Oh, I get what kind of shop you are---we never bought hardware as a service and always run in-house support and it's way cheaper to buy extra hardware for redundancy/parts than to fork out for disinterested support. So as I said, the entire value of the contract was the hardware---the contracts are usually deliver N pieces of hardware of M spec by X date and warrant hardware for Y years with the usual 5x8xNBD warranty. And guess what, with redundant hardware and virtualisation our core services downtime is literally 0 seconds, and median end-user problem report to resolution time is about 12 minutes. We don't have time to waste to "go to the single source for remidiation"---when something goes wrong, it needs to be fixed there and then! Like I said, it's cheaper to to hire staff who know what they are doing ;-)
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iFixit Shares 2019 Mac Pro Teardown: 'A Masterclass in Repairability'
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Oh, I get what kind of shop you are---we never bought hardware as a service and always run in-house support and it's way cheaper to buy extra hardware for redundancy/parts than to fork out for disinterested support. So as I said, the entire value of the contract was the hardware---the contracts are usually deliver N pieces of hardware of M spec by X date and warrant hardware for Y years with the usual 5x8xNBD warranty. And guess what, with redundant hardware and virtualisation our core services downtime is literally 0 seconds, and median end-user problem report to resolution time is about 12 minutes. We don't have time to waste to "go to the single source for remidiation"---when something goes wrong, it needs to be fixed there and then! Like I said, it's cheaper to to hire staff who know what they are doing ;-)
Single-sourcing hardware isn’t hardware as a service, and with many lease arrangements you return the equipment back to the manufacturer/seller (i.e. Dell, HP)
You didn’t single-source hardware? You hire “staff who knew what they were doing” but bought, Dell, HP, Lenovo or whoever you could get the best deal on that week?
Otherwise, I don’t understand your reply to OP, except that it sounds very arrogant and condescending (to me).
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Probably the old PC builder in me showing, but that picture is sexy AF with all those high quality parts laid out. Remembering the old Chinese metal cases from the 90's we had to use for punters on a budget; the jagged sharp edges left your arms looking like those of a depressed emo.
which part of my reply bothered you ? The one when I said Windows basically is garbage or the one where you didn’t understand the meaning of a backup ?
I see your point but I will have to disagree. The professionals you mentioned haven't been the target audience for at least a decade and didn't need a Mac Pro to get the job done in the first place.
I'm self-employed and I do motion/graphics design and 3D and I do have trouble spending that much money on a Mac Pro and I am by far not alone. You're right that tax deduction saves you money, which is also the case for a cheaper alternative. But the problem is that the value just doesn't align with the price they are asking for it.
The Mac Pro is starting at $7,230 in my country. According to Geekbench the $4,500 iMac I opted for after the Mac Pro announcement scores better than the $7,230 Mac Pro base model... and the iMac includes a 5K monitor. I would have loved a modular machine, and if they had offered anything like the 2013 model at a similar price point, I would have gone for that. But they didn't and let's be honest, unless you're a high-end professional who buys five of those workstations to do some serious calculations, this is just not the tool you need.
I am still of the belief that a modular laptop is the way to go with a caveat. For each user who can upgrade their device, there is a user who tries really hard and ends up draining Apple Support time. My random guess is that by making the system user unfriendly (macbook), the savings on support was significant in comparison to the opportunity cost of loss of modularity.
I completely AGREE with you on the positioning that a brand entanglement shouldn't require a capital purchase every jump. There's a fiscal tipping point for Apple and upgradeability post-sale was past that point... just not enough money to made NET (we aren't talking GROSS).
I used to lug around my 15" macbook pro... it did the job enough for what I needed. I could set up an eGPU with a beast CARD and monitor if it is a long term customer engagement... I have samsung fast ssd (that clients buy and keep themselves)...
Your points are all valid, with the tax code (in the US) as it is written, it is just as easy to write off a new laptop each year then to upgrade my existing...
And a 10g reduction in the weight of a phone by using glue instead of screws? Come on.
MI50 , MI60 , R VII , and Vega II all use the same GPU die with features flipped on and different HBM RAM attached to the interposer with that same die.
NAVI 2.0 doesn't look to be AMD's next "big compute" chip.
"... Therefore, Arcturus, not Navi, was Vega's successor all along. ....There's a high possibility that Arcturus will probably use a variation of the Vega silicon, ..."
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-arcturus-vega-gpu-support,39935.html
"... We should expect Arcturus to power the HPC side of Radeon, while Navi will continue swinging for gamers moving into 2020 with Navi 20 and beyond. ..."
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/68074/amds-next-gen-arcturus-gpu-teased-here-1h-2020/index.html
HBM2e is far more likely to get attached to 7p nm or 7nm+ bump of Vega where the memory controller is tweaked and the clocks bumped with the incremental process optimization.
Navi 2.0 probably has real time ray tracing hardware thrown at it rather than transistors added to increase the generalized compute. I think the W5700X is an indication that Apple would track that with another card ( late 2020 - early 2021 W5702X or W6700X ... whatever AMD does product name code wise). Navi mainly seems to be tracking the space the Polaris was in. It will probably expand out a bit, but it isn't a "big compute" card. Some of the main drivers of it ( Xbox , Playstation) weren't looking for that.
7nm limits how big can make the die so if throwing lots of extra transistors at ray tracing then won't be cranking up support for more general compute. Arcturus needs bfloat ( and concurrency and better caching ) along with memory controller updates ( and Infinity Fabric bump if lying around). "Vega 30" could do that quicker. If had a tensor cores to thrown in ... those too.
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It shipped to a few who weren't interested in publicity. Pro Vega Ii will probably ship in bigger overall quantities.
If a different die that would be one thing. But the die is same. In the HPC market buyers tend to use small sample output on their own code before do any 6+ figure buys of the tech. But yeah, it was probably Feb or so before the software stack for MI50/MI60 was ready for prime time, critical production work. But it also now end of December and off by a month or two doesn't negate that this baseline tech has been out there for even longer than the Mac Pro was being shown publicly. Feb was still 3-4 before Apple said it would be another Quarter (or two) before Mac Pro shipped.
No. AMD/Apple were not keen on talking about those. More downscale.
"... Providing up to 14 TFLOPS of single-precision floating-point (FP32) performance and up to 28 TFLOPS of half-precision floating-point (FP16) performance, AMD Radeon™ Pro Vega II GPUs are optimized for powering demanding professional applications. ..."
In another thread , someone linked in the WWDC presentation on Metal Ray tracing which makes mention of using half scale ( something like makes for smaller ray buffers which means more data packed into smaller area stuffed in the VRAM .) If AMD was cutting Apple a price break it wouldn't be surprising if Vega II had Radeon VII's downshifted FP64 ratio.
To be fair, it's not really the GPU that's overpriced in that situation, those can be just standard priced desktop GPUs. It's the enclosure that really hurts.
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As far as I can tell you don't pay much in the way of an Apple Tax for those Xeon upgrades on their site, they're just stupidly overpriced CPUs to begin with.
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Why is Apple so "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" on these issues? Only Apple can have the best repairable desktop and the most unrepairable Laptop. Only Apple can have an overpowered tablet held back by the limitations of the operating system, while at the same time in their computer lineup have the best operating system held back by underpowered hardware, in the form of intel integrated graphics garbage and yesterdays processors. Only Apple can be at the forefront of forcing a new I/O in the computer lineup, while holding on to outdated propriety I/O for their phones that ironically include in the box a cable to an even older I/O standard.
This is really down to the "left hand not talking to the right hand" at Apple. It's a management problem with no unifying vision across all products.
This is really down to the "left hand not talking to the right hand" at Apple. It's a management problem with no unifying vision across all products.
Well I don't and this little fact should warrant a worse score for Apple. For this machine it should be 100% upgradable.
I don’t understand the whole T2 thing. Why do I need Apple to lock down my storage and data?
Apple’s consumers, those that buy the vast majority of their products, vote with their dollars on every decision Apple makes on each individual device. The thinner/lighter they make laptops, the easier they make iPad Pro, and maybe, the more expandable they make Mac Pro, all provide positive feedback in “we’re making more money”.
These folks don’t care about what’s IN the laptop or IN the iPad, just that it’s able to do the things they want to do, in a way that makes sense. Apple could cake the entire insides of a MacBook Pro with glue with each individual screw being a different type, and it wouldn’t matter to the folks using Final Cut Pro, or Logic Pro.
If it’s Jekyll and Hyde, it’s that some products are made for Jekyll’s and some are made for Hyde’s. You make everything for Jekyll’s and you lose your Hyde’s, and vice versa. So, different products using different methods to keep WILDLY different groups of folks buying products.
I am a little confused on the whole thing, actually, especially as it relates to upgradeability. There's a second M.2 slot on the mobo, so can you not add additional storage there? Does the T2 keep you from initializing a new drive in that secondary slot? And PCI storage via a PCI expansion card, or SATA storage via the internal SATA port, those wouldn't be locked to the T2, right? And the M.2 slot the original SSD is in is standard, isn't it? So I mean the drive you take out won't be readable by another machine, which means data lost, yeah, but in terms of upgrading the storage you should be able to physically replace the drive yourself, but does the T2 stuff mean that you won't be able to initialize the replacement?
We've never seen the T2 in a machine with upgradeable/replaceable storage before, so at least as far as I can find we don't actually know how it'll behave with this stuff.
The LG G5 received a reparability score of 8.5 and size and weight wise is smack dab between the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus which is right where it should be since the screen is also halfway between the two. This despite those iPhones coming out a year and a half later and the LG having nearly double the battery capacity.
So no, making a phone with all the flagship features that is easily repairable with a battery that can be replaced in seconds without any tools does not necessitate a brick.
SOMEone has to be the first
Get it, record your progress in YouTube videos and make some money from the trouble! If things go well, you buy a NEW Mac Pro in the event that you mess up the old one!I don’t think it was savings on support, it was more savings on build. Before making the ”soldered” solution Apple analyzed their users and found that the vast majority of people never upgraded, either themselves or paying someone else to do it. Apple were adding modularity (and complexity) for little to no user benefit. And, it’s not surprising, this is true for Windows as well. If users are happy with the performance out of the box, and their needs don’t grow drastically (which is most people), they don’t upgrade.
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Well, if you’re happy with 4 hours of screen on time, sure. Is 5-6 additional hours worth repairability? Not for me. I spend most of my time using the phone and, if it’s made right, I’ll spend zero hours repairing it.
Then again you COULD carry around an extra battery pack, but that’ll put you over the weight of the 8 Plus.
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Pick the 3.2GHz 16‑core Intel Xeon W processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.4GHz. You're not saving that much by changing the CPU on your own, so if you ask this question just don't bother with it.
I hear I guess my point is that it’s hardly the outdated tech OP was trying to imply. What’s newer that Apple could have used? Maybe there’s something out there but I’m unaware of what it would be. If you’re using the latest product it’s hard to fault them too much.
re: FP64 I guess we can assume it’s basically the same as the VII... if it were MI50/60 class they probably wouldn’t have omitted it. Considering MP isn’t exactly competing in the HPC space, I’m sure they didn’t have FP64 performance at the top of their requirements, and chose price as you say. It’s a good fit for 90-95%+ of the customer base I would think.
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