I agree. As a good OS X desktop computer without a screen it could be interesting. The iMac is beautiful product design but I don't want a computer/screen hybrid and the Mini is nice as low end desktop but is too expensive just for that.
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Apple Apologizes About Mac Pro's Lack of Upgradability, Ensures It's Still Committed to Pros
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I agree. As a good OS X desktop computer without a screen it could be interesting. The iMac is beautiful product design but I don't want a computer/screen hybrid and the Mini is nice as low end desktop but is too expensive just for that.
This is what I'm afraid of. They say modular, and the first thing I thought of was external thunderbolt gpu boxes, or thunderbolt displays with GPUs integrated.
Maybe there's been no mini news because the new Mac pro will be a souped-up mini. E5 in a mini sized case and eGPUs over thunderbolt for people who need them.
YESS: we've entered the Post post-PC era !
Anything you can't do with an iPad, which is close everything, you can now do with a Mac
Diversity in MacPro models !!
I am sooo excited (umpfh, getting emotional...) [<= wanted to insert a Mac emoticon here, but wtf, so much searching...]
Anything you can't do with an iPad, which is close everything, you can now do with a Mac
Diversity in MacPro models !!
I am sooo excited (umpfh, getting emotional...) [<= wanted to insert a Mac emoticon here, but wtf, so much searching...]
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I find it interesting that the by now much-derided 'pipeline' word seems to have been replaced by 'horizon line'.
Quote: "We're committed to the Mac, we've got great talent on the Mac, both hardware and software, we've got great products planned for the future, and as far as our horizon line can see, the Mac is a core component of the things Apple delivers, including to our pro customers."
Now we should be happy as they decided to build a new MacPro instead of releasing one now?
Does anybody really intend to buy a completely overpriced current MacPro with outdated grafic cards that has been officially dedicated as a wrong concept?!?
What the heck did they do during the last 3 years? What a horrible management!
Does anybody really intend to buy a completely overpriced current MacPro with outdated grafic cards that has been officially dedicated as a wrong concept?!?
What the heck did they do during the last 3 years? What a horrible management!
Wow. Very surprising talk from Schiller all of the sudden. No less than 3 days after I sent him this email quoted below. I wonder if it was the straw that broke the camel's back. 
Great to see this turn of events, but it will take a heck of a lot for me to fall for Apple's wiles again. This new Mac Pro had better be stunning and everything the Trashcan was not and get some serious long term, dedicated, on-going support both on the hardware, software and 3rd party front. Anything short of that and I'm staying away.
*Not real name used, for privacy reasons.
Great to see this turn of events, but it will take a heck of a lot for me to fall for Apple's wiles again. This new Mac Pro had better be stunning and everything the Trashcan was not and get some serious long term, dedicated, on-going support both on the hardware, software and 3rd party front. Anything short of that and I'm staying away.
Dear Phil,
my name is Lone Deranger*, I’m a Visual Effects/CG-artist working in the film industry. I’m part of a team of artists that won the Oscar, BAFTA and VES for Best Visual Effects with The Jungle Book last month. While I’ve never stood in the spotlights for this (thankfully), it is my third Visual Effects Oscar. Previously winning for Avatar in 2009, and Gravity in 2013. Over the years my colleagues and I have used Macs in various capacities to create these award winning pictures. Yet during the past 2-3 years, Macs have completely disappeared from artist's desks at my company, MPC (The Moving Picture Company). The only Macs you will find here now are older generation MacBooks, used by coordinators for light-weight tasks such as scheduling and taking notes. No Mac Pros anymore of any kind.
My personal 2010 Mac Pro workstation at home will soon need to be replaced. It’s been an amazing machine (in no small part thanks to 3rd party hardware upgrades that Apple never offered), but I fear this time around I will be leaving Apple for a Windows based workstation because Apple, it seems, stopped caring about professional artists who operate on the cutting edge of quality and performance. The 2013 Mac Pro while pretty, never was the machine most of us expected, let alone wanted or needed. Exorbitant price aside, the hardware just didn’t cut the mustard. Not back in 2013, and certainly not now, 3.5 long, neglected years later.
I have been a massive fan, user and evangelist of Apple products for nearly a decade and a half. During which I have bought 2 Mac Pros, 2 iMacs, 4 MacBook Pros, 2 MacBook Airs, 1 PowerBook, 2 iPads, 2 iPhones, 2 iPods, an AppleTV and a host of smaller peripherals. But no longer. I feel deeply disappointed by Apple's abandonment of creative professionals and neglected by the deafening silence towards our creative community.
I get it, our community is small, probably not worth caring about anymore now that there are so many millions of consumers out there looking for a new iPhone or iPad. And yet our work is seen and consumed by hundreds of millions of people around the world. With content creators like myself moving away for more capable (yes, it’s true, I’m sorry to say), Windows/Linux workstations, the once proud slogan 'Made on a Mac’ is dying under your watch. You support musicians through Apple Music and try to glamourise developers with ‘Planet of the Apps’, yet you abandon CG-Artists. Artists that so desperately want to continue to practice their craft on an OSX machine with enough horse-power to enable them to flex their creative muscles. And no, 27” iMacs, or 15” Touch-bars do not suffice at the VFX Oscar level. Not by a long shot.
The crippling of the Mac Pro product line is one thing, but to now see it being done to the MacBook Pro line too is a double blow. Again, it’s a beautiful machine, both inside and out. But it’s hamstrung. Please leave the 'thinness at all costs' design for the MacBook line if you can, which, lets face it, is the product for consumers. There is no justifiable rationale that says that both product lines need to be equally thin at the expense of performance. Smaller at the expense of everything performance-driven users need. What point is there in shaving off a few more millimetres from the enclosure when I have to carry some dongles and a card-reader in my bag? To the professional, those are just extra points of failure in the long run. More things I have to keep track of. Heaven forbid I should forget one, or someone borrows it on set, and it gets lost. Then where is the world class I/O functionality I had with my older MBP?
Apple is always touting that they are on the cutting edge of new technologies and pushing the envelope. Well,... so are we, the VFX-artists. We need to push just as hard as you do. Our industry is no doubt just as cut-throat and ruthless as yours is. It evolves at break-neck speed while Hollywood (our client) is utterly relentless in their quest to cut costs. To keep our heads above the water, we need to operate at the very pinnacle of digital imagery. Delivering better work faster and smarter all the time. Our software (Maya, Pixar’s PRMan, Nuke, ZBrush, etc.) is always being pushed to give us more. And through the ingenuity of the developers and artists… we get better results and stay afloat. But our Macs are the one area where the limit has been reached a long time ago, they have become the weakest link. You used to help push the limits by giving us regular hardware updates and it was great. You allowed us to add upgrades, such as storage, newer GPUs, more RAM, etc. and we could stay ahead of the curve. Where have you gone? What happened? Why have you stopped supporting us?
You recently spoke of courage to make design decisions. Courage is also admitting not hitting the mark. Like: "Hey, maybe we didn't get it quite right for everybody. Maybe we should listen to users out there. Let's learn from this and do better next time”.
There are a lot of Pro users out there thinking that labelling the 2016 MBP with the ‘Pro’ moniker is a mistake. That the 2013 Mac Pro is not the next step in workstation design they are needing to do their job. If you don’t want to take these concerns seriously, then you are failing a group of your oldest and loyal customers, and the time might be there for us to move on.
I truly hope it won’t come to that.
Thank you for listening,
Lone Deranger*
Visual Effects Artist
ps. If you can’t quite bring your team to make thicker laptops, why not re-introduce the 17” models? Add the much missed anti-glare option (yes, we really need it!) and make the gigantic trackpad work with the Apple Pencil, as if it was a Wacom tablet. Really, it’s okay to add a higher Ram ceiling at the expense of battery life. The bigger bag we have to buy to house the dongles will hold the adapter too.
*Not real name used, for privacy reasons.
At least, with the 2013 design, they could theoretically delegate the PCIe functionality to an external enclosure connected via Thunderbolt 3. Now, the single-CPU-socket motherboard has always puzzled me. Don't they want to take advantage of the Xeon's ability to run multiple in parallel? Am I missing something?
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I wish. I've successfully set up multiple Hackintoshes but have never considered them a viable alternative. If an update or something screws up my work machine, I'm finished, and I cannot use "my Hackintosh broke" as an excuse.
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1: You mean multiple cores or multiple CPU chips? Once you buy Xeon, you're already assuming you're using parallel processing, else you'd buy i7 with fewer cores and better per-core performance. Apple only put one CPU chip in the latest Mac Pro, but older ones (like mine) had 2. There are some more nuanced performance considerations that come with that.
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With the exception of Angry Birds, this was always true. People use iPads for work, but I don't know those people... everyone I know uses a Mac or other PC. Makes a lot more sense in most cases.
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It oughtta replace the super overpriced Mac mini that they still claim is "important" but is likely getting the axe. Seriously, for those who need something more than a low-end machine, the Mac Pro is way overkill for most. Lots of expensive enterprise-grade features like Xeon performance, ECC, multi-socket CPU support, dual GPUs, NUMA, etc in the Mac Pro, and its parts are rarely upgraded. Consumer-grade isn't a whole lot worse but is a whole lot cheaper, assuming new vs new (since used servers are hella cheap).
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I wish. I've successfully set up multiple Hackintoshes but have never considered them a viable alternative. If an update or something screws up my work machine, I'm finished, and I cannot use "my Hackintosh broke" as an excuse.
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1: You mean multiple cores or multiple CPU chips? Once you buy Xeon, you're already assuming you're using parallel processing, else you'd buy i7 with fewer cores and better per-core performance. Apple only put one CPU chip in the latest Mac Pro, but older ones (like mine) had 2. There are some more nuanced performance considerations that come with that.
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Absolutely agree - but that's mainly because they're unsupported by Apple, are liable to be broken by the next software update, technically breach the software license and hence certainly shouldn't be used for commercial purposes. Anyway, I wasn't making a serious suggestion - just making the point that building a MacOS-compatible machine with generic PC parts is not even rocket science.
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Don't lots of businesses get their IT kit on 3 year leases? There are good tax reasons to have your hardware as a "cost of doing business" rather than a capital asset.
That would nicely explain why the fertiliser started hitting the fan about now...
Christ, you're never happy, are you?
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Well, if YOU reject their apology, I'm sure they'll have to rethink their entire strategy. Tim Cook has called an emergency meeting based on you not being satisfied, I imagine.
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Wow. Very surprising talk from Schiller all of the sudden. No less than 3 days after I sent him this email quoted below. I wonder if it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Great to see this turn of events, but it will take a heck of a lot for me to fall for Apple's wiles again. This new Mac Pro had better be stunning and everything the Trashcan was not and get some serious long term, dedicated, on-going support both on the hardware, software and 3rd party front. Anything short of that and I'm staying away.
*Not real name used, for privacy reasons.
Bloody hell, a detractor who is both articulate and measured; good work, sir.
Well, let's face it - not yet. Nothing has changed other than a spec bump and a price reduction. Still the same limiting internal design, still only Thunderbolt 2 with no USB-C and still bloody expensive for what it is. Added to the fact that there's a new machine coming *somewhere* around the corner, where's the *real* incentive to purchase now compared to yesterday? Jeez - when I look at the Apple site and see that all you get in the box for the money is the machine and a power cord, I can't help but feel I'm being ripped off if I buy one! The bitching is not going to stop yet...
Real internal expansion slots are dead. Most PCs don't have room for anything except an extra graphics card. Everything else is 4x and lower now. CPUs simply dont have the io to drive much more stuff now without getting into exotic server hardware. Even with a staggering 40 PCIE 3.0 lanes (i7 and Xeon LGA 2011-3) that's only enough for two GPUs (16x each) and two more devices like TB3 or M.2 (at 4x) unless you take lanes away from graphics you don't get more. Apple won't go backwards and put retired slots back in. The same with drives, disks are out SSDs are in and there's no going back. One M.2 is equivalent in bandwidth to SATA3 with FIVE drives in RAID. USB3 is enough bandwidth to max out spinning disk for another few years.
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Dual CPU is done. Intel stratified that right out of reasonabity. Go lookup a LGA 2011-3 dual motherboard, they're not something Apple would ever use again with parts spread out all over the board and oppressive thermal requirements. Intel's chipset and pricing options mean Apple would have to make two completely different products just to support Dual CPUs as its far to expensive to just "leave sockets open" on those boards.
"there were growing concerns that Apple no longer cared about professional users"
Not concerns, when you over charge for years old tech, which has been vastly surpassed by the rest of the industry, your actions show you don't care.
They could have put better GPUs in the refreshed models. The current cards are crap.
Apple is on its way out. They current answer to professionals is but this now discounted ( ha ) years old hardware in the hopes that in the future you can by a whole new machine when you need to upgrade.
Cant justify Apple purchases anymore. It used to be overprices, but current tech. Now its just overprices.
Not concerns, when you over charge for years old tech, which has been vastly surpassed by the rest of the industry, your actions show you don't care.
They could have put better GPUs in the refreshed models. The current cards are crap.
Apple is on its way out. They current answer to professionals is but this now discounted ( ha ) years old hardware in the hopes that in the future you can by a whole new machine when you need to upgrade.
Cant justify Apple purchases anymore. It used to be overprices, but current tech. Now its just overprices.
I'm very interested to see if the next one is made in the usa as well. That decision must have added to the cost, and reduced the flexibility to reduce the retail price.
The recipe for the next one seems so simple. Fast and upgradable with osx. Packaging is nice to have, but isnt fundamental. The current mac pro is pure vanity.
The recipe for the next one seems so simple. Fast and upgradable with osx. Packaging is nice to have, but isnt fundamental. The current mac pro is pure vanity.
Think you are being a bit harsh. In isolation maybe, but I suspect a lot of emails were sent. No successful company can ignore its customers. It might all be too late for me though, I don't think my existing Mac Pro can last another year and I just don't want the existing offering, even with a price cut.
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Are you happy with it?
Lets see what Apple releases first.
The Trash Can was definitely form over functionality. Sure it looks nice.. but functionality is more important. It has little in the way of internal expansion. Its as if Apple did not understand "Pro" user needs.
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Strange, I've seen plenty of Pcs that have great expandability. Those all in ones may be limited, but the rest.. different story. If you are buying a PC, its better to build one yourself - or getting a computer shop to do it for you. Cheaper than off the shelf in most cases, and you get the components that you want, instead of junk.
The narrative here, "Oh gosh, we're sooo sorry, please give us a year blah, blah, blah", doesn't jibe with the reality. Apple has all the money and resources in the world, a crack marketing department with near real-time feedback from retail, and it took them three years to reach this conclusion? Something else is afoot here and my guess is they are going to open MacOS to retail, end-user licensing, and the current crop of Macs are the last Apple branded products you will see with intel CPUs. In the future if you want to run MacOS, you'll buy your own intel box to run it. Everything else Apple sells will have iOS and A-series CPUs.
Real internal expansion slots are dead? For professional machines?
Best not tell all the PC motherboard manufactures are they do seem to be producing generation after generation of full sized board with lots of slots.
I bought a new golf etrolley instead of a new MacPro today. Thanks Apple.
My good old 5.1 may keep on working another year or better lets say 2 years...
My good old 5.1 may keep on working another year or better lets say 2 years...
I'm calling it now. The nnMP when it finally comes out three years from now (they didn't say 2018), will have one slot, soldered down memory, and room for one or two SSDs with proprietary connectors. This will be Apple's definition of "upgradable".
Keep the trash can cool form factor for the mac mini, and address the pro machine issues with a new form factor??
