Is pro-film and audio production the target market for the new MacPro?
At first I thought they might be going for the ML demographic, which has the budget and demand for beefy workstations, but they're using AMD GPUs, not nvidia.
At first I thought they might be going for the ML demographic, which has the budget and demand for beefy workstations, but they're using AMD GPUs, not nvidia.
Apple has traditionally been the computer for creatives. In recent years, they've let their pro hardware and software lines languish and I think they've lost quite a bit of ground since you can buy a windows computer that runs the same editing software for quite a bit cheaper.
Pro film and audio production people also have huge budgets, as evidenced by the $43000 reference monitor they compared the new display to in the keynote.
From my understanding, Apple has been writing/maintaining GPU drivers. They've been pretty bad at optimizing them (they also are dropping OpenGL support) so Nvidia wants to maintain drivers themselves. As Apple has been locking down more and more of the OS, it's pushing out Nvidia from creating and distributing drivers. If Apple ceded to Nvidia, I imagine it would be harder for Apple to push things like Metal.
The details of the fight are probably a lot more detailed since they would be negotiating about hardware supply and long term contracts.
Something similar happen with Google. They couldn’t update some of their Nexus phones because they were dependent on drivers they didn’t control.
The real profits come from consumers. Pro-market is moneywise small (on Apple scale).
Maybe one (or main?) purpose of the pro-lineup is to just make consumer products more attractive. Bit like with cars - some people read and dream about highend models and buy the $30-40k model.