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Steve Jobs Once Considered Killing Apple's Pro Products

subsonix said:
Yeah I know, but it's the same ballpark
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But you said "as fast", not "almost as fast". Can't let those bits slip by without a challenge. ;)


subsonix said:
Yeah I know, but it's the same ballpark, first because these are not benchmark results, secondly because if you are running into a bottleneck at 1.25GB/s, getting 150MB/s more for $5.500 will probably not be enough to solve your problem. Regarding what sizes Apple will offer, I have no idea.
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Nobody does, but still there are comments that the internal drive will be fine. And Apple could easily charge $6K for a TB drive.

Workstations are often set up with a minimal drive for the OS and a larger, faster drive for local data. Hard to see how the MMP will do that.

I'll praise Apple if they have a 2TB to 4TB internal drive option, or if the "blank space on the 2nd GPU where PCIe SATA drive should be" can get a BTO 2TB to 4TB data drive.

Of course, we'd need to be prepared for Apple to charge what most people would consider to be a hefty down payment on a house for those drives. That's the reality of proprietary form factor SSD drives (or at least "niche form factor", even if technically it's not proprietary).
 
AidenShaw said:
Nobody does, but still there are comments that the internal drive will be fine. And Apple could easily charge $6K for a TB drive.
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I really don't think that's going to be the case considering that there are already a MacBook Air 512GB SSD option.
 
subsonix said:
I really don't think that's going to be the case considering that there are already a MacBook Air 512GB SSD option.
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Is the MBA drive native PCIe, or SATA?

True PCIe drives are far more than the small form factor SATA drives.

$4K is market price for an 800 GB Intel 910 PCIe SSD. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167126 I just bought 8 of these, and shopped around. (Spent $3.6K each through a local supplier where we have a corporate discount.)

I don't think that $6K for a 1TB PCIe Apple drive is out of line - assuming that it's comparable to other native PCIe drives. If it's just small form factor SATA then MBA prices are reasonable.

But since SATA can't do 1.25 GB/sec, it can't be SATA.
 
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blamblam said:
FCPX is still iMovie "pro." It still hides things from you and the color correction went from being a professional tool to instant mediocrity, a sad joke, with a bad punch line.
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No one did mission critical color correcting in any version of Final Cut. It was always passed to another program (Used to be color, now it's perfectly fine to send it to Resolve.) The color grading options in the program proper though, are in fact better than the previous options. Much better selection masking, as many multiple separate color grades as you like, and better real time waveform guides.
 
AidenShaw said:
Link please - I looked but found nothing.

Why does OWC call it a "6 Gbps" drive if it is PCIe? That's a SATA number.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Air_2012

I think that you're trying to compare kumquats and cucumbers - the MBA SFF SATA drive has little or no commonality with a native PCIe drive.
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The PCIe drive was introduced in the new Haswell MacBook Air this summer, older models are SATA, including the OWC model you linked to. It's been benchmarked at ~800MB/s. There are an article on it here on MacRumors and several discussions, it was publicly announced by Apple and here is an Anandtech article testing it.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7058/2013-macbook-air-pcie-ssd-and-haswell-ult-inside
 
PROS and Comic CONS

Once upon a time Hollywood dismissed genre films and ignored things like Comic Con because they thought it was too small an audience. Now genre films own Hollywood, because a smaller group of fans were pop culture leaders. Apple's Pro customers are smaller in number, but they are tech leaders. It's because of their Pro customers that they even have a consumer market.

I hope that's something they don't ever forget.
 
WardC said:
I think this is what you are looking for, these are PCIe Blade SSDs:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Othe...n=googlebase&gclid=CPrumcnM-bgCFctr7Aodb3cAxg

They are PCIe Express Inferface, but the drives are SATA III.

If I am guessing, the new Mac Pro uses a similar interface. but based on the SATA 3.2 standard, which delivers faster speeds.
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They are not PCIe SSDs, it's two SATA III SSDs configured in RAID0 on a PCIe card, to be fitted on a regular internal PCIe slot. Mac Pro and the MacBook Air do not use SATA at all, they are PCIe SSDs.
 
0x0x0x0 said:
No they haven't been tested, and no they don't exist: the article you pointed to mentions that Corning were planning on offering. There's nothing on their website offering specific lengths- just mentioning possibilities of lengths...

Besides, don't you think that if R&D was complete and they were capable of manufacturing the "thing", they'd not cash in on their R&D now by releasing the product before others offered similar tech?
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They had them at at CES. A large coil up and running. in fact they had 6 in a line daisy chained reaching 600m - I saw the demo and tried to get a vague price out of them. They said no idea yet. I suspect it will be $500+

As for not being out. Supply and demand. Machine costs would be high and probably little sales. how many people need a 100m TB cable.

Now that there are lot more TB devices coming out it'll come out.
 
My statement was, this is irrelevant. Pixar (or any other sane company) will NEVER pic a computer, on which they do any portion of their work, based on physical looks.

Also, apparently they don't even use Apple machines/products (not the same products available to us, anyway) (in a large scale, anyway) to get the job done. It's actually pretty tough, it would seem, to find good information, but as far as I can tell, basically everything they use is custom built. This is NOT to say that Apple has nothing to do with them on a software/hardware level, but it is unlikely they will be using MacPros for much of their work, because they dimply aren't powerful enough. Some of the stats I am reading is that their custom machines run upwards of $200,000 and they generally have eight or more at a time.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft...teve-jobs-pixar-uses-microsoft-windows-azure/
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...puter+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari[/QUOTE]

The looks of the MP wowed Pixar. But that's just a bonus as I said. Looks alone are not enough for them or any other professional to choose a piece of hardware. Of cause Pixar use their own custom build equipment. That is fact. My point is the new MP would be a small piece of their hardware puzzle. It obviously fits in well with their existing hardware setup.

My understanding is that for some of the lighter work (talking GB's of images/video and not TB's and higher) can be moved to the Mac Pro. And because it's based on being modular, all their current external devices play nicely with it.

You didn't prove what I said wrong. You just agreed with it. So we are on the same page.
 
People have long been saying that SJ would have treated pro users better than Tim Cook, but all along I've been saying that Jobs was the one who wanted to dump the pros and TC is actually turning things around on that front.

By the way, Logic X is pretty awesome. Definitely needs some work beyond the .0 and .01 releases, but it's a huge step forward.
 
Funny

One thread is about lack of innovations and a other about leaving pro market. To me it is quite obvious that apple has to take a piece of the office market. It is a huge market. Ipad in some degree is cannibalize on mac. In a worst case scenario it will be a big impact. It also take big chunk out of the windows cake. And people are using their ipads on work and that is a big opening for the office market. An opportunity they can't miss if they don't have any other big thinks going on. The stock holders expect growth. And now with the android competition windows cake seems to be easy money.
 
AidenShaw said:
External storage also has more cables and failure points, compared to internal drives connected to the mobo and ps.
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That seems a little subjective. I've always preferred external components where I can get away with it, as opposed to tinkering on the inside of a machine. I've seen too many instances of one component in a PC failing and taking other components out with it. I think both approaches have good and bad sides.
 
inkswamp said:
That seems a little subjective. I've always preferred external components where I can get away with it, as opposed to tinkering on the inside of a machine. I've seen too many instances of one component in a PC failing and taking other components out with it. I think both approaches have good and bad sides.
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Many of the failures are related to misbehaving wetware.

...like unplugging (and maybe killing) your RAID array while trying to plug a USB drive into the back of the MMP.
 
subsonix said:
It's a PCIe drive.



I don't think they necessarily have to be though, that is, the prices you mention are not tied directly to component costs.
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There is something odd about these drives. While they are PCIe, the figure I have seen quoted fall short of what might be expected from a PCIe SSD. That said, the throughput is plainly greater than that of a SATA drive. The SATA controller is the bottleneck for many SSDs and we are well rid of it.
 
Pancreatic cancer once thought about killing Steve Jobs

(too soon?)

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inkswamp said:
That seems a little subjective. I've always preferred external components where I can get away with it, as opposed to tinkering on the inside of a machine. I've seen too many instances of one component in a PC failing and taking other components out with it. I think both approaches have good and bad sides.
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Indeed. And let's consider that COLO's and other large data centers use a myriad of machines networked together, with the pieces connected, but not all integrated. An HD that goes down can be replaced, without having to take the system offline to fix.
 
imageWIS said:
Pancreatic cancer once thought about killing Steve Jobs

(too soon?)

----------



Indeed. And let's consider that COLO's and other large data centers use a myriad of machines networked together, with the pieces connected, but not all integrated. An HD that goes down can be replaced, without having to take the system offline to fix.
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My servers' hard drives are definitely integrated (directly connected to the internal SAS controller and the server power supply).

They're also in hot swap bays that are accessible with the system up and running.

A typical 2U server (of mine) has 8 or 16 hot swap drive bays.

My SAN arrays have 120 to 160 or more hot swap drives - also integrated. No rat's nest of daisy-chained cables. One Oracle database is on a 90 drive RAID-60 array (and of course the logs and other files are on other arrays). I get at least one drive failure a week, and the database doesn't have to go offline to replace dead drives.

And the current Mac Pro drives would be hot swappable if Apple had decided to support industry standards.

You don't need drives to be external for them to be hot swappable - even my Dell and Lenovo laptops support hot-swapping of bay drives.
 
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subsonix said:
Why? PCIe is merely an interface.
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This drive is "slow" by PCIe standards. That is what is odd.

Yes, PCIe is an interface and, in this case, even a comparatively slow device attached to it is faster than a similar SATA interface device.

So the good news is that it is a faster drive. Whether the reason that it is not as fast as might be expected is because of battery life considerations or just what is not entirely clear, but it is a worthwhile improvement nonetheless.
 
RBR2 said:
This drive is "slow" by PCIe standards. That is what is odd.

Yes, PCIe is an interface and, in this case, even a comparatively slow device attached to it is faster than a similar SATA interface device.

So the good news is that it is a faster drive. Whether the reason that it is not as fast as might be expected is because of battery life considerations or just what is not entirely clear, but it is a worthwhile improvement nonetheless.
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Well, there is this bit in the Andandtech piece.

On the storage front, Apple officially leads the charge with the move to PCIe based SSDs. The upcoming Mac Pro, as well as the new MacBook Airs both use PCIe based SSDs instead of SATA drives. A quick look at OS X's system profiler reveals a PCIe 2.0 x2 interface, capable of 1GB/s in each direction.
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So we know that the drive is using 80% of the available bandwidth. Keep in mind that this is a very small computer.
 
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