askunk
macrumors 6502a
As much as I hope it too, it wouldn't make much sense: why penalise Pro users while leaving RAM access to consumers? After all, iMacs have always had access to RAM, but not the last generation.
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MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)
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As much as I hope it too, it wouldn't make much sense: why penalise Pro users while leaving RAM access to consumers? After all, iMacs have always had access to RAM, but not the last generation.
Which is insane. Why does a desktop computer fret about a few millimeters of depth?
fuchsdh
macrumors 68020
We'll know in a few weeks when iFixit is on the case. I expect it'll be about as easy as the previous Mac mini, in which case it's mostly just screws (getting in further will require more disassembly.)
Have they ever revealed anything there? I feel like if there's a pre-WWDC unveil it'd either A) be its own "pro" style roundtable like the Pro Mac discussions or the MacBook Pro rev, or B) at NAB in April.
The NextCube was a straight foot in either dimensions, right? Leaving aside the issues with slots in such a form factor, that's still 1700+ in3; more than five times the volume of the cylindrical Mac Pro. You can definitely fit cool and quiet Xeons in that kind of case (hell, if you wanted to go crazy you could put a huge custom fan in the front.)
(I feel like a tower-like case is a better space factor just because of the reduced footprint though.)
vailr
macrumors regular
Yes, but: take it to a Genius Bar, and they may require that everything first be returned to original factory hardware condition, before they will agree to do any "under warranty" repairs.
The press at the Apple Event were told this by Apple.
The support people usually don't know much about new hardware, especially before it ships. It doesn't even look like the support team has the manual for the new product yet, it's not even posted. And the page on upgrading your RAM mentions the 2014 Mac mini but nothing about the 2018 yet.
Which has always been true of all Apple hardware since the company started.
Do you actually have a source. I hate to be that guy, I've just done some looking and I don't see a quote from legitimate apple rep of any kind. I suppose we'll know for sure soon enough, but if its there, I'd appreciate the reference.
That’s true, I wouldn’t trust Apple though to not make it sealed in effect, I mean they claimed last year that they would not throttle the iPhone 8 and iPhone X due to batteries ageing because of ‘their advanced design’, and that all changed this week!
So I wouldn’t put anything past them at present, it’s like the iMac Pro has memory you can swap, after you’ve unglued the machine and stripped half of it down, not something most will do on a machine that expensive.
filterdecay
macrumors regular
I bought the z4. Apple should of done more sooner. Sorry. bitter sweet. Going from ibook g3 to water cooled g5's to the glory that was the 2.66ghz intel macpro to a 6core macpro to a 12 core macpro monster. black macbook to many macbook pros (I'll stay mac for my laptops). The pros carried apple through some dark times and then they shunted us for great money. No complaints I would do the same. The only thing is with an extra trillion dollars laying around you would think they could squeeze some off to keep innovating for us pros.
Hp is ready to eat apples lunch btw. The z workstations have bios settings to use apple shortcuts. They know us.
Hp is ready to eat apples lunch btw. The z workstations have bios settings to use apple shortcuts. They know us.
You are talking about the old, old one. 2014 had no "twist off" base.
"... Gone are the handy thumb indents and indicators. This mini doesn't appear to have twist-off bottom cover! ... "
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac+mini+Late+2014+Teardown/30410
Nothing so far illustrates that this isn't the 2014 bottom (with more recycled plastic.) . All Apple has shown so far is the cover already off. if the "flash by in a couple seconds) photo from the talk Tuesday is closer to reality than the animations on the Mini's overview web page the DIMMs are buried fairly deep under the enclosure. They aren't oriented to be significantly within the open 'hole' with the cover off.
I think Apple knows that some folks will be digging inside to do RAM upgrades. But it is unclear if they are going to encourage that for the mainstream.
ssgbryan
macrumors 65816
The user doesn't care, however Sir Idiot Boy is more concerned about a product's looks than it's performance.
Okay, where has that been reported?
It’s of course possible that they are making a mistake, but the support team seem to be quite clear that they are referring to the new model, and people have posted pages from some sort of Apple documentation that is, again, explicit that upgrades can only be done by an authorised provider.
Do you not find it weird that during the event Apple made a specific point of saying that the mini has SO-DIMMs (which naturally garnered a positive reaction) but didn’t say that users can upgrade it themselves? If the Mac mini is user upgradeable - which is what people want - why not actually say that instead of the comment about SO-DIMMs (which is actually kind of irrelevant)?
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Depends how you look at it. One school of thought is that the RAM door was lost on the iMac Pro as an unfortunate consequence of the cooling. Another school of thought is that Apple never had any intention of having a RAM door on the iMac Pro.
I believe the latter is true. I think if Apple wanted to preserve the RAM door and also improve the cooling then they would have found a way to do that.
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fuchsdh
macrumors 68020
I don't think you need to come up with some shadowy motivations. The reality is they were only going to reengineer so much for a niche product. The RAM door was simply much lower on the list of priorities than "reuse the same case" and "redesign the internals".
Now, for the completely rethought Mac Pro where they could design it from scratch and there are no previous limiting factors? That of course is the million dollar question.
(My hunch is that in the probably alternate reality where the iMac Pro was going to be the only pro desktop they probably would have left the RAM hatch in to throw people a bone; after all they didn't remove easy access to RAM from the cylinder model even though that was the only quick-change component in that model.)
The feature to "off loading" work from the MacBooks to the Mac mini o a cluster of minis is the best sneakpeek into the modular Mac pro, but Apple's reluctance to update form factors anticipates a possible trashcan reborn, maybe 5x faster than 2013 tcMP., And likely to rely on dual AMD Navi and Vega64.
BillyBobBongo
macrumors 68030
They also seem too keen to keep pushing eGPUs at us, which are fine for mobile devices...but have no business in a desktop computer.
I'm afraid of that too. External upgrades are always more expensive than internal ones. Nothing beats the tidyness and price-performance ratio of having storage and graphics card in the workstation. And price-performance ratio is something that Pros consider too.
aaronhead14
macrumors 65816
I just want to reinterate, in case Apple employees are reading, how incredibly important it is for us professionals to have a large desktop with plenty of room to expand, and plenty of PCIe slots. Basically we need the 2012 cheese grater Mac Pro, but with new hardware. It's not rocket science. It doesn't require much innovation. No need to reinvent the wheel here. We just need a powerhouse PC that runs macOS. Small, thin, all-in-one machines are NOT for pros; they're for regular consumers. Please give us what we need-- a traditional expandable machine. And we'll love you and give you our money!
I think Apple is much more deliberate than that. And I wouldn't characterise it as "shadowy motivations", it's just good business sense. The iMac forum here, as an example, is full of people buying iMacs with 8GB RAM and then adding their own from third parties. Why would Apple let people continue to get away with that, when they can force people to buy it from them and capture all of that revenue (and then some, given their markup)? It's just good business sense.
The corollary to your argument is that Apple's hardware engineers couldn't figure out how to "reuse the same case" and "redesign the internals" and "keep the RAM door", and were forced to give up and sacrifice the RAM door because it was too hard. I don't believe that for one second. This argument also requires you to believe that the same unfortunate compromise occurred for the other Mac models too, which have also progressively lost their access to RAM - rather a remarkable coincidence! 🙂 In my opinion, it's much more likely that this is evidence of a deliberate business strategy.
DearthnVader
Suspended
ICYMI, this is the 3rd or 4th thread related to the MP7,1 ...
DearthnVader
Suspended
Crazy right?
I mean, the Trash Can has to be the most unpopular Mac, maybe of all time, but it's also the one selling the longest.
When new chipsets and CPU's come out, it's a matter of weeks on the PC side before we start seeing shipping products from Dell, HP, etc.
Apple in taking the Pro desktop line, and the Pro desktop users for granted. As if we have no choice but to buy from them. It's going to come back and bite us all on the ass as people defect.
fuchsdh
macrumors 68020
If this was the deliberate business strategy, they would have removed the RAM door on the 2012 iMacs and not gone back to UDIMMs for the Mac Mini. I'm not saying Apple doesn't love money they get from charging overhead on BTO upgrades, but my point was that it's clearly not their sole motivation or even their primary one, it's just a natural end result of their priorities. People can and should vote with their wallets when that clashes with their own priorities.
Well, that's how business works. Apple clearly seems to have changed course, but it's tough to adjust heading on a ship like Apple.
As has been pointed out many a time in this thread and elsewhere, no one has forced you into buying Apple. If you've switched and it's working for you, that seems like an ideal outcome. Apple doesn't owe pros anything, and the opposite is very much true as well. It's business.
DearthnVader
Suspended
Far be it for Apple to listen to the people that don't buy their products, because of product shortcomings. I skipped my upgrade cycle, because the 6,1 didn't fit my needs, and used some of that money to build a linux box, that I also run virtual machines on.
Somewhere around here I started a tread about my virtual Mac Pro being better than a real one.
If the 7,1 offers what I need, I'll still buy one, as I prefer to use the macOS. Thing is, when the hell will that be?
Apple's too fat with iPhone profits to care much about the Mac Pro line, and it shows. More and more people on this board defect, and once they build the toolchain they need on another OS, they can be locked into it because of the costs of pro software. I fear those people won't come back, or won't come back until they need to update their software suite, making 7,1 sale less than stellar, and perhaps leading Apple to end the line.
I'm lucky, I built my software suite on open source, so I can run it on any platform, and the only thing it costs be to move back and forth is some time.
vailr
macrumors regular
Maybe the most important objective is to nudge Apple towards continuing to update macOS, so that newer non-Apple PC's continue to gain operating system support for their updated hardware Hackintoshes?
HP's Z8 product line seems like an ideal fit, if Apple were to officially license macOS to run on HP's Z8 machines. They could add in a T2 chip (or other small motherboard chip) to try and keep macOS from running on most other non-HP & non-Apple machines. I think Apple & HP have a previous history of working together, such as on an Apple digital camera, about 25 years ago. And as a 13 year old high school student in summer 1968, Steve Jobs himself had a product assembly job working at HP in Palo Alto. Steve Wozniak was also employed at HP for a while.
HP's Z8 product line seems like an ideal fit, if Apple were to officially license macOS to run on HP's Z8 machines. They could add in a T2 chip (or other small motherboard chip) to try and keep macOS from running on most other non-HP & non-Apple machines. I think Apple & HP have a previous history of working together, such as on an Apple digital camera, about 25 years ago. And as a 13 year old high school student in summer 1968, Steve Jobs himself had a product assembly job working at HP in Palo Alto. Steve Wozniak was also employed at HP for a while.
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