CheeseFreeze

Fine, but it's time they up the storage limits in the highest tiers. 

I'm getting close to 2 TB with my family. When I back it up to Synology NAS or something else, all the meta-data will be lost in the process. Apple does not provide an API so I can back it up externally. They are locking me in.

Also, this makes iCloud £1 more than Google's way more advanced Google Drive offering with 2TB. iCloud via the browser doesn't even have a keyword Search! Trying to find documents is a nightmare and requires you to know which folder and subfolders it is in. Apple's cloud strategy is behind competitors.

blastdoor said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

blastdoor said:

Apple has repeatedly made a really big deal out of the benefits of integrating the GPU and CPU. While I could imagine a PCI card that acted as an accelerator of sorts, and a GPU could technically play such a role, it would have been surprising to see the Mac Pro support add-on GPUs aa that term is commonly understood. 

As I’ve noted before, the path to having a “modular” Mac Pro — in the sense of cobbling together multiple cpus and GPUs — is to buy as many Mac minis as you want and network them. 

It might be cool if apple took that to a higher level and made it possible to network multiple minis using something faster that 10 Gb Ethernet. But I think that’s the most one could reasonably hope for in terms of a future modular “Mac Pro”

Xgrid was cool and the concept remains so, but that's not quite the same and requires massively parallel jobs to get the fullest extent. Even theoretically including Thunderbolt for networking, that will still only allow 40 gigabit connections in between, and more realistically, 10gig ethernet is today's solutions. The folks I worked with for this review have all experimented with clustering, but the calculations don't lead themselves perfectly to it. 

It's a good idea, don't get me wrong. It's just not for everything that a "modular" Mac Pro could do, or has done.

agreed, it's definitely a niche that can effectively use multiple networked minis. Happens to be my niche, so I find it interesting. 

Really, the high-end 'pro' market is a just a collection of niches. The 2008-2012 Mac Pro served several of these niches. Now, no single machine serves them all. The Mac Studio gets some, the Mac Pro gets some, a cluster of minis can get some. 

I've long thought Apple should offer an AWS-like 'iCloud Pro' to address more pro niches. I mean 'AWS-like' in a very loose sense. Using AWS isn't terribly hard but it's not super easy, either. There's plenty of room for improvement in the UI/UX, especially for smaller (but still 'pro') users. I know AWS itself offers Mac mini instances, and other providers do too, but there's a lot of room to make it easier, more transparent.