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New Mac Pro Uses 68% Less Energy, 74% Less Aluminum Than Previous Generation

That's all fine and dandy.

However, all their other hardware is on the exact opposite track. Everything is glued together now, things can't be properly repaired or easily seperated for recycling anymore. That has much more of a negative effect and a few tons of aluminum that were saved in the production of a niche product can't outweigh that.
 
Rogifan said:
Yeah but the way you worded it makes sense. In the iPad Air video Jony Ive says "iPad Air is only 7.2mm thin". I'm sorry but that's wrong (even if I get what he means).
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I know I shouldn't get small when I'm drivin', but, uh, I was drivin' around the other day, you know [whistles tunefully] and a cop pulls me over. And he goes, 'Hey, are you small?' I said, 'No, I'm tall, I'm tall.'
 
JPSaltzman said:
....until you add on all the spaghetti attachments and Thunderbolt drives and USB 3 hubs and the 3-4 oversized monitors -- and then suddenly your nice little cylinder (ohhh so cute!) is an octopus gone amuck. And the energy each of these plug-in devices will require (especially the multiple monitors) will wipe out any gains you think you may have achieved just by buying the cylinder. Because as we all know with Apple products, you JUST don't buy the cylinder.
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So if Apple was still producing the cheese grater you wouldn't need oversized monitors?
 
Kilamite said:
I'm quite surprised the industry isn't making more of a fuss about the new Mac Pro. It really is quite incredible what Apple have managed to do here.

Soon, I will feel the old man telling children, "in my day, powerful computers used to occupy a lot of your desk and be noisy and power consuming."
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Taking reference designs and putting it on a different print layout is hardly impressive. Apple hasn't reduced the power consumption, the chip makers have. Dell could do the same, the question is if they are able to make a nice design and if they have the brand to sell it at those prices.
 
bit of an apples to oranges comparison here. My mac pro contains 4 hard drives and an optical drive. I think a fairer comparison would be to compare the amount of materials used by the current mac pro and a thunderbolt case capable of housing 4-6 drives versus an older mac pro.
 
osx11 said:
Producing Aluminum requires an insane amount of energy. So yes, less Aluminum is a good thing.

According to Wikipedia, US Aluminum production consumes 5% of US generated energy.
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At the same time, recycling aluminum requires about 5% of the energy to produce it from bauxite.
 
Am I supposed to be impressed? Apple is probably the only company that uses pervert approach to design of workstations (and desktops too). Most other companies will start with tech specs like performance, memory/storage capacity, expandability etc. and then will design an appropriate case. Apple starts with the case (including the size) and then fits as much as they can into the can. Obviously the latter approach guarantees most compact design. The only problem is when you need to actually use these toys.

On can look at it this way: when you need a desktop computer/workstation with, say, 16TB of hard drives and a couple of PCIe based cards HP Z420 (and old MP) might be able to fit it into a standard case utilizing a single PSU and a couple of fans. nMP will have to use external enclosures for hard drives and extra cards. This configuration will end up with 3 PCUs and at least three fans. Most likely it will weigh more and consume more power than HP workstation.
 
Gosh, who would've thought that eliminating the big aluminum enclosure would reduce the amount of aluminum used in making it? :rolleyes:
 
Konrad9 said:
Wow that's low energy consumption. I wonder how long it would take to recoup the cost of upgrading just from saved electricity costs? Obviously there would need to be a lot of users, but still.
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Other than big companies with hundreds of computers does anyone care about electricity costs related to computer use.
 
IGregory said:
Other than big companies with hundreds of computers does anyone care about electricity costs related to computer use.
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Planet earth cares. Besides, while I'm not sure how much it will save you, even if this saves you 10$ a year are you not gana care at least a little? And if you combine energy saving a little from here and there it adds up to a lot of oil not being used.
 
I wanted to address all of the comments that state that the need for external peripherals undoes any energy savings in the Mac Pro. That's not necessarily true. Yes, there will be some Pro stations that are individually attached to a large external storage array. For individuals running their own Mac Pro, power consumption may creep up back to the levels of the old box.

But that's not the only use case. A large number of Mac Pros that go out are used as nodes in a render farm, and that's where these energy savings are going to add up. Those setups are already using NAS anyway, so the price for external storage is already being incurred. But using less than 50% of the power per compute node compared to the old boxes -- the savings will quickly add up there.

And even with individual workstations, there could still very well be power saving compared to the old big box. Let's say you hook up a 4 TB hard drive. It's going to draw less than 10 W at idle, and if you buy one for energy efficiency, less than 5W. Considering the new Mac Pro runs 90W lower than the previous generation at idle, you're still going to be looking at considerable savings.
 
This is great news. That was one of my qualms about the Mac Pro, since the power supply is rated for nearly 500 watts. At idle, it's consuming about as much electricity as a light bulb. That's not too bad.
 
Isn't that cute how they made the pie chart out of WOOD? Because, you know, the Mac Pro is Environmentally Friendly. And stuff.
 
I'm jealous. I can't upgrade for awhile. It looks cool.

What do you think about the idea that you cant replace the GPU's though? Do you know if there's a GPU replacement plan if one goes bad? It happens a lot. That's my biggest concern.

luckydcxx said:
i was at the apple store today and managed to check out the new pro. it is amazing, the engineering and design is absolutely incredible. :apple:
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I think it is kind of facetious to claim "green" cred because aluminum is recyclable or copper is a desired commodity by scavengers.
People just don't recycle Macs.
I know folks that still have every mac they ever bought.

Old Macs dont die, they become dedicated iTunes players.
 
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