No, they went with the 5mm edge instead of a bay deliberately. It's never going to happen.
Accessibility is the selling point of the new Mac Pro. The iMac will remain a closed box.
A closed box isn't as much of an issue if it is readily repairable by a reasonably skilled technician. The iMac has degenerated to the point that it is an expensive repair for anybody.
If there is no new Mac Pro at WWDC I would expect many people to be extremely pissed off
That was the case last year though. It didn't make Apple do anything different.
June 4th/5th: Apple Store goes down for new laptops
WWDC on the 10th: iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 as Tim said
September/October: refreshed Mini, iMac, possibly newly designed Mac Pro and refreshed iOS devices
Given how close the Haswell launch is to WWDC, they might take the store down before WWDC and have the new laptops available after and mention battery life improvements at WWDC.
If you are doing an intensive blur operation on video for example, you only have to load each frame into memory at a time.
Adobe's raytracer uses CUDA. NVidia has their own engine too:
I'm not sure what kind of blur you mean there. Common ones would be depth of field, which would depend on some way to define z depth, or motion blur. Motion blur requires samples from other frames too. If it doesn't sample far enough out. you get weird effects. I would have to look up how many pieces of software render blur that way. While it's shifting, most of the heavy lifting remains cpu bound. The really significant things are those like Premiere and its playback engine.
Not that 512MB is suitable for that but many raytracers are offering GPU acceleration. Video processing is a more common use case.
That list reads about how I expected. Octane is a somewhat newer one, but still quite limited after several years. Lux isn't that great. Cycles is still basically an alpha stage open source piece of software. Mental Ray's iray is only bundled with one or two shipping products. It's basically a beta product. Vray doesn't use gpu based processing for anything other than previews. It's to allow you to position lights or rotate hdri's to get reflections in the right place (assuming not mapped to rebuilt geometry). I mean if you examine those up close, aside from octane, the gpu functions are fairly limited or not yet stable (and lux is just painful and slow). The issue with 512 is that you would run into trouble with textures. With a lot of games it's also really pushing it. I know there are frequently arguments over whether or not it matters, yet Apple shipped 1GB cards on the upper macbook pros in 2011, and they were slower gpus than what the imacs currently use. It's just Apple cutting corners where they expect it won't be felt as much.
Quote:
That was the case last year though. It didn't make Apple do anything different.
They did somewhat of a PR statement regarding 2013. That was at least uncharacteristic of Apple.
I got Gauntlet Dark Legacy running via MAME on my 2011 i5 Mac mini with Intel HD 3000 Graphics. Not only does it run but at playable to nearly full speed. So what was the problem all this time? It was in fact the emulator.
MAME OS X has not been updated in several years and as a result runs a lot of games as slow as a snail. I found another emulator that requires use of the terminal (which with a few tutorials I was able to run) and it works great.
I still am probably going to upgrade to a 2013 Mac mini and hopefully Apple will offer the Iris Pro graphics as a BTO at the very least with them offering it standard as a best case scenario.
If they do not offer the Iris Pro graphics, I may get a quad-core i7 mini, a dual-core i5 mini, or simply nothing at all until my current mini dies out.
The good news for me and the bad news for Apple is that for now I do not have to buy an iMac and to be quite honest, I really didn't want one anyway as I had no use for it.
Having said all that, I hope Apple does better with VRAM standards on the iMac and goes from 512 MB to 1 GB. I also hope the base mini is given a flash option though we shall see.
I got Gauntlet Dark Legacy running via MAME on my 2011 i5 Mac mini with Intel HD 3000 Graphics. Not only does it run but at playable to nearly full speed. So what was the problem all this time? It was in fact the emulator.
MAME OS X has not been updated in several years and as a result runs a lot of games as slow as a snail. I found another emulator that requires use of the terminal (which with a few tutorials I was able to run) and it works great.
Sounds like you need to get cracking on the source code!
I still am probably going to upgrade to a 2013 Mac mini and hopefully Apple will offer the Iris Pro graphics as a BTO at the very least with them offering it standard as a best case scenario.
Hopefully Iris Pro is standard. However I'm not convinced that Intel has the right processor on offer yet for the Mini.
If they do not offer the Iris Pro graphics, I may get a quad-core i7 mini, a dual-core i5 mini, or simply nothing at all until my current mini dies out.
Long term it is better to prefer quad cores. However when looking at Haswell processors the CPU cores don't offer a lot of improvements so don't expect huge improvements from CPU bound code.
The good news for me and the bad news for Apple is that for now I do not have to buy an iMac and to be quite honest, I really didn't want one anyway as I had no use for it.
Actually this is a good thing for Apple as I doubt that they want you to buy the wrong machine.
Having said all that, I hope Apple does better with VRAM standards on the iMac and goes from 512 MB to 1 GB. I also hope the base mini is given a flash option though we shall see.
Flash as a supplement to HD storage in a Mini would be great. Fusion tech actually makes sense in they Mini. As to VRAM we will have to see what the next version of Mac OS offers up. The VRAM allocation issue could go away. It might be to early to wish for heterogeneous computing and giving the GPU equality for memory access but you never know. It is however a good reason to wait for Haswell.
On MAME OS X? No thanks. The emulator I am using works great.
It is rather interesting how powerful today's computers are, they can emulate legacy systems in real time. The versatility of Mac OS is pretty nice, the ability to run even old DOS or Apple2 programs is just an emulator or VM away.
Realistically, how much of an improvement would a quad mobile 4600 be over a quad mobile 4000 and a quad mobile 3000?
Hard to say. Graphics should be much better for Intel Integrated GPUs. Benchmarks are all over the place right now, that probably has a lot to do with drivers. The best course of action is to see what gets delivered Monday, check out a few web sites for reviews and go from there. Graphics seem to be any where from 1.2 to 2 X better.
As Mac users we may need to wait for better drivers before making definitive statements anyways due to the lag in GPU support on Mac OS. In fact we might have to wait for the next rev of Mac OS before passing judgement. WWDC will hopefully reveal where Apple is going with GPU technology. I'm really hoping that we see a strong focus on GPU utilization in the next Mac OS rev.
If there is no new Mac Pro at WWDC I would expect many people to be extremely pissed off, especially professionals relying upon Apple to come through with a new revision. As to Intel it wouldn't be the first time they did a special processor for Apple. Intels Haswell reveal could be most interesting here.
Any rational corporation would look for viable ways to rescue a product with such declining sales. I'm still of the opinion that Apple has damaged the Mac Pro more than the market. The reality is the workstation market itself isn't that bad off.
Hmm. I could never understand why Apple used 'server' class cpus for the Mac Pro. I guess the move to Intel allowed that distinction. But the old blue and white G3 was a great tower. Did we have 'server' class cpus back then? Just stick a hex core i7 in the new slim fast Mac Pro, space to Raid a couple of SSDs. Room for a couple of GPUs. Lop the PCI and optical drive and sundry legacy ports off. Have a more compact machine. Charge £1495 for it. Price goes up as you add 2nd SSD or 2nd GPU. Want another? Add another to your cluster. And you have a mini cluster. 12 cores. Upto 4 drives. One can stand on top or alongside the other.
It's old bones as far as the damage Apple themselves caused the Mac Pro line. The 'update' last year is proof enough. Could have offered more ram. More HD. Cheaper price. Better gpu. But no. They didn't. Last year's was a shocker. When a member of the original Mac team is calling you out in public you know you've got problems. (Hello Hubris.)
For me? It's Cube 2. It may not be as small as a Cube. But it's going slim fast. What's that mini tower format? A bit of that. Imagine not much bigger than 3 Mac Mini's stacked one on top of the other.
Let's face it. If you bought x3 Mac Minis you'd have some cluster power. Some one man band artists built Linux mini clusters or 'render farms' using old machines and dispatch 3D to them while they 'get on.'
I've often toyed with the idea of adding a Mac Pro to my iMac as I get into 3D more and render times go up. Mind you. Nothing I can't do now with an iMac in an hour or so or an overnight job.
I remember doing my MA in 3D. All those Intel dual cpu machines. I had that 800mhz Athlon PC. The iMac i7 is now light years ahead of them all this time later.
I can see Apple redefining the Mac Pro as a more compact 'workstation' for the solo graphic artist/small studio crowd. Just add IO care of Thunderbolt 2. Add another hexcore 'Cube.2' as you need more render stations.
Take off the price of the £895 display off the iMac I bought? You're looking at £1295 for a base unit. That gets them into the solo artist crowd and the odd gamer who wants to try a Mac as their next dual booting 'PC.' Very Prosumer. Like Final Cut X, goes with the prosumer tag and get more units into more hands.
Sure, it overlaps with the iMac. But I don't see that as a problem. The Mac Mini has overlapped with the 'old' ground the imac used to occupy as imac has moved in to the old G3 tower's territory.
It's just semantics to me. I like the iMac. Fine consumer/prosumer/workstation machine.
But I'd like to think the new Mini and Mac Pro Mini (it will be bigger than the old Cube I'd think...) will give people options.
If Apple could consumer/prosumer-ise 'X-Grid' style clusters and add minis to an iMac dock render cluster...or make prosumer Cubes that could add up to a weighty solution via modular approach....
Depends on which way Apple go.
As Marv' has said. In a few years time it won't matter. The coming cpu and gpu power will make the current crop look archaic. We've been 'i7' class for a while now. When we make the next big leap it the pro may well go the way of the daisies. The next update will buy it some time...
In English. The Xeons priced the pro' out of its market in my view.
They could have had a couple of single cpu towers in the sub £2k zone. At £1295 and £1495. Even these prices aren't cheap by any stretch compared to PC prices. Apple have the component leverage buying power they never used to have.
Dual Cpus at £1895 and one at £2,495. Sure. Xeons at that level? I could just about stomach.
I don't think the Xeon's helped the Pro long term. Just expediated it's irrelevance.
We should have i7 quad and hex core 'prosumer' models in small cases at sane pricing levels.
Not that it matters. It's no longer on sale in Europe. I guess we'll wait until Autumn until Apple reveals their card.
Hard to say. Graphics should be much better for Intel Integrated GPUs. Benchmarks are all over the place right now, that probably has a lot to do with drivers. The best course of action is to see what gets delivered Monday, check out a few web sites for reviews and go from there. Graphics seem to be any where from 1.2 to 2 X better.
In English. The Xeons priced the pro' out of its market in my view.
Apple could of went E3 in the base model and not impact price one bit.
They could have had a couple of single cpu towers in the sub £2k zone. At £1295 and £1495. Even these prices aren't cheap by any stretch compared to PC prices. Apple have the component leverage buying power they never used to have.
Well that is funny money, but a perfectly good Mac Pro could be had for under $1500.
Dual Cpus at £1895 and one at £2,495. Sure. Xeons at that level? I could just about stomach.
There is a legitimate market for dual socket machines but this is an entirely different market than the majority of workstation usage. That is Apples big problem with having only one platform for the "pro" desktop market.
I don't think the Xeon's helped the Pro long term. Just expediated it's irrelevance.
It isn't XEONs themselves but Apples processor selection and the price tag out on those processors. Many XEON parts aren't that expensive and in a few cases are actually cheaper than their desktop counterparts. Apples problem was not selecting the right processor and making the other changes required to be able to deliver a Pro at a reasonable price.
That is if a reasonable price was even their goal. It honestly looks like they tried to kill the machine at one time by making the price unreasonable.
We should have i7 quad and hex core 'prosumer' models in small cases at sane pricing levels.
Not that it matters. It's no longer on sale in Europe. I guess we'll wait until Autumn until Apple reveals their card.
Lemon Bon Bon.
It isn't on sale due to a rather pathetic attempt at protectionism. You guys need to get your government under control.
Xeon is required if you want ECC RAM which many workstation (engineering/science/financial) users want.
True but there are lower cost XEON solutions. I don't really believe that XEON itself is responsible for the high price of the current Mac Pro.
For the solo artist the iMac is sufficient given how fast it is now.
Not really, little things Mac the iMac a poor choice for many users. For example the built in screen might not meet some user requirements. Beyond that fast is relative.
For a consumer grade powerhouse the Mac Mini is very nice if you don't need a GPU.
Which unfortunately means the Mini is limited to lower end usages. I like the Mini and honestly I'm hoping it will become more viable with Haswell. That GPU shortcoming though is hard to deal with. A Mini with TB2 will be a very interesting platform though. Even then Apple needs to move for ad with GPU driver improvements which are rather poor right now. No modern OpenGL support is something that isn't excusable right now especially when you can do better on Linux. They need to enable OpenCL on the GPU too.
One of the reasons I have championed the XMac concept is to address the GPU issue in the Mini. However a refactored Mac Pro at the right price might address that just as well. The trick is the right performance mix at the right price.
Apple could of went E3 in the base model and not impact price one bit.
It depends what one they're using. The top E3 is roughly the same price as the cpu they currently use, but it introduces another completely different logic board design.
Not really, little things Mac the iMac a poor choice for many users. For example the built in screen might not meet some user requirements.
You keep stating this as if you can't use any monitor you want with the iMac.
Beyond that fast is relative.
A fully tricked out iMac 27 (3.4 + 680) is very fast relative to anything else in Apple's lineup except a fully tricked out Mac Pro. Against the 3.3 hexacore with a 5870 Mac Pro it's faster.
Which unfortunately means the Mini is limited to lower end usages.
Low end usages like render farms and compute farms?
I like the Mini and honestly I'm hoping it will become more viable with Haswell.
It's viable now if your mix of actual work (as opposed to benchmarks) don't hit the GPU heavy filters that often or need to run Resolve. The pro app performance numbers for the mini were quite good for an $800 machine.
One of the reasons I have championed the XMac concept is to address the GPU issue in the Mini. However a refactored Mac Pro at the right price might address that just as well. The trick is the right performance mix at the right price.
So instead of improving the Mac Mini you've moved to the camp that prefers to gimp the Mac Pro to get your xMac.
A nice mac mini addition would be a Mac Mini Pro with E3 haswell Xeon 1265L v3, a 750M, 2 SSD stick slots and 4 ECC RAM slots for $1999. Much better than gimping the entire Mac Pro line by removing slots and bays.
Some folks will whine $1999 is too expensive but its $500 cheaper than the cheapest Mac Pro and does stuff the iMac can't and won't hurt iMac sales. I think $1699 would be better but that's may hurt iMac sales more than Apple will allow.
There are people on the planet who could get a home sales pitch from Tim himself, a one of kind specially built machine designed especially for them by Jon after moving his design lab next door and consulting on everything down to the color of the wallpaper for the room, and a Genius on call 24/7 in a car on the street and they would still claim that it wasn't good enough.
Then there are the people who have iMacs and Mac minis who put them to use getting work done every day.
There are people on the planet who could get a home sales pitch from Tim himself, a one of kind specially built machine designed especially for them by Jon after moving his design lab next door and consulting on everything down to the color of the wallpaper for the room, and a Genius on call 24/7 in a car on the street and they would still claim that it wasn't good enough.
Then there are the people who have iMacs and Mac minis who put them to use getting work done every day.
My issue is more basic.
When wishing for a pony there's generally two kinds of kids:
1) The kind that wishes for their own special pony so they can hug it and kiss it and call it george. This is most normal kids.
2) The kind that wishes that a pony be taken away from some other kid so they can have one. These are spoiled brats.
Largely xMac adherents devolve into the latter because they know that wishing for ponies from Apple is a forlorn hope to begin with and most likely a zero sum game. There's only one pony to be had and better that they should have a pony and not the other kid.
That annoys me because YOU'RE WISHING FOR A GODDAMN PONY. IT AINT GONNA HAPPEN ANYWAY SO WHY THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO BE SELFISH ABOUT IT? JUST WISH FOR YOUR OWN GODDAMN PONY AND LEAVE THE OTHER PONIES THE F*** ALONE. APPLE'S GOING TO BUILD WHATEVER APPLE'S GOING TO BUILD.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
It won't happen though unless the customer base makes it an issue.
No, they went with the 5mm edge instead of a bay deliberately. It's never going to happen.
Accessibility is the selling point of the new Mac Pro. The iMac will remain a closed box.
A closed box isn't as much of an issue if it is readily repairable by a reasonably skilled technician. The iMac has degenerated to the point that it is an expensive repair for anybody.
If you are doing an intensive blur operation on video for example, you only have to load each frame into memory at a time.
Adobe's raytracer uses CUDA. NVidia has their own engine too:
https://developer.nvidia.com/optix
V-Ray:
Cycles:
Mental Ray:
LuxRender:
Octane:
Not that 512MB is suitable for that but many raytracers are offering GPU acceleration. Video processing is a more common use case.
That was the case last year though. It didn't make Apple do anything different.
June 4th/5th: Apple Store goes down for new laptops
WWDC on the 10th: iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 as Tim said
September/October: refreshed Mini, iMac, possibly newly designed Mac Pro and refreshed iOS devices
Given how close the Haswell launch is to WWDC, they might take the store down before WWDC and have the new laptops available after and mention battery life improvements at WWDC.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
If you are doing an intensive blur operation on video for example, you only have to load each frame into memory at a time.
Adobe's raytracer uses CUDA. NVidia has their own engine too:
I'm not sure what kind of blur you mean there. Common ones would be depth of field, which would depend on some way to define z depth, or motion blur. Motion blur requires samples from other frames too. If it doesn't sample far enough out. you get weird effects. I would have to look up how many pieces of software render blur that way. While it's shifting, most of the heavy lifting remains cpu bound. The really significant things are those like Premiere and its playback engine.
Quote:
https://developer.nvidia.com/optix
V-Ray:
Cycles:
Mental Ray:
LuxRender:
Octane:
Not that 512MB is suitable for that but many raytracers are offering GPU acceleration. Video processing is a more common use case.
That list reads about how I expected. Octane is a somewhat newer one, but still quite limited after several years. Lux isn't that great. Cycles is still basically an alpha stage open source piece of software. Mental Ray's iray is only bundled with one or two shipping products. It's basically a beta product. Vray doesn't use gpu based processing for anything other than previews. It's to allow you to position lights or rotate hdri's to get reflections in the right place (assuming not mapped to rebuilt geometry). I mean if you examine those up close, aside from octane, the gpu functions are fairly limited or not yet stable (and lux is just painful and slow). The issue with 512 is that you would run into trouble with textures. With a lot of games it's also really pushing it. I know there are frequently arguments over whether or not it matters, yet Apple shipped 1GB cards on the upper macbook pros in 2011, and they were slower gpus than what the imacs currently use. It's just Apple cutting corners where they expect it won't be felt as much.
Quote:
That was the case last year though. It didn't make Apple do anything different.
They did somewhat of a PR statement regarding 2013. That was at least uncharacteristic of Apple.
I got Gauntlet Dark Legacy running via MAME on my 2011 i5 Mac mini with Intel HD 3000 Graphics. Not only does it run but at playable to nearly full speed. So what was the problem all this time? It was in fact the emulator.
MAME OS X has not been updated in several years and as a result runs a lot of games as slow as a snail. I found another emulator that requires use of the terminal (which with a few tutorials I was able to run) and it works great.
I still am probably going to upgrade to a 2013 Mac mini and hopefully Apple will offer the Iris Pro graphics as a BTO at the very least with them offering it standard as a best case scenario.
If they do not offer the Iris Pro graphics, I may get a quad-core i7 mini, a dual-core i5 mini, or simply nothing at all until my current mini dies out.
The good news for me and the bad news for Apple is that for now I do not have to buy an iMac and to be quite honest, I really didn't want one anyway as I had no use for it.
Having said all that, I hope Apple does better with VRAM standards on the iMac and goes from 512 MB to 1 GB. I also hope the base mini is given a flash option though we shall see.
Flash as a supplement to HD storage in a Mini would be great. Fusion tech actually makes sense in they Mini. As to VRAM we will have to see what the next version of Mac OS offers up. The VRAM allocation issue could go away. It might be to early to wish for heterogeneous computing and giving the GPU equality for memory access but you never know. It is however a good reason to wait for Haswell.
It is rather interesting how powerful today's computers are, they can emulate legacy systems in real time. The versatility of Mac OS is pretty nice, the ability to run even old DOS or Apple2 programs is just an emulator or VM away.
Hard to say. Graphics should be much better for Intel Integrated GPUs. Benchmarks are all over the place right now, that probably has a lot to do with drivers. The best course of action is to see what gets delivered Monday, check out a few web sites for reviews and go from there. Graphics seem to be any where from 1.2 to 2 X better.
As Mac users we may need to wait for better drivers before making definitive statements anyways due to the lag in GPU support on Mac OS. In fact we might have to wait for the next rev of Mac OS before passing judgement. WWDC will hopefully reveal where Apple is going with GPU technology. I'm really hoping that we see a strong focus on GPU utilization in the next Mac OS rev.
Quote:
If there is no new Mac Pro at WWDC I would expect many people to be extremely pissed off, especially professionals relying upon Apple to come through with a new revision. As to Intel it wouldn't be the first time they did a special processor for Apple. Intels Haswell reveal could be most interesting here.
Any rational corporation would look for viable ways to rescue a product with such declining sales. I'm still of the opinion that Apple has damaged the Mac Pro more than the market. The reality is the workstation market itself isn't that bad off.
Hmm. I could never understand why Apple used 'server' class cpus for the Mac Pro. I guess the move to Intel allowed that distinction. But the old blue and white G3 was a great tower. Did we have 'server' class cpus back then? Just stick a hex core i7 in the new slim fast Mac Pro, space to Raid a couple of SSDs. Room for a couple of GPUs. Lop the PCI and optical drive and sundry legacy ports off. Have a more compact machine. Charge £1495 for it. Price goes up as you add 2nd SSD or 2nd GPU. Want another? Add another to your cluster. And you have a mini cluster. 12 cores. Upto 4 drives. One can stand on top or alongside the other.
It's old bones as far as the damage Apple themselves caused the Mac Pro line. The 'update' last year is proof enough. Could have offered more ram. More HD. Cheaper price. Better gpu. But no. They didn't. Last year's was a shocker. When a member of the original Mac team is calling you out in public you know you've got problems. (Hello Hubris.)
For me? It's Cube 2. It may not be as small as a Cube. But it's going slim fast. What's that mini tower format? A bit of that. Imagine not much bigger than 3 Mac Mini's stacked one on top of the other.
Let's face it. If you bought x3 Mac Minis you'd have some cluster power. Some one man band artists built Linux mini clusters or 'render farms' using old machines and dispatch 3D to them while they 'get on.'
I've often toyed with the idea of adding a Mac Pro to my iMac as I get into 3D more and render times go up. Mind you. Nothing I can't do now with an iMac in an hour or so or an overnight job.
I remember doing my MA in 3D. All those Intel dual cpu machines. I had that 800mhz Athlon PC. The iMac i7 is now light years ahead of them all this time later.
I can see Apple redefining the Mac Pro as a more compact 'workstation' for the solo graphic artist/small studio crowd. Just add IO care of Thunderbolt 2. Add another hexcore 'Cube.2' as you need more render stations.
Take off the price of the £895 display off the iMac I bought? You're looking at £1295 for a base unit. That gets them into the solo artist crowd and the odd gamer who wants to try a Mac as their next dual booting 'PC.' Very Prosumer. Like Final Cut X, goes with the prosumer tag and get more units into more hands.
Sure, it overlaps with the iMac. But I don't see that as a problem. The Mac Mini has overlapped with the 'old' ground the imac used to occupy as imac has moved in to the old G3 tower's territory.
It's just semantics to me. I like the iMac. Fine consumer/prosumer/workstation machine.
But I'd like to think the new Mini and Mac Pro Mini (it will be bigger than the old Cube I'd think...) will give people options.
If Apple could consumer/prosumer-ise 'X-Grid' style clusters and add minis to an iMac dock render cluster...or make prosumer Cubes that could add up to a weighty solution via modular approach....
Depends on which way Apple go.
As Marv' has said. In a few years time it won't matter. The coming cpu and gpu power will make the current crop look archaic. We've been 'i7' class for a while now. When we make the next big leap it the pro may well go the way of the daisies. The next update will buy it some time...
Lemon Bon Bon.
In English. The Xeons priced the pro' out of its market in my view.
They could have had a couple of single cpu towers in the sub £2k zone. At £1295 and £1495. Even these prices aren't cheap by any stretch compared to PC prices. Apple have the component leverage buying power they never used to have.
Dual Cpus at £1895 and one at £2,495. Sure. Xeons at that level? I could just about stomach.
I don't think the Xeon's helped the Pro long term. Just expediated it's irrelevance.
We should have i7 quad and hex core 'prosumer' models in small cases at sane pricing levels.
Not that it matters. It's no longer on sale in Europe. I guess we'll wait until Autumn until Apple reveals their card.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Over Ivy Bridge not Sandy Bridge correct?
Xeon is required if you want ECC RAM which many workstation (engineering/science/financial) users want.
For the solo artist the iMac is sufficient given how fast it is now.
For a consumer grade powerhouse the Mac Mini is very nice if you don't need a GPU.
That is if a reasonable price was even their goal. It honestly looks like they tried to kill the machine at one time by making the price unreasonable.
It isn't on sale due to a rather pathetic attempt at protectionism. You guys need to get your government under control.
Which unfortunately means the Mini is limited to lower end usages. I like the Mini and honestly I'm hoping it will become more viable with Haswell. That GPU shortcoming though is hard to deal with. A Mini with TB2 will be a very interesting platform though. Even then Apple needs to move for ad with GPU driver improvements which are rather poor right now. No modern OpenGL support is something that isn't excusable right now especially when you can do better on Linux. They need to enable OpenCL on the GPU too.
One of the reasons I have championed the XMac concept is to address the GPU issue in the Mini. However a refactored Mac Pro at the right price might address that just as well. The trick is the right performance mix at the right price.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
Apple could of went E3 in the base model and not impact price one bit.
It depends what one they're using. The top E3 is roughly the same price as the cpu they currently use, but it introduces another completely different logic board design.
You keep stating this as if you can't use any monitor you want with the iMac.
A fully tricked out iMac 27 (3.4 + 680) is very fast relative to anything else in Apple's lineup except a fully tricked out Mac Pro. Against the 3.3 hexacore with a 5870 Mac Pro it's faster.
http://www.barefeats.com/imac12p1.html
So relative to what is the iMac "slow"?
Low end usages like render farms and compute farms?
It's viable now if your mix of actual work (as opposed to benchmarks) don't hit the GPU heavy filters that often or need to run Resolve. The pro app performance numbers for the mini were quite good for an $800 machine.
So instead of improving the Mac Mini you've moved to the camp that prefers to gimp the Mac Pro to get your xMac.
A nice mac mini addition would be a Mac Mini Pro with E3 haswell Xeon 1265L v3, a 750M, 2 SSD stick slots and 4 ECC RAM slots for $1999. Much better than gimping the entire Mac Pro line by removing slots and bays.
Some folks will whine $1999 is too expensive but its $500 cheaper than the cheapest Mac Pro and does stuff the iMac can't and won't hurt iMac sales. I think $1699 would be better but that's may hurt iMac sales more than Apple will allow.
There are people on the planet who could get a home sales pitch from Tim himself, a one of kind specially built machine designed especially for them by Jon after moving his design lab next door and consulting on everything down to the color of the wallpaper for the room, and a Genius on call 24/7 in a car on the street and they would still claim that it wasn't good enough.
Then there are the people who have iMacs and Mac minis who put them to use getting work done every day.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bergermeister
There are people on the planet who could get a home sales pitch from Tim himself, a one of kind specially built machine designed especially for them by Jon after moving his design lab next door and consulting on everything down to the color of the wallpaper for the room, and a Genius on call 24/7 in a car on the street and they would still claim that it wasn't good enough.
Then there are the people who have iMacs and Mac minis who put them to use getting work done every day.
My issue is more basic.
When wishing for a pony there's generally two kinds of kids:
1) The kind that wishes for their own special pony so they can hug it and kiss it and call it george. This is most normal kids.
2) The kind that wishes that a pony be taken away from some other kid so they can have one. These are spoiled brats.
Largely xMac adherents devolve into the latter because they know that wishing for ponies from Apple is a forlorn hope to begin with and most likely a zero sum game. There's only one pony to be had and better that they should have a pony and not the other kid.
That annoys me because YOU'RE WISHING FOR A GODDAMN PONY. IT AINT GONNA HAPPEN ANYWAY SO WHY THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO BE SELFISH ABOUT IT? JUST WISH FOR YOUR OWN GODDAMN PONY AND LEAVE THE OTHER PONIES THE F*** ALONE. APPLE'S GOING TO BUILD WHATEVER APPLE'S GOING TO BUILD.
Jesus.