[WOT] Warning - long winded discussion - was Re: Apple iPad announcement evokes yawn

Bob Sneidar bobs at twft.com
Thu Mar 8 13:38:24 EST 2012


I also seemed to have touched a nerve! :-) I wasn't relating gas prices to the apple event (a drastic oversimplification of what I was saying) I was relating an unstable economy that has all the signs of destabilizing even more (using the rising gas prices as one vector on the issue as an example, perhaps I didn't make that clear,) to the seemingly apparent unwillingness of Apple to produce any dramatically new products or technology into the market right now. And sure Apple is catching up. Why wouldn't they? After they released the revolutionary iPad, other companies one upped them. As is so often the case, Apple does the innovation and takes the chance. Once other companies see that there is a market they come along with Me Too products. No surprises there. If Apple didn't bring the iPad up to speed, they would be roundly criticized for THAT! 

The Xserve was never anything like a Mac Pro? Really? Sure they were different products optimized for different purposes, but nothing like?? Same chip set, same bus architecture, they used the same memory in Mac Pro's of the same chipset, etc. No high end graphics card true, and precious little space to put one, but still, nothing like is a bit of an overstatement, don't you think? There is nothing about the Xserve to prevent it from running the stock non-server OS X except perhaps the installer will refuse to run on it and that is something Apple decided to do, as far as I know. And you CAN run OS X Server on the Mac Pro. Really, the only thing to prevent someone from using an Xserve as a desktop computer is the horribly loud fans, and the (once) excessively high price tag on the OS. I run Parallels and up to 4 virtual machines running Windows on two of my Xserves. There is no software I can run on a Mac Pro that I cannot run on an Xserve. Nothing like is another drastic oversimplification in my opinion. 

Economic uncertainty IS a part of EVERY company's reality, ESPECIALLY companies who produce what amounts to luxury products to the consumer market. And I could argue just as easily that Apple's profits last quarter are due at least in part to them not overextending themselves by developing any radically new products until they are certain the economy is really recovering. I do agree however that there needs to be more done with Thunderbolt. It's way too expensive right now, and not a lot of peripherals are available that use it. I'm just not sure what Apple can do to change that. They cannot really twist the arm of the 3rd party hardware developers. 

Let's agree to disagree. 

Bob


On Mar 8, 2012, at 9:55 AM, Tim Jones wrote:

> Whoa - I touched a sensitive nerve ending with that one..
> 
> Everything that you mention was all stuff that could have been announced via press release.  The quad core is the GPU only.  The 4G-LTE support is again - catch up.  Economic uncertainty is not part of the reality of Apple.  They made the largest net profit in the company's history last quarter.
> 
> The Xserve was never anything like a Mac Pro (or a PowerMac).  the Mac Pro is used for serious M&E production and is NOT designed to be a server while the Xserve was primarily an enterprise server system and was never designed (or sold) for desktop use - the two can never be confused.  Apple canned the Xserve because they underestimated the efforts of supporting an enterprise environment.  For another company, $415M a year is big money.  For Apple, it's not worth maintaining since it's so far removed from their core efforts.  Get on the phone and call any major studio's system support team and ask them what the best thing Apple could give them and you'll get the same story from all of them - new licenses for Final Cut Pro 7 and a 12 core Mac Pro that will fit in a rack.  This is what I do for a living.
> 
> I - and a lot of folks in the M&E space - regularly use our iPads 10 to 12 hours (or more) a day and we love them.  Just because it's something you wouldn't appreciate doesn't mean that the rest of the world also doesn't appreciate it.  In fact, this is sent from my iPad, but I remove that silly tag at the bottom.
> 
> Heck, Peter Frampton even used one on stage last night.
> 
> I love my Apple products, and I own multiple, but I am confused by your statement relating gas prices to the Apple event (??).
> 
> Tim





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