Apple to fire up Penryn-based Mac Pros - Page 5

new Xeons now available

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/...1_marqsub_45nm

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/...ec&pricing.pdf

Mac Pro updated tomorrow?

either Tuesday or Wednesday. At least let's hope so.

Programmer, I do agree with you that the macpro is price competetive with other Xeon workstations, as is the dual cored minmac, imac and probook/macbook. However, as I understand it the main advantage the Xeon has over Conroe is that multi CPUs are supported while for the conroe you are "stuck" with one CPU be it dual or quad cored.
And you do pay for that multi CPU founctionality of the Xeon with expensive fully buddered DIMMs etc


So the mini and the iMac cover the "dual core market" pretty well, the Mac Pro give good value in the octacore market, but less so in the quad core
I am not sayin that Apple should enter the low end tower market with razor thin margins, the Dell I compared to is 2 to 3 times Dells very cheapest towers. At that price range Apple should be able to both make money and a product to be proud of.

Yeah, I remember similar voices saying that about the 'low cost' Mac. Yet the Mac Mini we now have. And the anti-Intel argument way back.

(If they offered a decent quad mid-tower range I'm sure they'd sell twice the amount over the Mac Pros. But we'll have no way of knowing unless they make one.)

And the iMac competes and includes a screen.

Take the screen away and boost the specs to a quad and better gpu.

The 8800GT and Quad 2.4 gig Conroe are dirty cheap.

A decent £995 tower is a reality.

It's up to Apple.

It must sure be complicated for Apple to compete on GPUs...they strip down the ram and offer way out of date gpus like the 7300 while the 2600 Pro gets 256 megs instead of 512.

Ati and Nividia have new, cooler, better, cheaper, faster cards coming. I hope the Pro and iMac gets the option for them.

Programmer, your arguments are out of date. Apple are on Intel now. So they have to compete.

They'll probably add a sub-notebook and i hope they add a Mid-tower while they're at it.

Blue Ocean? Meh. I don't care as long as I get decent gpus and/or a mid-tower that gives me and PC owning friends more choice. It's about time they allowed us to fit a greater range of gpus. ie more than one for the iMac would be a start.

We'll see about the price range on the new Penryn based Mac Pros...but I'm not optimistic they're going to be any cheaper...

Lemon Bon Bon.

Apple writes these blanket drivers for Nvidia cards that cover their whole spectrum. They need at least two drivers, one for Geforce, and one for Quadros - then they need to let the Macs boot BIOS and EFI so we can use the whole range of Nvidia cards from any manufacturer. ATI on the other hand writes their own shit, but I still say Apple needs to wake up, and shake up their desktop line by allowing this so Mac and Mac/windows Boot-camp users can choose the Mac as a gaming rig. It should open up to better Mac sales, not to mention the semi-pro single processor tower that many users would appreciate. With an adjustment like this in their line-up Apple could dominate desktop sales. And quit using the deskop market is slowing excuse to explain their desktop strategy failure.

Since no update to the Mac Pro's you would be a fool to not choose a 2.8 24" Imac over a Mac Pro.

Cost you're getting a free 24" Monitor!


Same price as the 2.6 Mac pro.

LOL Whatever you say man. Dual 2.8 mobile cpu vs quad SERVER 2.66. 800mhz bus vs 1333mhz bus.

24" LCDs are a whole ~$500 now. I'd much rather have the mac pro than a 2.8 iMac. Hell, I'd rather have a quad 2.0 Mac Pro than a 2.8 iMac.

On raw processing yes the pro is faster..on graphics performance it's 1%..

http://macspeedzone.com/html/hardwar...07/10_21.shtml

on the display..

it's £599 so that's what nearly $2000 of your us dollars? :-)

Others may disagree with you, but I know a Mac developer personally. He is planning to buy a 24 inch iMac for his work. In his words, it's fast enough. Sure the Mac Pro would be nice, but he cannot justify the huge price difference.

The only thing holding him back right now is the freeze problem with the iMac. As soon as he's confident with the iMac hardware stability, it's hello iMac for him.

Yep.


You can get 24" displays for the $450 USD mark. Samsung has been running the price for over a month now. Which is 218.055 your price.

BTW I would never buy a mac pro with a 7300gt, I'd go x1900xt or bust.

Sure, but lets compare apples with apples...

I can get a 24" display for 139, which is what $300 for a no-name brand. or £200 ($400) for a heard of brand, but that's not an apple display.

Most apple displays are OLDER samsung panels... I was comparing apples to apples.

Lets take that a step further. Lets compare Apple's outdated LCDs to Samsungs LCDs.

Apple Displays: 14ms Response Time
http://www.apple.com/displays/specs.html

Samsung Displays: 5ms Response Time
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16824001234

the iMac isn't a slouch... but it is laptop parts and it is limited to expandability and it is etc. Sure most people can get by with iMacs. Your developer friend must not compile very much or not do big builds, otherwise I'm sure he'd want the quad - octo cpus. There is nothing more frustrating than waiting 20 minutes for something to compile. Of course those are medium to big projects. But when you are compiling 50 times a day to debug, that time adds up.

I'm not disputing the tech, I've got dell displays, I meant on the price of the 24" mac "display" to the mac pro without.

Power requirements would raise internal case heat latency. I wouldn't be surprised if their tolerances inside the case had to skim off the ram.

Well, he doesn't develop applications like Photoshop, but he was a key developer of Flip4Mac, for example. I have no idea how big a utility like that is on your scale, small or medium? He has said that he'd prefer a Mac Pro, but the cost difference is too much.

Well I know you and I (and probably him) can all agree that a desktop mac would fit this bill perfectly .

Flip4Mac comes in pieces, so I can imagine he'd only be re-compiling certain parts at a time. Either way, that is only one project. I'd imagine if he's smart enough to be on the Flip4Mac team, he'd be involved in stuff that would require large compiling times. A desktop mac (quad) sure would be nice .

I work on both a 2.66 Mac Pro quad (with the ATI X1900 and 5 gig of RAM) and the 2.8 Core 2 Extreme (with 4 gig of RAM). Running After Effects (CS3), I'm surprised at how speedy the latter machine is. In terms of previewing a complex series of layers, the iMac sometimes seems almost as fast as the Mac Pro. Crazy.

Of course, as beautiful as it is, the iMac nevertheless scares the crap out of me in terms of its present and future reliability. I've had one hideous garbled screen and fear more to come. Giving it a "workout" produces major heat on the back of the thin black outer crust. Just the other day I was projecting a QuickTime movie (H.264 codec, DV) when the audio and video ceased to synchronize properly. It happened not once but THREE times. Put simply, it's ridiculous to pay $2500 for a computer that may end up being a beautiful ornament. Needless to say, the 20 clients in my audience were not impressed by the synching problem on Apple's latest and greatest prosumer machine.

My point in all of this is that the Mac Pro remains a reliable workhorse, whereas the iMac strikes me as lovely but dodgy.

I have confused the issue. What didn't dawn on me until now is that the iMac would be the developer's 'personal' Mac, at home. Everything he uses at work is a Mac Pro. Sorry folks; I didn't mean to mislead everyone. Believe it or not, his current 'at home' Mac is a Quicksilver. The same thing I typing on now in my office, but his is a dual CPU.

Quicksilver? Tell him he needs to ask for a raise

Off topic, but I have a question.
Pardon my ignorance, but this brought up a question for something I know nothing about. Would it be possible for said developer with the 24" iMac have the program compliled on an xServe or a Mac Pro over a local network in order to speed up the process?

You may be right, but. Apple currently does in fact compete in the $599 range, only $99 above your lower limit of $500. It just happens that at this time the Mac mini isn't a very good value even for its' target market, those that place a very high premium on size.

You price range also includes the range from $800 ot $1500 in the low margin category. While these may not, and I stress "may not" have the stratoshperic gross margins of 35% they most certainly are not low margin computers for any manufacturer by any stretch of the imagination.

What effect on Apple's sales of iMacs, Mac minis and Mac Pros, if they did indeed sell such a computer, is conjecture and at this point quite moot since Steve Jobs effectively killed any hope of a such a machine with his statements concerning AIO. And now especially since Apple's desktop sales actually surged, Apple will not even consider and appears to hold only contempt and disdain for such a machine.

The 8800 GT now offers a single slot PCIe solution at a very decent price.
Would make for a very nice bottom line card. Or then at least as a cheapish BTO option.
Even better would be dual SLI 8800 GT BTO option.
They can make it, if they want to.

Well, I guess today's not the day.

Looks like SanFran really will be the place, and the ultralight (and ultraexpensive) will be the One More Thing.

Hmmm, it is currently 7:30 a.m. in Cupertino. I would think that any updates would happen after they opened for business, no?

What's the history? Anyone know?

I would wait until at least tomorrow because of Veterans' Day, but I must admit I grow increasingly despondent of seeing a new Mac Pro this year.

Definitely! They have compile farms (groups of computers) that do nothing but compile. I haven't done it with XCode, but I have done it with Visual Studio in MFC. You can network 2 computers together, work on one compile and debug on another. Or just use another for pure compiling. Or both of them for compiling. I'm pretty sure XCode has that capability, but again I haven't done it before on XCode. It's a pretty cool feature.

I think this is where people are starting to disagree. I don't see the desktop surge as an excuse NOT to bring out such a machine. I see it as REASON to bring out such a machine. Apple's desktop sales are lagging. While the rest of the industries is doing fine. Why is that? In my POV and others, it's because they don't have a normal solution that people want. They force you into a small computer with horrible harddrive space and horrible graphics. Into an AIO with a glossy screen and again, horrible graphics. And an LCD you may not want (you already have one, have a better one, hard to match with an external lcd for calibration), and a VERY expensive solution that is the Mac Pro. The normal consumer isn't going to go for the Mac Pro.

These days consumers are buying laptops (for portability), AND towers (expandability, on the cheap side, faster than laptops, etc). Apple may be going about this wrong. They may be blaming their poor desktop sales on the fact that the consumer has poor choices for BUYING a desktop from apple.

Perhaps cannibalization of the rest of the lineup is exactly what apple needs. If that is what the consumer wants, I see no reason not to give it to them. Especially if it will bring EVERY MORE users over to the platform because that is what they have been waiting for. Why not give the consumer. While I think SOME cannibalization will occur, I don't think it would be as drastic as one would think. The lines are very clearly different. There is a large group waiting for some sort of desktop mac from Apple, they have been waiting since the switch to intel. It's time Apple delivered.

Now back to the Mac Pro... where is it?

In searching MacCentral and AI, I've found some updates have been announced prior to 9:00am EST and others just after 1:00pm EST. So I guess it fluctuates.

Still, the Apple Store isn't down, Mac Pros shipping in 1-2 days and no EOL rumours from Big Box vendors, I can't see Apple updating the Pro line in the next few days.

We can still hope, though.

As much as I hate to, I agree with you. If they make it till black friday without announcing them, I don't see apple announcing until MWSF. Reason being is how much it will mess with the quarterly numbers with the machine only being out part of the quarter. Not a foolproof reason, but I feel a good one. Apple loves to manipulate quarterly numbers this way.

Agreed.

Because of the holiday yesterday, I think they will announce maybe tomorrow.
We'll see.
If indeed MWSF becomes the place, then you can bet the enclosure and ACDs will be redesigned.

Hope springs eternal, but my patience doesn't. But what choice do I have? Pay full price for a EOL box? Not going to happen. I'm thinking eBay.


I would say that if we get past tomorrow with no updates, you can forget about it. Nothing until '08.

C'mon Apple, purty please!??!!!

If a statutory holiday is the reason Apple lets a major release slip, Steve Jobs has truly mellowed.

Well, the time has come and gone and no update. Tomorrow is the last chance before January in my opinion, so keep your fingers, toes, legs and eyes crossed.

I made up my mind, will go for new Mac pro if compatible with new ATI FireGL video cards (best in their class at the present moment with the 40% lower cost in comparison with Nvidia)

Thank you, I learn something everyday.


Slight nitpick. The last quarterly results showed that Apple desktop sales had indeed exceeded the industry in market share gains, significantly. I don't remember the exact numbers but is was dramatic. Only reenforcing Apple's current stratetgy of AIO and Mac mini.

I've been telling these clowns MWSF for 5 months but nobody listens.

At least you deduced your opinion from reasonable places, and sources of information. I won't give mine, but it's just as obvious.

Last quarter also saw the redesign of those machines, which had to have some impact on last quarter's numbers. Before then, they had much lower growth on desktops than notebooks.

Imagine what more desktop improvments would do?

Unfortunately for those of us with dead or aging machines the wait is excruciating. (Mine is dead and I am on a loaner.) The aging form factor, video cards and pricing has a lot of people waiting and I will guess chip supply is a potential issue as the demand is probably pretty high for the next best thing.

For the real high end MacPro a new video card is probably the biggest issue. Increases in front side bus and increases in speed from 3 to 3.2 will be nice but price performance may not change that much. This machine is the X5482 with a 5400 chipset. Minor power improvements over the current MacPro.

At the next level or midrange there is a problem. Do you go for a X5472 with a 5400 chipset and FB-Dimms (Speed) or the E5472 chip (expensive) with a 5100 chipset that supports DDR memory (lower bus speed and cheaper) and save significantly on the power requirements (Green)?

The Intel watts/performance specs seems to use the 5100 chipset at 1333 Mhz with DDR to tout the advantages of Penryn.

I know what I want and I am sure that Apple will make my decision as difficult as possible. I may even end up waiting for that *%&# elusive xMac.

I personally think that video is the most important part, I use old ATI FireGL V 5100, and want to upgrade to the best card on the market at the present - ATI V7600, I know there are better cards but what you get for 1000+ usd is amazing, and I want this card on the Mac pro, no I actually want any card on Mac pro...