Apple Reveals All-New Mac Pro With Up to 28-Core Processor and 1.5TB of RAM, Starting at $5,999

[PickUrPoison]

The interesting (but completely academic for most of us, even those who plan to buy) is whether the 1.5TB max is just about availability of RDIMMs - The higher end xeons in w- series list 2tb as max memory I believe, so possibly it’s the availability of > 128GB modules that sets the 1.5TB ceiling. Would be interesting (again, purely academic for the vast majority of us) if after market upgrades allow for greater capacity using larger modules.

Yes, the “M” parts can address 2TB. It’s a little strange because of course with a 6-channel memory controller you want banks to be in multiples of 6 yet to take maximum advantage of interleaving you need to use same-size capacities on both sockets of each channel. So 12*128 is the max capacity if you want the maximum memory bandwidth.

There would be a bit of a performance hit but you could forego an optimal fully-balanced memory config and in theory use 6*256 plus 6*64 for a total of 1.92TB in a near-balanced config. (Memory bandwidth would be about 97% of the max if properly populated.) Another option would be 4*256 on one of the memory controllers and 4*256 on the other, creating a four-channel interleaved set and the max 2TB capacity—but at the penalty of only achieving 67%(!) of the max memory bandwidth.

The above presumes the availability of 256GB RDIMMs (LRDIMMs?) and that the 2019 MP would work properly with >1.5TB, and 256GB modules. It is common for Apple logic boards to be able to use higher capacity memory modules than Apple specifies/sells but for any given model, who knows?

 

[Zen_Arcade]

I've not read through the entire thread, but I think the only potential reasonable ground for complaint with the 7,1 MP is that it is a single socket. On the other hand, with a 28 core CPU option, it seems unlikely that raw CPU power will be an issue, though it is interesting that HP offers the Z8 with a dual socket option. Albeit at a considerable price . . .

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Would sell like hot cake for sure, and would still leave more than enough margin for TCs greed.

No, wouldn’t sell that well because the majority of people buying computers today are looking for something mobile. It will sell, yeah, but we’re talking a percent of a percent of all Mac sales. May not even be worth the effort.

Maybe they're not done and will announce a lower speced model. Never know.

I think we do know. The lower spec’d model is the iMac Pro. The Mac Pro is primarily for folks that need more power than the iMac Pro. That’s a very small number of people.
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What is someone with that history of machines supposed to choose now in a similar price bracket? I don't see any answer from those complaining about the complainers.

It used to be that your needs aligned with that of a LOT of regular consumers in that the iMovies they wanted to make, the Photos they wanted to edit, they could see some real benefit with a system not constrained by the thermal requirements of a more mobile system. Machines with slots AND less capable processors filled a need for those that needed just a little more. However, those consumers that were purchasing a system that was well beyond their needs, rarely upgraded their machines (because they rarely grew into the power).

Today, those same consumers are buying non-upgradable MacBooks and iMacs and there’s no longer a crossover where there’s enough people that need slots AND a low performing processor to make it worth the effort. Upgrading has always been more of a pro activity, but previously, it was available on decidedly non-Pro systems. Not anymore.

 

[09872738]

No, wouldn’t sell that well

How would you know? From the reactions in this forum and elsewhere one could deduce you are wrong here. Maybe a majority wants something mobile. However, Apple just announced the new Mac Pro, which isn't mobile, is it? If you were correct creating the Mac Pro makes least sense, because it sits right in the smallest niche of all.
I'd wager an upgradeable Mac below the Mac Pro would sell just as well as an iMac. Easily

 

[PickUrPoison]

How would you know? From the reactions in this forum and elsewhere one could deduce you are wrong here. Maybe a majority wants something mobile. However, Apple just announced the new Mac Pro, which isn't mobile, is it? If you were correct creating the Mac Pro makes least sense, because it sits right in the smallest niche of all.
I'd wager an upgradeable Mac below the Mac Pro would sell just as well as an iMac. Easily

It wouldn’t. 80% of customers buy the MacBook lineup, and another 10-15% buy iMac. Both the mini and the Pro sell somewhere in low to mid single digits. 90-95% of users want an all-in-one form factor.

Things change. In the 2000s, quite a few users needed to buy the Pro to have decent performance. That changed when mainstream CPUs and GPUs (including mobile for maybe the last 5 years) began to offer sufficient performance for many former buyers of the Mac Pro.

High end iMacs became the machine of choice for many pros; they performed well enough and had an excellent display. Apple saw this trend and introduced iMac Pro, and it further cannibalizes Mac Pro. Mac mini fills the desktop needs of many who don’t want an all-in-one, and if you need a high-end desktop there’s Mac Pro.

That’s unfortunate for those who want a consumer grade tower. But that’s reality. Like those who want a gaming laptop or an iPhone SE, not enough people want what you want. Most (>95%?) Mac buyers don’t want/need to ever put a PCIe card in a slot.

Furthermore, the 1-2% that would buy a “Mac Pro mini” would buy a machine every ten years. (We see that all the time with the older Mac Pro.) That’s not enough to sustain a product. There simply is not enough demand.

 

[09872738]

There simply is not enough demand.

Again: by your very own argumentation, the just introduced Mac Pro makes least sense: it sits right in the smallest of all niches.
I get what you are saying, but if you are correct Apple should have scratched the Mac Pro first and foremost.

 

[PickUrPoison]

Again: by your very own argumentation, the just introduced Mac Pro makes least sense: it sits right in the smallest of all niches.
I get what you are saying, but if you are correct Apple should have scratched the Mac Pro first and foremost.

Though relatively low in demand, the Mac Pro works (from a business standpoint) for exactly the reason many in this thread are complaining: the high price.

It’s also a halo product, but paired with a reference monitor that compares favorably to monitors costing tens of thousands more, there’s a legit market for it. I think the XDR monitor is going to be a rather big hit, and will drive sales of the Mac Pro. As poor as the product management has been on the Mac Pro for the last five years, they’ve done a complete 180. This is Apple at their best (imo). MPX, 8 slots, 10GigE, tons of RAM/cores/power/cooling... sign me up But yeah... $6k buy-in

And don’t get me wrong; I sympathize completely with the xMac/consumer Pro segment; that’s me. But I’m willing to throw an extra couple grand at it. Like many posters, I’d also like a 27” 5K monitor; de-spec’ed is fine, it doesn’t have to be a reference standard. Apple’s pricing would probably be $2,000-2,500 and I could (somewhat reluctantly) live with that.

 

[09872738]

there’s a legit market for it.

Not that I disagree, but the same is true - to an even higher degree imo - for a Mac inbetween the Mini and Pro. Hell, they spent so much effort for a product that no one wanted or needed (iMac Pro), a product just intended to quickly (and briefly?) fill a gap until the arrival of the real thing, the Mac Pro.
But the real void, the very broad pro and semi pro markets, remain deserted.

I am not sure how it happened that the Mac Pro shifted upmarket so far: Phil Schiller's announced at WWDC 2017 that the Trashcan was considered a failure and that they started work on a new, modular Mac Pro. Keep in mind: he did that at WWDC - which is a developer's conference. Clearly he insinuated the new Mac Pro's intended audience are developers (amongst other groups of course), which the Mac Pro really is not.

So either Apple deliberately decided to not address developers and small/medium creatives or - my suspicion - they heavily underestimated customer's price sensibility. Apparently, Cupertino is so loaded and is so used to customers paying any price they lost their sense for life outside the bubble

 

[Martyimac]

Not that I disagree, but the same is true - to an even higher degree imo - for a Mac inbetween the Mini and Pro. Hell, they spent so much effort for a product that no one wanted or needed (iMac Pro), a product just intended to quickly (and briefly?) fill a gap until the arrival of the real thing, the Mac Pro.
But the real void, the very broad pro and semi pro markets, remain deserted.

I am not sure how it happened that the Mac Pro shifted upmarket so far: Phil Schiller's announced at WWDC 2017 that the Trashcan was considered a failure and that they started work on a new, modular Mac Pro. Keep in mind: he did that at WWDC - which is a developer's conference. Clearly he insinuated the new Mac Pro's intended audience are developers (amongst other groups of course), which the Mac Pro really is not.

So either Apple deliberately decided to not address developers and small/medium creatives or - my suspicion - they heavily underestimated customer's price sensibility. Apparently, Cupertino is so loaded and is so used to customers paying any price they lost their sense for life outside the bubble

I am with you RE your previous responses. I am fully vested in a headless world. I don't want an AIO because you lose your monitor, you lose your whole machine. (Yes I have spare monitors available) I for one would by a "mini Mac Pro" to replace my tcMP, luckily it is still humming along and doesn't need replacing, yet. I have a 2018 mini but even with ram upgraded to 32GB, it occasionally stutters a little especially when using Firefox on some websites. And no, I don't want to learn Safari, quite happy with Firefox.
IF  brought out a "mini Mac Pro" at a reasonable price (even for ) I would be first in line.

 

[09872738]

IF  brought out a "mini Mac Pro" at a reasonable price (even for ) I would be first in line.

Mee too. But I fear we rather get steaming hot popsicles....

 

[Unregistered 4U]

How would you know?

By using the phrase “Selling like hot cake” you’re inferring a MASSIVE amount of sales, right? Like, the hottest selling Mac quarter over quarter? Because when I say “No, it wouldn’t sell that well” I mean it would absolutely not be the hottest selling Mac ever. It wouldn’t be the second or third best selling Mac either.

Right now, in the real world, mobile devices outsell all desktop variants by a huge margin quarter after quarter. Releasing any desktop form factor machine, no matter what it’s internals are, will not change that. As I indicated, it WILL sell (because it fills a need for a specific price point), but wouldn’t sell like hot cakes.

From the reactions in this forum and elsewhere

Reactions on forums are reactions, not market data.

Maybe a majority wants something mobile.

You are ABSOLUTELY correct on this and I agree 100%.

creating the Mac Pro makes least sense, because it sits right in the smallest niche of all.

Creating the Mac Pro makes the least sense ONLY if you price it the same as an iMac. But they haven’t priced it the same as an iMac, so it makes total sense. It’s going to be a very low volume system, SO each system sold will have a high price. I would not be surprised if they carry almost no inventory of these and only make them BTO.

an upgradeable Mac below the Mac Pro would sell just as well as an iMac

Well, yes, ANYTHING at the iMac price point, will sell just as well as an iMac. (And, iMacs don’t sell nearly as well as MacBooks.)
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So either Apple deliberately decided to not address developers and small/medium creatives or - my suspicion - they heavily underestimated customer's price sensibility.

Neither one. If you go back and read reports around the time where they first spoke about the new Mac Pro, the defined who their pros are, what systems they’re using and what they would need from a future Mac Pro. 30% of all users are defined by Apple as pros (folks that use a pro app at LEAST once or twice a month). Of those people, notebooks are by far the most popular Macs, then comes the iMac and then the iMac Pro. The Mac Pro is a single digit percent of all Mac sales.

With everyone split out like this already and Apple well suiting the needs of a wide swath of customers, there was only one set of customers it was worth going after, those that REALLY need more power than the iMac Pro.

So, it isn’t that they deliberately decided not to address developers and small/medium creatives. Those are in the 80%, there’s already a system out there for them (and they’re massively choosing mobiles over desktops). And, they didn’t underestimate customer’s price sensibility because THIS Mac Pro is made for those that NEED that much power. These are the folks that have been spending the last couple of years visiting Apple’s campus and going over their workflows. They look at the Mac Pro and see dollar signs for all the money they’re going to make with it.

The Mac Pro is a top end machine and the only folks even considering it is expected to be those folks that were thinking about dropping some cash on a higher end iMac Pro. Those folks plans may change. For everyone else, what’s out there is what your options are.

 

[PickUrPoison]

<snip>

- The $5,999 option includes the $175 Radeon 580 GPU. It IS the option without the expensive GPUs. You can expect the high end GPUs to add another $2K+ to the price. Each.

The base GPU is actually the 580X, equivalent to the Radeon Pro WX7100, which is about $500 on the street right now/$800 retail. And yes, the single and especially dual Vega 2 options will be expensive.

 

[Stephen.R]

The base GPU is actually the 580X, equivalent to the Radeon Pro WX7100, which is about $500 on the street right now/$800 retail. And yes, the single and especially dual Vega 2 options will be expensive.

I’ve tried to find info but can’t so far: what’s the difference between the Pro 580 in the Mac Pro (and something else has it from memory. iMac pro?) and the RX 580, often seen in eGPUs?

 

[toke lahti]

Maybe. This Mac Pro is priced to exclude mid-range, for better or worse. It will exist in a rarefied but highly promoted environment as a halo product. What will be interesting is if they later migrate the general design to something more accessible. Many would be happy with the chassis and cooling built around a non-Xeon mainboard that starts at $2999 for the same 8 core/32GB/256SSD configuration.

Many have been waitng for xMac since G5 era, ie. about from year 2004...
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How does that change anything? There were plenty of workstation class CPUs for years. Heck, Apple was using them in various iMac Pros and even the trashcan. I really don't understand the huge wait on these machines. I was expecting something more outside the box. (I'm not sad that it's not. I just cannot see what part of this particular machine took so long to engineer.)

I guess the wait is because macs, especially this mac, is not the product they make the profits of the company. So they take all the time to find the cheapest long term deals for parts and find the timewindows of assembly lines when they would othewise be idle.
Maybe they even have some internal guideline, that every product has to make 100% profits with design cost spread out for the years they will sell this model.

 

[imageWIS]

Did you configure the HP that you linked?

Just to get the base Z8 G4 to the entry specs of the mac pro (remember, need to select the Xeon Gold with the 24MB cache!) puts it over 6k, before storage and video cards.

I'm halfway through configuring one that is comparable to the top of the line Mac Pro (56 Cores, 1.5 TB of RAM) and I'm at $81K.

Again, my post was CLEARLY about the prices we know, and I used the BASE Mac Pro in comparison. You (and everyone else at the moment) have zero idea how much Apple will charge for the top of the line Mac Pro.

 

[dantroline]

Yeah leaves a huge price gap between it and even an imac pro.


Yeah sadly I don't think my clients pay me enough to justify this gear. Shame there isn't anything headless at a price point between a mac mini and this!

At this point I am glad Apple released this beast. They priced it like this for various reasons, one being that they don't expect most people to even think of buying one, but for some businesses the purchase is a no-brainer. I've happy migrated away from Apple software now (so I can buy whatever is best value for money now, and cross-platform offerings are all far better quality products now) but it's good to see where tech is headed.
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This is a great deal, my 2009 Mac Pro which cost $4500 latest 10 years!!!!! so the cost per year is very low!!!!. Hmm a new window PC every three and a half years at $2500 is $7500. So which is really a better hardware price, people forget how much they spend of hardware over a 10 year period like my friend who has spent a ton of money on PC hardware and still thinks that his computers saved him money

This is actually right. The metaphorical good pair of shoes beats ten pairs of sloggies.

 

[ct2k7]

I am not sure how it happened that the Mac Pro shifted upmarket so far: Phil Schiller's announced at WWDC 2017 that the Trashcan was considered a failure and that they started work on a new, modular Mac Pro. Keep in mind: he did that at WWDC - which is a developer's conference. Clearly he insinuated the new Mac Pro's intended audience are developers (amongst other groups of course), which the Mac Pro really is not.

So either Apple deliberately decided to not address developers and small/medium creatives or - my suspicion - they heavily underestimated customer's price sensibility. Apparently, Cupertino is so loaded and is so used to customers paying any price they lost their sense for life outside the bubble

That’s the thing, they announce these at developer events, and target it not for developers. Sure the joke about running multiple simulators, though that can be done on a Mac mini or an iMac or an iMac Pro. Then the rotation of the screen to portrait for devs to code.

They make these nuances yet completely go against them. It shouldn’t have been showcased at a developer conference. A special event was right for this product.

The media had a full day exclusive before developers only had one day (all attendees had to reserve a time slot) then it was sent back. I don’t understand what the point of this was. It’s an exercise in pure frustrating trying to understand the unveiling, target and product matrix.

 

[Tiger8]

Jony Ive doesn't care about design anymore.

Apple got this one right.

 

[Stephen.R]

target it not for developers

Speak for yourself.

The display I’ll agree is definitely a pro video specific item, but the Mac Pro starts as just a handful of cores and memory - nothing about it is tuned to video from the start.

 

[ct2k7]

Speak for yourself.

The display I’ll agree is definitely a pro video specific item, but the Mac Pro starts as just a handful of cores and memory - nothing about it is tuned to video from the start.

The way I see it, is that it’s a base computer which you’re meant to upgrade as is applicable to you, which is the why I feel the base specs for the base price represents the worst for anyone.

Most developers nowadays generally don’t need 32GB RAM with Xeon processors and ECC memory, in my experience.

 

[venom600]

It would cannibalize their iMac and iMac Pro sales, Apple don't want you to own a machine that you can repair and upgrade yourself, they want you to buy their all in one machines that you need to replace with the latest model in a few years time.

BOOM. There it is. It's that simple. Apple doesn't want you to have a machine that you can upgrade and repair. However, if they MUST sell you one, they are going to price it so high that it won't kill the sales of the pointlessly thin, virtually impossible to repair machines. The past decade has shown that they hate the idea that you might be able to repair or upgrade anything, starting with the Macbook Pros with integrated batteries from 2009. Every successive generation of every product they make gets harder to repair, more impossible to upgrade, and more disposable.

 

[ct2k7]

BOOM. There it is. It's that simple. Apple doesn't want you to have a machine that you can upgrade and repair. However, if they MUST sell you one, they are going to price it so high that it won't kill the sales of the pointlessly thin, virtually impossible to repair machines. The past decade has shown that they hate the idea that you might be able to repair or upgrade anything, starting with the Macbook Pros with integrated batteries from 2009. Every successive generation of every product they make gets harder to repair, more impossible to upgrade, and more disposable.

This is why right to repair is important.

 

[Stephen.R]

Most developers nowadays generally don’t need 32GB RAM with Xeon processors and ECC memory, in my experience.

That entirely depends on what you’re developing.

An iPhone app? Sure maybe not. A distributed server side app though?

I’m not saying it’s impossible to work without it. I’m saying there are other professions besides video editing that can make use of the power of a Mac Pro and benefit from its extensibility.

 

[dantroline]

BOOM. There it is. It's that simple. Apple doesn't want you to have a machine that you can upgrade and repair. However, if they MUST sell you one, they are going to price it so high that it won't kill the sales of the pointlessly thin, virtually impossible to repair machines. The past decade has shown that they hate the idea that you might be able to repair or upgrade anything, starting with the Macbook Pros with integrated batteries from 2009. Every successive generation of every product they make gets harder to repair, more impossible to upgrade, and more disposable.

Even that is not really it. Upgradeability is great but it is a business model all of its own which obviously Apple has not chosen to follow (makes less money for them no doubt). Engineered obsolescence is in any case baked into ports and protocols. You can get the best open system ever and in three to five years they will twist the knife and you'll find it harder and harder to find parts and everything will start to seem old. As long as the build is reliable it is likely better to get the best you can afford at the time and keep it until it breaks or can't do what you need it to and then retire it to other tasks. For all their limitations my old Mac Minis still work and are still running 24/7 doing menial tasks.

The most important thing for hardware IMO is that it can run Linux, because in the end, when security upgrades stop and everyone has moved on, your old kit can be repurposed until it dies.

 

[dfs]

Jony Ive doesn't care about design anymore.

t finally entered his head that this specialized kind of Mac is going to find its natural home in studios and laboratories, and what these two environments have in common is their strong preference for rack mounting (something which -- incredibly -- failed to occur to the designers of the current Mac Pro, which cannot have done much to help sales). Compared to this need, aesthetic considerations don't count for very much so Ive very sensibly kept his paws off the thing's designing. The very fact that this monster is so ugly makes it look very very businesslike.