If the modular Mac Pro (mMP?) isn't coming until 2019 then I suspect they will throw pros a bone with the new Macbook Pros in (presumably) June. For example make a Macbook Pro with a Xeon and ECC memory, similar to they did with the iMac.
Ahh.. so you think modularity refers to the ability to add more and more ARM processors to it, snap in style?
Because PC workstations mostly have 1 or 2 CPUs, but if the A-series CPUs are very cool and power-efficient (which they are, originating in phones) then it might be possible to have a workstation with 5 or 10 CPUs. Epic!
God, I hope Jony doesn't have any input into the design of this machine. Otherwise we'll be seeing something that looks pretty and is totally unfit for pro use.
You mean like the old Mac Pro tower that was also designed by Jony Ive's team? I'm sure you're the expert on what a Pro needs anyways.
That was when Jobs was still around to give insight to what Pros people wanted.
Of course, if this were true then he’d never have come up with the G4 Cube and the Hockey Puck Mouse.
Jobs’s real talent was surrounding himself with exceptional people who shared his vision for simplicity, and could temper his vision with pragmatism. If not for the pragmatiststs then OSX would’ve been released without the Carbon APIs, and iOS would’ve been released without an API at all.
Apple wants to get into healthcare; they hire doctors with vision Apple wants to kickstart their education initiatives; they hire teachers with vision. Apple wants to ram up the retail experience; they hire a retail genius with vision (having first hired a warehouse manager with no vision at all from PC World).
App,e want to kickstart its line of professional desktop machines then they hire professionals … with the same vision for simplicity. And that’s kind of important, because the machine that will show up at the end of this extended incubation is not the machine that the “professionals” around here are asking for, namely a Dell box that just happens to run OSX. They certainly wouldn’t need until the end of 2019 to pull that off.
I need a lot of CPU for data science, but a GPU goes entirely unused, so I wouldn't need Navi Pro with HBM2 adding to the cost.
Actually, no. The OS X interface is drawn using the graphics card, so unless you're working 100 percent of the time in the command line, your GPU is definitely doing some of the work (that said, I do understand you meant "nearly all" of what you need is CPU-centric).
I didn’t like that narrative... “Not this year”, “understanding from soup to nuts” [still?], “internal workflows with real content” sound like bla bla bla to my ears.
Those quotes from Apple sound horrible. They should have just said the Mac Pro will be available in 2019, and left out these weird statements or rationale, which sound devoid of sense to me. Designing for workflows? That’s what drove them down the 2013 Mac Pro route.
So it wasn't just me then. Was that rambling nonsense an example of what happens when a marketing drone has nothing to spin?
Still. I'm very, very, happy to see Apple opening up a little on the communication side, allowing corporate and institutional customers some fodder for planning.
It’s not nonsense per se, it’s the implications of what the comments mean if they are being sincere. They said they hired “professional users” to essentially help design this new Mac Pro and have now formed a pro workflow team or group to that effect.
That implies:
1. Apple gave the 2013 Mac Pro a try. It was something different, targeted. They didn’t see much success with it, and instead of doing the work to keep it updated or make it more attractive to buyers, they let it die and had no interest in replacing it. Also means whatever decisions and research they did to design the 2013 Mac Pro was wrong. Every organization has a brain fart, that’s the way it breaks sometimes, but they didn’t even do the work to update it. You would have to conclude they were planning on abandoning the market.
That implies nothing more than a loose-leaf narrative, obviously a communication/PR mistake.
To understand why Apple couldn’t update the Mac Pro one must dig through ark.intel.com to get an idea about the evolution of Xeons. If Apple achieved some progress with the current generation within the footprint of an iMac then this is welcome. On the other hand Apple is one of the creators / investors of Thunderbolt and there is nothing wrong in making Thunderbolt one of the pillars of their whole conceptual world. Those who still live in the USB-A ecosystem cannot understand that.
Here, I went through the exercise of choosing Xeon and FirePros.
The 2013 Mac Pro shipped with Ivy Bridge Xeon E5 v2 CPUs and Pitcairn, Tahiti GPUs: E5-1620 v2 4C 3.7/3.9 GHz, 10 MB L3 E5-1650 v2 6C 3.5/3.9 GHz, 15 MB L3 E5-1680 v2 8C 3.3/3.9 GHz, 20 MB L3 E5-2697 v2 12C 2.7/3.5 GHz, 30 MB L3
By I think by late 2014 or 2015, it became obvious that the dual GPUs were the wrong bet. They could have redesigned the unified thermal core to be 1 140W Xeon and 1 250W GPU to at least take advantage of high Watt GPUs, but nope. Who knows. The future book on this Mac Pro misstep is going to be really interesting.
Great exercise... Now we have Thunderbolt 3 plus Xeon Scalable and Xeon W.
Xeon W: single socket, up to 18 cores / 36 -> iMac Pro Xeon Scalable: double socket, up to 28 cores / 56 (x 2) -> Mac Pro (?)
(Xeon W is the single socket variant of Xeon Scalable.)
Depressing how behind the curve Apple is here. Probably too much focus on portables, with iPhone sales plateauing, they are looking to grow other divisions. Hopefully the team will fix it.
1. MacBooks (not Pros) likely outself all Mac desktops alone each and every quarter.
2. iPhone sales aren't plateauing. They're up.
3. The forthcoming Mac Pro could ferment, brew and dispense free beer inside it, and it would still be way less than five percent of Mac sales. Schiller said it was never higher than that -- ever. A niche product that 0.1 percent of Apple customers are going to buy is not going to turn anything around, particularly when there is literally no area of the company that is not currently in possession of a license to print money and high-90s customer sat. The next Mac Pro is a thank you (and likely a sign-off) to the Mac veterans, not a viable product line.
I need a lot of CPU for data science, but a GPU goes entirely unused, so I wouldn't need Navi Pro with HBM2 adding to the cost.
Actually, no. The OS X interface is drawn using the graphics card, so unless you're working 100 percent of the time in the command line, your GPU is definitely doing some of the work (that said, I do understand you meant "nearly all" of what you need is CPU-centric).
What GPU? integrated or discrete? Since you said “card” I think you meant the discrete GPU in which case your statement becomes less true.
Depressing how behind the curve Apple is here. Probably too much focus on portables, with iPhone sales plateauing, they are looking to grow other divisions. Hopefully the team will fix it.
1. MacBooks (not Pros) likely outself all Mac desktops alone each and every quarter.
2. iPhone sales aren't plateauing. They're up.
3. The forthcoming Mac Pro could ferment, brew and dispense free beer inside it, and it would still be way less than five percent of Mac sales. Schiller said it was never higher than that -- ever. A niche product that 0.1 percent of Apple customers are going to buy is not going to turn anything around, particularly when there is literally no area of the company that is not currently in possession of a license to print money and high-90s customer sat. The next Mac Pro is a thank you (and likely a sign-off) to the Mac veterans, not a viable product line.
Even granting all that, when has Apple purely been about making profit? They want to make profit and make the world a better place at the same time I think.
And giving the smartest and most creative people amazing tools could make the world a better place and Apple will benefit from that along with the rest of us.
I hope that doesn't sound hopelessly naive, but Tim Cook has publicly said on several occasions that X product or X initiative was not purely about profit.
Why is Apple still selling the cylinder Mac Pro? Who would buy it? This blog says Apple should have resurrected the cheese grater while they work on this new device. I think that’s ridiculous but if Apple is going keep selling the trash can it should contain the most up to date specs as possible.
Why is Apple still selling the cylinder Mac Pro? Who would buy it? This blog says Apple should have resurrected the cheese grater while they work on this new device. I think that’s ridiculous but if Apple is going keep selling the trash can it should contain the most up to date specs as possible.
At $3000 price level it is still a decent 4K video editing workstation. Not everyone deals with 8K video to buy an iMac Pro. Thunderbolt 2 supports 4K and 5K monitors. Its dual GPUs provide dual horsepower to FCP.
With all that in house content creation Cook has decided must happen, Apple must be kicking itself it didnt keep up to date with high end hero machines to make it on.
God, I hope Jony doesn't have any input into the design of this machine. Otherwise we'll be seeing something that looks pretty and is totally unfit for pro use.
You mean like the old Mac Pro tower that was also designed by Jony Ive's team? I'm sure you're the expert on what a Pro needs anyways.
That was when Jobs was still around to give insight to what Pros people wanted.
Of course, if this were true then he’d never have come up with the G4 Cube and the Hockey Puck Mouse.
Jobs’s real talent was surrounding himself with exceptional people who shared his vision for simplicity, and could temper his vision with pragmatism. If not for the pragmatiststs then OSX would’ve been released without the Carbon APIs, and iOS would’ve been released without an API at all.
Apple wants to get into healthcare; they hire doctors with vision Apple wants to kickstart their education initiatives; they hire teachers with vision. Apple wants to ram up the retail experience; they hire a retail genius with vision (having first hired a warehouse manager with no vision at all from PC World).
App,e want to kickstart its line of professional desktop machines then they hire professionals … with the same vision for simplicity. And that’s kind of important, because the machine that will show up at the end of this extended incubation is not the machine that the “professionals” around here are asking for, namely a Dell box that just happens to run OSX. They certainly wouldn’t need until the end of 2019 to pull that off.
Just bring Alex Lindsay of Pixelcore in as a consultant on the Mac Pro and it will likely be just what professionals want (and me of course )
Why is Apple still selling the cylinder Mac Pro? Who would buy it? This blog says Apple should have resurrected the cheese grater while they work on this new device. I think that’s ridiculous but if Apple is going keep selling the trash can it should contain the most up to date specs as possible.
... And to understand why the cheese grater may not come back we need to think about Thunderbolt.
Thunderbolt is the standard that turns your PC inside-out.
The main components of your PC are tied together with a bus called PCIe. Your graphics card, your SSD communicate with the CPU over PCIe. Now consider extending that PCIe bus over a cable outside the case of your PC: this is Thunderbolt. With Thunderbolt you can attach a desk-load of peripherals (RAIDs, monitors, external GPUs, network interfaces…) and make all of these communicate at speeds previously only available internally on your PC. Without Thunderbolt, you’d have to build a PC the size of that desk to include all of those peripherals. Thanks to Thunderbolt you can isolate the core of your PC from the peripherals and get a more refined and modern configuration with better thermal management and virtually unlimited expandability.
The trash can Mac Pro is the power core at the center of such a modern configuration.
Putting an iMac Pro on the floor and hooking it up to a 3rd party 4K display is close to what it would be. The only difference being able to switch components out, which people wouldn't do for another 3 or 4 years and wasn't possible with the 2013 model either.
Not the only difference. I have a 2008 Mac Pro (currently sitting idle - due to recent flakiness - maybe due to the local environment in the tropics) and I am maybe one of the few that had upgraded -- it even from day one.
Putting an iMac Pro on the floor and hooking it up to a 3rd party 4K display is close to what it would be. The only difference being able to switch components out, which people wouldn't do for another 3 or 4 years and wasn't possible with the 2013 model either.
Not the only difference. I have a 2008 Mac Pro (currently sitting idle - due to recent flakiness - maybe due to the local environment in the tropics) and I am maybe one of the few that had upgraded -- it even from day one.
Why is Apple still selling the cylinder Mac Pro? Who would buy it? This blog says Apple should have resurrected the cheese grater while they work on this new device. I think that’s ridiculous but if Apple is going keep selling the trash can it should contain the most up to date specs as possible.
... And to understand why the cheese grater may not come back we need to think about Thunderbolt.
Thunderbolt is the standard that turns your PC inside-out.
The main components of your PC are tied together with a bus called PCIe. Your graphics card, your SSD communicate with the CPU over PCIe.
Now consider extending that PCIe bus over a cable outside the case of your PC: this is Thunderbolt. With Thunderbolt you can attach a desk-load of peripherals (RAIDs, monitors, external GPUs, network interfaces…) and make all of these communicate at speeds previously only available internally on your PC. Without Thunderbolt, you’d have to build a PC the size of that desk to include all of those peripherals. Thanks to Thunderbolt you can isolate the core of your PC from the peripherals and get a more refined and modern configuration with better thermal management and virtually unlimited expandability.
The trash can Mac Pro is the power core at the center of such a modern configuration.
When you are dealing with spinning rust, all thunderbolt does is add cost. The "old" way is you just plug a rather high-performance SAS controller in the main box and then connect the external hard drive enclosure using the SAS cable. The "new way" is to basically run the PCIe through thunderbolt, over a cable, to another box that has a power supply for the card, a PCIe slot (which could have been internal) ... plug that same SAS controller in, then wire up the drives to it. Basically, all you did was get the same performance by adding hundreds or more dollars to the cost.
And current tests on GPU cards -- show there is an impact on performance. They perform well, but there is overhead with running it through Thunderbolt to another computer. There is a reason why the PCIe slots for graphics cards tend to be the closest to the CPU. There can be performance degradation of up to 30% on a 1080Ti.
You realize that most Apple products that are totally brand new take many years to design, engineer, and fine tune before its announcement? This isn't just slapping parts together like a DIY PC and call it good. Apple is not Dell, HP, etc. If all you want is a bunch of parts slapped together then by all means, go get that or create your own.
If you need a professional Mac in the meantime, the iMac Pro is actually a great Pro Mac to get. It will still have significant value, even next year should you want to sell it for a new Mac Pro.
This is hilarious and your Apple bias isn't evident at all! (sarcasm)
"Parts slapped together"? Seems to me that most of the world, including professionals, produce just fine on HP and Dell products that are "slapped together". Many are top sellers and award winning designs (if looks matter to you). If you mean that Apple takes years to create museum-worthy artistic designs and that professionals can't get anything done without having a piece of art on their desk, then you're right. I've always said if Apple took the aluminum Mac Pro chassis and put in a modern system board with the latest techonolgy, not only would people beat down the door to buy one, but you could be using one now, not sometime in 2019.
While everyone else gets current, high performance technology to work with, Apple users are always the last to get it. But, hey, it's beautiful.
>...while the Mac Pro accounts for just a "low single digit" percentage market share.
This should provoke howls of dismay and disbelief among techie boyz who insist they are "power users" who are the overhwleming Apple market in general and in particular, need a *real* machine to have 10,000 Chrome tabs open to keep all those women-hating Reddit forums going.
Not to mention the disdain of the tons of super-successful businessmen who know precisely what Apple needs to do and how they focus too much on X when they should be paying attention to their forum posts. If you're disgusted with Apple's prosumer approach, well then, vote with your dollars. Today. Don't wait, don't threaten to switch to Windows. Do it today.
Otherwise, just accept that your iMac is more than enough to edit those 2-minute 4K videos and pretend you're a seasoned editor "working in the industry."
This is one of those threads that people can look back on and have a good laugh after Apple announces the final product and how it differs from the past approach. Not enough imagination about what's being done...
Will it take them to 2019 to give the mini a decent bump too? I have 4 x 2011 i7 server models waiting for an upgrade. It gets a little bit tiresome to scour e-bay for used 2011/2012 server configs.
I would not hold my breath waiting for a Mini. They have never committed to making a new model. At least last year they gathered in several journalists/bloggers to say that they had missed the direction of the market for the MacPro. They said that the Mac Pro would not come before 2017. Now they say 2019. It will probably get here by Q1 2020. Both the mini and the Pro's sell in lower volume compared to laptops and the iMac, but apple probably makes much less profit on the mini just because thats the difference between a $500 machine and a $5,000 machine. The Mini may not get any attention due to the need to dedicate those people to other projects. Its gone the way of the iPadMini. I tend to think both products would get more sales if they were updated.
Well, of course the mini sell in lower numbers when they don't do anything to keep it current. People (both new and existing customers) want to get the best deal possible at the moment of purchase, but models that have not seen a refresh in 2, 3, 4 years increasingly sound like a bad deal and people put it off or get something entirely different.
AFAIK Cook recently said the mini was an important part of Apple's future. We need to see proof of the pudding, Tim.
Comments
Because PC workstations mostly have 1 or 2 CPUs, but if the A-series CPUs are very cool and power-efficient (which they are, originating in phones) then it might be possible to have a workstation with 5 or 10 CPUs. Epic!
Of course, if this were true then he’d never have come up with the G4 Cube and the Hockey Puck Mouse.
Jobs’s real talent was surrounding himself with exceptional people who shared his vision for simplicity, and could temper his vision with pragmatism. If not for the pragmatiststs then OSX would’ve been released without the Carbon APIs, and iOS would’ve been released without an API at all.
Apple wants to get into healthcare; they hire doctors with vision
Apple wants to kickstart their education initiatives; they hire teachers with vision.
Apple wants to ram up the retail experience; they hire a retail genius with vision (having first hired a warehouse manager with no vision at all from PC World).
App,e want to kickstart its line of professional desktop machines then they hire professionals … with the same vision for simplicity. And that’s kind of important, because the machine that will show up at the end of this extended incubation is not the machine that the “professionals” around here are asking for, namely a Dell box that just happens to run OSX. They certainly wouldn’t need until the end of 2019 to pull that off.
Xeon W: single socket, up to 18 cores / 36 -> iMac Pro
Xeon Scalable: double socket, up to 28 cores / 56 (x 2) -> Mac Pro (?)
(Xeon W is the single socket variant of Xeon Scalable.)
2. iPhone sales aren't plateauing. They're up.
3. The forthcoming Mac Pro could ferment, brew and dispense free beer inside it, and it would still be way less than five percent of Mac sales. Schiller said it was never higher than that -- ever. A niche product that 0.1 percent of Apple customers are going to buy is not going to turn anything around, particularly when there is literally no area of the company that is not currently in possession of a license to print money and high-90s customer sat. The next Mac Pro is a thank you (and likely a sign-off) to the Mac veterans, not a viable product line.
And giving the smartest and most creative people amazing tools could make the world a better place and Apple will benefit from that along with the rest of us.
I hope that doesn't sound hopelessly naive, but Tim Cook has publicly said on several occasions that X product or X initiative was not purely about profit.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/04/05/new-mac-pro-wont-arrive-until-2019/
Thunderbolt is the standard that turns your PC inside-out.
The main components of your PC are tied together with a bus called PCIe. Your graphics card, your SSD communicate with the CPU over PCIe. Now consider extending that PCIe bus over a cable outside the case of your PC: this is Thunderbolt. With Thunderbolt you can attach a desk-load of peripherals (RAIDs, monitors, external GPUs, network interfaces…) and make all of these communicate at speeds previously only available internally on your PC. Without Thunderbolt, you’d have to build a PC the size of that desk to include all of those peripherals. Thanks to Thunderbolt you can isolate the core of your PC from the peripherals and get a more refined and modern configuration with better thermal management and virtually unlimited expandability.
The trash can Mac Pro is the power core at the center of such a modern configuration.
And current tests on GPU cards -- show there is an impact on performance. They perform well, but there is overhead with running it through Thunderbolt to another computer. There is a reason why the PCIe slots for graphics cards tend to be the closest to the CPU. There can be performance degradation of up to 30% on a 1080Ti.
"Parts slapped together"? Seems to me that most of the world, including professionals, produce just fine on HP and Dell products that are "slapped together". Many are top sellers and award winning designs (if looks matter to you). If you mean that Apple takes years to create museum-worthy artistic designs and that professionals can't get anything done without having a piece of art on their desk, then you're right. I've always said if Apple took the aluminum Mac Pro chassis and put in a modern system board with the latest techonolgy, not only would people beat down the door to buy one, but you could be using one now, not sometime in 2019.
While everyone else gets current, high performance technology to work with, Apple users are always the last to get it. But, hey, it's beautiful.
This should provoke howls of dismay and disbelief among techie boyz who insist they are "power users" who are the overhwleming Apple market in general and in particular, need a *real* machine to have 10,000 Chrome tabs open to keep all those women-hating Reddit forums going.
Not to mention the disdain of the tons of super-successful businessmen who know precisely what Apple needs to do and how they focus too much on X when they should be paying attention to their forum posts. If you're disgusted with Apple's prosumer approach, well then, vote with your dollars. Today. Don't wait, don't threaten to switch to Windows. Do it today.
Otherwise, just accept that your iMac is more than enough to edit those 2-minute 4K videos and pretend you're a seasoned editor "working in the industry."
AFAIK Cook recently said the mini was an important part of Apple's future. We need to see proof of the pudding, Tim.