Apple’s New Mac Pro Sold Out

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Those of you dying to get your hands on a new Mac Pro will be out of luck, at least until February.

The old aluminum tower (approximately 2 foot by 2 foot by 8 inches wide) has been replaced by a sleek, black-coated mini-keg just 9.9 inches tall and 6.6 inches across. And into this, they have one of the most powerful desktop systems you can buy with not one but two high-end graphics cards. It achieves its small size by outsourcing mass data storage to external expansion units via six super fast (20 Gb/s) Thunderbolt 2 ports.
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So, how many did they sell??? 100? 1000? 10,0000?
Even I can sell out an item if I don't have enough of what I am selling...
 
They range in price from basic $2999 to high end $9599. Not cheap and very much geared toward 4k video professionals.
 
I'm not into video production at all. Just a little bit of Lightroom 5 here and there on my Win7 box.
Is Apple pretty much the main player in the 4k game? In other words, if you wanted to create and edit 4k content, is this where those professionals are going to go?

pgwalsh said:
They range in price from basic $2999 to high end $9599. Not cheap and very much geared toward 4k video professionals.
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"Sleek" is the one word I would NOT use to describe the TrashcanATX MacPro. "Sleek" applied to the old tower.
 
He predicts the company will sell 1.1 million Mac Pros in 2014
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.... really? I have literally never seen a Mac Pro in real life. Even my friends who do digital work on Macs use iMacs and MacBooks because they can't afford a Mac Pro. 1 million units?
 
Rizen said:
.... really? I have literally never seen a Mac Pro in real life. Even my friends who do digital work on Macs use iMacs and MacBooks because they can't afford a Mac Pro. 1 million units?
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That's not surprising. My MBP is faster than a dual quad 2008? Mac Pro.
 
kcmastrpc said:
in before, "it's a conspiracy, Apple bought their own machines."
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No conspiracy, its marketing hype as old as the internet itself. Release limited supplies so that you can then advertise that its so popular that you can't make enough to meet demand.

If by contrast they created three times as many and then had a third they couldn't sell piling up in stores, it would be viewed as a flop.

Watch the actual sales figures, then you can get a chuckle. ;)
 
I'm convinced Apple only announces things like this to make their other products appear cheap by comparison.

I don't do any video editing. Is Apple still the standard in that industry? I would think that now that the hardware is (somewhat) standardized Apple would lose a lot of business to those who would rather save money and build their own.
 
Rizen said:
.... really? I have literally never seen a Mac Pro in real life. Even my friends who do digital work on Macs use iMacs and MacBooks because they can't afford a Mac Pro. 1 million units?
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The Mac Pro hasn't been updated since what, 2010? So that's not surprising.
 
I think its cool. They've solved having dual GPU's being sandwiched together running hot and loud by using a big triangular heat sink with a big fan. Vapor-chambers and heat-pipes work best when not upside down. It's basically a new form factor. Just needs gaming GPU's and Win8.1 on there.
 
Gweenz said:
I don't do any video editing. Is Apple still the standard in that industry? I would think that now that the hardware is (somewhat) standardized Apple would lose a lot of business to those who would rather save money and build their own.
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It's apparent. You have to understand that in the production and development business time is money. If one of your designers/developers is down for a day that means revenue loss in the terms of "I could of bought two mac pros with that money."

the notion of "building your own to save money" is not given even a fraction of a second consideration by media shops like ILM, Digital Domain, Asylum VFX, etc.
 
Silverghost said:
I think its cool. They've solved having dual GPU's being sandwiched together running hot and loud by using a big triangular heat sink with a big fan. Vapor-chambers and heat-pipes work best when not upside down. It's basically a new form factor. Just needs gaming GPU's and Win8.1 on there.
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I agree. The design (like most of apple's stuff) is pretty neat. With motherboards getting smaller and computing in general requiring less power I hope we will start to see more interesting "tunnel" type case designs. PC cases could use a change as we have been using an atx tower type case design for around 20 years, and there's a lot of wasted space in there.
 
Limit initial supply then take advantage of PR to create demand. I'm guessing they sold about 100.
 
its ugly and overpriced. Can't believe the fuss over 2 gpus. Using Xeons over the "K"rippled stuff makes sense at least.
 
kcmastrpc said:
It's apparent. You have to understand that in the production and development business time is money. If one of your designers/developers is down for a day that means revenue loss in the terms of "I could of bought two mac pros with that money."

the notion of "building your own to save money" is not given even a fraction of a second consideration by media shops like ILM, Digital Domain, Asylum VFX, etc.
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This. I cannot get the builders to accept this idea.
 
Atx is not wasted space, the purpose of keeping a tower in the workplace versus a mini or micro tower is that it's much easier to work on, plus standard parts will fit versus the more exotic cases.

I'm not yet sold on this solution, they include impressive specs by borrowing ideas from the mobile platform to give us a case that is very necessary.
 
Skripka said:
"Sleek" is the one word I would NOT use to describe the TrashcanATX MacPro. "Sleek" applied to the old tower.
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While I believe the MacPro to be a complete waste of money - It is sleek from a design standpoint. People keep calling it a trashcan, but what they fail to recognize is how small of a trashcan it is. They are fitting a top of the line dual-GPU system into a very small amount of space, and the cooling is brilliant.

Doesn't mean I would ever buy it. At the same time recognition should at least be made instead of just calling it 'trash can'.
 
Trimlock said:
Atx is not wasted space, the purpose of keeping a tower in the workplace versus a mini or micro tower is that it's much easier to work on, plus standard parts will fit versus the more exotic cases.

I'm not yet sold on this solution, they include impressive specs by borrowing ideas from the mobile platform to give us a case that is very necessary.
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I don't know how much experience you have in the enterprise environment recently, or if you have any at all.

I can tell you first hand that in 2013 we simply do not work on repairing systems anymore.

Why?

Due to how the warranties are these days the local IT guys who work for the business in question aren't allowed to open systems up anymore. The expectation in 2013 is to send every and any system back to the manufacturer for all repairs. This includes simple things like replacing a hard drive. It is more cost effective to just send the thing back as all these repairs are to be provided under warranty.

What does this have to do with what you wrote? Having a big ATX case that is easy to work on is meaningless in the enterprise environment now. 4-5 years ago - Sure, but with the way warranties are these days the bean counters figured out it's easier to just send the systems back to depot for repair.
 
Mchart said:
I don't know how much experience you have in the enterprise environment recently, or if you have any at all.

I can tell you first hand that in 2013 we simply do not work on repairing systems anymore.

Why?

Due to how the warranties are these days the local IT guys who work for the business in question aren't allowed to open systems up anymore. The expectation in 2013 is to send every and any system back to the manufacturer for all repairs. This includes simple things like replacing a hard drive. It is more cost effective to just send the thing back as all these repairs are to be provided under warranty.

What does this have to do with what you wrote? Having a big ATX case that is easy to work on is meaningless in the enterprise environment now. 4-5 years ago - Sure, but with the way warranties are these days the bean counters figured out it's easier to just send the systems back to depot for repair.
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I have a hard time believing you ship a whole system back for a bad hard drive. Hot swap... send a tech out. Shipping isn't cheap, especially for heavy stuff.

Agreed that the cooling design is very interesting. Seeing a new form factor come out of this would be great.
 
Mchart said:
While I believe the MacPro to be a complete waste of money - It is sleek from a design standpoint. People keep calling it a trashcan, but what they fail to recognize is how small of a trashcan it is. They are fitting a top of the line dual-GPU system into a very small amount of space, and the cooling is brilliant.

Doesn't mean I would ever buy it. At the same time recognition should at least be made instead of just calling it 'trash can'.
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We'll see if "brilliant" is the right word....I suspect "loud" and "hot" will be a better fit and also "idiotic" in that you have no choice but to buy a dual-GPU system even if you have no use for them.....For instance say all the audio folks running ProTools. Also "idiotic" thanks to having no choice but to have all your formerly internal expansion devices vommited onto your desk.

If this was an HTPC system I might agree with you....but for a workstation like it is advertised and priced at....hell no. So yes, "trash can".
 
sprtnbsblplya said:
I'm not into video production at all. Just a little bit of Lightroom 5 here and there on my Win7 box.
Is Apple pretty much the main player in the 4k game? In other words, if you wanted to create and edit 4k content, is this where those professionals are going to go?
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I definitely can't say if they're a main player in 4k, but this is their first real push into the Realm of 4K. This is a very capable machine and is not intended to compete with you typical desktop. This is a workstation class computer geared towards video editors and the scientific community. You could easily build something comparable speed wise with typical hardware, but nothing about this machine is typical. It's a specialized computer for a particular audience. If you're into gaming, audio etc then this is not for you. The video cards are exceptional and they're not for a typical user or gamer.

This machine is focused on networked storage high performance data for video and science. If your apps are optimized for OpenCL, then they'll perform very well on this machine.
 
Not very surprising seeing this as designers and media types and such would be all over it.
 
What I find ridiculous about the Mac Pro is that it is made for professionals, but its entire aesthetic seems geared toward the "I'll take it because it's shiny" consumer crowd. Or does the design truly offer better cooling than a standard tower?
 
Megalith said:
What I find ridiculous about the Mac Pro is that it is made for professionals, but its entire aesthetic seems geared toward the "I'll take it because it's shiny" consumer crowd. Or does the design truly offer better cooling than a standard tower?
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Valid points and one has to wonder about the design. Certainly not user upgradeable except for ram.
 
Skripka said:
We'll see if "brilliant" is the right word....I suspect "loud" and "hot" will be a better fit and also "idiotic" in that you have no choice but to buy a dual-GPU system even if you have no use for them.....For instance say all the audio folks running ProTools. Also "idiotic" thanks to having no choice but to have all your formerly internal expansion devices vommited onto your desk.

If this was an HTPC system I might agree with you....but for a workstation like it is advertised and priced at....hell no. So yes, "trash can".
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Yea, except this thing is extremely quiet. Instead of just spewing garbage out of your face, try reading about it.
 
rageFIST said:
I have a hard time believing you ship a whole system back for a bad hard drive. Hot swap... send a tech out. Shipping isn't cheap, especially for heavy stuff.

Agreed that the cooling design is very interesting. Seeing a new form factor come out of this would be great.
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service is on site, and yes thats how the real world works...

also chances are enterprises are buying HP/Dell/Lenovo almost none of which are standard ATX
 
kcmastrpc said:
It's apparent. You have to understand that in the production and development business time is money. If one of your designers/developers is down for a day that means revenue loss in the terms of "I could of bought two mac pros with that money."

the notion of "building your own to save money" is not given even a fraction of a second consideration by media shops like ILM, Digital Domain, Asylum VFX, etc.
Click to expand...

No, they don't build their own, They buy Dell or HP workstations with dual 12 core (24 threads per socket, so 48 threads in a single machine) Xenon's 128GB+ of DDR3, 3TB of PCIe based SSD and multiple Quadro\FirePro GPUS. Mac Pros are interesting gadgets compared to the workstations VFX shops use because Time is Money.
 
Megalith said:
What I find ridiculous about the Mac Pro is that it is made for professionals, but its entire aesthetic seems geared toward the "I'll take it because it's shiny" consumer crowd. Or does the design truly offer better cooling than a standard tower?
Click to expand...

I've seen a lot of company leaders fall victim to the "shiny".
 
Mchart said:
I don't know how much experience you have in the enterprise environment recently, or if you have any at all.

I can tell you first hand that in 2013 we simply do not work on repairing systems anymore.

Why?

Due to how the warranties are these days the local IT guys who work for the business in question aren't allowed to open systems up anymore. The expectation in 2013 is to send every and any system back to the manufacturer for all repairs. This includes simple things like replacing a hard drive. It is more cost effective to just send the thing back as all these repairs are to be provided under warranty.

What does this have to do with what you wrote? Having a big ATX case that is easy to work on is meaningless in the enterprise environment now. 4-5 years ago - Sure, but with the way warranties are these days the bean counters figured out it's easier to just send the systems back to depot for repair.
Click to expand...

Not 100% true for all. I work at a major corporation and our IT guys service rigs right at your desk or take them to a room in the building for repairs all the time. We just started to deploy Win 7 to most users in our building and our IT guy has been opening up our Dells to replace Hard Drives and put more ram in and replace the video cards to support the 3 monitor setups that we all use.
 
Are miners buying these out too? :p

(Yes it's a joke, maybe)
 
klljm said:
Not 100% true for all. I work at a major corporation and our IT guys service rigs right at your desk or take them to a room in the building for repairs all the time. We just started to deploy Win 7 to most users in our building and our IT guy has been opening up our Dells to replace Hard Drives and put more ram in and replace the video cards to support the 3 monitor setups that we all use.
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I've worked for several large firms in silicon valley. Every computer I had was leased and was replaced with a new system. Even small start-ups I had the same experience. I'm not saying what you're saying is untrue, it's just not normal. It's usually lease and replace or buy and replace.
 
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