Apple winding down Mac Pro tower shipments as it works to finish new cylindrical model
It's the end of the line for the aluminum Mac Pro tower, as Apple appears to now be winding down shipments to resellers in preparation to launch a newly redesigned professional-grade desktop later this year.
As can be seen in the AppleInsider Mac Price Guide, the current-generation Mac Pro with a 3.2-gigahertz processor is out of stock at resellers Amazon, Mac Connection, B&H, and J&R. Additionally, as of Wednesday afternoon, only two units remain in stock at MacMall.
This is the first time the Mac Pro has been spotted sold out at so many authorized resellers, and is likely a sign that Apple is winding down ? or has halted ? production of the current model.
That comes as no surprise, as Apple uncharacteristically offered a sneak peek for its new cylinder-shaped Mac Pro at its Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month. Apple usually does not show off a new product until it is ready to ship, or at least has a specific launch window.
However, the company only said that the new Mac Pro would launch sometime in 2013, without committing to a date or timeframe.
When it launches, the newly redesigned Mac Pro will mark the end of an era for Apple's legacy aluminum tower, which has existed since the launch of the Power Mac G5 in June of 2003. That was billed by Apple as the first personal computer to use a 64-bit processor, a PowerPC G5 processor developed by IBM.
The first Power Mac G5 featured dual 2-gigahertz processors, and could support up to 8 gigabytes of RAM. In particular, the aluminum tower was touted by Apple a decade ago for having four distinct thermal zones to keep the system running cool. Each zone was equipped with thermal sensors, allowing them to be cooled independently and quietly.
Apple also boasted about the removable door on the side of the Power Mac G5, which allowed users the ability to quickly access and swap out the hard drive, RAM, graphics cards, and other components.
The desktop was rebranded as the Mac Pro in 2006, when Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel processors while keeping the same enclosure. The first Intel-based tower Mac included two dual-core Intel Xeon 5150 processors clocked at 2.66 gigahertz.
The first Mac Pro system came with a gigabyte of RAM by default and officially supported 16 gigabytes of RAM.
The design of the tower remained largely the same, though Apple added a second optical drive bay, along with a second USB port and FireWire 800 port on the front of the desktop. The system also supported four full-length PCI-Express slots, along with a double-wide graphics slot.
"This is a beautiful enclosure design," Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller said of the Mac Pro during the WWDC keynote in 2006. "Outside it has all of the same benefits as before."
While Apple felt those benefits were enough to carry the current design through a decade, this year the company revealed its designers have been working on a radical new approach for the next Mac Pro. The unique design prompted Schiller to quip at this year's WWDC: "Can't innovate anymore, my ass."
The new desktop will stick with Intel's Xeon family of processors, with configurations going as high as 12 cores. The machine will also have support for third-generation PCI-Express, with bandwidth speeds up to 40 gigabytes per second.
The new Mac Pro will also feature PCIe flash storage, clocked at 1,250 megabytes per second, more than doubling the 500 megabyte-per-second speed of flash drives on SATA connections.
Unlike with the aluminum tower, the Mac Pro redesign is not focused on swapping out components. Instead, Apple will offer expandability through ports, including six high-speed Thunderbolt 2 ports.
In addition, the new Mac Pro will feature four USB 3.0 ports, two gigabit Ethernet ports, HDMI 1.4, and audio input and output. It's advertised to arrive later this year.
As can be seen in the AppleInsider Mac Price Guide, the current-generation Mac Pro with a 3.2-gigahertz processor is out of stock at resellers Amazon, Mac Connection, B&H, and J&R. Additionally, as of Wednesday afternoon, only two units remain in stock at MacMall.
This is the first time the Mac Pro has been spotted sold out at so many authorized resellers, and is likely a sign that Apple is winding down ? or has halted ? production of the current model.
That comes as no surprise, as Apple uncharacteristically offered a sneak peek for its new cylinder-shaped Mac Pro at its Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month. Apple usually does not show off a new product until it is ready to ship, or at least has a specific launch window.
However, the company only said that the new Mac Pro would launch sometime in 2013, without committing to a date or timeframe.
When it launches, the newly redesigned Mac Pro will mark the end of an era for Apple's legacy aluminum tower, which has existed since the launch of the Power Mac G5 in June of 2003. That was billed by Apple as the first personal computer to use a 64-bit processor, a PowerPC G5 processor developed by IBM.
The first Power Mac G5 featured dual 2-gigahertz processors, and could support up to 8 gigabytes of RAM. In particular, the aluminum tower was touted by Apple a decade ago for having four distinct thermal zones to keep the system running cool. Each zone was equipped with thermal sensors, allowing them to be cooled independently and quietly.
Apple also boasted about the removable door on the side of the Power Mac G5, which allowed users the ability to quickly access and swap out the hard drive, RAM, graphics cards, and other components.
The desktop was rebranded as the Mac Pro in 2006, when Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel processors while keeping the same enclosure. The first Intel-based tower Mac included two dual-core Intel Xeon 5150 processors clocked at 2.66 gigahertz.
The first Mac Pro system came with a gigabyte of RAM by default and officially supported 16 gigabytes of RAM.
The design of the tower remained largely the same, though Apple added a second optical drive bay, along with a second USB port and FireWire 800 port on the front of the desktop. The system also supported four full-length PCI-Express slots, along with a double-wide graphics slot.
"This is a beautiful enclosure design," Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller said of the Mac Pro during the WWDC keynote in 2006. "Outside it has all of the same benefits as before."
While Apple felt those benefits were enough to carry the current design through a decade, this year the company revealed its designers have been working on a radical new approach for the next Mac Pro. The unique design prompted Schiller to quip at this year's WWDC: "Can't innovate anymore, my ass."
The new desktop will stick with Intel's Xeon family of processors, with configurations going as high as 12 cores. The machine will also have support for third-generation PCI-Express, with bandwidth speeds up to 40 gigabytes per second.
The new Mac Pro will also feature PCIe flash storage, clocked at 1,250 megabytes per second, more than doubling the 500 megabyte-per-second speed of flash drives on SATA connections.
Unlike with the aluminum tower, the Mac Pro redesign is not focused on swapping out components. Instead, Apple will offer expandability through ports, including six high-speed Thunderbolt 2 ports.
In addition, the new Mac Pro will feature four USB 3.0 ports, two gigabit Ethernet ports, HDMI 1.4, and audio input and output. It's advertised to arrive later this year.
Comments
I'm not really surprised. How many people today are buying the current Mac Pro and its dated specs?
Part of me is wondering if Apple might pull an about-face on this one and end up re-releasing the current Mac Pro if/when the new design is rejected by people who aren't satisfied with the new design.
I'm withholding my own judgement until I see what the price point will be, and especially if they'll be providing a reasonably priced solution for PCIe/expandability. Right now and external chassis that would allow current-gen Mac Pro expandability via Thunderbolt is pretty expensive and not very elegant compared to it just being part of the box. I'm also wondering how much space will be needed above the unit to allow for heat dissipation - my Mac currently sits in a soundproof case with ventilation ducts going out the back and it'll be interesting to see if the new design will be kosher with that, especially if I have to cram in a bunch of external devices for extra hard drives, PCIe, etc.
The new Mac Pro seems to me to be very similar to the Mac Mini in its product concept, which will be great for 95% of users, but Im not sure if it'll be the best option for my studio, and pretty much every audio professional I know has expressed similar fears.
I'm very happy with the current Mac Pro's form factor and expandability options, and really if they had re-released it with an updated processor, bus and hard drive options, i would probably continue buying a new one every 5-6 years (have already gone through 2 and upgraded hard drives &memory multiple times on each - nothing but positive experiences while upgrading and replacing them).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Constable Odo
Wall Street's already talking about it but they definitely don't have anything good to say about it.
… because Wall Street is where we should go for professional hardware reviews?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gustav
My biggest concern with this machine is price of storage. PCIe flash is more than ten times the price of an equivalent sized hard disk.
Indeed. The largest SSD they offer in their products so far is the 768 and that's $900.
There is a space on the board for a second drive connector if you look at the pictures of the new Mac Pro closely, but for me the internal storage space has to be about 2TB to be useful as a replacement for my old Mac Pro. I'm thinking this thing will debut with 2x768GB drives as the very top option only. Probably less.
They pretty much have to make new displays for it too, so it will be interesting to get more Thunderbolt display options at least.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Constable Odo
May I be the first to say "trash can Mac". Oh, wait... That's already the official code name of the new Mac Pro. That Jonny Ive is a trip. he said to himself, "Everyone wanted some Apple innovation and now I'm going to give them something to really talk about." Unfortunately, this new Mac Pro will go down in infamy as the radical-looking desktop that no one wanted. Wall Street's already talking about it but they definitely don't have anything good to say about it.
1) Not a "desktop" but a pro machine.
2) Cylindrical things look like other cylindrical things. So what?
It could as easily be a "jet engine Mac" as a "trash can Mac."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Constable Odo
May I be the first to say "trash can Mac". Oh, wait... That's already the official code name of the new Mac Pro. That Jonny Ive is a trip. he said to himself, "Everyone wanted some Apple innovation and now I'm going to give them something to really talk about." Unfortunately, this new Mac Pro will go down in infamy as the radical-looking desktop that no one wanted. Wall Street's already talking about it but they definitely don't have anything good to say about it.
Except in one year we will see multiple "innovators" building cylindrical computers. And a choir is Samsung fans will by saying that it's an obvious idea and will be linking to some obscure Star Trek episode featuring cylinders.
Not to mention the best way I've kept breathing life into my MP was to upgrade the video card with off the shelf PC cards. It's highly unlikely that any company is going to release an after market GPU in 3 years down the road for this new MP. It's no longer a simple firmware flash, it would involve designing a new board.
Right now I'm leaning to buy the tower MP over the cylinder. But I'll wait and see how much the new ones are. The lack of GPU upgrades are probably my biggest hesitation at this point.. that and no dual CPU option.
Quote:
Originally Posted by justamacguy
If you don't think it will fly... you don't understand what thunderbolt has to offer in the way of raw speed and PCI capability on a wire.
Actually you overestimate its value. Until Tbolt is actually PCI-E ready with an x16 or even an x8 lane of bandwidth it's functionality is far less encompassing then you imagine it to be.
It will take Thunderbolt 3.0 before that even happens. 20Mbps (20 Megabits per second theoretical) is nowhere near PCI-E 3.0 126Gbps bandwidth. By the time TBolt 3.0 arrives PCI-E 4.0 at 252Gbps will be out.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ursadorable
I'm still reserving judgement. After watching the keynote I was ready to slap down money for one. Now having more time to think it over, I'm considering buying one of the current generation MP's instead, simply because the abysmal bump in speed. I'm not sure where Apple get's it's 2X as fast comparison, because it smells like Bullshit about now.
Not to mention the best way I've kept breathing life into my MP was to upgrade the video card with off the shelf PC cards. It's highly unlikely that any company is going to release an after market GPU in 3 years down the road for this new MP. It's no longer a simple firmware flash, it would involve designing a new board.
Right now I'm leaning to buy the tower MP over the cylinder. But I'll wait and see how much the new ones are. The lack of GPU upgrades are probably my biggest hesitation at this point.. that and no dual CPU option.
The performance bump isn't from the CPU it's from the leverage of those Dual FirePro OpenCL 1.2 compliant box that have 4096 shaders on it that OS X 10.9 will everage heavily. Apple's OpenCL 1.2 stack is highly optimized, scalable and efficient. More and more of the OS is leveraging the GPGPUs and even the new Intel designs are waking up to the fact they are falling behind AMD's APU approach.
When AMD comes out with Steamroller (FX and APU) the Intel weakness will be highly revealed. Excavator being the end of FX CPUs will be when AMD truly start making big noise and fast. Steamroller this Fall, Excavator next June. Intel has a lot of work ahead in the OpenCL space and GPGPU space they can nowhere near compete against AMD.
If Tbolt were licensed to Apple they could easily position Intel against AMD in the near future.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Constable Odo
Wall Street
Here's the two words in your post where I stopped reading and where you lost all credibility.
Quote:
Originally Posted by justamacguy
If you don't think it will fly... you don't understand what thunderbolt has to offer in the way of raw speed and PCI capability on a wire.
Oh, I think they understand. It's just a question of a) paying for it and b) availability.
Quote:
Originally Posted by justamacguy
If you don't think it will fly... you don't understand what thunderbolt has to offer in the way of raw speed and PCI capability on a wire.
Yes, it's slower than the slots in the Mac Pro would have been by a factor of 6. A PCIe 3.0 x16 slot is 16 GB/s. A TB port is 2.5GB/s (20 Gbps) max (some bandwidth may be taken by the display).
6 ports < 4 slots. Even if you keep the old configuration of slot 1 and 2 being x16 slots and 3 and 4 being x4 slots the difference is between 6x2.5 = 15GB/s vs 40 GB/s.
External PCIe would have been faster at 4GB/s for a gen 1 x16 ePCIe cable and 8GBs for the gen 2.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer
The performance bump isn't from the CPU it's from the leverage of those Dual FirePro OpenCL 1.2 compliant box that have 4096 shaders on it that OS X 10.9 will everage heavily. Apple's OpenCL 1.2 stack is highly optimized, scalable and efficient. More and more of the OS is leveraging the GPGPUs and even the new Intel designs are waking up to the fact they are falling behind AMD's APU approach.
When AMD comes out with Steamroller (FX and APU) the Intel weakness will be highly revealed. Excavator being the end of FX CPUs will be when AMD truly start making big noise and fast. Steamroller this Fall, Excavator next June. Intel has a lot of work ahead in the OpenCL space and GPGPU space they can nowhere near compete against AMD.
If Tbolt were licensed to Apple they could easily position Intel against AMD in the near future.
You know, I think folks here have been vastly overestimating the impact of OpenCL on day to day performance even for pros. Frankly, given that a big chunk of Apple consumer lineup has zero OpenCL GPU support indicates that even OSX 10.9 will not be heavily dependent on it unless the expectation is that all the 2012 MBA, 13" MBPs and Minis will start beachballing a lot under 10.9.
Specific apps will perform well using GP/GPU code. Most of these apps already had solid CUDA support and are adding OpenCL support due to a heavy AMD push for them to do so. Intel doesn't give a shit about OpenCL and would rather folks optimize for x86 performance and the Xeon Phi. OpenCL support has thus far been somewhat grudging on their integrated GPUs and completely MIA in OSX.
So for Pros the result is moving from nVidia based cards and moderately more mature CUDA codebase in the apps they use to ATI cards and somewhat new OpenCL code in apps. Performance simply isn't going to hugely jump because the delta isn't between no GP/GPU at all and suddenly now dual FirePros but between moving from Quadro 6000s to FirePro W9000 equivalents.
http://vr-zone.com/articles/why-amd-firepro-still-cannot-compete-against-nvidia-quadro-old-or-new/17074.html
The devil is in the details. In this case the driver support as well as coder support for the app developers.
Let's face it - it's a different take on the form of a professional workstation computer . It has compromises but I think it's exciting to have all that thunderbolt expandability. I don't know what the price is gonna be but I think I like the machine so far - it remains to be seen if simply shrinking the size of the current model & updating the components would have been better, but then again this is Apple, not Dell. We said "NEW MAC PRO!" and they said "HERE!". And there it is.