While I realize this is a Mac Pro thread the issue with this embarrassing update goes beyond the mac Pro user segment. What is truly bothersome is Apples thumbing its nose at desktop users of any sort. As far as I know there are no Mini or iMac updates to speak of either. It is like they have totally given up on the desktop, no matter what your performance needs are.
Their excuse may be poor sales as the only machine close to holding even was the iMac, with the rest of the product line in decline. Apparently nobody at Apple asks why the lineup is having such a terrible time sales wise. Nothing done today will improve Apples desktop sales position, but rather will make it far more pathetic in the coming quarter.
I have to wonder how the poor engineers at Apple are feeling right now. I'm convinced they want to produce bleeding edge desktop machines but apparently have had the rug pulled out from under them. The fact that they couldn't manage a GPU update is so disgusting as to leave me with flames coming out of my ears. Mind you I'm not likely to be a Mac Pro customer but I'd like to be a desktop customer but this has a a big FU written all over it.
The only good news I can take from this debacle is that the Mac Pro line is not dead and hope this is just to clear stock for the actual new Mac Pro update in a few months.
I don't think Apple has stock to clear any more. They apparently turn over their inventory in 5 days. Even with something as low volume as the Pro, they won't build enough to have unsold stock. Not after 2 years.
If a worthwhile update was coming, now was the time to do it. The chips are available. The new Xeon CPUs aren't much faster in raw performance but there's no excuse for not including the latest desktop GPUs.
At least the entry 12-core is not much more than the entry 8-core used to be.
I'm surprised at the lack of an iMac update, it's long overdue.
The prior raid card was a piece of trash, and they didn't offer decent support on it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JBrickley
Good grief! The MacPro is still, two years later, faster than most PC's. In order to get any better you have to spend a heck of a lot of money on PC Workstation class hardware. Only a couple of Ivy Bridge Xeons are even out yet. Most people who use Mac Pro's can't even push them hard enough to max out their capabilities. Quit the attitude!
I have a Mac Pro (last produced model), it cost me $8k and I didn't even max it out on options. They are not selling a lot of these machines. Instead of fretting over this machine, I am building a rackmount cloud server instead. Future computers will be laptops and anything that needs real power will be on the cloud server. I just remote connect to the private cloud and kick off my rendering jobs there. It's faster that way anyway
Where are you getting your information? The hardware is the same. OSX is faster in some things, slower in others, and this is a workstation. If you're capable of building servers, you already knew all of that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
Not trying is never good form the business point of view. It sends the wrong message to your customers.
As to this "update" i'm a bit in shock, Apple had got tot realize that this sends the wrong message to its customers pro and not so pro. The lack of a real GPU update though is totally shocking. A new chip soldered to the motherboard would have ben better than this.
I have to believe something is up at Apple and this is some sort of stop gap measure.
A stop gap measure would have made more sense last year. Intel's price adjustments came about last year. The W3565 dropped to around $300. The w3680 dropped to roughly $600 from 1000-1100. Prices from Apple stayed the same. I can't imagine that they're introducing a couple different cpu models if they are planning on a Sandy Bridge E release in the coming months. Apple doesn't do short refresh cycles like that. Further they could use the same board design for Sandy + Ivy. I wouldn't personally invest in updates on a line that get so little attention given that it doesn't say much for future support.
After Apple's huge comeback (I remember the dark days), I never thought I'd ever again need to think about switching platforms. Sadly, here we are. Is the Mac dead? That the real question. Apple is stronger than ever, but is the Mac dead?
Facebook user on mac pro group claims tim cook replied with pretty much 'later next year"
Translation, maybe they are going to wait for ivy server chip? who knows.
At the very least they need to bring the 2010 rehash into a price that's actually reasonable. Charging what the parts were worth, in 2010, is unacceptable. Not a single peice of hardware in the "new" mac pro is current or relevant by todays standards.
Also, those saying you can't build a tower off the sandy bridge Es?
how is releasing an old model with USB 2.0 better then releasing a beast with 2.0. They BOTh still have USB 2.0. At least one of them is current generation hardware.
I don't think Apple has stock to clear any more. They apparently turn over their inventory in 5 days. Even with something as low volume as the Pro, they won't build enough to have unsold stock. Not after 2 years.
If a worthwhile update was coming, now was the time to do it. The chips are available. The new Xeon CPUs aren't much faster in raw performance but there's no excuse for not including the latest desktop GPUs.
At least the entry 12-core is not much more than the entry 8-core used to be.
I'm surprised at the lack of an iMac update, it's long overdue.
Marvin the whole thing stinks! I mean this honestly; it is the hostility towards the desktop user that i'm feeling here and an unwillingness to innovate with respect to desktop machines. I mean really if your sales are in decline and people regularly point out why the desktop lineup stinks you would think Apple would spend a dollar or two too freshen things up.
I'd be the first to admit that there may be issues with Intel and their chip sets. Sandy Bridge E has a terrible history of delays, bugs and setbacks. So maybe SB-E wasn't in the cards. Even so that doesn't mean we should have to put up with a 2 year old video card.
As to the iMac well that does need a major overhaul and this would have been the ideal time to do so. Apparently Apple has a certain disdain for the desktop user and has decided to make them wait a few more months. Effectively nothing was touched with respect to the desktop lineup.
Now we can speculate that maybe, just maybe, that they will release new hardware with Mountain Lion. That is supposedly a month off. As to the Mac Pro, I think users here are screwed because you won't see an update for some time, possibly a year. The only real hope Pro users now have is that Apple has a something in the wings to debut sometime this year that will bring modern technology to the Pro user. In any event Apple has killed sales for the entire desktop lineup as far as i'm concerned. There is no way I'd recommend any desktop from Apple at the moment.
I don't think they've given up on the Pro. They need Pro users. They're just not announcing a major refresh of the Pro on the same day as all the updates to these more mobile-oriented unveilings. There will be a dedicated event to announce the major Pro updates. Probably along side with the other desktops.
Maybe you should just drop a couple of extra video cards in your Mac Pro as Photoshop can offload to the multiple GPU's. That is parallel processing using super fast numerics built into video cards. Welcome to the future. You could even drop in two old 5770 graphics cards in addition to what you have now and cut your processing time tremendously. Even if Apple did upgrade to Ivy Bridge Xeon's and SATA III 6g you wouldn't notice much difference as it's all about the video cards with Photoshop. Do yourself a favor and get a fast SSD from OWC (don't buy the 6G model as the Mac Pro can only do 3G. Put your apps and OS on the SSD, that will speed things up. Partition the SSD and leave enough working space for your current project files and loading those multiple GB files will go many times faster.
The reason you hear "render, render, render" all the time is because that's what most Mac Pro's are used for. If Adobe would develop a Photoshop render farm command line tool that ran in Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD it would be possible to just drop all those files into a folder where the render farm servers grab it and process it, splitting the work across hundreds of CPUs and GPUs. So instead of sitting at your desk staring at a Mac Pro crunching multiple steps it goes and gets processed in a data center and gives you the results. This is the way real work is done, it's automated. It's pretty expensive to pay a talented artist to stare at a screen and blaming Apple for it is lame. Unlike Adobe, Apple implemented the ability to compile large projects using surrounding networked Mac's. So big projects like Mathematica which literally takes all day to compile can do so hundreds of times faster.
Seriously, you are not pushing your Mac Pro hard if the fans don't roar, your disk starts thrashing and it looks like it's going to melt down. Photoshop does not push a Mac Pro to it's limits because Photoshop has yet to push enough threads/processes/polygons at it. Sure it will run Photoshop faster, but if Adobe would get off their lazy butts and write some real code, it would go so much faster still!
If AI were capable of being embarrassed, it should be embarrassed by this know-nothing article.
What Apple has actually done is:
- Kept the same Nehalem and Westmere processors.
- Pruned the standard and BTO options, making the previously premium 3.2 GHz quad the base model.
- Upped the base RAM from 3GB to 6GB (useless either way).
- Kept the rest of the specs the same, as far as one can tell so far.
- Lowered the prices.
As a pricing illustration, I bought a quad 3.2/1TB/3GB Mac Pro two months ago for $2928. Today (with 6GB) that costs $2499. Oh, and before 27 geniuses on AI post about how stupid I must be feeling—wrong. I bought a new Mac Pro workstation for a new employee exactly when we needed it.
Bottom line is it's a slight speed bump and moderate price reduction, but tells us nothing about the future of the Mac Pro line.
I'm open to other ideas here!!! What this is telling me though is that Apple couldn't take the time to put any desktop machine on equal footing at WWDC.
This is NOT Xeon E5.... E5645 is still the old Nehalem architecture!
E5's are like this: E5-4650
All that happened here was a minor speed bump....
So disappointed!
You're right, this is an old chip. According to Intel's Website this chip was launched in Q1 of 2010. People seem to still like and buy this chip, but it's by no means cutting edge. I'm also surprised that they didn't update the graphics card. Particularly since Mountain Lion offers out-of-the-box support for cutting edge graphics cards.
Seriously, you are not pushing your Mac Pro hard if the fans don't roar, your disk starts thrashing and it looks like it's going to melt down. Photoshop does not push a Mac Pro to it's limits because Photoshop has yet to push enough threads/processes/polygons at it. Sure it will run Photoshop faster, but if Adobe would get off their lazy butts and write some real code, it would go so much faster still!
The point is that doing equivalent work on an iMac you get beach balls and crashes. As long as it is measurably faster and less problematic to work on a Mac Pro than a iMac, I'll opt for Mac Pro.
I love the 'real work' jab. I thought I was elitist but you have even me beat in that department. We make money in the graphics business because we don't hire specialized artists, programmers and video editors. We do everything ourselves and and do it well enough to get steady repeat business. So although your claim that most work performed on a Mac Pro is rendering, it does not apply to me, even if it were true, which I highly doubt. The most important thing for me is multitasking. We have iMacs here as well but they can't handle the load and you aren't going to put any extra video cards or SSDs in those machines. My comments weren't intended to complain that our Mac Pros aren't fast enough, it was that we want to buy more but not two year old components even if they could be souped up by third party add ons. I, like everyone else but you wanted the latest new hardware because we plan to use them for 5 years or more.
If AI were capable of being embarrassed, it should be embarrassed by this know-nothing article.
What Apple has actually done is:
- Kept the same Nehalem and Westmere processors.
- Pruned the standard and BTO options, making the previously premium 3.2 GHz quad the base model.
- Upped the base RAM from 3GB to 6GB (useless either way).
- Kept the rest of the specs the same, as far as one can tell so far.
- Lowered the prices.
As a pricing illustration, I bought a quad 3.2/1TB/3GB Mac Pro two months ago for $2928. Today (with 6GB) that costs $2499. Oh, and before 27 geniuses on AI post about how stupid I must be feeling—wrong. I bought a new Mac Pro workstation for a new employee exactly when we needed it.
Bottom line is it's a slight speed bump and moderate price reduction, but tells us nothing about the future of the Mac Pro line.
I have to agree it tells us little about the Mac Pros future. On the other hand this tells us volumes about how Apple feels about the desktop user. I mean really a three year old GPU card. It isn't just the Mac Pro though as the whole desktop line up was ignored.
Comments
Well, I think it's obvious Apple doesn't care about the Mac Pro anymore. These updates don't bring Thunderbolt or USB 3 and the case is 10 years old.
Everyone, check intel website:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/server-chipsets/server-chipset-c600.html
Now all the chipsets which support xeon E5 doesn't support USB 3.0 and TB, even not support pcie 3.0
The cxx chipset although support pcie 3.0, but it is for entry level workstations.
Apple MAY want to make BIG UPDATE when REAL CHIPSET which support tb, usb 3, and pcie3.0.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bdkennedy
…and the case is 10 years old.
And your argument falls apart there.
While I realize this is a Mac Pro thread the issue with this embarrassing update goes beyond the mac Pro user segment. What is truly bothersome is Apples thumbing its nose at desktop users of any sort. As far as I know there are no Mini or iMac updates to speak of either. It is like they have totally given up on the desktop, no matter what your performance needs are.
Their excuse may be poor sales as the only machine close to holding even was the iMac, with the rest of the product line in decline. Apparently nobody at Apple asks why the lineup is having such a terrible time sales wise. Nothing done today will improve Apples desktop sales position, but rather will make it far more pathetic in the coming quarter.
I have to wonder how the poor engineers at Apple are feeling right now. I'm convinced they want to produce bleeding edge desktop machines but apparently have had the rug pulled out from under them. The fact that they couldn't manage a GPU update is so disgusting as to leave me with flames coming out of my ears. Mind you I'm not likely to be a Mac Pro customer but I'd like to be a desktop customer but this has a a big FU written all over it.
I don't think Apple has stock to clear any more. They apparently turn over their inventory in 5 days. Even with something as low volume as the Pro, they won't build enough to have unsold stock. Not after 2 years.
If a worthwhile update was coming, now was the time to do it. The chips are available. The new Xeon CPUs aren't much faster in raw performance but there's no excuse for not including the latest desktop GPUs.
At least the entry 12-core is not much more than the entry 8-core used to be.
I'm surprised at the lack of an iMac update, it's long overdue.
Quote:
Originally Posted by huntson
Notice the lack of raid cards
The prior raid card was a piece of trash, and they didn't offer decent support on it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JBrickley
Good grief! The MacPro is still, two years later, faster than most PC's. In order to get any better you have to spend a heck of a lot of money on PC Workstation class hardware. Only a couple of Ivy Bridge Xeons are even out yet. Most people who use Mac Pro's can't even push them hard enough to max out their capabilities. Quit the attitude!
I have a Mac Pro (last produced model), it cost me $8k and I didn't even max it out on options. They are not selling a lot of these machines. Instead of fretting over this machine, I am building a rackmount cloud server instead. Future computers will be laptops and anything that needs real power will be on the cloud server. I just remote connect to the private cloud and kick off my rendering jobs there. It's faster that way anyway
Where are you getting your information? The hardware is the same. OSX is faster in some things, slower in others, and this is a workstation. If you're capable of building servers, you already knew all of that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
Not trying is never good form the business point of view. It sends the wrong message to your customers.
As to this "update" i'm a bit in shock, Apple had got tot realize that this sends the wrong message to its customers pro and not so pro. The lack of a real GPU update though is totally shocking. A new chip soldered to the motherboard would have ben better than this.
I have to believe something is up at Apple and this is some sort of stop gap measure.
A stop gap measure would have made more sense last year. Intel's price adjustments came about last year. The W3565 dropped to around $300. The w3680 dropped to roughly $600 from 1000-1100. Prices from Apple stayed the same. I can't imagine that they're introducing a couple different cpu models if they are planning on a Sandy Bridge E release in the coming months. Apple doesn't do short refresh cycles like that. Further they could use the same board design for Sandy + Ivy. I wouldn't personally invest in updates on a line that get so little attention given that it doesn't say much for future support.
After Apple's huge comeback (I remember the dark days), I never thought I'd ever again need to think about switching platforms. Sadly, here we are. Is the Mac dead? That the real question. Apple is stronger than ever, but is the Mac dead?
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
It is like they have totally given up on the desktop, no matter what your performance needs are.
I don' t think it's like that at all.
Wait, so this 2012 MacPro has the same video card (5770) I put into my 2006 MacPro 2.0GHz (1,1) back in 2009, which I paid $299 for at Fry's?
Am I missing something? Is there a 'Super Turbo Extreme' after the '5770' that I'm not seeing?
https://www.facebook.com/MacProsPlease/posts/454670807879356?comment_id=5766996&offset=0&total_comments=183
Facebook user on mac pro group claims tim cook replied with pretty much 'later next year"
Translation, maybe they are going to wait for ivy server chip? who knows.
At the very least they need to bring the 2010 rehash into a price that's actually reasonable. Charging what the parts were worth, in 2010, is unacceptable. Not a single peice of hardware in the "new" mac pro is current or relevant by todays standards.
Also, those saying you can't build a tower off the sandy bridge Es?
that doesn't stop it from being a beast
http://www.promax.com/s-154-promax-one-tech-specs.aspx
how is releasing an old model with USB 2.0 better then releasing a beast with 2.0. They BOTh still have USB 2.0. At least one of them is current generation hardware.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
I don't think Apple has stock to clear any more. They apparently turn over their inventory in 5 days. Even with something as low volume as the Pro, they won't build enough to have unsold stock. Not after 2 years.
If a worthwhile update was coming, now was the time to do it. The chips are available. The new Xeon CPUs aren't much faster in raw performance but there's no excuse for not including the latest desktop GPUs.
At least the entry 12-core is not much more than the entry 8-core used to be.
I'm surprised at the lack of an iMac update, it's long overdue.
Marvin the whole thing stinks! I mean this honestly; it is the hostility towards the desktop user that i'm feeling here and an unwillingness to innovate with respect to desktop machines. I mean really if your sales are in decline and people regularly point out why the desktop lineup stinks you would think Apple would spend a dollar or two too freshen things up.
I'd be the first to admit that there may be issues with Intel and their chip sets. Sandy Bridge E has a terrible history of delays, bugs and setbacks. So maybe SB-E wasn't in the cards. Even so that doesn't mean we should have to put up with a 2 year old video card.
As to the iMac well that does need a major overhaul and this would have been the ideal time to do so. Apparently Apple has a certain disdain for the desktop user and has decided to make them wait a few more months. Effectively nothing was touched with respect to the desktop lineup.
Now we can speculate that maybe, just maybe, that they will release new hardware with Mountain Lion. That is supposedly a month off. As to the Mac Pro, I think users here are screwed because you won't see an update for some time, possibly a year. The only real hope Pro users now have is that Apple has a something in the wings to debut sometime this year that will bring modern technology to the Pro user. In any event Apple has killed sales for the entire desktop lineup as far as i'm concerned. There is no way I'd recommend any desktop from Apple at the moment.
I don't think they've given up on the Pro. They need Pro users. They're just not announcing a major refresh of the Pro on the same day as all the updates to these more mobile-oriented unveilings. There will be a dedicated event to announce the major Pro updates. Probably along side with the other desktops.
Life support....little time left...eh...perhaps another shot...EOL it is...Mac Pro No More
The era started with the PowerMac..
Maybe you should just drop a couple of extra video cards in your Mac Pro as Photoshop can offload to the multiple GPU's. That is parallel processing using super fast numerics built into video cards. Welcome to the future. You could even drop in two old 5770 graphics cards in addition to what you have now and cut your processing time tremendously. Even if Apple did upgrade to Ivy Bridge Xeon's and SATA III 6g you wouldn't notice much difference as it's all about the video cards with Photoshop. Do yourself a favor and get a fast SSD from OWC (don't buy the 6G model as the Mac Pro can only do 3G. Put your apps and OS on the SSD, that will speed things up. Partition the SSD and leave enough working space for your current project files and loading those multiple GB files will go many times faster.
The reason you hear "render, render, render" all the time is because that's what most Mac Pro's are used for. If Adobe would develop a Photoshop render farm command line tool that ran in Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD it would be possible to just drop all those files into a folder where the render farm servers grab it and process it, splitting the work across hundreds of CPUs and GPUs. So instead of sitting at your desk staring at a Mac Pro crunching multiple steps it goes and gets processed in a data center and gives you the results. This is the way real work is done, it's automated. It's pretty expensive to pay a talented artist to stare at a screen and blaming Apple for it is lame. Unlike Adobe, Apple implemented the ability to compile large projects using surrounding networked Mac's. So big projects like Mathematica which literally takes all day to compile can do so hundreds of times faster.
Seriously, you are not pushing your Mac Pro hard if the fans don't roar, your disk starts thrashing and it looks like it's going to melt down. Photoshop does not push a Mac Pro to it's limits because Photoshop has yet to push enough threads/processes/polygons at it. Sure it will run Photoshop faster, but if Adobe would get off their lazy butts and write some real code, it would go so much faster still!
If AI were capable of being embarrassed, it should be embarrassed by this know-nothing article.
What Apple has actually done is:
- Kept the same Nehalem and Westmere processors.
- Pruned the standard and BTO options, making the previously premium 3.2 GHz quad the base model.
- Upped the base RAM from 3GB to 6GB (useless either way).
- Kept the rest of the specs the same, as far as one can tell so far.
- Lowered the prices.
As a pricing illustration, I bought a quad 3.2/1TB/3GB Mac Pro two months ago for $2928. Today (with 6GB) that costs $2499. Oh, and before 27 geniuses on AI post about how stupid I must be feeling—wrong. I bought a new Mac Pro workstation for a new employee exactly when we needed it.
Bottom line is it's a slight speed bump and moderate price reduction, but tells us nothing about the future of the Mac Pro line.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WelshDog
I don' t think it's like that at all.
I'm open to other ideas here!!! What this is telling me though is that Apple couldn't take the time to put any desktop machine on equal footing at WWDC.
Quote:
Originally Posted by friedmud
Story is WRONG.
This is NOT Xeon E5.... E5645 is still the old Nehalem architecture!
E5's are like this: E5-4650
All that happened here was a minor speed bump....
So disappointed!
You're right, this is an old chip. According to Intel's Website this chip was launched in Q1 of 2010. People seem to still like and buy this chip, but it's by no means cutting edge. I'm also surprised that they didn't update the graphics card. Particularly since Mountain Lion offers out-of-the-box support for cutting edge graphics cards.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JBrickley
Seriously, you are not pushing your Mac Pro hard if the fans don't roar, your disk starts thrashing and it looks like it's going to melt down. Photoshop does not push a Mac Pro to it's limits because Photoshop has yet to push enough threads/processes/polygons at it. Sure it will run Photoshop faster, but if Adobe would get off their lazy butts and write some real code, it would go so much faster still!
The point is that doing equivalent work on an iMac you get beach balls and crashes. As long as it is measurably faster and less problematic to work on a Mac Pro than a iMac, I'll opt for Mac Pro.
I love the 'real work' jab. I thought I was elitist but you have even me beat in that department. We make money in the graphics business because we don't hire specialized artists, programmers and video editors. We do everything ourselves and and do it well enough to get steady repeat business. So although your claim that most work performed on a Mac Pro is rendering, it does not apply to me, even if it were true, which I highly doubt. The most important thing for me is multitasking. We have iMacs here as well but they can't handle the load and you aren't going to put any extra video cards or SSDs in those machines. My comments weren't intended to complain that our Mac Pros aren't fast enough, it was that we want to buy more but not two year old components even if they could be souped up by third party add ons. I, like everyone else but you wanted the latest new hardware because we plan to use them for 5 years or more.
Well you must feel pretty stupid Neil. 26 to go
Quote:
Originally Posted by NeilM
If AI were capable of being embarrassed, it should be embarrassed by this know-nothing article.
What Apple has actually done is:
- Kept the same Nehalem and Westmere processors.
- Pruned the standard and BTO options, making the previously premium 3.2 GHz quad the base model.
- Upped the base RAM from 3GB to 6GB (useless either way).
- Kept the rest of the specs the same, as far as one can tell so far.
- Lowered the prices.
As a pricing illustration, I bought a quad 3.2/1TB/3GB Mac Pro two months ago for $2928. Today (with 6GB) that costs $2499. Oh, and before 27 geniuses on AI post about how stupid I must be feeling—wrong. I bought a new Mac Pro workstation for a new employee exactly when we needed it.
Bottom line is it's a slight speed bump and moderate price reduction, but tells us nothing about the future of the Mac Pro line.
I have to agree it tells us little about the Mac Pros future. On the other hand this tells us volumes about how Apple feels about the desktop user. I mean really a three year old GPU card. It isn't just the Mac Pro though as the whole desktop line up was ignored.