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Apple 'Questioning' the Future of its Mac Pro Line?
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I used to work for one of north america's largest retailers (and oldest) as a designer in their marketing department.
Our own private department had its own server that was 10TB large. Every employee's computer was a Mac Pro. Not a single laptop (except the manager, since he was dealing with clients and needed mobility).
Thats just one example. In all, i've been exposed to probably about 10 studios that ive dealt with personally, all of which had used Mac Pros.
I'd like to hear more ignorant crap from some of these people in this thread. I don't think many of them have jobs that rely on using a computer for actual work.
I was referring to a new larger 30"+ iMac that designed specifically around having two xeons.
But it IS NOT the flagship product !
The iPhone is.
So everyone needs to ask yourself this:
You own a car company and sell a stand-alone GPS unit. That Unit is bought by everyone else who owns different cars then the one you sell.
It becomes your #1 Item and the Idea of a flagship product becomes that product.
Sure,..your car company still makes engines for other machines ....
But are you going to stop making your best car because all of a sudden your cheapest product becomes SO successful that ANYONE can buy it??
NO !
It makes no sense !
So CHILL everyone ! The Mac Pro will still be around ........For those who can AFFORD it !
I wasn't making any false accusations. My original point was that there is a lot you CAN'T do with an iMac or mac mini. For many, they really do "need" internal drive bays and more than 16 GB of RAM (which IS all the iMac is offered with btw). It is hugely inconvenient to have to store everything externally! And that doesn't even say anything about trying to stick 12+ core processers in an iMac or mac mini.
Any way you look at it, there is no replacement for the Mac Pro. That was my point. Not a false accusation.
Really? My father runs a graphics design studio, and the entire studio hasn't used a single tower mac since the G5 era. They all have iMacs.
So maybe you are the ignorant one.
Well said that's why I laugh when people say less than 1% of professionals rely on MacPro. Obviously they are not exposed to high end work on several industries that create media content.
Ah, don't know if that's doable though. I mean, that iMac would have to have at most 2.5 times the depth of the current one to house an Xeon. Wouldn't really look much like an iMac.
Oh no, a multi quoter.
Yes, it's hardly a report though is it?
Lot's of 'ifs' there but if true, they may just as well reinvent it and relaunch it than giving up and leave. Your iPod examples makes little sense since they had other equivalent or better products in the same segment.
Yes, it's hardly a report though is it?
Lot's of 'ifs' there but if true, they may just as well reinvent it and relaunch it than giving up and leave. Your iPod examples makes little sense since they had other equivalent or better products in the same segment.
It doesn't have to fix all of them. Even a 60-80% solution is enough to trim off enough users to continue iMac sales growth while reassigning resources applied to the Mac Pro to something else with high growth.
Fat, cash cow margins aren't be all end all for Apple. There are buckets of cash coming in right now. They need growth to support to stock price and boost employee benefit packages.
That may change somewhat as the overall windows PC market shifts over the EFI (well UEFI ) boot environments. Part of the crappy environment is that cards for the Mac required additional firmware/software. If there is a larger EFI market than that should allow more vendors to enter.
The other issue was that the Mac Pro was the only Mac that could use PCI-e cards. With TB and TB PCI-e expansion boxes (http://www.magma.com/thunderbolt.asp) the number of people with Mac who can possible buy a PCI-e graphics card actually goes up slightly.
A some point early the whole USB 3.0 vs. Thunderbolt discussions when down a rathole. Thunderbolt was never going to replace USB 3.0 . Some people drank the "one port to rule them all" Kool-aid but that was just that kool-aid.
TB is on a normal deployment growth curve. Two years ago USB 3.0 was slowly starting. TB market deployment is likely going to take two years too. (Apple deploying agressively just helps USB 3.0 not suppress the deployment... it was never going to speed it up significantly. )
Not bad since firewire (FW400 ) is widely deployed. TB doesn't have to be a "USB killer" to be successful.
TB isn't even widely used yet! Optical TB is quite a ways down the road. When that happens, we may very well not need the Mac Pro. But for now, it would be a wise idea to keep it.
Maybe several industries that create media content don't constitute a big majority of professionals who use a mac.
Maybe it's actually true that less than 1% of professional mac users use a Mac Pro.
Tried skimming through all the posts as fast as I can.
It seems that most Mac Pro users want a customizable desktop that runs Mac OS. It seems the 4 HD bays is not negotiable. The ability to hook up your choice of display(s). And an upgradeable processor and graphic card (I doubt these things Apple will allow).
If you were a designer working for Apple, how would you redesign the Mac Pro?
AND make it a viable commercial product?
It seems that most Mac Pro users want a customizable desktop that runs Mac OS. It seems the 4 HD bays is not negotiable. The ability to hook up your choice of display(s). And an upgradeable processor and graphic card (I doubt these things Apple will allow).
If you were a designer working for Apple, how would you redesign the Mac Pro?
AND make it a viable commercial product?
This. I was hoping to purchase a refreshed Mac Pro for scientific computing, for computational and statistical analysis of bioinformatics data. Genomics, proteomics, 3D mass spec imaging datasets eat a lot of RAM and CPU time.
*nix is pretty deeply entrenched in the computational sciences. If Apple more aggressively marketed to educational institutions, research universities, etc., using OS X's UNIX compatibility as a selling point, I think they could really expand the Mac Pro's market. Especially if they cut deals to bundle Matlab, Maple, Mathematica, etc., like NeXT used to do with Mathematica. I can dream...
Quite down the road? Intel promised that in couple years it'll jump to 100mbit and soon to Gbit, as far as I can remember. They said that it's very easy to implement higher speeds due to the design.
It's too bad that the 100Gb iteration of Thunderbolt is not yet out. Some high-spec Mac Minis could make an inexpensive compute cluster. Maybe built on a future implementation of XGrid.
Unfortunately, if they take away the Pro, there are a few things that nothing else in the lineup can make up for.
Xeon: More cores, can run dual chips (a cluster like above may help with some tasks)
Memory: Standard Intel doesn't support ECC memory - only Xeons.
Expandability: No PCIe slots, no fiber HBAs, no 3rd Party GPUs (TB 'can' do this, but not until they reach at least 100Gb links for many cards like GPUs)
When they took away the XServe, at least people could fall back on Mac Pros, or even Minis if they didn't need expandability. If they take away Pros, theres nothing to fall back on.
Unfortunately, if they take away the Pro, there are a few things that nothing else in the lineup can make up for.
Xeon: More cores, can run dual chips (a cluster like above may help with some tasks)
Memory: Standard Intel doesn't support ECC memory - only Xeons.
Expandability: No PCIe slots, no fiber HBAs, no 3rd Party GPUs (TB 'can' do this, but not until they reach at least 100Gb links for many cards like GPUs)
When they took away the XServe, at least people could fall back on Mac Pros, or even Minis if they didn't need expandability. If they take away Pros, theres nothing to fall back on.
Highly doubtful this will happen. It is probably a redesign in the works. Relax people, there's no way Apple is going to opt out of the professional market just because the macbook air will potentially be their #1 profit in computing in the future.
TB is PCI if it can be done via PCI it can be done via TB it just hasn't yet. The current iMac has two TB ports which is the equivalent of PCIe x 8. You put 4 on there and you would have the equivalent bandwidth of PCIe x 16. TB can pretty easily replace everything PCI does. You may not like it that way, but it could.
Really? The applications used in our studio are Illustrator, In Design, and sometimes Photoshop. Neither In Design or Illustrator can take advantage of 4+ cores nor the GPU. So they will run the same speed on a Mac mini as they do on a 12 Core Mac Pro.
The only applications in that studio which would utilize a Mac Pro is Photoshop, and only when certain filters/plugins are used. And those type of Photoshop stuff is not done much in our studio, so it'd be useless. They mostly use Photoshop to airbrush and clean up. No processor heavy plugins are used.
So maybe the jokes on you.
You used the example of your father.
Sorry man, nothing personal but I am a veteran designer on the TV and film industry and like I told you, worked in several studios from small to large ones in few large markets across US.
MacPro is heavily used on these companies. iMacs are growing in acceptance due their increasing power but the lack of expandability and AIO solution is NOT the machine of choice for folks that heavily depend on major software applications to create media content across a variety of industries.
If you want to think otherwise, then I will not try to change your mind.
