10 ms·
I don't see it that way at all. The Mac Pro has always been about the top 1% power users. The appeal was twofold: it was a bitchin'-fast machine you could stu
by gamache 13y ago
I don't see it that way at all. The Mac Pro has always been about the top 1% power users. The appeal was twofold: it was a bitchin'-fast machine you could stuff with as many cards and drives as you want, and it ran OS X.
This new design removes the former selling point. 12 core max (same as current)?? Four RAM slots (down from eight)?? 1/6th the volume (i.e. space to plug stuff in)??
This offers almost no advantage over a late model iMac with a Thunderbolt-to-PCIe breakout module (which is what many power users have been doing in the years since the last update).
- meerita 13y agoWelcome to the era where you process all in the cloud. You don't need 30 HD on your machine anymore or 200gb ram. I was a bit shocked at the beginning but then I realized most of the studios are using cloud solutions to make intensive renders or local hardware farms with plenty of processing power. I think the Mac Pro still exceeds on power, but you know you will always find someone else more hungry of power :)
- voltagex_ 13y agoHeh, I bet you're somewhere with high bandwidth, no data caps and very low latency. Here, I'm 30-60ms away from the big datacentres, and 200-400ms away from the US. Data is capped at ~500gb per month on the high end plans, and that's both upload and download. I'm lucky to get 10 megabits down, 1 megabit up on a good day. Coupled with the fact our country's going to head back to the 1950s with the inevitable change of government next election, screw the cloud.
- KnightHawk3 13y agoAustralia? But yeah, where I am I was on mobile internet for a year where I would go 2 weeks on a 2G connection and even on the 3G I had pings of 200~ to data centers in my city.
- voltagex_ 13y agoGuessed it. I was debating whether to mention it in my post.
- sgt 13y agoSouth Africa here - we're also suffering from the fact that geographically "in the middle of nowhere". As for government, don't get me started. But I'm curious - what's happening in Australia that makes you say that it's about to back to the 50s?
- meerita 13y agoMost of the people I know they didn't updagraded their Mac Pros ever in 3 to 6 years of use. I heard people upgrading memory, replacing discs, but the rest it should be intact. The Mac Pro is a nice machine for people who won't upgrade in 3 o 4 years, even more and still having power. If they didn't release this, I would continue with the idea of making my Hackintosh but this new baby is nice.
- bjustin 13y ago>This offers almost no advantage over a late model iMac with a Thunderbolt-to-PCIe breakout module (which is what many power users have been doing in the years since the last update). A few big advantages over the iMac: Xeons processors, so more cores & more cache; ECC RAM; and (two) workstation graphics cards. Six thunderbolt ports means up to 36 (!) PCIe peripherals by daisy chaining, which means a lot more expandability than the iMac or even the 2010 Mac Pro.
- mturmon 13y agoAnother interesting engineering innovation relative to the iMac is PCIe mass storage (as opposed to SATA).
- rbanffy 13y agoPCIe will probably be in the next generation of iMacs.
- gilgoomesh 13y agoIt's in the current generation through Thunderbolt.
- mrpippy 13y agoThe Haswell MBAs released today use PCIe flash
- mturmon 13y agoAnother interesting engineering innovation relative to the iMac is PCIe mass storage (as opposed to SATA).
- mturmon 13y agoAnother interesting engineering innovation relative to the iMac is PCIe mass storage (as opposed to SATA).
- mturmon 13y agoAnother interesting engineering innovation relative to the iMac is PCIe mass storage (as opposed to SATA).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ttcbj 13y agoI mostly agree with this. I have owned three mac pros. I use them for development work. I like them because they are fast, well-built, run OS X (which I like), I can put lots of RAM in them, and put a few extra hard drives in with software RAID. There isn't much about this announcement that excites me. I don't think I need two graphics cards (though maybe 4K will be nicer than I realize). I don't need it to be smaller and I don't really care what it looks like, as long as it is well built. But: * I have had really good experiences with past mac pros, and poor experiences with hardware from other vendors, so I am reluctant to switch. * The cost differential of a mac pro vs. an imac is not that great, relative to the cost of development time, so I am likely to give the mac pro the benefit of the doubt. If the benchmarks show it is significantly faster, I will probably just go with it. I do wonder who is excited about this machine. I think another commenter is right - it is the video editors and high end graphics types this machine is truly built for.
- Samuel_Michon 13y agoVideo editor and high end graphics guy checking in. I’m very excited, mostly by the size of the new Mac Pro. I’ll be able to take this workstation anywhere and just plug it into some rented displays. Lugging the current Mac Pro around means I’ll have to go there by car or settle for taking a MacBook Pro along and doing rendering on a rented Mac Pro. The new Mac Pro, I can bring along in a carry-on and have plenty of room to spare for other equipment. Too bad it won’t be available for months, I have so many projects for which this would be a dream.
- seanp2k2 13y agoYou could also pop this in a backpack, possibly along with a small projector and wireless mouse / keyboard :) I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see these showing up on tours with bigger electronic music acts.
- Sealy 13y ago-Thunderbolt-to-PCIe breakout module (which is what many power users have been doing in the years since the last update) Do you have any examples of this? I did a quick google but didn't find anything. My imagination is telling me that looks like some sort of motherboard with slots in it...
- wmf 13y agoIt looks like http://www.magma.com/expressbox-3t http://www.magma.com/expressbox-3t http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpresschassis.html http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpresschassis.html http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/PCIe_Chassis/Mercury_Helios/ http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/PCIe_Chassis/Merc...
- seanp2k2 13y ago12 cores is because it's a single CPU. More info: http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2013/2013040201_Some_details_of_upcoming_Intel_Xeon_E5_v2_and_E7_v2_CPUs.html http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2013/2013040201_Some_details_o... Expected release date is Q4 2013.