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Any chance of nnmp in 2018?

pat500000

pat500000

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Jun 3, 2015
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Now that MR articles talked about engineers either leaving or being replaced to work on MBP for the first half of 2017, what are amd's future gpu and chip that are coming up for 2018?

Really though, after reading MR latest news about mac pros and mini being involved in politics and how apple stated that they would manufacture them in China...it really doesn't look like nmp 2017 is gonna happen...EVEN IF THE CHIPS/GPU or whatever are ready to be implemented...politics are hindering our products.
 
It's so hard to say. At this point, if it gets too difficult to manufacture the next-gen Mac Pros, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple axes the line. I think that Macs are generally still pretty great (albeit neutered), but they are a second class citizen for Apple. And, if you're Apple, when you have a product that sells 1-3% of your already-second-class line of products, you start asking yourself "Is it worth it?"

On the other hand, I feel that Apple drip feeds their customers just barely fast enough in order to keep them buying. Wouldn't be surprising to see Apple update the Mac Pro either next year or in 2018 just to "prove" to the Pros that they still care.
 
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Jack Burton said:
I am still amazed that they took a reusable, beautiful aluminum chassis for the classic mac pro and instead made a machine harder to manufacture. That's a special kind of stupid.
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I've never even owned a Mac Pro yet I LOVED the massive aluminum chassis on the older ones! It looked like a proper pro machine (and it was--it was expandable). I personally think the trash can looks cool but if I were shopping for a workstation I wouldn't purchase it.

I remember Apple saying during the keynote that when you need to expand the hardware on the new Mac Pro you can just do it externally with the Thunderbolts ports. I nearly lost it.
 
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pat500000 said:
Suffering from Tim's mystical syndrome.
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This is an autoimmune disease, cannot be healed, only pain relief pills...
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mavericks7913 said:
Keeping a trash can design is VERY meaningless you know. Gosh... Apple destroyed their own Mac environment by themselves. What a shame.
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No MP at all is even more...
 
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v0lume4 said:
It's so hard to say. At this point, if it gets too difficult to manufacture the next-gen Mac Pros, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple axes the line.
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If all these other much smaller tech companies are capable of putting together a computer which uses modern components, and Apple is somehow incapable because the only way they can envision it is to put it in a thermally and volumetrically restrictive enclosure, then frankly they deserve to lose the customer base they've managed to retain up to this point. It's just plain ignorance and stubbornness.

No one would begrudge them just holding their hands up and saying they made a mistake with the trashcan enclosure.. it wasn't the right kind of design, for the kind of horsepower they wanted to pack in there. Just go back to something more traditional and actually release some hardware that does what the customers actually want!!
 
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Chicane-UK said:
If all these other much smaller tech companies are capable of putting together a computer which uses modern components, and Apple is somehow incapable because the only way they can envision it is to put it in a thermally and volumetrically restrictive enclosure, then frankly they deserve to lose the customer base they've managed to retain up to this point. It's just plain ignorance and stubbornness.

No one would begrudge them just holding their hands up and saying they made a mistake with the trashcan enclosure.. it wasn't the right kind of design, for the kind of horsepower they wanted to pack in there. Just go back to something more traditional and actually release some hardware that does what the customers actually want!!
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I agree. However, I can't tell if Apple intentionally saying that to make excuse to ship jobs to china or what. There's too much politics going on involving Mac Pro.
 
Chicane-UK said:
No one would begrudge them just holding their hands up and saying they made a mistake with the trashcan enclosure.. it wasn't the right kind of design, for the kind of horsepower they wanted to pack in there. Just go back to something more traditional and actually release some hardware that does what the customers actually want!!
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Has apple ever said it was wrong in a keynote? I cant recall a time.
 
Can someone please explain to me what is difficult in assembling a Mac Pro? I see its value in the design and in the use of expensive components. But it has nowhere near the size, weight and power constraints that make the assembly of, say, an iPhone so difficult.
 
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Whatever the rumoured politics behind the Mac Pro maybe, the latest one was a solution looking for a problem. The previous one served the needs of the pro users.

Unclear how many of us needed an underpowered, messy, small form factor workstation ? Innovation for the sake of innovation is unnecessary. Give us the tower and let us do the innovation in our works, Apple.

You won't lose face.
 
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Chicane-UK said:
Yes. Steve Jobs definitely held his hands up a few times and admitted when they got it wrong. One of the occasions that springs to mind is the iCloud launch...
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That's somewhat painful to watch how passionate he was when his health was degrading so fast. That commands respect. Anyway, sorry for the OT bit...
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BeechFlyer said:
Can someone please explain to me what is difficult in assembling a Mac Pro? I see its value in the design and in the use of expensive components. But it has nowhere near the size, weight and power constraints that make the assembly of, say, an iPhone so difficult.
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I don't know how "difficult" it is, but if it was made in China it would certainly be cheaper to assemble...
 
BeechFlyer said:
Can someone please explain to me what is difficult in assembling a Mac Pro? I see its value in the design and in the use of expensive components. But it has nowhere near the size, weight and power constraints that make the assembly of, say, an iPhone so difficult.
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The problem is that the PSU and more importantly the unicorn-poop encrusted "thermal core" (AKA shared heat sink) can't handle more than 450 watts. Though a single GPU these days will utterly destroy even the D700 (best card in the nMP, which is really just a heavily binned and UNDERCLOCKED Radeon 7970 circa 2011), even putting two Radeon 480's into the new trash can exceeds the 450watt specification by quite a bit.

So apologists on this board keep on making up imaginary future GPUs that will meet the arbitrary thermal and power requirements of having TWO in the trash can, even though a SINGLE GTX 1080 blows dual D700 out of the water (yet uses the same power).

Not only that but the trash can doesn't sell very well, so economy of scale isn't helping mitigate the added costs of physically constraining a video card down to the unique form-factor. Ergo: Apple /AMD/Nvidia spend gobs of money cramming this thing into the trash can and don't make a reasonable return for their efforts. If Apple were to have adopted a standard sized video card, it'd simply be a matter of buying a bunch of cards, shipping them to the US trashcan assembly facility, and throwing them on the assembly line.

I'll also point out that all of us who dislike the trash can form-factor complained about all these things back in 2013 before the thing even shipped. goMac and others assured us that not only was this a great move but that we'd have user-upgradeable cards in short order.
 
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Morpheo said:
That's somewhat painful to watch how passionate he was when his health was degrading so fast. That commands respect. Anyway, sorry for the OT bit...
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Yeah - it is sad to know that he didn't have long left after this, and it was pretty clear to see he wasn't a well man.

But my point was he wasn't afraid to appear a little 'off script' and self deprecating in some of the keynotes. It's just not a trait I see when Tim speaks.. they seem so fastidiously scripted, marketing focussed and cold these days :(
 
Chicane-UK said:
Yeah - it is sad to know that he didn't have long left after this, and it was pretty clear to see he wasn't a well man.

But my point was he wasn't afraid to appear a little 'off script' and self deprecating in some of the keynotes. It's just not a trait I see when Tim speaks.. they seem so fastidiously scripted, marketing focussed and cold these days :(
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Indeed. Jobs looked like he spoke from his heart, Tim Cook looks like he speaks from a prompter. Not saying he's doing a bad job running Apple, but for one thing Steve Jobs was doing the demos, he was not only the CEO, he was a user too. People connected to that, he believed in Apple's products, he believed in the Mac. Fast forward today, no matter how much "times have changed" people still use computers and it takes more than an iPad or a laptop to do certain things. When I hear Tim Cook during a keynote, everything seems so phony I just wait for the other guys to show up (it's all about "beautiful" and "magical"...). Obviously they are different persons and I'm not judging him, but I miss that from the Steve Jobs era.

Still... I'm glad to hear the desktops will see some refresh/update - hopefully this won't be disappointing...
 
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Chicane-UK said:
No one would begrudge them just holding their hands up and saying they made a mistake with the trashcan enclosure.. it wasn't the right kind of design, for the kind of horsepower they wanted to pack in there. Just go back to something more traditional and actually release some hardware that does what the customers actually want!!
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The MP6,1 isn't a bad system.

Apple should have marketed the trash can as a Mac Mini Pro, and done a major overhaul of the cheese grater chassis with the latest technology - like NVMe disks, 10 GbE, ...

Of course, Apple can still work out a deal to support OSX on select configurations of Z-series or Precision workstations.
 
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