New Mac Pro thread (merged)

[spunkgarLEWII]

The 2009/2010 Mac Pros are still the best bang for the buck. I expect their values to increase given how well they hold up. If you are looking for excellent internal expansion, why not consider the 2009 Quad-core. You can always flash the 4,1 to 5,1 firmware to make it into a 5,1, should your needs change.

The best processor for the money is the w3680 or 3.33 6-core.

You don't need the MacCan. You would be spending lots of money for external drives which can be bulky and take up a lot of space.

I'm not a pro but I have a massive itunes library and video/photos to store. I was interested in the new mac pro because of the potential swapable hard drives etc. I hate having externals all over the place.

the cost of externals will make this mega expensive plus you will need extra externals for back ups as well.

plus the amount of plug sockets/surge protectors you would need for. I'm in a small home office and I already have 10 things plugged in around my desk.. so would hate to see what a busy production suite would like..

Now that its all just external I might as well just stick with my iMac.

 

[torana355]

I work in Prepress and just showed my boss the new Mac pro, we are going to order some of the current models while we can, my bosses words were "Apple can't be serious, that is bloody stupid" lol

 

[seveej]

In contrast to many posters here - shooting from the hip - I've been holding back for half a day, thinking about this.

First off, it is too early to call on many of the issues brought up here, such as third gfx cards (nVidia seems to be on many people's minds), external expandability options (I expect some third parties will soon start launching Mac Pro -oriented expansion chassis's).

In short, I'm not worried about people being able to live with the ramifications of the "externalize everything optional" -approach.

What will actually be the deal-breakers (if any) are questions like:
- internal memory limit (there does not seem to be space for too many chips)
- heat&noise
- price, price, price...

The problem here is, that considering the price of the CPU's involved, I really cannot see the price of the "best" rig being anywhere significantly below the previous gen 12 core (maybe the new enclosure is cheaper than that huge chunk of Al), but I predict, that Apple will need to be able to sell lots of them to be able to keep the margins up, and thus there really needs to be a decently priced entry-level option (I'm thinking like 1500$, 2000$ tops for a single CPU version). If the Pro sells even half as well as I'm sure Apple's planning, OEM manufacturers will be interested to take part.

What I find heartening is that Apple's dead serious about the (new) Mac Pro (i guess we'll start referring to it as the "nMP"), they give a sneak preview to build the hype, they've designated it to be built in the USA - in short, they are not going to give up on the Pro segment unless the sales "do the cube".

In summary, many will surely be disappointed (especially those who expected to get these CPU's in the current chassis type), while many will just be relieved, that Apple's not killing the pro lineup.

RGDS,

 

[SimonMW]

I hate having externals all over the place.

the cost of externals will make this mega expensive plus you will need extra externals for back ups as well.

Many pro's use external storage all the time. There are some really nice looking multiple enclosures out there. If you think about it, having four internal drives is actually extremely limited. I still have one of the 2006 MacPro's and it is still working well (though desperately needs upgrading). But I have to buy external drives to do the video editing I need to do and to make backups etc. It doesn't really make much sense just to have some limited internal storage space if you are going to have to use external drives anyway.

Looking at the size of the new MacPro, even if I have external drives it will still take up way less space than my current tower. No more taking the case off to delicately plug in additional PCIe cards etc. I like the idea of Thunderbolt just daisy chaining what I need.

Most people wanted a MacPro for the expandability. The way things are now many devices such as video output to broadcast monitors etc are increasingly done with Thunderbolt now anyway, and I think Apple have recognised this and designed the new MacPro accordingly. Having a clunky great tower was never really the best way of doing things and you were always limited by ports/slots internal space. With a multitude of Thunderbolt 2 ports many of those limitations are taken away.

Funniest thing I find in all of this is that the guys who were all doom and gloom about Apple killing off the Mac Pro are strangely silent at the moment!

 

[Zaap]

Heh, I love my wife's candid/first impression comments after I showed her the new MP.

"The old one had handles so you can lift it, what do you do with this one? Roll it?"

 

[theSeb]

Nice with a handle. But what is it supposed to be used to? A old mac pro had two, and it was used to carry the system. When building a system with the new mac pro you will need adapters and converters for everything. And a lot of cables. Very different design than what apple is used to do. On my old dell laptop my table is full of cables, with mac book it is a few. This new mac pro will be like the dell laptop. It has 6 TB ports, and they will be needed.

It's used for spinning it around apparently.

 

[iMatt.]

 

[ValSalva]

It's really sinking in today.

Apple has made a great machine within self-imposed usage limitations that were only important to them.

It didn't have to be that small.

This is going to be a very expensive single socket computing appliance with limited RAM and less reliable external storage options.

It has a lot of hot components in a small space with new unproven cooling solutions. Early adopters will be punished.

I'm worried this won't sell and the Mac Pro line will disappear.

 

[ekwipt]

This thing will sell

 

[KaraH]

Thank you Tim for the bought of insomnia last night. It will do wonders for my morning meetings.

I did figure it out though. They are using the iPod naming conventions. The abbreviation MP now stands for Mac Pico.

I am not joking about wondering if I can do my work on a mini (augmented by an iMac for things I can offload). What drew me to the MP was expandability and now the mini is actually more expandable than the pro. Talk about a sad realisation.

Going back to our earlier discussion about stocks, with 200 shares the argument can be made that I should pay more attention to when it historically dips. After all, I went from 6 figures to 5 (well, hopefully will be back to 6 soon). I take the long view though and am letting it ride until I get nearer to retirement or it dips below my comfort level (which I have quite a bit of margin for considering what price I bought at). All that means I tend to take the long view on my investments rather than be a day trader ... less ulcers that way.

 

[--AG--]

Compare e.g. with a Dell precision that, by the time the MacPro is released, could be fitted with

Dual 12 core cpu
512 Mb ram
Dual Nvidia Quadro GPU/Tesla
Inte Xeon Phi ?

So, how much state of the art is the Pro? Previously it used to be the fastest tower money can buy, not anymore.

 

[subsonix]

This is going to be a very expensive single socket computing appliance with limited RAM and less reliable external storage options.

Think they mentioned dual GPUs (6GB vram), 12 cores and 128GB ram.

It has a lot of hot components in a small space with new unproven cooling solutions. Early adopters will be punished.

You seriously think they have not tested the cooling?

 

[TheTuesdaydude]

A Hackintosh for me please

This is just not what a Workstation should look like, it´s just wrong...
I kind of like the design, but more for a "multimedia put it next to my TV thingi".

My Workstation is not standing on my desk, so i don´t care what it looks like. What i care about is Options, i want to put in a GPU, HDD´s, SSD´s PCI-E cards of MY choice.

For the same money that i think this cute thing might cost... well, my next MacPro will be a Hackintosh.

 

[Wardenski]

That's bad news for video cards, but what else uses anything besides PCIe 4x? Any capture card, Audio card, Fibre Channel card, or RAID array will not even saturate Thunerbolt 2.0. Stop FUDing. And don't reply to me with 2 devices that can.

But you'll still have to buy an external enclosure so TB bandwidth is only half the argument.

 

[KaraH]

Hmm ... maybe when they refresh the retina macbook pro. The 15" already has a nvidia card.

Now if the app I want to use would support retina.

- desperately seeking a workable mac that does not start with an 'i'

 

[mtasquared]

deep thoughts

I noticed the design of this thing mimics the new Apple headquarters they're building, which is round. Coincidence?

As I see it right now, I'm keeping my current 2010 mac pro for work and plan on maybe putting the 2013 model on my desk in the future as kind of an ornament. Don't know what the heck I'll do with it. Its kind of menacing looking with the cover off.

 

[sash]

The main point for me is they keep investing in MacPro / workstation, which is a great news in itself. New and unusual design -- daring innovation has always been the core of Apple's culture. One thing for sure: it will be copied by dells & co quite soon.

 

[ssls6]

I think it is great and may alienate a few but will bring in 10 fold to the pro line-up. I can see having a mac pro tower and a round drive sled tower next to each other on the desk. It would clean up a bunch of cables and crap in my office. Dual monitors running independently (via OSX Mavericks)....life will be sweet. Only the box hobbyist will be left out.

We can name the CPU tower Sauron and the drive tower Saruman.

I expect round drive towers with optical on top to be coming. They will be expensive but a good match to the new mac pro. Massive local storage on workstations is a thing of the past.

I had predicted this but in cube form. Happy to be surprised by Apple.

 

[handsome pete]

I think it is great and may alienate a few but will bring in 10 fold to the pro line-up.

How do you figure? It's unlikely the price is going down.

 

[dpny]

I work in Prepress and just showed my boss the new Mac pro, we are going to order some of the current models while we can, my bosses words were "Apple can't be serious, that is bloody stupid" lol

For print production and pre-press there's no reason for using a Mac Pro anymore, retouchers aside. None of the non-video Adobe CS apps are significantly multithreaded, and most of them are memory-bound, not CPU-bound. One of the new iMacs will be faster day-to-day than a Mac Pro.

 

[jeabraham]

Thunderbolt does not have anywhere close to the bandwidth of a full pci express card.

Pretty sure TB has more bandwidth than PCIe.

 

[ssls6]

How do you figure? It's unlikely the price is going down.

Just my prediction based on

1) the $3k price point on high end iMacs is proven
2) the mac mini performance is capped below the iMac
3) there is a market for people who use their own monitors
4) the new size makes it sexy and it doesn't look intimidating
5) brand and style sell

Only time will tell if this expands their market or not. I say it will by by 10X.

 

[whtrbt7]

I'll add my 2 cents to the pot on the new machine being what Apple calls a "Pro" user (even though I think my needs are pretty basic).

The design of the 2013 Mac Pro is pretty decent. I used to have a heatsink based silent computer chassis and it was inefficient due to it's lack of fans, flat motherboard, and non-effective heat pipe design. Originally I was thinking of centralizing a square heatsink core on 4 main boards which would have thermal grease linked to the boards on the front side with all I/O on the back side of the boards. The 2013 Mac Pro design seems to have used this type of design which really does increase the cooling power of the unit as well as provide decent access to I/O. I also like the size and the form factor of the unit which can be organized into square shelving with crosswind type cooling.

The main thing I think a lot of Pro users were worried about was storage. After using internal storage for years, it reached a point to where I needed to use external FC and now TB storage for centralized storage and also storage management. It just makes sense. A smaller and faster PCIe internal storage for basic paging and processing functions just makes sense in today's computing environment. The new built-in storage seems to be adequate for this function instead of trying to manage a separate RAID 0 on the main processing machine for speed. For those of you using internal storage, it will make sense to externalize storage so with every new processing unit you upgrade to is completely independent from your storage unit.

The graphics cards built into the thermal core also makes a lot of sense even though there are probably a lot of users that would like to use their own modular PCIe graphics cards. A baseline high-end double graphics card solution makes a lot of sense since you can serve to multiple monitors and still get work done without using a separate graphics processing module which would complicate the I/O. By using TB2 as the main daisy-chain of external storage, monitors and accessories, it's easier I/O since you only need 1 type of plug. It's much like using USB for lots of different things.

On the processor front, using a single CPU helps the design remain scalable. It's good enough for current technology and when you need more power, you simply buy a new processing unit (or several in my case). What would be more beneficial is to daisy chain Mac Pros so they can be process in parallel.

Memory seems to be adequate on the unit with probably 32GB of max RAM which would be half of the 64GB of RAM but who really uses that much RAM? If I need to use more RAM, I would probably have another processing unit anyways in order to make up time for processing.

Overall, I think for people that need multiple professional workstations, the 2013 Mac Pro will be a great buy. It's all-in-one type of architecture will pretty much allow for good IT practices and also easy IT management. For enthusiasts and gamers, it's still a really awesome machine but it's not really built for that purpose.

 

[GermanyChris]

Pretty sure TB has more bandwidth than PCIe.

How do you figure?

 

[Umbongo]

Just my prediction based on

1) the $3k price point on high end iMacs is proven
2) the mac mini performance is capped below the iMac
3) there is a market for people who use their own monitors
4) the new size makes it sexy and it doesn't look intimidating
5) brand and style sell

Only time will tell if this expands their market or not. I say it will by by 10X.

So you think this system which will be poor value for consumers and offers limitations to professionals compared to previous systems, will sell more than Apple sold Mac Pros total to this point?