Contrary to popular opinion Apple does respond to reasoned user input. That is one of the reasons why Apple has feedback sites, user forums and other communications vehicles. It is why Steve's E-Mail address was public.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SSquirrel
Apple reads feedback it is sent and sending them feedback is far more productive than posting on AI anyway. Not giving a company money and direct communication w/them are some of the best ways for consumers to have their message heard by companies.
All of that being said I'm absolutely convinced that Apple people, be they Engineers or managers do read this forum. I'm certain that evolution of the Mini was guided by a series of comments here and on other Apple related web sites. Early in the Mini that resulted in more USB ports being installed. Later we got the HDTV port. So in part forums like this do serve as a communications pipeline to Apple. It might not be the best one and maybe not weighted to heavily in the case of the Mac Pro but Apple does notice underlying themes.
But costs as much as 3 x 27" iMacs, which includes 3 x 27" LED IPS displays worth $3,000.
Intel takes too long to update the Xeons. The E5 Sandy Bridge chips are coming in Q1 2012 now, a year after the Core-i series Sandy Bridge.
I would like to see the Mac Pro get one more design refresh for the next 5 or so years before it's finally laid to rest. Even if they ditch the dual-processor models, which are way too expensive.
The 6-core 3.33GHz W3680 is only around $600. They could have a single model and cut out the extras to either match the current entry price or hit the old $1999 price. No optical drives, no PCI slots, 1GB Radeon 6990M, 4 x drive bays, 400W PSU, 4 x Thunderbolt ports.
The 12-core models do have their place for high-end rendering but you can buy multiple machines for this like the high-end companies do. You could buy 3 x $2000 Mac Pros in a slim design and outperform a 12-core for a lower cost.
No PCI slots? Are you nuts? Why do you think we need these computers in the first place? Higher frame rates on games?
Not everyone is midrange. Just the unexceptional. You might remember "The Crazy Ones".
You might want to read for content. The whole point in having a midrange performance Pro is to drive sales so that some of the development costs for the high end model get absorbed. I'm pretty much convinced that the Pro isn't profitable for Apple, to correct that they need a variant that appeals to a wider array of users.
Without profitability there will be no Pros for The Crazy Ones.
I have been watching this thread with interest / exasperation and while I can sympathize with the genuine concern of some people a number of the statements on here do no favors to the cause of keeping the mac pro line up and running. Comments such as where the alphas lead the sheep will follow and so called professionals insisting that they need 32 gig of ram to run a 32 bit app show deep arrogance and total misunderstanding respectively.
Lets face a few facts here:
1, The MP is designed in an era where expansion was a significant problem. The majority of content creators were running into problems with storage and ram.
2, Single chip computers coped with multithreaded professional applications poorly.
3, Hard drive speed was a serious bottleneck in access time / load time for large media hence Raid was popular.
1, These days in almost all situations we will see very little benefit from more than 8Gig of ram, from memory an iMac can take 16G. Current hard drive capacities compare well with the storage space in all but the most recent workstations raid arrays.
2, Single chip computers now run true multithreaded applications very well and the core architecture is extremely stable which reduces the need for Xeon processors, indeed it makes them pointless on the single processor version of the MP.
3, SSD offer a massive advantage to load times of large clips/ files. Couple a SSD with a large bulk storage drive and you have a pretty good compromise.
I agree apple should work to keep the power users but that doesn't mean that they need to keep building monoliths for an insignificant number of people (as far as revenue goes). Im sorry but also the MP doesn't give a significant 'halo effect' to the rest of the apple line up.
What would I like to see?
a, Apple putting their best brains into modular computing, something like distributed computing for people who don't want to learn the nitty gritty. Need to upgrade core horse power - add a module.
b, Incorporating Flash and traditional hard drives into all Macs and work on algorithms to make these work as well as possible as a sort of seamless hybrid drive (apart from special cases such as the Air)
c, Offer matt screens (I don't give a damn about them - I just want to stop hearing complaints from people).
To be brutally honest while a small number of users can make use of 4 drive bays, multiple card slots and 2 physical chips a significant number of users buy the MP simply because its got pro in the name and they like to pretend that they need the power so their work is not slowed down.
Guys lets get some perspective here, Apple is a computer manufacturer, if their stuff doesn't suit our needs and we are truly pro / power users then we move to a system that does. Yes I like the way OSX works but that shouldn't stop me choosing Windows / Linux if it makes me more productive. We are on this forum because we are generally passionate about apple products (or in some cases passionate about complaining about them) but I have yet to find one job that can't be done with either a Windows machine of Linux.
I have been watching this thread with interest / exasperation and while I can sympathize with the genuine concern of some people a number of the statements on here do no favors to the cause of keeping the mac pro line up and running. Comments such as where the alphas lead the sheep will follow and so called professionals insisting that they need 32 gig of ram.
I have 20GB of ram on my Mac Pro, and constantly hit a ceiling - even on a lowly 8-core machine - when running 64bit After Effects. Working in HD or 2K gobbles up Ram like you wouldn't believe when building complex vfx shots. My next machine - when they finally update the mac pro - will have at least 48GB, more likely 64GB. No iMac is likely to get near that (nor offer more than 4 cores) any time soon.
Thunderbolt will eventually remove the need for them. Too many legacy products still around. It's not like a floppy drive.
No, it's like USB. For which there were virtually no peripherals. Just like Thunderbolt.
And if you remove all legacy ports and only have Thunderbolt, history progresses just as it did before. Everyone stops using USB, FireWire, Ethernet, and whatever else and uses Thunderbolt.
You might want to read for content. The whole point in having a midrange performance Pro is to drive sales so that some of the development costs for the high end model get absorbed. I'm pretty much convinced that the Pro isn't profitable for Apple, to correct that they need a variant that appeals to a wider array of users.
Without profitability there will be no Pros for The Crazy Ones.
Apple could sell the Pro at a loss and not even feel it. There are many of us who would pay what is necessary to ensure they don't have to. It is essential to our businesses.
I have been watching this thread with interest / exasperation and while I can sympathize with the genuine concern of some people a number of the statements on here do no favors to the cause of keeping the mac pro line up and running. Comments such as where the alphas lead the sheep will follow and so called professionals insisting that they need 32 gig of ram to run a 32 bit app show deep arrogance and total misunderstanding respectively.
Sorry, dude, you don't know what you're talking about. If anything, I would say that the 32-bit version of AE is more RAM hungry than its 64-bit counterpart. You are correct than individual instances of 32-bit apps cannot take advantage of 32 gigs of RAM, but that's irrelevant.
For example, in order to get around this very problem, 32-bit After Effects launches a separate instance of its background rendering app *for every core* on the machine running it (provided enough RAM is available). And while you can technically open an AE background rendering instance with as little as half a gig of RAM, it's pointless, because rendering usually slows to a crawl with anything less than 2 gigs per core.
So you do the math ? 2 gigs per core for the 12 core equals 24 *minimum*, and that's *just* for After Effects; all your other apps need RAM too, so 32 gigs at the very least is actually pretty reasonable.
I have been watching this thread with interest / exasperation and while I can sympathize with the genuine concern of some people a number of the statements on here do no favors to the cause of keeping the mac pro line up and running. Comments such as where the alphas lead the sheep will follow and so called professionals insisting that they need 32 gig of ram to run a 32 bit app show deep arrogance and total misunderstanding respectively.
Lets face a few facts here:
1, The MP is designed in an era where expansion was a significant problem. The majority of content creators were running into problems with storage and ram.
2, Single chip computers coped with multithreaded professional applications poorly.
3, Hard drive speed was a serious bottleneck in access time / load time for large media hence Raid was popular.
You know I kind of agree with you on some of this stuff, but Apple likes to ditch old technology before newer standards and concepts stabilize. On OSX the vast majority of popular professional applications have switched over to 64 bit including Adobe's creative suite, pretty much anything from Autodesk, FCPX, etc. If you aren't having pageout issues or massive scratch data files, more ram ends up being pointless, but some people do have these issues. When they were 32 bit applications, it was totally different and yeah unless you had raided drives you could could have long pauses at times waiting on the drive. Today many of these applications can just hold that data in ram, so why not do so?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Thunderbolt removes the need for them, really. It's not insane. Insane is thinking Apple would keep the Mac Pro the same.
PCIe 3.0 is on the way. PCI standards will still be used for something, but the way they're used may change. If you look at the macbook air, it's a prime example. Apple went to PCI based solid state storage there as it lacks some of the bandwidth limitations of sata. The days of cards set up at the back of a machine may be numbered, but pci express is still a better standard for high bandwidth items than SATA.
Thunderbolt needs to have some way of at least accommodating breakout box versions of some of the higher bandwidth cards today to really displace the need for slots. Right now it matches an 4x PCIe 2.0 standard. It works for quite a lot. It just doesn't work for everything, and intel needs to do a better job of pushing thunderbolt to developers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
No, it's like USB. For which there were virtually no peripherals. Just like Thunderbolt.
And if you remove all legacy ports and only have Thunderbolt, history progresses just as it did before. Everyone stops using USB, FireWire, Ethernet, and whatever else and uses Thunderbolt.
I'm just going to add if you take away things before a new solution is in place, you're going to take a major hit on sales in the short term on affected product lines as people wait on other vendors. This supports my "intel needs to push sdks and really get behind thunderbolt".
You could pay attention to recent moves by Apple and Intel which show that they haven't declared usb eol yet. The thunderbolt display has usb ports. Intel is integrating usb3 on their chipsets next year but not thunderbolt. My guess is they're not pushing it due to cost issues. The chip complexity seems to contribute to manufacturing cost. Until that changes, there is little incentive for manufacturers to really get behind it outside of higher end machines. With Apple every machine carries a strong margin. This isn't the case with all oems.
I think there is a halo effect from the Mac Pro. In advertising oriented video post production almost everyone uses Mac Pros. Most all of the editors, agency producers, agency creatives, facility producers and operations managers like me use Macs. In my experience it is rare to see any PCs at a post house. Part of this preponderance of Macs is due to the fact that most all of the cutting is done on Macs. Naturally the people operating these edit systems want Mac laptops for their own use. The agency people just tend to prefer macs, but they also need to have seamless file and app compatibility with their editors. And PCs don't always provide that. One agency we work with installed Final Cut on all of the laptops issued to creatives. Funny thing, none of those laptops were PCs.
So the Mac Pro is an important part of the video post Mac puzzle. If people are forced to start using PCs that Mac preponderance will gradually decrease. Apple needs to decide if killing the Mac Pro is worth the risk of such a great disturbance in the Mac force. And is doing so would create brand damage in the industry that has done a lot to build the brand.
"I read on "Apple Insider" that there is a rumor that Apple plans to kill off the MacPro. Please don't do this. A lot of people depend on these machines to make their workflow more efficient. I have had my MacPro for about a year now and I LOVE IT. No more bottle necks. I run Pro Tools, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Safari (streaming videos) simultaneously and this machine just takes it. Yeah the MacPro is pricey (I've invested close to $10,000 on my Pro, software, and peripheral audio gear) but you get what you pay for. I try to crash my Pro but it refuses to. I occasionally will get a program crash but that's it; the OS is solid. BTW, I've owned a Mac Classic, Power Computing Clone, a blue G4, a graphite G5, 2006 Macbook Pro (that I use to DJ with now), and now my crown jewel the MacPro. Hopefully my rant doesn't fall upon def ears. Lastly, don't forget about us "pros" that helped Apple get through the dark ages of the late 90's. Thank you for your time."
Sorry, dude, you don't know what you're talking about. If anything, I would say that the 32-bit version of AE is more RAM hungry than its 64-bit counterpart. You are correct than individual instances of 32-bit apps cannot take advantage of 32 gigs of RAM, but that's irrelevant.
For example, in order to get around this very problem, 32-bit After Effects launches a separate instance of its background rendering app *for every core* on the machine running it (provided enough RAM is available). And while you can technically open an AE background rendering instance with as little as half a gig of RAM, it's pointless, because rendering usually slows to a crawl with anything less than 2 gigs per core.
So you do the math — 2 gigs per core for the 12 core equals 24 *minimum*, and that's *just* for After Effects; all your other apps need RAM too, so 32 gigs at the very least is actually pretty reasonable.
I did say most people don't need the MP and from memory After Effects allows rendering on more than one computer hence even in your situation the monolith of a current MP isn't required. Even in your case where you are probably one of the few people who is maxing out your MP wouldn't you prefer the option to be able to upgrade by adding a module containing a single chip, enough ram and a fast local storage to speed up your work rather than needing to buy another 4k+ tower taking a huge amount of space?
With regard to the halo effect, I really think some of us inflate the importance of our choices to apples bottom line. Apples marketing department is not stupid and if they could see a benefit in it they would promote the Mac Pro. I can't remember the last time they used a MP on a TV ad and their own FCP site shows it running on a laptop and an iMac.
As someone said earlier 'for a few no amount of power will be enough' but that doesn't mean to say that the power needs to be in a single huge box that can only be utilized by a single user.
Fair point with the ram but that still doesn't justify a modern Mac needing 4 internal 3 1/2drive bays and 2 optical drives. I would assume that if the MP was killed other / replacement macs would be given the ability to hold more ram for users who need it.\\
Sorry this is in relation to hmm's comment about holding data in ram - too early here, my brains hasn't woken up yet.
No PCI slots? Are you nuts? Why do you think we need these computers in the first place? Higher frame rates on games?
People buy the Mac Pro for anything computationally intensive. CAD, video editing, simulations, etc. A tiny subset ever needed the PCI slots and nearly all of them can now be accommodated by Thunderbolt.
Apple knows the market, and any wise company will know how to think whole to part. A small part of the market (developers that create content for the other devises Apple makes) is too important to abandon high end production machines without a viable alternative. Just because you have low sales does not make the machines unimportant or irrelevant... this is just more low level bait reporting...by linking the end of the Xserve with the Mac Pro situation.
"people familiar with the matter said" Who... come on... tell... if not then stop this! Who! Who! Yes, who makes a difference in the quality of reporting. Scant rumors and innuendo, Poor work Kasper.
Mac Pro re-design YES, possible, needed...
Elimination of high end computer for content development? No... Unrealistic, possible? Yes, anything
is possible. AppleInsider should stop posting from the anything possible position and not list sources... to many "they say" statements to be credible.... I think AppleInsider is going away because of poor reporting...
A better question would be what do you think Apple would introduce to replace the Mac Pro for high end content developers that the current line of machines outside of Mac Pros do not serve?
1, These days in almost all situations we will see very little benefit from more than 8Gig of ram, from memory an iMac can take 16G. Current hard drive capacities compare well with the storage space in all but the most recent workstations raid arrays.
2, Single chip computers now run true multithreaded applications very well and the core architecture is extremely stable which reduces the need for Xeon processors, indeed it makes them pointless on the single processor version of the MP.
3, SSD offer a massive advantage to load times of large clips/ files. Couple a SSD with a large bulk storage drive and you have a pretty good compromise.
Please stop saying idiotic shit like that and expect to be taken seriously. Here at work I got JBoss application server hosting our application, which is itself a a really complex server with millions of lines of code, Oracle database server, MS SQL Server, DB2 server, I'm running Eclipse, dozens of shells, hundreds of utilities all at the same time. I have 32 GB of RAM and I could use 64 GB easily.
People like you don't actually do anything with the computer. You guys could apparently all just get an iPad or at most Air and continue happily without noticing anything.
People who actually do things on their machine can never have enough CPU cores, fast enough cores, enough RAM.
By the way RAID was never about increasing storage capacity, it was always about increasing fault tolerance and increasing throughput.
Please, if you are not the target audience for Mac Pro class workstation refrain from chiming in with idiotic comments.
The issue is huge! You may not understand the need to have a workstation that runs Mac OS but that doesn't make other peoples needs irrelevant. In many cases some of these users would never have enough horse power, there is nothing Apple can do about that, however Apple can build a reasonably priced high performance machine that makes money for them.
I completely understand why people want workstations in the Mac world and I don't think the MP will die here. If it does, it will be replaced by something else, they are not just going to put a giant hole in their lineup. I also don't think putting forth the question of if all these new accounts are real or people stuffing the ballot box a bit is wrong either. This happens on many other threads at AI, you should know that well as long as you've been here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
The goal should be an entry level performance box that starts at $1200. As it is now the pro isn't even remotely affordable to those with midrange needs.
I think we could see a lowering of the entry cost, but I'm not sure that we will ever see a Pro selling for $1200. While there would be people happy to be able to buy a desktop, you would also have people questioning how having the same chip that they stuck in the new iMac makes for a "professional" desktop.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
All of that being said I'm absolutely convinced that Apple people, be they Engineers or managers do read this forum. I'm certain that evolution of the Mini was guided by a series of comments here and on other Apple related web sites.
Of course, Apple could have been inundated w/feedback by people and they never read jack shit here. People should certainly post here for discussion, but they shouldn't rely on this forum for their voice to be heard directly by Apple.
Comments
Apple reads feedback it is sent and sending them feedback is far more productive than posting on AI anyway. Not giving a company money and direct communication w/them are some of the best ways for consumers to have their message heard by companies.
All of that being said I'm absolutely convinced that Apple people, be they Engineers or managers do read this forum. I'm certain that evolution of the Mini was guided by a series of comments here and on other Apple related web sites. Early in the Mini that resulted in more USB ports being installed. Later we got the HDTV port. So in part forums like this do serve as a communications pipeline to Apple. It might not be the best one and maybe not weighted to heavily in the case of the Mac Pro but Apple does notice underlying themes.
But costs as much as 3 x 27" iMacs, which includes 3 x 27" LED IPS displays worth $3,000.
Intel takes too long to update the Xeons. The E5 Sandy Bridge chips are coming in Q1 2012 now, a year after the Core-i series Sandy Bridge.
I would like to see the Mac Pro get one more design refresh for the next 5 or so years before it's finally laid to rest. Even if they ditch the dual-processor models, which are way too expensive.
The 6-core 3.33GHz W3680 is only around $600. They could have a single model and cut out the extras to either match the current entry price or hit the old $1999 price. No optical drives, no PCI slots, 1GB Radeon 6990M, 4 x drive bays, 400W PSU, 4 x Thunderbolt ports.
The 12-core models do have their place for high-end rendering but you can buy multiple machines for this like the high-end companies do. You could buy 3 x $2000 Mac Pros in a slim design and outperform a 12-core for a lower cost.
No PCI slots? Are you nuts? Why do you think we need these computers in the first place? Higher frame rates on games?
Not everyone is midrange. Just the unexceptional. You might remember "The Crazy Ones".
You might want to read for content. The whole point in having a midrange performance Pro is to drive sales so that some of the development costs for the high end model get absorbed. I'm pretty much convinced that the Pro isn't profitable for Apple, to correct that they need a variant that appeals to a wider array of users.
Without profitability there will be no Pros for The Crazy Ones.
Lets face a few facts here:
1, The MP is designed in an era where expansion was a significant problem. The majority of content creators were running into problems with storage and ram.
2, Single chip computers coped with multithreaded professional applications poorly.
3, Hard drive speed was a serious bottleneck in access time / load time for large media hence Raid was popular.
1, These days in almost all situations we will see very little benefit from more than 8Gig of ram, from memory an iMac can take 16G. Current hard drive capacities compare well with the storage space in all but the most recent workstations raid arrays.
2, Single chip computers now run true multithreaded applications very well and the core architecture is extremely stable which reduces the need for Xeon processors, indeed it makes them pointless on the single processor version of the MP.
3, SSD offer a massive advantage to load times of large clips/ files. Couple a SSD with a large bulk storage drive and you have a pretty good compromise.
I agree apple should work to keep the power users but that doesn't mean that they need to keep building monoliths for an insignificant number of people (as far as revenue goes). Im sorry but also the MP doesn't give a significant 'halo effect' to the rest of the apple line up.
What would I like to see?
a, Apple putting their best brains into modular computing, something like distributed computing for people who don't want to learn the nitty gritty. Need to upgrade core horse power - add a module.
b, Incorporating Flash and traditional hard drives into all Macs and work on algorithms to make these work as well as possible as a sort of seamless hybrid drive (apart from special cases such as the Air)
c, Offer matt screens (I don't give a damn about them - I just want to stop hearing complaints from people).
To be brutally honest while a small number of users can make use of 4 drive bays, multiple card slots and 2 physical chips a significant number of users buy the MP simply because its got pro in the name and they like to pretend that they need the power so their work is not slowed down.
Guys lets get some perspective here, Apple is a computer manufacturer, if their stuff doesn't suit our needs and we are truly pro / power users then we move to a system that does. Yes I like the way OSX works but that shouldn't stop me choosing Windows / Linux if it makes me more productive. We are on this forum because we are generally passionate about apple products (or in some cases passionate about complaining about them) but I have yet to find one job that can't be done with either a Windows machine of Linux.
Sorry about the ramble.
No PCI slots? Are you nuts? Why do you think we need these computers in the first place? Higher frame rates on games?
Thunderbolt removes the need for them, really. It's not insane. Insane is thinking Apple would keep the Mac Pro the same.
I have been watching this thread with interest / exasperation and while I can sympathize with the genuine concern of some people a number of the statements on here do no favors to the cause of keeping the mac pro line up and running. Comments such as where the alphas lead the sheep will follow and so called professionals insisting that they need 32 gig of ram.
I have 20GB of ram on my Mac Pro, and constantly hit a ceiling - even on a lowly 8-core machine - when running 64bit After Effects. Working in HD or 2K gobbles up Ram like you wouldn't believe when building complex vfx shots. My next machine - when they finally update the mac pro - will have at least 48GB, more likely 64GB. No iMac is likely to get near that (nor offer more than 4 cores) any time soon.
Thunderbolt removes the need for them, really. It's not insane. Insane is thinking Apple would keep the Mac Pro the same.
Thunderbolt will eventually remove the need for them. Too many legacy products still around. It's not like a floppy drive.
Now if you're building from scratch...
Thunderbolt will eventually remove the need for them. Too many legacy products still around. It's not like a floppy drive.
No, it's like USB. For which there were virtually no peripherals. Just like Thunderbolt.
And if you remove all legacy ports and only have Thunderbolt, history progresses just as it did before. Everyone stops using USB, FireWire, Ethernet, and whatever else and uses Thunderbolt.
You might want to read for content. The whole point in having a midrange performance Pro is to drive sales so that some of the development costs for the high end model get absorbed. I'm pretty much convinced that the Pro isn't profitable for Apple, to correct that they need a variant that appeals to a wider array of users.
Without profitability there will be no Pros for The Crazy Ones.
Apple could sell the Pro at a loss and not even feel it. There are many of us who would pay what is necessary to ensure they don't have to. It is essential to our businesses.
I have been watching this thread with interest / exasperation and while I can sympathize with the genuine concern of some people a number of the statements on here do no favors to the cause of keeping the mac pro line up and running. Comments such as where the alphas lead the sheep will follow and so called professionals insisting that they need 32 gig of ram to run a 32 bit app show deep arrogance and total misunderstanding respectively.
Sorry, dude, you don't know what you're talking about. If anything, I would say that the 32-bit version of AE is more RAM hungry than its 64-bit counterpart. You are correct than individual instances of 32-bit apps cannot take advantage of 32 gigs of RAM, but that's irrelevant.
For example, in order to get around this very problem, 32-bit After Effects launches a separate instance of its background rendering app *for every core* on the machine running it (provided enough RAM is available). And while you can technically open an AE background rendering instance with as little as half a gig of RAM, it's pointless, because rendering usually slows to a crawl with anything less than 2 gigs per core.
So you do the math ? 2 gigs per core for the 12 core equals 24 *minimum*, and that's *just* for After Effects; all your other apps need RAM too, so 32 gigs at the very least is actually pretty reasonable.
I have been watching this thread with interest / exasperation and while I can sympathize with the genuine concern of some people a number of the statements on here do no favors to the cause of keeping the mac pro line up and running. Comments such as where the alphas lead the sheep will follow and so called professionals insisting that they need 32 gig of ram to run a 32 bit app show deep arrogance and total misunderstanding respectively.
Lets face a few facts here:
1, The MP is designed in an era where expansion was a significant problem. The majority of content creators were running into problems with storage and ram.
2, Single chip computers coped with multithreaded professional applications poorly.
3, Hard drive speed was a serious bottleneck in access time / load time for large media hence Raid was popular.
You know I kind of agree with you on some of this stuff, but Apple likes to ditch old technology before newer standards and concepts stabilize. On OSX the vast majority of popular professional applications have switched over to 64 bit including Adobe's creative suite, pretty much anything from Autodesk, FCPX, etc. If you aren't having pageout issues or massive scratch data files, more ram ends up being pointless, but some people do have these issues. When they were 32 bit applications, it was totally different and yeah unless you had raided drives you could could have long pauses at times waiting on the drive. Today many of these applications can just hold that data in ram, so why not do so?
Thunderbolt removes the need for them, really. It's not insane. Insane is thinking Apple would keep the Mac Pro the same.
PCIe 3.0 is on the way. PCI standards will still be used for something, but the way they're used may change. If you look at the macbook air, it's a prime example. Apple went to PCI based solid state storage there as it lacks some of the bandwidth limitations of sata. The days of cards set up at the back of a machine may be numbered, but pci express is still a better standard for high bandwidth items than SATA.
Thunderbolt needs to have some way of at least accommodating breakout box versions of some of the higher bandwidth cards today to really displace the need for slots. Right now it matches an 4x PCIe 2.0 standard. It works for quite a lot. It just doesn't work for everything, and intel needs to do a better job of pushing thunderbolt to developers.
No, it's like USB. For which there were virtually no peripherals. Just like Thunderbolt.
And if you remove all legacy ports and only have Thunderbolt, history progresses just as it did before. Everyone stops using USB, FireWire, Ethernet, and whatever else and uses Thunderbolt.
I'm just going to add if you take away things before a new solution is in place, you're going to take a major hit on sales in the short term on affected product lines as people wait on other vendors. This supports my "intel needs to push sdks and really get behind thunderbolt".
You could pay attention to recent moves by Apple and Intel which show that they haven't declared usb eol yet. The thunderbolt display has usb ports. Intel is integrating usb3 on their chipsets next year but not thunderbolt. My guess is they're not pushing it due to cost issues. The chip complexity seems to contribute to manufacturing cost. Until that changes, there is little incentive for manufacturers to really get behind it outside of higher end machines. With Apple every machine carries a strong margin. This isn't the case with all oems.
So the Mac Pro is an important part of the video post Mac puzzle. If people are forced to start using PCs that Mac preponderance will gradually decrease. Apple needs to decide if killing the Mac Pro is worth the risk of such a great disturbance in the Mac force. And is doing so would create brand damage in the industry that has done a lot to build the brand.
"I read on "Apple Insider" that there is a rumor that Apple plans to kill off the MacPro. Please don't do this. A lot of people depend on these machines to make their workflow more efficient. I have had my MacPro for about a year now and I LOVE IT. No more bottle necks. I run Pro Tools, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Safari (streaming videos) simultaneously and this machine just takes it. Yeah the MacPro is pricey (I've invested close to $10,000 on my Pro, software, and peripheral audio gear) but you get what you pay for. I try to crash my Pro but it refuses to. I occasionally will get a program crash but that's it; the OS is solid. BTW, I've owned a Mac Classic, Power Computing Clone, a blue G4, a graphite G5, 2006 Macbook Pro (that I use to DJ with now), and now my crown jewel the MacPro. Hopefully my rant doesn't fall upon def ears. Lastly, don't forget about us "pros" that helped Apple get through the dark ages of the late 90's. Thank you for your time."
Sorry, dude, you don't know what you're talking about. If anything, I would say that the 32-bit version of AE is more RAM hungry than its 64-bit counterpart. You are correct than individual instances of 32-bit apps cannot take advantage of 32 gigs of RAM, but that's irrelevant.
For example, in order to get around this very problem, 32-bit After Effects launches a separate instance of its background rendering app *for every core* on the machine running it (provided enough RAM is available). And while you can technically open an AE background rendering instance with as little as half a gig of RAM, it's pointless, because rendering usually slows to a crawl with anything less than 2 gigs per core.
So you do the math — 2 gigs per core for the 12 core equals 24 *minimum*, and that's *just* for After Effects; all your other apps need RAM too, so 32 gigs at the very least is actually pretty reasonable.
I did say most people don't need the MP and from memory After Effects allows rendering on more than one computer hence even in your situation the monolith of a current MP isn't required. Even in your case where you are probably one of the few people who is maxing out your MP wouldn't you prefer the option to be able to upgrade by adding a module containing a single chip, enough ram and a fast local storage to speed up your work rather than needing to buy another 4k+ tower taking a huge amount of space?
With regard to the halo effect, I really think some of us inflate the importance of our choices to apples bottom line. Apples marketing department is not stupid and if they could see a benefit in it they would promote the Mac Pro. I can't remember the last time they used a MP on a TV ad and their own FCP site shows it running on a laptop and an iMac.
As someone said earlier 'for a few no amount of power will be enough' but that doesn't mean to say that the power needs to be in a single huge box that can only be utilized by a single user.
Sorry this is in relation to hmm's comment about holding data in ram - too early here, my brains hasn't woken up yet.
No PCI slots? Are you nuts? Why do you think we need these computers in the first place? Higher frame rates on games?
People buy the Mac Pro for anything computationally intensive. CAD, video editing, simulations, etc. A tiny subset ever needed the PCI slots and nearly all of them can now be accommodated by Thunderbolt.
"people familiar with the matter said" Who... come on... tell... if not then stop this! Who! Who! Yes, who makes a difference in the quality of reporting. Scant rumors and innuendo, Poor work Kasper.
Mac Pro re-design YES, possible, needed...
Elimination of high end computer for content development? No... Unrealistic, possible? Yes, anything
is possible. AppleInsider should stop posting from the anything possible position and not list sources... to many "they say" statements to be credible.... I think AppleInsider is going away because of poor reporting...
A better question would be what do you think Apple would introduce to replace the Mac Pro for high end content developers that the current line of machines outside of Mac Pros do not serve?
1, These days in almost all situations we will see very little benefit from more than 8Gig of ram, from memory an iMac can take 16G. Current hard drive capacities compare well with the storage space in all but the most recent workstations raid arrays.
2, Single chip computers now run true multithreaded applications very well and the core architecture is extremely stable which reduces the need for Xeon processors, indeed it makes them pointless on the single processor version of the MP.
3, SSD offer a massive advantage to load times of large clips/ files. Couple a SSD with a large bulk storage drive and you have a pretty good compromise.
Please stop saying idiotic shit like that and expect to be taken seriously. Here at work I got JBoss application server hosting our application, which is itself a a really complex server with millions of lines of code, Oracle database server, MS SQL Server, DB2 server, I'm running Eclipse, dozens of shells, hundreds of utilities all at the same time. I have 32 GB of RAM and I could use 64 GB easily.
People like you don't actually do anything with the computer. You guys could apparently all just get an iPad or at most Air and continue happily without noticing anything.
People who actually do things on their machine can never have enough CPU cores, fast enough cores, enough RAM.
By the way RAID was never about increasing storage capacity, it was always about increasing fault tolerance and increasing throughput.
Please, if you are not the target audience for Mac Pro class workstation refrain from chiming in with idiotic comments.
The issue is huge! You may not understand the need to have a workstation that runs Mac OS but that doesn't make other peoples needs irrelevant. In many cases some of these users would never have enough horse power, there is nothing Apple can do about that, however Apple can build a reasonably priced high performance machine that makes money for them.
I completely understand why people want workstations in the Mac world and I don't think the MP will die here. If it does, it will be replaced by something else, they are not just going to put a giant hole in their lineup. I also don't think putting forth the question of if all these new accounts are real or people stuffing the ballot box a bit is wrong either. This happens on many other threads at AI, you should know that well as long as you've been here.
The goal should be an entry level performance box that starts at $1200. As it is now the pro isn't even remotely affordable to those with midrange needs.
I think we could see a lowering of the entry cost, but I'm not sure that we will ever see a Pro selling for $1200. While there would be people happy to be able to buy a desktop, you would also have people questioning how having the same chip that they stuck in the new iMac makes for a "professional" desktop.
All of that being said I'm absolutely convinced that Apple people, be they Engineers or managers do read this forum. I'm certain that evolution of the Mini was guided by a series of comments here and on other Apple related web sites.
Of course, Apple could have been inundated w/feedback by people and they never read jack shit here. People should certainly post here for discussion, but they shouldn't rely on this forum for their voice to be heard directly by Apple.