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Mac Pro Build-to-Order Ship Dates Slip as Future Remains Uncertain
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A car is a tool. It's only meant to get you from point A to point B. Yet people still care about a car's looks. Are you saying you don't? If Apple's only concern was accessibility and air-flow, they would've built an open-air rack-mount instead of a pristine aluminium box.
Now that I think about it........ did you just try to convince forum readers that Apple doesn't care about style and elegance... even in the MacPro? -1.
I did. It was a derelict PowerMac G4 case into which I installed x86 components.
"NEED" for a new technology is a difficult thing to gauge. I didn't *NEED* a quad-core CPU back in 2008 but over time, it became more relevant and, eventually, necessary. I don't *NEED* SATA III today, but if I buy new hardware that's going to last me more than a couple years, I'm certainly going to prefer to have it, for longevity's sake.
BTW, who still uses RAID cards? Decent boards all have on-board RAID controllers these days. LOL.
I would be lucky to, you're right! But that's because we're talking about Apple. Follow any other computer company, and you'll see that they are FREQUENTLY updating their products. Their base models change sometimes monthly... That doesn't make them good companies, or good computers, but companies who aren't protected by THE GREAT WALL of OS X know they have to offer the latest and greatest in order to compete.
What Apple does (rather, DOESN'T do) is pure profit motive. And that's their prerogative. But it makes them a loathesome entity amongst consumers who know how blatently disrespected they are.
LOL. You clearly do not know how large a SATA III controller chip is. Not a controller card... a controller chip. Tell me why nearly every modern motherboard on NewEgg supports SATA III, and isn't the size of a coffee table...
No. That's Apple's solution. You've been whipped into believing Apple's rules are adequate, and therefore, tolerable. Like I said before, Apple's strategy is Apple's prerogative, but that does not make them a good company. Meeting consumer expectations is a necsessary part of being a successful company. For the most part, Apple does a pretty good job. When it comes to its loyal user-base of pros and prosumers, Apple willingly turns a blind eye. That is disresspectful behavior.
It's also the reason I have not purchased an Apple computer since 2002.
USB2 Port = USB3 Port. SATA III is an on-board protocol.
New motherboard, yes. New case, no. Not until you add Thunderbolt.
But Apple has an obligation to redesign a motherboard every once in a while if they want to call themselves a PC retailer. Given how fast technology moves, I don't find it unreasonable in any stretch of the imagination to expect to have to change board designs twice a year!
LOL. Because your petty want is more important than my petty want.
Who cares in the end. get an ipad if you want sleek. if you want to get to work, no one is looking at your case anyway. By the way, have you ever seen the but ugly PC cases on display at Micro center etc? Oh, and Apple doesn't "owe", they "profit".
I would never buy a case at Microcenter, but there are definitely some sexy non-Apple cases out there...
-Clive
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I have 3TB worth of Himalayan XDCam and 5DMKII footage I need to sort and edit, and have been waiting for this update to sink $5000 into a new MacBook Pro and get going (all I've got now is a suped up MacBookPro with SSD drive, great computer for the field, but not post). Reading about Apple's disregard for the pro market and this ugly lag time is saddening and has me seriously considering a full switch to HP, Boxx or Dell, and then just start running windows off of my MacBook Pro. What up Apple?
Is it time to abandon Apple, or should I hold out for this update?
Is it time to abandon Apple, or should I hold out for this update?
Given the next Xeon's move the PCIe controller inside the processor(s) instead of the QPI hub on the current design. I wonder if that design is going to need to change?
It would seem to me that the changes would lend itself to a highly modular system with each Processor with it's memory and PCIe slots on its own board that plugs in to the IO board. Sounds like the sort of simplification of the Product line Tim Cook would like.
I didn't say I don't. I like the way the MP looks now and see no need for it to change. The holes at the front are there for a purpose so would you like oval holes or something?
Had a MDD G4 myself, can't say it's one of the best case designs ever tbh...
Anybody that is doing things that saturate the onboard chipset and/or need hardware RAID use RAID cards.
This is a pro machine, remember?
Given you said that you haven't owned a Mac for 7 years I would like to inform you that there is no hardware RAID available. Only the Apple RAID card, software RAID or a 3rd-party RAID card are your options...
And you clearly don't know what I am on about. I know the chips are tiny.
I said PCI-E lanes, i.e. how the IO subsystems communicate with the NB and in the SB chips the CPU...
If they were to add 3rd party chips they would need to probably use the PCI-E slot lanes as to bypass the DMI. However it's been a while since I read up on this and someone with more detailed hardware knowledge should correct this.
Hence why I said they would need to use some of the PCI-E slots lanes for 3rd party controllers...
Each to their own. If I was in the market for a Mac Pro with SATAIII I'd buy an in warranty second hand machine and find a decent SATA & USB 3 PCI-E card. Hey-ho.
Your assuming that adding 3rd party controllers wouldn't move things about a-bit. My experience is that a small change usually ends up doing something else somewhere else. But again I don't do mobo design for a living so who knows?
Could you perhaps explain this better? The Apple RAID card and 3rd-party RAID cards are hardware RAID - so hardware RAID is available.
What did you try to say?
There are cheap PCIe to PCIe switch chips available - so one isn't limited by the number of PCIe lanes coming out of the chipset.
Of course, switches don't increase the bandwidth, so you have the situation where the bus is over-committed and some load scenarios could see bottlenecks.
If you think that the alienware cases are hot then you are the one with the problem. As a professional I wouldn't EVER put that in my office or workspace..... EVER! It looks childish and gaudy.
The Mac Pro case design is the best I have ever used and looks sleek and professional.
Any bog standard Mac does not have the ability to do hardware RAID. I think the Southbridge in the 2009/2010 Mac Pro is the ICH10, not ICH10R, so even the hardware doesn't support it.
It requires an additional RAID card (I.e. more hardware), to enable the ability to configure a hardware RAID array. Although people say the Apple card is **** and hence buy third party cards.
And we are now back where we started
Hot yes . . . . HELL YES, but they aren't built for workstation class environments, never said I'd use it as such either. They have a very nice mix of internal engineering and cooling that make it nice eye candy for your desk, but I could never use one for video editing. The chassis is built for gaming, hence the double wide PCI slots for SLI and Crossfire, the 2.5" slot for SSDs, and so forth.
Having an opinion isn't subject to you or anyone else's comments about having a problem. Let's just leave it at that.
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Oddly enuf, some of us actually DO use an Adobe workflow (scary, I know), as well as other Pro software venders.
The Mac Pro could easily be refreshed, offer a variety of i7 Extreme Edition Processors, a beefy video card, Thunderbolt, it wouldn't exactly be difficult.
Ah, the old notion of if I don't need it, nobody needs it.
As a matter of fact I am using SSD and the work I do does see a noticeable difference from that extra speed. I am talking about real life results, and SATA II is demonstrably a bottleneck for the work I do.
Again, the blinders are on, one guy is happy with the purchase of one machine so nothing else matters. That doesn't change the fact that the current MP, particularly the base model, is extremely poor value for the price compared to alternatives. I agree that Apple rarely lowers prices (though this is clearly a case where they should, and they should have done it when the i7s first shipped), but even if they're unwilling to do that, there's no excuse for not bumping the chip in the base MP model at that same price.
That's supposed to be Apple's product strategy for competing with machines that are blowing them away on price/performance? No wonder sales are so dismal.
As I said, doing an update NOW when the next gen is a couple months away wouldn't make sense, I'm saying they should have done this months ago. And yes, it really would have been worth doing, a redesign like that isn't rocket science, it's probably one of the easiest R&D projects Apple could tackle. The last MP update was in July 2010, I don't think it's outrageous to suggest that they might have made even one update during that time.
I absolutely don't, because it's something that sits on the floor under my desk so I rarely if ever see it. The important things to me are size, being quiet, ease of upgrades, features/specs, etc. Looks mean exactly zero to me. As far as the case itself I'd much rather see things like included mounting hardware for multiple SSD, and that wouldn't require any change to the externals.
I guess you forgot about the people who would be saturating SATA II but aren't because their mobo includes SATA III?
Exactamundo. It's not rocket surgery, is it?
Put an Apple sticker on it, sell it for $500 more than
a similar spec PC so fanbois won't feel dirty buying one
and it would absolutely fly off the shelves.
And Apple won't do it.
So, your definition is that "hardware RAID" is "hardware RAID embedded on the motherboard", but not "hardware RAID on a PCIe card".
By the way, the ICH10R is pretty good for RAID-1, but has abysmal write speeds for RAID-5 (as one should expect). I have a 3ware (LSI) SATA RAID with 256 MiB of battery-backed cache, which is about 25-40 times faster at writing than the Intel controller.
That wasn't really an update, it was the same box/mobo with different CPUs and graphics cards dropped into the sockets.
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Quite. I should have been more clear
And that is precisely why people who need high performance buy high performance RAID cards as the onboard is usually not great
Very true, and much of that software was far better than what Apple was offering, hence the reason for Shake, Final Cut Server, and the ole' skool FCStudio to turn out how they did . . . dead or toned down.
Apple doesn't need to shove money into things that aren't making them a profit at all, or worse yet, they don't have the right minds to keep afloat. Nuke and even After Effects was destroying Shake as a compositor, no one other than the Washington Post bought FCServer, and FCP . . . . sorry, I really don't know what happened to that piece of software.
I do still prefer my pro apps, mostly Adobe CS's of various numbers and Avid MC5 running on a Mac, but I don't know what Apple really wants to do with it's professional applications.
The hardware and OS is still the only saving grace for Apple, and . . . . . well.
The QPI hub was/is on the daugthercard ( usually hidden underneath one of the massive heatsinks along with a CPU package ) since the 2009 model. Anantech had some breakdown pics (that smaller heatsink in the middle):
http://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/2800?cPage=6&all=False&sort=0&page=10
There were two different QPI hubs (for single and dual package). Among other benefits, the card serves to minimized the differences from the rest of the box between the two models.
Actually, the pain is going to be getting the additional and much faster PCI-e lanes off the cards and to the sockets. The other catch-22 is do you expand the connector so that can get more than 40 lanes out ( technically the dual package now will have 80. All 80 is probably overkill, but 56 ( 1 x16 + 2 x8 + 2 x4 on package 1 and 1 x16 from package 2 ) so that had 2 x16 slots , 1 x8 slot , 1 x4 slot, and some x8 & x4 lanes for stuff like embedded graphics and Thunderbolt (TB). The single package version only allows for 1 x16, 1 x8 , and 2 1 x4 ( and just one x8 bundle for internal for TB and embedded graphics to share) without resorting to PCI-e switching hocus-pocus on the slots. Some of the connector pins are going to be "dead" (or heavily switched) on the single package card.
I think DMI lanes are a bit wider too.
You do realize Tim Cook has been in charge of the whole Mac Product line for last 3-4 years?
That box was checked off 4 years ago.A discrete USB 3.0 and FW controllers could be attached to the IOHub because it would have PCI-e v2.0 lanes now.
P.S. The mobile graphics card + TB combo from the iMac would also simplified how to deliver "TB with video" on the Mac Pro also.
It will be bad for Apple if they ignore pro market.
If the pro market does not have a powerful machine to work on at their desk they will look for an alternative and the 'pro-culture' will slowly (or quickly?) shift to the new solution and forget about the days of Apple.
Over time everyone will develop for Android if there is no pro machine for creative people to make things on. All apple products will suffer.
music will be bought from an android music store, not itunes, and not added to the iphone/pod, but rather to a compatible device that the apple pro market replacement is developed for.
Mobile apps will be developed for the android market at an accelerated pace. Apple will lose share as the masses switch to the brand that is getting the most buzz because creative people will be creating on the new solution.
I am confident that Apple understands the battle they are in and not make the mistake of ignoring the creative people who develop the products to create their community that their brand needs to survive.
Worst case scenario: there is no mac-pro and another entrepreneur fills the market gap with a better machine for us and we will all tell each other and move to it reluctantly, but be impressed when we are there because innovation and creativity demands that this happen.
If the pro market does not have a powerful machine to work on at their desk they will look for an alternative and the 'pro-culture' will slowly (or quickly?) shift to the new solution and forget about the days of Apple.
Over time everyone will develop for Android if there is no pro machine for creative people to make things on. All apple products will suffer.
music will be bought from an android music store, not itunes, and not added to the iphone/pod, but rather to a compatible device that the apple pro market replacement is developed for.
Mobile apps will be developed for the android market at an accelerated pace. Apple will lose share as the masses switch to the brand that is getting the most buzz because creative people will be creating on the new solution.
I am confident that Apple understands the battle they are in and not make the mistake of ignoring the creative people who develop the products to create their community that their brand needs to survive.
Worst case scenario: there is no mac-pro and another entrepreneur fills the market gap with a better machine for us and we will all tell each other and move to it reluctantly, but be impressed when we are there because innovation and creativity demands that this happen.
The Mac Pro is profitable. We know this, and we know it's actually one of the more profitable individual lines. Not iPad kind of profits, but not everything can be iPads. Admittedly, some of these profits are because Apple doesn't lower the prices of older hardware over time, and the Mac Pro hardware is indeed fairly old. But Apple does make a profit off the Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro does not sell as well as other Macs, of course, so while it makes good profit on each individual sale, it does not make much money on the Mac Pro market as a whole, compared to more popular products like the iMac or MacBook Pro. Still, profit is profit, and overall the Mac market is growing so presumably the Mac Pro market is growing as well, just perhaps not as quickly.
As much as some people like to argue about Apple's consumer-orientation or its various previous business and engineering decisions, there is simply no reason for Apple to drop the Mac Pro as a line. They might change the name or the form factor, but Apple will continue selling a product we'll recognize as an heir to the Power Mac for a long time to come. As I said, profit is a profit, and there's only one reason why you turn down profit, and that's if you can make more profit doing something else. This is the key question we have to ask. Can Apple make more profit by dropping the Mac Pro line?
The answer, of course, is no. Mac Pro customers will not buy iMacs if they lose the Mac Pro, nor will they buy iPads or MacBooks. The Mac Pro caters to a niche consumer, but no other device Apple sells fills that niche. Apple will be dropping the albeit small profits made by the Mac Pro market in exchange for nothing. Businesses do not simply reject money.
People talk about the Xserves, but the Xserve was a small niche product that had two competitors also made by Apple. It competed with the Mac Pro Server, and to a lesser extent it competed with the Mac Mini Server. In essence, the Xserve was cannibalizing or being cannibalized by other products sold by Apple in the niche. Apple rightly dropped the line to reduce development costs within the market, and focused their efforts on the high end Mac Pro and the low end Mac Mini which were both able to compete in two separate markets instead of just the one the Xserve could. For the Mini, a cheap headless Mac for switchers. For the Mac Pro, workstations for pros.
People talk about the MacBook, which has much the same story as the Xserve. It was a product caught competing against multiple other Apple products for the same set of consumers. Apple ended the MacBook line to focus their efforts into the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and I suppose even the iPad.
People talk about the Cube, and you can probably already tell where I'm going with this. It was stuck between the iMac and the PowerMac G4. It was also rather expensive, which didn't help its case. The Cube was resurrected as the Mac Mini, eventually, but they are definitely not the same thing. Both are headless Macs, but what really matters is the price and power, and the Mac Mini found its niche in a way the Cube never could. The Cube has a better analogy with the xMac people ask for, the non-workstation tower we're likely to never see. At least, we won't see an xMac until Apple figures out a way to lure more customers away from the Windows world without cannibalizing sales of their iMac and Mac Minis (and even, Mac Pros).
The Mac Pro simply does not have the same problem the Xserve or other dropped lines have. It exists as the sole workstation in the Apple lineup. To kill it while it is profitable will simply mean a drop in profits for Apple, which is not something companies want to have happen. Furthermore, another company will sell workstations to those former customers, helping Apple's competitors, and those former customers will stop buying software from Apple, and their motivation to stay in the Apple Ecosystem of iPhones and iPads and an iMac at home for the kids and a PowerBook Air or Pro on the road.
Apple, especially recently with iCloud and stuff like Apple TV, wants to keep people in the Apple ecosystem. There may be a bigger halo effect from the iPod and iPhone than anything else, but you cannot deny that people who use Macs at work tend to be more than just one-time Apple customers. Everyone I know who has a Mac at work- any Mac, but Mac Pros especially- have multiple Apple products for use at home. What's more, they evangelize better and more consistently than the gadget freaks who may have an iPhone today but are ready to jump ship to the next greatest Android or Windows phone the next year. Most people are forced to use whatever they have at work, but they pick their other devices based on their own individual factors. Having a Mac Pro workstation in the office makes them a lot more likely to choose what they're used to for their computer at home, and whatever other devices work best in the ecosystem.
ROI, another term tossed around a lot, is good, but it's not the end-all, be-all of business. A company might sell oranges, and have the best ROI on those oranges as they can possibly have. They have magical orange groves that require no fertilization or irrigation, they just produces tons and tons of oranges for the minimal cost of picking and shipping them every year. But there's only so many oranges you can sell, only so much orange juice people are willing to drink and some people don't like oranges anyhow. A good company doesn't just sell oranges because it's the product with their highest ROI. They sell some pears too, because that's another market available to them they might be profitable in, even if the pears don't have as high an ROI and the market is smaller. It's also good insurance for when people's tastes change, or if there's a bad crop one year. A good company diversifies, cuts product lines that aren't profitable or are wasting money in opportunity costs, but keeps the profitable parts of their business alive, regardless of their individual shares of the overall profits.
Apple has always been, at least in recent memory, good at identifying where they need to focus their efforts, and good at what aspects of their business they need to change. The Mac Pro remains profitable in itself, is a vector for software and other hardware sales, and Apple makes no other product that can do what it does. Professionals have nothing at all to worry about until there are simply no more professionals for Apple to sell to, or Apple cannot sell a profitable professional machine. Talk of Apple evaluating the line shouldn't terrify anyone, a good company evaluates all of its product lines often. Somewhere at some point at some level, Apple discusses whether they should kill off or radically change the iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook Air, and all of their other products. This is a good thing, because when Apple discusses the future of a given line, that means they're trying to figure out how to make it better.
We'll see a refresh on the Mac Pro when the chips to put in a new one come out. Yes, it is Intel's fault, and hopefully in the future, Mac Pro suitable chips will be quicker to arrive. Apple could have stuck Thunderbolt! or USB 3.0 or whatever else in their old Mac Pros, but then people would be complaining about the CPUs remaining the same and really those peripherals don't exist yet in big enough numbers for anyone serious to care. Apple could not have put an i7 in there, though, and anyone who thinks otherwise does not understand what a workstation is. Yes, there are hobbyists and gamers who buy the Mac Pro as a regular desktop machine. Heck, I'm one of them. The Mac Pro needs dual-CPUs and ridiculous numbers of cores, though, and ECC RAM. The Mac Pro needs two optical drives and four HD bays, and tons of PCI slots. It needs a huge open grill on both ends so it runs quietly, and plenty of space inside so you can work with the internals easily for upgrades and hardware swaps. Open up a Mac Pro sometime if you have access to one, and really take a look. It's beautifully designed to be a pleasure to work with. Things slide in and out nicely, there's no cables to mess with unless you're working with really power-hungry GPUs, and everything is neatly packed in with plenty of room for air to breeze through and keep things cool and quiet. It's a machine built for professionals in a professional environment, don't think you can just slap a bunch of consumer/gamer parts into it and still call it a Mac Pro. It might meet some people's needs, but Apple would be abandoning a market that does need a workstation and those customers would have to go elsewhere.
The Mac Pro does not sell as well as other Macs, of course, so while it makes good profit on each individual sale, it does not make much money on the Mac Pro market as a whole, compared to more popular products like the iMac or MacBook Pro. Still, profit is profit, and overall the Mac market is growing so presumably the Mac Pro market is growing as well, just perhaps not as quickly.
As much as some people like to argue about Apple's consumer-orientation or its various previous business and engineering decisions, there is simply no reason for Apple to drop the Mac Pro as a line. They might change the name or the form factor, but Apple will continue selling a product we'll recognize as an heir to the Power Mac for a long time to come. As I said, profit is a profit, and there's only one reason why you turn down profit, and that's if you can make more profit doing something else. This is the key question we have to ask. Can Apple make more profit by dropping the Mac Pro line?
The answer, of course, is no. Mac Pro customers will not buy iMacs if they lose the Mac Pro, nor will they buy iPads or MacBooks. The Mac Pro caters to a niche consumer, but no other device Apple sells fills that niche. Apple will be dropping the albeit small profits made by the Mac Pro market in exchange for nothing. Businesses do not simply reject money.
People talk about the Xserves, but the Xserve was a small niche product that had two competitors also made by Apple. It competed with the Mac Pro Server, and to a lesser extent it competed with the Mac Mini Server. In essence, the Xserve was cannibalizing or being cannibalized by other products sold by Apple in the niche. Apple rightly dropped the line to reduce development costs within the market, and focused their efforts on the high end Mac Pro and the low end Mac Mini which were both able to compete in two separate markets instead of just the one the Xserve could. For the Mini, a cheap headless Mac for switchers. For the Mac Pro, workstations for pros.
People talk about the MacBook, which has much the same story as the Xserve. It was a product caught competing against multiple other Apple products for the same set of consumers. Apple ended the MacBook line to focus their efforts into the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and I suppose even the iPad.
People talk about the Cube, and you can probably already tell where I'm going with this. It was stuck between the iMac and the PowerMac G4. It was also rather expensive, which didn't help its case. The Cube was resurrected as the Mac Mini, eventually, but they are definitely not the same thing. Both are headless Macs, but what really matters is the price and power, and the Mac Mini found its niche in a way the Cube never could. The Cube has a better analogy with the xMac people ask for, the non-workstation tower we're likely to never see. At least, we won't see an xMac until Apple figures out a way to lure more customers away from the Windows world without cannibalizing sales of their iMac and Mac Minis (and even, Mac Pros).
The Mac Pro simply does not have the same problem the Xserve or other dropped lines have. It exists as the sole workstation in the Apple lineup. To kill it while it is profitable will simply mean a drop in profits for Apple, which is not something companies want to have happen. Furthermore, another company will sell workstations to those former customers, helping Apple's competitors, and those former customers will stop buying software from Apple, and their motivation to stay in the Apple Ecosystem of iPhones and iPads and an iMac at home for the kids and a PowerBook Air or Pro on the road.
Apple, especially recently with iCloud and stuff like Apple TV, wants to keep people in the Apple ecosystem. There may be a bigger halo effect from the iPod and iPhone than anything else, but you cannot deny that people who use Macs at work tend to be more than just one-time Apple customers. Everyone I know who has a Mac at work- any Mac, but Mac Pros especially- have multiple Apple products for use at home. What's more, they evangelize better and more consistently than the gadget freaks who may have an iPhone today but are ready to jump ship to the next greatest Android or Windows phone the next year. Most people are forced to use whatever they have at work, but they pick their other devices based on their own individual factors. Having a Mac Pro workstation in the office makes them a lot more likely to choose what they're used to for their computer at home, and whatever other devices work best in the ecosystem.
ROI, another term tossed around a lot, is good, but it's not the end-all, be-all of business. A company might sell oranges, and have the best ROI on those oranges as they can possibly have. They have magical orange groves that require no fertilization or irrigation, they just produces tons and tons of oranges for the minimal cost of picking and shipping them every year. But there's only so many oranges you can sell, only so much orange juice people are willing to drink and some people don't like oranges anyhow. A good company doesn't just sell oranges because it's the product with their highest ROI. They sell some pears too, because that's another market available to them they might be profitable in, even if the pears don't have as high an ROI and the market is smaller. It's also good insurance for when people's tastes change, or if there's a bad crop one year. A good company diversifies, cuts product lines that aren't profitable or are wasting money in opportunity costs, but keeps the profitable parts of their business alive, regardless of their individual shares of the overall profits.
Apple has always been, at least in recent memory, good at identifying where they need to focus their efforts, and good at what aspects of their business they need to change. The Mac Pro remains profitable in itself, is a vector for software and other hardware sales, and Apple makes no other product that can do what it does. Professionals have nothing at all to worry about until there are simply no more professionals for Apple to sell to, or Apple cannot sell a profitable professional machine. Talk of Apple evaluating the line shouldn't terrify anyone, a good company evaluates all of its product lines often. Somewhere at some point at some level, Apple discusses whether they should kill off or radically change the iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook Air, and all of their other products. This is a good thing, because when Apple discusses the future of a given line, that means they're trying to figure out how to make it better.
We'll see a refresh on the Mac Pro when the chips to put in a new one come out. Yes, it is Intel's fault, and hopefully in the future, Mac Pro suitable chips will be quicker to arrive. Apple could have stuck Thunderbolt! or USB 3.0 or whatever else in their old Mac Pros, but then people would be complaining about the CPUs remaining the same and really those peripherals don't exist yet in big enough numbers for anyone serious to care. Apple could not have put an i7 in there, though, and anyone who thinks otherwise does not understand what a workstation is. Yes, there are hobbyists and gamers who buy the Mac Pro as a regular desktop machine. Heck, I'm one of them. The Mac Pro needs dual-CPUs and ridiculous numbers of cores, though, and ECC RAM. The Mac Pro needs two optical drives and four HD bays, and tons of PCI slots. It needs a huge open grill on both ends so it runs quietly, and plenty of space inside so you can work with the internals easily for upgrades and hardware swaps. Open up a Mac Pro sometime if you have access to one, and really take a look. It's beautifully designed to be a pleasure to work with. Things slide in and out nicely, there's no cables to mess with unless you're working with really power-hungry GPUs, and everything is neatly packed in with plenty of room for air to breeze through and keep things cool and quiet. It's a machine built for professionals in a professional environment, don't think you can just slap a bunch of consumer/gamer parts into it and still call it a Mac Pro. It might meet some people's needs, but Apple would be abandoning a market that does need a workstation and those customers would have to go elsewhere.
All models on the UK Apple Store now showing at 1-3 weeks. At the time of this rumour it was only the 12 core model.
Certainly looks like something will be happening soon! Hurray!
Certainly looks like something will be happening soon! Hurray!
I can feel the Mac Pro coming... or am I already envisioning spring?
Anyway: we'll get a lot more power, and, so I hope, Apple will stay true to silent computing and won't put some vacuum cleaner soundtrack graphics cards into the Mac Pro.
Anyway: we'll get a lot more power, and, so I hope, Apple will stay true to silent computing and won't put some vacuum cleaner soundtrack graphics cards into the Mac Pro.
I imagine that few serious Mac users would buy a Mac Pro right now (or for that matter the last six months), and there must be more people like me who are ready to drop $10,000 on a machine but are now seriously investigating HP, Dell and Boxx. The mystery release dates may create a marketable sense of anticipation for other products, but here Apple is simply creating doubts in its most loyal customer base and jeopardizing its market share by remaining unclear.
Apple really needs to be dropping stronger hints about a refresh here.
Apple really needs to be dropping stronger hints about a refresh here.
As I stated "There is obviously still a need among 3D people (most that I know are on PCs though), movie editors and other power-hungry people."
In reply to another posters argument I was simply arguing that ALL creative people would NOT have to leave the Mac, in the unfortunate event that the MacPro was discontinued.
me too!
i will too. if your listening, Apple, there are 2 people who want it at least. please.
i will too. if your listening, Apple, there are 2 people who want it at least. please.