23 ms·

New Mac Pro Tech Specs

246 points by arunmib 7y ago

jaequery 7y ago
The biggest new feature im looking for is the removal of the touchbar. Until then, I’m going to just buy upgraded but used 2012-2013 macbook pros. It’s one of those sounds good on paper but useless in real life. Not only that, it’s a hindrance for coders like me who need to be able to hit the escape button and other top buttons quickly with force feedback.
- bradly 7y ago
  There is no touchbar included with new Mac Pro.
  - jonplackett 7y ago
    but there's never a bad moment to complain about the touch bar.
    - jaequery 7y ago
      Exactly!
    - thrwn_frthr_awy 7y ago
      This is the frustrating part. The amount of innovation pushed forward in desktop computing in the past 20 years and every once in a while they get some things wrong and people just can't believe it. Manufacturing and component commitments make "Oh just remove the touchbar" comments lacking of substance. Same with removing the headphone jack conversation–no one wants to talk about the trade-offs in making a phone waterproof whether they trade a headphone jack for a waterproof phone. Most people would, probably, which is why it is gone. Sorry, I'm new here and half the comments I read are bickering about some feature a someone doesn't think it optimal for how they use their device.
      - m45t3r 7y ago
        > Same with removing the headphone jack conversation–no one wants to talk about the trade-offs in making a phone waterproof whether they trade a headphone jack for a waterproof phone. This is not true at all. There are multiple Android phones that have waterproof and they have headphone jacks.
        thrwn_frthr_awy 7y ago
        What did they sacrifice for that? Nothing is free and those plugs are large.
        tstrimple 7y ago
        They replaced the headphone jack with a barometric vent which other phone manufacturers just put in a different location. Apple didn't have to get rid of the port. They decided to get rid of the port because they knew that their users would buy the phone anyway and then have more of a reason to buy AirPods. There is plenty of space in that corner though. Some guy wanted to see if he could add the headphone jack back and was pretty successful for a hand crafted solution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA
        dpkonofa 7y ago
        That is nonsense. He butchered that phone and definitely, 100% ruined the waterproofing function of the phone. Additionally, I'm curious which manufacturers you're speaking of because, the last time this type of comment came around, there was a distinct response of "most other phones don't include a barometric vent".
        tstrimple 7y ago
        All waterproof phones with barometers would include similar technology. Phones like the Galaxy S7 which was also waterproof and which also had a headphone jack. The video is an individual messing around with a dremel and soldering gun. Of course it's not waterproof at that point, that was never his goal. It's ludicrous to believe that Apple had to remove the headphone jack when other companies showed it can be done just fine without and others have shown just how much space is still available in the phone. Your assertion that it had to be done isn't supported by evidence.
  - jaequery 7y ago
    my bad, I read the title as a new MacBook Pro. Carry on.
    - wilg 7y ago
      OK, but there's a pretty big illustration of a desktop computer. Not sure how you missed that one.
- burnte 7y ago
  This is about the desktop. not mobile machines. The predecessor to this was the trashcan, which had no touchbar.
- 29_29 7y ago
  I'm not sure why people are downvoting you. I hate this feature on HN. I cant even read what you said.
  - jaequery 7y ago
    It looks like any slight mention of negativity towards Apple are being downvoted. The force is strong with this one.
    - dewey 7y ago
      No, it's not that. It's that you are posting about some unrelated gripe with another product line that's off-topic in this Mac Pro thread. As for the other comments complaining about downvoting, it's discouraged in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - 29_29 7y ago
        I still think we should try to be nice. At a minimum. She got downvoted again? Let's try to be more welcoming.
  - PhantomGremlin 7y ago
    If you're logged in, all you need to do is click on the "9 hours ago" field of the comment. That takes you to the individual comment, fully visible. So it's only one extra click to read. This unfortunately doesn't work if you're not logged in.
- htfu 7y ago
  Surely if esc is important to you you shouldn't be using the esc button as esc in the first place? Caps is both my esc and my ctrl and I wouldn't have it any other way. If f buttons are important just configure your fn-as-hyper+1 so do f1, etc. Checkout karabiner and hammerspoon.
kristianp 7y ago
Still no Nvidia cards?
- olliej 7y ago
  It’s seems like they went all in on AMD a few years ago, so I assume they have a bunch of long term agreements that lower the price? It’s more irksome to me that they don’t have a high spec non-pro desktop. Eg I want high end consumer desktop GPUs, not high end mobile GPUs (afaict that’s essentially what iMacs use). But my alternative appears to be “pro” GPUs with their absurd - for a consumer at least - markups and Xeons, which no one really wants ;)
  - gotoeleven 7y ago
    Mac Mini with an eGPU might be a decent option.
    - skunkworker 7y ago
      I'm close to going dedicated windows/ubuntu computer with an nvidia card for ML & gaming and a mac mini hooked into a KVM on the same screen. But not having allowed nvidia drivers in 10.14+ is a disappointment.
      - McAtNite 7y ago
        I’m currently running a VM with a GPU passed through and moonlight on my Mac for gaming. It’s really nice, my old MPB isn’t doing any real work so it easily lasts for hours if on battery, and the VM doesn’t eat up all the resources on my server so I’m free to do whatever I want to with everything else. My only real issue is I occasionally get slowdowns while playing which causes things to stutter. This is most like partly to blame on using WiFi for the Mac and partly to blame on using only a single port NIC for the server.
  - lostgame 7y ago
    eGPUs have been supported for a couple years now. Grab a Mac Mini, an eGPU, max out the RAM, add an external hard drive or two, boom, your ‘pro consumer’ Mac for about $2k.
proee 7y ago
This page would look better if they used high-quality 3d animated renders instead of the simplified 2D-graphics. Someone on the design team thought this was a great idea? It looks unpolished and out of place (in comparison to other well-done Apple product pages).
- 1123581321 7y ago
  There are already two other pages about the Mac Pro (linked at the bottom) with the more luxurious consumer feel to them. I think the functional look of the flat art is totally appropriate for such a text-heavy page—and the illustrations still animate seamlessly as the user scrolls.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > and the illustrations still animate seamlessly as the user scrolls Not on my computer if you scroll too fast :/
    - designcode 7y ago
      Maybe time for an upgrade to a Mac Pro then ?
    - flattone 7y ago
      Similarly my computer doesn't work if I put it too close to a raging fire pit.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        Fortunately, I don't do that too often.
- reificator 7y ago
  Honestly if they're chained to this godawful scroll-based animation garbage they keep pumping out, I'd much rather the understated 2D graphics they're using here. The 3D looks incredibly amateurish to me.
baroffoos 7y ago
The only shocking things here are the lack of ports. Only 2 usb A and 2 usb c ports. Its basically required to use a usb hub on this device since once you plug in a proper mouse and keyboard you only have the usb c ports left
- servercobra 7y ago
  I don't think they're expecting you to plug in a "proper" keyboard and mouse since it comes with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Plus it appears you get another 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports on the front as well.
  - benburleson 7y ago
    Which is insane.. do people really use the wireless capability of their keyboard or mouse? Especially when you can't use your freaking mouse when it's charging? Serious insanity. Edit to add: of course I know people use those keyboards... I meant are people actually moving with them in ways that makes the wireless capability useful? Do most users not stay in a pretty close proximity the whole time?
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      > do people really use the wireless capability of their keyboard or mouse? Yes. Why wouldn't you? Why do you think the downsides are? > Especially when you can't use your freaking mouse when it's charging? I charge it for about ten minutes every month while I'm out. It doesn't interfere with anything.
      - benburleson 7y ago
        The downside is requiring charging or batteries. I just have a hard time justifying the hassle when I have no need to make those devices wireless. And my battery always (when I had one) died mid-day, so it forced a work break, which isn't always bad anyway
        7y ago
rosege 7y ago
I wonder what a maxed out one will cost
- bobwaycott 7y ago
  I’d guess around the price of a small sedan.
  - justinator 7y ago
    or a mid-range road bike.
    - hellisothers 7y ago
      Or 2 months rent
      - sambroner 7y ago
        Where are you living? I hope it’s lovely!
        ansible 7y ago
        Two months rent for a converted closet in SF will get you some decent PC hardware. Not decent Mac hardware though.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  The Rolls Royce model of pricing: "If you have to ask, you can't afford it".
  - rosege 7y ago
    ha yep I definitely can't afford it!
  - octomiao 7y ago
    This is how I feel when boston dynamics released spotty.
jasoneckert 7y ago
At the base configuration (single 8-core Xeon W) with 256GB SSD and 32GB RAM for $6000, it's about twice what it should be. I could build a faster dual Xeon Silver series with more cores, Nvidia graphics, much larger SSD and 32GB RAM in a nicer case for around $3000. So, that Apple logo and macOS are the other $3000.
- jasoneckert 7y ago
  I love how any post I make that is critical of something Apple always gets me some negative points here on Hacker News - I actually made a point of showing my tech class this social phenomenon a few weeks back and we had a good discussion that explored possible reasons why it happens.
  - skellera 7y ago
    No one is going to disagree that you could build the same thing for cheaper and the point has been made over and over again. Apple isn’t selling for your use case.
    - mseidl 7y ago
      It's actually reasonably priced compared to other workstations. Plus, I'm pretty sure you get the accelerator card which is pretty amazing.
  - pram 7y ago
    Perhaps people would like to discuss the product, and not how everyone can cobble together a 5x more Powerful Rig from random Newegg parts?
  - kirstenbirgit 7y ago
    A similar rig from HP or Lenovo is going to cost you more.
  - temptemptemp111 7y ago
    The censors are just shooting themselves in the foot at this point. So transparent.
siquick 7y ago
What are people doing that require such high-powered desktops?
- empath75 7y ago
  Professional film editing.
- BlueToth 7y ago
  8K movie editing
- burnte 7y ago
  Advanced video, 3d rendering, etc.
- readbeard 7y ago
  I am working on a project right now where I am rendering atmospheric effects (lots of clouds). Even on a 12-core workstation, it takes a very long time to render a single frame to even be able to get a good idea as to what things will look like, so I'm doing a lot of changing something, waiting… changing something, waiting. Most of the final rendering can be offloaded to a farm, but being able to quickly and interactively get a good idea of what something will look like is extremely helpful and time-saving. Right now, I'm doing some of the work on an EC2 instance with 48 cores (96 vCPU) to help with this—cost-effective for occasional use, but I can certainly see the appeal of a machine like this. And for task like compositing where you need access to a bunch of huge source files, or where maybe you have a specialized video I/O device you need to use, running in the cloud might not be practical at all.
  - kristianp 7y ago
    I'm curious, is gpu-based rendering not an option for you?
    - readbeard 7y ago
      Not for the renderer I am using (Terragen), which has specialized features for rendering skies. I do normally use GPU rendering when it is an option though.
initself 7y ago
Looks like a company finally listened.
- 29_29 7y ago
  no NVIDIA cards its useless to me
- _ph_ 7y ago
  Very little. Yes, they finally made a Mac Pro that is extensible and up to date. Basically everything the 2008 Mac Pro already was. On the downside, they doubled its price so for the non-Hollywood customer, there still isn't a desktop machine. Even 3k is much for a deskop machine, but I had set some money aside to get a Mac Pro, if it had started around its predecessor price. There was even a time in the past, when a Mac Pro would start below 2k and consequently was very popular.
  - rangibaby 7y ago
    > on the downside, they doubled its price so for the non-Hollywood customer, there still isn't a desktop machine. Even 3k is much for a deskop machine I think there were more benefits to an ordinary user to getting a tower in the past then there are now. In the past even a hobby or prosumer photographer would see a big benefit from getting a Mac Pro. Nowadays an iMac or Macbook Pro with very normal specs can edit large RAW files without breaking a sweat. The extra HDD bays on a Mac Pro were great because you didn't have to mess around with USB2 (cheap but slow) or FW (fast but expensive). Now you have USB3 (cheap and fast) or TB (very fast but expensive). I guess that leaves upgradeable graphics cards, at this point it is easier to just get a PC or try a hackintosh build if you want a beast GPU for the latest games. > There was even a time in the past, when a Mac Pro would start below 2k and consequently was very popular. 2006: Mac Pro base model: $2,199 ($2,800 in 2019 dollars) 30" Cinema Display: $3,299 ($4,198) Soundsticks (Of course!) $169.99 2019: iMac 27" 5K base model: $1,799 iMac Pro base model: $4,999
    - _ph_ 7y ago
      Internal storage is a huge thing. I have external storage attached to my 27" iMac, but it is not completely reliable (disks get ejected occasionally) and completely beats the purpose of an elegant desktop machine. So I really would like a machine with several drive spaces, especially if I can access them. I could have lived reasonably by upgrading the internal storage of my iMac, if there was any way for me to access it. Graphics cards is another thing, but also the plain ability to clean fans when they start to clog up. The limitations of the iMac are amplified by Apple making the interior inaccessible. Finally, while the screen of the iMac is great, I would like to have a larger screen. So there are plenty of reasons still to have a bit more than the iMac can deliver.
lliamander 7y ago
Slightly off-topic, but who here uses a HEDT (high-end desktop) or workstation computer for software development? Does it make a significant difference in comparison with a standard business laptop?
- Skunkleton 7y ago
  I use a desktop, not sure I would call it high end (32 GiB, 6 cores, nvme). I do lots of large builds of things like linux kernels. I doubt any laptop would be able to keep up simply due to thermals.
  - lliamander 7y ago
    Yeah, what's considered high-end does shift, although that still sounds higher end than most laptops. I think a typical "high-end" desktop is one that has more cores, memory channels, and PCIe lanes than a typical "mainstream" desktop (whatever that happens to be at the time). Support for ECC memory is also sometimes a requirement. I use a 3 year-old laptop with 32GB of RAM, an SSD, and a dual-core i7 (U-series) processor. It's reasonably efficient. I think the amount of RAM and the IO speed of my SSD remove most of the hardware bottlenecks I face. However, I would like compile times to be faster, I do sometimes notice applications hanging, and IntelliJ (we use Java at work) seems limited on how many projects I can run efficiently in a single workspace. I'm just wondering whether a workstation-grade laptop (Dell Precision or Thinkpad P-series) would be a sufficient upgrade, or investing in a desktop would be worthwhile at some point.
    - virtualwhys 7y ago
      > I'm just wondering whether a workstation-grade laptop (Dell Precision or Thinkpad P-series) would be a sufficient upgrade, or investing in a desktop would be worthwhile at some point. Yes, either 17" machine offers an 8-core CPU and plenty of thermal capacity (i.e. larger chassis than their 15" equivalents), along with more than enough memory (128GB), and in Dell's case, a boatload of HD slots (4, run in whatever RAID config you want). These are desktop replacements, heavy (as in 6.5+ lbs), with 240W power bricks , so you'll probably want them to stay on the desk for most of the time. I'm personally looking to replace my old Dell Precision with a 15" 5540, maxed out. For Scala work the extra cores help reduce build times, probably the same for Java.
phillco 7y ago
And next to each component, "Market Price"
chx 7y ago
It is still not shipping so there's not really a reason not to use a Threadripper for lower price AND higher performance. Or even Epyc chips. We know the Titan Ridge Thunderbolt controllers work on AMD motherboards. Alpine Ridge had firmware problems but Titan Ridge is fine.
- bitL 7y ago
  You can likely Hackintosh it with a 64 core Threadripper, WRX80 8-channel board, 4TB ECC LRDIMM and run circles around Mac Pro for half the price. Ryzen seems to work quite well with the latest macOS.
- AceJohnny2 7y ago
  Apple & Intel are deeply entwined, both at a technical and a contractual level. There's a reason Apple has never made an AMD computer.
  - chx 7y ago
    Well, AMD had nothing to offer really especially in the low power space where Apple mostly is but Sharkstooth and Rome so throughly trounces Intel high end it's not even funny. (Yes, Sharkstooth is not yet out but already the Ryzen 3000 chips make a joke out of the lower end of Intel Xeons and leaking benchmarks paint an interesting picture of the upcoming Threadripper 3000s.)
- nwrk 7y ago
  Same. No Ryzen :(
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  Motherboard design takes time — and Apple would also need AMD firmware and software support. If Apple want to go AMD it would be next year's model at the very earliest.
  - chx 7y ago
    Eh, no. Google has been testing Rome for a long time before official announcement, this Mac Pro could easily have been the launch customer for Threadripper 3000.
Corrado 7y ago
I think they should include Apple Care for their professional equipment. This won't put any any more money in Apple's pocket but I could see it being another differentiator and a good bit of PR, especially to all of those price arguments. Plus, it's only $300 and I'm sure Apple could suffer that "loss" on a $6,000 - $30,000 purchase.
- pier25 7y ago
  I've always argued that for the prices that Apple charges Apple Care should be included in all its products. The first Apple computers I bought lasted for years and I never thought Apple Care was necessary, but since the fiasco with the 2011 MBP and the butterfly keyboards I'm not buying another of its products without Apple Care. Yes, Apple ended up doing the right thing in both cases but it took years after the problems started and a couple of class action lawsuits.
  - Marsymars 7y ago
    I don't think Apple should necessarily include coverage for user-caused damage as standard, but having only a single-year warranty on manufacturer defects is kinda shameful for a premium product. I expect premium products across most product categories to carry a three or five year warranty as standard. A single-year warranty is in general an indicator that a) the manufacturer doesn't have faith in reliability past the first year and b) the manufacturer is begrudgingly just meeting the minimum standard for warranties in most jurisdictions. Even if neither of these are the case, the optics aren't good.
    - Corrado 7y ago
      This is a really good thought and I would be OK with Apple extending the warranty on "professional" products instead of full Apple Care.
    - curt15 7y ago
      >A single-year warranty is in general an indicator that a) the manufacturer doesn't have faith in reliability past the first year and b) the manufacturer is begrudgingly just meeting the minimum standard for warranties in most jurisdictions. Even if neither of these are the case, the optics aren't good. Dell's Precision workstations come with 3 years warranty, upgradable to 5 years coverage with on-site service. There is no reason Apple can't match that.
joncrane 7y ago
Why do the different processor quantities have different base frequencies (higher for lower CPU count) but the same "Turbo Boost" frequency of 4.4 GHz? If you ran Folding@Home on one of these, would you get sustained 4.4GHz clock speeds?
- sedatk 7y ago
  I guess Turbo Boost works only for short intervals, not continuously.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- bgentry 7y ago
  Thermal limits. Lots of cores in a tiny space will generate lots of heat under a full workload. They can do full speed in short bursts (or when only one core is working hard) but can’t sustain full performance indefinitely without damaging themselves. The more cores in a small space, the lower the clock speed they can sustain for long periods of time.
- jannes 7y ago
  Intel's Turbo Boost specification only allows for a few seconds of boosting. Of course you can overclock (letting it run longer than stock settings) if you have better cooling or if you won the silicon lottery. Furthermore, I think the advertised Turbo Boost 3.0 frequency is single-core only. It will not increase all core frequencies to that level unless there is sufficient thermal headroom. https://segmentnext.com/2017/10/11/intel-removing-all-core-turbo-boost-from-its-specifications-page/ https://segmentnext.com/2017/10/11/intel-removing-all-core-t...
hinkley 7y ago
This thing is pulling almost 12 amps by itself. Add a couple monitors and hopefully you have recent vintage wiring in your office...
- na85 7y ago
  That'll be a peak amperage; it won't draw 12 amps by itself. Even if it did, most displays pull less than 1A, so theoretically you have room for 3 more displays on your standard 15A North American residential circuit. Any office should be on 20A circuits, anyways.
  - JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
    That would work great if you had nothing else in your office... A coffee pot pulls 5-8 amps. Laser printer 3-5 amps while printing. Stereo, lamps, etc., it all adds up pretty fast.
    - na85 7y ago
      I sure hope your office isn't all on one circuit! This conversation reminds me of the movie Apollo 13: "You can't run a vacuum cleaner on 12 amps, John!"
- Marsymars 7y ago
  Presumably that's with the dual-GPU, 28-core processor model under full load (and the MPX module drawing its full 500W, among other peripherals). An office with this kind of workload is going to require robust wiring regardless of which particular workstations are installed.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    And robust air conditioning, too. Source: worked in an office full of dual-GPU deep learning workstations. We had to bring in those gigantic rental portable conditioners in the summer, and re-do pretty much all of the existing wiring in the office, because electricians who installed the first iteration could not conceive of having two dozen ~900W workstations cranking away 24x7x365 in a single open office plan.
jagger27 7y ago
I'm bummed out that there's no sign of Navi cards as an option. The 5700 series seems right at home in this machine. I'm still holding out for a Navi product from Apple. There's some mention of support in the Kexts but alas my 5700 XT does not work in Mojave or Catalina (Hackintosh).
- frou_dh 7y ago
  > The 5700 series seems right at home in this machine. Isn't the Navi architecture gaming-focused? Vega might still be superior for the "compute" workloads of pro apps. Edit: Although I guess the base-spec comes with an ancient Polaris card, not Vega. Cheap bastards.
peignoir 7y ago
I wish I could afford these, but I’m really curious to test a hackintosh with threadreaper 3 following what they did on Linus tech tips with a virtualized PC and Mac running at the same time on the same monitor https://youtu.be/EozeSDeV3Vo https://youtu.be/EozeSDeV3Vo
- Pmop 7y ago
  Hackintosh allows you to have OS X on better hardware but these days it's really unsafe, due to the possibility of Apple going full ARM in the near future, dropping all the support for x86.
  - cosmotic 7y ago
    Considering they just spent possibly 6 years designing this crazy expensive x86 beast, I don't think support is going to drop that hard that fast to warrant avoiding x86.
  - dewey 7y ago
    > but these days it's really unsafe How is it different than buying a Mac now? It also won't upgrade itself to an ARM processor and they'd need to support existing macOS installations for a while anyway.
  - tiew9Vii 7y ago
    That logic is a bit strange. When / if Apple stop support for x86 any Apple computer purchased before they go ARM will essentially be end of life. If you do not want to build a hackintosh because of ARM in the future you also do not want to buy a Apple x86 computer today.
    - csande17 7y ago
      It seems like a Hackintosh would actually be the better choice if you're worried about Apple moving to ARM, since you could run Windows or Linux on it without relying on Apple for driver support.
  - 7y ago
hartator 7y ago
I like it. You pay the Apple tax for sure but the design makes sense and is nice. I wonder thought when they are gonna to announce the new MacBook 16”. It has been rumored a lot.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
m0zg 7y ago
And all of that will be pretty laughable compared to the stuff AMD is releasing later this year.
- dragontamer 7y ago
  The AMD Vega II appears to be a higher-end Radeon VII except with 32GB of HBM2 (instead of 16GB like the Radeon VII). So not really. AMD VegaII Duo (the dual-Vega II) is going to be far more powerful than anything AMD releases in the near future. 64GB of HBM2, 28+ TFlops single precision, etc. etc. CPU-wise, probably. Xeon W 28-core is still quite good from Intel however, with AVX 512 support and such.
  - snvzz 7y ago
    I would think he's referring to Zen2-based Threadripper.
    - m0zg 7y ago
      Not just Threadrippers, but better EPYCs as well. More PCIe lanes, more cores, cheaper (hence higher profit margin), and the only thing you really lose is AVX512 which hardly any software besides Intel MKL makes use of anyway.
      - snvzz 7y ago
        Keep in mind EPYC are not workstation CPUs. They can be used like that, but they are not made for that. Different tradeoffs.
        m0zg 7y ago
        Yes, lower frequency, more cores, more PCIe lanes, more throughput. Sounds good to me, as long as they use SKUs that aren't too low in frequency.
bfrog 7y ago
Doesn't a single thread ripper basically slay this thing?
- crazydoggers 7y ago
  Different market segment. The Mac Pro has 64 PCI lanes, and eight PCI slots, along with supporting 1.5TB memory. 3900x for example only has 24 pci lanes and 128GB memory support. Edit: My bad... I misread thread ripper for Ryzen for some reason
  - CarVac 7y ago
    The 3900X is not a threadripper.
  - ericd 7y ago
    The 2nd gen Threadripper has 64 PCI lanes, FWIW, haven't seen specs for 3rd gen yet.
- mister_hn 7y ago
  Yes, The Epyc 2 definitively destroys this one as appeared in multiple benchmarks.
- trynumber9 7y ago
  The Current 2990WX is typically slower. For example, rendering is a strong point of Zen: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13748/the-intel-xeon-w-3175x-review-28-unlocked-cores-2999-usd/7 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13748/the-intel-xeon-w-3175x-... but here it is behind. The Mac Pro's Xeon W would be slower than that tested Xeon W in multithread but faster in lightly threaded workloads. But AMD said new workstation chips are coming in November. This could be up to 64-core Threadripper chips with PCIe4 support. Though we have no idea on the clock rates so it is possible these Xeon W CPUs may still come out ahead in lightly threaded performance, especially with AVX-512.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  You'd be surprised how married effects houses can be to their chip architectures. Attempts to switch can sink you when you realize that some technical artist wrote some extremely critical plugin or extension that's super fast only because it uses Intel only or AMD only instructions. My own theory, Apple has probably already spoken with clients like effects houses long ago. Since these are the clients that will generate most of the revenue with this product, I'd wager they've put it together almost especially for them. If anyone else wants to buy one, gravy, but I'd bet Apple's money comes mainly from clients in those very specialized segments. My guess is, they won't be doing anything those clients don't want them doing with that platform. Apple made that mistake once already, and it sounds like they are done chasing the larger market with their pro platform. Basically, They're going the HP workstation route and just becoming an Intel distributor. Only they're trying to distribute components in a bit more aesthetically pleasing package.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
A great machine to be sure for high end content creation but Apple is not chasing the deep learning dev market because of the lack of CUDA. That market is better served by Linux boxes with appropriate GPUs for TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc. support.
- reilly3000 7y ago
  Bingo. Although it looks clear that there is a lot of movement towards broader support of AMD in DL via ROCm: https://rocm-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deep_learning/Deep-learning.html https://rocm-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deep_lea...
  - atemerev 7y ago
    A reference FFT implementation in CUDA: about 150 lines of code. A reference FFT implementation in ROCm: about 1200 lines of much uglier code using advanced C++ idioms. So no, it is not a replacement, again. Elegance matters.
- Uehreka 7y ago
  Nvidia really has the GPU market under their thumb. It would be one thing if their pitch was "We're not as good as AMD for games, but we've got CUDA for professionals and researchers!". At least that way there could be some sort of segmentation and I could tell people shopping for GPUs to "get the right one for what you want to do!" But that's not the world we live in. Nvidia's pitch is "We make the only hardware that runs the framework used by almost all deep learning research and media creation software, and we're also the only folks operating at our level when it comes to high-end video game graphics, and if our high-end cards are too expensive for you, we have cheaper ones. And when our competitors start to think they can catch up, we'll drop RTX and Tensor Cores on their face." AMD seems stuck on "We have great value middle-to-high-tier video game graphics cards" at best. I have no idea how they can get out from under that rock. They've been turning the CPU market upside down and smashing Intel's once proud "near monopoly" status. Nvidia seems like exactly the kind of prideful company that would be poised to fall, but I have no idea how AMD could make it happen.
thesquib 7y ago
What happens when Apple drops Intel and these become obsolete? I wonder if you can even boot Linux and use the internal storage...
- _ph_ 7y ago
  The Mac Pro obviously shows that Apple isn't planning to completely drop Intel (as in x86) anytime soon. At minimum, new OS releases are going to support x86 for the next 10 years.
lwansbrough 7y ago
Kind crazy you can’t configure this thing with an NVMe drive even if you’re ready to drop $30,000 on it.
- pram 7y ago
  The storage is NVMe, though? All of Apple's recent SSD storage is.
- nico_h 7y ago
  Pretty sure the default storage is NVMe Plus you can put some pci NVMe card the can support up to 4 NVMe slots
Hamuko 7y ago
The starting 256 GB SSD sticks out like a sore thumb on a machine as expensive as this. The barebones Mac Mini comes with 128 GB and 6-core Mini with 256 GB. And upgrading it is gonna cost an arm and a leg.
- sudhirj 7y ago
  Depends entirely on workflow. A lot of shops will have all of their stuff on a 10G NAS share, so you’re actually forbidden from copying to and from your computer because it’s just stupid and sometimes slower to do so.
  - _ph_ 7y ago
    Still, it isn't as if 1T of SSD is expensive. So if they set the entry price to 6k, 1T of SSD would be an appropriate minimum.
    - sudhirj 7y ago
      Yeah, that’s what they give on the iMac Pro as base, so it’s not like they’d never do it. But it’s clear they’re deliberately under configuring the base to force complete customisation, which is what I assume the kinds of people buying this will want. I’d go so far as to say they should sell it without a default hard disk if they could - let the buyers make the choice. I’m guessing it’s defaulting to the smallest disk just for optics. This is clearly a start with the skeleton and build it yourself kind of machine, which is as it should be. It just looks odd when the selector defaults to the lowest available option on every selection.
- whywhywhywhy 7y ago
  "If you can afford the Mac Pro then you can afford the extra storage" as the Apple bloggers keep saying....
  - grecy 7y ago
    More like "If you can afford the Mac Pro, you probably already have many, many Terra bytes of storage arrays"
dev_dull 7y ago
> 802.11ac Wi-Fi wireless networking Surprised there's no 802.11ax/wifi 6. Why not use the same wifi chips as the iPhones?
- mihaaly 7y ago
  perhaps it is not that mobile
  - mseidl 7y ago
    Not with that attitude.
  - scep12 7y ago
    It does have wheels, which is an upgrade on mobility from the previous generation.
- acdha 7y ago
  Think about what you're asking: this thing uses a high-end server board with a bunch of exotic specs. Those things take time to design, validate, and test — don't forget that reliability under sustained load is a hard requirement in that market — so adding extra chips isn't done on a whim. Then you have to ask how many people are using this for something where the performance hit of using WiFi is acceptable — it has two 10Gb ethernet ports so you can get an idea for the kind of usage they're targeting.
jaynetics 7y ago
"Maximum altitude: tested up to 16,400 feet (5000 meters)" Does anyone know how or where they do this testing? Seems quite bothersome to do.
- borgel 7y ago
  Might happen in a thermal/vac chamber. Seems easier than non artificial options!
- nickserv 7y ago
  Bolivia's capitalLa Paz is at more than 3500m, El Alto in the same metropolitan area is at more than 4000m. Not saying this is where they were tested (I have no idea), just pointing out that these altitudes are not necessarily far from major metropolitan areas and international airports.
- ghego1 7y ago
  This made me wonder, why is max altitude a limit? Is it due to cooling (less air)? I'd be glad to know more if anyone has some insights
  - Shaddox 7y ago
    I'm not a specialist, I just read up about it some time ago so take what I say with a grain of salt. Basically there's two issues affecting electronic chipsets at high altitude : air density and cosmic rays. The reduction of the air density can mess with the cooling system. Cosmic rays contain radioactive particles which can cause soft failures to occur in solid state electronics. EDIT : Found an interesting paper about it with more details : https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6046/529f05a65e182ac9323ef8eb26b2075d0e13.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6046/529f05a65e182ac9323ef8...
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Low humidity -> static. Lower air density -> less heat transfer, so components run hotter. Air pressure may affect disk drives and other sealed / fluid-dynamic systems. Capacitors and other electronics might possibly be affected. Apparently displays and printers (liquid ink) are strongly affected. Arcing increases with elevation. https://highaltitudelife.com/electronics.htm https://highaltitudelife.com/electronics.htm https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=24254 https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=24254 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derating
cgb223 7y ago
Is this saying that I can have 1.5 TERABYTES of RAM? That’s wild What’s the professional use case for that?
- QuinnyPig 7y ago
  Slack.
  - kirstenbirgit 7y ago
    Well, barely.
  - Bantros 7y ago
    Underrated comment
  - ksahin 7y ago
    You made my day.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jansan 7y ago
  Probably 8K video processing.
- remus 7y ago
  Running in-memory databases is a common use case for chewing through loads of RAM.
- amai 7y ago
  Excel on Big Data
imagetic 7y ago
For that price, it should come with Apple Care, Final Cut Pro X, and Logic Pro X included.
SCdF 7y ago
So apart from the pleasure of being able to use MacOS, I presume it will be cheaper to just put these parts together myself, yes? If the form factor is just a tower, well I can buy a tower myself. What is the advantage of paying for Apple a (presumed) bunch of money to build it for you? If you don't want the hassle of building a PC (which is fair) there are an endless supply of places that will put PCs together for you, with (I'm presuming) a much smaller cut than Apple.
- htfu 7y ago
  The amount of time I’ve had to fiddle with my audio/video editing beast of a hackintosh tower is quite insane really. Both necessary and well worth it, as Apple simply wasn’t selling anything appropriately powerful for like five years (also why x99 was so tricky until more recently - no equivalent hardware of theirs), but by any other calculation if you actually put the value of your own time anywhere close to any professional scale (or see it as a hobby) it will very likely end up costing way more to do yourself.
  - arvinsim 7y ago
    I could understand that you would want a proper Mac for work. But I think that time is well worth spending on a personal machine, especially when it is easier nowadays.
- Synaesthesia 7y ago
  Actually those server boards and CPU's from Intel are pretty darn expensive, as well as the fancy RAM etc. For it's specs, I think technically it is an OK price, but obviously for almost all other purposes you can custom build a PC for a fraction of the price yes, that's still really powerful. If you know how to hackintosh you can run Mac OS too. But yeah it's to get Mac OS, that's how it's always worked, and the Apple workstations have always been at the high price segment, from the early G3, G4 days too.
  - SCdF 7y ago
    Where are you reading the price? I don't see any when I go to the linked page, I presumed the prices weren't released yet
e12e 7y ago
Surprised no one(?) commented on the case yet - looks like they came to their senses and went back to the "old" case design. I've been seriously considering a second-hand, early Mac pro - just for the case. Not sure if they fit regular/modern psus - but those cases were very nice. Good riddance to the trash can design... Now, if these wouldn't be priced like a car, and came with some proper AMD cpus ...
- grenoire 7y ago
  It's the good ol' cheese grater, the case design was known for a while.
- chubot 7y ago
  How many fans does this case have? I thought the trash can was cool because the whole thing was one big fan. Never owned one though.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
betimsl 7y ago
Imagine having to hibernate a 1.5TB RAM machine :D
- masklinn 7y ago
  FWIW by default desktops are configured to just sleep (hibernatemode=0 = suspend to ram). Laptops default to persisting memory & sleeping (hibernatemode=3, a sleep which falls back to hibernation in case of complete power loss e.g. run out of battery). Both can be configured to regular hibernation (hibernatemode=25, persist memory then shut down).
DoctorPenguin 7y ago
Please forgive my ignorance but the specs on this are just average in my opinion. Why would I choose this over a custom build pc with almost the same, if not better, components? My experience with all apple products at work has been quite bad so I might be a little biased.
- movedx 7y ago
  If you don't get why you'd want to buy this, then it's not aimed at you. "Why would I pay AWS to host a Virtual Machine for me when I can get a physical host on Hetzner for the same price, if not less, that's 5x better?" -- the point has truly been missed.
  - Crinus 7y ago
    And what is the point then? I'm serious since i read this "if you do not understand why then it isn't for you" but without any explanations about what isn't understood.
    - movedx 7y ago
      Think about other products that exist in the wild. Have you ever looked at something on a shelf, or in someone's hand, come to an understanding of what it is and what it does and then thought, "That's stupid. I don't need that. There are better options!" The thing is the person using it loves it , and it's solving a very specific problem for them, a problem you don't have. It's the same thing here: you don't respect the product so you don't understand who would use it, so you don't buy it. That's fair enough. But the MacPro is designed for a niche audience who are happy with the hardware, implementation, support, and so on. The things they're doing with this product are not things you're doing, so you don't understand their pain points.
      - Crinus 7y ago
        This doesn't answer the question though. The question was "why would you buy this over a pc with the same specs?" and you answered essentially with "if you do not already know this then you cannot know this". How would one gain that knowledge in the first place? We aren't born with the knowledge of why one would buy this machine over another. We gain that knowledge based on specifics of the two machines. So the question is simple: what specifically makes the new Mac Pro a more desirable purchase option for someone than a PC with similar specifications?
hyperactive 7y ago
Not impressive. New MacPro hosts only PCIe gen3 when all PC motherboards are on gen4 already. New MacPro is old and it did not come out yet.
- movedx 7y ago
  It's not targeting you.
  - hyperactive 7y ago
    No it's not. I like MacOS and use their laptops, but Apple proprietary approach does not work for me when it comes to desktop. Their development lifecycle must be very long if they missed advancements in the CPU space. Ryzen to the masses.
    - movedx 7y ago
      But it does work for many others and/or certain industries, and that's fine.
- tolien 7y ago
  > all PC motherboards Gonna need a citation on the Xeon-W board with PCIe 4.0 support. Apple aren’t using Ryzen and definitely not Ryzen 3. If they were they’d be waiting for Threadripper - even current TR doesn’t support PCIe 4.
visionscaper 7y ago
> Configure two MPX Modules with up to four GPUs That's total, right? Not 4 GPUs per MPX module?
techstrategist 7y ago
What’s the best explanation as to why Apple is not supporting Nvidia GPUs?
- sdan 7y ago
  Legal issues. Think they had some clash a while back.
whywhywhywhy 7y ago
Still don't understand the justification for this machine, I waited years for a MacPro but when it became clear that Apple actually considered it a dead product and behind the scenes were building the iMac Pro to fill the niche I switched to windows and now run a dual 1080Ti workstation (Uses CUDA for 3D rendering path-tracing) for around half the price of a iMac Pro. Apple bloggers said time and time again the reason they were not making a tower was that there isn't really a market for one anymore, yet when they finally made it they decided to build something that only really serves the highest of high end video editors. Completely ignoring 3D, mid range video editors, developers who need high core counts + ECC, deep learning, etc. Before they made it we kept being told "There isn't enough of you to justify them making it" They finally make it and the narrative turns into "It's not for you it's for people who edit Marvel movies"
- swebs 7y ago
  Find me a comparable computer that: - Ships with anything other than Windows (Linux, OSX, BSD, etc) - Has a corporate warranty You'll quickly find that Apple has this market cornered. To many people, you're not paying the extra money for the goodness of Apple. You're paying to avoid the badness of Windows. There's also some software that works on Macs, but not Linux machines that may be necessary for the job.
  - curt15 7y ago
    "Find me a comparable computer that: - Ships with anything other than Windows (Linux, OSX, BSD, etc) - Has a corporate warranty" Support for mac-only software notwithstanding, Dell's workstations officially support RHEL, have Nvidia GPUs for CUDA workloads, and come with up to five years warranty with on-site service. You can probably find comparable HP Z-series workstations too.
  - jotm 7y ago
    HP offers Linux on their Z workstations, which have been reliable workhorses for decades. I believe Dell does, too.
  - dahauns 7y ago
ksec 7y ago
330 Comments, No one asked why was this submitted. We have discussions on HN [1] when it was announced. The Tech Spec page has been there since day 1, I looked hard and dont see any significant changes, if any changes at all. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20087315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20087315
- lm28469 7y ago
  That was 3 months ago, no one asked because no one remember it was posted.
  - ksec 7y ago
    That was not the point though, Its release were widely known and this spec page isn't news. It is generally accepted on HN unless the last submission had little to no discussion, and there is nothing new related to the topic, we mark those as duplicate.
bitxbit 7y ago
Or they can just open up OS X to more hardwares.
- scep12 7y ago
  Handling the burden of hardware fragmentation will reduce their quality and velocity. It's not in their DNA and definitely not in their strategy to make this happen.
coldcode 7y ago
People here seem to think this is just a random set of components not as good as X+Y+Z. This machine was designed and specced based on talking with the people who will be buying them, not the general public. Complaining its not X+Y+Z is like saying IBM didn't design a mainframe for your needs. Not everything has to build for everyone.
jibanes 7y ago
reminds me of a sun ultra 45
larrik 7y ago
So I can easily make a machine with more RAM than hard drive space...
esmi 7y ago
I was very skeptical of this machine and the whole Mac Pro as concept car idea [1] but the Afterburner Accelerator Card has me wondering if I was wrong. Especially if Apple finds a way to support more works flows and applications with it. That could be a real advantage moving forward and it’s not hard to understand how it could trickledown to other products. [1] http://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-pro-successor http://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-p...
hello_tyler 7y ago
I wish Apple would just sell me the damn OS and let me install it on whatever hardware I want.
EricE 7y ago
Still waiting for my xMac; the spiritual successor to the IIcx/IIci :(

246 points by arunmib 7y ago

The biggest new feature im looking for is the removal of the touchbar. Until then, I’m going to just buy upgraded but used 2012-2013 macbook pros. It’s one of those sounds good on paper but useless in real life. Not only that, it’s a hindrance for coders like me who need to be able to hit the escape button and other top buttons quickly with force feedback.

bradly 7y ago
There is no touchbar included with new Mac Pro.
- jonplackett 7y ago
  but there's never a bad moment to complain about the touch bar.
  - jaequery 7y ago
    Exactly!
  - thrwn_frthr_awy 7y ago
    This is the frustrating part. The amount of innovation pushed forward in desktop computing in the past 20 years and every once in a while they get some things wrong and people just can't believe it. Manufacturing and component commitments make "Oh just remove the touchbar" comments lacking of substance. Same with removing the headphone jack conversation–no one wants to talk about the trade-offs in making a phone waterproof whether they trade a headphone jack for a waterproof phone. Most people would, probably, which is why it is gone. Sorry, I'm new here and half the comments I read are bickering about some feature a someone doesn't think it optimal for how they use their device.
    - m45t3r 7y ago
      > Same with removing the headphone jack conversation–no one wants to talk about the trade-offs in making a phone waterproof whether they trade a headphone jack for a waterproof phone. This is not true at all. There are multiple Android phones that have waterproof and they have headphone jacks.
      - thrwn_frthr_awy 7y ago
        What did they sacrifice for that? Nothing is free and those plugs are large.
        tstrimple 7y ago
        They replaced the headphone jack with a barometric vent which other phone manufacturers just put in a different location. Apple didn't have to get rid of the port. They decided to get rid of the port because they knew that their users would buy the phone anyway and then have more of a reason to buy AirPods. There is plenty of space in that corner though. Some guy wanted to see if he could add the headphone jack back and was pretty successful for a hand crafted solution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA
        dpkonofa 7y ago
        That is nonsense. He butchered that phone and definitely, 100% ruined the waterproofing function of the phone. Additionally, I'm curious which manufacturers you're speaking of because, the last time this type of comment came around, there was a distinct response of "most other phones don't include a barometric vent".
        tstrimple 7y ago
        All waterproof phones with barometers would include similar technology. Phones like the Galaxy S7 which was also waterproof and which also had a headphone jack. The video is an individual messing around with a dremel and soldering gun. Of course it's not waterproof at that point, that was never his goal. It's ludicrous to believe that Apple had to remove the headphone jack when other companies showed it can be done just fine without and others have shown just how much space is still available in the phone. Your assertion that it had to be done isn't supported by evidence.
- jaequery 7y ago
  my bad, I read the title as a new MacBook Pro. Carry on.
  - wilg 7y ago
    OK, but there's a pretty big illustration of a desktop computer. Not sure how you missed that one.
burnte 7y ago
This is about the desktop. not mobile machines. The predecessor to this was the trashcan, which had no touchbar.
29_29 7y ago
I'm not sure why people are downvoting you. I hate this feature on HN. I cant even read what you said.
- jaequery 7y ago
  It looks like any slight mention of negativity towards Apple are being downvoted. The force is strong with this one.
  - dewey 7y ago
    No, it's not that. It's that you are posting about some unrelated gripe with another product line that's off-topic in this Mac Pro thread. As for the other comments complaining about downvoting, it's discouraged in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - 29_29 7y ago
      I still think we should try to be nice. At a minimum. She got downvoted again? Let's try to be more welcoming.
- PhantomGremlin 7y ago
  If you're logged in, all you need to do is click on the "9 hours ago" field of the comment. That takes you to the individual comment, fully visible. So it's only one extra click to read. This unfortunately doesn't work if you're not logged in.
htfu 7y ago
Surely if esc is important to you you shouldn't be using the esc button as esc in the first place? Caps is both my esc and my ctrl and I wouldn't have it any other way. If f buttons are important just configure your fn-as-hyper+1 so do f1, etc. Checkout karabiner and hammerspoon.

kristianp 7y ago

Still no Nvidia cards?

olliej 7y ago
It’s seems like they went all in on AMD a few years ago, so I assume they have a bunch of long term agreements that lower the price? It’s more irksome to me that they don’t have a high spec non-pro desktop. Eg I want high end consumer desktop GPUs, not high end mobile GPUs (afaict that’s essentially what iMacs use). But my alternative appears to be “pro” GPUs with their absurd - for a consumer at least - markups and Xeons, which no one really wants ;)
- gotoeleven 7y ago
  Mac Mini with an eGPU might be a decent option.
  - skunkworker 7y ago
    I'm close to going dedicated windows/ubuntu computer with an nvidia card for ML & gaming and a mac mini hooked into a KVM on the same screen. But not having allowed nvidia drivers in 10.14+ is a disappointment.
    - McAtNite 7y ago
      I’m currently running a VM with a GPU passed through and moonlight on my Mac for gaming. It’s really nice, my old MPB isn’t doing any real work so it easily lasts for hours if on battery, and the VM doesn’t eat up all the resources on my server so I’m free to do whatever I want to with everything else. My only real issue is I occasionally get slowdowns while playing which causes things to stutter. This is most like partly to blame on using WiFi for the Mac and partly to blame on using only a single port NIC for the server.
- lostgame 7y ago
  eGPUs have been supported for a couple years now. Grab a Mac Mini, an eGPU, max out the RAM, add an external hard drive or two, boom, your ‘pro consumer’ Mac for about $2k.

proee 7y ago

This page would look better if they used high-quality 3d animated renders instead of the simplified 2D-graphics. Someone on the design team thought this was a great idea? It looks unpolished and out of place (in comparison to other well-done Apple product pages).

1123581321 7y ago
There are already two other pages about the Mac Pro (linked at the bottom) with the more luxurious consumer feel to them. I think the functional look of the flat art is totally appropriate for such a text-heavy page—and the illustrations still animate seamlessly as the user scrolls.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > and the illustrations still animate seamlessly as the user scrolls Not on my computer if you scroll too fast :/
  - designcode 7y ago
    Maybe time for an upgrade to a Mac Pro then ?
  - flattone 7y ago
    Similarly my computer doesn't work if I put it too close to a raging fire pit.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Fortunately, I don't do that too often.
reificator 7y ago
Honestly if they're chained to this godawful scroll-based animation garbage they keep pumping out, I'd much rather the understated 2D graphics they're using here. The 3D looks incredibly amateurish to me.

baroffoos 7y ago

The only shocking things here are the lack of ports. Only 2 usb A and 2 usb c ports. Its basically required to use a usb hub on this device since once you plug in a proper mouse and keyboard you only have the usb c ports left

servercobra 7y ago
I don't think they're expecting you to plug in a "proper" keyboard and mouse since it comes with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Plus it appears you get another 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports on the front as well.
- benburleson 7y ago
  Which is insane.. do people really use the wireless capability of their keyboard or mouse? Especially when you can't use your freaking mouse when it's charging? Serious insanity. Edit to add: of course I know people use those keyboards... I meant are people actually moving with them in ways that makes the wireless capability useful? Do most users not stay in a pretty close proximity the whole time?
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > do people really use the wireless capability of their keyboard or mouse? Yes. Why wouldn't you? Why do you think the downsides are? > Especially when you can't use your freaking mouse when it's charging? I charge it for about ten minutes every month while I'm out. It doesn't interfere with anything.
    - benburleson 7y ago
      The downside is requiring charging or batteries. I just have a hard time justifying the hassle when I have no need to make those devices wireless. And my battery always (when I had one) died mid-day, so it forced a work break, which isn't always bad anyway
      - 7y ago

rosege 7y ago

I wonder what a maxed out one will cost

bobwaycott 7y ago
I’d guess around the price of a small sedan.
- justinator 7y ago
  or a mid-range road bike.
  - hellisothers 7y ago
    Or 2 months rent
    - sambroner 7y ago
      Where are you living? I hope it’s lovely!
      - ansible 7y ago
        Two months rent for a converted closet in SF will get you some decent PC hardware. Not decent Mac hardware though.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
The Rolls Royce model of pricing: "If you have to ask, you can't afford it".
- rosege 7y ago
  ha yep I definitely can't afford it!
- octomiao 7y ago
  This is how I feel when boston dynamics released spotty.

jasoneckert 7y ago

At the base configuration (single 8-core Xeon W) with 256GB SSD and 32GB RAM for $6000, it's about twice what it should be. I could build a faster dual Xeon Silver series with more cores, Nvidia graphics, much larger SSD and 32GB RAM in a nicer case for around $3000. So, that Apple logo and macOS are the other $3000.

jasoneckert 7y ago
I love how any post I make that is critical of something Apple always gets me some negative points here on Hacker News - I actually made a point of showing my tech class this social phenomenon a few weeks back and we had a good discussion that explored possible reasons why it happens.
- skellera 7y ago
  No one is going to disagree that you could build the same thing for cheaper and the point has been made over and over again. Apple isn’t selling for your use case.
  - mseidl 7y ago
    It's actually reasonably priced compared to other workstations. Plus, I'm pretty sure you get the accelerator card which is pretty amazing.
- pram 7y ago
  Perhaps people would like to discuss the product, and not how everyone can cobble together a 5x more Powerful Rig from random Newegg parts?
- kirstenbirgit 7y ago
  A similar rig from HP or Lenovo is going to cost you more.
- temptemptemp111 7y ago
  The censors are just shooting themselves in the foot at this point. So transparent.

siquick 7y ago

What are people doing that require such high-powered desktops?

empath75 7y ago
Professional film editing.
BlueToth 7y ago
8K movie editing
burnte 7y ago
Advanced video, 3d rendering, etc.
readbeard 7y ago
I am working on a project right now where I am rendering atmospheric effects (lots of clouds). Even on a 12-core workstation, it takes a very long time to render a single frame to even be able to get a good idea as to what things will look like, so I'm doing a lot of changing something, waiting… changing something, waiting. Most of the final rendering can be offloaded to a farm, but being able to quickly and interactively get a good idea of what something will look like is extremely helpful and time-saving. Right now, I'm doing some of the work on an EC2 instance with 48 cores (96 vCPU) to help with this—cost-effective for occasional use, but I can certainly see the appeal of a machine like this. And for task like compositing where you need access to a bunch of huge source files, or where maybe you have a specialized video I/O device you need to use, running in the cloud might not be practical at all.
- kristianp 7y ago
  I'm curious, is gpu-based rendering not an option for you?
  - readbeard 7y ago
    Not for the renderer I am using (Terragen), which has specialized features for rendering skies. I do normally use GPU rendering when it is an option though.

initself 7y ago

Looks like a company finally listened.

29_29 7y ago
no NVIDIA cards its useless to me
_ph_ 7y ago
Very little. Yes, they finally made a Mac Pro that is extensible and up to date. Basically everything the 2008 Mac Pro already was. On the downside, they doubled its price so for the non-Hollywood customer, there still isn't a desktop machine. Even 3k is much for a deskop machine, but I had set some money aside to get a Mac Pro, if it had started around its predecessor price. There was even a time in the past, when a Mac Pro would start below 2k and consequently was very popular.
- rangibaby 7y ago
  > on the downside, they doubled its price so for the non-Hollywood customer, there still isn't a desktop machine. Even 3k is much for a deskop machine I think there were more benefits to an ordinary user to getting a tower in the past then there are now. In the past even a hobby or prosumer photographer would see a big benefit from getting a Mac Pro. Nowadays an iMac or Macbook Pro with very normal specs can edit large RAW files without breaking a sweat. The extra HDD bays on a Mac Pro were great because you didn't have to mess around with USB2 (cheap but slow) or FW (fast but expensive). Now you have USB3 (cheap and fast) or TB (very fast but expensive). I guess that leaves upgradeable graphics cards, at this point it is easier to just get a PC or try a hackintosh build if you want a beast GPU for the latest games. > There was even a time in the past, when a Mac Pro would start below 2k and consequently was very popular. 2006: Mac Pro base model: $2,199 ($2,800 in 2019 dollars) 30" Cinema Display: $3,299 ($4,198) Soundsticks (Of course!) $169.99 2019: iMac 27" 5K base model: $1,799 iMac Pro base model: $4,999
  - _ph_ 7y ago
    Internal storage is a huge thing. I have external storage attached to my 27" iMac, but it is not completely reliable (disks get ejected occasionally) and completely beats the purpose of an elegant desktop machine. So I really would like a machine with several drive spaces, especially if I can access them. I could have lived reasonably by upgrading the internal storage of my iMac, if there was any way for me to access it. Graphics cards is another thing, but also the plain ability to clean fans when they start to clog up. The limitations of the iMac are amplified by Apple making the interior inaccessible. Finally, while the screen of the iMac is great, I would like to have a larger screen. So there are plenty of reasons still to have a bit more than the iMac can deliver.

lliamander 7y ago

Slightly off-topic, but who here uses a HEDT (high-end desktop) or workstation computer for software development? Does it make a significant difference in comparison with a standard business laptop?

Skunkleton 7y ago
I use a desktop, not sure I would call it high end (32 GiB, 6 cores, nvme). I do lots of large builds of things like linux kernels. I doubt any laptop would be able to keep up simply due to thermals.
- lliamander 7y ago
  Yeah, what's considered high-end does shift, although that still sounds higher end than most laptops. I think a typical "high-end" desktop is one that has more cores, memory channels, and PCIe lanes than a typical "mainstream" desktop (whatever that happens to be at the time). Support for ECC memory is also sometimes a requirement. I use a 3 year-old laptop with 32GB of RAM, an SSD, and a dual-core i7 (U-series) processor. It's reasonably efficient. I think the amount of RAM and the IO speed of my SSD remove most of the hardware bottlenecks I face. However, I would like compile times to be faster, I do sometimes notice applications hanging, and IntelliJ (we use Java at work) seems limited on how many projects I can run efficiently in a single workspace. I'm just wondering whether a workstation-grade laptop (Dell Precision or Thinkpad P-series) would be a sufficient upgrade, or investing in a desktop would be worthwhile at some point.
  - virtualwhys 7y ago
    > I'm just wondering whether a workstation-grade laptop (Dell Precision or Thinkpad P-series) would be a sufficient upgrade, or investing in a desktop would be worthwhile at some point. Yes, either 17" machine offers an 8-core CPU and plenty of thermal capacity (i.e. larger chassis than their 15" equivalents), along with more than enough memory (128GB), and in Dell's case, a boatload of HD slots (4, run in whatever RAID config you want). These are desktop replacements, heavy (as in 6.5+ lbs), with 240W power bricks , so you'll probably want them to stay on the desk for most of the time. I'm personally looking to replace my old Dell Precision with a 15" 5540, maxed out. For Scala work the extra cores help reduce build times, probably the same for Java.

phillco 7y ago

And next to each component, "Market Price"

chx 7y ago

It is still not shipping so there's not really a reason not to use a Threadripper for lower price AND higher performance. Or even Epyc chips. We know the Titan Ridge Thunderbolt controllers work on AMD motherboards. Alpine Ridge had firmware problems but Titan Ridge is fine.

bitL 7y ago
You can likely Hackintosh it with a 64 core Threadripper, WRX80 8-channel board, 4TB ECC LRDIMM and run circles around Mac Pro for half the price. Ryzen seems to work quite well with the latest macOS.
AceJohnny2 7y ago
Apple & Intel are deeply entwined, both at a technical and a contractual level. There's a reason Apple has never made an AMD computer.
- chx 7y ago
  Well, AMD had nothing to offer really especially in the low power space where Apple mostly is but Sharkstooth and Rome so throughly trounces Intel high end it's not even funny. (Yes, Sharkstooth is not yet out but already the Ryzen 3000 chips make a joke out of the lower end of Intel Xeons and leaking benchmarks paint an interesting picture of the upcoming Threadripper 3000s.)
nwrk 7y ago
Same. No Ryzen :(
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
Motherboard design takes time — and Apple would also need AMD firmware and software support. If Apple want to go AMD it would be next year's model at the very earliest.
- chx 7y ago
  Eh, no. Google has been testing Rome for a long time before official announcement, this Mac Pro could easily have been the launch customer for Threadripper 3000.

Corrado 7y ago

I think they should include Apple Care for their professional equipment. This won't put any any more money in Apple's pocket but I could see it being another differentiator and a good bit of PR, especially to all of those price arguments. Plus, it's only $300 and I'm sure Apple could suffer that "loss" on a $6,000 - $30,000 purchase.

pier25 7y ago
I've always argued that for the prices that Apple charges Apple Care should be included in all its products. The first Apple computers I bought lasted for years and I never thought Apple Care was necessary, but since the fiasco with the 2011 MBP and the butterfly keyboards I'm not buying another of its products without Apple Care. Yes, Apple ended up doing the right thing in both cases but it took years after the problems started and a couple of class action lawsuits.
- Marsymars 7y ago
  I don't think Apple should necessarily include coverage for user-caused damage as standard, but having only a single-year warranty on manufacturer defects is kinda shameful for a premium product. I expect premium products across most product categories to carry a three or five year warranty as standard. A single-year warranty is in general an indicator that a) the manufacturer doesn't have faith in reliability past the first year and b) the manufacturer is begrudgingly just meeting the minimum standard for warranties in most jurisdictions. Even if neither of these are the case, the optics aren't good.
  - Corrado 7y ago
    This is a really good thought and I would be OK with Apple extending the warranty on "professional" products instead of full Apple Care.
  - curt15 7y ago
    >A single-year warranty is in general an indicator that a) the manufacturer doesn't have faith in reliability past the first year and b) the manufacturer is begrudgingly just meeting the minimum standard for warranties in most jurisdictions. Even if neither of these are the case, the optics aren't good. Dell's Precision workstations come with 3 years warranty, upgradable to 5 years coverage with on-site service. There is no reason Apple can't match that.

joncrane 7y ago

Why do the different processor quantities have different base frequencies (higher for lower CPU count) but the same "Turbo Boost" frequency of 4.4 GHz? If you ran Folding@Home on one of these, would you get sustained 4.4GHz clock speeds?

sedatk 7y ago
I guess Turbo Boost works only for short intervals, not continuously.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bgentry 7y ago
Thermal limits. Lots of cores in a tiny space will generate lots of heat under a full workload. They can do full speed in short bursts (or when only one core is working hard) but can’t sustain full performance indefinitely without damaging themselves. The more cores in a small space, the lower the clock speed they can sustain for long periods of time.
jannes 7y ago
Intel's Turbo Boost specification only allows for a few seconds of boosting. Of course you can overclock (letting it run longer than stock settings) if you have better cooling or if you won the silicon lottery. Furthermore, I think the advertised Turbo Boost 3.0 frequency is single-core only. It will not increase all core frequencies to that level unless there is sufficient thermal headroom. https://segmentnext.com/2017/10/11/intel-removing-all-core-turbo-boost-from-its-specifications-page/ https://segmentnext.com/2017/10/11/intel-removing-all-core-t...

hinkley 7y ago

This thing is pulling almost 12 amps by itself. Add a couple monitors and hopefully you have recent vintage wiring in your office...

na85 7y ago
That'll be a peak amperage; it won't draw 12 amps by itself. Even if it did, most displays pull less than 1A, so theoretically you have room for 3 more displays on your standard 15A North American residential circuit. Any office should be on 20A circuits, anyways.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  That would work great if you had nothing else in your office... A coffee pot pulls 5-8 amps. Laser printer 3-5 amps while printing. Stereo, lamps, etc., it all adds up pretty fast.
  - na85 7y ago
    I sure hope your office isn't all on one circuit! This conversation reminds me of the movie Apollo 13: "You can't run a vacuum cleaner on 12 amps, John!"
Marsymars 7y ago
Presumably that's with the dual-GPU, 28-core processor model under full load (and the MPX module drawing its full 500W, among other peripherals). An office with this kind of workload is going to require robust wiring regardless of which particular workstations are installed.
- m0zg 7y ago
  And robust air conditioning, too. Source: worked in an office full of dual-GPU deep learning workstations. We had to bring in those gigantic rental portable conditioners in the summer, and re-do pretty much all of the existing wiring in the office, because electricians who installed the first iteration could not conceive of having two dozen ~900W workstations cranking away 24x7x365 in a single open office plan.

jagger27 7y ago

I'm bummed out that there's no sign of Navi cards as an option. The 5700 series seems right at home in this machine. I'm still holding out for a Navi product from Apple. There's some mention of support in the Kexts but alas my 5700 XT does not work in Mojave or Catalina (Hackintosh).

frou_dh 7y ago
> The 5700 series seems right at home in this machine. Isn't the Navi architecture gaming-focused? Vega might still be superior for the "compute" workloads of pro apps. Edit: Although I guess the base-spec comes with an ancient Polaris card, not Vega. Cheap bastards.

peignoir 7y ago

I wish I could afford these, but I’m really curious to test a hackintosh with threadreaper 3 following what they did on Linus tech tips with a virtualized PC and Mac running at the same time on the same monitor https://youtu.be/EozeSDeV3Vo https://youtu.be/EozeSDeV3Vo

Pmop 7y ago
Hackintosh allows you to have OS X on better hardware but these days it's really unsafe, due to the possibility of Apple going full ARM in the near future, dropping all the support for x86.
- cosmotic 7y ago
  Considering they just spent possibly 6 years designing this crazy expensive x86 beast, I don't think support is going to drop that hard that fast to warrant avoiding x86.
- dewey 7y ago
  > but these days it's really unsafe How is it different than buying a Mac now? It also won't upgrade itself to an ARM processor and they'd need to support existing macOS installations for a while anyway.
- tiew9Vii 7y ago
  That logic is a bit strange. When / if Apple stop support for x86 any Apple computer purchased before they go ARM will essentially be end of life. If you do not want to build a hackintosh because of ARM in the future you also do not want to buy a Apple x86 computer today.
  - csande17 7y ago
    It seems like a Hackintosh would actually be the better choice if you're worried about Apple moving to ARM, since you could run Windows or Linux on it without relying on Apple for driver support.
- 7y ago

hartator 7y ago

I like it. You pay the Apple tax for sure but the design makes sense and is nice. I wonder thought when they are gonna to announce the new MacBook 16”. It has been rumored a lot.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

m0zg 7y ago

And all of that will be pretty laughable compared to the stuff AMD is releasing later this year.

dragontamer 7y ago
The AMD Vega II appears to be a higher-end Radeon VII except with 32GB of HBM2 (instead of 16GB like the Radeon VII). So not really. AMD VegaII Duo (the dual-Vega II) is going to be far more powerful than anything AMD releases in the near future. 64GB of HBM2, 28+ TFlops single precision, etc. etc. CPU-wise, probably. Xeon W 28-core is still quite good from Intel however, with AVX 512 support and such.
- snvzz 7y ago
  I would think he's referring to Zen2-based Threadripper.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    Not just Threadrippers, but better EPYCs as well. More PCIe lanes, more cores, cheaper (hence higher profit margin), and the only thing you really lose is AVX512 which hardly any software besides Intel MKL makes use of anyway.
    - snvzz 7y ago
      Keep in mind EPYC are not workstation CPUs. They can be used like that, but they are not made for that. Different tradeoffs.
      - m0zg 7y ago
        Yes, lower frequency, more cores, more PCIe lanes, more throughput. Sounds good to me, as long as they use SKUs that aren't too low in frequency.

bfrog 7y ago

Doesn't a single thread ripper basically slay this thing?

crazydoggers 7y ago
Different market segment. The Mac Pro has 64 PCI lanes, and eight PCI slots, along with supporting 1.5TB memory. 3900x for example only has 24 pci lanes and 128GB memory support. Edit: My bad... I misread thread ripper for Ryzen for some reason
- CarVac 7y ago
  The 3900X is not a threadripper.
- ericd 7y ago
  The 2nd gen Threadripper has 64 PCI lanes, FWIW, haven't seen specs for 3rd gen yet.
mister_hn 7y ago
Yes, The Epyc 2 definitively destroys this one as appeared in multiple benchmarks.
trynumber9 7y ago
The Current 2990WX is typically slower. For example, rendering is a strong point of Zen: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13748/the-intel-xeon-w-3175x-review-28-unlocked-cores-2999-usd/7 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13748/the-intel-xeon-w-3175x-... but here it is behind. The Mac Pro's Xeon W would be slower than that tested Xeon W in multithread but faster in lightly threaded workloads. But AMD said new workstation chips are coming in November. This could be up to 64-core Threadripper chips with PCIe4 support. Though we have no idea on the clock rates so it is possible these Xeon W CPUs may still come out ahead in lightly threaded performance, especially with AVX-512.
bilbo0s 7y ago
You'd be surprised how married effects houses can be to their chip architectures. Attempts to switch can sink you when you realize that some technical artist wrote some extremely critical plugin or extension that's super fast only because it uses Intel only or AMD only instructions. My own theory, Apple has probably already spoken with clients like effects houses long ago. Since these are the clients that will generate most of the revenue with this product, I'd wager they've put it together almost especially for them. If anyone else wants to buy one, gravy, but I'd bet Apple's money comes mainly from clients in those very specialized segments. My guess is, they won't be doing anything those clients don't want them doing with that platform. Apple made that mistake once already, and it sounds like they are done chasing the larger market with their pro platform. Basically, They're going the HP workstation route and just becoming an Intel distributor. Only they're trying to distribute components in a bit more aesthetically pleasing package.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

A great machine to be sure for high end content creation but Apple is not chasing the deep learning dev market because of the lack of CUDA. That market is better served by Linux boxes with appropriate GPUs for TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc. support.

reilly3000 7y ago
Bingo. Although it looks clear that there is a lot of movement towards broader support of AMD in DL via ROCm: https://rocm-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deep_learning/Deep-learning.html https://rocm-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deep_lea...
- atemerev 7y ago
  A reference FFT implementation in CUDA: about 150 lines of code. A reference FFT implementation in ROCm: about 1200 lines of much uglier code using advanced C++ idioms. So no, it is not a replacement, again. Elegance matters.
Uehreka 7y ago
Nvidia really has the GPU market under their thumb. It would be one thing if their pitch was "We're not as good as AMD for games, but we've got CUDA for professionals and researchers!". At least that way there could be some sort of segmentation and I could tell people shopping for GPUs to "get the right one for what you want to do!" But that's not the world we live in. Nvidia's pitch is "We make the only hardware that runs the framework used by almost all deep learning research and media creation software, and we're also the only folks operating at our level when it comes to high-end video game graphics, and if our high-end cards are too expensive for you, we have cheaper ones. And when our competitors start to think they can catch up, we'll drop RTX and Tensor Cores on their face." AMD seems stuck on "We have great value middle-to-high-tier video game graphics cards" at best. I have no idea how they can get out from under that rock. They've been turning the CPU market upside down and smashing Intel's once proud "near monopoly" status. Nvidia seems like exactly the kind of prideful company that would be poised to fall, but I have no idea how AMD could make it happen.

thesquib 7y ago

What happens when Apple drops Intel and these become obsolete? I wonder if you can even boot Linux and use the internal storage...

_ph_ 7y ago
The Mac Pro obviously shows that Apple isn't planning to completely drop Intel (as in x86) anytime soon. At minimum, new OS releases are going to support x86 for the next 10 years.

lwansbrough 7y ago

Kind crazy you can’t configure this thing with an NVMe drive even if you’re ready to drop $30,000 on it.

pram 7y ago
The storage is NVMe, though? All of Apple's recent SSD storage is.
nico_h 7y ago
Pretty sure the default storage is NVMe Plus you can put some pci NVMe card the can support up to 4 NVMe slots

Hamuko 7y ago

The starting 256 GB SSD sticks out like a sore thumb on a machine as expensive as this. The barebones Mac Mini comes with 128 GB and 6-core Mini with 256 GB. And upgrading it is gonna cost an arm and a leg.

sudhirj 7y ago
Depends entirely on workflow. A lot of shops will have all of their stuff on a 10G NAS share, so you’re actually forbidden from copying to and from your computer because it’s just stupid and sometimes slower to do so.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  Still, it isn't as if 1T of SSD is expensive. So if they set the entry price to 6k, 1T of SSD would be an appropriate minimum.
  - sudhirj 7y ago
    Yeah, that’s what they give on the iMac Pro as base, so it’s not like they’d never do it. But it’s clear they’re deliberately under configuring the base to force complete customisation, which is what I assume the kinds of people buying this will want. I’d go so far as to say they should sell it without a default hard disk if they could - let the buyers make the choice. I’m guessing it’s defaulting to the smallest disk just for optics. This is clearly a start with the skeleton and build it yourself kind of machine, which is as it should be. It just looks odd when the selector defaults to the lowest available option on every selection.
whywhywhywhy 7y ago
"If you can afford the Mac Pro then you can afford the extra storage" as the Apple bloggers keep saying....
- grecy 7y ago
  More like "If you can afford the Mac Pro, you probably already have many, many Terra bytes of storage arrays"

dev_dull 7y ago

> 802.11ac Wi-Fi wireless networking Surprised there's no 802.11ax/wifi 6. Why not use the same wifi chips as the iPhones?

mihaaly 7y ago
perhaps it is not that mobile
- mseidl 7y ago
  Not with that attitude.
- scep12 7y ago
  It does have wheels, which is an upgrade on mobility from the previous generation.
acdha 7y ago
Think about what you're asking: this thing uses a high-end server board with a bunch of exotic specs. Those things take time to design, validate, and test — don't forget that reliability under sustained load is a hard requirement in that market — so adding extra chips isn't done on a whim. Then you have to ask how many people are using this for something where the performance hit of using WiFi is acceptable — it has two 10Gb ethernet ports so you can get an idea for the kind of usage they're targeting.

jaynetics 7y ago

"Maximum altitude: tested up to 16,400 feet (5000 meters)" Does anyone know how or where they do this testing? Seems quite bothersome to do.

borgel 7y ago
Might happen in a thermal/vac chamber. Seems easier than non artificial options!
nickserv 7y ago
Bolivia's capitalLa Paz is at more than 3500m, El Alto in the same metropolitan area is at more than 4000m. Not saying this is where they were tested (I have no idea), just pointing out that these altitudes are not necessarily far from major metropolitan areas and international airports.
ghego1 7y ago
This made me wonder, why is max altitude a limit? Is it due to cooling (less air)? I'd be glad to know more if anyone has some insights
- Shaddox 7y ago
  I'm not a specialist, I just read up about it some time ago so take what I say with a grain of salt. Basically there's two issues affecting electronic chipsets at high altitude : air density and cosmic rays. The reduction of the air density can mess with the cooling system. Cosmic rays contain radioactive particles which can cause soft failures to occur in solid state electronics. EDIT : Found an interesting paper about it with more details : https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6046/529f05a65e182ac9323ef8eb26b2075d0e13.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6046/529f05a65e182ac9323ef8...
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Low humidity -> static. Lower air density -> less heat transfer, so components run hotter. Air pressure may affect disk drives and other sealed / fluid-dynamic systems. Capacitors and other electronics might possibly be affected. Apparently displays and printers (liquid ink) are strongly affected. Arcing increases with elevation. https://highaltitudelife.com/electronics.htm https://highaltitudelife.com/electronics.htm https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=24254 https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=24254 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derating

cgb223 7y ago

Is this saying that I can have 1.5 TERABYTES of RAM? That’s wild What’s the professional use case for that?

QuinnyPig 7y ago
Slack.
- kirstenbirgit 7y ago
  Well, barely.
- Bantros 7y ago
  Underrated comment
- ksahin 7y ago
  You made my day.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jansan 7y ago
Probably 8K video processing.
remus 7y ago
Running in-memory databases is a common use case for chewing through loads of RAM.
amai 7y ago
Excel on Big Data

imagetic 7y ago

For that price, it should come with Apple Care, Final Cut Pro X, and Logic Pro X included.

SCdF 7y ago

So apart from the pleasure of being able to use MacOS, I presume it will be cheaper to just put these parts together myself, yes? If the form factor is just a tower, well I can buy a tower myself. What is the advantage of paying for Apple a (presumed) bunch of money to build it for you? If you don't want the hassle of building a PC (which is fair) there are an endless supply of places that will put PCs together for you, with (I'm presuming) a much smaller cut than Apple.

htfu 7y ago
The amount of time I’ve had to fiddle with my audio/video editing beast of a hackintosh tower is quite insane really. Both necessary and well worth it, as Apple simply wasn’t selling anything appropriately powerful for like five years (also why x99 was so tricky until more recently - no equivalent hardware of theirs), but by any other calculation if you actually put the value of your own time anywhere close to any professional scale (or see it as a hobby) it will very likely end up costing way more to do yourself.
- arvinsim 7y ago
  I could understand that you would want a proper Mac for work. But I think that time is well worth spending on a personal machine, especially when it is easier nowadays.
Synaesthesia 7y ago
Actually those server boards and CPU's from Intel are pretty darn expensive, as well as the fancy RAM etc. For it's specs, I think technically it is an OK price, but obviously for almost all other purposes you can custom build a PC for a fraction of the price yes, that's still really powerful. If you know how to hackintosh you can run Mac OS too. But yeah it's to get Mac OS, that's how it's always worked, and the Apple workstations have always been at the high price segment, from the early G3, G4 days too.
- SCdF 7y ago
  Where are you reading the price? I don't see any when I go to the linked page, I presumed the prices weren't released yet

e12e 7y ago

Surprised no one(?) commented on the case yet - looks like they came to their senses and went back to the "old" case design. I've been seriously considering a second-hand, early Mac pro - just for the case. Not sure if they fit regular/modern psus - but those cases were very nice. Good riddance to the trash can design... Now, if these wouldn't be priced like a car, and came with some proper AMD cpus ...

grenoire 7y ago
It's the good ol' cheese grater, the case design was known for a while.
chubot 7y ago
How many fans does this case have? I thought the trash can was cool because the whole thing was one big fan. Never owned one though.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

betimsl 7y ago

Imagine having to hibernate a 1.5TB RAM machine :D

masklinn 7y ago
FWIW by default desktops are configured to just sleep (hibernatemode=0 = suspend to ram). Laptops default to persisting memory & sleeping (hibernatemode=3, a sleep which falls back to hibernation in case of complete power loss e.g. run out of battery). Both can be configured to regular hibernation (hibernatemode=25, persist memory then shut down).

DoctorPenguin 7y ago

Please forgive my ignorance but the specs on this are just average in my opinion. Why would I choose this over a custom build pc with almost the same, if not better, components? My experience with all apple products at work has been quite bad so I might be a little biased.

movedx 7y ago
If you don't get why you'd want to buy this, then it's not aimed at you. "Why would I pay AWS to host a Virtual Machine for me when I can get a physical host on Hetzner for the same price, if not less, that's 5x better?" -- the point has truly been missed.
- Crinus 7y ago
  And what is the point then? I'm serious since i read this "if you do not understand why then it isn't for you" but without any explanations about what isn't understood.
  - movedx 7y ago
    Think about other products that exist in the wild. Have you ever looked at something on a shelf, or in someone's hand, come to an understanding of what it is and what it does and then thought, "That's stupid. I don't need that. There are better options!" The thing is the person using it loves it , and it's solving a very specific problem for them, a problem you don't have. It's the same thing here: you don't respect the product so you don't understand who would use it, so you don't buy it. That's fair enough. But the MacPro is designed for a niche audience who are happy with the hardware, implementation, support, and so on. The things they're doing with this product are not things you're doing, so you don't understand their pain points.
    - Crinus 7y ago
      This doesn't answer the question though. The question was "why would you buy this over a pc with the same specs?" and you answered essentially with "if you do not already know this then you cannot know this". How would one gain that knowledge in the first place? We aren't born with the knowledge of why one would buy this machine over another. We gain that knowledge based on specifics of the two machines. So the question is simple: what specifically makes the new Mac Pro a more desirable purchase option for someone than a PC with similar specifications?

hyperactive 7y ago

Not impressive. New MacPro hosts only PCIe gen3 when all PC motherboards are on gen4 already. New MacPro is old and it did not come out yet.

movedx 7y ago
It's not targeting you.
- hyperactive 7y ago
  No it's not. I like MacOS and use their laptops, but Apple proprietary approach does not work for me when it comes to desktop. Their development lifecycle must be very long if they missed advancements in the CPU space. Ryzen to the masses.
  - movedx 7y ago
    But it does work for many others and/or certain industries, and that's fine.
tolien 7y ago
> all PC motherboards Gonna need a citation on the Xeon-W board with PCIe 4.0 support. Apple aren’t using Ryzen and definitely not Ryzen 3. If they were they’d be waiting for Threadripper - even current TR doesn’t support PCIe 4.

visionscaper 7y ago

> Configure two MPX Modules with up to four GPUs That's total, right? Not 4 GPUs per MPX module?

techstrategist 7y ago

What’s the best explanation as to why Apple is not supporting Nvidia GPUs?

sdan 7y ago
Legal issues. Think they had some clash a while back.

whywhywhywhy 7y ago

Still don't understand the justification for this machine, I waited years for a MacPro but when it became clear that Apple actually considered it a dead product and behind the scenes were building the iMac Pro to fill the niche I switched to windows and now run a dual 1080Ti workstation (Uses CUDA for 3D rendering path-tracing) for around half the price of a iMac Pro. Apple bloggers said time and time again the reason they were not making a tower was that there isn't really a market for one anymore, yet when they finally made it they decided to build something that only really serves the highest of high end video editors. Completely ignoring 3D, mid range video editors, developers who need high core counts + ECC, deep learning, etc. Before they made it we kept being told "There isn't enough of you to justify them making it" They finally make it and the narrative turns into "It's not for you it's for people who edit Marvel movies"

swebs 7y ago
Find me a comparable computer that: - Ships with anything other than Windows (Linux, OSX, BSD, etc) - Has a corporate warranty You'll quickly find that Apple has this market cornered. To many people, you're not paying the extra money for the goodness of Apple. You're paying to avoid the badness of Windows. There's also some software that works on Macs, but not Linux machines that may be necessary for the job.
- curt15 7y ago
  "Find me a comparable computer that: - Ships with anything other than Windows (Linux, OSX, BSD, etc) - Has a corporate warranty" Support for mac-only software notwithstanding, Dell's workstations officially support RHEL, have Nvidia GPUs for CUDA workloads, and come with up to five years warranty with on-site service. You can probably find comparable HP Z-series workstations too.
- jotm 7y ago
  HP offers Linux on their Z workstations, which have been reliable workhorses for decades. I believe Dell does, too.
- dahauns 7y ago

ksec 7y ago

330 Comments, No one asked why was this submitted. We have discussions on HN [1] when it was announced. The Tech Spec page has been there since day 1, I looked hard and dont see any significant changes, if any changes at all. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20087315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20087315

lm28469 7y ago
That was 3 months ago, no one asked because no one remember it was posted.
- ksec 7y ago
  That was not the point though, Its release were widely known and this spec page isn't news. It is generally accepted on HN unless the last submission had little to no discussion, and there is nothing new related to the topic, we mark those as duplicate.

bitxbit 7y ago

Or they can just open up OS X to more hardwares.

scep12 7y ago
Handling the burden of hardware fragmentation will reduce their quality and velocity. It's not in their DNA and definitely not in their strategy to make this happen.

coldcode 7y ago

People here seem to think this is just a random set of components not as good as X+Y+Z. This machine was designed and specced based on talking with the people who will be buying them, not the general public. Complaining its not X+Y+Z is like saying IBM didn't design a mainframe for your needs. Not everything has to build for everyone.

jibanes 7y ago

reminds me of a sun ultra 45

larrik 7y ago

So I can easily make a machine with more RAM than hard drive space...

esmi 7y ago

I was very skeptical of this machine and the whole Mac Pro as concept car idea [1] but the Afterburner Accelerator Card has me wondering if I was wrong. Especially if Apple finds a way to support more works flows and applications with it. That could be a real advantage moving forward and it’s not hard to understand how it could trickledown to other products. [1] http://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-pro-successor http://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-p...

hello_tyler 7y ago

I wish Apple would just sell me the damn OS and let me install it on whatever hardware I want.

EricE 7y ago

Still waiting for my xMac; the spiritual successor to the IIcx/IIci :(