If that's the case, then good for Apple. They're basically saying, "You know absolutely nothing about cooling systems, so we're not going to sacrifice the quality of our device or engineering to meet your uninformed requirement."
Yes, it's better not to conform to laws in such a large market as the EU. Better to take a principled stand than to chuck in some different fans and make EU sales.
Yes, it's better not to conform to laws in such a large market as the EU. Better to take a principled stand than to chuck in some different fans and make EU sales.
The laws of physics beat the laws of government every time.
I'd rather them be objectively right and make the best product than conform to nonsense.
I don't get it, how are the fans unprotected? The case is the protection, no? I've never tried to boot it up with the side panel off, don't think you can, but then again there aren't any kids around a Mac Pro in pro environments, are there?
I for one hope they stick to the same design. The outer one that is, the inside gets redesigned almost every time. Which not that many people know or see, but ok.
Yes, you can boot a Mac Pro with the side panel off. For some diagnostic tests you have to run it with the side panel off to access the logic board.
Lots of home users have Mac Pros, and many of them have little brats who like to go sticking their fingers in things. The fans are unprotected because it's possible, if one tries hard enough, to stick a finder through the grills. The obvious solution for homeowners is not to let little brats play around an open Mac Pro, and to keep the side panel locked on.
The obvious solution for Apple is to change the grill designs on the fans. It's a simple change that would be done if Apple cared about continuing Mac Pro sales. This suggests that either the Mac Pro will be EOLed soon, or a replacement will be released soon enough to leave only a small gap in availability.
The laws of physics beat the laws of government every time.
I'd rather them be objectively right and make the best product than conform to nonsense.
I'm sure that sentiment would be widely popular among Apple stockholders, lol.
It's not a big deal, the EU just wants different fan grills. Consumer products must conform to regulations in every country and Apple has plenty of experience in meeting those regulations. Apple also have plenty of cash on hand to update the fans if they desired.
Most likely this isn't really even a problem with a Mac Pro replacement imminent. Or, the Mac Pro will be EOLed soon anyways. Either way, it's understandable that Apple would just quietly discontinue MP sales in the EU.
It's a legit question. What is so unique about the Xserve, that can't be done with any existing system, that makes it so needed to bring it back.
It's rackable, which makes it better for clustering (I've already answered to this). For stuff that doesn't need the computational power of a cluster, you have the MacBook Pro.
We can't have anybody touching the fan blades now, can we?
If somebody is pro enough to buy a Mac Pro, you'd assume that they were also pro enough to not touch any fan blades. Maybe Apple should also put a warning label on the power contact, do not eat this cord, this cord is not meant for human consumption. Who knows what somebody might think of, without a regulation in place that would have stopped the person from eating the cord.
As I suspected the document itself is a bit more obscure and generic. I'm assuming this is the part that covers the mac pro. It's just a list of standards that doesn't specifically take aim at the Mac Pro's fan blades. I did laugh at your contrived warning label. I like the wording.
Quote:
.2.5 Mechanical hazards
Injury may result from:
? sharp edges and corners;
? moving parts that have the potential to cause injury;
? equipment instability;
? flying particles from imploding cathode ray tubes and exploding high pressure lamps.
Examples of measures to reduce risks include:
? rounding of sharp edges and corners;
? guarding;
? provision of SAFETY INTERLOCKS;
? providing sufficient stability to free-standing equipment;
? selecting cathode ray tubes and high pressure lamps that are resistant to implosion and
explosion respectively;
? provision of markings to warn USERS where access is unavoidable
I used to be a fan of XServe but these days, with so much of the software used for those sorts of tasks being free and open source, what does one need a Mac server for that they couldn't do with Linux?
It's about Apple's ecosystem, not me. I think the Xserve makes a lot more sense than the Mac Pro, first because currently Apple has no standard-sized rack-mountable server option that one can easily stuff in a data center, and secondly because the modularity that made the Mac Pro relevant can now be accomplished through Thunderbolt (and is also present in the Xserve).
I used to be a fan of XServe but these days, with so much of the software used for those sorts of tasks being free and open source, what does one need a Mac server for that they couldn't do with Linux?
Run Microsoft Office.
Run Quicken.
Run Photoshop
Run iTunes
Run iPhoto
Sync with an iPhone
And 10 million more things.
Even if you want to pretend that servers never run desktop apps, there are Mac server apps that don't run on Linux. Filemaker, for example.
I used to be a fan of XServe but these days, with so much of the software used for those sorts of tasks being free and open source, what does one need a Mac server for that they couldn't do with Linux?
Run Final Cut Pro X, Logic Pro, Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Cinema 4D, AutoCAD, Maya, Mathematica. I dunno. Big number crunchy stuff. You know, for professionals who'd rather do things using their workstations rather than to their workstations.
It's rackable, which makes it better for clustering (I've already answered to this). For stuff that doesn't need the computational power of a cluster, you have the MacBook Pro.
So you see no need for users to want a powerful, non-portable consumer/prosumer machine? All you can think of are users with server racks at their house and users that would need a 13 or 15" display on a notebook PC? Seriously?
FileMaker's a good use case, but I can't imagine people using a server for the other tasks you listed. And by itself, Filemaker, fun as it is, apparently wasn't enough to keep the xServe line around, esp. in a world driven by MySQL and MongoDB.
Dude, in case you haven't noticed, the Mac Pro IS a server, it's just built into a tower rather than into a proper rack-mountable box. Those CPUs are designed with reliability in mind; they emphasize things that you don't really need in a workstation but pay premium for in a Mac Pro, such as multi-socket installations, ECC memory, and lower temperatures. These things are important in servers that run 24/7 and can actually extract some benefit from parallel processing to serve requests from multiple, independent sources. On the desktop, the only kinds of applications that can take advantage of lots of cores or CPUs are compression, encoding, and cryptography, which perform lots of processing on very small amounts of data that can easily be cached thus eliminating or mitigating the memory bandwidth and latency bottlenecks, tasks that you can and should be offloading to a server anyway; other kinds of single-user applications that require access to lots of data, such as Photoshop, will always have problems no matter how many CPUs you throw at them because all the CPUs are limited to the performance of the memory bus. While it is theoretically possible to take advantage of multiple memory busses on systems like those for this kind of job, in practice this requires the operating system to keep lots of memory access statistics and physically rearrange memory pages on the fly to make it possible, and current operating systems simply don't do that yet.
Forgot to mention that the memory bandwidth problems are even worse on x86-based systems, because for backward compatibility, x86 forces cache coherence across the board, so any writes to memory done through one cache unit have to be immediately propagated and synced in all other cache units, as well as the RAM itself, if at least one of the other cache units don't have that particular memory space cached.
And this is why multithreaded development is hard. If you thought it was only because of the need to control access to shared resources, you were only scratching the surface. I know this because I've made that mistake myself and had to learn the hard way (watching finished multithreaded implementations perform almost as poorly as single-threaded ones because I didn't know what I was doing).
Comments
Originally Posted by charlituna
Why?
It's a legit question. What is so unique about the Xserve, that can't be done with any existing system, that makes it so needed to bring it back.
Just ignore him. He can't honestly think a server would be better than a workstation for workstation needs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
If that's the case, then good for Apple. They're basically saying, "You know absolutely nothing about cooling systems, so we're not going to sacrifice the quality of our device or engineering to meet your uninformed requirement."
Yes, it's better not to conform to laws in such a large market as the EU. Better to take a principled stand than to chuck in some different fans and make EU sales.
/snark
Originally Posted by Junkyard Dawg
Yes, it's better not to conform to laws in such a large market as the EU. Better to take a principled stand than to chuck in some different fans and make EU sales.
The laws of physics beat the laws of government every time.
I'd rather them be objectively right and make the best product than conform to nonsense.
deleted
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
Ah, good to see you post.
I don't get it, how are the fans unprotected? The case is the protection, no? I've never tried to boot it up with the side panel off, don't think you can, but then again there aren't any kids around a Mac Pro in pro environments, are there?
I for one hope they stick to the same design. The outer one that is, the inside gets redesigned almost every time. Which not that many people know or see, but ok.
Yes, you can boot a Mac Pro with the side panel off. For some diagnostic tests you have to run it with the side panel off to access the logic board.
Lots of home users have Mac Pros, and many of them have little brats who like to go sticking their fingers in things. The fans are unprotected because it's possible, if one tries hard enough, to stick a finder through the grills. The obvious solution for homeowners is not to let little brats play around an open Mac Pro, and to keep the side panel locked on.
The obvious solution for Apple is to change the grill designs on the fans. It's a simple change that would be done if Apple cared about continuing Mac Pro sales. This suggests that either the Mac Pro will be EOLed soon, or a replacement will be released soon enough to leave only a small gap in availability.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
The laws of physics beat the laws of government every time.
I'd rather them be objectively right and make the best product than conform to nonsense.
I'm sure that sentiment would be widely popular among Apple stockholders, lol.
It's not a big deal, the EU just wants different fan grills. Consumer products must conform to regulations in every country and Apple has plenty of experience in meeting those regulations. Apple also have plenty of cash on hand to update the fans if they desired.
Most likely this isn't really even a problem with a Mac Pro replacement imminent. Or, the Mac Pro will be EOLed soon anyways. Either way, it's understandable that Apple would just quietly discontinue MP sales in the EU.
deleted
It's rackable, which makes it better for clustering (I've already answered to this). For stuff that doesn't need the computational power of a cluster, you have the MacBook Pro.
deleted
Quote:
Originally Posted by Apple ][
We can't have anybody touching the fan blades now, can we?
If somebody is pro enough to buy a Mac Pro, you'd assume that they were also pro enough to not touch any fan blades. Maybe Apple should also put a warning label on the power contact, do not eat this cord, this cord is not meant for human consumption. Who knows what somebody might think of, without a regulation in place that would have stopped the person from eating the cord.
As I suspected the document itself is a bit more obscure and generic. I'm assuming this is the part that covers the mac pro. It's just a list of standards that doesn't specifically take aim at the Mac Pro's fan blades. I did laugh at your contrived warning label. I like the wording.
Quote:
.2.5 Mechanical hazards
Injury may result from:
? sharp edges and corners;
? moving parts that have the potential to cause injury;
? equipment instability;
? flying particles from imploding cathode ray tubes and exploding high pressure lamps.
Examples of measures to reduce risks include:
? rounding of sharp edges and corners;
? guarding;
? provision of SAFETY INTERLOCKS;
? providing sufficient stability to free-standing equipment;
? selecting cathode ray tubes and high pressure lamps that are resistant to implosion and
explosion respectively;
? provision of markings to warn USERS where access is unavoidable
It's about Apple's ecosystem, not me. I think the Xserve makes a lot more sense than the Mac Pro, first because currently Apple has no standard-sized rack-mountable server option that one can easily stuff in a data center, and secondly because the modularity that made the Mac Pro relevant can now be accomplished through Thunderbolt (and is also present in the Xserve).
Run Microsoft Office.
Run Quicken.
Run Photoshop
Run iTunes
Run iPhoto
Sync with an iPhone
And 10 million more things.
Even if you want to pretend that servers never run desktop apps, there are Mac server apps that don't run on Linux. Filemaker, for example.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacRulez
I used to be a fan of XServe but these days, with so much of the software used for those sorts of tasks being free and open source, what does one need a Mac server for that they couldn't do with Linux?
Run Final Cut Pro X, Logic Pro, Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Cinema 4D, AutoCAD, Maya, Mathematica. I dunno. Big number crunchy stuff. You know, for professionals who'd rather do things using their workstations rather than to their workstations.
Have any new super chips been released lately that Apple would put into a new Mac Pro?
Does anybody think that Apple's chip design company they bought a couple of years ago is now up to creating a super chip for the Mac Pro?
deleted
So you see no need for users to want a powerful, non-portable consumer/prosumer machine? All you can think of are users with server racks at their house and users that would need a 13 or 15" display on a notebook PC? Seriously?
deleted
can I buy a USB fan after March 1?
*But* it is possible Apple will totally sell Mac Pros in Europe, even though they just said today that they will cease doing that.
Definitely a great article!
Dude, in case you haven't noticed, the Mac Pro IS a server, it's just built into a tower rather than into a proper rack-mountable box. Those CPUs are designed with reliability in mind; they emphasize things that you don't really need in a workstation but pay premium for in a Mac Pro, such as multi-socket installations, ECC memory, and lower temperatures. These things are important in servers that run 24/7 and can actually extract some benefit from parallel processing to serve requests from multiple, independent sources. On the desktop, the only kinds of applications that can take advantage of lots of cores or CPUs are compression, encoding, and cryptography, which perform lots of processing on very small amounts of data that can easily be cached thus eliminating or mitigating the memory bandwidth and latency bottlenecks, tasks that you can and should be offloading to a server anyway; other kinds of single-user applications that require access to lots of data, such as Photoshop, will always have problems no matter how many CPUs you throw at them because all the CPUs are limited to the performance of the memory bus. While it is theoretically possible to take advantage of multiple memory busses on systems like those for this kind of job, in practice this requires the operating system to keep lots of memory access statistics and physically rearrange memory pages on the fly to make it possible, and current operating systems simply don't do that yet.
Forgot to mention that the memory bandwidth problems are even worse on x86-based systems, because for backward compatibility, x86 forces cache coherence across the board, so any writes to memory done through one cache unit have to be immediately propagated and synced in all other cache units, as well as the RAM itself, if at least one of the other cache units don't have that particular memory space cached.
And this is why multithreaded development is hard. If you thought it was only because of the need to control access to shared resources, you were only scratching the surface. I know this because I've made that mistake myself and had to learn the hard way (watching finished multithreaded implementations perform almost as poorly as single-threaded ones because I didn't know what I was doing).