New Mac Pro Confirmed to Have Removable CPU

[StyleWriter 2]

I am a mac lover, for years now. that out of the way, I think using Xeon instead of i7 is a huge waste. Since they stopped using dual socket mb's there is really no benefit to using Xeon. While I suppose that a small percentage of MacPro users might benefit from more L3 cache or ECC memory, the vast majority of users won't. Apple could just as easily provide the exact same machine with an i7 6700k @ 4Ghz as an option and 85% of Pro users would be well served.

I suspect it's Apples way if differentiating the MacPro from the iMac and justifying the premium, but it's really marketing.

On the one hand it frustrates me that I had to build a hackintosh with an i7 to get the flexibility of pro machine for less than $1k. On the other hand, my employer (and my quarterly bonus) is grateful for the higher Average Selling Price associated with the Xeon.

 

[Rockman413]

Can we place the latest Xeon CPU into the Mac Pro easily?

 

[Michael Scrip]

Can we place the latest Xeon CPU into the Mac Pro easily?

It depends.

If it's the same socket... it's a possibility. But it's not something I'd want to attempt at home.

If Apple was planning ahead... they would have developed some sort of upgrade path for the nMP. You could bring your nMP to an Apple Store and have the CPU swapped out.

Same for the GPUs since they are on removable cards. You'd have to pay for this... but at least you could get it.

But none of that happened. No new CPUs. No new GPUs. In three years. Apple finally admitted that they were trapped by the design of the nMP.

And that's the saddest part of this whole thing.

They spend great effort creating the nMP... but they didn't think about the future?

Hopefully the next Mac Pro will not be a dead-end. They keep talking about "modularity" so maybe they learned their lesson.

 

[DeepIn2U]

It depends.

If it's the same socket... it's a possibility. But it's not something I'd want to attempt at home.

If Apple was planning ahead... they would have developed some sort of upgrade path for the nMP. You could bring your nMP to an Apple Store and have the CPU swapped out.

Same for the GPUs since they are on removable cards. You'd have to pay for this... but at least you could get it.

But none of that happened. No new CPUs. No new GPUs. In three years. Apple finally admitted that they were trapped by the design of the nMP.

And that's the saddest part of this whole thing.

They spend great effort creating the nMP... but they didn't think about the future?

Hopefully the next Mac Pro will not be a dead-end. They keep talking about "modularity" so maybe they learned their lesson.

Makes you wonder WHY they tried to make the nMP into a notebook in terms of limited upgradability with components.

Still I love the design, the balls it took and it's still quite powerful. It'll serve my basic needs quite well for at least 4yrs. Heck people are still using high-end G5's cause of the amount of RAM those could use 12GB and that was a long time ago in tech years.

I just hope the size doesn't increase exponentially on the replacement.