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Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”
- mattgreenrocks 14y agoThe Mac Pro clearly isn't on their radar. That said, a Hackintosh can save you a lot of money if you're looking at the Mac Pro line. It's a crappy solution, for sure. Apple would never bless such a thing, but they don't seem to try and stop it.
- AndrewNoNumbers 14y agoDitto to Hackintosh. The Mac Pro never was a good buy. Half the reason one buys an Apple product is because of the terrific build quality and design. That's extremely important in a notebook computer, something you'll carry around day in day out and have to depend on to not fail when you're in the field. There's far less incentive in buying a terrifically sturdy and pretty machine that will sit under your desk and not be moved for years on end.
- bengl3rt 14y agoI dunno about you guys, but as a college student that frequently takes internships, I move every 4-6 months. Having a really powerful desktop that can be thrown back into its (incredibly well designed) original box and shipped here, there, and everywhere while continuing to work perfectly and housing all my disks has been awesome.
- kcbanner 14y agoAny desktop case can be put back into its box and shipped in the same fashion.
- mattgreenrocks 14y agoActually, it's annoying to need a box for a desktop nowadays. But the trend towards ventilated cases makes it a necessity - there's no protection against the elements. Heck, I have problem with mine sitting near the door after I come in from the snow.
- bengl3rt 14y agoNot really - most other desktop cases are much flimsier and don't come with as well designed packaging. I've had computers not POST after shipping because something was dislodged in transit, but that never happens with the Mac Pro.
- pippy 14y agoThe fact is Mac Pro's aren't as profitable as iPads or iPhones. If you were CEO you'd de-prioritise the line as well. They're not killing off the line altogether probably because it's a less risky market. iPads and iPhones are new, and tomorrow a new phone could kill off iPhone sales over night. It is pretty shitty to see Apple do this however. I'd love for them to put in the bleeding edge hardware on the line.
- Osiris 14y agoMy problem with that line of reasoning is that the company has (had) over $100 billion in the bank. They have no reason to de-prioritize any area of the business that's making a profit. They have enough resources to pump into all their profitable lines of business and more. Is the potential of pissing off dedicated customers worth the money they'll save? What will they do with the money they save? Add it to their unimaginably large mountain of cash?
- ams6110 14y agoWho says the Mac Pro line is profitable?
- wmf 14y agoHow could it not be? The engineering is all sunk and the margin is ~35%.
- brianpan 14y agoThere's profit and there's profit. The margins are there but the units sold are not.
- moe 14y agoThat could easily be fixed by bringing the price back down into reality (i.e. 30-50% more expensive than equivalent x86-hardware, but not 300% more expensive). Currently you'd have to be lobotomized to buy a MacPro at this price point. You can buy literally 2-3 "beige boxes" with similar specs for that money. The shiny case and OSX make up for a lot, but there's a limit to what people will bear.
- mahyarm 14y agoI guess it's going to a thin client approach. iMac workstations with thunderbolt expansion and processing farms for rendering or what have you. I bet someone would make a killing with the pro market if they sold an easy to integrate and expandable render farm, or something that uses amazon services.
- burrokeet 14y agoExcept that you would have to pipe giga/terabytes of data to/from the cloud - that is why lots of in house rendering and catalogue systems use Fibre Channel and similar technologies - one of the bottlenecks is I/O from the workstation
- AndrewNCarr 14y agoI wonder if this is a tacit acceptance of the DIY hackintosh. Has anyone seen hacintoshes used by audio/video pros for production work? Everything I've read over the last year seems to imply that Apple is losing interest in the pro A/V market in favor of the profitable portable market, instead of keeping both going.
- T_S_ 14y agoDid my 17" MBP just become a collectors item?
- planetguy 14y ago"No Xeon E5 CPUs" I must admit I've lost track of what the latest and greatest CPU is at any given time, so I googled for "Xeon E5" and found this article: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/11/apple_quietly_updates_mac_pro_with_intel_xeon_e5_cpu.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/11/apple_quietly_... So what is it? Have they stuck in an Intel Xeon E5 or not?
- wmf 14y agoAppleInsider is confused. Xeon E5645 is two years old. Xeon E5-26xx is the new hotness.
- blueprint 14y agoThat's quite a mistake to make!
- adventureful 14y agoConsumer wise it's the i7-3930k and 3960x. For the XEONs as the other person noted, it's the E5-26xx and the E5-1650 is pretty badass. You can still go higher than these, but the prices skyrocket on the E7 line, eg the E7-8870, and the core to core value isn't higher: http://ark.intel.com/products/53580/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E7-8870-%2830M-Cache-2_40-GHz-6_40-GTs-Intel-QPI%29 http://ark.intel.com/products/53580/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E7-...
- tar 14y agoI do not understand. What is the appropriate use case for a Mac Pro where something equivalent and much cheaper cannot be used?
- wmf 14y agoPCIe cards. Multiple matte 30" monitors. Anything really CPU intensive.
- joshAg 14y agoI think he meant, why wouldn't a windows/unix/linux machine with similar hardware work just as well?
- jmelloy 14y agoBecause it doesn't run OS X?
- nikatwork 14y agoMost creative pro apps are only available on Windows or OSX. I don't hate Windows7 but I find OSX superior (integration, stability, decent shell etc). If you want OSX, you generally need a Mac. I'd switch to Linux if the apps were there, but it's not even close. And I'm an edge case, I suspect most creative types would rather not mess with xorg.conf.
- cheatercheater 14y agoThat's why I wish, over and over, for a Wine equivalent that runs OSX apps. I have ran some windows audio applications on Ubuntu 10.04 and the timing accuracy (tested by specialist software) was several orders of magnitude higher. In addition, I can achieve higher workloads. This is all with software that wasn't even compiled for my OS.
- dasil003 14y agoFinal Cut Pro?
- millzlane 14y agoThis isn't surprising. Look at the product wikis and see the comparison of all the hardware. From the mac pro all the way down to the phone. They have been selling overpriced hardware for a very long time. To be fair.. before the intel switch the hardware was theirs. Now, after the intel switch they're still selling over priced hardware except now it's cheaper for them because they're not using powerpc's anymore, and are now able to reap the benefits of using PC hardware.
- Bud 14y agoUh, except they aren't overpriced, as evidenced by the fact that nobody can undercut the Air or the iPhone or the iPad on price yet. And they aren't reaping the benefits of using PC hardware, either; other than Intel CPUs, Apple is custom-building all its motherboards and parts. So basically, you have no valid points at all and are just posting an anti-Apple rant.
- millzlane 14y agoYou only named 3 devices. All of which have only been on the market less than 5 years. It won't take the industry long to surpass those. Intel chips are the brain of the computer. Therefore the rest of the device benefits from it. And you can't argue that Apple didn't benefit greatly from the switch. Or else they wouldn't have rewritten their entire OS for them. So maybe 1/3 of my points are invalid.and I'm not anti apple I happen to own the latest macbook. And used to work there.
- Bud 14y agoI don't need to name more than 3 devices. You said the ENTIRE LINE was overpriced. You were wrong about that. You're also wrong about "the industry" not taking long to surpass the devices in question; they have had 4-5 years to surpass all the devices I named. Ultrabooks still haven't surpassed the Air or beaten its price point, and Android phone hardware hasn't surpassed the iPhone or beaten its price point, etc. You're just wrong. Own it. I own the latest MacBook Pro and used to work there, too, btw. :) I didn't accuse you of being anti-Apple. I said you posted an inaccurate, anti-Apple rant. Which you did. Peace.
- grecy 14y agoI agree this is a lame "update" But I don't think that means it's dead for certain. Maybe they are having a hard time figuring out if Thunderbolt will go on the gfx card or the motherboard...maybe they are still waiting for a usb 3.0/thunderbolt/ivy bridge chipset from inel? In fact, I think a "lame" update is a good sign that Apple wants to keep it around, and for whatever reason doesn't have the tech yet to make it much better.
- wmf 14y agoThey've had years to figure out the Thunderbolt thing. Xeon E5 was delayed 9 months, so the new Mac Pro actually should have been ready in September.
- robert_nsu 14y agoI don't get it. Why don't they just discontinue the Mac Pro?
- marquis 14y agoMac OSX is still solidly used in many industries, such as media and publishing. Recording studios need the Pro to install expansion cards, video production houses the same. I've seen close to riots because a production house wanted to move all their staff to Windows, and as much as you think it might save costs, you don't have to worry about Anti-Virus and Firewall software management, admin permissions etc on top of all that, Windows Pro licenses etc. Integration with iPad and iPhone is also important given that a lot of media development for these goes on in this studios.
- seanica 14y ago"you don't have to worry about Anti-Virus and Firewall software management, admin permissions" Are you sure about that? "Flashback" is just one example. Apple has also approached an av vendor to help harden OSX.
- ghshephard 14y agoFlashback is the exception that proves the rule. As much as I like to disagree with people who suggest that the OS X is "fundamentally more secure than windows" (it really, really isn't) - it does tend to have many fewer active exploits than Windows Platforms do - and your average OS X system is much less likely to be loaded up with malware than your average Windows XP system.
- creamyhorror 14y agoPerhaps, but I find it unlikely that professional companies would let their workstations - Windows or OSX - get loaded with malware. In fact, I hardly encounter exploits or malware on PCs nowadays, and never at all in the few corporate environments I've been in.
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- abruzzi 14y agoI think there are two possible explanations: 1. Marco's pessimistic take that they are clearing through existing inventory in slightly reconfigured and cheaper machines. 2. grecy's comment here that they needed to keep people hooked while they get the real bump out the door. If the answer is 2, then they really can't wait too long. A few people will be satisfied that they can get 12 cores for $3800, but it's only a stop gap. My pessimistic gut says Marco is right (see FCPx/exFCP fiasco), but I keep hoping he's wrong. Right now I have too much invested in PCIe in my studio (audio hardware) and might get one of these new 12 core boxes and nurse it along for as long as I can. Geof
- nym 14y agoIf #2 is correct, wouldn't they tease a new release instead of introducing a new model? No sense making customers buy something only to release a new model out of schedule.
- cbsmith 14y agoYou don't want to Osborne your existing line.
- justindocanto 14y agoOsborne? Never heard this term. What's this from?
- ben1040 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect Osborne Computer announced a future product that would outperform the current line. People waited, rather than buying what was currently being offered. In the meantime, with the drop in sales they ran out of cash and went bankrupt.
- sitkack 14y agoU should build a hackintosh using E5 Xeons http://vr-zone.com/articles/ultimate-8-core-matx-powerhouse-xeon-e5-2690-r4g-7970dcii-and-more-/15123.html http://www.macbreaker.com/2012/04/ultimate-xeon-hackintosh-server.html
- chrissnell 14y agoThe Mac Pro isn't just for those in the A/V industry. It's for anyone who wants a Mac with more than four cores. No other Mac can do 6+ cores. The Mac Pro hasn't seen a case update in at least six years. What other Apple product has been neglected like this?
- ary 14y agoNeglect on the internals side is objectionable, but what of the the case? It's still just as (subjectively) beautiful today as it was six years ago. Does a product really need to radically look different just to be "new?"
- chrissnell 14y agoWell, for one, it's huge. I'd love to see a smaller package that could still hold as many internal drives and PCIe cards. Something that could sit comfortably on top of a desk or be easily rack-mounted would be nice.
- ken 14y agoMarco actually wrote a nice article about this: http://www.marco.org/2011/11/02/scaling-down-the-mac-pro http://www.marco.org/2011/11/02/scaling-down-the-mac-pro Personally, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Apple was just keeping the Mac Pro alive long enough for third-party Thunderbolt accessories to catch on. Once you can plug in all the expansion you needed over Thunderbolt, what's the point of the Mac Pro? Just faster CPU and more RAM -- so maybe they'll release a special Mac Mini that's like a normal Mini but with Xeon processors and a ton of memory. They have a "Mac mini server" today, and they've had an "Xserve cluster node" in the past, so it wouldn't be completely out of line for Apple to release a special version. A lot of us wouldn't find it ideal, but it could be an answer to the "I need a Mac with 32GB of RAM" question, and Apple does seem to prefer all-in-one boxes that users plug their own external accessories into.
- AndrewNoNumbers 14y agoI'd politely like to ask.. What, besides A/V work, is a 6+ core OS X machine necessary for?
- mortenjorck 14y agoLet's say I'm running a post shop and I want to render from After Effects as fast as possible. In normal use, just how much faster will one of these dated Xeons render my comps than the quad-core i7 in a top-of-the-line iMac?
- chrissnell 14y agoDepends on how heavily After Effects leverages threads. With up to twelve cores on a Mac Pro, it could potentially be much faster.
- protomyth 14y agoAfter Effects has NVidia acceleration (CUDA), so a Mac Pro with multiple NVidia cards might be a better choice. This is an "upgrade" in the sense that the processors they were using became too expensive and they used the currently sold ones.
- reitzensteinm 14y agoHere is a relevent benchmark. The top of the line iMac has a Sandy Bridge 2600, and the 980X is the desktop version of the equivilant server part. 980X vs 2600 video transcoding: 24s vs 29.1s (lower is better) But there are still 2 CPUs in the Mac Pro, so you can double performance; it should be 2.5x faster still. Ivy Bridge, which features in the new MacBook Pros, and likely iMacs soon, nets another 10% or so for the same clock speed over Sandy Bridge. Haswell will likely be the point at which a quad core Haswell chip roughly equals a 6 core Westmere chip (not bad for a 3 generation gap). http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/16 http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-i... Edit: Another commenter pointed out that AE has CUDA acceleration. In that case, even a mid range graphics card would be faster than two high end CPUs.
- cheatercheater 14y agoWhy can't you offload to render nodes?
- forrestthewoods 14y agoOur sound guy is PISSED at the lack of update. Seriously, incredibly pissed. I've honestly never seen him this angry before. He'd been counting down the days till WWDC and a long overdue update. There are three major pieces of software he uses on his Mac that he swears by. It sounds like they have all just released or are about to release Windows versions. I'm beginning to wonder if this is a trend? Apple is clearly focused on iOS and consumer/prosumer and not professional. I certainly don't blame them. Is the future of professionals going to be Windows? Even for lifelong Mac die hards? It seems plausible imo.
- blueprint 14y agoTo confirm, what kind of professionals are you talking about for whom a new Macbook Pro isn't going to be fast enough?
- burrokeet 14y agoAudio professionals editing large surround sessions with lots of plugins and lots of tracks for one (plus you need 3-4 or more PCIe slots to stick Pro Tools or similar DSP cards in). These need as much horsepower as you can throw at them. Video professionals doing rendering or compositing, ditto. Not to mention the video cards available, plus being able to throw four full size drives directly on the SATA bus.
- veemjeem 14y agoProbably the ones who have 32gb of memory for their photoshop scratch buffer. There's still quite a few of these types of professionals. You just can't put that much memory in the Macbook Pro. Processor speed is probably less of an issue compared with memory capacity.
- fratis 14y agoWhy not just use a top-of-the-line iMac with 32GB RAM? It's not officially supported, but it does work.
- eddieroger 14y agoI was bummed, too, but I can also see why Apple doesn't put as much effort in to the Pros anymore. First off, those machines are meant to have longer lifecycles given their bumped hardware. So when you take that in to account, the biggest piece of tech I can see missing is Thunderbolt, but the Pros are meant to be hooked to bigger things with fibre cards and other Ethernet connected SANs. As for video, being the expandable machine means it will probably have extra GPUs with their own, non-Thunderbolt video cards in, so it's completely erroneous. As for the software updates, Mountain Lion will run just fine, as will the updated versions of the pro apps. I'd love an update as much as the next guy, but I take solace in the fact that my machine is a little less outdated than it can be, and understand that Apple is smart enough to know where their bread is buttered these days, even if it sucks.
- Osiris 14y agoI'm curious, why is it not possible to buy pre-configured, off-the-shelf dual or quad CPU PC systems? I know that you can get dual CPU server motherboards and build your own system, but as far as I know no one sells a pre-built desktop system that looks anything like the Mac Pro (spec-wise). EDIT: Looks like I was mistaken. You can get high-end PC workstations.
- wmf 14y agoIt's possible; they're called workstations.
- ktizo 14y agoIt is perfectly possible. You buy them from companies that supply the professional CAD market and it is relatively easy to find 32 core, dual processor, twin graphics card systems for less than $5000.
- tedunangst 14y agoI think you mean 12-core. Who's selling 16-core CPUs? Also worth pointing out that the Mac Pro is one such system as you just described.
- reitzensteinm 14y agoAMD makes 16 core Opterons (codename Interlagos), however they're slower than the latest 8 core Xeons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron#Models http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron#Models
- jacques_chester 14y agoSlower per-core, certainly. But for some workloads more cores is worth it.
- reitzensteinm 14y agoI should have been more specific. They're so much slower per thread that they're still slower overall even in heavily multithreaded tasks. In this Anandtech review, the 16 core Opteron trades blows with a six core Xeon (clocked at 2.3ghz vs 2.66ghz): http://www.anandtech.com/show/5058/amds-opteron-interlagos-6200 http://www.anandtech.com/show/5058/amds-opteron-interlagos-6... The 8 core DP Xeons weren't out yet when that review took place, but the Sandy Bridge chip was a big improvement over Westmere, in addition to the extra cores.
- gdubs 14y agoA souped-up iMac and some sort of thunderbolt 'bay' for expansion cards would serve the pro market, one would think. A large-scale touch display would be on the wish-list as well. That's my complete guess as to where they might be headed. I can't really imagine that Apple is unaware of how important the pro market is to their image, if not the bottom line. Consider the strong ties with Pixar – they must get constant feedback into what a pro setup needs. I'm betting on a big iMac/Pro update in the fall.
- MBlume 14y agoPerhaps you should actually bet with OP then!
- astrodust 14y agoA touch screen display? Are you proposing everyone get gorilla arm (http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html)? There's nothing wrong with the Mac Pro but the whiny ones who can't afford it or prefer to scoff at the price rather than recognize the value. Yes, we all want a smaller "Pro" system you can upgrade, but there's no market for it. The sad truth is Apple sells only "thousands" of Mac Pro systems compared to "millions" of their more mainstream products. That they make them at all is interesting considering the expense that must go into designing them. It's possible as Apple makes an increasing proportion of their revenue from iOS and are less threatened by the possibility of losing control of a portion of their OS X market that they might allow a few select manufacturers to produce and support a true workstation-class system. For Apple it'd be checks in the mail for licensing fees and an almost imperceptible loss of market share.
- brunorsini 14y agoIf you're into home recording (who isn't, these days?), this is a huge blow. When your Pro Tools/Cubase/Logic project has 40+ tracks of high resolution audio files and several high quality real-time plugins processing each one of them you really need a lot of CPU power. I purchased a Thunderbolt display just a couple of months ago. I wanted to use it with my Macbook Air while waiting for the Mac Pro to be updated, feeling that not even Apple could get away with a $1000 display that was not supported by its super expensive high end computer. I was wrong, apparently. Now I know what it must have felt like to have bought NeXT computers or Betamax VCRs.
- petercooper 14y agoI might be wrong, but you can still use the display with a current Mac Pro using DisplayPort, right? (You just won't get to use the other connectors.) I have a 2008 Mac Pro and was looking into doing this, but I'd need to buy a graphics card with DP first. UPDATE: Thanks! Yes, I was wrong ;-) Another source: http://store.apple.com/us/question/answers/product/MC007LL/A?pqid=Q4XK7XPHFAH9XP4PT49UUX4YYYJ4TDTJFKTTJHFAK27FT97KP http://store.apple.com/us/question/answers/product/MC007LL/A...
- brunorsini 14y agoI wouldn't count on that, because I actually had to update my macbook air just to get the Almighty Thunderbolt Display to work. In fact, my previous MBA (2010 generation, display port)didn't even power the thing up (it's powered exclusively over thunderbolt).
- sneak 14y agoI don't think that's accurate. The thunderbolt displays include a power supply with a magsafe power OUTPUT for charging a mac laptop plugged in to the thunderbolt cable, so it logically follows that they must have their own AC input.
- brunorsini 14y ago
- leeskye 14y agoAm I the only one who is stoked it comes with a third USB, standard SSD, and HDMI port?
- mark_l_watson 14y agoMy Dad, who is really into video editing and 3D animation, swears by the Mac Pro line. I have been suggesting that he get a fast MacBook Pro, use Thunderbolt with the nice raid box Apple sells, and move on. After the new MacBook Pro hotness and the minor Mac Pro update, I bet he will make the switch. My world is Linux servers and a MacBook Air (and a good SSH shell on my iPad if I am travelling light) work fine; some local develop using IntelliJ/RubyMine, etc., and good access to servers == happiness. I could personally care less if Apple wants to concentrate on what makes them money. For people who do professional video, sound, etc., maybe the Windows world is looking better, especially with Adobe's neat Creative Cloud stuff. I am a rank amateur when it comes to video and digital photo post production, and even I am thinking of dropping Final Cut Pro 7 and paying Adobe $50/month for Creative Cloud. I think that Apple has made their intentions clear.
- MetaCosm 14y agoHas it come to the point that the only way to build a serious Mac rig is a high end hackintosh? I had high hopes as I need a very serious rig for work related stuff, I put off doing soe RMA and other nonsense waiting for this thing... and ... this is it? Speaking of which, has anyone built a monster hackintosh?
- sneak 14y agoI was thinking about it, but then I just bit the bullet and got the top iMac, ordered 4GB with it, then ripped out the 2x2GB from Apple and put in 4x8GB. It's acceptable, though sometimes when I am churning data I wish I had more than 8 threads. Having to deal with opening up one's computer and also occasionally losing a half a day to tracking down proper kexts is not my idea of cost savings. (I'm not afraid of it, it just sucks and absorbs my only non-renewable resource.)
- MetaCosm 14y agoMy current rig is a last gen Mac Pro 12 core with 128GB of memory from OWC and 4x2TB in raid. I was hoping to upgrade to a box that could support more memory (the 128GB is already over the official spec, but well tested) ... but just meh. I am disappointed. But, it gets me off my butt to research how to build out a decent hackintosh.
- justindocanto 14y agoIf I used your logic last year when they did soft bumps to the MacBook Pro after not having a major upgrade since 2010, I would've been shitting my pants thinking they would be dropping the MacBook Pro and only going consumer... which, as we learned today, is not the case. The Mac Pro is a necessary part of their line for professionals and aren't going anywhere. My guess is next upgrade will be a big overhaul. It will also probably come with Mac Mini upgrades & a complete thunderbolt display selection (which I am waiting for). EDIT: the upgrade I'm referring to is April 2010 when the MacBook Pro's started using the Intel Core i5 and i7 processers, removed the express slot, etc. That's 2 years and 2 months between major updates AND you could say the 2009 was really the last time it was upgraded THIS much. So 3 years? and you're complaining about 2 which is not abnormal by any means.
- MBlume 14y agoYou and OP have made clear, concrete, differing predictions about the future, predictions which can be checked within the next 6-12 months. This is epistemically virtuous -- congratulations! If you want to be even more epistemically virtuous, you could arrange a bet. How much would you be willing to bet that there will be a new Mac Pro within the next year?
- justindocanto 14y agoLike I said: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/12/tim_cook_confirms_updated_mac_pro_coming_in_2013.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hackernewsyc+%28Hacker+News+YC%29 http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/12/tim_cook_confi...
- robomartin 14y agoThis illustrates the issue I highlighted in another thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097141 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097141 The fact that Apple keeps hardware and, increasingly, software, so tightly controlled leads to a situation like that of this "new" Mac Pro. If the Apple hardware ecosystem were open like that of Windows you'd have major companies all over the world evolving the platform in wonderful ways. Performance would go up and prices would come down. There are lots of use cases where the user couldn't give a crap about a nice and polished enclosure. You are paying dearly for design you don't need. If you want to pay for design, fine, do so, but to a lot of us it means nothing. Case in point: We have several workstations setup for Finite Element Analysis of heat and fluid flow. They are dual quad core i965 Extremes. They run overclocked at 4.0GHz with memory overclocked to 2.0GHz. They have 64GB of DDR3. All fluid cooled. Tons of storage as well. They also have dual NVidia graphics cards and sport three 24 inch 1920 x 1200 LCD monitors. Total cost, about $3,500. Including the three monitors and the OS hard drive. These are monster machines in terms of performance and they still cost less than a Mac Pro. We have three Mac Pro's as well. I would really like to see Apple open it up. A lot of interesting things could come of it. Because their hardware is not subject to competitive forces, we will now be stuck with a less-than-desirable incremental update for probably three years, if not more.
- sillysaurus 14y agoWhich monitors did you buy? How did you get them so cheaply?
- spqr 14y agoI have two Hanns G 28" LCD monitors that are 1920x1200 that cost $220 each from a sale on Newegg. I'm guessing you buy Apple products and have no idea how cheap non-Apple hardware can be?
- donio 14y agoI don't know what robomartin got but the Dell U2412M which is a decent 24" 1920x1200 IPS panel can be had for $300.
- 14y ago
- mgkimsal 14y agoAt the moment, this feels very much like a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Well, sales are down" or "Sales are such a small percentage of revenue"... that they question keeping the product line around. Given that there haven't been any major updates, yes, sales are down. I suspect if they hadn't put out a new model of the iPhone since the 3GS, sales of the iPhone would probably decline over the last 2-3 years.
- geuis 14y agoGonna play devil's advocate for a moment. Disclaimer: I don't work for Apple. I love their products (4 iPhones, 1 iPad, more 3 laptops in the last year, 1 Hackintosh that was an old gaming tower I built 3 years ago and never used till I put OS X on it, which I purchased). Apple's core revenue sources have changed significantly over the years. Used to be towers were a primary source of revenue. That's most likely no longer true, and hasn't been for a while. Take into account how much money Apple has to spend on R&D internally for their products. That's not only hardware, its also software support. One thing I've learned in the Hackintosh community is that while there's a lot of hardware that works really well, its a subset of all the hardware out there (chips, mobos, graphics cards, etc). You have to pay special attention to your hardware or getting OS X running is a huge pain in the ass, if impossible. It costs a lot of money to have good programmers to support hardware. I have to choose to believe that the people at Apple know what they're doing for the benefit of their company. If the internal folks responsible for weighing the scales have found that the amount of revenue earned for cost of development and all for Mac Pros is too narrow, or even negative, then its entirely responsible for them to be phasing out the availability of this product line. Yeah, lots of people want Mac Pro towers. That includes me. I'd still love to switch out my Hackintosh for a Mac Pro if just for the freedom to freely do software updates without worry. I develop about 50/50 between it and my laptop. But for Apple, who have proven over and over again that they know where their markets are going, they may be finding little to no value in continuing the Mac Pro line. A lot of people will counter with the argument that since Apple has so many billions of dollars, its just a drop in the bucket for them to continue Mac Pros. That may be true, but Apple isn't a company like Microsoft. They don't tend to waste billions of dollars on products that go nowhere or have little chance of success. Its true that Apple has had failures (Ping anyone?), but they are very small in comparison to their successes. Many people reading this may be too young to remember Apple from the late 80's and 90's. They were lost and wandering in the woods. They almost died a few times. I remember going with my mom to get our first Mac in the early 90's and having to pick between 3-4 different models of the same Performa series. They had multiple types of desktops available, including the Performa, Quadra, and others. Their product skews were all over the place. It wasn't until Jobs came back and brought a laser focus to their product lines that they turned around. He spent the last decade imprinting that way of thought on the entire company. Its vital to their future success, and our enjoyment and the productivity that comes from their products, that it continues. I would like to hope that there is an endemic fear in the company of losing that focus and going back to the Apple of old. So if Apple has found that the Mac Pro line is no longer worth it, its entirely reasonable that they begin phasing it out. I'm choosing to look forward and see what they're doing next, and how I can use what they're building to make cool, amazing new stuff. Not looking back and complaining that old things I thought were valuable are being taken away.
- codex 14y agoI suspect that Apple has delayed significant changes to the Mac Pro until desktop Retina displays are ready. Likely there was some snag, and the whole kit (including a Retina capable video subsystem) wasn't ready when originally planned. In that case, a small incremental update is the only option.
- TheMagicHorsey 14y agoWell, if you are banking on OS X as your platform for scientific computing, it seems you have chosen very poorly. I still don't understand why an organization would choose Mac Pros for workstations. That seems to me to be a class of machines where price/performance is very important, and Apple hasn't been very competitive in that area. I think Apple has done a pretty good thing today. They've politely signaled to the market that they want you to f' off and buy someone else's product in this segment, because you aren't worth the effort anymore. The money is in iOS and the laptops. And you don't need more than an iMac to develop for iOS or the laptops, so they just can't be bothered to make a workstation anymore. If you are pissed off about this you should investigate Linux or Windows.
- cheez 14y agoThe only reason I use OSX is because it's on a Macbook. I would never use this OS anywhere else. Please, someone give me a replacement for this damn hardware already.
- scarmig 14y agoOnly tangentially related, but what's the consensus on which "ultrabooks" look best to compete with MBP/MBA? I was hoping that Apple would make my choice for me, but I'm underwhelmed. I'm personally surprised that the Lenovo X1 Carbon hasn't gotten more notice: 14 inch screen, 1600x900, made of carbon fiber, beautiful body, less than 3 lbs, embedded 3G connectivity. Question marks seem to be battery (I've heard numbers ranging from 3.5 hours to 10 hours) and price (I'd wager around $1200ish?). Skepticism around the claims of improved sound. The Samsung Series 9 (also 1600x900, but 13.3 inch screen) also looks solid. Any others out or on the horizon worth noting?
- there 14y agoThe new ASUS Zenbook Prime (UX21A 11"/UX31A 13") models that were announced last month have similar specs to the new MBA (Ivy Bridge, up to 256Gb SSD, etc.) but are both available with 1920x1080 IPS screens. I had the original UX21 and sold it because the keyboard was not so great, but from the reviews of the new models, they have improved the keyboard and trackpad.
- hybrid11 14y agoWhat are you going to do with a Xeon processor, run a server on there?
- tlb 14y agoThe upgrade path from a Mac Pro is to a MacBook Pro with external monitor, and external Thunderbolt disk array if you need it.
- nvartolomei 14y agohttp://www.apple.com/macpro/index.html http://www.apple.com/macpro/index.html
- kevinpacheco 14y agoAccording to David Pogue, "Many Apple observers also wonder if Apple thinks that desktop computers are dead, since not a word was said about the iMac and Mac Pro. An executive did assure me, however, that new models and new designs are under way, probably for release in 2013." http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/an-explanation-of-the-news-from-apple/ http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/an-explanation-of-...
- fyolnish 14y agoHow is a 12 core 3.06ghz xeon not sufficient to develop Instapaper?
- drawkbox 14y agoIt would be a huge mistake for Apple not to keep the Mac Pro and the core of content creators/developers happy. We want/need a big machine to run OSX and Windows via Parallels, we need 16-32MB+ RAM minimum, We need many cores and lots of memory to do that with minimal problems. We want to run OSX. Where else can you run OSX on powerful hardware that isn't a Mac Pro? Apple better keep this in focus and see it as an investment. I love my Mac Pro. It is the best desktop I've ever had and what actually got me into Apple products. I can also develop all my Mac/iOS, Android and Windows apps on it, without it I'd need a windows machine again. The Mac Pro is still key to getting Windows people to switch so they can run it in parallels.
- daimyoyo 14y agoIt occurs to me that the single biggest complaint about the current update is the lack of processing power in the current MacPro. Why not rig together a box the size of an external drive that contains a dozen core Xeon processor and 64GB of DDR3 RAM? Then you could attatch it to whatever Mac product you were using via Thunderbolt and have all the horsepower you needed. Has any company done this?
- brunorsini 14y agoThere might be some hope, after all, at least according to David Pogue: "Many Apple observers also wonder if Apple thinks that desktop computers are dead, since not a word was said about the iMac and Mac Pro. An executive did assure me, however, that new models and new designs are under way, probably for release in 2013." 2013, really? http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/an-explanation-of-the-news-from-apple/ http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/an-explanation-of-...
- davweb 14y agoApparently someone has had a reply to an email sent to Tim Cook promising a bigger upgrade to the Mac Pros next year. http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/11/david-pogue-new-imacs-and-mac-pros-coming-probably-in-2013/ http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/11/david-pogue-new-imacs-an...
- zachinglis 14y agoApple don't update their line, obviously dead. Hmm? Weird conclusion. Tim Cook has come out and said there'll be an update next year: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/11/david-pogue-new-imacs-and-mac-pros-coming-probably-in-2013/ http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/11/david-pogue-new-imacs-an... But the truth is, this is really self-entitled. There's huge iPhone updates on the go (iOS6 and hopefully iPhone 5 later this year), big MacBook Pro updates but that wasn't good enough. Nope, because they didn't cover Marco's chosen line of computers… they're playing a half-assed game. Buying a computer is a 1:1 deal. You give money, they give computer (and support for a year.) That's it. That's the deal. There is no "we'll forever be in your debt" by Apple. Just because you want something, and you kick and stomp doesn't mean they should do it. We also don't know why. There could have been a hardware issue holding them up, or a software. We've got no idea on this. Apple are doing a pretty good job at the moment if you ask me.
- dpres 14y ago> I bet this is the last Mac Pro. If you wanted to kill a product line, an “update” like today’s would be a good way to clear out parts and keep selling to a few desperate buyers for a bit longer without any real investment. Apple's products build off one another. Apple is not going to kill the Mac Pro line because the iPad and iPhone would suffer.