Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)
- Thread starter Mago
- Start date
-
- Tags
- macpro 2016
- Sort by reaction score
The thing is, I'm willing to give Apple 2000-3500 Euros for a mac pro if I can upgrade the ram and the gpu in the future. That's it. Modern (standard) computers have a long lifespan with the exception of the gpus that get obsolete very fast, so I am more than willing to spend a lot of money on a mac pro.
And yet Apple just plays around with stupid futuristic concepts and products that represent massive compromise in one area or another while costing an arm and a leg. And it still takes them years to release a upgrade. Unbelievable!
And yet Apple just plays around with stupid futuristic concepts and products that represent massive compromise in one area or another while costing an arm and a leg. And it still takes them years to release a upgrade. Unbelievable!
Don't you want to upgrade the internal storage too?
I surely want to be able to do this.
With 10 gigabit Ethernet I no longer care where the storage is physically located.
You can pick up small 10gbe switches now for $500. Even the Cisco Small Business equipment is relatively cheap. 10 gigabit ethernet is not uncommon these days. The iMac Pro supports it, so for sure the mMP will as well. Spinning discs no longer need to be in your workstation, there's no performance penalty for putting them in the server room/closet or down the hall (with better RAID options and multi-user capabilities to boot). Even the low end "prosumer" grade NAS boxes (Synology, QNAP, et al) have supported 10gbe for years now. It's mainstream.
All I need is a fast boot SSD and a network cable. The days of needing a ton of internal storage for desktop machines is over.
Novus John is exactly correct -- RAM and GPU cycle a lot faster than CPU and display tech. A modular solution needs to support upgrading them all on different schedules. That's where the iMac Pro and trash can Mac Pro fail. You effectively have to upgrade everything at the same time which doesn't make sense. Either you suffer with deficient GPU and RAM towards the end of the machine's life, or you discard a perfectly good CPU long before you really need to.
"Analists" (actually blatant speculative bloggers) predict a new mac Mini to be announced soon, in case this is true it will said a lot about the mMP:
Its T2 implementation, to include dGPU or just iGPU+eGPU, ... stay tuned on Apple cr@p..
A Form Factor refresh will said a lot on Apple commitment on desktop, a pizza-box re-embodiment will means no interest in desktops and just giving a bone to the poorest fanboys.
A Not so mini, will mean beefy GPU or 3.5" Spinners (a mac server re-boot? -unlikely, but who knows...- )
An even smaller mac mini, means just basic H/W, no spinners and made it as cheap as possible (But sell pricey)
Its T2 implementation, to include dGPU or just iGPU+eGPU, ... stay tuned on Apple cr@p..
A Form Factor refresh will said a lot on Apple commitment on desktop, a pizza-box re-embodiment will means no interest in desktops and just giving a bone to the poorest fanboys.
A Not so mini, will mean beefy GPU or 3.5" Spinners (a mac server re-boot? -unlikely, but who knows...- )
An even smaller mac mini, means just basic H/W, no spinners and made it as cheap as possible (But sell pricey)
I think that you have to care where your boot drive(s) is(are), if it is possible to be upgraded or not, or be replaced after a failure or if it's just soldered in. A big difference if it is soldered, you have to care of this one.
Or get something like this:
https://www.servethehome.com/superm...ampaign=Feed:+ServeTheHome+(ServeTheHome.com)
It has dual 10Gbase-T Ethernet and significant expansion capabilities.
Add seasonic psu, case (I check with silentPc.com because quiet is nice.) and some disks. I use Freenas with ZFS for storage. If you are technical you can run it under esxi, have an enterprise router (pfsense) and servers (linux, freebsd, windows, etc.) running off it as well.
10Gbase-T Ethernet will run over existing cat5e, not like 100 meters, but 30-50 meters fine.
10Gbase-T Ethernet can change storage, backup, configurations, if you can live with the 700MB/s limitation.
About adding more internal capacity, yes the 10gbe may be a kind of a solution, but it has its problems too.
Note an important factor, too many things involved so you can't do fast troubleshooting, then you have to deal with different filesystems and some incompatibilities and the additional hassle for setting up and maintain the NAS, af course you also need a lot more money.
The old way... a lot better and simpler, only one thing needed, a new HD.
Even DAS is better for RAIDs than NAS, when it is possible and suitable for the task.
All Apple has to do is return to this:
Problem solved.
Problem solved.
I'm not sure that's the high horse you want to ride in on...
I dunno. The Mini is much lower cost. T.2 is expensive and complex to implement. I think you're likely to see something more in common with a low end iMac or MacBook than a pointer where the Mac Pro is going.
Even so... why would we need the Mac Mini to tell us where the Mac Pro is going? iMac Pro and MacBook Pro already tell us plenty. There isn't much new that a Mac Mini could say on the Mac Pro that the iMac Pro already hasn't.
The way I see it, Apple is in a corner. They've promised the modular MacPro because people (me too) want/need PC level customizability/accessibility/connectivity. And yet this is so against their current product philosophy of thin, glued computers/mobile class GPUs and scary BTO prices. I'd like to be mistaken.
And yet Apple rarely themselves provide upgrades for said expandability. A few graphic cards, one raid card and two fiber channel cards spanning entire generations of Mac Pro's. I can almost understand Apple's decision for the nMP based on their own offerings. They saw no market for it because they didn't provide better options.
Apple relationship to Pro users' needs, as performed by Ned Flanders' parents:
Since we are already ********ing
Cue Principal Skinner asking if he is out of touch. No, it's the children who are wrong.Innovate my ass indeed.
I truly believe this is where the pro market got axed... lack of actual updates, slower and low sales, because there want anything else down the pipe and people recognized it. (I think it’s funny to open up system information and see all the ‘legacy’ hardware that you probably couldn’t find on a system that could actually run the OS (high Sierra or Mojave)).
and T.2 locked storage on the mac pro will suck + forced raid 0 limited to pci-e X4.
The mac pro need to have real m.2 slots and at least 1-2 sata ports.
Living in the past! Surely we can do better
Proof positive that even nerds turn into their parents sooner or later.
Proof positive that even nerds turn into their parents sooner or later.
But the Raves were definitely much better in my days son....
[doublepost=1531871517][/doublepost]
It definitely needs the 2 x m.2 ports, but I think you could skip the sata from the main bay and rely on 10Gbe or Thunderbolt 4
for storage needs, keeps heat out of the main chamber.Is there anything out there that could also keep the graphics card out of the main box that's not thunderbolt but as fast as if it were PCIe plugged straight into the motherboard?
Could there possibly be an Intel or even AMD chip that would have graphics built on chip? for example if I were a music producer, I really don't need a $1000 graphics card in there, but if I'm a video editor/graphics person I do, so it would best be kept seperate...
Last edited:
10GbE has awful overhead if you use a network file system, and iSCSI is tricky to set up and is a dog unless you get a converged NIC with offload everything (there's a reason why single port Intel X5nn cards are often north of $300).rely on 10Gbe or Thunderbolt 4
And T-Bolt 4 is the light at the end of the tunnel - and the tunnel still looks to be a couple of years long. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/any-indication-or-hints-of-thunderbolt-4-80gbps.2018706/