I can’t wait anymore for Apple. I’m looking to replace my 2009 Mac Pro with a 32 core Threadripper system running Linux. I anticipate having that system by September.
I’ll run it headless and remote in from my iMac.
Are you looking at something like the Threadripper 7970X? I'm not sure how much better that would be than an M3 Ultra.
I think I was one of those 8000! After wavering a bit in the mid nineties, I would say overall Mac ownership was a very happy experience up until about 2015.
The difference between the cheese grater Mac Pro and the contemporary iMac is mainly internal vs. external expansion, not general expansion. I owned a 2009 Mac Pro and updated the RAM, drive space, boot drive, GPU, and added USB 3.0 support via a 3rd party card. However, I eventually had to move on from the Mac Pro because the old motherboard bottlenecked the GPU, and the WiFi and bluetooth standards were too old and also too problematic to try and update relative to the OS.
Bottom line: the 2017 5K iMac that I bought as a replacement can expand in all the same areas as the Mac Pro, with the exception of adding a card internally for USB upgrades. Again, the main difference is whether or not the expansion is handled internally or externally, not whether it's supported at all.
Can't upgrade the GPU in the iMac, which is one of the main reasons the old Mac Pro is still coveted today. Drives? Sure, external, but if you want RAID of 4 drives, not as cheap as just sliding in 4 drives. Upgrade CPU(s) like in the Mac Pro? Nope. With the iMac, everything is external. So while it's possible, it's not the same as the Mac Pro.
The process to replace the processor in the iMac Pro is no less or more of a pain in the ass than the Mac Pro cheese grater.
To be very, very clear. Apple has never endorsed CPU replacements, even if they were possible.
Mike, that comment makes it seem like you have never removed the CPU tray from a cheese grater. Apple literally has instructions on how to do it.
This isn't a CPU replacement. This is a tray replacement. The heat sink removal procedure with the long-handled Torx, the un-lidded processors on the 4,1, and the temperature sensor cable is a pain.
Yeah, I know they're possible. The point of the remark was that not everything can get a processor swap. Many iMacs can't, for instance.
Regarding the procedure, I stopped counting at 10 Mac Pro processor pair swaps and had a whole series about upgrading the 3,1 through 5,1 at another venue. And, I've done it three times on an iMac Pro, so I'm pretty sure I'm qualified to comment.
Every Mac can get a processor swap.
Some of them just need a SMD rework station to do it.
I'm not really that big a fan of the cheesegrater case. Sure, some component swaps were easy, but the hard drive trays were unnecessarily annoying, a better design wouldn't have needed a tray at all. And logic board replacement was FAR more of a pain than it should have been, power supply replacement wasn't great either.
The G3/G4 tower design was MUCH nicer for logic board replacement. Not so much for power supplies, and the Quicksilver and MDD were notorious for bad power supplies.
Oh, and the RAM boards in the early cheesegrater Mac Pros were incredibly annoying. Should have been nice, reality was that they were frequently flaky. I wasn't sad to see those go in the later ones.
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