Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Waiting till Day 600.

With the gap between high end notebook computers and low end Mac Pros diminishing, would anyone else suspect a significant price reduction in the next Mac Pro?

I think it's safe to say that high end computers are no longer as necessary for as wide a range of needs/professions. Peoples' workloads aren't growing nearly as fast as computer tech, for the vast majority of us at least.

Perhaps this is just wishful thinking on my part because I'd like to grab the next model. $2500 is a bit steep for me but I want a standalone tower with upgradability and cooling peace of mind, not to mention avoid their overpriced monitors.
 
hitekalex said:
You mean other than the fact that we are now nearing 2 years since the last refresh? And the fact that everything about Apple's recent product strategy points to rapidly declining interest (and ever decreasing slice in Apple revenues) in high-end desktops? And how about recent introduction of Thunderbolt, which in a lot of ways makes the notion of a huge desktop tower all but obsolete?

I will be shocked if Apple continues to sell Mac Pros in their current form factor past 2012. The current Pro chassis is a beast and everything about it screams 2005. The fact that there haven't been any credible rumors of redesigned Mac Pro chassis does not bode well for its future.
Click to expand...

Upgrades available since 2010 offered small performance gains for the most part and it is easy to see why Apple wouldn't bother updating their systems. Apples recent strategy does not include having professional users switch to another OS. Thunderbolt does not in anyway provide the increased efficiency that CPU, memory, I/O and graphics performance available on a desktop workstation does.

I'd be disappointed if Apple continued to sell them in their current form as they could offer more features by changing form factor. Single and dual socket Intel Xeon workstations are a long way from being obsolete however. The lack of rumours means nothing at all. As far as I can recall the only rumour with any substance in the past 6 years in regard to the Mac Pro was that Apple purchased all the 1600MHz Penryn Xeons for launch. Any real rumour about any Apple's product launch is scant. There are hundreds upon hundreds of E5 Xeon based products on the market now, yet there was only a couple of things leaked ahead of time. It isn't just Apple's secrecy, it is Intel's too.
 
Rizzn said:
With the gap between high end notebook computers and low end Mac Pros diminishing, would anyone else suspect a significant price reduction in the next Mac Pro?
Click to expand...

Not expecting any price drops as the "gap" get's closed significantly when the new desktop tech emerges. After new Xeon's the gap is back to where it was before the mobile parts new tech closed in a bit. It is about platform and generation. The consumer is 2 years newer. If it was a level generational playing field 2012 vs. 2012 it is still no contest and, as always, laptops are 2-3 years behind. The new E5's are also more expensive than the X56xx were.

Rizzn said:
I think it's safe to say that high end computers are no longer as necessary for as wide a range of needs/professions. Peoples' workloads aren't growing nearly as fast as computer tech, for the vast majority of us at least.
Click to expand...


Speak for yourself. 12-core Mac Pro's are not enough and there is no "high end" laptop that comes even close to that. The laptops are just now getting Quad core. There are thermal reasons to consider.
 
derbothaus said:
Speak for yourself. 12-core Mac Pro's are not enough and there is no "high end" laptop that comes even close to that. The laptops are just now getting Quad core. There are thermal reasons to consider.
Click to expand...

"...for the vast majority of us at least."
 
Umbongo said:
Thunderbolt does not in anyway provide the increased efficiency that CPU, memory, I/O and graphics performance available on a desktop workstation does.
Click to expand...

Sure it does. Thunderbolt mostly removes the need for a huge all-encompassing desktop tower, designed to host disk arrrays, power hungry GPUs, and variety of peripheral interfaces. All these things can now be modularized as external TB devices. Your main system now needs to only contain CPU(s)/memory, and can be miniaturized way beyond the existing beastly Mac Pro enclosure. It may sound crazy, but the future "professional" desktop will look more like Mac Mini and less like Mac Pro.

Umbongo said:
I'd be disappointed if Apple continued to sell them in their current form as they could offer more features by changing form factor. Single and dual socket Intel Xeon workstations are a long way from being obsolete however.
Click to expand...

The only thing that would make some sense for Apple at this point is to re-design Mac Pro into a much smaller desktop form factor, which can also be rack-mounted into standard server racks. This way they can keep their (rapidly descreasing in numbers) Mac Pro user base happy, while at the same time plug the hole left by the past XServe discountinuation. We still use XServe blades in my company, and would love to have a continuity path for the "true" MacOS server platform.

However, I don't believe Apple has much interest in any of that. So I am not expecting much.
 
Rizzn said:
"...for the vast majority of us at least."
Click to expand...

I don't care about those users though.;)
And most Mac Pro users don't care about those users either.
Those users could get along in the walled garden of iDevices. And they should.

----------
hitekalex said:
Sure it does. Thunderbolt mostly removes the need for a huge all-encompassing desktop tower, designed to host disk arrrays, power hungry GPUs, and variety of peripheral interfaces. All these things can now be modularized as external TB devices. Your main system now needs to only contain CPU(s)/memory, and can be miniaturized way beyond the existing beastly Mac Pro enclosure. It may sound crazy, but the future "professional" desktop will look more like Mac Mini and less like Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

Those solutions suck at the moment though. Even the easy one (external RAID chassis) still with the sleeping HDD's. The GPU thing is currently a laugh and how many extra brick boxes do you want on your desk before it is a complete mess of 50.00 TB cables?

hitekalex said:
The only thing that would make some sense for Apple at this point is to re-design Mac Pro into a much smaller desktop form factor, which can also be rack-mounted into standard server racks. This way they can keep their (rapidly descreasing in numbers) Mac Pro user base happy, while at the same time plug the hole left by the past XServe discountinuation. We still use XServe blades in my company, and would love to have a continuity path for the "true" MacOS server platform.

However, I don't believe Apple has much interest in any of that. So I am not expecting much.
Click to expand...

Have you used 10.7 server? I expect nothing for the enterprise moving forward. They broke everything consistently ever since 10.5.8 Server. It is obvious they only care for your small startup business of 12 employees. The client OS will continue to gain robust features to integrate into corporate networks but OS X as a server product will go the way of the dodo. They already fixed SMB to wrap up resource forks negating any need for AFP.
 
derbothaus said:
Have you used 10.7 server? I expect nothing for the enterprise moving forward. They broke everything consistently ever since 10.5.8 Server. It is obvious they only care for your small startup business of 12 employees.
Click to expand...

Startup of 12 employees? LOL. My company is a multi-national financial institution, and we were one of the largest users of NeXT system back in the days. We ported our NeXT in-house trading backends to OS X, as it was the easiest migration path for developers.

We have been migrating some of these backends to Linux, but many still run on OS X, and we need a solid hardware platform to run them on for some years to come.

I could care less about file / print / email servers, or whatever else you think 10.7 sucks at.
 
hitekalex said:
Sure it does. Thunderbolt mostly removes the need for a huge all-encompassing desktop tower, designed to host disk arrrays, power hungry GPUs, and variety of peripheral interfaces. All these things can now be modularized as external TB devices. Your main system now needs to only contain CPU(s)/memory, and can be miniaturized way beyond the existing beastly Mac Pro enclosure. It may sound crazy, but the future "professional" desktop will look more like Mac Mini and less like Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

Yuck. No thanks.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)

Yuck ??!!?? Are you serious ? I would love not having to hear the 5 churning fans in my Mac Pro, no matter how much more quiet they are than the competition. Give me a small, quiet, modular box and I'm happy
 
initialsBB said:
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)

Yuck ??!!?? Are you serious ? I would love not having to hear the 5 churning fans in my Mac Pro, no matter how much more quiet they are than the competition. Give me a small, quiet, modular box and I'm happy
Click to expand...

You're right, I'd rather hear the fans from 3 less well designed boxes scattered all over my desk and floor taking up more space than my Mac Pro....
 
braindeadfool said:
You're right, I'd rather hear the fans from 3 less well designed boxes scattered all over my desk and floor taking up more space than my Mac Pro....
Click to expand...

I was just typing this comment ...

As someone who sold his Mac Pro (1,1) for a early 2011 15 inch MBP, I can tell you the MBP is easily louder on average than my Mac Pro (except on boot but then again on boot my Mac Pro would dim my lights :) ).

(I've tried to type this 2x already so if dupes show up, sorry)
 
initialsBB said:
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)

Yuck ??!!?? Are you serious ? I would love not having to hear the 5 churning fans in my Mac Pro, no matter how much more quiet they are than the competition. Give me a small, quiet, modular box and I'm happy
Click to expand...

Your MacPro must be broken cause mine is whisper quiet with 6 drives and 4780 in there.
 
hitekalex said:
Startup of 12 employees? LOL. My company is a multi-national financial institution, and we were one of the largest users of NeXT system back in the days. We ported our NeXT in-house trading backends to OS X, as it was the easiest migration path for developers.

We have been migrating some of these backends to Linux, but many still run on OS X, and we need a solid hardware platform to run them on for some years to come.

I could care less about file / print / email servers, or whatever else you think 10.7 sucks at.
Click to expand...

I did not mean "your" as in your company personally.
You are totally in the minority with trading backends running OS X. You can't expect many people to be like "Yeah, print and email and file and directory services suck but my NeXT ports are rocking"
I did not say Server outright sucks. I am implying that they have taken less and less an interest in extending features in the interest of making it more accessible to small business. I am happy you found a workhorse niche for your Xserves. I have some older Xserves running Linux and they are very well made boxes. That wasn't in question.
 
Some people like to have one quiet system that can be customized to handle everything quietly and efficiently, while others prefer to connect several small pieces wired together. Depending on what the needs are, that might mean a USB hub, Thunderbolt hub, daisy-chaining several devices via Firewire or perhaps just juggling wires and connections on the few ports available on laptops, Minis and whatever else. That's not for me. All my stuff is plugged in once and works seamlessly. Thank you, Mac Pro.
 
derbothaus said:
I did not say Server outright sucks. I am implying that they have taken less and less an interest in extending features in the interest of making it more accessible to small business. I am happy you found a workhorse niche for your Xserves. I have some older Xserves running Linux and they are very well made boxes. That wasn't in question.
Click to expand...

I don't disagree with you. Apple isn't interested in Enterprise period - their current lineup includes zero Enterprise-grade products. The point I was making is the niche for OS X servers is probably about the same size as the niche for Mac Pro.. So if Apple were to continue playing in this space - it would make sense to redesign Mac Pro form factor in a way that can satisfy both types of "high end" demand.

But again, my money would be on Apple completely exiting this space, which means dropping Mac Pro (like they dropped Xserve 2 years ago).

The top end iMacs and even i7 QuadCore Mini Server already get you very close to lower end Mac Pro in raw performance. Thunderbolt gets you expandability. If Apple continues supporting the small niche of its customers whose needs require Xeon class workstations - it will be purely out of the goodness of their heart.. As it makes very little business sense at this point.
 
Last edited:
wonderspark said:
Some people like to have one quiet system that can be customized to handle everything quietly and efficiently, while others prefer to connect several small pieces wired together. Depending on what the needs are, that might mean a USB hub, Thunderbolt hub, daisy-chaining several devices via Firewire or perhaps just juggling wires and connections on the few ports available on laptops, Minis and whatever else. That's not for me. All my stuff is plugged in once and works seamlessly. Thank you, Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

Agreed, and the periphs are what I fear the most about going to an iMac. I'm considering one only because I don't do as much freelance work, and don't need to expand my system much beyond the SSD+HDD config on a maxed out iMac, but the fear of one day needing to or wanting to expand beyond even that still lingers.
 
hitekalex said:
But again, my money would be on Apple completely exiting this space, which means dropping Mac Pro (like they dropped Xserve 2 years ago).
Click to expand...

I'm unfortunately starting to think this may be a more likely possibility than we have been thinking. :(
 
iNeedAMacPro said:
ledzeppelin said:
I am curious, which PC did you get after all of this?
:eek:

Page 10 in this discussion has info about it..I just bought components and build it myself.
Click to expand...

Sorry I didn't catch your decision on that self build....I have popped in and out of this thread periodically since I am waiting on the new MacPro meself...
Anyhoo, you can try the OS, Lion, MountainLion etc. on your build can't you.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back