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Can it be operated without the enclosure...? That damn thing is so trypophobic...!

Hint to Apple - give option to change enclosure with smaller vent holes like the one with PM G5 or 1st gen MP, then charge a grand for it...!
I'm willing to bet money that they wind tunnel tested the wholes and CAD'd the $#!T out of that design to ensure that thing will not so much as whistle, whorl, whine, or shhooohooow, with noise. Not to mention to not weaken the strength of the enclosure.
 
The thing is, Apple is not a commodity PC maker. This is what got them in trouble in the early '90s in the first place. Their business model is hardware and software built as a unit featuring mac OS.

Should Apple make a mid-range tower? Maybe. The question is, what does it look like? And is there enough value for that market? There was actually a time when Apple did sell 10 different configs of the same model. Performa era anyone? And they were highly unprofitable. Jobs came, cleaned house, and simplified things to where they made sense.

It's very possible this high-end config will trickle down. The thing is, with hardware, the more use cases you have, the more the user demands things on the lower end of the market. It's always a race to the bottom. If you start at $2 or $3k, people would still be complaining about how terrible the config was, why they can't they offer a $1500 option, etc.

UP next at 10: people shouting to the rooftops why Apple doesn't license macOS.

Agreed.

We have 5 different iPads, though. FIVE, not counting the colors.

It seemingly shows Apple steering the Mac towards the WAY HIGH end, and us "real computer" but non-pro fans towards un-upgradeable hardware.

Yes, I want that $2-3K modular mid-tower.

No, Apple won't build it.

Yes, I hope I'm wrong.

No, I can't afford their ONLY upgradeable machine.

Yes, I CAN make do with a Mini+EGPU+ExternalSSD TB3 Combo

No, I'm not (truly) happy with that.
 
I was replying to someone who said "A few people seem unable to conceptualize the difference between a production studio and some schmuck editing video for their YouTube channel at Starbucks."

And then you came in and talked about 3D animation, which isn't editing video.

But, OK, you want to talk about Cinema 4D? Let's do that. Please tell me how a Radeon Vega GPU means anything to someone using Cinema 4D when Octane uses CUDA?
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If you don't know what CUDA or Octane is, you shouldn't be talking about Cinema 4D.

The $6K 2019 Mac Pro has a Radeon Pro 580X. You can't even run Octane on this $6K Mac. A $2K PC with an nVidia GPU and Octane would blow away that $6K Mac.

Look at the Octane benchmarks with PCs that have a dozen GPUs:
https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/results.php?v=4.00&sort_by=avg&filter=&singleGPU=0

You don't have a clue what you are talking about.


Maxon
“Tapping into the amazing performance of the new Mac Pro, we’re excited to develop Redshift for Metal, and we’re working with Apple to bring an optimized version to the Mac Pro for the first time by the end of the year. We’re also actively developing Metal support for Cinema 4D, which will provide our Mac users with accelerated workflows for the most complex content creation. The new Mac Pro graphics architecture is incredibly powerful and is the best system to run Cinema 4D.” — David McGavran, CEO, Maxon
 
Maxon
“Tapping into the amazing performance of the new Mac Pro, we’re excited to develop Redshift for Metal, and we’re working with Apple to bring an optimized version to the Mac Pro for the first time by the end of the year. We’re also actively developing Metal support for Cinema 4D, which will provide our Mac users with accelerated workflows for the most complex content creation. The new Mac Pro graphics architecture is incredibly powerful and is the best system to run Cinema 4D.” — David McGavran, CEO, Maxon

Statements like that are encouraging but should also be taken with a grain of salt.
 
So yeah... a parts list does not include custom-designed parts, overall design, engineering. labor, software, overhead, marketing, and every other cost normal people understand in product development, manufacturing, and sales. Usually you're better than this.

Yeah, you can build a Mercedes for half the price if you just buy the parts...


Comparing to build a Mercedes from parts to building a desktop/workstation computer is a false equivalence...

I don't think Linus is saying they didn't put any costs into this thing, but $6,000 for 256 GB and AMD 580 (even if it's a custom 580 model) is laughable. Building a desktop/workstation in 2019 isn't exactly rocket science.

  • 3/3/3 year (material/labor/onsite) Warranty


This is what I'm curious about, 3 years onsite thrown in for the HP is pretty damn good, for something Apple will charge an arm and a leg for.
 
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Statements like that are encouraging but should also be taken with a grain of salt.
I mean, if they fire the CEO or something. But, it's literally from the horses mouth.

Apple has pushed Metal for sometime now. I realize most of these companies live in CUDA land. But, Apple hasn't broken back with Nvidia for sometime now. They either want too much for the equivalent cards, or they don't want to put the pedal to the Metal (support it over CUDA on the Mac).
 
He's way lowballing some of his assumptions.

View attachment 841261

For example, he lists the Radeon RX580 as $200, but the Mac Pro has a Radeon RX580Pro with special Mac-specific firmware, which I cannot find for less than $350. Also, the version Apple is using is passively cooled, which nobody sells out of the box. But you can buy a passively cooled backplate for it, which runs an additional $150.

So the video card alone he assumes costs $200, but it would actually cost $500.

As another example, there is no way a generic EATX chassis would come close to comparing to the Mac Pro chassis, and its cooling system. Apple says the new Mac Pro runs at less than 10db, how much is that worth to a buyer? I don't know of any comparable cases, but other top of the line well-engineered cases easily cost $500+. Same with the PSU - I highly doubt a $300 PSU will be as quiet as Apple's. Passively-cooled high-watt PSUs are very expensive.


It will be interesting to see the performance difference between the two (580 and 580 pro) when the reviews pop up. I would imagine out of the gate it will slide somewhere in between a 580 and Vega 56. Good, but not great.

I see this as a cost move to keep a good profit margin even at the base config. The 580 is an old card at nearly 3 years since it came out. IMO, the base pro should have least came with a base Vega or Navi.
 
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Funny, the same Top Secret "stealth enclosure" ruse was played when the 6,1 was under development.

Even funnier, Apple now says the 7,1 design was "envisioned" years ago.

I bet the 7,1 design actually was the Top Secret "stealth enclosure" for the 6,1.

You know I'm right :)
 
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China will have that stand replicated five minutes after they get their hands on it, and you will be able to buy a near identical version on eBay for under $100... :D
Probably and I have no idea what makes Apple’s stand special but quality monitor mounts aren’t cheap either. As much as1$k seems a bit steep I’d be leery of trusting a 5$k monitor to a 100 stand. As with racing, if you have 5$ head buy a 5$ helmet.
 
Whatevs. You still haven’t built a new Mac Pro from scratch for half of what Apple’s charging.
I can build a pc from scratch for a third of the base model price and it would outperform the base model in majority of pro use cases. ECC, Xeon is just burning money, almost no one needs it it’s a highly specialized use case.
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It will be interesting to see the performance difference between the two (580 and 580 pro) when the reviews pop up. I would imagine out of the gate it will slide somewhere in between a 580 and Vega 56. Good, but not great.

It’s the Radeon pro 580x that is in base config. The card is a slightly downclocked version of the rx580
so it is slower than the 180€ rx580
 
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It’s the Radeon pro 580x that is in base config. The card is a slightly downclocked version of the rx580
so it is slower than the 180€ rx580

What is the point of down clocking the 3 year old 580 chip? Save costs? Instruction set?
 
If I go directly leather jacket manufacturer it will cost $50 and I can get that online at popular website for $150 or I can go to Nordstrom and pay $500. Pixar and similar companies are not going to purchase and deploy specialty build manufactures like Chillblast (no disrespect ) that have only a few hundred employees because they would be overwhelmed quickly and could likely be scooped up by some other company. You need to know that the company is going to be around for another 10 years, be able to truly support 500 or more units from a single company and deal with 100s of companies doing the same thing. Any one company can build a rocket box but only large companies like Dell, Apple, HP and really support large corporations adequately.
 
I mean, if they fire the CEO or something. But, it's literally from the horses mouth.

What I was alluding to is that it's still more or less marketing messaging from the company. There's obviously some sort of business partnership between the two companies. To what scale we don't know, but he's going to try and sell it in the best light possible.

That's not to say what he's claiming is untrue, but we won't really know much at all until we see how the hardware and software work together in the real world.
 
I like the fact Apple finally came out with an upgradeable modular desktop. However. why do they presume that only "professionals" want this type of format? I'm a home user that just wants a reasonably priced higher end computer that's modular enough for me to perform upgrades on my system just like I can do with Windows based systems. I don't need 2000 cores, terabytes of RAM, or a billion dollar monitor. I held back on buying an iMac because I didn't like the all-in-one design. I didn't want to have my entire system in the shop for a minor issue. Plus I just like a more traditional system setup. $6k for a base system is absolutely ridiculous. I'd have been more than happy getting a FULL system for $4-$5k (including monitor, etc...), but this is just plain stupid. How many of these are they going to sell? I've alway loved Apple, but god they're always at one end of the spectrum or the other. They never seem to get the middle, where most consumers live, right. :(
 
Any one company can build a rocket box but only large companies like Dell, Apple, HP and really support large corporations adequately.

Boxx would beg to differ. Granted, it's only one example, but there are other boutique hardware vendors that work with large companies. It's not like studios like Pixar just go out and choose one vendor to buy all of their stuff from. It's a mix depending on what they need for particular use.
 
there was a lot of good stuff in everything else you wrote, but this still sticks out to me whenever I see the sentiment. I certainly don't doubt that Apple has done their research, but why does it seem like so many are just giving them the benefit of the doubt after the Mac Pro 6.1? I imagine they did their due diligence there as well.

I think they've been pretty clear on where they failed there - and it wasn't a lack of due dilligence, they just tried to be forward thinking and guessed wrong. They thought the future of GPU computing was going to be lower powered parallel GPUs around higher powered CPUs and so a high i/o thermally maximized "core" could then be combined with thunderbolt I/O to replace most PCI needs.

(Also that way they could make a "tweener" that appealed to both high-end consumer and pro markets).

This wasn't a *crazy* projection at the time, it's just the boom in cryptocurrency mining dumping a *tonne* of windfall revenue into GPU development, and suddenly GPU processing performance is so much more important than just powering displays. That's why they talk about designing into a thermal corner - there was no way to manage the heat from modern GPUs. And the "twener" approach completely lost a segment of Pro customer (me) because TB is never going to be a fully acceptable PCI replacement - there's too much weirdly specific interface equipment, and it's not realistic to run a machine with two dozen interface dongles (and therefore twice that in potential points of failue) in a production environment.

I see the new Mac Pro as a response to 6,1 - in that the outcry then was "this is not what we need for the highest end workstations" - now did the needle swing too *far* in the other direction? Maybe, but that's where I am, so if they'd have gone more "generalist" I'd be into to premiumly priced MTO options anyway.

Apple takes lots of gambles trying to be forward thinking in their products - sometimes they pay off (Bondi iMacs, removing optical drives, iPods. iPhones...), sometimes they don't (Pippin, Ping).
 
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Does the new Mac Pro have any hard drive bays? o_O I certainly hope they don't expect people to use external drives, the drives used in external enclosures are typically the lowest-end models.
 
I'd have been more than happy getting a FULL system for $4-$5k (including monitor, etc...), but this is just plain stupid. How many of these are they going to sell?

They aren't going to sell too many at $6000 with the base config. If it was $5000 and came with 1TB SSD and a Vega 64, that would be a whole different story. They're going to sell a much higher end config to big studios.

For you, a refurbished iMac Pro for $4250 would be a better choice. But only if you need the T2 chip for H265 decoding, or the ECC RAM. Otherwise, most likely a $3500 iMac would be good enough. I know, that's not modular. It's a mistake that they aren't selling a $4000-5000 modular system for working pros.

Who's a pro? I would argue a working wedding videographer is a pro who deserves a modular system. It's not just Game of Thrones colorists who deserve a modular tower. Just watch Max Yuryev's video. He has a booming video business, and he feels like a modular Mac is out of reach for him. And he has a very successful small business. Who's the Mac Pro for then? HBO, Universal, Disney only?

I'm not complaining, as a software engineer, it's not the machine I need. I'm happy with a top-end iMac. But I think small businesses are priced out, and they may be forced to switch to PC, if they need a robust modular system.
 
I like the design, but it has many of the same limitations of the old Mac Pro tower sitting on my desk. Proprietary video cards, for one, though it's not clear if one could set aside the MPX geegaws and drop in a 3rd party video card - maybe flashed with Mac firmware. It supplies ample power to current GPUs but in five years it will be a limitation about which Apple will do nothing.

The 2019 Mac Pro's 1,400 Watt PSU is already pretty much maxing out the normal U.S. 115 Volt power outlet.
Anything over 1,600 Watts would therefore require re-doing how the electrical system of the end user is configured. Some efficiencies would be realized by switching to a 230 Volt wall outlet.
 
Does the new Mac Pro have any hard drive bays? o_O I certainly hope they don't expect people to use external drives, the drives used in external enclosures are typically the lowest-end models.

No it does not. From the on-line specs it looks like it has 2x M2 SSD mounting points and thats it (although it looks like there are at least a couple "extra" SATA connectors on the Mobo right above the half-length PCI used for base I/O - so it may be possible to rig a bay somewhere). You could obviously also convert PCIe slots into extra SSD bays as well.

As I (and others) have pointed out in this thread - you don't typically keep much onboard storage on a workstation like this in a production environment - in our case most of our workstations only have 256GB SSDs for OS and software - everything else is on local RAIDS or NAS (which is why all the TB3 / dual 10GbE is important).
 
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