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Apple Continues to Work on All-New Mac Pro With Upgradeable Design
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Just checked mactracker to remember the old day Pro Mac prices. 1300-2500$ for the G3, G4, G5 generations. Now the Pro line costs 5000-13000$.
So I suppose what happened is, the pro workstation became obsolete. Nobody needs one, so they are this expensive now. The intel switch is only partly responsible for this. 95% of all people that bought a Pro Mac back in those days are using laptops and entry level iMacs nowadays, which still cost around 1300$.
So I suppose what happened is, the pro workstation became obsolete. Nobody needs one, so they are this expensive now. The intel switch is only partly responsible for this. 95% of all people that bought a Pro Mac back in those days are using laptops and entry level iMacs nowadays, which still cost around 1300$.
Pseudo conspiracy theory:
I always thought that the 2013 Pro Cylinder was really designed for Wall Street. The "professional" traders who could bump up AAPL's stock price want multi-monitor support and were willing to spend a premium for something that looked trendy. Apple provided support for six monitors out of the box and figured nothing else mattered.
I always thought that the 2013 Pro Cylinder was really designed for Wall Street. The "professional" traders who could bump up AAPL's stock price want multi-monitor support and were willing to spend a premium for something that looked trendy. Apple provided support for six monitors out of the box and figured nothing else mattered.
That's pretty much it. iMacs and MacBook Pros have more than enough processing power and memory for a lot of the tasks that people used to need to buy an aluminum Mac Pro for. The 2013 Mac Pro redesign was the original acknowledgment by Apple that the "pro" desktop needed to target a much higher level of processing. It wasn't a machine that you would buy to run the Adobe Creative Suite or do 1080p video editing like the old aluminum Mac Pros.
MacAddict1978
macrumors 68000
There is no excuse for Apple's laziness with hardware updates. Some things are as simple as popping in the latest processor.... hello neglected Mac Mini. The trash can Mac Pro had no reason to not see annual refreshes. How hard is it to do this? Not very.
How do you trust Apple after such neglect and abuse in pro hardware and software? I personally don't. Five years from now, will the current i-Mac Pro be the same bloody model like the trash can?
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If they just brought that back, I'd buy it like yesterday. Offer builds with the current i-7/i-5 for people who just want a tower. I miss the days of choice in the Mac line up. There are still people who wants something that isn't a laptop, but making something that the user can upgrade isn't good for Apple's money bin.
How do you trust Apple after such neglect and abuse in pro hardware and software? I personally don't. Five years from now, will the current i-Mac Pro be the same bloody model like the trash can?
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If they just brought that back, I'd buy it like yesterday. Offer builds with the current i-7/i-5 for people who just want a tower. I miss the days of choice in the Mac line up. There are still people who wants something that isn't a laptop, but making something that the user can upgrade isn't good for Apple's money bin.
cmaier
Suspended
I owned a G5 aluminum Mac Pro and a 2009 8-core Xeon aluminum Mac Pro and I'm not that nostalgic for it. At the time, it was a solid solution for providing access to the internals. However, it was extremely heavy and collected a lot of dust internally over the years. Plus, even though you could update the GPU internally to newer/cheaper PC graphics cards once Mavericks came out, the older motherboard reduced the performance pretty significantly. I had a GTX 970 in my 2009 and although it allowed me to run a 4K monitor, the graphics performance wasn't that much better. The extra memory helped, but that was about it. IMO, the eGPU support that Apple has now committed to is a better solution for upgrading graphics cards.
Ishayu
macrumors regular
It's very likely that I'll get the Mac Pro, even though I cannot afford the iMac Pro.
The reason I can afford the Mac Pro and not the iMac Pro is precisely that I can upgrade it. You see, this allows me to use my existing display, mouse and keyboard, and it allows me to stick all my current internal storage into it, so I don't have to order all of that over again from Apple.
I completely appreciate that the iMac is a great product and even a great value if you have literally 0 computer components lying around already, but for most of us that isn't the case. I switched to the PC previously because Apple just didn't offer a solution I was happy with, and if they want me back, they can't ask me throw all my stuff out.
If the display is very good as well I might very well buy that LATER, when I can afford it after recovering from buying the Mac Pro itself.
Gasu E.
macrumors 603
Those positions are not inconsistent. The 2013 design worked optimally for 2013 components, supporting the goal of minimizing fan noise. But the single fan design wasn't can't handle 2017 components.
I'm a "pro" user.
I kind of actually hate that label since many people using computers at all levels are professionals. That said, I generate 2K to 6K 3D animated content for feature films, television, and interactive installations. So I'm imagining that I'm the target audience for a pro level machine.
The current trash can pro was fairly useless to us when it first came out (not enough upgradable components compared to the price). Since then, the price/performance ratio has fallen through the floor to the point that a generic pc at half the price can outperform the trash cans in most metrics that matter to us.
Even though our studio had over a hundred previous gen Mac pros, we have only purchased two trash can pros since that time. We still run the older cheese grater Macs because we have been able to upgrade them over time (though they are clearly only secondary computers for most artists now).
Our primary machines are multi core Xeon computers running Linux, with some of them running Windows.
That's the background.
The iMac pro is a complete non starter for us. Way way way too expensive. I have seen some people here argue that it is a machine targeted at larger companies that will buy hundreds of them (vs. Independent shops that can't afford them). In our case that is competent wrong. Even though we purchase computers by the hundreds, we cannot afford to buy machines that are so inflexible. We need to be able to separate the screen from the computer (we update each on different cycles). We need to be able to upgrade the memory (not every artist needs the same amount of RAM, but we need to be able to shuffle the machines from one artists desk to another. Fixed RAM means we have to buy the max spec for everyone which adds up). We need to be able to upgrade video cards (we keep machines for a number of years and graphics cards are changing at a very rapid pace. Also, some users will need the top end GPU, while others barely need more than integrated graphics level of power even though they need the max CPU setup).
Frankly, the iMac pro, to us, looks like a boutique machine with a very niche appeal. It is for people and organizations that value OSX very highly but for whom a regular i7 isn't powerful enough, who purchase a machine relatively often but don't ever change its usage, who can live with a fixed, rigid setup, and who are in industries that probably have a higher income. For these people, the iMac pro might be prefect and for them I strongly encourage getting one. But that is a very limited set of people. I think the iMac pro is mostly a publicity stunt.
The modular Mac Pro will have to address all of these issues of it is to be taken seriously by my company (and I'm sure we are fairly representative). Of course by now Apple has had something like nine years of duds in the "pro" marketplace. That's a lot of missteps that they have to overcome in order to convince many of us that they actually know what they are doing. It's also a lot of time for many of us to have given up and switch to Linux or Windows. So the new pro had better be a real knock out in order to reverse this slide.
Unfortunately there are plenty of signs that Apple isn't interested in anything other than boutique systems and locked down, proprietary hardware. No user upgradable RAM in the iMac pro? There isn't a single engineering reason for that. It's a cash grab, and a fairly obvious one at that. Same with the sealed mini. I'm not hopeful that their new "upgradable" pro will actually be upgradable in any way that most people think of when they imagine a pro computer. I suspect it is going to be a bunch of external enclosures connected with some sort of cable (thunderbolt or something proprietary). Sure that will be upgradable, but the cost will be high. Just like on the current pro where people suggested that all you need to do is plug in an external thunderbolt enclosure to add storage. While it works, it also adds hundreds of dollars to the cost of adding storage vs. doing it in a tower.
If this is the route Apple takes it won't be enough to bring us back. They'll make their cash like always, but they won't take over the very high end of the market. It's probably not something they really care about anyway since it's a relatively small market. But I'll be disappointed (but only slightly since I've already switched to a twelve core Xeon running centOS at home for less than half of a Mac Pro, and am looking at upgrading to a threadripper - a switch, btw, that made it easier for me to switch to a Pixel vs. my old iPhone too. It also opened me up to the idea of not needing Macs so much and so I also swapped out our iPad and our macbook Air for a chrome book).
Just my observations. I hope Apple comes out with a killer pro. I suspect, though, that it will be gorgeous and completely out of the question for us because what Apple thinks a working "pro" studio needs and what they really need are not the same thing.
I kind of actually hate that label since many people using computers at all levels are professionals. That said, I generate 2K to 6K 3D animated content for feature films, television, and interactive installations. So I'm imagining that I'm the target audience for a pro level machine.
The current trash can pro was fairly useless to us when it first came out (not enough upgradable components compared to the price). Since then, the price/performance ratio has fallen through the floor to the point that a generic pc at half the price can outperform the trash cans in most metrics that matter to us.
Even though our studio had over a hundred previous gen Mac pros, we have only purchased two trash can pros since that time. We still run the older cheese grater Macs because we have been able to upgrade them over time (though they are clearly only secondary computers for most artists now).
Our primary machines are multi core Xeon computers running Linux, with some of them running Windows.
That's the background.
The iMac pro is a complete non starter for us. Way way way too expensive. I have seen some people here argue that it is a machine targeted at larger companies that will buy hundreds of them (vs. Independent shops that can't afford them). In our case that is competent wrong. Even though we purchase computers by the hundreds, we cannot afford to buy machines that are so inflexible. We need to be able to separate the screen from the computer (we update each on different cycles). We need to be able to upgrade the memory (not every artist needs the same amount of RAM, but we need to be able to shuffle the machines from one artists desk to another. Fixed RAM means we have to buy the max spec for everyone which adds up). We need to be able to upgrade video cards (we keep machines for a number of years and graphics cards are changing at a very rapid pace. Also, some users will need the top end GPU, while others barely need more than integrated graphics level of power even though they need the max CPU setup).
Frankly, the iMac pro, to us, looks like a boutique machine with a very niche appeal. It is for people and organizations that value OSX very highly but for whom a regular i7 isn't powerful enough, who purchase a machine relatively often but don't ever change its usage, who can live with a fixed, rigid setup, and who are in industries that probably have a higher income. For these people, the iMac pro might be prefect and for them I strongly encourage getting one. But that is a very limited set of people. I think the iMac pro is mostly a publicity stunt.
The modular Mac Pro will have to address all of these issues of it is to be taken seriously by my company (and I'm sure we are fairly representative). Of course by now Apple has had something like nine years of duds in the "pro" marketplace. That's a lot of missteps that they have to overcome in order to convince many of us that they actually know what they are doing. It's also a lot of time for many of us to have given up and switch to Linux or Windows. So the new pro had better be a real knock out in order to reverse this slide.
Unfortunately there are plenty of signs that Apple isn't interested in anything other than boutique systems and locked down, proprietary hardware. No user upgradable RAM in the iMac pro? There isn't a single engineering reason for that. It's a cash grab, and a fairly obvious one at that. Same with the sealed mini. I'm not hopeful that their new "upgradable" pro will actually be upgradable in any way that most people think of when they imagine a pro computer. I suspect it is going to be a bunch of external enclosures connected with some sort of cable (thunderbolt or something proprietary). Sure that will be upgradable, but the cost will be high. Just like on the current pro where people suggested that all you need to do is plug in an external thunderbolt enclosure to add storage. While it works, it also adds hundreds of dollars to the cost of adding storage vs. doing it in a tower.
If this is the route Apple takes it won't be enough to bring us back. They'll make their cash like always, but they won't take over the very high end of the market. It's probably not something they really care about anyway since it's a relatively small market. But I'll be disappointed (but only slightly since I've already switched to a twelve core Xeon running centOS at home for less than half of a Mac Pro, and am looking at upgrading to a threadripper - a switch, btw, that made it easier for me to switch to a Pixel vs. my old iPhone too. It also opened me up to the idea of not needing Macs so much and so I also swapped out our iPad and our macbook Air for a chrome book).
Just my observations. I hope Apple comes out with a killer pro. I suspect, though, that it will be gorgeous and completely out of the question for us because what Apple thinks a working "pro" studio needs and what they really need are not the same thing.
I think the current trash can design is a pretty awesome idea so long as it doubles or even triples in size. This would give it enough space to upgrade CPU, RAM, GPU, and memory for whatever will be necessary. Form AND function.
There are so many logical fallacies in this argument. I get the preference for having a traditional tower that you can store everything internally, but argueing that having an updated Mac Pro is going to be cheaper than an iMac Pro in the long run is way off base. For all components you’ve listed there isn’t a single one besides possibly the display that makes very much sense.
- Keyboard/Mouse - the iMac Pro’s slate gray keyboard, mouse and track-pad are already in such high demand you could easily buy an iMac Pro and resale the keyboard, mouse and trackpad at substantial profit. I’m almost certain these could easily be resold on eBay after purchase for $75 for the mouse, $100-$150 for the keyboard, and $150-$200 for the trackpad. When the iMac Pro was first shown, those are things that many got excited about.
- Display - you said yourself you’d likely get a new display eventually for the Mac Pro. Why not just keep your current display and use it with the iMac Pro. Most people that work seriously on their computers that I know of find a single display cumbersome even when it is is a nice as the 5K display in the iMac.
- Storage Components - TB3/USBC enclosure are cheap. For the money you’d get from selling the mouse/keyboard/trackpad you could easily buy a nice 4-6 bay TB3 enclosure.
- Apple releases a new Mac Pro that looks a lot more like the trash can Mac Pro than the cheese grater one. It will continue to use TB expansion for everything except RAM, NVMe slots, and possibly a GPU. I highly doubt the new Mac Pro will have any SATA or SAS port internally, those are legacy interfaces now that would have died off 5 years ago if intel/Apple and even Dell and HP had their way.
- The new Mac Pro will likely be based on a dual or quad socket Xeon design, and the price will likely start at $7500+ without the keyboard mouse or display. That is the type of computer they mean when they say it will be designed for the most demanding workloads.
Dekema2
macrumors 6502a
I hope people here don't forget the fanfare involved with the previous model, "can't innovate anymore my ass," and the trailers with tantalizing cutscenes that made it seem like it would be the best computer since sliced bread. That was only 4 years ago. It turns out that isn't a timeless design, like the model before it which lasted for over a decade.
mac_in_tosh
macrumors 6502a
In the past, I've purchased a G4 and later a G5. The base models were sufficient and affordable for my non-pro needs and I was able and willing to pay the Apple tax for them. Considering that the iMac Pro starts at $5,000 and the Mac Pro will no doubt be more expensive, I will not be purchasing either of these. It appears the iMac is still the only affordable choice for enthusiast photographers or videographers, but I will not go for a sealed, soldered, glued system incapable of upgrading, and never liked the idea of an all-in-one. So while the recent news may be welcomed by the pro community, I think there are still a lot of people like me who will continue to be disappointed with Mac options. As a result, I purchased a Dell desktop running Windows 10 about 1.5 years ago, for photo and video editing, and so far it has not diasppointed.
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I’d still buy one today if it had just been upgraded every year. I think neglect played as big of a role in the demise of the Mac Pro as the design did.
That design with an i7-8700k, an RX580, and multiple user accessible NVMe slots would be a great desktop. Not super high performance, so I think the design would fit the target demographic better. Just a really killer prosumer level desktop.
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DanielSw
macrumors 6502
I think the design of the new Mac Pro will be largely predicated on Thunderbolt. Maybe even Thunderbolt Fiber for good throughput. Then there'll be separate (modular) card cages for those who need/want them, and, of course, the new Apple Display(s).
bommai
macrumors 6502a
At work, I use a HP Z840 workstation with two 8-core Xeons (for a total of 16 real cores doubled to 32 virtual hypervisor cores), 128GB of ECC RAM, 500GB SSD, Nvidia Quattro video card with 8GB of RAM and 3 display ports support. The internals are nicely laid out and it has two ethernet ports on the back along with a myriad of ports. This is standard issue for all the engineers. I think it is overkill since a HP Z440 would suffice. What is so hard to make a workstation like this? You don't have to innovate in all fields. You have to focus on the innovation. For pro hardware, the software should be the innovation. Let the developers innovate with software and plug in hardware. All the thinness, and whizbang looks are not going to win the bread!
Here is a link to HP Z840. It is a well designed machine.
Apple has the wrong idea that pros are just consumers with more money. Wrong. Pros don't want to spend too much money on things that don't add value. They want the ease of replacing memory and storage. They want long lifespan, reliability, and cost effectiveness. They want the ability to virtualize environments such as iOS, tvOS and macOS, and may be even watchOS. They want virtual machines and ones especially tailored for testing, development, etc.
Here is a link to HP Z840. It is a well designed machine.
Apple has the wrong idea that pros are just consumers with more money. Wrong. Pros don't want to spend too much money on things that don't add value. They want the ease of replacing memory and storage. They want long lifespan, reliability, and cost effectiveness. They want the ability to virtualize environments such as iOS, tvOS and macOS, and may be even watchOS. They want virtual machines and ones especially tailored for testing, development, etc.
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Ishayu
macrumors regular
I'm going to number the points 1-3.
1. Keyboard and mouse can indeed be resold, and I would indeed do that in a heartbeat, however buying the iMac Pro in the first place requires considerable capital. I cannot rely on being able to sell what I have after the fact. The money flow is larger than what I have available, simply because I haven't been in my job for very long and recently came out of education. And frankly, it's ridiculous that I should even have to go through all of that.
2. This counterargument makes no sense. The problem is not the number of displays, but rather the cost that this display adds to the price of the computer. I cannot afford the computer and the display simultaneously - they add up to too much. Also, call me crazy, but I actually don't like multiple displays. I have 2 displays, and one of them is almost permanently disconnected and turned off. I prefer virtual desktops.
3. I don't have that money. This point collides with point 1 directly. Maybe I can afford it if I don't have to buy the screen simultaneously. I could also buy it on financing, but the costs are just too great.
I agree entirely with Apple on how they are handling expansion, but GPU's, CPU's, and RAM cannot be upgraded via TB3 or even TB4. You require more bandwidth. This is indeed the case with the Mac Pro 2013. Apple hyped its expansion capabilities up and said we don't need to make it modular internally, because you can expand it externally, but for these 3 very important components this just doesn't work.
As for your suggestions about what Apple will release, I think you're wrong on both fronts. I don't think Apple will make another trashcan or trashcan-like computer. Most of them broke due to poor cooling, it was a colossal failure, it didn't take off in the PC market, everyone laughed at it, and it just didn't really work and wasn't supported well on the Mac platform, and they don't want to design themselves into a thermal corner again. I put the chance of another trashcan at virtually 0. It ain't happening.
I do think you're right that the Mac Pro could sport dual or quad socket Xeon boards, but I am very certain that there will be a config costing less than $7500. If Apple wants to sell that product at all, they just cannot make it that expensive. When they say "most demanding workloads" I really don't expect any more than the iMac Pro, which was also designed for the "most demanding workloads", and then it can go up from there and go complete nuts, sure, but there will be a cheap, relatively speaking, base config. They're not gonna start at $7500, that's utterly insane.
PickUrPoison
macrumors G3
There are many different pro needs, you describe yours, that’s fine... but you can’t generalize your requirements to the universe of Mac Pro buyers.
The iMac Pro all in one Xeon workstation will be purchased by many pros, including many software developers. A modular, upgradable Mac Pro is under development for users who aren’t interested in this form factor. iMac Pro only meets the needs of a subset of all users who would buy Mac workstations.
But if you buy the 18-core/128GB/1 TB SSD model—as a software developer, what really do you think you’ll need to upgrade over the next few years? I’d imagine 90% or more of current developers have a lesser configuration.
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Abazigal
Contributor
Martyimac
macrumors 68030
Yes it was.You probably meant two pro desktops. At least, that’s what I assumed you meant.
Markoth
macrumors 6502
...which is exactly why I'm going with a System76 laptop over a MacBook Pro. I'll keep my old 2015 MacBook Pro (with a 2014 processor, thank you Intel), but I can't justify the incredible lack of features on Apple's newest "pro" devices. The MacBook Pro is not a "Pro" device, if it requires you to fumble with dongles for everything. Once again, form over function.
I've been a Mac user for over a decade, so it's sad to see the state of things.
vailr
macrumors regular
I agree, the HP Z840 seems at least as well designed as the previous iterations of tower format Mac Pros.
This may, or may not, set well with your company's IT department, but: has anyone tried installing macOS High Sierra (Hackintosh) on an HP Z840, using a bootable external USB 3.0 connected via adapter cable to an SSD, simply as a "proof of concept"? I would think that booting and running macOS "natively" (instead of in a virtual machine) would be the better + faster solution.
Our company has been looking at switching from Dell Precision workstations to BOXX Apex series. A coworker got a demo unit, seems well built if not a little industrial but runs absolutely silent and cool. It looks like they run pretty standard ATX MSI motherboards so they should be pretty simple to hackintosh. For me I just don't have to the time to want to futz with it, I just want something that works well.
I could totally see the new Mac Pro being very similar to the BOXX Apexx 1. Essentially a machine that houses just the essential core components CPU, RAM, OS Volume (NVMe), and a slot for a full size GPU. Small ITX form factor, with stackable render farm add ons. It can house 22-core Xeon, with each add render pro an additional 18-core Xeon. Certainly much more industrial looking than Apple would ever build though.
http://www.boxx.com/products/workstations/apexx-1
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