No they did not. Professionals use the 5K Retina iMac these days. That’s what Alex Lindsay, the founder of PixelCorps and former Lucasfilm member, says about the Mac pro market. So many of you techie “wannabes but never quite” describe the so-called pro market as being machines with expansion slots. You live in some obsolete tower PC world that is fading quickly. Lindsay says PixelCorps’ 5K Retina iMacs outperform their Mac Pros significantly and he is a REAL professional whose company filmed in the White House recently.
So your statement that Apple abandoned the professional market a while ago is ignorantly misinformed. How do you think all these movies and shows are being put together with FCP? On Hackintosh towers? Blathering nonsense.
So the iMac outperforming the Mac PRO supports them not abandoning the pro market? I thought it would be the other way around.
While the iMac may be faster at some benchmarks, can it manage the sustained performance of the Mac Pro with its much more robust cooling system?
This whole system is so out of touch with any supposed "pro" market that it purports to address. What is with a "3-5 day" repair period? If you are a pro, and you've invested $10k or more into a system like this, how happy must you be to have to lose a week of productivity waiting for this? Apple should literally make this a while you wait repair that you schedule, but I guess the system is so woefully complex to service that you have to wait days to change a video card. Just another example why having a strange, semi-proprietary hardware design is a terrible idea for pros. And what's with no CPU updates since intro, max 1tb flash, no retina-level display option from Apple, and probably half a dozen other ridiculous decisions Apple has made with this product. Who comes up with and approves this stuff? Obviously execs with more money than brains, detached from reality.
1) What is wrong with that repair period? Seems excellent to me. If, as you say, "you are a pro, and you've invested $10k or more into a system like this," you're going to another option for getting your work done within that 3–5 day period.
2) What CPU updates do you want them to add? Why not any mention of GPU updates?
3) Why is "no retina-level display option from Apple" a fault of the Mac Pro? If you want a 4K or 5K display, there are options for you. You should know Apple was never going to release a display with multiple mDP ports for just the Mac Pro, or release a 4K display with only 30fps. My guess is the new displays will arrive when the Skylake chips that can handle the bandwidth are ready for the Pro Macs.
So the iMac outperforming the Mac PRO supports them not abandoning the pro market? I thought it would be the other way around.
The Mac Pro isn't a single machine, it's a class of machines, as is the iMac. There are old models, new models, high and low spec. The high-end new iMac outperforms old Mac Pros and sometimes entry-level new models:
That was demoed at CES with a 980ti inside. Mobile GPUs aren't that far behind the desktop models anyway (about 1/3-1/2 the performance) so they catch up after a couple of years. The next iMac GPU should be close to the 980ti and the MBP a 970M. But those external boxes would allow you to have a 12" Macbook and be able to plug in the box for heavy gaming or computing, it should work for Bootcamp gaming even if it's not supported on the Mac. Then you can upgrade the GPU all you want but it might still work out cheaper buying an iMac if you want a high-res display.
Yes, Apple abandoned the professional market awhile ago.
-kpluck
So how are all those movies and shows being produced with FCP? Alex Lindsay, founder of PixelCorps and former Lucasfilm member, says the 5K Retina iMacs are used on a daily basis for the bulk of their production work while the Mac Pros are used for other purposes. You apparently define a pro machine as a tower with slots. Nothing could be further from the truth these days. Look around you and you will see that your premise is blathering nonsense. Pixelcorps recently finished filming in the White House with President Obama so I would take Alex Lindsay’s opinion over yours any day of the week as he is a REAL professional.
A lot of movies and shows are being produced with Adobe Premiere. Some are even being produced with Premiere on Windows machines.
Wait a minute... the 2013 Mac Pros, the newest available, are now over two years old without a speed bump of any kind?
Yes, Apple abandoned the professional market awhile ago.
-kpluck
Unfortunately I think the Mac Pro took a hit as a result of industrial design taking precedence over performance. However, I am really pleased they decided to assemble it here in the US instead of Asia. I am sure their profit would be much higher if assembled outside the US but in the big picture it's nothing compared to iPhone profit so they did it either because they felt it was good publicity or just the better thing to do. Hopefully the second one.
This whole system is so out of touch with any supposed "pro" market that it purports to address. What is with a "3-5 day" repair period? If you are a pro, and you've invested $10k or more into a system like this, how happy must you be to have to lose a week of productivity waiting for this? Apple should literally make this a while you wait repair that you schedule, but I guess the system is so woefully complex to service that you have to wait days to change a video card. Just another example why having a strange, semi-proprietary hardware design is a terrible idea for pros. And what's with no CPU updates since intro, max 1tb flash, no retina-level display option from Apple, and probably half a dozen other ridiculous decisions Apple has made with this product. Who comes up with and approves this stuff? Obviously execs with more money than brains, detached from reality.
3) Why is "no retina-level display option from Apple" a fault of the Mac Pro? If you want a 4K or 5K display, there are options for you. You should know Apple was never going to release a display with multiple mDP ports for just the Mac Pro, or release a 4K display with only 30fps. My guess is the new displays will arrive when the Skylake chips that can handle the bandwidth are ready for the Pro Macs.
This point would be valid if these macs didn't exist.
Single-Stream (SST) displays
With OS X Mavericks v10.9.3 and later, the following DisplayPort displays are supported using single-stream transport at 30Hz:
Sharp PN-K321
ASUS PQ321Q
Dell UP2414Q
Dell UP3214Q
Panasonic TC-L65WT600
With OS X Yosemite v10.10.3 and later, most single-stream 4K (4096x2160) displays are supported at 60Hz on the following Mac computers:
Mac Pro (Late 2013)
iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, Late 2015)
iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014 and later)
MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015) with AMD Radeon R9 M370X
With OS X Yosemite v10.10.3 and later, most single-stream 4K (3840x2160) displays are supported at 60Hz on the following Mac computers:
3) Why is "no retina-level display option from Apple" a fault of the Mac Pro? If you want a 4K or 5K display, there are options for you. You should know Apple was never going to release a display with multiple mDP ports for just the Mac Pro, or release a 4K display with only 30fps. My guess is the new displays will arrive when the Skylake chips that can handle the bandwidth are ready for the Pro Macs.
This point would be valid if these macs didn't exist.
Single-Stream (SST) displays
With OS X Mavericks v10.9.3 and later, the following DisplayPort displays are supported using single-stream transport at 30Hz:
Sharp PN-K321
ASUS PQ321Q
Dell UP2414Q
Dell UP3214Q
Panasonic TC-L65WT600
With OS X Yosemite v10.10.3 and later, most single-stream 4K (4096x2160) displays are supported at 60Hz on the following Mac computers:
Mac Pro (Late 2013)
iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, Late 2015)
iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014 and later)
MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015) with AMD Radeon R9 M370X
With OS X Yosemite v10.10.3 and later, most single-stream 4K (3840x2160) displays are supported at 60Hz on the following Mac computers:
I think we will agree to disagree here. Six different Macs support UHD at 60hz and 4 different Macs support 4K at 60Hz. I do not think this is a limited market.
I think we will agree to disagree here. Six different Macs support UHD at 60hz and 4 different Macs support 4K at 60Hz. I do not think this is a limited market.
Not just limited, but extremely limited; and that's before you consider how many Mac users are going to be buying an external display. That's why it was never going to happen until there is an equilibrium (read: Skylake's IGPU).
Yes, Apple abandoned the professional market awhile ago.
-kpluck
No they did not. Professionals use the 5K Retina iMac these days. That’s what Alex Lindsay, the founder of PixelCorps and former Lucasfilm member, says about the Mac pro market. So many of you techie “wannabes but never quite” describe the so-called pro market as being machines with expansion slots. You live in some obsolete tower PC world that is fading quickly. Lindsay says PixelCorps’ 5K Retina iMacs outperform their Mac Pros significantly and he is a REAL professional whose company filmed in the White House recently.
So your statement that Apple abandoned the professional market a while ago is ignorantly misinformed. How do you think all these movies and shows are being put together with FCP? On Hackintosh towers? Blathering nonsense.
Horsefeathers.
I've been working in Hollywood post production for over 20 years with A-list post production houses like Sony Imageworks, Weta, Digital Domain, MPC, Disney Feature Animation etc..
Many post houses have iMacs, but they are for the graphic designers or people running AfterFX / Photoshop. Some editing is done on the iMac in Premiere and a lot less these days in FCPX. Lots of audio is done on the iMac, except the damn fan makes it useless in many recording situations. Basically anywhere you need a mid range machine you will find an iMac.
Yes, there are people are out there doing visual effects on iMacs, but I can guarantee you that you would be laughed out of the room if you suggest that the next Star Wars or Iron Man be done on iMacs. We're taking about small shops doing relatively low end work.
The Mac Pro still is the tool of choice for anyone running OS X for professional software like Maya, Nuke, FCPX etc. All of these programs are heavily multithreaded and take full advantage of the multicore Xeon and the dual graphics cards and will smoke the iMac. No one serious is running something like DaVinci Resolve on an iMac. That's just silly and untrue.
The Skylake CPU packs a lot of punch, but the mobile iMac GPU is beat by even the basic D300 cards in the Mac Pro. Once you run programs that are properly multithreaded 64bit the Xeon will eat the Skylake. There are many other reasons why the iMac is not suitable for heavy duty use. The iMac has only one Thunderbolt controller that has to handle both ports and you will notice a hit on heavy load. The Mac Pro has 6 ports and multiple controllers and a system bus that is significantly bigger. And of course there are the heat issues with the iMac running under sustained load for extended periods of time. To be clear the iMac is essentially a Macbook Pro built into a monitor, not a workstation.
The ugly truth is that most visual effects houses like Double Negative, ILM, Digital Domain, Weta etc don't run Mac Pro's or OS X. It's mostly HP Linux boxes and heaven forbid Windoze running Maya, Nuke, Modo, Hondini etc. In these bigger houses the Mac Pro is usually relegated to editorial, matte painters, audio etc.
The render farms, which can consists of thousands of blades, are usually Linux or Windows. No one is stacking trashcans in a machine room.
If you go into a digital intermediate bay at a post house you will find the rare Mac Pro 12 core / D700 running something like DaVinci Resolve to color time commercials, maybe a smaller budget movie. But ever since Apple went slot-less and single CPU post production houses have started to switch to HP or Supermicro boxes running Linux. Some of these machines pack 4 -8 Nvidia Titan X cards for realtime color grading of 2/4k RAW footage and 2 Xeon CPU. Try that with the current Mac Pro. Some places have held on to their silver 5,1 boxes and hot rodded them instead of switching over to the nMP or Linux.
If Apple wants to be taken serious again by professionals they need to bring back a high frequency dual CPU machine with PCI slots that can handle something like 4 Titan cards, sound cards, I/O cards etc.
But even at that the truth is that the Mac has never been wide spread in post production outside of editorial and a few specialized areas like design, AE/PS, matte painting and the audio departments. The price / performance ratio has never been there. In the past it was SGI, maybe SUN. Once the Pentium showed up everyone switched to PC boxes running Linux, Windows NT and eventually Win7. Pixar is one of the few bigger companies that deployed OS X on any kind of scale and believe me they are not sitting on iMacs.
I've been working in Hollywood post production for over 20 years... The Skylake CPU packs a lot of punch, but the mobile iMac GPU is beat by even the basic D300 cards in the Mac Pro. Once you run programs that are properly multithreaded 64bit the Xeon will eat the Skylake. There are many other reasons why the iMac is not suitable for heavy duty use.
Most of us here are not in hollywood, nor do we care what those "pros" do in terms of what we want to buy for ourselves. But do Hollywood or professional production houses have an exclusive lock on the "pro" descriptor? I say they do not. Some home users want a powerful Mac. A lot of Mac tower buyers of the past would love to have a Mac Pro, but they just can't afford it or justify that price considering the performance versus the iMac.
The achilles heel of the Mac Pro is the simple fact that so few apps are optimized for GPUs. It is truly "laughable." And what apps are optimized for the Xeon such that tests would be noticeably slower on the fastest Skylake 5K with 1TB SDD (which I am using right now to type this post)? The number of apps is so small I can't stop laughing. Also, the SSD in the iMac blows away any SSD in the Mac Pro right now, by the way. And although performance is more than just the SSD, the SSD plays a significant role.
When Apple and developers finally realize that Intel cannot give us CPU gains anymore like they could in the past, perhaps the emphasis will shift toward making ALL APPs (not just a tiny handful of PRO apps) be fully multi-threaded and GPU optimized. In that brave new world, the Mac Pro's dual "pro grade" video cards will make all the difference. But as of right now, the Mac Pro is laughable in how few apps are optimized to take advantage of that expensive (and aging — 2013) hardware.
About the only reason to buy a Mac Pro (other than one being flush with cash) is to run some CPU or GPU intensive process 24/7, such that better cooling makes a difference. But other than Hollywood or pro video production houses, who does that?
I've heard the first gen 5K iMac would get really hot. But in my experience using pro apps on the Skylake edition 5K iMac, the fans do ramp up at times but the machine stays very cool. I've not noticed any thermal throttling either. Apple seems to have gone out of their way to make the iMac better. Some awesomeness is coming to the Mac Pro this year perhaps, but the cost of entry into that product is still prohibitive for many people who WANT that machine. And again, people who aren't even "pros" want a Mac Pro. I myself am willing to pay a bit more for something noticeably better, but if the performance doesn't flat out skunk the Skylake iMac in most cases, I couldn't care less about the pros, I am going to fund an iMac purchase, not a Mac Pro purchase. And since the key to keeping the Mac Pro around is to have a reasonably sized customer base, it would seem only logical to prevent the user base from dwindling. There are still people these days who defect to Windows to save money, especially if the end result is almost the same as the Mac. I don't advocate that. It's just reality.
This whole system is so out of touch with any supposed "pro" market that it purports to address. What is with a "3-5 day" repair period? If you are a pro, and you've invested $10k or more into a system like this, how happy must you be to have to lose a week of productivity waiting for this? Apple should literally make this a while you wait repair that you schedule, but I guess the system is so woefully complex to service that you have to wait days to change a video card. Just another example why having a strange, semi-proprietary hardware design is a terrible idea for pros. And what's with no CPU updates since intro, max 1tb flash, no retina-level display option from Apple, and probably half a dozen other ridiculous decisions Apple has made with this product. Who comes up with and approves this stuff? Obviously execs with more money than brains, detached from reality.
Not sure where you are coming from. This is a part they need to ship. Even in the professional or enterprise market it is rare to find a better turnaround time on hardware repairs then this. If uptime is that important you maintain a pool of spares or own a MacBook Pro to fall back on. A GPU repair would require a burn-in test, so it probably would not happen while you wait. Most Apple parts arrive in 1-2 days, so in theory the repair may be completed sooner.
I had a Dell high end laptop (not even small business) that had it's graphic card go south (lines through the screen). The service guy came to my house and swapped out the motherboard and I was back in operation in an hour at zero cost to me. It can easily be done, I would argue a laptop is more complex and harder to service then a desktop any day. Pros need a higher standard. At a bare minimum have them order the parts and do it in an hour while you wait!
Who are you trying to fool? Apple's love affair with defective AMD graphics has been plaguing the Mac community for years now. In our office MacBook Pros and iMacs with AMD graphics are all dying off. Add to that, the weak storage solutions that Apple has adopted for the Mac Pro and iMac line, and you discover that Apple is ACTIVELY driving away power users to the Windows platform. You can build an 8 core, 16 thread monster High End Desktop PC for half the price of a comparable Mac Pro. And if that PC has a video card problem, you can replace or upgrade the devices yourself. Plus, you can return to the happy days of expanding storage internally - the way God intended. Apple's Mac Pro is a worthless piece of trash, and the iMac line isn't far behind. Here's hoping Tim Cook wakes up before the Mac dies...they are already seeing sales drop off. That will continue if they insist on perusing their current dumb strategy. Even the MacBooks are starting to look bad now, with Dell shipping quad-core Core i7 (Skylake) laptops (XPS 15) with thunderbolt 3 over USB type-C ports. Apple just got passed by Dell! Tim Cook isn't looking so great these days. He's Apple's version of Steve Balmer.
None of this has any basis in reality.
Apple keeps selling between 3.5 - 5.5 million Macs per quarter, at substantial profit, with annual consumer satisfaction reports from all angles that bear out the continued success of the platform.
As a pro that has a mac pro but also buys hi end PCs for customers, I 100% agree with the tweamswitcher post. I'm running my old 2008 mac pro until it is no longer supported and then /shudder/ I may have to go to a win 10 box. iMacs are are a waste of of environment - an unupgradable over heating laptop with a big nice screen that you have to throw away in a few years. I want to keep my monitors and I just want the latest non xeon high-end intel chips and a few PCI slots with multiple hard drive bays (even 2.5" is ok these days) at a competitive price. Apple has 100% dropped the ball on pros, and it's frankly disgusting. I will never get the new mac pro in it's current useless (but pretty) form. May be apple should just subcontract to Dell to make a business line. business people don't care about desktop looks - we just want the job done.
Yes, Apple abandoned the professional market awhile ago.
-kpluck
No they did not. Professionals use the 5K Retina iMac these days. That’s what Alex Lindsay, the founder of PixelCorps and former Lucasfilm member, says about the Mac pro market. So many of you techie “wannabes but never quite” describe the so-called pro market as being machines with expansion slots. You live in some obsolete tower PC world that is fading quickly. Lindsay says PixelCorps’ 5K Retina iMacs outperform their Mac Pros significantly and he is a REAL professional whose company filmed in the White House recently.
So your statement that Apple abandoned the professional market a while ago is ignorantly misinformed. How do you think all these movies and shows are being put together with FCP? On Hackintosh towers? Blathering nonsense.
It's more like - "apple screwed us with the mac pro - do we dump all our apple stuff and go to PC or deal with iMacs ... I guess for now iMacs - but every 2 years since we can't upgrade them...its still cheaper than that waste of money mac pro that we can't even buy apple monitors to go with!" Every pro Apple house is in the same bind right now (me included). The staunch loyalists are settling for iMacs - but are not happy.
I think we will agree to disagree here. Six different Macs support UHD at 60hz and 4 different Macs support 4K at 60Hz. I do not think this is a limited market.
Not just limited, but extremely limited; and that's before you consider how many Mac users are going to be buying an external display. That's why it was never going to happen until there is an equilibrium (read: Skylake's IGPU).
But as a percentage of Mac users that would be in the market for a 4k 60hz display would also be in the market for the Mac that supports it (high end machine with a dGPU). If they switch to just UHD, the percentage of Macs that support that jumps dramatically.
I can only add that Apple should make Macs more extendable, which is not the same thing as "expandable with slots." Apple hates slots. That's clear to see. And we aren't about to change that. But they could still make Macs extendable. Here's how.
Buy the best 5K Skylake iMac today, then when you need more power, buy a Mac Pro and attached the iMac to it as both a display AND an additional quad-core CPU and GPU. Have a MacBook Pro? Just connect that to the mix to use it's GPU and CPU. The more Macs you add, the more powerful a super-computer you will have.
In other words, Apple needs to make Macs to connect together in such a way to fully utilize the hardware of each device, giving you the full power of all machines connected to each other.
Why no one has done that before is beyond me. And don't tell me we don't have the technology to do it. It surely exists. It can't be that hard. And even if it is hard, that's why we have Apple. They claim to tackle hard things to make them simpler for us. Well, let them make Macs extendable. It's 2016, for goodness sake.
Yes, Apple abandoned the professional market awhile ago.
-kpluck
No they did not. Professionals use the 5K Retina iMac these days. That’s what Alex Lindsay, the founder of PixelCorps and former Lucasfilm member, says about the Mac pro market. So many of you techie “wannabes but never quite” describe the so-called pro market as being machines with expansion slots. You live in some obsolete tower PC world that is fading quickly. Lindsay says PixelCorps’ 5K Retina iMacs outperform their Mac Pros significantly and he is a REAL professional whose company filmed in the White House recently.
So your statement that Apple abandoned the professional market a while ago is ignorantly misinformed. How do you think all these movies and shows are being put together with FCP? On Hackintosh towers? Blathering nonsense.
I could agree with you to some extent, but the problem is they are still selling outdated and pricey Mac Pros as of today....
Big Apple supporter here, but I can't see a valid reason not to have had a "late 2015" Mac Pro last november.
Big Apple supporter here, but I can't see a valid reason not to have had a "late 2015" Mac Pro last november.
It's just not a big market and the GPUs make a bigger jump this year. The unit volumes per vendor are around 200-300k per year. When you look at specialist companies like Boxx who sell to VFX and research studios:
If you consider $10k workstations, $5m revenue is 500 units per year. That's fine for a company with a handful of employees but Apple is a huge international company and it's not worth designing machines just for those buyers. They poke fun at Apple's design but this is what desperate companies do:
What they don't say is that secretly they wish they could get away with doing what Apple does because that's how you get the margins. The issues they point out are irrelevant. 10Gbps ethernet will come with USB C/TB3 and is already supported over TB2. Multiple CPUs doesn't matter if you are sticking to a particular price point. More than 2 GPUs is useful for heavy real-time work but GPUs double in performance roughly every couple of years so a 2016 MP will be like using 4x previous-gen GPUs. Not offering NVidia is an issue for some people but Apple could change this if they wanted to.
Other companies like HP, Dell and SuperMicro are in the server business so they have constant sales in server hardware where Apple never did, which is why they dropped the XServe. They keep up with every refresh because they sell the chips in servers and they are willing to sustain a lot of SKUs, SuperMicro has over 4500 SKUs. Apple doesn't like dealing with excess inventory because it has such a long turnover and loses value, which impacts the margins. The ideal for any vendor is pre-confgured models. SuperMicro operates with 5% net margins and ships just over 300k servers and workstations per year at around $3-4k average. Workstations are most likely under 100k units for them as they are primarily a server company.
Apple maintains their net margins and they're probably making over 25% on the Mac Pro. A 2 year refresh helps here and it's not an impulse buy market nor are the performance jumps significant after a year.
The biggest problem the 2013 Mac Pro model had was not being a significant jump over the old 12-core because there's not much of an incentive to upgrade. This will change with the next one because it will go up to 18-core and the dual GPUs it gets will be equivalent to a dual 980ti (or dual Titan X) and possibly 12GB of high bandwidth video memory as well as external Retina display support. If people don't need the GPUs, the design isn't holding them back because they just stick to the base GPUs and choose a faster CPU. Apple wouldn't likely sell more than 18-cores with a dual-socket anyway, if they did it would be dual 12-core, which would be 30% faster at best and cost a bit more. CPU tasks can be split across multiple machines so people can buy as many as needed. Buy 10x 18-core models with base GPUs and network them all together.
There's going to be a limit to the resolution that media goes to. UHD is probably the last step. VR might need stereo 16K 60fps frames. If someone needs to handle that in real-time, it could take another couple of GPU iterations but there can easily be special GPU hardware made. Apple could even make a special single-board quad TB3 GPU with a single large HBM storage if they wanted to but again, the market just isn't big enough.
Apple spent $100m to bring Mac pro manufacturing to the US so the first year profits from the Mac Pro likely broke even. Financially, the market is meaningless for them but there is a certain status with it and it's good that they are staying with it for now. It would be nice if they could get the entry price down because $3k for a quad-core before the monitor purchase is pretty steep. Even if they come out with a $999 Retina display, a quad-core MP + display would be just under $4k and a 27" Retina quad-core iMac starts at $2k now with SSD. $3k with the display would be better and perhaps they can do a bundle deal rather than drop the Mac pro price dramatically.
This whole system is so out of touch with any supposed "pro" market that it purports to address. What is with a "3-5 day" repair period? If you are a pro, and you've invested $10k or more into a system like this, how happy must you be to have to lose a week of productivity waiting for this? Apple should literally make this a while you wait repair that you schedule, but I guess the system is so woefully complex to service that you have to wait days to change a video card. Just another example why having a strange, semi-proprietary hardware design is a terrible idea for pros. And what's with no CPU updates since intro, max 1tb flash, no retina-level display option from Apple, and probably half a dozen other ridiculous decisions Apple has made with this product. Who comes up with and approves this stuff? Obviously execs with more money than brains, detached from reality.
Not sure where you are coming from. This is a part they need to ship. Even in the professional or enterprise market it is rare to find a better turnaround time on hardware repairs then this. If uptime is that important you maintain a pool of spares or own a MacBook Pro to fall back on. A GPU repair would require a burn-in test, so it probably would not happen while you wait. Most Apple parts arrive in 1-2 days, so in theory the repair may be completed sooner.
So... what is normal turnaround for Mac Pro repairs?
Here in NZ, we are getting on-site NBD for 80 - 90% of HP Elitebook/Elitedesk/Z workstations (both laptops and desktops). Remaining 10 - 20% cases take longer because part is not available localy and gets couriered from Australia, but on average HP NZ does have parts in local stock, including motherboards and GPUs. I think it is quite respectable effort.
Comments
2) What CPU updates do you want them to add? Why not any mention of GPU updates?
3) Why is "no retina-level display option from Apple" a fault of the Mac Pro? If you want a 4K or 5K display, there are options for you. You should know Apple was never going to release a display with multiple mDP ports for just the Mac Pro, or release a 4K display with only 30fps. My guess is the new displays will arrive when the Skylake chips that can handle the bandwidth are ready for the Pro Macs.
http://barefeats.com/tube05.html
http://barefeats.com/imac5k18.html
For a replaceable GPU setup, the Razer Core offers this over TB3:
http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-stealth
That was demoed at CES with a 980ti inside. Mobile GPUs aren't that far behind the desktop models anyway (about 1/3-1/2 the performance) so they catch up after a couple of years. The next iMac GPU should be close to the 980ti and the MBP a 970M. But those external boxes would allow you to have a 12" Macbook and be able to plug in the box for heavy gaming or computing, it should work for Bootcamp gaming even if it's not supported on the Mac. Then you can upgrade the GPU all you want but it might still work out cheaper buying an iMac if you want a high-res display.
Single-Stream (SST) displays
With OS X Mavericks v10.9.3 and later, the following DisplayPort displays are supported using single-stream transport at 30Hz:
With OS X Yosemite v10.10.3 and later, most single-stream 4K (4096x2160) displays are supported at 60Hz on the following Mac computers:
With OS X Yosemite v10.10.3 and later, most single-stream 4K (3840x2160) displays are supported at 60Hz on the following Mac computers:
I've been working in Hollywood post production for over 20 years with A-list post production houses like Sony Imageworks, Weta, Digital Domain, MPC, Disney Feature Animation etc..
Many post houses have iMacs, but they are for the graphic designers or people running AfterFX / Photoshop. Some editing is done on the iMac in Premiere and a lot less these days in FCPX. Lots of audio is done on the iMac, except the damn fan makes it useless in many recording situations. Basically anywhere you need a mid range machine you will find an iMac.
Yes, there are people are out there doing visual effects on iMacs, but I can guarantee you that you would be laughed out of the room if you suggest that the next Star Wars or Iron Man be done on iMacs. We're taking about small shops doing relatively low end work.
The Mac Pro still is the tool of choice for anyone running OS X for professional software like Maya, Nuke, FCPX etc. All of these programs are heavily multithreaded and take full advantage of the multicore Xeon and the dual graphics cards and will smoke the iMac. No one serious is running something like DaVinci Resolve on an iMac. That's just silly and untrue.
The Skylake CPU packs a lot of punch, but the mobile iMac GPU is beat by even the basic D300 cards in the Mac Pro. Once you run programs that are properly multithreaded 64bit the Xeon will eat the Skylake. There are many other reasons why the iMac is not suitable for heavy duty use. The iMac has only one Thunderbolt controller that has to handle both ports and you will notice a hit on heavy load. The Mac Pro has 6 ports and multiple controllers and a system bus that is significantly bigger. And of course there are the heat issues with the iMac running under sustained load for extended periods of time. To be clear the iMac is essentially a Macbook Pro built into a monitor, not a workstation.
The ugly truth is that most visual effects houses like Double Negative, ILM, Digital Domain, Weta etc don't run Mac Pro's or OS X. It's mostly HP Linux boxes and heaven forbid Windoze running Maya, Nuke, Modo, Hondini etc. In these bigger houses the Mac Pro is usually relegated to editorial, matte painters, audio etc.
The render farms, which can consists of thousands of blades, are usually Linux or Windows. No one is stacking trashcans in a machine room.
If you go into a digital intermediate bay at a post house you will find the rare Mac Pro 12 core / D700 running something like DaVinci Resolve to color time commercials, maybe a smaller budget movie. But ever since Apple went slot-less and single CPU post production houses have started to switch to HP or Supermicro boxes running Linux. Some of these machines pack 4 -8 Nvidia Titan X cards for realtime color grading of 2/4k RAW footage and 2 Xeon CPU. Try that with the current Mac Pro. Some places have held on to their silver 5,1 boxes and hot rodded them instead of switching over to the nMP or Linux.
If Apple wants to be taken serious again by professionals they need to bring back a high frequency dual CPU machine with PCI slots that can handle something like 4 Titan cards, sound cards, I/O cards etc.
But even at that the truth is that the Mac has never been wide spread in post production outside of editorial and a few specialized areas like design, AE/PS, matte painting and the audio departments. The price / performance ratio has never been there. In the past it was SGI, maybe SUN. Once the Pentium showed up everyone switched to PC boxes running Linux, Windows NT and eventually Win7. Pixar is one of the few bigger companies that deployed OS X on any kind of scale and believe me they are not sitting on iMacs.
The achilles heel of the Mac Pro is the simple fact that so few apps are optimized for GPUs. It is truly "laughable." And what apps are optimized for the Xeon such that tests would be noticeably slower on the fastest Skylake 5K with 1TB SDD (which I am using right now to type this post)? The number of apps is so small I can't stop laughing. Also, the SSD in the iMac blows away any SSD in the Mac Pro right now, by the way. And although performance is more than just the SSD, the SSD plays a significant role.
When Apple and developers finally realize that Intel cannot give us CPU gains anymore like they could in the past, perhaps the emphasis will shift toward making ALL APPs (not just a tiny handful of PRO apps) be fully multi-threaded and GPU optimized. In that brave new world, the Mac Pro's dual "pro grade" video cards will make all the difference. But as of right now, the Mac Pro is laughable in how few apps are optimized to take advantage of that expensive (and aging — 2013) hardware.
About the only reason to buy a Mac Pro (other than one being flush with cash) is to run some CPU or GPU intensive process 24/7, such that better cooling makes a difference. But other than Hollywood or pro video production houses, who does that?
I've heard the first gen 5K iMac would get really hot. But in my experience using pro apps on the Skylake edition 5K iMac, the fans do ramp up at times but the machine stays very cool. I've not noticed any thermal throttling either. Apple seems to have gone out of their way to make the iMac better. Some awesomeness is coming to the Mac Pro this year perhaps, but the cost of entry into that product is still prohibitive for many people who WANT that machine. And again, people who aren't even "pros" want a Mac Pro. I myself am willing to pay a bit more for something noticeably better, but if the performance doesn't flat out skunk the Skylake iMac in most cases, I couldn't care less about the pros, I am going to fund an iMac purchase, not a Mac Pro purchase. And since the key to keeping the Mac Pro around is to have a reasonably sized customer base, it would seem only logical to prevent the user base from dwindling. There are still people these days who defect to Windows to save money, especially if the end result is almost the same as the Mac. I don't advocate that. It's just reality.
As a pro that has a mac pro but also buys hi end PCs for customers, I 100% agree with the tweamswitcher post. I'm running my old 2008 mac pro until it is no longer supported and then /shudder/ I may have to go to a win 10 box. iMacs are are a waste of of environment - an unupgradable over heating laptop with a big nice screen that you have to throw away in a few years. I want to keep my monitors and I just want the latest non xeon high-end intel chips and a few PCI slots with multiple hard drive bays (even 2.5" is ok these days) at a competitive price. Apple has 100% dropped the ball on pros, and it's frankly disgusting. I will never get the new mac pro in it's current useless (but pretty) form. May be apple should just subcontract to Dell to make a business line. business people don't care about desktop looks - we just want the job done.
It's more like - "apple screwed us with the mac pro - do we dump all our apple stuff and go to PC or deal with iMacs ... I guess for now iMacs - but every 2 years since we can't upgrade them...its still cheaper than that waste of money mac pro that we can't even buy apple monitors to go with!" Every pro Apple house is in the same bind right now (me included). The staunch loyalists are settling for iMacs - but are not happy.
Buy the best 5K Skylake iMac today, then when you need more power, buy a Mac Pro and attached the iMac to it as both a display AND an additional quad-core CPU and GPU. Have a MacBook Pro? Just connect that to the mix to use it's GPU and CPU. The more Macs you add, the more powerful a super-computer you will have.
In other words, Apple needs to make Macs to connect together in such a way to fully utilize the hardware of each device, giving you the full power of all machines connected to each other.
Why no one has done that before is beyond me. And don't tell me we don't have the technology to do it. It surely exists. It can't be that hard. And even if it is hard, that's why we have Apple. They claim to tackle hard things to make them simpler for us. Well, let them make Macs extendable. It's 2016, for goodness sake.
Big Apple supporter here, but I can't see a valid reason not to have had a "late 2015" Mac Pro last november.
http://www.boxxtech.com/about-us/our-customers
they are tiny in comparison to Apple. They were bought out by a venture capital firm recently that buys companies making $5m per year revenue or less:
http://www.craftsmancapitalpartners.com/portfolio.html
http://www.craftsmancapitalpartners.com/investment_criteria.html
When you look at the prices of the hardware, they go as high as $60k:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2887581/boxx-apexx-5-heres-what-a-36-core-five-gpu-workstation-looks-like.html
If you consider $10k workstations, $5m revenue is 500 units per year. That's fine for a company with a handful of employees but Apple is a huge international company and it's not worth designing machines just for those buyers. They poke fun at Apple's design but this is what desperate companies do:
http://macdailynews.com/2014/04/25/boxx-belittles-apples-mac-pro-in-new-commercial-with-video/
What they don't say is that secretly they wish they could get away with doing what Apple does because that's how you get the margins. The issues they point out are irrelevant. 10Gbps ethernet will come with USB C/TB3 and is already supported over TB2. Multiple CPUs doesn't matter if you are sticking to a particular price point. More than 2 GPUs is useful for heavy real-time work but GPUs double in performance roughly every couple of years so a 2016 MP will be like using 4x previous-gen GPUs. Not offering NVidia is an issue for some people but Apple could change this if they wanted to.
Other companies like HP, Dell and SuperMicro are in the server business so they have constant sales in server hardware where Apple never did, which is why they dropped the XServe. They keep up with every refresh because they sell the chips in servers and they are willing to sustain a lot of SKUs, SuperMicro has over 4500 SKUs. Apple doesn't like dealing with excess inventory because it has such a long turnover and loses value, which impacts the margins. The ideal for any vendor is pre-confgured models. SuperMicro operates with 5% net margins and ships just over 300k servers and workstations per year at around $3-4k average. Workstations are most likely under 100k units for them as they are primarily a server company.
Apple maintains their net margins and they're probably making over 25% on the Mac Pro. A 2 year refresh helps here and it's not an impulse buy market nor are the performance jumps significant after a year.
The biggest problem the 2013 Mac Pro model had was not being a significant jump over the old 12-core because there's not much of an incentive to upgrade. This will change with the next one because it will go up to 18-core and the dual GPUs it gets will be equivalent to a dual 980ti (or dual Titan X) and possibly 12GB of high bandwidth video memory as well as external Retina display support. If people don't need the GPUs, the design isn't holding them back because they just stick to the base GPUs and choose a faster CPU. Apple wouldn't likely sell more than 18-cores with a dual-socket anyway, if they did it would be dual 12-core, which would be 30% faster at best and cost a bit more. CPU tasks can be split across multiple machines so people can buy as many as needed. Buy 10x 18-core models with base GPUs and network them all together.
There's going to be a limit to the resolution that media goes to. UHD is probably the last step. VR might need stereo 16K 60fps frames. If someone needs to handle that in real-time, it could take another couple of GPU iterations but there can easily be special GPU hardware made. Apple could even make a special single-board quad TB3 GPU with a single large HBM storage if they wanted to but again, the market just isn't big enough.
Apple spent $100m to bring Mac pro manufacturing to the US so the first year profits from the Mac Pro likely broke even. Financially, the market is meaningless for them but there is a certain status with it and it's good that they are staying with it for now. It would be nice if they could get the entry price down because $3k for a quad-core before the monitor purchase is pretty steep. Even if they come out with a $999 Retina display, a quad-core MP + display would be just under $4k and a 27" Retina quad-core iMac starts at $2k now with SSD. $3k with the display would be better and perhaps they can do a bundle deal rather than drop the Mac pro price dramatically.
Here in NZ, we are getting on-site NBD for 80 - 90% of HP Elitebook/Elitedesk/Z workstations (both laptops and desktops). Remaining 10 - 20% cases take longer because part is not available localy and gets couriered from Australia, but on average HP NZ does have parts in local stock, including motherboards and GPUs. I think it is quite respectable effort.