Speculation Targets Mac Pro as First "Made in USA" Mac Product

[faroZ06]

Originally Posted by nStyle

Yeah, Apple! Manufacturer your most least-selling product in the same country that your HQ is located in! Entirely ethical.

Sadly, it is ethical in the terms that everyone does it.

[dansix]

Originally Posted by iMikeT

Where do I begin to dismantle your line of thinking?

Do you really think that people want to work like slaves for such low wages and live in horrible conditions like the people who assemble these products in China? The people there work in these conditions because there's over 1.25 BILLION people in the entire country. If one guy doesn't want a job for $7 per day, it's cool because there are a hundred people behind him that will take it for $6 per day.

You want to get real? Here's the reality. These people are working in conditions that were present in the USA 100 years ago. What you're promoting is turning the clock back and racing to the bottom.

I don't see how our opinions conflict.

[faroZ06]

Originally Posted by portishead

I'm sure you won't have a ps/2 connector and you won't be able to overclock it either

Don't the i5 and i7 CPUs have built-in overclocking called "Turbo Boost" anyway? Also, who the @#$% uses PS/2 and lives in 2012?

If I overclock my Mac Pro's CPUs to 3.2GHz or something, my UPS overloads

[haruhiko]

Originally Posted by iMikeT

Where do I begin to dismantle your line of thinking?

Do you really think that people want to work like slaves for such low wages and live in horrible conditions like the people who assemble these products in China? The people there work in these conditions because there's over 1.25 BILLION people in the entire country. If one guy doesn't want a job for $7 per day, it's cool because there are a hundred people behind him that will take it for $6 per day.

You want to get real? Here's the reality. These people are working in conditions that were present in the USA 100 years ago. What you're promoting is turning the clock back and racing to the bottom.

I suggest you to take a look at any modern factory in China. I'm sure 100 years ago USA was much worse.

[canucksfan88]

enters a $10,000 base price

[haruhiko]

Originally Posted by canucksfan88

enters a $10,000 base price

but it's 12-core!

together with a 700MB/S "hard drive".... it can cure cancer

/s

[tjwaido]

My Guess:
Up to 16 Cores
No Optical Drive Bay
Apple's Fusion Drive, 2.5" Disks or mSata SSD.
USB 3.0
Thunderbolt front and back
Last Quarter 2013

What I actually want:
Bu-ray Drive
FCP8
Blu-ray DVD Studio Pro
Mac Pro Update NOW

[VTECaddict]

Originally Posted by ppdix

I laugh when I see the Mac Book Pro's benchmarks which are like 25% of the power I get on my 2010 Mac Pro.
I got 2 LED Cinema Displays, 1TB Mercury Accelsior PCI-e SSD Drive that gives me 700MB/second Read speeds, plus 6 additional Internal HD's, PCI-e USB 3.0, FireWire 800 and 32GB of RAM. Oh yeah, I removed the CD drive and hooked up a 480GB SSD instead.
Try to upgrade an iMac or Mac Book...
Mac Pro is the only REAL Professional Mac. The rest are toys...

What is your point? It's not exactly headline news that that Mac Pro is more powerful...

[Quu]

It would be a good reveal for Apple to say they have the fastest personal computer in the world and it's made at home in the USA.

Something they've not been able to say for a very long time.

[iMikeT]

Originally Posted by dansix

I don't see how our opinions conflict.

Originally Posted by dansix

The outcome my be something akin to the auto industry. There's no way that Americans can build like the Chinese. The Chinese can do it better and cheaper because their cultural values are different. They are willing to live on the manufacturing campus in bunk beds and work over 12 hours a day like slaves. Let's get real.

The bold is where I disagree. The race to the bottom does not mean manufacturing is better, just cheaper.

Otherwise, I misinterpreted the rest of your post. And it's a sad fact that people are willing to give away their best interests for pennies.

Originally Posted by dansix

Tim Cook said it wasn't about cost. That's where I raise the ******** flag. All the Apple fanboys of course will jump all over me on this because they're all zombies, eating up all the B.S. that comes out of Cupertino.

Most of the electronics that I use on a daily basis has an Apple logo on it. I consider myself a fan of Apple and also holding a long position in AAPL. However, I am also critical about many of the things they announce. From the beginning, I knew to take this "Assembled in the USA" stamp and Cook's comments about it with a grain of salt.

[faroZ06]

Originally Posted by tjwaido

My Guess:
Up to 16 Cores
No Optical Drive Bay
Apple's Fusion Drive, 2.5" Disks or mSata SSD.
USB 3.0
Thunderbolt front and back
Last Quarter 2013

What I actually want:
Bu-ray Drive
FCP8
Blu-ray DVD Studio Pro
Mac Pro Update NOW

They're definitely going to have the optical drive bays and the 3.5" hard drive bays. I think the Mac Pro is the one thing where Apple NEVER sacrifices usability for style, and anyway, the iMac has a 3.5" hard drive (or at least it did in the 2011 model, can't get info about the new design).

I have a 2008 Mac Pro, and the only thing that Apple tried to make pretty but annoying is the metal door on the optical drive slots. It should work fine in theory, but for me, it gets stuck often.

[foidulus]

Ugh, more people somehow thinking this "assembled in the USA" thing is a new phenomenon, it's not. A large number(maybe all?) Mac Pros sold in the USA have been assembled in the USA for quite a while. Again, same with BTO imacs, the Mac Pro is such a low-volume, heavy beast that building large #s of them in China and shipping them by boat or air mailing almost every mac pro sold is a losing venture. They assemble them in the US so that they can get it delivered to a customer rather cheaply w/o having to sit on large piles of unsold finished product. They also used to make the XServes in the US too, but obviously that ended w/ the XServe....

[Lancer]

-Mac Pros are easier to build and customize than any other Apple product

So does this mean American's can't build the more complex Apple products?

[princigalli]

It was about time and it makes sense to start with a less popular product, at the same time the most expensive to transport. With the rise of fuel prices I bet everybody will start producing next to their consumer base.

[faroZ06]

Originally Posted by Skika

I dont even use Thunderbolt. I was just trying to tease you a little because your post is hilarious.

"My mac is the only pro tool yadda specs specs yadda yadda"

Great stuff haha.

I have a 2008 Mac Pro, and it's not a pro tool, just a personal computer
I just got it because it cost the same as a lowest-end MacBook Air ($1000), is really fast with its 8 cores, and lets me change anything I want on the inside. This was after my 2006 iMac died because of the stupid NVIDIA graphics card that semi-failed because NVIDIA sucks and that is pretty much inaccessible. The result: a computer that doesn't really work without a lot of cooling and a really nice 24" LCD that I can't use!

----------

Originally Posted by princigalli

It was about time and it makes sense to start with a less popular product, at the same time the most expensive to transport. With the rise of fuel prices I bet everybody will start producing next to their consumer base.

So the rising oil prices could be to our advantage, especially because the USA is producing more oil.

[Quu]

Originally Posted by ppdix

I laugh when I see the Mac Book Pro's benchmarks which are like 25% of the power I get on my 2010 Mac Pro.
I got 2 LED Cinema Displays, 1TB Mercury Accelsior PCI-e SSD Drive that gives me 700MB/second Read speeds, plus 6 additional Internal HD's, PCI-e USB 3.0, FireWire 800 and 32GB of RAM. Oh yeah, I removed the CD drive and hooked up a 480GB SSD instead.
Try to upgrade an iMac or Mac Book...
Mac Pro is the only REAL Professional Mac. The rest are toys...

While you're are correct in what you say there is a big down side to the Mac Pro when looking at it within the entire market, beyond just Apples product lines.

I could build a PC using an Asus Z9 motherboard with twin 6 or 8 Core E5 XEON's with 64GB of memory that would double your Mac Pro's performance. Then I could install Mac OS X on it too.

All that with more PCIe lanes at a faster speed (PCIe 3.0) and SATA 6.0Gb/ps for SSD's and USB3 for externals.

That is why the Mac Pro is a **** sandwich. It isn't like a portable or an all in one, all of Apples design choices for a MacBook Pro or an iMac don't come in to it when comparing the Mac Pro because it's essentially just a giant box with XEON processors inside. Apple has not innovated the workstation one iota and the rest of the market offers the exact same product, but faster in every specification.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about the Mac Pro for a workstation user is that when Apple ships a Mac Pro with say a Quad Core CPU you can't just go and drop a later released 6 Core chip in because Apple doesn't support that chip and do not provide an EFI update for it. So as a workstation owner you're stuck using what you bought or upgrading to a chip within the same series that you purchased reducing your upgrade options.

This doesn't occur with any other workstation product on the market because the companies actually support upgrades and release updates for new processors.

So you may harp on about how upgradable your Mac Pro is and how much you've done to it but how comes you've not upgraded the processors I wonder?

[ArtOfWarfare]

Originally Posted by puckhead193

Now the million dollar question, when?

I think the real million dollar question is how much...?

[ppdix]

Originally Posted by haruhiko

SSD = Solid State Drive
SSD Drive = Solid State Drive Drive
SSD Hard Drive = Solid State Drive Hard Drive
see?

Redundancy is part of life HAHAHAHA

----------

Originally Posted by haruhiko

but it's 12-core!

together with a 700MB/S "hard drive".... it can cure cancer

/s

A computer with less power than a Casio G-Shock took astronauts to the moon 40 years ago...
A Mac Pro might be able to cure cancer some day...

----------

Originally Posted by tjwaido

My Guess:
Up to 16 Cores
No Optical Drive Bay
Apple's Fusion Drive, 2.5" Disks or mSata SSD.
USB 3.0
Thunderbolt front and back
Last Quarter 2013

What I actually want:
Bu-ray Drive
FCP8
Blu-ray DVD Studio Pro
Mac Pro Update NOW

DVD's will be gone in 2 years... CD's are already obsolete...

----------

Originally Posted by VTECaddict

What is your point? It's not exactly headline news that that Mac Pro is more powerful...

My point is Apple doesn't see... Well, my point... The forgot the Pro's...
Apple was built on Professionals. Now they sell millions of cheap, consumer devices like ipods and iphones and mac books and forgot that once upon a time, professional graphic designers, photographers and movie directors were the creative and cool people using Macs. The rest were drones using PC's in a cubicle.

[mkbook]

People in this thread saying it's a mistake to leave China since the workers are treated like slaves and therefore the products are cheaper. Get a better job so you can afford a quality product made in a country that cares about their citizens. Take pride in the fact that your product wasn't made by people working 14 hours a day for pennies but by people treated with respect and dignity.

----------

Originally Posted by ppdix

My point is Apple doesn't see... Well, my point... The forgot the Pro's...
Apple was built on Professionals. Now they sell millions of cheap, consumer devices like ipods and iphones and mac books and forgot that once upon a time, professional graphic designers, photographers and movie directors were the creative and cool people using Macs. The rest were drones using PC's in a cubicle.

Agreed. I think it's a mistake for Apple to forget about the Pros. The other Macs that can't be upgraded or maintained are useless for serious users of computers. It's nice to see them finally updating their flagship Mac.

[TheSpeaker]

Called this one to some colleagues earlier this week. Easiest to assemble, lowest number of sales, highest margin...and they get the PR of being able to say a Mac line is being made in the US.

[Ichabod.]

Originally Posted by faroZ06

Don't the i5 and i7 CPUs have built-in overclocking called "Turbo Boost" anyway? Also, who the @#$% uses PS/2 and lives in 2012?

Yea! A USB-to-PS/2 adapter works fine for my IBM Model M!

<3 buckling springs

[ppdix]

Originally Posted by canucksfan88

enters a $10,000 base price

The great grand mother of the Mac Pro was the Power Mac 8100 in 1995. Base price was $4200 and with all the belts and whistles, it cost over $5500 and it was slow, it crashed constantly and it maxed out at 264MB of RAM and had no USB and it was a bitch to open...
Then came the G5. Which, unbelievably almost 10 years later still looks like a Mac Pro and started at $2000...
I would expect a $2000~$2500 base price for the New 2013 Mac Pro and up to $5000 with all possible upgrades. That's how much mine is worth now.

BTW, in 1991, my first PowerBook, a 140 (greyscale) cost me $3200... It had 4MB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk. The salesman told me not to get the available 80MB hard drive because I was never going to fill it up! HAHAHA
What are people complaining about?

[shortugae]

13" 2012 MacBook Pro

[tbrinkma]

Originally Posted by haruhiko

I suggest you to take a look at any modern factory in China. I'm sure 100 years ago USA was much worse.

Yeah. Back in 1912, people risked death by gruesome accident every day when they went to do their back-breaking work their 12+ hour shift in a factory. The workers in a modern Chinese factory have the uber-risky position of sitting at a bench, assembling small electronics. Scary.

[Hakone]

No wonder it's taking so long.