Looking at a older Mac Pro for davinci resolve r3d work.

[Marc Wielage]

And that is why I still cling to my good old Mac 4.1 updated to 5.1. I know at some point I will have to move to something else, but right now I just cling to a hope for something else beside trashcan. I will continue to use resolve on Windows, whenever I can. Current trashcan computer is a disaster.

I can only say that I get billable work done every week on a trashcan Mac. Apple has stepped up and fixed the GPUs for me (albeit 3 times!), and at the moment I'm able to do 4K work reasonably well.

But I agree 100% that the trashcan Macs are underpowered, overpriced, and not flexible enough for expansion. And I'm not happy that Apple has abandoned the pro audio/video/designer market by not making a rackmount machine with multiple PCIe slots and replaceable GPUs & CPUs, which is what we need. (The proprietary SSD in the nMP is also a total pain in the ass.)

It's possible that if and when nMP II comes out later on in the year with Thunderbolt 3, that might be a means of running an outboard Cubix-type expansion chassis to have 2 or 3 more GPUs (depending on whether the OS will allow it).

I also agree with Jake that it's bewildering as to why Apple won't freely license ProRes to whoever wants to use it on Windows. I don't think the sales of the Mac platform will take that much of a hit -- lots of people use it for simple, everyday stuff like email, web browsing, and all that stuff, and the number of people who need massive power aren't that big a percentage of their total users. And let's face it, Apple is a smartphone company that (barely) sells computers on the side.

I use the Mac every day and have since 1987. But there are aspects I hate about it, and I particularly don't like Apple's corporate attitude on a lot of issues. On the other hand, Microsoft is worse. If Linux were affordable, I'd jump to that in 2 seconds. The Linux version of Resolve is rock-solid and does pretty much everything.

 

[M.Halsell]

Its pretty unanimous that Apple has walked away from the Pro market as a market leader. We, collectively, are not the shot callers that we once were. Apple smartly is managing ProRes as I suspect it has a larger, diabolical use for ProRes as a content delivery format in the consumer markets. While other content distributors are debating which direction to go on the HEVC front, Apple already has theirs in hand. Lock, stock and barrel, tune, modify, deploy as needed.

So our pro needs are miniscule compared to Apple's vision of economic domination. Apple has move to the appliance model- smaller, efficient and narrow & specific in its application.

Production wise, our studio mindset now is that Apple desktops are encoding/decoding boxes, not workstations. Subsequently, there is no need for all that power on the Mac side. Generally speaking, anything ProRes related, any current Apple box can handle deftly. Any software in the Apple catalogue runs wells and ably. If you are trying to bend/break by applying a 100 nodes in the other said software, that's not really Apple problem. If your needs are industrial, look elsewhere for a solution and build a intermediate format/pipeline to bridge any work in the ProRes space.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Its pretty unanimous that Apple has walked away from the Pro market as a market leader. We, collectively, are not the shot callers that we once were. Apple smartly is managing ProRes as I suspect it has a larger, diabolical use for ProRes as a content delivery format in the consumer markets. While other content distributors are debating which direction to go on the HEVC front, Apple already has theirs in hand. Lock, stock and barrel, tune, modify, deploy as needed.

Actually, Apple is not using ProRes to deliver iTunes content, as far as I know. It's all H.264-based M4V's, at least so far. My guess is the reason why Apple is cagey about cross-licensing ProRes to Windows is that it boils down to a basic "what's in it for them" problem. Sure, it benefits users, but even if BMD was able to charge (say) $100 extra per Windows version to provide an optional ProRes export capability, Apple could question whether this will help or hurt them in the future.

At the moment, Mac sales are only about 9% of the company's income:

If Apple is making $234 billion a year (as they did in 2015), with a net profit of $53 billion, I'm not sure why they would give a crap about making an extra $5 million from Resolve a year. It's hardly worth their effort, and it can only benefit Windows manufacturers. Hell, even if it were $50 million, it wouldn't even be big enough to see on the chart.

 

[Eric Santiago]

Apple must love it when us wee folks discuss their thoughts and dreams

I've been in the graphics field since 1994 and this debate goes on and on.

To date IMHO my current status has me placed in a creative environment that dwarves all flavors of PC almost 6 to 1.

Sure my main 3D workstation is a BOXX/Dell but all other worker drones are Apple computers