Apple Spokesperson Confirms New Mac Pro Designs Likely Coming in 2013 [Update: Not iMac]

[mward333]

Apple Store--Mac Pro no longer listed as "new"

The Apple Store Online did something I've never seen them do. They had the Mac Pro listed as "New" after the WWDC, but now they removed the "New" label on the Mac Pro's listing. Very strange! The "New" label is gone today!

 

[Peace]

The Apple Store Online did something I've never seen them do. They had the Mac Pro listed as "New" after the WWDC, but now they removed the "New" label on the Mac Pro's listing. Very strange! The "New" label is gone today!

It was gone the same day it was put there.

 

[mward333]

It was gone the same day it was put there.

Thanks, Peace! I'm glad to know that. Maybe someone is listening to all of the ranting here?

 

[brbrown1988]

Just thinking this morning, after reading most of what was said over the last two days regarding the desktop Macs. The articles and Apple have clarified that the Mac Pro is being redesigned in 2013, not the iMac. This helps us out to speculate with some reasoning.

1. The portable line was fully refreshed this week. All in sync with similar specs/options [Ivy Bridge, USB 3, TB] iMac and Mac Mini - the last 2-4 updates for both have been either at the same time or within a month or so, so they are basically in sync, sort of. Mac Pro is on its own really, and the audience is a bit different anyway.
   
   
2. I see the iMac and Mac Mini updating in one month [July 2012], shipping with Mountain Lion [no technical reason though]. This delay is to simply not take away from the chatter and reviews of the new MacBook Pro Retina. Simple as that. It is about maximizing the press on the portable line, then press releasing the iMac and Mini in July to coincide with ML. [with Ivy Bridge, USB 3, Intel 4000 graphics and possibly updated discrete GPU in appropriate models. Maaaaayybe new SSD/HDD options] No Retina, nothing else really. Parity with the portable lineup.
   
   
3. Retina displays will debut across the portable line over the next 1-2 years, then make their way into iMac and TB Display in 2013-14.

This is just a hunch, but I feel that it is this simple. No malice or spitefulness on Apple's part, just maximizing the press exposure for the latest newness. Mac Pro, well, maybe a quiet option upgrade before the redesign, like an updated GPU or if they figure out TB on PCIe card.

Again, just a hunch, but I feel pretty good saying it.

Well said. Lets hope your right.

 

[heisetax]

Means if you are always waiting for the next better upgrade to come out you will always be waiting as one is always around the corner.

There is a reason for the joke that your computer is out dated by the time you get it home.

Sometimes we just wait for a certain new feature that will be on the next model. I was waiting for 3D transistors because even though I am a 28+ year Mac User I also care about hardware design. My current laptop is only 2 years old so didn't need replacing. But Apple is really just like Sam's Club & Costco. If you see something you want you better buy it that day because it may never be around again. Apple does that with many of their products. The last that has saved me well over $3,000 it the deletion of the 17" Mac Pro.

 

[scottwaugh]

Later in 2013 means later in 2013....

........

I thought that the article said later in 2013. To me that means after the middle of June at the very least. And maybe as late as New Year's Eve. Apple as well as most other companies tend to deliver at the end of the date range that they talk about. Why would this be any different?

.......

I think your right on this....later in 2013 probably means in time for Christmas sales (i.e. October or later) or if they have some delay New Years... I don't think it implies in a year at all...that would be "in the first half of 2013".

Frankly, with the direction Apple has been going with their designs (basically disposable consumer devices - iPod, iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro Retina...whose batteries are glued to the chassis), I'm rather apprehensive about what a true redesign of the Mac Pro will probably mean (this wait till end of 2013 is implying a serious redesign).

What would make more sense given the last 4 years of less and less user accessible and smaller designs? Not a full size tower, that's for sure and probably alot less user accessible \ upgradable...probably the guts of the top of the line iMac stuffed into something small and beautiful...

For a full tower Mac Pro, my guess is that this little bump in processor specs is the end...would seem likely we'll get a Final Cut Pro X (single Pro \ high end user focussed) type of redesign of the Mac Pro at the end of 2013...for most of that market you don't need a full tower, nor its expandability at all...and walk away from the corporate / multi-user market just like they did with FCP X, Xserve... That would make sense to me based on the last 4 years and the rest of Apple's lineup.

I'm just curious, anybody think the 2013 redesign of the Mac Pro will be a full tower?

 

[pertusis1]

Pros should jump ship anyways. The fact that apple hasn't updated the machine in nearly three years is proof enough that they don't take pros seriously. Dell and HP update their machines several times a year. They also change their pricing when the cost of the parts become cheaper. The writing is on the wall. There are some great professional machines from HP and Dell and most of them come with 3 year on site service standard, something apple does't even offer.

Also cutting support for machines that are barely 3 years old is pretty crappy as well. My macbook runs windows 7 and windows 8 better than it runs lion and windows 8 runs on machines that are 10 years old now and pretty well. My macbook won't run Mountain lion only because apple says so. Theres no real technical limitation for it not running. Mountain lion is not really an OS upgrade. Its just an update of a few built in apps and a few new ones. The hackintosh community already has ways to get it to run on unsupported machines. Heck it can run on windows machines from like 2003.

I love it - the owner of this post uses a dual G5 Mac Pro and bemoans the delay in an update

I have to admit though, that waiting for the updates is a bit of a bipolar experience. Champagne to pitchforks and back is the name of the game.

 

[mBox]

I love it - the owner of this post uses a dual G5 Mac Pro and bemoans the delay in an update

Haha funny we just put a few of those to rest We have a slew of 12-Cores thatll suffice during the Zombie Apocalypse

 

[blackhand1001]

I love it - the owner of this post uses a dual G5 Mac Pro and bemoans the delay in an update

I have to admit though, that waiting for the updates is a bit of a bipolar experience. Champagne to pitchforks and back is the name of the game.

That g5 is a shelf right now as it has random freezing issues that I haven't been able to figure out. Reformatted it several times and took the heatsink apart as well.

 

[Cristian123]

This is great news for prosumers who can now be reassured its safe to stay fully invested in the OS X ecosystem. I'm very excited to learn how Apple will evolve their professional product line next year. Until then, the current Mac Pros are still insanely powerful machines for those who need all that performance.

I never thought I would agree with you but you are right. I was within a mouse click of switching to Windows after this lackluster update but Apple's statement commiting to develop the product for the long term pushed me off the fence, and I bought the MP 12 core to meet my current needs, which it will. Still waiting for my loyalty certificate and personal phone calll from Tim Cook though.

Interestingly enough, at 2.4 12 cores, SSD boot and 6 TBs of storage the MP came quite a bit cheaper than the Dell/Hp competitors. Missing Thunderbolt and USB3 but whatever, with 6 TB of storage I will never have to rely on anything external for active workflow. Glad the ecosystem will survive. Looking forward to see what they produce next year. If the new MacBook Pro is now the benchmark for quality, it should be good.

 

[Setmose]

Later Next Year

I think you can parse that to mean: "later... (sometime) in 2013", not "late(r) in 2013". So it could be January for all we know. In fact, I'm thinking they just hedged by floating that vague time frame, and if the hardware gods are favorable, it could be sooner than next year.

Apple is at the mercy of Nvidia and AMD/ATI to produce a Mac version of their cards with Thunderbolt. The video card industry just standardized on including Mini-Display-Port. Apple likes to lead, and they may have dangled themselves a bit on this one.

 

[Setmose]

Looking to get a PC for gaming but what are the odds that Apple will create a gaming Mac Pro, or an iMac with desktop GPU?

You know, since "redesign" is being thrown around.

You can buy the current Mac Pro with Radeon 5870. The trick is to run it at a medium resolution (by today's standards) of 1920 x 1200 -- that's a 24" screen. I'm running all the latest games in both OS X and Windows with great frame rates. I have Mac Pro 8-core 2.93 GHz Nehalem (3.33 GHz Turboboost) with 12 GB RAM and 5870. Even sweated through the Rage / AMD drivers fiasco in Windows but now it runs great.

Looking forward to a Radeon 7970 Upgrade Kit at some point, but that is "nice to have" and definitely not a requirement.

 

[zimv20]

here is the first part of a phone conversation i had just now with a local apple store "specialist":

me: do you have mac pro's in stock?
her (excited): yes! we have the 13" and the 15", but not the...
me: no, not the laptops. the mac *pro*. desktop.
her: yes. for imac's, we have the...
me: no, not the imac. the mac pro. the 12-core mac pro. the big, heavy, desktop machine.
her (sounding not quite as excited now): oh, you mean the *tower*.

even the specialists forget those exist.

 

[AndrewClarke]

[...]Missing Thunderbolt and USB3 but whatever, with 6 TB of storage I will never have to rely on anything external for active workflow.[...]

Don't forget that if you need external drives, IIRC on the newest Mac Pros there's a spare SATA connector on the motherboard. I've also purchased USB3 and eSATA PCI cards from OWC, so those are options as well.

 

[snekker]

a comparison

The current Mercedes-Benz S-class has now been on the market for about 5 years. There was a facelift two years ago. So, next year the customers expects there to be a new model. Of course, there are no confirmations about that from Daimler AG, but some rumors seem to be leeking out from time to time. Now, think about what you´d do if you were waiting for the new model to arrive, then Daimler puts the "new" model on sale and you discover the damn thing looks exactly the same as the old one and you have to look carefully to find it looks just like the old model, but has a new colour and consumes insignifically less fuel than the old model. So you ask Daimler: is this really the "new" model? Are you serious? The Daimler responds: we really care about you as a customer, so stick around and we will deliver something really great in 10 years time...
(so you get the idea that that car must be REALLY great, it probably has at least 10 wheels, can seat at least 10 people in an extremely luxurious fashion and runs on water).
Then you think about that for a few seconds more and think: naa, it probably does not run on water and it´s probably not going to be so much larger and better than the 7-series BMW either. And since you do not want to drive your old Yugo around town anymore, you´d probably buy the 7-series anyway.
It is going to take you around town as well, isn´t it?

 

[Hakone]

The last time I saw a BSOD was when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. You must be doing something wrong. Seriously. Maybe you should let a professional fix your system for you.

----------



Those chances go against zero. Apple solely targets the consumer market these days, but that does not include the high-end gamer market. Of course, Tim Cook cannot publicly say "we don't care about pro users anymore", but the reality does not leave much room for interpretation anymore: For Apple, the desktop and the pro market are DEAD. Their focus very clearly is on mobile consumer gadgets.

But why they don't simply sell a proper docking station for their high-end notebook line is still beyond me. You know, a 27" or larger iMac where you can simply slide your Macbook Pro in and turn it into a really powerful desktop system when you need or want it.

But who knows, maybe they're working on something like this right now. Or maybe not, maybe they believe their future lies in the iCloud with touch screen gadgets.

You need to read past sarcasm. Seriously.

 

[kendall69]

Apple just shot themselves in the foot. WHY would they admit redesign a year out. NO ONE with an ounce of brains cells will but a Mac pro knowing this. Why would they? Who would spend 3K today for an antique and another 3K for a rocket ship in a year, when you can spend 5K on a fully built rocket ship.

Now that Apple opened up it's big mouth, this should force them to bring this thing out a lot sooner that a year to see ANY sales of desktops.

 

[Umbongo]

Apple just shot themselves in the foot. WHY would they admit redesign a year out. NO ONE with an ounce of brains cells will but a Mac pro knowing this. Why would they? Who would spend 3K today for an antique and another 3K for a rocket ship in a year, when you can spend 5K on a fully built rocket ship.

Now that Apple opened up it's big mouth, this should force them to bring this thing out a lot sooner that a year to see ANY sales of desktops.

Maybe Apple don't care if they sell any Mac Pros or not between now and a redesign. They will still sell some. Some people need them to continue using OS X with their workflow. Sure they aren't as quick or as feature rich as a current PC workstation can be, but they can still get jobs done the same as they have been doing since 2006. It's all just been performance increases since since they switch to Intel; other than the addition of Display Port connectivity.

The Mac Pro market is very small in Apple's grand scheme of things and it won't really affect their bottom line even with the bad press and angry content creators and developers.

It's a shame that Apple continue to use minimal engineering resources and it leads to situations like this, but maybe that is why they are where they are in the market.

 

[snberk103]

Apple just shot themselves in the foot. WHY would they admit redesign a year out. NO ONE with an ounce of brains cells will but a Mac pro knowing this. Why would they? Who would spend 3K today for an antique and another 3K for a rocket ship in a year, when you can spend 5K on a fully built rocket ship.
...

Respectfully, I disagree. And I think you don't quite understand this market. And there is a very important feature that these "new" Mac Pros have.... a 3 year (with AppleCare) warranty.

Even though there are some technologies that would have been interesting to include in a MacPro, for me there is nothing I needed. 1) The PCI slots take care of the expansion that TB provides. 2) The internal HDD bays take care of any storage I may have wanted to hook up via TB. I have no need for USB 3 (see points 1 & 2 above).
(I'm a photographer, so my needs are of course specific to that field).

What the 2012 MacPros provide are 6 to 12 cores... more than most applications can use anyway. The ability to install more RAM than I need. More important than fast CPU speeds is the memory speed... and the MacPro has a very fast memory subsystem. Most photographers are not waiting for the CPU to finish, we are waiting for the image to be moved from a HDD to RAM or vice versa, so CPU speeds are not that important.

The current MacPros still have 2 ethernet ports... one for the LAN, the other goes directly my printer... a far faster connection than USB 3.

So my plan is to pick up either a 2010 or 2012 MacPro this fall, and get AppleCare. Because this "update" was so minimal my 2008 MacPro will still be worth something on the used market - a nice way to subsidize the purchase. In 3 years - I can then look at what the then current MacPro is doing, after all the bleeding edge adopters have ironed out the bugs (thanks by the way!). At that point any new technologies will have had a chance to mature, and might actually be useful instead of just eye-candy.

 

[mBox]

Respectfully, I disagree. And I think you don't quite understand this market...

I try not to get involved when these things come up but I totally agree with you from a professional pov.
yes I would love to be given a heads up for budget reasons but that has never ever happened with Apple.
This is new territory for them and we all have to wait it out and see what they come up with.
And anyone that is really serious about Mac Pros would have purchased their lot back in 2010.
We did and we just did it again this year.
Some corporations have yearly (ours 2) budgets to tend too and has to be fulfilled or you wont get that budget ever again.

 

[democles]

$359B market cap

Apple has a $534B market cap and it takes them a full year (later in 2013) to update a computer? Things must be pretty cushy for the engineers in CA. Maybe they should send then to work in the Chinese gulag for a while, so those of us who don't want to abandon Apple for PCs, can have workstations that work.

 

[thermodynamic]

"confirms" + "likely" in same sentence = "unconfirmed" claim.

The next Mac Pro will just have Thunderbolt, the latest CPU and GPU chipsets, etc. Unless they radically redesigned the chassis, which is already sublime as a design.

It's a smaller market to the mobile laptops, but certainly formidable compared to the Dell Precision desktop line...

 

[toke lahti]

It's not that hard to believe. Apple as any other company has limited engineering resources. I can't imagine they have a permanent Mac Pro hardware engineer team assembled. A redesign of the workstation would take engineering resources away from other teams. They decided to prioritize other projects.

How much it would take to sort out some of the most glaring problems, such as USB3? I have no clue. But I assume they decided it wasn't worth it until other projects finished, and that's why we're looking at 2013. They aren't waiting for technology to come ripe, they are waiting for other Apple projects to finish.

..and they are likely to loose boatloads of professional users while it happens.

Remember how many times Tim Cook repeated in D10, that they only want to make best machines, no price points or anything else. Just best machines. Well, if MP has always been the best they can do, maybe they really should stop trying?

I don't care that the MacPro didn't get USB3. Now that Apple is supporting the standard we hopefully can buy a USB 3 PCIe card super cheap and plug it in. That's why we own MacPro's right? Expandability. Same goes for Thunderbolt. I don't really need it on my MacPro as I already have PCIe cards for my needs (eSATA, Fibre channel etc) Already got built in dual Gig Ethernet etc etc... Both USB 3 and TB would have been nice but since Intel is slacking on the processor/Motherboard front there wasn't much to offer really. The graphics card is the slap in the face. How much engineering does it take to at least give us a 7000 series card?

Usb3 drivers for intel's chips don't work with other vendors' chips, do they?

The simple answer could be that they have be unable to find a solution in order to package what they want to put into the new Mac Pro. The use of the new processors may include difficult cooling problems for example that produce unacceptable effects (e.g. cooling problems, loud fan noises etc) and therefore require a complicated reworking of the case. Most people on the forum are probably not aware of the problems of the PowerMac G5 (Wiki link) and it's own cooling problems., causing much embarrassment to the company at the time.

Yeah, right.
They can handle the cooling of Air or MBPR which have 100x tighter space, but not with MP?
Those new chips do not produce more heat than old ones...
And yes, liquid cooling it tricky. That's why they don't use it anymore.

Why a glass back?

Because it's heavier and breaks more easily.

But why they don't simply sell a proper docking station for their high-end notebook line is still beyond me. You know, a 27" or larger iMac where you can simply slide your Macbook Pro in and turn it into a really powerful desktop system when you need or want it.

Because without dock, they sell you 2 computers instead of one and a dock.

 

[zimv20]

Even though there are some technologies that would have been interesting to include in a MacPro, for me there is nothing I needed. 1) The PCI slots take care of the expansion that TB provides. 2) The internal HDD bays take care of any storage I may have wanted to hook up via TB. I have no need for USB 3 (see points 1 & 2 above).
(I'm a photographer, so my needs are of course specific to that field).

yep. i need one for audio, and your points hold. i need an internal pci-e slot and prefer to record to internal drives.

at this point, i'm simply weighing the 6-core vs the new 12-core. i'm pretty sure the 6-core would be more performant in the near term, i'm only trying to figure out if, over the course of the next 8-10 years (my est. timeframe for using this machine), future versions of Pro Tools will make such good use of the additional cores that the slower-clocked dual 6-cores will be the better long-term investment.

but i'm pleased the single 6-core is $700 cheaper than it was last week.

 

[Jiz]

32", in a case that looks a lot like a giant iPhone. Glass front and back, metal sides. Perhaps available in white or black.

They must be waiting for the large retina panels for the iMac and Apple TV?