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

[krazygoat]

Exactly you just said what I said and to be able to view your 3D models in a viewport they are rendered through an OpenGL buffer and to view the output of your 3D work you have to render it to an image, the larger the image the more processing is needed to compute it. Also textures have to match the resolution of the output otherwise you get pixelated textures.

I am the digital effects supervisor for a studio. I am also heading up our transmedia division and have toured and dealt with some of the top game companies in the industry. I built the pipeline at our studio. This year alone my credits include Real Steel, Cowboys and Aliens, Green Lantern, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Fast Five. I have worked with just about every major studio in the world including ILM, Weta, and Digital Domain.

I am not just making this stuff up. Movie studios and game development houses are not creating content on consumer systems. You do know that for games much of the lighting and detail was pre-computed on high-end hardware on highly detailed high-poly models and saved as normal maps for the poxy game models, so complex 3D games are not being developed on consumer systems. Our games we working on are nowhere near as complex Infinity Blade or Rage or even high-end console and computer games and development taxes our 2010 Intel Mac Pros. Many of us in the industry are literally itching for new professional systems to come out so we can upgrade all our Mac Pros because they are really starting to feel very slow for our needs.

So if you can tell me in all your experience working in either of these industries, you do have experience right, that people are using Airs and Netbooks to develop this stuff then I will concede. I have never ever seen it at any studio I have been at from design houses, to commercial studios, to film studios, to game development houses. Never, not seen it even once.

What professional experience do you have to tell us what systems work for the type of work we are actually doing day in and day out?

No, 3D does not exist as a hologram, it exists usually as a bunch of vertexes in a resolution independent coordinate system called a viewport that can then be rendered to a final bitmap image format by a renderer that converts 3D space coordinates and all texture mapping information, stencil buffers, lighting information, shading and blending into pixels to fit the output resolution as selected by the user.

Resolution is a product of the final render, not the actual production of 3D content.

And my games example was laughable ? You're saying a Mac Pro is required to make 3D games for iOS ? For the Nintendo 3DS ? No frankly. 3D software packages can run very well on lesser computers to make very adequate models for these platforms. Not all 3D work requires full fledged workstations anymore, a lot of it can be done for very complex projects that target lesser platforms on lesser computers.

Again, you need to understand that your high-end post work is a niche. These niches are becoming more and more scarce as time goes by as far as the need for Mac Pros go. There will come a time when Apple won't want to fund products for your particular niche.

 

[southerndoc]

Apple is complaining about not enough sales of the MacPro line, but what do they expect when they update the lineup only once every 12-18 months?

 

[pertusis1]

I sure hope not

When I was about 6 years old, my family got an Apple IIc. We upgraded soon thereafter to the IIe, then the IIgs (a screaming fast machine!). From there, we went to the Mac IIci (awesome), Mac Plus (dud), Performa, Centris, then Powermac. That was about the time iMac arrived on the scene - we got a fishbowl, then one of those inverted volleyballs with a screen on top. At that point, I switched back to the Powermac G4 400, then upgraded later to a dual G4 867 (still use it sometimes just for kicks, and it's fairly quick). Next computer was my current 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 duo iMac. Here's my problem...

I bought a 1080 sony HD video camera, but it takes my computer forever to render the video. I have tons of video, but need a faster computer to render it. I was holding out for the next Mac Pro update. This will create quite a conundrum if they end up discontinuing the line. There's no way I want to daisy-chain all of my current internal hard drives.

I don't think there's a chance they actually will discontinue it. In the big scheme of things, it can't be costing them much to continue to produce the line, and the publicity cost of stopping it could be pretty hard on their lower-end desktop/laptop business.

 

[Renzatic]

You do know that for games much of the lighting and detail was pre-computed on high-end hardware on highly detailed high-poly models and saved as normal maps for the poxy game models, so complex 3D games are not being developed on consumer systems. Our games we working on are nowhere near as complex Infinity Blade or Rage or even high-end console and computer games and development taxes our 2010 Intel Mac Pros. Many of us in the industry are literally itching for new professional systems to come out so we can upgrade all our Mac Pros because they are really starting to feel very slow for our needs.

Rage is the only exception here, since Id had to have some powerful hardware to bake out their huge ass 200,000 x 200,000 megatextures in a timely fashion.

Everything else? Normalmaps don't take that long to bake. I'm still relatively new to the 3D scene, but I've baked a 900,000 poly object to a texture in about 45 seconds on my old DDR1 based Opteron 185 (which was actually an old workstation CPU, but whatever...it's long past long in the tooth these days). The only thing that takes awhile on that front is ambient occlusion baking, but only relatively so. Baking AO off a 2 mil poly object would probably take about, maybe, 3 minutes on a standard Sandy Bridge i7.

For games, a workstation is a nice thing to have. It'll make for a smoother experience. But it's not absolutely necessary. Someone could easily make a game with the quality of assets as, say, Gears of War on consumer hardware without having to struggle too much.

 

[AidenShaw]

eSATA to Thunderbolt

Problem solved. Thunderbolt is over 3x faster than eSATA.

Did you mean "eSATA on TBolt"? I don't think that a dongle to drive TBolt from an eSATA port would make any sense, if it would even be possible.

It would likely cut into their system sales.

The topic, though, is about systems that they've already cancelled or may soon cancel.

You can't cut much deeper into system sales than by cancelling the system.

And we're not talking about people deciding between a $6K ProLiant and a MiniMac. It's more about people providing "Apple services" from a virtualized instance of Apple OSX vs. dropping support for Apples across the company.

It's about Apple deciding to sell OS and application software to a customer, or losing that customer to Windows or Linux.

Apple could price these at whatever point they think will make up for lost hardware revenue. Microsoft Server licenses start around $400 - surely that's more than Apple's profit on a MiniMac.

 

[Sol]

Apple is complaining about not enough sales of the MacPro line, but what do they expect when they update the lineup only once every 12-18 months?

Yes, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy to say the desktop market is dying while letting your desktop system languish with no updates in hardware, no price cuts and no new case for so many years. I think that a MacPro in the iMac range of prices would find a market but I guess Apple would see it as a a threat to their consumer lines.

 

[krazygoat]

I am sorry but I find it hard to believe you are working with muti-million poly models on a weedy system and it isn't slow as molasses. None of the engines we have tested with along with the 3D software was not compute intensive. We are using Modo, Maya, Zbrush, with Unity. I would love to hear what you guys are using as we are still early in our development stage and I will give anything a shot. Once things are baked down onto the game model and in Unity they move pretty decently although we have gotten Unity to choke a lot too, but we are on a 2010 Mac Pro. Heck when we were working with the Bulletstorm Zbrush/Maya models they could easily bring a system to it's knees.

Rage is the only exception here, since Id had to have some powerful hardware to bake out their huge ass 200,000 x 200,000 megatextures in a timely fashion.

Everything else? Normalmaps don't take that long to bake. I'm still relatively new to the 3D scene, but I've baked a 900,000 poly object to a texture in about 45 seconds on my old DDR1 based Opteron 185 (which was actually an old workstation CPU, but whatever...it's long past long in the tooth these days). The only thing that takes awhile on that front is ambient occlusion baking, but only relatively so. Baking AO off a 2 mil poly object would probably take about, maybe, 3 minutes on a standard Sandy Bridge i7.

For games, a workstation is a nice thing to have. It'll make for a smoother experience. But it's not absolutely necessary. Someone could easily make a game with the quality of assets as, say, Gears of War on consumer hardware without having to struggle too much.

 

[MythicFrost]

Why would Apple worry about 'cannibalising' iMac sales? Either way, they get to sell you a computer. With the Mac Pro, they may well sell you an overpriced monitor too.

It would make the iMac obsolete. Who would buy a 21.5" iMac for $1299 when you could buy a base Mac Pro for $1499. Who would buy a 27" iMac for $1999 when you could buy a base Mac Pro + screen for about $2499? A lot less, myself included. There are some however, who need the Mac Pro and will pay the premium.

 

[utl768]

not surprising

ive wanted a mac pro for years but its outrageously expensive

 

[AppleScruff1]

Honestly? I've moved on to windows, considering putting linux on a secondary hard drive. They lost me some time ago. I'm still rooting for it, though. The Mac Pros (although expensive) are beautifully built. It's the way towers should be. I don't want to see Apple exit a segment because then other vendors just stop trying to compete on that front.

Although I am considering a mac mini for a MAME machine. I can't build a cheap, smaller PC that competes with that mini's performance. No power brick!

You can build an excellent Windows box for less than a comparable Mac Pro as long as Windows suits your needs. I hope that they don't give up on this market segment.

I've already done this and I hope others will too.

It sure can't hurt to try. At worst you waste a few minutes of you time.

If Apple discontinues the Mac Pro, I won't be surprised - that's sort of the way they've been heading - but I'd be disappointed.

It would be a severe blow to the Macintosh eco-system and to a lesser extent the iOS eco-system.

Apple is a company that is constantly evolving. I don't recognize it as the same company as it was in the 90s, nor do I recognize it as the same company as in 2005 - but one thing has always been their Achilles-heel; namely the inability to focus on more than one thing at a time.

Once it was the Apple II, then the Mac, now iOS - which hasn't been so strange in the past, considering Apple never was that large - but now it is a huge multinational juggernaut, and as other of such caliber it must be able to be many things to many people.

It needs to be both a hardware company and a software company - a computer company and an appliance company. A tech company and a distribution company.

It can't just drop the ball in segments it has already established - at least if it wants to maintain its size, growth, influence and prosperity.

Dropping the Mac Pro would be the end of Apple as a professional computer supplier. It's that simple. It is not disputed that Apple sells more Macs and by extent more desktop Macs and by extent more Mac Pros than it has ever done - but on the other hand it's "yesterday's" business from the mono-focal point of view of Apple.

I think discontinuing the Mac Pro would confirm that Apple is still not mature enough to be a multinational super-corporation and can only do one thing well at any given time - an epic fail - and I'd sell my stocks as soon as the discontinuation of the Mac Pro was a fact.

Very well said. Hopefully this rumor is just a typical Apple marketing ploy to clear out old stock.

 

[Lone Deranger]

And frankly, what does resolution have to do with 3D ? Resolution is a factor of final rendering using vertex based models. If you had said polygon count, you might have been on to something.

Actually, in many a render engine (especially those primarily used in Visual Effects), resolution and polygons are inherently tied together. Renderman compliant engines go through a process called ‘dicing’ which is the process of subdividing the original polygons of the mesh into sub-pixel sized polygons. So as you up the resolution, up goes the polygon count at render time.

I know you’ll probably try and spin-doctor your way back on top of this argument as you always do, but I just thought I’d tell you that you’re in way over your head if you want to discuss 3D for VFX here. Tread carefully.

 

[Renzatic]

I am sorry but I find it hard to believe you are working with muti-million poly models on a weedy system and it isn't slow as molasses. None of the engines we have tested with along with the 3D software was not compute intensive. We are using Modo, Maya, Zbrush, with Unity. I would love to hear what you guys are using as we are still early in our development stage and I will give anything a shot. Once things are baked down onto the game model and in Unity they move pretty decently although we have gotten Unity to choke a lot too, but we are on a 2010 Mac Pro. Heck when we were working with the Bulletstorm Zbrush/Maya models they could easily bring a system to it's knees.

First off, I'm not a developer, I'm a hobbyist learning on my own time here, so I can't speak with 100% authority on a studio's entire workflow. What I can do is offer up what I've seen based on my experiences.

On my old Opteron, yeah, things did get a little chunkity once I get up into the 600-800,000 quad range in Modo, and about 2 million polys in Zbrush. It's still workable. I could make high quality assets on it. But it's not exactly what I'd call super smooth. Baking all my texture stages down could take about 15-20 minutes combined total.

But on my somewhat more recent i7 920? I can tear some crap up. I've seen Modo go up to 1.5 million polygons with barely a stutter, and I've subdivided to upwards of 6 million polys in Zbrush without it even batting an eye. That's a tremendous amount of geometry, and easily more than enough to make the highest quality game model. Provided you've done a decent job with your topology, you won't be baking out any jagged edges at that high of a mesh resolution.

For complex scenes in a game, you would've long since baked out your various bits and pieces to textures from your high res source, and poly decimated the meshes down into a less taxing form to be placed into your editor. It might be based on my limited experience, but I can't think of a single reason to go above 6 mil quads. Even in the high end world of pro game design, you'll still be working on one model at a time.

And this is just with a two generations old CPU, and 12 GB of ram. It won't be winning any speed awards anytime soon. But for game assets? It's more than enough.

Game design in general doesn't require more than a high end consumer PC. I mean hell. High end consumer PCs aren't exactly slow, they're just not as fast. You could even use an iMac for game design. Alot of people do. Just check out the Polycount and Luxology forums, and you'll see a few people getting by just fine. The only problem with the iMac is that it's more a high-end of the mid-end PC, and doesn't have nearly as much room to upgrade as you'd get out of a tower. But still, it works. And works well enough for the time being.

 

[mBox]

I am sorry but I find it hard to believe you are working with muti-million poly models on a weedy system and it isn't slow as molasses.

Its so easy to say that POS can do as well as a High-end box. What production facility let alone a major game corp could convince share/stake-holders that they will go into battle with un-reliable tech? From my experience I couldnt convince the tall foreheads where I work that I can just get by with a few Dell Optras . I would have my @$$ thrown out of a budget meeting

 

[AidenShaw]

You can build an excellent Windows box for less than a comparable Mac Pro as long as Windows suits your needs. I hope that they don't give up on this market segment.

Most of the time, the Mac Pro is a good deal (or at least is not seriously overpriced) if you try to match spec-for-spec with HP/Dell/Lenovo/DIY dual-socket Xeon workstations.

However, for many people the Mac Pro is over-spec'd for their needs. An HP/Dell/Lenovo/DIY with a single-socket Core i7 that matches their needs, however, is often quite a bit cheaper than the Mac Pro which is more than they need.

The problem with the pricing of the Mac Pro isn't that it's over-priced for a humonguous dual socket Xeon workstation. The problem is that it's over-priced for people who only need a Core i7 mini-tower.

Tim - give us the xMac!

 

[AppleScruff1]

Most of the time, the Mac Pro is a good deal (or at least is not seriously overpriced) if you try to match spec-for-spec with HP/Dell/Lenovo/DIY dual-socket Xeon workstations.

However, for many people the Mac Pro is over-spec'd for their needs. An HP/Dell/Lenovo/DIY with a single-socket Core i7 that matches their needs, however, is often quite a bit cheaper than the Mac Pro which is more than they need.

The problem with the pricing of the Mac Pro isn't that it's over-priced for a humonguous dual socket Xeon workstation. The problem is that it's over-priced for people who only need a Core i7 mini-tower.

Tim - give us the xMac!

I guess I should have clarified that I meant building it yourself.

 

[JoeG4]

I like the size of the tower, I just think the guts are for a specific crowd and there should be 2 versions of mac tower.

An i7/geforce/radeon tower and a xeon/quadro/whatever + hella expensive ECC memory tower.

I'd place bets on which one you'd see way more of in the setup thread after a year or so.

 

[MorphingDragon]

The 1U server is very much alive and well - but often it's a virtual machine host for many virtualized servers.

Yep, especially with small businesses starting to need the benefits of Uptime that Virtualization brings. Dell's and HP's 1Us are very cheap. Blades are expensive, and not really needed for a small business.

 

[InuNacho]

I like the size of the tower, I just think the guts are for a specific crowd and there should be 2 versions of mac tower.

An i7/geforce/radeon tower and a xeon/quadro/whatever + hella expensive ECC memory tower.

I'd place bets on which one you'd see way more of in the setup thread after a year or so.

I'd be down for an i7 tower if it was cheaper than the current Pro.
My current and future computing is going to involve gaming, ripping DVDs, and hobby level video work. I don't want a yellow mirror iMac, I don't want a MBP that'll sit on my desk 90% of the time like my Macbook, and definitely not a discless Mini hiding behind a mountain of Firewire drives and external DVD drives.

Give it the black Apple logo like the iMac to show that it's the "prosumer" tower and it's good to go.

 

[JazzyGB1]

I hope this rumour is wrong, as I think it'd be a HUGE mistake for Apple to drop their 'Pro' systems.
I know the Mac Pro is catering to a smaller & smaller user base these days and that it might not even be a profitable line anymore, but bizarre as it sounds... I think that part of it is irrelevant.
The Mac Pro is still an important product for those who do use it and an aspirational product for those who don't. It as after all (at present) their Flagship computer.
To abandon it may not hurt Apple's profits immediately, but I fear it would ultimately, as it would lower their standing.
They'd start to lose their appeal as an 'aspirational brand' which would have a negative impact on just about everything they sell, including iPhones & iPads.
Mercedes may sell more A Class model cars than any other car in their range, but most want to own a Mercedes as they associate it with quality, BECAUSE of their more expensive product range!!!
That's what the Mac Pro is at the Moment for Apple - it's their standard bearer.
Apple showing a new 16 Core Mac hooked up to four 27" monitors editing movies. music or creating 3D modelling on their website, is important for the stature of the company - even if such a system is horrendously expensive, used by but a few and not very profitable.
Take a product like the Mac Pro away from Apple and you take away some of the magic of owning any of their products.
For a company that makes Billions every year and is currently the most valuable technology company in the world, it's surely not too much to keep their flagship product alive.
Even if it loses them a little money, indirectly I think it makes them a lot more.

 

[MorphingDragon]

Actually, in many a render engine (especially those primarily used in Visual Effects), resolution and polygons are inherently tied together. Renderman compliant engines go through a process called ‘dicing’ which is the process of subdividing the original polygons of the mesh into sub-pixel sized polygons. So as you up the resolution, up goes the polygon count at render time.

I know you’ll probably try and spin-doctor your way back on top of this argument as you always do, but I just thought I’d tell you that you’re in way over your head if you want to discuss 3D for VFX here. Tread carefully.

Pretty Pictures Help

 

[oban14]

... and the once mighty computer maker will be entirely reduced to a toy, phone, and videogame manufacturer.

 

[islanders]

A roadmap would be nice. the reality is apple only offers a few mac pros that could be discontinued. I wish apple would do something different. 2 months ago there is no way I could invest in a mac pro. the uncertainty is what drove me away. The problem is you get stuck on a mac and you have to pay full retail to switch back over to windows. that happened to me with framemaker when mac switched over to osx.

 

[Renzatic]

Pretty Pictures Help

Image

No, dude! You totally made ngons on that second and third sphere primitive! Now it'll look all funny when you subdivide it!

...and then it dawned on me. It was at that very moment that I realized I am, in fact, a giant dork.

 

[Zwhaler]

Now days with iMacs coming with quad cores, 16 GB of ram, and terrabytes of hard drive space, and thunderbolts ability to add external storage, and an expansion slot chassis; I think this is an obvious move. Add a duel processor option to the iMac and there you go. The only people this will hurt is the people that use Mac OSX Server as the MacPro and MacMini is the only server hardware they currently offer.

No dual processor configs without Xeon. This is precisely why people like me need the Mac Pro

 

[Decaffboy]

I saw a documentary many years ago (70's or 80's) with some kids on the street playing basketball, and they all had Nike shoes on. The kids were complaining that Nike had lost touch with it's roots. They were the ones that made Nike cool and now Nike's prices were getting out of reach of the poor kid who plays basketball on the street. The true players. They said, "Nike, we made you and we can destroy you".

It was the video professional, photographer and graphic artists that once upon a time only used macs and made them cool and now Apple (if the rumors are true) is abandoning their roots.