Apple modular Mac Pro launch coming in 2019, new engineering group formed to guarantee fut...

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  • Reply 61 of 269
    So I guess is the new joke is ‘how many years does it take Apple to change a lightbulb?”

    The other takeaway is that the meeting where they leaked the Black iMac was a ruse to quell discontent among the screwed over Mac Pro user base. Apparently they were hoping the hopped up iMac would shut people up- they had nothing if they are just now hiring.

    Other than EFI, there is not a whole lot of difference between any whitebox PC and a Mac. We do not need Jony’s Stylings or some modular thing with proprietary connectivity that locks us into a dungeon of Apple’s capricious and fickle product plans. An updated Cheesegrater would be just fine- something capable of using standard cards, memory, etc.

    l would be willing to bet that if Apple asked H-P to market a Mac version of it’s workstations they could have product ready to ship before WWDC. Apple needs to decide if they want to make computers or just be a lifestyle brand selling phones.
    avon b7
  • Reply 62 of 269
    TheaterOnline.comTheaterOnline.com Posts: 1unconfirmed, member
    Good time to review options for upgrading existing Mac Pros - Any ideas - Nvidia GPU?
  • Reply 63 of 269
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member
    Eric_WVGG said:
    Damnit. This means that their new external display is probably another year off too.

    I know a lot of folks want the cheese grater back, but there's no reason for a computer to be that goddamned heavy. 
    If possible and it makes sense it’d be cool to see Apple drop the Mac mini and existing Mac Pro and make the new modular Mac Pro stackable where you could buy five or ten of these, Mac Mini sized (perhaps larger) Mac Pros and physically stack and connect them to one another and have the power increase five or ten-fold. Or perhaps... if you wanted to add more graphics you’d get their graphics box and add that on or for processor you’d get the processor box and add that on, allowing the machine to be upgraded and future proofed by wholesale adding on or replacing one or two or five or ten of these Apple boxes. Hope this is what they mean by modular.
    edited April 2018
  • Reply 64 of 269
    LukeCage said:
    I think pros will be happy with the end result 
    No, they have or soon will all have moved on.
    I cannot imagine mortgaging my business on the whims of Apple.
  • Reply 65 of 269
    ben2020ben2020 Posts: 1member
    Considering the state of other Macs they've released in recent years, such as the non-upgradeable iMac Pro and the MacBook 14,1 that has an over 10% failure rate of USB-C ports (at least in my experience) with John Ternus running things in hardware I wouldn't get my hopes up that Macs are going to get any better anytime soon.  I bet even this year's base model iMac will STILL have a 5400rpm laptop hard drive, which is just insane penny pinching and cost cutting in 2018 but what else would you expect from Tim Crook? 

    Post-2015 Apple - Destroying Steve Jobs' Mac legacy one Mac at a time.
    avon b7
  • Reply 66 of 269
    macxpress said:
    You mean like the old Mac Pro tower that was also designed by Jony Ive's team? I'm sure you're the expert on what a Pro needs anyways. 
    The Cheesegrater was engineered by a team led by Jon Rubenstein. They let Jony pick the drapes and design the graphics on the Box.
    A stylist like Ive should never be let within a country mile of an engineering decision.

    Form should always follow function. The trash can is what happens when a stylist is in charge. My upgraded 2010 Mac Pro is faster than that thing.
  • Reply 67 of 269
    misamisa Posts: 827member
    All Apple has to do for modularity is look at the gamer's built PC industry!  They been doing this for at least 7 years and counting!  If Apple want to be cheap and be standardized.  But know Apple, everything will be proprietary and can only be purchased through Apple for the most profit.
    Not quite. There's several issues, and the only reason Apple is going down this road is because someone tapped them on the shoulder and said "growth is here."

    So for starters:
    1. Desktop "desktop" PC's are dead. Traditional Laptops are "dead". Apple does not, and still does not build any kind of computer that is even remotely powerful enough to play a games throughout it's lifecycle. Their machines are basically glorified photoshop (iMac), or Render-farm machines, little else.
    2. Only the high end CPU and high end GPU market is a growth market. Reason? VR. Current attempts are VR have been laughable awful because they've been trying to shoehorn a low-resolution experience into a low-priced console or PC with an expensive HMD that is too heavy and lacks any real reason to use.

    This is where Apple has room to grow, but it will be one that people might not understand.

    1. VR requires a modular system. One that 16X PCIe 3.x cards can be attached to, and not be crippled by 4X thunderbolt bandwidth. So unless Apple figured out a way to put 32 lanes of PCIe in an accessable/modular system. This point is probably not going to get addressed. Proprietary video cards that only work in Apple's machine are not going to cut it here. Apple has to create a system that two external GPU's operating at the full 16 lane PCIe 3.x speed can operate at. I want to be able to stick two PCIe 700 watt cards in two external GPU enclosures and have them operate at the maximum speed, not be crippled to a single 4x.

    2. I want to be able to stack multiple Mac Pro's on top of each other with their own RAM/CPU/GPU for a renderfarm, or video render farm, or whatever else. It's currently hell of a lot cheaper to buy a rack of PC servers and spread them accross 16 linux installations than it is to buy two servers with 16 CPU cores. But unless energy is cheap, you want the latter, not the former.

    Those are the extreme options I want an Mac Pro to be able to do. It will not be everyone's options, but it highlights where the growth is. If VR is a growth industry then we need machines that can generate 8K "VR" experiences, not these "960x1080" half HD experiences. Given that a single Geforce 1080 card can not do 60fps at 4K, we're not there yet.

  • Reply 68 of 269
    StrangeDaysStrangeDays Posts: 12,834member
    onepotato said:
    God, I hope Jony doesn't have any input into the design of this machine. Otherwise we'll be seeing something that looks pretty and is totally unfit for pro use.
    Er, but what about all his other products that people love? The cheese grater is amazing, the iMac is amazing, the MBP, etc... 

    But sure fun narrative to pretend his work is unusable. 
    Soli
  • Reply 69 of 269
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member

    macxpress said:
    [...] This isn't just slapping parts together like a DIY PC and call it good.
    Fair enough, but it's not exactly rocket surgery either, is it? It's a computer. A better than average computer with a desirable operating system, but at the end of the day it's just a computer. When the time between updates exceeds the duration of depreciation write offs, the claims of special sauce, fairy dust, and omniscience start to wear a little thin.
    It certsinly isnt rocket science if you are using off the shelf Intel parts.   If they were using Intel the hardware would already be understood by the engineers and the drivers also derivative of past chip support code.  This is why i suspect new hardware.  

    Either that or there have been so many restarts of this project that the team simply isnt making progress. Sadly this is also a real possibility!!!   I really dont believe anybody at Apple even understands what a "pro" line up should be.  

    Note the phrase "pro line up" because if Apple folliws past practice and delivers just one box then they will have failed to understand their customer base.  At a minimal they need to deliver the following out of the gate:  
    1. A pro monitor!
    2. A storage subsystem (key to many pro needs)
    3. A high performance box
    4. A revised trash can Mac Pro

    The storage subsystem and the performsnce Mac need to be rack mountable ideally in half width modules.   The performance Mac needs at least two processor options, a single GPU option and reasonable internal storage expansion.    A side note the trash can with one internal storage slot was beyond stupid.   The storage subsystem needs to be expandable and capable of very high capacity.  RAID on that storage system shoukd be an option.  

    Now some of you may be wondering why update or revise the trash can.  Pretty simple really, the trash can is not a bad machine for pros simply needing a desk top performance machine.    The revisions would be as follows:   
    1.   This would become primarily a single board computer designed around an APU like chip, mostvlikely an AMD solution.
    2.    It would suppirt one optional GPU expansion slot.  
    3.     It mustvsupport at least two SSD expansion slits.  
    The goal should be a $1200 selling price for a respectably configured machine.     Why $1200 for a decent machine, because Apple repeatably fails to understand the word "pro".   Not every professional needs nor wants a $500 machine.  The low end wants decent processor performance in a box (tube) that supports modest expansion.   Modest being a storage device and possibly a GPU card.  What they dont need is a buikt in monitor, an extra GPU nir a Xeon processor.   They want a decent desktop Mac something Apple has failed reppeatable to deliver.  Even looking back decades ago at the cube and other desktop failure you have to wonder if Apple will ever learn.  You can only try to squeeze so much profit out of middling designs before people question the value if the product.  This has doomed just about ever Apple desktop in memory as the hardware has become overpriced junk.  Frankly junk is the right wird for todays Mini, Mac Pro and especially the iMacs.   Junk is what you call very dated hardware.  
  • Reply 70 of 269
    StrangeDaysStrangeDays Posts: 12,834member
    NanoFrog said:
    "Tiny % of market"...could this be because Apple is CLUELESS and makes a foolish "pro" machine that is a joke. The Mac Pro was/is nothing, that is why sales are so minimal. NOW they have a "pro" dev team? This is an admission that they have cared nothing for pro users and pro systems, a bald admission really. Chumps can't make a great computer. Apple is the iphone company, like most corporate grifters they go only where the easy cash is. Apple, particularly Apple under Cook, has become almost nothing. Burned out, over-rated, drenched in sloth. This is a monkey butt situation.
    Cool first post laden with troll trope trash. Shame you created an account just for that nonsense. I sense butthurt. 
    macseeker
  • Reply 71 of 269
    StrangeDaysStrangeDays Posts: 12,834member
    tipoo said:
    "Throughout, the idea of modularity was omnipresent. An iMac Pro with two iPad Pros hooked up to it allows for direct control, shortcuts and live access to the Logic manual all while you’re mixing a song on the main device. "

    Uh wait, you can do that? If not...Why not?! I always wanted tighter integration to use iPads to make Macs better. 
    Likewise. Also, the bigger point is being missed by Apple here... people want touchscreen capability on their displays!
    Yeah no. 
    pscooter63iqatedoireland
  • Reply 72 of 269
    StrangeDaysStrangeDays Posts: 12,834member
    avon b7 said:
    One of Apple's biggest historical failings has been communication (lack of it). They seem to be turning that around and it is very encouraging. I hope this propagates down the line.

    The part on workflow didn't make a lot of sense but you can't avoid marketing these days. Everything needs to be 'sold'.

    The takeaway here was the openness and doing it in a timely fashion. A big thumbs up.
    That’s not a failing, it’s a style decision. Jobs’ Apple chose to speak less. That isn’t good or bad on the face of it. 
    tmaypscooter63argonautireland
  • Reply 73 of 269
    StrangeDaysStrangeDays Posts: 12,834member
    So I guess is the new joke is ‘how many years does it take Apple to change a lightbulb?”

    The other takeaway is that the meeting where they leaked the Black iMac was a ruse to quell discontent among the screwed over Mac Pro user base. Apparently they were hoping the hopped up iMac would shut people up- they had nothing if they are just now hiring.

    Other than EFI, there is not a whole lot of difference between any whitebox PC and a Mac. We do not need Jony’s Stylings or some modular thing with proprietary connectivity that locks us into a dungeon of Apple’s capricious and fickle product plans. An updated Cheesegrater would be just fine- something capable of using standard cards, memory, etc.

    l would be willing to bet that if Apple asked H-P to market a Mac version of it’s workstations they could have product ready to ship before WWDC. Apple needs to decide if they want to make computers or just be a lifestyle brand selling phones.
    Man you love dreaming up nonsense conspiracies. So you think the iMP just popped out of a clamshell, fully formed? Yeah no. It’s a killer workstation with an all new internal thermal design and it too took time to produce. 
  • Reply 74 of 269
    BittySonBittySon Posts: 73member
    My iMac Pro is actually an amazing machine, and coming from a Mac Pro 3,1 that I had upgraded as far as possible, has far exceeded my expectations.  I was going to wait for the modular Mac Pro, but was glad I didn't, and now even more so.  I really can't think of anything that I would be able to do with what they are likely to put into the 2019 machine that I can't do right now with my iMac Pro. At least for my applications (3D modeling, Mat Lab image processing routines, some more advanced signal and image processing with up to 1TB data) it is stellar.
    iqatedo
  • Reply 75 of 269
    macxpressmacxpress Posts: 5,801member
    macxpress said:
    You mean like the old Mac Pro tower that was also designed by Jony Ive's team? I'm sure you're the expert on what a Pro needs anyways. 
    The Cheesegrater was engineered by a team led by Jon Rubenstein. They let Jony pick the drapes and design the graphics on the Box.
    A stylist like Ive should never be let within a country mile of an engineering decision.

    Form should always follow function. The trash can is what happens when a stylist is in charge. My upgraded 2010 Mac Pro is faster than that thing.
    Something engineered and something designed are 2 different things. Jony Ive does not engineer things...he designs them in conjunction with the engineering team and other teams to form a cohesive product (collaboration). You can't honestly sit here and tell me John Rubenstein designed the entire PowerMac G5 himself. Maybe he engineered the cooling system (which sucked BTW) and things like that, but I doubt he did much with the overall design of it. Thats where Jony and his team come into play just like any other Apple product. 

    And he couldn't have had much to do with the Mac Pro because he left Apple in 2006 and was working on the iPod team before he left Apple. 
    edited April 2018 pscooter63
  • Reply 76 of 269
    StrangeDaysStrangeDays Posts: 12,834member

    LukeCage said:
    I think pros will be happy with the end result 
    No, they have or soon will all have moved on.
    I cannot imagine mortgaging my business on the whims of Apple.
    No, that’s just your hater fantasy. Go invest in Dells if you’re so miserable. You’ll find they are pieces of shit that fail at thermal design...my client-issued SSD Dell dev laptop constantly fires up its hairdryer fans, even while idling. They suck. 
    pscooter63
  • Reply 77 of 269
    StrangeDaysStrangeDays Posts: 12,834member

    macxpress said:
    You mean like the old Mac Pro tower that was also designed by Jony Ive's team? I'm sure you're the expert on what a Pro needs anyways. 
    The Cheesegrater was engineered by a team led by Jon Rubenstein. They let Jony pick the drapes and design the graphics on the Box.
    A stylist like Ive should never be let within a country mile of an engineering decision.

    Form should always follow function. The trash can is what happens when a stylist is in charge. My upgraded 2010 Mac Pro is faster than that thing.
    100% nonsense on your part, you just made that up. Craig, who actually works at Apple and isn’t a random guy on a rumors site, says very differently. 
  • Reply 78 of 269
    SoliSoli Posts: 10,035member
    So I guess is the new joke is ‘how many years does it take Apple to change a lightbulb?”

    The other takeaway is that the meeting where they leaked the Black iMac was a ruse to quell discontent among the screwed over Mac Pro user base. Apparently they were hoping the hopped up iMac would shut people up- they had nothing if they are just now hiring.

    Other than EFI, there is not a whole lot of difference between any whitebox PC and a Mac. We do not need Jony’s Stylings or some modular thing with proprietary connectivity that locks us into a dungeon of Apple’s capricious and fickle product plans. An updated Cheesegrater would be just fine- something capable of using standard cards, memory, etc.

    l would be willing to bet that if Apple asked H-P to market a Mac version of it’s workstations they could have product ready to ship before WWDC. Apple needs to decide if they want to make computers or just be a lifestyle brand selling phones.
    Man you love dreaming up nonsense conspiracies. So you think the iMP just popped out of a clamshell, fully formed? Yeah no. It’s a killer workstation with an all new internal thermal design and it too took time to produce. 
    He says "Other than EFI, there is not a whole lot of difference between any whitebox PC and a Mac" and yet even between an iMac and iMac Pro there's a huge difference, including Apple's own T2 chip and what I was rumored as an A10 Fusion (but I'm not sure if that was confirmed).
  • Reply 79 of 269
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    wizard69 said:
    tipoo said:
    So fully 6 years between them by 2019, that's crazy to think of the gap left. That a very long time in silicon terms.

    The "pro workflow team" is encouraging. I'm hoping for myself it allows a lot of min/maxing, not fixed to relatively high end hardware on all parts like the iMac Pro. I need a lot of CPU for data science, but a GPU goes entirely unused, so I wouldn't need Navi Pro with HBM2 adding to the cost. 
    We will see buut im still not convinced Apple gets it!    As you point out "pro" needs vary widely and Apple just doesnt sem to understand this.  

    Apple whines about single digit sales for the Mac Pro but you have to ask what did they expect from the trash can.   As you noted not everybody needs dual GPU cards, in fact integrated GPUs can be good enough.   Likewise for some storage is the big issue.    Which brings up the idea that the machine must be a faamiky of components one if which needs to be a storage array.    

    What is really interesting here is all the focus on performance testing.   If this was an Intel platform  performance would be limited by the Intel supplied chips. In otherwords not much they can control performance wise.   This makes me wonder if the machine will be one if the rumored ARM based machines.  It would throw the industry a curve to have the first ARM based Mac be based on an ARM processor.  There are at least two commercial chips available today that could lead to a very high core count Mac Pro.  So maybe a 64 core Mac Pro is on the way.  

    Crazy?    Maybe but some of the statements just seem weird if this was an Intel based machine.  
    "This makes me wonder if the machine will be one if the rumored ARM based machines."

    But the very recent rumor with respect to ARM Macs mentioned that, that transition won't begin until around 2020.
    You cant assume they got the dates right.  Besides if Apple means late 2019 then there is little difference.  

    I just find the statements to be very perplexing if the next nachine is Xeon based.  Frankly they should upgrade the Mac Pro now to hold ppeople over.  Contrary to the non sense coming from Apple there is no reason not to upgrade the Mac Pro right now.  
  • Reply 80 of 269
    macxpressmacxpress Posts: 5,801member
    So I guess is the new joke is ‘how many years does it take Apple to change a lightbulb?”

    The other takeaway is that the meeting where they leaked the Black iMac was a ruse to quell discontent among the screwed over Mac Pro user base. Apparently they were hoping the hopped up iMac would shut people up- they had nothing if they are just now hiring.

    Other than EFI, there is not a whole lot of difference between any whitebox PC and a Mac. We do not need Jony’s Stylings or some modular thing with proprietary connectivity that locks us into a dungeon of Apple’s capricious and fickle product plans. An updated Cheesegrater would be just fine- something capable of using standard cards, memory, etc.

    l would be willing to bet that if Apple asked H-P to market a Mac version of it’s workstations they could have product ready to ship before WWDC. Apple needs to decide if they want to make computers or just be a lifestyle brand selling phones.
    Man you love dreaming up nonsense conspiracies. So you think the iMP just popped out of a clamshell, fully formed? Yeah no. It’s a killer workstation with an all new internal thermal design and it too took time to produce. 
    But but...you can make a DIY PC in about 30 minutes on PC Part Picker for half the price and just as powerful, if not more! So why does it take Apple 2yrs to design a Mac? /s

    The only real joke is the content of his posts...
    edited April 2018 pscooter63
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