Now that Apple has explained why they just couldn't add any upgraded component into this design due to thermal issues, is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
That swings for GPU, but there are chips (E5-v4) that Apple could be using for the Mac Pro that meet its TDP and would require only fairly standard changes to the socket.
Sure, but that's still a socket change and I can't imagine going through the R&D—comparatively easy and inexpensive as it might be—for a small bump in CPU performance when it's already such a low volume seller and without an upgrade to the GPUs.
I certainly wouldn't have greenly that operation, but I certainly would've tried to work with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to see what they could offer to move this design forward at least one generation without having to start from scratch (which I assume they did, but sales were too low to warrant any real investment from any party). I also wouldn't have allowed this Mac Pro to launch unless I thought that there was a long upgrade path for the case and chassis design (which I assume they also thought was going to be possible as the industry had mostly moved toward lower TDP and power consumption of components). I certainly can't imagine that they didn't have future plans.
PS: Is this Mac Pro now more of a flop than the Cube? I think it might be.
So if new chips would be comparatively easy and inexpensive then you'll admit there's no need for anyone to apologize for anything then?
Now that Apple has explained why they just couldn't add any upgraded component into this design due to thermal issues, is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
That swings for GPU, but there are chips (E5-v4) that Apple could be using for the Mac Pro that meet its TDP and would require only fairly standard changes to the socket.
Sure, but that's still a socket change and I can't imagine going through the R&D—comparatively easy and inexpensive as it might be—for a small bump in CPU performance when it's already such a low volume seller and without an upgrade to the GPUs.
I certainly wouldn't have greenly that operation, but I certainly would've tried to work with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to see what they could offer to move this design forward at least one generation without having to start from scratch (which I assume they did, but sales were too low to warrant any real investment from any party). I also wouldn't have allowed this Mac Pro to launch unless I thought that there was a long upgrade path for the case and chassis design (which I assume they also thought was going to be possible as the industry had mostly moved toward lower TDP and power consumption of components). I certainly can't imagine that they didn't have future plans.
PS: Is this Mac Pro now more of a flop than the Cube? I think it might be.
So if new chips would be comparatively easy and inexpensive then you'll admit there's no need for anyone to apologize for anything then?
I don't understand the question. Objectively, when there's mistakes with resolutions that are "comparatively easy and inexpensive" an apology is more likely in order.
When talking about the Mac Pro, there are many moving parts—most of which we'll likely never know about—that led to their initial design decisions that ended up backing them into a corner years down the road. We don't know what they had planned to do, what vendors had told them was doable, etc.
One thing I commonly see are people confusing responsibility with blame. Do you understand that you can fail at fulfilling a responsibility and not to blame?
Now that Apple has explained why they just couldn't add any upgraded component into this design due to thermal issues, is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
That swings for GPU, but there are chips (E5-v4) that Apple could be using for the Mac Pro that meet its TDP and would require only fairly standard changes to the socket.
Sure, but that's still a socket change and I can't imagine going through the R&D—comparatively easy and inexpensive as it might be—for a small bump in CPU performance when it's already such a low volume seller and without an upgrade to the GPUs.
I certainly wouldn't have greenly that operation, but I certainly would've tried to work with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to see what they could offer to move this design forward at least one generation without having to start from scratch (which I assume they did, but sales were too low to warrant any real investment from any party). I also wouldn't have allowed this Mac Pro to launch unless I thought that there was a long upgrade path for the case and chassis design (which I assume they also thought was going to be possible as the industry had mostly moved toward lower TDP and power consumption of components). I certainly can't imagine that they didn't have future plans.
PS: Is this Mac Pro now more of a flop than the Cube? I think it might be.
So if new chips would be comparatively easy and inexpensive then you'll admit there's no need for anyone to apologize for anything then?
I don't understand the question. Objectively, when there's mistakes with resolutions that are "comparatively easy and inexpensive" an apology is more likely in order.
When talking about the Mac Pro, there are many moving parts—most of which we'll likely never know about—that led to their initial design decisions that ended up backing them into a corner years down the road. We don't know what they had planned to do, what vendors had told them was doable, etc.
One thing I commonly see are people confusing responsibility with blame. Do you understand that you can fail at fulfilling a responsibility and not to blame?
You asked for people to apologize for "repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to (sic) put in new chips?" (I'm not sure that many, if any people, actually said that). Since you, with your own words, have established that Apple could've put in new chips and it would be "comparatively easy and inexpensive", then I'm asking if you're now going to retract that obnoxious demand.
Re. responsibility and blame (not that it has anything to do with what I was saying), Apple are responsible for the Mac Pro's design, and they are to blame for not delivering any upgrades or price reductions for 4 years. That's beyond question now, since they just reduced the price, after much justifiable criticism. Upgrades, they get a little bit more of a pass on, but in your own words, you admit that upgrades were possible.
Now that Apple has explained why they just couldn't add any upgraded component into this design due to thermal issues, is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
That swings for GPU, but there are chips (E5-v4) that Apple could be using for the Mac Pro that meet its TDP and would require only fairly standard changes to the socket.
Sure, but that's still a socket change and I can't imagine going through the R&D—comparatively easy and inexpensive as it might be—for a small bump in CPU performance when it's already such a low volume seller and without an upgrade to the GPUs.
I certainly wouldn't have greenly that operation, but I certainly would've tried to work with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to see what they could offer to move this design forward at least one generation without having to start from scratch (which I assume they did, but sales were too low to warrant any real investment from any party). I also wouldn't have allowed this Mac Pro to launch unless I thought that there was a long upgrade path for the case and chassis design (which I assume they also thought was going to be possible as the industry had mostly moved toward lower TDP and power consumption of components). I certainly can't imagine that they didn't have future plans.
PS: Is this Mac Pro now more of a flop than the Cube? I think it might be.
So if new chips would be comparatively easy and inexpensive then you'll admit there's no need for anyone to apologize for anything then?
I don't understand the question. Objectively, when there's mistakes with resolutions that are "comparatively easy and inexpensive" an apology is more likely in order.
When talking about the Mac Pro, there are many moving parts—most of which we'll likely never know about—that led to their initial design decisions that ended up backing them into a corner years down the road. We don't know what they had planned to do, what vendors had told them was doable, etc.
One thing I commonly see are people confusing responsibility with blame. Do you understand that you can fail at fulfilling a responsibility and not to blame?
You asked for people to apologize for "repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to (sic) put in new chips?" (I'm not sure that many, if any people, actually said that). Since you, with your own words, have established that Apple could've put in new chips and it would be "comparatively easy and inexpensive", then I'm asking if you're now going to retract that obnoxious demand.
1) I never asked people to apologize.
2) What GPUs do you believe Apple have easily put into the Mac Pro that would be inexpensive and yet increase its performance significantly? You can't just say "well they could one chip in one area and that would be enough," unless you continue to be disingenuous about what you know of Apple's history.
Re. responsibility and blame (not that it has anything to do with what I was saying), Apple are responsible for the Mac Pro's design, and they are to blame for not delivering any upgrades or price reductions for 4 years. That's beyond question now, since they just reduced the price, after much justifiable criticism. Upgrades, they get a little bit more of a pass on, but in your own words, you admit that upgrades were possible.
Interesting logic about a price reduction equates to fault and blame. So when last year's iPhone gets a price reduction when the next iPhone is updated, are you really suggesting that Apple is somehow at fault for the some egregious error with the previous year's iPhone? With pretty much every previous year's
See, I'd argue the most problematic issue for Apple's bottom line was having no original iPhone for sale months before the iPhone 3G arrived, not that they are selling the iPhone 6s for less month then they did the year prior.
Bottomline: Apple dropped the price to sell more Mac Pros. They've probably exhausted all the current buyers at that price point and still had units (or purchased components that could be made into units) that need to be sold. This is simple accounting, not the company giving themselves 50 lashes.
Now that Apple has explained why they just couldn't add any upgraded component into this design due to thermal issues, is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
That swings for GPU, but there are chips (E5-v4) that Apple could be using for the Mac Pro that meet its TDP and would require only fairly standard changes to the socket.
Sure, but that's still a socket change and I can't imagine going through the R&D—comparatively easy and inexpensive as it might be—for a small bump in CPU performance when it's already such a low volume seller and without an upgrade to the GPUs.
I certainly wouldn't have greenly that operation, but I certainly would've tried to work with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to see what they could offer to move this design forward at least one generation without having to start from scratch (which I assume they did, but sales were too low to warrant any real investment from any party). I also wouldn't have allowed this Mac Pro to launch unless I thought that there was a long upgrade path for the case and chassis design (which I assume they also thought was going to be possible as the industry had mostly moved toward lower TDP and power consumption of components). I certainly can't imagine that they didn't have future plans.
PS: Is this Mac Pro now more of a flop than the Cube? I think it might be.
So if new chips would be comparatively easy and inexpensive then you'll admit there's no need for anyone to apologize for anything then?
I don't understand the question. Objectively, when there's mistakes with resolutions that are "comparatively easy and inexpensive" an apology is more likely in order.
When talking about the Mac Pro, there are many moving parts—most of which we'll likely never know about—that led to their initial design decisions that ended up backing them into a corner years down the road. We don't know what they had planned to do, what vendors had told them was doable, etc.
One thing I commonly see are people confusing responsibility with blame. Do you understand that you can fail at fulfilling a responsibility and not to blame?
You asked for people to apologize for "repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to (sic) put in new chips?" (I'm not sure that many, if any people, actually said that). Since you, with your own words, have established that Apple could've put in new chips and it would be "comparatively easy and inexpensive", then I'm asking if you're now going to retract that obnoxious demand.
1) I never asked people to apologize.
I'd love to hear what weasel words you have to wriggle out of this
Now that Apple has explained why they just couldn't add any upgraded component into this design due to thermal issues, is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
That swings for GPU, but there are chips (E5-v4) that Apple could be using for the Mac Pro that meet its TDP and would require only fairly standard changes to the socket.
Sure, but that's still a socket change and I can't imagine going through the R&D—comparatively easy and inexpensive as it might be—for a small bump in CPU performance when it's already such a low volume seller and without an upgrade to the GPUs.
I certainly wouldn't have greenly that operation, but I certainly would've tried to work with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to see what they could offer to move this design forward at least one generation without having to start from scratch (which I assume they did, but sales were too low to warrant any real investment from any party). I also wouldn't have allowed this Mac Pro to launch unless I thought that there was a long upgrade path for the case and chassis design (which I assume they also thought was going to be possible as the industry had mostly moved toward lower TDP and power consumption of components). I certainly can't imagine that they didn't have future plans.
PS: Is this Mac Pro now more of a flop than the Cube? I think it might be.
So if new chips would be comparatively easy and inexpensive then you'll admit there's no need for anyone to apologize for anything then?
I don't understand the question. Objectively, when there's mistakes with resolutions that are "comparatively easy and inexpensive" an apology is more likely in order.
When talking about the Mac Pro, there are many moving parts—most of which we'll likely never know about—that led to their initial design decisions that ended up backing them into a corner years down the road. We don't know what they had planned to do, what vendors had told them was doable, etc.
One thing I commonly see are people confusing responsibility with blame. Do you understand that you can fail at fulfilling a responsibility and not to blame?
You asked for people to apologize for "repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to (sic) put in new chips?" (I'm not sure that many, if any people, actually said that). Since you, with your own words, have established that Apple could've put in new chips and it would be "comparatively easy and inexpensive", then I'm asking if you're now going to retract that obnoxious demand.
1) I never asked people to apologize.
I'd love to hear what weasel words you have to wriggle out of this
is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
Such a ridiculous liar.
And? You really need better reading comprehension. This isn't a rare instance for you.
I did ask if people were going to apologize for making absolute claims Apple and Anandtech have shown to be impossible, but I never asked anyone to apologize. For example, I wonder if your going to issue a mea culpa for misreading clearly started words, but I'm neither asking you to do so nor do I expect you to ever admit to the difference.
Now that Apple has explained why they just couldn't add any upgraded component into this design due to thermal issues, is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
That swings for GPU, but there are chips (E5-v4) that Apple could be using for the Mac Pro that meet its TDP and would require only fairly standard changes to the socket.
Sure, but that's still a socket change and I can't imagine going through the R&D—comparatively easy and inexpensive as it might be—for a small bump in CPU performance when it's already such a low volume seller and without an upgrade to the GPUs.
I certainly wouldn't have greenly that operation, but I certainly would've tried to work with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to see what they could offer to move this design forward at least one generation without having to start from scratch (which I assume they did, but sales were too low to warrant any real investment from any party). I also wouldn't have allowed this Mac Pro to launch unless I thought that there was a long upgrade path for the case and chassis design (which I assume they also thought was going to be possible as the industry had mostly moved toward lower TDP and power consumption of components). I certainly can't imagine that they didn't have future plans.
PS: Is this Mac Pro now more of a flop than the Cube? I think it might be.
So if new chips would be comparatively easy and inexpensive then you'll admit there's no need for anyone to apologize for anything then?
I don't understand the question. Objectively, when there's mistakes with resolutions that are "comparatively easy and inexpensive" an apology is more likely in order.
When talking about the Mac Pro, there are many moving parts—most of which we'll likely never know about—that led to their initial design decisions that ended up backing them into a corner years down the road. We don't know what they had planned to do, what vendors had told them was doable, etc.
One thing I commonly see are people confusing responsibility with blame. Do you understand that you can fail at fulfilling a responsibility and not to blame?
You asked for people to apologize for "repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to (sic) put in new chips?" (I'm not sure that many, if any people, actually said that). Since you, with your own words, have established that Apple could've put in new chips and it would be "comparatively easy and inexpensive", then I'm asking if you're now going to retract that obnoxious demand.
1) I never asked people to apologize.
I'd love to hear what weasel words you have to wriggle out of this
is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
Such a ridiculous liar.
And? You really need better reading comprehension. This isn't a rare instance for you.
I did ask if people were going to apologize for making absolute claims Apple and Anandtech have shown to be impossible, but I never asked anyone to apologize. For example, I wonder if your going to issue a mea culpa for misreading clearly started words, but I'm neither asking you to do so nor do I expect you to ever admit to the difference.
Obnoxious nonsense. Just because you didn't directly ask an individual to apologise doesn't mean you didn't put the suggestion that people should apologise out there. Such rank intellectual dishonesty to suggest there's any meaningful distinction, and pathetic that you won't even admit that your original post was full of passive aggressive self-satisfied bullshit.
Now that Apple has explained why they just couldn't add any upgraded component into this design due to thermal issues, is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
That swings for GPU, but there are chips (E5-v4) that Apple could be using for the Mac Pro that meet its TDP and would require only fairly standard changes to the socket.
Sure, but that's still a socket change and I can't imagine going through the R&D—comparatively easy and inexpensive as it might be—for a small bump in CPU performance when it's already such a low volume seller and without an upgrade to the GPUs.
I certainly wouldn't have greenly that operation, but I certainly would've tried to work with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to see what they could offer to move this design forward at least one generation without having to start from scratch (which I assume they did, but sales were too low to warrant any real investment from any party). I also wouldn't have allowed this Mac Pro to launch unless I thought that there was a long upgrade path for the case and chassis design (which I assume they also thought was going to be possible as the industry had mostly moved toward lower TDP and power consumption of components). I certainly can't imagine that they didn't have future plans.
PS: Is this Mac Pro now more of a flop than the Cube? I think it might be.
So if new chips would be comparatively easy and inexpensive then you'll admit there's no need for anyone to apologize for anything then?
I don't understand the question. Objectively, when there's mistakes with resolutions that are "comparatively easy and inexpensive" an apology is more likely in order.
When talking about the Mac Pro, there are many moving parts—most of which we'll likely never know about—that led to their initial design decisions that ended up backing them into a corner years down the road. We don't know what they had planned to do, what vendors had told them was doable, etc.
One thing I commonly see are people confusing responsibility with blame. Do you understand that you can fail at fulfilling a responsibility and not to blame?
You asked for people to apologize for "repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to (sic) put in new chips?" (I'm not sure that many, if any people, actually said that). Since you, with your own words, have established that Apple could've put in new chips and it would be "comparatively easy and inexpensive", then I'm asking if you're now going to retract that obnoxious demand.
1) I never asked people to apologize.
I'd love to hear what weasel words you have to wriggle out of this
is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
Such a ridiculous liar.
And? You really need better reading comprehension. This isn't a rare instance for you.
I did ask if people were going to apologize for making absolute claims Apple and Anandtech have shown to be impossible, but I never asked anyone to apologize. For example, I wonder if your going to issue a mea culpa for misreading clearly started words, but I'm neither asking you to do so nor do I expect you to ever admit to the difference.
Obnoxious nonsense. Just because you didn't directly ask an individual to apologise doesn't mean you didn't put the suggestion that people should apologise out there. Such rank intellectual dishonesty to suggest there's any meaningful distinction, and pathetic that you won't even admit that your original post was full of passive aggressive self-satisfied bullshit.
As usual. Such a liar.
That's just your inference. My implication has only caveats in which I stated. I write very literal on this forum because it's a tech forum and text conversations, even without considering a multi-threaded forum, already make communication less than ideal. You took something out of context and now you're trying to justify you poor reading comprehension with name calling. Go right ahead. My statements stand. Again, I still don't expect you to apologize or even take responsibility for your ignorance (nor do I want you to), but I am expecting you to dig your hole a little deeper..
Now that Apple has explained why they just couldn't add any upgraded component into this design due to thermal issues, is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
That swings for GPU, but there are chips (E5-v4) that Apple could be using for the Mac Pro that meet its TDP and would require only fairly standard changes to the socket.
Sure, but that's still a socket change and I can't imagine going through the R&D—comparatively easy and inexpensive as it might be—for a small bump in CPU performance when it's already such a low volume seller and without an upgrade to the GPUs.
I certainly wouldn't have greenly that operation, but I certainly would've tried to work with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to see what they could offer to move this design forward at least one generation without having to start from scratch (which I assume they did, but sales were too low to warrant any real investment from any party). I also wouldn't have allowed this Mac Pro to launch unless I thought that there was a long upgrade path for the case and chassis design (which I assume they also thought was going to be possible as the industry had mostly moved toward lower TDP and power consumption of components). I certainly can't imagine that they didn't have future plans.
PS: Is this Mac Pro now more of a flop than the Cube? I think it might be.
So if new chips would be comparatively easy and inexpensive then you'll admit there's no need for anyone to apologize for anything then?
I don't understand the question. Objectively, when there's mistakes with resolutions that are "comparatively easy and inexpensive" an apology is more likely in order.
When talking about the Mac Pro, there are many moving parts—most of which we'll likely never know about—that led to their initial design decisions that ended up backing them into a corner years down the road. We don't know what they had planned to do, what vendors had told them was doable, etc.
One thing I commonly see are people confusing responsibility with blame. Do you understand that you can fail at fulfilling a responsibility and not to blame?
You asked for people to apologize for "repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to (sic) put in new chips?" (I'm not sure that many, if any people, actually said that). Since you, with your own words, have established that Apple could've put in new chips and it would be "comparatively easy and inexpensive", then I'm asking if you're now going to retract that obnoxious demand.
1) I never asked people to apologize.
I'd love to hear what weasel words you have to wriggle out of this
is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
Such a ridiculous liar.
And? You really need better reading comprehension. This isn't a rare instance for you.
I did ask if people were going to apologize for making absolute claims Apple and Anandtech have shown to be impossible, but I never asked anyone to apologize. For example, I wonder if your going to issue a mea culpa for misreading clearly started words, but I'm neither asking you to do so nor do I expect you to ever admit to the difference.
Obnoxious nonsense. Just because you didn't directly ask an individual to apologise doesn't mean you didn't put the suggestion that people should apologise out there. Such rank intellectual dishonesty to suggest there's any meaningful distinction, and pathetic that you won't even admit that your original post was full of passive aggressive self-satisfied bullshit.
As usual. Such a liar.
That's just your inference. My implication has only caveats in which I stated. I write very literal on this forum because it's a tech forum and text conversations, even without considering a multi-threaded forum, already make communication less than ideal. You took something out of context and now you're trying to justify you poor reading comprehension with name calling. Go right ahead. My statements stand. Again, I still don't expect you to apologize or even take responsibility for your ignorance (nor do I want you to), but I am expecting you to dig your hole a little deeper..
And yet just the other week you took a massive inference from the fact I'd replied to you, assuming that I was supporting someone else's argument in its literal entirety simply because you'd quoted them. Massive double standard, and a long way from literal.
And this "inference" is so obvious it's absurd. You ask "if people will apologise" and expect anyone to believe that their isn't a tacit suggestion that they "should" apologise, and thereby an implied request. Ridiculous.
Do you get off on these semantics and the idea that you might be winning on an Apple fan forum? Pathetic.
Now that Apple has explained why they just couldn't add any upgraded component into this design due to thermal issues, is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
That swings for GPU, but there are chips (E5-v4) that Apple could be using for the Mac Pro that meet its TDP and would require only fairly standard changes to the socket.
Sure, but that's still a socket change and I can't imagine going through the R&D—comparatively easy and inexpensive as it might be—for a small bump in CPU performance when it's already such a low volume seller and without an upgrade to the GPUs.
I certainly wouldn't have greenly that operation, but I certainly would've tried to work with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to see what they could offer to move this design forward at least one generation without having to start from scratch (which I assume they did, but sales were too low to warrant any real investment from any party). I also wouldn't have allowed this Mac Pro to launch unless I thought that there was a long upgrade path for the case and chassis design (which I assume they also thought was going to be possible as the industry had mostly moved toward lower TDP and power consumption of components). I certainly can't imagine that they didn't have future plans.
PS: Is this Mac Pro now more of a flop than the Cube? I think it might be.
So if new chips would be comparatively easy and inexpensive then you'll admit there's no need for anyone to apologize for anything then?
I don't understand the question. Objectively, when there's mistakes with resolutions that are "comparatively easy and inexpensive" an apology is more likely in order.
When talking about the Mac Pro, there are many moving parts—most of which we'll likely never know about—that led to their initial design decisions that ended up backing them into a corner years down the road. We don't know what they had planned to do, what vendors had told them was doable, etc.
One thing I commonly see are people confusing responsibility with blame. Do you understand that you can fail at fulfilling a responsibility and not to blame?
You asked for people to apologize for "repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to (sic) put in new chips?" (I'm not sure that many, if any people, actually said that). Since you, with your own words, have established that Apple could've put in new chips and it would be "comparatively easy and inexpensive", then I'm asking if you're now going to retract that obnoxious demand.
1) I never asked people to apologize.
I'd love to hear what weasel words you have to wriggle out of this
is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
Such a ridiculous liar.
And? You really need better reading comprehension. This isn't a rare instance for you.
I did ask if people were going to apologize for making absolute claims Apple and Anandtech have shown to be impossible, but I never asked anyone to apologize. For example, I wonder if your going to issue a mea culpa for misreading clearly started words, but I'm neither asking you to do so nor do I expect you to ever admit to the difference.
Obnoxious nonsense. Just because you didn't directly ask an individual to apologise doesn't mean you didn't put the suggestion that people should apologise out there. Such rank intellectual dishonesty to suggest there's any meaningful distinction, and pathetic that you won't even admit that your original post was full of passive aggressive self-satisfied bullshit.
As usual. Such a liar.
That's just your inference. My implication has only caveats in which I stated. I write very literal on this forum because it's a tech forum and text conversations, even without considering a multi-threaded forum, already make communication less than ideal. You took something out of context and now you're trying to justify you poor reading comprehension with name calling. Go right ahead. My statements stand. Again, I still don't expect you to apologize or even take responsibility for your ignorance (nor do I want you to), but I am expecting you to dig your hole a little deeper..
And yet just the other week you took a massive inference from the fact I'd replied to you, assuming that I was supporting someone else's argument in its literal entirety simply because you'd quoted them. Massive double standard, and a long way from literal.
And this "inference" is so obvious it's absurd. You ask "if people will apologise" and expect anyone to believe that their isn't a tacit suggestion that they "should" apologise, and thereby an implied request. Ridiculous.
Do you get off on these semantics and the idea that you might be winning on an Apple fan forum? Pathetic.
Is really that hard for you to admit that you were wrong? What exactly do you have to lose (or win) by saying that you made an incorrect assumption on a message board? But enough of that, since you've now derailed the thread so much that the original topic isn't even being discussed, something that I'm also guilty of by treating you as an reasonable adult.
Now that Apple has explained why they just couldn't add any upgraded component into this design due to thermal issues, is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
That swings for GPU, but there are chips (E5-v4) that Apple could be using for the Mac Pro that meet its TDP and would require only fairly standard changes to the socket.
Sure, but that's still a socket change and I can't imagine going through the R&D—comparatively easy and inexpensive as it might be—for a small bump in CPU performance when it's already such a low volume seller and without an upgrade to the GPUs.
I certainly wouldn't have greenly that operation, but I certainly would've tried to work with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to see what they could offer to move this design forward at least one generation without having to start from scratch (which I assume they did, but sales were too low to warrant any real investment from any party). I also wouldn't have allowed this Mac Pro to launch unless I thought that there was a long upgrade path for the case and chassis design (which I assume they also thought was going to be possible as the industry had mostly moved toward lower TDP and power consumption of components). I certainly can't imagine that they didn't have future plans.
PS: Is this Mac Pro now more of a flop than the Cube? I think it might be.
So if new chips would be comparatively easy and inexpensive then you'll admit there's no need for anyone to apologize for anything then?
I don't understand the question. Objectively, when there's mistakes with resolutions that are "comparatively easy and inexpensive" an apology is more likely in order.
When talking about the Mac Pro, there are many moving parts—most of which we'll likely never know about—that led to their initial design decisions that ended up backing them into a corner years down the road. We don't know what they had planned to do, what vendors had told them was doable, etc.
One thing I commonly see are people confusing responsibility with blame. Do you understand that you can fail at fulfilling a responsibility and not to blame?
You asked for people to apologize for "repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to (sic) put in new chips?" (I'm not sure that many, if any people, actually said that). Since you, with your own words, have established that Apple could've put in new chips and it would be "comparatively easy and inexpensive", then I'm asking if you're now going to retract that obnoxious demand.
1) I never asked people to apologize.
I'd love to hear what weasel words you have to wriggle out of this
is anyone going to apologize for repeatedly stating over the past 2+ years that all Apple had to to put in new chips?
Such a ridiculous liar.
And? You really need better reading comprehension. This isn't a rare instance for you.
I did ask if people were going to apologize for making absolute claims Apple and Anandtech have shown to be impossible, but I never asked anyone to apologize. For example, I wonder if your going to issue a mea culpa for misreading clearly started words, but I'm neither asking you to do so nor do I expect you to ever admit to the difference.
Obnoxious nonsense. Just because you didn't directly ask an individual to apologise doesn't mean you didn't put the suggestion that people should apologise out there. Such rank intellectual dishonesty to suggest there's any meaningful distinction, and pathetic that you won't even admit that your original post was full of passive aggressive self-satisfied bullshit.
As usual. Such a liar.
That's just your inference. My implication has only caveats in which I stated. I write very literal on this forum because it's a tech forum and text conversations, even without considering a multi-threaded forum, already make communication less than ideal. You took something out of context and now you're trying to justify you poor reading comprehension with name calling. Go right ahead. My statements stand. Again, I still don't expect you to apologize or even take responsibility for your ignorance (nor do I want you to), but I am expecting you to dig your hole a little deeper..
And yet just the other week you took a massive inference from the fact I'd replied to you, assuming that I was supporting someone else's argument in its literal entirety simply because you'd quoted them. Massive double standard, and a long way from literal.
And this "inference" is so obvious it's absurd. You ask "if people will apologise" and expect anyone to believe that their isn't a tacit suggestion that they "should" apologise, and thereby an implied request. Ridiculous.
Do you get off on these semantics and the idea that you might be winning on an Apple fan forum? Pathetic.
Is really that hard for you to admit that you were wrong? What exactly do you have to lose (or win) by saying that you made an incorrect assumption on a message board? But enough of that, since you've now derailed the thread so much that the original topic isn't even being discussed, something that I'm also guilty of by treating you as an reasonable adult.
Soli said: I also wouldn't have allowed this Mac Pro to launch unless I thought that there was a long upgrade path for the case and chassis design (which I assume they also thought was going to be possible as the industry had mostly moved toward lower TDP and power consumption of components). I certainly can't imagine that they didn't have future plans.
PS: Is this Mac Pro now more of a flop than the Cube? I think it might be.
Part of the problem would be the custom AMD GPUs. Quadros are much more expensive so they are mostly stuck with AMD:
AMD isn't in a position financially to engineer custom GPUs for such a small volume of buyers. AMD has made close to $3b in losses over the last 5 years:
They have done some debt restructuring to help but they are still producing massive losses. They haven't delivered much in the way of workstation GPUs for a while.
Between that and Intel not delivering much in the way of worthwhile upgrades at the same price points and the migration of users to iMacs, the audience for this type of machine is very small now. Across the whole PC industry, workstations are 1-2% and like with every segment, most of the sales are the lower-end models. That's where it's different from the Cube because back then, the workstation audience was a far larger portion of buyers. Most users that were on workstations are now on iMacs and MBPs.
The 2012 Mac Pro was the old design and people didn't upgrade to that from their older models. No Mac Pro design will ever sell in high numbers any more because the entire worldwide market is small, this is about satisfying a very small portion of buyers who do very computationally intensive workloads for the sake of respecting the importance of that work.
Part of the solution here will be the iMac Pro because it will offer better value than the entry level Mac Pro and this will further diminish the audience for a headless box. What that box will be like remains to be seen but it's still not going to be what everyone wants because it will have compromises like any machine, it will be very expensive and it will be very late, being over a year away from now. If it keeps everyone happy then it's all good and it's a good thing for Apple to be reaching out to Mac users but there has to be a minimum threshold of customers where they stop selling models altogether, maybe 10k units/year or something.
The iMac Pro should suit a lot of users. They can design it so that the display opens up e.g have the display on a hinge at the base and have it open forward with clasps that hold it at the top. In the middle, they can put a full length desktop GPU (12.5TFLOP Vega is somewhere around 200W) that can be switched out and have a large (bigger than Mac Pro) fan behind pulling air out the back:
Easy access to storage, RAM and GPU. They could even leave a mini PCIe slot to allow for a card to connect to external boxes like a multi-GPU box via a vent. They'd just copy the framebuffer from the GPU to the IGP to allow it to send display output over Thunderbolt.
The 2012 Mac Pro was the old design and people didn't upgrade to that from their older models. No Mac Pro design will ever sell in high numbers any more because the entire worldwide market is small, this is about satisfying a very small portion of buyers who do very computationally intensive workloads for the sake of respecting the importance of that work.
The market is small, but these are $3000 to $10000 machines. There's enough sales there for it to be worthwhile. My workplace has something like 20 workstations sitting on or beside people's desks. These are gigantic 2 socket Xeon machines running a version of Linux. We are a MBP heavy workplace. Those could have easily been Mac Pros if Apple delivered the right machine. Each sale of a Mac Pro would be able the same revenue as 2 to 4 consumer Macs. Unit sales would be low, but the revenue share could easily be more or comparable to consumer desktop machines if the right machine was offered.
You have to wonder if this is a self fulfilling prophecy. Apple doesn't put a lot of effort into the Mac Pro - in this case they put in a lot of effort, they just made some very poor decisions - which means it doesn't sell a lot, which leads to the impression that the market is too small to service. If they built a desirable Mac Pro, maybe that mix of desktop Macs between the iMac and Mac Pro would be 60/40 rather than 90:10 or whatever single digit share means.
There is no two ways about it. Apple simply fucked up the Mac Pro with the cylinder design and lost out on 5 years.
Next year, an iMac can have a 6-core Core i7 (Coffee Lake), 64 GB RAM and maybe an Optane+SSD fusion thing (or is that an Optane+RAM L4 cache thing?). That machine will meet a lot of video editors needs. But, it won't be attractive to this small market of workstation buyers that want 2 Xeon sockets and PCI slots. Moreover, I'm thinking the iMac will be more and more power constrained. This "iMac Pro" thing seems inelegant. The platonic ideal is going to be something that is about 0.5" thick. No HDD. 135 W GPU maybe. It'll look something like at 30" iPad with a different aspect ratio.
The decision for the Mac Pro really just hinges on whether Apple wants to offer a product for the workstation market or not. If they do, they have to design accordingly.
Does anyone know which actual chips are in/will be in the new models and when they were released by Intel? Are they relatively new or have they actually been around for a year or two?
Many people said Intel didn't have any chips that could go into the current Mac Pro. Just wondering if that was true.
They can design it so that the display opens up e.g have the display on a hinge at the base and have it open forward with clasps that hold it at the top.
You realize they’re never going to do that, right? If Apple was going to move to greater user serviceability, wouldn’t they have done that basically immediately after Steve died? The image shows what you’re saying quite well–that they can get a full size card in there–but there’s no way the user will be able to see it, much less swap it.
They can design it so that the display opens up e.g have the display on a hinge at the base and have it open forward with clasps that hold it at the top.
You realize they’re never going to do that, right? If Apple was going to move to greater user serviceability, wouldn’t they have done that basically immediately after Steve died? The image shows what you’re saying quite well–that they can get a full size card in there–but there’s no way the user will be able to see it, much less swap it.
1) I do think it's unlikely. If they go with a "more serviceable" machine I would think it's going to be headless, which allows for greater options, including different display sizes and types over the usable life of the machine.
2) Nothing in their release cycle would change immediately after Jobs death. R&D, HW design, component sourcing, etc. take far too long. I'd say it would've probably been at 24–36 months before we started to see HW hit the market that Jobs didn't have some say about in some aspect of its inception.
2) Nothing in their release cycle would change immediately after Jobs death. R&D, HW design, component sourcing, etc. take far too long. I'd say it would've probably been at 24–36 months before we started to see HW hit the market that Jobs didn't have some say about in some aspect of its inception.
I did say ‘basically.’ :P I thought that would imply that the products already in the pipe would still get launched, and even thereafter any products which had been planned to use the same design would have until it came time for a new one. It’s the brand new things that would tip us off to their plans. So the 2013 Mac Pro might have been Steve’s idea, but it’s still a post-Steve design and could have been redone or outright swapped back to the old case. The thinner aluminum iMac, too, was post-Steve.
Come to think of it, that’s it, isn’t it? Just those two have changed, and they changed within two years of his death… Considering my second sentence in the above, could we really just not be seeing the full effects of post-Steve Apple yet? I’m all for a more serviceable (and upgradable) iMac, but Apple’s Apple…
Come to think of it, that’s it, isn’t it? Just those two have changed, and they changed within two years of his death… Considering my second sentence in the above, could we really just not be seeing the full effects of post-Steve Apple yet? I’m all for a more serviceable (and upgradable) iMac, but Apple’s Apple…
I don't know at what point Steve's direct input will no longer be a part of Apple, but even the still incomplete Apple Park is still full of his direct ideas and wishes, even as aspects of the plans have changed.
In regards to CE, there could patents that have Steve's name on them because it was his idea—at least in part—that are still years from being actual products. I've read that the Touch Bar and all its components was nearly a decade of R&D, and while many aspects of that may have changed over the years since his death as technology evolved (like running OS X on the T1-series chip) there could easily be plenty aspects of that new machine that are a direct part of Jobs' legacy.
Does anyone know which actual chips are in/will be in the new models and when they were released by Intel? Are they relatively new or have they actually been around for a year or two?
Many people said Intel didn't have any chips that could go into the current Mac Pro. Just wondering if that was true.
Nobody knows. At this point, you have to wonder if Intel even knows. You really need a decoder ring handy to even have a chance of figuring what would be the best Xeon chips to use, and I think you'd still be uncertain. SkyLake or Kaby Lake 2-socket Xeons are likely imo. SkyLake-SP with branding formula of Xeon + "metal of your choice" + "coded 4 digit number" are trickling out now. I assume these come in 2-socket variants, and there will be some SKUs with 3.8 to 4 GHz turbos. It'll be likely these.
They won't be much faster than what's in the MP today in single threaded performance. Maybe 30%? But they could have 24 cores instead of 12 (or 8 instead of 6, 14 instead of 8). There will be a few perf per core, number of core, perf per dollar winners among the hundreds of SKUs going back to the Haswell Xeons that Apple can choose from. You'll need write some code to figure it out.
The thing about Intel's CPUs is that single threaded performance has improved at a very low rate for the past 4 years. Being new is kind of beside the point. You want the best bang for the buck, and that could easily be a 3 year old Xeon that has 4 GHz turbo while most modern Xeons only have 3.5 GHz turbos, but with more cores.
The problem with the existing Mac Pro isn't the CPUs. It's that it is a point solution. It has no internal expansion. It's inflexible to changes. It's limited in what type of components that can be used.
The 2012 Mac Pro was the old design and people didn't upgrade to that from their older models. No Mac Pro design will ever sell in high numbers any more because the entire worldwide market is small, this is about satisfying a very small portion of buyers who do very computationally intensive workloads for the sake of respecting the importance of that work.
The market is small, but these are $3000 to $10000 machines. There's enough sales there for it to be worthwhile. My workplace has something like 20 workstations sitting on or beside people's desks. These are gigantic 2 socket Xeon machines running a version of Linux. We are a MBP heavy workplace. Those could have easily been Mac Pros if Apple delivered the right machine. Each sale of a Mac Pro would be able the same revenue as 2 to 4 consumer Macs. Unit sales would be low, but the revenue share could easily be more or comparable to consumer desktop machines if the right machine was offered.
You have to wonder if this is a self fulfilling prophecy. Apple doesn't put a lot of effort into the Mac Pro - in this case they put in a lot of effort, they just made some very poor decisions - which means it doesn't sell a lot, which leads to the impression that the market is too small to service. If they built a desirable Mac Pro, maybe that mix of desktop Macs between the iMac and Mac Pro would be 60/40 rather than 90:10 or whatever single digit share means.
There is no two ways about it. Apple simply fucked up the Mac Pro with the cylinder design and lost out on 5 years.
The PC workstation market shows the revenue potential and these are manufacturers who are supposedly offering what people want. The biggest workstation seller in the world is HP and they made $1.87b last year on workstations, just 6% of their overall revenue. The following report has marketshare numbers but Mac Pro info is in their paid report:
It looks like the 1.23m units is quarterly units, I mistook that for yearly units before so worldwide units would be somewhere over 4 million, some will be used as servers. HP is selling 38% (~1.7m), Dell is selling 35% (~1.6m). The lowest in the chart is 2%, which is just under 100k units and Apple has to be below this or they'd be in the chart. If you divide HP's revenue by the units, it shows an ASP of $1100 so HP is selling a lot of the entry level kind like this below $1000, most of the units would have to be below $2k:
These are used in architecture/engineering. Apple's biggest problem with the Mac Pro is the price. The higher the price goes up, the audience falls off very quickly. There's very few people buying at the higher-end. If you divided $5k into HP's revenue, this is 374k units and they are the biggest in the world and Apple offers models competitive at this price range. The iMac by comparison sells over 1m units per quarter, it sells around the same as the entire workstation market.
Apple will never boost unit sales or revenues close to iMac levels by catering to the high-end workstation market. The numbers just don't add up and as time goes on, the lower-end hardware takes the place of the workstations. It happens more with Apple because Apple's lower-end hardware is built to a high standard, which can't be said about PC hardware.
The people who like workstations are passionate about them but this notion of it being some huge success if it's just done right is wishful thinking. The upgrade cycles are very long so it offsets the higher revenue and people buy upgrades from 3rd party manufacturers, which does nothing for Apple. Not only this but Intel's high-end chips take up a significant portion of the unit price - as much as 40% of the retail price so the high-end machines aren't all that lucrative.
It really comes down to the results of the performance being offered. The performance-per-watt of hardware determines what can be done in a given thermal limit. GPUs are still progressing fairly well and bulky notebooks can house dual SLI 1080 notebook cards, which can give around 12-14TFLOPs of computing power (current Mac Pro is 7TFLOPs). If CPU isn't the bottleneck and that is enough GPU power then the tower workstation can be easily replaced with a notebook or iMac-like machine for a lower price.
The cylinder Mac Pro moved the Mac Pro to SSD storage (10x faster), dual GPUs and quiet operation. This suits photography, music, video editing, some scientific computing which is the highest volume of Mac Pro buyers. The most vocal Mac Pro buyers are the following kind (like the guy with the hat):
Tasks dealing with video compositing, color grading, VFX, heavier scientific simulations, 3D rendering etc need lots of computing power. The real-time stuff will need more GPU power until ~8K can be handled in real-time at half-resolution but this is only a couple of generations away as quad GPUs do this now. The CPU tasks will always need more but they aren't progressing fast enough anyway and the costs are too high. Even if you upgraded to the latest available CPU hardware, you are only going to be doubling performance around every 4 years now. This kind of thing should all be trying to move to the GPU because it's 5-10x faster there. There's a disconnect between the software developers and hardware manufacturers, which leads to the conclusion of just throwing more CPUs at it but special hardware would do a better job and could be improved faster.
Comments
When talking about the Mac Pro, there are many moving parts—most of which we'll likely never know about—that led to their initial design decisions that ended up backing them into a corner years down the road. We don't know what they had planned to do, what vendors had told them was doable, etc.
One thing I commonly see are people confusing responsibility with blame. Do you understand that you can fail at fulfilling a responsibility and not to blame?
Re. responsibility and blame (not that it has anything to do with what I was saying), Apple are responsible for the Mac Pro's design, and they are to blame for not delivering any upgrades or price reductions for 4 years. That's beyond question now, since they just reduced the price, after much justifiable criticism. Upgrades, they get a little bit more of a pass on, but in your own words, you admit that upgrades were possible.
2) What GPUs do you believe Apple have easily put into the Mac Pro that would be inexpensive and yet increase its performance significantly? You can't just say "well they could one chip in one area and that would be enough," unless you continue to be disingenuous about what you know of Apple's history.
See, I'd argue the most problematic issue for Apple's bottom line was having no original iPhone for sale months before the iPhone 3G arrived, not that they are selling the iPhone 6s for less month then they did the year prior.
Bottomline: Apple dropped the price to sell more Mac Pros. They've probably exhausted all the current buyers at that price point and still had units (or purchased components that could be made into units) that need to be sold. This is simple accounting, not the company giving themselves 50 lashes.
Such a ridiculous liar.
I did ask if people were going to apologize for making absolute claims Apple and Anandtech have shown to be impossible, but I never asked anyone to apologize. For example, I wonder if your going to issue a mea culpa for misreading clearly started words, but I'm neither asking you to do so nor do I expect you to ever admit to the difference.
As usual. Such a liar.
And this "inference" is so obvious it's absurd. You ask "if people will apologise" and expect anyone to believe that their isn't a tacit suggestion that they "should" apologise, and thereby an implied request. Ridiculous.
Do you get off on these semantics and the idea that you might be winning on an Apple fan forum? Pathetic.
https://www.amazon.com/PNY-NVIDIA-Quadro-M6000-VCQM6000-PB/dp/B00UXHQHJS
AMD isn't in a position financially to engineer custom GPUs for such a small volume of buyers. AMD has made close to $3b in losses over the last 5 years:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/2vzk5z/amd_is_getting_very_close_to_bankruptcy_nobody/
http://marketrealist.com/2016/10/amd-turn-near-bankruptcy-financial-flexibility/
They have done some debt restructuring to help but they are still producing massive losses. They haven't delivered much in the way of workstation GPUs for a while.
Between that and Intel not delivering much in the way of worthwhile upgrades at the same price points and the migration of users to iMacs, the audience for this type of machine is very small now. Across the whole PC industry, workstations are 1-2% and like with every segment, most of the sales are the lower-end models. That's where it's different from the Cube because back then, the workstation audience was a far larger portion of buyers. Most users that were on workstations are now on iMacs and MBPs.
The 2012 Mac Pro was the old design and people didn't upgrade to that from their older models. No Mac Pro design will ever sell in high numbers any more because the entire worldwide market is small, this is about satisfying a very small portion of buyers who do very computationally intensive workloads for the sake of respecting the importance of that work.
Part of the solution here will be the iMac Pro because it will offer better value than the entry level Mac Pro and this will further diminish the audience for a headless box. What that box will be like remains to be seen but it's still not going to be what everyone wants because it will have compromises like any machine, it will be very expensive and it will be very late, being over a year away from now. If it keeps everyone happy then it's all good and it's a good thing for Apple to be reaching out to Mac users but there has to be a minimum threshold of customers where they stop selling models altogether, maybe 10k units/year or something.
The iMac Pro should suit a lot of users. They can design it so that the display opens up e.g have the display on a hinge at the base and have it open forward with clasps that hold it at the top. In the middle, they can put a full length desktop GPU (12.5TFLOP Vega is somewhere around 200W) that can be switched out and have a large (bigger than Mac Pro) fan behind pulling air out the back:
Easy access to storage, RAM and GPU. They could even leave a mini PCIe slot to allow for a card to connect to external boxes like a multi-GPU box via a vent. They'd just copy the framebuffer from the GPU to the IGP to allow it to send display output over Thunderbolt.
The market is small, but these are $3000 to $10000 machines. There's enough sales there for it to be worthwhile. My workplace has something like 20 workstations sitting on or beside people's desks. These are gigantic 2 socket Xeon machines running a version of Linux. We are a MBP heavy workplace. Those could have easily been Mac Pros if Apple delivered the right machine. Each sale of a Mac Pro would be able the same revenue as 2 to 4 consumer Macs. Unit sales would be low, but the revenue share could easily be more or comparable to consumer desktop machines if the right machine was offered.
You have to wonder if this is a self fulfilling prophecy. Apple doesn't put a lot of effort into the Mac Pro - in this case they put in a lot of effort, they just made some very poor decisions - which means it doesn't sell a lot, which leads to the impression that the market is too small to service. If they built a desirable Mac Pro, maybe that mix of desktop Macs between the iMac and Mac Pro would be 60/40 rather than 90:10 or whatever single digit share means.
There is no two ways about it. Apple simply fucked up the Mac Pro with the cylinder design and lost out on 5 years.
Next year, an iMac can have a 6-core Core i7 (Coffee Lake), 64 GB RAM and maybe an Optane+SSD fusion thing (or is that an Optane+RAM L4 cache thing?). That machine will meet a lot of video editors needs. But, it won't be attractive to this small market of workstation buyers that want 2 Xeon sockets and PCI slots. Moreover, I'm thinking the iMac will be more and more power constrained. This "iMac Pro" thing seems inelegant. The platonic ideal is going to be something that is about 0.5" thick. No HDD. 135 W GPU maybe. It'll look something like at 30" iPad with a different aspect ratio.
The decision for the Mac Pro really just hinges on whether Apple wants to offer a product for the workstation market or not. If they do, they have to design accordingly.
Does anyone know which actual chips are in/will be in the new models and when they were released by Intel? Are they relatively new or have they actually been around for a year or two?
Many people said Intel didn't have any chips that could go into the current Mac Pro. Just wondering if that was true.
2) Nothing in their release cycle would change immediately after Jobs death. R&D, HW design, component sourcing, etc. take far too long. I'd say it would've probably been at 24–36 months before we started to see HW hit the market that Jobs didn't have some say about in some aspect of its inception.
Come to think of it, that’s it, isn’t it? Just those two have changed, and they changed within two years of his death… Considering my second sentence in the above, could we really just not be seeing the full effects of post-Steve Apple yet? I’m all for a more serviceable (and upgradable) iMac, but Apple’s Apple…
In regards to CE, there could patents that have Steve's name on them because it was his idea—at least in part—that are still years from being actual products. I've read that the Touch Bar and all its components was nearly a decade of R&D, and while many aspects of that may have changed over the years since his death as technology evolved (like running OS X on the T1-series chip) there could easily be plenty aspects of that new machine that are a direct part of Jobs' legacy.
Nobody knows. At this point, you have to wonder if Intel even knows. You really need a decoder ring handy to even have a chance of figuring what would be the best Xeon chips to use, and I think you'd still be uncertain. SkyLake or Kaby Lake 2-socket Xeons are likely imo. SkyLake-SP with branding formula of Xeon + "metal of your choice" + "coded 4 digit number" are trickling out now. I assume these come in 2-socket variants, and there will be some SKUs with 3.8 to 4 GHz turbos. It'll be likely these.
They won't be much faster than what's in the MP today in single threaded performance. Maybe 30%? But they could have 24 cores instead of 12 (or 8 instead of 6, 14 instead of 8). There will be a few perf per core, number of core, perf per dollar winners among the hundreds of SKUs going back to the Haswell Xeons that Apple can choose from. You'll need write some code to figure it out.
The thing about Intel's CPUs is that single threaded performance has improved at a very low rate for the past 4 years. Being new is kind of beside the point. You want the best bang for the buck, and that could easily be a 3 year old Xeon that has 4 GHz turbo while most modern Xeons only have 3.5 GHz turbos, but with more cores.
The problem with the existing Mac Pro isn't the CPUs. It's that it is a point solution. It has no internal expansion. It's inflexible to changes. It's limited in what type of components that can be used.
http://jonpeddie.com/publications/workstation_report
It looks like the 1.23m units is quarterly units, I mistook that for yearly units before so worldwide units would be somewhere over 4 million, some will be used as servers. HP is selling 38% (~1.7m), Dell is selling 35% (~1.6m). The lowest in the chart is 2%, which is just under 100k units and Apple has to be below this or they'd be in the chart. If you divide HP's revenue by the units, it shows an ASP of $1100 so HP is selling a lot of the entry level kind like this below $1000, most of the units would have to be below $2k:
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/workstations/z240.html
These are used in architecture/engineering. Apple's biggest problem with the Mac Pro is the price. The higher the price goes up, the audience falls off very quickly. There's very few people buying at the higher-end. If you divided $5k into HP's revenue, this is 374k units and they are the biggest in the world and Apple offers models competitive at this price range. The iMac by comparison sells over 1m units per quarter, it sells around the same as the entire workstation market.
Apple will never boost unit sales or revenues close to iMac levels by catering to the high-end workstation market. The numbers just don't add up and as time goes on, the lower-end hardware takes the place of the workstations. It happens more with Apple because Apple's lower-end hardware is built to a high standard, which can't be said about PC hardware.
The people who like workstations are passionate about them but this notion of it being some huge success if it's just done right is wishful thinking. The upgrade cycles are very long so it offsets the higher revenue and people buy upgrades from 3rd party manufacturers, which does nothing for Apple. Not only this but Intel's high-end chips take up a significant portion of the unit price - as much as 40% of the retail price so the high-end machines aren't all that lucrative.
It really comes down to the results of the performance being offered. The performance-per-watt of hardware determines what can be done in a given thermal limit. GPUs are still progressing fairly well and bulky notebooks can house dual SLI 1080 notebook cards, which can give around 12-14TFLOPs of computing power (current Mac Pro is 7TFLOPs). If CPU isn't the bottleneck and that is enough GPU power then the tower workstation can be easily replaced with a notebook or iMac-like machine for a lower price.
The cylinder Mac Pro moved the Mac Pro to SSD storage (10x faster), dual GPUs and quiet operation. This suits photography, music, video editing, some scientific computing which is the highest volume of Mac Pro buyers. The most vocal Mac Pro buyers are the following kind (like the guy with the hat):
Tasks dealing with video compositing, color grading, VFX, heavier scientific simulations, 3D rendering etc need lots of computing power. The real-time stuff will need more GPU power until ~8K can be handled in real-time at half-resolution but this is only a couple of generations away as quad GPUs do this now. The CPU tasks will always need more but they aren't progressing fast enough anyway and the costs are too high. Even if you upgraded to the latest available CPU hardware, you are only going to be doubling performance around every 4 years now. This kind of thing should all be trying to move to the GPU because it's 5-10x faster there. There's a disconnect between the software developers and hardware manufacturers, which leads to the conclusion of just throwing more CPUs at it but special hardware would do a better job and could be improved faster.