Bummer. I had hoped the Vega cards would be a little bit cheaper. There is really a void here. My configuration is almost $13.000. After Effects is a slouch on an iMac Pro. I really don't know what to do ... The real question is: will AE perform better on a €13.000 bomb?
If you are a veteran or current military do not forget to order through the Apple Store for Veterans and Military as you get a 10% discount. If you are an Apple Card holder you can also get 6% back. That will help lower the price or allow you to buy a much nicer spec Mac Pro. Just the Veteran/Military discount would be $600 and in many places that would offset the sales tax.
The Military/Veteran Program uses ID Me for verification and takes just a few clicks and is used by other retailers for similar discounts.
As many said, $12,000 for a reasonable entry machine, exactly the same as a maxed out Mac IIfx in 1990 or thereabouts. I put ten of those in a single newspaper office along with postscript RIPs and scanners and Barco monitors.
I could get by with one configured for about $8,000. But I would upgrade the RAM using third-party. The prices I'm seeing on Newegg for 32GB 2933MHz DD4 ECC memory from Crucial is about $150 per DIMM. Apple wants $3000 for what seems like it should be about $1000 (unless the Mac Pro requirements are something new). But I will stick with my 2013 Mac Pro for at least another year. It meets my current needs no matter how much I want one of these beasts.
Usually the base config of a computer is the one you'd expect to be most popular (or at least close to it).
In this case, though, I can't imagine anybody getting the base config. If all you need is an 8 core processor, get an iMac. If you want ECC and AVX512, then get an iMac Pro. It's only when you start pushing the core counts up and adding in powerful GPUs that you start to exceed the iMac Pro.
i'm sure Apple will never tell us, but I bet the median sale price on these is well over $10k.
As many said, $12,000 for a reasonable entry machine, exactly the same as a maxed out Mac IIfx in 1990 or thereabouts. I put ten of those in a single newspaper office along with postscript RIPs and scanners and Barco monitors.
I just said the same thing at the end of another long thread but worth repeating here as more relevant ... I have to think Apple would have avoided a lot of the angst over the new Mac Pro's price had it been named the Mac WorkStation or something like that and not Mac Pro, as many have said Apple's 'Pro' term is used for prosumer stuff these days.
Yeap, that’s exactly what you get for labelling a pair of earbuds and a phone ‘Pro’, when they are not Pro their n any way shape or form, just offer some extra features. The Mac Pro is a proper Pro device and is proved accordingly, but I agree Workstation would be a much better fit then ‘Pro’.
Still it’s an amazing machine and for Apple the starting value isn’t bad, when you consider the expandability it offers and the price of the base config iMac Pro’. Shame it seems the built in SSD storage is proprietary somehow and requires upgrading or replacing by Apple.
Now if only Apple redesigned the iMac like the new XDR display and made the memory user upgradable in all models, and had decent specs from the baseline and up machines..
Can't wait to get one and load it up with some sweet NVIDIA RTX GPUs. You can do that, right?
Someone will need to verify but as I understand it, Mac OS no longer supports the Nvidia drivers and Nvidia doesn’t offer any for the latest Mac OS, so I’m not sure where that would leave you if you plugged in an RTX? If you used an AMD card it’ll probably be fine.
Can't wait to get one and load it up with some sweet NVIDIA RTX GPUs. You can do that, right?
Someone will need to verify but as I understand it, Mac OS no longer supports the Nvidia drivers and Nvidia doesn’t offer any for the latest Mac OS, so I’m not sure where that would leave you if you plugged in an RTX? If you used an AMD card it’ll probably be fine.
The pricing is very interesting, and much cheaper than I'd expected, when you look close.
First of all, CPU pricing is *surprising* - the cost of the chip upgrade from 8 to 28 cores is only about $300 higher than the difference in Intel's list prices. Obviously Apple is paying less than that, but still, this is a remarkably low mark-up! Put another way, Apple's margin on the nnMP configured with 28 cores is much lower than their margin on the 8-core unit. And I don't expect many purchasers to go with the 8-core unit. So, if they're Ok with that lower margin, why price the base at $6k? It's a bit of a mystery.
Secondly, SSD prices are reasonable, assuming you're willing to say that the Apple SSD performs on a par with top-grade SSDs like the Samsung 970 Pro. Those list at $300/TB, the same per-TB cost as upgrading from 2 to 4TB. Of course you can get quite good performers- maybe marginally better than Apple's but without the T2- for $150-$200/TB. Nothing stops you from buying one (or four) of those, though, sticking them on a $100 PCIe card, and dropping them into your nnMP, if you want to. All in all, Apple SSDs aren't cheap, but the added expense is way more reasonable than it was on, say, the last 15" MBP.
Memory is ridiculous. But that's easy to do yourself. I would expect that many users will order memory separately - even large corporate users. Those that don't are going to get reamed, but (surprise!) by a bit less than they would be if they were buying from Dell or HP.
The video cards are a big question mark. We won't know what they're worth until we start seeing a bunch of benchmarks. Apple's valuing the 580 at $400 which is high but in line with other name-brand vendors. Of course the interesting cards are all much pricier.
In short, if you're willing to buy your own memory, you can get a seriously roomy nnMP for $19k: 28 cores, 4TB SSD, one dual-GPU "Pro Vega II Duo", and the default 32GB RAM. Add $900 for 6x32 (192GB). Dump the 4x8GB, or buy another two for $100 and use all six for an extra 48GB. Now you're at $20k, and your Mac has 240GB RAM. Double your GPU for another $5k, if you like.
Overall this seems more than reasonable for users who actually need this power. If we lived in an Intel-only world, it'd be a smash hit at an excellent price.
The one problem is AMD. They're just starting to make inroads now but in six months they'll be everywhere. And I expect Dell and HP will be selling them in their workstation product line (whereas now Dell seems to be selling them only as "servers" and I can't find them at HP at all). The 64-core EPYC 7702 crushes the Intel 28-core chip, often by a factor of 2, while costing half as much. And you can get dual-chip systems if you really want a *lot* of cores.
This isn't going to make the nnMP obsolete right away - after all, Intel will still be inside a large majority of all systems, and in that class, the nnMP is a winner. But as a halo product, it won't be "the most powerful" anything. It'll be "half as powerful" or "a quarter as powerful" as top AMD single- and dual-chip workstations. That's not so great.
What Apple does next will really be more interesting than this nnMP. Will they build a 2020 model? Whether AMD or Intel, will they offer something better? Or do they let this thing sit there and shrivel in the harsh light of rapid tech advances, as they did with the nMP? If the former, I think they've got a great future on the high end. And if the latter, then they're done in that market, for at least the next 10 years, and probably a lot longer. Nobody will ever trust them again.
It took Apple six years but they pulled it off, they built a Mac Pro that'll sell even less well than the Trashcan.
There seems to have been a run on used Mac Pro machines at Otherworld Computing yesterday, maybe because of the repeat exposure to the new Mac Pro pricing for people like me who could’ve afforded the 2013 model (only just), but not this new one at TWICE as much. They used to have many more used Mac Pros available, early in the morning, but now it’s the oldest ones only.
The RX580 GPU is old and slow, while the Vega II (Navi W5700X) is at least new, but middle-end at best. Perhaps they are hoping the absurd amount of VRAM compensates for slow compute? Either way, it gets crushed by Nvidia's offerings.
Combine that with Intel CPUs that have stalled on the same node for five years and get absolutely destroyed by the latest AMD Threadripper CPU and you now have the most expensive obsolete on arrival workstation on the market.
Did someone get the hardware decisions exactly backwards over at Apple?
Why release literally the worst of each possible hardware camp in a single product? AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs would have made this MacPro a beast.
Bummer. I had hoped the Vega cards would be a little bit cheaper. There is really a void here. My configuration is almost $13.000. After Effects is a slouch on an iMac Pro. I really don't know what to do ... The real question is: will AE perform better on a €13.000 bomb?
You don't have to go with Apple's cards.
You don't? I can't seem to de-select the RX 580. Plus, are their MPX form factor cards one can install in this that aren't made by Apple?
You could add a PCIe card instead of MPX, but since Apple's killed Nvidia GPUs by refusing to allow them to write drivers for 10.14+ the highest-performing card you can add is a Radeon VII or a 5700XT. That saves you quite a bit of money over Apple's cards (although they force you to buy their RX 580), but doesn't improve the performance much over Apple's offerings.
Can't wait to get one and load it up with some sweet NVIDIA RTX GPUs. You can do that, right?
Someone will need to verify but as I understand it, Mac OS no longer supports the Nvidia drivers and Nvidia doesn’t offer any for the latest Mac OS, so I’m not sure where that would leave you if you plugged in an RTX? If you used an AMD card it’ll probably be fine.
Not if you are planning to use the GPU for ray tracing.
The RX580 GPU is old and slow, while the Vega II (Navi W5700X) is at least new, but middle-end at best. Perhaps they are hoping the absurd amount of VRAM compensates for slow compute? Either way, it gets crushed by Nvidia's offerings.
Combine that with Intel CPUs that have stalled on the same node for five years and get absolutely destroyed by the latest AMD Threadripper CPU and you now have the most expensive obsolete on arrival workstation on the market.
Did someone get the hardware decisions exactly backwards over at Apple?
Why release literally the worst of each possible hardware camp in a single product? AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs would have made this MacPro a beast.
I've already made the point that AMD poses a big problem for them down the line, but the truth is that Intel still owns the workstation market. Not for long, I expect, but at this point it's still the safe choice being made by most people putting down 20-60k per workstation.
OTOH, you don't know what you're talking about re: the Vega II. It's *not* Navi. And how it performs is *the* big open question. Well, that, and how much/how fast will vendors optimize their code for it? The jury's out. And yes, I'd feel happier if Apple supported NVidia again. But this story's not written yet. Let's see what happens.
Bummer. I had hoped the Vega cards would be a little bit cheaper. There is really a void here. My configuration is almost $13.000. After Effects is a slouch on an iMac Pro. I really don't know what to do ... The real question is: will AE perform better on a €13.000 bomb?
You don't have to go with Apple's cards.
You don't? I can't seem to de-select the RX 580. Plus, are their MPX form factor cards one can install in this that aren't made by Apple?
You could add a PCIe card instead of MPX, but since Apple's killed Nvidia GPUs by refusing to allow them to write drivers for 10.14+ the highest-performing card you can add is a Radeon VII or a 5700XT. That saves you quite a bit of money over Apple's cards (although they force you to buy their RX 580), but doesn't improve the performance much over Apple's offerings.
It's doesn't improve it at all. The MPX Vega II should walk all over the Radeon VII. The 5700XT is even slower.
Bummer. I had hoped the Vega cards would be a little bit cheaper. There is really a void here. My configuration is almost $13.000. After Effects is a slouch on an iMac Pro. I really don't know what to do ... The real question is: will AE perform better on a €13.000 bomb?
You don't have to go with Apple's cards.
You don't? I can't seem to de-select the RX 580. Plus, are their MPX form factor cards one can install in this that aren't made by Apple?
You could add a PCIe card instead of MPX, but since Apple's killed Nvidia GPUs by refusing to allow them to write drivers for 10.14+ the highest-performing card you can add is a Radeon VII or a 5700XT. That saves you quite a bit of money over Apple's cards (although they force you to buy their RX 580), but doesn't improve the performance much over Apple's offerings.
It's doesn't improve it at all. The MPX Vega II should walk all over the Radeon VII. The 5700XT is even slower.
Anandtech reported that the Radeon Pro W5700X is an upgrade choice for the new Mac Pro, but I see they meant that it will be an upgrade choice in the future. That card is essentially a workstation version of the Navi 5700XT. I thought they meant the W5700X was the "real" model number of the Vega II Pro.
So you're right that it is Vega II Pro (which given the name did seem quite odd) is Vega of course, and it appears to be a customized Radeon Instinct MI60. So in that case the performance is not such a mystery. Expect Radeon VII levels +7-10%. It's the full version of the same die the Radeon VII is made out of, so 64CU (versus 60CU) and 4096 stream processors (instead of 3840), and 1800Mhz instead of 1700Mhz peak.
Anyway, the bottom line is that the Vega II Pro is a poor GPU compared to Nvidia options. And the "story has been written." Nvidia cancelled their webdriver for MacOS this August while it was in beta, citing that Apple was refusing to negotiate. Who is really at fault? Who knows, but Nvidia isn't coming to the MacPro's rescue.
Anyone know if you can go look at them in the stores yet? That’s as close to having one of these as I will ever get. I like the design. Looks sweet!
I’m still saving up for the new 16” MacBook Pro to replace my mid-2010 MacBook Pro.
I just got the fully loaded 16" MacBook Pro and I really love the improvements. The keyboard has a great feel, and the new sound system was every bit as good as my super-expensive home stereo. And of course it's marvelous to have fingertip access to everything I've done in the last two years with the awesome 8TB drive. Oddly enough the performance improvements over my late 2016 MacBook Pro seem modest despite 64GB RAM and 8 cores instead of 4. On the other hand I really haven't pushed it much yet.
To answer your question:
I visited the massive flagship Apple Store Aventura yesterday and they said they did not know if they would get Mac Pros. They said Apple is not giving them any information.
I visited the upper middle sized Apple Store Boca Raton today and they still had the historic trashcan Mac Pro on display. They told me Apple was not planning to display the new Mac Pro there. They said it will be in "select stores" so I'm imagining that the stores they have big bucks in (costly architectural design, two story stores, etc) are likely to have it. So Apple Store Aventura should have it, Lincoln Road should have it, etc. Those just happen to be the places where the big buck customers live and spend. So if you want to see it, call the flagship designer stores first.
Comments
I’m still saving up for the new 16” MacBook Pro to replace my mid-2010 MacBook Pro.
The Military/Veteran Program uses ID Me for verification and takes just a few clicks and is used by other retailers for similar discounts.
https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/veterans_military
Merry Christmas
In this case, though, I can't imagine anybody getting the base config. If all you need is an 8 core processor, get an iMac. If you want ECC and AVX512, then get an iMac Pro. It's only when you start pushing the core counts up and adding in powerful GPUs that you start to exceed the iMac Pro.
i'm sure Apple will never tell us, but I bet the median sale price on these is well over $10k.
Still it’s an amazing machine and for Apple the starting value isn’t bad, when you consider the expandability it offers and the price of the base config iMac Pro’. Shame it seems the built in SSD storage is proprietary somehow and requires upgrading or replacing by Apple.
Someone will need to verify but as I understand it, Mac OS no longer supports the Nvidia drivers and Nvidia doesn’t offer any for the latest Mac OS, so I’m not sure where that would leave you if you plugged in an RTX? If you used an AMD card it’ll probably be fine.
Combine that with Intel CPUs that have stalled on the same node for five years and get absolutely destroyed by the latest AMD Threadripper CPU and you now have the most expensive obsolete on arrival workstation on the market. Did someone get the hardware decisions exactly backwards over at Apple?
Why release literally the worst of each possible hardware camp in a single product? AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs would have made this MacPro a beast.
You could add a PCIe card instead of MPX, but since Apple's killed Nvidia GPUs by refusing to allow them to write drivers for 10.14+ the highest-performing card you can add is a Radeon VII or a 5700XT. That saves you quite a bit of money over Apple's cards (although they force you to buy their RX 580), but doesn't improve the performance much over Apple's offerings.
So you're right that it is Vega II Pro (which given the name did seem quite odd) is Vega of course, and it appears to be a customized Radeon Instinct MI60. So in that case the performance is not such a mystery. Expect Radeon VII levels +7-10%. It's the full version of the same die the Radeon VII is made out of, so 64CU (versus 60CU) and 4096 stream processors (instead of 3840), and 1800Mhz instead of 1700Mhz peak.
Anyway, the bottom line is that the Vega II Pro is a poor GPU compared to Nvidia options. And the "story has been written." Nvidia cancelled their webdriver for MacOS this August while it was in beta, citing that Apple was refusing to negotiate. Who is really at fault? Who knows, but Nvidia isn't coming to the MacPro's rescue.
To answer your question:
I visited the massive flagship Apple Store Aventura yesterday and they said they did not know if they would get Mac Pros. They said Apple is not giving them any information.
I visited the upper middle sized Apple Store Boca Raton today and they still had the historic trashcan Mac Pro on display. They told me Apple was not planning to display the new Mac Pro there. They said it will be in "select stores" so I'm imagining that the stores they have big bucks in (costly architectural design, two story stores, etc) are likely to have it. So Apple Store Aventura should have it, Lincoln Road should have it, etc. Those just happen to be the places where the big buck customers live and spend. So if you want to see it, call the flagship designer stores first.