[iampliny]

Pro was always a stepchild at Apple. Steve Jobs never stopped by NAB for the Final Cut Pro press events. And more than a decade ago I started seeing middle managers being "promoted" from Pro Apps to other divisions like iTunes.

The hard truth is that we pro folks aren't that lucrative. Pro users probably sit in the bottom of a smiling curve with high-volume consumer products on the one side, and high-revenue Enterprise on the other. To a company like Apple, pro users represent the worst of both worlds.

That's why you also see "media storage" companies like G-Technologies, who introduced pro products (like the late G-Speed) only to abandon that market for high-volume, low-touch consumer products like LaCie Rugged.

I want a new MBP with an nVidia GTX 1080 as much as the next guy, but I'm not holding my breath.

[rayiner]

Let's not forget that long before Apple exited the "Pro" market, companies like SGI went out of business. So did all the companies that used to make graphics hardware targeted to pros. They were overwhelmed by ATI and NVIDIA's repurposed gaming GPUs.

[iampliny]

Yep. Tricked-out gaming rigs catching up with the heavy-iron graphics workstations was hugely disruptive. Low-overhead boutiques could suddenly do the same work as high-overhead facilities. But then you blinked, and the same work was happening in no-overhead places like The Director's Living Room.