Review: Apple's redesigned late 2013 Mac Pro

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Comments

  • Reply 41 of 119
    robin huberrobin huber Posts: 3,949member
    How are competitors going to copy this iconic design without looking like they are copying? I have no doubt that they will.
  • Reply 42 of 119
    emoeller wrote: »
    appex wrote: »
    Performance - how does it compare to previous model?

    This review today @ Macworld has a nice comparison for you...

    http://www.macworld.com/article/2084814/breathing-new-life-into-old-mac-pros.html

    and this:
    Finally a Widescreen Matte (yes you guessed) from the Toolkit was applied over the whole edit.

    It probably took about an hour and a half to build, but that's including finding all the shots and choosing music. We then wondered how long the timeline would take to render. Would this Mac Pro impress the colleagues who had got slightly bored of being constantly bombarded with amazing facts about the machine?

    If we had built this in FCP7, we would expect a render time of probably up to an hour as there were some heavy pixel recalculations and GPU intensive effects going on on that timeline.

    It took 42 seconds. Yes you read that right, 42 seconds.

    Gobsmacked

    Gobsmacked again. And this was on a machine that was dragging video back and forth off NAS drives, not 10GigE or Fibre Channel either.

    http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/news/1317-fcpx-and-the-mac-pro-a-real-broadcast-job-real-editing-and-real-deadlines
  • Reply 43 of 119
    haggarhaggar Posts: 1,568member

    I wonder if the SSD in the Mac Pro can saturate 4 PCIe lanes, or even 2 lanes.  If not, then it would have been better to have 2 SSD slots, each with 2 PCIe lanes.  Better yet would be to have 2 SSD slots that automatically run in single x4 or dual x2 mode depending on whether a second SSD is installed.

  • Reply 44 of 119
    haggarhaggar Posts: 1,568member

    What is it like to use a 30 Hz display?

  • Reply 45 of 119
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Robin Huber View Post



    How spoiled by cheese-box commoditized PCs we've become. I spent $5000 for a Mac years ago ($10,000 in today's dollars) that my iPhone could beat today. This machine is a steal.

    Hey Robin, Were you able to locate your friend in Switzerland? I hope so.

     

    Best.

  • Reply 46 of 119
    flaneurflaneur Posts: 4,526member
    flaneur wrote: »
    We see here Apple, the marketing company that can't innovate, stealing ideas again.

    This is a 1950s Tatra V12 air-cooled Diesel which clearly is the inspiration for the thermal-vortex design:

    1000

    /S

    Hardly.

    Ok, so I made the sarcasm tag a little bigger.
  • Reply 47 of 119
    flaneurflaneur Posts: 4,526member
    Hey Robin, Were you able to locate your friend in Switzerland? I hope so.

    Best.

    Phil Boogie steered him to this thread started by relic, which i'm sorry to say was probably among her last words with us on this earth.

    http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/158838/well-it-looks-like-im-no-longer-in-remission

    She really was a delightful person. I became very fond of her after she told us of her first adventures at CalTech.
  • Reply 48 of 119
    hillstoneshillstones Posts: 1,490member

    So you people think Apple buying Adobe would be a good idea?  Are you not paying attention to Apple's lousy software track record?  Look how they dumbed down iMovie, Final Cut Pro, and iWork by removing features that people used to get their work done.  So you want them to strip features from Photoshop and Illustrator and then have the nerve to call them professional-grade products?  That is what would happen if Apple bought Adobe.  Now after customer backlash, Apple is working to restore the features they removed from those products.  Apple needs to stop dumbing-down all their software products.

  • Reply 49 of 119
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Originally Posted by hillstones View Post

    Are you not paying attention to Apple's lousy software track record?

     

    You’re certainly not, and don’t have a clue what Apple did. Be quiet.

  • Reply 50 of 119
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by DimMok View Post

     

    Me want to use to bang out killer Strata 3D renderings.....Also can Apple please buy Adobe already.

    Lets have have Apple put another feather in their cap with taking over Photoshop and Illustrator.


     

    Right. After banning Adobe Flash from iOS, and rallying against it in MacOS, Apple is going to turn around and buy the company?  Adobe,  purveyor of nagware?  And do Photoshop and Illustrator still even exist as products? I thought everything got combined in the mystical cloud somewhere. Even if Apple did acquire PS and Illustrator, what makes you think there would be an improvement? Look what they did to the last iteration of iWork, gutting features and making Numbers utterly useless!  I keep the old version of iWork, and have no desire whatsoever to do anything in the clouds.  Adobe can wither and vanish into the mist as far as I'm concerned.  A once-great company, now unworthy of attention.

  • Reply 51 of 119
    flaneur wrote: »
    Hey Robin, Were you able to locate your friend in Switzerland? I hope so.

    Best.

    Phil Boogie steered him to this thread started by relic, which i'm sorry to say was probably among her last words with us on this earth.

    http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/158838/well-it-looks-like-im-no-longer-in-remission

    She really was a delightful person. I became very fond of her after she told us of her first adventures at CalTech.


    Ohhh... I missed that post by Relic. Very sorry to read that! Relic and I locked horns on a few occasions, but I really enjoyed her well-reasoned posts -- she gave as good as she got!

    I also missed her post about " her first adventures at CalTech." Do you have a link -- I grew up in Pasadena a couple of miles from CalTech, and my business partner's father was a graduate.


    I hope Relic recovers and contributes for many more years.


    Ha! It occurs to me that Relic had more tech devices than DaHarder! -- Only hers were real!
  • Reply 52 of 119
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Originally Posted by TeaEarleGreyHot View Post

    Look what they did to the last iteration of iWork, gutting features and making Numbers utterly useless! 


     

    Yep, you don’t get it.

  • Reply 53 of 119
    brlawyer wrote: »
    Not to sound picky with this review, but how on Earth has NO ONE checked the nMP's gaming potential alongside pro apps?

    It is f#$%^&g amazing with anything I've tried. Even Windows games running in Wineskins. Just for a laugh I logged onto Second Life (with 75 Mb/s FiOS) and set all graphics and rendering to Ultra and distance to Max. I could fly around and see for ever 'as smooth as silk'. OK, got to get back to organizing my Aperture libraries ....


    Do I understand you correctly... You have only one New Mac Pro?
  • Reply 54 of 119
    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer Posts: 7,503member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum View Post





    An old saying -- going back to the halcyon days at General Motors, might apply here:



    "There's no substitute for cubic inches!"

     

    I missed the /s tag. My bad.

  • Reply 55 of 119
    flaneurflaneur Posts: 4,526member
    I missed the /s tag. My bad.

    I made it too small and too underneath, to coin a phrase.
  • Reply 56 of 119
    flaneurflaneur Posts: 4,526member
    Ohhh... I missed that post by Relic. Very sorry to read that! Relic and I locked horns on a few occasions, but I really enjoyed her well-reasoned posts -- she gave as good as she got!

    I also missed her post about " her first adventures at CalTech." Do you have a link -- I grew up in Pasadena a couple of miles from CalTech, and my business partner's father was a graduate.


    I hope Relic recovers and contributes for many more years.


    Ha! It occurs to me that Relic had more tech devices than DaHarder! -- Only hers were real!

    I'll look through her posts starting about six months ago. Not all at once, but a little at a time. Maybe some search terms will come back to me. I think you will enjoy the story too.
  • Reply 57 of 119
    jdwjdw Posts: 1,324member
    "Beautiful," "exquisite," "sexy," "revolutionary."

    Poppycock! I've been an apple fan since my Mac 128K in 1984, but my eyes are not blinded like the rest of yours are that I am unable to see how awful that reflective case looks in virtually any environment! It looks absolutely horrible! Even if I had the money and the desire to buy this machine, which I do not, I would avoid buying it for that reason alone. Put a matte finish on it with a slightly glossy coat to solve the problem, for goodness sake!

    It another foolish design blunder by the very man (Ive) that we praise so much for having assisted Steve jobs in saving Apple, is that, to the objective observer, the shape of this Mac looks like a modern trashcan. I'm a firm believer in "simplicity" in design, but I also believe that the Mac Pro could've been designed in a simple fashion that did not resemble a wastebasket.

    Lastly, most of us here who own high-powered Macs typically use a wide range of apps including Outlook and Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign and Chrome and Safari and iPhoto and Aperture and Final Cut Pro 10. But in terms of a "performance boost," the only app out of that list that stands to benefit on the Mac Pro versus a high-end iMac is Final Cut Pro! There's no performance benefit, not really, to any of those other apps that we all love and use perpetually! It therefore makes no sense to pay so much money for the Mac Pro UNLESS one buys it exclusively As a Final Cut Pro editing box, or perhaps a box that runs Mathematica or certain specialized scientific apps, which many of us do not use.

    Since it's clear that I myself am not interested in the Mac Pro, why have I even taken time to write this post? The reason is because I like many others wish to express disappointment in the Mac Pro. It's great for a small number of people out there, but it's not the new category of Mac but some of us have been waiting for. What I mean is, we want better cooling (to increase longevity and reduce component failures) as well as noticeably faster performance when running virtually any app under OS X.
  • Reply 58 of 119
    Though it's a beautiful machine, there seems to be minimal consideration as to how cables are treated. I don't doubt much thought went into how they connect to the computer, but once connected they look like unorganized, gangly 'tendrils'. There is definitely an opportunity here for a third-party solution, but it seems Apple just stopped designing once they got to the I/O ports. They create this stunningly beautiful machine, that I want to display on my desk without interruption, yet I need my monitors, ethernet, power cable, the odd USB to iPad/iPhone cable, and audio line to connect to it and it's not pretty. Before, my Mac sat on the floor with the tangled mess nicely out of view. Now it's prominently displayed for everyone. It seems very short-sighted and un-Apple.

    Also, how easy is it to swivel the tower when everything is connected, and a few of those cables are barely reaching it? A nice idea, but not as innovative as I'd like it to be. I'll need to be sure there is enough slack in the cables so everything moves as effortlessly as it was intended to be.

    No, for the moment, I'll just hang on to my Mac Pro mid-2010, upgrade to a PCIe SSD and 16 GBs of RAM and dream of a more mature, a more refined, Mac Pro 2.0 'trashcan'.
  • Reply 59 of 119
    flaneurflaneur Posts: 4,526member
    Ohhh... I missed that post by Relic. Very sorry to read that! Relic and I locked horns on a few occasions, but I really enjoyed her well-reasoned posts -- she gave as good as she got!

    I also missed her post about " her first adventures at CalTech." Do you have a link -- I grew up in Pasadena a couple of miles from CalTech, and my business partner's father was a graduate.


    I hope Relic recovers and contributes for many more years.


    Ha! It occurs to me that Relic had more tech devices than DaHarder! -- Only hers were real!

    Here it is, actually a page of Relic, including me giving her a hard time. Anyway, post #71.

    http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/158377/new-samsung-ad-knocks-iphone-language-limitations-features-goats/40
  • Reply 60 of 119
    comleycomley Posts: 139member
    We all have different points of view

    I think the Mac Pro is a beautiful machine I can't wait for February this is when I get my machine
    The small form factor is desirable for me I travel quite a bit and I can take with
    Many people told me that the Mac Pro was go be very expensive how wrong they was

    3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache
    16GB (4 x 4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
    512GB PCIe-based flash storage
    Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM each £3500
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