When I clicked on that page and saw "The future of desktop computing.." and that trash can slide into view I actually thought it was supposed to be a metaphor.
This page is a fantastic example of great development skills used in a way that is utterly infuriating to use. I don't want it to animate when I use my scroll wheel. I want the page to scroll.
Off topic, but were this and the Air the only product announced? If so, I'm disappointed- I was hoping to pick up an updated Macbook Retina 13". Oh well.
I tried Firefox on Windows 8. I did not find any animation effects. However, Chrome on Windows 8 has those animations, and the applications' scroll bar is hidden. Bad UI indeed.
I had to enable JS to find out what you're talking about. The result was 200 megs of memory consumption and the realization I may be using a different kind of internet than most people when using NoScript. (I'm surprised they have a non-JS version.)
It works just fine, I think the complaint was that when one uses the scrollwheel on the mouse, the expectation is that the page will scroll. It's a cool demo page, but it feels weird.
I wish meta complaints about site a link points to would be flagged out of existence. This adds absolutely nothing to the discussion of the topic on-hand, the new Mac Pro. It takes up a ton of scrolling space with unrelated moaning garbage.
Yep, exactly my thoughts. Also, didn't Tim Cook say the mini was going to be manufactured in the US as well? And could it also be the case that the Mini will follow the Pro's form factor because it would save money in manufacturing an entirely separate low-margin unit?
After seeing the Pro, I fantasized how fun it would be to have a desktop machine with several symmetric displays.
My bet is that Apple will be hard pressed to keep the current 2,500 base price. Three next generation Thunderbolt connectors, expensive Xeon processors, expensive ECC RAM, expensive PCIe flash disk. They basically took all the cheap, legacy and physically large stuff off the Mac Pro and folded up the remainder into a triangle that goes into a tube.
Can you believe that the old Mac Pro case and fundamental design was launched 10 years ago with the Power Mac G5?
Pretty incredible run. Both the PowerMac G5 and aluminum PowerBook G4 helped pave the way for the Intel transition. A good way to re-use R&D and save money!
And the Cube was slower than the midrange Power Mac of the day, and was encased in a thick plastic case, and -- worst of all -- had a capacitive power switch which would trip by itself in humid weather.
The last upgradable mac is now dead. I thought the whole idea of the pro was the ability to put in graphic and other specialty cards as needed for "Pro" use. This looks like another cute consumer PC. Maybe they'll sell it along side the HP's at Sam's Club.
I think the idea here is that, between plentiful Firewire 2 and Thunderbolt 2, you now have enough external bandwidth that you shouldn't need internal cards. When given the choice, I prefer this route, since it means I can transport my proprietary stuff to other machines, or even use them with laptops in a pinch.
That might not work for you, granted, but the amount of bandwidth available between all those ports (20 GB/s in the case of Thunderbolt 2) should be enough to cover most use-cases.
I would have designed it the same way - Thunderbolt is the future of expansions, not tiny little cards you need to slide inside of the HW. This machine recognizes that - They give you 6 (six!) to play with.
Thunderbolt IS PCIe, so it's just as fast.. Why should card makers be constrained in expanding the machine to make peripherals small enough to fit inside? If I want 1 solid foot of Disks for my workstation, then so be it. Wire it in over Thunderbolt, and I'm good to go.
That's pretty standard for the PCIe type SSD cards. I've been watching them for a while I didn't know you could boot off them but it appeard that has changed
Apple is doubling down on their segmentation here. They're clearly abandoning (I don't mean this in a pejorative sense) a mass appeal with this new iteration and targeting it specifically to 'actual' professionals: graphic designers, video editors, etc.
Are you suggesting the Mac Pro ever had mass appeal? This strikes me as the opposite, abandoning the 'actual' professionals in favour of a weird mass market design.
I don't see how this is a mass market design. It's a bunch of Xeons cores paired with ECC RAM, stupid-fast storage, and way more GPU power than any reasonable person can use. And probably priced to match.
I assume he is referring to the strange decision to make the thing so small (and beautiful) at the expense of any internal expandability. So professionals are going to have all sorts of hard drives and external graphics cards and optical drives etc hanging off this thing.
sorry if I am barking up the wrong tree.. but do you think it will be beautiful with all the breakout cables ?
For me this whole thing looks like a blast from the past - my trusty C64 with everything outside the box (and there were some articles in the 64er magazine [german magazine] which showed how to build everything into a single case for the neat, "integrated" look)
I think for many people it will be a beautiful black cylinder on a cluttered desktop. For people who need to use expansions this will take up a significantly larger footprint than a machine that allows for internal expansion.
For those that put the machine under their desk it will just be a mess of cables and things to kick over.
Third parties are going to have a field day designing accessories to this that will do away with the clutter. A six pronged lightning plug that splits into a meta-rack monolithic black box. Done.
The whining about this product is expected but so misguided.
But, coupled with zero internal expansion, no spinning disk bays, and a small number of RAM slots.
I can't really tell to whom the product is targeted, honestly. If I were buying a Mac Pro for work, I'd want the expand ability. If I were a consumer buying a desktop, I'd get an iMac or mini.
Indeed, I've been using the same Mac Pro since 2008. I bought an ATI Radeon 6970 around a year or so ago and extended its life that much more. For most of my computer's life, its had a PCIe eSATA card.
I can't say I'm too excited about a computer that's relegated to an much more expensive Mac Mini.
So on top of the almost-certainly really expensive Mac Pro, you now also need to get the really expensive PCIe expansion enclosure on top of it? Or did I miss nvidia or ati making thunderbolt video cards?
This is why the idea that this makes sense for professional users is silly. It's just asking them to spend a lot more money for something that's been possible with standard case designs for decades. The old Mac Pro was already a bit silly with its chassis that seemed designed to survive a car crash, but this one just takes the cake.
The cooling system design is innovative and interesting on its own, but this continues the trend of the Mac Pro being a check box for Apple instead of a real product.
The existing Mac Pro has four drive bays. That number seems to be too many, or way too few, never quite right. This design seems to surrender to the fact that one stupidly fast SSD is good enough to build a base, and the rest can be attached externally.
NVidia and AMD have been making external video cards for a while now using external PCIe, but they haven't sold very well and support for these sorts of connectors is limited. Thunderbolt 2 should eventually change that.
Apple's in a bit of a tough spot here. The Mac Pro can never be fast enough or big enough for some, and the bigger and faster they make it, the more it becomes overkill for those that just need something more serious than an iMac or Mac Mini.
I did some more reading and it looks like Thunderbolt 2 is a lot like a single lane of PCI-e v4, slightly faster but similar.
Hopefully Thunderbolt performance will continue to improve, though, and it can leverage all of the improvements to PCI-e.
The fiber version of Thunderbolt/Light-Peak could probably fix a lot of these issues with copper signal limitations. At this point the electronics in the Thunderbolt cable are so expensive that switching to a more expensive cable with no electronics might be a net win.
I was looking at that kind of thing as well and the only thing that's worth noting is that I think a lot of video cards currently actively used are only 16x so they can be run on older motherboards with pcie 1 or 2.
It's not clear that thunderbolt 2 isn't enough bandwidth to effectively run a video card, though I think you'd probably run into problems daisy chaining video cards with video cards or trying to run two out of one enclosure.
This is just blind speculation (I am not apple [power] user, nor have I owned the new mac pro):
Maybe (sacrificing customizability[?] for portability) + (somewhat superficial/look change maybe for change's sake) + (lack of (water cooling, cd/dvd/bluray%, power surge supply/protector thingy%, raid%)) != professional market?
% = if you want these, there goes some of the portability/simplicity. (unless apple monitor usually has cd drive?)
I might be off the mark, feedback welcome. Maybe this is enough for most creative professionals? Video/3d/gaming/some programming/some engineering might be somewhat infinite in appetite for processing power and all, I would think.
My thoughts having never owned a Mac Pro (though on my 2nd MacBook Pro): SAN/NAS + the near uselessness of internal optical drives.
In a "professional" environment, large storage is on the network, redundant, with regular backups (preferably including off-site backup). The more important the data is, the less likely anyone wants it sitting on someone's desktop any longer than necessary for that person to do their job.
The handful of people using Mac Pros in my work environment generate and store massive amounts of data, but they don't store it on their desktop indefinitely.
I don't see it that way at all. The Mac Pro has always been about the top 1% power users. The appeal was twofold: it was a bitchin'-fast machine you could stuff with as many cards and drives as you want, and it ran OS X.
This new design removes the former selling point. 12 core max (same as current)?? Four RAM slots (down from eight)?? 1/6th the volume (i.e. space to plug stuff in)??
This offers almost no advantage over a late model iMac with a Thunderbolt-to-PCIe breakout module (which is what many power users have been doing in the years since the last update).
Welcome to the era where you process all in the cloud. You don't need 30 HD on your machine anymore or 200gb ram. I was a bit shocked at the beginning but then I realized most of the studios are using cloud solutions to make intensive renders or local hardware farms with plenty of processing power. I think the Mac Pro still exceeds on power, but you know you will always find someone else more hungry of power :)
Heh, I bet you're somewhere with high bandwidth, no data caps and very low latency.
Here, I'm 30-60ms away from the big datacentres, and 200-400ms away from the US. Data is capped at ~500gb per month on the high end plans, and that's both upload and download. I'm lucky to get 10 megabits down, 1 megabit up on a good day.
Coupled with the fact our country's going to head back to the 1950s with the inevitable change of government next election, screw the cloud.
But yeah, where I am I was on mobile internet for a year where I would go 2 weeks on a 2G connection and even on the 3G I had pings of 200~ to data centers in my city.
Most of the people I know they didn't updagraded their Mac Pros ever in 3 to 6 years of use. I heard people upgrading memory, replacing discs, but the rest it should be intact. The Mac Pro is a nice machine for people who won't upgrade in 3 o 4 years, even more and still having power.
If they didn't release this, I would continue with the idea of making my Hackintosh but this new baby is nice.
>This offers almost no advantage over a late model iMac with a Thunderbolt-to-PCIe breakout module (which is what many power users have been doing in the years since the last update).
A few big advantages over the iMac: Xeons processors, so more cores & more cache; ECC RAM; and (two) workstation graphics cards. Six thunderbolt ports means up to 36 (!) PCIe peripherals by daisy chaining, which means a lot more expandability than the iMac or even the 2010 Mac Pro.
The most basic forms of segmentation aren't especially relevant to the discussion of the finer points of where Apple is targeting this machine. It would be like bringing up the high-power engine in a sports car, when the discussion is about where within the sports car market the maker is aiming. That it has a high-power engine is generally a given.
I suspect that a lot of people bought the Mac Pro despite the fact that it has Xeon processors, rather than because of it. They're a lot more expensive without a huge performance benefit for desktop or workstation applications.
The main advantages of Xeon were dual-socket support and support for oodles of RAM slots, and the new Mac Pro supports neither of these things.
I think you’re omitting the Xeon’s increased stability versus consumer grade architectures. Many Mac Pros are used to run non-stop, they need to be more dependable than other computers.
Does this really matter in 2013? Serious question. I could see ECC having been useful in 2000 in the midst of the megahertz race, but I'm not too convinced about today...
The probability of a bit error on normal RAM is quite high [1]. The more RAM you add the more likely you are to see corruption. Not that ECC fixes everything - I still see uncorrected ECC errors on the older HPC nodes on our grid.
What about powering all those Thunderbolt devices which have been daisy chained? The extra cables and power supplies are going to be an absolute mess compared to the old Mac Pro.
I mostly agree with this. I have owned three mac pros. I use them for development work. I like them because they are fast, well-built, run OS X (which I like), I can put lots of RAM in them, and put a few extra hard drives in with software RAID.
There isn't much about this announcement that excites me. I don't think I need two graphics cards (though maybe 4K will be nicer than I realize). I don't need it to be smaller and I don't really care what it looks like, as long as it is well built. But:
* I have had really good experiences with past mac pros, and poor experiences with hardware from other vendors, so I am reluctant to switch.
* The cost differential of a mac pro vs. an imac is not that great, relative to the cost of development time, so I am likely to give the mac pro the benefit of the doubt. If the benchmarks show it is significantly faster, I will probably just go with it.
I do wonder who is excited about this machine. I think another commenter is right - it is the video editors and high end graphics types this machine is truly built for.
Video editor and high end graphics guy checking in. I’m very excited, mostly by the size of the new Mac Pro. I’ll be able to take this workstation anywhere and just plug it into some rented displays. Lugging the current Mac Pro around means I’ll have to go there by car or settle for taking a MacBook Pro along and doing rendering on a rented Mac Pro. The new Mac Pro, I can bring along in a carry-on and have plenty of room to spare for other equipment. Too bad it won’t be available for months, I have so many projects for which this would be a dream.
-Thunderbolt-to-PCIe breakout module (which is what many power users have been doing in the years since the last update)
Do you have any examples of this? I did a quick google but didn't find anything. My imagination is telling me that looks like some sort of motherboard with slots in it...
I'm amused by all the disparaging comments about this new design. Every time Apple launches an incredible product it is always immediately decried. I'll wait til these are on sale before judging them.
It works on Firefox, it just delays for a long time before you can scroll, tricking you into thinking that you're just looking at a boring teaser page picture.
All I see is some thing that looks like a cross between the monolith from '2001' and an ashtray from the local Greyhound station. Clicking all over the page doesn't do anything (FF 20.0 on Windows 7 x64).
Guess I'm not in the target audience for whatever it is...
Hurrah! GPUs sealed directly into the machine. No more keeping old macs alive with extra GPUs. (the quadro 4000 and k5000 really helped the 2009 macpro)
It also appears to only have one CPU. From what the page says its only got one Memory controller, which as the "new"* Xeons have onboard memory controllers. So that seems a bit of a fail.
*as in the same Xeons that have been in the HP Z620/820 for the last 8 months
The only thing appears to be going for this mac is that it has nice disk bandwidth.
The Z series workstation is going to be cheaper, and almost twice as fast+. (assuming one buys the correct fusionio card.) it also has the advantage of taking normal pci slot graphics cards, which can be upgraded later.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadiCan is super motivational, too.
It can fit on your desk... Well it will have to in order for it not to replace my vacuum cleaner.
Off topic, but were this and the Air the only product announced? If so, I'm disappointed- I was hoping to pick up an updated Macbook Retina 13". Oh well.
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/mac_accessori...
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC380LL/A/magic-trackpad?f...
http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad/
http://www.apple.com/magicmouse/
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/mac_accessori...
I'm pretty impressed that they didn't slap a logo on the front.
After seeing the Pro, I fantasized how fun it would be to have a desktop machine with several symmetric displays.
My bet, the entry level Pro will be $1899-$1999.
Can you believe that the old Mac Pro case and fundamental design was launched 10 years ago with the Power Mac G5?
See you WWDC 2014!
That might not work for you, granted, but the amount of bandwidth available between all those ports (20 GB/s in the case of Thunderbolt 2) should be enough to cover most use-cases.
Things like graphics cards use 16x PCI-E 3.0 at this point which is 128Gbits/s.
[1]: http://www.pcisig.com/news_room/faqs/pcie3.0_faq/#EQ3
Thunderbolt IS PCIe, so it's just as fast.. Why should card makers be constrained in expanding the machine to make peripherals small enough to fit inside? If I want 1 solid foot of Disks for my workstation, then so be it. Wire it in over Thunderbolt, and I'm good to go.
20 Gbit/s thunderbolt != 8 drives @ 6 Gbit/s (42GBit /s)
i think a modern raid card can deliver 8gbit/s over 8 PCIe 3 lanes
However i guess you could trunk a few together?
[Scan Components](http://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/all/hard-drives...)
It was as if Apple lured R2D2 to the dark side and released as the Mac Pro!
Weird industrial design != mass market.
For me this whole thing looks like a blast from the past - my trusty C64 with everything outside the box (and there were some articles in the 64er magazine [german magazine] which showed how to build everything into a single case for the neat, "integrated" look)
For those that put the machine under their desk it will just be a mess of cables and things to kick over.
The whining about this product is expected but so misguided.
I can't really tell to whom the product is targeted, honestly. If I were buying a Mac Pro for work, I'd want the expand ability. If I were a consumer buying a desktop, I'd get an iMac or mini.
I can't say I'm too excited about a computer that's relegated to an much more expensive Mac Mini.
Six of those, which can be chained, is way better than having four internal slots.
This is why the idea that this makes sense for professional users is silly. It's just asking them to spend a lot more money for something that's been possible with standard case designs for decades. The old Mac Pro was already a bit silly with its chassis that seemed designed to survive a car crash, but this one just takes the cake.
The cooling system design is innovative and interesting on its own, but this continues the trend of the Mac Pro being a check box for Apple instead of a real product.
NVidia and AMD have been making external video cards for a while now using external PCIe, but they haven't sold very well and support for these sorts of connectors is limited. Thunderbolt 2 should eventually change that.
Apple's in a bit of a tough spot here. The Mac Pro can never be fast enough or big enough for some, and the bigger and faster they make it, the more it becomes overkill for those that just need something more serious than an iMac or Mac Mini.
Refs:
- http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/19/pci-express-makes-the-3-0...
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pci_express
- http://www.zdnet.com/intel-unveils-thunderbolt-2-7000016595/
- http://www.tomshardware.com/news/lucid-gpu-graphics-thunderb...
- http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-graphics-thu...
TL;DR external video cards via Thunderbolt help but can't hang in terms of performance with real internal cards. (edited for formatting)
Hopefully Thunderbolt performance will continue to improve, though, and it can leverage all of the improvements to PCI-e.
The fiber version of Thunderbolt/Light-Peak could probably fix a lot of these issues with copper signal limitations. At this point the electronics in the Thunderbolt cable are so expensive that switching to a more expensive cable with no electronics might be a net win.
It's not clear that thunderbolt 2 isn't enough bandwidth to effectively run a video card, though I think you'd probably run into problems daisy chaining video cards with video cards or trying to run two out of one enclosure.
Maybe (sacrificing customizability[?] for portability) + (somewhat superficial/look change maybe for change's sake) + (lack of (water cooling, cd/dvd/bluray%, power surge supply/protector thingy%, raid%)) != professional market?
% = if you want these, there goes some of the portability/simplicity. (unless apple monitor usually has cd drive?)
I might be off the mark, feedback welcome. Maybe this is enough for most creative professionals? Video/3d/gaming/some programming/some engineering might be somewhat infinite in appetite for processing power and all, I would think.
In a "professional" environment, large storage is on the network, redundant, with regular backups (preferably including off-site backup). The more important the data is, the less likely anyone wants it sitting on someone's desktop any longer than necessary for that person to do their job.
The handful of people using Mac Pros in my work environment generate and store massive amounts of data, but they don't store it on their desktop indefinitely.
This new design removes the former selling point. 12 core max (same as current)?? Four RAM slots (down from eight)?? 1/6th the volume (i.e. space to plug stuff in)??
This offers almost no advantage over a late model iMac with a Thunderbolt-to-PCIe breakout module (which is what many power users have been doing in the years since the last update).
Here, I'm 30-60ms away from the big datacentres, and 200-400ms away from the US. Data is capped at ~500gb per month on the high end plans, and that's both upload and download. I'm lucky to get 10 megabits down, 1 megabit up on a good day.
Coupled with the fact our country's going to head back to the 1950s with the inevitable change of government next election, screw the cloud.
But yeah, where I am I was on mobile internet for a year where I would go 2 weeks on a 2G connection and even on the 3G I had pings of 200~ to data centers in my city.
But I'm curious - what's happening in Australia that makes you say that it's about to back to the 50s?
If they didn't release this, I would continue with the idea of making my Hackintosh but this new baby is nice.
A few big advantages over the iMac: Xeons processors, so more cores & more cache; ECC RAM; and (two) workstation graphics cards. Six thunderbolt ports means up to 36 (!) PCIe peripherals by daisy chaining, which means a lot more expandability than the iMac or even the 2010 Mac Pro.
The features you list are hardly innovation, just market segmentation.
The main advantages of Xeon were dual-socket support and support for oodles of RAM slots, and the new Mac Pro supports neither of these things.
[1] : http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory
There isn't much about this announcement that excites me. I don't think I need two graphics cards (though maybe 4K will be nicer than I realize). I don't need it to be smaller and I don't really care what it looks like, as long as it is well built. But:
* I have had really good experiences with past mac pros, and poor experiences with hardware from other vendors, so I am reluctant to switch.
* The cost differential of a mac pro vs. an imac is not that great, relative to the cost of development time, so I am likely to give the mac pro the benefit of the doubt. If the benchmarks show it is significantly faster, I will probably just go with it.
I do wonder who is excited about this machine. I think another commenter is right - it is the video editors and high end graphics types this machine is truly built for.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see these showing up on tours with bigger electronic music acts.
Do you have any examples of this? I did a quick google but didn't find anything. My imagination is telling me that looks like some sort of motherboard with slots in it...
Let's try a cylinder.
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=20th%20anniversary%...
Interestingly enough, the subwoofer contains the computer’s power supply.
http://512pixels.net/2012/12/tam/
I am using a the Rockmelt browser on a Mac Mini, and I am seeing only the trashcan thing...
The page has some secret trick or something to have more info???
In their defence though, the page works perfectly with JS disabled if you just want the info.
Guess I'm not in the target audience for whatever it is...
LET ME SCROLL damn it
It also appears to only have one CPU. From what the page says its only got one Memory controller, which as the "new"* Xeons have onboard memory controllers. So that seems a bit of a fail.
*as in the same Xeons that have been in the HP Z620/820 for the last 8 months
The only thing appears to be going for this mac is that it has nice disk bandwidth.
The Z series workstation is going to be cheaper, and almost twice as fast+. (assuming one buys the correct fusionio card.) it also has the advantage of taking normal pci slot graphics cards, which can be upgraded later.
+owing to having a second CPU