Mac Pro 2018

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Exciting times ahead....

Apple is developing the new 2018 Mac Pro, in the classic modular style of the original tower.

“We’re working on it,” says Schiller. “We have a team working hard on it right now, and we want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we’re committed to making it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system, designed for our demanding pro customers.

“As part of doing a new Mac Pro — it is, by definition, a modular system — we will be doing a Pro display as well. Now you won’t see any of those products this year; we’re in the process of that. We think it’s really important to create something great for our pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that’ll take longer than this year to do.”

Yes, that’s right, a new Mac Pro and new external Pro display are both on the way. But they won’t be coming this year.

Source

Because of the upcoming new modular designed Mac Pro, Nvidia recommits to developing Mac drivers by releasing Pascal driver later in April 2017, with Titan Xp support.

Open to Mac Community

Speaking of users, we’re also making the new TITAN Xp open to the Mac community with new Pascal drivers, coming this month. For the first time, this gives Mac users access to the immense horsepower delivered by our award-winning Pascal-powered GPUs.

Source
 
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It's only april bro... 2018 is a long ways away.
 
Is APPLE currently working with ALPHACOOL or CORSAIR or EKWB for the modular water cooling
in the new MAC PRO TOWER?

Simply adding 4 NVIDIA TITAN Xps in SLI generates 1000 Watts of heat - add some massive CPUs and
Huge banks of RAM as well as many slots for huge drives and additional pci slots in the new MAC
PRO tower requires a 1500 to 2000 Watt Power Supply.
This new tower sounds like a real capable system.
 
Now they are saying maybe 2019. Tim Cook is a joke.

This is why Apple hardware is never cutting edge, they take so long to develop the damn system the parts are outdated by the time they release it.
 
Now they are saying maybe 2019. Tim Cook is a joke.
Oh wow. Now that's lame.

They're probably going to pull the October launch 2018, late December delivery tactic again.
But you'll actually receive your shipment sometime in February. lol
 
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This is why Apple hardware is never cutting edge, they take so long to develop the damn system the parts are outdated by the time they release it.

A modular server running commodity hardware should take months to develop, not years.
 
But the case . . . The case will take years to get it looking just right.

Common now, think differently!

Tim Cook doesn't think differently. It's been nothing but disappointment after disappointment from him. He's an ops guy, not a creative genius like jobs. He can run the company great, but he can't innovate.
 
There is a lot of cynicism in general about what Apple can do and what they are going to do.

1.) Because their development will take a year doesn't mean they will be using 1 year old hardware.

2.) They may be waiting for specific improvements in hardware that they feel are worth it to move to. Although I agree that the Mac Pro should have received at least ONE update between its launch in 2013 and now, Apple at least choose wisely with the hardware thats in it. The core improvements that Intel has done from Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake don't matter much, outside of clock speed (which has been shown in bench marks. Sure there were lots of voltage and temp improvements, but for raw power that is irrelevant). Really where the current Mac Pro lacks is primarily in GPU power and connectivity (EG: TB3/USB-C). It sounds like that will be addressed in the next Mac Pro.

3.) Jobs setup Apple to work 'without him'. Each person is selected as a part of Apple to do what they do best. Tim Cook has little to nothing to do with product design and future product development. You can blame Jony Ive and Dan Riccio for that. Read their executive chart.

4.) Most people complaining in this thread will never even buy a Mac Pro. It's out of reach for most people. The cheapest variant is $3,000. So why complain about a product that affects you not-at-all? Especially about a future product that doesn't exist yet that you wouldn't even buy if it was here today? Yes, this is a discussion forum, but coming in here and complaining about a "shitty product" that doesn't interest you at all anyway doesn't promote "discussion".

Commentary: I'm glad there is a new Halo product. I've never owned a Mac Pro myself. But I would love to have one to help grind through video rendering. Someday when my work is lined up and I have the work that requires it, I will. That is of course unless the iMac just continues to be such a good buy to make the Mac Pro, not irrelevant, but not necessary for what I do.

Frankly that is the announcement I've been waiting for. An iMac with TB3/USB-C, a vastly better video card, and a CPU bump (or preferably move to hex core! That would really make the iMac basically the best bang for your buck while being in OSX). Updates to the screen as well. The current one is already 10-bit with full 10-bit workflow from GPU to screen (and with the software in OS to utilize it) but any improvements to being able to see more content while retouching/editing would be greatly appreciated. Anyway, that's all a side note. Here's hoping the new Mac Pro is a success. Of course like all things, we shall wait and see.
 
I'm hoping that the recent "meh" about the 2016 MacBook Pro was a thorough kick in the teeth to Apple. Between that and the Mac Pro, "Pros" are about one nerve away from going postal on 1 Infinite Loop.

Pros don't want small, and thin, and light, and cute. They want something with balls-to-the-wall power and at least some kind of future proofing. Pros don't mind a laptop that weighs a little, Pros can afford gym memberships. They don't mind a desktop that takes a little bit of space, IKEA makes big desks. Do focus groups. Ask people. You don't have to blow a lot of R&D on this, it's NOT that challenging.

Maybe they *did* do a focus group, and somehow they ended up with all the same people that told Microsoft "yeah, a full screen Start thing sounds like a great idea!"

(I personally like the 2016 MacBook Pros tho, even if they benchmark weird and have no 'legacy' ports. I just ordered one and it should be here next week)
 
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Frankly that is the announcement I've been waiting for. An iMac with TB3/USB-C, a vastly better video card, and a CPU bump (or preferably move to hex core! That would really make the iMac basically the best bang for your buck while being in OSX). Updates to the screen as well. The current one is already 10-bit with full 10-bit workflow from GPU to screen (and with the software in OS to utilize it) but any improvements to being able to see more content while retouching/editing would be greatly appreciated. Anyway, that's all a side note. Here's hoping the new Mac Pro is a success. Of course like all things, we shall wait and see.

There's a good chance of a Pro iMac coming this year. I think this will fill up offices, while the new Mac Pro are for higher level arts/developers/engineers.
A hex-core 32" would sell very well, but a possible 4K price tag is a bit much considering that the coming Mac Pro can swap out GPUs and CPUs.

A $3000 Mac Pro can be scaled over time, whereas a iMac will need to be replaced if CPU/GPU demands are exceeded.
Also the gains are on the GPU side of things these days so an iMac GPU will never match that of the Mac Pro.
Which means the iMac Pro will not be so pro after all.
 
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It was very surprising when Apple decided to move away from the Pro market, given their dominance in creative agencies worldwide. As a bottom line consideration, it's a given consumer-level goods like iPods, iPhones and Macbook Airs will generate exponentially more revenue, but these moves ignored the bread-and-butter that helped define them.
 
There's a good chance of a Pro iMac coming this year. I think this will fill up offices, while the new Mac Pro are for higher level arts/developers/engineers.
A hex-core 32" would sell very well, but a possible 4K price tag is a bit much considering that the coming Mac Pro can swap out GPUs and CPUs.

A $3000 Mac Pro can be scaled over time, whereas a iMac will need to be replaced if CPU/GPU demands are exceeded.
Also the gains are on the GPU side of things these days so an iMac GPU will never match that of the Mac Pro.
Which means the iMac Pro will not be so pro after all.

They won't sell a 4K iMac (with the exception of the 20"). As they've already shown they are much more interested in selling a 5k one. I fully expect the next iMac will keep the same external specs, but with improvements internally. I'm sure it will still be 5k and 27". But will have a better contrast ratio. Or a more surprising option if they decide to make the leap to OLED now. I'm 100% certain they will eventually, but I think it's very unlikely that it will be this coming generation or even the next one. Another possibility is offering an OLED option for an additional $600 or something like that. That also might happen.

I would really already call the iMac a pro level device. When fully spec'ed out it costs more than a Mac Pro. And for a lot of creative agencies that don't necessarily need machines with that many cores having the real estate is nice. Additionally with some very small exceptions GPU power doesn't matter that much either. Unless you're rendering lots of video or doing 3D graphics, it doesn't matter much (but even with that there were tons of videos putting the 2015 iMac vs the 2013 Mac Pro for video rendering and the iMac wrecked it IIRC). For all the Photoshop/Lightroom/Illustrator users out there, a 2010 iMac still has enough GPU juice to chug along smoothly.

They generally put a high-mid level mobile GPU in the iMac. If they continue on that trend it will be more than enough for my needs, and also most content producers.

===

As far as the modular nature of the Mac Pro, it is yet to be seen how useful that is. Apple's reasoning with the 2013 Mac Pro was really correct. Even if a lot of people disagreed with it. Most production houses that buy machines NEVER upgrade them in their entire lifecycle of use. Individual users sure, but when you factor the deep pockets versus the small ones, it made sense for Apple to produce a product that wasn't modular internally but had a huge amount of external connectivity to do anything a user could possibly want.

On the Mac Pro Towers from 2007-2011 (I think?) they found that most people never changed the GPUs. Most people never upgraded the RAM (although some people with internal help desks did get around to it). And certainly NONE of them ever replaced the processors. At most people swapped HDDs when they died. And that effectively didn't matter either with the move to PCIE-SSD. So while I think the idea of "over time" swapping parts is novel, most people don't (and for clarity and 'fairness' this is true whether a production house is buying PC's or Macs. Most companies buy workstations, use them for 3 years, and then do it again. They rarely if ever upgrade components). It's the same concept with cell phones with removable batteries. A small number of "power users" care, but 99.999% of consumers never used that feature. Additionally there wasn't a lot of GPU's developed to be used in the original Mac Pro, so there weren't really a lot of upgrade options. I honestly don't see that changing. So I don't think having a system where you can swap them will matter.

Now this is all just personal observations. It's very possible that Apple will do something surprising with the new Mac Pro and that video card manufacturers will start making various pro cards for it, but I just don't see it happening. Because the market of people that own a Mac Pro is small and then the people that would then upgrade their video cards in a Mac Pro is even smaller. Unless they allow for GPU swapping in other machines (like the iMac and say Mac Mini) then I really doubt third party GPU's will take off. Because Apple doesn't want their under-costed machines to be able to breach the performance of their top tier machine. But as with all things, we shall see.



It was very surprising when Apple decided to move away from the Pro market, given their dominance in creative agencies worldwide. As a bottom line consideration, it's a given consumer-level goods like iPods, iPhones and Macbook Airs will generate exponentially more revenue, but these moves ignored the bread-and-butter that helped define them.

I agree. And I think the Mac product line has been ignored for far too long. The part that sort of irritates me is that it's not as if Apple is starving for financial resources. They really should hire more people with more expertise so that they can handle the development of all their product lines simultaneously. The issue is that they are depending on too few people to develop everything. And obviously there is a limitation to how much any given individual can do.

I hope they're learning. Because the one thing that kills companies is not being able to change direction quickly enough. "Business as usual" is a death sentence. In the case of a mega-company like Apple, it might be a slow one, but it is a sure process for any company that doesn't stay with the market.
 
I read the extended interview. Glad to hear that Apple is aware of external GPUs and thinks they have their place. For my workflow (statistic, machine learning, and AI), this is a much better solution than buying a Mac Pro, since my main use is development and debugging and anything ultra heavy I can run in the cloud anyhow. A Mac Pro is too small of a machine to put multiple Tesla cards in.
 
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Apple seems to be more enthusiastic about producing products with their own CPU chips. iPhones and iPads.
Things that have Intel seems to take forever to receive an update. If Apple could produce competitive desktop CPUs I would think we would have seen more effort into their Mac line.

Apple has to understand that the Mac line shows what the best Apple can do.
When PCs are blazing past you for 1/4th of the price, it doesn't show that Apple can produce high-end, Halo products. Innovation comes from the top down.
 
I would think that while end users might not want to change the CPU or the GPU but the company might want to. It is way easier to get AMD or nVidia furnish you with a driver than having them come up with an upgraded proprietary board every generation. PCI Express won. Similarly, perhaps the win from Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake IPC wise is small but there are more and more cores pouring in and even previously LGA 2011 and LGA 2011 v3 both served two generations and especially now with things slowing down the same platform might serve three, who knows -- so Apple might just need to validate the new CPUs and boom! refresh. Which, I might add, they just did to the Mac Pro but it shouldn't take this long.
 
I would think that while end users might not want to change the CPU or the GPU but the company might want to. It is way easier to get AMD or nVidia furnish you with a driver than having them come up with an upgraded proprietary board every generation. PCI Express won.

AMD and nVidia do not manufacturer boards for Apple. Apple develops them all themselves. All that AMD and nVidia do is provide chips. I should note that if they did, their whole manufacturing process would have much bigger slow downs than they do. What with them needing separate proprietary boards for every system they make both in the form of motherboards and videocards. It is true that nVidia and AMD both provided boards for Apple in the past to their specifications with the original Intel Mac Pro, but Apple has taken control of all those processes some time ago.

2: The Mac Pro does use PCI Express. And yes, it does use them for their video cards. It would have probably cost 10's of millions (if not 100s of millions) of dollars for them to force Intel to create a new connection type at the chip level to do what PCI Express already does. The only "difference" is they just made the physical connection different. But that connection is PCI-E and pinned as such.
This is similar to Apple shrinking DVI and turning that into a proprietary connection without creating a new standard. They did the same thing with Display Port creating Mini-Display Port. That one of course is now accepted as a standard, but it originally wasn't. So I guess you could say Apple just turned PCI-E into "Mini PCI-E".

The reasoning behind it I believe it was two fold: to prevent people from fiddling with the internals, but more importantly messing with how much of a thermal load the Core could take. As well as making more stress on the power supply in terms of output. This actually is somewhat confirmed in the linked articles. One of the major reasons why they're now moving away from the small Mac Pro again is because they realized multi-GPU produced so much heat that they couldn't really keep upgrading the video cards. The maximum thermal envelope became the problem.
And then secondly of course to simply fit the video cards into a machine that small. So there was a practical size limitation. While it may not seem like the connection itself needs to be shrunk to meet those demands, if you look at pictures of the internals, creating any additional space is desirable. I think it was a wonder that they went with full sized DDR.


Similarly, perhaps the win from Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake IPC wise is small but there are more and more cores pouring in and even previously LGA 2011 and LGA 2011 v3 both served two generations and especially now with things slowing down the same platform might serve three, who knows -- so Apple might just need to validate the new CPUs and boom! refresh. Which, I might add, they just did to the Mac Pro but it shouldn't take this long.

On this we agree. Apple has been very slow and has been ignoring their high-end base. Hopefully they'll learn their lesson. While I do think it's a mistake for a company like Apple to be "reactionary" (as Apple is polarizing, they'd never get anything done if all they did was listen to complaints. Tons of people complain and don't know the business aspect or also know the market in terms of its broad base as well as Apple does.) Apple should however be more proactive than it has been.

It seriously might have taken them this long (3-4 years) just to figure out what the next step was in terms of where to go with the Mac Pro (to solve the GPU heat issue), but they could've created incremental updates as it went along. They could've released a new iMac. They could've created a Mini with easy external GPU support. But they haven't. And it's this dragging of the feet that is going to bulldoze them.
Now this isn't to contradict my earlier statement. I do still feel that "if you were going to stop updating" then Sandy Bridge was a good place to do so. But to be clear: I 100% want them to be updating more frequently than they are. They could've also done updates to their graphics cards at this point as well, provided whatever they replaced them with also had a similar power draw and thermal load. But obviously they haven't until this past week or whenever it was.
 
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On the whole "does Apple still have it now that Jobs is gone" question:

My theory is that Apple still has lots of innovation left, but it struggled to figure out where to go without obvious direction. And it's learning that what made the Jobs-era Apple soar wasn't just Jobs or Ive by themselves... it was the dynamic between the two. Ive would come up with novel, elegant designs, but Jobs was always there to ground them in his expectations. It feels like the Cook-era Apple doesn't have that restraint -- Ive is free to pursue designs to their logical extremes rather than balance them with what customers still expect. Hence computers that are extremely compact and rely on a single connector format, like Thunderbolt or USB-C. They adhere to a kind of ideological purity, but they appear out of step with what users want.

The company is at its best when design and function clearly go hand-in-hand. The Apple Watch, believe it or not, is a good example of that: Apple didn't do a great job with software until watchOS 3, but the hardware and some underlying software choices are still proving to be very well-considered. Just ask Android Wear buyers... I swear, every Android Wear 2.0 device I've seen so far has at least one deal-breaking design element. Want a heart rate monitor? Going to need an extra-chunky watch. Want a real choice of bands? Okay, but you'll have to lose multiple features or pay through the nose.
 
Lol, you did what I did 6 years ago and got a Mac Pro. I could not go back to a PC after getting a Mac Pro. Nothing touches the Mac Pro case on the PC side. It's so elegant and well-built. I don't game on a pc anymore so no need for a PC. I upgraded the CPUs to get it to 12 cores, put in some ram, put in a 7950 and a PCIe flash drive. The machine is more than enough, even 6 years later. Will upgrade next year though if it is worthwhile.
 
I'm hoping that the recent "meh" about the 2016 MacBook Pro was a thorough kick in the teeth to Apple. Between that and the Mac Pro, "Pros" are about one nerve away from going postal on 1 Infinite Loop.

Pros don't want small, and thin, and light, and cute. They want something with balls-to-the-wall power and at least some kind of future proofing. Pros don't mind a laptop that weighs a little, Pros can afford gym memberships. They don't mind a desktop that takes a little bit of space, IKEA makes big desks. Do focus groups. Ask people. You don't have to blow a lot of R&D on this, it's NOT that challenging.

Maybe they *did* do a focus group, and somehow they ended up with all the same people that told Microsoft "yeah, a full screen Start thing sounds like a great idea!"

(I personally like the 2016 MacBook Pros tho, even if they benchmark weird and have no 'legacy' ports. I just ordered one and it should be here next week)
Apple doesn't care about "Pros". Other wise they would of updated the Mac Pro by now. Lots of digital content creators have moved on from Macs now. Style > function been Apple's thing for a long time now.
 
I hope Apple keeps supporting 5.1 Mac Pros until they release the true successor.
It would be a shame if 2010/11/12 Mac Pro couldn't natively upgrade 10.13 later this year.
 
I hope Apple keeps supporting 5.1 Mac Pros until they release the true successor.
It would be a shame if 2010/11/12 Mac Pro couldn't natively upgrade 10.13 later this year.

It's not such a big deal. Their yearly OS updates are kind of just service packs along with iOS features, but I would guess 5.1 will still be supported on 10.13.
 
Apple doesn't care about "Pros". Other wise they would of updated the Mac Pro by now. Lots of digital content creators have moved on from Macs now. Style > function been Apple's thing for a long time now.
It's not that they don't care, they just lost sight of what a "Pro" is. I think at some point they felt a "Pro" was someone that looked good using their computer at Starbucks, or someone that wants a computer that looks like a stylish trash can. They made products for a Tim Cook "Pro" and not a person working freelance out of a soho loft in San Francisco "Pro."
 
Apple doesn't care about "Pros". Other wise they would of updated the Mac Pro by now. Lots of digital content creators have moved on from Macs now. Style > function been Apple's thing for a long time now.

That isn't remotely fair or true. The industry I'm in is still mostly 100% Mac. Even with the gaffs. Even with competing products like the Surface Studio (which I might add is more expensive than an iMac but is the only major competing desktop on the Windows side. And Surface Pro being the only competing mobile device on the Windows side).
You say that in ignorance, because you only see your own position in the market and not everyone else.
 
It's not that they don't care, they just lost sight of what a "Pro" is. I think at some point they felt a "Pro" was someone that looked good using their computer at Starbucks, or someone that wants a computer that looks like a stylish trash can. They made products for a Tim Cook "Pro" and not a person working freelance out of a soho loft in San Francisco "Pro."

To iterate on what I mentioned earlier: it was a case of Apple letting its philosophical 'purity' get ahead of what customers needed. "Look at how small and quiet this is? Isn't it great?" Well, the problem is that pros don't care about small and quiet, they care about whether that pro 3D render will finish quickly enough to complete the project on time. They care about whether or not they can add the cards they need to get everything done. And Apple seems to be acknowledging that reality, although it's not clear how well it'll address the issues.
 
New Mac Pro user render. Who can point out everything that's wrong with this concept?



That isn't from Apple. That's just somebodies concept.
Apple would never put touch ID or a touch bar directly onto a tower. It is FAR more likely that there will be a new keyboard with both of those features on it, or even an extra peripheral with both of those functions on it, LONG before it would every appear on a case.
I give credit where it's due to those concept and idea makers because it takes time to create renders and animate all that stuff, but they should be thinking "real world" and not pie-in-the-sky if they want to impress anyone with their industrial design.
 
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