Roundup: First-Look Impressions of the New Mac Pro

[Ryth]

 

[pika2000]

Where did i misquote, i copy pasted a sentence. The sentence only makes sense in context of original post so there is no harm in taking it as an excerpt and it being misunderstood.

You typed up a quote as if it was posted by me beforehand. Just stop doing that and we can continue with the thread discussion.

 

[jjvdhoef]

And people like you don't seem to understand, that there is a pro market beside all this shiny video and photo editing you are talking about. That has nothing to do with prosumers. There are people who need a tower design for customising and expandability reasons, but don't need a Color-proofed high-end monitor for editing photos or videos. There are people who need a lot of CPU power, but ECC memory and XEON processors are not necessary (and too expensive). And exactly for those people (who are many more than the few hyper pros doing 8k video editing in real time) there is nothing in the Apple line-up since years. The old MacPro until 2013 (cheese crater) was all that. It had a moderate entry level price and could be tailored with standard parts to the business needs by the owner himself. Now I get a "pretty" enclosure and a Xeon 8-core CPU for 6k (256GB HD and 32GB RAM don't count, peanuts). And no, a Mac mini or an iMac are no options. I find this attitude extremely arrogant, to be honest.

That Macpro ALSO had ECC ram and XEONS.

 

[Marekul]

You typed up a quote as if it was posted by me beforehand. Just stop doing that and we can continue with the thread discussion.

ok sorry my bad that was an accident i was sure i quoted #299, nihil0's post.

 

[edgonzalez32]

A $60k machine makes you "lmfao" when you are working on million dollar plus projects?

Uh, yea, it does. I get a kick out of building a cart just to see how expensive I can make one of their machines. Does it bother you that much?

You guys are really so quick to just start nitpicking the smallest of comments here jfc.

 

[jlocker]

Buy a $1500 mac mini with a Intel i7 and a sonnet echo Express III-R with three PCI slots for $999. There is your $2500 lower cost Mac.

 

[iReality85]

That's kind of insane they're charging $999 for the "Pro" stand, sold seperately. So you get a $4,999 monitor that just comes with a regular stand that does not offer height or tilt adjustment? Like, WTF?

And the VESA adapter is $199. Holy hell.

 

[Spock]

View attachment 840761 Buy a $1500 mac mini with a Intel i7 and a sonnet echo Express III-R with three PCI slots for $999. There is your $2500 lower cost Mac.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a device like that with PCI and a couple of drive bays that has a place for the Mac mini to sit in to basically make the Mac mini a mid tower or even rack mountable.

 

[jlocker]

That's kind of insane they're charging $999 for the "Pro" stand, sold seperately. So you get a $4,999 monitor that just comes with a regular stand that does not offer height or tilt adjustment? Like, WTF?

And the VESA adapter is $199. Holy hell.

Ahh, who says you have to use Apple's stand there are lots of companies that make mounting units for Monitors? Sounds like a third party manufacturing opportunity for some companies!!!!

 

[Dozer_Zaibatsu]

I hope they have these in the Apple Store, I want to see what a $6k display looks like. Way out of my league/needs but very intrigued.

I'm sitting next to a couple of Eizo displays right now in that price range. You're not going to really notice anything on these monitors unless you are specifically looking for the even color. I'm sure that may be a good reason for that ridiculously high-end monitor stand and the flashy metal grid. It makes the monitor look very fancy and sci-fi.

 

[Nugget]

That's kind of insane they're charging $999 for the "Pro" stand, sold seperately. So you get a $4,999 monitor that just comes with a regular stand that does not offer height or tilt adjustment? Like, WTF?

And the VESA adapter is $199. Holy hell.

No, you've got it wrong. The monitor does not come with a regular stand at all. You have to pair it with either the pro stand or the vesa adapter. Or lean it against the wall, I suppose.

 

[iReality85]

No, you've got it wrong. The monitor does not come with a regular stand at all. You have to pair it with either the pro stand or the vesa adapter. Or lean it against the wall, I suppose.

Wow, for real?! That... blows my mind.

I would be shocked if people actually buy the "Pro" stand.

The $199 VESA adapter is bad enough. But at least then, you can get a really nice Ergotron MX arm for only $185 retail.

 

[Uaaerospace2]

A question from ignorance: who is the person/company buying this? Don't movie studios generally custom-build? Or is that a relic memory from the past?

I work at a University and we record and edit all video content for distance education courses. We have multiple studios and we also shoot in the field. We'll end up buying several of these. It's a no brainer for us. We had the trashcans and have more recently the iMac Pros, but when time comes they will likely be replaced by these new Mac Pros. And, the screen price isn't high. If you think the screen is too pricey, then clearly you don't need a screen like this. We won't need a screen like this on most of our workstations, but we do need them in our color rooms.

I do think the $999 price tag for the monitor stand is steep, but I also know that the dual monitor articulating arms on our desks weren't cheap either. So, we won't be buying the stand at all -- just the vesa mount.

 

[SSDGUY]

Your comparison does not make sense. Technology grows exponentially while with time prices drop and depreciate.
Technology gets cheaper with time not more expensive, especially 250% percent more.

I has gotten cheaper and continues to do so. In '93 few would have ever dreamed of the types of devices and computing power now accessible for under $10k. The money it took to barely let you edit on a 10mb color image now gets you something with which you can make major motion picture, develop insane VR technology, etc. The new MacPro is pricey high-end tech for sure, but for the quality and power and expandability of workstation it is, it's comparable to others using other OS's. But yes, it's still a Mac and that's always a premium price, like it or not. Am I miffed they didn't offer something truly modular at a more prosumer (ie. most professionals) price point? You bet I am. BUT, in a year or two, prices will come down on the brand new high end stuff as it always does. But it looks like I'll be keeping my 2015 27" iMac for a while.

 

[ssgbryan]

ALL the components you listed are cheaper and less powerful that the MP components. The CPU cost twice as yours. Your computer memory isn’t ECC, that’s a lot more expensive. And so on and so on. Everyone the knows the first thing about computers knows that “8 core”, “1TB” are totally meaningless qualification by themselves.

Errh yeah that memory is ECC - All AMD chips can use ECC memory.

You are clearly mixing pears with Apple(s)

AMD Ryzen vs Xeon - not same CPU and not same price range
they are offering 32 GB of ECC 2600 RAM - again not same RAM as your and not same price range
1 TB of SSD storage - are you talking about SSD or NVME.2?
GPU - let's say you are in similar range as 580X

Also, do you have 64 PCI-E lanes in your PC? do you have special HW GPU dedicated to work with 8K Pro Res RAW video? And I could go on and on.

Your computer is not pro workstation, it is for playing videogames.
[doublepost=1559634199][/doublepost]

I tried similar config as base Mac Pro and price was 5899 USD... also that does not include Afterburner, T2 chip and other specific Mac Pro stuff.

$6,000 gets you:

Threadripper - 32 cores

Epyc - 24 cores

Each with 128 Gb of Ram, 1 TB of NVMe storage, and the workstation version of the 580 (WX5100).

One more thing........

With those Dells and HPs, if there is a problem with your system, Dell or HP will send a technician to your location.

 

[SSDGUY]

Wow, for real?! That... blows my mind.

I would be shocked if people actually buy the "Pro" stand.

The $199 VESA adapter is bad enough. At least then, you can get a really nice Ergotron MX arm for only $185 retail.

I think that's actually a screen shot from the first Terminator movie.

 

[jlocker]

New Apple Credit card this summer quote"Customers will also get 3 percent Daily Cash on all purchases made directly with Apple, including at Apple Stores" This should almost pay for my 3 year Applecare warranty cost. And with my educational discount, i bet i will get another $300 - $400 off of the new system.

 

[td2243]

is this what we're classing as pro now?

Yes, it is. Sounds very pro to me.

 

[davidwes]

Bummer about the Xeon processor.

I build scientific software and for the last 11 years my organization has been Mac Pro based. We’ve probably bought 50 trash-cans and 100 cheese graters over the years.

Today: we ordered a Linux box from System76 with a 32 core AMD Threadripper, 128GB of RAM, 2x 1TB NVMe drives and Nvidia RTX 2070 for... $6700.

That’s only $700 over the new 8-core Mac Pro... and (for our workflows of compiling and running highly scalable parallel software) it is about 4x the machine.

Also: next year we’ll probably be able to update our workstations with 64 core threadrippers for a minimal amount.

Yes: we lose out on OSX (which most of us love)... but we just can’t justify it anymore.

To be clear: I think Intel is more of an issue here than Apple. As Apple pointed out the new Mac Pro is in the same price range as other Xeon based workstations... but that’s completely ignoring the fact that AMD threadripper based workstations are blowing out Intel right now.

Apple needs to ditch Intel and go with Arm...

Can you explain why the Linux box will be 4x faster? I mean, there hasn't even been a benchmark for the MacPro yet.

 

[td2243]

"The Modular Mac Pro. The computer for a few of us."

I'm calling it now, the wheels for this will be priced at $500.

And with proprietary threads so you can’t buy casters from anywhere else.

 

[StoneJack]

Why people can't realize that Pro is for Pros.
Most people would never need a workstation, so why all complaining? It is funny to read like people try to configure 28 core computers and price them like they even were going to buy even 12 core one.

 

[jlocker]

Can you explain why the Linux box will be 4x faster? I mean, there hasn't even been a benchmark for the MacPro yet.

Exactly, we do not know the final Xeon processors that will be going into the new Mac Pro, we still have almost 100 to 200 days until the launch of the product, and computer production at Apple has been perfected over the last 43 years so production does not take weeks any longer if needed for production output.

 

[handsome pete]

I work at a University and we record and edit all video content for distance education courses. We have multiple studios and we also shoot in the field. We'll end up buying several of these. It's a no brainer for us. We had the trashcans and have more recently the iMac Pros, but when time comes they will likely be replaced by these new Mac Pros. And, the screen price isn't high. If you think the screen is too pricey, then clearly you don't need a screen like this. We won't need a screen like this on most of our workstations, but we do need them in our color rooms.

I do think the $999 price tag for the monitor stand is steep, but I also know that the dual monitor articulating arms on our desks weren't cheap either. So, we won't be buying the stand at all -- just the vesa mount.

What kind of video are you shooting that you need this kind of power for? I only ask because in my former life teaching at universities (video/3D) I've seen the misappropriation of funds towards equipment that is complete overkill for its target use.

edit: punctuation fix

 

[davidwes]

Not true, sure if you go to Dell or HP. but if you go a custom pc builder a fraction. More bang for you buck. A base model with 256gb of storage is laughable.

Your statement is literally "Not true, [okay its true]. but if you [something thats not comparable at all]. More bang for your buck"

 

[TheMadCow]

Not really, not for the people it's intended for.

Yeah, about that. I am the "people" this is intended for. And it's way too damn expensive once configured. Sadly PC configurations are much more affordable and you get an Nvidia GPU. The AMD chipset is useless for serious graphics and 3D production.