Rumor: Apple's new Mac Pro, Mac mini with Thunderbolt coming by August

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  • Reply 61 of 131
    sevenfeetsevenfeet Posts: 472member
    Here's my shot at Mac Mini predictions (I own a 2009 Mac Mini). I'm extrapolating from the 13" MacBook Pro, which is it's closest design cousin.



    Certainty:

    Sandy Bridge w/core i5 processors @ 2 cores.

    Thunderbolt (1 port)

    USB 2.0 (4 ports)

    Firewire 800 (1 port)

    Mini Displayport (EDIT: this is in the Thunderbolt port...sorry for being redundant)

    Intel HD 3000 graphics (sorry, nothing better than this)

    SDXC slot



    Maybe:

    4 gigs standard (up to 8 gigs offered, OWC will find that 16 gigs works too)

    HDMI (fairly likely, people still use these machines as media centers, even with Front Row going away)

    Core i7 @ 2 cores (like the 13" Macbook Pro)

    Core i7 @ 4 cores (maybe a build to order...would make it a modern day SE/30)

    No optical drive at all (A non-optical server version has been shipping of the Mini for 2 years)

    SSD BTO option (especially if the optical drive goes)



    Not gonna happen:

    USB 3.0 (try next year with Ivy Bridge)

    Blu-Ray (never)
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  • Reply 62 of 131
    joseph ljoseph l Posts: 197member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Sevenfeet View Post




    .

    Thunderbolt (1 port)

    USB 2.0 (4-5 ports)

    Firewire 800 (1 port)

    Mini Displayport



    SDXC slot





    HDMI (fairly likely, people still use these machines as media centers, even with Front Row going away)







    USB 3.0 (try next year with Ivy Bridge)

    Blu-Ray (never)







    That is so complicated and messy. It is not Steve's style to cling like a dying man to legacy crap - not when the future is already here.



    Every one of those legacy ports can be replaced with Thunderbolt, which is the new open standard. I hope that the Mini has one, and only one gaping "port", that being Thunderbolt. Your design would have it riddled with holes and ports and legacy worn out stupidity.



    That is WAY too complicated. One port. No decisions. No confusion. Everything and anything plugs right in, no muss, no fuss, no thinking.



    Think of it this way: The old smartphones had like 50 different buttons on them, but all of them were unnecessary, and all of them were way confusing. Steve revolutionized everything, because his iPhone had ONLY ONE BUTTON. Suddenly, the rest of us could actually understand how to use the damn things!





    Same thing with the mini. It is a nightmare for a typical consumer to set up a computer. But with only one port, it suddenly becomes so simple that the rest of us can do it easily! One port to rule them all!!
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  • Reply 63 of 131
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Joseph L View Post


    Every one of those legacy ports can be replaced with Thunderbolt, which is the new open standard. I hope that the Mini has one, and only one gaping "port", that being Thunderbolt. Your design would have it riddled with holes and ports and legacy worn out stupidity.



    Keep dreaming. Don't get on this guy's case, either. Your vision is the same as mine. I just have the sense to know it won't happen for YEARS.
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  • Reply 64 of 131
    sevenfeetsevenfeet Posts: 472member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Joseph L View Post


    That is so complicated and messy. It is not Steve's style to cling like a dying man to legacy crap - not when the future is already here.



    Every one of those legacy ports can be replaced with Thunderbolt, which is the new open standard. I hope that the Mini has one, and only one gaping "port", that being Thunderbolt. Your design would have it riddled with holes and ports and legacy worn out stupidity.



    That is WAY too complicated. One port. No decisions. No confusion. Everything and anything plugs right in, no muss, no fuss, no thinking.



    Think of it this way: The old smartphones had like 50 different buttons on them, but all of them were unnecessary, and all of them were way confusing. Steve revolutionized everything, because his iPhone had ONLY ONE BUTTON. Suddenly, the rest of us could actually understand how to use the damn things!





    Same thing with the mini. It is a nightmare for a typical consumer to set up a computer. But with only one port, it suddenly becomes so simple that the rest of us can do it easily! One port to rule them all!!



    I might agree, except that USB is too ubiquitous right now to drop (Apple still sells wired USB keyboards and third party printers for example). USB is not going anywhere for years. As far as using the Thunderbolt port to plugin break-out boxes for other legacy ports (like USB/Firewire), do any of these devices actually exist yet? I'm sure that they will soon, but they probably won't be priced cheaply when they first hit the market. I think we'd be lucky to see such a device for $100 right now. And as for Firewire, too many of us in the Mac community still depend on it every day. I have 5 external firewire drives + 1 Drobo @FW800 rocking my Mini right now. I cannot abandon Firewire for a while and I'm sure I'm not alone.
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  • Reply 65 of 131
    joseph ljoseph l Posts: 197member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Sevenfeet View Post


    And as for Firewire, too many of us in the Mac community still depend on it every day. I have 5 external firewire drives + 1 Drobo @FW800 rocking my Mini right now. I cannot abandon Firewire for a while and I'm sure I'm not alone.





    Get an adapter. Put it next to your external floppy disk drive. Problem solved.
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  • Reply 66 of 131
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Joseph L View Post


    Get an adapter. Put it next to your external floppy disk drive. Problem solved.



    No, seriously. You're going to illegitimize the case for Thunderbolt if you keep acting like this. The Thunderbolt transition will be slow because all other ports are still needed. Please grasp this soon.
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  • Reply 67 of 131
    minderbinderminderbinder Posts: 1,703member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Joseph L View Post


    I hope that they drop the legacy HDMI port now that they have Thunderbolt. In fact, they could drop all the ports except Thunderbolt, because that is now all that is needed. The rest are like floppy Disks.



    Drop all the other ports NOW? I doubt it would even make sense in a few years, there are just too many peripherals for firewire and USB out there. And I don't want to have to buy a TB to USB hub just for things like mice and keyboards. Or were you joking? Besides the fact that it will take a while for TB peripherals to even be available, the port is way too expensive for simple gear.



    Adapters are so much more clunky. And do you really think usb/TB adapters are going to be dirt cheap?



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    It's 64-bit now. Wouldn't that constitute it being Cocoa and therefore having been rewritten?



    The developer beta is 64 bit, but that's not available to the public yet, and there's some debate about whether it's all cocoa or some sort of hacked together hybrid code. It is supposed to be better performance, I'd like to know if the audio and video encoding code has been rewritten to use multiple cores - 64 bit is great but multicore will give an even bigger boost to encoding.





    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    Because not a single Mac that has ever been released can work with a version of the OS that was created before said Mac's release.



    Flat out wrong, there are plenty of examples to the contrary. We simply don't know, sometimes machines can be switched over to earlier OS, sometimes not, sometimes it's possible with some degree of hacks (copying over system files, things like that). It mostly depends on how radical the hardware update is, if it's just a speed bump the older OS generally works fine. I'd bet you can put 10.5 on current MPs, they're essentially the same hardware as the 2009 models which came out with the earlier OS.





    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Joseph L View Post


    Get an adapter.



    Are these adapters shipping? What do they cost?
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  • Reply 68 of 131
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    Because not a single Mac that has ever been released can work with a version of the OS that was created before said Mac's release.





    That sounds Bad.

    I thought in the past was a similar situation where G5s were updateted near an OS Transition and they also worken with the "old" OS.





    The most PRO Users won't work with a complete new OS until it's Version .3 or something in this place.



    So it would be bad if Apple ships new Mac Pros with a .0 Version of a new OS.







    I think i will take the safe tour:

    i will order a 6-core MacPro this Week.



    A need Rosetta and 10.6 the next 2-3 years - and it would be bad if i'l buy a new Mac for 3-4.000 ? and it won't boot in SnowLeopard.
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  • Reply 69 of 131
    minderbinderminderbinder Posts: 1,703member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by graubereich View Post


    I thought in the past was a similar situation where G5s were updateted near an OS Transition and they also worken with the "old" OS.



    There was, and plenty of similar cases. Sometimes new hardware can use older OS, sometimes not. It really just depends on how radical the change is to the new hardware so in this case there's no way to know how it will be for the next MP update.
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  • Reply 70 of 131
    sevenfeetsevenfeet Posts: 472member
    In the history of Apple products, there have been a few times they've broken with conventional wisdom and dropped a popular connectivity option. In 1984, the original Mac came with RS-422 ports featuring a DIN-8 configuration versus the more common RS-232 serial interface and it didn't come at all with the very popular parallel port interface. That limited Apple's ability to have Macs connect to anything for two years until the peripheral market caught up (and SCSI was added). You could get RS-232->RS-422 adapters since RS-422 was backwards compatible with the older standard and there wasn't any logic to it...just wiring design.



    The original iMac in 1998 ditched RS-422, ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) ports and SCSI for USB 1.1. That was a real stretch for the market and a big gamble for Apple whom at the time was fighting its way out of a death spiral. But USB had been on the market for Windows for over a year previous and HP had a small line of USB printers at the ready. And the iMac proved to be such a big hit that peripheral makers started making candy colored hubs and devices for it. Finally, Windows support got better and that world slowly adopted too.



    But today is not 1998. USB is about as ubitquitous as they come for standards. Thunderbolt is not making that go away now, if ever. Firewire will probably go away at some point but not until there are Thunderbolt->Firewire solutions that actually work at a decent price point. Too many of us still have Firewire external devices at home and they are still used in the professional markets, especially the video and music industries.



    Steve Jobs is a visionary but he's also practical. I probably wouldn't care that much if my next Mac Mini didn't have an optical drive since I want to get an external Blu-Ray burner anyway. Boot media for Macs will now likely come on flash drives as already happen for Macbook Airs. But I depend too much on the ports on the back of the machine. Shrinking everything down to Thunderbolt is an interesting concept but not practical in the real world.
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  • Reply 71 of 131
    unicronunicron Posts: 154member
    How does this jibe with Wikipedia saying Sandy Bridge Xeons will be released Q4 2011~Q1 2012?
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  • Reply 72 of 131
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Unicron View Post


    How does this jibe with Wikipedia saying Sandy Bridge Xeons will be released Q4 2011~Q1 2012?



    The rumor's wrong, that's right. Either that or Apple is getting chips three months early.
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  • Reply 73 of 131
    brutus009brutus009 Posts: 356member
    I had been desperately awaiting the arrival of a refreshed mini for my HTPC setup, but I've found that my 2009 mini plays DVDs and Netflix at 1080p just fine. That's all I really use it for.



    The only feature that will entice me to buy is Blu-Ray, and I don't see that happening.

    :: shrugs ::
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  • Reply 74 of 131
    welshdogwelshdog Posts: 1,929member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by graubereich View Post


    ...most PRO Users won't work with a complete new OS until it's Version .3 or something...



    True that.
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  • Reply 75 of 131
    solipsismsolipsism Posts: 25,726member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    The rumor's wrong, that's right. Either that or Apple is getting chips three months early.



    There is precedence for both scenarios.
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  • Reply 76 of 131
    asciiascii Posts: 5,936member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Sevenfeet View Post


    But today is not 1998. USB is about as ubitquitous as they come for standards. Thunderbolt is not making that go away now, if ever. Firewire will probably go away at some point but not until there are Thunderbolt->Firewire solutions that actually work at a decent price point. Too many of us still have Firewire external devices at home and they are still used in the professional markets, especially the video and music industries.



    Thunderbolt works at a lower level than USB and Firewire though, it's just an extension of the PCI bus on to an external port. If the Thunderbolt connector was only a USB one, you could run USB3 devices with mere software. And in fact the Thunderbolt connector was originally USB, but the USB Committee objected, so Apple changed to Mini-DP.



    Even though a simple adapter with no logic is all that's required, this was nevertheless a fatal move imho, and in fact Sony had the good sense to ignore the Committee and go with a USB connector anyway on their Thunderbolt laptops.



    There was a rumor a while back that Apple was going to release some kind of hub that connected to the Thunderbolt port and provided all the other kinds: USB3, Firewire, iPod.
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  • Reply 77 of 131
    brutus009brutus009 Posts: 356member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Joseph L View Post


    Get an adapter.



    Nobody wants adapters anywhere, ever, for anything.



    Unsightly

    Awkward

    Added Expense

    Unsightly

    Loss of Fidelity

    Unsightly

    Footprint

    UNSIGHTLY UGLY CRAP HANGING OUT THE BACK
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  • Reply 78 of 131
    philboogiephilboogie Posts: 7,675member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by simonGardener View Post


    heres hoping theres a BTO Mac Pro fast enough to make iTunes run smootly with a large music collection



    Yes I know I'm delusional but we can live in hope - it'll probably happen b4 apple get around to rewritting it from the ground up



    I'm using a Mac Pro, latest model, and it's a screamer. Except for iTunes, with 300GB it is pretty slow. It sometimes needs to think about a change. Looks like it's hung, and all of a sudden it marches on. Music simply plays (ofcourse) but video can sometimes hang.



    Yep, a new iTunes that would make use of all processors in a Mac Pro would be great. Something I expected a few years ago actually. Hopefully they'll get around to it when the introduce a new iPod lineup later this year. They took their time with FCP as well, so maybe after Lion is out the door they take care of some other legacy software.
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  • Reply 79 of 131
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by brutus009 View Post


    Nobody wants adapters anywhere, ever, for anything.



    Guess I'll stop using this wired Internet to Wi-Fi adapter, then.



    OH WAIT THAT'S MY AIRPORT EXTREME.



    Quote:

    Awkward



    If you have Parkinson's or other nervous system disorders that make it hard to plug things in.



    Quote:

    Added Expense



    This is your ONLY legitimate point.



    Quote:

    Loss of Fidelity







    Quote:

    Footprint



    Zero. How is this even in a list?



    Quote:

    UNSIGHTLY UGLY CRAP HANGING OUT THE BACK



    Just like your Thunderbolt cables. Your point?
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  • Reply 80 of 131
    brutus009brutus009 Posts: 356member
    Quote:

    Awkward
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    If you have Parkinson's or other nervous system disorders that make it hard to plug things in.





    Ever try plugging an HDMI cable into your iPad? Ever move your mini around in a tight entertainment center nook? The user must constantly consider the presence of an adapter to avoid getting it caught on something and breaking the connection. I have yet to see a perfectly designed minimalistic adapter that avoids this.



    Quote:

    Added expense
    Quote:

    This is your ONLY legitimate point.





    Because we're already paying for something that's just supposed to work.



    Quote:

    Loss of fidelity
    Quote:







    Adding another medium, link, or connection to any signal invariably introduces not only a loss of fidelity but an added risk of signal failure. Given the lack of analog signals present in today's technology, you'll really only see the latter. So I might have written "Risk of signal failure" but it's the same thing. It's just one more link that can break, one more thing to depend on, one more risk.



    Quote:

    Footprint
    Quote:

    Zero. How is this even in a list?





    Where do you keep your sleek, minimal mini? Is it tucked away neatly in an entertainment center for your HTPC? Every cable has a bend radius; adding a dongle might force your mini to sit further from the wall. Is it sitting neatly on the far corner of your desk? Using a dongle adds clutter to an othewise immaculate system.



    Quote:

    Unsightly
    Quote:

    Just like your Thunderbolt cables. Your point?





    A cable is a cable. They're all round and straight with varying thickness and a proprietary connector. After you plug them in, they can be neatly bundled and routed... unless you've got a big fat adapter in the way.
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