"new professional Mac would be "heavily reliant on Thunderbolt" with " no internal expandability "
WTF is the point if you cant upgrade the internals!
My thoughts exactly. No expandabillity - i.e. control in MY hands - equals fail.
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Apple Planning 'Something Really Different' for New Mac Pro
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My thoughts exactly. No expandabillity - i.e. control in MY hands - equals fail.
Well if it's modular - then it will be an iPad Retina. With optional keyboard. Wait a minute....
It'll be a Intel NUC cluster box. Buy one with as many NUC's as you need, expand up to 8 or 16 as supported by the Mac Pro tower case.
Brilliant.
Brilliant.
My left brain is doing a happy dance.
My right brain is still cautious but optimistic.
My dream is something that will give me the power of the current imacs without having to buy the monitor. Hopefully something to bridge the huge gap in the current product line. Personally I don't need the super duper multi drive computer that others are lusting for. Upgradable components would be a plus. Hopefully some modular system at various price points.
One can dream.
I will see what they say at wwdc and then if I don't like it i will have to buy a mac mini.
My right brain is still cautious but optimistic.
My dream is something that will give me the power of the current imacs without having to buy the monitor. Hopefully something to bridge the huge gap in the current product line. Personally I don't need the super duper multi drive computer that others are lusting for. Upgradable components would be a plus. Hopefully some modular system at various price points.
One can dream.
I will see what they say at wwdc and then if I don't like it i will have to buy a mac mini.
I have my doubts, too. A modular tower like that would be awesome. I'd build one to be a home server, and another to use as workstation. But I'm not sure it's feasible for even Apple to solve all the technical hurdles.
The NUC is a barebones system with a mobile CPU, iGPU and couple of ports - good for HTPC or extremely light use. Pretty much the antithesis of Mac "Pro".
Can we quote you and laugh at you if they do release something really different
Here's my wild prediction:
The "Mac Pro" isn't a single desktop machine at all. Instead it comes in a series of modular units what connect together via thunderbolt (hopefully, they click together like lego).
You pick a CPU module, a "base" module (w/the basic platform: mobo, power supply, 1 drive bay), one or more graphics card modules, extra storage modules, etc. You might even be able to click multiple machines together that with automatically configure themselves into a grid.
Yes....
But, instead of all external imagine a larger cube where Mac Mini style components slide in the back, are plug and play through Thunderbolt, then the back panel is closed up for a nice clean look.
Why should it be rack-mountable? Nobody uses Apple equipment in a server room - not even Apple.
And since the article had ZERO content except for "you'll be glad that you waited for our next vaporware product", well, let's just wait and see what they will actually ship. IF they even ship a new Mac Pro. At this point in time, the new Mac Pro is sitting right next to the rumored AppleTV and the rumored iWatch - which are all compatible with iWork X, Aperture X and Logic Studio X...
If you can't customize or add third party GPU's... it's a non-starter. I need to be able to add or change my CUDA cores as software outpaces hardware for specific features. If this box doesn't have at least 1 PCI slot... also pretty much a deal breaker. I need to be able to get out of the box to an expansion chassis at the least. TB alone can't provide enough throughput, especially if its truly only a singe buss of TB over multiple ports.
No optical drive... good. So make it 19" wide for rack-mount then?
Ready to leave Apple in the dust if this doesn't pan out well, and I've owned their products exclusively since the Apple IIe.
No optical drive... good. So make it 19" wide for rack-mount then?
Ready to leave Apple in the dust if this doesn't pan out well, and I've owned their products exclusively since the Apple IIe.
"Somewhat corroborating Baird's phone call, Lou Borella -- administrator of the 'We Want a New Macpro' Facebook group -- wrote on the page that he heard the new professional Mac would be "heavily reliant on Thunderbolt" with "no internal expandability", and would have support for dual-GPU's and no FireWire or optical drive."
Looks like they are going to **** it up. No internal expandability and no optical drive. Yea, that's a real pro level machine right there!
Of course they are going to **** it up - they have got nothing else to do! In the same way they are ****ing up everything they do now simply because they don't know what to do!!! All they needed to do for a pro machine was to upgrade the processors and thunderbolt and bits and job done, but no, they want to **** it up - and they will do!!!
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Third parties?
I'm not sure Steve Jobs is that dead.
Hmm well they make a fair amount of cash from licensing iOS device docks, AirPlay speakers etc. if Mac Pro goes modular and is to thrive, i doubt they are going to be the ones to develop all the modules. As long as the core machine is Apple, why not?
simply not true. being able to flypack a mac pro would be huge to a lot of people in my business. also I have several seats of users in a single room, I'd much rather be able to rack mount the CPU's out of the way, keep fan noise isolated. plenty of facilities still utilize this kind of gear.
THIS is what all the data centers are for
The new Mac Pro will just be a dumb terminal and you will pay for a configuration in the cloud and it will stream to your "Pro" box. Unlimited storage, memory, etc.
ultimate xGrid... honestly if you had a fast enough broadband connection this would be amazing.
I think he meant really different from the current design. I.e. not referring to a brand new computer category or anything. I did not get any hype out of that.
That's why it's not a tower.
I have a friend that works for Apple and got me a photo of the new Mac Pro
Ugh...sounds like a recipe to end up spending over $10k when all is said and done.
Here's what professionals need (regardless of the way Apple wants to believe they need):
Lots of RAM, and ideally lots of RAM slots so that we don't have to spend outrageous amounts of money to get us up to 64gb or more.
Powerful graphics cards, ideally CUDA capable, and multiples of them. Apps like Blackmagic Resolve can leverage multiple cards to offload the processing to.
Lots of crazy fast storage. TB technology is exciting, but also ridiculously expensive right now (with no real sign of coming down). Also, crowding your desk with lots of external stuff isn't particularly appealing IMHO.
FW is still alive and well...sorry! Many people with FW audio and video interfaces will lose their **** if Apple doesn't include at least 1 FW port in there.
Blu-Ray writeable...yup, shiny plastic disks are still a great way to deliver our work to clients, no optical drive also means no access to our existing libraries of stuff and old backups....not good.
Last but not least, we need a reasonable price for a number of reasons. Some of us with facilities need to purchase a number of machines and cost is definitely a factor. Secondly, technology is evolving rapidly, and we can't hold on to our workstations nearly as long as we used to, so the upgrade price shouldn't be crazy high.
A Mac Pro shouldn't appeal to the iPhone crowd, it's a machine specifically designed for a niche usage and it should reflect that. If Apple is thinking of giving me a glorified Mac Book Pro without a screen and call it a Mac Pro, they're not going to get my money regardless of how "cool" their new box looks!
this scenario will not work in every situation (remote work) and is dependent on a highly available, quality connection. while cool in theory, not something i'd want to rely upon in order to deliver high quality work in mission critical situations like live events. electricity yes... ISP, no.