I feel so disgusted by complaints i've read about the lack of optical drive. I can't conceive that there are people that can't handle progress! If you need an optical drive go buy an external one, buy ten i don't care. But please don't force the rest of us to have useless 80s' tech in our computers! I'm glad Apple ignores such ridiculous requests, even if i'm angry with Apple for other reasons!
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Apple Offers Sneak Peek of Completely Redesigned Mac Pro
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The current Quad-core is $2.499 - the 12-core is $3.799.
Guess the new Pro will be:
$7.999-$9.999
Pro. Indeed.
Guess the new Pro will be:
$7.999-$9.999
Pro. Indeed.
Sometimes it's progress and sometimes it is losing functionality that is not dead and is still current tech for those who live in the present. (Blu-ray drives mostly) And it has been said dozens of times, some do NOT want to buy an external drive for a desktop, they want it internal and could use that same statement, don't force us to buy an external.
Can someone tell me whether thunderbolt 2 is as fast as the SATA connections in the current MP? I currently have 5 HDs in my MP and 2 external Drobos for backup. My system has 64GB RAM and needs huge ammounts of VM too. Where am I going to put 5 sata drives? Will external TB be slower than current MPs?
I like the fact that it's potentially portable, except when you add in the extra external ****. That said you could have your core base rig and a lighter travel rig but with the same CPU power.
What I was hoping for was more cores - 16 or 24.
I like the fact that it's potentially portable, except when you add in the extra external ****. That said you could have your core base rig and a lighter travel rig but with the same CPU power.
What I was hoping for was more cores - 16 or 24.
It (TB2) is much faster, the current gen Mac Pro uses SATA2 (3Gb/s).
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I'm very familiar with pro video setups, indeed some might need a blu ray drive, but i guess it's a very small percentage of pro users (let alone ALL users). I really wouldn't like it to big bigger or louder in order to have a blu ray drive. You must also know that all pro users use external drives for their archive, and they keep only the projects they're working with at the moment inside their CPU boxes and i'm sure they prefer working their assets with 1,25 GBps than using stupid HDDs. So i don't see any problems!
Just looking at the apple site again, and it struck me that the whole design is based on the small size. Why? that's a low priority on my list for a pro machine. In fact it isn't even on my list.
If they could be hooked together to combine computing power then, yes I could stuff more power into the same space as my current MP takes up - that would make sense. But small for the sake of being small doesn't.
And 4 RAM slots - what's the total memory capacity?
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It seems the liquid damage threads will no longer be reserved for the macbook pro section
.I agree with you guys on it being a step backwards in that regard. The guys who think "modular" is a good move are just buying into Apple's silliness. I do think that notebooks are their biggest seller, so they decided to backport both the problem and their solution into the desktop model. It's not something I really like, although it might work for me overall. Computing has always been about what you can fit in the box or replacing specialized components with equally capable generic ones. This only goes contrary to that flow due to artificially imposed design constraints. They prioritized size and weight over actually making use of the available SATA bus internally
. Check out the new mac pro's page. Others may see R2D2 or an Apple designed roomba. I see a black hole where you deposit funds. I see a lot of downsides, but in terms of performance, assuming strong developer support and up to date OpenGL, it could be a big boost in OSX. Of course this is partially due to poor driver performance in the past few years, especially in terms of gpus. If they can reverse that trend, it will look all that much more fabulous. Bleh youtube failed me on clips. I was going to reference absolutely fabulous there since Ive is from the UK.
128GB I think, that's what they said that had tested the system with.
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If just speaking for myself I would end up owning one computer and then running everything though that, been doing so for years. And a blu-ray drive can come in handy which has been dropping in need as of late for a couple of reasons.
I still like the idea of options, this Mac Pro and another version a bit bigger and expandable. I imagine the percentage of those who want a blu-ray drive to be small, it just does not apply to everyone nor do most people run everything from their computer.
On a personal level I have never used disks for storing data, I went from floppies (hated those things, were cheap) to flash drives and external hard drives for backups.
The only time I think I would be okay with an external optical drive would be if I had a desktop, laptop and maybe something else and then had one for all the systems during the times when one is required. It used to be several times a week, these days mostly when it involves others. Of course I'm not going to base what I own on what others want that is not business related.
Silly
Go for it. With this kind of thinking you already are a PC guy. This is a future of computers - expanded externally.
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OMG, TB is much faster than SATA.
Go for it. With this kind of thinking you already are a PC guy. This is a future of computers - expanded externally.
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OMG, TB is much faster than SATA.
Many people here still use good old cheap media (SATA hard drives) for storage, archiving and moving projects around between different workstations and platforms. Yeah, flash storage is great, but it's still very expensive, Mac or not. eSATA, USB3 or Thunderbolt RAID drive enclosures still are and will be used a lot.
The new Pegasus Promise with Thunderbolt 2 will probably cost up to $2000. Add that to a specced up Mac Pro coffee grinder and it's already very expensive.
Forget high end GPUs, those won't work in external enclosures. We can hope that Adobe has better OpenCL support in the new CC. Hopefully, so will Davinci Resolve. Otherwise these AMD cards are no good. No CUDA, no good.
Albeit the design is "cool"... it's just really impractical. It will suffer from that is known as "multiple points of potential failure" meaning there will be just "too many boxes" with too many cables, power adapters, loops (knowing that Thunderbolt doesn't send GPUs video straight to the monitor, but loops it through the motherboard) and so on. It's not a self contained system anymore. It is stacks of 3rd party accessories that need to make it into a self sufficient system. And that is a kind of a recipe for disaster.
Sorry, I guess I'm old school. I need a large box with plenty of PCIe so I can have two Nvidia GPUs, a playback card, a Redrocket card, plenty of SATA storage (people still use hard drives, damnit!). You say that these large boxes aren't portable, but in the end by being totally contained all-in-one, they are much more portable than lugging around a Mac Pro with 5 other boxes and dozens of cables.
The new Pegasus Promise with Thunderbolt 2 will probably cost up to $2000. Add that to a specced up Mac Pro coffee grinder and it's already very expensive.
Forget high end GPUs, those won't work in external enclosures. We can hope that Adobe has better OpenCL support in the new CC. Hopefully, so will Davinci Resolve. Otherwise these AMD cards are no good. No CUDA, no good.
Albeit the design is "cool"... it's just really impractical. It will suffer from that is known as "multiple points of potential failure" meaning there will be just "too many boxes" with too many cables, power adapters, loops (knowing that Thunderbolt doesn't send GPUs video straight to the monitor, but loops it through the motherboard) and so on. It's not a self contained system anymore. It is stacks of 3rd party accessories that need to make it into a self sufficient system. And that is a kind of a recipe for disaster.
Sorry, I guess I'm old school. I need a large box with plenty of PCIe so I can have two Nvidia GPUs, a playback card, a Redrocket card, plenty of SATA storage (people still use hard drives, damnit!). You say that these large boxes aren't portable, but in the end by being totally contained all-in-one, they are much more portable than lugging around a Mac Pro with 5 other boxes and dozens of cables.
I think that is an unfair reading. People have been saying they should have kept the old MP form. They have cut out expandability, but why? Is there a reason they couldn't have made a similar device 1/2 -> 2/3 the size of the old MP instead of 1/8?
Don't get me wrong I think this is a lovely machine. I just don't see why they 'needed' to make it so small and non-expandable internally. It makes even less sense when that was one of the main selling points on their own website for the previous version. Add on the cables they spent years get rid of you come away really confused.
I can't even make a business case for it. It isn't like the price is going to drop dramatically. (Please let me be wrong here!) People would have paid the price anyway if they wanted a MP; heck, I was hedging and would have bought a version last year had it had significant internals upgrade.* The market that wanted internal expansion may have been small, but surely they would have contributed to a larger market willing to pay for a MP. Unless the price drops significantly, I can't see how this increases their market, and they were already at high profit margins for the boxes. I can only see the market shrinking.
* Yes, they were actually waiting on Intel. 'bout the only thing they could have done with the old MP was upgrade the graphics and drop the price. Now I'll go back to my more appropriate device, a Mac Mini. Can't see that they will make more profit off me as I'll spend less money. Upgrades I might have made to in a server I'm not going to make in a consumer device used as a server and can be satisfied I'm not hampering the functions of the machine.
I've been mulling over the machine, and I think that if the price is reasonable then it could be a pretty good contender; it's the kind of machine that a professional will love to have on display on their desk (assuming that fan won't suck up every loose item on your desk!), which has always been an Apple strong-point, and Thunderbolt add-ons shouldn't be too hard to hide away.
My concern is still on the GPU(s) though; including two as standard is fantastic, and means you've effectively got a quad processor machine, depending upon what applications you're running, but how many drives will they support? Could I hook up a full eight monitors via Thunderbolt if I wanted to, like I can with the previous Mac Pro (once you've shoved four GPUs in there)?
What if the included GPUs aren't powerful enough for my needs? There are lots of applications that don't take advantage of multiple GPUs, and prefer one massively powerful one, but you're not going to be able to fit any full-length, double height monsters into the new Mac Pro by the looks of it; which is a shame as if they'd just kept the machine a bit taller, and a bit larger in diameter, then they probably could have managed it. High-end GPUs are going to end up being relegated to Thunderbolt accessories but is that going to be good enough? 20gbps sounds a lot, but a powerful GPU will eat that up quickly; does Thunderbolt bandwidth run both ways (20gbps up and 20gbps down)? With the right drivers a device could, I suppose, use multiple Thunderbolt ports, but it feels very limiting. Not a concern for me personally as I'm all about processing power rather than graphics (as they're not my main requirement), but I like upgrade options for long-term use.
The machine is interesting; it's stylish and powerful, but and the fact that every component is accessible was really surprising, as anyone that's had to get at an older Mac Pro's motherboard knows that not everything in those machines was as easy as swapping a drive or some RAM. I just really hope they've kept the cost down, or at the very least about where it is now, as pushing it much higher will kill the machine off entirely.
My concern is still on the GPU(s) though; including two as standard is fantastic, and means you've effectively got a quad processor machine, depending upon what applications you're running, but how many drives will they support? Could I hook up a full eight monitors via Thunderbolt if I wanted to, like I can with the previous Mac Pro (once you've shoved four GPUs in there)?
What if the included GPUs aren't powerful enough for my needs? There are lots of applications that don't take advantage of multiple GPUs, and prefer one massively powerful one, but you're not going to be able to fit any full-length, double height monsters into the new Mac Pro by the looks of it; which is a shame as if they'd just kept the machine a bit taller, and a bit larger in diameter, then they probably could have managed it. High-end GPUs are going to end up being relegated to Thunderbolt accessories but is that going to be good enough? 20gbps sounds a lot, but a powerful GPU will eat that up quickly; does Thunderbolt bandwidth run both ways (20gbps up and 20gbps down)? With the right drivers a device could, I suppose, use multiple Thunderbolt ports, but it feels very limiting. Not a concern for me personally as I'm all about processing power rather than graphics (as they're not my main requirement), but I like upgrade options for long-term use.
The machine is interesting; it's stylish and powerful, but and the fact that every component is accessible was really surprising, as anyone that's had to get at an older Mac Pro's motherboard knows that not everything in those machines was as easy as swapping a drive or some RAM. I just really hope they've kept the cost down, or at the very least about where it is now, as pushing it much higher will kill the machine off entirely.
While I like the product from a design stand point. I dislike the fact they're going the iMac route and sealing it tight with what looks like RAM being the only user serviceable part. With all external expansion, I can imagine some setups will get very messy with all the cabling, PCIe cages, etc.. I can't see this costing less than $2500, probably closer to $3k. Hope I'm wrong about that.
It will be cheaper then the current model.... because its smaller and no aluminum case $$$$$........ so i think it will be a lot cheaper.
Why would they bother making it in USA if it was only going to be $2K? They could make all of their products here if they could do it that cheap.
Interesting...
I'm still undecided about this; it will come down to price in the end. If it's reasonable, the processing power and GPUs look mean though I'm not strictly a "Pro" user, just publishing and web design.
But one thing that does strike me as ironic is how the website lauds the lack of physical connections when talking about Bluetooth wireless peripherals, yet champions external upgradeability. This machine will be sprouting wires all over the place like someone left a potato in the trash can. It will severely detract from the "cool" factor, which though I don't believe is of concern to a Pro user Apple were clearly going for with the design.
I'm still undecided about this; it will come down to price in the end. If it's reasonable, the processing power and GPUs look mean though I'm not strictly a "Pro" user, just publishing and web design.
But one thing that does strike me as ironic is how the website lauds the lack of physical connections when talking about Bluetooth wireless peripherals, yet champions external upgradeability. This machine will be sprouting wires all over the place like someone left a potato in the trash can. It will severely detract from the "cool" factor, which though I don't believe is of concern to a Pro user Apple were clearly going for with the design.
:O
If I have mine under FULL load, CPU and GPU, I cant hear a thing.
The PM G5 on the other hand is a different story.
Mixed feedlings here…
The inside:
On the spec side its a dream machine, maybe exactly the long awaited tool for power users.
On design side its more a like a maxed out Mac Mini, seems like the only changeable component being the memory.
Apple takes the most advanced technology and shrinks its to their own proprietary format. The customer is no longer free to choose / able to upgrade with industry standard components. Upgrading with outside storage through thunderbolt is ridiculous expensive at the moment.
The outside:
Fits more into a living room than an office.
The inside:
On the spec side its a dream machine, maybe exactly the long awaited tool for power users.
On design side its more a like a maxed out Mac Mini, seems like the only changeable component being the memory.
Apple takes the most advanced technology and shrinks its to their own proprietary format. The customer is no longer free to choose / able to upgrade with industry standard components. Upgrading with outside storage through thunderbolt is ridiculous expensive at the moment.
The outside:
Fits more into a living room than an office.
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