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2018 MacPro Modular
- Thread starter Skywalker5
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Maybe read the 239 pages of discussion at Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 first 
Maybe read the 239 pages of discussion at Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 first
Sometimes a new thread is refreshing...after a while they tend to turn into a GPU ****fest.
Let's at least reference similar and related threads - such as the recent RED President played a role in making the new modular Mac Pro ....
Mac Pro will be incredible. Trust me. Believe me. You're going to love it. Absolutely, best computer by far, trust me. I've used it. Phenomenal really. Lots of power, so much. It'll cost billions and billions of dollars. - That good? People seem to buy phrases like that these days
Lots of threads cover this, as @AidenShaw mentioned. Speculation at this point is just dreaming with no credence.
All the world knows is allegedly "pro and modular," whatever that means to Apple.
Lots of threads cover this, as @AidenShaw mentioned. Speculation at this point is just dreaming with no credence.
All the world knows is allegedly "pro and modular," whatever that means to Apple.
To me, modular means being able to CTO a system with up to quad sockets, 72 cores, 144 threads, 6 TiB of RAM, five dual-wide GPUs, and a 6000 watt power supply.Mac Pro will be incredible. Trust me. Believe me. You're going to love it. Absolutely, best computer by far, trust me. I've used it. Phenomenal really. Lots of power, so much. It'll cost billions and billions of dollars. - That good? People seem to buy phrases like that these days
Lots of threads cover this, as @AidenShaw mentioned. Speculation at this point is just dreaming with no credence.
All the world knows is allegedly "pro and modular," whatever that means to Apple.
I bought three of them, with between 1 TiB and 3 TiB of RAM. After about 18 months, I pushed the Titan X (Maxwell) cards down the food chain, and put in GTX 1080 Ti Pascal cards. Also added a TiB of RAM.
Waiting to see what the Volta gaming cards bring.
YMMV
__________
And I'll repeat that perhaps the best part of "modularity" is if it lets you CTO the system you want.
Copy the new Dell Precision towers and rack and slap an Apple logo on it
https://www.custompcreview.com/news/dell-shows-precision-5820-7820-7920-workstations-siggraph-2017/
"At the top of the stack we have the Dell Precision 7920 Tower. The system features a dual socket Skylake SP Xeons with up to 28-cores per CPU, up to 3TB of DDR4 ECC RAM, choice of AMD or Nvidia graphics up to the AMD Radeon Pro SSG or Nvidia Quadro GP100, and support for all types of storage including 2.5″ SATA/SAS, 3.5″ SATA/SAS, NVMe PCIe SSDs, M.2 PCIe SSDs, and U.2 PCIe SSDs."
Sounds good to me
https://www.custompcreview.com/news/dell-shows-precision-5820-7820-7920-workstations-siggraph-2017/
"At the top of the stack we have the Dell Precision 7920 Tower. The system features a dual socket Skylake SP Xeons with up to 28-cores per CPU, up to 3TB of DDR4 ECC RAM, choice of AMD or Nvidia graphics up to the AMD Radeon Pro SSG or Nvidia Quadro GP100, and support for all types of storage including 2.5″ SATA/SAS, 3.5″ SATA/SAS, NVMe PCIe SSDs, M.2 PCIe SSDs, and U.2 PCIe SSDs."
Sounds good to me
Many - And there all expressed in the "other" threads covering this same subject. Why rehash?
Not in this case, it's redundant.
Lou
Yep. I'm about a month away from building a new 4k video editing system. Apple won't have anything worth buying by then. I'm sure I'll build one of these.
More chance of "Aliens" landing than Apple offering those specs or anything near them. Though, if you're after that sort of horsepower, Apple would never (past and future) be on the radar.
If Apple can't produce a decent workstation, maybe it should license the OS to a couple of selected vendors on a distinct set of models such as the Dell Precision, HP Z or Lenovo Workstations. Some of these start for not unreasonable money and scale as big as you like. Apple can then concentrate it's own efforts on the consumer models it favours so much.
Mac Pro will be incredible. Trust me. Believe me. You're going to love it. Absolutely, best computer by far, trust me. I've used it. Phenomenal really. Lots of power, so much. It'll cost billions and billions of dollars. - That good? People seem to buy phrases like that these days
It's going to be huuuuuge!
It's nice to have those threads of speculations, but at the end of the day it's a bit pointless as Apple will do what Apple wants. They won't listen to our wishes.
Glass half full (flap! oink!):
Return of the Cheesegrater - in a slightly more compact form without internal space for optical & spinning rust drives - but with at least 2 full-size PCIe slots. It's what pro users want/need, hackintosh users build such systems every day, Foxconn could have several container-loads of them in the docks in a couple of months while Apple did the software testing and fixing - assuming they started last April its hard to see why a company with Apple's resources couldn't have them in the shops for Christmas. So probably not that then - not magical enough.
Glass half empty:
A sealed box containing the guts of a midrange iMac Pro, with a few BTO choices for single or dual GPUs. It's modular because it doesn't include a screen (go read the press conference transcript without rose-tinted glasses - that's the only thing that you can be sure that Apple mean by 'modular').
Probably not worth the effort - HP/Lenovo/Dell etc. would probably like to have MacOS as an option but I can't see them getting behind it and shoving when all of their salesforce's experience is with other OS's. Its the sort of thing that would appear during negotiations to seal a large corporate deal (Mac os available: tick box) then never be mentioned again.
Now, if Apple let them make their own Macbooks then I'm sure they'd be interested - but there's obvious reasons for that not happening.
Its more feasible than in the past, though - 10+ years ago, the mini-tower was the go-to form factor for consumers and pros alike and a plain, affordable Mac mini-tower would have decimated the market for iMacs, Minis and Pros. Nowadays, consumers/prosumers and low-end mainly seem happy to pay the premium for ultraportable laptops and all-in-ones - towers are for workstations and gaming, which isn't Apple's bread and butter.
Of course, they tried this the other way round in the 90s before the second coming of Jobs - except sorta the other way round: 1990s Apple weren't so good at selling consumer/office devices but had a strong following from graphics/AV pros (then, they had clear technical advantages over 1990s PCs) so they licensed (classic) MacOS to third parties, presumably hoping they'd go after the mass consumer/office PC market leaving Apple to the high-end workstations. Of course, the third parties looked at the thin margins in the highly competitive consumer PCs, looked at the extra cost of building Macs (totally different PPC architecture then, remember) then looked at the nice juicy markups that Apple were getting on premium graphics/AV workstations - and duly started turning out high-end systems that undercut Apple's workstations. Those were first up against the wall when Jobs returned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#Official_Macintosh_clone_program
Anyway: it's not as if Apple can't make a nice Mac workstation - they just have to follow the instructions on any Hackintosh site (not literally, of course - but the point is that there aren't any significant technological challenges - and 95% of the reason why hackintoshes aren't suitable for pro use is simply that they're unlicensed and unsupported). They clearly don't see it as desirable.
It will be proprietary parts. The case will be dune shaped. The graphics card will be a triangular shape with a hole in the middle. The CPU will be a ball. The memory will zigzag form factor. And the SSD will be the length of a ruler.
Actually one of the above might be true
https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/08/intels-push-for-petabyte-ssds-requires-a-new-kind-of-drive/
Actually one of the above might be true
https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/08/intels-push-for-petabyte-ssds-requires-a-new-kind-of-drive/
Mac Pro will be incredible. Trust me. Believe me. You're going to love it. Absolutely, best computer by far, trust me. I've used it. Phenomenal really. Lots of power, so much. It'll cost billions and billions of dollars. - That good? People seem to buy phrases like that these days
Lots of threads cover this, as @AidenShaw mentioned. Speculation at this point is just dreaming with no credence.
All the world knows is allegedly "pro and modular," whatever that means to Apple.
This is even funnier if you read it with Donald Trump voice...
True. It's a sad state of affairs really with Apple hardware. A hackintosh is never a realistic option for me as it's totally unsupported and I don't trust Apple not to break it with an update. Microsoft come in for a lot of bad press too, but at least it is designed to be run on any PC hardware. We need Apple to wake up and realise we are not in a post-pc era.
I get enough US politics elsewhere. Can we leave it out of the Mac Pro section please.
I've been buying MacPro's twice, first the 1,1 and then the 5,1. Loved both systems. Extremely expensive and, back then almost impossible to upgrade GPUs (As Apple used EFI and most "Windows" GPU's only supported BIOS, lack of drivers etc. etc.
Apple will look how the interest goes for the iMac Pro and, if successful they will most likely not launch a modular system pro computer, at all.
So I'm going to keep my hackintosh, a cheap Intel NUC with eGPU (Thunderbolt 3) that does everything I want, and I can upgrade the GPU if I want to (That being NVIDIA will support High Sierra, otherwise switch to AMD).
Apple will look how the interest goes for the iMac Pro and, if successful they will most likely not launch a modular system pro computer, at all.
So I'm going to keep my hackintosh, a cheap Intel NUC with eGPU (Thunderbolt 3) that does everything I want, and I can upgrade the GPU if I want to (That being NVIDIA will support High Sierra, otherwise switch to AMD).
those are amazing .. hopefully apple copies it
Also I doubt it will be 2018 .. maybe announced by the end of 2018 and available in 2019