Apple arcade getting console controller support

Brave

https://www.dualshockers.com/ios-tvos-13-dualshock-4-xbox-one-s-controllers-apple-arcade/

That’s potentially big news, depending on what the service actually turns out to offer.

On a side note: there’s actually been a shed load of news today, more than I’ve posted here, but if you only went to EG you’d be forgiven for thinking bugger all had happened. What on earth is going on with their news coverage? It’s piss poor atm.

DrDamn

Possibly all on flights.

Jonbwfc

Aye, e3 next week. Johnny Chiodini has been running their video channel on his own for about a week.

There actually wasn’t much game related in the keynote tbh. Pad support on Apple TV is interesting but I suspect you’ll have to have a specific paired pad for it - you won’t be able to share a pad between Apple TV and XBO for example. And there are already some fairly decent pads that work with apple tvs.

other than that.. you’d have to be utterly insane to buy a Mac Pro or that monitor for gaming and Apple Arcade really wasn’t talked about much at all, so…

Alex

Yeah, was looking at the Mac Pro today. The minimum price is $6,000, they reckon the top of the range one will cost about $35,000. Yes, thirty five thousand dollars. But hey, that’s Apple.

Edit: fixed price, here’s article. https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/6/3/18651208/apple-mac-pro-how-much-top-spec-price-estimate-ballpark

BritishBean

Alex I figure there’s a market for that Mac Pro but I’m certainly not it! I think people are more concerned about the fact they’re asking for £5000 for a monitor, but if you want a stand to stop the monitor falling over its an extra £1000!

I do love my MacBook Pro though. I’ve had it for 6 years, still runs like a dream. I can’t say that of any of mine or my families Windows PCs or laptops over the years.

Brave

I think what they’re doing is returning the Mac Pro “marque” to the domain of high end creative industry people. The last decade has seen a lot of my creative buds who were embedded in the Mac eco system drift away to windows, especially with the higher end surface pcs catering to exactly what the creative industry wanted, while apple ditched it all, including neutering Final Cut Pro and completely ditching aperture.

A friend of mine who used to work under me in the early days now runs a big London design team and switched his office to PC for that very reason. Even basic creative industry needs like disc burning weren’t being catered for by apple any more.

This thing is a huge video editing and graphics creation powerhouse. It’s in no way similar to the last few Mac Pro iterations imo which were squarely aimed at home buyers. Same for the monitor. This is aimed at industry people looking for colour accuracy above all else. The nearest equivalent monitor is 43000 quid. I.e. a creative/Hollywood production tool.

The stand is really ridiculous though.

Jonbwfc

I was discussing this with a friend and a lot of people going ‘12 Grand for a PC!’ don’t quite seem to have the right perspective to me.

The new Mac Pro is not a machine to sit on your desk and for you to read your email and use Word and Excel and what have you. Maybe not even for you if you’re a Youtube ‘creative’ doing stuff in 1080p video. It’s just not that at all. If you want that, Apple will sell you anything from a basic Mac mini and you can go buy a monitor up to the iMac Pro which is actually a pretty hardcore piece of kit when you look at the specs. if you’re buying even the most basic Mac Pro to do any of that, you’re wasting your money.

The Mac Pro is not a tower PC, it’s a piece of serious industrial machinery in the shape of one. The ‘industry’ in this case just happens to be blistering top end digital content production. Simultaneous 100 track recording setups. 8K video editing with multiple cameras and in-edit rendered SFX. Serious research level analysis of petabyte data stores.

When you look at the Mac Pro price, you shouldn’t ask “how much does a ‘Dell tower cost?’”, you need to ask "How much does a JCB cost? Or a production grade CNC milling machine?' That’s the ‘equipment’ the Mac Pro is actually in the same environment as, not someone’s laptop.

Same with the monitor. Yes, it’s insane (and maybe for six grand they could throw in a stand of SOME sort, even if it’s not the all singing all dancing one) but it’s a tool for a very specific requirement, and the more specific the requirement, generally, the higher the price.

Now, I agree with the comment that therefore the market they’re shooting for is vanishingly small - maybe a couple of thousand locations worldwide. But equally, it was probably never intended to be anything else.

Just as an illustration - Aston Martin are making an EV Rapide. They’re making 150 of them. They could probably make more but I suspect 150 is about the number they think they’re going to sell - the number of people who can afford and want to buy a quarter million pound electric car is probably limited. So if they only sell 150 of them, is it a failure? Why, because it didn’t sell as many in 2019 as a Tesla 3 or a Porsche 911? I suspect it did them a lot of good to do it as an engineering challenge, and it got them a lot of publicity and I doubt they’ll lose money…

I honestly don’t know if it’s a good idea, the new Mac Pro. And I do wish Apple did something in the ‘middle ground’ that was not an iMac because they’re a pain if they go wrong. But I suspect we’ll never know if it makes Apple money or not and, frankly, I’m not entirely sure Apple really care - they have a lot of money already, after all.

what I do think is that analysing the Mac Pro as if it was a ‘normal’ or even standard workstation PC is doing it all wrong, IMO.