'Constant Negativity' From Pro Users Led Apple to Develop Modular Mac Pro, Which May Not Ship Until 2019

[EcranBleu]

It is courageous to call feedback from users "negativity"

Agreed. Users are the ones paying for it. Their opinion matters! Also, could someone explain why they needed to "redesign" the Mac Pro? I still have a 2008 "cheese grater" and even if it is showing its age, the design of the case is still brilliant. Pop the hood in 5 seconds, add or replace a disk/SSD in 30 seconds.

Who in their right mind decided that using a cylinder (hint HDs and SSDs usually are rectangular) would be a good idea?

Also, while we wait another 2+ years for this new "design" (what's next? A pyramid shaped computer where everything is glued and soldered?) why don't they just reuse the cheese grater case with new guts?

 

[sofila]

I suspect that perhaps, just maybe, "MacBook Pro" sales in the period following the 2016 release broke records, because the 2015 refurbs were included in the "MacBook Pro" sales figures?

Shrug?

These last news from Apple put in a totally different perspective late Oct2016 and Nov2016 threads about MacBook Pro sales and reviews. Phil Schiller's words especially.

 

[Digital Skunk]

The design team seems to have forgotten or been overridden on many of Rams commandments for good industrial design on The Can™. Compare the previous generation Mac Pro to The Can™ and see how they stack up following those theories. Overdesigned and not long lasting due to it's lack of upgradeability.

Excellent point!

The day it was released I smelled a machine that was for the boutique post production houses and design/image creation firms. You know, people that will buy a machine for the looks over the functionality.

It was a fast machine, but not even a year or so later it was average, and there was no upgrade path for anyone that dropped nearly $12k on it and it's many many many additions.

Also, you had to buy all new furniture if you intended to rack mount the thing. Most post houses I've worked with or consulted for don't put their heavy iron and hardware in the same room as the client and specialist. They centralize it and run cables. The NMPro was just a downright tacky update and made a mess of any high-end master control suites.

Legitimate criticism is now negativity ?

That's always been the case with Apple. "You're holding it wrong!" being the central mantra.

....

Nothing against the original poster, but some will never understand the basic idea that you can fit MORE things into a BIGGER box.

It'll be nice to see all of the hardware you mentioned in the palm of our hands, but tower of those times will be far more powerful.

 

[mudflap]

THERE IS AN ICEBERG AHEAD CAPTAIN!! WHAT SHOULD I DO??

I DUNNO, WE HAVE UNTIL 2019 to figure it out...

If they released something now you'd complain that it didn't contain the latest processors from Intel or DDR 5.

 

[HarryWild]

The current Pro is going be used as a trash can in 2019 or sooner! That what the initial design of it was before it was a Mac Pro! So you money spent is not "wasted" after all! LOL!

 

[Analog Kid]

Agreed. Users are the ones paying for it. Their opinion matters! Also, could someone explain why they needed to "redesign" the Mac Pro? I still have a 2008 "cheese grater" and even if it is showing its age, the design of the case is still brilliant. Pop the hood in 5 seconds, add or replace a disk/SSD in 30 seconds.

Who in their right mind decided that using a cylinder (hint HDs and SSDs usually are rectangular) would be a good idea?

Also, while we wait another 2+ years for this new "design" (what's next? A pyramid shaped computer where everything is glued and soldered?) why don't they just reuse the cheese grater case with new guts?

I've swapped a 2008 cheese grater for a second hand 2013 nMP about a year ago, and I love the trashcan. One of the things that struck me as I hauled that billet of aluminum out is how much size and weight there is to it and how little I ever needed it. Expansion slots I never use in a case that could lead to a workers comp claim if I needed to get behind it to plug a cable in.

I'm exaggerating a bit, obviously, but the trashcan gives me the horsepower I need in a quiet enclosure with easy access to the ports. When I got it I added a bunch of RAM which was really straightforward. I don't need the expansion slots, optical bays, or all the airfoils and open space the towers used to provide. I swapped graphics cards in the older unit but there was never much in the way of selection after a couple years and the benefit became minimal. I used to have a 4 drive RAID in the cheese grater, now I have it in a separate (much smaller 4x 2.5" SSD) enclosure at the end of a TB cable and under the desk. The nMP itself sits up off the floor where it collects much less dust through its cooling system.

The appliance model suits me fine. Buy the performance I need, then replace it all in 3 or 5 years with a new unit that continues to work as an integrated whole. I can keep the storage and the display from generation to generation. If they'd kept the form factor and updated the specs this year or next, I'd have been fine.

I get it that my use case isn't everyone's, but I think people here tend to forget that theirs isn't either.

 

[PowerGala]

One of the things that made the Aluminum Mac Pro nice was the design that didn't use a ton of off the shelf parts. The memory tray, the CPU tray, the drive bays, etc. It also did a good job taking off the shelf parts when it came time to upgrade.

If they want to recapture that feeling, they are either going to have to "fix" the old design so they can sell it in the EU, or start from scratch. Doing a standard ATX case would be pretty lazy, and capture precisely 0% of that feeling.

Oh, certainly. I didn't mean that they can't or shouldn't use custom components. They most certainly should, but the tower is such a simple and effective design that they really shouldn't over think it. It's probably easier today to source custom parts and print custom boards than ever before, so even if they make a tower like the Alienware Area-51 they'll still be fine so long as it's versatile enough to upgrade the Xenons as Intel releases them.

I just don't to make a Mac Cone or something for the sake of being innovative. They don't need to reinvent the wheel here. It just needs to be a powerhouse.

 

[Count Blah]

Maybe THEY aren't stupid; but their decision to purchase a clearly inferior model of a Product, over an improved version (and it IS vastly improved!), does make me question their intellect and/or sanity.

Alright!!! The traditional - If people don't think EXACTLY the way I do, then they are stupid and/or insane.

Congrats!!

 

[hawkeye_a]

For all the negativity, which I too have contributed to. I must say, that the 'trash can' MacPro, is one unique and specially designed computer, much like the G4 Cube was.

I must say, while Apple didnt succeed this time, I'm glad they tried something different and new. I just wish they had iterated sooner to address the shortcomings.

If only they had made it upgradable using standard components, it might have been enough for Pro users who would have liked to upgrade the system. IMHO

 

[calaverasgrande]

Count me as one of those in the surge of order for older machines. Day after the touchbar debuted I went to the Apple website pulled up the specs of the new 15" alongside the previous 15" model. When I compared the price of a refurb 15" retina MBP to a new 15" touchbar model of almost identical specs, I found it hard to justify spending $1400 for the difference! If I had instead bought a retail version of the machine I'd still be paying much more for a gimmick that I might not even use. Besides, I use my esc key daily.
As far as the Mac Pro. It's absolutely ridiculous how they have been sleeping on that. The industry standard for video/Graphic/3D departments is to replace the machines every 3 years or less. Apple does not appear to have been on a schedule to fulfill even that minimum threshold. The only conclusion I can arrive at is that they are ready to cede the professional content creation space to Dell and HP. They certainly cannot expect us to use iMacs. Even with a Xeon E3.

Frankly they should just open source MACOS and focus on the little toy idevices that make up the bulk of their revenue.
Pro machines are obviously low margin in comparison, especially after you add in the cost of R&D.
An open source MACOS could be forked to have different distros for general desktop use and content creation.
For example, I do not want Siri, Photos, iTunes and a dozen other little updaters and helpers running in the wings. I want the minimum services required for an environment to produce content. No social media push, no lifestyle apps.
This could also help get the Mac back to it's roots in BSD/Unix/Linux. It would be very nice to be able to update my PHP, MariaDB and SQL versions as easily and quickly as I can on a Linux box using yum or apt-get.
Or here is a better idea. How about MACOS continues forward for the inevitable Arm powered laptops. But desktops run on opensource OSX.
Then I can get a dual CPU Z800 series dumptruck to crush jobs with instead of hairdryering my poor Mac Pro with it's underused dual D700's.

 

[JMacHack]

Four slots for blade SSDs directly attached to the bus at full speed that can be upgraded would be adequate

If it's going to be tower-sized, why not 8 or 16 slots? Blade drives are way smaller than 3.5 inches. Go nuts, I say.

 

[LarryC]

They need time to design its thinness.

Best response I've seen yet, and sadly, it is probably also the most accurate. In my opinion, do not let Ive get near this new Mac Pro. It is supposed to be a powerful workstation, and it should be expandable. I do not give a dam if it looks like a work of art or how dam thin it is. I'm sick of Apple's attitude that they can charge much more for older components. And honestly, there are just too many fan boys that line up for miles to kiss apple''s backside, no matter what they say or do. They are a technology company, not a church. And there just never seems to be a lack of people who worship this company.

 

[Michael Scrip]

RE: development time to build the next Mac Pro...

Apple probably spent 2-3 years coming up with the design of the cylinder Mac Pro in the first place.

Then it took them 2-3 years to finally realize their mistake.

And now it will take another 2-3 years to undo this mistake.

That could be between 6 and 9 years spent on this mistake. Yikes.

I hope they've learned their lesson. Workstations aren't fashion. It literally says "work" in the name.

Keep it simple. Workstations are a known thing. A mature product category. No need to be all clever with them.

 

[Osxguy]

My two cents. Too late. Should have never abandoned the market to begin with. Saw this with Aperture. The iPhone is part of the solution but so is a professional desktop solution. The Mac Pro was sexy but left out what the power mac had. Like normal other solutions came up. Keep up the work apple but better double tour efforts.

 

[macduke]

Why the hell should I buy a RAID storage enclosure, if I could simply pop in 4x12TB 3.5" HDD in the computer directly (think the old Mac Pro, where actually you can put 6 without adding a SATA controller, if you don't need the optical drive). On top of that, your celebrated RAID enclosure most likely will not have copy on write... so I would be much better off just running the drives in a Mac Pro with ZFS... And I could have done it natively, if Apple bought Sun instead of the hipster headphone company.

BTW, try buying a 72TB storage without using the "outdated" spinning drives, and without committing a bank robbery first to be able to afford it ;-)

I just said that capacity to show it's possible, not because I need it. I don't need any more than 4TB to store my Lightroom Library, design files, archived video, and web backups.

 

[ChrisA]

I had been thinking to a "Hackintosh", possibly using an old Mac Pro case and a Xeon mainboard. My 2011 iMac will need to be replaced and I HATE to toss a perfectly good LCD monitor in the trash use to upgrade the CPU

 

[DaveN]

Why does it take so long to develop a product? It used to be you would see new models every year.

 

[jdawgnoonan]

I had been thinking to a "Hackintosh", possibly using an old Mac Pro case and a Xeon mainboard. My 2011 iMac will need to be replaced and I HATE to toss a perfectly good LCD monitor in the trash use to upgrade the CPU

This is why the one iMac that I ever bought will be the last iMac that I ever buy. When the computer is old and no longer worth using you also have to get rid of a great display. It is also wasteful that the display can only be a display for other Macs via Target Display mode. I wish that Apple would release a Mac Mini that had the capabilities of the iMac; Even though that is perfectly feasible from a technical perspective, they will never do it.

 

[macduke]

You're being disingenuous about the limitations of a smaller form factor and you know it. A larger system, should one's work require it, will provide better options for all of those things, air or liquid cooling, larger GPUs, more GPUs, more RAM slots, etc. We can also pretend that spinning drives are 'horrible tech from 1998 that no serious techie would want to use' but that also would be disingenuous. Until storage costs come down for larger SSDs then spinning disks are with us for the foreseeable future. Not as a system or scratch drive but as storage? You won't beat it's cost ratio at this point in history.



All of your examples are strawman examples that were not in the previous generation Mac Pro, or any Mac for many many years for that matter. Nowhere did anyone who was against The Can™ say they wanted those things, but you know that. Oh, and we don't want a PC, we want a Mac. We just want a different kind of Mac than you.

But the 56k modem might be fun to have just for the old bing bong sounds it used to make when connecting to AOL.



All good ideas. I agree with you here. I am for them. I want to see them in the next Mac Pro. TB3 (or 4 by then), USB 3.1 Gen 2, M.2, U.2, Isolinear Chips, a warp drive. None of those things are precluded by granting the requests of people like myself. If anything more of that tech can go into a larger form factor.

I was using hyperbole because I honestly think that's how Apple views things sometimes, such as optical drives and headphone jacks. Though you wouldn't know it with the base model iMac and it's 5400rpm drive, lol, which I've repeatedly criticized.

The problem is that Apple talked about Mac Pro users being less than 10% of Mac users. What you want is what 10% of the 10% want, or maybe even 1% of the 10%. You want a custom PC that is a Mac. They'll never go completely in that direction because there isn't money in that and it doesn't affect the vast majority of their Pro users. The effort it takes isn't worth keeping that less that fraction of 1% of users. I see no reason with the improvements in chip efficiency why they couldn't build an adequately cooled mid-sized tower that could house dual GPUs and 16 core Xeons with no drive bays, four RAM slots, four SSD slots, and a custom, Apple-designed thermal dissipation system. Apple is always about reducing things down as much as possible. Clearly they took it too far, but don't expect them to just give you the old Mac Pro—otherwise they would have already done it and not take 1-2 years to design the new one. That's why IMO, it's going to be a smaller box, and perhaps have different component sections that can be easily swapped out. We'll be lucky if every component doesn't have proprietary connectors to make it "easier", lol.

I'm not necessarily saying what you want is bad, or that some people wouldn't buy it. I'm just saying that when you look at how Apple operates, and the decisions they tend to make, it's not very likely at all that those old things will come back.

 

[MallardDuck]

Spinning drives are outdated, as are optical media.

I'll go right out and by 10TB of solid state storage - and upload it to the cloud for backup on a daily basis too.

 

[macduke]

If it's going to be tower-sized, why not 8 or 16 slots? Blade drives are way smaller than 3.5 inches. Go nuts, I say.

Perhaps. This is Apple we're talking about, so four is probably considered lucky. I've always learned to temper my expectations for expansion from Apple. I also think it's pretty likely that we're not getting the huge towers back, but something between that and the trashcan.

 

[MallardDuck]

They need time to design its thinness.

They're probably looking at isolinear chips from TNG as inspiration
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Perhaps. This is Apple we're talking about, so four is probably considered lucky. I've always learned to temper my expectations for expansion from Apple. I also think it's pretty likely that we're not getting the huge towers back, but something between that and the trashcan.

You're likely right...a square trash can

 

[macduke]

I'll go right out and by 10TB of solid state storage - and upload it to the cloud for backup on a daily basis too.

You could build a 10GB array for $2750 on Amazon and then buy another 10GB for $2750 to mirror it and then add in the price of an enclosure. Also, we're talking about the cost of SSDs in 2018/2019 whenever Apple gets this thing out to the public, so that much storage will probably cost half as much. Not unrealistic for a professional. I understand needing spinning drives for archival purposes, but in a video production environment where you do a lot of work, those things are constantly getting filled and often put into secure archival storage. You'd have to be cracking open your case all the time. Most people I've known in video production where they use a lot of storage do this. They're used to using external drives to dump 6K/8K footage off their Red cameras while out in the field, as well as while importing them at the studio. External drives are a part of life. They don't want to wait all day while downloading footage so they use SSDs.
[doublepost=1491597409][/doublepost]

You're likely right...a square trash can

I think it will be a squircle trashcan mini tower in jet black, lol.

 

[Rustus Maximus]

The problem is that Apple talked about Mac Pro users being less than 10% of Mac users. What you want is what 10% of the 10% want, or maybe even 1% of the 10%. You want a custom PC that is a Mac. They'll never go completely in that direction because there isn't money in that and it doesn't affect the vast majority of their Pro users...

Well, we'll see. Who would've thought they'd even signal rolling back from this design, but here we are. I'm sure it will land somewhere squarely in the middle between what we're both thinking. Either way, good discussion!

"If only..."



lol...

 

[ExCalDelta]

If the timeline for the new mac pro is accurate, the 2013 mac pro will not be labeled vintage until 2023. That is insane.