Apple's announcement...

[Daniel Bolton]

Apple now have a real solid mass consumer base, so now they are taking advantage of it. That means products with a higher price tag but not a great deal of improvement in performance. Mac's have always been pricey but you could see a real difference in the performance compared with windows machines. You paid for quality. Now I could build a more powerful windows machine for almost a 1/3 less of the price. Now you pay more for aesthetic than performance with Apple. Shame.

[Liam Hall]

The apple you all remember died with Steve jobs. His sense of design and the importance he placed on design were traits passed to him by his father.

That's a bit harsh on Sir Jonathon Ive and the other 70,000 Apple employees, don't you think?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive

[Mark Britton]

My two cents: Steve Jobs was pretty clear and up front with everyone where Apple was headed. In 2010, he stated that they were in 'the post PC era'. I think some people took that to mean 'we beat Windows PCs'. But I think Mr. Jobs was referring to Apple, and he was telling everyone that Apple had shifted its focus away from computers and into portable consumer devices. Apple Computer, Inc. is no longer called that. They changed the name of the company to Apple, Inc. Words have power and changing the name of a company is not done on a whim. It is a message, to both your customers and your employees.

Final Cut X surprised a lot of people. But again, I think it was clear and consistent with the direction Apple was focused: delivering video to mobile platforms were first and foremost, with output to Facebook, YouTube, etc right there and in your face. The magnetic timeline seemed to me to be a first step towards a user interface that would work for a touch interface, at the expense of precision and 'muscle memory' of the legion of editors that lived on FCP. Apple believes that small, portable, touchscreen devices are the future of the company, and they're putting all their resources into making that happen.

Apple, Inc. will keep making Mac Pros, simply because people still buy them. They know they have a base of customers that are invested in them, both emotionally and financially. But they aren't going to pull 100's of their top people off their iDevice juggernaut to work all hours to build you the best tower PC on the planet. Doing that to make a product that might sell a few 100,000 just doesn't make sense when you could keep them on a product that sells a few 100,000,000. The honest truth is that they still might love you, but they don't need you any more. They've moved on. The relationship is over, pro market, Apple is trying to let you down gently.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

I'm actually pretty stoked.

When I saw the introduction of that new Macbook Pro, I was impressed. Be honest: that's one very nice piece of technology!
And the price is very affordable. They used FCP X in the demos which is also updated IMMEDIATELY to get use of the display. That's nice. FCP X, that got a new What's New page that puts an official tag on the R3D support coming later this year, next to some other potentially interesting updates.

Been using FCP X, I've warmed up to it a bit. It's very incomplete, and has some big short-comings, but it has strong points that no other NLE's can match too. If Apple keeps working on it (a commitment they seem to be making) I think it can be very huge in the future.

The not a real new Mac Pro was VERY disappointing. Totally not what I was expecting. But Tim Cook mailed that 'something great is coming next year'. To me that says: a redesign of the Mac Pro, with 4K displays, and it's not finished yet.
Yes, we need new Mac Pro's, and they SHOULD have given better updates to the Mac Pro. I personally don't think the MBP 17" is coming back.
But I don't think Apple is leaving the pro user.

[Claus Mueller]

I understand why some are frustrated because Apple didn‘t launch a 4K MacPro/iMac or at least a new super performance MacPro with TB/USB 3.0 etc.
But it is only a matter of 12-24 months until Apple will or can offer an affordable 4K solution ($2-3K). Until then it‘s good to know that we‘re well prepared for the „Post-HD Era“.

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Never mind the quality (I only had a cellphone cam on me!), feel the Finder 1.0:



One from my collection :-)

Mike

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

My bet (and I have no inside knowledge whatsoever)

Am I the only one made a little... uneasy... by that statement? You would think Apple would give the CEO of the company that's been driving 4K the last few years a *little* heads-up on their roadmap...

Mike

[Craig Schober]

I hate to break it to a forum of professionals but Apple is not on the way out - professionals are on the way out. There will always be expensive toys for elite artisans and technicians but those markets will continue to shrink. Maybe I'm wrong and the release of the Red One actually increased the size of the professional market but as I see it, the pro market just shifted it's definition to accommodate more content creators. That might sound like more pros until you step back and see that most Mac users are content creators too.

I think Apple is still on the right track. Big and expensive (relatively speaking) tech is never going to be the end game because it will never get into enough hands to disrupt lethargic, lazy markets. Any company that is truly pushing innovation rather than just counting beans knows this. Apple and Red might not need each other technically but they share that culture so it is inevitable that they will both serve the same large community together.

[Lawrence Bansbach]

Just get a hackintosh, then you get your OSX and thunderbolt and USB3.0 + all the cheapness and speed, AND you get to learn something building your own computer....ikea furniture is harder.

That's only because Ikea instructions sometimes inexplicably flip the orientation of the illustrations from one panel to the next.

[Kenny Mosher]

I hope you are right Jim. I am willing to wait