High performance computing is either deployed through commodity clusters or gpu clusters. This product has fallen in the void between those and a desktop that isn't very large.
Unless Apple is willing to show the world that they use their own hardware and their own OSX for their servers and data centers, their advertising of Mac Mini "servers" means nothing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Windle
How about we forget about the Mac Pro and make it so that Mac minis can be shared via Thunderbolt for x-san to utilise the available hardware on the "chain".
Cheap, reliable, expandable and AVAILABLE !!
Applications have to be written for cluster support. Redundant hot swap power supplies and hard drives don't require software support.
With the technology coming on line in 2013, Apple could easily make a very interesting professional platform. There is still a significant market between what an iMac can do and the problems associated with paste together computational clusters. I really don't know what Apple is up to Mac Pro wise but the could easily deploy a machine with 24 to 50 i86 type cores and when combined with a state of the art GPU it could effectively compete with small clusters at a much lower cost.
If history is any indicator anytime you can move computation off shared hardware everyone wins.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ifij775
High performance computing is either deployed through commodity clusters or gpu clusters. This product has fallen in the void between those and a desktop that isn't very large.
You can find 256 GB SSDs for About $180 dollars these days. So a 2 TB drive is a possibility at an affordable price. Now $1500 for that drive may not sound affordable to many but many Mac Pro users would jump at such a drive.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
If true, and I think it's has merit, it would appear they are keeping the 3.5" bay which some thought would go away as they move it to all SSD. I guess that's still possible with a PCie SSD card but I think it's highly unlikely as the only option for storage.
I'm not expecting anything radically different; just a smaller case than the current Mac Pro as certain components are shrunk and some removed, like the ODDs. I expect a new "look" but something around that volume and still using 4xHDD bays seems most likely to me.
I don't see how anyone can say that. A 2TB SSD will be extremely expensive over a 2TB HDD which will put it far out of the "affordable" category for most people.
Even if Anobit can help Apple reduce costs this is a professional machine where they will test the HW more throughly and where they will market it accordingly so if it's thousands of dollars for the cheapest one don't expect Apple to undercut that.
Apple really has never competed against the type of enterprise hardware STEC sells. Admittedly Apple sells its hardware a a stiff premium over PC hardware but at each machine release cycle their hardware is pretty agressive if you look at base SSD installations. I'm pretty much convinced that they could introduce a 1TB module for under $1000 if they really wanted to. Remember this is rumored to be a larger drive format so there is lots of space to spread chips economically across the PC board.
I don't quite get what the target market is any more for the Mac Pro. I doubt the revenues are even worth mentioning in financial reports. I imagine they keep some guy from Next around updating this product so they don't have to lay him off
Given the above and a few other issues i suspect the article is bogus. Or at the very least somebody saw something they didn't understand.
The headline made me think of their fusion drives, in which ssds could make up a portion of a ~2TB volume.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ifij775
High performance computing is either deployed through commodity clusters or gpu clusters. This product has fallen in the void between those and a desktop that isn't very large.
If a company is running an hpc cluster on some flavor of Linux running proprietary code, it's doubtful that they were ever a potential mac pro customer. In terms of workstations in general, other oems have seen modest rebounds since the drop around 2008.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM
It seems like 2TB should be possible in the 3.5" drive size.
I am highly skeptical on this. Apple did rearrange pricing on various options last year, yet for a 512GB ssd, the first one is an $850 upgrade + $1000 for each additional one. I don't think they will jump to 2TB.
There's simply no way of knowing what Apple uses; I just watch these keynotes* and don't see any Apple hardware. On top of that, there are many articles to be found on what software and hardware Apple uses, although that is merely blog/rumor/analyst kinda stuff.
* 2011 WWDC Keynote screendump
so your refutation is 'you don't know' but people who also don't know have guessed in the past that apple currently doesn't use their own hw in their own brand new data centers to power their nacent iCloud offerings, therefore you argue it's not possible Apple is designing this sort of hardware for their own internal use for future products?
Were these the same people who felt that Apple would never use a custom developed ARM chip to power an iPhone or iPad?
If you're saying, I'm just guessing, well, yes, I am, (which puts me on the same pedestal for all your 'authoritative sources') but there are multiple uses for a 2TB SSD, and they don't all have to be HW consumer based for company that is now making billiions a year in profits in delivering web services, and I'm pointing out that Apple has in the past 'made and ate it's own dogfood' to get market advantage.
PCI does seem like the way to go for a super fast boot drive though, which generally doesn't need to be huge capacity.
I still have HDD's in my MP and boot off a PCIe SSD. It doesn't boot up in a blip because the HDD's need to spin up first before the bootloader has decided from which device to boot. So in order to make it boot really fast, you will need to boot from a SSD-only config, without having the storage...to boot.
so your refutation is 'you don't know' but people who also don't know have guessed in the past that apple currently doesn't use their own hw in their own brand new data centers to power their nacent iCloud offerings, therefore you argue it's not possible Apple is designing this sort of hardware for their own internal use for future products?
Were these the same people who felt that Apple would never use a custom developed ARM chip to power an iPhone or iPad?
If you're saying, I'm just guessing, well, yes, I am, (which puts me on the same pedestal for all your 'authoritative sources') but there are multiple uses for a 2TB SSD, and they don't all have to be HW consumer based for company that is now making billiions a year in profits in delivering web services, and I'm pointing out that Apple has in the past 'made and ate it's own dogfood' to get market advantage.
I know, it's just a rumor. But .Mac email uses Oracle; check your email header. Aperture relies on Google Maps, MobileMe file upload, through iDisk web interface, used Flash. And so on...
Yes, a 2TB SSD would be great. And maybe they have a chance at getting rig of HDD's in their data centers and replace them with SSD. Should drop their electricity bill
Is it just me or is the new forums software really screwing up quoting???
I see no problem with a large SSD, I just don't see the wisdom in putting it on a SATA interface in a largish HD format. It would make far more sense from the standpoint of econmics to integrate a flash solution with a hard drive. The thing is why would Apple do this when they can just go out and buy such a solution right now. So I'm of the wait and see mentality on this one.
There is one possibility though, that is Apple needs to stay with SATA because they need the PCI Express ports for something else. I still have this feeling Apple wants to hit a home run with the new Mac Pro and may try to introduce Intels Xeon Phi hardware on the machine. Maybe not the full 300 watt chip but a special product from Intel just for Apple running at maybe 150 watts. There are a couple of other possibilities but I consider them to far out. Xeon Phi would explain the long wait for a refresh. Everybody thinks they will go standard XEON and I frankly don't think that is in the cards.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hmm
The headline made me think of their fusion drives, in which ssds could make up a portion of a ~2TB volume.
If a company is running an hpc cluster on some flavor of Linux running proprietary code, it's doubtful that they were ever a potential mac pro customer. In terms of workstations in general, other oems have seen modest rebounds since the drop around 2008.
I am highly skeptical on this. Apple did rearrange pricing on various options last year, yet for a 512GB ssd, the first one is an $850 upgrade + $1000 for each additional one. I don't think they will jump to 2TB.
Cluster technology is very interesting but even here as performance on the desktop goes up more code moves from clusters to the desktop. Apple has technology available to them that would allow for a massive jump in performance over the current Mac Pro. It really is a matter of just how aggressive they want to be. Just consider the tech that Intel has been public about, 3D memory, Xeon Phi and a GPU overhaul would dramatically transform the Mac Pro.
As to Apples pricing on SSDs, lets face it they are at times very strange. The AIRs for example are very good deals. The new Mac Pros are harder to judge due to the mark up for retina but the base models where not that badly priced at release time. Of course in the Apple tradition the machines have remained at those price levels for a long time. There is light at the end of the tunnel though, as they did change the price structure on a few machines recently. I see that as a sign that Apple is slowly moving away from its old ways of no price flexibility over the life of a product.
Is it just me or is the new forums software really screwing up quoting???
You're referring to the html tags? I don't know where that comes from, but it's an excruciating job to clean up.
I see no problem with a large SSD, I just don't see the wisdom in putting it on a SATA interface in a largish HD format. It would make far more sense from the standpoint of econmics to integrate a flash solution with a hard drive. The thing is why would Apple do this when they can just go out and buy such a solution right now. So I'm of the wait and see mentality on this one.
Me too. I think they might create a separate daughterboard for the RAM sticks, with its own bus/connection. Could be PCI, but they will need to have about 3 o more posts for the user to expand their MP's with video or whatever cards. Pretty much the point of the MP, expandability.
I still have this feeling Apple wants to hit a home run with the new Mac Pro and may try to introduce Intels Xeon Phi hardware on the machine.
Looks like it, actually. Otherwise they would simply bump up the clock speed, and I don't think that is what will wow the potential upgraders. And they like to put custom parts in their machines.
As to Apples pricing on SSDs, lets face it they are at times very strange. The AIRs for example are very good deals. The new Mac Pros are harder to judge due to the mark up for retina but the base models where not that badly priced at release time. Of course in the Apple tradition the machines have remained at those price levels for a long time. There is light at the end of the tunnel though, as they did change the price structure on a few machines recently. I see that as a sign that Apple is slowly moving away from its old ways of no price flexibility over the life of a product.
Hope you're right, and that they will also lower the RAM prices. Would be nice to configure the whole machine on Apple.com instead of hunting down cheaper parts but needing to make certain they will work.
Is it just me or is the new forums software really screwing up quoting???
Hmm. Do you use the BBCode editor or the richer one? If you'll notice in my posts, I always remove the "Quote:", the blank line above the quote, and the line between the user designator and the post content. That's all manual. I've been doing it so long that I don't even notice it anymore, but it tightens up the formatting a great deal.
Wish Huddler would push an update out to change the stock formatting to the above, with quotes pushed right up against the top of the post and less internal space.
Now all they need is a high end 17" MBP with 32gb ram, high end video card, blu ray, and 1tb ssd for power users. I know many audio video pros in LA who are waiting for this.
Now all they need is a high end 17" MBP with 32gb ram, high end video card, blu ray, and 1tb ssd for power users. I know many audio video pros in LA who are waiting for this.
They'll be waiting until the heat death of the universe. These will never happen. They need to educate themselves or no one will care when they go bankrupt.
The 17" MacBook Pro is dead, period. And the iMac already has a video card capable of doing anything sub-workstation that you'd imagine.
I think a lot of you forget that these machines are mostly bought by businesses. A lot of businesses will just approve the requests from whom ever orders their equipment without blinking about the cost of the 2TB SSD. For instance I know a few colleagues who have gotten approval for retina mac book's even though the normal ones will do just as well for what they do.
I think a lot of you forget that these machines are mostly bought by businesses. A lot of businesses will just approve the requests from whom ever orders their equipment without blinking about the cost of the 2TB SSD. For instance I know a few colleagues who have gotten approval for retina mac book's even though the normal ones will do just as well for what they do.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. There's no way of telling what the selling ratio is between business and 'home professionals' but I see the MP only in environments where there isn't an unlimited budget. And don't forget, businesses are keen at saving costs, especially overhead, because that is how a manager will look at the procurement of expensive high end computers. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple hardly sells any 4x512GB SSD for their current config option. Sadly, I guess no one will ever find out if this is the case.
I think a lot of you forget that these machines are mostly bought by businesses. A lot of businesses will just approve the requests from whom ever orders their equipment without blinking about the cost of the 2TB SSD. For instance I know a few colleagues who have gotten approval for retina mac book's even though the normal ones will do just as well for what they do.
This makes the assumption that all of these businesses have truly elastic budgets. The retina macbook pro isn't sold at a drastically different price point. The 13" is a bit higher. The 15" models have always been $1800 and $2200. Even though the rMBP starts at $2200, it bundles a few things that would have been configure to order options in the older one. A higher resolution display, ssd, and 8GB of ram are still configure to order options in the older one, so it's possible that the total cost is similar. The article suggests 2TB SSD drives destined for the mac pro. Right now they charge $850 for a 512 on the first bay. The others are $1000 each, so it would remain quite high, and budgets are not all entirely elastic. It varies. Mac Pros start at $2500 yet there are many configurations especially with the addition of specialized hardware that can exceed $10k. I don't think anyone would buy a 2TB ssd at the likely price points as a boot drive. If anything such a configuration would leverage the portion of users that needed a certain amount of fast temporary storage or scratch space. SSDs have already displaced a lot of the configurations that leveraged multiple internal HDDs + an internal raid on a chip type card for higher performance temporary disk space. Larger SSDs could probably kill off a lot of those internal hardware raid solutions in general, considering a good raid card can add $1000 to that setup. It depends on how much space is required.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
There's simply no way of knowing what Apple uses; I just watch these keynotes* and don't see any Apple hardware. On top of that, there are many articles to be found on what software and hardware Apple uses, although that is merely blog/rumor/analyst kinda stuff.
I guess it could happen. Google is known for building a lot of their own servers. I would laugh if he suggested that they would run OSX server.
I was set up for rich text editing but I switched back to BBCode to see if that is easier. The rich text editor does seem to make doing the simple difficult. For example responding between two paragraphs. What was more frustrating was that the software would often drip parts of what was being quoted or squish everything together.
Hmm. Do you use the BBCode editor or the richer one? If you'll notice in my posts, I always remove the "Quote:", the blank line above the quote, and the line between the user designator and the post content. That's all manual. I've been doing it so long that I don't even notice it anymore, but it tightens up the formatting a great deal.
Now this entry was real easy after reverting to BBCode.
Wish Huddler would push an update out to change the stock formatting to the above, with quotes pushed right up against the top of the post and less internal space.
I wish they would just fix the rich text editor to work the way most users would expect to be able to use it. The editor supports a lot of crap I really don't need and one has to jump through huge hopes to respond to a paragraph in the middle of a quote. It makes you wonder if the software authors even use their own product.
If only that was true in the real world. One of the biggest obstacles to Apple products in the business world is their high cost. In fact some organizations won't even considering them as they opt for the lowest possible price to run Office on. In many ways PC are seen as nothing more than machines to run MS Office and maybe a database of some sort. As such they are purchased at the lowest price possible.
I think a lot of you forget that these machines are mostly bought by businesses. A lot of businesses will just approve the requests from whom ever orders their equipment without blinking about the cost of the 2TB SSD. For instance I know a few colleagues who have gotten approval for retina mac book's even though the normal ones will do just as well for what they do.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by ifij775
High performance computing is either deployed through commodity clusters or gpu clusters. This product has fallen in the void between those and a desktop that isn't very large.
Unless Apple is willing to show the world that they use their own hardware and their own OSX for their servers and data centers, their advertising of Mac Mini "servers" means nothing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Windle
How about we forget about the Mac Pro and make it so that Mac minis can be shared via Thunderbolt for x-san to utilise the available hardware on the "chain".
Cheap, reliable, expandable and AVAILABLE !!
Applications have to be written for cluster support. Redundant hot swap power supplies and hard drives don't require software support.
With the technology coming on line in 2013, Apple could easily make a very interesting professional platform. There is still a significant market between what an iMac can do and the problems associated with paste together computational clusters. I really don't know what Apple is up to Mac Pro wise but the could easily deploy a machine with 24 to 50 i86 type cores and when combined with a state of the art GPU it could effectively compete with small clusters at a much lower cost.
If history is any indicator anytime you can move computation off shared hardware everyone wins.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ifij775
High performance computing is either deployed through commodity clusters or gpu clusters. This product has fallen in the void between those and a desktop that isn't very large.
You can find 256 GB SSDs for About $180 dollars these days. So a 2 TB drive is a possibility at an affordable price. Now $1500 for that drive may not sound affordable to many but many Mac Pro users would jump at such a drive.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
If true, and I think it's has merit, it would appear they are keeping the 3.5" bay which some thought would go away as they move it to all SSD. I guess that's still possible with a PCie SSD card but I think it's highly unlikely as the only option for storage.
I'm not expecting anything radically different; just a smaller case than the current Mac Pro as certain components are shrunk and some removed, like the ODDs. I expect a new "look" but something around that volume and still using 4xHDD bays seems most likely to me.
I don't see how anyone can say that. A 2TB SSD will be extremely expensive over a 2TB HDD which will put it far out of the "affordable" category for most people.
Here is an article from less than 2 weeks ago regarding a 2TB PCIe SSD: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20130128235100_STEC_Introduces_2TB_Solid_State_Drives_New_Version_of_Caching_Software.html
Even if Anobit can help Apple reduce costs this is a professional machine where they will test the HW more throughly and where they will market it accordingly so if it's thousands of dollars for the cheapest one don't expect Apple to undercut that.
Apple really has never competed against the type of enterprise hardware STEC sells. Admittedly Apple sells its hardware a a stiff premium over PC hardware but at each machine release cycle their hardware is pretty agressive if you look at base SSD installations. I'm pretty much convinced that they could introduce a 1TB module for under $1000 if they really wanted to. Remember this is rumored to be a larger drive format so there is lots of space to spread chips economically across the PC board.
The speed is exactly the same!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Exactly. The only differences are a 10x improvement in speed and an inability to power devices through it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ifij775
I don't quite get what the target market is any more for the Mac Pro. I doubt the revenues are even worth mentioning in financial reports. I imagine they keep some guy from Next around updating this product so they don't have to lay him off
developers developers developers, iOS developers, specifically...
time is money.
Apple plans on making the Mac Pro a big winner this time around i heard.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
Given the above and a few other issues i suspect the article is bogus. Or at the very least somebody saw something they didn't understand.
The headline made me think of their fusion drives, in which ssds could make up a portion of a ~2TB volume.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ifij775
High performance computing is either deployed through commodity clusters or gpu clusters. This product has fallen in the void between those and a desktop that isn't very large.
If a company is running an hpc cluster on some flavor of Linux running proprietary code, it's doubtful that they were ever a potential mac pro customer. In terms of workstations in general, other oems have seen modest rebounds since the drop around 2008.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM
It seems like 2TB should be possible in the 3.5" drive size.
OWC's price for 1TB PCIe drive is $1500.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID
Pricey BTO option, maybe.
I am highly skeptical on this. Apple did rearrange pricing on various options last year, yet for a 512GB ssd, the first one is an $850 upgrade + $1000 for each additional one. I don't think they will jump to 2TB.
Originally Posted by wizard69
The speed is exactly the same!
But it can be faster with optical. That tells me it will, particularly since Intel's working on a 50Gb/s version for 2015.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
There's simply no way of knowing what Apple uses; I just watch these keynotes* and don't see any Apple hardware. On top of that, there are many articles to be found on what software and hardware Apple uses, although that is merely blog/rumor/analyst kinda stuff.
* 2011 WWDC Keynote screendump
so your refutation is 'you don't know' but people who also don't know have guessed in the past that apple currently doesn't use their own hw in their own brand new data centers to power their nacent iCloud offerings, therefore you argue it's not possible Apple is designing this sort of hardware for their own internal use for future products?
Were these the same people who felt that Apple would never use a custom developed ARM chip to power an iPhone or iPad?
If you're saying, I'm just guessing, well, yes, I am, (which puts me on the same pedestal for all your 'authoritative sources') but there are multiple uses for a 2TB SSD, and they don't all have to be HW consumer based for company that is now making billiions a year in profits in delivering web services, and I'm pointing out that Apple has in the past 'made and ate it's own dogfood' to get market advantage.
I still have HDD's in my MP and boot off a PCIe SSD. It doesn't boot up in a blip because the HDD's need to spin up first before the bootloader has decided from which device to boot. So in order to make it boot really fast, you will need to boot from a SSD-only config, without having the storage...to boot.
Of course HDD's need software support for hot swap. You know of RAID, right?
Oh they certainly are dogfooding themselves; they replaced Meeting Maker with their own Calendar and Scheduling application. Amongst many other 3rd party software. But supposedly they do use MS Azure and Amazone Web Services:
http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/03/rumor_apples_icloud_powered_by_microsoft_amazon_servers
I know, it's just a rumor. But .Mac email uses Oracle; check your email header. Aperture relies on Google Maps, MobileMe file upload, through iDisk web interface, used Flash. And so on...
Yes, a 2TB SSD would be great. And maybe they have a chance at getting rig of HDD's in their data centers and replace them with SSD. Should drop their electricity bill
Is it just me or is the new forums software really screwing up quoting???
I see no problem with a large SSD, I just don't see the wisdom in putting it on a SATA interface in a largish HD format. It would make far more sense from the standpoint of econmics to integrate a flash solution with a hard drive. The thing is why would Apple do this when they can just go out and buy such a solution right now. So I'm of the wait and see mentality on this one.
There is one possibility though, that is Apple needs to stay with SATA because they need the PCI Express ports for something else. I still have this feeling Apple wants to hit a home run with the new Mac Pro and may try to introduce Intels Xeon Phi hardware on the machine. Maybe not the full 300 watt chip but a special product from Intel just for Apple running at maybe 150 watts. There are a couple of other possibilities but I consider them to far out. Xeon Phi would explain the long wait for a refresh. Everybody thinks they will go standard XEON and I frankly don't think that is in the cards.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hmm
The headline made me think of their fusion drives, in which ssds could make up a portion of a ~2TB volume.
If a company is running an hpc cluster on some flavor of Linux running proprietary code, it's doubtful that they were ever a potential mac pro customer. In terms of workstations in general, other oems have seen modest rebounds since the drop around 2008.
I am highly skeptical on this. Apple did rearrange pricing on various options last year, yet for a 512GB ssd, the first one is an $850 upgrade + $1000 for each additional one. I don't think they will jump to 2TB.
Cluster technology is very interesting but even here as performance on the desktop goes up more code moves from clusters to the desktop. Apple has technology available to them that would allow for a massive jump in performance over the current Mac Pro. It really is a matter of just how aggressive they want to be. Just consider the tech that Intel has been public about, 3D memory, Xeon Phi and a GPU overhaul would dramatically transform the Mac Pro.
As to Apples pricing on SSDs, lets face it they are at times very strange. The AIRs for example are very good deals. The new Mac Pros are harder to judge due to the mark up for retina but the base models where not that badly priced at release time. Of course in the Apple tradition the machines have remained at those price levels for a long time. There is light at the end of the tunnel though, as they did change the price structure on a few machines recently. I see that as a sign that Apple is slowly moving away from its old ways of no price flexibility over the life of a product.
You're referring to the html tags? I don't know where that comes from, but it's an excruciating job to clean up.
Me too. I think they might create a separate daughterboard for the RAM sticks, with its own bus/connection. Could be PCI, but they will need to have about 3 o more posts for the user to expand their MP's with video or whatever cards. Pretty much the point of the MP, expandability.
Looks like it, actually. Otherwise they would simply bump up the clock speed, and I don't think that is what will wow the potential upgraders. And they like to put custom parts in their machines.
Hope you're right, and that they will also lower the RAM prices. Would be nice to configure the whole machine on Apple.com instead of hunting down cheaper parts but needing to make certain they will work.
Originally Posted by wizard69
Is it just me or is the new forums software really screwing up quoting???
Hmm. Do you use the BBCode editor or the richer one? If you'll notice in my posts, I always remove the "Quote:", the blank line above the quote, and the line between the user designator and the post content. That's all manual. I've been doing it so long that I don't even notice it anymore, but it tightens up the formatting a great deal.
Wish Huddler would push an update out to change the stock formatting to the above, with quotes pushed right up against the top of the post and less internal space.
Originally Posted by Trajan Long
Now all they need is a high end 17" MBP with 32gb ram, high end video card, blu ray, and 1tb ssd for power users. I know many audio video pros in LA who are waiting for this.
They'll be waiting until the heat death of the universe. These will never happen. They need to educate themselves or no one will care when they go bankrupt.
The 17" MacBook Pro is dead, period. And the iMac already has a video card capable of doing anything sub-workstation that you'd imagine.
I think a lot of you forget that these machines are mostly bought by businesses. A lot of businesses will just approve the requests from whom ever orders their equipment without blinking about the cost of the 2TB SSD. For instance I know a few colleagues who have gotten approval for retina mac book's even though the normal ones will do just as well for what they do.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. There's no way of telling what the selling ratio is between business and 'home professionals' but I see the MP only in environments where there isn't an unlimited budget. And don't forget, businesses are keen at saving costs, especially overhead, because that is how a manager will look at the procurement of expensive high end computers. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple hardly sells any 4x512GB SSD for their current config option. Sadly, I guess no one will ever find out if this is the case.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AandcMedia
I think a lot of you forget that these machines are mostly bought by businesses. A lot of businesses will just approve the requests from whom ever orders their equipment without blinking about the cost of the 2TB SSD. For instance I know a few colleagues who have gotten approval for retina mac book's even though the normal ones will do just as well for what they do.
This makes the assumption that all of these businesses have truly elastic budgets. The retina macbook pro isn't sold at a drastically different price point. The 13" is a bit higher. The 15" models have always been $1800 and $2200. Even though the rMBP starts at $2200, it bundles a few things that would have been configure to order options in the older one. A higher resolution display, ssd, and 8GB of ram are still configure to order options in the older one, so it's possible that the total cost is similar. The article suggests 2TB SSD drives destined for the mac pro. Right now they charge $850 for a 512 on the first bay. The others are $1000 each, so it would remain quite high, and budgets are not all entirely elastic. It varies. Mac Pros start at $2500 yet there are many configurations especially with the addition of specialized hardware that can exceed $10k. I don't think anyone would buy a 2TB ssd at the likely price points as a boot drive. If anything such a configuration would leverage the portion of users that needed a certain amount of fast temporary storage or scratch space. SSDs have already displaced a lot of the configurations that leveraged multiple internal HDDs + an internal raid on a chip type card for higher performance temporary disk space. Larger SSDs could probably kill off a lot of those internal hardware raid solutions in general, considering a good raid card can add $1000 to that setup. It depends on how much space is required.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
There's simply no way of knowing what Apple uses; I just watch these keynotes* and don't see any Apple hardware. On top of that, there are many articles to be found on what software and hardware Apple uses, although that is merely blog/rumor/analyst kinda stuff.
I guess it could happen. Google is known for building a lot of their own servers. I would laugh if he suggested that they would run OSX server.
Now this entry was real easy after reverting to BBCode.
I wish they would just fix the rich text editor to work the way most users would expect to be able to use it. The editor supports a lot of crap I really don't need and one has to jump through huge hopes to respond to a paragraph in the middle of a quote. It makes you wonder if the software authors even use their own product.