I wouldn't bet against a surprise. However I've seen nothing to indicate that Ivy Bridge based Xeons are ready for production. It would be a bit of a joke if they where as the SB E-5's just came onboard a few weeks ago.
If Apple and Intel did team up here I'd suspect though that it wouldn't be for the run of the mill Xeons anyways. Instead I'd see then focusing on some of Intels new clustering technology or high performance chips. If Apple really wanted to secure the Mac Pros future a cheap easily clustered platform would be one way to go. I'm a big fan of the idea of morphing the Pro into a high performance compute module that can easily talk to its neighbors over a high speed link.
The problem with such a machine is that it tends to throw users out of their comfort zone. You see this in the forums when anything other than the current Mac Pro chassis is suggested as a way forward. Add completely new technology to that new chassis and some users will be overwhelmed.
This is just one way Apple could surprise us at WWDC with a massively overhauled Mac Pro. The surprises could be offered up in conjunction with Intel or they could be Apples own technology. What ever the new Mac Pro is it had better be pretty good considering the very long development cycle and Apples hints. It would be pathetic indeed to see the same old me too implementation of a standard Intel chip set.
So let's hope for a surprise with the next Mac Pro
The new E3 Xeons are Ivy Bridge. They are unsuitable unless Apple really is planning to introduce a micro-server in a rack mountable case. The 6 and 8 core E5 Xeons that are likely to be in any new Mac Pro model are definitely Sandy Bridge unless Intel has planned a big surprise announcement for WWDC.
I concur. There are a lot of technicalities in this article that are flat out wrong. Makes me think the writer was purposely thrown off course by their source
Ivy Bridge WILL be in the new Pros, it's better at voltage, has MUCH better thru put, supports more cores, and to that guy who said there is no Xeon version of Ivy Bridge he's wrong, too
Where are you obtaining your fountain of misinformation? Take a look at Ivy Bridge cpus coming out this year. Nothing exceeds 4 cores. I'm not sure about superior throughput either.
I'm a big fan of the idea of morphing the Pro into a high performance compute module that can easily talk to its neighbors over a high speed link.
The problem with such a machine is that it tends to throw users out of their comfort zone. You see this in the forums when anything other than the current Mac Pro chassis is suggested as a way forward. Add completely new technology to that new chassis and some users will be overwhelmed.
Me too. Personally I’d like to see the Mac Pro product niche define a standalone desktop supercomputer (relative to Apple’s consumer products available at the time at any rate), offering a viable, resilient High Performance Computation platform that can realistically address known hard problems in the scientific domain - not just be a beast at video. My personal area of interest would be running numerical general relativity codes for the simulation of black hole collisions, which can easily consume sustained Teraflop compute rates for days, and several hundred GB of memory or more.
The scientific community - an admittedly small user base for Apple which is sadly neglected these days - would be all over a product that could offer OS X - based, relatively affordable, self-contained Terascale computing. Big iron is already at the Petascale level, but there simply aren’t enough installations in the world for shared time on such machines to satisfy everybody’s needs, and entry-level Petascale HPC capabilities start in the $200K range. Imagine if Apple could change the game for individual researchers by offering a workstation that, even in it’s basic configuration, could be considered a serious compute alternative to a slice of time on a large facility at an institution.
Of course some HPC companies are already evolving their platforms along a “hybrid” approach, with a multi-core CPU + massively multi-core GPU architecture (though admittedly utilising the custom interconnect fabric and unusual system topologies prevalent in this domain). The venerable supercomputer maker Cray is partnering with nVidia to use their Tesla K10 and K20 cards (which contain about ~3,000 CUDA cores...) in it’s current XK6 series of machines (which use AMD Opterons as CPUs, and run Linux, incidentally).
As for the ability of software to utilise a large number of GPU cores, it’s becoming increasingly easier to leverage these. Mathematica (science bias I know!) has been multi-CPU-core aware for some time, but the interest with version 8 is Wolfram now provide a built-in CUDALink package which allows almost transparent use of the huge number of cores on eg a Tesla GPU card directly from the high-level Mathematica environment. It’s a shame they recommend Dell and HP machines on which to do this.
It’s interesting to note that Apple are apparently re-partnering with nVidia on the laptop graphics front, however perhaps they should take a leaf out of Cray’s book and work more closely with nVidia (or Cray?!) to build the next generation Mac Pro: a truly differentiated machine orders of magnitude more capable than the nearest consumer product, where the graphics card is not merely an add-on but GPU acceleration is regarded as an intrinsic part of the architecture. In this sense, it would matter less to the future of the Mac Pro about where exactly Intel is in it’s CPU roadmap. Probably not this WWDC though....
The Xserve was a low volume machine and therefor was cut. The Mac Pro is a low volume machine (and there were concerns it would be cut). Why not make a few minor modifications that make the machine serve both purposes? Now you have a machine that is still potentially low volume, but you've increased sales slightly because it can fit in another market.
I'm not missing any points. Those mods you want aren't going to be minor to be effective. There is just too little interest in a rack mountable machine for Apple to bother, and I agree with that. It's been estimate that Apple is now selling about 50,000 Mac Pro's a garter. That's about half of what they were selling two years ago. Much of that can be attributed to their not upgrading the machine during that time. But the Xserve was estimated to be selling about 10,000 units a quarter, and it was discontinued.
If Apple does make a major upgrade to the Mac Pro, and the sales could grow back to the. 100,000 a quarter number, why would they care about that other 10%? Why mod the entire line just for that? It makes no sense. Unless they feel that it would result in major sales increases, they shouldn't do it. It could result in a lessor machine for the rest of us, and I for one wouldn't want that to happen, as I'm looking forward to buying another one either this year or the next.
Since this is Apple's only machine that has a swappable graphics card, it would be nice if they grew up enough to allow all PC graphics cards to work, provided the drivers were available. Paying three times the price for a generation old graphics card just because it has the magical Apple ROM on it is insulting.
That's not Apple's fault. For years if was because only Apple was using EFI, and old BIOS oriented cards a wouldn't work. Manufacturers had to make an EFI based card specifically for Apple, and for the low volumes expe Ted, it wasn't worth it to them. But, if you wanted to you could buy some modded cards.
Now that more Windows machines must use EFI, there's a much better chance of getting flashed cards, if you want to take that chance.
But this is all up to third party card makers. If they don't want to, they won't. And that's the way it's been.
You mis the point here. A Mac Pro sized well to fit a rack doesn't have to be a rack mount machine from Apples standpoint. Rather it should be easily adaptable either with an Apple kit or third party kit. This relates to my position that the Mac Pro or it's replacement needs to be designed to serve the needs of a wider audience of users. In part that means being adaptable and of more reasonable cost.
In other words Apple needs to take an example from the instrumentation field where many portable or transportable instruments can be mounted in a rack with adapter kits and pretty much serve in that capacity when the need comes up. Mainstream or the bulk of sales may go to portable uses but other uses have the option of integrating the instrument into a system of their choice.
What is important here is that this sort of design bias doesn't have to impact looks negatively or even capability as the Mac Pro can be designed as large as Apple sees fit. I'd suggest though that large is not the way to go and that the bias should be towards half rack sized hardware. Putting two Mac Pros into 3 or 4"U's" of rack space would work out very nice all around. The important thing to realize is that these are not purpose designed rack mount machines but rather chassis designed to be easily adapted for such. It is a design concept that works well for instrumentation as mass production is focused on the most common need.
Some of you guys are really amazing. You've been complaining for years about mini PowerMacs, then mini Mac Pro's, a headless consumer Mac, etc. I've been saying all that time that it's not going to happen because Apple isn't interested. And THAT's the point. There is no other.
All of your schemes are for nothing. It's what you want to see. But it doesn't matter what you want. It's what Apple wants that matters, because they don't care about what you want here. This is simply not a market they care about. They went half heartedly into servers, and we see the result. What makes anyone here really think that whatever you propose makes any sense for THEM? Not for YOU, but for THEM?
You can yakkedly yak as much as you want here, and call me anything you want for not agreeing, but I said years ago that Apple wasn't going to make any of the machines you guys were wanting, and they didn't. So who understands the point here, and who doesn't?
Apple had sales last calendar year of $108.5 billion. This year's estimates are up to $185 billion.Your proposals might result in a few million bucks of revenue for them. You think they really care, or need that? The few thousand they might sell a year is totally trivial for them. you can come up with whatever logicyou want to for why they could do this, but the fact remains that unless they see a large demand, they won't do it.
Mel I have to ask what is it with you that you can't grasp what is being suggested here? It is pretty simple in reality, the Pro needs to be resized for easy rack mounting. That does not mean that Apple has to market a rack mount machine. All people are asking for is a clean avenue for adapting the case to professional installations when the need arises.
Refer to my above post. The Mac Pro doesn't HAVE to be anything you think it has to be. What it HAS to be is whatever Apple thinks it has to be.
I am soooo looking forward to the endless posts about how disappointed everybody is with the keynote and how they had expected a long list of new things that didn't get released, and how they know better than Apple what needs to be sold and how Apple didn't live up to their expectations and why they are blah blah. That's why Apple is hitting home runs with products and.... do we ever hear about the whiners, except through their own complaints?
I am soooo looking forward to the endless posts about how disappointed everybody is…
Agreed, but I will be genuinely (and rightly) disappointed with Apple if these links are correct and the 3GS is getting iOS 6 while the first-gen iPad does not.
Refer to my above post. The Mac Pro doesn't HAVE to be anything you think it has to be. What it HAS to be is whatever Apple thinks it has to be.
You couldn't be more wrong here. The Mac Pro needs to have features it's users want to be successful. In that regards the current machine is a failure as can be seen with the declining sales.
Let's face it Ford had the Edsel but having a product nobody wants does a company little good. In this regards I'm convinced that if Apple fails to make a Pro that is appealing to a wider audience it will go the way of the XServe and the Edsel.
Like it or not Apples desktop line up is stagnet. Obviously Apple can ignore this if they want, but it doesn't mean customers have to accept it. Your attitude seems to imply that customers have to accept Apples design decisions, but reality is far different. What is revealed tomorrow will have a huge impact on the future of Apples desktop sales. If it is the same ole crap I'm not to convinced success is at hand.
People have a right to express disappointment with Apples hardware line up, if the line up defys all reason and rational expectation. That is happening right now with Apples desktop line up where iMac sales are flat and Mini and Mac Pro sales are in decline.
If the marketers at Apple would pull their heads out for a moment and read some of these comments, they might grasp why it is becoming so hard to sell desktop products.
I am soooo looking forward to the endless posts about how disappointed everybody is with the keynote and how they had expected a long list of new things that didn't get released, and how they know better than Apple what needs to be sold and how Apple didn't live up to their expectations and why they are blah blah. That's why Apple is hitting home runs with products and.... do we ever hear about the whiners, except through their own complaints?
I'm not missing any points. Those mods you want aren't going to be minor to be effective. There is just too little interest in a rack mountable machine for Apple to bother, and I agree with that.
The mods are very minor. The reduction required would be a case around 19" height and 5-6" width (in tower configuration). That would allow you to put a Mac Pro into a 3U space on a rack on its side. Essentially you remove the "handles" and shuffle it around a little.
And there's even a rumor that there were prototypes last year:
EDIT: Well that's really chimpy to wipe out links to 9to5. So here's a big FUI and a link to tuaw that has a link to 9to5.
And yes, it would allow Mac shops that miss the XServe to fill that niche. All in all a very good compromise. No additional SKU. No impact to current Mac Pro users. Just a case without those big assed handles. Or at least slimmer ones. I certainly don't understand your kvetching about this. It doesn't impact your use at all and would greatly help others. It's a smart redesign where everyone wins and not too taxing on Ive's team given they've had quite a while to play around with alternatives.
The mods are very minor. The reduction required would be a case around 19" height and 5-6" width (in tower configuration). That would allow you to put a Mac Pro into a 3U space on a rack on its side. Essentially you remove the "handles" and shuffle it around a little.
More importantly the mods are incorporated into a new Pro chassis and don't cost Apple anything. I'm not sure where the resistance comes from in regards to this rather simple request, I would still expect that some sort of kit would be required for actual rack mounting.
Frankly such a machine would play to several of Apples more high profile customers. Especially people that need to pack and ship their computing installations often.
And there's even a rumor that there were prototypes last year:
>>Link deleted.
EDIT: Well that's really chimpy to wipe out links to 9to5. So here's a big FUI and a link to tuaw that has a link to 9to5.
Makes you think that somebody at Appleinsider has some sort of mental issue with regards to 9to5.
And yes, it would allow Mac shops that miss the XServe to fill that niche. All in all a very good compromise. No additional SKU. No impact to current Mac Pro users. Just a case without those big assed handles. Or at least slimmer ones. I certainly don't understand your kvetching about this.
I don't get it either. The current Mac Pro case is certainly far bigger than it needs to be.
It doesn't impact your use at all and would greatly help others. It's a smart redesign where everyone wins and not too taxing on Ive's team given they've had quite a while to play around with alternatives.
If the next Mac Pro or it's replacement comes in the same case I will be extremely disappointed with Apple. Like it or not I will express that disappointment here and on other forums. I have this feeling though that I won't have to do that.
Like a toaster and refrigerator? TS put it way better, what was that, a toasterator? No, a... darn! TS, please!
Actually, I'd say it's more like a refrigerator and a freezer. They both do basically the same thing, just in slightly different ways. Oh, wait, that's right, someone already realized you could make one unit that does both...
I'm not missing any points. Those mods you want aren't going to be minor to be effective. There is just too little interest in a rack mountable machine for Apple to bother, and I agree with that. It's been estimate that Apple is now selling about 50,000 Mac Pro's a garter. That's about half of what they were selling two years ago. Much of that can be attributed to their not upgrading the machine during that time. But the Xserve was estimated to be selling about 10,000 units a quarter, and it was discontinued.
If Apple does make a major upgrade to the Mac Pro, and the sales could grow back to the. 100,000 a quarter number, why would they care about that other 10%? Why mod the entire line just for that? It makes no sense. Unless they feel that it would result in major sales increases, they shouldn't do it. It could result in a lessor machine for the rest of us, and I for one wouldn't want that to happen, as I'm looking forward to buying another one either this year or the next.
Yes, cutting the damn handles off would be a huge modification wouldn't it? Legitimately, that's all they would absolutely have to do to get it so you can set the dumb thing on it's side on a rack shelf. I know businesses that did this themselves but put a couple of pre-tapped holes so someone can release a rack kit and you'd at least have a box you can cleanly put in a rack... The handles on the current design aren't really usable anyway as the metal digs into your hands if you have to move a machine more than about 5 feet.
You don't base an investment on whether you'll only increase sales 10%. You base a business investment on whether the amount you have to invest will increase your return. If it costs Apple an extra $1 million to redesign the machine, but they make an extra $1.25 million it is still a smart business decision. They are willing to customize the Mini to make a server version of it, what's to say they won't do the same with the Pro???
I'm just hoping they didn't bother announcing it since it's really just a speed bump, and some new ports and stuff. No real wow factor. I hope I see it in the store when it opens back up.
Comments
If Apple and Intel did team up here I'd suspect though that it wouldn't be for the run of the mill Xeons anyways. Instead I'd see then focusing on some of Intels new clustering technology or high performance chips. If Apple really wanted to secure the Mac Pros future a cheap easily clustered platform would be one way to go. I'm a big fan of the idea of morphing the Pro into a high performance compute module that can easily talk to its neighbors over a high speed link.
The problem with such a machine is that it tends to throw users out of their comfort zone. You see this in the forums when anything other than the current Mac Pro chassis is suggested as a way forward. Add completely new technology to that new chassis and some users will be overwhelmed.
This is just one way Apple could surprise us at WWDC with a massively overhauled Mac Pro. The surprises could be offered up in conjunction with Intel or they could be Apples own technology. What ever the new Mac Pro is it had better be pretty good considering the very long development cycle and Apples hints. It would be pathetic indeed to see the same old me too implementation of a standard Intel chip set.
So let's hope for a surprise with the next Mac Pro
Quote:
Originally Posted by bbwi
I concur. There are a lot of technicalities in this article that are flat out wrong. Makes me think the writer was purposely thrown off course by their source
Ivy Bridge WILL be in the new Pros, it's better at voltage, has MUCH better thru put, supports more cores, and to that guy who said there is no Xeon version of Ivy Bridge he's wrong, too
Where are you obtaining your fountain of misinformation? Take a look at Ivy Bridge cpus coming out this year. Nothing exceeds 4 cores. I'm not sure about superior throughput either.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
I'm a big fan of the idea of morphing the Pro into a high performance compute module that can easily talk to its neighbors over a high speed link.
The problem with such a machine is that it tends to throw users out of their comfort zone. You see this in the forums when anything other than the current Mac Pro chassis is suggested as a way forward. Add completely new technology to that new chassis and some users will be overwhelmed.
Me too. Personally I’d like to see the Mac Pro product niche define a standalone desktop supercomputer (relative to Apple’s consumer products available at the time at any rate), offering a viable, resilient High Performance Computation platform that can realistically address known hard problems in the scientific domain - not just be a beast at video. My personal area of interest would be running numerical general relativity codes for the simulation of black hole collisions, which can easily consume sustained Teraflop compute rates for days, and several hundred GB of memory or more.
The scientific community - an admittedly small user base for Apple which is sadly neglected these days - would be all over a product that could offer OS X - based, relatively affordable, self-contained Terascale computing. Big iron is already at the Petascale level, but there simply aren’t enough installations in the world for shared time on such machines to satisfy everybody’s needs, and entry-level Petascale HPC capabilities start in the $200K range. Imagine if Apple could change the game for individual researchers by offering a workstation that, even in it’s basic configuration, could be considered a serious compute alternative to a slice of time on a large facility at an institution.
Of course some HPC companies are already evolving their platforms along a “hybrid” approach, with a multi-core CPU + massively multi-core GPU architecture (though admittedly utilising the custom interconnect fabric and unusual system topologies prevalent in this domain). The venerable supercomputer maker Cray is partnering with nVidia to use their Tesla K10 and K20 cards (which contain about ~3,000 CUDA cores...) in it’s current XK6 series of machines (which use AMD Opterons as CPUs, and run Linux, incidentally).
As for the ability of software to utilise a large number of GPU cores, it’s becoming increasingly easier to leverage these. Mathematica (science bias I know!) has been multi-CPU-core aware for some time, but the interest with version 8 is Wolfram now provide a built-in CUDALink package which allows almost transparent use of the huge number of cores on eg a Tesla GPU card directly from the high-level Mathematica environment. It’s a shame they recommend Dell and HP machines on which to do this.
It’s interesting to note that Apple are apparently re-partnering with nVidia on the laptop graphics front, however perhaps they should take a leaf out of Cray’s book and work more closely with nVidia (or Cray?!) to build the next generation Mac Pro: a truly differentiated machine orders of magnitude more capable than the nearest consumer product, where the graphics card is not merely an add-on but GPU acceleration is regarded as an intrinsic part of the architecture. In this sense, it would matter less to the future of the Mac Pro about where exactly Intel is in it’s CPU roadmap. Probably not this WWDC though....
I'm not missing any points. Those mods you want aren't going to be minor to be effective. There is just too little interest in a rack mountable machine for Apple to bother, and I agree with that. It's been estimate that Apple is now selling about 50,000 Mac Pro's a garter. That's about half of what they were selling two years ago. Much of that can be attributed to their not upgrading the machine during that time. But the Xserve was estimated to be selling about 10,000 units a quarter, and it was discontinued.
If Apple does make a major upgrade to the Mac Pro, and the sales could grow back to the. 100,000 a quarter number, why would they care about that other 10%? Why mod the entire line just for that? It makes no sense. Unless they feel that it would result in major sales increases, they shouldn't do it. It could result in a lessor machine for the rest of us, and I for one wouldn't want that to happen, as I'm looking forward to buying another one either this year or the next.
That's not Apple's fault. For years if was because only Apple was using EFI, and old BIOS oriented cards a wouldn't work. Manufacturers had to make an EFI based card specifically for Apple, and for the low volumes expe Ted, it wasn't worth it to them. But, if you wanted to you could buy some modded cards.
Now that more Windows machines must use EFI, there's a much better chance of getting flashed cards, if you want to take that chance.
But this is all up to third party card makers. If they don't want to, they won't. And that's the way it's been.
Some of you guys are really amazing. You've been complaining for years about mini PowerMacs, then mini Mac Pro's, a headless consumer Mac, etc. I've been saying all that time that it's not going to happen because Apple isn't interested. And THAT's the point. There is no other.
All of your schemes are for nothing. It's what you want to see. But it doesn't matter what you want. It's what Apple wants that matters, because they don't care about what you want here. This is simply not a market they care about. They went half heartedly into servers, and we see the result. What makes anyone here really think that whatever you propose makes any sense for THEM? Not for YOU, but for THEM?
You can yakkedly yak as much as you want here, and call me anything you want for not agreeing, but I said years ago that Apple wasn't going to make any of the machines you guys were wanting, and they didn't. So who understands the point here, and who doesn't?
Apple had sales last calendar year of $108.5 billion. This year's estimates are up to $185 billion.Your proposals might result in a few million bucks of revenue for them. You think they really care, or need that? The few thousand they might sell a year is totally trivial for them. you can come up with whatever logicyou want to for why they could do this, but the fact remains that unless they see a large demand, they won't do it.
Refer to my above post. The Mac Pro doesn't HAVE to be anything you think it has to be. What it HAS to be is whatever Apple thinks it has to be.
I am soooo looking forward to the endless posts about how disappointed everybody is with the keynote and how they had expected a long list of new things that didn't get released, and how they know better than Apple what needs to be sold and how Apple didn't live up to their expectations and why they are blah blah. That's why Apple is hitting home runs with products and.... do we ever hear about the whiners, except through their own complaints?
Let's get it out of the way: Failnote.
Less than 24 hours to go.
Lots of popcorn.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bergermeister
I am soooo looking forward to the endless posts about how disappointed everybody is…
Agreed, but I will be genuinely (and rightly) disappointed with Apple if these links are correct and the 3GS is getting iOS 6 while the first-gen iPad does not.
You couldn't be more wrong here. The Mac Pro needs to have features it's users want to be successful. In that regards the current machine is a failure as can be seen with the declining sales.
Let's face it Ford had the Edsel but having a product nobody wants does a company little good. In this regards I'm convinced that if Apple fails to make a Pro that is appealing to a wider audience it will go the way of the XServe and the Edsel.
Like it or not Apples desktop line up is stagnet. Obviously Apple can ignore this if they want, but it doesn't mean customers have to accept it. Your attitude seems to imply that customers have to accept Apples design decisions, but reality is far different. What is revealed tomorrow will have a huge impact on the future of Apples desktop sales. If it is the same ole crap I'm not to convinced success is at hand.
If the marketers at Apple would pull their heads out for a moment and read some of these comments, they might grasp why it is becoming so hard to sell desktop products.
Quote:
Originally Posted by melgross
I'm not missing any points. Those mods you want aren't going to be minor to be effective. There is just too little interest in a rack mountable machine for Apple to bother, and I agree with that.
The mods are very minor. The reduction required would be a case around 19" height and 5-6" width (in tower configuration). That would allow you to put a Mac Pro into a 3U space on a rack on its side. Essentially you remove the "handles" and shuffle it around a little.
And there's even a rumor that there were prototypes last year:
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/21/next-generation-mac-pro-rumored-to-feature-rack-mount-stackable/
EDIT: Well that's really chimpy to wipe out links to 9to5. So here's a big FUI and a link to tuaw that has a link to 9to5.
And yes, it would allow Mac shops that miss the XServe to fill that niche. All in all a very good compromise. No additional SKU. No impact to current Mac Pro users. Just a case without those big assed handles. Or at least slimmer ones. I certainly don't understand your kvetching about this. It doesn't impact your use at all and would greatly help others. It's a smart redesign where everyone wins and not too taxing on Ive's team given they've had quite a while to play around with alternatives.
Frankly such a machine would play to several of Apples more high profile customers. Especially people that need to pack and ship their computing installations often. Makes you think that somebody at Appleinsider has some sort of mental issue with regards to 9to5. I don't get it either. The current Mac Pro case is certainly far bigger than it needs to be.
If the next Mac Pro or it's replacement comes in the same case I will be extremely disappointed with Apple. Like it or not I will express that disappointment here and on other forums. I have this feeling though that I won't have to do that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
Like a toaster and refrigerator? TS put it way better, what was that, a toasterator? No, a... darn! TS, please!
Actually, I'd say it's more like a refrigerator and a freezer. They both do basically the same thing, just in slightly different ways. Oh, wait, that's right, someone already realized you could make one unit that does both...
Quote:
Originally Posted by melgross
I'm not missing any points. Those mods you want aren't going to be minor to be effective. There is just too little interest in a rack mountable machine for Apple to bother, and I agree with that. It's been estimate that Apple is now selling about 50,000 Mac Pro's a garter. That's about half of what they were selling two years ago. Much of that can be attributed to their not upgrading the machine during that time. But the Xserve was estimated to be selling about 10,000 units a quarter, and it was discontinued.
If Apple does make a major upgrade to the Mac Pro, and the sales could grow back to the. 100,000 a quarter number, why would they care about that other 10%? Why mod the entire line just for that? It makes no sense. Unless they feel that it would result in major sales increases, they shouldn't do it. It could result in a lessor machine for the rest of us, and I for one wouldn't want that to happen, as I'm looking forward to buying another one either this year or the next.
Yes, cutting the damn handles off would be a huge modification wouldn't it? Legitimately, that's all they would absolutely have to do to get it so you can set the dumb thing on it's side on a rack shelf. I know businesses that did this themselves but put a couple of pre-tapped holes so someone can release a rack kit and you'd at least have a box you can cleanly put in a rack... The handles on the current design aren't really usable anyway as the metal digs into your hands if you have to move a machine more than about 5 feet.
You don't base an investment on whether you'll only increase sales 10%. You base a business investment on whether the amount you have to invest will increase your return. If it costs Apple an extra $1 million to redesign the machine, but they make an extra $1.25 million it is still a smart business decision. They are willing to customize the Mini to make a server version of it, what's to say they won't do the same with the Pro???
Quote:
Makes you think that somebody at Appleinsider has some sort of mental issue with regards to 9to5.
We think it's because 9to5Mac's parent company competes with AI's parent company. We (mods) want it changed, too.
No MacPro announced...
Seriously?! No desktop refresh at ALL?
Really wouldn't have fit into today's presentation. I expect all desktops to upgrade soon.
I'm just hoping they didn't bother announcing it since it's really just a speed bump, and some new ports and stuff. No real wow factor. I hope I see it in the store when it opens back up.