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AVID & MAC RUMORS: RELATED?

Nick Morrison

Nick Morrison

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What I'm about to say is pure rumor. These are two pieces of industry gossip that seem to make more sense when heard back to back. And I've heard these a week apart, from two people that are very knowledgeable.

RUMOR 1: Avid may stop supporting MAC in the next year. Not definite. But possible.

RUMOR 2: MAC may stop making towers. No more Mac Pros.


Heard back to back. They make sense. Don't you think?

On the other hand, they don't. Avid is courting Final Cut users madly, so to have them abandon MAC now is weird. And while APPLE makes much more off it s consumer products, surely it still makes a profit of its wildly popular Mac Pro towers right? (at least in the design world).

Or maybe APPLE doesn't make enough off of Mac Pro's and they will cut them loose, like Final Cut.

And maybe Avid doesn't want to support an architecture that is only laptop based.


Thoughts?

Again, this is rumor. But it's interesting nonetheless no?
 
Nick Morrison said:
RUMOR 1: Avid may stop supporting MAC in the next year. Not definite. But possible.
Click to expand...

There is no information to support this rumor. Not sure where you heard it but its wild speculation. It would not benefit AVID in any way to discount any platforms especially ones it is already coded for and entrenched in.
 
Jason Diamond said:
It would not benefit AVID in any way to discount any platforms especially ones it is already coded for and entrenched in.
Click to expand...

And having enormous success with given FCPs recent stumblings.

Not sure I'm getting the same harmonics between these rumours... But one does so love a conspiracy theory.
 
Avid has left mac before and came right back. I doubt they are gonna make the same mistake twice. macbook pro's are still very popular mobile editing platforms too, 1 product out of many doesn't convince a company that's striving to take back the market they lost to fcp, doesn't define them pulling out of the platform.


and there is still 0 word on the mac pro being discontinued. I speculate that if they were going to, they really would have announced it by now. fact of the matter is, they hasn't been a major leap in tech till this year. apple products usually release as, innovative, bleeding edge tech, than one update after that, that's better but nothing really new. and than a release that's back to the bleeding edge tech again.

we had that one update with the 12 core, but fact of the matter is, intel hasn't come up with anything worth of note till this year. sandy bridge just wasn't a big enough of a leap. dual 8 core processors, ivy bridge, and pci express 3.0, along with thunderbolt are major leaps. and that tech is just getting started this year.

and with new mountain lion coming out this summer, there's already code for more GPU support. how are they not coming out with a new tower if they are programming more code for gpu's you can throw in and out of the system? can't really do that on a imac...
 
Avid will not be dropping mac support anytime soon.

I have no doubt, however that Apple is seriously considering killing the Mac tower form factor.
 
Jason Diamond said:
There is no information to support this rumor. Not sure where you heard it but its wild speculation. It would not benefit AVID in any way to discount any platforms especially ones it is already coded for and entrenched in.
Click to expand...

I never denied that it was wild speculation. But my source is well informed. I'm sure its just a doomsday scenario that's been bandied about.
 
a-strangelove_0.jpg
 
Last time Avid abandoned Apple a large number abandoned Avid, no doubt Apple have new hardware in mind but supporting the creative industries always was important to Apple. I hope they realise creative industry is a very major key to Apples sucsess. they will loose much more than they will gain if they abandon us.
 
There is definitely going to be a new Mac Pro some time this year (Sandy Bridge-EP) that will live through 2013 and Avid will definitely continue supporting OS X till then. There's nothing to worry about in the short term.

What happens after? Apple is moving to ARM company wide with self-branded SoCs. idevices are already there, Macbooks will follow by 2013 (in view of Windows on ARM laptops flooding the market later this year, they don't have a choice) with Mac Pro being the final product to move. OS X and iOS will merge - we are already starting to see glimpses of this. I don't know when it will happen, but my guess is by 2014 Mac Pros will cease to use cutting-edge powerful Intel x86 machines and move to more efficient many core ARM systems. Still powerful, but just not at the bleeding edge. While indeed it is wildly popular in niche industries like filmmaking, these but contribute a very small quantity, and Apple is seeing Mac Pro more and more as device for creating content (incl. videos/movies) for idevices. It just makes more sense for Mac Pro to run on the same architecture as iPhones and iPads. One thing is for sure - Apple and Intel have no future. None whatsoever.

The switch to ARM will be like the move from OS 9 to OS X and PPC to x86, but at the same time. Some developers may decide the new Apple ecosystem is not worth developing for and concentrate on more suitable platforms. My guess is that some would wait till the ecosystem is stable and proven. If Avid isn't there in 2014, they would probably come around by 2016 - this is something they have done before in the mid-2000s. So your well-informed sources aren't speaking through their hat - there are valid reasons for why it might happen. Good news is that such an occurrence is probably 2 years away.
 
Avid cannot afford to abandon the Mac OS X platform because eventually iOS and Mac OS X will be merged into iOS X similarly to what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8.

You heard it here first. Avid, if you are listening, think about this.

Michael Zaletel
 
Nick Morrison said:
RUMOR 1: Avid may stop supporting MAC in the next year. Not definite. But possible. ... RUMOR 2: MAC may stop making towers. No more Mac Pros.
Click to expand...
I'd guess we'll know at NAB in three weeks.

But: Apple is not exhibiting at the show, which is not a good sign. Many, many people in LA have been concerned about the potential loss of Apple in continuing to market desktop systems. It'd be sad to see them leave this business, but I concede that they're making an awful lot of profit from non-computing areas these days (iPhone / iPod / iPad).
 
avid would be stupid to leave the mac.
but i have the bad feeling there wont be a new macpro, and everything moves to thunderboldt.
i so wish that apple, if they abandon the macpro, licence the os to a 3rd party company like boxx.
where you have suddenly 4 thunderboldt connections and 6 pci slots. i have no clue about computers though ;)
 
Marc Wielage said:
I'd guess we'll know at NAB in three weeks.

But: Apple is not exhibiting at the show, which is not a good sign.
Click to expand...

When they walked away from the trade show that bears the name of their own product Apple seemed to indicate that they don't need trade shows to achieve their marketing goals. For years they made statements comparing the number of unique visitors to their retail stores to the numbers of similar contacts made at the shows and viewership of their own online PR events appears to be through the roof.

I'm not convinced that their absence from NAB means anything at all. That's not to say however, that I don't share some of your concern. I would think that the damage done to customer confidence by the FCPX release debacle is reason enough to justify a presence this year if for no other reason than to allay these concerns. This gives me pause.
 
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