Apple intros new Mac Pro with "Nehalem" Xeon processors - Page 6

For those of us wanting the option of more than 8 gigs of ram, that price is up to $3299. Earlier this week, you could get that for $2499.

It's frustrating. I want to be happy for Apple's resurgence but i'm growing weary with the return to smarmyness. I'm tired of seeing marketing retreads and excuses. I'm tired of being told "we've got great products in the pipeline" or "we're going to innovate through the recession" that gets puked out on queue.

Apple's hardware (holistically speaking) doesn't match their software. I figured we'd get the benefits of Intel IP along with some key differentiator tweaks from Apple. Well that differentiator is simply FW and a nice markup.

At this rate it appears that Apple needs a shakeup. They needs a couple bad qtrs and a rechecking of the ego. Only a company with an out of control ego would tell you that they saved you $700 by delivering a unibody Macbook because aluminum is what you really wanted. Only a company with hubris would deliver a quad core Mac Pro with a $800 premium.

I only hope that the Mac press can get some balls and stop rolling over like some subservient bitches and call Apple to court. We'll see.

The shroud of the dark side has fallen.

Lemon Bon Bon.

I find it hard to believe that these quad core Nehalem Mac Pros are limited to only 8GB of RAM. It should be 16 (4 x 4GB) since it's not a chipset limitation at all.

Thats true, but you must consider the size of the files. That's the most important factor.

If the file is 20 MB in size, any Mac product is going to be plenty fast, Quartz, Open CL, Grand Central, or whatnot.

In fact, the slowest computer Apple made a year ago is more then fast enough for file around that size. People are getting themselves tied in knots worrying about speeds.

My daughter is a senior in high school, it's a well known art/academic school here. She's going to get a four year BFA in London next year in photography. She has a 3.06 GHz iMac, bought last year when it first came out. she works on composites up to 100 MB in size, and the machine is pretty damn fast. Normal files from her Canon 40D whip by when she presses the key to do an unmask or other effect.

Most people won't see any speedup with a faster machine. The iMac also has a very good quality IPS panel, which, despite the gloss haters out there once calibrated, is excellent for photo work.

The new OS technologies Apple will be coming out with in 10.6 will only enhance that speed which is already quite fast enough.

Only if you are doing professional work that involves really large files should you worry about even faster machines. And then, I would opt for spending more for a faster two cpu machine.

The reason for that is that it will last longer. As Adobe gets PS to work with x number of cores, something they're working on, an eight core machine will get even faster, not slower, making that investment a pretty darn good one. Five years from now, you will find the machine performing better than it does today.

Sorry to respond to myself...

Looking at the dell website, they have i7 boxes that can handle 12 gigs of ram for $899 and 24 gigs for $1099.

I thought the MP was supposed to be a workstation? Doesn't the whole argument that xeon 3500 is so much better lose a lot of steam when the ram maxes out at less than boxes about a third the price?

Mel, stop being the most tweakerish grumpy old fart imaginable.

You know what I meant, the core is based on the new Architecture.

You keep behaving the way you do, and you're not an easy person to like.

I think Apple just doesn't want to sell or support the 4GB DIMMs. 16GB should work fine. Non-ECC DDR3 should work, too, but don't take my word for that.

Also, ATI Crossfire should be 100% supported by the hardware... it'll just require Windows and the appropriate driver.

You keep making the same mistake that others who seem to want to prove that a workstation chass machine is no better than a cheaply made home machine on all fronts.

Get over the fact that a Xeon is not an i7.

That's like calling a four cylinder engine essentially the same as an eight cylinder engine.

Sure, they are conceptually the same, but the performance is not. If it were, both sports cars and workstations would use the cheaper parts, but they don't. Workstations from every vendor will cost about the same. When Xeon machines come out from Dell, Hp, Boxx, and others, we will see, again, that Apple's machines are no more expensive, and are likely even cheaper.

For people who insist on using a home-built computer, fine, have fun with all the problems you might end up with. I built enough of them over the years.

If Apple WERE to build an i7 mini tower, it would be much less expensive also, but they don't want to.

We can argue with them about that, and you know I've been a LONG term advocate for one, but that's their choice. We have to move on from that.

If some people can't afford, or don't want to spend the money, that's up to them.

But trying to find reasons why the Mac Pro is overpriced is not helpful, because the customers for these machines, for the most part, don't care. These are very popular in scientific research. In engineering, publishing, graphics, movie editing, audio work, and esp. in Europe, where Archicad is more popular than Autocad, in architecture.

These aren't markets that can generate millions of sales a year, but it's an important market for Apple nevertheless, and they aren't constrained by price that much.

People complaining here about it isn't going to make the sightest difference to Apple, because these people aren't their customers for these machines.

My personal example comes from my older life as an electronics engineer for my own company back when. We made professional speakers and electronics for the recording industry, discos, etc. It was very expensive. But there were always some people who were willing to pay that price for the equipment to have for themselves at home. This was just before the "high end" home audio market really developed. Our products WERE expensive, really expensive, but they delivered good value for those who needed them. But we always had some people who called us up and said that they would buy our stuff if we lowered prices, or made cheaper products.

Well, we weren't about to do that, because it wasn't our market. If people were crazy enough to buy our stuff for their living room, that was up to them.

Its the same thing with the Mac Pro. It's not a home machine, and its not a machine for marginal professionals who do this part time, or who are at the edge of profitability.

When we consider where prices are relative to where they used to be years ago, even the most expensive Mac Pro now is no higher in price, and gives you vastly more. I paid $6,000 for my 950 back in the early '90's, with 8 MB RAM, a 320 MB HDD, 1 MB video memory for the onboard 2D graphics. No CD player. I bought a 2x Toshibia and machined the computer case to get it to fit (the first CD installed in a Mac here in the States, and possibly, in the world! That was another $600. The Professional keyboard was another $189.

This was early 1992. I could go on to tell you that RAM to go to 64 MB (unheard of at the time) cost over $3,000, but you would know that.

This machine was cheap when compared to low priced workstations of the time.

But now the Mac Pro IS a workstation. It has an industrial built quality. Let's leave it at that, and go on from there.


There's a difference often though. I defend what Apple does if I think they are right, and I scold them when I think they are wrong. Overall, we can't argue that their strategy is wrong, because it's not.

There are some apologists out there too who defend everything, no matter what. That's wrong also.

But Apple does do some strange things, and make some odd decisions, we can agree on that.

But a lot of the "whiners" just complain about the same things over and again. That gets tiring to read. They have no intelligent solutions to what they aren't happy about. Claiming that Apple can cut large amounts off prices as solutions to their unhappiness about pricing isn't helpful, as they know nothing about manufacturing. Complaining that Apple doesn't make this or that isn't helpful either, as it changes nothing, and we've heard it all before ad nauseam.

I like to see a well thought out argument, even if I don't agree, and like getting into that, but much of it is drivel.


I'm willing to bet the Mac Pro will perform better. Of course with the two different OS's, some of the problems will come from that as well.

I'm also willing to bet that there will be some incompatibilities at some point with either software drivers, or hardware with the home built PC.

How long you expect to keep your machine will also determine the value of it. If you expect to get a new one every two years or so, it won't seem to be such a good value as the Mac Pro will last far longer. With MS there's no knowing how long a machine will be viable.

Right now, Apple's determining the longevity of their older machines is due to moving from the PPC to Intel, so it's to be expected that they are finally phasing out eight year old machines, and shortly, all PPC machines. I imagine that the first generation 32 bit Intel machines will not be able to run later 64 bit OS's either. But MS has a plan of obsolescence that helps hardware manufacturers keep up their sales. This is well known in the industry, and has been reported upon extensively in publications such as Computerworld, Infoworld, and others over the years. A new machine today may very well not run that newer OS upgrade two years from now. Not so with the Mac.

Apple's new coming OS advances won't be seen, for the most part in Windows for years, if at all. Open CL, which has been accepted as a standard, and which will not only speed up games, but all heavy duty applications won't be available in Windows, because MS is just about the only company not to sign on. They will continue to promote DirectX which is primarally geared towards games, and is said to have little functionallity in professional apps.

Grand Central, another Apple technology is being said to make it much easier to parallelize software for multiple cores, also exclusive to Apple. Much software won't even need to be modified to work with it, though tweaking software will result in larger gains.

We will see a major improvement in file structure with ZFS when it arrives for client machines. MS has been trying to get Cairo into an OS since the early '90's, and hasn't been able to figure it out in all that time.

We will also get rez independence well before MS does.

I could go on, but I hope you get the point.


How about a month or more?

According to tests done on sites such as Anandtech, a well respected site, the Nehalems are well ahead of all other Cpu's in most every category.

Another advantage is that this is the beginning of a new line from Intel. When the 32 nm versions come out, the "tick" in their schedule, you will be able to pop those new chips (possibly 8 cores! Much faster speeds) in place of the ones in there now. It might take a bit of doing, but the design of these new machines makes it look MUCH easier than the old machines where the processors were buried, and more than a bit of the machine had to be disassembled to get to them. These are right out in the open.

That's why I opted for the cheaper dual 2.66 model rather than the more expensive dual 2.93 one.

The standard DP to DVI adapter is $29.00.

The DP to dual link adapter is $99.

You should check prices before telling people. It's easy to find.

I don't see that happening. Besides, I'm surprised at you. You know that the Mac Pro is not a home machine. Compare it to comparable machines when they do come out.

I look at it the other way around.
I'd grab the more affordable 2.8Ghz system. Nehalem is a great architecture but it's the Tick of the new architecture meaning that Intel's "Tick Tock" strategy is to deliver a new architecture every two years followed by a process shrink. The former 2.8Ghz Xeons were the "tock" of the last architecture. You may want to take advantage of the pricing advantage and that will easily carry you for a few years by the time you upgrade your Mac Pro you'll be looking at Sandy Bridge which will bring 4Ghz and 8-cores on a single die. You can't lose either way it's going to take a year to two years for Apple to get their apps and 3rd parties multithreading their apps properly to take advantage of these cores.[/QUOTE]

The old machines are at their peak, pretty much.

The new machines are at their beginning, and that new shiney 8 core, higher speed 32 nm chip coming off the lines in 2010 will be able to be popped into this new machine that's just come out. The old machines are what they are now. A slight increase in speed won't be a good enough reason to spend a couple thousand on new chips for them, but it will be for the Nehalem machines.

With Apple's new OS technologies right around the corner, even 16 cores in a year from now might be more than usable.

That metric is only for price sensitive markets, which the workstation market is not really part of. This is a market where performance and build quality is paramount, and that where the Mac Pros excel.

Their machines DO last 4 to 5 years. Your PC won't, thats for sure, and when you go back to the trough in 2 to 2.5 years, you'll be thinking that it was a mistake to go back to PCs.

It's possible they will accept 16 GB. This isn't the first time that Apple hasn't tested larger memory sticks with lesser priced machines because they think people buying those machines won't spend the very high prices for them.

Everyone here should remember that even the first Powermac G5's were capable of taking 16 GB with 2 GB sticks even though Apple was advertising 8 GB RAM with 1 GB sticks as the max.

This goes way back to my 950 in the early '90's. Apple said that only 2 MB sticks would work, for a total of 32 MB RAM. I asked them about that, and was told they didn't test with the much more expensive 4 MB parts. I bought two, and they worked, so I replaced all, and had 64 MB (16 memory slots! Those were the days!).

Some web site will test for this shortly after they get their machines, and we will find out.

We should all wait for that before getting too antsy about it.

I'm sorry if you don't like me.

But say what you mean then. No one knows what you mean other than yourself. I wasn't the only one to point out your error. People point out mine as well. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don't.

The problem is that we have to go by what the branding is, or it gets confusing. I don't see why that should be a problem for you or any others. Is it that i7 is easier to type than Nehalem?

If you make that mistake on Anandtech or any of the other sites I'm on, you will be jeered at. At least I'm polite about it.

If we all use the same terms, there won't be any confusion.

Crossfire might be supportable. The second slot is 16 lanes as opposed to the four each the other two slots have. It's not double spaced though. Now if it were, THAT would have been a hint!!!

I just saw the crucial price for 4GB SODIMM 870 bucks!!

They don't even list DDR-3 8GB kits. I'm positive that Apple
has artificially limited the RAM options for the QC Mac Pro because
they're hoarding the RAM for the SMP systems which makes sense to
me.

I hope you're right because I can't in good faith recommend this machine to our creative and studio departments with that limitation. I'm sure it's an artificail limitation imposed by Apple. I would just like to see some real world confirmation from someone who has a quad core 2009 Mac Pro, who added 3x4GB or 4x4GB of memory.

Yeah but those are So-DIMMs (what my iMac would take, or a 17" MBP). The Mac Pros take full sized DIMMS. At the most they are costing $500-600 for a 12GB kit.

http://www.crucial.com/store/partspe...KIT51272BB1339

Well, we have a large research budget to buy whatever hardware we want, and wanted to buy 4 MPs for scientific work. But just because I can easily burn up some research grant money (paid by other people's taxes) on shiny hardware, doesn't just make these obscene jumps in markup "right". We'll probably still get the MPs, but I wish I didn't feel I was getting quite so shafted by Apple pumping *up* prices on a *cheaper* product. Why is it wrong to be upset by that, why should we just be silently stoic as a Corporation squeezes its users without justification?

Most of the Mac Pro's in my department, and almost all the switchers in my Institute only did so because, with educational discounts, they could get better prices on workstations than Dell could compete with (price was the key to the Apple resurgence, that and Matlab resupporting OS X, even though Windows is much faster still). Apple is still in a fragile position in scientific computing in the UK at least. We'll see what happens when Dell get the Nehalems, but if Apple is not competitive, I guarantee they will lose out on scientific sales.

Phil's assertion that a 2.66 quad core Nehalem is a substantial improvement over a pair of 2.8 quad core Harpertowns seems bogus. Yes the new chips are good and the new architecture has fewer bottlenecks, but there are half the physical cores, lower clock speed and, worst of all, Apple has crippled the RAM limit on the base machine.

In fact they seem to have no clue how to configure the RAM at all. Nehalem is a triple channel architecture so there should be 3, 6 or 9 DIMM slots. Instead the new Mac Pros have 4 or 8 slots.

Maybe next year they'll get their act together, but by then I'll have a Nehalem hackintosh and really won't care what Apple does.

Nehalem would have to be 200x faster than Penryn to make up for the missing 4-cores. I don't know how anyone could postulate that a quad core Nehalem is more efficient than than its predecessor to that degree. Perhaps in an encoding test or application that do not handle +4 cores well.

The single cpu Mac Pro makes no sense to me.

Enthusiasts may not need more than 8 gbs of RAM but aren't going to pay that price to play and pros often need more than 8 gbs of RAM (or don't want that limitation).

Who's this machine marketed for?

I don't want to move to the windows platform.

I don't mind paying extra, within reason, to get good performance out of my Mac. In fact I bought a MBP almost three years ago and not a MacBook, which is probably adequate for my needs.

But right now Apple only offer the Mac Pro for those looking for more than dual core machines. I don't know why because quad core machines really aren't cutting edge at this point. They are certainly easy to find with pc vendors.

My wife and kids share a pc that's 4 years old and is ready for replacement. Right now Apple have nothing to offer me that I want and I'm trying to reasonable. But I won't 'settle' for a dual core machine at this point as I think quad core machines will have better longevity at this point. My analogy is that buying dual core now was like buying single core 3 years ago. The wave is about to roll over and quad core is going to be mainstream in one year if it isn't already.

Right now the cheapest quad core Mac is $2500.

A few things:

First, high end kit always has a fat profit margin on it. Always. I don't know why people are acting as if fat margins were introduced with this update. This is partly to compensate for low sales volume, partly because the people serious about getting the latest and greatest have never begrudged the extra money.

Second, Apple is clearly making room for the iMac to move into the professional space, as I predicted (which makes it all the more remarkable that it actually happened).

Third, for its intended market it doesn't cost that much. Used professionally, i.e. to make money, it will pay for itself in a few weeks at the latest. Used institutionally, it will be bid for (not sold at MSRP) and frequently by institutions that qualify for educational discounts, and in many cases the purchase will be paid for by depreciation accounts set up 3 or 5 years ago to pay for them. In other words, most the Mac Pro's market have been buying machines at prices that would make most people here blanche, and they will react to this update by buying them if it's time for them to buy. They may go into debt that will be repaid within the month or they may draw from reserves built up for the purchase. Either way, no big deal. This isn't new: The PowerMac 9600 was made for the same market, as were the vastly more expensive workstations from SGI and Sun and HP.

As far as the video card options go, I imagine that the hold-up is with DisplayPort compatibility. As workstation GPUs accommodate DisplayPort, Apple will add them to the options list. This seems to me a lot more likely than Apple abandoning one of their core professional markets.

This, from hmurchison, made me do a double-take:


They deserve a couple of bad quarters, a shakeup and an ego check because they're the only company in their product category that isn't watching their sales go over Niagara Falls in a barrel? They deserve to fail because they're offering a gorgeous workstation with bleeding-edge chips at a price in line with prices in its category for the last decade? What?

If your answer is that they aren't passing consumer desktops off as pro machines, I seem to recall that being the final knife through the heart of once-great SGI.

You can wish that the landscape is something other than it is, but if you step over the cliff that you have convinced yourself shouldn't be there you will still fall to your death.

We'll likely know in a week or two, as soon as the sites that already have machines from Apple (yes, there are a few), or will get theirs rush shipped. Anandtech, Ars Technica and others, as well as Barefeats will let us know shortly.

The biggest problem I can see with the new Mac Pro is that Apple seems to forget what makes a computer a premium product. Besides the Xeon processor and the aluminum case (which hasn't been updated for 6 years), I don't see anything premium about the new Mac Pro. Where are the Quatro\\FireGL BTO options? How come there is only ONE PCIe 16X slot? How come the machine is limited to only 4 drive bays? Being a high-margin and low-volume product, it's perfectly feasible for Apple to offer many different options tailored made for each customer. The limited options offered on the new Mac Pro are frustrating customers who are willing to pay handsome amounts for a computer, but need a tailor made solution. Apple need to wake up and realize that the Mac Pro is not a cheap mid-tower and they need premium services and options to go with it!

Amorph

I don't have a problem with the SMP Mac Pro going up a bit. I'm just flummoxed by the $2500 Quad system because it just seems to be excessively priced.

I love Apple's success and I have a distaste for the pleas for lower pricing because of the economy but I just have to wonder if the pricing on the Mac Pro is Apple blinking a bit out of fear.

I appears that it's not innovation that will guide Apple through the tough times here but margins that exceed what many of us feel are acceptable without rebuffing.

I certainly don't want Apple to have some down qtrs overall as I want to get my first iPhone but much like kidnapping, if we all suck it up and pay the ransom it just means more abductions LOL

What I keep telling people here is that you have to wait for comparable machines from other manufacturers before complaining about these prices.

Only after Dell, Hp, Boxx, and others come out with theirs can we determine if these prices are too high. If they are all about the same, then clearly, they are not too high.

If the others are substantially lower, then we can see that they are.

If price is such an issue, why don't you just buy the same consumer boxes some others here are touting to be just as good at half the price?

You mean 200% don't you?

Enthusiasts would pay that price. They were paying over $3,000 for the game machines from Alien and Voodoo.

And we don't yet know if 8 GB is a real limitation or not.

Besides, very few pro's DO need more than 8 Gb RAM. It's a power race. "I have more RAM than you do".

I hope not, but you brought it up.


Stop making the same mistake as others here. This is NOT a home machine. This is an industrial workstation.

Sadly, Apple refuses to make a home tower. But this is not one. It's not clear if it's too expensive either. We have to wait for Xeon machines from others to know.


I agree. I'm finally giving up my dual 2 GHz G5 Powermac.

With Apple's new OS tech coming out, the more cores the better. In a few years, people will be very happy they plunked down the extra cash. While those who bought single cpu machines are replacing theirs, the dual crowd will just be coming into the full power crest their machines are designed to deliver. In the long run it will have been cheaper, even though the upfront cost is higher.

I agree completely!

And what we keep responding is that the PCs with i7 ARE comparable machines. In the case of the 8 core, yes we'll have to wait and compare.


I just might. On tuesday morning I had $2799 burning a hole in my pocket, and it's really looking like Apple may lose that sale.

I'm aware that the Mac Pro is not a home machine. I'm not even considering getting one. I don't have any idea if it is or isn't fairly priced.

But right now it's the ONLY quad core machine that Apple offer.

What quad core Mac would you recommend to a friend?

First of all, read Amorph's post. It explains some of what you're talking about.

Secondly, you are wrong about the slots. If you went to Apple's site and looked at the specs, you would have seen that there are TWO 16 channel slots. The double width slot for the normal placing of the graphics card, and the one next to it as well.

Four drive bays are plenty. Just how big do you want this machine to be? How much more expensive do you want it to be?

Those that need significantly more than the 8 Terabytes you can now put inside (yes, we see Apple's typical conservatism here, stating 4 Terabytes) get external drive bays, often using the fiber card Apple offers.

The new Mac pro has 2 16x PCI Express and 2 4x slots. One 16x is populated with a graphics card. The 3 remaining are 16/4/4.

Don't give into the marketing, look at facts. Xeon and Core i7 are brand names. Bloomfield is the base chip. It is available in Core i7 and Xeon 3500 branding. The only difference is ECC memory support. The xeon branding doesn't magically turn from an I4 into a V8. It remains the same chip, pricing and all. It will perform the same no matter what branding is used. Then there is Gainestown (Xeon 5500). Gainestown is nothing more than bloomfield with a second quick path link for multiprocessing.

No, they are not. Apple doesn't make an i7 machine for consumers, or for anyone. When the single cpu Xeon workstations come out from others, you can then compare the costs.

Apple doesn't make the machine you, and many others would like to see, including me. That's too bad, and I'm not saying that in a sarcastic way.

But you have to stop comparing machines built for commercial use to machines built for home use. Even if the performance is comparable, it's still not the same machine. The organizations that buy expensive workstations and servers do NOT buy the machines you and a few others here are pushing. The failure rates are too high, among other things.


Well then, pull the trigger and buy it. It's not like that's a threat to us here. We'll miss you, but you can have fun in the PC forums.

D'Oh!!