Apple Offers Sneak Peek of Completely Redesigned Mac Pro

[Carouser]

Yeah, after 46 pages, could someone let me know if Pro Users care how their computer looks or not?

I've heard plenty of people saying "ugh, it looks like a garbage can / toilet / [something else predictable and unfunny]" yet it seems to be this same crowd saying "I don't care how it looks, I care how it works".

Thanks in advance.

 

[JCLrox]

It looks like Apple is trying to start a major transition for professional users. Using external expansion for all or most of your drives and other devices that would normally go inside the computer probably sounds like a pretty foreign idea, and it should be. For decades, everything has been inside the computer. But there is a limit to how much can be fit inside a traditional box shaped PC. Plenty of people use more drives than one of these traditional PCs can contain. The only other way to handle more drives would be to make the computer bigger. Keeping them outside of the PC can allow more of them (up to 40 with the new MP). Organization should not be too much of a problem. If external storage starts to catch on, there will certainly be inexpensive racks that make managing drives easy. It's not hard to imagine racks being stored under desks where the boxes used to be, and the compact computers themselves sitting right next to the display. Storing drives externally also means you don't have to open the computer every time you want to move a drive or put in a new one. It's certainly not rocket science to open up the computer, but it's arguably faster and easier to manage your drives if they're sitting on top (or underneath) your desk. Of course, this is definitely not for everyone. Consumers couldn't benefit from external expansion at all, and there are plenty of professionals out there who aren't ready to leave behind traditional PCs. And there's no guarantee that external expansion will succeed - the new Mac Pro may indeed go the way of the Cube, as many have predicted. Or it could be a game changer. Only time will tell.

 

[xcodeaddict]

Is there gonna be a punch up?

 

[Blu Reel]

In summary...

After watching the announcements, reading WWDC reports, and reading many reactions, I pulled together this summary of what we know, don't know, can infer, and can speculate on. And of course, my humble opinion at the end.

The new Mac Pro

Barring any changes,
This is what we know -
1) Size & Shape - 9.9" height x 6.6" diameter, cylinder
2) Case material - polished aluminum
2) Processor - Up to 12 core processing power, Xeon E5 chipset
3) Graphics - Dual GPUs supporting three 4K displays
4) Memory - 4 expansion slots, DDR3 1866 MHz ECC - user upgradeable
5) Storage - 1 x SSD on a PCI Express bus
6) Wireless - Wifi 802.11 ac, Bluetooth 4.0
7) Connections
4 x USB 3 ports
6 x Thunderbolt 2 ports
2 x Gigabit ethernet ports
1 x HDMI port
1 x Standard PC power cord connection
1 x 3.5mm Headphone jack
1 x 3.5 Speaker(?) jack
8) Unified Thermal Core - shared heat dissipation with single large fan
9) Designed and assembled in the US
10) NO internal PCI slots
11) NO other internal storage
12) NO optical drive

This is what we can infer from the images on Apple's website and WWDC reports.
1) Internal power supply (grilled area between the motherboard and the case)
2) Single processor (only 1 set of connectors can be discerned on the motherboard and no room for a second)
3) Interchangeable SSD connector (SSD shown being inserted into the connector)
4) Proprietary video card connectors to the motherboard (no PCI board connectors on the video cards' length and black connector(?) on bottom end)
5) No direct video card display connectors - video outs not connected to GPU cards
6) Apple uses the term GPUs instead of video cards. The "video cards" seen do not function like video cards of old with PCI long edge connectors and video outs on the short edge.
7) The GPU card has the connector for the PCI Express SSD built into it. So, the GPU card could be part GPU and part Storage controller. It would be logical for the GPU to be on the same PCI Express bus as the SSD.

What we currently don't know -
1) Price
2) What is the maximum amount of memory supported in Gigabytes? We can infer 128GB from OS Mavericks.
3) Will there be a dual CPU model? (taller cylinder?)
4) WIll there be a more memory slots model? (taller cylinder?)
5) Will there be another SSD port? (put into the empty space on the second GPU card)
6) Is there a rack mount version?
7) What are the CPU offerings going to be?

Miscellaneous Notes:
Size Comparisons (9.9" height, 6.6" diameter)
1) Micro ATX motherboard (smallest) 6.75" x 6.75"
2) previous Mac Pro Tower - 20.1" height, 8.1" width, 18.7" depth


Questions and Speculation
1) Will Apple make a series of Thunderbolt enclosures to house storage drives and PCI cards?
2) Will there be an upgrade path for GPUs?
3) Is there a new bus for connecting GPUs?
3b) If so, can it be connected externally in the future?

My opinion
The most pressing question is what's it going to cost.

For what it's worth, I'm planning on buying one. Why? Because my 17" MacBook Pro Core2 Duo with which I edit HD videos and render out After Effects projects on is seriously begging for an upgrade. And that also means, I don't have any investments in PCI cards and I'm already used to the workflow of using external storage solutions. I have removable drive bays in those as well as my Blu Ray burner and DVD burner.

Looking forward to more news.

 

[jdbrandt]

3rd party opportunity for a matching external chassis

It seems to me that there will be an opportunity for any of a number of companies to manufacture an external chassis that would sit under and match the fit and finish the cylinder, with slots for different HDD and optical form factors along with legacy connectors (FW800). Not unlike the HDDs designed to sit under the Mac Mini. See http://www.123macmini.com/accessories/guide/enclosures.html

The new Mac Pro's only 9" tall, for crying out loud. A matching 6" tall RAID enclosure with additional legacy connectors to sit under the Mac Pro would sell well. Stackable like http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack/ would be nice...

 

[gnasher729]

The Steve Jobs rolling in his grave comments are not just disrespectful they're outright disgusting. You don't like the new announcement fine but why keep calling out to the dead.

I think they are not disgusting, but plain stupid. If Steve Jobs was alive and healthy today, he would have _loved_ being on stage and presenting this new machine.

On second thought, they are disgusting. Some people dislike the new machine (as can be expected, this being MacRumors), and in order to make it seem that their opinion is the correct one, they appeal to an authority who is dead and therefore cannot tell them how wrong they are.

 

[xbjllb]

Design basis for new Mac Pro

It wasn't until I saw it at head-on height that it came to me

"I..... am...... Nomad...... I..... am...... perfection......."

Now if they could just get it to hover...

 

[MakoRumors]

Perspectives

I couldn’t care less about:
Appearance – It’s a computer people. It goes under the desk and there it stays. Don’t care if it is sky blue pink, round, square, oblong, pyramid, or dihedral.
Housing material – Again, it’s a computer. Don’t take it out of the office, on the road, off-road, to the beach, etc. Could be made of paper mache for all I care if it holds the internals and accepts my keyboard/mouse commands, generates the files, and puts the image on the screen.
Super Drive – Have an external burner and am very happy. For all those that complain about things that need to be housed internally, strange they don’t say the same about a printer. It’s all in the paradigm.
Expandability (Expendability??) – I suspect that knowing this would be utilized heavily by the Video industry, me thinkst Apple probably has considered this in the design process. Perhaps not, but I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.


I do care about:
Speed & computing power – However they accomplish this (internally) is fine with me. I have several friends who keep asking why I don’t simply get an iMac. Have you done much video editing (and rendering, compressing, etc.)? Deer-in-the-headlights stare is about all I get. Those who haven’t done any have no idea how computing power and throughput is paramount.
Hard Drive Storage – Give me enough space that is secure, safe, & quickly accessible and I’m a happy camper. Don’t care if it is internal, external, in the cloud, thumb-drive, Quiji Board, or whatever. Will be getting a RAID enclosure that Thunderbolt will connect quite nicely.
Decent Video Display – Give me several monitors for ample workspace which provides decent non-stuttering playback and that’s all I care about… Don’t care what Video card, internal/external buss is involved – I’m betting they’ve considered this in the design as well.
Stability – Give me apps the work. Do away with the fancy stuff that looks nice has wow & pizazz and expend that effort towards making them bulletproof and I’m a happy camper. How I detest the crash and spinning beach ball.....

Ok – off my little ole soapbox.

 

[RedGreenBlue]

does anyone think this new mac will be available in the uk or if not
do you think it will be possible to find somewhere in uk to buy one ?

anyone?

thanks

I expect Apple to give up on the UK and Europe altogether. Too far away! ;>)

 

[xbjllb]

PERFECT Desktop Setup

Just having fun with it. I'm getting one the second it hits the stores.

As soon as someone can tell me how to hack snow leopard to run on it.

 

[manghangson]

Anyone thinking like this hasn't had to move a Windows based engineering system around with the plethora of cords and cables. It's like a gaggle of Octopuses being dragged around. Cables, cables, cables... YIKES!!!

You do realize that you are talking about *everything* being added externally. DVD drive, expansion cage, etc... With their power cables and assorted cables...

Throw in a few external drives, a DVD drive, printer, scanner, keyboard/mouse... Cables!!!

Whatever...

Yea. You're right, I definitely never had multiple devices, drives, breakout cables, broadcast monitors, cinema displays and peripherals attached to my computer and had to move them around. Well other than every system i ever had ever.

But hey, I'm not a windows engineer hanging out on a mac forum.

And guess what, if you're an engineer, ITS YOUR JOB. If you did it well, you would be organized and moving things around wouldn't be such a problem. If you can't handle drives and devices daisy chained by one thunderbolt thread, you should look for a different line of work.

Have fun watching your DVDs

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

The lack of PCI expansion and upgradeable GPUs (well at least using ordinary cards...and we know Apple has a horrible history of not offering any kind of upgrades for existing computers short of the following year's model to replace it) are the primary things that make this machine DOA. Yeah, you can get adapters and external drive storage galore, but I don't see where Thunderbolt 2 can make up for a lack of true PCI-16x expansion. You'd think Apple would have put an expansion connector on the bottom of this thing or something to add a second cylinder with card expansion for those that need it (if even technically feasible).

Frankly, it just boggles my mind that my simple 2012 Mac Mini has a FW800 port and yet this thing does not (requiring another DONGLE to do something that should be built-in). FW is used often enough in Pro Audio that it should be a no-brainer to include it on a truly Pro model. Even if it is on the way out, it's still in massive use today in that field.

Yes, you can build a nice Hackintosh, but that's not really a solution for professional companies to use a hacked computer setup. It just seems unbelievable that Apple can offer a simple business class plain vanilla tower case with regular updates using off-the-shelf parts for those that need it with full Apple support. It'd cost them next to nothing and yet they'd rather lose customers instead. The mere fact this thing is so wild looking tells me that Tim Cook is the technical equivalent of a fashion designer. He's clearly FAR more worried about form than function and that is a bad bad thing in the professional world of computing. This thing is going to hide under most people's desks out of site anyway and with no optical drives or anything, it SHOULD be out of site. They would have been better off with a rack-mount design if they want something invisible that's suited for professional use. But no one else makes a computing R2D2, so that's clearly what has Tim's attention. Unfortunately, whereas this for iOS devices at least makes sense in a "fits in the pocket easily" sense, I don't know where this computer is designed to fit unless it has a secondary function of removing and filtering cigar smoke....

 

[Abraham Bloom]

New MAC PRO

Yes I am not happy with the new Mac Pro. We had the G4 Cube and .... drum roll - I said it first "Mac Pro TUBE". Lost all the utility that I bought my Mac Pro for. No slots, no internal disk storage. If I wanted loud irritating external drives I would have bought a Mac Mini and stuck them on that platform. It is cool looking, possibly blazing fast but can you put 4 hard disks at 3tb each and a SSD and DVD burner in it along with 48 gb of ram without selling your first born? If I have to have external devices then why have the Pro?? That is why I spent all that dough for a machine that I can customize. Will I buy one? My Pro is still under apple care for a few years, ask me when it runs out. Right now I'd buy the most powerful Mac Mini I could afford and an external drive. BUT NOT ANYTHING MADE BY PROMISE TECHNOLOGY. I have never had any device from them that worked worth a toot.

 

[alfonsog]

I'm replacing my dead 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 with this new Mac Pro whenever it comes out, probably the low end one (I used it for music production and if I ever get back in it complex math calculations.) Hopefully there will be a matching black keyboard and upgraded thunderbolt display. Probably picking up a 2013 Air in the next week or so since I fried my mom's mac mini so I hooked up my 2011 Air to her 24" Apple display and have only been using my work computer and iPhone the past few months..

 

[heisetax]

Phil Schiller mentioned Expandability through external storage

But a video card is not "expandable storage: in my book. Other than the G4 Cube this is the most restrictive Macs in this class starting with the II around 25 years ago. To me this is really a Mac Mini on steroids. The G4 Cube had a limited following like the Mac Mini does because of the lack of internal expandability & the use of an underpowered CPU for the price that is charged. As a Mac Pro User I want to have my computer case to include more the a couple of video cards, 4 memory card slots, over priced SSD with no choice to replace with or add internal hdd drives. Where's the nice neat Mac Pro that I have been using for 7 years now? It is one thing to need an adapter card for computers in the Mac Mini price range but to have a half a dozen to a dozen pieces of computer equipment on my table at a minimum looks very sloppy & unprofessional.

If Apple came back & said that this is the replacement for the Mac Mini & that the real Mac Pro is still being designed with the things that professionals need, want & will buy somewhere. For the last year I felt that the Mac Mini was the new Mac Pro. I was close to being correct. Its just as easy to add a $1,000-2,000 PCIe expansion buss on a Mac Mini as it is this so called Mac Pro. But with the first test to see if it is a Mac is to see if it is small & pretty. I was one of those that was very happy with the 2006-2013 Mac Pro case. I thought that the Mac Pro should be like the older one with the upgrades to USB3, SATA III, room for 2 to 4 SSD cards like OWC uses on a PCIe card & Apple will be using on the new Mac Pro Mini, 8+ memory slots & several PCIe card slots. These so called PCIe expansion buss items may hold up to 3 cards but they can only be under powered cards. I want to like the new Mac Pro Mini but with the little bit of information & no pricing probably available until the unit is ready to ship.

For the past many years Apple may have been very slow to update the Mac Pro but at least they gave much of what users needed. I've been running 2 video cards at 16X since I replaced my very early 1st gen Mac Pro in Aug of 2006. So having 2 cards at 16X is not new to the Mac. Then because Apple did not update the Mac Pro now for over 3 years I added cards to add USB3 & SATA III. This new Mac doesn't even have any SATA I or II or III present. ThunderBolt is still over priced. The ThunderBolt adapters are still all ThunderBolt 1 models with ThunderBolt 2 still to be made. The way ThunderBolt has been selling we will be hoping that it will still be here when the new Mac Pro ships.

 

[jncoanalog]

Not sure how you come to your design adage. It is only a relative truism. Looks are due often design constraints, or we'd have the infinitely cooler oval displays from numerous alien technologies you see in the abundant documentaries available on the internet.

Not sure I understood the comment about "the infinitely cooler oval displays", but the point I was trying to make was that the act of designing something has nothing to do with the act of imposing a certain 'look', or appearence, to something. Of course 'looks' are often due to design constraints, what I was trying to say was that design constraints should never be due to 'looks'. I'm not sure if I made my point clear, but if your willing to learn portuguese (my mother tongue) I could try to explain it better

Anyway, my 'adage' wasn't really too on-topic so lets move on...

Most computers need more air to cool it, but because they are making them smaller and smaller need faster noisier fans. A large fan rotating quietly is often better than a small fan pushing the air at a faster speed. Sure, air is a terrible coolant, but it really the only one in use in commercial systems and in this system.

Okay, it isn't a linear function in that double the fan size at half the speed doesn't move the equivalent volume of air, but it is noticeable. The core's triangular design makes it so you can combine several fans that create cooler pathways over disparate hotspots into a single simple pathway. That is awesome. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't have benefited from a larger fan at the same quiet speed pulling more air over parts at a quieter db. And the device could have provide both smaller device and some expandability.

I believe we are really saying the same thing, just looking at it from opposite extremes of the spectrum.
I do very much agree that this new design could have benefited from a little larger fan (and from a little bit larger design overall while maintaining the form factor), what I was praising was the benefits that this new approach provided over the old one (1 big fan rotating at slower speeds than the multiple smaller fans found on the old design).

I think you are just highlighting the flaws of this new design vs. an hypothetical one (maybe with a similar form factor but a little bigger), while I'm highlighting the benefits of this new design/paradigm vs. the old one.

I'm not against modular. I think it is a great idea. TB is fantastic, and hopefully will outstrip potential saturation for years to come. But the box was already pretty modular as far as peripherals go.

I believe the most important benefit/change here should be a mindset one. People should really stop thinking about specs and numbers and actually spend more time thinking about actual computing power needs. Efficiency in other terms. And this new thermal design could hypothetically do loads for efficiency, as could the 'modular' approach they chose.
The box was maybe pretty modular as far as peripherals go, but it was surely pretty inefficient in the sense that you were obliged to get either components you didn't needed or empty space that brought nothing good but created tons of problems.
With the cylindrical design, they maintained (and with the TB2 implementation actually upped) the modular capacity for peripherals while they eliminated (or at least reduced) much of the problems created by the internal expansion capabilities of the box.

Apple on the other hand has been working to reduce the number of cables around. Now they have back-flipped for non-obvious reasons and implemented a design which will introduce clutter. SSD prices haven't dropped that much recently, and data volumes are still steadily increasing.

Maybe Apple could design a cylindrical base (even stackable ones possibly) where the New Mac Pro would sit that provides flexible expandability (think SSDs, HDDs, GPUs, Sound Cards, Video Cards, whatever...) for those who really need the expandability. For those who don't, just stick with the main cilinder and maybe attach an HDD or two.
However, I don't see them doing it; so..... maybe this could be a good idea for a kickstarter project Maybe (and only maybe) then I could make the money to buy one of those good looking (and very well designed, at least apparently) machines and just spend my days staring at it (because I don't have any actual need for one)!

I just hope you are not right (at least not too much) and that Apple doesn't do to the Mac Pro what they've done to the iMac... Pushing a very much needed 'new' computing concept/paradigm, and perfecting a machine to a state with no precedents in the PC industry, just to immensely cripple that very same machine by obsessively wanting to make it smaller than it actually needs to be.

 

[patent10021]

I think many of you are missing the point. A Mac Mini on steroids is exactly the future and exactly the point. Expandability now means external expandability.

Lead follow or get out of the way.

 

[heisetax]

The lack of PCI expansion and upgradeable GPUs (well at least using ordinary cards...and we know Apple has a horrible history of not offering any kind of upgrades for existing computers short of the following year's model to replace it) are the primary things that make this machine DOA. Yeah, you can get adapters and external drive storage galore, but I don't see where Thunderbolt 2 can make up for a lack of true PCI-16x expansion. You'd think Apple would have put an expansion connector on the bottom of this thing or something to add a second cylinder with card expansion for those that need it (if even technically feasible).

Frankly, it just boggles my mind that my simple 2012 Mac Mini has a FW800 port and yet this thing does not (requiring another DONGLE to do something that should be built-in). FW is used often enough in Pro Audio that it should be a no-brainer to include it on a truly Pro model. Even if it is on the way out, it's still in massive use today in that field.

Yes, you can build a nice Hackintosh, but that's not really a solution for professional companies to use a hacked computer setup. It just seems unbelievable that Apple can offer a simple business class plain vanilla tower case with regular updates using off-the-shelf parts for those that need it with full Apple support. It'd cost them next to nothing and yet they'd rather lose customers instead. The mere fact this thing is so wild looking tells me that Tim Cook is the technical equivalent of a fashion designer. He's clearly FAR more worried about form than function and that is a bad bad thing in the professional world of computing. This thing is going to hide under most people's desks out of site anyway and with no optical drives or anything, it SHOULD be out of site. They would have been better off with a rack-mount design if they want something invisible that's suited for professional use. But no one else makes a computing R2D2, so that's clearly what has Tim's attention. Unfortunately, whereas this for iOS devices at least makes sense in a "fits in the pocket easily" sense, I don't know where this computer is designed to fit unless it has a secondary function of removing and filtering cigar smoke....

Being a non smoker I have no need for a cigar smoke filter. I wonder what the real Mac Pro will look like? So far we have only seen a black waste paper basket that can or will double as a cigar smoke filter.

----------

Not sure I understood the comment about "the infinitely cooler oval displays", but the point I was trying to make was that the act of designing something has nothing to do with the act of imposing a certain 'look', or appearence, to something. Of course 'looks' are often due to design constraints, what I was trying to say was that design constraints should never be due to 'looks'. I'm not sure if I made my point clear, but if your willing to learn portuguese (my mother tongue) I could try to explain it better

Anyway, my 'adage' wasn't really too on-topic so lets move on...



I believe we are really saying the same thing, just looking at it from opposite extremes of the spectrum.
I do very much agree that this new design could have benefited from a little larger fan (and from a little bit larger design overall while maintaining the form factor), what I was praising was the benefits that this new approach provided over the old one (1 big fan rotating at slower speeds than the multiple smaller fans found on the old design).

I think you are just highlighting the flaws of this new design vs. an hypothetical one (maybe with a similar form factor but a little bigger), while I'm highlighting the benefits of this new design/paradigm vs. the old one.



I believe the most important benefit/change here should be a mindset one. People should really stop thinking about specs and numbers and actually spend more time thinking about actual computing power needs. Efficiency in other terms. And this new thermal design could hypothetically do loads for efficiency, as could the 'modular' approach they chose.
The box was maybe pretty modular as far as peripherals go, but it was surely pretty inefficient in the sense that you were obliged to get either components you didn't needed or empty space that brought nothing good but created tons of problems.
With the cylindrical design, they maintained (and with the TB2 implementation actually upped) the modular capacity for peripherals while they eliminated (or at least reduced) much of the problems created by the internal expansion capabilities of the box.



Maybe Apple could design a cylindrical base (even stackable ones possibly) where the New Mac Pro would sit that provides flexible expandability (think SSDs, HDDs, GPUs, Sound Cards, Video Cards, whatever...) for those who really need the expandability. For those who don't, just stick with the main cilinder and maybe attach an HDD or two.
However, I don't see them doing it; so..... maybe this could be a good idea for a kickstarter project Maybe (and only maybe) then I could make the money to buy one of those good looking (and very well designed, at least apparently) machines and just spend my days staring at it (because I don't have any actual need for one)!

I just hope you are not right (at least not too much) and that Apple doesn't do to the Mac Pro what they've done to the iMac... Pushing a very much needed 'new' computing concept/paradigm, and perfecting a machine to a state with no precedents in the PC industry, just to immensely cripple that very same machine by obsessively wanting to make it smaller than it actually needs to be.

These PCIe expansion boards do not allow for a very fast card as thunderBolt is very slow compared to PCIe.

 

[iSee]

Cylindrical hard drives? Actually they tried that early on in the history of drive development. It functioned like the belt on an old dictograph, or the early recorders from Edison. They didn't work too well, which is why the industry went with platters, plus the reading mechanism would be unwieldy over time. I just measured a hard drive, and if someone used the small notebook sized SAS drives, they could pull off some kind of rack system with the drive platters horizontal. The more traditional half-height drives would have to be mounted vertically to get any number of them in an enclosure, and that wouldn't be very many without going really high, or much wider.

I guess someone could make an enclosure with an indentation in the top to hold the Mac Pro, which would help somewhat with the proliferation of cables I've feared. It's too bad they didn't develop a connector in the bottom of the Mac Pro to allow for vertical expansion. Maybe some third party manufacturer can come up with a 'dock' attachment and the ability to stack add-on accessories... Who knows...

----------



I'm lusting for an illuminated plug-in keyboard! They have them built-in for the notebooks, why not one that plugs in? Come on Apple! Release an illuminated wired keyboard! Please...

I meant a cylindrical enclosure, not really a cylindrical drive! Come of think of it I remember my mother showing be a cylindrical hard drive at her work when I was a kid (roughly ~1980) that had a huge sounding capacity like 5MB... but I seem to remember it was actually a bunch of platters... and I don't see those coming back.

I don't really think new hard drive form factors will happen... the rise of SSDs will (and are) slowing changing things, but drives with platters are slowly becoming obsolete, so there's pressure for them to change.

 

[heisetax]

Yea. You're right, I definitely never had multiple devices, drives, breakout cables, broadcast monitors, cinema displays and peripherals attached to my computer and had to move them around. Well other than every system i ever had ever.

But hey, I'm not a windows engineer hanging out on a mac forum.

And guess what, if you're an engineer, ITS YOUR JOB. If you did it well, you would be organized and moving things around wouldn't be such a problem. If you can't handle drives and devices daisy chained by one thunderbolt thread, you should look for a different line of work.

Have fun watching your DVDs

You need to wake up & smell the cables. This is a poor design for a Pro model unless it is a replacement for the Mac Mini. You need to see my present Mac Pro. It has 4 FW800, 5 USB 2, 2 USB 3, Sata II, SATA III, optical drives, 5 inter hdd, 5 displays connected to it, 2 networks, both optical & analog audio with the ability to connect to 6 5 drive expansion drives using both eSATA II & eSATA III. And all of the cables go to one box. Just to do what is built-in will require a few thousand $s plus all of those cables & extra adapters. The only way the price can be right is if a maxed out one costs less that $2,000. And we all know that that price is only wishful thinking. Just look that you can spend over $1,000 for a maxed out Mac Mini & it only uses built in video now.

 

[Junkdrop1]

Friends at NOAA (marine biology) and NWS (doing weather mapping research) are already anxious to get one or more of these new Mac Pros.

I think there's a chance that studios can reduce their hardware and energy consumption footprint, as well as reduce reliance on server bays and render farms.

IMO this is a good move by Apple.

G

 

[Middleman-77]

@Blu Reel

FYI, we DO have information on the latest pricing for the MP>

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/11/australian_apple_tax_repealed_for_macbook_air/

According to this article, the new Mac Pro 12 Core is likely to cost around US$3799. What that will include I don't really know.

As to your questions on speculation:

1) Future TB devices from Apple? I don't really know. Apple nowadays seems to be very much focused on consumer-end products like iPad and iPad mini mass appeal. Storage is more of a niche Prosumer market area and if their performance for the past 10 years is anything to go by, they may not want to touch it and leave it for 3rd party firms like Areca, Promise, Belkin & Village Instruments to handle. Unless of course Apple decides to up their game and decides to see that Prosumers, Enterprise and the average Joe really do benefit from their future Thunderbolt products (and by offering very high performance products, knock out any remaining competition in the market). One says this is still possible because they haven't released their Apple TV yet. If anything to go by, the new Mac Pro with 4K output could well form a new arsenal of products along with the new Apple TV/Cinema Display that could target a new segment of the market - high end graphics. With high-end graphics there is also speculation that the Mac Pro with its new size and design, could also be marketed as a potential new gaming platform which trumps the traditional PC on performance. We'll have to see how Apple handles that.

As to your other questions - it feels the GPU may not be upgradable and there that could well be a new connecting interface with the design of this new casing. But whether the new Mac Pro will be able to connect and daisy-chain with other computers in future only time will tell. Some functions used to be possible on the old PowerMac G4 systems via Firewire from one computer to the next (like a network card) but not Thunderbolt as far as I know. With the high bandwidth of Thunderbolt 2 and with this new high performance spec of the whole machine, what would be interesting is how the new Mac Pro will work interface-wise with rendering like those used for 3D, Final Cut and animation ie. QMaster etc.

As it goes I do have one extra concern about the new MP. Has the new internal fanblades met the tough requirements of the EU?

 

[nordicappeal]

Seems like everyone have something to say - even me - I've started to look for at secondhand Mac Pro

 

[bradl]

You need to wake up & smell the cables. This is a poor design for a Pro model unless it is a replacement for the Mac Mini. You need to see my present Mac Pro. It has 4 FW800, 5 USB 2, 2 USB 3, Sata II, SATA III, optical drives, 5 inter hdd, 5 displays connected to it, 2 networks, both optical & analog audio with the ability to connect to 6 5 drive expansion drives using both eSATA II & eSATA III. And all of the cables go to one box. Just to do what is built-in will require a few thousand $s plus all of those cables & extra adapters. The only way the price can be right is if a maxed out one costs less that $2,000. And we all know that that price is only wishful thinking. Just look that you can spend over $1,000 for a maxed out Mac Mini & it only uses built in video now.

And your present Mac Pro is so 2000s with everything being so monolithic in it. That model, which is the PC model, btw, is so so outdated that it struggles to keep up with changing technologies as bad as the PC market struggles. Everything is moving away from that model so fast that not even the darling of the PC market can even keep up. If you've noticed, Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, Acer, and others are trailing miserably in the very market they cornered between 1995 and 2010. With the Cloud coming in, nobody wants to remain static in a single place, tied down to something that is a task in itself to move.

Apple caught onto that with the MacBook, iPhone and iPad lines, and are making their high-end pro model just as easily portable.

The days of multiple drives in a monolithic box are gone. And this is coming from someone who had that type of setup in a Linux box since 1993 up until last year. I dropped all of that for a Hackintosh with a single drive, external USB3 drive for backups, as well as dropped my flightsim PC down from 4 drives to a SSD for the OS and 1 3TB drive for everything else.

Higher capacity drives and cloud storage killed the model you hold so dear. Don't blame Apple for coming up with something that applies to computing today because you may not want to adapt. Either way, you can keep your current Mac Pro. If it suits you, then stick with it. But then again, you can't complain about not having anything updated because what was updated you don't like. You know, beggars/choosers.

BL.

 

[Blu Reel]

@Blu Reel

FYI, we DO have information on the latest pricing for the MP>

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/11/australian_apple_tax_repealed_for_macbook_air/

According to this article, the new Mac Pro 12 Core is likely to cost around US$3799. What that will include I don't really know.

As to your questions on speculation:

1) Future TB devices from Apple? I don't really know. Apple nowadays seems to be very much focused on consumer-end products like iPad and iPad mini mass appeal. Storage is more of a niche Prosumer market area and if their performance for the past 10 years is anything to go by, they may not want to touch it and leave it for 3rd party firms like Areca, Promise, Belkin & Village Instruments to handle. Unless of course Apple decides to up their game and decides to see that Prosumers, Enterprise and the average Joe really do benefit from their future Thunderbolt products (and by offering very high performance products, knock out any remaining competition in the market). One says this is still possible because they haven't released their Apple TV yet. If anything to go by, the new Mac Pro with 4K output could well form a new arsenal of products along with the new Apple TV/Cinema Display that could target a new segment of the market - high end graphics. With high-end graphics there is also speculation that the Mac Pro with its new size and design, could also be marketed as a potential new gaming platform which trumps the traditional PC on performance. We'll have to see how Apple handles that.

As to your other questions - it feels the GPU may not be upgradable and there that could well be a new connecting interface with the design of this new casing. But whether the new Mac Pro will be able to connect and daisy-chain with other computers in future only time will tell. Some functions used to be possible on the old PowerMac G4 systems via Firewire from one computer to the next (like a network card) but not Thunderbolt as far as I know. With the high bandwidth of Thunderbolt 2 and with this new high performance spec of the whole machine, what would be interesting is how the new Mac Pro will work interface-wise with rendering like those used for 3D, Final Cut and animation ie. QMaster etc.

As it goes I do have one extra concern about the new MP. Has the new internal fanblades met the tough requirements of the EU?

Technically speaking, the article is just giving their best guess as to what the pricing could be based on previous history. So I stand by my decision to say we don't know what the pricing will be.

I'm hoping the radical design change would also lead to a radical price change and hopefully in the cheaper direction
But that's just hoping.

Now your point on Thunderbolt products makes me think of a whole new scenario.

I agree the current 3rd party manufacturers aren't doing much of a job of creating Thunderbolt devices. I'm speculating that what I'm seeing with Apple's strategies with the iPhone and the iPad will carry over to this new Mac Pro design. Meaning, the success of the iPhone and the iPad and the iPod was Apple's focus on delivering an entire ecosystem. Sure they left room for the 3rd party vendors to sell their stuff, but Apple made sure that the functional experience with these products worked from "start to finish" without 3rd party products.

So, I'm crossing my fingers and looking at the this sneak peek into the future of the Mac Pro as looking into the future of Mac Computers or at least the new Mac Pro line.

A significance of Apple case designs over time
While people bring up the Mac Cube as a comparison, we have to remember the Mac Cube didn't represent the entirety of any particular Mac line up (Pro or consumer). It's appearance and disappearance didn't influence either Mac line up.

By changing the look and material of the case for one it's line ups, Apple is setting the trend for the entire lineup. For example, they went from plastic cases, mice and keyboards, to the aluminum cases, mice and keyboards.

When Apple ditched the floppy drives, they did it across the board for the entire line up.

Sure, we can say that Apple has been ditching the optical drives across the Mac line up "slowly" this time around. But, this Mac Pro really indicates to me that Apple has something bigger up their sleeves.

Is there something more?
The entire time that we've all been complaining about no new updates, refreshes, or upgrades to the Mac Pro, Apple has been working on this. To me, I don't think they needed that much time to develop this one box (cylinder). Actually, this Mac Pro looks shippable tomorrow. And the way they advertise which processor is going into this Mac Pro indicates to me that they don't think it's the most critical thing to announce because they'll just drop in the latest shipping processor.

And two more questions make me think that there is much more than meets the eye here.

Why give us all a sneak peek at an obviously unique design with no fixed release date? One that breaks with several entrenched workflows and traditions? And give Apple's competitors a chance to make their knockoffs? The shipping date could be as late as Dec 31. That's a lot of time for knockoffs to be designed and released before Apple ships the Mac Pro.

Why bring back manufacturing (ok assembly) of this ONE computer to the US? That's NOT cost effective even without radically changing the design. We all know it's much cheaper to build PCs in the Far East.

The point here is you don't build manufacturing plants for a single product while you have other manufacturing plants that build similar products already in existence - not unless you're building something that you plan on building with enough volume to justify building a dedicated plant.

If you said that Apple is making it's own plant to help offset production of the iPad or the iPhone, I would say that's logical and normal business growth.

But building a new plant just to build and sell ONE "new" product that severs ties with multiple existing ecosystems doesn't justify it for any business unless you have a broader and/or long-term plan and strategy. You certainly don't build a plant with the hopes that other businesses will build "necessary" complementing products.

A reason to build a plant to manufacture a product separate from your other similar products is for secrecy. But since Apple let the cat of the bag on it's secret design of the new Mac Pro, that suggests there's a bigger secret.

And who knows what THAT bigger secret is.

I'm hoping I'm right and it's an ecosystem and additional models of the new Mac Pro or even a whole new Pro line up.

Disclaimer
Now if Apple built a plant dedicated solely to building the Mac Cube, then I would agree with all the negative reactions to the new Mac Pro because then there would be a track record of illogical/reckless business development that we all could point to that would indicate that Apple is such a dumb business company.

And yes, Apple has made series of blunders recently, but hopefully since Apple sacked those people in charge, the possibility of new blunders has been greatly reduced.



How's that for reading between the lines of Apple's marketing?