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iOS 7 software release
- Thread starter singveld
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INFINITE LOOP / THE APPLE ECOSYSTEM
A critical look at the new Mac Pro
A graphics pro breaks down Apple's new machine.
Hell finally froze over yesterday and Apple announced a new Mac Pro at WWDC. At first glance, the new machine was as mysterious as it was terrifying to me and many other creative pros who have been waiting for ages for this thing to drop. But now that Apple has a full site page for the new machine and I’ve gotten some info from people familiar with its internals and with OS X 10.9, the Mac Pro has becomes less of a mystery.
But that’s also what’s freaking us out.
The design
At 6.6" × 9.9" for its cylindrical machined aluminum case, the new Mac Pro is tiny, and no other workstation-class Xeon desktop with a discrete workstation GPU—or two, in this case—looks anything like it. You get the feeling that the designers sat around coming up with ideas for the new Mac Pro and said, “If Darth Vader edited video, what would his computer look like?” Well... it would probably look like this:
So the Mac Pro will, I suspect, be a ridiculously quiet workstation as well. This is Apple engineering at its best, and I won’t have any concerns about using this for long sessions of V-Ray rendering or ZBrush sculpting. Detractors will say it’s going to overheat if you do anything serious, but Apple knows these things need to run around the clock for days on end. It didn’t put a dual workstation GPU in there and expect people not to use it extensively. More about that further on.
The new Mac Pro makes the previous generation look (thankfully) as outdated as it should, given that the machine it’s replacing uses technology from 2010. All the expected modern technologies are here, plus some that will put the new machine ahead of many current competing workstations: dual Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 1.4, Thunderbolt 2.0 with DisplayPort 1.2 support for up to three 4K displays, 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0, 1866MHz ECC RAM, PCIe-based flash storage, and dual AMD FirePro GPUs with up to 6GB of VRAM. The addition of WiFi as standard is a nice addition, but it’s kind of a gimme considering the machine's lack of upgradeability.
Judging by the animation on Apple’s site, the RAM also appears to be easily user-replaceable:
Performance-wise, the move to PCIe-based internal storage as standard was really smart. Since SATA3 tops out at 600MBps, it’s soon going to be the weakest link as the next generation of SSDs start to push beyond that range. Considering that Apple uses fast Samsung SSDs as standard in its laptops, I’m sure the company will slap a very fast SSD in the new Mac Pro. Expect companies like OWC to make Mac Pro-specific flash storage upgrades after the machine launches.
As far as the other technologies go, it’s clear that Apple is pulling out all the stops to make the Mac Pro a serious professional’s tool that won’t get dated any time soon. Which is good, because the stuff inside it better last...
A truly epic lack of expandability
Ask any Mac Pro users where “small size” sits on their list of workstation needs and they will tell you it's down at the bottom, squarely between “should make my bed in the morning” and “covered in fur.” The added desktop space will be nice to make room for those three shiny 4K displays that we can apparently afford, but “tiny” isn’t on my list of wants for a workstation. Fortunately for me, “rack-mountable” isn’t on there either, since cylindrical isn’t the most server-ready format.
But the small size creates a potential problem. Aside from the regressive lack of any easily accessible ports on the front of the machine, the new Mac Pro has some serious expandability issues.
Internal hard drives
I’m personally on the fence about this one and see it as more of a nuisance than a showstopper. Most professional video people use external RAID arrays for their video work, and the new Mac Pro’s six Thunderbolt 2 ports will provide more than enough expandability to accommodate them.
But I don’t do much video work, and the four internal drive bays of the existing Mac Pro enclosure became a comfy standard for me and my work. Anything more seems like too many—but zero extra drive bays is, to put it mildly, too few. Now I will be forced to replace my existing eSATA RAID enclosure since eSATA/Thunderbolt adapters are stupidly expensive and there are no PCI slots in the machine to accommodate an eSATA adapter card. Considering the still-high price of external Thunderbolt enclosures, the price of the Mac Pro better be reasonable, because it’s clear that many of us will be forced to take this route as well.
I think that Apple is doing two things with this approach to expandability: one, it hopes to light a fire under third-party Thunderbolt supporters the way it did with USB and the iMac. Two, it wants to drive a wedge between professional video on the Mac (still the standard, regardless of how many times you troll me) and video editing on the PC. Many tools that were once PCI-only have been moved to an external Thunderbolt enclosure, much like how audio cards for FireWire and USB became the norm in mobile music. I’m sure that Apple’s move with the Mac Pro was meant to help accelerate that trend so that the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro can share formerly PCI-based video hardware. For many devices, the 20Gbps bandwidth of Thunderbolt 2 will be fine for this purpose, but those will also cost more than a vanilla PCI card.
our USB 3.0 ports
This is one of the worst culprits in the new Mac Pro’s lack of expandability. It’s not even reasonable to have less than six USB ports on a workstation. With such a limited amount of USB connections and internal expandability, the minimal profile of Apple’s new Mac Pro will be predictably mired by a clumsy caboose of USB hubs and Thunderbolt devices.
No optical drive
Over a year ago, when I first considered the prospect of a tower without an optical disk, it seemed premature. I was doing periodical archiving of my portfolio to a Blu-ray drive that was also supported fine by Adobe Encore. I’d occasionally use the Superdrive to reinstall software from DVD. But today, even my MacBook Pro has a hard drive caddy where the internal Superdrive used to be. All my software archives are either on a hard disk or in the cloud. Autodesk doesn’t send my Maya updates on DVD anymore since it’s all done via Web, and if my machine’s in need of an OS reinstall, Apple’s OS even boots from the cloud or a USB stick.
Sure, the need to make a DVD backup for a client may come up, but I can just use my gaming rig’s Blu-ray/DVD burner or use my girlfriend’s external USB Superdrive (which she uses with her MacBook Air) on the Mac Pro. Well, hopefully—rather stupidly, the drive doesn’t work with my MacBook Pro. Apple, please unlock that thing, because the new Mac Pro is getting expensive enough as it is.
That GPU
So with the new Mac Pro, graphics pros get a mixed blessing: two workstation-class AMD FirePro cards with a boatload of memory and compute power... soldered onto the Mac Pro’s motherboard:

This left a pit in my stomach after the WWDC Mac Pro talk. I work as an art director and a 3D artist, and this prospect of never being able to replace the video card freaks me out. I don’t care about gaming on the Mac Pro—I have a PC and a PS3 for that—but having the same GPU for four years (typically how long I keep a Mac Pro) is not appealing.
The good news is that the GPU in the new Mac Pro is the most progressive that Apple has ever been with a high-end video card—it's obviously meant for professionals, unlike the 1GB reference designs that shipped with previous Mac Pros. And two of these GPUs are standard in the new machine. While there are no details on the base options, the maxed-out option is based on a dual FirePro W9000 with 6GB of VRAM apiece.
I don’t care much that it’s a FirePro since that’s just a marketing term for the drivers and support you get with a professional GPU. If you’ve read any of my reviews of the Quadro for Mac or the HP Z820, I mention that the lack of a workstation card in current Macs is a non-issue since you already get support for professional applications with Geforce and Radeon GPUs in OS X, and developers like Autodesk work to certify their applications with those gaming cards in OS X. The flip side of the new FirePro card is that if you want to use the Mac Pro for the occasional game, you’ll get full support and bug fixes for those too. Nothing really changes from an end-user perspective except the cooler name and the increase in VRAM.
The other potentially good side of the “workstation GPU” label of the FirePro is that Apple doesn’t need to charge you the inflated price for two actual FirePro cards. Apple has obviously made an arrangement to buy the hardware for less than you would personally pay an OEM for two cards (which might tell us why two Nvidia GPUs aren’t in there, considering how Nvidia let AMD take the PS4 and XBox One because the margins offered by Sony and Microsoft were too low to warrant the time and manufacturing effort). Since AMD and Apple aren’t writing a completely separate driver for FirePros vs. Radeons, and because they don’t need to build an entirely separate support network for the FirePro, there’s no reason why these pro GPUs will include the huge markup that gets foisted on retail/OEM FirePro users. So you are, in theory, getting the best of both worlds: two beefy workstation GPUs, full support with professional applications, and a lower price tag.
As for what to expect performance-wise, it’s hard to say since the last iteration of Radeon 7950 for Macs was a huge letdown for me. In my experience with apps like Maya and Cinema 4D, it came nowhere near the performance with pro apps that you see in Linux (fastest) or Windows (fast) with the same 7950. A dual 6GB GPU with OpenGL 4.1 support (coming in OS X 10.9) would do much to address my concerns about long-term shelf life for 3D on the new Mac Pro, but Apple and AMD need to address OS X’s driver performance shortcomings, because they are significant. Once the hard work of getting tessellation and other OpenGL 4.1 features is done, I really hope they start honing GL speeds in OS X because the last thing I want is a slow video card with lots of video RAM and a fancy name—for four years.
But many 3D users aren’t even going to get to the point of using the new Mac Pro. The fact that the GPU is not user-replaceable remains a huge issue for people like me, and this is going to do a lot to send potential Mac Pro 3D users to Windows PCs. If there are only good/better/best purchase options, with the GPU and the CPU speeds linked for build options on the Mac store, that would further limit our options. I really hope there’s some freedom on the configuration end, since I usually buy a top-end GPU but the mid-speed Xeon.
Crossfire for OS X
I spoke with one developer who has some knowledge of how dual-GPU support works for the Darth Pro, and it seems that OpenGL apps can leverage both GPUs with some extra work by the developers. That means that we could see Crossfire-like support for professional 3D applications in OS X (OpenCL compute apps don’t need to be modified to use both GPUs’ stream processors).
This is something that Windows professional OpenGL apps don’t get in Crossfire/SLI setups, and the second GPU of SLI and dual-GPU cards goes unused in pro apps under Windows and Linux. With dual GPUs as a standard feature and the available APIs, this could persuade developers to do the extra work. But, being a long-time Maya beta tester, I know how companies like Autodesk work: they only fork their very cross-platform code when they have to, so there's little chance of this happening with apps like Maya or AutoCAD.
No Nvidia option?
The other thing that jumps out about the new Mac Pro is that Nvidia is completely AWOL and won’t have any competing GPU config. This puts a lot of video and 3D professionals in a bad spot because many need CUDA support.
Apple may be trying to not-so-delicately nudge everyone to move their code from CUDA to OpenCL, but I’ve seen a first-hand failure of AMD’s OpenCL support with V-Ray RT for Maya. Chaos Group built V-Ray RT on OpenCL, but after extensive work trying to get the GPU variant of its RT render engine running on AMD hardware and an effort by yours truly to light a fire under Apple and AMD, Chaos Group gave up and ported it to CUDA instead. So V-Ray RT’s GPU mode only works with OpenCL and CUDA—on Nvidia hardware.
If Apple wants OpenCL and AMD to be the answer to CUDA, the support needs to be there so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. As it is, I now have zero options for V-Ray RT GPU on the 2013 Mac Pro since the software doesn’t work on AMD cards, and no Quadro/Geforce card is available for the machine. I’m sure some company will eventually build a Thunderbolt 2 Nvidia GPU-in-a-box for people who need CUDA, but to quote our own Peter Bright, “Thunderbolt 2 is equivalent to 2.5 lanes of PCIe 3 or 5 lanes of PCIe 2,” so it's hard to say what kind of a performance hit that will incur for compute tasks with an external GPU.
"Time will tell” seems to be the running theme with the new Mac Pro design. With such a contentious redesign, it’s hard to say if this is going to be Apple’s Xeon version of the Cube or a truly revolutionary approach to workstation hardware. I'll be writing a full review and pulling no punches, so expect to see that around September or October, when the Ivy Bridge Xeon E5 Mac Pro ships—presumably in a coffee grinder box.
A critical look at the new Mac Pro
A graphics pro breaks down Apple's new machine.
Hell finally froze over yesterday and Apple announced a new Mac Pro at WWDC. At first glance, the new machine was as mysterious as it was terrifying to me and many other creative pros who have been waiting for ages for this thing to drop. But now that Apple has a full site page for the new machine and I’ve gotten some info from people familiar with its internals and with OS X 10.9, the Mac Pro has becomes less of a mystery.
But that’s also what’s freaking us out.
The design
At 6.6" × 9.9" for its cylindrical machined aluminum case, the new Mac Pro is tiny, and no other workstation-class Xeon desktop with a discrete workstation GPU—or two, in this case—looks anything like it. You get the feeling that the designers sat around coming up with ideas for the new Mac Pro and said, “If Darth Vader edited video, what would his computer look like?” Well... it would probably look like this:
So the Mac Pro will, I suspect, be a ridiculously quiet workstation as well. This is Apple engineering at its best, and I won’t have any concerns about using this for long sessions of V-Ray rendering or ZBrush sculpting. Detractors will say it’s going to overheat if you do anything serious, but Apple knows these things need to run around the clock for days on end. It didn’t put a dual workstation GPU in there and expect people not to use it extensively. More about that further on.
The new Mac Pro makes the previous generation look (thankfully) as outdated as it should, given that the machine it’s replacing uses technology from 2010. All the expected modern technologies are here, plus some that will put the new machine ahead of many current competing workstations: dual Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 1.4, Thunderbolt 2.0 with DisplayPort 1.2 support for up to three 4K displays, 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0, 1866MHz ECC RAM, PCIe-based flash storage, and dual AMD FirePro GPUs with up to 6GB of VRAM. The addition of WiFi as standard is a nice addition, but it’s kind of a gimme considering the machine's lack of upgradeability.
Judging by the animation on Apple’s site, the RAM also appears to be easily user-replaceable:
Performance-wise, the move to PCIe-based internal storage as standard was really smart. Since SATA3 tops out at 600MBps, it’s soon going to be the weakest link as the next generation of SSDs start to push beyond that range. Considering that Apple uses fast Samsung SSDs as standard in its laptops, I’m sure the company will slap a very fast SSD in the new Mac Pro. Expect companies like OWC to make Mac Pro-specific flash storage upgrades after the machine launches.
As far as the other technologies go, it’s clear that Apple is pulling out all the stops to make the Mac Pro a serious professional’s tool that won’t get dated any time soon. Which is good, because the stuff inside it better last...
A truly epic lack of expandability
Ask any Mac Pro users where “small size” sits on their list of workstation needs and they will tell you it's down at the bottom, squarely between “should make my bed in the morning” and “covered in fur.” The added desktop space will be nice to make room for those three shiny 4K displays that we can apparently afford, but “tiny” isn’t on my list of wants for a workstation. Fortunately for me, “rack-mountable” isn’t on there either, since cylindrical isn’t the most server-ready format.
But the small size creates a potential problem. Aside from the regressive lack of any easily accessible ports on the front of the machine, the new Mac Pro has some serious expandability issues.
Internal hard drives
I’m personally on the fence about this one and see it as more of a nuisance than a showstopper. Most professional video people use external RAID arrays for their video work, and the new Mac Pro’s six Thunderbolt 2 ports will provide more than enough expandability to accommodate them.
But I don’t do much video work, and the four internal drive bays of the existing Mac Pro enclosure became a comfy standard for me and my work. Anything more seems like too many—but zero extra drive bays is, to put it mildly, too few. Now I will be forced to replace my existing eSATA RAID enclosure since eSATA/Thunderbolt adapters are stupidly expensive and there are no PCI slots in the machine to accommodate an eSATA adapter card. Considering the still-high price of external Thunderbolt enclosures, the price of the Mac Pro better be reasonable, because it’s clear that many of us will be forced to take this route as well.
I think that Apple is doing two things with this approach to expandability: one, it hopes to light a fire under third-party Thunderbolt supporters the way it did with USB and the iMac. Two, it wants to drive a wedge between professional video on the Mac (still the standard, regardless of how many times you troll me) and video editing on the PC. Many tools that were once PCI-only have been moved to an external Thunderbolt enclosure, much like how audio cards for FireWire and USB became the norm in mobile music. I’m sure that Apple’s move with the Mac Pro was meant to help accelerate that trend so that the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro can share formerly PCI-based video hardware. For many devices, the 20Gbps bandwidth of Thunderbolt 2 will be fine for this purpose, but those will also cost more than a vanilla PCI card.
our USB 3.0 ports
This is one of the worst culprits in the new Mac Pro’s lack of expandability. It’s not even reasonable to have less than six USB ports on a workstation. With such a limited amount of USB connections and internal expandability, the minimal profile of Apple’s new Mac Pro will be predictably mired by a clumsy caboose of USB hubs and Thunderbolt devices.
No optical drive
Over a year ago, when I first considered the prospect of a tower without an optical disk, it seemed premature. I was doing periodical archiving of my portfolio to a Blu-ray drive that was also supported fine by Adobe Encore. I’d occasionally use the Superdrive to reinstall software from DVD. But today, even my MacBook Pro has a hard drive caddy where the internal Superdrive used to be. All my software archives are either on a hard disk or in the cloud. Autodesk doesn’t send my Maya updates on DVD anymore since it’s all done via Web, and if my machine’s in need of an OS reinstall, Apple’s OS even boots from the cloud or a USB stick.
Sure, the need to make a DVD backup for a client may come up, but I can just use my gaming rig’s Blu-ray/DVD burner or use my girlfriend’s external USB Superdrive (which she uses with her MacBook Air) on the Mac Pro. Well, hopefully—rather stupidly, the drive doesn’t work with my MacBook Pro. Apple, please unlock that thing, because the new Mac Pro is getting expensive enough as it is.
That GPU
So with the new Mac Pro, graphics pros get a mixed blessing: two workstation-class AMD FirePro cards with a boatload of memory and compute power... soldered onto the Mac Pro’s motherboard:

This left a pit in my stomach after the WWDC Mac Pro talk. I work as an art director and a 3D artist, and this prospect of never being able to replace the video card freaks me out. I don’t care about gaming on the Mac Pro—I have a PC and a PS3 for that—but having the same GPU for four years (typically how long I keep a Mac Pro) is not appealing.
The good news is that the GPU in the new Mac Pro is the most progressive that Apple has ever been with a high-end video card—it's obviously meant for professionals, unlike the 1GB reference designs that shipped with previous Mac Pros. And two of these GPUs are standard in the new machine. While there are no details on the base options, the maxed-out option is based on a dual FirePro W9000 with 6GB of VRAM apiece.
I don’t care much that it’s a FirePro since that’s just a marketing term for the drivers and support you get with a professional GPU. If you’ve read any of my reviews of the Quadro for Mac or the HP Z820, I mention that the lack of a workstation card in current Macs is a non-issue since you already get support for professional applications with Geforce and Radeon GPUs in OS X, and developers like Autodesk work to certify their applications with those gaming cards in OS X. The flip side of the new FirePro card is that if you want to use the Mac Pro for the occasional game, you’ll get full support and bug fixes for those too. Nothing really changes from an end-user perspective except the cooler name and the increase in VRAM.
The other potentially good side of the “workstation GPU” label of the FirePro is that Apple doesn’t need to charge you the inflated price for two actual FirePro cards. Apple has obviously made an arrangement to buy the hardware for less than you would personally pay an OEM for two cards (which might tell us why two Nvidia GPUs aren’t in there, considering how Nvidia let AMD take the PS4 and XBox One because the margins offered by Sony and Microsoft were too low to warrant the time and manufacturing effort). Since AMD and Apple aren’t writing a completely separate driver for FirePros vs. Radeons, and because they don’t need to build an entirely separate support network for the FirePro, there’s no reason why these pro GPUs will include the huge markup that gets foisted on retail/OEM FirePro users. So you are, in theory, getting the best of both worlds: two beefy workstation GPUs, full support with professional applications, and a lower price tag.
As for what to expect performance-wise, it’s hard to say since the last iteration of Radeon 7950 for Macs was a huge letdown for me. In my experience with apps like Maya and Cinema 4D, it came nowhere near the performance with pro apps that you see in Linux (fastest) or Windows (fast) with the same 7950. A dual 6GB GPU with OpenGL 4.1 support (coming in OS X 10.9) would do much to address my concerns about long-term shelf life for 3D on the new Mac Pro, but Apple and AMD need to address OS X’s driver performance shortcomings, because they are significant. Once the hard work of getting tessellation and other OpenGL 4.1 features is done, I really hope they start honing GL speeds in OS X because the last thing I want is a slow video card with lots of video RAM and a fancy name—for four years.
But many 3D users aren’t even going to get to the point of using the new Mac Pro. The fact that the GPU is not user-replaceable remains a huge issue for people like me, and this is going to do a lot to send potential Mac Pro 3D users to Windows PCs. If there are only good/better/best purchase options, with the GPU and the CPU speeds linked for build options on the Mac store, that would further limit our options. I really hope there’s some freedom on the configuration end, since I usually buy a top-end GPU but the mid-speed Xeon.
Crossfire for OS X
I spoke with one developer who has some knowledge of how dual-GPU support works for the Darth Pro, and it seems that OpenGL apps can leverage both GPUs with some extra work by the developers. That means that we could see Crossfire-like support for professional 3D applications in OS X (OpenCL compute apps don’t need to be modified to use both GPUs’ stream processors).
This is something that Windows professional OpenGL apps don’t get in Crossfire/SLI setups, and the second GPU of SLI and dual-GPU cards goes unused in pro apps under Windows and Linux. With dual GPUs as a standard feature and the available APIs, this could persuade developers to do the extra work. But, being a long-time Maya beta tester, I know how companies like Autodesk work: they only fork their very cross-platform code when they have to, so there's little chance of this happening with apps like Maya or AutoCAD.
No Nvidia option?
The other thing that jumps out about the new Mac Pro is that Nvidia is completely AWOL and won’t have any competing GPU config. This puts a lot of video and 3D professionals in a bad spot because many need CUDA support.
Apple may be trying to not-so-delicately nudge everyone to move their code from CUDA to OpenCL, but I’ve seen a first-hand failure of AMD’s OpenCL support with V-Ray RT for Maya. Chaos Group built V-Ray RT on OpenCL, but after extensive work trying to get the GPU variant of its RT render engine running on AMD hardware and an effort by yours truly to light a fire under Apple and AMD, Chaos Group gave up and ported it to CUDA instead. So V-Ray RT’s GPU mode only works with OpenCL and CUDA—on Nvidia hardware.
If Apple wants OpenCL and AMD to be the answer to CUDA, the support needs to be there so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. As it is, I now have zero options for V-Ray RT GPU on the 2013 Mac Pro since the software doesn’t work on AMD cards, and no Quadro/Geforce card is available for the machine. I’m sure some company will eventually build a Thunderbolt 2 Nvidia GPU-in-a-box for people who need CUDA, but to quote our own Peter Bright, “Thunderbolt 2 is equivalent to 2.5 lanes of PCIe 3 or 5 lanes of PCIe 2,” so it's hard to say what kind of a performance hit that will incur for compute tasks with an external GPU.
"Time will tell” seems to be the running theme with the new Mac Pro design. With such a contentious redesign, it’s hard to say if this is going to be Apple’s Xeon version of the Cube or a truly revolutionary approach to workstation hardware. I'll be writing a full review and pulling no punches, so expect to see that around September or October, when the Ivy Bridge Xeon E5 Mac Pro ships—presumably in a coffee grinder box.
Call it ultramodern. Once you get past the signature home page grid of apps, the new design language in Apple's iOS 7 looks more than a little like the "modern" design on my HTC 8X Windows Phone, with its big, rounded sans-serif fonts and flat buttons.
We should expect no less from Apple; after all, Steve Jobs said that good artists copy, great artists steal. Apple's genius isn't in inventing entirely new technologies. It's in taking existing technologies and polishing, commercializing, and mainstreaming them.
We saw that with the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod and the iPhone. And now we're seeing it with iOS 7, which on one level plays catch-up with some of its major rivals, but does so in a way that could crush them.
It's Not Actually Just Design
iOS 7's design borrows a lot from Microsoft's Windows Phone 8. The flatness, the focus on large fonts and sliding panels, even the fonts themselves; you see a lot of Windows Phone 8's much cleaner, more "modern" approach. That super-flat weather app looks a heck of a lot like the weather app on my HTC 8X.
you dun even have an iphone, why should we listen to you?
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Colours are beta, they're focusing on operational beta test.
The Colours are bait for people to complain.
It will be darker and intensified on release.
I've tested on my iphone ,5 operationally it's awesome lots of jailbreak tweaks like barred numbers, control centre, etc..
Reverted back after one night the colours too white atm for comfort to eyes.
The Colours are bait for people to complain.
It will be darker and intensified on release.
I've tested on my iphone ,5 operationally it's awesome lots of jailbreak tweaks like barred numbers, control centre, etc..
Reverted back after one night the colours too white atm for comfort to eyes.
i would rather crash my car into a wall and burn myself alive.
Because I don't have an iPhone, I can give impartial advice and make impartial judgements.
WWDC 2013 - what does it all mean?
By Mark Webster
9:30 AM Friday Jun 14, 2013
Eddy Cue the Apple senior vice president of Internet Software and Services gestures to applause after demonstrating the new iTunes Radio. Photo / AP
Someone asked me if I was disappointed at the June 10th announcements; did it mean Apple wasn't innovating any more? No, I don't believe so. At all.
Apple has a pattern of releases it follows and hates releasing things that don't work properly. When, on the rare occasion the Inc does release something that doesn't measure up, heads soon roll. Just look at the Apple Maps app.
Apple is also not market driven; it rarely reacts to market swings or fads unless they're considered to be of lasting value. That's why when Samsung put out a smartphone with a distinctly larger screen, I didn't expect Apple to follow suit.
Apple has already designed the size of smartphone it thinks is correct, and this may have been honed with the iPhone 5 to give a very slightly longer model and one-row-of-icons more screen real estate, but I do believe this is as far as Apple will go. Likewise with near-field communications, thumbprint scanners and other whizzy stuff. Just how much do you want your iPhone to do, actually? But anyway, Apple's new Activation Lock addresses lots of security issues immediately iOS 7 comes out, and will work on all the current iDevices that will support iOS 7.
To my mind, as a long-term Apple user, everything is still chugging along swimmingly (sorry to mix metaphors). It seems to me that those who were new to Apple thanks to iPhone and then iPad have wildly different expectations compared to longer term users. Longer-term users see iDevices as adjuncts to their Mac computers, not a whole exciting new world. Perhaps this is jaded, but at least it reins in expectations.
I think the new iDevice fan-base is partly what causes fluctuations in the stock prices, especially when some in the media succumb to the 'what's new!' roller coaster. But those sorts of expectations simply don't drive Apple. As Tim Cook repeatedly stated, Apple's goal is to make really great products to enrich people's lives.
In a way, iDevices are like blank slates. That's partly why they are so simple physically, with so few buttons. The real magic comes from the touch interface, the OS and the apps, and that's why iOS 7 is significant. People already (mostly) love the Apple experience, and iOS 7 will make that experience a lot better, while OS 10.9 'Mavericks' promises the same.
Of course, iRadio could be seen as a response to Spotify and Pandora, and perhaps it is, but it's also simply a way to keep people using iTunes and the Music app. It may be late to the party, but if it works well, it will be great to have those capabilities in iTunes.
For now, WWDC 13's announcements on the two operating systems promise to drive your existing, qualifying Apple products faster, more efficiently and to make them more intuitive and productive to use. What more could an Apple fan ask for?
Innovation? OK, the new Mac Pro is outstanding. I tangibly want one, even though I don't need one. If you do need one, your lust may be ten times mine. As Phil Schiller stated so rudely for the critics, "Can't innovate any more my ass!" This became a trope and was shown on US news channels like CNN for the rest of the day. And Schiller is right. Check out the specs, the new Mac Pro is brilliant. This is Apple expertise done right.
As for price ... well, we don't know yet, but this kind of power won't be cheap. But the MacBook Air has also received a real boost as a laptop, and Apple sells a lot of laptops. Price for the 11-inch remains the same, the 13-inch has actually dropped a little, but they're both much more powerful.
Post WWDC commentary on US TV, though, did dwell on Apple's stock price, which only rose one per cent after the announcements. Apple's stock price, they said, has gone down 20 per cent this year while Samsung's has risen 12. This might worry Tim Cook with his accounting background, but does it hurt the core of Apple? I don't think so.
I mean, is Apple a company you invest in for returns or a company that makes products you want? I sit firmly in the second category.
So many smiling people leaving the Moscone Center at once meant Apple employees had to let people onto the down elevators in batches. At the bottom, in the lobby, I spotted a New Zealand flag held aloft on an iPad. The bearer was one Thomas Rix, a Kiwi who has lived in the Bay area for three years and who currently works for Twitter.
He was surrounded by Australians - that flag is an easy mistake to make - and I was the first Kiwi to talk to him. He and the Australians around him were, as developers, were positively buzzing at what they'd seen. That, in the end, is the crux of the matter, because that's what we, as consumers, end up with: their products.
Personally, I was relieved that Apple's presentation basically demonstrated business as usual: excellent products, excellent core software. I was heartened there was no succumbing to cheapness or geegaws, despite the critics, despite the market and stock pressures. I am very glad of the new Mac Pro, and it was good to see the developers get genuinely excited.
But I looked forward to finding out what the other journalists in this hotel thought: Hedirman Supian and Derek Ho from Singapore, and Rodney Chester, Garry Barker and Chris Griffith from Australia. They're all experienced watchers of the Apple world - Garry had, over a long journalistic career, been to 20 Apple events like this, including the Macworld conferences when Apple still keynoted them.
He had even interviewed Steve Jobs in Tokyo when a Macworld was held there. The consensus for the 2013 WWDC keynote seemed to be the same as mine - steady at the helm was a good thing, producing excellent software and hardware was Apple's core value and there were plenty of signs of that.
We also discussed the fact that the whole WWDC had a new American focus, or maybe refocus, since the original Apple computers were built here until they were farmed out all over the world - Ireland, Malaysia, Taiwan then China: the new Mac Pro will be built in the US, and the next ten years or Mac operating systems will all have names from the region of California. Go USA. This fact will go down well, here in the US at least. Actually I think even someone in China would be proud to buy a US-built Mac.
The only resounding regret was that everyone wanted to buy a new iWatch. And that was not announced.
By Mark Webster
By Mark Webster
9:30 AM Friday Jun 14, 2013
Eddy Cue the Apple senior vice president of Internet Software and Services gestures to applause after demonstrating the new iTunes Radio. Photo / AP
Someone asked me if I was disappointed at the June 10th announcements; did it mean Apple wasn't innovating any more? No, I don't believe so. At all.
Apple has a pattern of releases it follows and hates releasing things that don't work properly. When, on the rare occasion the Inc does release something that doesn't measure up, heads soon roll. Just look at the Apple Maps app.
Apple is also not market driven; it rarely reacts to market swings or fads unless they're considered to be of lasting value. That's why when Samsung put out a smartphone with a distinctly larger screen, I didn't expect Apple to follow suit.
Apple has already designed the size of smartphone it thinks is correct, and this may have been honed with the iPhone 5 to give a very slightly longer model and one-row-of-icons more screen real estate, but I do believe this is as far as Apple will go. Likewise with near-field communications, thumbprint scanners and other whizzy stuff. Just how much do you want your iPhone to do, actually? But anyway, Apple's new Activation Lock addresses lots of security issues immediately iOS 7 comes out, and will work on all the current iDevices that will support iOS 7.
To my mind, as a long-term Apple user, everything is still chugging along swimmingly (sorry to mix metaphors). It seems to me that those who were new to Apple thanks to iPhone and then iPad have wildly different expectations compared to longer term users. Longer-term users see iDevices as adjuncts to their Mac computers, not a whole exciting new world. Perhaps this is jaded, but at least it reins in expectations.
I think the new iDevice fan-base is partly what causes fluctuations in the stock prices, especially when some in the media succumb to the 'what's new!' roller coaster. But those sorts of expectations simply don't drive Apple. As Tim Cook repeatedly stated, Apple's goal is to make really great products to enrich people's lives.
In a way, iDevices are like blank slates. That's partly why they are so simple physically, with so few buttons. The real magic comes from the touch interface, the OS and the apps, and that's why iOS 7 is significant. People already (mostly) love the Apple experience, and iOS 7 will make that experience a lot better, while OS 10.9 'Mavericks' promises the same.
Of course, iRadio could be seen as a response to Spotify and Pandora, and perhaps it is, but it's also simply a way to keep people using iTunes and the Music app. It may be late to the party, but if it works well, it will be great to have those capabilities in iTunes.
For now, WWDC 13's announcements on the two operating systems promise to drive your existing, qualifying Apple products faster, more efficiently and to make them more intuitive and productive to use. What more could an Apple fan ask for?
Innovation? OK, the new Mac Pro is outstanding. I tangibly want one, even though I don't need one. If you do need one, your lust may be ten times mine. As Phil Schiller stated so rudely for the critics, "Can't innovate any more my ass!" This became a trope and was shown on US news channels like CNN for the rest of the day. And Schiller is right. Check out the specs, the new Mac Pro is brilliant. This is Apple expertise done right.
As for price ... well, we don't know yet, but this kind of power won't be cheap. But the MacBook Air has also received a real boost as a laptop, and Apple sells a lot of laptops. Price for the 11-inch remains the same, the 13-inch has actually dropped a little, but they're both much more powerful.
Post WWDC commentary on US TV, though, did dwell on Apple's stock price, which only rose one per cent after the announcements. Apple's stock price, they said, has gone down 20 per cent this year while Samsung's has risen 12. This might worry Tim Cook with his accounting background, but does it hurt the core of Apple? I don't think so.
I mean, is Apple a company you invest in for returns or a company that makes products you want? I sit firmly in the second category.
So many smiling people leaving the Moscone Center at once meant Apple employees had to let people onto the down elevators in batches. At the bottom, in the lobby, I spotted a New Zealand flag held aloft on an iPad. The bearer was one Thomas Rix, a Kiwi who has lived in the Bay area for three years and who currently works for Twitter.
He was surrounded by Australians - that flag is an easy mistake to make - and I was the first Kiwi to talk to him. He and the Australians around him were, as developers, were positively buzzing at what they'd seen. That, in the end, is the crux of the matter, because that's what we, as consumers, end up with: their products.
Personally, I was relieved that Apple's presentation basically demonstrated business as usual: excellent products, excellent core software. I was heartened there was no succumbing to cheapness or geegaws, despite the critics, despite the market and stock pressures. I am very glad of the new Mac Pro, and it was good to see the developers get genuinely excited.
But I looked forward to finding out what the other journalists in this hotel thought: Hedirman Supian and Derek Ho from Singapore, and Rodney Chester, Garry Barker and Chris Griffith from Australia. They're all experienced watchers of the Apple world - Garry had, over a long journalistic career, been to 20 Apple events like this, including the Macworld conferences when Apple still keynoted them.
He had even interviewed Steve Jobs in Tokyo when a Macworld was held there. The consensus for the 2013 WWDC keynote seemed to be the same as mine - steady at the helm was a good thing, producing excellent software and hardware was Apple's core value and there were plenty of signs of that.
We also discussed the fact that the whole WWDC had a new American focus, or maybe refocus, since the original Apple computers were built here until they were farmed out all over the world - Ireland, Malaysia, Taiwan then China: the new Mac Pro will be built in the US, and the next ten years or Mac operating systems will all have names from the region of California. Go USA. This fact will go down well, here in the US at least. Actually I think even someone in China would be proud to buy a US-built Mac.
The only resounding regret was that everyone wanted to buy a new iWatch. And that was not announced.
By Mark Webster
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