Wrong. The parallels graphics emulation under any Mac OS client is absolutely horrible. Most games/graphics intensive programs don't work much or at all in Parallels.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Working on Two New Mac Pro Desktops, One of Which Will Be Reminiscent of Power Mac G4 Cube
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I know this is from five months ago, but I hope something like this is true! If it is, I may rethink the M1X Mac Mini plan I have for a new Mac desktop to buy next year and instead get an Apple Silicon Mac Pro Cube!
I think the Silicon MacPro has been hiding in plain sight for some time now. Seems to me Apple spent a lot of time and effort designing the 2019 MacPro chassis. And in the lead up to the announcement there were many a gnashed teeth about what exactly Apple meant by "modular," fearing a 2013 MacPro trashcan redux. But the trashcan wasn't entirely awful, for certain tasks. It's portability made it popular on film sets, even to this day what with proxy files and such. But of course there's a lot of folks that absolutely need the expansion options of PCI as well as crazy fast GPUs. So what if the section we see in the current MacPro (that's already labeled Mac Pro) is a removable blade-like thing that has an X1 (or whatever the marketers come up with) with built into the die 128GB of RAM, and then also a bunch of ECC RAM slots that would be just for applications. Thing could be powered by an external power supply like they just came up with for the new iMac, and have like four TB4 ports... but then later (or at the time of purchase for a bundle discount) you could get the full tower and just slot it in. Now we've got something that makes the "I just want a Mac" set and the "I need ALL the expansion" crowd happy. Makes the G4 Cube-like design rumors a little more understandable too.
Just my theory/hope.
Cheers,
Just my theory/hope.
Cheers,
To be honest, that's what I thought when I looked at the older massive Mac Pro. They put the processors and memory (?) on a slide out tray. Theoretically, you could put damn near anything on a tray that lined up with the expected connections, and have a PeeCee killer all set for trouncing on the competition.
And yet...
It was abandoned. Forsaken for the 'locked down' mantra. It would seem the Mac Pro was a glimpse of a 'weak moment' in jobs' life at Apple? Everything else following that was locked down extra tight. So, looking at it in that light: Is there a future for an 'unlocked' computing system at Apple? Does the Mac Pro in its current incarnation really have a future? Is this the Mac Pro version of the iMac Pro, and it will be quietly suffocated in a meeting room in ' The Loop ', and left for dead, again.
Did pro users actually flock to the 'trash can'? I suppose the rack mount kits might have helped, but is a device hopelessly tied to plug in arrays really 'portable'? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd freely welcome a 'trash can', but I'm far from a 'pro user', although I did give my iMac Pro a heck of a run for the money (and it kinda failed).
I sure hope that the Mac Pro has a future. I really honestly do. I still have my Mac Pro. I LOVE it to death. It's HUGE, and breaths very noisily, and did rock the world, at one time.
But, going back to the 'ROM Slot' in my IIcx, to allow for 'easy ROM upgrades' that Apple DID NOT USE when they found out the IIcx ROM's were 'dirty', hence the IIci, and the Mac Pro with the incredibly well thought out 'tray' with incredible potential, and now the New New Mac Pro *might* be capable of 'going Apple silicon' with just a swap of a 'tray'?
Their past is prologue. I seriously doubt it...
There were TONS of those things at ESPN when I worked there. Producers love them for initial edits and they could just pick it up and leave if they needed to. All the final production was done in the on-site server farm anyway (as any good we’ll funded production house should).
Exactly.
I think, Apple is beginning to realize that (even with workstation-class systems) companies and consumers rarely upgrade components after purchase. Typically, in companies, there’s an eventual replacement of a group of computers. For servers, modularity is important, especially hot-swap when possible. However, Apple rightfully stepped away from the server market; there’s no reason to try competing nowadays. And, in fact, look how many companies have (successfully) adopted the Mac mini for server farms.
Basically, unless you like tinkering and showing off (e.g., gamers), upgrading component by component isn’t generally practical.
I was there for two years, you know how many times I was sent out to upgrade RAM or storage for a user? Never. I was one of three people that covered both campuses for specialty fixes that the Help Desk couldn’t solve so I would know. You know what a big company like that does when a machine isn’t cutting it? Send me, with the appropriately specc’d machine in hand to swap it out.
The thing that says "Mac Pro" on it there is just a passive air cooler, it's mostly air.
Sure— *over* the Xeon chip. My point is that SoC is so much more thermally efficient that they'll be able to build a whole computer in that space that could theoretically (and optionally) slot into a larger expansion chassis that's rather similar to the tower we have today.
There was a company that came out with an 'upgradable' peecee, and had a 'processor slot', and it flopped. I think that part of the problem was they started with an 8-bit chip (?), and the slot was 8-bit too. So, to 'future-proof' the idea, someone would have to come up with a processor slot that would be capable of using all possible widths for data bus sizes, making it rather impossible to pull off. A 64-bit processor would be hobbled by a smaller data bus connection to the rest of the 'guts'. And with some processors requiring special support chips for them alone, making the 'processor card' potentially larger. So the 'guts' of the box is just a collection of drives and possibly memory, but even having memory off the card asks for problems. The huge tower Mac Pro has memory on the processor card, which seems like a genius idea. I think they pulled off a modular computer very well, but didn't follow through on the idea, for likely technological reasons. That, and age, and that little fan issue...
Ironically, moving to a system-on-a-chip model makes the ability to upgrade easier, but I doubt there is much support for allowing users to replace their 'chips' in Apple's ivory tower, which is sad. The obstinately refuse to allow people to extend the usefulness of their Apple hardware, and still claim to be 'environmentally aware'. *shrug*
Ironically, moving to a system-on-a-chip model makes the ability to upgrade easier, but I doubt there is much support for allowing users to replace their 'chips' in Apple's ivory tower, which is sad. The obstinately refuse to allow people to extend the usefulness of their Apple hardware, and still claim to be 'environmentally aware'. *shrug*
I would imagine the new Apple silicon Mac Pro Cube would be about 8" per side, with feet on the bottom raising it up for air intake...
2019 Mac Pro style ventilation (3d holes) top & bottom, 140mm fan top & bottom (bottom intake, top exhaust)...
Mac mini style PSU, just taller (and more wattage, of course) on one side of the chassis, motherboard on the other, the space between basically filled with a heat sink similar to the one in the 2019 Mac Pro, ports on the back in a vertical arraignment...
But I hope it is in Space Gray with matching keyboard & mouse, and it does not have the same legs or handles as the 2019 Mac Pro...
2019 Mac Pro style ventilation (3d holes) top & bottom, 140mm fan top & bottom (bottom intake, top exhaust)...
Mac mini style PSU, just taller (and more wattage, of course) on one side of the chassis, motherboard on the other, the space between basically filled with a heat sink similar to the one in the 2019 Mac Pro, ports on the back in a vertical arraignment...
But I hope it is in Space Gray with matching keyboard & mouse, and it does not have the same legs or handles as the 2019 Mac Pro...
So are we about to see the 'Mini Mac Pro'? Oooooo... Exciting... (Will it look like a mandolin? I mean, considering the large one looks like a cheese grater, it would make sense
)
So are we about to see the 'Mini Mac Pro'? Oooooo... Exciting... (Will it look like a mandolin? I mean, considering the large one looks like a cheese grater, it would make sense
Mac mini (Pro) will look like a standard Mac mini, a small flat square with rounded off corners...
Mac Pro Cube will look like what is says, a Cube; much taller than your standard Mac mini...
As for the mandoline (the correct spelling), the analogy does not hold up, as a mandoline is not representative of a Cube primitive shape whatsoever...?
1) Bummer. Is that where the 'transparent top' idea came from? But anything transparent will not conduct heat like a real metal top can, unless it has some kind of overworked/capable 'thermal management solution'.
2) Only if it's made completely transparent, with blinking lights inside. (Immersive cooling would be an I MUST BUY THAT THING NOW NO MATTER WHAT THE COST!!!)
3) At least I think I've been saying it right. Those things are dangerous, and are totally similar to a 'grater'. They are a sharp kitchen luxury that can take skin off your knuckles. OUCH!!!
1 - Transparent top is supposed to be for better WiFi / BlueTooth reception...
2 - Das blinken lights...? What is this, a BeBox...!?! ;^p
3 - Skin, shmin; those thinks will flay your fingers to the bone...!
1) Hiding the antennas under the gigantic logo isn't enough?
2) I missed that one. I was dreaming of the look of the Cray system... The Cray-2 and 3 were immersive cooled.
3) At one restaurant, I used an 'automatic potato peeler', and it was just as frightening as it sounds. It was a gigantic slightly conical shaped drum with a rotating large grit disc of sandpaper type stuff on a rotating turntable on the diagonal placed bottom. You started it up, dumped a bag of potatoes into the maw of it, briefly closed the lid and then dumped out the nuded tubers. And OH YEAH, you could leave them in too long, and have nothing left. There was a water rinse that kept them wet, and also cleaned the disc. It was hell to get the ones out that didn't want to emerge all starkers. That disk was extremely surprisingly rough. Any rotation would cause great pain. Another restaurant I worked at had a massive industrial cheese grater. They grated their own cheese for their on-table dispensers. It was not uncommon to see small colored flecks int he cheese, that being the surface of the waitresses fingernails!!! If someone ever had 'chewy grated cheese', it was likely fingernails...
EDIT: Forgot to mention that the 'large grit disc' was extremely heavy, so once you got it spinning, it really wanted to keep spinning, taking skin and fingernails. As I remember, they didn't want people to wear gloves, probably because the skin and chitin were somewhat digestible, but the glove bits wouldn't be. YUCK... Memories, and 'The Things We Do For Money'... (That's the title of my autobiography, BTW. I'm sure it will be a best seller
)
Last edited:
Aerogel?Be nice; Don’t destroy people’s dreams with realistic comments
How about Aerogel shell? As least we would be able to touch it without the risk of burning...
Maybe..
I'm dreaming of a full immersion cooled iMac Pro. How cool would that be. And so exotic too...
I hope aerogel would be commom for this exaxt reason, however (sadly) it is recently discovered and there is no cost-effective way to mass produce it..
Unfortunately, it's still Intel-based, so it's even more of an instant dismissal than modern Mac products are in general (at least the M1 Macs can be decently private with Linux on them). And also, the small Pro isn't really all that reminiscent of the Cube, certainly not enough to stop the brutal massacre of working or fixable examples.
Welp, i was wrong on "recently" but i recommend you to watch a video from nilered titled "Making aerogel" there are dozens of videos like this tho.