anome said: The basic premise of Thunderbolt is that it's an external PCIe bus, so your components that used to have to be connected internally can be connected externally, and replaced even more easily than having to crack open the box.
I think the overall design premise of the current Mac Pro was to hide all the wires, maybe just one TB cable to a Raid box and another to a monitor. Trouble is, having all the I/O connections in the rear is a major pain in the ass so you end up with even more cables to breakout boxes. I love the front facing USB for quickly loading camera memory cards.
Also if you do want to upgrade something housed in a breakout box, you still have to crack open a box, or replace the entire thing including the housing, power supply, fans as well as the card itself, so it ends up being even more expensive and time consuming to upgrade. Personally, I don't really care about wires. I have wires all over the place to charge my phone, Apple Watch, iPad, MBP, wired headphones, land line, power strips, UPS, cables to my computer and monitor. Hiding the I/O ports just for a sleek look is self defeating in my opinion.
So Apple’s path will not lead them down the direction of touch Mac screens, as they’ve stated. Instead, Federighi suggests that making the iPad Pro, which they feel has a better drawing experience, work better with the Mac is the answer.
“We recognize customers often [use both] — we all certainly use both — so we’re really focused on making them work well together,” he says. “Because we think in many tasks, that’s actually the best solution. So all of our customers should feel free to buy multiple products,” he jokes, laughing. “We encourage that.”
Perhaps the use of iPad and/or iPhone as external surfaces to compliment the Mac experience is forthcoming after all.
Federighi is careful to note that, while Apple set out do so something new and different with the Mac Pro, “we didn’t start with a shape and say, ‘well, here’s the fastest machine we can put in that box.’ We actually started with a target for performance and came up with what I think was a very clever design of that thermal core and thermal architecture to accommodate what we thought was the right power architecture.”
“What I think we didn’t appreciate completely at the time was how we had so tailor designed that specific vision at the time that in the future we would find ourselves a bit boxed in to a circular shape,” he says.
So Apple is incapable of walking and chewing gun at the same time? How long does it take to design a tower that serves the market- we do not give a crap about styling. Take the Pre-Trashcan form factor and update it for the current market- that should take a small team little time.
A company as big and well heeled as Apple should be able to serve a select small market and waste gobs of money on crap like Animated Balloons on Text Messages and Facebook integration. Serving specialty markets is common in business all the time- you do not have to make a killing on every product line. The line should have been kept up to date all along and the Black Trashcan was a tragic mistake.
In Medicine, Hospitals and Clinics commonly offer necessary services that are break even at best because it is in the best interest of the customers. Mammography is a prime example- unless you do huge volume you will never make a dime providing the service, but it is done anyhow. Apple makes truckloads on iPhones and should be able to subsidize the high end pro market.
Actually in business there is a concept called the "majority fallacy" which suggests going after niche markets can be highly lucrative.
We’re not going to get into exactly what stage we’re in, just that we told the team to take the time to do something really great. To do something that can be supported for a long time with customers with updates and upgrades throughout the years. We’ll take the time it takes to do that. The current Mac Pro, as we’ve said a few times, was constrained thermally and it restricted our ability to upgrade it. And for that, we’re sorry to disappoint customers who wanted that, and we’ve asked the team to go and re-architect and design something great for the future that those Mac Pro customers who want more expandability, more upgradability in the future. It’ll meet more of those needs.
- Schiller, Apple
Okay, that took gut. Thank you. (And the reason why I can't see any other companies like Microsoft or Samsung to do AND why I love Apple as a company.)
On the side note, I have MacPRO and to call the design a trashcan is something that an ignorant person who never used it will say. It packs with so many understated innovative deigns inside such as the perfect thermal core that no other PC has.
The Cylinder has turned out to be another Cube. Overpriced and underpowered. I'd really like them to keep the Cylinder in the lineup as a mid-range option. Then the mini can be the bic lighter of Macs, with no expansion. The Cylinder can be the somewhat expandable middle of the road machine, and the new box can be the true Pro machine, with the greatest expandability.
I'm imagining a round stackable mini, maybe even a donut -- maybe there's more to Apple Park than we realize!
If this refresh/update comes out in 2018, then it's what, only three years late?
Five years late. The trash can should never have gotten out the door. Apple would have been better off doing a speed bump on the cheesegrater than ever releasing that thing.
The Cylinder has turned out to be another Cube. Overpriced and underpowered. I'd really like them to keep the Cylinder in the lineup as a mid-range option. Then the mini can be the bic lighter of Macs, with no expansion. The Cylinder can be the somewhat expandable middle of the road machine, and the new box can be the true Pro machine, with the greatest expandability.
I'm imagining a round stackable mini, maybe even a donut -- maybe there's more to Apple Park than we realize!
No more circular computers. Even Federighi said their decision to make the Mac Pro round had unforeseen negatives that hobbled the upgrade cycle.
I didn't know that online forums were comprised of only the 1%.
Funny that the Mac Pro is an extremely small seller, yet everyone and their dog seems to be using one (and therefore, have the "right" to complain incessantly about it).
Sounds kind of similar to the people who always preface their $hit posts with "I own several Apple products but...."
It wasn't a small seller until the trash can came out.
I'm typing this on a Mac Pro right now. It's not a cylinder. I've only installed or worked on a few trash cans, I can almost count the number of them I've touched on fingers and toes. The cheesegrater? No idea. High hundreds? Low thousands? I'm not sure. Personally? I only own three. Now that's nothing like MacBook Pros, I've got five within my current line of sight, but when I complain about something Apple has done wrong, I know a little something about it. That little pic beside my username, with the Apple ][, couple Disk ][ drives, and Monitor II? Yeah, I have one of those, it still works, I've been doing this for a while.
The last trash can Pro I installed was last year. It was a compromised install from the start, I'd much rather have used a 2016 XServe, but that doesn't exactly exist. It's in a rack, it replaced a dying 2008 cheesegrater that was there because the old location where it was originally installed didn't have a rack, this one does.
Look, there are pretty much two groups of people who post on these boards, the "Apple can do no wrong" types, and those of us who actually have work to do and need the appropriate hardware to do it. The trash can Pro is designed to be pretty. Whether it is or not is a matter of opinion. But what isn't a matter of opinion is that it's an inherently compromised design. It's unarguable that a small cylinder form factor picked looks over capabilities, it has one SSD slot vs the 6 internal drive bays of the cheesegrater (2 optical, 4 HDD bays). It has one CPU socket, vs the two in the cheesegrater. And it has two graphics boards, but they aren't upgradeable, for most of my purposes I only need one, and I could put four in a cheesegrater if I did need to. I don't need a bunch of external drive boxes cluttering up my desk, I don't need a bunch more cables making the rack even more complicated. It's compromise, and for most of us, it was the wrong one.
Yeah, sometimes we're not happy with what Apple does. Yeah, macOS is still FAR better than anything out of MicroSloth, so we still use hardware that isn't ideal for the purpose. And yes, we want Apple to get on the ball and ship better stuff.
Thin isn't what everybody needs in a laptop. And cylindrical is not what almost anybody needs or wants in a powerhouse workstation or server.
That's why we complain. We know Apple is capable of better. They've done better before.
Interesting all the talk of modular and give they want to target proHardware.
Why not make it rackable?
Go one further make it openCompute new rack modules geared towards number crunching workflows. Most of the other vendors in the project are geared toward data serving so Apple could pretty much lock up that niche. Apple get to the leverage the work of others in the area and also build out the system to suit Creative Pro needs. Even offer some products that others wouldn't see value in like a small attractive desk rack or even road cases for mobile deployment.
Then the only real Pro challenge that doesn't doesn't address is the need to try and get the pro and a high number of pixels far enough away from the noise made by driving that many pixels. That could be where the new Displays come into it.
If this refresh/update comes out in 2018, then it's what, only three years late?
Never good enough for some people. How miserable.
Are you serious? The trash can is already long overdue for a major update and being told this could be at least another year away is little comfort for those pros trying to stick with Apple. No it's not good enough, it should have been delivered this year. Apple are in crisis recovery mode now. Pre-announcing something so far out makes this clear. The announcement is in some ways more bad news than good for the future of pro computing on Mac. Many have already left and many more won't be prepared to wait another year. These are facts, and it is not a case of never being good enough or being miserable. That's rediculous, you obviously don't understand the issues.
The fact that they announced so far ahead probably reflects the fact that Mac Pro sales are so bad that they want to assure Pro users that they know there's a problem and they are working on it. They're trying to head off losing those users to Windows PC's. I wish they would breathe some life back into the mini while they're at it.
Elvis has left the Building in Video. The tragic combination of iMovie Pro X ( d.b.a. FCPX) and the trashcan sent the editing world away from Apple and rightly so. Apple, with the attention span of a housefly, abandoned Aperture and those customers. They also ruined Logic Pro in a similar manner.
As someone with a real Mac Pro Tower, who bought and used Final Cut Pro, Aperture and Logic I was and am not amused. It did not have to be this way.
Apple has more money than any other company on the earth and huge human resources to devote to multiple product lines simultaneously as it is not the starving company of 1997 trying to remain afloat. They should be able to keep the Mac current while wasting money and people on crap like Beats. And , if it comes down to Planet of the Apps or a new Mac Pro, tell Eddie Cue to have a nice day and find a new job.
Blah blah blah. Your comments are from someone stuck in 2006.
Wow, awesome rebuttal.... You sure convinced me... /S
My question is, what changed? They've known they were doing a lousy job in the pro market for the last three years? Why decide to say something NOW? Why only start investing in the pro market again now? Was someone cooking the books in terms of stats? Did they finally realize that so long as the iPad stays in line with what it is now it'll never replace a MacBook let alone a Mac Pro? Did Tim finally have a heart to heart with someone who told him that pricing the MacBook Pro out of the range of customers who they should be targeting was a bad idea?
Seriously Apple has been putting all their eggs into iOS and ignoring the Mac aside from making it thinner and thinner and more and more boring. Give me a 1 inch design and powerful hardware and software to take advantage of it, over these needlessly thin designs!
The Mac is a DYING and SHRINKING platform. PERIOD.
Increased Mac sales (doubled over the past 8 years), $23bn revenue/year, Apple in the top 5 PC vendors and is the most profitable PC vendor - equates to a dying platform?
Comments
Also if you do want to upgrade something housed in a breakout box, you still have to crack open a box, or replace the entire thing including the housing, power supply, fans as well as the card itself, so it ends up being even more expensive and time consuming to upgrade. Personally, I don't really care about wires. I have wires all over the place to charge my phone, Apple Watch, iPad, MBP, wired headphones, land line, power strips, UPS, cables to my computer and monitor. Hiding the I/O ports just for a sleek look is self defeating in my opinion.
Perhaps the use of iPad and/or iPhone as external surfaces to compliment the Mac experience is forthcoming after all.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/04/apple-pushes-the-reset-button-on-the-mac-pro/
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/04/apple-pushes-the-reset-button-on-the-mac-pro/
On the side note, I have MacPRO and to call the design a trashcan is something that an ignorant person who never used it will say. It packs with so many understated innovative deigns inside such as the perfect thermal core that no other PC has.
I'm typing this on a Mac Pro right now. It's not a cylinder. I've only installed or worked on a few trash cans, I can almost count the number of them I've touched on fingers and toes. The cheesegrater? No idea. High hundreds? Low thousands? I'm not sure. Personally? I only own three. Now that's nothing like MacBook Pros, I've got five within my current line of sight, but when I complain about something Apple has done wrong, I know a little something about it. That little pic beside my username, with the Apple ][, couple Disk ][ drives, and Monitor II? Yeah, I have one of those, it still works, I've been doing this for a while.
The last trash can Pro I installed was last year. It was a compromised install from the start, I'd much rather have used a 2016 XServe, but that doesn't exactly exist. It's in a rack, it replaced a dying 2008 cheesegrater that was there because the old location where it was originally installed didn't have a rack, this one does.
Look, there are pretty much two groups of people who post on these boards, the "Apple can do no wrong" types, and those of us who actually have work to do and need the appropriate hardware to do it. The trash can Pro is designed to be pretty. Whether it is or not is a matter of opinion. But what isn't a matter of opinion is that it's an inherently compromised design. It's unarguable that a small cylinder form factor picked looks over capabilities, it has one SSD slot vs the 6 internal drive bays of the cheesegrater (2 optical, 4 HDD bays). It has one CPU socket, vs the two in the cheesegrater. And it has two graphics boards, but they aren't upgradeable, for most of my purposes I only need one, and I could put four in a cheesegrater if I did need to. I don't need a bunch of external drive boxes cluttering up my desk, I don't need a bunch more cables making the rack even more complicated. It's compromise, and for most of us, it was the wrong one.
Yeah, sometimes we're not happy with what Apple does. Yeah, macOS is still FAR better than anything out of MicroSloth, so we still use hardware that isn't ideal for the purpose. And yes, we want Apple to get on the ball and ship better stuff.
Thin isn't what everybody needs in a laptop. And cylindrical is not what almost anybody needs or wants in a powerhouse workstation or server.
That's why we complain. We know Apple is capable of better. They've done better before.
Why not make it rackable?
Go one further make it openCompute new rack modules geared towards number crunching workflows. Most of the other vendors in the project are geared toward data serving so Apple could pretty much lock up that niche. Apple get to the leverage the work of others in the area and also build out the system to suit Creative Pro needs. Even offer some products that others wouldn't see value in like a small attractive desk rack or even road cases for mobile deployment.
Then the only real Pro challenge that doesn't doesn't address is the need to try and get the pro and a high number of pixels far enough away from the noise made by driving that many pixels. That could be where the new Displays come into it.
/S