Engadget: Apple finally reveals the new Mac Pro

Who wants to drop a tonne of coin on PCIe gen 3? Single Socket... etc etc.

4 slot cooler though.

At least it has DDR 4. Welcome to 2014.

It doesn’t use PCIe gen3 x16... the GPU interfaces are completely custom called MPX and that is before we get to the Afterburner card which I suspect is Apples first foray into using their own silicon in a desktop...

 
It doesn’t use PCIe gen3 x16... the GPU interfaces are completely custom called MPX
The MPX is just the additional slot behind the x16 interface. You can remove the Apple "MPX" card and put in a standard x16 GPU.
Screen Shot 2019-06-03 at 8.10.56 PM.png
 
Does a meager 215DPI still classify for their "Retina" moniker? That's not even any higher than the 27" 5k displays that have been around for years now.

Still a nice res though.
 
The MPX is just the additional slot behind the x16 interface. You can remove the Apple "MPX" card and put in a standard x16 GPU.
View attachment 165365

Yes so the GPUs are using a custom interface... similar to what was done in the old days on server boards with PCI-X etc. The standards don’t allow for anything else currently.
 
When you factor in the build materials and design, its justifying its price. People need to stop comparing these systems to consumer grade shit. The iMac was flouted as overpriced but ended up being cheaper than its competitors if you spec them equivalently.

Xeon chips are not cheap people.
The problem is that you can build a comparable Windows system for over a thousand dollars less, even considering the components. Heck, get a couple of good deals and you can build a DUAL 3647 system for the price Apple is asking for their base model.
 
Yes so the GPUs are using a custom interface... similar to what was done in the old days on server boards with PCI-X etc. The standards don’t allow for anything else currently.
Yup. So you can put any graphics card into the MPX slot, but an MPX card can't go in a traditional slot.

Can you power a standard GPU though?
From Apple's site, the extra slot is rated for 475 watts, and I don't see any standard power connectors.
There's a 10-pin connector up above the x4 PCIe slot.

Screen Shot 2019-06-03 at 8.18.26 PM.png
 
Can you power a standard GPU though?
From Apple's site, the extra slot is rated for 475 watts, and I don't see any standard power connectors.

Someone will likely make an adapter but it wont matter as you will only be using AMD anyway.

Does a meager 215DPI still classify for their "Retina" moniker? That's not even any higher than the 27" 5k displays that have been around for years now.

Still a nice res though.

Retina simply means that the PPI has reached a point where the pixels are invisible to the human eye. 215DPI easily meets this :)
 
Apple really must hate NVIDIA to choose Vega over Turing. And that design is fucking atrocious, those of you who find it aesthetically pleasing need your eyes checked.
 
The display is not even remotely comparable to anything else on the market. First 6K display, the mounting system is magnetic with automatic locking latches. You do realise you don’t even have to buy the monitor yeah? ;)

I have no issues with the monitor pricing, just the $1000 stand.

Go watch the keynote. People clapped and cheered for the $5000 monitor, no clapping at all, when it was announced that matte finish was another $1000, and you can hear the audience negative shock reaction to the $1000 stand, and that is a died in the wool Apple audience.

I cut Apple a lot of slack and am usually defending their products around here.

But a $1000 monitor stand is fucking absurd. It's like a spinal tap parody of Apple pricing that people would mock up as a joke.
 
Retina simply means that the PPI has reached a point where the pixels are invisible to the human eye. 215DPI easily meets this :)

Not for everyone.

I just forgot what they originally specd for that nomenclature, thought it was originally like 300 or something.
 
The problem is that you can build a comparable Windows system for over a thousand dollars less, even considering the components. Heck, get a couple of good deals and you can build a DUAL 3647 system for the price Apple is asking for their base model.

But you cant have OSX (legally) and thats before we get to things like the insane USBc integration, the afterburner card etc. It is a completely different market and its like comparing an factory exotic car to a riced up civic.

Can you even run one of these 28 core monsters with a single power supply? All the boards I have seen have dodgy dual PSU setups and even Linus couldnt do it with the hackintosh build.
 
But you cant have OSX (legally) and thats before we get to things like the insane USBc integration, the afterburner card etc.
Agreed. OSX is the reason I'm considering one of these to replace my existing Mac Pro. The price difference and lack of CUDA hurts, though.

Can you even run one of these 28 core monsters with a single power supply? All the boards I have seen have dodgy dual PSU setups and even Linus couldnt do it with the hackintosh build.
I don't see why not. Supermicro (what all of my non-Apple builds are) has no issue running dual 205W 28-core CPUs.
 
Not for everyone.

I just forgot what they originally specd for that nomenclature, thought it was originally like 300 or something.

It depends on viewing distance and use case

Apple really must hate NVIDIA to choose Vega over Turing. And that design is fucking atrocious, those of you who find it aesthetically pleasing need your eyes checked.

It has nothing to do with hate. NVIDIA are stubborn and want CUDA. Apples apps are built around OpenCL and anyone with a hackintosh knows AMD wipe the floor with NVIDIA in FCPx etc. This is not a gaming rig so forget about comparing them that way.

If Apple Afterburner is what I think it is and has the power of even 2 x A12X chips then it will wipe the floor with GPUs and change the market forever honestly...
 
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$1200  Xeon W-3225
$500   Supermicro X11SPA-TF
$275   4x8GB DDR4 ECC RDIMM
$200   Power Supply
$175   Radeon 580
$50    EATX Case
$35    M.2 256GB SSD

All in all I'm looking at about $2500 in hardware to recreate the Mac Pro with off-the-shelf PC components. I'm trying to convince myself that MacOS is worth a $3500 premium, but I'm really not seeing it.
 
It depends on viewing distance and use case



It has nothing to do with hate. NVIDIA are stubborn and want CUDA. Apples apps are built around OpenCL and anyone with a hackintosh knows AMD wipe the floor with NVIDIA in FCPx etc. This is not a gaming rig so forget about comparing them that way.

If Apple Afterburner is what I think it is and has the power of even 2 x A12X chips then it will wipe the floor with GPUs and change the market forever honestly...

How big is the OpenCL market vs CUDA again? What developer would be idiotic enough to buy this cheese grater?
 
Code:
$1200  Xeon W-3225
$500   Supermicro X11SPA-TF
$275   4x8GB DDR4 ECC RDIMM
$200   Power Supply
$175   Radeon 580
$50    EATX Case
$35    M.2 256GB SSD

All in all I'm looking at about $2500 in hardware to recreate the Mac Pro with off-the-shelf PC components. I'm trying to convince myself that MacOS is worth a $3500 premium, but I'm really not seeing it.
Is the custom Vega II not part of that $6000 price tag? Cause it seems a bit disingenuous to compare it with a radeon 580...

Edit: Goes read tfa... no, it's not. huh...
 
All in all I'm looking at about $2500 in hardware to recreate the Mac Pro with off-the-shelf PC components. I'm trying to convince myself that MacOS is worth a $3500 premium, but I'm really not seeing it.
You left out a bunch of stuff, and the Apple pricetag also covers an overengineered computer where everything inside has been designed to gel and fit perfectly with an emphasis on cool & quiet, far nicer than some generic case with a bland Smicro motherboard. But the thing is that Apple isn't actually asking DIYers to care or see any point. We're not the target market. So "I can build it cheaper myself" isn't shining a light on anything unknown.

Even though Macs have never been my thing, I remember being very impressed with how well thought out the internals of the older Mac Pro towers were, while upgrading one for a friend.
 
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Code:
$1200  Xeon W-3225
$500   Supermicro X11SPA-TF
$275   4x8GB DDR4 ECC RDIMM
$200   Power Supply
$175   Radeon 580
$50    EATX Case
$35    M.2 256GB SSD

All in all I'm looking at about $2500 in hardware to recreate the Mac Pro with off-the-shelf PC components. I'm trying to convince myself that MacOS is worth a $3500 premium, but I'm really not seeing it.

There are many ways to look at it, if you are penny pinching and only looking at numbers then you will fail.

All the Mac Pro’s come with a 1.4KW PSU, capable of running quad gpus and the apple afterburner, none of this applies to your build let alone running OSX which appears to have been overhauled by all key app developers to ensure seamless support.

Let alone other factors like the insane amount of thunderbolt integration, dual 10gig ethernet, on the fly hardware storage encryption thanks to T2 and stupid fast SSD’s not the $35 junk your quoting

How big is the OpenCL market vs CUDA again? What developer would be idiotic enough to buy this cheese grater?

OpenCL market is big especially in the Apple space. All core apps are OpenCL based. FCPx is widely used and seamlessly leverages multiple GPUs

Mate seriously give the blind Apple hate a rest, we don’t even know its performance yet. Stop being a spec sheet snob.
 
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For comparison, see attached pdf of a similarly spec'd dell. Note that this is priced with three years of support, and I don't know what support apple will offer or at what cost. This is also with a generic dell board which, while likely nonstandard, doesn't have the extended pcie bus and possibly other features the mac has. You even need a sas controller and bay addon to use nvme m.2 drives (or use their slim chassis which isn't compatible with that cpu and memory).
 

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  • The Dell Online Store_ Build Your System.pdf
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For comparison, see attached pdf of a similarly spec'd dell. Note that this is priced with three years of support, and I don't know what support apple will offer or at what cost. This is also with a generic dell board which, while likely nonstandard, doesn't have the extended pcie bus and possibly other features the mac has. You even need a sas controller and bay addon to use nvme m.2 drives (or use their slim chassis which isn't compatible with that cpu and memory).

You would need to add dual 10gig nics also, larger psu and thunderbolt expansion but yeah comparing workstation to workstation, the price disparity is much smaller than people think. The problem is Apple always gets compared to DIY or consumer hardware for some stupid reason.

People who want or need this hardware can afford it and 95% of the people on here are numpties who were never a target market.

In Australia the standard warranty is 2yrs swap over. No idea if this is going to change though with this new product.
 
Some of y’all are acting like a bunch of scrubs living in a basement. When you have graphic designers and artists making around $100K / year, $6K on a desktop they will use for a few years and work faster is easy money. Even getting those people a machine they are “happy” with can pay for itself in months. These are work PCs for a specific market, not PCs for forum enthusiasts.
 
I would have preferred to see a pair of SFP+ ports, better compatibility and there is actually support for it. I am not a fan of 10G Base-T, let it die.
 
Some of y’all are acting like a bunch of scrubs living in a basement. When you have graphic designers and artists making around $100K / year, $6K on a desktop they will use for a few years and work faster is easy money. Even getting those people a machine they are “happy” with can pay for itself in months. These are work PCs for a specific market, not PCs for forum enthusiasts.
I work with 2 guys who if apples sales claims are correct will see a 4 month ROI on them.
 
I would have preferred to see a pair of SFP+ ports, better compatibility and there is actually support for it. I am not a fan of 10G Base-T, let it die.

SFP is easily achieved through internal expansion or using one of the many many Thunderbolt ports. Hell you can even run SFP off the monitor.

That said 10GBe is ideally suited for its use case and enviroment.
 
You would need to add dual 10gig nics also, larger psu and thunderbolt expansion but yeah comparing workstation to workstation, the price disparity is much smaller than people think. The problem is Apple always gets compared to DIY or consumer hardware for some stupid reason.

People who want or need this hardware can afford it and 95% of the people on here are numpties who were never a target market.

In Australia the standard warranty is 2yrs swap over. No idea if this is going to change though with this new product.
That and with the Mac Pro you're getting turnkey, you're getting bulletproof, you're avoiding incompatibility issues of disparate components from different manufacturers, you're avoiding Windows 10 random updates hosing drivers or deleting data, and you're getting bumper to bumper warranty. And you don't need any tech staff to support and maintain, just plug in. If anything goes wrong for any reason, Apple deals with it. In a production setting, time is money, and there's no time for troubleshooting shit.

Sure, the Dell, HP and Lenovo's offer something loosely similar as far as prebuilts, but not at Apple's level of custom integration, industrial design, and precertification for the intended pro applications. Not even close. Again, I'd never buy one, but gotta give credit where it's due as a fan of technology.
 
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That and with the Mac Pro you're getting turnkey, you're getting bulletproof, you're getting bumper to bumper warranty. And you don't need any tech staff to support and maintain, just plug in. If anything goes wrong for any reason, Apple deals with it.

Sure, the Dell, HP and Lenovo's offer something loosely similar as far as prebuilts, but not at Apple's level of custom integration, industrial design, and precertification for the intended pro applications. Not even close. Again, I'd never buy one, but gotta give credit where it's due as a fan of technology.
Yeah, there's really no direct comparison. At least, none that'd give you a quote just like that. But it's about as close as you can get from a generic (enterprise focused) systems builder. Just wanted to establish a baseline, minimum you should expect to pay for such a system.
 
There are many ways to look at it, if you are penny pinching and only looking at numbers then you will fail.

All the Mac Pro’s come with a 1.4KW PSU, capable of running quad gpus and the apple afterburner, none of this applies to your build let alone running OSX which appears to have been overhauled by all key app developers to ensure seamless support.

Let alone other factors like the insane amount of thunderbolt integration, dual 10gig ethernet, on the fly hardware storage encryption thanks to T2 and stupid fast SSD’s not the $35 junk your quoting

OpenCL market is big especially in the Apple space. All core apps are OpenCL based. FCPx is widely used and seamlessly leverages multiple GPUs

Mate seriously give the blind Apple hate a rest, we don’t even know its performance yet. Stop being a spec sheet snob.
My build includes a 1.4kW PSU and 10 Gig Ethernet. You can put quad GPUs in it if you want. I'm missing Thunderbolt support ($200 if you MUST have it), and "on the fly hardware storage encryption" (which is a very BAD idea for 99.999% of users - Some of us like being able to restore our computer when a part fails, not wipe the HDD) Not to mention the T2 chip is known to prevent users from replacing failed parts themselves. I'm also impressed that you know how fast the SSDs are, when the rest of us are left in the dark. I assumed that they'd be like the nMP SSD was when IT came out - bottom-tier solutions about half as fast as the typical consumer SSD.

IMO OpenCL is vastly inferior to CUDA. The applications I use that require GPGPU do not work with OpenCL. There's no support, whatsoever. The only applications I'm familiar with that DO have support for both (parametric modeling, FEA, etc) work faster with CUDA. Final Cut X works great with it, I suppose. Why wouldn't it? It was built from the ground up to support OpenCL.

As for blind Apple hate? Heh.

-Written on a 2013 Mac Pro by a guy with Apple certifications who's been waiting half a decade for Apple to release the 2019 Mac Pro
 
Sure is fanboy in here. I have no doubt that Mr Rossmann will have plenty of videos about these breaking, just like every other "It Just Works" apple product.

I would take a Supermicro based workstation over this without hesitation, just for the lower hardware fail rate. Let alone the whole "genius" bar thing, where your data is "lost forever" but you must buy a new one....
 
My build includes a 1.4kW PSU and 10 Gig Ethernet. You can put quad GPUs in it if you want. I'm missing Thunderbolt support ($200 if you MUST have it), and "on the fly hardware storage encryption" (which is a very BAD idea for 99.999% of users - Some of us like being able to restore our computer when a part fails, not wipe the HDD) Not to mention the T2 chip is known to prevent users from replacing failed parts themselves. I'm also impressed that you know how fast the SSDs are, when the rest of us are left in the dark. I assumed that they'd be like the nMP SSD was when IT came out - bottom-tier solutions about half as fast as the typical consumer SSD.

IMO OpenCL is vastly inferior to CUDA. The applications I use that require GPGPU do not work with OpenCL. There's no support, whatsoever. The only applications I'm familiar with that DO have support for both (parametric modeling, FEA, etc) work faster with CUDA. Final Cut X works great with it, I suppose. Why wouldn't it? It was built from the ground up to support OpenCL.

As for blind Apple hate? Heh.

-Written on a 2013 Mac Pro by a guy with Apple certifications who's been waiting half a decade for Apple to release the 2019 Mac Pro

A good quality 1.4KW PSU for $200... LOL

You can restore data easily with T2 using time machine or iCloud. Or you can just pull the SSDs out and put them in another system and unlock them using user auth. Anything else will reside on network shares. Just because you don’t understand the ecosystem, doesn’t mean its not possible.

OpenCL is open source and not inferior, you are just assuming that because your apps don’t support it which I assume includes Premiere which is a pile of shit from an architecture point of view.

Apple apps are built on OpenCL and work great, they ain’t going to redesign the whole ecosystem because NVIDIA has a hard on for CUDA and selling licenses.

For example on current Macs, FCPx can leverage both AMD and Intel iGPUs for their individual strengths and hardware decoding. CUDA cannot do that. This even reaches to Apples custom silicon.
 
Or you can just pull the SSDs out and put them in another system and unlock them using user auth.
My understanding is that you CAN'T do this. That the encryption key needed for decryption is stored on the motherboard, not on the drive itself. So if your motherboard dies, everything on the SSDs are lost too. If I'm wrong about that, groovy. I misunderstood, mea culpa, etc.

You can add another $500 to the system I "built" upgrading components if you want. You're still at literally HALF the cost of a 2019 Mac Pro. For what? Support for Final Cut Pro X? A couple of Thunderbolt ports?

I want to believe in Apple. Hell, there's well over ten grand in Apple products in my house right now and we're due for phone and tablet upgrades this year. But this new Mac Pro? The value just isn't there. I'd rather have three new RTX 2080 Tis, another 2TB of SSD storage, and twice the core count than a fancy case and a different OS.
 
Well, at least it's a step in the right direction. The trash can design just wasn't the correct fit for the prosumer/pro market due to how limited it was to upgrade.

I still think the trash can design was cool though, and it's a shame it won't live on for lower-end Apple's.
 
My understanding is that you CAN'T do this. That the encryption key needed for decryption is stored on the motherboard, not on the drive itself. So if your motherboard dies, everything on the SSDs are lost too. If I'm wrong about that, groovy. I misunderstood, mea culpa, etc.

You can add another $500 to the system I "built" upgrading components if you want. You're still at literally HALF the cost of a 2019 Mac Pro. For what? Support for Final Cut Pro X? A couple of Thunderbolt ports?

I want to believe in Apple. Hell, there's well over ten grand in Apple products in my house right now and we're due for phone and tablet upgrades this year. But this new Mac Pro? The value just isn't there. I'd rather have three new RTX 2080 Tis, another 2TB of SSD storage, and twice the core count than a fancy case and a different OS.

You can do this, what you cannot do is remove the actual memory chip from the board and seperate everything. The Macbooks are soldered so its a different argument as they are talking about physically desoldering memory chips and transplanting them.

Also worth mentioning that the Macbooks can also be recovered using either the lifeboat connector or USBC on the newer models. Problem is everyone believes Rossman like he is gospel and doesn’t have the tools to do it. Instead he rips lifeboat connectors off boards due to liquid damage making any future data recovery impossible.

How about you wait for it to arrive instead of comparing spec sheets. Apple is well known for being more than the sum of its parts and wait for user experience reviews and some benchmarks...

I’m not passing judgement on anything until I try it, well except Windows, thats non-negotiable.
 
What's the difference between the new Mac Pro and a cheese grater?


One does something useful and the other costs six thousand dollars.

*Sixty*
Sixty thousand dollars, US.

also, I am glad someone else thought it looked like a cheese grater :LOL:
 
How about you wait for it to arrive instead of comparing spec sheets. Apple is well known for being more than the sum of its parts and wait for user experience reviews and some benchmarks...
That's fair. Lord knows Final Cut kicked the SHIT out of AVID back when I was in that industry.
 
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