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Apple 'Questioning' the Future of its Mac Pro Line?

Yeah, NEWSFLASH - Apple hasn't updated the Pros in so long, why would anyone buy one? Don't blame the computer, blame the lack of updates. I just bought a new iMac with 8-cores that's faster than my 2008 Mac Pro with 8-cores...and that was the premium 3.2 gigahertz machine.

You make a massive machine, and we'll buy it, but make it MASSIVE. Some of use need a place to plug-in our drives. :)

Also, what would I do with my 30" monitor? Make it my alternate?
 
wiz329 said:
Yeah, great idea. Try fitting in 4 drives in your iMac. Ever do any rendering? Want to use more than 16 GB of RAM? Oooops.
Click to expand...

The current iMac can use up to 32GB of RAM and Thunderbolt solves the drives problem.
 
They need to make a better computer or lower the price point.

Don't get me wrong it is a terrific machine, but if they want to sell more, something has to change.
 
smulji said:
"What they can do is increase the expandability features with "device boxes" that attach via Thunderbolt and accept graphics cards, pci cards, drives, and even add value such as GPU ganging as coprocessors. "

You've hit the nail on the head here. This is what I think Apple intends to do. The future of computing is mobile & modular. Only those that really need the extra horsepower will buy the attachments needed to upgrade their units. The days of big towers will dwindle.
Click to expand...
Apple may rely on third parties for this market entirely. Third party external box, third party (Intel) blades to fit those boxes, and Apple simply provides drivers. Third parties and primary partners are well advised to lean into my post now.

Look what they did with FCP! QED.

Rocketman
 
byebye mac pro, hello linux-vm-win8-box.
wouldnt like that as I love OS X... and while I like the iPhone and iPad for what they are I'd rather work on a real workstation, not some iGadget and sure as hell not some glossy mirror.

anyway... my bet is on apple keeping the MP alive for some time to come but I dont expect rad changes on the case design - if it looked that same way ten years from now, so be it... it lives under the desk anyway and most people use it to work rather than show off with it in the subway or restaurant.
 
Doom!

Great, I finally get my whole group focused around a Mac Pro workflow and now they're talking about pulling the plug... It's all about compute power for us-- CPU speeds today, but we're already looking at how many GPU cards we can stack in a box to use OpenCL processing.
 
re: thunderbolt

Right.... this is nonsense. I don't want to go back to the situation I had back in the 1980's with 8-bit computers that needed external boxes all over the desk for expansion! The iMac only looks neat and clean as long as you don't need to plug much into it. When you start adding external hard drive enclosures, you've got more wires and more power outlets consumed (usually by brick type AC adapters, no less).... Part of the attraction of a Mac Pro is the ability to stuff 4 drives inside, as well as other expansion options you might need to use, by way of internal card slots.

Thunderbolt is fine for niche situations where you need the throughput, or on portables, where you might run all your external "docking station" type desktop peripherals over it when the system is sitting on your desk. But it's not an excuse to get rid of a user-expandable desktop machine.


reallynotnick said:
I don't know why everyone thinks thunderbolt solves all the expansion problems, it is only 10Gb/s which for an external connector yes is fast but PCI Express 2 is 64Gb/s and PCI Express 3 which is coming out is 128Gb/s.

You can't run a high end GPU over thunderbolt, it would be terrible. Not unless they released a 100Gb/s version really soon.
Click to expand...
 
The more apple does with iOS and kills off the Mac Pro line, the more it will validate the ridicule from non-mac users that apple products are just TOYS for computer illiterate noobs.

Some of us actually use a Mac Pro for real work.
 
It might be a lower percentage compared to the notebooks, but obviously Apple has been selling those like hot cakes. Would be nice to have some real figures instead of a % comparison to see if the Mac Pro sales have gone down in numbers. It looks like Apple has been selling a lot more of the other stuff, making the MP look unpopular / unwanted?


p.s.
Anyone claiming the i7 is the same as a Xeon CPU….. check the prices. A 6 core i7 is half the price of a Xeon 6 core.
 
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Boy.
This is smart business decision. Is long overdue. With the improve Final Cut X is now shown that to have Mac Pro is overkill. All real working pros have move to iMac or MBP by now anyway.



:apple:
 
cjsmurf said:
It's not needed and archaic. To say you need it so you can upgrade it in the future? - ok perhaps but there are so many options out there especially with storage.

The mac pro line is becoming the niche market. Beefed up iMac's are totally capable of doing the job. The main expansion would be for hard drive space which can easily be done with external drives. Set up the external storage over a network so you won't have the clutter of all the cables - I'm doing that for my air to handle all of the media I need as I do my rough cuts for editing. Cloud computing is the wave of the future.

Gene Roddenberry was the visionary - Apple is making it happen!
Click to expand...

Ever tried using external storage over a network for photoshop use? Completely defeats the point of TB in the first place.

oiuh151 said:
The current iMac can use up to 32GB of RAM and Thunderbolt solves the drives problem.
Click to expand...

For a lot of professionals, 32GB just doesn't cut it.
If you want a bunch of daisy chained stuff on your desk, so be it. Also, have you actually purchased a TB device yet? Ridiculously expensive as opposed to popping in 2 or 3 TB drives in a MP.
And any sort of rendering on a quad core is just a JOKE compared to a 12-core system.
 
cjsmurf said:
It's not needed and archaic. To say you need it so you can upgrade it in the future? - ok perhaps but there are so many options out there especially with storage.

I've switched from my aging mac pro to a macbook air - that's right an air! It handles EVERYTHING I need it to do and does it well. This includes photoshop, flash and Avid Media Composer - that's right AVID!

I use these tools as my business. This is my life and getting the air has made my business portable. I'm much happier now.

I'll admit it can get sluggish if I'm opening multiple applications at once having one application on my air and the other on my Cintiq but it's not too often I work on multiple applications. I prefer to deal with one task at a time. And if I needed to use After Effects I may have gone with a macbook pro - still not a mac pro.

The mac pro line is becoming the niche market. Beefed up iMac's are totally capable of doing the job. The main expansion would be for hard drive space which can easily be done with external drives. Set up the external storage over a network so you won't have the clutter of all the cables - I'm doing that for my air to handle all of the media I need as I do my rough cuts for editing. Cloud computing is the wave of the future.

Gene Roddenberry was the visionary - Apple is making it happen!
Click to expand...

I'm really sick of hearing people like you.
"I had a Mac Pro and now my MacBook Air can do everything my Mac Pro did!"

I'm sorry, but if your Macbook Air can do everything your Mac Pro can then you obviously were not doing intensive things.

Photoshop? What were you working with 2 layers and 1 mask?

Avid? What was your video a 10 second clip?

I think many people on this board are just naive at the true people who are using Mac Pros.
 
iChrist said:
Boy.
This is smart business decision. Is long overdue. With the improve Final Cut X is now shown that to have Mac Pro is overkill. All real working pros have move to iMac or MBP by now anyway.



:apple:
Click to expand...

Please read the longest post in page 11 and reconsider your comment.
 
Terrible news. I really hope this is a rumour.

I want and need Mac Pro. End of discussion.
 
You MAY be right, but I sure hope not ....

I'd like to think Apple doesn't REALLY view things this way. Every company would LIKE to see you keep buying their latest products, obviously. But at the same time, it really boosts sales and respect for your company's products overall if you build them to last. If they get that reputation as machines "you can use for a good 5 or 6 years straight", that means more people will consider paying a premium for a new one, vs. the competition.

I think especially when it comes to the "Pro" models, many of the customers in that target market are people with the financial means and justification to keep upgrading regularly, either way. They're going to view that "6 year shelf life" as simply a way to help keep resale values up so they don't get shafted too badly when they want to put their 1-2 year old model up for sale to buy the latest one.



Negritude said:
And that's one of the main reasons why Apple will discontinue it. :D

Apple wants you to buy a new machine sooner. The Mac Pro is less profitable not only because of low sales volume, it's unprofitable because it doesn't force you to follow the planned obsolescence timetable our economy is based on.
Click to expand...
 
nerdo said:
It might be a lower percentage compared to the notebooks, but obviously Apple has been selling those like hot cakes. Would be nice to have some real figures instead of a % comparison to see if the Mac Pro sales have gone down in numbers. It looks like Apple has been selling a lot more of the other stuff, making the MP look unpopular / unwanted?


p.s.
Anyone claiming the i7 is the same as a Xenon CPU….. check the prices.
Click to expand...

The current nehelem cpu that apple uses in the base mac pro is a dinosaur (its from november 2008). And its xeon not xenon. I can tell you exactly what is different with it between the core i7. Bet you can't. It has multpiple QPT links instead of one so it can be used in dual socket motherboards. It also supports ecc memory. Other than that theres nothing better about it. Its actually inferior to sandy bridge. Its using an old architecture and an old process 45nm. You can run benchmarks all day, sandy bridge is faster than nehelam.
 
wiz329 said:
For a lot of professionals, 32GB just doesn't cut it.
If you want a bunch of daisy chained stuff on your desk, so be it. Also, have you actually purchased a TB device yet? Ridiculously expensive as opposed to popping in 2 or 3 TB drives in a MP.
And any sort of rendering on a quad core is just a JOKE compared to a 12-core system.
Click to expand...

I never said it cut it for every person on the planet, I was simply correcting him.

Four hard drive bays are not that many. Chances are a lot of Mac Pro users have external hard drives already making your argument invalid. Thunderbolt is expensive now because it's new technology, new technology is always expensive once it's first introduced.

wikus said:
The more apple does with iOS and kills off the Mac Pro line, the more it will validate the ridicule from non-mac users that apple products are just TOYS for computer illiterate noobs.

Some of us actually use a Mac Pro for real work.
Click to expand...
So that's all you care about? What others think of the products you use?

Some people use iPhone's for work. Some use iPads. Some use Mac Mini's. Some use iMacs.
 
Prodo123 said:
Please read the longest post in page 11 and reconsider your comment.
Click to expand...

The post you speak of is proving my point. Is no way working pro would have time to write such long comment on silly MR message board. You don't know troll when you see one, no?

Pros are up on trends and know big tower is silly and old fashioned. Is unecessary. iMac beat Mac Pro in all meaningful benchmarks.

Fact.

:apple:
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

I currently own a 2008 2.8ghz 8-core Mac Pro and my previous computer was a Dual 2.7ghz G5 Powermac. I used these computers for all my video editing, but next time I am getting a 27inch iMac with a Promise thunderbolt raid drive. Why? Because the current iMac trounces my 2008 Mac Pro and the newer Mac Pro just cost way way too much.

Instead of buying a tower every 3-4 years I'm thinking of just buying a new iMac every year and selling the old one on Craigslist. Would be cheaper then getting a 8-core Mac Pro every couple of years and I would always be up to date.
 
pmjoe said:
Apple just needs to make a bigger version of the Mac mini server. More and better accessible RAM slots, at least two 3.5" drive bays, and up the CPU to the 3.4GHz quad core i7 that's in the top iMac.
Click to expand...

So this:

macpro.jpg
 
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