Despite new CPU options, Apple reportedly questioning future of Mac Pro

1192022242533

Comments

  • Reply 421 of 649
    [QUOTE=themind;1981195]



    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.



    You need to walk a mile in my shoes -- working with images that often trigger the Photoshop warning that saving a file bigger than 2 GB may be a problem for some other programs ---- 44x68 inch images at 16 bits -- and you think that 8 GB of RAM is enough? Go get a sandwich just to rotate the image 90 degrees? I use all 4 of my built-in 2 GB hard drives - and 15 more in 3 bays run by a big PCI expansion card - plus a coupe of monitors. and you think that a 21 inch iMac is enough ???

    Apple cannot just dump the Mac Pros ..... Period.

    And, they won't. Just hang in there and keep the cc ready.
  • Reply 422 of 649
    haven't they got CASH to f^^n just do it?

    I have been a mac user since 1994 and until last year when I had to leave my powermac to relatives while I went overseas.

    I wanted to buy the new mac pro and I will f^^n buy the next generation, when it comes.

    I have no other needs from apple but the mac pro, which I intend to keep for another 10 years (upgrades, guys, upgrades).

    but if they "put it on ice", not a single dollar on apple, never.

    there are way cheaper competitors in pc market and better OS in mobile space.

    I had an iphone 3g for 18 months and I did not miss it when they stole it.

    my wife has iphone 4 and I am not envy, I like my HP pre3 and Touchpad more that jOSs gear (better screen on touchpad, better OS interaction/experience)

    incredible...

    this is not the apple I used to love.
  • Reply 423 of 649
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by cubeover View Post


    haven't they got CASH to f^^n just do it?



    Do WHAT?



    Quote:

    there are way cheaper competitors in pc market



    No, there aren't. We covered that.



    Quote:

    I like my HP pre3 and Touchpad more that jOSs gear (better screen on touchpad, better OS interaction/experience)



    Enjoy your nonexistent support, zero apps, and zero software updates.
  • Reply 424 of 649
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by iPedro View Post


    Here's a straightforward solution:



    Make the Mac Mini scaleable in stacks. Use the Thunderbolt port to make it simple to build anything from a FinalCutPro station, to a server, to a super computer by simply daisy chaining Mac Minis.



    This would enable Apple to continue to serve the Pro market all the while only having to continue to build a Mac Mini which is enough for most people. Power users could add another Mac Mini or several to meet the needs they would find in the Mac Pro.



    The required change is in OSX enabling the stacking, no need for Apple to design, build and maintain a separate hardware line. To address the only remaining shortcoming: expansion slots. These could be added in the chain as external components. Either Apple could build and sell an expansion stack shaped like the Mac Mini with Thunderbolt I/O or leave it to third party manufacturers to build their expansion chips into these shapes.



    The Mac Pro will be missed, but its place is in the history books.



    --------------------------------------

    That MIGHT work IF



    MacMini had TWO Thunderbolt Ports

    1st - for Mini to Mini interconnect

    2nd - for External Device or 2nd ( Mini to Mini ) interconnect



    AND if CPU's could cooperate efficiently?

    -------------------------------------
  • Reply 425 of 649
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mstone View Post


    Short answer: It is not approved by Apple and they are capable of preventing it if they choose to.



    -----------------------------

    YES - But I would NOT want to rely on the 'compatibility' of such a device



    Especially since the whole point would be to run extra Cards etc?

    Would OSX really support this combination ?

    ? Would I still be able to keep OSX up to date ?



    Too many unknowns for comfort?



    More likely I would be forced to switch to Windows? UUCK?

    ? to get a "Tower" type configuration?



    iMacs with external Card Boxes do not thrill me?

    A: More Expensive then an internal solution

    B: Much more prone to theft of expensive add-on cards

    -- Would need to 'secure' any add on boxes?

    C: The 'external Box' solution seems messy?



    No ? I really want the MacPro range to continue?
  • Reply 426 of 649
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mario View Post


    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.



    Once again I seem to have discovered the arrogant streak in someone here. Read the post and you will see that I say most users and have said so repeatedly. In addition since this is about the MP please enlighten me as to why your talking about Microsoft SQL server? Are you running windows server on your mac? If you are then please tell me why you are running server on a workstation without hot swap or redundant power supplies. Or are you, as I suspect, dropping rather silly comments that have absolutely nothing to do with the Mac Pro?



    Its a computer, the world and yes even apple will not come to an end if it stops being made.
  • Reply 427 of 649
    Let's keep things under perspective. Despite all the legitimate complains from the professional users demanding the highest performance in a workstation, it is a very small market. In fact there wasn't enough money in this market to sustain SGI, SUN and all the other major workstation makers catering to this market. And the market using Apple workstations is probably even smaller since it seems its mostly graphics/video users, since lots of scientific/engineering software simply doesn't run in OSX.



    In my area of work, all scientific simulation software that used to run exclusively on unix and required a very expensive branded workstation, was eventually ported to windows for desktop use, and linux to run in clusters for big jobs that a workstation simply cannot handle. OSX will never be supported, since it doesn't offer anything superior above linux for this purpose.



    This situation is not new. so I doubt Apple is going to simply discontinue the MP now when they would have done so long ago when it was clear it had extremely limited commercial appeal. It seems they are content to have it available despite the low sales. In fact, HP Dell etc offerings are in the same price range, so I don't understand why people are complaining that they are a rip off.
  • Reply 428 of 649
    iqatedoiqatedo Posts: 1,822member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by pistolero View Post


    Let's keep things under perspective. Despite all the legitimate complains from the professional users demanding the highest performance in a workstation, it is a very small market. In fact there wasn't enough money in this market to sustain SGI, SUN and all the other major workstation makers catering to this market. And the market using Apple workstations is probably even smaller since it seems its mostly graphics/video users, since lots of scientific/engineering software simply doesn't run in OSX.



    In my area of work, all scientific simulation software that used to run exclusively on unix and required a very expensive branded workstation, was eventually ported to windows for desktop use, and linux to run in clusters for big jobs that a workstation simply cannot handle. OSX will never be supported, since it doesn't offer anything superior above linux for this purpose.



    This situation is not new. so I doubt Apple is going to simply discontinue the MP now when they would have done so long ago when it was clear it had extremely limited commercial appeal. It seems they are content to have it available despite the low sales. In fact, HP Dell etc offerings are in the same price range, so I don't understand why people are complaining that they are a rip off.



    You have made some interesting points, especially in respect of SGI and Sun. A colleague and I however, ported a LINUX only scientific package to OS X with very little effort. The advantage? To be fair, this applies in my case if not in general but it relieved me of the need to run that awful OS, especially the great pretender Ubuntu. Honestly, to me, this was a great relief and gave me a complete processing chain under the one OS (the one to rule them all lol)! Others would disagree.



    It's nice to see 8 instances of the application running in 8 cores, each one fully taxed.



    All the best.
  • Reply 429 of 649
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by fyngyrz View Post


    I'm both a photographer and a developer. As a photog, my Mac Pro works VERY hard to process large numbers of DSLR images using Aperture. It could be faster and I wouldn't mind; but as yet, there is no significantly faster Pro model.



    As a developer, I'm cooking up something along the lines of Aperture that is designed to spread the load better than Aperture does. It works; large areas of the software are much faster on my 8-core than Aperture is; but the fact is, it was designed with the idea that the new 12 core/24 thread machines would benefit even more, and so on into the future.



    The idea that the 12-core units are the end of the line is both disappointing to me as a photog and a developer. There's no such thing as "too much power" when you have 16 gb of photos to process from a single day's work, and there's no such thing as "too much power" when you can divide images up into subregions to process (well, at least until you get to about a core per scan line or so, which we're not even remotely near.)



    And for the video folk... the same, but in spades. Every image frame is a "photo", albeit a lower resolution one than what a DSLR produces.



    Nah, I've thought about it some more, and I just can't believe Apple would kill the Mac Pro line. They MAKE Aperture. They know full well that there isn't enough horsepower yet to even consider lopping the top off the performance chart.



    I simply have to jump in here.



    I am an amateur photographer, and I will consistently take 8GB+ of 16MP RAW NEF photos. On my quad-core PC overclocked to ~4GHz with 8GB of ram (the whole thing cost me under $1000 to build), it barely takes any time to process the images in Photoshop.



    I have used Aperture, and it seems on par with photoshop as far as processing efficiency.



    So I guess what I am getting at is that I think many (but certainly not all) of you think you need a $5,000 Mac Pro to process images, etc. HD video, obviously, requires serious horsepower. But all of the photographers on here clamoring about how they need 12 cores to process their pictures, are, I suspect, simply trying to justify their own purchase of a Mac Pro.
  • Reply 430 of 649
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by SchnellFowVay View Post


    I simply have to jump in here.



    I am an amateur photographer, and I will consistently take 8GB+ of 16MP RAW NEF photos. On my quad-core PC overclocked to ~4GHz with 8GB of ram (the whole thing cost me under $1000 to build), it barely takes any time to process the images in Photoshop.



    I have used Aperture, and it seems on par with photoshop as far as processing efficiency.



    So I guess what I am getting at is that I think many (but certainly not all) of you think you need a $5,000 Mac Pro to process images, etc. HD video, obviously, requires serious horsepower. But all of the photographers on here clamoring about how they need 12 cores to process their pictures, are, I suspect, simply trying to justify their own purchase of a Mac Pro.



    Why didn't you just stop at "amateur" -- and move on to a different forum ???
  • Reply 431 of 649
    mariomario Posts: 348member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by themind View Post


    Once again I seem to have discovered the arrogant streak in someone here. Read the post and you will see that I say most users and have said so repeatedly. In addition since this is about the MP please enlighten me as to why your talking about Microsoft SQL server? Are you running windows server on your mac? If you are then please tell me why you are running server on a workstation without hot swap or redundant power supplies. Or are you, as I suspect, dropping rather silly comments that have absolutely nothing to do with the Mac Pro?



    Its a computer, the world and yes even apple will not come to an end if it stops being made.



    I'm running all kinds of stuff on my Mac. I'm not running anything in production on it. I use it for development. Because our application works on OS X, Linux, Windows, AIX, HPUX, Solaris, AS400 and it works with Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, DB2/AS400 and bunch of embedded DBs (just for demo purposes). Honestly, even the people who use our software on OS X don't host the server on OS X, they usually do it on Linux. Solaris/Oracle is our preferred (recommended platform), but OS X being what it is, makes for a really attractive development platform. OF course if there is no longer a decent workstation computer from Apple, I will be forced to develop on Linux.
  • Reply 432 of 649
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    And they'll do it when the next model comes out.



    They need to address these rumours NOW

    ? Tell us a new MacPro is coming in the future or not ?



    ? It's the unknown, that's a problem?



    We need to know what's happening, especially for the kinds of work we use MacPros for?



    This is not really an area that Apple need to be secret about?

    ? If they don't sell that many?



    But we need to know if we can continue to rely on Apple for high end hardware?



    ? I did once wonder if Apple would purchase SGI but that never happened?

    and SGI died a death?

    There hardware was too expensive for most of the people who wanted to use it?

    ? We bought Macs instead?



    Now our 60 Mac Pros are getting old, and will need replacing soon

    ? we bought 10 new ones this summer?



    All of them have extra cards in them, All have 2 or 3 monitors attached

    We were planning to buy new MacPros ? when they finally arrived?



    We are keen to see what the Roadmap is for the MacPro?
  • Reply 433 of 649
    iqatedoiqatedo Posts: 1,822member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Quazar View Post


    They need to address these rumours NOW...



    ? I did once wonder if Apple would purchase SGI but that never happened?

    and SGI died a death?



    Of course, SGI isn't actually deceased.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Quazar View Post


    There hardware was too expensive for most of the people who wanted to use it?

    ? We bought Macs instead?



    Now our 60 Mac Pros are getting old, and will need replacing soon

    ? we bought 10 new ones this summer?



    All of them have extra cards in them, All have 2 or 3 monitors attached

    We were planning to buy new MacPros ? when they finally arrived?



    We are keen to see what the Roadmap is for the MacPro?



    With those numbers, can understand your concern. Have you sought clarification with Apple?
  • Reply 434 of 649
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Quazar View Post


    They need to address these rumors NOW



    No.



    Quote:

    ? Tell us a new MacPro is coming in the future or not ?



    No. That's not how a successful business is run.



    Quote:

    We need to know what's happening, especially for the kinds of work we use MacPros for?



    Never bothered you before. For the last two decades, you've been fine with it. You buy what is available exactly when you need it. You can't afford to wait. If you can, you're not in Apple's target market.



    Quote:

    We are keen to see what the Roadmap is for the MacPro?



    Intel has it. Go to Intel's site.
  • Reply 435 of 649
    macroninmacronin Posts: 1,174member
    I just want a sweet rackmountable Mac Pro for using in the living room as a HTPC/WoW rig… ;^p
  • Reply 436 of 649
    ssquirrelssquirrel Posts: 1,196member
    Expecting roadmaps from Apple, the most secretive computer company on the planet, is a pipedream. If people jump ship from a rumor, that's their fault. Apple will address the issue when they either have new systems to release (which means waiting on Intel) or by announcing they are canceling the lineup. New systems would mean either new MPs or a new and different line name to replace it, the way the Mac Pro replaced the Power Mac.



    Kind of interesting to me that Apple left Motorola b/c they couldn't boost the G5 fast enough for Apple's taste, never got to 3GHz and didn't suit for battery life in portables. Now here we are, Intel has been doing great ever since switching to the Core 2 setup and now their TDP is coming down significantly in portables while still maintaining high productivity output. Of course, now the MP is stuck in limbo b/c of the decision Intel made to only allow their Xeon processors to be multi-proc setups and their Xeon line has been extremely slow. Of course, what other option does Apple have? Ridiculous pile of cores of ARM to replace Intel? Going AMD when Bulldozer is showing benchmark results behind most regular Intel desktop procs, let alone the Xeons? I think not.



    Once again Apple is stuck waiting and not being able to satisfy customers (in a particular group) b/c their chip supplier has a schedule that is very long for the specific chips in question.
  • Reply 437 of 649
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by SSquirrel View Post


    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.



    Sure people wil stuff the ballot box at times. However you can't dismiss that people have real concerns about work station class hardware from Apple. Nor can you dismiss that Apple has neglected the desktop resulting in poor sales there.

    Quote:





    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.



    There are many ways to classify pro machines. It isn't always about CPU power.

    Quote:





    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.



    To that I have to say you are completely wrong. People at Apple do read and act on postings here. I'm completely convinced of that based upon how things like the Mini and the AIR have evolved over time.
  • Reply 438 of 649
    hmmhmm Posts: 3,405member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by themind View Post


    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.



    My posts get way too long too easily. i'll just say the one optical drive standard doesn't budge the price at all. They chose the price point. A $25 part means very little here, and a redesign of the case with that space removed or converted might cost more than continuing to ship them as they are today.



    Ram like I said is just an issue of old paradigms. 64 bit builds helped immensely with that bottleneck even if you don't see the performance increase every second you spend within an application. It's just nice not to have long pauses or periods of slowdown when it's low on addressable ram.



    I don't see the all in one form factor truly holding out a lot longer without heavy innovation. It needs something to keep it from becoming like a laptop with a larger display. As high resolution displays really start to infiltrate mobile products, the 27" display on the imac is going to look way more lackluster. It's not easy to leverage the technology upward. You pick up a lot of engineering issues with going to a larger display format as there are so many potential points of failure (remember dead pixel policies a few years ago?). Typically the desktop panel technology trickles down from what is used in dicom and broadcast quality displays.



    If anything desktops may look a lot more like the mini in a few years. It's just the technology to do this isn't here today so people need something they can use today.
  • Reply 439 of 649
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by BigPhotos View Post


    Why didn't you just stop at "amateur" -- and move on to a different forum ???



    Seriously??



    What I posted was relevant and representative of my personal experience. Why don't you move on to a different forum.



    Also, everyone, don't forget that just because Apple discontinues the MP, doesn't mean they are out of the workstation market for good. The MP's design, while elegant and extremely well engineered, is very dated.



    I agree that even if building and selling MP's is a net loss for Apple, it is important, at the very least, to maintain professional/workstation Operating System market share.



    And, as much as I hesitate to EVER suggest that Apple would allow 3P hardware manufacturers again, I can see a possibility that Apple may partner with another producer of High End workstations (i.e. HP, etc.) to make the machines. They may even call it an apple and sell it on the Apple store. This would probably alleviate many of the operating losses caused by the MP.



    Doing something like this for the iMac or the Mac Mini would be unthinkable, given the tight engineering specs and proprietary designs used in both. BUt the Mac Pro is pretty much just a shiny PC built with a really well designed case. There's no particular reason they couldn't license the case to HP, and HP couldn't obtain the same components through its sources and build an identical computer that would come preinstalled with OSX.



    Again, I hesitate to suggest that Apple would ever again experiment with 3P hardware licenses. BUt if they were going to, the Mac Pro seems a logical place to do it.
  • Reply 440 of 649
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mcarling View Post


    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.



    A great deal of that computationally intensive processing takes place on the internal PCIe cards, such as NVidia Cuda graphics cards for Adobe, etc, etc.. Video I/O is on these cards. Where are there 16x Thunderbolt expansion options? The cruel fact is that most of that work will move to PC's. Heaven forbid! It will just be easier than Thunderbolt kludges connected to underpowered laptops and consumer level desktops. There is a halo effect from the high end creative work done on Mac Pros. I just hope Apple's new management realizes that. Not to mention that many people's livelihoods depend on them.
Sign In or Register to comment.