I love watching people moan about this yet unreleased product.
I think the new Mac Pro episode will resemble the iPad one - lots of "ohemgee it's like just a bigger ipod, lol, how stupid do they think we are, kthx?" reactions, when in fact this product will probably push a new paradigm shift in the way workstations are built i.e. moving away from the plastic pieces of shit ubiquitously sold now. Seriously, I dare you to look around a regular "PC customization" website e.g. [1]. Apart from Razer and maybe Alienware nobody has even tried to really innovate the workstation landscape. I remember when I was building one of my first desktops with my dad - 20 years ago.
A final thought: Apple has a million flaws (mostly software and systems, grr), but they didn't get where they are for being stupid or for not understanding the market, so at least give them some fucking credit.
We reserve our right to moan at consumer junk with the workstation label glued on.
Innovation is not something I really want in the workstation market.
I want something utterly reliable that works flawlessly for several years and if something goes wrong I can swap the bits out in minutes. If I need more disks, just throw them inside it without playing around with half knackered frayed cables, external enclosures, power management and cable routing, volume management etc. More RAM? chuck it in. More CPU, chuck another CPU in.
Apple aren't offering ANY of that.
To be honest, neither Alienware or Razer are even workstation class machines either.
People have a low expectation of the term "workstation" these days.
People have a low expectation of the term "workstation" these days.
The whole "prosumer" thing has been blurring the lines, typically to the detriment of the "pro" market, except for those "pro" markets that do not overlap with the consumer space whatsoever, e.g. heavy construction equipment.
I think Apple's philosophy here is to push all the expansion to external devices. The new Mac Pro has 6 thunderbolt 2 ports on it. I'd assume you could probably connect some extremely large and fast storage enclosures with that kind of bandwidth. A regular workstation will always be limited by the space available inside of it. Not with this.
I would be disappointed if you could not lock this new Mac Pro and bolt it to your desk.
I also bet someone already is drawing a cylindrical case that holds a few 3GB drives and connects to that Mac using Thunderbolt. Make the cable short and rigid and you get something inspired by the Petronas towers.
And if I had or planned to buy those 20 Thunderbolt devices, I think I would drill a hole in a desk, pull a Thunderbolt cable through, and hang the devices and the cabling under the desk surface
Alternatively, one could build a Cray-1 inspired enclosure by adding a small pedestal with 10 Thunderbolt devices in a circle around it; unfortunately, this machine does not have a thunderbolt connector at the bottom.
And now that I am throwing analogies around: this thing needs a handle on top: http://curta.org.
That 'no connector at the bottom' is a bad thing, by the way. I can't find any picture on apple.com showing this thing with power and display cables plugged in.
Finally, I hope they have tested this thing well for dust intake and overheating in the case people place objects close to it on their desk.
We do use fibre, but only in production deployments.
The secondary issue is "open holes". People like plugging stuff into their workstations. We can fix that with desk cages as well. There is a hole big enough to get your finger at the power button.
I didn't downvote you, but I don't think your criticism is well founded. For example, on the existing Mac Pro, adding a hard drive not require any cables at all. Neither does adding RAM. So it's not the case that "Apple aren't offering any of that."
I also don't see how the machine you linked to supports "chuck another CPU in". It looks like it limits you to two, which is the same as the Mac Pro.
I'm talking about the "new Mac Pro". The existing one a better piece of kit if you ask me.
You can change the CPUs officially with the HP. I doubt Apple will offer that option.
My current "workstation" is configured with 2x 4 core Xeons, 32Gb of RAM, 2x Samsung 840's, a 5 drive SAS array, a 32Gb PCIe RAMdisk and 2 Quadro cards. That won't fit in the new Mac Pro...
nah, dyson fans have used similar bases for years.
I kid, I kid.
Honestly though I do not care for an integrated "pro" machine. This is form over function. Fail a component and its off to the shop. Combined with, if I want to upgrade them I need to replace the unit.
If they are going to integrate everything then they need to drop the price. Integration implies lower costs as having all the support needed to drive user added cards and internal drives can be done away with.
Plus its not like I want to have an octopus of cables on my desk and moving storage to all external does that.
Benefits, perhaps driving the thunderbolt prices down and having new and interesting devices to connect to the system.
In the end integration means commodity, just expensive. Can't wait to see what they want for it, I figure on three thousand minimum, which would be a third too much for something so inflexible. Apple, meet Dyson
Exactly why I'm not taking it seriously. What does form do for a power desktop? Nothing. I put my desktop under my desk. I can't see it. I have to stoop to reach the power button.
I'm not going to say there's absolutely no use for form in any desktop, but IMO it's practically the number one least important feature of a power desktop/workhorse.
To me this looks like an example of Apple's craftsmanship in depth where quality and elegance can be seen at multiple levels, from the case to the internal hardware to the OS and its APIs.
Certainly one can find flaws, but compared to a typical Windows machine Apple has more craftsmanship (in my opinion). Windows exhibits more of the "just get it done" utilitarian idea.
A craftsperson can make the most beautiful, elegantly designed thing that is a joy to look at, use, and serves as a conversation piece... and still fail to meet the brief.
If someone needs a high stool for a high workbench, giving them an Aeron task chair is, while beautiful and well-made, missing the brief.
Don't get me wrong - I like everything about the Mac Pro but you pay for your thrills. I can't afford to lay out that kind of scratch unnecessarily. Apple has done a nice job with the design, no doubt. Meanwhile, I have a high end Windows PC for much less money. The speed thrills me, so I don't need a Mac to get a thrill.
The new design might bring some improvement on cooling a lot of powerful hardware stashed inside a small space while keeping the noise level to a minimum.
Dyson? You're so far off ... it's clearly Darth Vader.
I can't believe no one has recognized the classic Lucas handiwork. The helmet descending on the tangled mass of circuits. The signature triangular mouth piece is so clearly evident in the heat exchanger. I can just hear it cooling ...
Amazing retro-future design cues aside, it might be user-serviceable for all components - will wait for the teardown. It's gorgeous enough to be on the desktop and may be quieter because of the chimney. And it's finally a really powerful Mac.
If you need something more powerful than this, it seems maybe a server is more appropriate.
I buy AppleCare and leave the screwdrivers to the Genius Bar. They have copies of them on all of the continents I travel between; I frequently do not.
Furthermore, who wants to be in the laptop repair business? I push bits. For a few hundred bucks they'll fix anything that breaks and I can stop being the Maytag Man and get on with life.
I take it you do not visit Poland or Trinidad and Tobago often. Fair enough, to each for their own needs! But keep in mind the grandparent is not necessarily a high-flying high-paid bit-pusher like you, so your dismissal is still a little self-centered.
(Should I mention that it took two standard-size Phillips heads to replace my screen, the kind of sizes frequently found in a basic swappable-head screwdriver?)
I agree. Apple has used the geometry of the device to assist more with cooling, and shares the heat sink among components, and uses one large slow fan. This kind of thing really pushes my buttons.
It's 10" high, which is unexpectedly compact. It seems like the designers have chosen a shape to maximize use of space. I'm sure it isn't the only way to go but it's a wonderful next step.
Again Apple has shown us what we want when we thought we just wanted "more".
But at what cost? Everyone likes to bash big box PCs but the fact is that every single component of one can be swapped out for another. Something tells me that won't be the case for the Mac Pro, and when all it's going to do is sit under my desk, I can afford to have it be a little less compact.
You're not the target audience. Notice the demo apps for the Mac Pro during the keynote: Final Cut Pro. The Mac Pro is not, and will not, be a developer's machine (though it could be).
There's the overall computing market, which overwhelmingly favors laptops. A subset of this market desires powerful desktop computers. An even smaller subset desires a self-serviceable desktop computer.
For everyone else, particularly people who who use these machines to make a living and are not overly technical (and have no real reason to be), a Mac Pro with a good support contract attached is far more valuable than one they can open and tinker with.
I think this particular point is overblown. Everywhere I look developers have overwhelmingly switched to MacBooks to little ill effect - machines that are far less expandable and less maintainable than these Mac Pros. It turns out that, if you use these machines to make money, it makes a lot more sense to let Apple take care of problems than to roll up your shirt.
Doubly so if you can't tell the front of a DIMM from the back.
Developers will continue buying MacBook Pros in droves. The Mac Pro is overwhelmingly a media machine.
The air being heated naturally flows upwards, so blowing downwards in such a design is a very bad idea. Ideally (and for it to be truly a relevant design), the whole thing is silent at the very least while idle, using very little if any fan and relying on convection to do most of the cooling.
So how many cubic feet per minute will convection cause in this case? 1? 10? Fans will move a hundred cfm or more without much noise.
Both of my recent hardware failures have been caused by dust accumulating in heatsinks, so having something which contributes to that is also a "very bad idea". Especially since the air passes through a relatively confined space which you can't regularly clear out.
What constitutes much noise is subjective, I suppose, but any fan moving hundreds of cfm will be very loud. A 140mm fan moving 20 to 30 cfm is still audible, if you're in a quiet room.
A common approach is to have an intake filter that catches dust. Another is to elevate the case a few inches above the ground.
I love making fun of it but of course I'm just hiding my admiration. At one point I owned an iMac G4 lamp-shade and it seems to hearken back to that design - especially the bottom vents. Ive and co clearly felt they had to come out with something as unique as that lamp-shade design (although it was discontinued, probably because it was really easy to snap in half) and new to inspire excitement about Apple again. It's really sleek, and not nearly as unwieldy as the lampshade iMac. Apple and Tesla routinely set new standards for industrial design. I predict they will sell like hotcakes, not just among professionals but for home users as well.
I think it looks gorgeous. I can't wait to see one in person. My only hesitation about the design is that cylinders don't snuggle well with other computing equipment.
Well snap. Sorry man. It was more of a function of not knowing versus trying to be rude. I actually went out of my way to shorten it to be (what I thought was) courteous, but you make a valid point and I can see how that is actually quite sketchy. I can see how that would be taboo.
"everyone" might be an exaggeration but the adoption curve for iPad is ramping up a lot faster than for the iPhone. Apple has sold over 100 million iPads so far.
This is going to be a $3000 workstation. Its processor will cost more than that "workstation" you linked to. They aren't even competing in the same space.
The new "paradigm" this is pushing is that you don't need PCIe cards or internal storage. We'll see about that.
This is not the first time they've decided there are elements that don't need to be part of the base machine. Each time there were outcries but they were proven right in the end. When's the last time you needed an optical drive for example? And did you see the mention under Thunderbolt 2 of "add a PCI expansion chassis" - that's their answer for those who really really need expansion.
I do in fact use an external unit, but only because the internal units on every Mac I have owned have failed due to Apple using very low quality, poorly designed Chinese sourced hardware components. This same low quality internal "SuperDrive" unit is in the add on Apple external optical disc.
The external third unit is pretty noisy, has a large wall wart, and takes up desk space which contributes two cables, power and USB, as well as taking up one of the small number of USB ports on the Mac. This is an exceptionally poor design compared to the experience of using a PC which reasonable comes with an optical drive, something that I use very frequently, as do most computer users.
Apparently Apple believes that Thunderbolt 2 changes that equation.
It looks to me like they've tried hard to make sure that the included GPUs are adequate for 90% of their users, at least for today. As for tomorrow their philosophy has always preferred replacing the machine rather than upgrading it piece by piece.
Yeah, that seems to be their solution. Actually, it seems like their solution is to pick a GPU that is adequate for 99% of their users at launch time. Which is not ideal, since everyone who buys a Mac Pro is going to be paying for super-premium graphics, even if they are buying the machine for the Xeons.
A major benefit of these systems is extensibility and repair options, which is why the layout isn't welded together with vendor lock-in proprietary components. Regardless... The ultimate in performance, price and flexibility is still to build it yourself.
Personally, I'd prefer to build a workstation with better specs for a third the price. I'm sure lots of people are terrified to open a computer, and will gladly pay premium prices for something that will look chic for the first nine months.
Let's talk about the real paradigm shift here: Black.
> Let's talk about the real paradigm shift here: Black.
The shape! I really wish they could have gone with a cube or a sphere...not a cylinder! But I understand why those options are not optimal thermally while the sphere is not optimal spatially.
> part from Razer and maybe Alienware nobody has even tried to really innovate the workstation landscape
By and large this holds true, however an increasing number of manufacturers are offering pre-built slim form factor PCs. They may not be radical re-designs of the sort Apple is trying to push, but they're certainly a departure from the norm [1].
Precisely. No one has taken the real human usability of the box design into question for far too long.
The cylinder doesn't inform a way of using it, it invites multiple. I picture myself using it "sideways," half turned for easy access/cable management.
Rack mounting will require innovation as well, but imagine how densely you could pack them and how dynamic you could make the cooling.
A single fan in a workstation machine. Unbelievable.
I have two large silent fans: one in the power supply and one over the cpu in my monolithic 2007 PC.
How about a load of mini-itx boards suspended in cooking fat?
I agree in that most workstation units have are visually lack lustre. I was asking someone the other day why they don't wrap X model of iPhone in alumunium or titananium, and he said that it costs too much. But surely they are so small that it wouldn't hurt to add some luxury materials - a can of pop comes with a free alu can.
The design actually reminds me perhaps of a precursor to the R1 astromech droids (on the inside.)
Come on. If you're getting a customised PC, the items have to interoperate, but you gain flexibility. The Mac Pro customises... how? You're comparing apples and oranges.
Besides, while the new design has some interesting features (well... one plus a different look), it's not like you could have built an 'all-in-one' with your dad 20 years ago. Stop with the hyperbole.
It's not going to change anything. For awhile now, they've been constantly shrinking and slimming their Mac Mini and iMac line and until today it looked like that's what they were focusing on in terms of desktop. It's always been a choice of a compact fully-configured iMac or a bulky cheaper, configurable PC tower and the towers didn't go anywhere. Now they're taking away the configurable part of the Mac Pro, so there are even more people who'll move to PC towers from their outdated last-gen Mac Pro.
Honestly I saw the page after seeing the 'trash can' comments and expected to be unimpressed. But I actually quite like the concept, though maybe that's the nuclear engineer in me talking.
Copywriting and product-debate aside, that's some pretty impressive frontend presentation. From what I can tell from the minified JS, they're using Require.JS for code organization, their own jQuery-like utility toolkit they call Apple Core, fully pre-rendered text everywhere, and javascript that plays and pauses two copies of the HTML5 video, one backwards and one forwards, shuffling their opacities for seamless transitions.
Interestingly, they don't need separate videos for each transition, because the video is streamed rather than pre-buffered in its entirety. Not that Apple really cares about its bandwidth costs here, but it's an interesting strategy.
Ugh. I think it's beyond awful. Incredibly slow and in many environments (chrome-windows) effectively non-functional. I still haven't made it to the end because of how slow and unresponsive it is.
If your machine isn't already rendering that page flawlessly, I would argue that you weren't the website's target audience. IMO, the site caters those looking for a high end performance machine; those who likely already own and are using a MBP or even an Air and want that extra performance boost.
I personally went through slide by slide just to read the specs. The transitions aren't the fastest given they overrode scroll events in favor of framing and animation, but it was done so intentionally as a form of presentation.
"If your machine isn't already rendering that page flawlessly, I would argue that you weren't the website's target audience. IMO, the site caters those looking for a high end performance machine; those who likely already own and are using a MBP or even an Air and want that extra performance boost."
If you don't already have a fast computer, you probably will never want a fast computer. Makes complete sense.
Wow, I've done entire reverse-engineering projects (namely re-skinning Angry Birds Chrome, for one) squinting at minified JS and never knew that that was what that { } button did! Thanks!
The site is really cool but to me feels too much like a fancy Flash page of old, just made with HTML. It's simply not as effective at presenting information as a traditional, scrollable webpage, for instance you can't use your browser's in-page search to look for keywords.
Also it doesn't really work in the mobile browsers I've tried (works very poorly on iOS, falls back to a normal page on Android, doesn't show anything at all on Windows Phone).
A normal webpage plus a cool demo video, while certainly not as creative/innovative as this, would probably be more useful.
>The site is really cool but to me feels too much like a fancy Flash page of old, just made with HTML. It's simply not as effective at presenting information as a traditional, scrollable webpage, for instance you can't use your browser's in-page search to look for keywords.
This makes the assumption that the raw details is the only information they want to convey.
Communication works in many levels. The presentation (form) level is just as important. The designed this way to communicate inside the very the design of the page ideas about the exclusiveness, high-techness (sic), etc of the product.
I'd say this implicit stuff is even more important to them than the actual raw information.
I was surprised how bad it works in landscape orientation on their own ipad devices.. Alignment is wrong, scrolling is not smooth.. Overall, just bad. I could understand if I was browsing from an android platform..
What the hell is wrong with you? The 'if it were android' bit just shows how completely Apple has made us expect the web to not be open. The whole fucking point of web standards is that it doesn't matter what you browse from - if they were conformed to. But no, apple violates them every which way (and gets praised for not being the shittastic company it is to boot) and fucktards like you just accept that 'sure, apple doesn't have to write standards-complient code which will work on competing devices'.
People like you are directly responsible for the horrible state of the web. Every time you make a comment like this you undermine the openness of the web and further catapult us towards the dictator-state where Apple creates concentration camps for open-source software developers and, eventually, users. Do you use any open source software? SInce you have an ipad, probably not. You probably shouldn't even be on this website considering it's "hacker news", not "hipster fuckhead who has a shiny but useless tablet that leads to the fall of all hackers news". People like you are the reason I'm considering leaving this site.
If not for the specific nature of the second sentence, I would be intrigued that someone had gone through the trouble of writing a cursing troll-bot for HN. But since no Turing-test-passing bot would use such language, I just feel bad for the IRL friends of this miserable human troll.
> The 'if it were android' bit just shows how completely Apple has made us expect the web to not be open.
I think it reflects more how bad Apple are at browser compatible websites, and how we expect them to suck. I have run into many issues in the iOS devcenter where it would only work in Safari. Lame.
Some unintended consequences of playing the video backwards - when I go in reverse from slide 9 (Fan) to slide 8 (Thermal Core), the arrows indicating air flow and thermal flow are animated in reverse :-)
>probably just tested in safari. preaching to their own choir I guess.
I doubt they sell many Mac Pros to new customers, so it's not surprising that they wouldn't focus on making that part of the site work well for other browsers and platforms (although it did work fine under Chrome on Ubuntu for me).
No doubt the tech behind it is very cool, but, presentation-wise, it just looks like a well-made slideshow with a weird gimmick for switching slides to me. Did the right arrow button go out of style or something?
But it doesn't solve my "need a new mac pro" problem.
Right now my 2009 octo mac pro, with six displays attached, plays three roles:
- it is my high end desktop workstation, with three primary high resolution (2560x1600) displays.
- it is my HTPC, with one of the six monitors strung into another room entirely.
- it is my office NAS, with four internal 3TB disks
So, three roles all rolled into one device. This is possible because I can expand it internally with 3.5" disks and pcie cards. In fact, my 3x gt120 cards only take up 3 of the 4 slots.
To duplicate this, I think I need to:
a) add an external disk enclosure
b) drive my fourth display via HDMI
c) pray that 3x 4k displays leaves can coexist with 2x 2560x1600 displays as secondary displays, which seems unlikely
d) pray that the disk array doesn't cannibalize enough thunderbolt bandwidth to interfere with the displays
e) another external box for cd ripping and general optical disk usage
... and all the while, with a single physical CPU, and no ability to ever upgrade the graphics cards. Granted, my needs must not be complicated if I can live with gt120s in 2013, but it was nice to know I could upgrade.
Oh, and I have upgraded my SSD boot device three times in the 4.5 years I've owned this system. That was nice.
So again, I actually really like this device - I think it is a very, very cool computer. But as a discriminating mac pro user who pushed the form factor to the limits, it is not at all what I need.
I think that the whole notion of "it's nice to know I could upgrade" is primarily a consequence of what's currently in the system. Consider the next upgrade.
You buy this thing in 2013. For bulk storage, you hook up a usb 3.0 raid array and a cheap usb dvd drive. A couple years later, you decide you need more fast storage, so you add on a 512GB / 4 TB thunderbolt fusion drive box (note: this product doesn't exist today). Next year, you upgrade the USB raid array to thunderbolt and decide you want an external cinema quality 4k / THX video converter, that also connects over thunderbolt.
Then in 2016, you conclude that the 24 core macbook pro is sufficient for your day to day, and hook up your bulk storage to that when you're home, but leave the cinema converter and the old usb raid array hooked up as your htpc.
Incidentally, to address your specific scenario, I'm pretty sure that an Apple TV costs less than your gt120 did.
In other words, you doubled down on the tail end of one way of doing things, and little of that will carry over to the new standards. It's the same situation many people were in with AGP graphics cards, IDE hard drives and ATX power supplies without the additional 12v connector.
I definitely see what you are saying, and that is why I do think it is a very impressive and very cool computer.
But a lot of the value for me was the one device. A single, unix based[1] device that did everything from be my htpc to be my fileserver to be my desktop, music player, build box, run all my vms, etc.
I derived a lot of value from that. Even if the second device is an apple TV, it's still a second device.
Also, diverging a bit, a lot of folks are talking about a lot of video based expandability via the thunderbolt ports, but remember - it's not even as fast as 4x pcie ... 10mb/s over copper vs. 120 mb/s ... if I have my numbers right.
PCIe 4.0 is double the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0, which is about 1 GB/s per lane, or 16 GB/s for PCIe 3.0 x16. PCIe 4.0 x4 would be ~8 GB/s, and x16 would be 32 GB/s. Unfortunately, the spec won't be finalized for another couple years.
I feel like Apple is betting the farm on Thunderbolt being the future, and I don't see that future materializing. How many Thunderbolt peripherals have y'all even seen in real life that weren't the Apple external monitor or a mini displayport display adapter? I feel like this is even less prevalent than Firewire was back in the 1394 glory days (it was/still is an excellent bus for running audio, due in no small part to the fact that it's not USB; separate controller, doesn't crash if your USB bus gets wonky, etc.).
They're not "betting the farm" on it: they're locked into Thunderbolt because Intel sold them an end-to-end platform, from CPU to chipset to everything in between. That "everything in between" includes Thunderbolt; it's the reason you haven't seen the latest USB on a Mac in forever. Even in spite of a dearth of options, Thunderbolt was the only way to go on a Mac because Intel said so.
"it's the reason you haven't seen the latest USB on a Mac in forever."
Do I misunderstand what you mean by this? USB3 is rolling out on Macs and available on most of them today. (I think the Mac Pro is the only one currently lacking it.)
Right, you can get it on the very latest Macs, most of which are just rolling out now and none of which have been out for more than a year. USB 3 is old at this point; most manufacturers started shipping devices and computers with USB 3 ports in 2009. But because Intel didn't adopt USB3 until their Panther Point reference platform in 2012, Apple really didn't have much of a choice.
(Intel really, really wanted people to use Thunderbolt, even though there weren't any Thunderbolt devices available.)
It took four years from when the standard was finalized for Macs to finally start shipping with USB 3.
Oh wow, yeah... didn't realize it was 20 Gbits/s for TB2 and not GB. It's not even close to as fast as currently shipping PCIe 3.0 x16, at 2.5 GB/s versus PCIe's 16. I guess external video cards are not really much of an option. Even using up all six TB2 ports won't get you as much bandwidth as a single PCIe 3.0 x16 slot.
Thunderbolt 2 is 20gbps = 2500MB/s. Raw 4K video maxes out at 776MB/s, RED has compression that pushes it down to 2.5MB/s. The Mac Pro has six ports, so a total of 120Gbps (15GB/s), if the controller can handle that.
Perhaps reload my mac pro with snow leopard one last time, get another year or so out of it, and then "switch" to linux on an old school workstation like this.
Hate to abandon all of my mac VMs, though. I don't think a non-mac vmware host can run mac VM guests... without a lot of mucking around, that is...
another Mac user that thinks Lion is a useless POS? Do yourself a favor a get a liberated computer next time (and the cheapest Mac desktop if you just have to develop for iOS or OS X). That's what I'm going to do when I have to upgrade.
It's entirely possible on VirtualBox, but it requires you to have a similar processor to an existing Mac, and some additional wizardry. I can verify it works for some virtualization software through at least Snow Leopard...not sure about Lion and beyond (but probably).
I love VirtualBox and I think it beats VMWare and others in UX department anytime. That said, for running Mac (Hackintosh) I would STRONGLY recommend VMWare. On VirtualBox I have tried 3 (!) different images and they were all slow, while the one I am running on VMWare works properly. And I mean properly.
I never had these kind of problems with Linux and Windows guests on VirtualBox though, so I'm not sure what the problem is - but it is real.
- how often does it need to be updated, or tended to ... is it like a hackintosh where you need to muck around with it every month or so because something "breaks" ?
You'll also want to look up "osx86" and read up on that. TL;DR it's stable in my experience if you don't need to upgrade the OS. If you do want OS upgrades, even minor ones, it's going to be somewhat painful. While I've had VERY good results (my Kalyway OSX was more stable than a real MBP running Snow Leopard), YMMV.
Based on your comments, it wouldn't be an ideal solution for you.
Depends on how you do it. You can download an existing VMWare image (don't use VirtualBox for this - the guest will be slow, not sure why) and run it in minutes. Just be sure NOT to allow it any access to network, unless you are willing to be a part of some botnet. It's probably not legal even if you have the original CD.
Or you can install from your own ISO image... havent't tried it myself. But it's still against Apple EULA which states their software can only be used on their own HW.
While we are at it, how does Apple pull something like this off? Isn't there some anti-monopoly law that should prohibit using such EULAs?
(it's probably cheaper too, but you'll still have a huge "ugly" "old" box [sitting under your desk where it won't matter anyway])
I'm still glad Apple made this, but I feel like it might miss their target market a bit. It does fit with their strategy of "disposable devices" though; you'll be buying a new one if you want to upgrade.
Maybe build a Hackintosh? I've been running one for 18 months (coming off a Mac Pro when it became clear upgrades would be a long time coming). It's pretty great. If you're careful with hardware selection you can apply Apple's own software updates with zero issues.
I am using a hackintosh for over a year now, I had a macbook pro prior. Works great, Core i7 3770k with 32gb, SSDs...
Funny enough I use a corporate issued Retina as my Windows Laptop (and Steam gaming..) I can't lock it at work (Apple, no kensington?!), so I keep it at home mostly.
Unless Apple comes out with another expandable tower that has multiple sockets and supports > 128GB of ram I won't be buying one of their desktops.
I have an _old_ Q6600 based hackintosh with RAID SSD and RAID 10 secondary. Granted the ram maxed out at 8GB but the machine is still speedy. Having > 64 would vastly simplify my workflow by enabling more VMs to be live at the same time.
Awesome. Thanks for the link. Would you be able to say with any reasonable certainty that it is primarily the motherboard that is key for building a Hackintosh? I want to build a Haswell Win7/OS X machine, and judging from this link and the other brief research that I've done, that if one sticks with Gigabyte for the motherboard you're more or less all set.
Many users would find a USB3 array to be fast enough. I would likely go that route instead of a TB array just based on the cost difference between the two.
I expect that a 4k display will totally consume a TB port each. The 2x 2560x1600 displays should be chainable off a single TB port (you can do that currently). That leaves to more TB ports. Also, I expect that each TB port has its own bandwidth separate from the others, so if your TB array is the only device on the 5th or 6th port, I expect there would be no issue.
There is certainly no getting around that your tower would require a separate disk box and DVD or blu-ray reader. That is unfortunate.
The video card upgrade situation deeply concerns me though. The FirePros aren't entry level like the GT120s are, but they won't be top of the line 6 years from now. Further, what if I need to be running CUDA applications?
Probably a minor refresh for Haswell. I wouldn't expect too much.
Pure speculation, but maybe they had some integration difficulties and didn't want to commit to a specific timeline, or they couldn't release it /right now/ like the MBA so they wanted to hold off to fill out their fall event. There are a ton of other things that could have held it back; perhaps Intel isn't ramped up enough on volume production of the quad-core Haswells and they didn't want to just update the dual-cores first.
Exactly, that's all the MBA refresh was - much to my girlfriend's disappointment - no retina display (but if the Air got a retina display, there ends up being very little to differentiate between the Air and the new Pros).
care to elaborate why you have all of this in one device?
My guess is that having 3 seperate devices (a workstation, a NAS and a small HTPC) makes more sense for encapsulation and failure scenarios. However, if the workstation runs 24/7 anyway it might make sense as the uptime of the NAS/HTPC probably isnt very critical if you mess something up on the Workstation and have to reboot or something.
Also like to know what you use 6(!) displays for :) What do you work on ?
That is not entirely accurate, the DP signal can be embedded in a TB stream (like on the Apple TB Display, where the actual signal in the TB cable is TB data) but a TB device can demux the DP data and output DP data in the DP/TB connector. The DP data actually uses pars of the total available bandwidth with Thunderbolt 2 since there is no dedicated 10 Gbit channel for video data as with classic Thunderbolt.
Your first two sentences sum up the situation for me as well. It looks like a nice way to quietly drive a bunch of high-resolution monitors, but I still need new workstation.
Maybe I'll see something I can use at SC13 in November. An updated CX-1 (which I guess would be -2) would be as nice as it is unlikely.
As a design asthetic I find it fairly interesting. By working toward a design managing the thermals in a way that allow for more heat removal while allowing it to not sound like a 747 on takeoff is good. I suspect your typical desktop machine will benefit from that kind of thinking.
Also for a long time Intel was trying to push all of the expansion boards outside the case with USB, and Apple seems close to achieving this with thunderbolt. Leaving the primary chassis as the system/holder for CPU+Memory+GPU with perhaps some boot media, and putting anything else outside.
I can't wait to see on in action to see how well this strategy works in practice vs in slideware.
Thunderbolt is actually a few PCIe 3 lanes (4 in the original incarnation) and a display port in a cable. This way, an external peripheral is not inferior to most on board alternatives in terms of throughput, and has not room for interesting things add size is no longer a constraint.
I am developing my first PCIe project and must say I am still shocked on how powerful and underutilized the bus is. Hope Thunderbolt solves this - peripherals could be much powerful than today, from SSDs and USB sticks to high bandwidth data acquisition tools.
In the ways the heat management is designed, it reminds me of the oft-maligned G4 Cube, which used the same components around the edges, airflow through the centre idea to cool the machine. The small size of the unit also reinforces the similarity for me.
the cube also didn't have a fan, it just used a chimney effect. And no I never heard of an overheat problem, I still have my cube--13 years, and it still runs fine (slow these days though...)
This page is a fantastic example of great development skills used in a way that is utterly infuriating to use. I don't want it to animate when I use my scroll wheel. I want the page to scroll.
Off topic, but were this and the Air the only product announced? If so, I'm disappointed- I was hoping to pick up an updated Macbook Retina 13". Oh well.
I tried Firefox on Windows 8. I did not find any animation effects. However, Chrome on Windows 8 has those animations, and the applications' scroll bar is hidden. Bad UI indeed.
I had to enable JS to find out what you're talking about. The result was 200 megs of memory consumption and the realization I may be using a different kind of internet than most people when using NoScript. (I'm surprised they have a non-JS version.)
It works just fine, I think the complaint was that when one uses the scrollwheel on the mouse, the expectation is that the page will scroll. It's a cool demo page, but it feels weird.
I wish meta complaints about site a link points to would be flagged out of existence. This adds absolutely nothing to the discussion of the topic on-hand, the new Mac Pro. It takes up a ton of scrolling space with unrelated moaning garbage.
"Okay, we COULD just label the ports with regular high color contrast paint. Say, white paint on a black background or black paint on a white background. But that would be TOO EASY and the panel would then really 'pop' against our otherwise monolithic clean design. Which would be distracting."
"But during actual use the ports are going to be on the BACK of the device (so you won't see it) and will have random stuff plugged into some of the ports, which ALSO would disturb the pure clean lines of the thing, so who cares?"
"No, no, we've got to label this thing with black labels on a black background, so it blends in."
"How will people be able to see the labels?"
"Easy. We'll add LED backlighting!"
"How will people TURN ON the LED backlighting, without the button to do THAT destroying our perfect design?"
"Simple - there's no button for it - you just move the machine to turn on the backlight!"
"What if you want the backlight to STAY on for a while, longer than the default?"
"Just keep shaking the machine. Or duct-tape a vibrator to it."
Black on black is pretty funky, but it might make sense to have LED lights. When you plug stuff into its expansion ports, chances are you're gonna move the machine slightly, so it lights up automagically which lets you see where things are.
You may also put this inside a cabinet or under the desk maybe (I'd put it on a mantlepiece) where light isn't abundant. Shake it, ah, there it is. No hard drive so you can shake your heart out!
It's the weird colour scheme that freaks me. Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls, which are labeled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to let you know you've done it. Hey, what is this, some kind of galactic hyper-hearse? (Zaphod Beeblebrox)
considering the labels are totally unnecessary, i don't see the problem. it's not like people are going to be plugging USB cables into the thunderbolt ports or the power cable into the HDMI port by accident.
Still, there is something of a problem in that sometimes people plug things in while the power is off, and computers are often kept tucked away in dim corners. Looking at the machine from an angle, it's not always obvious which connectors are where, especially if you're not a techy who could name ports in their sleep.
My Dell U2410 has buttons that detect when your finger gets near them (they start lighting up) which is pretty slick. Maybe it's just a bit more expensive / harder to integrate and wasn't considered worth it. Not exactly sure how it works but I think it uses the same physical phenomenon as a theremin. Again it's mostly pointless, but it is pretty slick.
As long as the machine is plugged in, I don’t think we can speak of it as being completely off. I suspect the LED illumination will work even when the machine is turned ‘off’. Even if the computer is not plugged in, the LED illumination might work, provided the machine has a built-in battery. At this point in time, we just don’t know. I’m going by the amount of thought Apple usually puts into its products.
You've gotta admit it looks like at best slightly varying shades of grey in that shot. Though they did make it worse with lighting effects - maybe they put the panel in the shade here so the LED feature would stand out more when it gets turned on later?
> Do you really twist your neck around on your laptop to make sure that the labels for plugging in peripherals all the time?
Not all the time, but...yes, sometimes.
On my MacBook Pro, the headphone jack and the microphone jack take the same kind of plug but function differently. The only difference is label and position, but the label is tiny and relatively low contrast so it's hard to see clearly. One option is to plug it in, see if it works, then try the other one. Or remember positionally which one is which (headphone jack turns out to be the closer one). Another option is to squint at the tiny label, which I have been known to do on occasion.
As long as it's not too expensive, it's exactly what a lot of prosumers might want (especially those who want to ditch their laptops for iPads and iPhones, and maybe a MBA for the road- a lot of people's MacBook Pros live on their desks). I can't see a serious video editor wanting one, but they're all jumping ship to get cheaper Wintel workstations (and at some point, studios will move the heavy lifting to some kind of local big-iron server).
I can see developers who want a slightly better machine buying it, and rich people, and photographers, and so on. If Thunderbolt expansions bring down the costs of upgrades (compared to buying the upgrades with Apple - not everyone likes to open their chassis) then it might be quite attractive.
How about the entire graphic design industry? Finally a 'headless iMac' with balls. The MacPro allows me to attach my EIZO monitors. The iMac screens are consumer-quality, really. If you're looking for high quality screens (and OSX), the MacPro is the best. I am curious about the price-range.
Audio production and engineering as well. The more plugins that can be run in real time (rather than baked) the less overhead in managing the ever growing complexity of modern electronic music projects, especially with ever increasingly CPU hungry plugins. Take Diva[1] for example - amazingly resource intensive analog simulation, but it sounds incredible! Currently on my top-end-2011-era macbook pro I can only have one of these going dynamically and then must bake and unbake different channels as I continue to experiment. Being able to run a number in real time would really speed up the work flow.
I'm guessing it will start somewhere between $2,500 to $3,500. It will be probably more than the top-end iMac. I can't see it being a lot more expensive than the current low-end Mac Pro.
It would be nice if they had a less expensive version, but this is Apple we're talking about.
At that price I'd jump in just to use it for web development and some video processing and OpenCL development.
But I suspect it will be a lot more expensive than that, especially here in the UK. I say it will probably start at $3,500 at the very minimum in the US and then with extra RAM and other upgrades it can go up to $6000 if not more.
This machine will typically come coupled to very beefy displays and external thunderbolt RAID drives and the whole set-up will average more than $10,000.
You started off by citing his connection though. It's a small desktop. The reason he said Mac Mini _Pro_ was in reference to that high end spec you mention in your responce.
I can't see any way a 'prosumer' will be able to afford it considering what's going inside. I think these things are going to run $3000+, but maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe I'm mis-defining 'prosumer.'
Dual FirePro cards, mini PCI-E SSD, and up to a 12-core [single] CPU? I feel like this will start north of $3500, but they might have a cheaper base config. Maxed, it'll probably top $5k.
Sounds about right. It's nice to imagine them doing a version with a single socket and a nice-but-consumer-level GPU -- that would finally be a worthy embodiment of the mythical "xMac" -- but they've been actively disinterested in releasing a headless mid-range machine for years, and I can't see that changing now.
FCP was never the only solution in the pro video editing market. Avid has been the traditional choice since the mid-'90s, but FCP was encroaching.
Unfortunately the botched introduction of FCP X sent Apple back a decade in this market. FCP X was too different from 7, and it didn't even support many of the workflows that pros needed. Since users had to learn new software anyway, a lot of editors went to Avid or Adobe (Premiere is quite good nowadays).
Correct. At least a decade. Combined with the 'all-our-apps-for-50-bucks from Adobe has made a lot of studio's jump ship to Adobe Premiere. I mean what was Apple smoking? FCP wasn't even compatible with FCP.
I'm not saying FCP X is bad today, but the 1.0 release was an undisputed flop.
A lot of people jumped ship to Avid and Adobe rather than wait for FCP X to eventually improve. Convincing them to take another look at FCP X won't be easy.
While it's nice to have a great machine for editing photos, or writing software, it's more a "nice to have". As long as you don't run out of RAM, most of the time you aren't limited by CPU speed. And a lot of those tasks tend to be harder to parallelise, so having 12+ cores isn't a huge deal. Video editing is much more likely to be limited by CPU, and it parallelises nicely, so a better machine saves tonnes of time.
Have a look at the current options Apple is putting out. If you need something that's cheaper than what Apple puts out, or something that's bleeding edge, then you're out of luck. This is especially true with video cards.
Apple used to offer the best value workstations on the market. They got lazy, or maybe the Chinese / Taiwanese started undercutting IBM, Dell, and HP; which forced prices down to a point where Apple wasn't interested.
And Apple doesn't have a very predictable upgrade cycle. If you're spending $5,000 on a machine, only to see the next version come out a few months later, it's not going to be very fun. Nor is holding off upgrades, because you just don't know if a new model is around the corner.
Video requires a heap of grunt. Apple wasn't offering machines with enough grunt, or cheap enough machines. They looked at the cost of switching, vs the cost of sticking with Apple, and a lot decided to switch.
Personally I couldn't care less about the design, it would be sitting behind several large screens anyway and the thermal ideas sound interesting....
That said....
4 ram slots???? Really? 12 cores, 2 GPUs and I get 32GB of ram? Maybe 64GB if 16GB dimms in standard sizes become a thing? That kills it completely in my book.
I was thinking about this as well. It would make sense to cluster these with a front-end node. The improvements to the scheduler, among other things over the past few years, would indicate a simpler way to build the equivalent of a VAXCluster.
Apple is doubling down on their segmentation here. They're clearly abandoning (I don't mean this in a pejorative sense) a mass appeal with this new iteration and targeting it specifically to 'actual' professionals: graphic designers, video editors, etc.
I don't see it that way at all. The Mac Pro has always been about the top 1% power users. The appeal was twofold: it was a bitchin'-fast machine you could stuff with as many cards and drives as you want, and it ran OS X.
This new design removes the former selling point. 12 core max (same as current)?? Four RAM slots (down from eight)?? 1/6th the volume (i.e. space to plug stuff in)??
This offers almost no advantage over a late model iMac with a Thunderbolt-to-PCIe breakout module (which is what many power users have been doing in the years since the last update).
>This offers almost no advantage over a late model iMac with a Thunderbolt-to-PCIe breakout module (which is what many power users have been doing in the years since the last update).
A few big advantages over the iMac: Xeons processors, so more cores & more cache; ECC RAM; and (two) workstation graphics cards. Six thunderbolt ports means up to 36 (!) PCIe peripherals by daisy chaining, which means a lot more expandability than the iMac or even the 2010 Mac Pro.
I suspect that a lot of people bought the Mac Pro despite the fact that it has Xeon processors, rather than because of it. They're a lot more expensive without a huge performance benefit for desktop or workstation applications.
The main advantages of Xeon were dual-socket support and support for oodles of RAM slots, and the new Mac Pro supports neither of these things.
I think you’re omitting the Xeon’s increased stability versus consumer grade architectures. Many Mac Pros are used to run non-stop, they need to be more dependable than other computers.
Does this really matter in 2013? Serious question. I could see ECC having been useful in 2000 in the midst of the megahertz race, but I'm not too convinced about today...
The probability of a bit error on normal RAM is quite high [1]. The more RAM you add the more likely you are to see corruption. Not that ECC fixes everything - I still see uncorrected ECC errors on the older HPC nodes on our grid.
The most basic forms of segmentation aren't especially relevant to the discussion of the finer points of where Apple is targeting this machine. It would be like bringing up the high-power engine in a sports car, when the discussion is about where within the sports car market the maker is aiming. That it has a high-power engine is generally a given.
I mostly agree with this. I have owned three mac pros. I use them for development work. I like them because they are fast, well-built, run OS X (which I like), I can put lots of RAM in them, and put a few extra hard drives in with software RAID.
There isn't much about this announcement that excites me. I don't think I need two graphics cards (though maybe 4K will be nicer than I realize). I don't need it to be smaller and I don't really care what it looks like, as long as it is well built. But:
* I have had really good experiences with past mac pros, and poor experiences with hardware from other vendors, so I am reluctant to switch.
* The cost differential of a mac pro vs. an imac is not that great, relative to the cost of development time, so I am likely to give the mac pro the benefit of the doubt. If the benchmarks show it is significantly faster, I will probably just go with it.
I do wonder who is excited about this machine. I think another commenter is right - it is the video editors and high end graphics types this machine is truly built for.
Video editor and high end graphics guy checking in. I’m very excited, mostly by the size of the new Mac Pro. I’ll be able to take this workstation anywhere and just plug it into some rented displays. Lugging the current Mac Pro around means I’ll have to go there by car or settle for taking a MacBook Pro along and doing rendering on a rented Mac Pro. The new Mac Pro, I can bring along in a carry-on and have plenty of room to spare for other equipment. Too bad it won’t be available for months, I have so many projects for which this would be a dream.
-Thunderbolt-to-PCIe breakout module (which is what many power users have been doing in the years since the last update)
Do you have any examples of this? I did a quick google but didn't find anything. My imagination is telling me that looks like some sort of motherboard with slots in it...
Welcome to the era where you process all in the cloud. You don't need 30 HD on your machine anymore or 200gb ram. I was a bit shocked at the beginning but then I realized most of the studios are using cloud solutions to make intensive renders or local hardware farms with plenty of processing power. I think the Mac Pro still exceeds on power, but you know you will always find someone else more hungry of power :)
Heh, I bet you're somewhere with high bandwidth, no data caps and very low latency.
Here, I'm 30-60ms away from the big datacentres, and 200-400ms away from the US. Data is capped at ~500gb per month on the high end plans, and that's both upload and download. I'm lucky to get 10 megabits down, 1 megabit up on a good day.
Coupled with the fact our country's going to head back to the 1950s with the inevitable change of government next election, screw the cloud.
But yeah, where I am I was on mobile internet for a year where I would go 2 weeks on a 2G connection and even on the 3G I had pings of 200~ to data centers in my city.
Most of the people I know they didn't updagraded their Mac Pros ever in 3 to 6 years of use. I heard people upgrading memory, replacing discs, but the rest it should be intact. The Mac Pro is a nice machine for people who won't upgrade in 3 o 4 years, even more and still having power.
If they didn't release this, I would continue with the idea of making my Hackintosh but this new baby is nice.
Are you suggesting the Mac Pro ever had mass appeal? This strikes me as the opposite, abandoning the 'actual' professionals in favour of a weird mass market design.
I don't see how this is a mass market design. It's a bunch of Xeons cores paired with ECC RAM, stupid-fast storage, and way more GPU power than any reasonable person can use. And probably priced to match.
But, coupled with zero internal expansion, no spinning disk bays, and a small number of RAM slots.
I can't really tell to whom the product is targeted, honestly. If I were buying a Mac Pro for work, I'd want the expand ability. If I were a consumer buying a desktop, I'd get an iMac or mini.
Indeed, I've been using the same Mac Pro since 2008. I bought an ATI Radeon 6970 around a year or so ago and extended its life that much more. For most of my computer's life, its had a PCIe eSATA card.
I can't say I'm too excited about a computer that's relegated to an much more expensive Mac Mini.
So on top of the almost-certainly really expensive Mac Pro, you now also need to get the really expensive PCIe expansion enclosure on top of it? Or did I miss nvidia or ati making thunderbolt video cards?
This is why the idea that this makes sense for professional users is silly. It's just asking them to spend a lot more money for something that's been possible with standard case designs for decades. The old Mac Pro was already a bit silly with its chassis that seemed designed to survive a car crash, but this one just takes the cake.
The cooling system design is innovative and interesting on its own, but this continues the trend of the Mac Pro being a check box for Apple instead of a real product.
The existing Mac Pro has four drive bays. That number seems to be too many, or way too few, never quite right. This design seems to surrender to the fact that one stupidly fast SSD is good enough to build a base, and the rest can be attached externally.
NVidia and AMD have been making external video cards for a while now using external PCIe, but they haven't sold very well and support for these sorts of connectors is limited. Thunderbolt 2 should eventually change that.
Apple's in a bit of a tough spot here. The Mac Pro can never be fast enough or big enough for some, and the bigger and faster they make it, the more it becomes overkill for those that just need something more serious than an iMac or Mac Mini.
I was looking at that kind of thing as well and the only thing that's worth noting is that I think a lot of video cards currently actively used are only 16x so they can be run on older motherboards with pcie 1 or 2.
It's not clear that thunderbolt 2 isn't enough bandwidth to effectively run a video card, though I think you'd probably run into problems daisy chaining video cards with video cards or trying to run two out of one enclosure.
I assume he is referring to the strange decision to make the thing so small (and beautiful) at the expense of any internal expandability. So professionals are going to have all sorts of hard drives and external graphics cards and optical drives etc hanging off this thing.
sorry if I am barking up the wrong tree.. but do you think it will be beautiful with all the breakout cables ?
For me this whole thing looks like a blast from the past - my trusty C64 with everything outside the box (and there were some articles in the 64er magazine [german magazine] which showed how to build everything into a single case for the neat, "integrated" look)
I think for many people it will be a beautiful black cylinder on a cluttered desktop. For people who need to use expansions this will take up a significantly larger footprint than a machine that allows for internal expansion.
For those that put the machine under their desk it will just be a mess of cables and things to kick over.
Third parties are going to have a field day designing accessories to this that will do away with the clutter. A six pronged lightning plug that splits into a meta-rack monolithic black box. Done.
The whining about this product is expected but so misguided.
This is just blind speculation (I am not apple [power] user, nor have I owned the new mac pro):
Maybe (sacrificing customizability[?] for portability) + (somewhat superficial/look change maybe for change's sake) + (lack of (water cooling, cd/dvd/bluray%, power surge supply/protector thingy%, raid%)) != professional market?
% = if you want these, there goes some of the portability/simplicity. (unless apple monitor usually has cd drive?)
I might be off the mark, feedback welcome. Maybe this is enough for most creative professionals? Video/3d/gaming/some programming/some engineering might be somewhat infinite in appetite for processing power and all, I would think.
My thoughts having never owned a Mac Pro (though on my 2nd MacBook Pro): SAN/NAS + the near uselessness of internal optical drives.
In a "professional" environment, large storage is on the network, redundant, with regular backups (preferably including off-site backup). The more important the data is, the less likely anyone wants it sitting on someone's desktop any longer than necessary for that person to do their job.
The handful of people using Mac Pros in my work environment generate and store massive amounts of data, but they don't store it on their desktop indefinitely.
First thing I noticed was all the dark -- what, did someone turn off all the lights? Where's the white that has dominated Apple material for so long?
But hey, give Tim Cook some credit here. This is literally the first significant product release during his tenure as CEO where the major elements of the update weren't simply screen-size or resolution. I don't have a lot of confidence this is earth-shattering, but it will be interesting to see how this is received.
Classically, White has been consumer grade and black has been the professional grade in Apple design. See iPhoto vs Aperture, or iMovie vs Final Cut Pro. The Macbooks were all white, while the pros were (admittedly not black, but) metallic. I don't think it is that much of a change from what they've already projected out there.
This rule was left behind some time ago. Eg, Macbooks are also silver - even the Air. Obviously Iphones are both black and white, regardless of features. But who knows, maybe the new tower is a throwback to the old days?
This product must have been in development for years. In his biography (2011), Steve Jobs said he was working on an exciting new product, I think this was it. He also said Ive had already made the designs for the new products of the next 3 years.
That’s not to say that Cook has to prove himself, he’s already done that for years. However, this product has Jobs written all over it (he was mad about powerful workstations with outrageous designs).
The last upgradable mac is now dead. I thought the whole idea of the pro was the ability to put in graphic and other specialty cards as needed for "Pro" use. This looks like another cute consumer PC. Maybe they'll sell it along side the HP's at Sam's Club.
I think the idea here is that, between plentiful Firewire 2 and Thunderbolt 2, you now have enough external bandwidth that you shouldn't need internal cards. When given the choice, I prefer this route, since it means I can transport my proprietary stuff to other machines, or even use them with laptops in a pinch.
That might not work for you, granted, but the amount of bandwidth available between all those ports (20 GB/s in the case of Thunderbolt 2) should be enough to cover most use-cases.
I would have designed it the same way - Thunderbolt is the future of expansions, not tiny little cards you need to slide inside of the HW. This machine recognizes that - They give you 6 (six!) to play with.
Thunderbolt IS PCIe, so it's just as fast.. Why should card makers be constrained in expanding the machine to make peripherals small enough to fit inside? If I want 1 solid foot of Disks for my workstation, then so be it. Wire it in over Thunderbolt, and I'm good to go.
I'm amused by all the disparaging comments about this new design. Every time Apple launches an incredible product it is always immediately decried. I'll wait til these are on sale before judging them.
When I clicked on that page and saw "The future of desktop computing.." and that trash can slide into view I actually thought it was supposed to be a metaphor.
This one shows the two "GPU cards" - notice the one on the right has a white connector, bottom middle, which is for the SSD. Otherwise, they are almost identical (I see slightly different components at the top)
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/graphi...
-I think the big question here is how are the three "cards" joined together?
These days PCIx (and similar) extender cables are used commonly on server builds. I wouldn't be surprised if apple used some sort of equivalent ribbon to connect the graphics cards.
1. Use of glue somewhere which knackers any chance of repairing it. Memory, disks and that is it.
2. Proprietary fan which will get noisy after time and cost a fortune to replace. First step will be to put it on the floor so you can't hear it... leading to...
2a. Someone is going to put a half drank coffee cup in it and blow it up.
2b. Plume of hairballs every time a cat owner fires it up as it'll suck in every bit of crap off the floor (the dirtiest place in your house).
2c. Someone will whack their noggin on the desk while they're trying to plug their headphones into it.
Perhaps I'm bitter because my 2010 MBP blew up spectacularly, but I'm seeing a lot of visual design over sensible engineering in Apple recently.
The iMac is a sensible design over this. If only it wasn't such a bastard to get inside it.
I tend to use computers for years (typing this on a 7 year old Lenovo). I'd like the opportunity not to fill up a landfill after a couple of years.
The product descriptions seem just horribly written:
> Something that provides an extremely powerful argument against the status quo.
> The new Mac Pro packs an unprecedented amount of power in an unthinkable amount of space. A big reason we were able to do that is the ingenious unified thermal core
> Not only does it feature a state-of-the-art AMD FirePro workstation-class GPU with up to 6GB of dedicated VRAM — it features two of them.
> The new Mac Pro looks unlike any other computer. Because it is unlike any other computer.
It works on Firefox, it just delays for a long time before you can scroll, tricking you into thinking that you're just looking at a boring teaser page picture.
All I see is some thing that looks like a cross between the monolith from '2001' and an ashtray from the local Greyhound station. Clicking all over the page doesn't do anything (FF 20.0 on Windows 7 x64).
Guess I'm not in the target audience for whatever it is...
Four ram slots? That maxes out at 64 Gig of RAM. What happened to the old 128 Gig?
Sorry, dropping $999 ea. on a single monitor, much less multiple monitors, is just stupid. The difference at the screen between a Thunderbolt display and a display costing half as much isn't enough to warrant the extra cost.
The former machine had a visually distinct box with tons of space inside for the video card of your choice and you could stuff drives in it for days, without relying on expensive external boxes that sucked up slots on the power strip.
It's probably the right design for someone, but not for people who want a serious workstation and not an art statement.
Those links are largely sensationalism. I don't agree with everything Apple does, but it's certainly not as bad as how those articles portray it to be. To call GateKeeper "DRM" is absurd, and having non-upgradeable hardware is a design choice, not a diabolical plan.
Unless you can show me a non-biased, non-partisan view of how Apple is the worst tech company to buy from, I'll continue to enjoy my MacBook Air.
These are critiques of Apple's other products and software, but none of them apply to this specific hardware. Are there specific criticisms of this Mac Pro hardware?
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, this is an objective trend that you're pointing out and it's a legitimate basis to use for predicting the style of any future Apple device. A company's product launches aren't discrete probabilistic events like tosses of a coin -- they tend to follow patterns...
[Edit]: Man, I didn't even say I supported/cared about this manufacturing aspect (hint: I don't) and I'm already getting downvoted... Considering all the controversial things I've said on this site that hadn't earned me a negative score before, this doesn't exactly shed a positive light on Apple proponents. It's OK to not care about a certain aspect/political issue, but the guy's argument was a sound one, at least give him/her that much.
I think some people get tired of repeated comments by geek-liberal activists coming out of the woodwork to attack Apple, when, in reality, very few people share their particular perspective. "Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!"
Why do people think we come out of the woodwork? I want you to be free if that's important to you! If you disagree (with either being free or my analysis of the situation) you can still buy it.
> Man, I didn't even say I supported/cared about this
> manufacturing aspect (hint: I don't) and I'm already
> getting downvoted...
Cognitive dissonance FTW. When people make a tradeoff decision that involves an entity with a provable history of unethical behaviour (patent lawsuits anyone?), they'd rather not be reminded of it in public.
This from a Spotify and Google user, note. I'm not saying that tradeoff decisions are necessarily wrong, just that my theory is that sensitivity about them is why you're getting downvoted.
All of the articles are about Apple's proprietary lock-in and difficulty in making your own repairs. This definitely looks like more proprietary form factors and parts to me - I think it's safe to say this will be a definite downgrade in terms of an iFixit score.
Do you really think HN readers are so uninformed that they are not aware of the tradeoffs in Apple hardware? They are tradeoffs, not evil conspiracies.
Third link is gasp non-removable battery. Yep just like practically every knock of-- excuse me ultrabook has (and for exactly the same reasons Apple did it the first time: people like the very thin form factor).
It's a brilliant design (far beyond its aesthetic novelty), and quite frankly I could care less that they lock things up or spy on me. Make sure to copy and paste your little comment on every Windows PC/phone/tablet announcement as well. Last I checked, it's easier to install Linux on a Mac than a new PC. Oh, you didn't know? Apple isn't the only "diabolical" company. Don't forget about Google, Microsoft, Facebook, the government, etc.
Actually, you know, you're right. We need to boycott these evil organizations. Who needs technology when the companies who make it are greedy? Who needs a government when it does stupid things every once in a while?
All I asked was that people consider these issues before buying Apple. For some types of evil, Apple is the least evil company in its field. For others, it's the worst.
I posted to HN because I'm concerned that these sorts of discussions get no air-time when discussing the latest, greatest IT products. As an example, when was the last time you saw a reviewer asking a company about the GPL compliance of its new Android product?
(Actually, when was the last time you saw a reviewer do anything other than copy-and-paste from a press release? Most reviews these days are just marketing copy).
This concept reminds me of the old Silicon Graphics workstations. Some 15 years ago they were something I would dream of having on my desk. SGI was the symbol of performance and graphics and the computers looked very different from everything else.
Maybe this is also a tribute to Steve Jobs and NeXT. Think Different.
Taking a look at the site and the walk around, it eases most of my problems, but not all of them:
- The RAM looks accessible enough that it can be changed/modified with ease.
- That's true for the built-in drive as well, it looks like one of the "blade" type SSDs that comes in the rMBP. Even if its a slightly different form factor, I've got faith OWC will come up with solutions. Will be slightly miffed about losing a "No SSD, give me the cheapest mechanical drive" purchasing option, but there it is.
- My real concern is the GPUs. With the new thermal profile and the walk around, those really don't look like off the shelf parts. I'm pretty sure you can't easily swap them. I'd prefer an nVidia option generally, and more importantly the FirePros will likely be optimized for graphics work, and terrible for gaming (yes, I do sometimes game on my Mac Pro) and not optimized for scientific computing, which would be my other use case.
It's just enough to make me like the new Mac Pro, but also hesitate because of the GPU.
That's where I'm at now. A FirePro is a graphic design GPU. I don't want a graphic design GPU. That's not what I do. I certainly don't want to pay for two of them.
And at the prices the Mac Pro will go for, we're also talking about comparable systems with a Titan in them. I'd much prefer that GPU, except Apple's going with a bespoke design by the looks of it.
My current mac pro has 6 displays attached, three of which are "high resolution" (2560x1600).
I think that the 4k displays require 2x thunderbolt ? Or else why would there be a limitation of 3 ?
So all 6 TB ports used, and no ability to add a 4th display.
EDIT: well, I could add a 4th with HDMI, but it would be low resolution, and the 5th and 6th displays are impossible. Also, all 6 TB ports used up, so no further expansion is possible.
"Thunderbolt can be daisy-chained just like USB, so you're not limited to just the 6 provided ports."
Ok. Still trying to understand the "3" limitation on 4k displays. If it's a bandwidth issue, you'd think the number would be 4, since there are two cards.
And if it is bandwidth, then presumably 3 4k displays plugged in and ... even the empty TB ports become unusable since there is no more bandwidth available ?
I just want to plug in 6 monitors and am trying to figure out how :)
It's bandwidth of the HDMI interface (is my understanding), but even then, the max of a standalone AMD or nVidia graphics card is typically three displays. And these are 4K displays!
Wait till the actual release date! There is not a good reason for them to announce new apple displays until they can actually be used with their hardware. Thunderbolt 2 doesn't even exist yet.
Hurrah! GPUs sealed directly into the machine. No more keeping old macs alive with extra GPUs. (the quadro 4000 and k5000 really helped the 2009 macpro)
It also appears to only have one CPU. From what the page says its only got one Memory controller, which as the "new"* Xeons have onboard memory controllers. So that seems a bit of a fail.
*as in the same Xeons that have been in the HP Z620/820 for the last 8 months
The only thing appears to be going for this mac is that it has nice disk bandwidth.
The Z series workstation is going to be cheaper, and almost twice as fast+. (assuming one buys the correct fusionio card.) it also has the advantage of taking normal pci slot graphics cards, which can be upgraded later.
Yep, exactly my thoughts. Also, didn't Tim Cook say the mini was going to be manufactured in the US as well? And could it also be the case that the Mini will follow the Pro's form factor because it would save money in manufacturing an entirely separate low-margin unit?
After seeing the Pro, I fantasized how fun it would be to have a desktop machine with several symmetric displays.
My bet is that Apple will be hard pressed to keep the current 2,500 base price. Three next generation Thunderbolt connectors, expensive Xeon processors, expensive ECC RAM, expensive PCIe flash disk. They basically took all the cheap, legacy and physically large stuff off the Mac Pro and folded up the remainder into a triangle that goes into a tube.
Can you believe that the old Mac Pro case and fundamental design was launched 10 years ago with the Power Mac G5?
Pretty incredible run. Both the PowerMac G5 and aluminum PowerBook G4 helped pave the way for the Intel transition. A good way to re-use R&D and save money!
And the Cube was slower than the midrange Power Mac of the day, and was encased in a thick plastic case, and -- worst of all -- had a capacitive power switch which would trip by itself in humid weather.
I'm a big fan of everything except less RAM capacity. Getting the disks out of the case makes a lot of sense -- 4 drives was never enough to be meaningful. A boot SSD and a big 8+ drive external RAID on TB2 seems a lot better (ideally with an SSD or more RAM to cache), and/or NAS/SAN.
Curious where it will be priced; if it's $1999 or less for a usable base config, it could be a default. Mini never really made a lot of sense as a desktop. It's depressing leaving an rMBP docked all the time.
One low-end xeon (and one ati) is pretty low end. Xeons are not that much of a premium at the lower levels. ECC RAM is worth it to me. (the question is where the low end is vs. Mac Mini; I'd consider a low end one as a HT box vs. a Mac Mini, even)
It sounds like people have them pegged as FirePro W9000s, which retail for >$1500, but that's probably the top option, with the lowest end being a much wimpier card. So you may be right.
(Also, I didn't realize they had ditched the dual-CPU approach, though that was probably a good decision)
The New Mac Pro, the world's fastest trashcan introduced by the world's least usable web page.
More seriously, I think it's pretty cool, I like that the design has a point, thermal management, rather than just having a weird shape to look all "designy". It's hard for me to accept that this is a pro machine though, very over integrated for that kind of role.
And also, for a company that's not supposed to be focused on specs, there's a lot of specs on that page (when it works).
I've been using the same Mac Pro since 2008. I bought an ATI Radeon 6970 around a year or so ago and extended its life that much more. For most of my computer's life, its had a PCIe eSATA card and an external case. It works great still but its starting to show its age.
I can't say I'm too excited about a computer that's relegated to an much more expensive Mac Mini. Thunderbolt 2 is nice but its a poor substitute for internal drive bays and 16x PCIe.
> Thunderbolt 2 is nice but its a poor substitute for internal drive bays and 16x PCIe.
Why, exactly? I don't know how many lanes will be in the Thunderbolt2 (haven't checked the specs), but I have a Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID storage (4 drives), which is really fast. SSD sys drive + Thunderbolt storage = win in my books.
Yes I love the design. But the main thing with the Mac Pro that I love is I can swap a drive, memory etc without walking through the mall to the Apple Store. I have shied away from too many iMacs for this reason (I have 2, both failed at times where I needed them now - one a drive from Seagate and one a video card which pretty much kills that beautiful screen along with it). As long as it is easy to swap memory, a drive externally, and maybe a video card then I am cool with it. Otherwise customizable computers from Apple are no longer.
This definitely explains why it took a while to update the Mac Pro. A nice surprise today.
The more I look at this design, the more I think it's absolutely brilliant. Increasingly we're seeing fantastically small form factors for mid-ranged desktop computers like the Intel NUC and the Mac Mini, yet high end workstations are still stuck in massive, ugly ATX towers.
This seems to elegantly solve the problem of squeezing components that tend to run very hot, into a relatively small space. The shared heat sync and cooling pipe is really clever.
While only some people may care about the size or design of their workstation, I suspect that nearly everyone cares about how noisy it is. The design of the Mac Pro should make it relatively quiet I would wager.
That's pretty standard for the PCIe type SSD cards. I've been watching them for a while I didn't know you could boot off them but it appeard that has changed
My first reaction was, oh wow looks just like the NeXT cube, that's kinda a cool tribute to Jobs.
Then my second reaction was, oh man, it will sorta look like I have a trash bin on my desk. I wish they had made the dimensions a little different. I think this will be the "flop" model where they work out hardware kinks and the next one will be prettier/sleeker, so I'll hold out til then.
So instead of a Cube we have a Cylinder. I'm sure it will look nice with a couple of large monitors and a Cintiq. The combination will still cost less than even a small company car and will be able to handle most of the tasks people use workstations for!
I don't even care if it will be really great or not in the practice at the moment (even if I hope it will be great), but it is so reassuring and warm to see somebody trying new things...
Would be interesting to see more GPU equipped machines designed for data processing instead of just processing graphics. ("just" not to minimize the value/importance of design, photography, and art, but "just" in that there's more to GPUs that design, photography, and art.) Form + function for matrix multiplication.
Though totally unrelated to the Mac Pro (other than it being a knockoff of MacBook Air) Dell has made an interesting push for data crunchers. Their recent-ish re-launch of an Ubuntu machine [0] that enables you to simulate and then push your environment up to the cloud is an interesting, if fairly niche product.
Could the Mac Pro, with it's specific audience, the Dell XPS, and maybe even the RasberryPi, be the beginning of a much more specialized desk/laptop computing movement in the face of iPads (errr... tablets) eating the general purpose, internet surfing computer market?
It took me embarrassingly long to figure out how that website worked. The text telling me to scroll took like 10-15 seconds to show up, so I kept exiting the page and looking at these comments to see if there was more than just a picture. Eventually I figured it out, but still had to scroll slowly and methodically through to see everything.
yeah, i felt like a bit of an idiot because i couldn't figure out how to go to the next slide. then i found that i could click the dots on the right side.
later, i accidentally scrolled and it took me to the next slide. i was all like, "ah, that's what they meant by scroll".
Not to fork the discussion, but: I'm thinking of putting together a new (Linux) PC for my needs (which are mainly number-crunching, photo processing, etc.). How much of the tech in this Mac Pro is available today to build one? I'm not sure I've seen any PCIe SSDs, for example. How about Thunderbolt 2?
Just a couple months ago, we built a similarly specced 1TB SSD raid using an expensive controller and 4 256 GB drives for a multipass batch processing job that we do. It gets about 1GB/sec read and write performance and cost about $1k altogether. A controller that can max out the PCI bus is about $300 alone.
The major benefit we found is that the higher random access speeds allow us to multiplex our jobs without completely thrashing the old RAID array that we replaced.
But it sucks that there are no PCI solutions for what we needed. OCZ had a couple cards but they were out of date and enterprise priced.
I think what we really need is some kind of slot for internal flash the same way DIMMs are slotted, maybe even have the controller and flash chips physically separated for more fine grained upgrades or have the SSD controller embedded in the motherboard chipset.
The weird 9.5mm enclosure and sata cables that SSDs currently use is some kind awkward weening phase off of spinning platters that needs to go away. Even single SSDs are starting to saturate SATA3 and the SATA specs aren't keeping up.
Hopefully a new trend in workstations that look like the Mac Pro will come along the same way that many "Ultrabooks" look vaguely like MacBook Airs. At which point we'll hopefully get more sensible SSD and interconnect management.
I actually think this is a "Pro" machine - just the definition of "Pro" has narrowed to someone who does visual design work (FirePros instead of a more general purpose/off-the-shelf solution that can be swapped out for something specialized) and has large enough storage needs that they've probably got an external drive enclosure or NAS already (only the SSD for internal storage).
Unfortunately, that narrower version doesn't fit me. But since "Scientists" weren't mentioned in the litany of users of the Mac Pro, and apple.com/science is a 404 page now (which was better than the Leopard-era page that came before it talking about the innovative Workgroup Cluster), I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
I was looking at the IO bit, and due to the new horrible black on black labels, I was unable to see that there were actual ethernet ports there.
Completely unrelated ofcourse, but that's pretty telling about the black on black + led thingie they've gone for. It's not something to be taken too far.
Edit: I have my monitors in portrait mode. Setting a window to span several monitors and work in "landscape-mode", I can see ethernet is mentioned. On a portrait screen it falls outside the visible area of the viewport and there are no scrollbars.
Edit 2: By resizing the window, I see that the width of the viewport is adjusted based on the height of the visible viewport (w = 2*h). So on a portrait type display (tall) the width of everything is adjusted to be even bigger. This pushes most of the content (apart from the black tube) outside the visible viewport and off the screen.
Basically, this page was designed to only ever work in landscape and break doubly in portrait. And hence most of the details on the page were simply not available.
So instead of a Cube we have a Cylinder. I'm sure it will look nice with a couple of large monitors and a Cintiq. The combination will still cost less than even a small company car.
I've seen a lot of Star Trek lately. It would fit in right next to other alien spacecraft against the special effect space backdrop of The Original Series.
The design looks so familiar, and it has been bugging me the whole day. Finally, I found it! The new Mac Pro designs reminded me of this DLINK Wireless Router
The design is obviously polarizing and leaves many questions unanswered. But one surprising and promising development is that Cook said this would be a platform for "the next ten years." In the face of fears that Apple would abandon the "pro market", this is one of the most explicit forward-looking statements they've made in some time.
I'm pretty bummed about the new Mac Pro, I really want / need my dev work station purchase this summer to have a Haswell generation CPU, plus NVidia Cuda support. Which this seems to lack.
(context, I'm doing a lot of Dev work on high peformance numerical algorithms, and the fewer machines i need to test all the different substrates, the better.)
For the home user, this is fine, but one thing Apple forgot about (And they usually do) is the enterprise customer. If you're looking to replace your current setup of Mac Pros with these, how would you go about mounting these things in a rack?
I wonder if you can use the center to play office basketball with the paper scraps. If it gets hot because of usage you may even have a fun little fire pit to use.
Regardless it looks cool and it may have issues but it will be a great computer, overpriced but great.
The thing I really like about my old Mac Pro is that I could crack it open and stick a couple old graphics cards in there and go crazy with media. I had 5 screens including a TV and a Wacom digitizer connected to mine.
It will be very frustrating if they don't make a dual coy socket version. If you do iOS development and large compiled code bases, a mac pro is the best you have. Hackintoshes waste your time in other ways.
What is the height of this workstation ? I hope apple is not messing with the cardinal rule of making workstations tall enough that you can rest your legs on them when you lean back on the chair.
Interesting design aesthetic. This still doesn't justify the price and Apple's going to be taking a hit now that so much of the entertainment industry has turned away from Final Cut.
Nice design. I hope it's quiet (is the bottom air intake really sufficient?) Will it accommodate any standard parts (PCIe cards?) other than memory/drives?
They're going with external expansion options. There are enclosures you can buy for PCIe cards to plug them in to the Thunderbolt ports if you need to.
I really don't care about the product itself, but I am always glad when Apple releases something new. It's really interesting to study the release process.
It's truly impressive being able to create such hype around a release. Funny enough, many Apple fan-boys are basically fanatics. The rational thing to do is of course to work against the corporations, in order to force them into improving and lowering the prices. But somehow Apple has managed to create a "personal army" of fan-boys, blindly defending their every move.
On a related note: I am really surprised they are going desktop, has not the last five years been about replacing it?
Without expandability this product is for hipsters and the aesthete. If I am paying thousands of dollars for a computer I refuse to compromise on core functionality.
Actually it appears somewhat upgradeable; the memory is seated in standard slots and is clearly user-serviceable. The SSD appears to be as well; it may require third-party kit ala OWC (One World Computing) but oh well.
The only two remaining components that may or may not be are the GPU boards and the processor. The system seems serviceable enough so far.
But let's wait for final specs and user guides before passing judgment.
It hasn't been announced, but xenon processors and PCI-E flash storage is typically much more expensive than the Core Processor line or SSD storage since they are almost exclusively marketed towards servers.
That said, disregarding the Apple tax I'm sure Apple gets pretty good deals on their hardware so it is possible that it will be at similar price point as the current line (which was typically regarded as over priced and outdated anyways)
for a thousand bucks I would buy a new desk and monitor to make it the center piece of my new study in my house. instead Apple will want at least five thousand and expect it to be a business class workstation.
Personally, I have been waiting a very long time for this. PC users need not read this. I love this company as they have revolutionized many things. Just the App Store alone gives me enough reason to be loyal forever. iOS... just beautiful. The Mac Pro... mind blown..
I think the new Mac Pro episode will resemble the iPad one - lots of "ohemgee it's like just a bigger ipod, lol, how stupid do they think we are, kthx?" reactions, when in fact this product will probably push a new paradigm shift in the way workstations are built i.e. moving away from the plastic pieces of shit ubiquitously sold now. Seriously, I dare you to look around a regular "PC customization" website e.g. [1]. Apart from Razer and maybe Alienware nobody has even tried to really innovate the workstation landscape. I remember when I was building one of my first desktops with my dad - 20 years ago.
A final thought: Apple has a million flaws (mostly software and systems, grr), but they didn't get where they are for being stupid or for not understanding the market, so at least give them some fucking credit.
[1] http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/view/Vortex-500-gaming-pc/