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

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  • Reply 101 of 269
    lorin schultzlorin schultz Posts: 2,771member

    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. 
    I agree, with one exception: it's a failing if one wants institutional or corporate buyers who usually have to lock down capital projects months in advance. The "delight" of the Mac Pro "reveal" experienced by some Avid editors I know was rather substantially mitigated by the company having given up on Apple and switching to HP workstations.

    The giddy feeling one gets from Apple-style unveilings is a GREAT idea for anything that falls within the realm of an impulse purchase. It's not great for anything that requires planning a year ahead.
  • Reply 102 of 269
    SoliSoli Posts: 10,035member

    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. 
    Uh, yeah, yes.

    Lemme guess, you were among those who argued Apple will never offer a stylus for the iPad, right?

    Apple is glacially slow to grasp the obvious, but the benefits of touch are too obvious for even Apple to ignore forever, even if you can.
    I seem to recall he was on-board with having a digitizer and stylus on the iPad. Jobs point about a stylus wasn't that it shouldn't exist, but that it shouldn't be the primary way in which you interact with the device; which was how you needed to use devices before multipoint capacitance touchscreens were commonplace and when a tablet was just Windows with all the UI elements designed for a mouse pointer, not a finger. MS, in all their wisdom, pushing Windows on a smartphone where it was a completely different OS but where they tried to mimic the Windows UI as much as possible so that a stylus was needed to do pretty much anything on the device. The same with Blackberry, which was inarguably much better, but still sucked big donkey ball. The simple genius of the iPhone was that the UI was designed around the HW and I/O. Not exactly a left-field realization and yet it changed everything.


    edited April 2018 macxpressMorphroth
  • Reply 103 of 269
    lorin schultzlorin schultz Posts: 2,771member

    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. 
    That tends to support the argument that Ive's clam shape for the iMac was ill-advised. It imposed thermal limitations that required feats of engineering prowess to overcome, while offering zero benefit to the user.

    You can't claim, as you did earlier, that Ive's influence is universally positive then excuse slow product releases that arise from his decisions.
  • Reply 104 of 269
    macplusplusmacplusplus Posts: 2,112member
    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... 
    The iMac is irrefutably absurd. Ive sacrificed thermal performance and drive accessibility to achieve an utterly pointless objective: thinness in a device that realizes absolutely zero benefit from being thin, at a point where the user is not even able to perceive it!

    It's a great product and sells very well, but let's not dress it up with any Emperor's Clothes bullshit about Jony's infallibility. Sometimes his decisions are awesome, other times they're just goofy.
    Actually it gets great benefit from being thin: it holds less heat. Give it a larger chamber it will hold more heat, will require bigger and noisy fans, not to mention more dust and dirt that internally embellish your preferred designs.
    macxpress
  • Reply 105 of 269
    asciiascii Posts: 5,936member
    I really like the idea of having their own internal group of artists whose workflow they can observe, rather than just relying on customer feedback. Should result in a tighter feedback cycle.
  • Reply 106 of 269
    bkkcanuckbkkcanuck Posts: 864member
    So does 2019 mean Q1 or Q4?
    I’d guess they’re targeting WWDC.
    My guess is they are targetting March.  I always got the feeling that they wanted to get to the point of previewing a machine in Dec 2018, but were not sure about that and definitely were not sure about shipping... which is why they were careful not to say coming next year -- they said not this year (2017)
  • Reply 107 of 269
    Think "fleet of self-driving computers."
    1. The 2019 Mac Pro will be thinner, lighter, and entirely self-contained, with no ports, no expansion options, no displays, and no traditional user input devices of any kind.
    2. It will communicate its needs and the tasks it wants its users to perform using brain waves.
    3. Once delivered, it will unpack itself, recycling the packing materials and the delivery drone, and extract all additional energy directly from sunlight whenever required.
    4. It will automatically relocate itself to the precise location offering the optimum amount of solar energy within the existing building, until it can construct an optimized environment nearby.
    5. It will lead local grassroots movements to reorient government, commerce, finance, and zoning regulations in order to optimize the efficacy of these growing Mac Pro computing communities.
    The working slogan is "Mac America Great Again!"
    entropys
  • Reply 108 of 269
    bkkcanuckbkkcanuck Posts: 864member
    ascii said:
    I really like the idea of having their own internal group of artists whose workflow they can observe, rather than just relying on customer feedback. Should result in a tighter feedback cycle.
    It is good to have a group who will act as customers driving requirements - I just wish they had the equivalent for other science/AI professionals as well.  My guess is that they will be part hardware and part focused on working on ironing out remaining issues with workflow within Final Cut X.  
  • Reply 109 of 269
    theothergeofftheothergeoff Posts: 2,081member
    So does 2019 mean Q1 or Q4?
    I’d guess they’re targeting WWDC.
    Which WWDC... 2018? or 2019?
    If this year's WWDC
          ".... All this will ship around  End of Year"  (iMacPro shipped Dec 14)
    and the 'revenue year 2019' starts Oct 1.

    New hardware could be after the Fall release of MacOS  10.14 (it will be the .2 release at the earliest if '2019')

    here's to hoping;-)


  • Reply 110 of 269
    macplusplusmacplusplus Posts: 2,112member

    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. 
    Uh, yeah, yes.

    Lemme guess, you were among those who argued Apple will never offer a stylus for the iPad, right?

    Apple is glacially slow to grasp the obvious, but the benefits of touch are too obvious for even Apple to ignore forever, even if you can.
    It is a pencil, not a stylus. Stylus exists almost since the beginning of the iPad. I use one on my iPhone Plus to retouch photos.

    The Pencil is another thing. It is a 1:1 digital remake of an analog tool. The difference between the stylus and the Pencil is as big as a bicycle and a car: you cannot draw naturally with a stylus, for example you cannot jot your signature, you cannot write with your characteristic handwriting. You can do all of these with the Pencil and more. This is a progress that required the development of faster processors and special displays, not Apple’s latency in understanding what you think obvious truth.
    wonkothesane
  • Reply 111 of 269
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    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. 
    There's not much of a gap when you factor in the iMac Pro. If you were to spec out parts for a Mac Pro today, it would just be a headless version of the iMac Pro. Putting an iMac Pro on the floor and hooking it up to a 3rd party 4K display is close to what it would be. The only difference being able to switch components out, which people wouldn't do for another 3 or 4 years and wasn't possible with the 2013 model either.

    Their team of people working with pro workflows sounds like a great setup. Even contracting people to work on high-end visual effects jobs so they can sort out all the performance issues. That benefits all Mac users. Sometimes people assume more powerful hardware is needed when software runs slowly but as Apple has shown with FCP X vs Premiere, it can just be a case of making the software optimal. Apple has also demonstrated this with iOS products.

    The other factor mentioned in the article is the external GPUs. Apple showed the Techcrunch reporter Macbook Pros running with 1 and 2 external GPUs with 8K workflows. For people looking for that enthusiast-PC type setup, this works fine. GPUs are able to do real-time raytracing:



    That 24fps demo was done using quad Tesla V100 GPUs so around 60 TFLOPs of GPU performance. The CEO of Epic estimated around 40TFLOPs would be needed to do photoreal graphics in real-time ( https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/40-teraflops-tim-sweeney-epic-photo-realism/ ). The current iMac Pro has 11 TFLOPs. Photorealism doesn't have to be real-time for post-production work but they are already moving to 7nm GPUs so in a couple of years there will be a doubling of GPU performance. This means ~4TFLOP MBPs and 20 TFLOP iMacs and hooking up an extra GPU or two via TB3 can bring it up to 60 TFLOPs.

    It's good to have the option of a modular tower system. It will likely allow up to double the performance of the iMac Pro but at price points around $8k-14k, it's not going to be the equivalent of the old towers that started around $1900. It's going to be an aspirational product that almost nobody will own. Most professionals will still be using iMacs and MBPs as their everyday workhorses. It's always nice to see new hardware designs though. I reckon they'll want to show it off at WWDC 2019 so over 12 months away. That puts it in a timeframe to get PCIe 5, maybe TB4:

    http://www.tomshardware.com/news/pcie-5.0-release-0.3,34720.html
    edited April 2018 GG1wonkothesanemacxpressargonaut
  • Reply 112 of 269
    Stop selling those iMac Pros like in the article. I am not sure why you still do not understand that professional needs CPU and drive separate from display. There are better displaus for professional in publishing and editing on the matrket than Apple display in iMac. Maybe one should look at EIZO and NEC professional displays. Some of them offer far more, but Apple is not in this business - otherwise your iMac Pro would cost $15000 - not $5000. Plus prose may be using 2-4 displays like this on one CPU unit. Is it hard to understand how proffessional (real -not basement Joe wannabe pro) studio is built and operates?
  • Reply 113 of 269
    thttht Posts: 5,421member
    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... 
    The iMac is irrefutably absurd. Ive sacrificed thermal performance and drive accessibility to achieve an utterly pointless objective: thinness in a device that realizes absolutely zero benefit from being thin, at a point where the user is not even able to perceive it!

    It's a great product and sells very well, but let's not dress it up with any Emperor's Clothes bullshit about Jony's infallibility. Sometimes his decisions are awesome, other times they're just goofy.
    Actually it gets great benefit from being thin: it holds less heat. Give it a larger chamber it will hold more heat, will require bigger and noisy fans, not to mention more dust and dirt that internally embellish your preferred designs.
    Virtually all computers transfer heat through convection, ie, moving cool air from outside, flowing that air through heat sinks inside the computer, and then moving that heated air to the outside. The big drivers for heat transfer, for most computers, are the wetted surface area of the heat sinks, the flow rate of air across the heat sinks, and the ambient temperature of the air. Thin and small form factors have limited volume to put heat sinks inside, and that therefore limits how much performance a computer should have.

    I like the iMac design. I want it to get even thinner. They should get rid of the HDD and make it even thinner, like 0.5” thick, and have BTO stand options that could double as USB/TB hubs, including HDD storage. This is perhaps a reason to go with ARM instead of Intel. It allows Apple to have form factors that they can’t do with Intel parts. But they can probably do this with Intel parts to some extent.
    Soli
  • Reply 114 of 269
    Sam123Sam123 Posts: 10member
    danvm said:
    macxpress said:
    larrya said:
    Should this really take 2 years??
    You realize that most Apple products that are totally brand new take many years to design, engineer, and fine tune before its announcement? This isn't just slapping parts together like a DIY PC and call it good. Apple is not Dell, HP, etc. If all you want is a bunch of parts slapped together then by all means, go get that or create your own.

    If you need a professional Mac in the meantime, the iMac Pro is actually a great Pro Mac to get. It will still have significant value, even next year should you want to sell it for a new Mac Pro.
    I suppose you have no idea the engineering and design involve in HP workstations.  I suggest you check the HP Z8, which is miles ahead off what Apple offers today.  This model is capable of 3TB of RAM (yes, Terabytes), two CPU's with a max of 56 cores, a three NVidia Quadro P6000.  Do you really think that a device like this is a "bunch of parts slapped together"? 

    http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations-z8/index.html?jumpid=cp_r11260_us/en/psg/hp_desktop_workstations/z8-mdplink

    In addition, these models have been updates in a frequent basis, so high end customers have the latest specs always.  There is no excuse for what Apple has done to the Mac Pro line.


    Yes its true.
    HP and Dell too are so far ahead of Apple in the high end workstation market its crazy to think Apple will ever catch up. Apple has given away so much high end market share (and cash) to Dell and HP and they will never get it back. If the new Mac-Pro was slated for 2019 they could have upgraded the existing Mac-Pro to CPU choices to some current processors. At least this would have bought them the time they needed to develop the new Mac-Pro.  
  • Reply 115 of 269
    SoliSoli Posts: 10,035member
    Sam123 said:
    danvm said:
    macxpress said:
    larrya said:
    Should this really take 2 years??
    You realize that most Apple products that are totally brand new take many years to design, engineer, and fine tune before its announcement? This isn't just slapping parts together like a DIY PC and call it good. Apple is not Dell, HP, etc. If all you want is a bunch of parts slapped together then by all means, go get that or create your own.

    If you need a professional Mac in the meantime, the iMac Pro is actually a great Pro Mac to get. It will still have significant value, even next year should you want to sell it for a new Mac Pro.
    I suppose you have no idea the engineering and design involve in HP workstations.  I suggest you check the HP Z8, which is miles ahead off what Apple offers today.  This model is capable of 3TB of RAM (yes, Terabytes), two CPU's with a max of 56 cores, a three NVidia Quadro P6000.  Do you really think that a device like this is a "bunch of parts slapped together"? 

    http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations-z8/index.html?jumpid=cp_r11260_us/en/psg/hp_desktop_workstations/z8-mdplink

    In addition, these models have been updates in a frequent basis, so high end customers have the latest specs always.  There is no excuse for what Apple has done to the Mac Pro line.


    Yes its true.
    HP and Dell too are so far ahead of Apple in the high end workstation market its crazy to think Apple will ever catch up. Apple has given away so much high end market share (and cash) to Dell and HP and they will never get it back. If the new Mac-Pro was slated for 2019 they could have upgraded the existing Mac-Pro to CPU choices to some current processors. At least this would have bought them the time they needed to develop the new Mac-Pro.  
    Which is it? Are they incapable of catching up or did they give it away?
    edited April 2018
  • Reply 116 of 269
    CobraGuyCobraGuy Posts: 76member
    250+ billion in the bank can buy miracles I guess.

    i miss my old Dual G5 PowerMac.

    😐
  • Reply 117 of 269
    KITAKITA Posts: 392member
    Marvin said:

    That 24fps demo was done using quad Tesla V100 GPUs so around 60 TFLOPs of GPU performance. 
    And an additional 500 TFLOPS (mixed precision) from the 4x V100's Tensor cores.
    fastasleep
  • Reply 118 of 269
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,858administrator
    Stop selling those iMac Pros like in the article. I am not sure why you still do not understand that professional needs CPU and drive separate from display. There are better displaus for professional in publishing and editing on the matrket than Apple display in iMac. Maybe one should look at EIZO and NEC professional displays. Some of them offer far more, but Apple is not in this business - otherwise your iMac Pro would cost $15000 - not $5000. Plus prose may be using 2-4 displays like this on one CPU unit. Is it hard to understand how proffessional (real -not basement Joe wannabe pro) studio is built and operates?
    This is extremely arrogant, assuming that what you need is what everybody needs. I don't contest that there are Eizo and NEC displays, but that's a red herring.

    Enterprises, say IBM and whatnot, are ordering iMac Pros by the hundreds and plunking them on desks, where they will never see an upgrade again. Also, I guarantee you real, professional studios are buying, and using, them. Lucasfilm and Disney has about a thousand of them -- are they not a real studio?

    Do some professionals need discrete CPU and monitor? Yes. Do all or even a majority? Not even remotely.
    edited April 2018 fastasleepking editor the grateroundaboutnowpscooter63Rayz2016muthuk_vanalingammacxpress
  • Reply 119 of 269
    macplusplusmacplusplus Posts: 2,112member
    tht said:
    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... 
    The iMac is irrefutably absurd. Ive sacrificed thermal performance and drive accessibility to achieve an utterly pointless objective: thinness in a device that realizes absolutely zero benefit from being thin, at a point where the user is not even able to perceive it!

    It's a great product and sells very well, but let's not dress it up with any Emperor's Clothes bullshit about Jony's infallibility. Sometimes his decisions are awesome, other times they're just goofy.
    Actually it gets great benefit from being thin: it holds less heat. Give it a larger chamber it will hold more heat, will require bigger and noisy fans, not to mention more dust and dirt that internally embellish your preferred designs.
    Virtually all computers transfer heat through convection, ie, moving cool air from outside, flowing that air through heat sinks inside the computer, and then moving that heated air to the outside. The big drivers for heat transfer, for most computers, are the wetted surface area of the heat sinks, the flow rate of air across the heat sinks, and the ambient temperature of the air. Thin and small form factors have limited volume to put heat sinks inside, and that therefore limits how much performance a computer should have.

    I like the iMac design. I want it to get even thinner. They should get rid of the HDD and make it even thinner, like 0.5” thick, and have BTO stand options that could double as USB/TB hubs, including HDD storage. This is perhaps a reason to go with ARM instead of Intel. It allows Apple to have form factors that they can’t do with Intel parts. But they can probably do this with Intel parts to some extent.
    The iMacs have very cleverly designed heat sinks. The heat sinks not only conduct hot air, they also radiate heat like a stove. What makes the volume of the case a crucial factor is that radiated heat.
  • Reply 120 of 269
    asciiascii Posts: 5,936member
    bkkcanuck said:
    ascii said:
    I really like the idea of having their own internal group of artists whose workflow they can observe, rather than just relying on customer feedback. Should result in a tighter feedback cycle.
    It is good to have a group who will act as customers driving requirements - I just wish they had the equivalent for other science/AI professionals as well.  My guess is that they will be part hardware and part focused on working on ironing out remaining issues with workflow within Final Cut X.  
    Yep having some other professions would be good too.

    When I watch video reviews of the Macbook Pro from creative professionals a common complaint is that the lack of an SD card slot interferes with their workflow, because that's what their other gear uses. So if Apple are truly adapting their products to these people's workflows I wonder if the SD card will make a comeback? (presumably they would use this feedback in all their pro products, not just the desktops)
    dysamoria
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