Thanks for the detailed listing.
In any event, this still illustrates my basic point that Apple has rattled through multiple 'video' protocols over a relatively short time period.
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
Thanks for the detailed listing.
In any event, this still illustrates my basic point that Apple has rattled through multiple 'video' protocols over a relatively short time period.
Good grief. The underlying video protocol Thunderbolt propagates has been Display Port over all three versions. Yes, it has gone from one Display 1.1a 'channel' to two DisplayPort 1.1a 'channels' to DisplayPort 1.2 to adding DisplayPort 1.3/1.4 in the most recent controller versions ( those are more controller implementation evolution than socket changes ) . DisplayPort has changed from 1.1 to 1.4 over 2008-2018. Is that suppose to be indicative of DP's flakiness also? Or standards naturally evolving over time?
TB1 and TB2 are the exact same port and cables with standard mini-DP port (i.e., could plug in standard DP cables and backward compatibility mode would 'just work'. ). TBv3 jumped to USB-C, but so did a ton of other system vendors if don't have myopic blinders on. New premium Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc laptops that don't have any USB-c sockets on them in 2018 are????
Reportedly the new Nvidia GPUs have VirtualLink sockets on them.... yep USB-C physical connector with video and USB stuff all on one cable. [ I don't think that will become standard on Macs. Rumors Apple is waiting for non wires at all headsets. Not sure that will scale to 20-40 folks in the same room all on headsets but we'll see. ] But there is no reason why a new usage ( VR) should be hogtied to DB-15 or DVI sockets. The screen size ( resolution and bandwidth ) have changed over the last 20-30 years. Those earlier sockets were not designed to cover larger scopes at modern bandwidths. Effort has been thrown into the baseline of Type-C to scale over a decent amount of time. However, it probably won't last "forever" either.
Yes, thank goodness for at least some degree of relief, because the bigger picture has been:
2000-04: ADC
2004-08: mini-DVI
2008-11: mini DisplayPort
2011-16: TB1/TB2
2016-: USB-C (TB3)
When compared against the typical hardware lifecycle (~5 years), each hardware purchase has resulted in new physical plug each time .... except for one upgrade cycle in the {mDP/TB1/TB2} period.
As such, even if you group {mDP/TB1/TB2} all together, this has still been a different video plug every 4 years.
And even so, I didn't ever see mDP/TB1/TB2 all that broadly adopted in the PC community, and it never IMO has shown up on Conference Room projectors, so if you were traveling and making presentations with a MBP, to be well prepared, you were wise to drop the cash for mDP-DVI, -VGA (and maybe even a -HDMI) adaptor dongles in your travel bag...
Similarly, it wasn't helpful that Apple also gimped data I/O performance too: during the first half of the mDP/TB12 era (2008-2012), Apple continued to depreciate Firewire and yet took utterly forever to finally adopting USB3: the result was customer pain in being forced into paying the early adopter "Thunderbolt Tax" (TB1/TB2) for external data bandwidth.
Note: a YMMV reminder applies: experiences invariably come back to individual situations/dates (such as hardware purchase cycles) and for what was important (and when) on specific workflow needs/priorities.
All this thread witnesses how sick is Apple being managed.
Apple as a company is running mighty fine, it is just Mac has been treated like unwanted step-child ever since they went from Apple Computer to Apple 11 years ago.
Which they borrowed the name from the Beatle's "Apple Corps" (pronounced "apple core") Records.
Last edited:
Actually Steve Jobs just wanted his company to appear before Atari in the phone book and they couldn't come up with a better name.
Steve Wozniak said:
Or so goes one of the many stories regarding the matter ...
Last edited:
Dude, that’s a pretty clueless comment. I understand and am sympathetic to some degree, but the only thing this thread “witnesses” is the same group of people going in circles for two years; total echo chamber.
I don’t like where the Mac is at right now, but Apple is expertly managed. They recognize Siri is their biggest weakness and they need to fix that first. It’s a much bigger problem than the MacPro. Or the Mac in its entirety. Every single consumer with both an iPhone and an Echo can experience firsthand how crappy Siri is, and that’s truly egg on Apple’s face. Even infrequently updated, the Mac remains an attractive alternative to anything running Windows.
I want a new Mac Pro, but frankly, if I had to choose between that and better Siri and Maps, I’d pick the latter. My 4,1>5,1 is still churning along nicely (knock on wood), but I deal with voice recognition and navigation everyday, and it’s astounding how superior Google is with both.
Apple has said a new MacPro is coming. It will not be a PC workstation running MacOS. It will be whatever it is, and people here will complain about it the same way they complained about the 6,1 and 5,1.
It’s not going to move the needle much in the grand scheme of things.
Uh, no. You forgot to qualify that with "In my opinion"
Uh, no. Even with horrendously outdated innards, the MacBook Air keeps on selling like hotcakes.
"O" as in "OMG, not ARM"
"P" as in "Please give us a slot box"
"Q" as in "Questionable Quality GPUs have to stop"
"R" as in "Red Team has to go"
"S" as in "Six PCIe slots would be nice"
...
So today, I opened up my cheesegrater, pulled off the side cover without having to find a security torx bit. Pulled out a tray of composites, coppers, alloys and other such marvels of modern material science, withdrew some RAM chips, as one of them became faulty, and replaced them with new and higher capacity RAM chips purchased from the interwebs.
To think I was able to do this myself, without a Genius™ certification, without having to pick from either a crippling RMA procedure, or extortionate pricing policy.
And to think this might be relic of the past, something future generations will never know well enough to miss.
It has been 10 years my sweetheart cheesegrater since we first exchanged vows , and even though we both show our age, i still love you. Happy anniversary babe. <3
To think I was able to do this myself, without a Genius™ certification, without having to pick from either a crippling RMA procedure, or extortionate pricing policy.
And to think this might be relic of the past, something future generations will never know well enough to miss.
It has been 10 years my sweetheart cheesegrater since we first exchanged vows , and even though we both show our age, i still love you. Happy anniversary babe. <3
Intel has hinted that they are engineering their own brand of discrete graphics card.
Could Apple also be involved with that effort, to maybe be included with the 2019 modular MacPro?
https://wccftech.com/intel-discrete-graphics-cards-arctic-sound-gpu-2020-launch/
Well AMD is now providing Vega-series GPUs for some of Intel's CPUs so hiring the head of AMD's GPU program makes me feel that these Intel dGPUs will be derivatives (from a design standpoint) of AMD Vega and Polaris. Which is not a bad thing from a macOS angle since Apple uses AMD already so one imagines applications like Final Cut Pro would see performance on them similar to AMD-branded GPUs.
Of course, it does nothing for those wanting nVidia for gaming or CUDA application support.
Please see also: https://gizmodo.com/intel-and-amd-j...70.634942649.1522026149-3494214420.1521481782
Product list: https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/136847/Kaby-Lake-G
They feature an H-series 8th-generation CPU and an AMD Radeon RX Vega chipset.
My biggest issue is I'm forced to max TB2 on current mac pro, TB1 on my current early 2011 (which I'm too stubborn to sell still), and if I want TB3, only hot throttling noisy MBP's and iMac's are an option, which means they are not an option..... I can get 3 or 4 maxed out 2012 i7 Mac Mini's for the price of one Mac Pro...having owned neither and only looked at tests etc. online, kinda makes it hard to decide which to go for...I'm leaning towards trying out a used 2013 Mac Pro with some apple care still on it, so I can easily get rid of it without loosing too much money..the 2012 Mac Mini will surely feel much similar to the mac I'm currently on, and I'm sure the fan will get loud too...
It's kinda amazing at this point, how long the actual Pro's have gone without having a TB3 product to purchase, or upgrade option..(yes I know, iMac Pro is an option, but then again, different product group)
Also, I can't believe there hasn't been someone who's figured out to add TB2 or TB3 to the old cheese graters... Buying a cheese grater at this point feels so archaic to me, as much as building a PC does because all I want is a super fast, super reliable Mac OS system, and I need fast I/O, don't need a screen, and I don't want noise or throttling, at all ! Only bright side is there is only a few TB3 sound cards available and none of them are what I'm looking for, so I'll have to go with a TB2 so in that regard the 2013 Mac Pro would work...slow HDD though and single core performance is meh (again, on paper...maybe the lack of throttling will actually mean single core performance will be tolerable...not super happy about paying a cars worth for "tolerable")
It's kinda amazing at this point, how long the actual Pro's have gone without having a TB3 product to purchase, or upgrade option..(yes I know, iMac Pro is an option, but then again, different product group)
Also, I can't believe there hasn't been someone who's figured out to add TB2 or TB3 to the old cheese graters... Buying a cheese grater at this point feels so archaic to me, as much as building a PC does because all I want is a super fast, super reliable Mac OS system, and I need fast I/O, don't need a screen, and I don't want noise or throttling, at all ! Only bright side is there is only a few TB3 sound cards available and none of them are what I'm looking for, so I'll have to go with a TB2 so in that regard the 2013 Mac Pro would work...slow HDD though and single core performance is meh (again, on paper...maybe the lack of throttling will actually mean single core performance will be tolerable...not super happy about paying a cars worth for "tolerable")
Last edited:
If you don't want noise, you will throttle; if you want speed, you will have noise. Sorry, but the laws of physics aren't going to change for you.
TB is still a solution in search of a problem. It doesn't actually solve a problem and it is slower than things like eSATA.
Adding a TB2 or TB3 is a nonstarter because there isn't a TB controller on the logic board.