Mac Pro And Apple's Pro Workflow Team
“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.”
It feels a bit weird virtually clapping along to the sentiment that the biggest company in the world now knows what its customers want. It’s certainly interesting that rather than questionnaires or soliciting phone calls, Apple is actively hiring these creative professionals in-house. (You have to think at least one of these team members has already complained about the MacBook Pro’s keyboard reliability.)
I guess the danger here is that you tune too heavily towards the workflow team’s base of talent, which is currently composed of video artists, animators and music technicians. Requirements from other fields — of which the ‘pro’ market is very vast — may be de-prioritised or ignored entirely. Software development comes to mind.
Regarding the 2019 thing, it’s unfortunate but I was not surprised. At the 2017 roundtable, they explicitly said ‘not this year’. I took that to mean maybe a sneak peek at WWDC 2018 and a release in December, at the very earliest. These latest comments basically imply the same internal timeline, although now I think the chances of a June preview are even slimmer. I bet Apple is targeting a WWDC 2019 launch with the leeway to drop back to the fall, if deadlines slip.