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I know being expandable is important here but I am stunned by the fact that an iMac Pro actually comes with better SSD and Video Card for less money and you get
by Shivetya 7y ago
I know being expandable is important here but I am stunned by the fact that an iMac Pro actually comes with better SSD and Video Card for less money and you get a screen to boot!
256g SSD is shameful, I don't care what they were thinking. No Nvidia support mentioned so I know a few that just wrote it off for that oversight alone. They will probably hold out just to be sure but that was the hope for them and others.
While I was never in the market for a Mac Pro, though the iMac Pro is not out of the question jump over the iMac top tier, I never expected such low starting specs for SSD and Video at this price point. 580X is old, 2017 old. If this is what they are struck with by not using Nvidia they have done everyone a disservice.
* did the spec this out in 2017 when they announced it and just locked it in?
* edit : Wrong on price, iMac Pro is 1,000 less than base Mac Pro
- duskwuff 7y agoThe first step up from 256GB is 2x512GB, and there's configurations up to 2x2TB. My guess is that the 256GB configuration is meant for users that work primarily with data that's kept on network storage.
- kstrauser 7y agoRight. If you're working with multi-terabyte files that live on a NAS or an external directly-attached storage, the local drive is basically a cache of the OS plus whatever you're physically working on at that moment.
- cm2187 7y agoAnd it seems to come with 10gbe by default which is consistent with it.
- jandrese 7y ago2x 10GBE actually. Plus four 40Gbps Thunderbolt ports.
- cm2187 7y agoI find that link aggregation is pretty much useless and/or unstable. Not sure what good two 10gbe ports do. But seeing 10gbe becoming part of the standard spec is a really welcomed improvement. Not the least because it will drive prices down.
- Spooky23 7y agoWould be second interface be for a storage network?
- kbirkeland 7y agoI'm curious what your experiences are here. With enterprise-level networking equipment and LACP (802.3ad), I've never run into any weird issues.
- cm2187 7y agoI tried between two enterprise dlink switches, and also between a synology NAS and a dlink switch. Link aggregation in general only provides performance with multiple connections to multiple machines, so using link aggregation between one client (Mac) and one NAS will like result in zero performance improvement (the packets will only use one of the cables). It only makes sense if you have two or more NAS that you want to access simulatenously (or two or more clients accessing the same NAS, but that wouldn't be a use case for 2x 10gbe port on a client). Synology also supports balance slb bonding, which in theory goes around this single connection restriction. However I ran into some connection problems with some Windows clients. Never went to the bottom of them but they went away when I disabled the bonding. In any case, it is hard to saturate a 10gbe connection with a single NAS, unless it is packed with SSDs, which I wouldn't assume for mass storage. So I am not sure there is much value in aggregating the links in the first place.
- snuxoll 7y agoD-Link gear isn’t exactly what I’d judge networking standards on, they work I suppose but they’re hardly what I would install in even a small business office. I have multiple LACP bonds on my Juniper EX2200 at home working without issue, though the single stream limits you mentioned are the one thing LACP can’t fix.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TimTheTinker 7y agoIf you're a developer on a large (multi-GB) codebase, a beefy multicore system can be great for quick compile times, but hefty storage may not be a necessity.
- llampx 7y agoThere's no professional that would buy a machine with 256GB of storage. Let's call it what it is - a throwaway configuration meant to hit a price point.
- aczerepinski 7y agoA lot of people are disagreeing with you but I certainly concur. Sure, there are ways to work around it, but this is a $6,000 computer and you could get more storage than this in the 2004 iMac. I refuse to believe that meticulously emptying out your trash and downloads folder so that you can continue to squeeze by with 256GB is now acceptable for ultra high end, "I don't know a single person who can afford this" computing.
- wayoutthere 7y agoYou would if you had a storage appliance on a SAN, as the SAN is almost certainly faster than a single SSD. This is an extremely common setup for video production, so it’s not out of the target market at all.
- ianhowson 7y agoThere are plenty of cheap NVMe SSDs that can push 3.5Gbytes/sec (Samsung 970, Adata XPG). Even with dual 10Gbe NICs, you can't match that, nor the low access times of local storage. But I do agree that SAN storage is the norm here.
- chx 7y agoWe are past that now, new PCIe 4.0 SSDs just have been showcased along with the new AMD chips and they can do 5GBytes/s read and a bit above 4GB/s write (AMD is rumored to have invested in the R&D of the controller). You'd need 40 GbE to match one -- and EPYC Rome, also scheduled for this fall, will have 160 lanes allowing for dozens of them. You could very easily reach 100 GByte/s read which no network will match.
- deleted 7y ago
- ljw1001 7y agothat just shows that they put the tiny, essentially useless HD in to keep the base price artificially low.
- chrisseaton 7y agoIsn't providing a lower cost option a good thing?
- rwmj 7y agoBait and switch is a dark pattern, even if it's a common one.
- chrisseaton 7y agoIt's a product with a price tag and spec sheet anyone can find. Can't really see how they can be any more transparent.
- Spivak 7y agoIt's not a transparency issue, this dark pattern exists everywhere. You advertise "New X starting at $x" which is low enough to attract customers. But the thing you sell for $x is actually lacking in some small but important capacity making it unattractive for actual use. Then you sell an upgrade for the target price and customers are more willing to pay because it feels like they're paying a small premium for the thing they want. It's a neat psychology trick. Customers are far more receptive to upsells when they're the one doing the upselling.
- chrisseaton 7y agoWhere do you think the 'switch' is in that? At what point do they switch something from what was previously offered to something not expected? I don't think there is any switch. The specs are presented as up-front as any hardware spec is.
- jimbokun 7y agoOr is this meant to be the "I just want to buy my own disks separately model", with 256GB drive just there to allow OS to be pre-installed? EDIT: I see now there are only two internal drive bays, so that would mean tossing the 256GB that comes with it if you wanted to max out the internal storage.
- wtallis 7y ago> I see now there are only two internal drive bays, so that would mean tossing the 256GB that comes with it if you wanted to max out the internal storage. Or using some of the several PCIe slots to add lots more SSDs. It looks like the default configuration has enough spare PCIe slots and lanes to accommodate 8 M.2 SSDs in suitable risers. That can get you another 16TB for ~$1.8k (consumer-grade SSDs).
- duskwuff 7y agoYou can't buy drives separately. Storage is almost certainly raw flash, exposed as NVMe through the Apple T2 controller.
- imagetic 7y agoThey didn't mention storage expansion. This was a big red flag. While 250gb is fine for an OS drive, should I ever want to upgrade, what is the catch?
- machz 7y agoThe 256GB model is an old Apple hack to show a lower starting price (which rarely anyone would buy at this time) and which quickly goes up as you upgrade the components.
- _Codemonkeyism 7y agoAnd how many people here who claim to use a SAN for sure use a NAS is funny. From maintaining large image storage FC SANs with Apple xServe and IBM DS for some years this is no fun to administrate for peak performance and I would assume most smaller shops have NAS instead of SANs (no arguing larger shops have SANs as we did driving ten photo studios).
- _ph_ 7y ago256g of SSD would be appropriate under the conditions that a) this is a very basic and affordable configuration, so less than 3k and b) the machine would be user-expandable with NVMe drives or similar. Then you would get the minimal SSD just good enough to install the OS and put in third party storage to save money. And of course, you would want to be able to put in more than 4T of storage.
- jakobegger 7y agoWhy do you think that it's not user expandable? Surely you can just put a PCIe SSD card in the new Mac Pro and use that for storage?
- secabeen 7y ago256G of SSD is also fine if you store all of your data on a enterprise file array. Then the 256G only is used for OS, Applications and caching.
- mcphage 7y ago> 580X is old, 2017 old Is it? This site claims it came out in March 2019 but I definitely can't keep the various graphics card lines separate in my head: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-580x.c3398 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-580x.c3398
- old-gregg 7y agoYes, 580X is old (it's the same hardware as RX 480 from 2016) In fact, everything in that machine is old: the Xeons they use are rocking the Skylake core form 2015, with all of the recently discovered side-channel vulnerabilities. The upcoming AMD Threadripper 3 CPUs with PCIe4 would be a much better Pro offering. Clock-for-clock they are beating Skylake now, rumored to have up to 64 cores. Also, PCIe4-based RAID 0 arrays are pushing 15GB/sec transfer speeds IIRC.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- threeseed 7y agoDon't forget that Apple can see AMD and Intel's future roadmaps. AMD definitely has a superior offering with Threadripper 3 but we haven't seen what Intel is going to offer in comparison. And switching CPU manufacturers is never trial.
- addicted 7y agoIntel’s public roadmap has been highly unreliable. They’ve been delayed by years, and that was before the recent vulnerabilities were discovered. I’m not convinced about the value of their roadmaps. That being said, if you were only allowed to pick one platform to sell to your customers, in a machine which should last years, then Intel would definitely be the safer bet. It’s also the platform most of the software providers are likely gonna optimize first.
- strmpnk 7y agoI'm not sure why they'd consider Threadripper for the Mac Pro. This machine fits into Epic's target cases and could possibly live up to the asking price of the whole package at that point. Given how the rest of the mac ecosystem is going, I'd only expect the most stubborn of professional communities pick this up (film editing folks seems to still buy the Apple hype).
- drngdds 7y ago>I know being expandable is important here but I am stunned by the fact that an iMac Pro actually comes with better SSD and Video Card for less money and you get a screen to boot! I'm guessing it's just price discrimination. People who are in the market for a Mac Pro (or rather, their employers) are probably not price sensitive.
- threeseed 7y ago256GB SSD and base video card is fine. I would definitely look at a Mac Pro for software development (every minute counts) and if you're in that group there is simply no need for more storage or decent graphics.
- ljw1001 7y agomeh, i'm just starting to fool around with music editing and my 250 GB laptop is out of storage. Also, it's a three year old laptop and that's what it came with. They could have kept the stainless steel and given me a bigger drive. Who exactly is the intended user for this ultra-expensive, non-portable, box if it's too lame for hobbyists? This is just apple sticking a vacuum into their customers pockets, applying the same over-pricing policy that is now standard on their phones.
- shoo_pl 7y agoThat's silly to be honest. I am a developer myself and I can tell you Mac Pro or iMac Pro is a waste of money in every way imaginable. Look up barefeats benchmarks. Unless you have very specialised needs (like video editing) there is visible penalty when you increase the number of your cores. For every day usage 6-8 cores is what you should be aiming at, and preferably with highest clock speed possible. The more cores you have, the lower clocks get and the harder it is to sync cache between them. If your software cannot really use that much parallelisation it will be slower, not faster. For 99,99% devs spending cash on iMac Pro over iMac with i9 is waste of money and probably degraded performance. Mac Pro is even worse as you need to buy external monitor too.
- StillBored 7y agoWhat you say is true, but apple has generally been better at selecting processors from intel that aren't just re-bagged low clock xeons. It wouldn't surprise me if this thing is 5Ghz turbo on a couple cores. There was that 28core 5ghz beast intel was talking about (definitely not 300W though) and a few rumored W3175X, follow on.
- 7y ago
- jwr 7y agoFor development, I'm actually perfectly fine with 256GB SSD. And I don't care about the video card much at all. Still, I don't see this as a developer machine — I think an iMac Pro is a much better value proposition for developers, and in my case, where I really mostly care about single-threaded performance for interactive development in Clojure and ClojureScript, I'm looking at the iMac.
- noir_lord 7y agoOn the flip side over in Linux land I built an 8 core 16T desktop with 64GB of RAM and two 27” 4K HDR monitors for less than half the price of the base Mac Pro. Oh and it has an RTX2080 which beats an RX580 so badly it’s practically attempted murder. I bet the apple tax I really do (typing this on a 5th gen mini) but the base model is hilariously expensive and in a world where I can buy a 12 core/16T for 499 that beats a 1200 intel cpu obsolete before its released (and that 12C will drop straight in). They’ll sell, apple stuff always does but unless you need macOS’s for some reason I don’t see how.
- JBorrow 7y agoNot to come out over-defensive, but your base configuration (I guess?) doesn't include a GPU, I bet your caches are significantly smaller, and also no ECC ram. I also bet your storage is considerably slower.
- liquidify 7y agoECC ram can actually be a negative in certain use cases. Recording studios don't like the extra latency the ECC adds for MIDI for example.
- spamizbad 7y agoECC does not add latency and MIDI isn’t even sensitive to additional clock cycles in buffered memory (we are talking Nanoseconds here)
- psychometry 7y agoIt's almost like they assume everyone's going to upgrade the drive. Might as well just ship without any at all.
- myrandomcomment 7y agoMost of the people that are buying this will attached very large external storage as it is most likely going to be used as a video editing workstation.
- walterbell 7y agoIs video editing external storage more likely to be shared 10GbE NAS or direct attached Thunderbolt 3 with software RAID?
- smogcutter 7y agoNAS in any reasonably sized shop.
- walterbell 7y agoIs there a prevalent vendor/stack, e.g. Netapp, QNAP, FreeNAS, Unraid?
- altmind 7y agoNo prevalent stack AFAIK, but add Synology and WD Nas to the list.
- timc3 7y agoThe kinda places I see these going in would not touch either of those products. They are both seen as the most entry level of storage devices
- altmind 7y agoare we talking about workstation nas here? we have nothing but praise for synology performance and reliability. software is stable, tiering works flawlessly, expansion is inexpensive, web ui is good, ssh gives you a proper shell - do whatever operations on your nas locally, faster.
- _bxg1 7y agoThe branding distinction between "iMac Pro" and "Mac Pro" is just incredibly confusing.
- Redoubts 7y agoI think the Macbook and Macbook Air is much worse, but I suppose it's unclear if both are currently active lines.
- _bxg1 7y agoAt least in that case there are three letters of difference, instead of one :P
- rewgs 7y agoAgreed, and the solution is stupidly simple -- just swap the names! The whole thing is so un-Apple.
- _bxg1 7y agoI partly understood it with the "first"-gen New MacBook; it was experimental, and they wanted to give it this kind of minimalist-mystique of flipping the naming convention where this forward-looking device was now simply "The MacBook". But why does it even still exist now that the other ones have adopted most of its features?
- jrs95 7y agoYeah the pricing for the base model is insane. You can get a more powerful PC with 4x the storage for half the price. And you're right about Nvidia. I also stream on Twitch, was hoping I might be able to get one of these to replace my current PC. Without Nvidia there's no way.
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoIf you spec something with similar workstation grade hardware, you'll be in the same ballpark. Gaming PC hardware isn't comparable.
- snuxoll 7y agoI assume this uses ECC DDR4 which would at a minimum explain some of the price tag. That will set you back $500+ retail for 32GB alone, still don’t understand where the rest is going with a 8-core CPU and a RX580X though.
- chaostheory 7y agoMaybe the case makes up most of the price?
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoIt's an 8 core Xeon, plus a custom motherboard with dual 10gb, I would think that alone is probably about $2000.
- altmind 7y ago$5000 for imac pro(+applecare)? that is bonkers. $6000 is even more crazy. You can get more storage, better gpu, more options for network for much less. And you wont need to deal with apple geniuses to fix the issues.
- saagarjha 7y agoThose alternatives don’t run macOS.
- altmind 7y agoThese alternatives can run nvidia gpu :)
- cobalt 7y agoout of the box maybe
- alexis_fr 7y agoYep. Ubuntu lost by several orders of magnitude. They lost me with Unity, which seemed like something overly fancy which wasn’t required. Had they gone for stability instead of UI, they mighy have kept the users and developed a more suitable alternative to macOS. It really feels like a list battle. I’d pay $200 a year for an OS, especially an open-source one that doesn’t send my data to Amazon.
- throwaway2048 7y agoubuntu does not send your data to amazon, and has not for years now, the search plugin was pulled almost immediately.
- chaostheory 7y agoIf you don't like Ubuntu's GUI, it's baked into Windows 10 now. It's not ideal since you're missing out of the remaining good Mac apps (that aren't electron based) but it's a viable alternative now.
- 7y ago
- lambdasquirrel 7y agoEverything about the base specs are just good enough. I’m not defending it per se, but if you spec’ed the machine for any given purpose, whether software dev, or rendering, it’d probably raise the cost by at least $1-2k, and then you’d have the “real” machine. So, the reason the price looks egregious is because most of it is just base cost. This is a computer made for the engineers who’ve already “made it,” who are making that $500k a year and are looking for a Porsche over a Corvette.
- jahnu 7y agoWho and/or how many engineers are making $500k a year!?
- knicholes 7y agoDownload and install the app "Blind" to be shamefully informed of how many there are. Seemingly there is either a very large amount, or there are lots of SWEs who like to lie. Lots of it seem like stock options from FAANG and Uber.
- afarrell 7y agos/SWEs/Anonymous chat participants/
- ken 7y agoI've been on the internet. I know people lie. The OKCupid blog found that "There are consistently 4x the number of people making $100K a year than there should be" [1]. They also lie about their height, and what they look like. What reason should I have for trusting anonymous self-reported data in a category where people are known to exaggerate? [1]: https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-online-dating-a9e3990d6ae2 https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
- knicholes 7y agoFor OkCupid there's a clear motivation for exaggerating things like height, looks, and income. What motivation does one have for anonymously posting an exaggerated income? Are there really that many trolls who want to depress those making less than $500k/yr?
- jmull 7y ago> 256g SSD is shameful If you don’t want it, don’t buy it. There’s a pretty obvious general pro workflow for a configuration like this, where OS and apps are stored on the main drive and data is stored elsewhere. Where’s the shame in that?
- hinkley 7y agoThe entry level Macbook Pro is not the best bang for the buck. For about as long as I can remember, the best value in the neighborhood of $2950. So the 'good' Macbook gets cheaper due to inflation and not much else. Right now you can get 32 gig of RAM and the 512 SSD for around that mark. I'd probably throw in the video card upgrade for a personal computer, maybe not for a work one unless you're doing AI.
- busymom0 7y agoHonestly, I think the SSD size is okay. 512 would have been better but considering this is fully expandable, it's much cheaper to manually upgrade the SSD to whatever you like with after market SSDs anyway vs Apple charging more for it. Also the people who are looking to buy such a beast aren't going to be price sensitive. So this lets them price it at $5k.
- icedchai 7y ago256 gig is an embarrassment. My phone has 256 gigs. My laptop from 2011 had 256 gigs...
- mixmastamyk 7y agoMy disk array has 256 bigger units.
- endorphone 7y agoNeat. My new MacBook Pro has 256GB. I'm using ~133GB. That's XCode and the Xcode Beta, the full Office suite, Logic Pro, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IntelliJ, GoLand, Photoshop, Illustrator, a bunch of other Adobe apps, and on and on. When I'm at the desktop I use an external drive for dumping junk to, and for Time Machine backups. There is a point of diminishing returns, and given that most people don't have a giant Steam library on their Mac, 256GB is more than sufficient for a large number of users. And as many others have said, when you're working on professional data like video and audio it is almost always on an external array.
- icedchai 7y agoYou are right. It is sufficient for a large number of users. However, the Mac Pro is a high end workstation used by professionals, targeted for applications like high resolution video editing that require insane amounts of storage. Relatively speaking, storage is cheap. A high performance, 1 TB NVME drive can be had for under $350. This should be the base configuration on a high end workstation...
- dodobirdlord 7y ago> targeted for applications like high resolution video editing that require insane amounts of storage None of which is local. People have RAID boxes for that.
- wtallis 7y agoWhat benefit does a 1TB SSD have over 256GB for a video workstation that needs to connect to a 100+ TB array for the real work? If your video editing task can get by with even the 4TB maximum build-to-order option, then you're not in the target market.
- dylan604 7y agoI'm less concerned about the 256GB SSD. If this is a true Pro set up, then there's going to be very large storage media attached. The internal SSD is just to store the OS and apps. My main concern is the lack of a mention of Nvidia support. I'm very curious of the apparent bad blood between Apple and Nvidia. Were the GPU issues from the 2011 MacBook Pros to blame, or just one of the pieces of straw?
- TheOperator 7y agoWhat's wrong with a 256gb ssd? More than enough for plenty of use cases.