Call me crazy, but with Tim Cooks comments last year about the next Mac Mini being more pro focused, would it be unimaginable to have a merge of the two standalone Mac products similar to the iMac, and iMac Pro? They could share similar designs, plus the supposed next Mac Pro in the pipeline?
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Mac Mini, Mac Pro.....One in the same
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Doubtful, as the Mac Pro has a thermal package that greatly exceeds the Mac Mini; meaning, you would have Mac Mini components in a mostly empty chassis...
Imagine the internals on an iMac Pro, now Tetris that into a new Mac Pro chassis...
Now imagine the internals on a MacBook/MacBook Pro, a much smaller overall package to be Tetrised into a Mac Mini chassis...
I think they should redo the NeXT Cube, just scaled down in size, as a tribute to Steve Jobs...
I’m wondering the same. With the exception of a gpu you can make a modern pc in just about any package and not worry about thermals. The modular Mac Pro is very likely not going to be a big tower like the old Mac Pro was. I’m betting it is slightly bigger than the current Mac Pro and allows for full sized graphics cards to be installed as well as user accessible ram and storage. I would bet most prospective Mac mini buyers would love the ability to buy a mini that they can upgrade down the line and add a gpu to. I’d pay $1000 for a headless Mac that had an i5, 256gb ssd and 8gb ram (which is way more than that should cost) just to get a Mac I can throw my existing hardware into.
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I must've seen this suggested at least a half-dozen times on this forum. The problem is that many Mac Pro users don't want a Mac mini Pro, they want an expandable full-size tower with dual user-upgradable Xeon CPUs, multiple user-swappable desktop PCIe graphics cards, desktop ECC RAM, etc. All of this requires a much larger form factor, and a much higher price tag than can reasonably still be called a Mac mini (or Mac mini Pro).
A pro-focused Mac mini would appeal to a certain audience, especially with a sub-$1,000 starting price, but it shouldn't become a replacement for the Mac Pro.
A pro-focused Mac mini would appeal to a certain audience, especially with a sub-$1,000 starting price, but it shouldn't become a replacement for the Mac Pro.
May the CUBE be with you. Is that a Thomas Dolby song? Love those Apple cubes! I think I saw a "cube" hackintosh" build?
That wouldn’t be a Mac Mini at all. It would simply be a rebranding of the Mac Pro.
It would be like saying “Yeah... we finally got a new Mac Mini! Except it comes in a cool new notebook form factor and starts at $999! I guess it’s pretty similar to the MacBook Air, but it says ‘Mac Mini’ on the box, so it must be a new Mac Mini!”
It would be like saying “Yeah... we finally got a new Mac Mini! Except it comes in a cool new notebook form factor and starts at $999! I guess it’s pretty similar to the MacBook Air, but it says ‘Mac Mini’ on the box, so it must be a new Mac Mini!”
Well, then it wouldn’t be a Mac Mini and I guess talk of it wouldn’t belong in this sub forum.
But no, tomorrow’s announcement will likely have nothing at all to do with the Mac Pro. And if it does, the Mac Mini is officially dead.
I would disagree...
Talking about the New New (Modular) Mac Pro makes sense, as there are plenty of folks out there who might hold off on making (Windows boxen) purchases elsewhere if they have a solid idea of where Apple is going with the Mac Pro...
As for a preview of the new Mac Pro killing the Mac mini, no... Plenty of folks with year-end fiscal deadlines for equipment acquisitions, they might just 'bridge the gap' with a pro-focused Mac mini until the new Mac Pros start shipping sometime next year...
I think that the 'modular' moniker is guiding people into thinking that this is going to be something it isn't. If Apple haven't learned by now that half of the disdain levelled at the Trashcan Mac Pro was that the internals were not upgradeable and everything needed to be connected externally, creating spaghetti junction, then that is the only reason I can imaging a Mac Pro being 'Mini'. I doubt that we are going to be looking at some 'stackable' solution - for a start, they'll need to get (at least one) full sized graphics card in there somewhere. If they are going to insist on eGPUs on top of whatever discrete/built in graphics it might have, consider me unimpressed.
I can see an Apple-branded expansion chassis designed to fit under the Mac mini, this would be an eGPU with a MXM-format RC 5XX-series or Vega-series GPU...
As for a modular Mac Pro, when I say modular I am thinking along the lines of the cheese grater Mac Pros, but a mini-tower instead... Basically a microATX sized motherboard with PCIe slots for GPUs/SSDs/video io/audio io/etc. ...
I can't agree that there are many customers left for a new MP - I've had to move my group to HP Z8s due to their dramatically improved throughput after trying to hang on with maxed out 5,1s.
And we already have all the signals we need re the new MP, and it seems highly likely to be a complete disaster for those who need it to actually compute.
Wow, can we all get a glimpse thru your crystal ball...?
You know, seeing as how you already know that an as-yet-to-be-released product is a complete disaster...
Every time I hear the word modular Mac, I envision a Mac with proprietary upgrades and interfaces that can only be upgraded if apple allows us to upgrade.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/298...dular-pcs-arent-as-exciting-as-they-seem.html
Simply consider the trend for all of Apple's computers. No user upgradability, crippled by poor thermal design, locked down, unreliable, etc.
No crystal ball needed, just basic objective observations.