I'm so glad they showed the trailer for this off during WWDC along with what will very likely be my next workstation. (I'm really hoping that what I've budgeted for that new Mac Pro will be enough to cover it when it comes out this fall since they've only released the base price for it. Long live the cheesegrater 2.0!)
For All Mankind really looks interesting, and it just might get me to sign up for Apple's TV service. I really hope that they don't screw this up. From what I understand, Apple has really been letting the creatives do their own thing and not had the tech people from Cupertino trampling on their toes. Supposedly, the story behind Apple's TV service in its current form actually dates back to 2017 when they first announced that they were developing the new Mac Pro that they showed off at WWDC along with the trailer for For All Mankind. Apple had been trying to do something with TV for years, and had actually sort of given up on it. The complaining around the perpetually neglected Mac Pro changed that though when they decided to develop a new Mac Pro to meet the needs of the very people who had an issue with the 2013 model which you can still buy to this day. (If you have $6,000 to burn on one that's fully loaded, I implore you not to though.) Apple had gotten so out of touch with creative professionals though, that they didn't understand their modern workflows. Initially they went to other studios, offering free equipment in exchange for being able to observe how creatives worked, but studios were extremely reluctant to let Apple observe unreleased summer movies and hit TV shows, out of fear that content would leak out. This lead Apple to basically hire people to produce shows for them, with the initial idea being that they would just "find a distributor," like an Amazon or a Netflix, or just dump the content on iTunes and offer it there for a small fee, possibly offering it for free to Apple Music subscribers. As they continued to develop their new Mac Pro though, observing the way the creatives that they'd hired were working, they realized they had actual content that wasn't just good, but absolutely fantastic, and able to carry its own service, and thus we got their upcoming TV service along with their upcoming Mac Pro, with the development of the latter inadvertently driving the need for the former. (This is fine with me, especially if it means that their workstations don't wind up languishing without any updates for years on end again.)
Morgan, I wouldn't worry too much about the budget. Apparently Apple was very willing to fund whatever the creatives wanted in order to study how they were working, so the budget shouldn't be too much of an issue. Once they knew these shows were launching a TV service that they want to have rivaling HBO and Netflix in the "prestige" genre, they were very willing to ensure that they had the necessary budget to compete with those services.
Given that this is a Ronald D. Moore series I'm not too worried. The only time I really had a gripe with his style of storytelling was when we got "run–in–place Galactica" which was probably a little over halfway through where it sort of felt like the show was going nowhere and just sort of treading water while the writers figured out where the show needed to go, and to this day it's the one thing that irks me about BSG '04. I've only seen bits and pieces of Outlander, but I've loved what I've been able to catch, (if someone gave me the whole thing on Blu–Ray I'd totally watch it in its entirety,) so I'm not too worried.
I think the alternate history angle is interesting, but like Destructor, I sort of hope that they have a couple of historians as consultants who could say "yeah, that could have plausibly happened," or "no, that would be too unrealistic" in terms of building that alternate history. Not all alternate history stories are able to pull this off, but I'm hoping that this will be one of the ones that does.