Has Apple abandoned professional Mac users?
Video: Should professionals keep banking on the Mac?
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Welcome to the latest installment of our regular series of virtual roundtable discussions about important questions facing the future of technology. In this episode, Jason Perlow, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Boinx Software CEO Oliver Breidenbach, and I look at the future of Macs for professionals. It's a fascinating discussion, but since Apple watching is never a precise thing, we came away with a conclusively inconclusive conclusion.
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First, let me introduce Oliver to you. He's head of Boinx Software, a company that makes some exceptional tools for creative developers. Of most interest in our discussion is mimoLive, essentially an entire broadcast studio in a single piece of software. As Oliver describes it, his software will use all the power available to it, so even the high-end Macs sometimes can't keep up.
It's this sort of software and application we're interested in: Powerful, professional work that requires something more than just the power needed to browse the web and post on Facebook. Apple has long appealed to this sort of user, with unique-to-Mac tools like those produced by Boinx.
Read also: Maybe you shouldn't buy a MacBook Pro right now - CNET
But with just the completely inflexible iMac Pro available for pros, the Mac mini ignored, and underpowered laptops with memory limitations, what's in store for the future? Should you, if you're a professional, keep banking on the Mac? Or, as Jason and Adrian suggest, even expecting desktop computing to be around in five or 10 years is a risky bet.
Everything's going to change. The question is, how?
Tune in. It's an exciting back-and-forth. Also, from a "wow, we can really do this" perspective, I want to point out that we were able have a live roundtable discussion with panelists from Oregon, Miami, Wales in the UK, and Salzburg, Austria. And I was running it on my five-year-old iMac. So, amazing stuff is possible, even with older-generation hardware.
Read also: Dear Apple: iOS is now a toxic hellstew
With that, go ahead and tune into the roundtable. If you have any suggestions for next month's topic, feel free to leave comments below. And, if you have any comments or thoughts on the matters we discussed, we'd love to hear them. Post those below, as well.
You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.
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