Quote:
Originally Posted by
Monotremata
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Apple has in no way 'obsoleted' the Intel side of things or that iMac. They're still planning (or were at least) on new Intel Mac's coming out in the interim, and there is no way in hell they're going to abandon all the folks that kicked and screamed for the last 8 years for the $6000+ entry level Mac Pro that just came out last year. Intel still has quite a bit of life left in Apple's domain. There was even a new model of a 16" Intel MacBook that snuck into the Big Sur builds we still haven't seen released yet.
They put everything they had into the G4 Cube too, and sold it for nearly $1800. It had 20G. (not RAM, hard drive space

it had 64M of RAM. This was 2000) It spawned the Mac Minis in a sense, and was a cutting-edge design much like how the iMac Pro (or indeed the new Mac Pro) pulls out all the stops to do recordbreaking things within… the Intel technology.
Oopsy. Within… two years you'll be able to get a Mac M1 Mini that kills the Intel Mac Pro monster-tower in at least a few real-world things and gets close to it in everything else. And it won't be Mac Pro Tower prices. And there'll be some new monolith made of solid M1 chips, that'll become Skynet
I've been using Apple stuff since the Performa 575. That was a 68k machine, with 5M RAM and a 160M hard drive. It had a CD-Rom drive! You could play Myst on its 640x480 screen
My iMac Pro is TOTALLY obsoleted by the new M1 Macs. My iMac Pro will ALSO remain quite useable for lots of relevant things for a long long LONG time… but it's because of people like me who continue to program for stuff like that. I give Apple… four years before the only XCode you can run on the very newest machines which will not run old XCodes, will not compile to Intel anymore. Four years is a long time, but what I'm saying is that this 'obsoleting' is not my machine suddenly ceasing to work, or becoming unable to do what it already does. What I'm saying is that Apple will inevitably throw it under the bus to force me to buy into the new generation.
Mind you, this is how they DO the new generations. I get that.
It's fairly likely I'll even get into the new generation myself, well within that four years' time.
I'm just saying that you have to be made of money, because they absolutely will abandon all the folks. It's really kind of weird. Macs hold their value incredibly well, and stand up amazingly to years of use, and there are some of us who make an art form out of legacy support, and there are loads of (especially!) studio people who've spent a lot of money on optical-digital ADC/DACs or Firewire multichannel converters, Thunderbolt, etc. That combined with CoreAudio means we can treat the old gear like treasured tape machines: stuff can just work and do serious duty and never be 'obsolete'. All the while, Apple strips away support for those very machines release after release: XCode evolves and casts off the old hardware Apple no longer enjoys.
Means there's two worlds. The old studio rats, with a Studer tape machine and an old G5 with $20,000 of antique digital interfaces that can capture 36 simultaneous tracks all sounding great, are all set never upgrading a thing. And the folks running the Apple Silicon machines get to run 4096 tracks each with 256 Space Designers on 'em, at 192k. And never the twain shall meet…