The Mac Pro is meant for very specific applications (hi-res video editing, 3D rendering, etc.) It's not the best setup for typical use or even for gaming. Your typical user will get far more big for the buck from an iMac.
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Apple Expected to Launch New iMacs With Improved Processors and Display Quality This Quarter
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The Mac Pro is meant for very specific applications (hi-res video editing, 3D rendering, etc.) It's not the best setup for typical use or even for gaming. Your typical user will get far more big for the buck from an iMac.
This is the one thing that continues to irk me about Apple. It's like they tell you how much faster their machines are only to find out it's not as powerful as they could be due to the GPU.
If you buy a Mac for playing games, you're going to have a bad time. Apple has never targeted the cutting edge gaming market.
I wish that were possible, but OLED suffers from burn-in. That will be more of an issue on a monitor where images are often static, compared to a TV which has more movement. The situation is improving, but I doubt the technology will be suitable for some time. Hopefully something like QLED (the self-emitting technology, not quantum dot backlighting) will come to market soon as it seems to be the best of OLED and LCD in each of their strong areas.
In the meantime, I hope the KSF LED phosphor material is in the new iMac, and is a match for quantum dot backlighting.
Not to mention he could have spent half that building his own PC and got a much more powerful system if he wanted to play games.
I personally stay around the $1600 mark with my Macs. Not too skimpy as their base models and not ridiculously expensive as their options can get. I know people here love saying they "got a maxed out" Mac, but then they say they just email, process RAW photos and listen to iTunes. Oh well.
SSD prices for large sizes are still high so fusion drives still make sense.
Look at it another way. Fusion drives gives you 2 drives so if one were to fail you could technically decouple them and use the working one. So in your theory the HD portion would fail at some point in the future. If that were to happen you could decouple the drives, reinstall the OS on the 128 GB SSD and hook in an external drive. This is assuming you didn’t want to go through the cost of getting it fixed.
Here's the problem
A 1TB SSD does not cost $1000, no matter how you spin it, Apple is being greedy here.
And no I don't expect them to make 1TB SSD the base model. At least start with 256 and let people upgrade within the $500 range, in line with current SSD prices.
Are you suggesting that 7200rpm is much better than 5400? Hilarious.
What about an Apple external GPU solution for iMacs and portables?
Sure, it would be an expensive solution, but at least they'd be addressing the issue for those who don't want a separate gaming PC.
Sure, it would be an expensive solution, but at least they'd be addressing the issue for those who don't want a separate gaming PC.
Almost none of the current Macs could drive a 5K display. Skylake with the new DP 1.3 should be able to, but then there's the question of whether they can run it smoothly.
Why do we get rumors about every other Apple product, but NOT the Mac Pro?
Not going to happen until OS X supports 10-bit color output and applications are required to support color management. I'd put money on Apple sticking with sRGB displays in the foreseeable future.
It's an 8-bit sRGB glossy panel with a fixed refresh rate and no way of writing to the internal LUTs.
It's a nice display, but there are much better panels available from companies like Eizo, NEC, or even Dell, for example.
There are no OLED panels currently suitable for use as a computer monitor, even ignoring how expensive such a display would be.
The SSDs in my system run about as warm as the hard drives - right in the middle when comparing the warmest and coolest drives actually - and this is enterprise-grade 3.5" drives I'm comparing them to.
Today's high performance SSDs don't necessarily run any cooler than HDDs.
The problem with SSDs is capacity. It's still very expensive to buy high capacity SSDs, when there are now 8TB HDDs that are relatively inexpensive.
And frankly I don't see why most people care that much about SSDs in desktop machines.
Buy enough RAM for your system and you should never be touching the disk to open applications - they'll already be in memory.
I'm not saying there is no reason to use SSDs, but for most users' requirements, the only thing they benefit from is faster app launch times.
SSDs are more important in notebooks where they are physically saving you space inside the machine, draw less power, are going to be far more reliable due to the lack of moving parts, and are much quicker to respond than the <5400 rpm drives that spin down at every opportunity.
I expect that they will stick with AMD in the foreseeable future, due to the type of compute workloads Apple use.
I would prefer to see NVIDIA GPUs in there too.
But it's a common misconception that desktop Macs have insufficient cooling.
The issue is that Apple purposefully targets the upper thermal limits when designing their cooling solutions in order to keep the systems as small and quiet as possible.
I could set all the fans in my desktop PC to stay off up to a certain temperature threshold - my GPU is rated for operation up to 98℃ so it could be completely passive/silent up to say 90℃ - but I prefer to have the fans in my case running at all times to prevent heat from building up, extending the life of the components.
Instead of letting the heat build up to 90℃, the GPU fan is set to a minimum of 500 rpm, which is practically inaudible, but keeps the card at a cool 25℃. Under load the fans don't get much higher than that, and keeps the card around 50℃ (GTX 960)
Yes, anyone interested in gaming should build a PC. You're just throwing away money if you buy an upgraded Mac for gaming. You pay at least twice as much and performance is nowhere near as good - especially if you stick to OS X instead of booting into Windows.
IMO, OS X's increasing complexity and size will more or less force Apple's SSD implementation. For example, my iMac boots Snow Leopard from a Firewire 800 HDD in the same time it takes my internal SSD to boot Yosemite. Booting Yosemite from that same Firewire HDD takes 3 to 4 minutes compared to less than a minute for the SSD ( or Snow Leopard from the HDD ).
I do wonder just how powerful a modern day iMac could be if they still had the same chassis thickness as a Mac from say 5 years ago ......
As the iMac looks nice, I gave up on all in ones after the CRT in my G3 Graphite pod died. I'm quite happy with my 2012 Quad Core Mac Mini I bought last year.
Ive's obsession with thinness, to me, doesn't work for desktop computers. A 27' iMac certainly isn't very portable. Also, there are those that prefer a different monitor at this point seeing that the 27" is now going on 4 years without an update and there other choices out there.
I would like to see a Skylake Mac Mini in the future, but as I've mentioned before, the bean counters are now in control. But it's OK to spend R&D on a car. Oh well, they're going to do whatever.
Given Intel's recent late deliveries, a 3Q15 Skylake iMac seems unlikely. As speculated before in MacRumors, it seems likely Apple will skip Broadwell.
With Skylake announced and coming soon one wonders if these iMacs will have Skylake and have a long product cycle or last gen processors and have the shortest product cycle ever.
This could actually be done without a lot of work, since somewhat hacky third party solutions work for MacBooks. I think Thunderbolt GPUs would work on iMacs if they had integrated graphics enabled, as unusual as that seems (I guess the very bottom end model does? Not sure anyone would want to run a high end game on that though) - since the hacks actually write to the onboard video RAM directly to allow you to use the internal monitor for your game. Otherwise, you can do a thunderbolt GPU on any other iMac but you'd have to have an external monitor attached to the card to see your game
I thought Thunderbolt had the chance of allowing for some unique graphics hardware. The bandwidth is pretty low compared to PCIe slots (but getting better, slowly) - but imagine the powerful GPU you could have if you didn't have to fit it inside of a PC in the shape of a PCI card. Like a shoebox worth of powerful GPU hardware and integrated power supply and cooling. Not a very "Mac-like" thing of course...