Slashdot Mirror
The Mac Pro Is Getting a Major Do-Over (mashable.com)
Apple is moving away from the current, cylinder-shaped design used on its Mac Pro desktop, but that replacement will take until next year to hit shelves. From a report: "The Mac Pro, the current vintage that we introduced, we wanted to do something bold and different. In retrospect, it didn't well suit some of the people we wanted to reach," admitted Apple SVP Craig Federighi. "So many of our customers were moving to iMac that we saw a path to address to many, many more of those people," he added. "With the current generation Mac Pro, which some customers love, others may not, one of the things that's certainly clear and true about that is the team tried to do something different, something bold and we always want to encourage the Mac team that whatever products you make, that make customers happy, that we do bold work. Because the Mac's always been about that. It's been about not being conventional thinking, not me-too-stuff," said Phil Schiller. [...] While we'll have to wait until 2018 for the Mac Pro rebirth ("Want to do something great... that will take longer than this year to do," said Schiller), iMac fans can expect a significant update this year, including some new configurations designed specifically for Pro users who already fans of the all-in-one design. [...] Schiller was somewhat less emphatic when I asked if he was willing to make any "courageous" decisions about Mac Pro ports. I thought I saw a little discomfort flicker across Schiller's face as he reacted to that word and he told me that Apple wasn't making promises about ports on the Mac Pro. Port decisions, he said, are made at a product level. "Just because on one product we removed something, doesn't mean we're going to remove it elsewhere," he told me. More on this here.
Uhh... Are you in crack? You're projecting yourself into their words. They admitted no screw ups. They actually said this is according to plan - the team is suppose to make bold statements (ignoring that most commercial requirements should not be bold statements; reliability is the key factor)
Few people consider Microsoft's Surface line of products as anything more than toys. They are not artists tools unless you like the precision of finger-paint.
More or less, Microsoft bought out the nTrig tech, which artists loathe, and used it on every Surface product beyond the Surface Pro 3. The Wacom tech is far more precise, and has far more pressure sensitivity and angle sensing in the stylus that allows it to be a replacement for most analog art tools. Yet Wacom produces competing products that are over $2000 more for what is identical hardware. That just should not happen.
The Cintiq ends up being the best bang for the buck because buying a "tablet" device with a built in digitizer means either you get a shitty nTrig tech, or a shitty tablet computer with a good digitizer. We've been down this road before with covertable laptops. One just does not full-time use a portable all-in-one type of machine as your full time computer because it's not good at everything, it's only good-enough for a few edge cases that you can use it as a desktop replacement, but it's not good enough to cover all cases (such as games, 3D modeling, Photoshop and game development) due to only being 12.5% to 25% as powerful as a desktop.