Anyone looking forward to the new Mac Pro?

[metril]

Really bad design. The thermal solution is not efficient. I know. My background is in thermals; especially in cooling components in space constrained situations. Does Apple probably know about this. Yes, they probably do, but then again, they don't care because the mass populace doesn't know anything about thermals.

Expensive trash can.

Before you call me an Apple hater, I have a macbook pro with the upgraded screen. I bought it because I wanted the screen.

 

[evilsofa]

Really bad design. The thermal solution is not efficient. I know. My background is in thermals; especially in cooling components in space constrained situations. Does Apple probably know about this. Yes, they probably do, but then again, they don't care because the mass populace doesn't know anything about thermals.

Okay, tell us something other than "I know" about why this design is bad and inefficient, because we aren't the mass populace.

 

[MeowMeow]

Could anyone explain to me what the purpose of those is?

When I think which professional tasks might need machines that powerful, I think of complex tasks like air traffic control, simulations for the military or whatever magic Pixar uses to to make their movies.
But surely an airport, the military or Pixar don't care if their machines are a little bigger, so why does it need to be so tiny?

 

[metril]

@evilsofa

In laymen's terms, the cooling design of the new mac pros introduces a hotspot behind the CPU/GPU. Essentially, you'd get a low pressure vortical region. If you want to cool, you want to eject these vortical regions out of the vicinity of your hot object (heat source) as soon as possible. If you don't you deplete the heating capacity of your medium; in this case air.

First Law of Thermodynamics states that heat flows from a hot object to a cooler object. The smaller the temperature delta between the CPU/GPU and air, the less efficient the heat exchange between them. Furthermore, air is already a bad conductor of heat. However, we have an abundance of air and we can make it "flow", thus giving us a nearly limitless heat sink in a "localized" region. But as stated earlier, the vortical region, also known as a vortex, traps the air. It then takes longer for the air to travel across the heat source.

So, the CPU/GPU heat up the air and in the process the CPU/GPU lose some thermal energy and perhaps reduce in temperature. This may take a micro second or so. The air is now at nearly the same temperature as the CPU/GPU and hence in pseudo thermal equilibrium. This local air may be stuck in the vicinity of the CPU/GPU for several micro seconds before it moves on. For these several micro seconds, there is no noticeable heat exchange between CPU/GPU and the air. Hence, no CPU/GPU cooling.

But to make matters worse, there is still thermal output from the CPU/GPU. There is still a flow of heat. From 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, entropy cannot decrease, but there is a flow of thermal energy from the CPU/GPU. If there is a flow of thermal energy, then entropy must increase. But earlier, I said that the air and CPU/GPU were in pseudo thermal equilibrium. Hence, the air and the CPU/GPU stay in pseudo equilibrium, but the temperature of the air and CPU/GPU will increase in unison.

If you were to monitor temperature at say 1 MHz, you would see lots of oscillations. The graph would be skewed such that the peaks would be stretched and the trough would be shrunken.

The reason why I can state all this is because I simulated a very similar cooling solution for work.

 

[evilsofa]

@evilsofa

In laymen's terms, the cooling design of the new mac pros introduces a hotspot behind the CPU/GPU. Essentially, you'd get a low pressure vortical region. If you want to cool, you want to eject these vortical regions out of the vicinity of your hot object (heat source) as soon as possible. If you don't you deplete the heating capacity of your medium; in this case air.

I'm not sure what you mean by "behind the CPU/GPU". The cooling system you tested for work was like this?

 

[metril]

@evilsofa

Sorry. By "behind CPU/GPU" I meant behind the PCB, in the actual heat sink. The cooling system I simulated was nearly identical. The layout of the fins may have differed either in number (perhaps 2 or 3 more) and in angle (perhaps 1-2 degrees) of extrusion. It's the design of the heatsink that I don't like. Now, there is a way to make the heatsink work better. You could use an asymmetric fan. Nonetheless, there is no ducting that I noticed between the fan and the heatsink; no reliable way to smoothly turn the flow.

 

[Terpfen]

Let's wait for reviews and hands-on reports before we go ahead and declare a new cooling system a bad design.

 

[Grentz]

In my mind it neglects one of the main reasons to go desktop over laptop form factor...upgradability and expandability.

Yes it is more powerful, but that is about the only advantage.

 

[Captain Kirk]

In my mind it neglects one of the main reasons to go desktop over laptop form factor...upgradability and expandability.

Yes it is more powerful, but that is about the only advantage.

The only thing I see myself adding would be a Superdrive and an SD reader. Assuming the storage isn't stupidly expensive, I don't yet see the need for an additional RAID caddy, etc.

 

[Snowdog]

@evilsofa

In laymen's terms, the cooling design of the new mac pros introduces a hotspot behind the CPU/GPU. Essentially, you'd get a low pressure vortical region. If you want to cool, you want to eject these vortical regions out of the vicinity of your hot object (heat source) as soon as possible. If you don't you deplete the heating capacity of your medium; in this case air.

First Law of Thermodynamics states that heat flows from a hot object to a cooler object. The smaller the temperature delta between the CPU/GPU and air, the less efficient the heat exchange between them. Furthermore, air is already a bad conductor of heat.

That sounds like load of BS to me. Air does have quite poor thermal conductivity, but the CPU/GPU are bolted to what looks like multiple pounds of giant aluminum heatsink. Aluminum has fantastic thermal conductivity. The heat is going to flow very efficiently in the aluminum, from hotspot CPU/GPU attachments, to the rest of the giant aluminum heatsink. That is why it is called a Heat Sink. The whole structure sinks heat.

Air may be inefficient, but it's job isn't cooling a hotstop near the CPU, it is working on the whole heatsink, which looks to have enormous surface area compared to typical PC heatsinks.

You have to worry about trapped micro-pockets of air when you are building heatsinks with too little metal, and too little surface area.

I think you would have to quite inept to build a giant multi-pound Aluminum heatsink with massive surface area, that didn't do a very good job.

 

[Terpfen]

In my mind it neglects one of the main reasons to go desktop over laptop form factor…upgradability and expandability.

Thunderbolt.

Assuming you're actually in the market the Mac Pro is intended for. The thing is likely going to start at $2500. If you're predisposed to a laptop, then you have no business with a Mac Pro.

 

[robvas]

In my mind it neglects one of the main reasons to go desktop over laptop form factor...upgradability and expandability.

Yes it is more powerful, but that is about the only advantage.

The RAM appears easy to upgrade - and you can expand through ThunderBolt 2.0

That said, ThunderBolt devices are still pretty expensive and I don't see that changing.

 

[wonderfield]

I'm confused as to why localized heat in a heat sink would create localized regions of vortical air flow. Most GPU heat sinks would suffer from this issue were this the case.

 

[Serpico]

Let's wait for reviews and hands-on reports before we go ahead and declare a new cooling system a bad design.

Why should people wait for actual results when they can speculate as to why its a bad idea?

 

[Serpico]

This clearly is a niche product. One niche I can see it for are DIT (digital imaging techs) on film sets. They are needed for mobile data transfer, encoding, and color correction for digital camera workflow.

Compared to a standard tower case this is smaller and fits into much smaller road cases. External storage isn't a negative either. Storage for film work, musicians, photographers, basically any of the fields that this is aimed at, uses external storage anyway.

Thunderbolt 2 is going to be a huge plus, same with all of that CPU and GPU processing power. Panavision's upcoming digital motion picture camera is going to have an 8K sensor and its on-board storage is most likely going to be 1.5TB PCIe SSDs. When shooting in uncompressed formats it is going to be a LOT of data to transfer (and you gotta keep transfers fast so that the camera can continue reloading once a drive is dumped), color correct, etc, and TB2 will help tremendously.

So yeah, that's one pro niche I can see really loving this. For most people is way overkill, but that's what every other product Apple makes is for.

 

[Tyler-Durden]

I'm much more excited for the MBP retina updates. I'd love to get a 13" retina with Haswell CPU. I think that'd be the ultimate traveling laptop.

 

[Grentz]

Thunderbolt.

Assuming you're actually in the market the Mac Pro is intended for. The thing is likely going to start at $2500. If you're predisposed to a laptop, then you have no business with a Mac Pro.

So, you can put thunderbolt on a laptop too, in fact it is already there.

As was already noted, this just leads to a messy workspace with all these add on things everywhere. Our designers already do that with laptops, and yet still retain some portability when they want it. That sounds like a better option than this which tries to bridge the two worlds.

This reminds me of the stupid G4 Cube.

 

[Captain Kirk]

So, you can put thunderbolt on a laptop too, in fact it is already there.

As was already noted, this just leads to a messy workspace with all these add on things everywhere. Our designers already do that with laptops, and yet still retain some portability when they want it. That sounds like a better option than this which tries to bridge the two worlds.

This reminds me of the stupid G4 Cube.

Except, you won't be able to have a laptop with the built-in memory or GPUs of this beast. And I'm pretty sure the MBPs don't come with 12-core procs...

 

[UnknownSouljer]

So, you can put thunderbolt on a laptop too, in fact it is already there.

As was already noted, this just leads to a messy workspace with all these add on things everywhere. Our designers already do that with laptops, and yet still retain some portability when they want it. That sounds like a better option than this which tries to bridge the two worlds.

This reminds me of the stupid G4 Cube.

Answer below

Except, you won't be able to have a laptop with the built-in memory or GPUs of this beast. And I'm pretty sure the MBPs don't come with 12-core procs...

Right on, and I'll expand a bit.



Kind of ignoring a lot. If your need is portability then yes, you'd get an MBP. But the Mac Pro is still in a league of it's own.

12 Cores
128 GB of RAM
PCI-E Based SSD
Dual FirePro GPUs with 12 GB of VRAM
Thunderbolt 1.2 capable of streaming 4k video

No MBP or laptop in general can touch this territory. If you don't need this kind of power, then this box doesn't make any sense. As has been mentioned, if you're not doing high end video, audio, or stills work or some other form of rendering or design that benefits from speedy multicore CPUs and GPUs this sort of machine doesn't make sense for you or fill the needs that you need.

Personally I can see how this machine could easily be hooked up to 3x 4k displays and use a fourth Thunderbolt for an external raid array (like the Promise Pegasus, or possibly a new breed of external raid arrays) and have an extremely potent system. Such a setup isn't out of the norm for the aforementioned industries even now.

I don't quite understand people's complaining about "cables everywhere" as some degree is always going to be inevitable in any setup. At least with this it's for a purpose that makes sense and it's modular nature is an advantage and not a disadvantage. And it's still plenty small to fit all of that in various equipment cases.

I also tend to think you're forgetting that in the case of a production team that needs this sort of power, they're going to have money to spend, but also have the staff to move and handle such a machine. People moving Mac Pro's on to jobs are by in large not going to be lone wolves. They are going to be digital techs or other jobs of that nature that will be one part of a much larger whole. If you're a lone wolf doing solo production work this machine probably won't fit your budget, your transportation needs, simplicity, or a host of other different factors. This isn't designed for them. As a very quick brief example, if you're shooting a big budget 50M movie and it's being shot on a Red Epic 4k camera and you want to be able to watch RAW footage dailies what machine do you think is going to keep up? The Mac Pro or the MBP? The answer is obvious, there isn't even a point in trying to argue about it.

 

[Elledan]

I think that the Ars Technica (p)review nailed it. It's not a bad system, but they missed the point by making it so small. For a workstation size doesn't matter, you just want to have your expansion ports. This new Mac Pro basically forces everything to be external, from optical drives, to storage, to any kind of expansion for sound, interfaces and such you'd normally put in a PCIe expansion slot, like in the 2010 Mac Pro.

With these eccentric, totally non-standard GPUs there is also the issue that many people using Mac Pros rely on CUDA, which requires an NVidia card. Unless this becomes available as an option, CUDA will be cut off, and with it a lot of pro tools for Mac. Running CUDA via TB 2 isn't going to cut it there either. It's only equivalent to a 5-lane PCIe 2.0 connection, which is going to impose a performance penalty compared to a full 16-lane version.

It's going to look mightily cluttered on a desk with this new Mac Pro too. Imagine the mess of little boxes and cables sneaking to and from on a desk. I know I would rather have it all neatly fitted into a single system case.

Finally, why is there no dual-socket option? This system really disappoints so far as Apple's new top-end offering.

Awaiting the reviews later this year.

 

[Terpfen]

I think that the Ars Technica (p)review nailed it. It's not a bad system, but they missed the point by making it so small.

Did Apple miss the point, or are the talking heads missing the point? It's more the latter. The form factor changed for a reason.

With these eccentric, totally non-standard GPUs...

Which? What is non-standard about the Fire Pro line?

It's going to look mightily cluttered on a desk with this new Mac Pro too. Imagine the mess of little boxes and cables sneaking to and from on a desk. I know I would rather have it all neatly fitted into a single system case.

False premise. You're basically claiming that because Apple isn't using PCI-E cards internally, they are creating a mess externally... but cable messes have existed regardless of internal design for decades. The two are unrelated.

This system really disappoints so far as Apple's new top-end offering.

Awaiting the reviews later this year.

Seems to me you didn't bother to wait for reviews.

 

[Elledan]

Did Apple miss the point, or are the talking heads missing the point? It's more the latter. The form factor changed for a reason.

And which reason may that be?

Which? What is non-standard about the Fire Pro line?

I figured it'd be obvious, but: the PCB it's on. The way it can only be cooled by the central heatsink of the Mac Pro. It's a component which is designed for and can only be used in this Mac Pro design. This makes it a hugely expensive and rare component.

False premise. You're basically claiming that because Apple isn't using PCI-E cards internally, they are creating a mess externally... but cable messes have existed regardless of internal design for decades. The two are unrelated.

Yes, they are. By the time you have hooked up a bunch of USB hubs and a pile of Thunderbolt adapters and boxes, you'll have dozens of cables sneaking across the desk. With PCIe slots you could have all those adapters omitted, and instead use an internal PCIe card. TB is also slow compared to even an x8 PCIe 2.0 slot.

Seems to me you didn't bother to wait for reviews.

I'm waiting for them, alright, but there's not much that's going to change between now and then, is there? Not some kind of XBox One-like 180 at any rate. This is what we'll get and this is what we'll have to like.

Pull the other one, that one's got bells on it

 

[W.Feather]

What is nonstandard is the Fire Pro form factor that Apple is using here. The point is there is no option to go with a real Cuda solution for those that need it, not that the Fire Pro is non standard

Apple more than likely is using PCIe internally, however they are not allowing users to upgrade, or add the PCIe components they want to the internals of the machine. However fast Thunderbolt is, it is not as fast as a PCIe slot just yet, and your same argument for speed is negated by the argument for something faster (in this case, a real PCIe expansion option).

The "mess" will be more in this, there is no way to argue this. You are taking components that are traditionally inside a case, and hidden, and taking them outside. Sure the aftermarket components will make it look nice, and neat, but the point is, there are external parts, and just naturally there will be more of a "clutter" if you do not have the components hidden in a case. For the users that do not *need* the extras, then the upcoming Mac Pro is a great solution, however the majority that already do use a Mac Pro, need lots of add ons, and will have more stuff on their desk than previously.


Cooling wise, metril is right, the design itself is not the most efficient, however Apple is constrained by size, their engineers did the best with what the designers told them to work with, its not the first time, and wont be the last. I highly doubt the CPUs/GPUs will run out of spec hot, however they will be warmer than the alternative's on the server market / workstation market.

 

[wonderfield]

We don't know what the entire array of configurable graphics options are.

 

[W.Feather]

@ Wonderfield , you are right, however everything announced / speculated / rumored points to an AMD/ATI chip offerings only, and not an nVidia chip offering. Ive yet to find one site even claim that an nVidia chip may be an option on the new Mac Pro

 

[UnknownSouljer]

I was going to quote several people, but W.Feather has already continued to point out some things so it's as good a place as any to start.

First I'd like to state, that I had a web source that explained a lot of this stuff, but I'm having trouble finding it. Long story short, Apple addressed a lot of the concerns during their keynote about the "why" behind the changes. I'll outline them below.

What is nonstandard is the Fire Pro form factor that Apple is using here. The point is there is no option to go with a real Cuda solution for those that need it, not that the Fire Pro is non standard

Right. I can agree with this to a certain degree. Apple states the change in form factor and design was due to the fact that they discovered most people with Mac Pros didn't upgrade their video cards anyway. Secondly there weren't many options for users that did upgrade to upgrade to. Even within the past two years Mac Pro users have had all of three options (I believe, someone else can point them out if they care to.. But I believe it's something like the Quadro 4500, 5770, or 5870. There are probably a few more, but even still there were never really any options) to change to, and none of said options were cheap (not that the super high-end segment cares about cost...)

That said, Apple parts are all non-standard anyway. "Non-Mac" GPU's won't work in Mac Pros, they all had to be specially designed anyway. With that in mind, it's still technically feasible for the "non-standard" video cards to be upgraded. Whether any manufacturer will bother to make an upgrade or whether Apple has designed this option in is of course yet to be discovered.

Apple more than likely is using PCIe internally, however they are not allowing users to upgrade, or add the PCIe components they want to the internals of the machine. However fast Thunderbolt is, it is not as fast as a PCIe slot just yet, and your same argument for speed is negated by the argument for something faster (in this case, a real PCIe expansion option).

Well, the question is, what PCI-E internal components are wanted or needed? As long as the Mac Pro has had PCI-E there has only been three devices that I know of that could be used. Which was video cards, raid cards, and the specialized fibre channel card to connect to X-San. The video cards are taken care of, there isn't any internal storage to speak of in order to raid (and the PCI-E SSD is already extremely quick), X-San is probably the only variable. X-San seems like it has been de-emphasized as of late, declining since the demise of the Xserve.

So that said, what device can you think of that would require PCI-E based bandwidth? I struggle to find any that Thunderbolt won't solve, including external arrays.

The "mess" will be more in this, there is no way to argue this. You are taking components that are traditionally inside a case, and hidden, and taking them outside. Sure the aftermarket components will make it look nice, and neat, but the point is, there are external parts, and just naturally there will be more of a "clutter" if you do not have the components hidden in a case. For the users that do not *need* the extras, then the upcoming Mac Pro is a great solution, however the majority that already do use a Mac Pro, need lots of add ons, and will have more stuff on their desk than previously.

Okay, but then we have to talk about what is quantifiable, and what most users will use. Additionally we would have to talk about whether or not that clutter actually matters. If I'm buying a Mac Pro as a serious professional (in any industry) my first priority is does the machine meet my needs and get the job done. What the machine looks like, weights, how much clutter it has, and all the rest of this is pretty far down the list. But it's nice that Apple considers these things even if I or any other professional doesn't.

Back to the first point, I gave an example (several posts back) of what a standard user who would be using a machine like this would have, and I went with 3x 4K displays and an external raid array. Even on the current gen Mac Pro (or I guess last gen Mac Pro depending on how you look at it) there would be no way to reduce this "clutter" in that situation. Discussing "optical drive" clutter is silly. Just like on the Air and the MBPr, they've shown that almost no one uses them any more. If you do (just to say support your argument), great, but you're in the minority.

Quite frankly the ONLY thing that the new Mac Pro suffers from (if anything at all) is the lack of internal storage (and if you really want to argue, optical drives). There is nothing else that most users didn't end up using externally anyway, and even in the case of storage, a lot of professionals still used external arrays anyway so it still failed to "reduce that clutter".

Cooling wise, metril is right, the design itself is not the most efficient, however Apple is constrained by size, their engineers did the best with what the designers told them to work with, its not the first time, and wont be the last. I highly doubt the CPUs/GPUs will run out of spec hot, however they will be warmer than the alternative's on the server market / workstation market.

We won't know until someone has it in their "hot" little hands. Everything else is just speculation. Let's just say you're right. Does it matter? I think I'd personally trade the machine being slightly hot for quiet computing. That's an easy trade for me.

 

[W.Feather]

Ill address it in more depth when Im home, but quick rebuttle:

1) The heat --- Im not hating on it in the least, just saying that the claimed target audience is people using the PC for work, and for heavy CPU/GPU loads. Those dont lend to quite computing regardless, and its not (supposedly) aimed at the consumer level.

2) Clutter ---- There will be more cords coming out of the back, to have the equivlant of the lost interior components, weather its the HDD, the Super Drive, etc, that = more clutter and is quantifiable. The majority of people will have two peripherals connected that they previously did not need, Storage and a Super drive, monitor doesnt count since thats needed regardless.

3) PCIe --- Exactly what you said, RAID / Internal storage. Yes thunderbolt does make up for it, however it is not as fast, and as has been pointed out by many of the defendants of the new Mac pro, speed is everything. In the case of editing, would you rather the slower TB, or the faster PCIe ? Would you rather 1 CPU, or 2? In most considerations, the previous MP is superior for the target audience. Has Apple decided to change going after businesses and instead target consumers with this? If so that would explain alot, because the design characteristic changes , to me, scream home use, not business use...

4) Most of what i see as their potential market are those upgrading from a previous Mac Pro, so the space is a non-issue regardless, its already in use by the machine, and in the end to get the equivalent that some/most of the users need/want, the foot print will be the same.

 

[Terpfen]

The posts below yours and above mine did a nice job, but there's one thing I want to reply to…

I'm waiting for them, alright, but there's not much that's going to change between now and then, is there? Not some kind of XBox One-like 180 at any rate. This is what we'll get and this is what we'll have to like.

Exactly what needs to be 180'd? It's a ridiculously powerful base workstation whose expandability comes through what is basically PCI-E over a cable. Your complaints come down to a preference for internal expansion with extremely flimsy justification—cable management. Even if Apple had kept the current chassis, I suspect you would have an entirely different set of objections.

The Mac Pro isn't for you. Just don't buy it. Enjoy.

 

[Captain Kirk]

As has been mentioned, if you're not doing high end video, audio, or stills work or some other form of rendering or design that benefits from speedy multicore CPUs and GPUs this sort of machine doesn't make sense for you or fill the needs that you need.

My own personal thought is to use it as a desktop / virtual machine power house. I currently run my Mac Mini as my primary desktop. Alongside the Mini is a Linux mid-tower that's running ~8 or so VMs that the Pro could easily handle. Retire the mid-tower and consolidate is my plan .

 

[wonderfield]

People seem to be confused as to why Apple went in this direction. I don't see what's confusing about it: they wanted to offer a unique product with a unique design for a space awash with relatively boring machines. This is what Apple does. This is what Apple has always done (forgetting the 'bad years').

The original iMac didn't need to have translucent panels in fun colors. The Mac mini doesn't have to be as small as it is, and needn't be encased in aluminum. The new iMac doesn't need to have a razor-thin profile. The Air doesn't need to taper down to almost nothing, and the Cinema Display doesn't need to have edge-to-edge glass.

The Mac Pro doesn't need to be a small aluminum cylinder. It's a small aluminum cylinder primarily because it's unique, and secondarily because it's an effective way to jam a lot of hardware in a low volume case. And I/O is via Thunderbolt because Apple wants to widen the Thunderbolt ecosystem.

 

[Elledan]

Exactly what needs to be 180'd? It's a ridiculously powerful base workstation whose expandability comes through what is basically PCI-E over a cable. Your complaints come down to a preference for internal expansion with extremely flimsy justification—cable management.

Not quite. Thunderbolt 2.0 is equivalent to a 5-lane PCIe 2.0 connection, or 2.5-lane PCIe 3.0 connection. That's extremely anemic compared to an x8 or x16 PCIe 3.0 connection like you'd have internally. It's not enough for external videocards when you want to use them for CUDA and such. The external CUDA boxes NVidia sells use an x8 link or better.

Also fun is that when TB 3.0 or whatever comes out you can not upgrade your Mac Pro to it. There are no expansion slots for it. Nada. Zilch.

Face it: this MP looks more like a laptop stuffed into a cylinder. Zero upgradability.

 

[Terpfen]

Also fun is that when TB 3.0 or whatever comes out you can not upgrade your Mac Pro to it. There are no expansion slots for it. Nada. Zilch.

No one else can upgrade to Thunderbolt 3, given that it doesn't exist.

You dislike the Mac Pro. We get it. Go buy a current Mac Pro and enjoy.

 

[wonderfield]

Also fun is that when TB 3.0 or whatever comes out you can not upgrade your Mac Pro to it. There are no expansion slots for it. Nada. Zilch.

That's right. You sell the existing Mac — which will hold its resale value better than almost any other PC you could think of — and you buy a new Mac.

Upgradability is absolutely essential when the machine you're using depreciates more quickly than a new car. It isn't for Macs: you sell the old one for relatively high dollar value; you replace with a new one.

 

[Elledan]

That's right. You sell the existing Mac — which will hold its resale value better than almost any other PC you could think of — and you buy a new Mac.

Upgradability is absolutely essential when the machine you're using depreciates more quickly than a new car. It isn't for Macs: you sell the old one for relatively high dollar value; you replace with a new one.

Even when your 2010 Mac Pro is loaded full of PCIe expansion cards for video processing and other specialized hardware? Will taking the performance hit by moving to a slower interface (PCIe x16 to TB's x5) be acceptable?

I think that for many this is the point where they'll just give up on Macs and get a loaded Xenon-based workstation for less than this new Mac Pro. Apple certainly isn't accommodating all of the existing Mac Pro users here, that's for sure.

 

[Terpfen]

Apple certainly isn't accommodating all of the existing Mac Pro users here, that's for sure.

Apple ditches legacy concepts pretty quickly.

 

[Skripka]

Apple ditches legacy concepts pretty quickly.

"Legacy concepts"? Guess what amigo.

As someone in professional audio, I sure as hell use optical media every day of the week. Also as someone in audio, I need a rig that runs silent or close to it-the standard Mac Pros have done this for years....I've never seen a blower fan (like they're planning on using) of any size that did the job quietly and they have the "benefit" of collecting dust quicker. If Apple wants to ditch "legacy concepts" that is great, with ProTools no longer locked to OSX-audio people will drop their Mac Pros and Apple will loose customers. Also a crapload of people in pro audio are still using FireWire interfaces, and this rig has no real option for that that is reliable. As someone in audio, I have no need to waste my money on 12GB of VRAM and dual heat-producing GPUs that make my system run loud. I also sure as hell use internal mass storage first for scratch (far beyond whatever SSD they choose to throw in)as well as external backups.

Apple has lost touch with their workstation base, you know the supermajority of people who buy Mac Pro, on this one. And has confused their consumer sheeple with their consumers who use machines for actual work.


Form factor and size of the machine is nearly the bottom of the priority list of people who buy a MacPro. Those who need the box find room for full ATX towers. Bands on tour often have roadie cases with MacPro ATX towers in them. Because that form factor works on the road...this one simply doesn't...and is a fashion statement for fashion statement's sake.

 

[wonderfield]

Even when your 2010 Mac Pro is loaded full of PCIe expansion cards for video processing and other specialized hardware? Will taking the performance hit by moving to a slower interface (PCIe x16 to TB's x5) be acceptable?

No one's telling you to get rid of your machines. I'm saying that the "upgrade path" for the new Mac Pros is a "replace path". I'm also saying that this isn't a big deal.

 

[Elledan]

No one's telling you to get rid of your machines. I'm saying that the "upgrade path" for the new Mac Pros is a "replace path". I'm also saying that this isn't a big deal.

And people like Skripka just above your post say that it is a major deal and likely to kill off a few current markets the Mac Pro is used in.

I guess it's not a big deal for those few markets for whom this new Mac Pro's target isn't a major inconvenience or deal breaker.

 

[Snowdog]

And people like Skripka just above your post say that it is a major deal and likely to kill off a few current markets the Mac Pro is used in.

I guess it's not a big deal for those few markets for whom this new Mac Pro's target isn't a major inconvenience or deal breaker.

Apple has been weeding out customers who use third party hardware for years.

The Apple Normal: buy a bunch a firewire gear, only to have the next line of Macs abandon Firewire, so you have to buy all new gear again.

By now the remaining niche likely won't be surprised that they have to ditch their third party gear yet again. That just comes with the territory when you buy Apple gear.

 

[CEpeep]

What's preventing the use of legacy Firewire hardware? A Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter is $29. We use these here on our MBPr machines and they work great; they're reliable and allow full FW800 speeds. Being prepared to shell out $2500+ on a new Mac Pro and then complaining about a $29 dongle seems completely ridiculous to me. There's some good reasons not to like the new Mac Pro, but the lack of hardware FW ports is not one of them.