Had one just this week. Of course we were zapping a Raspberry Pi with 8,000V.

That's the reason why Windows has more crashes. Very varied hardware. I had an issue where sometimes the machine would fail to come back from sleep or hibernation, which turned out to be because sometimes the PCIe link training either failed or came up with a different result for the GPU. Setting the BIOS to force it to PCIe 4 fixed it. Similarly a friend had random crashing which was fixed by running his RAM slightly below rated speed.

Some people just have crap hardware too. Weak power supplies, failing drives, inadequate cooling.

Macs only do better because Apple tightly controls the hardware. Prebuilt Windows machines are probably similarly reliable, at least from people like Lenovo and maybe Dell.

Users should never be able to do things that cause crashes in the same way that drivers should not ever be able to press any button or press any pedal that causes the engine to spontaneously burst into flames.

I'm also a Mac user, but let's not boast here, shall we?

My personal guess would have been at least 10x. Did Microsoft bribe the study authors?

Dude, are you living under a rock?

These bands are creating new music. But the money that allows them to do so comes from their old music. I have bands in my collection that have been making music for 30 years.

No they don't. They don't even make ok money. Tours are expensive and a lot of people, from road crew to venue security, take their cut before the musicians. The big guys, they make a killing on tours. But the small ones sometimes don't even break even.

In fact, a common wisdom in the industry is that touring is worth it not because the tour itself makes profits, but because it builds a fanbase and drives what is called "catalog discovery" - both old and new fans looking buying the albums with the songs they liked (and for the old fans, didn't know).

This study: https://www.giarts.org/article... says that 28% of income across all the musicians surveyed comes from tours. The share is larger for the rock/pop sector where it nears 40% but even that isn't easy money. And if you consider that only 20% of the rock/pop musicians make more than $50,000 a year, then it becomes a hollow statement.

Plus, it goes directly against your first statement - while on tour the band is not creating new music. So if you want to drive musicians more towards constantly creating (which most of them already do), then you can't make live performances the main income source.

CPU performance. Now compare GPU performance against a PC built out with eight GPUs to do parallel 3D rendering.

The trash can was thermally limited by its design, and could never be upgraded to hold newer CPUs or GPUs. Anyone for whom the trash can Mac Pro would work could just as easily use an Apple Studio, give or take, ignoring the lack of ECC (which the Apple Silicon Mac Pro also lacked).

Depends on what you mean by covered. Can they do their work? Yes. Are they negatively impacted by hardware limitations? Also yes. A lot of professionals would be willing to pay extra for ECC. The fact that Apple doesn't offer ECC makes their machines less than ideal for use cases where a crash would be expensive. The fact that a lot of pros put up with crashes doesn't mean they like the situation. It just means that they dislike it less than switching platforms and tools.

But the pro users I was specifically talking about here are the ones doing high-performance computing tasks involving GPUs. Their only real option is to change platforms, because even though the new Apple Silicon CPUs are great in terms of performance per watt, the wattage is really low, so if you genuinely need boatloads of GPU, to the extent that Apple was still in the game without NVIDIA support, they completely dropped out of the game when Apple Silicon dropped support for AMD. At that point, Apple computers became nearly useless for most modern high-performance computing/AI workloads, people doing large-scale 3D video rendering, etc., because they're underpowered as shiped and can't be expanded with more GPUs, and parallelizing work across multiple machines is way more expensive and not always practical.

The historical definition of "pro" is people who are running software beyond what a typical user would run. Web browsers and productivity software (word processors, spreadsheets) are not pro apps; they are business apps. Pro apps are mostly things like high-end photo editing (think Photoshop/Pixelmator, not iPhoto/Capture One), 3D modeling, audio/video production, etc.

Developers at least arguably fall into that category, though they are borderline, because they don't have huge storage requirements or huge compute requirements. Developers can do most of their work on laptops, though Apple's non-Pro laptops are pretty thermally throttled, so they will be miserable. And developers are probably the group who care most about ECC RAM, because they understand enough to know why it matters, but they still often use laptops because they don't want to be tethered to a desk. It's a tradeoff.

No, and they never were. While the users might have professional occupations, their computing requirements are indistinguishable from a high school student. "Pro" in this context doesn't mean "users with money". It means "users with needs that exceed typical requirements". :-)

Oh. Today I learned that FCP regained live multicamera switching support in 2024... four years after everybody stopped caring and started using OBS, vMix, or Tricaster.

I suppose to be fair the UK isn't so much better. The police can make these requests themselves. They have an oversight group, but they rubber stamp everything it seems. Hundreds of thousands of requests per year.

Most Chinese phones use Android. Google could be huge there, but choose not to be.

They gave the Chinese government access to Chinese user's data years ago. They don't seem to have an issue with governments gaining warrantless access to their systems.

If you care about privacy, go Android. Google does require warrants, and doesn't operate in China due to the warrantless access requirement.

It will, you can side load them.

And Apple's total lack of third-party GPU support on Apple Silicon (beyond a few kludges that use them for AI workloads, but no display), losing the current Mac Pro is no great loss. :-)

And yeah, the BlackMagic stuff I've bought lately is Thunderbolt. Also, most of the software for things like real-time switching runs on Windows anyway, so I'd imagine the market for that on Mac is not huge. And so much stuff gets brought in over networks these days (NDI, SRT, etc.) that HDMI ingest probably isn't that interesting anyway. You're more likely to use a dedicated encoder box that provides streams over Ethernet. My production work has been doing it that way since the pandemic.

Exactly this. Apple neutered the Mac Pro by making all of its additional functionality useless.

Years ago, they announced that they were killing support for kernel-space drivers. Then they announced a user-space replacement, DriverKit, that is basically half-assed when it comes to PCI, providing no support for any of the sorts of PCIe drivers that anyone would actually want to write. The operating system already comes with built-in support for USB xHCI silicon and most major networking chipsets, nobody builds PCIe audio anymore, FireWire support is dropped in the current OS release, and video drivers can't be written because Apple didn't bother writing the hooks.

That last one is the showstopper for PCI slots on a Mac. The main reason people bought Mac Pro or bought Thunderbolt enclosures was to support high-end video cards. With Apple not supporting any non-Apple GPUs on Apple Silicon, the slots are basically useless. I'm not saying that PCIe is useless by any means, just that the neutered, broken, driverless PCIe-lite hack that Apple actually makes available on macOS is basically useless.

I suppose you could theoretically provide DriverKit support for RAID cards, but really at this point everybody just uses external RAID hardware attached over a network anyway, so the number of people who would buy a Mac Pro for something like that is negligible.

And I guess in theory, you could port Linux video card drivers over if the only thing you're doing is using GPUs for non-video purposes (e.g. for AI model training or offline 3D rendering), but tying it into the operating system as a video output device is likely impossible without additional support from Apple, and nobody is going to bother to do that for the tiny number of people who would want that when you can just run Linux on x86 and not have to do all that porting work. After all, for those sorts of tasks, you probably aren't benefitting much from the OS or the CPU or memory performance anyway.

So basically the Mac Pro was dead on arrival because of Apple dropping support for very nearly every single thing that the Mac Pro could do that couldn't be done just as easily with a Studio (without even attaching a Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure). And once the Studio came out and had a comparable CPU in a much smaller form factor, the writing was on the wall.

More than that, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is a sad toy that was never truly worthy of the Mac Pro name by any stretch of the imagination. It doesn't even have ECC memory or upgradable RAM. IMO, Apple really should have just been honest with its pro users and said "We no longer care about you," and then they should have dropped the Mac Pro as part of the Apple Silicon transition, rather than shipping something so massively downgraded that is so many miles from being a true pro desktop machine.

Anyone who is even slightly surprised by it being discontinued was obviously not paying attention.

There is more than one study and more than one way to look at it. Especially for streaming, having a catalog matters, especially for the smaller artists who will never have a charts-level hit:

"In 2024, nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify aloneâ"likely translating to over $4 million across all recorded revenue sources. What's remarkable is that 80% of these million-dollar earners didn't have a single song reach the Spotify Global Daily Top 50 chart. This reveals a fundamental shift from hit-driven success to sustainable catalog-based income, where consistent engagement from devoted audiences matters more than viral moments or radio dominance."

https://cord-cutters.gadgethac...

Also don't forget that many studies such as DiCola's "Money from Music" focus on the superstars and the big hits. That is true, the charts pop music generates 80% or so of its income within the few weeks it stays in the charts and then drops of sharply.

Honestly, I don't care about the charts and superstars. They wouldn't starve if we cut copyright terms to six weeks. I do care about the indie artists that I enjoy. Who after ten years get the band back together for another tour through clubs with 200 or 500 people capacity. I'm fairly sure they would suffer if the revenue from those albums disappeared. And disappear it would. Maybe fans would still buy the CDs from the merch booth, but Spotify would certainly not pay them if it didn't have to.

What phrase would you use to describe that, other than "spoke incoherently"? I mean, I can think of some medical terms that might apply, but that's how I would describe his debate performance. He wandered off the subject, had trouble forming a complete thought... basically like a Trump speech, only he paused a lot when he lost his train of thought instead of rambling about illegal aliens eating pets or whatever.