Availability of Apple's 15-inch MacBook Pros constrained ahead of redesigned models - Page 3

Just put lots of RAM and an SSD in RAM iMac and it will fly as a developer workstation, to the point you will have a very hard time noticing any difference with a 12 core Mac Pro. I did it a few weeks ago with my 2010 quad core i7 iMac, and I can only say the machine feels like something completely different for devlopment work. Compilation, debugging, starting the iOS simulator, it's all near instantaneous.

Hardly surprising if you think about it, since almost all typical development tasks are decidedly I/O bound, so if you have a decent CPU (which all the current iMacs have), lots of RAM and a fast SSD (I used a Samsung 830), there is very little to gain by throwing more hardware and money at it by buying a Mac Pro. We've long passed the point that development work requires extreme high-end hardware.

See my earlier post above.

Well, if neither the 13" nor the 13" Pro get a discreet GPU, I'll have to say goodbye to Macs.

Are you using a matte display now? If so, you don't mind the glossy screen on an iMac?


I really hope the MP stays as well. I don't really need all the power, but at least I get to look at the matte 30'' ACD. Could've done that with a Mini, but then all my HDD would need to be external, which I don't like. Clean desk policy - also at home.


If you wait for the latest and greatest, you'll end up never buying a replacement. You want a Mac Pro, buy it. Now, before they go out of stock. Like the article said. Although, still available in the UK (Amazon link one, two or a used G5 for £ 175)


True words; fully agree.

I doubt the time saving is noticeable. You can max the processor, memory, and graphics of the 27" iMac and save lots of money over a Mac Pro. Ask developers and they will tell you for Xcode RAM is more important than processor speed. Furthermore, most graphics intensive iOS apps are better tested on iOS devices themselves.

The Mac Pro is best for graphics and animation designers where renderings usually takes hours. The rendering process can take advantage of parallel processing. The time saving can be big with the Mac Pro in this case.


I am using i7 15" MBP for developing my app. It works great.

You have no way to know what is coming. As to the Mac Pro its time has come, done right a much smaller machine would be appealing enough for Apple to sell in volume.


BS! Servicing a hard drive is not unreasonably difficult. Your statement is actually pretty insulting, as it implies that people are too stupid to effectively work on their own hardware.

Actually, given the right software and enough RAM you can actually benefit significantly from more cores as a developer. Compilation can be easily spread across multiple cores.


Mac OS loves RAM, no surprise here.

This is just plain baloney. Many developers leverage all of those cores daily.

Quite agree. I just had a 2008 iMac graphics card burn out for which Apple will not accept that it was defect from the start. So now I have a perfectly good screen, drive etc etc but I have to replace the whole lot. So much for Green credentials!!! Got to face it Apple is no longer a PRO company, as is obvious by the last OS Lion. Sorry but you have got to be joking. The king is dead long live the king....

Was it?


What does that have to do with this?


No idea what this means. This is all I can find.


OH! you're saying that Apple isn't for professionals anymore, I see. Come back when you have an actual argument.


Sorry but you have to be joking.

What you are the Global moderator and that is your response. Jesus.

Ok not GREEN because if Apple did a mid range PRO desktop ala monitor then maybe we wouldn't have to ditch the whole thing when it went bust.

Re the iMac that just went tits up. It was a top of the range at the time mid 2008 and which in the laptops which had the same graphics chip Apple admitted that there was an inherent defect. Nvidia have admitted that there was a general defect in all their versions of that chip.

Lion compared to Snow Leopard the advantages for a Pro were insignificant and if you don't see that then you are clearly not a PRO user.

Re: Come back when you have an actual argument.

Rubber band scrolling for one....
Hiding system files two...
Still no tabbed browsing in the Finder three...
Bookmarks in Safari four...
Expose changes five....
etc etc

Intel official Ivy Bridge introduction is on April 29th.

DigiTimes says other PC laptop makers are prepping their MacBook Air clones (aka ultra books) for shipping at or just before that date. Yeah DigiTimes is often BS. But the Ivy Bridge release date makes it likely.

So I think it's safe to say Apple will intro the new MacBook Pro at or just before April 29th. 3 weeks to go, not too bad. Or early May if they screw up somehow...

Depends on what you're developing. I was doing Java / Eclipse and thought the same.

Then I started using that ridiculous CPU hog Xcode and guess what, it's actually CPU constrained on my C2D 2.66. POS software, bloatware, whatever, but it's definitely going to be faster on an 8 core Mac Pro.

XCode is the first piece of software I am using that makes me wish I had a quad i7.

Ad Mac Pro: If it makes profits they'll keep it. If it makes losses, they'll can it. It's that simple.

Obviously it's good to keep a high end / prestige model around even if unit sales are low. As long as it's profitable overall. But if it makes losses, Apple is going to be merciless. They won't keep it around just for appearances, each and every Apple product must make money, otherwise it's cut.

Either explain what that implies or don't bring it up.

Your post was so off-topic and far from reality that I figured I'd just rebut every point.


Again, what does this mean?


Isn't that a contradiction?


Ditch what whole thing? You have the iMac.


Okay, so you're entitled to a replacement. Take it to an Apple Store and have it fixed.


You clearly don't understand what you're talking ABOUT. See, I can capitalize words, too.


Oh, no! What a non-"PRO" feature!


As a "PRO", do you find you need Library access on a daily basis?


Oh, no! Safari offers bookmarks! How un-"PRO" of Apple!


No, please keep going; you've yet to reach an actual valid point.

That is the concern re Pro users. Apple is in a situation in which it has never been before as the world's most valuable company. I am sure it is very tempting for it to chase ever higher profits and so may well lose sight of where it came from and stop supporting the long time base users. Unfortunately consumers can be very fickle and the whole thing could come crashing down and possibly far quicker than it went up.

It means the same as in the 1930's Germany people like you would have me sent to the concentration camps just because I happened to disagree...

Get over your nonsensical beliefs. Only a complete idiot (read: Nazis; you're right) would use his power like that.

You take issue with someone not agreeing with your post, and you're attacking the person instead of giving a rebuttal or answering my questions, which is certainly not an unreasonable request. Were I not a moderator, you'd make a holier-than-thou comment about my post count.

If you wish to remain paranoid that I'll "do something" to you for disagreeing, feel free. You'll be paranoid until the end of your days.

Also, you've automatically lost, I think. You invoked Godwin.

Psssssttt.....

They already got rid of the discrete GPU in the last 13" revision.

Or maybe you really mean 'discreet' and you want the GPU to hide in the corner?

I said that because of the juvenile response of yours.

Rubber band scrolling.
1. Scrolling in the finder to the bottom, whoops bounce missed that link.
2. Text area box in a browser. Scrolling. Whoops just gone to the bottom of the page.

Bookmarks.
1. Adding a bookmark unlike in Firefox and Explorer etc I cannot add another bookmark folder or drag and drop existing bookmarks into different locations.
2. Adding Bookmarks in Safari has been terrible for a long time.

If you are going to be a moderator at least show some.
1. Objectivity
2. Understanding of the subject

You're not understanding what he's moderating on AI. He's a forum member just like you and me who was given additional right to help this board free of VIOLATIONS. Having an opinion is not a VIOLATION.

Specially, his duties — that he volunteers his time doing — is clean up spam from the site so we have to look at it.

Maybe it should say Spaminator under his name instead of Global Moderator but until he becomes Digital Jesus or he violates the very few rules of the forum then you have no soapbox on which to make your complaints.

Having what to do with "PRO"s?


Having what to do with "PRO"s?


Then tell this idiot (me) right here (me) what any of your points have to do with "PRO"s. Also what "GREEN" means.

You hate Lion because it changed things. You don't like change. Your hate is nowhere near objective. And I take issue with that, is all.


Anymore I'm no different from other mods, it's just that because I choose to be in the discussion, I've abdicated my power to edit others' posts, delete them, give infractions, etc. It's all on the honor system. Same as melgross, I think.

It's discussion vs. moderation (punishment), and I choose discussion. And yet people still whine about how I'm "in the discussion" and how that's "unfair" because I'm a moderator.

I don't see people whining about melgross having 25k+ posts. He's in the discussion and he's a moderator. I don't see HIM abusing his power, and yet I'm the one that always gets the "THIS from a MODERATOR? " responses.

You can absolutely create folders of bookmarks and rearrange bookmarks to your hearts content. Perhaps this page can help you out.

I think it's just sour grapes for many... or that huge AI paycheck you get.

You can't slot in a more powerful graphics card (or 3). Graphics processing is probably the #1 segment of power users, not programmers (NB: I am a developer myself).

Thunderbolt! Problem solved! Seriously, Thunderbolt GPUs will be big.

Also, I'd think that CPU power is the #1 requirement of Mac Pro users, but I could be wrong. But if I am, why in the world are they wasting money on a Mac Pro when they could get a Windows machine and SLI/Crossfire a ton of MODERN cards for that power?

That's b/c they are. Not even on a straight intelligence level, but their technology intelligence. My mom can program a VCR. God help her w/a computer. Explaining things 50 times doesn't make it stick either. Also, it's only insulting if you are not capable of working on the machine yourself. You are, so why should you feel insulted?

Exactly why I had to build my "mackintosh", to go along with my MBP and iPad ... and the mini just isn't enough.

um, I meant "hackintosh" (auto-spell check is annoying!).

I really don't understand why people think it's valid to make sweeping statements like this. ALL Macs for ANY development. What? My iOS compiles take 10 - 20 seconds depending on what else the system is doing. This is a serious pain when working on tight-corner issues that require a lot of app restarts. So, no, NOT all Macs are powerful enough for any app development. Does it matter which Mac I'm using? Should I say, since according to you, ALL macs are capable?

No it doesn't.

That's a good point. If they don't release new models in early May, other manufacturers will get a 1 month head start on Ivy Bridge. If they do update them in early May, it's not likely they'd host an event so close to WWDC.

Given that the rest of the models can be updated in June, they could all be updated at the same time and announced at the same time. This would allow them to transition the 13" MBP more easily as the 13" Air will have been updated to Ivy Bridge.

Development work doesn't scale to infinite cores. If you have a decent quad-core CPU, compilation runs will not be able to saturate all of them because things get I/O-bound and build dependencies start to limit further build parallelisation. Adding more does not make sense.

I have iPulse running on my quad-core iMac, so I can see CPU load in real-time when building stuff in XCode. It clearly shows that during large compiles, most of the time only 2 cores are completely saturated, and the other 2 are under-utilized, most likely waiting for dependencies to finish building. The effect is even more obvious if you are doing incremental/partial (ie: not clean) builds, which means only changed files are going to be compiled. In that case it is RAM and I/O that are holding you back, not CPU.

CPU power is not something you can just blindly add more of and expect things to get faster, not anymore at least.

I don't consider a quad-i7 'extreme high-end', I was comparing the top-end of the iMac range against a Mac-Pro with dual 6-core Xeons.

The point was whether a current iMac would work well as a development workstation, or that you would want to have a Mac Pro for that. IMO, there is very little to gain using a Mac Pro to run XCode, as long as you have a decent CPU in your iMac, lots of RAM and and SSD. You'll save lots of money and you will have a very hard time seeing any performance difference. In fact, I'm 100% sure that a Mac Pro with HDD's will be a lot slower for development work than a quad-core iMac with an SSD.

Bang on the money.

I think that's probably the argument Apple is looking at in assessing the Mac Pro's future.

It's sales last time Apple did break out hovered above 100k. And that was around the time of the Grator Industrial re-design. If it's 50k a quarter with the current archaic specs I'd be surprised. I think the Cube was canned with sales of about that or less.

The tower concept hasn't been mainstream at Apple since the iMac blossomed after it's Bondi introductory impact and subsequent fruity flavoured explosion. The iMac smashed the Power Mac's sales. Surprise? Not really. It was an affordable, powerful Mac in the £595-£1295-ish price range initially.

I wouldn't mind Apple dropping the Pro's starting price to £995 for the entry and have 3 more models at 250£ intervals topping out with a dual model at £2k. They've done it before historically. But is the tower concept going to go mainstream after they've spent so much time eliminating it as a differentiator for the Xen-chic Apple design ethos vs PCs? The last time a tower was mainstream was 1997? The G3 Blue and White was lovely. It sat where the iMac does now. Todays iMac blows away the G3 blue and white, the G4, the G5 and the early Intel tower machines. Heck, it even roughs up a 12 core on certain tasks if you hook up a thunderbolt Pegasus and plop in an internal SSD and pack the iMac with 16 gigs of ram.

It doesn't take much advancing of the iMac's capabities to prick whatever air is left in the Pro's balloon.

Computers are getting smaller. Big boxes are so yesteryear. It's dinosaur land. (...and that's coming from me who waited ten years for the 'ideal' tower Mac and then bought an iMac in a sale and all my fears were dispelled.)

The iMac has eaten the lunch of the mainstream tower market. In most aspects it offers most of what a mini tower can give you plus a nice screen. It even got a decent top end gpu last time around with as much vram as you see ram in a Macbook Air. Not bad, Apple, eh? And ati/amd are pushing power and efficiency in their gpus if not always absolute power and they make a very nice fit for iMacs. That's alot of sales for AMD per quarter if they can keep Apple sweet in the power/efficiency game. And that power looks even better with the 7000 series. These iMacs are worlds away from the old Bondi/fruit gum iMacs. Alot has changed since the iMac's introduction. It's AIO, but it's way more powerful.

I'd like to see a 'Big Mac' Mini. Double whopper. If you stacked two Minis one on top of the other...you'd have 8 cores. Using Thunderbolt as the bridge to use one of the chips as co-processor? Room for two HDs etc. (Ivy bridge will run super cool.) People are using them as servers. The discrete gpu option will be 'ok'. And there's the chance that MSI will get an external thunderbolt option gpu up and running inside 6 months. How long before Apple say F*** it with intel and go A6? Ax whatever in teh next several years? Maybe AMD will come back into the fray and offer great SoCs? Wafer thin desktops/laptops with iPad style SoCs? Not this year, no...but Apple's ambition in the iPad showed what they can do when they control their destiny. And I bought an iPad over a Macbook. (To be fair, I don't like laptops.)

Price? Not a lot compared to the shocking value of the entry Pro. It's not hard to see where this is going.

Smaller. More power. Thinner. Apple's desktop designs are heading in the iPad direction. Look at the white iMac's introduction alongside a side on iPod. Tells you alot about what Apple thinks about desktops. They even used laptop parts in the iMac for years even though they had desktop options they didn't compromise their philosophy. Slimmer. Power efficient. Good bang for buck without requiring a chernobyl reactor in your wardrobe or inducing heat to fry an egg.

We can only hang our hats of hope on Wizard's refactor hypothesis. If we get one more Mac Pro? It will be the last hurrah.

How many years until iMacs have 6 and 8 cores? AMD have consumer 8 core processors now, don't they?

Lemon Bon Bon.

Computers are becoming commodities. Toasters. Look at the smash hit success of the iPad. What it isn't today will soon by slurped up by an iPad 4 with quad cpu and rogue gpu.

Look how far it's come in a couple of years?

The next gen consoles and low end to low mid laptops should be looking over their shoulders nervously.

Things can change fast. Just as Enterprise, R.I.M or M$ or Palm...or HP... The i-Warriors hoardes are taking Rome by sheer force of numbers and no shortage of power.

Lemon Bon Bon.

Apple could bundle Final Cut X with top end iMacs to keep some of the Pro's happy.

Who's to say where the top end iMac could go. Each year it is getting more and more powerful. Some times evolutionary some times a leap...there's something irrevocable about it's climb. (And I'd still like to see the X-Mac...give it a better gpu and no screen and price it the same as an iMac. Death match. See who wins.)

Lemon Bon Bon.

After the Cube though, can you really see Apple doing the X-Mac? When many consider the Mini to be the rebirth of said machine?

LOL. Yes. A Cube with a lower price. *(If only it had better gpu options...I'd so be there...)

Lemon Bon Bon.

Well argued and you stuck to your point.

ie look at where the Pro's specs are now. Look at the task. Look at the market for said tasks.

Is the Pro absolutely necessary. I think you've made the case for iMac with SDD and lots of ram in this instance.

The i7 processor has been a great leveller for the iMac. That along with the Pro's languishing at the hands of both Intel and Apple (who haven't been innocent in the Pro's lack of value.)

In this instance the SDD and lots of ram can offset the dual 6s.

I like the instant on speed of the iPad. Apps don't take ages to load. How long before Apple brings SDDs to the desktop Mini and iMacs as standard? if not this year? Next?

My next iMac...I'll definitely want an SDD as standard and 8-16 gigs of ram.

Lemon Bon Bon.

I do think there are areas left where the Mac Pro is still relevant. If you really need massive CPU power and storage capacity, and you need OS X, there really isn't any alternative yet. Think about render farms, scientific computing, that kind of stuff. It's a small market, but still a valid one, and I don't expect Apple to phase the Mac Pro out just yet. They'll probably have to upgrade it at least once or twice.

That said, eventually I think the Mac Pro will go the way of the Dodo, and that it will be replaced by small machines that you can stack and combine to scale to Mac Pro performance, just like you suggested. Thunderbolt is just a preview of what would be possible if it moves to fiber-optic and increases bandwidth ten-fold. The technology already exists in Intels labs...

What we need is a ridiculously fast interconnect that comes close to a local memory bus, distributed GPU's, some kind of shared/extendable memory model and software that ties it all together, to the point you just add more compute nodes by hooking them up over next-gen thunderbolt and the OS does the rest.

D-Range.

I've often maintained that Apple should have two tower lines.

They've already got an impressive case/tower with the Pro. Just give the front a face lift and keep it all dual processor for those 50-100k sales per quarter.

However, in the iMac price range £999-£1649, offer a mini-tower aka the old G3 Blue and White class with i7 processors with a decent gpu. It would boost sales of the 27 inch monitor even further.

If they got 100-200k mini towers and 50-100k Workstations, sales of 300k for two desktop tower lines isn't so bad with Apple's margins. Though Wizard thinks they'd sell way more desktops if they offered his X-Mac. We may never know. But can we trust Apple to price it sensibly like they did the Cube?! Towers are mere boxes after all. There's plenty of PC resellers getting by on less margins. So I guess it's down to Apple's philosophy which seems almost anti-tower as time has gone by.

What you say about the fibre optic bandwidth in the pending upgrade of Thunderbolt (next year? The year after?) and bandwidth cluster nodes computing stacked aka like modules seems the consensus for many on here. Perhaps it's a matter of time. *(Looks at the next ten years..? Five?) The mini could easily be one lego brick with another sitting on top. When you can start getting a Mini for about £500 with quad core and buy two for £1000, you have 8 cores and plenty of ram and hard drive space for the money. It's just how to link them to fit the purpose.

Like you say, the transition away from a Mac Pro isn't quite there yet. But it wouldn't be the 1st time Apple didn't let sentiment get in the way of business, Floppy, fruit iMacs, Cube, X-Serve, OS9, Lamp stand iMac, Candy bar iPod Mini...Apple sometimes can stuff even when it's doing well. They even ditched firewire on the Macbook before bringing it back? They even shipped fruity iMacs without CD players...(DVD only indeed...yeesh...)

Lemon Bon Bon.