed). But the new one comes with two built-in AMD FirePro GPU's, each with its own 16 lane PCIe 3.0 interface to the CPU, so it has at least a theoretical edge just due to the 3.0 spec. But more to the point, because it has three independent Thunderbolt 2.0 interfaces (with two connectors per interface), one "cylinder" Mac Pro can support up to six 2560x1600 displays or three 5120x2880 5K displays.

 

It also has a built-in HDMI 1.4 port, which the old one lacks, but a much more significant difference is the old one just has USB 2 ports vs. the new ones way faster USB 3 ones. Sure, you can buy PCI cards to upgrade the old one to USB 3, but don't forget you only have four total PCI slots, two of which are 4 lane, to work with.

 

The same limitation applies if you want to upgrade the old one with a Thunderbolt interface. You can do it, but if you want a really high performance rig, you are going to run out of lanes pretty quickly. This is why I said there are things that would be difficult or impossible to do in a single box. The performance of Thunderbolt almost makes irrelevant how many slots are in the box, at least for systems with the end-to-end architectural support required to get the most out of it.

 

So personally, if I had an older Mac Pro, instead of spending a lot on upgrading it I would sell it & buy one of the new ones instead. Overall I think this is a better investment, in part because the high resale value of the old ones will defray some of the cost, but mostly because the new ones are really much more powerful beasts. It does not hurt that they run much quieter & cooler, or that most upgrades consist of plugging in a cable or two, about as user-friendly as it gets.

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The truth is, both are component wise pretty much outdated nowadays! - And personally I wouldn't buy neither of these today!

 

As seen lately in some comparison benchmarks, for example a top configured iMac (though pretty much unupgradable and more consumer oriented hardware in my eyes) does outperform the latest Mac Pros (the trashcans) from 2013 and the even older cheesegraters <= 2012 ones anyway. A top configured iMac today does certain tasks much faster than these, even it contains due to it's formfactor more notebook sized lower heat up components. And everything additionally has to be pluged on externally (cable hick-hack) since there is no room internally.

 

However the overall point was more to show here, that those things being as professional advertized hardware should usually also offer an upgradable architecture, which allows to exchange and upgrade main components to some degree. So the hardware can keep up better with actual technology changes, in order to be a more valuable investment, which then amortizes it's higher costs at least for some years, until reaching the state to be needed to be completely renewed. - That's something missing the last years from Apple, they didn't touched what they once called desktop pros for years now. Instead so far they payed only attention to the mass more consumer hardware things.

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I thought about mentioning some of the iMac benchmarks like this one but the post was already pretty long & (like you said) they only apply to certain tasks.

 

But regardless, I think my point still is a valid one: upgrading main components won't take you very far unless the overall architecture can support it. Because the technology does change fairly rapidly, you will probably won't get that support for long, making the amortization calculation somewhat deceptive unless you take that into account.

 

I do agree that the new Mac Pro is way overdo for an upgrade. As I understand it, the delay is (or was?) mostly because Intel was having problems supplying Apple with the 'next gen' Xeon CPU's & support chips that actually meet the tight tolerance specs Apple is so picky about, & the somewhat less powerful ones Intel can deliver do not deliver enough of an improvement for Apple to justify upgrading the new pro using them because of Intel's promise that the new ones will be available "real soon now." Again, as I understand it, Apple is quite unhappy about this & privately there is a lot of friction between the two companies because of it.

 

While I admit that is speculative, it has happened before, most famously when Motorola was unable to deliver the PPC CPU's Apple wanted that led to the switch to Intel in the first place.

 

Which brings up one final (maybe) point: 'bullet' specs do not tell the whole story about how well a system will perform in real world, day in & day out use. The overall integration of all the parts of the hardware & the OS are just as if not more important for that. Apple generally does this very well, which is why so many pros are willing to spend more for an Apple system that on paper looks like it won't perform as well as a cheaper one from some other vendor.

 

I don't want to turn this into yet another 'Mac vs. Windows' debate, so I will leave it at this: there are certainly some excellent, rock-solid Windows-based systems out there, but there are also a lot that are not, particularly in the 'value priced' end of the market. The old adage "you get what you pay for" is still true.

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Jip today things in IT are all very fast-moving, something you buy today is pretty fast outdated tomorrow, that's the way of cookie crumbles! - Having a good hardware & software system integration and ideally being optimally coordinated and stable with each other is mandantory for a halfway good and performant computer.

 

There isn't usually much difference between the Mac/Win systems here, at least not if you are going to buy something of (hopefully) better quality here. Look for example at Microsofts own Surface hardware line offerings here, what they offer is similar to the Apple stuff and is price wise also equally expensive here.

 

The good hardware in the Windows world is also expensive, though you have much more choices here and you can of course also build your own tailor-made computer of selected components you want to have specially inside. - In contrast to the Win world, OS and hardware related things are always easier for Apple to handle, since they only have to support their own dedicated hardware/software and not those thousends of foreign computers and components here too. - Finally all hardware vendors can only component wise place inside what the market and other vendors do actually offer and have on sell here. And the hardware generally only works as good as the software who finally drives and interoperates with it does permit this, if the software is buggy the best hardware can't shine and play out it's full potential (the same applies the other way round, if the hardware is crap the best software can't help)!

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149$?

might just as well get Capture One Pro which is at least well established, a bit of a learning curve but get's the job done from tethering to batch export 

 

C1p is 50$ for Sony users btw.

 

and if you just want a very fast/ the fastest browser without a catalog, you can use bridge for the interim for free https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/19003-free-fast-file-browser-bridge/?p=88124

 

 

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... That's something missing the last years from Apple, they didn't touched what they once called desktop pros for years now. Instead so far they payed only attention to the mass more consumer hardware things.

 

Sometimes it helps to complain and to shout out loud ... (seen today). - Though some sources do see it more as Vaporware instead.

 

 

Mac Pro will be modular again - just not now

Together with the Speedbump announcement, Apple also had a preview of the upcoming Mac-Pro generation - extremely unusual for the company. Compared to the well-networked Apple blogger John Gruber , the group announced that he would soon be offering a "completely re-imagined" Mac Pro, which should have a modular design again - the current series can only be extended by Thunderbolt 2. It is then again possible to block high-end CPUs and large graphics card, which is to simplify the updating of the machines through Apple. Apple did not call an appointment, but this year it will be nothing more. "If there was a break in the upgrades and updates, we apologize for what happened with the Mac Pro, and we'll come out with something great to replace," says Marketingchef Phil Schiller.

 

Apple displays return

At the same time with the new Mac Pro are finally synonymous Apple screens planned. Recently, Apple had outsourced this task to LG, with the Ultrafine 5K but technical shipwreck suffered . There are also new iMac models on the release list, which are expected to be available this year. Apple now sees them as a professional computer. According to Apple, the Mac mini is also part of the product line - even if the company sees it as a mixture of pro and consumer product and did not specify how it is going on here.

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...

 

C1p is 50$ for Sony users btw.

 

 

Yip it's price wise a good lower update price for Sony users than usually here. - Most cam vendors don't build their supplied RAW software really explicitely themselves, for example ...

  • Sony uses Capture One Express (for Sony) which comes with Sony cams
  • Nikon's raw software is nowadays based on Silkypix their former software was instead NIK based (before Google bought NIK Software)
  • Leica uses LR
  • ...and so on...

 

and if you just want a very fast/ the fastest browser without a catalog

 

 

Doesn't On1 claim to have a very fast (or the fastest) RAW processor software just newly build? Though I never tried that one and so don't know if it possibly might also offer image management/browser like features too here or not.

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Yip it's price wise a good lower update price for Sony users than usually here. - Most cam vendors don't build their supplied RAW software really explicitely themselves, for example ...

  • Sony uses Capture One Express (for Sony) which comes with Sony cams

 

Doesn't On1 claim to have a very fast (or the fastest) RAW processor software just newly build? Though I never tried that one and so don't know if it possibly might also offer image management/browser like features too here or not.

189€ fir browsing, yeah sure they offer that but in that case I'd rather go back to Adobe

 

Express is pretty limited, but 50€ for the full version (with Sony limited RAW) support is okaaaay....

 

btw the new MacPro pricing is still a joke compared to the iMac pricing 

 

 

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I assume you mean MediaPro from C1 here for that price. Well it might be for those who are used to C1Pro anyway here, so to say mostly business oriented photographers, since those use it mostly.

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I assume you mean MediaPro from C1 here for that price. Well it might be for those who are used to C1Pro anyway here, so to say mostly business oriented photographers, since those use it mostly.

yeah C1p + MediaPro, definitely targeting a different (pricing) range than AP ( + DAM)

(for such a high price, I'd rather go with Adobe)

 

after all bridge is free so no need to spend 189, just keep the Adobe Application Manager and Update Assistant and CC Account until Affinity has a DAM, yeeeeah

 

 

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Well C1 customer audience is usually another one, those who also have a PhaseOne in their studio! ;)

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