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Apple 'Questioning' the Future of its Mac Pro Line?
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iMacs are fine at what they were designed for. I have nothing against them, they're nice machines.
Yet that said an iMac is not even something I'd consider as an alternative to my Mac Pro. Frankly I have no idea or feeling regarding what Apples got up their sleeve, if anything. I hope those who are convinced Apples not going to abandon this category are correct.
I'd sure hate to see Apple further dumb down their lineup.
iToyz make all the money, but I'm a professional.
I'll be the first to admit it would be a sad day if Apple kills off the Pro.
Yet that said an iMac is not even something I'd consider as an alternative to my Mac Pro. Frankly I have no idea or feeling regarding what Apples got up their sleeve, if anything. I hope those who are convinced Apples not going to abandon this category are correct.
I'd sure hate to see Apple further dumb down their lineup.
iToyz make all the money, but I'm a professional.
I'll be the first to admit it would be a sad day if Apple kills off the Pro.
That's right. The iMac can not take the place of a Mac Pro.
I would consider a Mac consumer tower if it were expandable like a Mac Pro.
IF....if, the Mac Pro were discontinued, I'd buy the latest and greatest Mac Pro and max it out.
When that becomes obsolete, I'd be forced to buy a PC.
How many people really upgrade their insides these days? It's more productive to buy a new machines. It use to be cost effective to upgrade but when you want the ummph, just get a new machine for the new chips, bus speeds, etc that you can't get with a max pro.
I say this hoping that apple will make the iMac upgradable. Ram you can, hard drives theres TB. Graphics card is the only bug they haven't figured out unless they start to offer serious cards in their machines.
I say this hoping that apple will make the iMac upgradable. Ram you can, hard drives theres TB. Graphics card is the only bug they haven't figured out unless they start to offer serious cards in their machines.
This isn't very accurate. Basically anything that dies requires a trip to the Apple store with an imac. You can't just swap components out. GPU functions do matter to some people beyond things like gaming. TB has one enclosure out currently. It's noisy (a lot of people do Audio work on a mac) and it's expensive compared to being able to house several drives internally. Upgrading components or replacing dead ones isn't really an issue in a mac pro. It takes a few minutes. With an imac even the primary hard drive requires a trip to the Apple store. Otherwise you have temperature sensor issues and "possibly" a voided warranty as those parts are not considered user serviceable.
I'm not sure what else to say. If you tried both you might understand my issues here. The end result of these suggestions isn't that pretty.
The video card is the only upgrade I would like. Those are lucky to last 18-24 months.
I do not need an entirely new system with a 2009 Core i5 750 is more than enough power. The only reason I want to replace my Macbook is...the video card. h.264 playback is suffering.
Desktop life is getting ridiculous when you get easily get a quad core.
This is my plan precisely.
I've already set aside the funds, so that I can act swiftly before Apple pulls them out of the sales channels, as they are wont to do once they've made the decision.
This is why I'm following this extremely closely. Apple is known to make discontinued products disappear in a flash without a word. Which makes this even more challenging since one must read between the lines of random rumors in order to try & identify when to order.
I have my finger on the button and ready at any moment.
Even for Mac Pro users, the issue isn't so much upgrading a few years after the purchase - it's the ability to customize the system at the time of purchase.
The Imac has very few BTO options, and no aftermarket options. (Soon T-Bolt will be a year old, and still not much available. (Lots of promises and pre-announcements, but not much shipping.))
I agree with you that relatively few people upgrade after the sale, but disagree that an upgradeable tower isn't needed - because towers give much more options for upgrading at the time of the sale.
It would be a little different if Apple didn't have a proprietary motherboard - buying a mini-tower with a standard factor motherboard like ATX makes it easy to get the new chips and bus speeds - while keeping disks, power supplies and other peripherals.
Check the third party retailers too. Some of them are cheaper. My issue with buying a product that's EOL'd is how long before Apple no longer offers updates or bug fixes. The G5s were pretty much ignored the second they started to roll out Intel machines (referenced because it was a major change). I'm not convinced this would be any different. I mean it's Intel x86 hardware, but the basic hardware (and gpus) are not shared with any other line.
People on here often quote thunderbolt as the solution for everything, yet it's in a relatively small number of machines. The fact that it's not even in the mac pros probably limits its audience somewhat. I could see it being really popular for external hard drives if it wasn't so expensive and had more options than a single enclosure (not even counting the lacie as it's not remotely worth it). I almost forgot I was going to mention I'm wondering how things will go next year, as Intel's basic spec for thunderbolt is supposed to use a different connector on the Windows side.
I just built a hackintosh instead of buying a MP.
It's upgradable and easy to build providing you are a bit teksavvy. You just need to be careful with your motherboard and graphics card. Pretty much any HDD, RAM and Sandy Bridge CPU (with HD 3000) will work. There's very good info online. It's not plug and play like a real mac but you get bonuses like USB 3.0 and more parts to choose from.
My specs are :
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-B3H-B3 Motherboard
Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3Ghz overclocked to 4Ghz.
XFX Radeon HD 6870 1GB
8GB G-Skill RAM
OCZ Solid 3 SSD (OS) + Hitachi 7200RPM 1GB HDD (Storage) + 7200RPM 500GB HDD (Windows for gaming)
It is blazing fast, runs OSX very well and in is very stable. Cost me less than half the price of a Mac Pro and the large communty behind hackintoshes is creating compatibility for more and more parts...
My goal was to get a Mac Pro, but this is just as good and I can upgrade it easily (more than a mac pro)...
I'm not here to bitch on a apple products. I own a MBP and love it. This just seemed like a good idea considering the uncertainty around the MP.... and it's price.
It's upgradable and easy to build providing you are a bit teksavvy. You just need to be careful with your motherboard and graphics card. Pretty much any HDD, RAM and Sandy Bridge CPU (with HD 3000) will work. There's very good info online. It's not plug and play like a real mac but you get bonuses like USB 3.0 and more parts to choose from.
My specs are :
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-B3H-B3 Motherboard
Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3Ghz overclocked to 4Ghz.
XFX Radeon HD 6870 1GB
8GB G-Skill RAM
OCZ Solid 3 SSD (OS) + Hitachi 7200RPM 1GB HDD (Storage) + 7200RPM 500GB HDD (Windows for gaming)
It is blazing fast, runs OSX very well and in is very stable. Cost me less than half the price of a Mac Pro and the large communty behind hackintoshes is creating compatibility for more and more parts...
My goal was to get a Mac Pro, but this is just as good and I can upgrade it easily (more than a mac pro)...
I'm not here to bitch on a apple products. I own a MBP and love it. This just seemed like a good idea considering the uncertainty around the MP.... and it's price.
Well, mostly I need to be able to swap in and out multiple drives on the fly constantly and have them all be bootable if necessary and run at sata speeds and not a drop slower. When they can come up with a swappable thunderbolt solution that when using 6 drives is still as fast AND reliable as internal sata per drive, and make sure each drive, incl windows, is bootable, then I will take a close look at such a platform. Aside from that, I have added a pcie usb 3 card to the mac pro which has helped me considerably, but the main deal breaker for me (other than system performance) is the drives thing. Thunderbolt isn't there yet overall as far as I know, and once they update the MP to sata 3, even further.
Need the Mac Pro line
I am an artist and photographer and use the Mac Pro line tower. Also an Apple customer from the beginning. Every graphic artist and film maker I know uses the Mac Pro as well.. Please do not abandon your Professional users. We all need the Apple towers, that are upgradable, expansive, professional. I plan to buy a iPad for fun, but use, need, and love my tower. Just waiting for Apple to release its new one so that I can buy it.
I am an artist and photographer and use the Mac Pro line tower. Also an Apple customer from the beginning. Every graphic artist and film maker I know uses the Mac Pro as well.. Please do not abandon your Professional users. We all need the Apple towers, that are upgradable, expansive, professional. I plan to buy a iPad for fun, but use, need, and love my tower. Just waiting for Apple to release its new one so that I can buy it.
This isn't a rumor. It's pure speculation that has been beaten to death and beyond on the Mac Pro forum.
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I see broken links for your images....
Your totally wrong dude about the TB bandwidth. It's equally as powerful and fast as PCIE!!!! You don't know what in the hell your talking about! And Xeons allow multiple processors but you can go TB with an HD Matrox card and render H264 faster than a Mac pro so whatever dude!
You know... I don't truly care what the machine looks like. They could build it any shape as long as it's functional. I just want a stable machine that doesn't come close to overheating, that will house basically everything (aside from backups) internally. I don't like the display tied to either simply because I can purchase a better quality one separately, and it's better when nothing short of a logic board will truly force you to send the machine in for servicing.
Your post is a broken link!
Just kidding - I doctored the quote.
The problem could just be more sites blocking deep links, and people not checking correctly to see if their post is OK.
TB is equal to 1 4-lane pci-slot.
Care to count how many lanes MP's pci-slots have alltogether?
So wrong....
- T-Bolt is 10 Gbps (4 lanes at 2.5 Gbps each)
- If you have an Imac with dual T-Bolt ports, you get 20 Gbps (8 lanes at 2.5 Gbps each)
- T-Bolt adds significant latency - so a PCIe x4 port in a T-Bolt cabinet does not match a PCIe x4 internal slot in performance
- A Mac Pro has a PCIe 2.0 x16 internal slot (80 Gbps - far faster than T-Bolt, and without the added latency of T-Bolt) (Actually, it has two x16 slots, but we can assume that one will almost always be used for a graphics card.)
- A Mac Pro has two PCIe 2.0 x4 slots (20 Gbps each, without the T-Bolt latency)
LOL ! Good one.
And the "prior art" can be most any episode of "Lost in Space" or "Star Wars" or "Star Trek", or most any other sci-fi movie or TV show from the last 50 years.
PCI-Express 3.0 is just around the corner as well and the PCI-SIG has proposed its own external cable standard which will be based on that version.
For those who don't follow the specs, PCIe 3.0 is about double the speed per lane of PCIe 2.0, which is about double the speed of the PCIe 1.0 lanes in T-Bolt.
Thunderbolt 1.0 as Apple has implemented it will be the "Apple Desktop Bus" of the early 21st century. A nice technology - but basically irrelevant.
Someone recently posted a rumour that next years Windows systems with T-Bolt won't be using the mini-DisplayPort connector. I haven't been able to find anything proving or disproving that rumour - but if true that will make all those non-existent mDP T-Bolt peripherals stillborn.
Perhaps they're thinking of the USB port implementation that was used during early LightPeak demos, and Sony is reportedly sticking with rather than the new connector.
Perhaps - but since piggy-backing on the video connector is basically such a stupid idea I would tend to believe rumours that a different connector will be used.
I suspect it's their compromise meant as a way to simplify/make things easier for users (monitor outputs are VGA and HDMI).
BTW, it's the VAIO Z series.