Apple Apologizes About Mac Pro's Lack of Upgradability, Ensures It's Still Committed to Pros

[cwkoller5]

I'm willing to bet that Hollywood has been chewing Apple's ear over this, especially now that Final Cut Pro X has been fixed (from *its* initial debacle). Doubt they'll go to market without bringing in some serious pros to consult and bless the designs. They'll make this right. Late, and probably expensive, but ... uh ... right.

 

[Lone Deranger]

Bloody hell, a detractor who is both articulate and measured; good work, sir.

Thank you.

 

[btrach144]

Christ, you're never happy, are you?
[doublepost=1491387993][/doublepost]

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.
[doublepost=1491388255][/doublepost]

Bloody hell, a detractor who is both articulate and measured; good work, sir.

I bet you'd fall on a sword for Apple. Until they actually produce new Mac products, it's nothing more than lip service.

 

[kwikdeth]

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.

you're not looking at the entire picture of how a CPU interacts with the system and you're overlooking DMI. DMI has always been the method through which USB peripherals and SATA disks, along with other peripherals, communicate with the CPU, its done this way to avoid stealing valuable PCIe lanes for simple peripherals. Desktop class CPUs like in the iMacs only have 16 PCIe lanes total in the entire CPU package, so by the rationale you describe, no iMac ever made would be capable of utilizing its graphics cards to their full potential since it has to share its 16 lanes between everything in the computer. It simply does not work that way. That doesnt even account for the fact that the newer CPUs have support for things like 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes in addition to 4 PCIe 2.0 lanes AND DMI3 on top of that. and such. Also, that's 40 lanes per processor. If Apple chose to go back to a dual-CPU system the entire point becomes moot.

I do agree with your sentiment about disk drives. However, its the lack of those "retired" slots that got Apple into this entire mess to begin with. "exotic server hardware"? That's what the mac pro IS!!! its always used server grade hardware since they went to Intel. The only time it wasnt was when they decided to put server grade parts into a case that wasnt really suited for the purpose. they use 26xx CPUs in the higher configs which are, by design, for dual-cpu use case (2xxx cpus)

 

[Greymacuser]

Again, we don't believe you Apple. Actions speak louder than words, and we haven't seen any action from Apple since 2012.

 

[paulomagrani]

"Can't apologize anymore my ass" ;(
Let's rise the Hackintosh to a new era!

 

[sevoneone]

[doublepost=1491327560][/doublepost]Jony Ives in charge of design or pro hardware = No Hope.

I agree whole heartedly with this. Jony is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a brilliant designer and one of two people left that made Apple what it is. However, they must understand by now that Pro and Prosumer users are not typical consumers that buy a PC off the shelf every 3-5 years and never upgrade it.

 

[kyykesko]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA....
Wait, April fools was 3 days ago!

You're just not using your Apple calendar right!

Honestly, still waiting for even one pro laptop to be added to their collection. Maybe one day. I just fear I won't be around when that happens.

 

[groove-agent]

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.

Well done. Your letter completely exemplifies how I feel also .. especially bringing back antiglare screens. I don't understand how glossy screens have become mainstream when they're proven to increase eye fatigue.
[doublepost=1491459821][/doublepost]I've been getting tired of Apple's incompetency, lack of productivity and poor excuses and starting to look at PCs again. I built a Hackintosh, but miss using a laptop so I've been looking at competing products. As a result, I'm discovering the newly released MacBook *Pro* really doesn't look pro at all by comparison.

I'm comparing it to some of the Lenovo Think Pad, which can go up to 64 GB RAM, Xeon processors, at least 2 drives, NVIDIA Quadro GPU with 2-8 GB VRAM, and thunderbolt 3. Oh but it's not thin but it still has plenty of ports to plug stuff in. I shouldn't have to buy extra cables to charge my iPhone.

The new Dell XPS15 is a beautiful machine with thunderbolt 3, 7th generation processors, user replaceable memory (up to 32GB), NVIDIA GTX 1050 w/ 4GB GPU on a LCD screen that has tiny bezel (it looks great!).

Even Microsoft has a great idea value-wise with the Surface combining tablet, laptop, and desktop features in one unit. I have 3 Apple products which cost more than the surface.

Windows 10 boots in 3 seconds on my hackintosh. MacOS Sierra boots in 10+ seconds. Same kind of difference dual booting my MBP. That's sloppy.

Whether you like these products or not, you have to admit, Apple is far behind the competition for value. They still have some useful features esp. software wise in MacOS but the gap is closing quickly.

 

[Digital Dude]

I'm surprised they finally admitted they miss judged what the consumer wants. It's been one bad design after another and I didn't think they cared at all what we thought. By the time they get this new Mac Pro ready for market, many current pro users will be long gone.

 

[groove-agent]

I don't know if it's bad design, but negligence on their part. However, I have to admit, the Mac Pro was overpriced for what it was, and you could hardly customize it (which is the mistake I think they're admitting).

What I don't understand is what they've been doing for the last 3 years. Maybe they thought they could convince everyone to use an iPad for a computer? I thought they might have been working on new ARM-based platform which would explain the delay. However, they seem to have NOTHING and are just getting started now. If so, this is completely awful management of a company with such huge resources at their disposal. There is no excuse really.

I'm surprised they finally admitted they miss judged what the consumer wants. It's been one bad design after another and I didn't think they cared at all what we thought. By the time they get this new Mac Pro ready for market, many current pro users will be long gone.

 

[sudo1996]

I meant GPUs, not CPUs. Corrected my original post.

Ah yes. Dual GPUs are exotic. Actually, support even for one GPU is really sketchy across the industry, compared to CPUs, and this is becoming relevant for machine learning.

 

[Cineplex]

Really? What did you tell him?

I had a broken Mac that nobody wanted to fix. He got it fixed.

 

[0388631]

Any idea if they'll use a white trashcan for the next gen of Mac Mini if it comes to that?

 

[zooby]

.

 

[Suribacktofront]

I suspect the main reason they are talking about a future product at least 9 months out is that they are doing a minor spec bump of the mac pro, probably without thunderbolt 3. Apple is probably concerned about further alienating pros by releasing a pure spec update after all this time without any further information.

The trash can pro was an innovative design, but that doesn't mean it was a successful one. It targeted what perhaps should have been the way the industry went, rather than the way it did. While Apple has pushed parallel software supporting multiple CPU cores and openCL via multiple GPU as a way to scale out for years now, the software industry has been very slow to adopt these more difficult development techniques - instead, the industry has focused on optimizing their CPU bound code (since CPUs are no longer doubling in performance every other year) and offloading logic onto a single GPU (which are still gaining performance by leaps and bounds).

Apple presumably saw that most customers never upgraded the Pro models, which lets it a much larger (hollow) machine that had to have its power requirements and cooling built to adapt either being empty or fully loaded. They built the machine solely around its own power and cooling needs - but this wound up being a limitation when the market showed that people wanted more speed and less cores/GPU, hence them painting themselves into a "thermal" corner.

The idea was that since thunderbolt is basically external PCI-express, any accessory that could go inside the machine could be added as an external accessory. However, thunderbolt isn't a standard but an Intel product, and accessories have generally been limited. The market for an external mac-compatible graphics card/GPU for example never materialized.

I suspect the pro development team has been working on trying to shoehorn more traditional workstation architecture into the form factor for a while, and the spec upgrade this week is most likely the result of an internal decision (probably sometime last year) that the machine just needs to be redesigned.

 

[phillytim]

Apple is still committed to Pros? Lol. That's hard to believe after the recently released MacBook "Pros"

THIS. A MILLION TIMES A MILLION TIMES!
[doublepost=1491997284][/doublepost]

The magic is gone at this company.

Rather than surprise and delight, they've disappointed so many times that they feel guilty enough to come out and tell people what's in the product pipeline.

Imagine the product introductions years ago... not a single thing mentioned before the curtain was lifted. Now we have a circus sideshow.

Every single day I pray that my 2011 MacBook Pro keeps chugging along. In 2011 I was ecstatic to throw money at a solid Apple computer. My how things have changed, here in 2017.

If my 2011 MBPro died today, I would be so traumatized as to which replacement computer I'd pick up - I'm NOT happy with Apple's current MacBook Pro offerings, at all - overpriced, non-upgradeable (=disposable) junk, is my opinion of them.

And that is not something I am comfortable throwing a couple thousand dollars at! I may switch to a nice Windows laptop, if my back was to the wall.

 

[DeepIn2U]

as ive always said, the nMP should have just been the "Mac", and the Mac Pro kept going as the real Mac Pro. The new mac pro is an amazing looking machine, its not a bad machine... its just not what was needed in that segment.

and heat. most of the Cubes are dead now from heat killing the PSUs.

Heat was NOT a problem for the Cubes .. not unless you ran these units more than 4yrs old with the latest software that crushed the G4 500Mhz cpu.

The Cubed died simply because of the Plastic forming bubbles and cracks in production that was far too brittle and broke under it's own weight it's maiden year. Far too many returns under warranty costed more than Apple was pulling in for ALL the G4's (remember the Sawtooth was around, not the QuickSilver). Loved the G4 Cube and I'd buy a working model right now if I could just for nostalgia and art piece reasons.