Apple to cease European Mac Pro sales March 1 due to regulatory requirements - Page 2

 

Just ignore him. He can't honestly think a server would be better than a workstation for workstation needs.

 

Yes, it's better not to conform to laws in such a large market as the EU.  Better to take a principled stand than to chuck in some different fans and make EU sales.

 

/snark

 

The laws of physics beat the laws of government every time.

 

I'd rather them be objectively right and make the best product than conform to nonsense.

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Edited by MacRulez - 5/16/13 at 12:40pm

Yes, you can boot a Mac Pro with the side panel off.  For some diagnostic tests you have to run it with the side panel off to access the logic board.

 

Lots of home users have Mac Pros, and many of them have little brats who like to go sticking their fingers in things.  The fans are unprotected because it's possible, if one tries hard enough, to stick a finder through the grills.  The obvious solution for homeowners is not to let little brats play around an open Mac Pro, and to keep the side panel locked on.

 

The obvious solution for Apple is to change the grill designs on the fans.  It's a simple change that would be done if Apple cared about continuing Mac Pro sales. This suggests that either the Mac Pro will be EOLed soon, or a replacement will be released soon enough to leave only a small gap in availability.

 

I'm sure that sentiment would be widely popular among Apple stockholders, lol.

 

It's not a big deal, the EU just wants different fan grills.  Consumer products must conform to regulations in every country and Apple has plenty of experience in meeting those regulations.  Apple also have plenty of cash on hand to update the fans if they desired.

 

Most likely this isn't really even a problem with a Mac Pro replacement imminent.  Or, the Mac Pro will be EOLed soon anyways.  Either way, it's understandable that Apple would just quietly discontinue MP sales in the EU.

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Edited by MacRulez - 5/16/13 at 12:40pm

It's rackable, which makes it better for clustering (I've already answered to this). For stuff that doesn't need the computational power of a cluster, you have the MacBook Pro.

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Edited by MacRulez - 5/16/13 at 12:39pm

As I suspected the document itself is a bit more obscure and generic. I'm assuming this is the part that covers the mac pro. It's just a list of standards that doesn't specifically take aim at the Mac Pro's fan blades. I did laugh at your contrived warning label. I like the wording.

 

 

It's about Apple's ecosystem, not me. I think the Xserve makes a lot more sense than the Mac Pro, first because currently Apple has no standard-sized rack-mountable server option that one can easily stuff in a data center, and secondly because the modularity that made the Mac Pro relevant can now be accomplished through Thunderbolt (and is also present in the Xserve).

Run Microsoft Office.
Run Quicken.
Run Photoshop
Run iTunes
Run iPhoto
Sync with an iPhone
And 10 million more things.

Even if you want to pretend that servers never run desktop apps, there are Mac server apps that don't run on Linux. Filemaker, for example.

 

Run Final Cut Pro X, Logic Pro, Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Cinema 4D, AutoCAD, Maya, Mathematica. I dunno. Big number crunchy stuff. You know, for professionals who'd rather do things using their workstations rather than to their workstations.

Have any new super chips been released lately that Apple would put into a new Mac Pro?

 

Does anybody think that Apple's chip design company they bought a couple of years ago is now up to creating a super chip for the Mac Pro?
 

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Edited by MacRulez - 5/16/13 at 12:42pm

So you see no need for users to want a powerful, non-portable consumer/prosumer machine? All you can think of are users with server racks at their house and users that would need a 13 or 15" display on a notebook PC? Seriously?

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Edited by MacRulez - 5/16/13 at 12:42pm

can I buy a USB fan after March 1?

Apple to cease Mac Pro sales in Europe.

*But* it is possible Apple will totally sell Mac Pros in Europe, even though they just said today that they will cease doing that.

Definitely a great article!

Dude, in case you haven't noticed, the Mac Pro IS a server, it's just built into a tower rather than into a proper rack-mountable box. Those CPUs are designed with reliability in mind; they emphasize things that you don't really need in a workstation but pay premium for in a Mac Pro, such as multi-socket installations, ECC memory, and lower temperatures. These things are important in servers that run 24/7 and can actually extract some benefit from parallel processing to serve requests from multiple, independent sources. On the desktop, the only kinds of applications that can take advantage of lots of cores or CPUs are compression, encoding, and cryptography, which perform lots of processing on very small amounts of data that can easily be cached thus eliminating or mitigating the memory bandwidth and latency bottlenecks, tasks that you can and should be offloading to a server anyway; other kinds of single-user applications that require access to lots of data, such as Photoshop, will always have problems no matter how many CPUs you throw at them because all the CPUs are limited to the performance of the memory bus. While it is theoretically possible to take advantage of multiple memory busses on systems like those for this kind of job, in practice this requires the operating system to keep lots of memory access statistics and physically rearrange memory pages on the fly to make it possible, and current operating systems simply don't do that yet.

Forgot to mention that the memory bandwidth problems are even worse on x86-based systems, because for backward compatibility, x86 forces cache coherence across the board, so any writes to memory done through one cache unit have to be immediately propagated and synced in all other cache units, as well as the RAM itself, if at least one of the other cache units don't have that particular memory space cached.

And this is why multithreaded development is hard. If you thought it was only because of the need to control access to shared resources, you were only scratching the surface. I know this because I've made that mistake myself and had to learn the hard way (watching finished multithreaded implementations perform almost as poorly as single-threaded ones because I didn't know what I was doing).
Edited by Vaelian - 2/1/13 at 1:39am

Read somewhere it could be a fan issue: they are unprotected.

 

The next design that Tim said is coming this year could meet the requirements and be sold.

 

We'll see.

Any source to backup your unsubstantiated claim? I doubt it has anything to do with electrical hazard from 5V fans, so I don't believe that at all.

What do you know about that exactly? I fail to see how electrical security requirement can fall under your "screwy law" label...

 

Really? You read 'unprotected fans' and your first guess is "electrical hazard"?

 

Call me old-fashioned, but I wish more fans were like they were a few decades ago. Might instill some intelligence in people early. 

 

Your typical and ignorant garbage... Don't have a clue of what is in question yet go on with his ridiculous and prejudiced slandering...

 

Dude, in case you haven't noticed, when the world needs a server they use Linux.  You don't need a server to synch iTunes with your iPod, leaving the only reason to use a Mac server being Filemaker.  For everything else there are reasons the world chooses Linux, such as:

 

 

All the more reason to use the de facto standard for modern servers and supercomputers.  I realize this is a lonely view here, but I support Apple's move to drop XServe.  It wasn't selling; Xeon processors in a rack-mounted form factor are commodities not worth Apple's time to address.

Not really, Linux is not properly suited for all the tasks, has design issues, is not POSIX compliant, and no Linux distribution integrates seamlessly with OS X or Apple's ecosystem. While you can make that happen, it is, again, not seamless, thus justifying investment in the hardware, which is a lot cheaper than human resources.


And the Mac Pro isn't?

Like Apple fans, you mean¿

iForgot. RAM test as well, with those lights coming on. Neat stuff.

True. I just cannot phantom the idea of creating a law for every freakin' possibility of injury. What's next? Illegal to cross a street without properly looking because you might get run over?

It's not: no LOM, no hot swap HDD, no redundant PSU...

Agree. if we're going to get laws and redesigns just so people don't have to think anymore we'll evolve into being, well, dumb.

True, Linux is not UNIX, but tell us:  where has the few areas where the Linux Standard Base isn't a superset of POSIX ever slowed down the dominance of Linux in the server market?

 

Apple is a consumer electronics company, having positioned themselves as leaders in a "post-PC era".

 

So you'll have to take that up with Apple.  How many years has it been since they saw it worth their time to update the Pro?

Did you stop discussing technical merits because the subject is no longer convenient to you? Linux succeeds because it's something anyone can easily add their crap to, even I've done it myself as part of a port to PDA nearly a decade ago, not because it's technically superior. Linux's support for real time multithreading is crap as it suffers from inverted priority issues resulting from lacking POSIX compliance; likewise, Linux's support for asynchronous IO is also crap compared to any BSD flavor, OS X included, due to design issues that can not feasibly be fixed without changing a boatload of code. Have these things stopped Linux from growing in popularity? No, but neither did Internet Explorer's issues. Most people, including system administrators don't really understand the kind of effort software engineers like me have to put into working around Linux's issues. As a user I do enjoy Linux, it makes everything feel easy compared to other kernels, but as a software engineer I loathe it, and if given the choice I'd rather write code for Darwin servers, which are at least POSIX 2001 compliant, than for Linux that is roughly, but not exactly, POSIX 2008.


I don't know, I don't care about the Mac Pro, in my opinion it serves no real purpose, which is why I said that they should kill it and bring back the Xserve, which would target a bigger audience than the Mac Pro does. Mac Pro is server hardware in a workstation box that you can't feasibly host in a data center; Xserve is server hardware in a server box that you can host in a datacenter or use as a workstation.

Uh, okay then.

 

Here's where you can let Apple know they screwed up by putting a server in a workstation case:

http://www.apple.com/contact/

 

Good luck with that.  Let us know how it works out.

 

Personally, I support Apple's decision on XServe, and I also support their decision to let the Mac Pro languish given their current product focus.  The world has moved on, and Apple mas moved on to more profitable things.

That's ridiculous. I'm just stating my opinion, I'm not a client for any of those products. I'm a urban digital nomad, my MacBook Pro is my desktop and everything I need. I'm not saying either product is needed, only that if they have to have a modular product, at least let that be the Xserve.

Well, there's a heck of a lot more space in the Pro case, allowing far more add-ons far more easily.  But since we both agree neither product is needed in light of Apple's current priorities, I probably should have just left it alone. :)

Somehow my post got messed up even though I rewrote it, it submitted the old one. Your perception here is off. Intel leverages Sandy Bridge E in both Xeon and i7 builds, and they cost the same amount. Sandy EP is used by Dell, HP, and all of the rest, mostly in dual package workstations. Apple uses both from the Nehalem/Westmere era currently. No data center would build around Apple hardware. Apple didn't even use the Xserve in their own centers. Minis work for small offices. If it's something IO intensive, a mac pro refactored to be rackmount friendly would suffice for limited demand. It's not like Apple even has the infrastructure set up for enterprise server support, yet you think they'd be better off resurrecting something they ditched long ago. Even with the long duty cycles of server hardware, it's unlikely that a large number of customers would return. I think you're way too stuck on it being server hardware. You're thinking of E5-46XX and E7 hardware.

Edited by hmm - 2/1/13 at 1:43pm

More EU red tape. Hopefully we'll be out of it soon

You're joking right? Spain going broke and losing 2 existing jobs for every 1 "green" job they create. Germany going "green" and having electric rates go up 61% since 2000. Greece in such economic turmoil that people are having to cut down every tree they can in order to have heat and cook food. That's logical?

No they have pushed the responsibility from the pedestrian to the automaker. Pedestrian Impact Standards are why cars are getting blocky front ends with tall hoods. Larger area to absorb impact and more space between the hood and engine so it crushes when people step in front of your car.

All I can say is that I am getting tired of constant OSX updates that are less and less functional and are only designed to increase profit, less attention to Pro Apps, and the neglected Mac Pro. I am really glad I bought into the 2010, 5,1 Mac Pro as it has not changed substantially since. Snow Leopard 10.6.8 will remain my go to OS as it is stable and sane in its operation. I have Mountain Lion on one internal boot drive for those companies like Adobe that only really care about the latest release for stability in their apps. Multiple boots, not very easy on an iMac. Please, a Mac Pro in the future so developers keep developing for pros. I love my iPhone and my iPad, but I’m not buying another one soon, and can only do my work on a Mac Pro level machine. Please, GIVE US A TIMELINE, or get off the pot!

 

We'll have to wait for that to start happening before you can say you're tired of it.

 

Completely redesigned = "less attention to"?

 

That's because it hasn't changed.

 

You, 2001.

 

HA! Adobe caring about stability or the latest features! Oh dear, that's a knee-slapper!

 

Holding Option is hard.

 

Cook promised one. Not sure why people STILL keep sacrificing goats to pagan gods as though we know nothing about its future.

 

It's called the iMac.

 

"This year". You'd think since you care so much you would have paid more attention.

I stand by my statements despite your derision. Check Mac Performance Guide. We are both talking performance, not promises.

 

Right. There's no question that it's hopelessly out of date, except where it isn't. It's due—overdue in some cases—but that we know we're getting a new one is more than we've ever known before.