Apple offers sneak peek at new cylindrical Mac Pro assembled in the USA

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Comments

  • Reply 61 of 311
    davidadavida Posts: 57member


    It's not a cylinder, it's a Tube.


     


    Mac Tube, the successor to the Mac Cube.

     

  • Reply 62 of 311
    conrailconrail Posts: 489member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Pendergast View Post


     


    Maybe you're stuck in the past, hmm?


     


    People are never happy.





    Maybe he has thousands of dollars invested in specialized equipment that won't work with this device.


     


    Thunderbolt adoption has been painfully slow already.  TB2 will be even worse.    Hopefully the haswell iMacs will have TB2 in order to expand it's possible target audience somewhat.

  • Reply 63 of 311
    pottmipottmi Posts: 3member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer

    Disappointed. Scaled down for all the wrong reasons.

    I agree. It should have been scaled down into a laptop form factor. I would accept a _very_ short battery life for the trade off of desktop performance. My laptop goes from home to work and back and is rarely off power. This form factor would fill in the void left by Apple dropping the 17" MBP.
  • Reply 64 of 311

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by wizard69 View Post





    How can you call it scaled down when it is offering well over twice the performance? I really don't understand the big box mentality this machine will significantly out perform the old one and probably in some ways more well more than 2 times. How is that anything less than professional?



    Final judgement will have to wait for the actual shipping model but this machine just look very impressive as seen from this over view.


    You must be joking. They called it scaled down becasue it is. You think they magically designed a system that has all of the features of the current machine in a box a quarter the size? Where are the PCI slots? Where are the bays to install tons of storage inside the box? This box is more of a scaled up Mac Mini than a scaled down Mac pro.... it ignores all of the reasons that people wanted a Mac Pro in the first place. 


    Quote:

    Originally Posted by wizard69 View Post





    You most likely can't. Upgradeable GPUs will quickly become a thing of the past anyways, I wouldn't get too worked up over it.


    Based on what? Just because Apple decrees something doesn't make it right or the industry standard. 

  • Reply 65 of 311
    rezwitsrezwits Posts: 878member


    The Thunderbolt could be 6 Firewire ports with adapters.


     


    I am just laughing at how people thought Apple would kill the Mac Pro line...


     


    Like Apple programmers and the people that work at Apple don't want the fastest thing money can buy!  So they made it, and are going to sell it to us, to those that can afford it.


     


    I think apple is making a serious move with OpenCL and AMD/ATI.  Apple is serious about utilizing resources and power in their systems at all times.  I.E. putting the GPU to work at all times.  I think they want all developers to move forward and create apps to always expect GPU and CPU sharing the load as equals, almost, but having specialized functions when the time arrises.


     


    I am excited cause there's a future, not a bleak iOS everything world, and the thing that is great is that the "Mac" lives on...


     


    Laters...

  • Reply 66 of 311
    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer Posts: 7,503member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by JeffDM View Post





    It's possible that it could help push less expensive options.



    It would have been nice to have an nVidia option, you need nVidia for certain tasks.

    Is it possible to do SMART over any external device save for maybe eSATA?



    Given that Thunderbolt is PCIe, I think it could support SMART because it would be a SATA chip on PCIe.



    That said, the number of times SMART saved my bacon on any computer was zero.


     


    How? Any product expansion is across Thunderbolt. We already know the cost inflation on Tbolt 1. When Tbolt 2 arrives costs will increase, not decrease from third party vendors, whose present expansion options are sparse presently.


     


    Thunderbolt is PCI-E 2.0 x4. Thunderbolt 2 is supposed to include PCI-E 3.0 support, yet no specifics from Intel.


     


    New Macbook Air with Haswell is just Thunderbolt 1.0 today.


     


    I don't see a single benefit from this design other than Jony Ive's obsession with getting thin and small.


     


    As has been said, this isn't a desk top piece of art. It's a Workstation. We aren't entering the world of Star Trek, no matter how much Apple thinks the world wants everything they sell to be All-in-One and a lot of add-ons.


     


    I just don't see this selling at any level Pro users want. They will be pissed about all the extraneous money needed to connect legacy equipment.


     


    Performance over PCI-E 2.0 x4 eliminated expanded GPGPU support. I don't need Nvidia for any task.

  • Reply 67 of 311
    bdkennedy1bdkennedy1 Posts: 1,459member


    Making it round saves on materials. When you have a square you have all of that wasted space near the corners.


     


    Quote:

    Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer View Post


     


    It's not. The heat dissipation options are at the top and one isn't going to expect much convective heat transfer across the system as the design looks like its a fuel cell.


  • Reply 68 of 311
    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer Posts: 7,503member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by rezwits View Post


    The Thunderbolt could be 6 Firewire ports with adapters.


     


    I am just laughing at how people thought Apple would kill the Mac Pro line...


     


    Like Apple programmers and the people that work at Apple don't want the fastest thing money can buy!  So they made it, and are going to sell it to us, to those that can afford it.


     


    I think apple is making a serious move with OpenCL and AMD/ATI.  Apple is serious about utilizing resources and power in their systems at all times.  I.E. putting the GPU to work at all times.  I think they want all developers to move forward and create apps to always expect GPU and CPU sharing the load as equals, almost, but having specialized functions when the time arrises.


     


    I am excited cause there's a future, not a bleak iOS everything world, and the thing that is great is that the "Mac" lives on...


     


    Laters...



     


    The best news was going with AMD. The worst news was only a specific subset of GPGPUs available from AMD.

  • Reply 69 of 311
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    Maybe it'll be like when you see pictures of cars. The Kia Pro_Cee'd looks cheap and boring in pictures but looks amazing and very upmarket in person. Hopefully the MacPro will be like the Kia; it looks odd in pictures but amazing in person.

    On a side note, the graphics of the thing make it look a bit like a retro super computer.

    Very Cray like. It makes one suspect that there is some sort of intentional linkage. However when it comes ot engineering I suspect Apple is dealing with some of the same issues Cray had to deal with. That is cooling or thermal issues and electrical distances. The circular design ought to allow for very good cooling. As for the more compact design that is inevitable due to the nature of high speed electronics.

    In a nutshell the design is forward looking. No matter what chips it ships with in the fall, two to three years down the road the electronics will be even more tightly packed together. I suspect that they have a platform that will be good for a ten year run.
  • Reply 70 of 311
    What problem did Apple solve by making the Mac Pro portable? It's not like it's easy carrying around a 27" Apple Display.
  • Reply 71 of 311
    nhtnht Posts: 4,522member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Pendergast View Post


     


    Huge internal storage is not the future. 


     


    Also, external Thunderbolt RAID storage is more reliable and just as fast. 



     


    Huge storage is the future because huge data is the future.  ALL my file sizes are getting bigger and 4 bays wasn't huge anyway and gave me options to add HDD or SSDs as needed.


     


    And where can you put the external RAID?  Before it was just a Mac Pro.  Now it's a Mac Pro and an external array and an external burner that you can't even stack on top of the new Mac Pro completely neutering the portability advantage which for a pro tower wasn't all that important anyway.


     


    Meh.  The no slots is the real killer but lack of internal bays isn't helpful either.

  • Reply 72 of 311
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member


    Originally Posted by rezwits View Post

    The Thunderbolt could be 6 Firewire ports with adapters.


     


    Huh? He just misspoke. They were ALL pretty nervous up there for some reason. Don't know why; they succeeded phenomenally.





    I think apple is making a serious move with OpenCL and AMD/ATI. 



     


    Meanwhile, OS X refuses to support modern OpenGL…





    Originally Posted by frankstallone View Post

    What problem did Apple solve by making the Mac Pro portable?


     


    The last one was portable, too. I literally carry mine around from place to place when I have to work to move.


     


    60 lbs. does great stuff to your upper body.

  • Reply 73 of 311
    jlanddjlandd Posts: 873member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


     


     


    The ports look further apart than any ports on any other Mac. And since all the plugs for every single one of these type of ports is so small, you're manufacturing an "issue" where there has never been one for any Mac.


     



    The remark was in jest but from true experience, not anything manufactured as you say.  The USB port on every fairly recent MacBook Pro I use that are on the same side will not allow me to choose what devices, namely dongles and Thumb drives, I can use without resorting to a hub even when I don't need one.  It's not a manufactured issue.   My favorite thumb drive is standard thinness but has a sliding switch for the connector.  Can't add it in without pulling out the adjacent device.  I don't have this problem on any other laptop because other companies are not as insanely driven by making everything as small as possible.

  • Reply 74 of 311
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member

    If only they scaled it up 3:2 and allowed one to plug-n-play different GPGPU daughter cards. I'd love to purchase a separate daughter card that had non-FirePro GPGPU dual Processors on it to swap in and out for different needs. Or a separate daughter card to add 2 additional GPGPUs and let the OS manage their computing via OS X and activate them for OpenCL/OpenGL on the fly. That would have allowed a new definition of plug-n-play and expansion.
    Eventually GPU cards, as we know them today, will be a thing of the past. One can speculate about the exact architecture of this machine but frankly we don't even know how the GPU's are tied into the rest of the machine.
    All storage expansion via Thunderbolt 2 for any serious performance is nauseating.

    Cost just went through the roof.

    You still haven't shown that an external disk array will significantly add to costs. For one we don't know the retail price of this machine though I don't think it will be all that inviting. i do suspect though that the model alluded to in the reveal is likely to be a high performance configuration. Nothing about the intro says that an entry level machine with one GPU isn't possible.
  • Reply 75 of 311

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


     


    60 lbs. does great stuff to your upper body.



     


    Hahhaa, although I am known to bring my 24" Apple Display to work with me, I think that is even stretching it. The Mac Pro was huge because it wasn't being moved and had room for internal expansion (IMHO). I am with those here whose sentiment resonates with the fact that Apple shrunk this for all the wrong reasons.

  • Reply 76 of 311
    bugsnwbugsnw Posts: 717member


    My Apple TV blipped and at one point, there was Greg....the next, this black cylinder. I saw Schiller and knew it was probably the new Mac Pro. Really threw me off.


     


    Looked pretty darn cool to me. Lots of acronyms. Has to be faster than anything out there.


     


    No matter what Apple does, or how much faster the next iteration might be, there will always be complainers. They simply cannot move on from thinking they need to modify everything.


     


    Technology is moving away from that. It's moving towards faster, smaller, cooler. And thank god for that. It will just take time for many people who resist change to adapt.

  • Reply 77 of 311
    philipmphilipm Posts: 240member


    Why doesn’t anyone else see this?


     


    It’s a Dalek.

  • Reply 78 of 311
    bobborriesbobborries Posts: 151member


  • Reply 79 of 311
    jd_in_sbjd_in_sb Posts: 1,600member
    Looks terrific. Very brilliant idea - the spinning cylinder.
  • Reply 80 of 311
    bsenkabsenka Posts: 799member
    It looks like a fun and capable upscale consumer computer. Big upgrade from a mini or an iMac, for sure.

    HUGE downgrade from a Mac Pro though. This will further send more audio and video professionals away from the Mac.
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