Yes. Of course you could argue that compact fluorescents were invented later or that LED lighting is likely the way of the future, but 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives were not invented in 1954. It's just not that relevant to pick out factoids regarding the predecessors of current technology.
I don't know how Apple can shift the hardware paradigm without alienating some users. I'm not even sure they SHOULD be moving it in this direction, as the user benefit is not immediately apparent to me, but you know Apple...
External storage isn't a big deal, but it IS more expensive. The other issue is much more serious. To someone already heavily invested in PCIe cards -- like $3,000 graphics cards or $10,000 Pro Tools cards -- the change represents a fairly significant hit in both convenience and cost. I'd grumble too.
I don't know how Apple can shift the hardware paradigm without alienating some users. I'm not even sure they SHOULD be moving it in this direction, as the user benefit is not immediately apparent to me, but you know Apple...
External storage isn't a big deal, but it IS more expensive. The other issue is much more serious. To someone already heavily invested in PCIe cards -- like $3,000 graphics cards or $10,000 Pro Tools cards -- the change represents a fairly significant hit in both convenience and cost. I'd grumble too.
Typically if the risks are high, those guys are going to be more conservative when it comes to major hardware changes. That is normal, but they represent a small enough fraction of users that they probably aren't required to determine the viability of the line. This means more of those users could be later adopters without killing the line. I don't expect this to sell in high numbers from day one. I doubt Apple is expecting that.
One thing that people often forget is that these things are going away eventually. Hard drives are legacy technology.
Everything goes away eventually but that's not a useful observation for 2013. Hard drives
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Some would suggest that even if SSD gets cheaper, HDD will get even cheaper but that's not necessarily true.
Except that it has been thus far. Eventually it wont be false. Not in 2013.
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Computer manufacturers can try bundling 2-4TB drives with machines but the vast majority of people have no need for that amount of space (and this is evident from the fact that WD and Seagate sell ~10m external drives per quarter) so gradually they will lose the consumer volume. The point where I think HDDs will collapse completely is $0.10/GB because 2TB for $200 is affordable. Right now, the best price is around $0.60/GB.
1 minute of 1080p video from your iPhone takes around 180MB. Given that everyone has a 1080p video camera on their person nearly 24/7 do you believe that will increase or decrease the amount of video taken by the average person? Plus you can't simply ignore the fact that most PCs will come with a 1TB or two of disk space when you quote only "10m external drives" as evidence that the "vast majority of people have no need for" 2TB worth of storage given many folks have a TB already.
Everything is bigger. Movies, photos, applications, etc.
A 1 TB SSD today cost $600. $0.10/GB for SSDs are still a little ways off.
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There's not much point in designing a machine with 4x 6Gbps SATA bays when a 20Gbps TB port will run the SSD faster and many people will eventually just need 1 external vs a RAID drive.
Mac Pro is the context and eventually isn't the timeframe. The cost benefit analysis is being done for fall of 2013, not fall of 2018. If you need 10TB of space locally for your 4K projects then 4 x 4TB internally fits the bill nicely.
Frankly, Apple should have had dual SSD blade slots as standard anyway and allowed RAID 1.
Everything goes away eventually but that's not a useful observation for 2013.
The implied timeframe was soon and by soon I mean the next 5 years. The $1/GB mark was the tipping point. A 250GB Samsung 840 is $173. The 960GB Crucial M500 is $600. So the pricing is somewhere between $0.63-0.70/GB.
In 2011, it was around $390-500 for 256GB so $1.52-1.95. Fall of ~25%.
In 2012, it broke the $1/GB mark and 256GB went for under $200. Fall of ~40%.
In 2013, it is now $0.63-0.7. Fall of ~30%
So retail SSD prices fell well over 25% year over year. If it continues to drop just 25% year over year then 2014 would see ~$0.53/GB, 2015 ~$0.39/GB, 2016 ~$0.29, 2017 ~$0.22, 2018 ~$0.17, 2019 ~$0.12, 2020 ~$0.09.
7 years and HDDs are gone. It's common for people to suggest Apple should wait until 2020 before doing anything radical but if everyone simply plants themselves in the ground and refuses to move until the market is suitable, the market won't reach that point.
Apart from the flooding in Thailand, it has been dropping in price but as I say, once computer manufacturers ship with SSDs, the HDD manufacturer shipping volumes will drop to under 1/3. They'll have to make that up by increasing prices. Seagate has started making consumer SSDs in the last couple of months so they'll just switch over. WD will have to buy up an SSD company. News just in:
1 minute of 1080p video from your iPhone takes around 180MB. Given that everyone has a 1080p video camera on their person nearly 24/7 do you believe that will increase or decrease the amount of video taken by the average person? Plus you can't simply ignore the fact that most PCs will come with a 1TB or two of disk space when you quote only "10m external drives" as evidence that the "vast majority of people have no need for" 2TB worth of storage given many folks have a TB already.
The average selling price of WD and Seagate drives is $63 per unit so I would say the bulk volumes are lower than 1TB - typical entry points seems to be 320-512GB - but the point there was that if you can buy a 512GB SSD for $150 in 2016, it's not necessarily going to be the case that someone will instead buy a 6TB HDD for $150 just because they have the option. People will instead value the 10x extra performance, lower weight, less noise and improved reliability over the capacity.
It's true that people will store more media at higher quality levels but I don't think people will store vast amounts of hours of footage on their internal drives. Even 256GB would give around 30 hours of footage at consumer bitrates. That gets edited and put on Youtube or Facebook or something and moved to an external or even deleted if it's not that important. I don't think consumers are going to turn into people with high-end media needs in large numbers.
The cost benefit analysis is being done for fall of 2013, not fall of 2018. If you need 10TB of space locally for your 4K projects then 4 x 4TB internally fits the bill nicely.
Not really because 4K would struggle on a normal HDD so you'd be looking at hardware RAID and you'd have your boot drive in some RAID0 config. Plus if you wanted redundancy, you'd lose a significant portion of the data. Then you have the headaches of getting it to work like these guys:
That was even for an external drive. The guy with the Sonnet Thunderbolt adaptor didn't seem to have any trouble though. You're also talking about cost-benefit from the buyer's point of view. Apple has to design machines from a profitability point of view and controlling the internal storage works in their best interest. It may put some people off buying entirely but I doubt it. As history has demonstrated, people tend to prefer working around any inconveniences Apple presents than moving away from the whole eco-system and losing the benefits.
Frankly, Apple should have had dual SSD blade slots as standard anyway and allowed RAID 1.
If they have high enough density SSDs, I don't see much benefit. I reckon they'll be able to offer 1.5TB blades. But proper hardware (not software) RAID drives should be external and the internal drive backed up regularly.
7 years and HDDs are gone. It's common for people to suggest Apple should wait until 2020 before doing anything radical but if everyone simply plants themselves in the ground and refuses to move until the market is suitable, the market won't reach that point.
Apart from the flooding in Thailand, it has been dropping in price but as I say, once computer manufacturers ship with SSDs, the HDD manufacturer shipping volumes will drop to under 1/3. They'll have to make that up by increasing prices. Seagate has started making consumer SSDs in the last couple of months so they'll just switch over. WD will have to buy up an SSD company. News just in:
The average selling price of WD and Seagate drives is $63 per unit so I would say the bulk volumes are lower than 1TB - typical entry points seems to be 320-512GB - but the point there was that if you can buy a 512GB SSD for $150 in 2016, it's not necessarily going to be the case that someone will instead buy a 6TB HDD for $150 just because they have the option. People will instead value the 10x extra performance, lower weight, less noise and improved reliability over the capacity.
They are probably being somewhat aggressive in design due to the length of time the design must last. If sales were healthy we probably would have seen a refresh of the old one with Sandy and the new design after Ivy. I'm still surprised they didn't design it to accommodate more sata express ssds in the future. If it wasn't for the growth in mobile devices, I might expect more hybridized solutions. Current HDDs use ram caches. There is little reason you couldn't have a hardware version of Apple's fusion drive. I think Seagate currently has such a thing. Neither company seems to be doing that poorly. If we still had a huge array of HDD manufacturers, that would not be the case. I caution you about reliability. They are not always more reliable or a better solution. They are significantly better in mobile form factors, which represent the bulk of the volume. It's just an issue of moving things with a lot of delicate mechanical parts. Don't buy into OWC's nonsense propaganda though.
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Not really because 4K would struggle on a normal HDD so you'd be looking at hardware RAID and you'd have your boot drive in some RAID0 config. Plus if you wanted redundancy, you'd lose a significant portion of the data. Then you have the headaches of getting it to work like these guys:
That actually depends upon the application. Adobe apps always allow you to specify scratch drives, so it didn't need to be your boot drive. A lot of those apps can also use ram for a lot of things that were previously maintained as scratch data.
I don't know how Apple can shift the hardware paradigm without alienating some users. I'm not even sure they SHOULD be moving it in this direction, as the user benefit is not immediately apparent to me, but you know Apple...
It isn't Apples job to build machines for the past, that is what many people don't understand - Apple builds hardware for the future!¡! Just look at the first iPAD and iPhone releases, very innovative but nether model was really here yet as far as delivering in what the device promised. Each of those devices though woke the industry and the consumers up to what is possible. The rapidity with which the iPad has evolve is pretty making really when you put it in context.
As for user benefit, the vast majority of Mac Pro users will never be denied anything other than internal disk expansion. This isn't a bad thing at all really and frankly users coming from other Apple hardware will already have external storage. The smaller machine is inevitable simply due to the physical requirement of high speed digital electronics.
External storage isn't a big deal, but it IS more expensive.
People however are making a big deal out of it which is a shame really because it blinds them to several realities of the Mac ecosystem. One reality it that the vast majority of Macs out there have zero provision for internal disk arrays. Simply from the compatibility standpoint internal storage for a machine that is maybe 2% of sales is a bit silly. Another reality is that the Mac Pro decouples storage array technology from the compute unit technology. This effectively means you aren't paying for bulk storage everytime you do a compute unit update.
The other issue is much more serious. To someone already heavily invested in PCIe cards -- like $3,000 graphics cards or $10,000 Pro Tools cards -- the change represents a fairly significant hit in both convenience and cost. I'd grumble too.
This is a serious issue and frankly is a problem with hardware of all types based on PC standards. $10,000 is actually cheap, imagine a machine that costs $70,000 that is no longer supported because the manufacture refuses to support the old AT card and offers no upgrade path other than to buy a new machine. Grumble all you want but I have to deal with these issue regularly at work. In the end you have to adjust behavior and either buy the new hardware of find an alternative.
The common approach here is to call Apple evil and throw a tantrum but honestly folks this happens again and again in the PC industry. This isn't Apple or any other company being evil, it is the reality that you can't support everything for ever. I still see people whining about the lack of 68k and PPC support in Mac OS/X , which makes about as much sense as whining about a ten year old I/O card.
The only answer one has is to support that I/O card via legacy hardware for as long as you need too. It is what we have to do in industry.
As an aside, a week or so ago I read an article about the nuclear industry looking for programmers of old Digital Equipment computers. The industry expects to support DEC hardware until 2050. Now many of us would see that as just plain stupid but all sorts of issues come into play so even though itis a huge regression they are effectively stuck in the past. It highlights however the fact that if you tie yourself to specific hardware you eventually end up all on your own.
Everything goes away eventually but that's not a useful observation for 2013. Hard drives
When magnetic drives will go away is an open question, however the need for massive storage locally is highly variable and depends on the specifics of the user. For many 1TB of local storage is fine.
Except that it has been thus far. Eventually it wont be false. Not in 2013.
I would argue that the magnetic industry has hit a wall for now. The rate of capacity increase isn't as aggressive as it once was.
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1 minute of 1080p video from your iPhone takes around 180MB. Given that everyone has a 1080p video camera on their person nearly 24/7 do you believe that will increase or decrease the amount of video taken by the average person? Plus you can't simply ignore the fact that most PCs will come with a 1TB or two of disk space when you quote only "10m external drives" as evidence that the "vast majority of people have no need for" 2TB worth of storage given many folks have a TB already.
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The interesting thing here is that as a laptop user I've had several external drives over the life of my 2008 MBP. There is no realistic way to out enough storage into a portable these days so you have to live with external devices.
Everything is bigger. Movies, photos, applications, etc.
Which is the biggest argument against internal storage. For some of use it was almost an annual need to upgrade the external storage. Effectively you will outgrow storage space before you will out grow the computer.
A 1 TB SSD today cost $600. $0.10/GB for SSDs are still a little ways off.
Yep but the price of flash storage is coming down faster than magnetic storage. As an be seen in Apples AIRs SSD are now big enough and affordable enough to allow for a very nice machine that can handle many users needs completely.
Mac Pro is the context and eventually isn't the timeframe. The cost benefit analysis is being done for fall of 2013, not fall of 2018. If you need 10TB of space locally for your 4K projects then 4 x 4TB internally fits the bill nicely.
Not anymore so than an external solution. In fact. The external solution could be better as it can be a tailored solution for the user.
Frankly, Apple should have had dual SSD blade slots as standard anyway and allowed RAID 1.
Well that I can agree with. Have you let Apple know this?
Why does "external storage" have to mean WD drive enclosures all over your desk? As others have said, Flash prices are falling rapidly, hard drives are dying, the companies that make them know so, that is why they are consolidating.
Soon "external storage" will mean thumb drive sized sticks, plugged in to the Thunderbolt ports on the back. Visually small, Thunderbolt speed, and higher capacity every year. Yes, external storage, but not your granddaddy's external storage... And in this world, computer designs with "drive bays" will look rather silly.
There's a Dutch designer who made renderings of a glass cover for he new MP:
Whole bunch more of these renderings at his site, if you like that sort of thing.
Like many others who are drooling over this thing, I am not enough of a power user to need it. But I want it. Oh, how I want it! It would be like having a Formula One car in my office, when all I need for daily transportation is a Ford Focus.
Also, I wonder how many accessory makers are going to jump on this design bandwagon and produce iAccessories for other devices based on this design? For those who need external storage or optical drives, why not house them in a Mac Pro-like enclosure? IMO, it's a brilliant design. Really is.
Doesn't that depend upon how you measure efficiency? In this design you have one round fan cooling everything with apparent high efficiency. No design is perfect, for example magnetic hard disks have round platters which leads to much wasted space. Same thing goes for floppy disks which had round disks in square enclosures.
Back in the day I worked on RF amplifiers that had rather large power tubes that where literally cooled via a wind tunnel like arrangement. The tube was round as was the integrated heat sink, all of this was fitted into a fan assembly to maximize cooling of that tube. It looked just like a miniature wind tunnel.
Now you are expressing concerns about the wisdom of putting rectangular devices in a round enclosure. On the surface it looks like wasted space. But is it really, especially when you think about the old way of putting two high performance GPU cards and a CPU in a box. Think about how the alternatives would be produced. The ATX approach of the sat century would was a huge amount of space. Apple could have put everything on a sijgle mother board with islands of heat sink / cooler stacks.
Admittedly the concepts running through my mind before this machines debut revolved mostly around single board solutions with those heat sink islands. Such designs immediately result in cooling issues unless you carefully arraigned the components and focus a lot of energy on heat management (fans). This design beats anything I've thought about by a signiifcant margin. Further it does so with out resorting to tricky heat pipe, heat sinks or other ways to conduct heat in a machine physically challenged by limited air flow. Heat management looks to be rather simple in this new Mac Pro.
They way I see it is that Apple choose the internal triangle heat sink to maximize board area inside the round column. Such a design gives them access to three surfaces to cool the three chips they where most worried about. More so the layered approach of the rest of the components tends to make good use of the remaining physical space. Notice how the SSD is placed in the middle of the underlying board.
Well, one reason "why not" is that putting rectangular devices in a cylindrical enclosure is not a particularly efficient use of space.
Well as you can seei don't directly agree with you here. It is one of these things where I could respond wither with a yes or a no. Right now I lean towards a no and have to ask you how would you have put this mich capacity into an alternative enclosure. The key to this design is the integrated cooling heat sink which in my mind probably leads to a significant efficiency of space over many alternative approaches.
The big problem with this machine is that few have had hands on with it nor has it really been taken apart by anybody. The little that I've seen of it in pictures leaves me with a very positive impression of the machine.
Tim said something along the lines of "the next ten years" if I recall correctly.
It wouldn't surprise me. First the market it covers isn't one that cares about shape in most circumstances. Some probably would have liked "rack-friendly", but I don't know percentages. This is likely one of those things that will be far better fleshed out in revision 2. I'm a little surprised they didn't leave space for a small array of internal sata express storage. Wizard actually touched on that idea a number of months ago as an array of pci based ssds, and there is an established spec for it.
Doesn't that depend upon how you measure efficiency? In this design you have one round fan cooling everything with apparent high efficiency.
Oh I agree that the Mac is ingenious in that respect. I was responding to the suggestion that aftermarket accessories may take on that form. An external hard drive, card cage or I/O device wouldn't really benefit from a cylindrical shape but would occupy more space than a rectangular enclosure.
I really wasn't thinking about anything more than that, but your line of thinking is opening my mind a bit. You're right that there may be room to apply a little imagination to generally accepted designs. Perhaps a drive array would benefit from a central power supply in a cooling tunnel with the drives around the outside...
Doesn't that depend upon how you measure efficiency? In this design you have one round fan cooling everything with apparent high efficiency. No design is perfect, for example magnetic hard disks have round platters which leads to much wasted space. Same thing goes for floppy disks which had round disks in square enclosures.
Back in the day I worked on RF amplifiers that had rather large power tubes that where literally cooled via a wind tunnel like arrangement. The tube was round as was the integrated heat sink, all of this was fitted into a fan assembly to maximize cooling of that tube. It looked just like a miniature wind tunnel.
Now you are expressing concerns about the wisdom of putting rectangular devices in a round enclosure. On the surface it looks like wasted space. But is it really, especially when you think about the old way of putting two high performance GPU cards and a CPU in a box. Think about how the alternatives would be produced. The ATX approach of the sat century would was a huge amount of space. Apple could have put everything on a sijgle mother board with islands of heat sink / cooler stacks.
Admittedly the concepts running through my mind before this machines debut revolved mostly around single board solutions with those heat sink islands. Such designs immediately result in cooling issues unless you carefully arraigned the components and focus a lot of energy on heat management (fans). This design beats anything I've thought about by a signiifcant margin. Further it does so with out resorting to tricky heat pipe, heat sinks or other ways to conduct heat in a machine physically challenged by limited air flow. Heat management looks to be rather simple in this new Mac Pro.
They way I see it is that Apple choose the internal triangle heat sink to maximize board area inside the round column. Such a design gives them access to three surfaces to cool the three chips they where most worried about. More so the layered approach of the rest of the components tends to make good use of the remaining physical space. Notice how the SSD is placed in the middle of the underlying board.
Well as you can seei don't directly agree with you here. It is one of these things where I could respond wither with a yes or a no. Right now I lean towards a no and have to ask you how would you have put this mich capacity into an alternative enclosure. The key to this design is the integrated cooling heat sink which in my mind probably leads to a significant efficiency of space over many alternative approaches.
The big problem with this machine is that few have had hands on with it nor has it really been taken apart by anybody. The little that I've seen of it in pictures leaves me with a very positive impression of the machine.
The only drawbacks that some are having is the lack of internal HDDs and PCI card slots. For those that actually want additional HDDs, they have to use an external USB, Thunderbolt (which can turn into Firewire) which can be anywhere from a small pocket drive to a large RAID array, so while Apple loses the space, additional cooling and power supply, cages, etc. to have internal HDD, they have to use external. Same thing applies with the PCI cards.
I think Apple probably guessitmated how many people actually need PCI slots and figured that it's a percentage of the MacPro users and that since there are probably about 5 or so third party external PCI enclosure MFGs, that it's probably better to do PCI slots and HDD externally for those that actually use it.
I know that a LOT of users that buy MacPros are using them for Pro Tools HD systems, but since Avid came out with the Native version, it's becoming less of an issue to use PCI slots since the processors are capable of doing what MOST people would normally use a VERY expensive PCI card. With the video production people, BlackMagic is putting out an external Thunderbolt capture box instead of using PCI capture cards. Now, RED has a PCI slot that is normally inserted in a MacPro, but either RED is going to come out with a Thunderbolt solution AND/OR the user will just simply get an external PCI enclosure and just use that when needed.
I'm just wondering what and when Thunderbolt 2 based products will be emerging and what's in store for the new Thunderbolt spec.
Other than that, I think Apple did some cool design work in the cylinder, it's just a big paradigm shift. But the thing is tiny. Have you seen some of these PC mfg workstations that have optional water cooling systems and about 12 huge fans? It's getting ridiculous and a lot of people don't want a box that's the size of a small refrigerator that makes a lot of noise.
Oh I agree that the Mac is ingenious in that respect. I was responding to the suggestion that aftermarket accessories may take on that form. An external hard drive, card cage or I/O device wouldn't really benefit from a cylindrical shape but would occupy more space than a rectangular enclosure.
I actually grasped that after retreading your post just after posting mine. If I had the resources I'd design a card cage / drive array enclosure that would be a base for the Mac Pro. The idea being to make it look like a mini CRAY. The old Crays where a bit iconic back in the day.
I really wasn't thinking about anything more than that, but your line of thinking is opening my mind a bit. You're right that there may be room to apply a little imagination to generally accepted designs. Perhaps a drive array would benefit from a central power supply in a cooling tunnel with the drives around the outside...
Actually drive arrays, especially in their rack form, put a lot of thermal stress on disk drives. At least in the poorer designs they do. Often there is little space for air flow around the drives as they are packed fairly tight into the enclosure. This often results in large fans trying to force a heavy air flow through the chassis.
A desktop array of the other hand can be far more flexible in its design and thermal solution. With respect to Apples new machine and its thermal core it would be easy to refactor that chassis into a disk array that provides far more cooling than many rack arrays while being very quiet when used on a desktop. While I don't know the exact dimensions of the chassis it looks like you could get five disk drives in there along with a controller board. If not five conventional 3.5" drives an array of laptop sized drives would do. The interesting thing here is that some server chassis have switched over to laptop sized drives to manage thermals better. The potential negative here is that the wiring harnesses would be ugly.
The only drawbacks that some are having is the lack of internal HDDs and PCI card slots.
Honestly I would have preferred a design that offered up a card slot or two. Some I/O will never move to Thunderbolt simply because of bandwidth or the lack of a large market for the I/O card. Given that though I see much potential for this design.
As for the HDDs, I'm of mixed feelings on this one. One of the reasons I've np been promoting the XMac idea for years was to allow for that very option of additional disk drives inside the chassis. I was not even considering disk arrays but rather the option of a drive bay or two for bulk storage. My opinion is still mixed but years of running a laptop with an external drive in tow has changed my mind a bit. With the new high speed I/O options, external disk drives are not the terror that they once where. Still with this Mac Pro design I do hope that they allow for the option of another internal SSD. Frankly not so much for bulk storage but as a scratch "disk".
For those that actually want additional HDDs, they have to use an external USB, Thunderbolt (which can turn into Firewire) which can be anywhere from a small pocket drive to a large RAID array, so while Apple loses the space, additional cooling and power supply, cages, etc. to have internal HDD, they have to use external. Same thing applies with the PCI cards.
There is one good point, well maybe two here, with respect to having to go external. One is that the array you buy can be tailored to your usage. The second is that you don't have to buy it again and again each time you upgrade the CPU. Or vis versa you can upgrade or add to your array storage with out having to upgrade your CPU chassis. I really don't see the external storage issues as the big bugaboo that many make it out to be.
Support of PCI Express cards though is an entirely different discussion. This does bother me as the only rational argument for them is that Thunderbolt simply can't support some of the more demanding I/O needs.
I think Apple probably guessitmated how many people actually need PCI slots and figured that it's a percentage of the MacPro users and that since there are probably about 5 or so third party external PCI enclosure MFGs, that it's probably better to do PCI slots and HDD externally for those that actually use it.
I'm certain this is part of it though I'm not sure external chassis will solve anything for the majority of the people needing internal slots. The interesting case here though is that Apple solved the the majority of the reasons for multiple slots by providing two compute capable GPUs. These will have the high speed bus's for communications and can in many cases replace DSP cards and similar products.
I know that a LOT of users that buy MacPros are using them for Pro Tools HD systems, but since Avid came out with the Native version, it's becoming less of an issue to use PCI slots since the processors are capable of doing what MOST people would normally use a VERY expensive PCI card.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that Avid is already fine tuning some OpenCL code to leverage this hardware. For Avid and most other developers, the nice thing about this machine is that it removes ambiguity about what is in the machine computation wise. In other words they will be able to write software knowing that they have a certain level of performance available to them.
With the video production people, BlackMagic is putting out an external Thunderbolt capture box instead of using PCI capture cards. Now, RED has a PCI slot that is normally inserted in a MacPro, but either RED is going to come out with a Thunderbolt solution AND/OR the user will just simply get an external PCI enclosure and just use that when needed.
There is an assumption here that an external box would be fast enough. I'm not sure that is the case in every situation.
I'm just wondering what and when Thunderbolt 2 based products will be emerging and what's in store for the new Thunderbolt spec.
It could be well into next year.
Other than that, I think Apple did some cool design work in the cylinder, it's just a big paradigm shift. But the thing is tiny. Have you seen some of these PC mfg workstations that have optional water cooling systems and about 12 huge fans? It's getting ridiculous and a lot of people don't want a box that's the size of a small refrigerator that makes a lot of noise.
It will be interesting to hear this machine under heavy load.
As to those PC manufactures, I have nothing against building boxes for high performance. The problem is these are not high volume designs. What is neat about this new Mac Pro is the amount of power picked into that small space. That and the potential for the next process shrink.
The idea being to make it look like a mini CRAY. The old Crays where a bit iconic back in the day.
I was so close to having a Cray X-MP, the bank I work for bought one back in the mid 80's, when it went offline they stored it in the basement with the rest of the relics where it sat for 18 years. The IT manager said I could have it if I could get it out of there. The problem was it was so huge and weighed a ton, at the time I lived in a small apartment. Reluctantly I passed and it was finally scrapped . Now that I have a house I kick myself for not renting out a storage unit, it would fit perfectly in my family room. I would have course gutted it and converted the innards to storage space as using it as a computer would have cost me a fortune in power bills, why bother anyway when my TV is probably more powerful. Like you said that iconic look was just so cool, I mean who wouldn't want to sit on a Cray computer while watching Futurama with the family.
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Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
Lol. I think you'd have a more difficult time finding out who invented the lightbulb.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightbulb
Yes. Of course you could argue that compact fluorescents were invented later or that LED lighting is likely the way of the future, but 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives were not invented in 1954. It's just not that relevant to pick out factoids regarding the predecessors of current technology.
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Originally Posted by Bergermeister
I wasn't talking just about looks.
Gotcha.
I don't know how Apple can shift the hardware paradigm without alienating some users. I'm not even sure they SHOULD be moving it in this direction, as the user benefit is not immediately apparent to me, but you know Apple...
External storage isn't a big deal, but it IS more expensive. The other issue is much more serious. To someone already heavily invested in PCIe cards -- like $3,000 graphics cards or $10,000 Pro Tools cards -- the change represents a fairly significant hit in both convenience and cost. I'd grumble too.
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Originally Posted by v5v
Gotcha.
I don't know how Apple can shift the hardware paradigm without alienating some users. I'm not even sure they SHOULD be moving it in this direction, as the user benefit is not immediately apparent to me, but you know Apple...
External storage isn't a big deal, but it IS more expensive. The other issue is much more serious. To someone already heavily invested in PCIe cards -- like $3,000 graphics cards or $10,000 Pro Tools cards -- the change represents a fairly significant hit in both convenience and cost. I'd grumble too.
Typically if the risks are high, those guys are going to be more conservative when it comes to major hardware changes. That is normal, but they represent a small enough fraction of users that they probably aren't required to determine the viability of the line. This means more of those users could be later adopters without killing the line. I don't expect this to sell in high numbers from day one. I doubt Apple is expecting that.
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Originally Posted by Marvin
One thing that people often forget is that these things are going away eventually. Hard drives are legacy technology.
Everything goes away eventually but that's not a useful observation for 2013. Hard drives
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Some would suggest that even if SSD gets cheaper, HDD will get even cheaper but that's not necessarily true.
Except that it has been thus far. Eventually it wont be false. Not in 2013.
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Computer manufacturers can try bundling 2-4TB drives with machines but the vast majority of people have no need for that amount of space (and this is evident from the fact that WD and Seagate sell ~10m external drives per quarter) so gradually they will lose the consumer volume. The point where I think HDDs will collapse completely is $0.10/GB because 2TB for $200 is affordable. Right now, the best price is around $0.60/GB.
1 minute of 1080p video from your iPhone takes around 180MB. Given that everyone has a 1080p video camera on their person nearly 24/7 do you believe that will increase or decrease the amount of video taken by the average person? Plus you can't simply ignore the fact that most PCs will come with a 1TB or two of disk space when you quote only "10m external drives" as evidence that the "vast majority of people have no need for" 2TB worth of storage given many folks have a TB already.
Everything is bigger. Movies, photos, applications, etc.
A 1 TB SSD today cost $600. $0.10/GB for SSDs are still a little ways off.
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There's not much point in designing a machine with 4x 6Gbps SATA bays when a 20Gbps TB port will run the SSD faster and many people will eventually just need 1 external vs a RAID drive.
Mac Pro is the context and eventually isn't the timeframe. The cost benefit analysis is being done for fall of 2013, not fall of 2018. If you need 10TB of space locally for your 4K projects then 4 x 4TB internally fits the bill nicely.
Frankly, Apple should have had dual SSD blade slots as standard anyway and allowed RAID 1.
The implied timeframe was soon and by soon I mean the next 5 years. The $1/GB mark was the tipping point. A 250GB Samsung 840 is $173. The 960GB Crucial M500 is $600. So the pricing is somewhere between $0.63-0.70/GB.
3 years ago, Crucial had a 256GB for $660:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/07/07/crucial-realssd-c300-256gb-ssd-review/1
Samsung had a 256GB for $550:
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Samsung-470-Series-256GB-SSD-Review/
So that's around $2.15-2.58/GB.
In 2011, it was around $390-500 for 256GB so $1.52-1.95. Fall of ~25%.
In 2012, it broke the $1/GB mark and 256GB went for under $200. Fall of ~40%.
In 2013, it is now $0.63-0.7. Fall of ~30%
So retail SSD prices fell well over 25% year over year. If it continues to drop just 25% year over year then 2014 would see ~$0.53/GB, 2015 ~$0.39/GB, 2016 ~$0.29, 2017 ~$0.22, 2018 ~$0.17, 2019 ~$0.12, 2020 ~$0.09.
7 years and HDDs are gone. It's common for people to suggest Apple should wait until 2020 before doing anything radical but if everyone simply plants themselves in the ground and refuses to move until the market is suitable, the market won't reach that point.
Apart from the flooding in Thailand, it has been dropping in price but as I say, once computer manufacturers ship with SSDs, the HDD manufacturer shipping volumes will drop to under 1/3. They'll have to make that up by increasing prices. Seagate has started making consumer SSDs in the last couple of months so they'll just switch over. WD will have to buy up an SSD company. News just in:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/24/western-digital-stec-ssd/
The average selling price of WD and Seagate drives is $63 per unit so I would say the bulk volumes are lower than 1TB - typical entry points seems to be 320-512GB - but the point there was that if you can buy a 512GB SSD for $150 in 2016, it's not necessarily going to be the case that someone will instead buy a 6TB HDD for $150 just because they have the option. People will instead value the 10x extra performance, lower weight, less noise and improved reliability over the capacity.
It's true that people will store more media at higher quality levels but I don't think people will store vast amounts of hours of footage on their internal drives. Even 256GB would give around 30 hours of footage at consumer bitrates. That gets edited and put on Youtube or Facebook or something and moved to an external or even deleted if it's not that important. I don't think consumers are going to turn into people with high-end media needs in large numbers.
Not really because 4K would struggle on a normal HDD so you'd be looking at hardware RAID and you'd have your boot drive in some RAID0 config. Plus if you wanted redundancy, you'd lose a significant portion of the data. Then you have the headaches of getting it to work like these guys:
http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/292/1801
That was even for an external drive. The guy with the Sonnet Thunderbolt adaptor didn't seem to have any trouble though. You're also talking about cost-benefit from the buyer's point of view. Apple has to design machines from a profitability point of view and controlling the internal storage works in their best interest. It may put some people off buying entirely but I doubt it. As history has demonstrated, people tend to prefer working around any inconveniences Apple presents than moving away from the whole eco-system and losing the benefits.
If they have high enough density SSDs, I don't see much benefit. I reckon they'll be able to offer 1.5TB blades. But proper hardware (not software) RAID drives should be external and the internal drive backed up regularly.
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Originally Posted by Marvin
7 years and HDDs are gone. It's common for people to suggest Apple should wait until 2020 before doing anything radical but if everyone simply plants themselves in the ground and refuses to move until the market is suitable, the market won't reach that point.
Apart from the flooding in Thailand, it has been dropping in price but as I say, once computer manufacturers ship with SSDs, the HDD manufacturer shipping volumes will drop to under 1/3. They'll have to make that up by increasing prices. Seagate has started making consumer SSDs in the last couple of months so they'll just switch over. WD will have to buy up an SSD company. News just in:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/24/western-digital-stec-ssd/
The average selling price of WD and Seagate drives is $63 per unit so I would say the bulk volumes are lower than 1TB - typical entry points seems to be 320-512GB - but the point there was that if you can buy a 512GB SSD for $150 in 2016, it's not necessarily going to be the case that someone will instead buy a 6TB HDD for $150 just because they have the option. People will instead value the 10x extra performance, lower weight, less noise and improved reliability over the capacity.
They are probably being somewhat aggressive in design due to the length of time the design must last. If sales were healthy we probably would have seen a refresh of the old one with Sandy and the new design after Ivy. I'm still surprised they didn't design it to accommodate more sata express ssds in the future. If it wasn't for the growth in mobile devices, I might expect more hybridized solutions. Current HDDs use ram caches. There is little reason you couldn't have a hardware version of Apple's fusion drive. I think Seagate currently has such a thing. Neither company seems to be doing that poorly. If we still had a huge array of HDD manufacturers, that would not be the case. I caution you about reliability. They are not always more reliable or a better solution. They are significantly better in mobile form factors, which represent the bulk of the volume. It's just an issue of moving things with a lot of delicate mechanical parts. Don't buy into OWC's nonsense propaganda though.
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Not really because 4K would struggle on a normal HDD so you'd be looking at hardware RAID and you'd have your boot drive in some RAID0 config. Plus if you wanted redundancy, you'd lose a significant portion of the data. Then you have the headaches of getting it to work like these guys:
That actually depends upon the application. Adobe apps always allow you to specify scratch drives, so it didn't need to be your boot drive. A lot of those apps can also use ram for a lot of things that were previously maintained as scratch data.
As for user benefit, the vast majority of Mac Pro users will never be denied anything other than internal disk expansion. This isn't a bad thing at all really and frankly users coming from other Apple hardware will already have external storage. The smaller machine is inevitable simply due to the physical requirement of high speed digital electronics. People however are making a big deal out of it which is a shame really because it blinds them to several realities of the Mac ecosystem. One reality it that the vast majority of Macs out there have zero provision for internal disk arrays. Simply from the compatibility standpoint internal storage for a machine that is maybe 2% of sales is a bit silly. Another reality is that the Mac Pro decouples storage array technology from the compute unit technology. This effectively means you aren't paying for bulk storage everytime you do a compute unit update.
This is a serious issue and frankly is a problem with hardware of all types based on PC standards. $10,000 is actually cheap, imagine a machine that costs $70,000 that is no longer supported because the manufacture refuses to support the old AT card and offers no upgrade path other than to buy a new machine. Grumble all you want but I have to deal with these issue regularly at work. In the end you have to adjust behavior and either buy the new hardware of find an alternative.
The common approach here is to call Apple evil and throw a tantrum but honestly folks this happens again and again in the PC industry. This isn't Apple or any other company being evil, it is the reality that you can't support everything for ever. I still see people whining about the lack of 68k and PPC support in Mac OS/X , which makes about as much sense as whining about a ten year old I/O card.
The only answer one has is to support that I/O card via legacy hardware for as long as you need too. It is what we have to do in industry.
As an aside, a week or so ago I read an article about the nuclear industry looking for programmers of old Digital Equipment computers. The industry expects to support DEC hardware until 2050. Now many of us would see that as just plain stupid but all sorts of issues come into play so even though itis a huge regression they are effectively stuck in the past. It highlights however the fact that if you tie yourself to specific hardware you eventually end up all on your own.
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1 minute of 1080p video from your iPhone takes around 180MB. Given that everyone has a 1080p video camera on their person nearly 24/7 do you believe that will increase or decrease the amount of video taken by the average person? Plus you can't simply ignore the fact that most PCs will come with a 1TB or two of disk space when you quote only "10m external drives" as evidence that the "vast majority of people have no need for" 2TB worth of storage given many folks have a TB already.
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The interesting thing here is that as a laptop user I've had several external drives over the life of my 2008 MBP. There is no realistic way to out enough storage into a portable these days so you have to live with external devices. Which is the biggest argument against internal storage. For some of use it was almost an annual need to upgrade the external storage. Effectively you will outgrow storage space before you will out grow the computer. Yep but the price of flash storage is coming down faster than magnetic storage. As an be seen in Apples AIRs SSD are now big enough and affordable enough to allow for a very nice machine that can handle many users needs completely. Not anymore so than an external solution. In fact. The external solution could be better as it can be a tailored solution for the user. Well that I can agree with. Have you let Apple know this?
[IMG ALT=""]http://forums.appleinsider.com/content/type/61/id/27892/width/500/height/1000[/IMG]
Whole bunch more of these renderings at his site, if you like that sort of thing.
Why does "external storage" have to mean WD drive enclosures all over your desk? As others have said, Flash prices are falling rapidly, hard drives are dying, the companies that make them know so, that is why they are consolidating.
Soon "external storage" will mean thumb drive sized sticks, plugged in to the Thunderbolt ports on the back. Visually small, Thunderbolt speed, and higher capacity every year. Yes, external storage, but not your granddaddy's external storage... And in this world, computer designs with "drive bays" will look rather silly.
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Originally Posted by hmm
They are probably being somewhat aggressive in design due to the length of time the design must last.
Tim said something along the lines of "the next ten years" if I recall correctly.
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Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
There's a Dutch designer who made renderings of a glass cover for he new MP:
Whole bunch more of these renderings at his site, if you like that sort of thing.
Like many others who are drooling over this thing, I am not enough of a power user to need it. But I want it. Oh, how I want it! It would be like having a Formula One car in my office, when all I need for daily transportation is a Ford Focus.
Also, I wonder how many accessory makers are going to jump on this design bandwagon and produce iAccessories for other devices based on this design? For those who need external storage or optical drives, why not house them in a Mac Pro-like enclosure? IMO, it's a brilliant design. Really is.
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Originally Posted by Jag_Warrior
[...] For those who need external storage or optical drives, why not house them in a Mac Pro-like enclosure?
Well, one reason "why not" is that putting rectangular devices in a cylindrical enclosure is not a particularly efficient use of space.
Back in the day I worked on RF amplifiers that had rather large power tubes that where literally cooled via a wind tunnel like arrangement. The tube was round as was the integrated heat sink, all of this was fitted into a fan assembly to maximize cooling of that tube. It looked just like a miniature wind tunnel.
Now you are expressing concerns about the wisdom of putting rectangular devices in a round enclosure. On the surface it looks like wasted space. But is it really, especially when you think about the old way of putting two high performance GPU cards and a CPU in a box. Think about how the alternatives would be produced. The ATX approach of the sat century would was a huge amount of space. Apple could have put everything on a sijgle mother board with islands of heat sink / cooler stacks.
Admittedly the concepts running through my mind before this machines debut revolved mostly around single board solutions with those heat sink islands. Such designs immediately result in cooling issues unless you carefully arraigned the components and focus a lot of energy on heat management (fans). This design beats anything I've thought about by a signiifcant margin. Further it does so with out resorting to tricky heat pipe, heat sinks or other ways to conduct heat in a machine physically challenged by limited air flow. Heat management looks to be rather simple in this new Mac Pro.
They way I see it is that Apple choose the internal triangle heat sink to maximize board area inside the round column. Such a design gives them access to three surfaces to cool the three chips they where most worried about. More so the layered approach of the rest of the components tends to make good use of the remaining physical space. Notice how the SSD is placed in the middle of the underlying board.
Well as you can seei don't directly agree with you here. It is one of these things where I could respond wither with a yes or a no. Right now I lean towards a no and have to ask you how would you have put this mich capacity into an alternative enclosure. The key to this design is the integrated cooling heat sink which in my mind probably leads to a significant efficiency of space over many alternative approaches.
The big problem with this machine is that few have had hands on with it nor has it really been taken apart by anybody. The little that I've seen of it in pictures leaves me with a very positive impression of the machine.
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Originally Posted by Bergermeister
Tim said something along the lines of "the next ten years" if I recall correctly.
It wouldn't surprise me. First the market it covers isn't one that cares about shape in most circumstances. Some probably would have liked "rack-friendly", but I don't know percentages. This is likely one of those things that will be far better fleshed out in revision 2. I'm a little surprised they didn't leave space for a small array of internal sata express storage. Wizard actually touched on that idea a number of months ago as an array of pci based ssds, and there is an established spec for it.
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Originally Posted by wizard69
Doesn't that depend upon how you measure efficiency? In this design you have one round fan cooling everything with apparent high efficiency.
Oh I agree that the Mac is ingenious in that respect. I was responding to the suggestion that aftermarket accessories may take on that form. An external hard drive, card cage or I/O device wouldn't really benefit from a cylindrical shape but would occupy more space than a rectangular enclosure.
I really wasn't thinking about anything more than that, but your line of thinking is opening my mind a bit. You're right that there may be room to apply a little imagination to generally accepted designs. Perhaps a drive array would benefit from a central power supply in a cooling tunnel with the drives around the outside...
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Originally Posted by wizard69
Doesn't that depend upon how you measure efficiency? In this design you have one round fan cooling everything with apparent high efficiency. No design is perfect, for example magnetic hard disks have round platters which leads to much wasted space. Same thing goes for floppy disks which had round disks in square enclosures.
Back in the day I worked on RF amplifiers that had rather large power tubes that where literally cooled via a wind tunnel like arrangement. The tube was round as was the integrated heat sink, all of this was fitted into a fan assembly to maximize cooling of that tube. It looked just like a miniature wind tunnel.
Now you are expressing concerns about the wisdom of putting rectangular devices in a round enclosure. On the surface it looks like wasted space. But is it really, especially when you think about the old way of putting two high performance GPU cards and a CPU in a box. Think about how the alternatives would be produced. The ATX approach of the sat century would was a huge amount of space. Apple could have put everything on a sijgle mother board with islands of heat sink / cooler stacks.
Admittedly the concepts running through my mind before this machines debut revolved mostly around single board solutions with those heat sink islands. Such designs immediately result in cooling issues unless you carefully arraigned the components and focus a lot of energy on heat management (fans). This design beats anything I've thought about by a signiifcant margin. Further it does so with out resorting to tricky heat pipe, heat sinks or other ways to conduct heat in a machine physically challenged by limited air flow. Heat management looks to be rather simple in this new Mac Pro.
They way I see it is that Apple choose the internal triangle heat sink to maximize board area inside the round column. Such a design gives them access to three surfaces to cool the three chips they where most worried about. More so the layered approach of the rest of the components tends to make good use of the remaining physical space. Notice how the SSD is placed in the middle of the underlying board.
Well as you can seei don't directly agree with you here. It is one of these things where I could respond wither with a yes or a no. Right now I lean towards a no and have to ask you how would you have put this mich capacity into an alternative enclosure. The key to this design is the integrated cooling heat sink which in my mind probably leads to a significant efficiency of space over many alternative approaches.
The big problem with this machine is that few have had hands on with it nor has it really been taken apart by anybody. The little that I've seen of it in pictures leaves me with a very positive impression of the machine.
The only drawbacks that some are having is the lack of internal HDDs and PCI card slots. For those that actually want additional HDDs, they have to use an external USB, Thunderbolt (which can turn into Firewire) which can be anywhere from a small pocket drive to a large RAID array, so while Apple loses the space, additional cooling and power supply, cages, etc. to have internal HDD, they have to use external. Same thing applies with the PCI cards.
I think Apple probably guessitmated how many people actually need PCI slots and figured that it's a percentage of the MacPro users and that since there are probably about 5 or so third party external PCI enclosure MFGs, that it's probably better to do PCI slots and HDD externally for those that actually use it.
I know that a LOT of users that buy MacPros are using them for Pro Tools HD systems, but since Avid came out with the Native version, it's becoming less of an issue to use PCI slots since the processors are capable of doing what MOST people would normally use a VERY expensive PCI card. With the video production people, BlackMagic is putting out an external Thunderbolt capture box instead of using PCI capture cards. Now, RED has a PCI slot that is normally inserted in a MacPro, but either RED is going to come out with a Thunderbolt solution AND/OR the user will just simply get an external PCI enclosure and just use that when needed.
I'm just wondering what and when Thunderbolt 2 based products will be emerging and what's in store for the new Thunderbolt spec.
Other than that, I think Apple did some cool design work in the cylinder, it's just a big paradigm shift. But the thing is tiny. Have you seen some of these PC mfg workstations that have optional water cooling systems and about 12 huge fans? It's getting ridiculous and a lot of people don't want a box that's the size of a small refrigerator that makes a lot of noise.
A desktop array of the other hand can be far more flexible in its design and thermal solution. With respect to Apples new machine and its thermal core it would be easy to refactor that chassis into a disk array that provides far more cooling than many rack arrays while being very quiet when used on a desktop. While I don't know the exact dimensions of the chassis it looks like you could get five disk drives in there along with a controller board. If not five conventional 3.5" drives an array of laptop sized drives would do. The interesting thing here is that some server chassis have switched over to laptop sized drives to manage thermals better. The potential negative here is that the wiring harnesses would be ugly.
As for the HDDs, I'm of mixed feelings on this one. One of the reasons I've np been promoting the XMac idea for years was to allow for that very option of additional disk drives inside the chassis. I was not even considering disk arrays but rather the option of a drive bay or two for bulk storage. My opinion is still mixed but years of running a laptop with an external drive in tow has changed my mind a bit. With the new high speed I/O options, external disk drives are not the terror that they once where. Still with this Mac Pro design I do hope that they allow for the option of another internal SSD. Frankly not so much for bulk storage but as a scratch "disk". There is one good point, well maybe two here, with respect to having to go external. One is that the array you buy can be tailored to your usage. The second is that you don't have to buy it again and again each time you upgrade the CPU. Or vis versa you can upgrade or add to your array storage with out having to upgrade your CPU chassis. I really don't see the external storage issues as the big bugaboo that many make it out to be.
Support of PCI Express cards though is an entirely different discussion. This does bother me as the only rational argument for them is that Thunderbolt simply can't support some of the more demanding I/O needs. I'm certain this is part of it though I'm not sure external chassis will solve anything for the majority of the people needing internal slots. The interesting case here though is that Apple solved the the majority of the reasons for multiple slots by providing two compute capable GPUs. These will have the high speed bus's for communications and can in many cases replace DSP cards and similar products. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Avid is already fine tuning some OpenCL code to leverage this hardware. For Avid and most other developers, the nice thing about this machine is that it removes ambiguity about what is in the machine computation wise. In other words they will be able to write software knowing that they have a certain level of performance available to them. There is an assumption here that an external box would be fast enough. I'm not sure that is the case in every situation. It could be well into next year. It will be interesting to hear this machine under heavy load.
As to those PC manufactures, I have nothing against building boxes for high performance. The problem is these are not high volume designs. What is neat about this new Mac Pro is the amount of power picked into that small space. That and the potential for the next process shrink.
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Originally Posted by wizard69
The idea being to make it look like a mini CRAY. The old Crays where a bit iconic back in the day.
I was so close to having a Cray X-MP, the bank I work for bought one back in the mid 80's, when it went offline they stored it in the basement with the rest of the relics where it sat for 18 years. The IT manager said I could have it if I could get it out of there. The problem was it was so huge and weighed a ton, at the time I lived in a small apartment. Reluctantly I passed and it was finally scrapped