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Mac Pro Launch Nears as Apple Business Staff Begin Offering Price Quotes
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The 3GB of VRAM/lack of HSA is going to be the biggest "bottlenecks" on these machines for video editing.
Businesses that NEED theses will only have 3. Power, gigabit network, and fiber to the SAN.
Probably monitors.
And at least one expansion box for your fiber.
Another for other processing cards.
Perhaps another for 10Gb if you're serious about networking.
Ummmm.... you could always spec a Mac Pro up to $10,000... and some people did.
The Mac Pro has always been a workstation... it's not a home computer.
Go check other vendors and see how high you can price their workstations...
I am pretty sure that people that needs GPU performance know that they need GPU performance and therefore will order the nMP with D700 that have 6GB of VRAM each. So nope, i don't get your point of the hypethetical bottleneck.
Mac Pros were always expensive and always sold. The reason the Hackintosh will be more appealing to people is that the new Mac Pro has no PCI slots. That's just terrible.
The top 1% in the US made nearly $400,000 in 2012 and the top 10% made $114,000, that makes the iMac a computer for the top %10
Yeah, I've been wondering about that. This computer might end up being cheaper than the alternatives like the 2008 model was.
Depends entirely on what the business requirements are in one's locality. An LLC has a state and federal income passthrough to the individual but that has nothing to do with local business laws. Many localities have a business property tax on the value of equipment owned or leased at the end of the year. The tax is on any business regardless of how it's organized (sole proprietor, LLC, S corp, C corp, etc.
Let me see your logic here... "I consider myself a prosumer therefore all prosumers are like me." Uh. no. What you are is a wealthy individual or at least one with a lot of disposable cash and a fetish for expensive toys. Congrats. But the average individual hobbyist cannot justify a $3000 computer, especially one that still needs additional thunderbolt storage since there is no internal bay or connector. Add in another $700 right there if its going to be done right.
The previous MPs had a true "prosumer" model in the entry level model, just barely. But there is no middle ground in the new MP line up. The choices are expensive and even more expensive, and CTO's to make it hideously expensive. I would posit that Apple no longer makes a prosumer Mac, but guessing Apple believes the 27" i7 iMac fills that void being faster than previous entry MP.
But I think a prosumer machine needs to be headless, not just marginally affordable. Maybe they'll beef up the Mac Mini same way BMW did with the 3 series when they pushed out the 1, but I somehow and not feeling good that is likely.
I agree. THAT high and no internal PCI expansion? WTF?!? It should come with an external bus for that kind of money. You can build a MONSTER Hackintosh for $2k that would be far more useful to some of us (i.e. combined Mac/Windows home machine good for everything from video to gaming to surfing). I know it's been rehashed to death, but Apple needs a freaking XMac. You shouldn't have to build a Hackintosh to get the kind of Mac that a true power user would want. And it wouldn't cost Apple much to do it. There are a bevvy of nice cases already out there that Apple could pick from. All they need is a good motherboard to put in it and let people build their own the rest of the way to order with reasonable prices (i.e. you don't need an overpriced Xeon CPU that doesn't get updated often enough for a home machine). You guys can keep this overpriced trash can POS.
I didn't say that, but I found the approximate pricing. According to this article, it's the same specs as an existing AMD GPU that costs 3158 USD (and there are two of them): http://architosh.com/2013/10/the-mac-pro-so-whats-a-d300-d500-and-d700-anyway-we-have-answers/
"So here’s the easiest part. The D700 has exact spec matches to the FirePro W9000, AMD’s highest performing workstation class GPU. [...] Amazon has the FirePro W9000 at 3,158.USD. Apple is providing two D700′s in all Mac Pro configurations as options. That’s over six grand in GPU costs alone."
I'm guessing the other user got the 6800 USD from the NewEgg pricing of 3400 USD each. But I would guess the newer one would be a little cheaper.
Looking for the D700, not W9000.
Anyway 80% of the price of a workstation GPU is due to the driver. The other 20% is the (usually) higher memory amounts.
This is why Quadros have never made much sense on the Mac, because there was no substantial performance difference between them and the gaming equivalents. And the OSX gaming cards were generally actually qualified and supported by vendors such as Autodesk.
If and only if the FirePro drivers for OSX are substantially better in pro apps than the gaming cards can one realistically consider it an equivalent value. If that actually happens then sure the Mac Pro would be a good value.
http://www.digitalstormonline.com/aventum-ii.asp
And look at the cooling solutions. Think about it, Apple has just innovated right past that "Brazil" (the movie) organic mass of liquid and air cooling.
If you want something REALLY crazy.
http://www.gamepc.com/about/images.asp
Super high performance work stations simply don't fit in a tiny can.
Correct, I priced it at Newegg because they are now $4,330 a piece at Amazon via "PC parts depot".
Equivelant parts from the Newegg crapbin still hit 80% of the sticker price. As an IT person, if you're self-building $3000 server hardware, you're an idiot wasting your companies money... That's the difference between $30k IT workers and $75k IT workers in a nutshell.
As I posted above, if you want to see some REALLY high performance stuff, here you go. The vast majority of these are much higher performance than a nMP
Part of the skill of being skilled in the PC business logistics is to know what your component suppliers can and cannot do. The Mac Pro is in December primarily because the parts/components/software it requires aren't particularly available until December.
This has little, to nothing to do with iOS devices and their release chain and far more in the choices Apple made in the Mac Pro design and when to start that process.
There are lots of indicators that Apple was contemplating walking away from this product line. The huge gap in major updates. Lack of anything that required even marginally above the minimal effort in the 2012 release. Finally having to suffer from withdrawing the product from EU pragmatically because it parts of it were too old. That is not something Apple was heavily invested in R&D in late 2010- early 2012.
The Intel Xeon E5 v2 parts are shipping for servers and not quite as volume complete for workstations. ( other workstation vendors have subset of configurations available ) . This is 2nd year in a row where Intel as slowly rolled out the product line. If Apple was betting the farm on 12 core E5 v2 and high volumes of E5 1600 v2 parts then delays sliding into Nov-Dec were highly likely even back if working with 2012 roadmaps. It only got worse as 2013 progressed.
Very similarly Intel never planned for Thunderbolt v2 to be in volume production in 2013. Initial set of shipments but volume was targeted for 2014 years ago.
Once coupled to those Q4 2013 components, the Mac Pro was pragmatically also coupled to OS X 10.9. Again something like 10.9.1 or 10.9.2 is more likely what Mac Pro in order not to have the glitches that were highly predictable that 10.9.0 would have.
If Apple had started in mid-late 2011 and attached the Mac Pro to Xeon E5 v1, TB v1 , and OS X 10.8.3-4 then they could have launched in Feb-March 2013 and avoid the whole debacle of EU market withdrawal and months of dribbled out sneak peaks.
I'm sure Apple is quite aware that not all businesses only have deadlines in December. As for plans Apple has talked about there were changes coming. Anyone's who had business critical needs in most locations had plenty of heads-up to get something into place from June-October if had to be production ready and deployed in December.
If stranded without a new Mac Pro in the EU , December isn't a 'new' constraint. The previous 9-10 months didn't have Mac Pro either. If that wasn't enough time to build a plan ....
Every launch window has a group of users whose timing is off from the launch.
Not even likely. It is not surprising because they are wrong tool for wrong jobs. Computers spans a broad spectrum of tools and they are all interchangeable. Apple doesn't build large data center computers, so they largely don't use them or OS X to run their data centers.
Narcissistic cruft. That drama queen cruft might be the general staple of the the film/design industries but it has really little to do with business outside. "The Mac is only cool because us privileged cool people use them."
Macs are 'cool' largely because they are useful tools to get things done. The 'coolness' doesn't derive from the social club of the users.
Macs, not necessarily Mac Pro. Nor is the app generation business going to grind to halt of folks keep using their current Mac Pro for another month or two to generate apps.
Yep, SO terrible that my current MacPro has 3 slots, but I only use one.. oh.. wait...
If someone needs many slots, that's one thing, but there are a lot of potential users that don't need slots, they just need power.
The Most basic 4 core with the d300 version of this will scream at any Photoshop task.
It may well be a good gaming rig - we'll find out in a few weeks. Certainly a Portable one!