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

[David Lazaro]

[/COLOR]If they exit the market before the chaining becomes a viable option, they'll lose maybe some people on the road, who might get back on track later on.[/QUOTE]

I don't think so. Pros in every way of life, be they IT pros or creative pros, value stability above everything. And nowadays Windows and Linux are the stable platforms to use.

Just another question, for example: how I do a project backup to some proven, stable media, like LTO 5 from a Mac mini or a MacBook Pro?

 

[Craigy]

Here's my 2c.

I've been using Macs for over 25 years. I am a creative professional, using Logic, FCP, AFX, Color etc...

For me the the relationship with technology and the "liberal arts" that Steve was so passionate about was key over the past decades in artists, musicians and film makers helping to give Apple the marketing 'Halo' they deserved for making our lives so much easier.

Even if a new Mac Pro doesn't make much sense on paper, I'd hate to see a large proportion of creative pros moving away to windows boxes over the next months and years. I think Apple would loose something more important than profits and revenue from that - and I believe the 'liberal arts' intersection that Steve, and apparently Apple, were so passionate about would start to decay.

Sure, people will create albums and Mac Books and Cut movies on Mac Book Pros and iMacs... But there's a lot of people out there who have been key evangelisers for Apple over the years that require the horsepower that only a new Mac Pro line can deliver.

I personally don't think they will drop it.. I think the people in that market bring more to Apple than directly related revenue and bottom line, and I think Apple are smart enough to realise this..... I hope ;-)

 

[AppliedMicro]

MBA Tim and the bean counters might not get it.
Or - they may get it, but have a plan for IOS everywhere and no more Macs..

Their current at least is:
Introduce innovations and new functionality to iOS first.
Then, maybe later, bring it "back to the Mac".

That's minor. ECC's value is that it makes the chances of a memory error corrupting your database nearly zero. What if a single bit error adds $2,097,152 to the balance of your checking account? What if it shows up as an extra $32,768 charge on your credit card?

Are you telling us, my bank account balance is computed just once by a single CPU somewhere? Come on! There are many errors way (!) more likely to produce these errors to my bank account balance or credit card statements than RAM ECC. Above all human error and then probably communication lines (many card payments get still transmitted over prehistoric dial-up).

 

[Marx55]

Apple should build a "headless" Mac mini Pro or a Mac Pro mini.

With a matte display to complement.
No fan (or very quiet at least).
Quad-core.
Two 3.5-ich 7200 rpm disk drives inside.
Thunderbolt.
Firewire 800.
USB 3.
SDXC card slot.
Gigabit Ethernet.

Did I say quiet?

 

[iBug2]

And that word is "ecosystem".

The Mac Pro is at the top of the Apple ecosystem. Make it extinct, and you may discover that its value to the ecosystem was far more than its per-quarter profits.




You get it (although you didn't say "ecosystem"). I'm not sure that Apple gets it, though. MBA Tim and the bean counters might not get it.

Or - they may get it, but have a plan for IOS everywhere and no more Macs.

I don't think in terms of ecosystem, killing the Mac Pro would create a big ripple effect. I'd assume most iToys content is created in Linux/Win environments. Not to mention the ones being created on the mac platform would be diffused to other desktops than the Mac Pro as well.

But this is irrelevant imho. If I'm wrong, and killing the Mac Pro would hurt Apple due to effecting content creation on iToys, Apple would be the first to know about that, hence they wouldn't kill the Mac Pro. At this point I don't think Apple would do a bad business decision which is this obvious that even people in a forum could think about it.

 

[iSayuSay]

MacPro still has a lot of market. If only they sell MacPro with current price but including a 27" display with it, that would be much more reasonable.

Yeah yeah I know MacPro was designed for prosumer. It's designed to be expensive since it'll pay for itself on the run, or if you're super rich, than no problem of having 2 or 3 MacPros laying around unused

Just price it start from $2500 but including a display instead bare bone tower only. That will do it. Steve said that he didn't scared of having his own product cannibalized by his other creation. If he didn't do it, somebody else will.

The lowered price MacPro will eat-up some iMac sales, but man .. aint somebody else would do that too?

 

[Chaos123x]

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)

Apple doesn't care about creative artists anymore they only care about people that use the iPhone cause its cool.

 

[macadam212]

Also Apple might not sell many of them, but they probably make a lot of money when they do.

Remember just most of this still is rumour and speculation, just because someone heard something - doesn't mean it's correct.

 

[Craigy]

And that word is "ecosystem".
The Mac Pro is at the top of the Apple ecosystem. Make it extinct, and you may discover that its value to the ecosystem was far more than its per-quarter profits.

Exactly what I was trying to say... Buch much more succinct

 

[EvryDayImShufln]

Here's my 2c.

I've been using Macs for over 25 years. I am a creative professional, using Logic, FCP, AFX, Color etc...

For me the the relationship with technology and the "liberal arts" that Steve was so passionate about was key over the past decades in artists, musicians and film makers helping to give Apple the marketing 'Halo' they deserved for making our lives so much easier.

Even if a new Mac Pro doesn't make much sense on paper, I'd hate to see a large proportion of creative pros moving away to windows boxes over the next months and years. I think Apple would loose something more important than profits and revenue from that - and I believe the 'liberal arts' intersection that Steve, and apparently Apple, were so passionate about would start to decay.

Sure, people will create albums and Mac Books and Cut movies on Mac Book Pros and iMacs... But there's a lot of people out there who have been key evangelisers for Apple over the years that require the horsepower that only a new Mac Pro line can deliver.

I personally don't think they will drop it.. I think the people in that market bring more to Apple than directly related revenue and bottom line, and I think Apple are smart enough to realise this..... I hope ;-)

Fully agree with this. Also, if they drop it, literally all their machines become "disposable" in the sense that they cannot be upgraded (not much, at least). If you want something as simple as a graphics card upgrade in an iMac, you need a new one.

At the same time, it's not too surprising that they don't sell too well, IMO due to the price. Maybe Apple is going to question its worth as it stands and hopefully rework it into something that is both more profitable and less expensive to produce. Hell, I'd love to own one, even though I'm not a graphic designer. I used to have a windows box and would love to get the mac equivalent. If they enlarged the market, it could become profitable.

 

[iBug2]

Are people really considering running 24x7 render farms with these systems - when from posts it seems that they can't even play a Flash video without ramping the fans to "takeoff power"?

I think that the Mac Pro is humonguous - but it's cooling system can keep 32 threads cool without making much noise.

That's a good point though. Apple would need to improve cooling on the minis if they ever decide to market them as a replacement for Mac Pro later on. Mac Pro is a dead silent machine unless the GPU is running heavy. I don't even want to think about the noise 10 mac minis would make under heavy load.

 

[AppliedMicro]

LOL Apple are in the business of gaining MORE users, not losing users to the PC side by removing a full product range like the Mac Pro

Wouldn't it then be great if Apple introduced a rack-mountable server that could run Mac OS X?

I mean… lots of people have racks for their servers and lots of companies and institutions use Macs as desktop devices and iPads / iPhones as mobile devices. Wouldn't it be great, if you could just add as solid dual-power-unit server to your server rack that runs OS X to manage mobile devices and desktops in your company or institution? That should gain them more users and really solidify their position from an ecosystem standpoint, shouldn't it?

 

[jackrv]

This is why no one buys the mac pro.

Its a ripoff.

300 dollar cpu (apple pays no where near this much btw)
100 dollar motherboard (again apple pays less)
25-35 dollar memory
75 dollar hdd (being generous you can find them cheaper.
110 dollar gpu
100 dollar case (apple probably spends less)
60 dollar power supply
20 dollar cd drive

Around 800 dollars worth of parts if you bought them personally. No? lets give it the benefit of the doubt and pretend the mother board and case cause 200 a piece and the memory was 50. Its still only a 1000. That 1000 still has hefty margins. Where is this extra 1500 going.

Now lets take it a step further. Lets say they replaced that aging nehalam and replaced it with a sandy bridge i5 (this would kill the quad mac pro.

That would drop the price of the motherboard and the cpu significantly. Put that in a mid sized case and now the case is also cheaper. The experience would be great and they would be at a good price if they were around 900-1000.

All in ones don't make good pro machines because the price performance ratio flat out sucks. For some reason apple think that the mac pro needs to have that same crappy price performance ratio.

The average price I see for dual-xeon compatible motherboards are $400-$500. The Supermicro MBD-X8DTN+-F -O (just as a quick search example) is $481. A 6-core Xeon 3.46Ghz is $1375 (each).

Remember, the Pro is NOT a desktop tower. It is a workstation-class computer. Granted, Apple makes a huge markup by buying in volume. But even HP sells workstation-class machines from $2000 - $3700. You are listing consumer components.

And before I draw Bug's wrath, no you DON'T need ECC memory, but workstation computers will come with it regardless, driving up the price even more.

For me to build a Dual-CPU 12-core Xeon workstation from scratch, I will be paying A LOT.

You are really paying for the Xeons and the GPU. Maybe the HDDs if they are 7200+ or even 10k SAS.

 

[ronwasserman]

One of many steps that could slowly cause the Apple empire to shrink over time.

It's just not going to be the same now that Mr. Jobs is gone.

 

[iZac]

See, I bought a Mac Pro back in '06 and have run it for over 5 years. Totalling up what I spent on it during it's lifespan and what I just sold it for, it's cost me around £225 a year.

Now thats fantastic for me, but terrible for a increasingly consumer company that want to get you to chop in your machine every couple of years rather than upgrade it. My currently nomadic life dictates I buy a notebook at the moment, but you can rest assured that when I settle back down, as long as there is a Mac Pro around, I'll buy one.

 

[blackhand1001]

The average price I see for dual-xeon compatible motherboards are $400-$500. The Supermicro MBD-X8DTN+-F -O (just as a quick search example) is $481. A 6-core Xeon 3.46Ghz is $1375 (each).

Remember, the Pro is NOT a desktop tower. It is a workstation-class computer. Granted, Apple makes a huge markup by buying in volume. But even HP sells workstation-class machines from $2000 - $3700. You are listing consumer components.

And before I draw Bug's wrath, no you DON'T need ECC memory, but workstation computers will come with it regardless, driving up the price even more.

For me to build a Dual-CPU 12-core Xeon workstation from scratch, I will be paying A LOT.

That 300 dollars I quoted for the xeon its using in the base model. I am not talking about the 12 core models. I am talking about the base model. EVen if it used the more expensive dual socket board, I allocated 200 for the case and 200 for the motherboard and still got 1000. So lets say they spend 400 on the motherboard. Its 1200 if the case is 200. 1100 if its 100. Doesn't add up anywhere close to 2500.

BTW
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131378
doesn't look anywhere close to 400 to me.

How does dell manage to outspec it even with a real workstation card for half the price.
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellst...n&s=soho&cs=ussoho1&model_id=precision-t3500&

 

[toddybody]

Apple owes nothing to anyone. Especially not out of sentimentality. Those people you are referring to are no more special than anyone else. And market dynamics have changed in leaps and bounds since those "dark days."

Apple needs to service the most profitable markets. Nothing personal. Biz is biz.

Im trying to like you buddy, but youre making it pretty hard.

 

[AidenShaw]

How many Mac Pro's are being used for banking?

I used an easy to understand example of the risks of single-bit errors. Map that to whatever you do, and think of the worst case scenarios from one bit of memory being bad.

What if you're doing a scientific analysis, and one number early in the run was bad, and days later you discovered that the whole run was nonsense because the error caused the analysis to diverge instead of converge? What if you're doing a multi-day render, and some critical metadata was corrupted early in the first day - and all the humans in the film are now the color of Smurfs?

My 2010 MacBook Pro in my sig currently has Chrome with about 15 tabs open and Outlook 2011, it is being forced to use the Intel integrated GPU, fans are set to full 6000RPM and it's current temp according to SMC Fancontrol is around 58 Degree C!!

If I play a You Tube HD video fill screen it soon gets HOT. So yes, using a mac Mini? to work like a Pro machine will make it sound like a jet engine and as hot as a toaster, hey the iToaster is born!!

As for the Ecosystem, totally right but you can make Apps on any Mac. I thought most people just use iMacs or PC's?

The "ecosystem" is much more than "using a Mac Pro to make apps for Itoys". In particular - the links between content creation and content consumption are important. If content creation abandons Apples and moves to more Android/Windows friendly environments, that could cause subtle shifts that make IOS less attractive.

For example, the horrific slaughter of sharks to make soup has had terrible effects on other ocean life.

An "ecosystem" is highly connected in ways that may not be obvious. Killing the XServe and the Mac Pro may look good to MBA Tim for this quarter's numbers, but it could be a big mistake over time.

 

[EvryDayImShufln]

One of many steps that could slowly cause the Apple empire to shrink over time.

It's just not going to be the same now that Mr. Jobs is gone.

Still, you're talking about a tiny percentage of the Mac market, which is not Apple's primary revenue-maker anymore. They cut servers and that definitely didn't affect their overall computer market share or profits (and definitely not their stock price).

I think it's more of a flagship model for them, and while nobody buys it, everyone wants it.

I am of course talking about the masses here, and not the niche market that needs this type of workstation.

 

[Eidorian]

The average price I see for dual-xeon compatible motherboards are $400-$500. The Supermicro MBD-X8DTN+-F -O (just as a quick search example) is $481. A 6-core Xeon 3.46Ghz is $1375 (each).

Remember, the Pro is NOT a desktop tower. It is a workstation-class computer. Granted, Apple makes a huge markup by buying in volume. But even HP sells workstation-class machines from $2000 - $3700. You are listing consumer components.

Apple goes even further. The single or dual processor Mac Pro uses the same logic board. The difference is just in the daughterboard with the processors on RAM on it. BTO just changes the SKU for the daughterboard and so on. I wonder how they will implement this now since the PCI-Express controllers are on-die.

Oh look another complete logic board revision!

 

[derbothaus]

Ha, good one kid. Congrats to you little buddy. Is good you have Mac Pro for video game. But working pros do not use these outdated machines with old chips and graphic cards anymore.

Welcome to 2011. Nice to have you!

There are fleet of working pros that I admin that use them. So...
120+ Mac Pro's. 4 iMacs for pre-press only.
Graphics are outdated. Chips and boards are still on market. Still no replacement till November (X79, Xeon E5). Can't be too outdated with no replacement yet. Post in 2 weeks.

 

[jackrv]

The single cpu mac pro doesn't use a dual socket board. Second that 300 dollars I quoted for the xeon its using in the base model. I am not talking about the 12 core models. I am talking about the base model. EVen if it used the more expensive dual socket board, I allocated 200 for the case and 200 for the motherboard and still got 1000. So lets say they spend 400 on the motherboard. Its 1200 if the case is 200. 1100 if its 100. Doesn't add up anywhere close to 2500.

In that case, I will agree. The high end i7s can go toe to toe with Xeons, the big difference is that Intel disables Multi CPU and other things like ECC support.

If you only needed a single Xeon, a well-built DIY can do just fine. Also do remember though that the price points on the components are now a bit old since the last Pro refresh. Apple doesn't lower prices as new tech comes out, they just offer the new models at a similar price.

If a new Pro were to come out tomorrow at the same price, it would (hopefully) be using recent chipsets at a higher performance point.

 

[AidenShaw]

Are you telling us, my bank account balance is computed just once by a single CPU somewhere? Come on! There are many errors way (!) more likely to produce these errors to my bank account balance or credit card statements than RAM ECC. Above all human error and then probably communication lines (many card payments get still transmitted over prehistoric dial-up).

But, those dial-up lines have very good ECC and error recovery algorithms.

Wouldn't it then be great if Apple introduced a rack-mountable server that could run Mac OS X?

I mean… lots of people have racks for their servers and lots of companies and institutions use Macs as desktop devices and iPads / iPhones as mobile devices. Wouldn't it be great, if you could just add as solid dual-power-unit server to your server rack that runs OS X to manage mobile devices and desktops in your company or institution? That should gain them more users and really solidify their position from an ecosystem standpoint, shouldn't it?

I would suggest instead that people lobby Apple to allow OSX to run on a small set of top-tier x64 servers from HP/IBM/Dell/SuperMicro, including running virtualized on ESX or Hyper-V.

You'll get better, more up-to-date hardware (Apple won't match what HP spends on server R&D, nor will they consider having a range of servers from 1U edge servers to quad socket 7U monsters).

 

[AppliedMicro]

But, those dial-up lines have very good ECC and error recovery algorithms.

Yep - but can provide the same (or better) error recovery by just keeping systems and software redundant. So while ECC RAM makes sense by itself, it is by no means a non-substitutable necessity.

Fully agree with this. Also, if they drop it, literally all their machines become "disposable" in the sense that they cannot be upgraded (not much, at least). If you want something as simple as a graphics card upgrade in an iMac, you need a new one.

The graphics card is about the only thing in a Mac Pro that can be upgraded in a Mac Pro that you cannot (reasonably) in an iMac.

What if you wanted a CPU upgrade? You have to purchase a new Mac anyway (as opposed to some other PCs/workstations). Graphics card upgrades are mostly overrated anyway, if you cannot upgrade the CPU in the same machine. Especially on the Mac platform, which isn't a great gaming platform anyway, and where you pay through the nose for a high-performance graphics card. In some cases nearly as much as for an entire Windows PC that delivers comparable performance.

 

[Don't panic]

don't think it's going to happen, because Apple NEEDs to be able to claim to make high-end, top of the line computers, because they sustain the brand as a high-end, top of the line brand. even if they are money losers (which they aren't).
so if it goes, it will be substituted by something comparable in power and marketing.

one alternative would be the multi-component, stackable mini-form-factor units, with direct thunderbolt connectivity and parallel computing.
the basic 'tower' would be similar to a current mini but with a removable head plate. then you can separately buy the components and add them up.
pick your configuration, mix and match and build an actual TOWER of components. need another drive? add it up. another core? no problem. Need an upgrade? swap the 'floor' that got obsolete. click-clack. done.
ultimate versatility.