“hermetically sealed super-thin slither of alloy primarily designed to look good on your plate-glass desk”
Oh dear, that's the second time you've re-quoted that - it obviously upsets you. I don't think I'm the one that's been "triggered" here.
You’ve read the transcript
Yes. Have you? It gives away almost nothing about the design of the new Mac Pro except that it won't have a built-in display and it won't follow the nMP dead-end of requiring the heat to be spread evenly between a CPU and two GPUs, and it won't be coming this year.
I’m telling you you’re wrong.
Then I repeat my invitation for you to point out the bits of the transcript where they commit to the new Mac Pro having "slots and drive bays".
Here's the bit where someone asks the relevant question and Apple pretty much fail to answer it:
From:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/t...-john-ternus-on-the-state-of-apples-pro-macs/
Ina Fried (Axios): One other takeaway is that pros value a couple of things – well, they value a lot of things. The two times I can remember Apple designing a really cool product that didn’t necessarily meet a broad audience are this and the cube [PowerMac G4 Cube]. And the lesson was that they value that expandability, more options. Is it a lesson now that you guys are beginning to think about the next thing, that it needs to be more traditionally shaped and traditionally open?
Craig Federighi: I wouldn’t say we’re trying to paint any picture right now about a shape. It could be an octagon this time [laughter]. But certainly flexibility and our flexibility to keep it current and upgraded. We need an architecture that can deliver across a wide dynamic range of performance and that we can efficiently keep it up to date with the best technologies over years.
I think it’s a strength of the company that we see new technologies creating new opportunities. We tend to try to jump on those pretty aggressively and so you look at that architecture of that Mac Pro, it had great Thunderbolt external I/O and we said: ‘This is a great opportunity to change what had been a conventional build a big card rack and slot a bunch of cards in there.’ We said: ‘a lot of this storage can be achieved with very high performance with Thunderbolt. So we built a design in part around that assumption, as well. Some of the pro community has been sort of moving that direction, but we had certainly in mind the need for expandability. If you wanted a great RAID solution in there, it probably made a lot more sense to put it outside the box than actually be constrained within the physical enclosure that contained the CPU. So, I think we went into it with some interesting ideas, and not all of them paid off.
So, first there's that very important phrase: "
and that we can efficiently keep it up to date with the best technologies over years." - "we" being Apple - not the end user. They're talking about their ability to produce updated modules and BTO options, not user expandability. (The following paragraph contains the only occurrence of the word "slot" in the transcript, BTW - PCIe is never mentioned). The problem they're acknowledging with the cylinder is that
they haven't been able to offer an updated model for three years.
Then, does the second paragraph say that external-only expansion of the nMP was an "interesting idea" that paid off, or didn't pay off? Clue: it doesn't say either, they're being completely ambiguous about it. Probably because
they hadn't decided back in April.
Lets try again: I'm not saying that the new Mac Pro is definitely going to be a sealed unit. I'm just pointing out that
nothing in the April announcement promised otherwise... and since in the last 5 years Apple have shown a strong preference towards "no user serviceable parts inside" (Mac Mini, rMBP, 2016 MBP, iMac Pro) and increased miniaturisation (even in "pro" products) that is hardly an extraordinary possibility.
You're the one claiming
as fact that the new Mac Pro will have slots and drive bays - a massive U-turn for Apple.
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I'm guessing that the 1440p iMacs used a simple DisplayPort interface to the display panel, and it was cheap and simple to offer switching between the on-board graphics and a DisplayPort signal arriving via Thunderbolt.
The 5k iMac reportedly uses some sort of custom high-speed display interface, since DisplayPort 1.2 can't drive a 5k display over a single 4-lane stream. Its not hard to imagine how that would complicate driving the display from a DP1.2 stream from the Thunderbolt input. I haven't seen any technical details of this internal interface - including whether the screen is driven by a single stream (possible with DP1.4 data rates or a proprietary interface) or treated as two panels in multi-stream mode. If its single stream, then even TB3 won't be able to drive it - TB's DisplayPort tops out at DP1.2a speeds and only supports 5k in multi-stream mode.
Not sure if/why this applies to the 4k 21.5" iMac (maybe it uses a custom display interface, too?)
Just speculating. Corrections from people with actual data welcome...
As much as I like iOS stuff, Macrumors swamps this place with too much of it.
