Still using mine. My only problem with it is that I need to figure out how to upgrade macOS without the original SSD in place. Big Sur is no longer compatible with a lot of software.
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Apple Launched the Controversial 'Trashcan' Mac Pro 11 Years Ago Today
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Man I think besides the 2013 MP the only other Mac case I'd love to see them remake with AS is the G4 Cube. What a cool machine that was!
Our Studio sits on top of our OWC Thunderbay 8, so no worries about any liquids being spilled under it. It's far too high up for that!
I wonder when Apple’s $100 million market research report will finally, finally, finally figure out that customers loathe non-upgradeable storage and memory.
Apple launched the controversial "trashcan" Mac Pro eleven years ago today, introducing one of its most criticized designs that persisted through a period of widespread discontentment with the Mac lineup.
The redesign took the Mac Pro in an entirely new direction, spearheaded by a polished aluminum cylindrical design that became unofficially dubbed the "trashcan" in the Mac community. All of the Mac Pro's components were mounted around a central thermal dissipation core, cooled by a single fan that pulled air from under the case, through the core, and out the top. The fan could spin more slowly than smaller fans and keep the Mac extremely quiet, even during intense operations.
Apple announced the radically redesigned Mac Pro at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 2013. During the announcement, Apple's Phil Schiller infamously remarked "Can't innovate anymore, my ass." The comment was directed at critics who pointed at the previous Mac Pro's lack of updates and claimed Apple had largely abandoned its pro user base and was out of ideas.
Phil Schiller unveiling the redesigned Mac Pro in 2013
Apple said that the new Mac Pro offered twice the overall performance of the previous generation while taking up less than one-eighth of the volume, thanks to its unified thermal core. The Mac Pro twinned Intel Xeon processors with dual AMD FirePro workstation GPUs, enabling it to deliver seven teraflops of computing power.
While the striking design was undoubtedly ambitious, users were unhappy with the way that almost all expansion had to be served externally by Thunderbolt 2 ports. Many professional users who were reliant on powerful hardware could not get past the Mac Pro's lack of internal slots to add graphics cards and memory.
The result was a device that was unable to adapt to changing hardware trends. Even Apple seemed unsure how to offer a meaningful hardware update for the Mac Pro; as recently as 2019, it was possible to buy a brand new trashcan Mac Pro from Apple, with no upgrades coming to the device during the preceding six years.
This led Apple to make a rare admission of the product's failure during a meeting with reporters in April 2017, explaining in detail why the device didn't succeed in the way it had hoped. In 2019, Apple's full mea culpa came in the form of yet another Mac Pro redesign, which took the machine back to a highly modular tower form factor with eight PCIe slots and three impeller fans.
Yet in many respects, what the 2013 Mac Pro set out to achieve—a small, powerful computer for professionals, with external expansion only—lives on and has been executed more effectively by the Mac Studio.
Article Link: Apple Launched the Controversial 'Trashcan' Mac Pro 11 Years Ago Today
Except some legacy software I'm running on Sierra won't run on Sequoia - hence keeping it on Sierra. 👍
I remember ordering mine in 2014 and was so hyped about it. I had the 6 core/D500/32GB model. It was very easy to upgrade the RAM, i maxed it out to 64GB at some point and there was a 128GB kit available 3rd party but it was slower than stock
And then it started overheating and crashing constantly because the thermal design was inherently defective. I wonder if they ever patched the driver issues that caused it. The GPU's were too hot because they stuffed 2 of them in there.
They gambled big on the future being multi-GPU and external accessories via thunderbolt, but the industry never went that way, in fact it went the opposite, with everything now on a single die (M chips) and all your work is cloud based haha
And then it started overheating and crashing constantly because the thermal design was inherently defective. I wonder if they ever patched the driver issues that caused it. The GPU's were too hot because they stuffed 2 of them in there.
They gambled big on the future being multi-GPU and external accessories via thunderbolt, but the industry never went that way, in fact it went the opposite, with everything now on a single die (M chips) and all your work is cloud based haha
Someone has the same idea:
TLDR; this is a prototype, and some changes are needed before it can be brought to market.
And for those who want to protect their Mac Studios from liquid spills: https://www.spigen.com/products/mac-studio-stand
This was the fate that befell mine; it was used all throughout my MBA connected to two 30" and two 20" cinema displays, and performed flawlessly with an upgraded 1TB Apple drive... At first...
As time went on, it would lag or crash randomly. If left asleep, I would find it rebooted and quit everything I had open at random. Sometimes it would be fine for days or weeks, sometimes multiple nights in a row, I would find that sleep had killed it.
I disabled as much as I could to allow it to sleep peacefully, but sleep never came.
I then started finding that sleep kernel panics were one issue, and the lag while awake was another - due to the ECC (error-correcting) Ram was causing errors. It would boot up with a red light error indicator within the case, to a random missing stick of memory. Someone's one slot, sometimes another.
I bought replacement ram, but the bigger issue was the kernel panics while asleep. I gave up. It was replaced by a 2019 iMac which blew it out of the water and eliminated that wild desk setup worth of cable clutter. (As fun as it was to use.)
Now that Mac Pro is relegated to being an art display in the home office. One of the coolest and glitchiest Macs I've ever used, and unfortunately to my knowledge, it has not been nor will ever be corrected - at least by Apple.
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Got the unit shortly after initial announcement. I had the max memory and SSD of that time with the D500 video cards. At the end, it had the 128GB OWC memory and 2TB SSD. It and the two 27" Thunderbolt Apple momitorwere replaced by two Studio Dinsp[lays and the M1 Ultra Mac Studio with 128GB of Ram and 8TB SSD. The Studiosits on top of the same Apple CD/DVD player as the trashcan sat on for many years.
I loved my Mac Pro as a video editor and photoshop user. I bought one in 2013 and bought some new guts for it in 2020 including an updated mother board punched with tons of ram and a bigger SSD. It served me well until the software could no longer be updated, which was a shame as it was a better machine than its replacement - a Mac Mini.
Still have it and fire it up every once in awhile to get data off my raids.
Still have it and fire it up every once in awhile to get data off my raids.
My work Mac has been a 2013 Trash Can for years now. Paired with a 30" Dell monitor that does 2560x1600 it has been flawless for me all these years.
So when I saw an eBay Refurbished one (8-core 3.0 GHz with dual D700's, 32 GB, 1 TB SSD) for only $350 about a year and a half ago, I jumped on it for personal use (originally to supplant my aging Mid 2010 MacPro5,1 cheese grater). I still haven't finished that task yet 😂 but it's been a great machine for testing OCLP with.
The only problem for me is that it won't drive my 34" LG 5K2K monitor at anything higher than 4K (with black bars on either side) so I will probably get rid of it soon(ish). There are some minor graphics issues with certain apps (Slack, Vivaldi etc.) when you use OCLP to run a recent OS but there are workarounds (see this Forum thread for details).
If you don't have a use case that pushes the thermal envelope too much, these are great little cheap machines to get now. I've found most 3rd party software these days only requires Catalina or Big Sur, so even if you stuck to Monterey it would handle most anything you could throw at it.
So when I saw an eBay Refurbished one (8-core 3.0 GHz with dual D700's, 32 GB, 1 TB SSD) for only $350 about a year and a half ago, I jumped on it for personal use (originally to supplant my aging Mid 2010 MacPro5,1 cheese grater). I still haven't finished that task yet 😂 but it's been a great machine for testing OCLP with.
The only problem for me is that it won't drive my 34" LG 5K2K monitor at anything higher than 4K (with black bars on either side) so I will probably get rid of it soon(ish). There are some minor graphics issues with certain apps (Slack, Vivaldi etc.) when you use OCLP to run a recent OS but there are workarounds (see this Forum thread for details).
If you don't have a use case that pushes the thermal envelope too much, these are great little cheap machines to get now. I've found most 3rd party software these days only requires Catalina or Big Sur, so even if you stuck to Monterey it would handle most anything you could throw at it.
I bought one 5 years ago, and used it as my primary desktop for many years. Aside from being long in the tooth on connectivity it was great. When Apple stopped providing OS updates, I replaced it with a studio, and bought a 2nd trash can. After an upgrade to memory, they together make a very cool looking and silent proxmox cluster. Runs, home automation, personal cloud services, and docker. Aside from the power draw, it’s perfect.
I love the design and the way they look standing next to each other.
I love the design and the way they look standing next to each other.
They are below 300 on ebay all day, and I am this close to just going for it. Can I ask, how much of the modern feature set is gimped on these old machines? Air drop? iMessage? Hand-off? etc etc.
Most solid computer I’ve ever had in my life. I bought it when it came out and it is still running solid as a full-time music producing workhorse, running hundreds of tracks, maxing the RAM all the time AB’s abusing virtual RAM. Still screams.
- 2000 Power Mac G4 Cube
- 2013 Mac Pro
- 2020 Mac Studio
In terms of time gap the 2005 Mac mini G4 is more directly linked to the 2000 Power Mac G4 Cube.
It’s a shame that design had to be retired because of the bad buzz, because it would’ve been such a cool look for the Mac Studio.
The design was retired because it didn’t work as intended for the target market, nor there were adequate components to update the computer because of the thermal envelope. The bad buzz, as you put it, was a consequence of the design not meeting the goals it was supposed to achieve.
Would be super cool on a mac studio, I agree with you on that front.