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New Mac Pros?

N

no3tic888

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 31, 2008
51
0
My friend just sent me this e-mail:

Just stopped by the Downtown (San Francisco) Apple store and noticed something strange… there were no MacPros on display anywhere in the store. Very strange.

Also there were no Adobe products anywhere on the shelves. I know
Adobe is going to introduce CS4, but it is not due until sometime
between October 2008 - April 2009. You would think some of their other
products would be on the shelves. Weird.

Other than that, they blocked off the area where the MacPros used to
be and stocked the area with stacks and stacks of black and white
MacBooks. I guess they really want to get rid of them to make way for
the newly designed MacBooks and MacBookPros.

Has anyone heard anything about a new MacPro?

Has anyone been to other Apple stores and seen this?

My friend is in the market for a new Pro so I trust his observation.
 
Although this seems promising, I think its very unlikely that new Mac Pros are coming out this year. With the Macbook/Air/Pro (the more popular Apple computers) updates and incremental iMac updates coming, there's too much going on for Mac Pros to be released. Plus, a new Mac Pro wouldn't seem complete without new Cinema Displays and like I mentioned before, that's way too much going on at one time. Apple spreads their releases out; they make more money when they have momentum going (the halo effect), not when they flood the market all at one time. Mac Pros, Cinema Displays, and Minis will most likely be introduced at Macworld in January. Who knows, maybe the wait will make it more realistic for Core i7 processors to be introduced in the next Mac Pros.
 
The only thing Apple can do to a Mac Pro right now is increase the standard RAM or HDD capacity.

Intel will not release any new CPUs for the Mac Pro until the Core i7 ships in late 2008 / early 2009.
 
CWallace said:
The only thing Apple can do to a Mac Pro right now is increase the standard RAM or HDD capacity.

Intel will not release any new CPUs for the Mac Pro until the Core i7 ships in late 2008 / early 2009.
Click to expand...

Well, if you didn't want to hear it from a "macrumors newbie," here it is from a "macrumors demi-god." :D
 
As has been stated it won't be upgraded until Intel release the i7 Xeons at the end of the year / beginning of next. My guess is that Apple will do what they did this year and release them quietly the week before Mac World.
 
CWallace said:
The only thing Apple can do to a Mac Pro right now is increase the standard RAM or HDD capacity.

Intel will not release any new CPUs for the Mac Pro until the Core i7 ships in late 2008 / early 2009.
Click to expand...

it is about time they introduce blu-ray support.
you know, the next generation of CD drive. like apple take forever to get on board already.

goodness sake.
 
MacBook08 said:
Well, if you didn't want to hear it from a "macrumors newbie," here it is from a "macrumors demi-god." :D
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's meaningless. Demi-god means that you have $25. (Note: CWallace is a great guy with helpful info. All I'm saying is... YOU could be a demi-god for $25 and one post.)

NO NEW MAC PROS UNTIL AT LEAST MACWORLD 2009. No Blu-ray, either.

Thread over.
 
I'm expecting Blu-Ray support. I mean, Apple's systems are media computers, after all. I hope to see support for larger hard drives, too. Terabyte drives are going to become the norm soon.
 
ma2ha3 said:
it is about time they introduce blu-ray support.
Click to expand...

Apple needs to release new Apple Cinema Displays, first. The current models cannot accept a 1080p Blu-ray signal because they lack HDCP, so it can be downgraded by the content owner to a lower spec (like, say, 480p).

That being said, rumors are circulating that new ACDs are coming by Mac World 2009, if not earlier.
 
There's no such thing as 540p. :p The next step down is 720p, followed by 720i (No one uses it), then 480p, and standard 480i.

DVI is the same as HDMI without sound. Offhand I don't know if the ACD's are 1080i or 1080p.
 
m1stake said:
There's no such thing as 540p. :p
Click to expand...

True. I was just using it as a placeholder. My point was that if you playback content protected with HDCP on a system that is not fully HDCP-compliant, the content may not play back at all or it may playback in a degraded state, depending on how the content owner wants to handle it. So instead of 1080p, it might be something like 480p.

So you could add a Blu-ray player to your Mac Pro and watch it in Windows, but if you have an ACD, it might only look like a DVD.
 
ma2ha3 said:
it is about time they introduce blu-ray support.
you know, the next generation of CD drive. like apple take forever to get on board already.

goodness sake.
Click to expand...

Erm... it's the "next generation" of the DVD drive, really. Though that's still a poor analogy :)

New 2.8 THz Mac Pro's this week! :)
 
Continuing this thread jack..
I bought a nifty little device/adapter (called the HDFury) that takes an HDCP-protected signal from DVI (via a HDMI>DVI cable) and outputs the signal, sans-HDCP, to any VGA display..

I'm using it to hook my PS3 to a Sony SDM-P234b (which has the same panel as a ACD 23").
Granted, this device only takes care of the display side of things- your video card needs to be HDCP compliant as well..
 
m1stake said:
There's no such thing as 540p. :p The next step down is 720p, followed by 720i (No one uses it), then 480p, and standard 480i.
Click to expand...

Yes there is.

There is 589p, 898p, 7896p, 453908p, 234p, blah blah blah ...p.

The P just stands for the time of interlacing the pixels use. The number in front of the P just reflects the amount of vertical pixels there are on the screen.

480p, 720p and 1080p just tend to be the most common "p's" used by manufactures. But that doesn't mean that other "p's" don't exist.;)
 
Firefly2002 said:
New 2.8 THz Mac Pro's this week! :)
Click to expand...

Though I know that's meant to be a joke, I'd just want to point out that would be utterly impossible, ever, with a system sized bigger then 1 mm :p

Why? Because currently we use electricity, and even when using optical wiring it couldn't be done.
You see: 2.8THz means there is a signal transmitted within the CPU every 1/2,800,000,000,000 seconds. When you calculate how far that signal would go when travelling at the speed of light in vacuum (which is the fastest it can go, it's slower through matter), you see the signal only gets about 0.1 mm far before another signal is sent, and were not even counting the lag it gains when some mutation is done with the signal.

This means we're almost at the top of clockspeeds: most engineers agree CPUs won't get any faster than 10GHz, ever.

That is btw the reason why developers need to learn to program in multiple threads, because we can use multiple cores delivering more power :)
 
there will not be any new Mac Pro's its 8core what more you want

ok maybe new video cards and a blu ray burner but thats it (don't see that as a mayor upgrade)

still love my 2x2,66ghz intel core 2 duo xeon
this beast will give me at least 2 more years of pleasure by running the biggest and most consuming cpu killer apps :cool:
 
kiang said:
Though I know that's meant to be a joke, I'd just want to point out that would be utterly impossible, ever, with a system sized bigger then 1 mm :p

Why? Because currently we use electricity, and even when using optical wiring it couldn't be done.
You see: 2.8THz means there is a signal transmitted within the CPU every 1/2,800,000,000,000 seconds. When you calculate how far that signal would go when travelling at the speed of light in vacuum (which is the fastest it can go, it's slower through matter), you see the signal only gets about 0.1 mm far before another signal is sent, and were not even counting the lag it gains when some mutation is done with the signal.

This means we're almost at the top of clockspeeds: most engineers agree CPUs won't get any faster than 10GHz, ever.

That is btw the reason why developers need to learn to program in multiple threads, because we can use multiple cores delivering more power :)
Click to expand...

Visible light is 400-800 THz. That can be taken long distances by optical fibres and lasers. In fact, Intel have been experimenting with replacing electric cables with optical links for years - both at the nanoscale and for things like USB cables.

If a signal was travelling at 400THz, it's hard to predict what it'd look like. The cable is just a waveguide - the actual energy transmission happens in the field around the cable. At those frequencies, you'd probably see a fat beam of light with the cable at its centre.
 
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