Apple has announced that the new redesigned Mac Pro will be released in 2019, reports TechCrunch.
Matthew Panzarino recently met with John Ternus, Vice President of Hardware Engineering, Tom Boger, Senior Director of Mac Hardware Product Marketing, Jud Coplan, Director of Video Apps Product Marketing and Xander Soren, Director of Music Apps Product Marketing to discuss Apple's plans for the new Mac.
"We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It’s not something for this year," said Boger. "We know that there’s a lot of customers today that are making purchase decisions on the iMac Pro and whether or not they should wait for the Mac Pro."
In order to help improve its products for professionals, Apple has created a Pro Workflow Team. The group is under John Ternus and works closely with engineering. Ternus says that Apple wants to sit with real customers to understand their actual flow and see what they're doing in real time. Unfortunately, this is sometimes not possible due to the proprietary and secretive nature of the work, so Apple has started hiring creatives directly.
These are award-winning artists and technicians that are brought in to shoot real projects (I saw a bunch of them walking by in Apple park toting kit for an outdoor shoot on premises while walking). They then put the hardware and software through their paces and point out sticking points that could cause frustration and friction among pro users.
“We’ve been focusing on visual effects and video editing and 3D animation and music production as well,” says Ternus. “And we’ve brought in some pretty incredible talent, really masters of their craft. And so they’re now sitting and building out workflows internally with real content and really looking for what are the bottlenecks. What are the pain points. How can we improve things. And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed.”
“We’ve gone from just you know engineering Macs and software to actually engineering a workflow and really understanding from soup to nuts, every single stage of the process, where those bottlenecks are, where we can optimize that,” says Boger. “And to JT’s point because we build the hardware the firmware the operating system the software and have these close relationships with third parties we can attack the entire stack and we can really ferret out where we are we can optimize for performance.”
Apple says the lessons learned from the Pro Workflow Team will help shape the Mac Pro.
“So it’s definitely influencing the architecture of where we’re going, what we’re planning for,” says Tom Boger. “We’re getting a much much much deeper understanding of our pro customers and their workflows and really understanding not only where the state of the art is today but where the state of the art is going and all of that is really informing the work that we’re doing on the Mac Pro and we’re working really really hard on it.”
It appears that Apple is still in the modular mindset for the Mac Pro.
“As we said a year ago working on modular was inherently a modular system and in looking at our customers and their workflows obviously that’s a real need for our customers and that’s the direction we’re going,” says Boger.
More details in the full report linked below!
Read More
Matthew Panzarino recently met with John Ternus, Vice President of Hardware Engineering, Tom Boger, Senior Director of Mac Hardware Product Marketing, Jud Coplan, Director of Video Apps Product Marketing and Xander Soren, Director of Music Apps Product Marketing to discuss Apple's plans for the new Mac.
"We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It’s not something for this year," said Boger. "We know that there’s a lot of customers today that are making purchase decisions on the iMac Pro and whether or not they should wait for the Mac Pro."
In order to help improve its products for professionals, Apple has created a Pro Workflow Team. The group is under John Ternus and works closely with engineering. Ternus says that Apple wants to sit with real customers to understand their actual flow and see what they're doing in real time. Unfortunately, this is sometimes not possible due to the proprietary and secretive nature of the work, so Apple has started hiring creatives directly.
These are award-winning artists and technicians that are brought in to shoot real projects (I saw a bunch of them walking by in Apple park toting kit for an outdoor shoot on premises while walking). They then put the hardware and software through their paces and point out sticking points that could cause frustration and friction among pro users.
“We’ve been focusing on visual effects and video editing and 3D animation and music production as well,” says Ternus. “And we’ve brought in some pretty incredible talent, really masters of their craft. And so they’re now sitting and building out workflows internally with real content and really looking for what are the bottlenecks. What are the pain points. How can we improve things. And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed.”
“We’ve gone from just you know engineering Macs and software to actually engineering a workflow and really understanding from soup to nuts, every single stage of the process, where those bottlenecks are, where we can optimize that,” says Boger. “And to JT’s point because we build the hardware the firmware the operating system the software and have these close relationships with third parties we can attack the entire stack and we can really ferret out where we are we can optimize for performance.”
Apple says the lessons learned from the Pro Workflow Team will help shape the Mac Pro.
“So it’s definitely influencing the architecture of where we’re going, what we’re planning for,” says Tom Boger. “We’re getting a much much much deeper understanding of our pro customers and their workflows and really understanding not only where the state of the art is today but where the state of the art is going and all of that is really informing the work that we’re doing on the Mac Pro and we’re working really really hard on it.”
It appears that Apple is still in the modular mindset for the Mac Pro.
“As we said a year ago working on modular was inherently a modular system and in looking at our customers and their workflows obviously that’s a real need for our customers and that’s the direction we’re going,” says Boger.
More details in the full report linked below!
Read More