iFixit Shares 2019 Mac Pro Teardown: 'A Masterclass in Repairability'

[Stephen.R]

The market this is aimed at don’t “upgrade” machines. They buy them fully configured and replace them with a newer model when the old one no longer suits their needs. Compared to other pro machines in that market, the Mac Pro is a bargain..... the prices are insanely higher than the MP.

I disagree, completely, with the basic premise that there is a single “group” of customers who are likely/able to buy a Mac Pro.

I don’t know which subset of actual potential customers you’re thinking of but I can’t imagine any that configure it BTO and never upgrade it later.

 

[FlyingDutch]

What exactly is "bad" in Win10, the Linux subsystem, free type-1 hypervisor, sandboxing, application guard? Or is it simply that it's not from Apple?

Windows 10 is garbage. In every single aspect, starting from the UI.
And YES, definitely not from Apple.

 

[guzhogi]

Green is really on the consumer. If you’re environmentally conscious, take that old laptop back to Apple, they’ll deal with it properly. They MAY even give you some money for it! AND, they’ll repurpose it properly (refurbished or recycled). Folks that don’t want to recycle won’t recycle no matter how replaceable the parts are.

True. As long as Apple makes this process easy for the consumer, which it is. It's amazing how green people were back in the day, and yet allowed everything to become disposable. I'm only 36, but I remember hearing about people using reusable bags when shopping for groceries, reusable razors, diapers, etc. Plus, people seemed more open to opening something up and fixing a problem, rather than just buying a new one when the old one broke.

Methinks people are forgetting that this is an expandable system.

I disagree. I think their gripe is what you mentioned:

The only thing you can't do is swap the original SSD cards in the original SSD connectors, or add non-Apple SSD cards to that same tray. They depend on a controller in the T2 chip.

I think that's what people want. How much you (dis)agree is another question.

 

[Stephen.R]

Yes.
If I had a problem with my boot drive, I had cloned drives all ready to go. Just shut down, open, remove the boot drive and slide in the clone. OR - just reboot into the clone. That was my 2008 Mac Pro with 4 drive bays.

To keep things in perspective though, you can have a 2TB ssd in a case the size of a pack of chewing gum that has practically the same speed as the internal SSDs, and you can use it with any recent Mac on a whim, without opening the case.

The place for mechanical drives is in hot swap bays in a drive enclosure. Not inside a machine that you have to turn off to open.

 

[FlyingDutch]

Or a more likely scenario, SSD fails and you lose days of productivity... go figure!

Ever heard about backups ?
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It wouldn't have to be that fat either.

The Dell XPS 15 has swappable RAM and SSD... and it's only 4.4 lbs and a similar thickness.

Again... only thing I can see there is that windows desktop. No thanks.

 

[Stephen.R]

My data is pretty well protected already if I encrypted the drive with FileVault

The whole point of the T2 is that it’s (en|de)crypted at line speed - there’s no performance penalty for encrypting the drive.

There is also an option (3rd party) that doesn’t use the MPX slots, it uses the SATA connector on the logic board. I haven’t looked into it but it attaches to the frame iirc. 2 x SATA.

it’s the same manufacturer (promise) who make the MPX bay module.

Theres no reason to tie a drive to a physical chip.

Unless you want to offload the work of encrypting and decrypting everything and remove the performance penalty of doing it all on the cpu.

Having something like 4xM2 slots would be a awesome.

it has a bunch of PCIe slots so you can have m2, u2, even sata based SSDs, just pick the card with the features you want.

Are there additional NVMe slots at least?

See above, there’s what we slots you add via PCIe cards.

 

[IG88]

Anyone else hoping for a Mac Pro Mini? Something this modular but with a price tag we can swallow.

Yes. Non-Xeon, preferably AMD.
CPU: Base 8 core, up to 16 core
RAM: Base 32GB, up to 128 GB
SSD: Base 512 GB SSD
GPU: Base RX 5700XT

 

[JimmyHook]

iFixIt still has yet to put forward any ideas on how to make a lightweight laptop that is 9/10 repairable. They just criticize without helping solve the technical issues that prevent it.

 

[sbrunner]

With a plethora of PCI slots, I don't think it will be particularly hard to add additional storage not tied to the T2 chip. I think this is an excellent solution that provides the best of security as well as expansion.

Perhaps, similar to DELL servers that run the OS on secured drive, eg SD Card, and anything else can run on storage. You may not need a large internal SSD and can simply add M.2 drives on a PCIe adapter with similar performance.

 

[Swift]

+1 on this. SSD security is important on a laptop because it gets schlepped around with you and is easily lost or stolen. The Mac Pro will most likely live in an office, studio or production environment and is less likely to be misplaced or subject to theft.

T2 security is great, but not a requirement for a desktop in the way it is for a laptop or even an iMac.

 

[sbrunner]

Very similar to Dell's Area 51. We can discuss cost and size, but it is a modular and manageable laptop. I believe there is a Panasonic that is modular (I think it is the Toughbook).

Depends what you need. There are not many workstation class compact notebooks out there, with the DELL 5530 being one of the very few. Apple could have allowed upgrade of storage and RAM, though. Certainly would have hoped that we can update the AC Wifi for AX at some point. But then, I am also not willing to lug-around an Area 51 sized monster. I love that I can camp out at a customer site, or hotel, and have all my computing needs within 4 lbs.

 

[Deep Dish]

Imagine, a Mac Pro Book, a big ol' fatty laptop where you could swap in parts.

It was referred to as the TitaniumBook, and it was glorious.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

But by all means demean your own professionalism with a stupid cheese grader stunt.
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+1 on this. SSD security is important on a laptop because it gets schlepped around with you and is easily lost or stolen. The Mac Pro will most likely live in an office, studio or production environment and is less likely to be misplaced or subject to theft.

T2 security is great, but not a requirement for a desktop in the way it is for a laptop or even an iMac.

T2 includes not just security, but their DSP encode/decode for HEIC/HEVC, H.264, H.265, etc, and much more.

 

[sbrunner]

The more interesting question is can you buy the bottom line $6k version and upgrade CPU, RAM, storage and GPU with generic parts for half the price? It appears to me that one could, albeit not as elegant. Would also be interesting if one could use alternative CPUs such as instead of the W-8180 a W-3175X that is a third of the price.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Yes. Non-Xeon, preferably AMD.
CPU: Base 8 core, up to 16 core
RAM: Base 32GB, up to 128 GB
SSD: Base 512 GB SSD
GPU: Base RX 5700XT

Apple will put in a Ryzen 3900 inside the iMac for those design specs, not a consumer Mac Jr Pro. Apple will switch to Threadripper/EYPC for future Mac Pros, not a BTO option and thus the cores will start at 24 cores/ 48 threads and pricing will be less, but with the certified ECC LR-DIMMS for large memory footprints go down in pricing [Not NEMIX but Crucial, Corsair, Kingston, Samsung, Micron, SK-Hynix] that 50% price tag will still be the same for 1.5TB of RAM: $25k.

9to5Mac has installed the Nemix products which Apple won't touch and I suspect their own prices won't be heavily discounted for much longer.

 

[blinkytoo]

See? That wasn't so hard - now do it for my iPhone and Macbook and we are good.

Yes please stop glueing in batteries and using weird custom screws that make repair impossible!

 

[citysnaps]

The whole point of the T2 is that it’s (en|de)crypted at line speed - there’s no performance penalty for encrypting the drive.


it’s the same manufacturer (promise) who make the MPX bay module.


Unless you want to offload the work of encrypting and decrypting everything and remove the performance penalty of doing it all on the cpu.


it has a bunch of PCIe slots so you can have m2, u2, even sata based SSDs, just pick the card with the features you want.


See above, there’s what we slots you add via PCIe cards.

And one more option are external Thunderbolt 3 interfaced NVMe-based SSDs; offering rates in the neighborhood of 2.4 GB/sec reads and 1.8 GB/sec writes.

Not nearly as fast as Apple's T2-controlled SSDs with read and write rates of 3.4 GB/sec. But still a nice and very portable option.

Personally, I'm all on-board with Apple's T2 chip as it provides an extremely well-managed and sophisticated cryptographic system offering line-rate encrypted storage, secure boot processing, and other system controller functions - all in hardware, a huge plus.

 

[sbrunner]

If they offered a Mac Pro mini with 4 PCIe slots instead of 8, 6 DIMM slot instead of 12, and a smaller power supply and case, some would like it, sure. But those changes only remove a few hundred dollars of cost from the BOM.

But we have this already, just buy a TB3 to PCIe enclosure. I was even using a solution like this on my old MBP 2014 with TB2. Works very well.

 

[IG88]

Apple will put in a Ryzen 3900 inside the iMac for those design specs, not a consumer Mac Jr Pro.

I was stating what I wish they would do, not what I think they'll do.

Agreed that Apple has viewed the iMac as "The Mac" for many years.

But the previous generations of Mac Pro tower were well within reach of consumers that wanted a fully expandable desktop Mac. This new tower has priced itself well out of reach of any sane consumer and as such has left a lot of Mac fans with nothing to buy. iMac / Mac Mini = nope for me.

 

[tmanto02]

Duh.

Big device, repairable. Small device, not so repairable...

 

[Kan-O-Z]

Those that want this level of repairability on their iPhone or iPad need to be ready to double the thickness of their devices! Somehow I don't think you guys want to walk around with a really thick iPhone!

 

[0x0x0x0]

Ever heard about backups ?
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Again... only thing I can see there is that windows desktop. No thanks.

What exactly are you going to do with a backup when you can't boot the Mac Pro??? You simply fail to appreciate the consequences of a total failure of the boot SSD!
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Windows 10 is garbage. In every single aspect, starting from the UI.
And YES, definitely not from Apple.

If that's the level of your argument, then there's no point even discussing anything!

 

[AndiG]

But other than that, the Mac Pro is amazingly upgradable when it comes to storage.

Methinks people are forgetting that this is an expandable system.

Don‘t know how long Apple parts will be available. Don‘t know what happens when the T2 chip fails and finally I‘d have to spent at least 12K to get a minimal useable configuration and then I would have to add internal PCIe cards for M2 storage to bring it into a useable state.
That way I still won‘t be able to use NVidia cards, or Cuda, modern OpenGL or Vulkan.

Might be a awesome device for video editing but fails for every other usecase.

 

[mi7chy]

One thing they got right is it has eight expansion slots just like Woz's Apple II systems.

 

[guzhogi]

But we have this already, just buy a TB3 to PCIe enclosure. I was even using a solution like this on my old MBP 2014 with TB2. Works very well.

I guess some people would prefer having all the components in the same enclosure instead of two separate ones. Different strokes for different folks, as long as they make educated decisions.

In terms of the T2, I'd like to know when the non-Pro iMac will get it, and get rid of the Fusion drive? Every other Apple device has dropped spinning disks for SSDs. Why not the iMac? I'm sure the lack of a spinning disk will save a bunch of space. Plus, I'm curious when macOS will require a T2 chip?