Apple's Mac Pro retail inventories suggest refresh on the horizon - Page 4

First off I never thought of the Mac Pro as a desktop, it is more off a machine for professionals. Or it should be but Apple configures it in odd ways that results in the comments in this thread. You see I fully understand it is a low volume machine, but Apples seems to be hell bent on selling it as a compromised machine at a high price. Here I'm talking about the video cards for the most part. If it is a Pro machine configure it as such.

What is worst is that Apple tries to sell a watered down version of this machine as a desktop machine in the image of the many PC desktops. However the machine can't really be priced for that market either. Thus the continued growl from the Mac community for an XMac. That is a true desktop machine built from desktop parts for people like me. That is somebody expecting a little better performance than can be had in a Mini and a half decent video card. I say card when talking about video but would be happy with a soldered in discrete video GPU on the motherboard. I'm not here to slag the Mini as it is a very nice machine, especially in the last revision, but it is just a little short on power. What I'm implying here is that Apple needs to concentrate on the Pro market with the Mac Pro and deliver a machine for the rest of us slotted between the Mini and the Pro in price. That way you aren't delivering half baked Mac Pros to the middle of the road market and creating ligitimate issues for the high end users. I know the various XMac ideas are seen as a joke in the Mac using community, but really you guys need to move a lot more Macs to sustain the current high stock price. Filling the desktop void would go a long way to solving the problem of accelerating sales even more. By the way some of us have come to see the Mac Pro as a bit of a joke these days for reasons other than expressed here.

The other thing that tweaks me a bit is AMD, does Apple have a problem using their chips? Frankly it is the only leverage you have with Intel. AMD is Apples best chance of delivering an XMac class machine at a reasonable price and without the wasted hardware of an Intel solution. Apple needs to do something as the hardware line up has been stagnet for years on the desktop. You know this is true, as the Mini, iMac and Pro haven't changed in years.

Thankfully Apple still innovates with the Laptop line, I'm actually impressed with the new AIRs. The question is this you drive sales of your portables via being innovative but apparently have punted, given up, with the desktops - so what is the problem? Like I said I'm not a Mac Pro user as I'm getting by with my old MBP, but honestly the recent Mac Pro iterration looks like it was an after thought or a fall back plan of some sort.

Maybe my perspective is a little warped but the value equation isn't very balanced at all for the two desktop machines Apple has. The Mini isn't bad at all but the Mac Pro quickly becomes outlandish when viewed against middle of the road hardware. By the way I left the iMac out of the discussion because I don't consider it to be a desktop due to the built in monitor.

If you care to discuss this further feel free to. I'm even willing to take the discussion off the forum. Just be warned I'm not impressed at all with Apples desktop line up. The current hardware thumbs its nose at whole classes of users. That isn't good for Apple long term.

That's the iMac. You're going to have to learn to live with it.


We noticed. I assume you think it's a laptop?


Well, it has worked for the past decade and a half; it obviously won't work anymore.

If it isn't design to hook up to a monitor, as its primary video interface, then I don't consider it to be a desktop. Further a desktop is servicable and to some degree expandable.

Well no, but in some ways it isn't much better! It has no more expandability than a laptop and some might say worst servicability.

Actually it hasn't as it is one big black mark keeping Macs out of the business environment. Business want easy to service and configure machines with at least some expandability. For example I know of a production floor that has hundreds of PCs on it, many of them containing one or more expansion cards for various uses. The number installed more than exceeds what is sitting in the front offices.

Now you may ask what sits in thoose expansion slots. Well obviously that varies from use to use but consider some of these:
Ethernet cards.
Industrial networking cards.
RS232 cards.
Hardware Interface cards.

In some cases the cards are nothing special but we have zero opportunity to plug them into any reasonably priced Mac. More importantly a compact and easily serviced Mac. In essence one obstical to Apples moving into business is the lack of a suitable machine. This doesn't even touch upon why we as individuals would like to see a better desktop offering.

Besides lets be honest here Apples Mac succcess is mostly a story about its laptop line up. That is where they have had the most good fortune and is what draws in new customers. Why is that you might ask, well for one thing they pay attention and aren't affraid to try new things. Really just look at what has come out of Apple with respect to new laptops in the last year. The only thing holding Apple back in this space is Intel.

On the desktop it is an entirely different story with the Mac Pro a glaring example of a lack of attention to this market. I could almost understand the lack of attention with respect to Mac Pro, as it is a limited volume machine, but the problem is Apple offers it up as a solution for uses where it is way to expensive. The Mac Pro is well a machine for Pros, it doesn't serve the volume expandability market at all. Oh and before you say it; yes Apple can build such a machine and still have their margins.

Sometimes I think Mac users just like bending over and being Apples little love toy.

Retail sales of laptops now outpace desktops 4 to 1. Don't think you need sort of dickish estimations of Apple's customer's proclivities to account for why they're focused on that market.

Why the frick would I want Ethernet on a separate card when we won't have anything better than gigabit for years and it's already built in?


Such as?


Oh, so an interface defined in the 60s and slower than any port available today. Okay.


Such as?


Cannibalization of the iMac, Mac Mini, and Mac Pro would say otherwise.


Sometimes I think PC users should just build their fricking PCs and be done with it. Apple doesn't cater to you. Buy from someone else until they do. They're doing perfectly fine without your business.

there are two common uses for another Ethernet adapter.

One is to to use the machine to isolate a work cell from the rest of the facilities business systems. The other as a dedicated communications link.


Where should I start. More importantly are you even remotely familiar with them. In any event a short list:
Modbus Plus
Devicenet
Cameralink (Actually there are a number of high speed camera interfaces)


Yep it is all of that and still used to communicate with a wide variety of hardware.

Really you need to get out more. There are all sorts of interface cards, you know A/D cards D/A cards, digital cards, motor driver cards. Cards for accessing QA equipment. The list goes on and on.

The first word in the line above demonstrates clearly you don'tknowwhat you are talking about. This machine would dramatically expand the markets Apple could sell into.

They could be doing even better. In fact they need to do a lot better to justify their high stock price.

Out in industry they are slowly learning their lesson as far as putting all their IT eggs in one basket. The problem now is that Linux is the only alternative and some businesses will not touch that at all. The industry is ripe for an alternative but Apple has nothing to sell into this market.

It is even becoming an issue on the software side. It is no surprise that Autocad is back on the Mac. It is all about a sound stable alternative.

I for one would love Apple to bring to market a more expandable desktop Mac that did not cost the earth. I will be looking to get a new Mac at some point next year. As I do 3D modeling and animation I would welcome a desktop Mac with the ability to expand the memory to say 32Gb's and easily upgrade and replace the graphics card, all of which would be a boon to 3D artists and many other creatives. I have and work on a Mac mini and MacBook Pro at the moment and get by quite well, a testament to Apple's vision of putting a lot of power in small form factors in to peoples hands.

However I will need to have more horse power under the hood in the coming year and would love to be able to buy a machine at around the £1500 mark that I could expand. The only machine that has expandability is the Mac Pro. At £2000 the entry level system is nothing to really write home about. We are all after all living in more austere times these days so why oh why can we not have a desktop machine which has the power of the iMac but with more expandability on the memory and graphics front? At the end of the day memory and graphics allow you to get more done faster, look how OS X 10.6 has begun to access the power of the gpu.

My opinion is a more expandable desktop option is need by anyone who is creating content and not just wanting a stylish ornament on there desktop ie the iMac. Don't get me wrong the iMac is a good machine for a lot of people but for those of us that want to upgrade their memory and gpu at a reasonable budget there is just nothing there in Apple line up other than spending £2000 + on a Mac Pro.

I know if you want a good Xsan client, you should really have a separate Ethernet port for metadata on the private VLAN. I know you can do without but you're not helping yourself out by doing everything over 1 port.

Upgrade options are always spoken about with hypotheticals. In reality the number of people who upgrade their video card and increase the RAM to 32GB are few to none.

A 24GB upgrade to the Mac Pro costs £1000. 32GB would be £1500. Why would you bother about £500 on the machine if you plan to spend £1500 on RAM?

A 16GB upgrade for it costs £878 but only £380 for the iMac.

You only see a significant GPU upgrade every 3 years in desktop chips so you buy a new iMac every 3 years.

A 27" iMac with 2.93GHz Core i7, 1GB Radeon 5750 and 16GB RAM = $2550.
Cheapest junk upgradable tower with similar spec:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16883227278

$889 + the same $350 RAM upgrade + 27" IPS screen ($899) + keyboard/mouse ($50) + webcam ($20) = $2208



Difference in price is made up by resale value.


It's too late. If they wanted to do this, the time was 2-3 years ago but now, a tower really doesn't offer anything more over an iMac besides being able to replace your own drives.

Interesting comment about buying a new mac every 3 years got me to looking back at all the Macs I have had over the years and how long I have used them before replacing that particular Mac:

II Vi 5 years
Centris 660AV 4 years
Power Mac 8100 5 Years
iMac G3 DV SP 5Years
PowerBook G4 5 Years
iMac G5 6 Years (Died 2 weeks ago and not replace yet)
MacBookPro 17 inch (Late 2007 vintage) 3 Years so far (Replaced PowerBook)
Mac Mini (March 2009) 1.5 Years so far

It would be interesting to hear how long it takes others before you buy a new Mac?

Looking at the figures you have posted taking things at face value over a 6 year period you would have bought 2 iMacs at lets say $/£2550 you would have spent $/£5100.

Now lets say for the purposes of argument you bought a $/£1500 XMac spent around $700 on 32GB of Ram, iMac Ram as the XMac would use the same Ram then 3 Years down the line you get extravagant and spend $/£1000 on a gpu card and use that XMac for 6 Years. The cost adds up to $/£3200 and at the end of the day as you have upgraded the to a top of the line gpu you will have a machine that will out perform the second iMac you bought at the 3 year mark.

This leaves you with $/£1900 in your pocket to have a holiday/vacation, buy gold or even invest in Apple share lol ;-)

Now you might say Apple are a business and are out to sell as many machines as possible, and I would agree with you. However as I will be forced to buy a Mac Pro for considerably more money I am going to make it last longer before I buy another. I work for a number of creative companies on a freelance basis and they are doing the same, making their Macs (all types) last longer.

What wizard 69 was saying about business and that Apple is missing out on a large chunk of new business is right. Lets face it Apple survived for years on the back of creative businesses but needed to borden their appeal and rightly so to the general public at large. The problem now is that there is a large hole in there desktop line. £2000 for an entry level Mac the only Mac you can expand is a little steep, as specially as in terms of cpu performance its little better than a top end iMac. In my view the entry level system should have been the 6 core for £2000 that makes things a little more palatable.

I think my self and many others fall into the category of wanting the power of a top end iMac but with the expandability of a Mac Pro. I feel that a lot in the creative industries, the people that once upon a time Apple survived on would welcome a little more choice.

We are living in time were easy money and credit has gone and this factor is still yet to feed though fully so I would say the argument for the XMac that you can expand is more relevant now that at any other time.

Your initial assumption is that the £2550 iMac is worth nothing after 3 years, which wouldn't be the case, you'd at least get £1000 for it. Also, the xMac tower has a 6-year old CPU in it and the iMac bought after 3 years will be over twice as fast and could still be in warranty and could well be worth more than the xMac after 6 years so the £1900 will diminish to a negligible amount spread over 6 years.

I prefer the idea of a separate upgradable computer myself but Apple has been in this business longer than anyone and by now they know what the best strategy is, not just profit-wise.

Imagine if everyone went the tower route and didn't upgrade for 6 years. Where is the room to innovate? The best game to play is not performance-per-dollar but performance-per-watt because it gives you the edge with design, quietness and portability.

I would love to have a Mac Cube with a desktop-class i5 or i7 quad and a powerful GPU but it's up to Intel to build one that fits and they haven't. They can fit one into the back of a 27" screen but not a neat headless machine. They can make a smaller Mac Pro, which I'd personally quite like too, possibly with the Radeon 1090T but as soon as they do this, they draw attention away from the iMac and it pushes people into buying the cheaper tower and they end up buying cheap screens.

As a design company, Apple know that display technology is important. Once you use an IPS display regularly, you see how much different the experience is compared to TN but average consumers don't know this at the time of purchase.

I'm still rooting for the Mac Mini but an all-in-one will win the long game, just not the iMac. It will be the iPhone that trumps all of them eventually.

Just for curiosity I looked up around on the net as to what my 3 Year old MacBook Pro would be worth. £750 to £900 I payed just over £2000 three years ago. To be honest people looking for second hand computers a looking to get a bargain. The even Macs don't hold their value like they used to. Warranties usually are just 1 years manufacturers warranty unless you take out extra insurance cover.


For a desktop portability is not an issue, designs nice to have but irrelevant if you need power and expandability as is performance - per watt to a large extent for a desktop.


Why? There are people and a lot of them that want a powerful stylish all in one but are not bothered about expandability so they have the iMac. Why would buying a tower force you to buy a cheap monitor? I have my Mac Mini hooked up to a 40 inch LG LED. LG if I am not wrong supply Apple with the screens for laptops, monitors and iPads etc.


Hows the iPhone iPod and iPad are world class content consumption devices. They are not that good at content creation, not at a professional level.

The problem is this from my point of view:

Value for money
iMac

Power
iMac Top end
Mac Pro (6 Core upwards)

Expandability
Mac Pro

Longevity How long can it last and be useful
Mac Pro

I think there are many people looking for these things in a desktop. The Mac Pro nearly gets there but not quit. For my taste I don't particularly want a huge lump of iron work on my desk. I like I said before the things that make sense to upgrade are Memory, GPU and yes Hard drives.

In short there are many people around the world that create content that would love something like the fabled XMac if only Apple gave them the choice. Yes there are far more content consumers out there in the world but lets not for get the content creators that for many years sustained Apple though thick and thin, give us a choice.

I hope you eventually learn what you're talking about. No updates for nearly a year.