Why not make an MacPro that looks like an XServe but is only 18"wide and 18" deep?
The Xserves were so deep because that's the industry standard. These machines fit into racks and are designed to be pulled out on rails, even while operating. They need to be that deep so the rails can hook into the rear of the rack. You wouldn't want to suspend the weight of an Xserve on just the two thumb screws on the front of the case. Besides, you need all that extra Xserve room for all the redundancy.
The data center industry thrives on standards. I remember ordering $20 million in servers and associated gear and seeing them sit in a monstrous pile in the middle of the data center because the DC staff had given us the wrong specs on their racks and our rails wouldn't fit.
An internal hard drive I can replace in 5 minutes...blindfolded.
To hell with the hard drive....on a desktop or laptop it too is a dinosaur...a throw back to the era of spinning disks. Solid state drives are the the future and offer better performance. 256GB SSDs are already well under $400.00, and the prices will continue to drop. The MacBook Air has the right idea, tiny sticks of memory that could be aggregated for capacity or redundancy. You could easily put 5 in an iMac and have a truly awesome local storage solution in about as much space as a laptop hard drive. That's future forward design - drive bays are no longer needed.
The best use for hard disks is external RAID arrays and network storage devices.
Seems like there would be a lot of interest in a "beefed-up" version of the mini, maybe... wait for it... in a "cube" form factor!
Like the newton, the old cube wasn't the "bad idea" it was made out to be... it was just way too early for the market.
I like the idea of a cube, it would have a board in the base that allowed a macmini to be dropped in. Connecting up power, ports etc. This is surely something for a 3rd party company to develop, no?
I am in the market for one. They last a long time so I always buy the top of the line. Just waiting for the TB equipped version. I hope they make at least one more version.
Where else are you going to get 12 cores and 64 gigs of ram? With that much power you really need the larger enclosure just for the fans.
The expansion slots are pretty cool too. I have used two so far.
You do realize that you can build a comparable PC for far less than half the cost, right?
I am in no way saying the PC is the better option, but you seem enamored with this ability to have expansion slots, etc. Any PC motherboard has these slots.
With the Mac Pro, what you are essentially paying is a $3,000+ premium for OSX and a pretty aluminum case. You can build a 12-core PC, for example, for $2,300-$2,800, using the same or similar processors as the Mac Pro. Not to mention you can overclock them too. And you can mount the motherboard in a Mac Pro case if you want to.
Again, I am not so much raggin on the Mac Pro as much as I am pointing out that if all you want is 12 cores, 64GB of ram, and expandability, maybe the Mac Pro isn't the right machine for you (unless you absolutely need OSX).
Apple's other products all have a certain level of engineering artistry, and a level of uniqueness, that makes them command their hardware premium over similarly equiped PCs. The Mac Pro, however, is staggeringly overpriced. Outside of the professional video development arena, I have never been able to see how they make sense?
You do realize that you can build a comparable PC for far less than half the cost, right?
I am in no way saying the PC is the better option, but you seem enamored with this ability to have expansion slots, etc. Any PC motherboard has these slots.
With the Mac Pro, what you are essentially paying is a $3,000+ premium for OSX and a pretty aluminum case. You can build a 12-core PC, for example, for $2,300-$2,800, using the same or similar processors as the Mac Pro. Not to mention you can overclock them too. And you can mount the motherboard in a Mac Pro case if you want to.
Again, I am not so much raggin on the Mac Pro as much as I am pointing out that if all you want is 12 cores, 64GB of ram, and expandability, maybe the Mac Pro isn't the right machine for you (unless you absolutely need OSX).
Apple's other products all have a certain level of engineering artistry, and a level of uniqueness, that makes them command their hardware premium over similarly equiped PCs. The Mac Pro, however, is staggeringly overpriced. Outside of the professional video development arena, I have never been able to see how they make sense?
With the mac pro, it pretty much is about OSX, well that and powerful reliability, but yes the hardware could be duplicated in a PC, but the Hackintosh solution isn't going to work for most people. Too risky.
Right, the system that sells the smallest percentage of Apple's products being canceled will ruin them. Not even close.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hmm
Given the tdp ranges that have shown up in articles, I'm not 100% sure they could fit it along with discreet graphics. It's kind of borderline as the ranges in terms of wattage didn't shift at each processor tier. There are several ways they could do this. They could accept intel integrated graphics which will still suck but will be barely within spec due to OpenCL support meaning you'll be able to run FCPX. The other option is they might be able to underclock it slightly.
The current $800 Mac Mini uses a 35W cpu and a discrete video card, so any of the next gen CPUs will be fine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TechNewb
Who cares if it's made of server parts, make a tower with high end tower parts, it doesn't have to be Xeons. Just add top of the line i7 instead.
The processors have to have 2 QPI links or else they won't support multi-chip setups. Xeons all have this and possibly the Extreme's, but none of the others do. Intel wants only their most expensive chips supported for that basically.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jasenj1
There's not many "Avatar" level movies made or albums produced, but being able to use those pros using your machines for real heavy-lifting in marketing material seems like it ought to pay dividends in the sales of the consumer class machines.
What articles talked about Avatar being made on Mac? The only articles I can find all point to Linux.
This is the thing I have to disagree with most strongly. External storage modules are not a replacement for internal storage in a computer. Especially a computer that comes with one TB port. This whole idea that TB would be acceptable to the pro crowd that uses the Mac Pro is a joke.
Of course, that one TB port would still allow you to chain 5 Pegasus Promise 12TB enclosures before getting to your TB Display, so how is that a bad thing? I don't think you'll be shoving 60TB into your MP.
They have limitted sales because they rarely update them and they are WAY overpriced.
The sales of the Mac Pros suck because they don't put enough effort into making it a desireable product.
AGREED!!
Apple's Mac Pros are wayyyyyyyyyyy overpriced for what you get. people do not usually consider one because they are definitely NOT the fastest, or most expandable.
If you don't believe me look at the competition.
Perhaps Apple should license it's OS to Boxx computer. At least they would have a real workstation.\
For my education, what is it about the Mac Pro that recording studios require? (Not my field.)
You can load multitudes of music plugins at the same time and change them on the fly.
Its great to be able to pull up a reverb and put it across a vocal (which may be 15 different tracks) using 15 different instances. All of this in a song which may have 80 Tracks.
You can be as creative as you want without worrying.
Something you can't get with Windows at ALL & something a IMac struggles to do.
I know this may be seen as old hat but I still think is the best next thing Apple should do, that is make an eight way PCIe based chassis ditching all mechanical legacy drives, it could even use half hight PCIe card designs making for an extreemly sleek 19" rack, like any new thing... (ie: FCPX) it would need some teething time to integrate into the mainstream but Apple are no strangers to introducing next generation leaps are they?
I would like to also see 6 & 8 core IvyBridge i7EXTREEM not Mobile based processors used with the new intel liquid cooling system built on PCIe cards too but that may be stretching the precept a bit at the moment.
the only reason one would need more than a single multiCPU in the future would be for servers and that job would benefit from multiple racked machines all through connected via opticle TB plenty fast enough for tv studio employ and massively interfacability through dedicated PCIe cards. perhaps 3 USB3 sockets too for general periferals.
this concept would minimise case requirement and development cost with a thin PSU down one side, no SATA optical or HD drive bays just very fast 8 and 16 lane PCIe slots for upto twin GPUs and as many SSD or hybrids ect cards in raid as you need the skys really is the limit with totem poled racking, and a single computer would become the perfect MacproX workstation with MacOS and integrated server really would cream the processional and high end business PROmarkets aswell as enthusiast level beyond iMacs.
This modular system would give PCIe designers a platform for developing new cards like the RED Rocket 4K dedicated video processor I'm sure all pro's can imagine their ideal machine simply buy plug and play PCIe the apple way, and I'm sure apple would find a higher end app shop aswell to make it profitable.
I could even be impressed enough to come back to MacOS.
But in so far disappointed reality I think after all this time and with all the money Apple has coveted, if they can't be asked to support its traditional hardcore people and are prepared to sacrifice the Apple figurehead machine it should at least licence out MacOS X...
Hmmm! first Acorn went, then SGI now ApplePro, thank goodness at least windows is still there to fall back on bad as it may have been in the past, and I don't see much of that outside of running Proapps anyway and haven't had any crashes either over the last few months and Ivy Bridge along with impressive nVidea GPU processor cards will be available on this PC platform too, I no longer feel I'm missing anything especially the ever wandering if Apple would continue to support my future needs, I know windows based PCs will, what a shame!
With the Mac Pro, what you are essentially paying is a $3,000+ premium for OSX and a pretty aluminum case.
Have you ever serviced a Mac Pro? It's not merely pretty; internally, it's exceptionally elegant from a practical standpoint.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SchnellFowVay
Apple's other products all have a certain level of engineering artistry, and a level of uniqueness, that makes them command their hardware premium over similarly equiped PCs. The Mac Pro, however, is staggeringly overpriced.
In fact, configuring similar single-CPU machines at HP and Dell doesn't yield prices all that much lower than Apple's single-CPU models (in a quick search, I couldn't figure out how to configure dual-CPU models from those sources). Sure, build-your-own may be somewhat cheaper - though the single-quantity prices for high-end Intel CPUs can be quite high. So, I'm not sure that the claim of "staggeringly overpriced" holds up.
A little different than what I was envisioning, but all in all, that's it! Now, Apple needs native OS support for this type of parallelism.
Oh, and I know this is a bit of fantasy, but how about a "Mac mini Cluster" with 10 Gigabit Ethernet and/or a Fiber Channel. Not that Thunderbolt isn't blazing fast, I feel it leaves something to be desired for the cluster market.
But does it have to be this monster? The ever elusive hypothetical small form factor X-Mac mini tower would be just fine. ...
The size seems to be a big problem for some folks, but for the life of me I can't understand why. Are you all working on submarines that you can't afford a couple square feet of floor space under your desk? That's where my "monster" sits. Oooh, it's so big!
Comments
Why not make an MacPro that looks like an XServe but is only 18"wide and 18" deep?
The Xserves were so deep because that's the industry standard. These machines fit into racks and are designed to be pulled out on rails, even while operating. They need to be that deep so the rails can hook into the rear of the rack. You wouldn't want to suspend the weight of an Xserve on just the two thumb screws on the front of the case. Besides, you need all that extra Xserve room for all the redundancy.
The data center industry thrives on standards. I remember ordering $20 million in servers and associated gear and seeing them sit in a monstrous pile in the middle of the data center because the DC staff had given us the wrong specs on their racks and our rails wouldn't fit.
An internal hard drive I can replace in 5 minutes...blindfolded.
To hell with the hard drive....on a desktop or laptop it too is a dinosaur...a throw back to the era of spinning disks. Solid state drives are the the future and offer better performance. 256GB SSDs are already well under $400.00, and the prices will continue to drop. The MacBook Air has the right idea, tiny sticks of memory that could be aggregated for capacity or redundancy. You could easily put 5 in an iMac and have a truly awesome local storage solution in about as much space as a laptop hard drive. That's future forward design - drive bays are no longer needed.
The best use for hard disks is external RAID arrays and network storage devices.
Seems like there would be a lot of interest in a "beefed-up" version of the mini, maybe... wait for it... in a "cube" form factor!
Like the newton, the old cube wasn't the "bad idea" it was made out to be... it was just way too early for the market.
I like the idea of a cube, it would have a board in the base that allowed a macmini to be dropped in. Connecting up power, ports etc. This is surely something for a 3rd party company to develop, no?
A post from Feb 2008 asking for a mid-range tower.
http://matthewdarnell.blogspot.com/2...rom-apple.html
We should call it 'Mac'
Mac Mini < Mac < Mac Pro
-Matt
I was going to suggest the same thing. Just make a MAC.
I am in the market for one. They last a long time so I always buy the top of the line. Just waiting for the TB equipped version. I hope they make at least one more version.
Where else are you going to get 12 cores and 64 gigs of ram? With that much power you really need the larger enclosure just for the fans.
The expansion slots are pretty cool too. I have used two so far.
You do realize that you can build a comparable PC for far less than half the cost, right?
I am in no way saying the PC is the better option, but you seem enamored with this ability to have expansion slots, etc. Any PC motherboard has these slots.
With the Mac Pro, what you are essentially paying is a $3,000+ premium for OSX and a pretty aluminum case. You can build a 12-core PC, for example, for $2,300-$2,800, using the same or similar processors as the Mac Pro. Not to mention you can overclock them too. And you can mount the motherboard in a Mac Pro case if you want to.
Again, I am not so much raggin on the Mac Pro as much as I am pointing out that if all you want is 12 cores, 64GB of ram, and expandability, maybe the Mac Pro isn't the right machine for you (unless you absolutely need OSX).
Apple's other products all have a certain level of engineering artistry, and a level of uniqueness, that makes them command their hardware premium over similarly equiped PCs. The Mac Pro, however, is staggeringly overpriced. Outside of the professional video development arena, I have never been able to see how they make sense?
You do realize that you can build a comparable PC for far less than half the cost, right?
I am in no way saying the PC is the better option, but you seem enamored with this ability to have expansion slots, etc. Any PC motherboard has these slots.
With the Mac Pro, what you are essentially paying is a $3,000+ premium for OSX and a pretty aluminum case. You can build a 12-core PC, for example, for $2,300-$2,800, using the same or similar processors as the Mac Pro. Not to mention you can overclock them too. And you can mount the motherboard in a Mac Pro case if you want to.
Again, I am not so much raggin on the Mac Pro as much as I am pointing out that if all you want is 12 cores, 64GB of ram, and expandability, maybe the Mac Pro isn't the right machine for you (unless you absolutely need OSX).
Apple's other products all have a certain level of engineering artistry, and a level of uniqueness, that makes them command their hardware premium over similarly equiped PCs. The Mac Pro, however, is staggeringly overpriced. Outside of the professional video development arena, I have never been able to see how they make sense?
With the mac pro, it pretty much is about OSX, well that and powerful reliability, but yes the hardware could be duplicated in a PC, but the Hackintosh solution isn't going to work for most people. Too risky.
A revamped smaller, lower cost case (some kind of distinctive cube?).
Fewer slots.
Integrated, but good motherboard video (like the iMacs 6970).
Single CPU version uses normal desktop Sandybridge.
Normal, non ECC memory.
It should be easy to get the base machine under $1500 with decent margins.
You can maintain the dual Xenon MB with ECC memory for the lunatic fringe as an expensive BTO option.
A lot of home users don't want built in monitors, but that only leaves you a choice between the low end mini and the ridiculous Mac Pro.
http://www.apple.com/feedback/
Fill it out. They do read these. Your feedback to Apple could make the difference.
this will be the undoing of Apple.
Right, the system that sells the smallest percentage of Apple's products being canceled will ruin them. Not even close.
Given the tdp ranges that have shown up in articles, I'm not 100% sure they could fit it along with discreet graphics. It's kind of borderline as the ranges in terms of wattage didn't shift at each processor tier. There are several ways they could do this. They could accept intel integrated graphics which will still suck but will be barely within spec due to OpenCL support meaning you'll be able to run FCPX. The other option is they might be able to underclock it slightly.
The current $800 Mac Mini uses a 35W cpu and a discrete video card, so any of the next gen CPUs will be fine.
Who cares if it's made of server parts, make a tower with high end tower parts, it doesn't have to be Xeons. Just add top of the line i7 instead.
The processors have to have 2 QPI links or else they won't support multi-chip setups. Xeons all have this and possibly the Extreme's, but none of the others do. Intel wants only their most expensive chips supported for that basically.
There's not many "Avatar" level movies made or albums produced, but being able to use those pros using your machines for real heavy-lifting in marketing material seems like it ought to pay dividends in the sales of the consumer class machines.
What articles talked about Avatar being made on Mac? The only articles I can find all point to Linux.
http://www.junauza.com/2010/01/techn...tar-movie.html
This is the thing I have to disagree with most strongly. External storage modules are not a replacement for internal storage in a computer. Especially a computer that comes with one TB port. This whole idea that TB would be acceptable to the pro crowd that uses the Mac Pro is a joke.
Of course, that one TB port would still allow you to chain 5 Pegasus Promise 12TB enclosures before getting to your TB Display, so how is that a bad thing? I don't think you'll be shoving 60TB into your MP.
They have limitted sales because they rarely update them and they are WAY overpriced.
The sales of the Mac Pros suck because they don't put enough effort into making it a desireable product.
AGREED!!
Apple's Mac Pros are wayyyyyyyyyyy overpriced for what you get. people do not usually consider one because they are definitely NOT the fastest, or most expandable.
If you don't believe me look at the competition.
Perhaps Apple should license it's OS to Boxx computer. At least they would have a real workstation.
For my education, what is it about the Mac Pro that recording studios require? (Not my field.)
You can load multitudes of music plugins at the same time and change them on the fly.
Its great to be able to pull up a reverb and put it across a vocal (which may be 15 different tracks) using 15 different instances. All of this in a song which may have 80 Tracks.
You can be as creative as you want without worrying.
Something you can't get with Windows at ALL & something a IMac struggles to do.
I would like to also see 6 & 8 core IvyBridge i7EXTREEM not Mobile based processors used with the new intel liquid cooling system built on PCIe cards too but that may be stretching the precept a bit at the moment.
the only reason one would need more than a single multiCPU in the future would be for servers and that job would benefit from multiple racked machines all through connected via opticle TB plenty fast enough for tv studio employ and massively interfacability through dedicated PCIe cards. perhaps 3 USB3 sockets too for general periferals.
this concept would minimise case requirement and development cost with a thin PSU down one side, no SATA optical or HD drive bays just very fast 8 and 16 lane PCIe slots for upto twin GPUs and as many SSD or hybrids ect cards in raid as you need the skys really is the limit with totem poled racking, and a single computer would become the perfect MacproX workstation with MacOS and integrated server really would cream the processional and high end business PROmarkets aswell as enthusiast level beyond iMacs.
This modular system would give PCIe designers a platform for developing new cards like the RED Rocket 4K dedicated video processor I'm sure all pro's can imagine their ideal machine simply buy plug and play PCIe the apple way, and I'm sure apple would find a higher end app shop aswell to make it profitable.
I could even be impressed enough to come back to MacOS.
But in so far disappointed reality I think after all this time and with all the money Apple has coveted, if they can't be asked to support its traditional hardcore people and are prepared to sacrifice the Apple figurehead machine it should at least licence out MacOS X...
Hmmm! first Acorn went, then SGI now ApplePro, thank goodness at least windows is still there to fall back on bad as it may have been in the past, and I don't see much of that outside of running Proapps anyway and haven't had any crashes either over the last few months and Ivy Bridge along with impressive nVidea GPU processor cards will be available on this PC platform too, I no longer feel I'm missing anything especially the ever wandering if Apple would continue to support my future needs, I know windows based PCs will, what a shame!
Apple's Mac Pros are wayyyyyyyyyyy overpriced for what you get.
Not in the least. Do you even know what they're for?
people do not usually consider one because they are definitely NOT the fastest?
You want a faster release schedule, take it up with Intel.
Perhaps Apple should license it's OS to Boxx computer. At least they would have a real workstation.
So, nonsense then. Got it.
With the Mac Pro, what you are essentially paying is a $3,000+ premium for OSX and a pretty aluminum case.
Have you ever serviced a Mac Pro? It's not merely pretty; internally, it's exceptionally elegant from a practical standpoint.
Apple's other products all have a certain level of engineering artistry, and a level of uniqueness, that makes them command their hardware premium over similarly equiped PCs. The Mac Pro, however, is staggeringly overpriced.
In fact, configuring similar single-CPU machines at HP and Dell doesn't yield prices all that much lower than Apple's single-CPU models (in a quick search, I couldn't figure out how to configure dual-CPU models from those sources). Sure, build-your-own may be somewhat cheaper - though the single-quantity prices for high-end Intel CPUs can be quite high. So, I'm not sure that the claim of "staggeringly overpriced" holds up.
Does XGrid still exist ? Is it capable of linking minis over thunderbolt for parallel processing ?
plugging machines into xgrid doesn't magically make them all become one super machine.
I don't know where people got that idea from.
You mean something like this:
http://www.macworld.com/article/163265/article.html
A little different than what I was envisioning, but all in all, that's it! Now, Apple needs native OS support for this type of parallelism.
Oh, and I know this is a bit of fantasy, but how about a "Mac mini Cluster" with 10 Gigabit Ethernet and/or a Fiber Channel. Not that Thunderbolt isn't blazing fast, I feel it leaves something to be desired for the cluster market.
I had an iMac at work and after having to have the logic board replaced because of a video issue I said I would never spend any money on an iMac.
If I can't easily replace parts, than I don't want it.
If I can't easily replace parts, than I don't want it.
Then you don't want a Mac at all. Enjoy your home-built PC.
Getting to the logic board on a Mac Pro is even harder than an iMac.
But does it have to be this monster? The ever elusive hypothetical small form factor X-Mac mini tower would be just fine. ...
The size seems to be a big problem for some folks, but for the life of me I can't understand why. Are you all working on submarines that you can't afford a couple square feet of floor space under your desk? That's where my "monster" sits. Oooh, it's so big!