Of course there are hordes of different kinds of professionals that use Macs. But targeting stratospherically high end production, artists and media people is a market that’s not currently being addressed by other manufacturers. It’s a very small market, but one that would be highly profitable.
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Right, no one disagrees. Apple targets that market currently. The entire point of this article is that there are a lot of other professionals whose needs aren’t being met by Apple’s current product lines.
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You are right, I was not clear in my first statement. Let me try to clarify my thought. I believe that the word “pro” does not mean the same thing as “professional”, as one could deduce. Everyone is a professional. My mother is a music teacher and she needs a good computer. Even before online classes, covid, etc. In fact there are few trades nowadays that can be solely analogic. My point is, if you are not working with 3D rendering or HDR color correction, why would you need a 5K retina screen? I work with Adobe Premiere and my 4K monitor is absolutely fine for me. I have an excelent “PRO” machine running Windows. For way less. So if you want Apple to became an expensive Banana, why won’t you buy an awesome Banana for less? Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to reduce writers to paper and pen, you guys surely make way more money than I do, because you sell ideas, not files. I sell most of the time processed files. So I cannot use 35mm film (which by the way has an astonishing quality) because my clientes (Netflix, Amazon, iTunes) won’t accep anyhthing other than ProRes 422 HQ footage.
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Because I stare at text all day, every day. I have a 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina screen and a 27-inch Thunderbolt Display next to it, and the quality difference is obvious and constantly annoying. I’ve used 4K displays and they’re certainly better than the Thunderbolt Display, but not as good as the 5K display. It’s partly an ergonomics and eyestrain issue, but it also plays out in accuracy. For a while, my wife was working in a job where people had standard mediocre PC monitors. Partly because of the fuzziness of the text, they tended to make more mistakes and fail to catch them because they weren’t as easily seen on screen. Cornell vs Connell vs Corneil, for instance.
On the same grounds, switching to a PC with Windows isn’t an option—hardware is the easy part, in fact; software is what matters. I have decades of experience with macOS and Mac apps, and I’m vastly more fluid and productive on a Mac than I would be on a PC. That might not be true for you, but I can guarantee it is for long-time Mac professionals.
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Hi Adam - Great article. I hope Apple hears you!
Older eyes need sharper (and bigger) monitors. I finally abandoned my quest for a large external Retina display and bought a 24" M1 iMac, which I love (except for the port and stand limitations.). If your older Mac can run Catalina, “Airplay Receiver” might be an option. Not for me, so I plugged my 27" (pre-Retina) 2013 iMac into the new iMac as a (fuzzier) external.
For the laptops, I’d suggest Apple drop the MBP 13 and beef up the Air (especially ports) call it a “Pro Air”? As for this whole “Pro” concern, Apple is now essentially a Phone company, and that’s where their priorities are focused. You can apply the same “over-pro-ing” observation to the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max phones, which have mind-blowing photographic and cinemagraphic capabilities. As far as I can tell, 95% of them don’t go to “professionals” but to cat-video creatives and consumers who just want “the newest iPhone”.
OK. I’ll give a shot at explaining this in a way that’s balancing informative, accurate, accessible, and pithy. (I expect to fail at least one.)
First, break it into parts. “HDR on 8K ProRes 4444 video” These describe a list of different file attributes for video. Each one is basically someone saying move all the sliders up.
HDR - High Dynamic Range. I think this one is the best understood already given the use of the term in consumer TVs, and iPhones, etc. For our use the important part is that the file contains information about a wider range of light level for each pixel, therefore more data per pixel, and therefore the file will be larger, and the computer will have more to handle as it works on the file.
8K - maybe better understood than HDR because people are familiar with 4K, but maybe less familiar because nobody is buying 8K displays or content. Anyway, this is describing the number of pixels per frame of video and the larger resolution means therefore the file will be larger, and the computer will have more to handle as it works on the file. (4 times larger than 4K)
4444 - This is the one that’s going to be the most wonk-y. You often see this expressed as something that looks more like 4:4:4:4 . If you want to dive in further you could start here and here, but for this post I’ll just say that visual information in a video file can be measured — and therefore described for re-creation — in a few ways and this is saying that each of those ways is being measured in the most data-capturing way (Each number represents one of those ways as a ratio on a scale of 1-4). “4444” is another way of saying there is no sub-sampling. Because each attribute is measured at the highest rate, the file will be larger, and the computer will have more to handle as it works on the file.
ProRes - as the files are getting larger (I assume you saw a trend above), you start to hit problems with storing, transmitting, and otherwise dealing with the files. Enter compression. Most are familiar with “.mp4/m4v” “.mkv”, or relatedly, “.mp3” ProRes is a “standard” for video compression/bundling that is primarily engineered to benefit video editors or others that work with video files before they are distributed. However, nothing comes for free. The trade of of smaller files is that the processor now needs to do the work of de/compressing as you work on the file and so ProRes files stress the processor more (and the storage less).
Now for the other part, “grade color” Somewhat like developing film, the data files that come out of cameras are not very useful until you do work on them. The data is recorded in the most “pure” form they can be, but that’s not normally a video that is very accurate to the human perception, and not aesthetically pleasing. (It will often look washed out or hazy). Part of this is because the file has more information than the devices that show them can portray. Color grading will often narrow the range of information to just what is useful, or boosts certain attributes like contrast, or adjusts the “temperature” of the image to match the mood desired. There are a lot of reasons and goals for color grading, but for more and more video it is not-optional to do it for at least SOME level. Presets make this easy on the person, but does not reduce how much work the computer needs to do.
Grading is particularly important for evaluating system performance, because it typically needs to touch every pixel of every frame (or if not, the frame needs to be pre-analyzed to determine which pixels could be left alone, which also is computationally intensive) and so the more data in the file, the more “work” is involved. The gold standard is “Real Time” which means the computer can apply the grading at least as fast as you can perceive it as the file plays back, frame by frame.
Hopefully this helped, or at least helped more than it hurt.
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You get a cookie! 
Thanks for the explanation—I understand now what’s happening and that by using all that terminology, Apple is basically signaling to high-end video professionals that the MacBook Pro is for them. Apart from the technical bits, what I hadn’t realized at all was the raw video would need color grading to be useful.
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Well, OK I will accept your point. I believe machines are made to serve the man, and not the contrary. So if you want to stick with your Mac, I think you are entitled to. But let me remind you that you can have a powerful M1 processor, neural memory MacMini at home and use a beautiful Samsung QLED Display, with Eye Saver tech and everything. In fact you can use anything you want. Keyboards, mouses, webcams… There is nothing preventing you from getting new hardware and pluging it to your Mac. Just make sure to get the best cables! People tend to forget how good cables are important.
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What Adam said.
A 27 inch iMac costs $1,799 and it has a beautiful built in screen, and it comes with a Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard and other stuff. Freestanding displays are already a flooded consumer and prosumer market, and Apple probably doesn’t want to jump into another longtime wrestling contest with Samsung, LG, Dell, Asus, etc., etc. It’s expensive to build and ship monitors, and lower price points in an already highly saturated market will lower Apple’s gross margins.
Ever since Steve Jobs returned to revive Apple, killed Mac clones, and refocused on a relatively small line of highly unique hardware and software, the company thrives. My guess if Apple could have developed a freestanding screen that would be drastically different enough to warrant a significantly higher price than their competition, they would have done so. If they have decided to make another screen, it would probably not be priced very much lower than the XDR.
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If Apple can make a killing on a 27" 5K iMac for $1799, I can’t see that there is some kind of insurmountable challenge related to removing the iMac from that and selling the 5K screen alone for $1500.
And if that iMac is highly profitable at $1799, then obviously the iMac without the iMac at $1500 wouldn’t be just as profitable. Likely even more so.
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Of course there isn’t. There also isn’t an insurmountable barrier from Apple making a sub $800 laptop, or a router, or printers or a $2000 desktop or all the other product categories for which there isn’t an insurmountable barrier and yet for which Apple doesn’t make products.
That you can make a logical argument that they could do it is not the same thing as Apple agreeing that they should do it.*
*this comment only good until March 8 – for displays, anyway. I’m betting there isn’t going to be a new router tomorrow.
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The argument was about profits. That is nonsense.
It was more specifically about profit margins. As demonstrated in a post above, Apple has tended to have very significantly higher margins as well as profits. Displays typically have low margins.
Yes, absolutely correct. Doesn’t mean they won’t introduce a monitor tomorrow, of course
I think they’ll also debut an updated XDR with an Apple chip and an updated Pro screen. Hasta la vista Intel.
Let’s stop speculating here on what’s going to happen tomorrow—we’ll know soon enough.
I’m still interested in hearing about ways that Apple could better meet the needs of other types of professionals. Everything I suggested in this article is possible and feasible—that’s the ballpark in which it’s useful to play. No one is saying that Apple should release a $99 iMac or build a neural implant to control your pointing device.
Go with “Yes, and…” and everyone will have more fun.
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Healthcare. Apple Watch has made enormous strides for individual users on a personal level, but for decades, every time that I’ve walked into a doctor’s office, hospital or clinic, all I see is PCs as well as Android and Windows knockoffs of iPads, though I do see iPhones. A member of my extended family is a radiologist, and they use Macs in his practice for imaging. He said that lots of other radiologists do so as well, but that’s it.
I could be wrong, but I think the healthcare industry is at least as, if not bigger, than media. It could possibly be even bigger for Apple. They are always yapping about how tremendously big Apple is going be for the industry, bit I haven’t yet seen any earth shattering results.
You got it! Yes, and a dock for laptops ala the late lamented Duo Dock. I have so many cables hanging off my laptop at home and at the office because I plug into many things. Having a dock that would simplify that would be great.
An all-enclosing dock like the Duo Dock is not likely to come back. No computer makers are making docks like that anymore. They take up a lot of desk space, they block airflow and they force you to close the computer’s lid when it’s docked.
A flat-ish dock with a connector on the back or bottom (so you can open the lid and use the built-in screen while docked), is what PC makers sell today (if they sell docks at all). Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t put any ports on the back or bottom, so a dock like this would have to attach to the side of the computer, which isn’t nearly as convenient
And with that in mind, I don’t think it would have any large advantage over a third-party Thunderbolt dock (e.g. a CalDigit TS4 or an OWC TB3). With this kind of “dock”, you can have all your peripherals where you want to put them on your desk, and use a single TB3/4 cable to connect it all to your Mac (including power for all but the biggest models).
I think Apple isn’t interested in designing and selling their own dock because they came to the same conclusion that I did - that there are really good third-party docks already available, so why not just recommend and resell a few of them?
Yes, these docks aren’t cheap, but I am confident that any hypothetical Apple dock wouldn’t cost any less.
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