The Mac Pro is Dead - Page 8

you definitely know how to make a catchy title.

i honestly don't see what the fuss is all about. its a production machine. their customers are producers of content. sure, ditch the mac pro... what are we going to use, G5's?



how the hell would you fit 4 hard drives, 64gb or ram, dual dvd burners, 12 cores and their corresponding cooling system into an imac?

if it fits under the desk, who cares? not like your going to run out the door and leave your mac pro behind because you didn't feel like carrying it to work today. im all for making it bigger if it keeps it cooler and deters thieves.

Sure, it wouldn't have to be as thin as the XServe though, maybe 2U as opposed to the 1U XServe and the 5U Mac Pro. There should be a comfortable compromise in there somewhere. The Xserve also doesn't have that neat cheese grater design for airflow.

That is not the point. the title of the thread alludes to the MacPro's ever-retarding update cycles, its insignificance in terms of sales and the fact that portable computers are catching up with the behemoths.

Apple will continue with the MacPro as it is their halo machine, but if the beancounters made executive decisions around there, the MacPro would have been ditched last year.


Rackmount cares.

I think the new, slimmed down Mac Pro will come in as a 3U chassis…

If Apple had a 3U MacPro, the would deploy it into their computer centre.
Now Apple have bought HP servers for hundreds of millions instead of its own Xserve/MacPro/Xraid.

Or... they HAVE and they just didn't show us pictures of it because, hey, it's not out yet.

Or maybe the... jeez, what's the name of that one tech that iTunes uses? Whatever that is: it probably doesn't need anything more fully-featured than a UNIX core on which to run.

HTML?

No, it's two words together. Gah, this is going to kill me.

It's the server-end tech that is used to manage the Store, I think.

I doubt they would use a massive amount of workstations for a data center. The only reason that Virginia Tech used Power Macs in their (initial) supercomputer/cluster was because the Xserves were not out yet Makes no sense to use a machine that has extra bits that go to waste when you can load way more computational power per square foot into racks of blade servers


WebObjects?!?

Yes. That's it. That's what I thought they were running. Your questclamation mark combo suggests that I'm completely off about that...

Why would Apple effectively pull out of several critical industries, none of which blink at dropping $10k-$20k on a single machine, and many of which order those machines by the truckload?

The Pro may not be Apple's most visible offering, but it's a critical part of their strategy. It may change in response to emerging technology, but it's not going anywhere. As long as it takes more power to create things than it does to consume them, there will be a more powerful professional machine at the vanguard.

As for the xMac, this thread (and all previous threads on the subject, for that matter) prove why Apple doesn't offer a headless desktop between the mini and the Pro: There isn't any one product or any one market that people want. xMac threads are always smorgasbords of custom designs--which makes them fun to read, granted, but it also points to the unlikeliness of any of those designs getting beyond Photoshop.

I think the reason the MacPro has changed so little over the years is simple economics. Once Apple fixed on a case design and contracted for the tooling the costs going forward are low. Particularly if the changes from one rev to the next are primarily circuit boards and not the metal parts. They get to spread those initial design and tooling costs out over a very long time. More profit ensues. So if they have a redesign coming (which they surely do if for no other reason than to implement Thunderbolt) it will be good right out of the box and it will remain unchanged for almost a decade. Seems like smart business to me.

I still really like the way Mac Pros look and how they are put together. I pulled a power supply from an early 2008 model just yesterday. It was a total breeze. Wish my car was that easy to work on.

Apple has changed the front and back jacks on the Mac Pro a few times, that has never required much of a redesign.

Exactly. We want a mid sized headless Mac that offers some internal expansion so that it can be customized to our needs or desires. That's the whole point. We feel that Apple is putting limitations on the Mac consumer. We can't all afford $2500 to have a computer that offers the ability to be customized.

I freely admit that if the money wasn't an issue I would buy a Mac Pro. Not because I need everything it offers but because it is the only Mac that offers me the chance to be myself.

Apple used to say, "Think Different". I answer, "How?" I can't get an iMac with a matte screen. I can't get an affordable Mac that is easy to open to replace a bad drive. I can't get an affordable Mac that has any internal expansion. This is thinking different?

Then Apple asked, "Which Mac Are You?" My answer? "The one you won't offer!" The one you don't even try to offer. The Mac that is missing. The Mac that because it doesn't exist is pushing me away from Apple.

Why does it seem that there is a wide range of ideas for a XMac versus the Mini, iMac or Mac Pro? Because those products have existed for years and ideas for improvements have already been made. Practical use has improved those Macs. The same would happen to a mid sized mid range Mac if Apple would bring one to market.

Would Apple's idea of a mid sized mid range Mac be exactly the same as mine? No. But it would be closer to meeting my needs and wants than the current Mini and iMac.

Like the server industry?

Sales volume is important. Apple are selling more iPads in 1 month than Mac Pros in a year and they are changing people's way of thinking and working.

The Mac Pro is just another box. It's well-designed and robust but it's not a game-changer. Like mainframes, which over time have been relegated to specialist tasks, the desktop tower is just a holdover until CPUs/GPUs reach a certain performance and SSDs reach a certain price.


It will always take more power to create than consume content but I think the criterion for desktop longevity will be which content a machine allows you to create. When (not if) a Mac Mini allows you to create photorealistic 3D imagery in real-time, you don't need anything more than this and this will happen within 10 years.


And yet there is only one product on sale from Apple designed to satisfy all markets including the server industry now. The current Mac Pro design had to come from some specifications such as:

- allow 2 socket motherboards
- allow a desktop GPU
- have PCI slots for expansion
- have 4 drive bays (it used to be two) for up to 12TB of storage
- stay as quiet as possible running at full load

These decisions were made years ago though and technology moves on. Single processors have up to 10-cores in them now. MXM mobile GPUs rival their desktop counterparts. Thunderbolt has adequate bandwidth for PCI devices. Single SSD chips can outperform quad-RAID0 hard drives.

The Mac Pro is not going to disappear overnight but it will fade into insignificance the more that the lower-end machines satisfy unchanging needs.

very carefully ?

I'm sure it's possible, but not with a noise profile that you would like, or you really pull back on the performance or spike the price.

What about this rumor that the next MacPro will have a bespoke CPU?

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/06/20/...-time-capsule/

Sending from your iDevice, I reckon...

I seriously doubt this rumor. If anything, it's ARM-based chips being made by Intel for Apple. Nothing for Macs.

The next generation of Mac Pros (not the one's about to be released) will be all inside the display. Apple has pre-production units that are baked into the display but have a cable that comes out going to a mini tower, that is used to host hard drives and additional graphics cards. At the time I saw the units they had a cable connection that looked like firewire sometimes but I couldn't identify this. I now know that cable to have been early prototypes of thunderbolt.

This solution solves everyone's problem in that you don't need the tower, unless you really need it. You can buy it after market when you are ready to upgrade, and you don't have to worry about the tower going out of date because it's connected by something like thunderbolt to the display/cpus.

That's called the iMac. It has been around since '98. Check your sources.


Which, for the pro market, is 100% of the time. You never need the useless display, which you can buy your own of.

I don't know . I saw some charts on a Mac fan website that showed that over the past two years, Macs as a proportion of sales for Apple have fallen very significantly, replaced obviously by billions of dollars of income from iPhones.

From a larger perspective, the migration of apps like iMovie to the new iPhone and the app store in general, combined with cloud computing, point to the end of the age of the PC. The new PC is probably going to evolve to something closer to the iPad and iPhone, Android, etc. type of devices. AVID demonstrated a remote editing over the web application at NAB this year. It isn't that Macs won't be around, but I think that we will continue to see the slow erosion of features, inputs and pro features on Macs because obviously the pros aren't where the big money is, it is the masses buying iPhones, iTunes and the App store that are driving Apple forward.

This trend is not limited to just Macs either. People who have been trumpeting that the age of the PC are coming to a rapid close say that it is all PCs, not just Macs. It is true when you think about it. Who needs computers anymore when you can communicate via phone, text, Twitter with your handheld device and you can consume media on your small little iPad type of device? Those two operations cover probably 95% of all PC users. Doesn't a Mac Pro tower with its massive size and weight, tethered to huge monitors begin to sound somewhat like an anachronism?

Not saying that PC/Macs are going away in the next year or two but the writing is plainly on the wall that the era of the PC is drawing to an end except for a small contingent of users who may find that the machines that they need may no longer be made.

Perhaps we will eventually become like Cuba with the classic American cars, we will all be nursing pristine antique G5s and Mac Pros because Apple stopped making them. A huge black market for parts, software and manuals will spring up on Ebay to keep them still humming? Shades of my days with the Amiga! That was another machine that users wanted to keep going more than the manufacturer(s) did.

I do see the ability to control and manipulate media will become more and more ingrained in consumer and prosumer products like the new iPhone. At some point, most everything that takes big iron and lots of third party software to accomplish will be able to be done by anyone with a small, portable and cheap device. Moore's Law still applies and doing almost everything in software will just keep on evolving. Remember ICE cards for your Mac and AE plug-ins? Seems like ancient history but it was only, what, ten years ago \ ?

I think you missed the sarcasm in his post.

You go ahead and get unbanned () and then tell me when the iPhone can hold 12 terabytes. Until then, I'll stick with my real computer that can actually do work.


Probably because it wasn't there, yep.

16-Core Mac Pros With Unique Intel CPUs Coming In July To Melt Your Face Off


I say; just because I want to randomly speculate and throw some fuel on the fire; what if is not a dual 8-core configuration, but a QUAD 4-core configuration!?! Thereby leaving an opening in the future for a beastly quad 8-core machine; 32 cores of fire-breathing goodness, crunching away on whatever data you can throw at it!!!

Notice absolutely no price set. The Westmere version of such a machine costs $3838 PER. CHIP.... when purchasing 1,000 of them.

So long, bank account!

LOL A 20K baseline Mac Pro Users storm One Infinite Loop and torch the place

An Apple spokesperson rebuttals, "Fastest, Mac Pro, EVAR!!!"