Apple tells reseller new Mac Pro coming in spring 2013 - Page 8

If I was an artist I would draw up a mock up but sadly it would look pretty pathetic.  

In a nut shell I see the need for slots for the foreseeable future. FireWire should go, that I agree with. A Pro machine should have at least 4 TB ports though. I'm not sure if the technology is there yet for 4 TB ports. It really doesn't matter as this isn't Apples primary focus. I just see designs that easily convert to Rack Mount as solving issues for a certain number of Apples customers. Done right it doesn't cost any extra for the mainstream user so why not. Well there are such elves then there are shelves. Book shelves, if properly built, shouldn't be a problem. Think of a stack of books end to end. This is one reason why library shelving is so expensive you end up with considerable weight on those racks. I use to think the Mini was a joke but it is growing on me. The fact is advancements in chip technology have turned the Mini into something that is at least respectable. Unfortunately it just doesn't have the graphics chops right now for all of my needs. I'm hopeful that Apple does right by Haswell in the Mini and slots in a GT3 supporting chip

 

The new Mac Pro will likely have space for at most two magnetic drives. External disk arrays will be connected by TB for those that need them. Primary storage will be SSD hopefully sitting on the PCI bus. Getting rid of the capacity to hold a disk array internally will allow for a significant shrinkage of the chassis and significantly reduce power supply size. In fact I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple put laptop sized drives in the new Mac Pro to save even more power. It has worked out well in the server market so it certainly can be done in the workstation market. In any event I know some of my wishes for the Mac Pro seem like long shots to many in this thread but really Apple needs a workstation design that can carry forward for another 8 years or so. That means things like SSD for main storage is a must have. Support for TB is also a must have which brings into question how they will handle the GPU. Further things like 3D ram modules could dramatically change the way a machine is built allowing for size compact action once again. We probably won't get everything that I salivate over but if we get nothing then you might as well call Apple dead on the desktop.

It's often suggested that Apple can generate a lot more sales by having more options in the lineups but you have to demonstrate there is a significant market for the suggested options and the figures don't back it up for a tower in the $1000-2000 range. Apple already has the premium PC market locked down, just as they have with the tablet and smartphone markets.

He seems to describe a half cube for rack-mounting, which isn't technically a cube e.g 13x13x7. This is essentially a smaller Mac Pro on its side.

If they were going with an actual cube, I don't think it would be good going above 8". The 12" NeXT Cube was far too big:



It would have the same footprint as the Mac Pro does now but I wouldn't like to see it take up more horizontal space. If it has to sit on the floor, it'll get in the way of your feet and it certainly won't sit on the desk. I'd like to see a machine people can sit on their desk quite easily.

 

And the iMac is invalidated because "slots", despite Thunderbolt providing that, correct? 

 

… Not the glossy argument again. Is it?

My, how times have changed. I once disabled Software Update on my Mini and it had an uptime of 260 days. Like TS, I wonder why they needed the weekly reboot.

I understand your point here sol, but do not through out the idea of a HDD-less Mac Pro. Apple can easily determine how the MP is being used, and if the percentage of uses with very large datasets far outweigh the number of uses with a single HDD in the MP it might be a good design. One or two SSD's for the OS and Apps and all HDD's external; a rebirth of the Xserve RAID if you will. It'll allow them to shrink the PSU and create a small Form Factor. Though personally I don't see any benefit to a redesign chassis. The current on will be 10 years old this June, so it's not without reason they haven't changed it. I do think they need to redesign the handles as they are annoyingly sharp if you need to carry one more than a foot or two.

The old school desktop design, triple pizza box, was ok during the CRT area. Flatscreens gave the tower a favorable design. The iMac is the AIO and perfect as-is. They could go all external, simply put the MP in the keyboard with build in SSD, connect up to 14 HDD's over TB, create a new 30-40" ACD with a removable videocard slot. PCIe goes into an external box for those who need it.



Well, maybe not. I certainly don't see a reason for a redesigned chassis. And rack mountable? If they want to return to the enterprice/server market, they should start with a clean slate, not redesign a desktop computer with a 1GB of GDDR5 memory videocard.

Thunderbolt isn't a slot and its limited adoption means you won't see specialized cards moving to outside the box anytime soon.    In simple terms there is no effective replacement for slots at this point.    Frankly it doesn't appear that either Apple nor Intel are in a rush to promote the adoption of TB.   Maybe that will change 5 years down the road but even then you still have legacy hardware to support.  

Where do you get these ideas?    Glossy has nothing to do with screen failures.   The simple fact is screens go bad and you are at a huge disadvantage if that means replacing the entire PC.   Beyond that screens are often specialized for the task at hand.   For example a small screen for a crampe d work area while another might have a touch screen. Not to mention the iMacs are rather big machines and as such get in the way simply because the screen is large.  If you have a bench full of lab equipment finding room for a 27" screen is an issue.   

It makes a much bigger difference for some things than others. Admittedly I hate the way that most of these panels deal with glare reduction, but I hate glossy even more. I have used imacs in the past, and the reflections can be extremely annoying when dealing with colors. I'm not sure how much you know about displays, but anything gamma encoded works so that 1 + 1 != 2 either visually or physically. It's used to display images, text, etc. in a way that looks good at a lower contrast ratio. The appearance of parallel light rays reflecting off glass is really additive to these values, so it really decreases the perceived separation in them. If it was a complete non-issue, Apple wouldn't have attempted to mitigate the issue. If you completely blacken the room it's quite tolerable, but having to do that is annoying.

 

Actually thunderbolt has at least working products in a lot of the higher end specialty hardware, basically in the $500-5000 range. You don't have a lot of simple solutions without a relatively high minimum purchase though, which makes me somewhat skeptical of long term support. I don't think it's meant to be ubiquitous. It won't support the more extreme bandwidth requirements, and its ability to support multiple devices is extremely limited based on the device type. There are many things that don't work, and it's not clearly explained anywhere. For example a lot of people buy other displays then mistakenly try to use thunderbolt cables from Apple. The Apple display will support another thunderbolt display. For slightly atypical requirements, it's really possible to run into situations where the combination of desired hardware won't work with the available ports. I wouldn't personally make big investments in thunderbolt hardware. Marvin actually pointed out a while ago that some of these lists would be incredibly expensive for freelance individuals, yet at the freelance or smaller shop level, people don't always replace all their hardware simultaneously. Due to the cost, it's sensible to avoid the potential for orphaned peripheral devices unless they're paid for very quickly. I've personally gone the route of only purchasing computing equipment that can be paid for or justified within 12-18 months to avoid the issue of frankensteined setups.

 

In my experience, if Apple wants to drop something, support drops off very quickly. The express 34 slot remained on the 17" macbook pros longer than the others, yet reliable drivers and support for any of those cards dropped off a long time ago. Many of them aren't supported with Lion and on. A new thunderbolt revision could go the same way.

If you haven't seen the new iMacs, please look at them some time. I had another chance to look at them this weekend. It's very astonishing how strong the AR treatment is. It's the strongest AR treatment I remember seeing. Even in a brightly lit retail environment, the reflections are minimal, sometimes I had to look hard for reflections. And I'm annoyed with the 2011 iMac's reflections, in the 2012 models, I consider it to be a non-issue.

You're going to perceive more of a reflection in the darker areas of an image but that's true of any display. The glare used to be bad but the new one has reduced it to the point that the glare isn't really a problem any more.

Obviously if you sit with your back to an open window, it's still a problem but it's not a mirror like it used to be and much easier to fix - a matte display would wash a reflection that bright over the whole display:



What are some examples of Thunderbolt solutions that are vastly more expensive than equivalent PCIe solutions?

Why won't it support more extreme bandwidths? That's in their roadmap.

A lot (I assume you mean thousands) of people are buying non-Apple Thunderbolt displays and an Apple Thunderbolt cable? Why would they be doing that, what displays are they and why exactly don't they work?

Of course not because you want to see it fail for whatever reason. You'd presumably have been happy to buy a PCI-X device though only to see it made obsolete with PCIe. That standard only lasted 8 years. You probably also don't want to invest in DDR3 RAM as they'll change the slots with DDR4. Avoid Mini-displayport too, that'll probably fail.

Yes, I'm sure a new Thunderbolt revision will obsolete all existing Thunderbolt hardware just like Firewire 800 made all Firewire 400 devices obsolete. No hang on, you could just plug one into the other with an updated cable. Maybe Apple and Intel can do that. We can only hope they know what they're doing but yeah, in the meantime don't buy any products from any manufacturer because it's not going to last more than 10 years, which is the minimum you should expect anything to last.

I will certainly take another look at the iMac when I need to replace my Mac Pro. I keep on reading posts like yours, and the possibility of switching to a cheaper solution seems all the more viable. The only 'heavy-duty stuff I do is mostly Aperture, and that doesn't require all the horsepower my Mac Pro is giving me. Still, the 4xHDD does have its advantages, and I even use the ODD. Or at least used to -- I've finished ripping all my optical discs except for the DVD's that are stacked up next to my DVD player. But those are all BR, and I simply cannot picture myself of buying a read-only BR drive to add another geez-knows-how-many-gigabytes to my current, hmm, I don't even know, but the internal storage on a MP is really great. Anyone know if there's a real storage bump looming on the horizon, like going from the current 4TB to, say, 200TB or something similarly crazy?

That's off topic, but the screen seems a likely candidate as a replacement for my 30" ACD. Thanks for your post JeffDM.

@Marvin: that is the most useful comparison picture I have ever seen, thank you very much indeed for that!

There's something on the horizon:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/10/researchers-increase-hard-drive-density-sixfold-with-salt/

but how far out they are is never clear. I wouldn't expect them to jump very far because they'd sell fewer of them. Most likely they'll go to 6TB next year. They can probably go up 2TB every year on the 3.5" models:

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/122921-seagate-hits-1-terabit-per-square-inch-60tb-drives-on-their-way

Who needs Google when we have Marvin!

 

Agreed. I'm using the 2010 iMac now, and it's generally workable in a pro setting. The glossy screen took some getting used to, but it's usable.

 

The main issue with the iMac is the lack of a user-replaceable hard drive.

Having to lose six working days for Apple's hard drive recall is ridiculous and downright inexcusable for pro users.

 

If the iMac is what Apple wants more pros to use, they should sell a version of the 27" without a hard drive at all, so that all confidential files can be kept safely at home/work if the machine has to be serviced. OWC could sell a version of the MiniStack made for iMac users with a RAID drive and removable Time Machine backup, and many pro users would, I think, be content with that.

 

This is the first time I've thought of this regarding hard drives. And it makes me livid, because I wouldn't put it past them.

 

That's not how I'd operate, at least. If I had the ability to create a product ten times better than anything on the market, I'd do it. *shrug* That's all that needs said. I wouldn't make something twice as good to sell "more" of them, I'd make something ten times as good and watch the entire market buy my product because of the immensity of its improvement.

 

If the improvement is big enough, you'll start to pull in not only the people who wouldn't have bought it at a 2x improvement, but also the people who weren't planning to buy a new one at all. That's what they should be going for. That kind of one-upmanship is what we need in hard drives these days, in both camps.

I have never seen a side by side. Thanks for that. For anything really critical, I suggest subdued lighting anyway, as there aren't any imac display hoods. I would even recommend it with matte displays if possible if you really need consistency. I also suggest allowing it to warm up for 30 minutes or so prior to judging color from a previous session due to shifts as the display stabilizes. Some are better than others though. I was trying to explain that reflections don't really follow the same behavior as a color managed device that emits light.

 

You're really misinterpreting my posts today. Wizard mentioned that you won't see specialized cards migrate. I mentioned that the expensive, specialized ones were the first to release thunderbolt versions. I've mentioned some of the tools made by Black Magic before, as they were some of the first to ship thunderbolt products. My claim was that it has working products from companies that have a sizable market on the Mac and margins that can absorb the extra development cost. I haven't seen as much consumer grade stuff at similar price points to what you would pay for usb3.

 

I'm skeptical as to what machines will get this, the state of daisy chaining if you need to run a number of peripherals from different companies with different firmware, and intel's claims compared to what is actually delivered. They projected 10 years out with some uncertainty. It's also dependent on them adding that many PCI lanes, so that thunderbolt may derive such bandwidth and completely ignores the fact that display bandwidth may grow immensely by the end of the decade given the emergence of higher dpi displays. I'm still skeptical as to when we'll have shipping desktop products of that type. It started with phones simply because of the huge growth and small screen size. Desktop displays have been relatively stagnant for years though. The biggest difference is that prices have come down.

 

Again misinterpretation! I meant people buying a non-Apple display to use in conjunction with their mini or to add a large screen to their notebook. I wouldn't make that mistake on cables, but some people seem to do so. I actually

 

 

None of that is really true. It was weird how the last G5s got PCIe with no PCI-X slots so it took half a cycle to see anything for them. In that sense it was an awkward transition to PCIe. You also ignored some of my previous points that I know you have read. Ram isn't really something you pass between machines, so the argument makes little sense there. Mini displayport works the same as displayport. The only thing I've complained about is lack of full displayport 1.2 and 10 bit out support from Apple.

You misinterpreted me on a number of these points. I was saying whenever Apple changes direction on something, support drops off quickly whether it's from Apple, third parties, or a combination. Sometimes it can be 1-2 years from discontinuation. If you look at what I mentioned regarding staggering purchases of peripherals and primary computing devices, sometimes it's possible to just buy at a bad time (like late cycle or prior to a transition) because you happened to need it then. Right now I'm waiting for some stability there prior to investing in any storage solutions based around thunderbolt. The other problem is that it's coupled to a display, yet not every peripheral allows for daisy chaining.

Edited by hmm - 2/26/13 at 11:17pm

Well I do as that's mostly how I find things.

I wanted them to make 2.5" drives accessible from the base but they obviously realised that people would just end up buying the entry models and put Samsung or Crucial SSDs in them. It also complicates their manufacturing having accessible panels on the outside but I think it would have helped them in some ways because they'd have happier customers and faster service times. A technician could replace a broken drive in 5 minutes while someone was standing in the store instead of prizing the display off and gluing it back on again.

Accessible slots don't work so well for the Fusion drive setup though because if someone removes one drive, it would break it. Also, they obviously wanted 3.5" drives for the extra capacity and they are better being tightly secured to minimize noise. I'd be quite happy with an option where they put a blade SSD screwed in beside the RAM slots on the 27" and offered a 256GB and 512GB option on its own. There aren't really many competitively priced blade SSDs. There's a chance the SSD could get too hot that way but they can probably cool it down quite easily and it's a setup I'd prefer.

The problem there though is sustaining a large company. If you sell a product that will mean you saturate the market very quickly, the sales will start to tail off and you might have to downsize the company. There are two sides to the ethics of this because while technological progress means that consumers get better products at lower prices, it's harder for companies to sustain growth and jobs will be lost all the way from manufacuring to retail.

I think the way they do things now is the better way simply because the whole reason anybody really does anything is to try and improve the quality of life and having a sustainable economic model is more important to this than having technology that isn't really essential. There's a balance that has to be made so that we don't just have to put up with junk products as that affects growth too but it wouldn't be wise of them to give us everything all at once. I really wonder what's going to happen to the whole tech industry in another 20-30 years given how far it has come in that time. It seems very much like computers will go the way of televisions and it all just becomes about the services. No doubt that's why companies are making moves to develop their own OS as that's the only guaranteed point of leverage anyone will eventually have over profitable services.

Right now, HDDs are around $0.05/GB and SSD is $0.60/GB. I can see all manufacturers just ditching HDDs and moving to faster, more profitable SSDs. There's not much point in having 200TB drives if it can still only read/write at 150MB/s and more importantly has really low random read/write speeds. SSD just needs to get down to $0.10/GB to replace any size of HDD because you can just stick more chips in. There's not the same weight and noise issues like with mechanical platters. Imagine in 2 years, they half SSD prices to get to $0.30/GB and another 2 years, it's $0.15/GB, you'd potentially get a 2TB 2.5" SSD for $300. Even if you can get a single 20TB HDD for the same price, people will still need RAID systems for reliability and if you have files that take up that much space, you need high performance.

I doubt we'll ever see consumer HDDs that are 60TB+ in size because the market appeal for them would be so small. I can see them focusing on speed more than capacity to the point that RAM and storage are one and the same - in effect 2TB of storage becomes 2TB of RAM and video memory or at the very least is tiered storage with small amounts of very fast memory and of course all soldered to the motherboard. While it seems crazy now to solder storage to the motherboard, when computers are so inexpensive, it will be a better model to just replace the whole board. The iPad Mini is $329, which means the parts cost less than $200 and that includes the display. For any board or chip failure, they'd charge $100 for the whole part.

There are a few but you wouldn't say that there aren't as many consumer grade expressCard or PCIe cards as USB 3 products. The problem is that people class Thunderbolt as just a competitor to USB 3 and it's really missing the point of what Thunderbolt is. It's essentially a faster expressCard merged with the mini-displayport output.

There's a premium for the faster ports and active cables. Lacie's drives come with a $50 premium. G-tech is a bit more with 4TB USB 3 at $399 and with Thunderbolt, $538. Thunderbolt needs more volume, cheaper parts and faster licensing steps but it takes time for this to happen. The problem as always lies with cheap product manufacturers that side with USB 3 because it's good enough but it will never negate the need for multi-protocol ports.

It goes to 20Gbps per channel next year as they will use PCIe 3 lanes. Displayport 1.2 will be supported this year and is enough for 4k resolution.

A Thunderbolt cable wouldn't even plug into the display though so it's not even remotely a problem with Thunderbolt and I doubt it's a widespread issue. The laptops and Minis have HDMI for consumer displays.

Would you have hesitated to buy an eSATA drive? That standard is going to totally die out in favour of USB 3. At the end of the day, consumer electronics is like cars.You don't expect to have the same car for more than 10 years because you'd be able to afford a better one after that period of time. If a new storage standard comes along, you copy the data over to it and move on with your life.

You make out like Apple will get bored with Thunderbolt and just phase it out within 1-2 years. People said the same with displayport vs the much more widely adopted HDMI. They co-exist now just like TB and USB 3.

Brilliant!

Marvin is a walking book of knowledge and very helpful all the time.
 

Fully agree!

Even after he says Google is the source of his information?     The web is an interesting way to get facts these days, something that didn't even exists in the sixties when I was going to school.    Like a library it is a resource everybody should learn to leverage.  

Given that fusion drives are a combination of two drives, you have a higher chance of failure. I wish they were serviceable. Beyond that it's not always a good idea to use disks up to the point where they stop working. It's possible for drives to become flaky prior to that, although I doubt most people recognize that.

 

 

I already view them as appliance like. All of the computer parts stores with the exception of Frys went out of business long ago.

 

 

 

NAND hasn't always been profitable while HDDs have been profitable. Here is a Forbes article on Western Digital if you don't believe me. Don't mistake higher pricing for extremely profitable. Now that is often how transitions happen. CRT to LCD happened due to profitability. It took years to get LCDs of reasonable quality for any kind of specialized use, even with significantly higher price points. Everyone complained about HDD pricing after the floods, yet the manufacturers did quite well in the aftermath.

 

I don't necessarily see this happening in the near future. It could happen eventually. If you look at computers, the functions they cover for the average individual are largely dependent on their capability. Computers were around at the time of VCRs, yet even if the footage was scanned and digitally graded, we didn't have consumer grade storage mediums appropriate for such use. I just used that because it's an easy example. Soldering parts doesn't always lower costs. Motherboard manufacturers were concerned about the BGA rumor from intel, as such changes could increase their costs. If intel was able to build the majority of the motherboard functions into the cpu package, that might be different.

 

 

 

External hard drives tend to carry crappy margins. If you need a lot of them, it makes more sense to pick up a decent JBOD or Raid box. eSATA used to be the only somewhat cheap option with decent performance, but I welcome USB3 for a reason, as it's cuts out the use of third party HBAs that are not directly supported by Apple. When I dealt with those, I tried to at least use host cards and storage boxes that contained the same brand of hardware or at least the same chipset brand in each to minimize issues. Even then it's somewhat hit and miss finding this stuff on OSX. I wouldn't suggest many of them today simply because support seems to be dropping off. In spite of the issues with usb3, I would rather test something based on that. With thunderbolt I'm kind of waiting to see how it shakes out. Right now you have a maximum of two ports out, and effective daisy chaining seems limited to Apple's own peripheral devices. I figured they really only backed thunderbolt for those things and figured anything else was a bonus. It runs over a connector that they already used anyway. If you look at a 2010 macbook pro and a 2011, both have the mini displayport connector on the upper left by the ethernet port.

 

I would hesitate to invest in hardware that requires eSATA today. If you need a few drives, that can be anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand or more depending on capacity and configuration. Mac options are a little limited today. I was going to say I would probably look at Areca, but their page is abit out of date. There isn't that much available in really good external storage today. LaCie and the others you regularly reference are popular because they're marketed well. They aren't that great. Try calling LaCie's sales or tech support to ask a simple product question. They never have an answer as they do little beyond marketing pretty things. There are a few raid and jbod boxes that have multiple io outputs such as esata/usb3/sas or thunderbolt. I haven't tested any of them. I dislike Apple's solution there. The store has too many listed complaints on it. I would rather pay for a decent raid box, populate it with drives that meet my needs (Caviar Black for most configurations or RE-4s for any parity based raid), and test it myself prior to placing it in service. Something pre-configured should show up and work near 100% of the time.

 

I would like to see how it catches on overall. Intel also hinted that it would come down to the amount of bandwidth people will pay for in the end. I may be more interested in its revision B, especially if it supports up to 4k as well as data.

Some of the facts you Google I found sometimes to be incorrect.
 

A fair amount of devces have two ports for daisy chaining, it's certainly not limited to Apple's devices. You've seen the demos.

A question like what - 'does it come in anything other than grey'? It's a hard drive, how complicated can it be? You plug it in; if it's broken, you send it back. The reviews for Lacie products don't seem to be all that bad:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/HA721ZM/A/lacie-1tb-sata-iii-ssd-thunderbolt-little-big-disk-hard-drive
http://store.apple.com/us/product/H7114ZM/A/lacie-little-big-disk-thunderbolt-series-hard-drive

and it's still only dozens of people out of many thousands of drives sold. Lacie also isn't the only TB manufacturer. If people mention Pegasus, the reaction is that people always mention Pegasus and they are too pricey; if it's Lacie, the support sucks; if it's anyone else there aren't enough choices for TB solutions.

There are hardly any HDD manufacturers left. They all merged into Seagate and WD and they both have Thunderbolt drives. In terms of TB drive bundle providers, there's Promise (Pegasus), Lacie, Seagate, WD, Elgato, G-Tech, Buffalo, Drobo. Who else needs to make a Thunderbolt hard drive?

What drive setup would you in fact recommend over any of those Thunderbolt products? You mentioned a decent RAID box with Caviar Black drives so which enclosure? The Pegasus R4 4TB is $1099 and 4 Caviar Blacks would be 4 x $120 = $480 so the 4 bay enclosure would have to be $620 tops.

Do you have a 4k display that means you need 4k + data or is this one of those artificially high minimum requirements? If it supports your single imaginary 4k display on one port, you have the other port and USB 3 to use for data.

 

True. And this is the first time Apple's actually had a real, justifiable excuse for sealing the machine.

So you can expect them to double down on Fusion.

 

 

On another note, many people don't seem to realize that Apple has already cleared some headspace for the new Pro in the lineup.

There isn't an iMac configuration over 2K anymore.

 

The new Pro could start at $2049 (with no display), representing a $500. price drop, and still not hurt consumer sales of the iMac.

Only sometimes? I think the Internet is filled with garbage and google is the worst design for a search engi e. all based on who has the most hits, stemming from their PageRank system. I still have trouble finding what I'm looking for. And then needing to validate the info. Don't get me wrong, the Internet is a great resource ...

Not nearly enough. The fact that anyone has to read the specs of a device to verify it is pretty sad. It's not something I ever needed to think about with Firewire devices. It's like the USB mentality has infected the TB device world. The problem being, USB ports are plentiful, USB hubs are plentiful, it's hard to say that with TB.

And Apple sells those dongles. Fair enough, a second port is a bit much for those devices, but it shouldn't be a question for a larger device.

I don't consider LaCie because of support experiences I've heard from hmm and others around the net, and considerable issues with premature failures. A premium brand should have premium support.


http://www.buffalotech.com/products/portable-hard-drives/portable-hard-drives/ministation-thunderbolt

High up in this page:
Additionally, you can daisy-chain up to six Thunderbolt devices to maximize use of a single port†.

Fine print (way at the bottom of the page)
†MiniStation Thunderbolt does not have a Thunderbolt pass-through port so it must be the last device on a daisy-chain.

If Intel really does have stringent approval process, I don't understand why they let this product and Seagate's little TB sled go without a second port.

I think the top-end 27" was always $1999 but had BTO options to take it above, which are still there. If you configure it with the i7, it goes to $2200 and with the GTX 680M, it goes to $2350. I don't think it would affect iMac sales much if the next Pro started at $2k though because you still need a display and the minimum for an equivalent display would be $650. Apple would be making large enough margins on the Mac Pro sale anyway that they'd probably make more from the Pro sale than the iMac sale.

I have the same trouble trying to get the results I'm looking for. There are far too many spam results and the UI is not very good. For some reason Bing has copied it almost exactly and has worse results. I'd quite like to see a set of results like Apple's Top Sites view. A grid of 5 x 5 icons with just the domain name + text snippet and it would expand to the size of the browser window vertically with more items so I can page through results without scrolling down and be able to have file-based anonymous profiles so that the browser remembers different search preferences and there can be multiple profiles that can be removed, synced or deleted easily without needing any logins.

One of the most helpful Google options is the minus character where you just add something like -Samsung and it eliminates all the results you aren't interested in. You can also use things like filetype:pdf e.g ipad filetype:pdf if you want to find reference documents. Quotes helps for phrases. You can also search some of the known sites like anandtech with things like site:anandtech.com thunderbolt review -htc.

Yes, there really needs to be a Thunderbolt hub of some sort that gives you say 4 ports out of a single port. I'm not sure why nobody has built those yet. It would only need one controller for all the ports. Maybe Apple or even Intel can come up with one but it's needed for those situations where manufacturers don't put an extra port on. maybe they want to encourage people to put the extra port on their devices but they won't all do it.

 

I'm thinking that Thunderbolt development is relatively expensive and third parties know that the move to optical is imminent.

 

This might not affect peripherals, but that's a big guess if you're throwing down millions on design and production.

They're probably just waiting for 2.0 to be sure.

 

What about the video requirements of such a device?

It should be able to work the same way as the Cinema displays, which can be chained together. If too many displays are attached, the remaining ones would just stay dark, which is what happens now. I'd expect the hub to support up to 2 displays on the current controllers and allow them to be connected to any hub port and in 2014, up to 4 displays.

 

Ah, that was my only concern. I didn't think they'd let something like that happen, but since they already do…

 

Hey, is it true that you can't use three displays on the current crop of Mac Pro graphics cards unless BOTH of the Mini DispayPort ports have a POWERED adapter (meaning Apple's $100 dual-link DVI to MDP adapter)? Or how does that all work out?

This whole idea that Apple needs headspace is totally bogus.   IMacs and Mac Pros sell into entirely different markets.    Pricing of one has zero impact on the desirability of the other.   

It is a fantastic source for the technically inclined.   I've been around long enough to know what it was like to get tech manuals, data sheets and other documentation before the Internet.    This access really does level the playing field and means that any body any where on the planet can innovate if they so desire.  

 

Now obviously Google isn't perfect.    However neither are web sites maintained by the likes of Intel or TI.   The alternative or rather the practice in the past though was terrible.   

It may be bogus to you, but their past behavior suggests they may think this way. I think if they're going to retain a fairly high cost of entry, the hardware specs should justify at least justify the price.

My experience with Lacie is that they are not designed for heavy use. The usual complaint is a dead drive just outside of warranty. It's not always the drive itself. I saw this constantly with their older firewire drives. It was often a burnt firewire bridge (bridge, bridgeport, something like that, can't remember the exact part name). With single drive solutions you could always pry open the case and attempt to mount the bare drive in something else. That wouldn't work with the ones that used 2 drives in a Raid 0 internally.

 

I didn't say many HDD manufacturers were left. Seagate and Western Digital are the only ones out of those that actually manufacture the hard drives themselves. They have both retained profitability. Seeing as you included companies that make external hard drives as opposed to the hard drives themselves, those guys still sell on relatively thin margins. To go to ssds, they would have to leverage performance. If it's just a backup solution, speed is a minor factor. I suspect they'll eat low end hardware raids and cheap Rocs prior to anything else. That process is already underway.

Good question. Right now I'm not so sure. Areca made some decent solutions, but they're quite expensive and I think their site is out of date. Some of those products seem to be discontinued. I would have to do some research, but it wouldn't be an impulse purchase tagged onto the purchase of a Mac. Promise actually makes a lot of stuff. They make enterprise grade storage products too, so this isn't outside their area of expertise. Reading some of the comments doesn't inspire confidence. I can't find any information on its RAID management software. RAID setups can be finicky, and I have no way of figuring out how theirs is configured. Here is an example. They offer an 18TB Raid 5 system. I don't know what kind of drives are used, so I have no idea if it addresses write hole issues. Judging by the price, I doubt they are using enterprise grade drives, which would be appropriate there.  Keep in mind I never said the Pegasus was expensive. I just said I didn't like it. At that price range I would probably avoid Raid solutions if they aren't an absolute requirement. I abhor low end raid solutions.

No I don't, but we're discussing future technology. I have mentioned that I wanted to see 10 bit displayport support. Displayport 1.2 is a requirement for that. I also wanted to know what it supports with a display in the chain. You're right that I would still have the other ports, but that doesn't mean much. When there is no way to expand the number of ports, you have to ensure you have a way to plug everything in, regardless of how many devices. That is why I'm interested in knowing what works per port. I'm skeptical of solutions that try to consolidate things to such a degree as I want to know exactly what works or doesn't work prior to supporting them.

 

Also seeing as this is future hardware, I would really like a 4k display. The displayport 1.2 standard has been out for some time. I see no reason to buy another machine that doesn't support it. I don't like huge displays. 24" at 16:10 is the perfect height for me as it's easy to scan quickly. It could go larger if it's a 16:9, and obviously I have to buy based on what is actually available. I hope they kick the dpi up a bit. Even with it further back, I can see the difference in resolution compared to some of the notebooks. Text is a prime example, but it shows to a lesser degree in other things.

Edited by hmm - 3/1/13 at 11:19pm

Yeah, Apple recommends the dual-link:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3477
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4279

It would be nice if more 3rd party displays supported displayport as you shouldn't need any adaptors.

They have a manual:

http://www.promise.com/media_bank/Download%20Bank/Utility/Pegasus%20User%20Manual%20(English)%20.pdf

Like the Caviar Black?

Wrong color? As you are aware, there aren't many alternatives so I don't see why you'd dislike it. Dick Applebaum on the forum bought a 12TB Pegasus drive (two in fact) and hasn't mentioned any problems with it.

But you can say that about anything. You can say that you won't invest in PCIe because if NVidia makes a Tesla or Titan GPU, they might not develop a driver for the Mac so it's useless anyway.

On the one hand, you dismiss new technology because it might not last long enough yet on the other would say that Mac Pro buyers don't hold onto hardware more than 6 years anyway. If hardware doesn't need to last that long, there shouldn't be a problem.

If you need a machine with a RAID system, an iMac with Thunderbolt works today. If you need to run a 4k display in 3 years along with that RAID, upgrade the iMac. It's not really a big problem.

That I can tell, optical TB makes no difference to the device, because that's only done inside the cable. It doesn't change the connector either. I think it's a pretty clever system.

That looks like a really good design!

I know these; good tips! I wish the date settings would work (better). If I filter the results to only show pages updated last month it hardly ever works as you want. I understand that it's also the content that Google cannot manipulate, and therefore would simply love a 'database internet' where there are mandatory fields that need to be filled. Sort of a meta data internet if you will.


Indeed, the internet is giving us way more than before ≈1995, I just wish the sites themselves would be more informative, structured. Meta tagged, jpg's correctly named so it would show up in a search et cetera.

Another thing I considered was a kind of tag cloud like you get on websites but dynamic:

http://www.goat1000.com/tagcanvas.php

(hit image links to see the icon view, it can even just use favicons near the text to differentiate the links. I don't think it needs to rotate either, just pan and zoom)

Perhaps there's a search engine that's done this already. You could be on the Google homepage and start typing a search term and Google will just populate a cloud around the box with results. This cloud would show the most relevant terms highlighted but items would be grouped by context. On a multi-touch device, you'd be able to easily pan, rotate and zoom around but it would support the mouse too. If your phrase had two divergent meanings, all results associated with one meaning could be to the left and the other to the right.

They could order the results depth-wise by date and relevance can be off to the sides so you'd just zoom in for older results but always see appropriate results and pan around to see further out terms.

It gets away from this idea of a fixed page of 10 or so links that mostly dictates what you can find and it means that it's no longer just a top 10, it would be as many as would fit into the browser window.

Yeah, Google Image search seems to pick out phrases from pages that images are located on sometimes so the weirdest results come up. They really need to do some basic image analysis to weed out the crazy results.

Now THAT is good design and a great idea. Reminds me a bit of musicovery.com/ where you could stream music based on your mood. Now it looks pretty poor, it was great looking, and working, a few years back.

Nice to read that 'someone on the internet' is having the same feelings about Google search. Not only that, the way you describe it sounds like how I imagine it. Again, thank you Marvin.

Canvas is nice but I don't think that aspect is quite ready for mass use just yet. Open up Activity Monitor and check your Safari Web Content before, during and after using it. It's very processor intensive. I had hoped by 2013 they would have figured out a way to resolve that. Perhaps offloading the animation to the GPU or some other HW acceleration but that is out of my depth so I'm not even sure that's possible with WebKit.

Me and my Mac Pro mind; never monitor the Activity anymore. But fully agree; in 2013 this ought to be peanuts for light computers as well. But I'm not a software developer so what do I know.