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Apple Offers Sneak Peek of Completely Redesigned Mac Pro
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I hope they sell a stripped down version, i.e. 1 6 core processor, 256GB Flash Drive and 32 GB 2 16GB ECC memory module.
I am sure apple will charge an arm and a leg and your first born for more memory and more flash storage.
Then of course a 4-5 bay 3.5 TB enclosure for all of our 3-4 TB HD's we will still be using for quite some time which are still around $800.00
Oh well, to me it looks like Dyson designed it....
I am sure apple will charge an arm and a leg and your first born for more memory and more flash storage.
Then of course a 4-5 bay 3.5 TB enclosure for all of our 3-4 TB HD's we will still be using for quite some time which are still around $800.00
Oh well, to me it looks like Dyson designed it....
Note time that was posted. Note when Apple.com went live with that information.........
Note the last few pages of me saying I was wrong.....
exactly... looks aren't terrible important with a pro machine - but what creative wants a mess of wires, etc. running across desk top? wish it's had room to drop in my own hard drive or two, and room for specialized graphics card for those who need such things.
Thinking about colo's and render farms, this design allows a rack of pros to have a sideways orientation and cold air on one side and hot on the other, or vertical and cold on bottom and hot on top. Pretty smart.
I wonder about its possible grid capability and GPU co-processor capability. New API's based on prior standalone apps?
Rocketman
I wonder about its possible grid capability and GPU co-processor capability. New API's based on prior standalone apps?
Rocketman
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This was only a sneak peak at the new design.
What do we know?
Case material:
It's shiny and smooth and doesn't look like brushed aluminum. This doesn't = plastic.
Ok. Just saw the new Apple page on this. Yes, it's not plastic. It's polished aluminum.
Internal storage has been moved to strictly external -
1) logical since Thunderbolt 1 10Gbps exceeds Sata 6 Gbps specs. Better performance threshold for Raids. Two SSDs Raided together exceed 6Gbps in throughput.
2) cheaper to upgrade external housing when larger hard drives require newer hardware to be recognized. Think does your current motherboard support a 16 TB hard drive? No, because it does not exist yet. How much does it cost to replace a motherboard vs an external storage housing? I know some of my external enclosures need to be dumped because they won't accept 3TB drives. And there's no firmware upgrade.
3) power consumption - for everyone with all four internal drive bays used, how many of you access all 4 drives constantly, or consistently every few minutes? Unless you Raided at least 2 of them together, most of us just have 4 individual drives of storage that we use one at a time. But all 4 drives are plugged in and powered. Forget about the power wasted. All four drives generate heat. Heat is the number one reason for short life expectancy of a PC. For me personally, my Hackintosh i7 tower already generates enough heat to raise the temperature in a closed bedroom by 15 degrees.
4) cost of hard drives as pointed out by many is very cheap. It really doesn't have much impact on the cost of a "tower" anymore. So, Apple being a premium type of company would be "cutting costs" by not spending R&D money to engineer internal storage anymore and further cut costs by removing a significant source of heat generation in a computer both from the drives themselves and the additional power needed in the power supply design to drive the "maximum" amount of hard drive slots provided. So, my hope is that this would result in, at least, a somewhat "cheaper" Mac Pro.
No optical drive
This is both a space issue and a relevant function issue. Software installers have gone the direction of either download or flash drive. My last round of large installers was from Adobe and it was all download. And now that Adobe has gone subscription base - no more ownership of the software = no more DVD installers.
Flash drives have replaced my burnable CDs and DVDs for transferring files. Why? because it's so much faster of a process and cheaper over time.
I do have a DVD burner and a Blu Ray burner. I installed them in my Hackintosh. I don't use them that much, not even for archiving. Why? because they're not Terabyte storage solutions. I just continue to buy "cheap" hard drives and retiring them to archive as they get full. Yes, I edit HD videos. I'm thinking about moving them back out into external enclosures so that I can use them at will between my different computers. Why invest in multiple Blu Ray burners (still $80 on sale for internal mounting) when I can just invest in one?
So back to Apple. Why keep a large device internally when it doesn't get used that often? Especially when it's just as good housed externally?
Dual GPUs that will drive three 4K displays.
1) How many "Pros" or anyone for that matter need to drive more than three monitors at a time? And for those of us that do use more than 1 display at a time, what are the 2 main reasons why we do? More screen space because 1920x1200 isn't large enough and a second display dedicated to one full screen task while we work on the first screen. So I ask - Do you know what a 4K display is? or how big they are? No? That's because there aren't any for sale at Micro Center, Fry's or Best Buys. They're bleeding edge BIG. Yes, more than double the horizontal resolution of HD. And the one 4K TV that I saw was physically as large as two 24" HD displays side by side.
2) Why is anyone talking about upgrading a GPU at this point? No one is using a computer monitor this large. There are barely any 4K TVs out there. Forget the cost of the Mac Pro. How many people can afford 4K computer monitors?
3) Notice the phrasing - "GPUs" vs "video cards." Also, remember Apple just hired a bunch of AMD graphics engineers in Orlando. What do you think they're working on?
It's small!
1/8th the size of the existing Mac Pro with a handle on top. This works great for myself working with a number of my "Pro" clients where each of us have our own system. The hidden "power" here is the ability for the group of us to come together physically and tap into our collective power of our systems. I don't have to be a large corporation (or small) to be able to "afford" the collective power of multiple systems.
After all, isn't that what the original power of the PC was when it was first introduced? Back then it was the main frame computer that did everything and only corporations could afford to have that kind of power. The PC put that power into the hands of the individual.
The difference today is that now we have the knowledge that PCs can be networked together to harness greater computing power. And that cost of networked computing power can be spread out among my "network" of "Pros" with each of us having our workstation that we can "easily" bring together.
Lack of PCI slots
Let's be honest. Who does this affect the most? The people who already invested in PCI cards. NOT the people who haven't bought any PCI cards, yet. So, let's create a list of "Pro" cards that will no longer be supported internally.
The BIG unanswered question
How much is it going to be? At the right price, I think many of us will adapt happily.
The small unanswered question
For me, I want to know if Apple will make their own Mac Pro Storage unit to go along with the new design. I also have had a poor experience with many third party external enclosures.
What do we know?
Case material:
It's shiny and smooth and doesn't look like brushed aluminum. This doesn't = plastic.
Ok. Just saw the new Apple page on this. Yes, it's not plastic. It's polished aluminum.
Internal storage has been moved to strictly external -
1) logical since Thunderbolt 1 10Gbps exceeds Sata 6 Gbps specs. Better performance threshold for Raids. Two SSDs Raided together exceed 6Gbps in throughput.
2) cheaper to upgrade external housing when larger hard drives require newer hardware to be recognized. Think does your current motherboard support a 16 TB hard drive? No, because it does not exist yet. How much does it cost to replace a motherboard vs an external storage housing? I know some of my external enclosures need to be dumped because they won't accept 3TB drives. And there's no firmware upgrade.
3) power consumption - for everyone with all four internal drive bays used, how many of you access all 4 drives constantly, or consistently every few minutes? Unless you Raided at least 2 of them together, most of us just have 4 individual drives of storage that we use one at a time. But all 4 drives are plugged in and powered. Forget about the power wasted. All four drives generate heat. Heat is the number one reason for short life expectancy of a PC. For me personally, my Hackintosh i7 tower already generates enough heat to raise the temperature in a closed bedroom by 15 degrees.
4) cost of hard drives as pointed out by many is very cheap. It really doesn't have much impact on the cost of a "tower" anymore. So, Apple being a premium type of company would be "cutting costs" by not spending R&D money to engineer internal storage anymore and further cut costs by removing a significant source of heat generation in a computer both from the drives themselves and the additional power needed in the power supply design to drive the "maximum" amount of hard drive slots provided. So, my hope is that this would result in, at least, a somewhat "cheaper" Mac Pro.
No optical drive
This is both a space issue and a relevant function issue. Software installers have gone the direction of either download or flash drive. My last round of large installers was from Adobe and it was all download. And now that Adobe has gone subscription base - no more ownership of the software = no more DVD installers.
Flash drives have replaced my burnable CDs and DVDs for transferring files. Why? because it's so much faster of a process and cheaper over time.
I do have a DVD burner and a Blu Ray burner. I installed them in my Hackintosh. I don't use them that much, not even for archiving. Why? because they're not Terabyte storage solutions. I just continue to buy "cheap" hard drives and retiring them to archive as they get full. Yes, I edit HD videos. I'm thinking about moving them back out into external enclosures so that I can use them at will between my different computers. Why invest in multiple Blu Ray burners (still $80 on sale for internal mounting) when I can just invest in one?
So back to Apple. Why keep a large device internally when it doesn't get used that often? Especially when it's just as good housed externally?
Dual GPUs that will drive three 4K displays.
1) How many "Pros" or anyone for that matter need to drive more than three monitors at a time? And for those of us that do use more than 1 display at a time, what are the 2 main reasons why we do? More screen space because 1920x1200 isn't large enough and a second display dedicated to one full screen task while we work on the first screen. So I ask - Do you know what a 4K display is? or how big they are? No? That's because there aren't any for sale at Micro Center, Fry's or Best Buys. They're bleeding edge BIG. Yes, more than double the horizontal resolution of HD. And the one 4K TV that I saw was physically as large as two 24" HD displays side by side.
2) Why is anyone talking about upgrading a GPU at this point? No one is using a computer monitor this large. There are barely any 4K TVs out there. Forget the cost of the Mac Pro. How many people can afford 4K computer monitors?
3) Notice the phrasing - "GPUs" vs "video cards." Also, remember Apple just hired a bunch of AMD graphics engineers in Orlando. What do you think they're working on?
It's small!
1/8th the size of the existing Mac Pro with a handle on top. This works great for myself working with a number of my "Pro" clients where each of us have our own system. The hidden "power" here is the ability for the group of us to come together physically and tap into our collective power of our systems. I don't have to be a large corporation (or small) to be able to "afford" the collective power of multiple systems.
After all, isn't that what the original power of the PC was when it was first introduced? Back then it was the main frame computer that did everything and only corporations could afford to have that kind of power. The PC put that power into the hands of the individual.
The difference today is that now we have the knowledge that PCs can be networked together to harness greater computing power. And that cost of networked computing power can be spread out among my "network" of "Pros" with each of us having our workstation that we can "easily" bring together.
Lack of PCI slots
Let's be honest. Who does this affect the most? The people who already invested in PCI cards. NOT the people who haven't bought any PCI cards, yet. So, let's create a list of "Pro" cards that will no longer be supported internally.
The BIG unanswered question
How much is it going to be? At the right price, I think many of us will adapt happily.
The small unanswered question
For me, I want to know if Apple will make their own Mac Pro Storage unit to go along with the new design. I also have had a poor experience with many third party external enclosures.
Last edited:
PRO?What Apple just did is built a computer no one else could have built.
The entire desktop PC world is still using a 1983 stile IBM PC that is standing on it's side. The last big inovation was the turn if over so the power supply on the top.
Apple is walked away from hard drives, from optical drives and card slots. What is left is just the "computer", the part that "computes".
Also I did not see a power supply. Did anyone notice. Is there som 8" cube that goes on the floor?
The entire desktop PC world is still using a 1983 stile IBM PC that is standing on it's side. The last big inovation was the turn if over so the power supply on the top.
Apple is walked away from hard drives, from optical drives and card slots. What is left is just the "computer", the part that "computes".
Also I did not see a power supply. Did anyone notice. Is there som 8" cube that goes on the floor?
Room for second SSD?
Looking at the photos on the Apple website, I see a SSD connector on one of the graphics card and a blank spot on the other. I wonder why. Adding another socket would allow users to double their internal storage and let Apple sell use two identical cards instead of similar yet different cards.
Looking at the photos on the Apple website, I see a SSD connector on one of the graphics card and a blank spot on the other. I wonder why. Adding another socket would allow users to double their internal storage and let Apple sell use two identical cards instead of similar yet different cards.
They should've named it...iCan!
(It is a radical redesign. Maybe the new look will grown on me...)
(It is a radical redesign. Maybe the new look will grown on me...)
The demos on Apple's site show four RAM sticks either side of the larger CPU logic board. The SSD is attached behind one of the other two graphics logic boards - it's a long strip just like those in Airs/rMBPs
Well on the Luxology forums people from The Foundry are saying the performance is amazing and seeing how as their products are used in every single major film out there I tend to listen to their opinion.
It's not merely "space shifting" if you have to pay likely thousands of dollars to get functionality back.
the RAM is the four channel DDR3 SIMMs we all know, just abit faster
The FLASH replaces the hard dries and is used like a hard drive. Well sort of "fusion" changes this a little so all the end user sees is a big and fast disk
