Which professionals is the Mac Pro for? We couldn’t find them
We asked professionals if they wanted Apple’s desktop, and they all said no.
We asked professionals if they wanted Apple’s desktop, and they all said no.
The MacBook Pro is the best laptop I've ever owned. It is extremely powerful, hugely energy-efficient, and the mechanical keyboard is finally really nice.
Since the MBP entirely scratches my business itch, the only desktop I'd buy is a gaming rig, which the Mac Pro certainly is not.
Edit: butterfly keyboard not mechanical keyboard, sorry!
Apple hasn't been for professionals, for like a decade now.
MacBooks are super popular in a variety of professional fields. They are still the go-to machines for photography and video editing. They are popular in software development for providing a good UNIX environment out of the box while also being very solidly built machines.
The more my software engineering career matures, the more I see my peers using MacBooks.
Windows still absolutely dominates government and enterprise, but the idea that professionals don't use Macs is pretty nonsensical. It's the kind of thing I believed when I was 20 and working in tech support, back when I still thought it was cool to call Apple users "sheep".
I think Apple is going to lose that edge with developers as WSL and its ecosystem keep improving. There's no Apple servers, so a lot of that code they're writing runs on Linux, but Macs only look like Linux. They actually work differently, and you have to use homebrew and a lot of tools are different. But I can load up just about any distro with WSL, so all the packages install the same. Add on top of that the difficulty of making Mac work with AD and having a different version of Microsoft Office. Plus their licensing terms for virtualization are terrible, and they don't make multi-session servers anymore, so developing IOS apps usually means you have a small fleet of Mac Minis instead of some nice enterprise hardware.
This. Good enterprises offer both options. I think people are starting to realize that its best to let people pick the tool that works best for them in this circumstance. Also, equivalent Dells (I have mainly worked at Dell shops lately) are actually more expensive than a MacBook Pro.
Another thing is that enterprise tools lock down Macs a lot less in my experience. This usually pushes people in the direction of Mac when you don’t have to go through an approval process to install an app or package you want to test.
I think Apple is going to lose that edge with developers as WSL and its ecosystem keep improving. There's no Apple servers, so a lot of that code they're writing runs on Linux, but Macs only look like Linux. They actually work differently, and you have to use homebrew and a lot of tools are different. But I can load up just about any distro with WSL, so all the packages install the same. Add on top of that the difficulty of making Mac work with AD and having a different version of Microsoft Office. Plus their licensing terms for virtualization are terrible, and they don't make multi-session servers anymore, so developing IOS apps usually means you have a small fleet of Mac Minis instead of some nice enterprise hardware.
Disagree.
All the software companies i work with has switched to MacBook Pros as their mainline professional laptop of choice in the past decade.
It’s literally a better product for most of developer work and much easier to support.
In fact, I’m confident that MX MacBook Pros have cannibalized a good chunk of Mac Pro sales because they are just that good.
Well, I've worked for the government (as contractor), corporations, and small businesses, I could count a few times I've seen people using Apple Mac Pro devices on one hand (more often seeing Macbook Pro rather, but very rarely for development) and more time than I can count on either Linux or Windows workstation computers.
We use Linux desktop often, because most of our servers are running on Linux so it helps to have version conformity when matching up with server's versioning and we occasionally use Windows for Visual Studio, proprietary software and so forth. But there are a few times where we get discounts for buying software for Linux rather than Windows.
Employees in my office switched from Apple Macbook Pro to Windows/Linux based laptops like Framework Laptop, because Macbook Pro often time lacked GPU that you would find on Linux and Windows workstation. Apple is going off on it's own little world with their own Metal API/GPU and it doesn't reflect the reality in real world emerging technologies. For instance, there are some computational challenges that in my office, we make use of Vulkan Compute so that we can purchase both Nvidia GPU and AMD GPU to generate real-time data, had we used Metal API and Apple's products, it would've been cheaper to purchase cloud compute servers. (We wanted to ensure each developer can test the given Vulkan code on their own desktop/workstation.)
What? I'm a software engineer (a so-called "professional") at a major corporation and we get the choice between Windows and Mac. Every single person I know in the company has chosen Mac.
This is always weird to me. Running containers on my Linux machine is way faster than all of my coworkers on Windows. But they still are able to run containers way faster than our coworkers on Apple.
I don't see the appeal of an apple machine for coding unless you're making Apple specific software. To each their own though.
I'm a software engineer and have been one at T-Mobile, Comcast and various video game studios. Not a single person used Mac as an engineer. The closest we got was people using Linux because they were backend developers or operations. Mac users were always limited to account managers or non-technical executives. If you know a whole major corporation that uses Mac and it's not Apple or Adobe, then I'd be very shocked.
Too bad the Reddit migration attracted trolls like this.
Maybe try music production professionals, a lot of them tend to use Macs
I dont really think that music production is performance limited though
For projects with a huge number of tracks, VSTs, etc, you can push hardware to the limit quicker than you might think.
They’d want a Mac Studio. In fact, that product was designed specifically for music production professionals and outperforms the Pro.
The only people the Pro targets are those who want expansion capabilities, and the latest version is hamstrung in this regard.
So I was confused at first, until I realized the headline said "Mac Pro", not "Macbook Pro".
Plenty of professionals use MacBooks, Mac Minis, and even Mac Studios.
The question is, who wants the new Mac Pro? The vast majority of professionals are better suited by a laptop, or can get all the same work done with a Mac Studio.
I would think this would probably be more useful for people involved with video production or animation than music production, which could likely be accomplished on a MacBook.
iOS doesn't work with any of the software I use on a daily basis. Linux doesn't either for that matter.
At least Linux has Wine. Also, I'm sure there is software out there for Linux users
I mean, Mac also has wine.
Developer/Devops here. I've been using MacBook pro going on probably 13 years now professionally. Being that Linux isn't supported by the enterprise at work and the other option is windows, it's really a no brainer.
But the larger issue among the professionals I spoke to, and one that will likely take many more product cycles for Apple to truly fix, is one of trust. Apple, the business behemoth that it is, still has a reputation to build in the enterprise space. In order to become a go-to purchase for studios, Apple doesn’t just need to make the Mac Pro more competitive on price — it needs to reestablish itself as a brand that industries can rely on for years to come. And it needs to make some amends.
This, basically. Is it going to sell in huge numbers? No. But canceling it would be bad for the brand.
I mean, it's just a really bad value compared to the rest of the lineup. It's basically a Mac Studio in a larger case and a PCIe breakout board bolted on. That's it. But for twice the price of the Mac Studio and 10 times it size.
The only unique features is has are PCIe and SATA ports. So unless you really need a ton of local storage or a ton of GPU-power, there's no reason to buy it.
If you need a ton of local storage, it would be cheaper to buy a NAS and some 20TB drives for it than to upgrade from a Studio to a Mac Pro. Especially with a 10-gig Ethernet connection.
If I recall correctly, you cannot even put GPUs in there, right? Only other pci peripherals, or did this change?
It’s an absurd product. It’s a Mac Studio gingerly placed into a behemoth of a case that, itself, costs $3k, And for what? Can’t upgrade the memory or storage. Can’t add dGPUs. All you get is more ports and the ability to add internal PCI cards, both of which could be accomplished with the Studio with far cheaper external solutions. And it's gigantic and weighs a ton.
Who is this for? Idiots?
![[VERGE] The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook](https://lemmy.uhhoh.com/pictrs/image/015e7b80-9f33-42c7-bb89-b6bc90798cf1.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=196)