Thoughts on Today's Apple Announcements
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Just watched the Apple announcements and I have mixed feelings. I would welcome others' thoughts.
Mac Mini:Just watching the live stream of the announcements, this seemed great. The current Mac Mini's but with the additional of USB3.0 and processor spec bumps. What could be bad? That said, I just looked at the configuration options on the Apple Online Store and I am really disappointed. The bump in Quad Core i7 options is great but the fact that they got rid of the dedicated graphics in the highest end non-server edition is a huge bummer and the terrible options for dual drive configurations is nearly a deal killer. Two 1TB drives in the server edition looks great until you realize that they are only 5400RPM which is out of the question for this sort of thing. I would consider the pair of SSDs but 2x 256GB is simply insufficient space. If these support all the upgrades available to the prior generation of Minis then the storage issue won't be such a deal breaker but the graphics card is still a disappointment no matter how you slice it. For our purposes this seems like two steps forwards and then two steps back.iMac:Pretty but that doesn't really affect us at all. I am really happy that they didn't dispense with the ethernet. USB3.0 is a lovely, if 150% expected, addition. The loss of the firewire port is a medium-to-large disappointment given that there are still only 2x thunderbolt ports. It is nice that both screen sizes now offer dual TB. The Tech Specs tab on the Apple store is a little bit unclear on this but it seems like there might be a possibility that the new iMacs only support one external monitor. If that is the case, I am going to have rethink the playback systems for a couple shows I have coming up since I was banking on driving a pair of TH2Gs from one iMac. I'm extremely curious/anxious to see what the answer to that is since that would be a massive step backwards from my perspective.Overall, I'm less than thrilled with the direction they are taking both of these lines in. I have several project that we will be buying new Mac playback computers for and I was really hoping to be able to avoid specing Mac Pros on them. Unfortunately, it is looking less likely that I will be able to get away with that. I am also looking forward to sometime in 2013 to see what Apple has in store for the Mac Pro though I will unfortunately probably have to buy a few of the current generation before the new ones are released. I would hate to be a media server developer who had invested in coding for OSX at this point (Catalyst, MBox, etc). -
Apple are more interested in iPads and iPhones now. The MacBook Pro is no longer a "pro" machine its a fancy mac air and what's happened to the mac tower? Saying all this I am ordering a MBP retina... But what other choice do I have?
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I actually really love my rMBP. After Effects absolutely flys.
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It's not that I dont like Apple anymore; everything I own is Apple; phone/ipad/mac and soon to be MBPr.
I know I will love my Retina when I get it but a small part of me is condiering the standard Macbook Pro with full spec - it even has a FW800 port.
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The retina display is pretty amazing. It's not just that it looks great but also that you can run it at crazy high resolutions which gives you a ton of work space. I run mine at 1920x1200 which is really awesome for drafting or editing. I don't think I could go back to have a lower res screen.
