Tim Cook confirms updated Mac Pro coming in 2013 - Page 9

 

Please don't take my word for it.  Do some research on the taste of tomatoes.  Most people prefer the old tomatoes to the new (and yes there are a minority of people who prefer the new).

 

Most people can't record DVD's.  When the format was first released, there was no recordable consumer solution.  My point is that people have given up one thing for another.  With DVDs, people have given up record capability for quality.

 

Latency has a tremendous affect on conversation.  As does echo suppression, bit rate and jitter.  All of these are reduced on cellular and VOIP.  The convenience of cell phones, and price of VOIP are consistent winners, despite the reduced quality.

 

Speaking of reduced quality, people have switched to buying music online in a lossy compressed format.  The sound quality isn't as good as CD, but it's more convenient, and frequently cheaper.

And I would take it vinyl was better quality than cassette and CD? What about FLAC?

 

I think I'm far more concerned about the people who have 20 year old tomatoes sitting around.

 

 

Anyone on Earth can record a DVD.

 

 

So what was given up with DVDs, "lack of storage space"? "Wasting time rewinding"? 

 

What about the DVR? What was given up there?

 

I never said vinyl was better than CD (although many people believe this to be true).  What I said was that change has both advantages and disadvantages.  Do you disagree?  Is your assertion that all change is always an advantage for all people?

 

Yes, there are audio formats better the CD.  They are not popular.  More music is not sold as lossy compressed files in a format that is lower quality than CD.  Yes better is available, but the cost and convenience of music that is "good enough" is the clear market winner.

 

When the market switched to DVDs the capability for consumers to record did not exist.

 

Recordable DVD technology came in at a later date, and most consumers cannot easily record from TV to a blank DVD  (by "easily" I mean by pressing a record button - which is all you needed to do with a VCR).

 

I never said that overall DVD's were a step backward, I merely said that in addition to the advantages (including better quality) there were some disadvantages.

 

Why do people insist that something must be 100% perfect or 100% horrible?  If I say that DVD's are not 100% perfect, people defend them by saying I am wrong because there are advantages.  When I point out that Apple is targeting the consumer market and not professionals, people assume I am somehow attacking Apple.  Apple is a great company.  They make great products for their intended market.  They are incredibly profitable.  This doesn't mean that their products are the ideal solution for every possible problem.

 

That's a different story than "you can't record a DVD" and "most people cannot record DVDs".

 

No, just correcting where you're diametrically wrong about them. This wouldn't be as big a deal if it wasn't your entire argument about the format. 

 

You want to compare them, compare them. You want actual disadvantages, list them:

 

Scratch a VHS tape, nothing happens. Scratch a DVD, boom.

But you can pull out the tape on a VHS and the player itself can destroy the cassette. Not so with DVD.

 

Now that's a comparison. You want to list equality, list equality:

 

VHS and DVD can record video and audio content. VHS and DVD can be readable, writable, and rewritable. 

 

And finally, you want the pitch to sell the new tech, pitch it:

 

DVD is higher quality video, audio, never needs rewound, does not degrade its own media with use, is interactive, and is more compact.

 

Makes "scratching" seem like a pretty good tradeoff.

Oh this brings into an argument about the laziness of people. Whatever is the easiest works for most people. The sheeple if you will. : /

And a premium can be charged for what once was mediocrity. It's kind of a shame.

Anyway, back to the Mac Pro. Can we possibly have the latest video cards from nVidia and AMD ready to go and working for it? I know gaming isn't crucial but let's say I do want to play Crysis 2 or whatever the latest game is. Can I play it on Ultra and will the Mac Pro live up to the hype?

Is it going to be a colossal disappointment?

 

 

The video recorder I had way back in college (many, many Mays ago) ate tapes on a regular basis and I lost many important events.  Since moving to DVD, I have been unable to read one, I repeat, ONE, disk because it was scratched.

 

My cousin's 5-year-old got ahold of it for a few minutes... and some keys.  In short, it took effort.  If you are at all careful with them, DVDs last a long time.  Video recorders also continue to be sold; on TV last week they were promoting a video tape to DVD recorder to save your old memories.  About 200 bucks.

 

Tapes can also be yanked out by kids, or adults.

Edited by Bergermeister - 10/29/12 at 12:09am

Well if they wanted to implement an option, they could do that. What they would want to avoid is dropping software support for the machine you just purchased. I'd have to see such a thing to comment. I mean how would it feel doing significant typing on something without the motion involved? Mice are something I never liked. They offer poor ergonomics in general. They were merely what could be produced effectively at that time. In terms of a touch ui, I like what wacom did with the fairly robust/adjustable stand. I just hate their quality control and warranty policies.

They've never offered a wide range of gpus. Apple used to have horrible gpus in their towers. This has improved to a degree. During the PowerPC era, fewer OSX applications really benefited from top gpus. Games were almost non-existent, and the heavy use of gpu frameworks didn't exist at the time.

There is one thing I'd still personally like to see. I'd like to see a machine that doesn't regularly hit its thermal limitations within the smaller boxes. That's one of the big remaining issues, and it really shouldn't be an issue. Regarding video cards, a lot of workstation features are in the drivers. On the PC side even the lighter ones use Quadro variants. The need isn't quite the same with OSX. Some consumer cards have fewer problems as the software developers test on what is available. Given the lack of workstation cards available on Macs, they test on what is commonly available. In the case of the Quadro 4000 and others, once stable drivers were worked out, barefeats showed up to a 2x gain over some of the other cards, but it depended on the application. There are some features you just can't get under OSX regardless of the card being used. The one thing that annoys me here is that you're grossly simplifying the issue. As for gaming performance, I can't find anything on the 680MX at the moment, but here is the 680M. It's quite a jump over the 650. I'm with you on usage scenarios. Intel's erratic update cycle hasn't helped either. I still want to see if they can handle peak performance without throttling down or sounding like a jet engine. These are things that shouldn't be necessary in a desktop just to save a a small amount of density.. I don't know where they stuck the fans or what size fans they're using, but there won't be much more information until december.

That phrase doesn't mean anything. All of the machines including the Mac Pro are pushed to their limits when they are made to run intensive processes. You are suggesting that machines like the iMac can't handle even moderately productive workloads, which is not the case at all. But you can try it yourself. Pry yourself away from your old Linux box that's probably melting your carpet right now and sit beside an iMac clutching your fire extinguisher and run it at full speed for a week and let us know what happens. Better yet, here's an example of someone who did just that:

http://vimeo.com/37898856

Guy using an iMac: Render was about a week (200 frames to SL 16 in Maxwell) Machine is a iMac, 2.93 Ghz Inter Core i7, 16GB 1333 Mhz DDR3. I think simulation was also a week. Its my home computer, so its not a datachunking beast
Guy afraid of using an iMac: No overheating issues running your iMac like that intensively for 2 weeks?
Guy using an iMac: Not that I know of

Just a small technical point there is a difference between thermal throttling and over heating. Throttling is use to prevent overheating so the lack of over heating could imply throttling.

I don't really know here as I'm not about to read through the thread the guy has. Frankly he might not even know as to when the machine throttles due to thermal issues. It will be real interesting to see how the new machines fair when they debut next month. Going thinner may or may not alter the thermal issues on the iMac.

Now on the Mac Pro the expectation should be that the machine never throttles. Tatis pretty much the point of a desktop machine, that is to leverage maximum value out of current CPU technology.

There isn't any evidence to suggest that iMacs can't sustain their peak performance for a prolonged period of time though. People just make that assumption based on the enclosure design.

True, but I don't really think they have been tested in that regard. It isn't something that bothers me terribly because even on my old 2008 MBP machine a long running job might be 20 minutes. It is a far cry from the days of my Mac Plus where simple tasks took all night.

The enclosure design actually could be a big aid in keeping the machine cool. There is far less wasted space and all air movement can be made productive.

As to modern chips, throttling is inherent in their design as the clocks will slow up if all of the cores are employed and certain thermal conditions are meant. It isn't marketed as throttling though, instead when the clocks ramp up under light loads it is called turbo mode or whatever. In a nut shell the cores are managed to keep power usage in check.

You come up with some very cool links at times, although I don't know who in their right mind would use maxwell. You should take note that throttling is to discourage problems encountered by high temperatures. Stuttering when it hovers around that zone is the irritating thing, and I'd like to know what kind of performance can be expected from the newest imacs with complete stability. I'm also quite interested in the display updates. Given that all in one becomes somewhat pointless if you can't use the display, I'd like to see where they're at relative to NEC and Eizo with the latest revision, mainly in terms of stability and uniformity. I'm not making presumptions in that regard. The updated screen treatment is definitely interesting. If we had something closer to a mini with the internals of the top imac, that might be enough for me personally. It still wouldn't service everyone. You can force an incredible amount of bandwidth through the dual socket models, but I don't know how much growth is there. This is kind of frustrating for those who absolutely need them.

 

 

I want to see the new ones. I wish to see how well airflow is handled, given that Apple likes any kind of ventilation to be placed out of sight. They have certain priorities and restrictions in their designs, and I want to see what it's like when something becomes available for sale.

 

I am curious what they did in this regard. They've recently put emphasis on things that were somewhat ignored for years. They've put emphasis on display revisions, and in their retina macbook pro marketing, they mention redesigned airflow. What concerns me is that when it comes to design choices, I worry that they place too high a value on aesthetics. My past experiences with imacs having sat in front of a number of them as they gained popularity after the switch to intel has been overwhelmingly negative, but that doesn't make me lose interest when changes are made. I just want to see the end results in more than a render on the Apple site. They have a pretty significant dead zone here in terms of availability. I'm not surprised the old ones were pulled from stores. Apple probably did not want to encourage excessive returns given that they have a very forgiving return policy on direct purchases. The refurbished store was full of macbook pros when the 2012s debuted, including 2010 models. I guess they didn't want to delay the announcement any further.

 

Marvin was right about their desire not to release the mini prior to the imac, or in this case the imac announcement. Part of this may have been that they didn't want to announce the fusion drive with the mini. It's also likely that they try not to announce the cheaper desktop machine first. The mini has lagged behind in past revisions. I can think of a number of reasons. If they share parts with other things that are either more expensive at the time of release or limited in supply, the mini would lose to the macbooks in that scenario.

The Macbook Air GPU stutters when it overheats but that has nowhere near the internal volume of a 27" iMac. Plus we aren't running single cores any more so any clock speed drop is going to be almost unnoticeable. If there had been widespread issues with them, you'd have heard about it by now.

Modern chips throttle to maintain as much performance as possible for a given ability to manage the heat they produce. For marketing reasons the manufactures have turned this upside down in that clock rates get boosted when workloads are minor. Turbo boost and other features are easier to market than trying to say we throttle the cores when under heavy load.

In the end though the result is the same, when heat output is too intense clocks get rolled back. If all the delays are display related it does make one a bit nervous. The laminated displays ought to look a lot better but durability and longevity still aren't quantified. This is one of the reasons I prefer the XMac, if Apple where to ever produce such a machine, as you have instant monitor adaptability. The built in display is just one irritation for me. I still think we will see something very interesting early next year from Apple. That is a Mac Pro replacement that addresses the need for performance and hopefully addresses cost. I'm very curious about the new iMacs though I'd probably resist buying one. Maybe the enhanced screen can soften my resistance. Yes they do at times but on the other hand the latest machines from Apple have been very well accepted. Everything from the Air, to the Mini to the iMac seem to have improved dramatically when it comes to thermal management. I'm pretty confident that the engineers at Apple have some of the best computer aided engineering tools out there to work with. What happened here is still a mystery. Apple is apparently trying to really advance the quality of these machines. At least in the context of the display. I just can't see them delaying delivery of the machines for half a year for a minor display improvement. Yeah I have no doubt he was right. The problem is I see it as fairly stupid on Apples part, Mini users simply don't have a huge amount of lust for the iMac. Initially I thought that Apple might have been on allocation from Intel. As time goes on I think it has become pretty clear that Apple was just being ignorant and apparently have given marketing people way to much influence at Apple.