2018 Modular Mac Pro might take lead from Mac Mini

[theluggage]

You'd have to assume that Apple execs are complete idiots if they parse modular as "keyboard/monitor/computer" based on the feedback they've gotten from the press and their pro customers.

...but read the quote I posted. Three types of systems: notebooks, all-in-ones and modular, and they make them (present tense). Ergo, by their definition, the Mac Mini and Mac Pro cylinder are modular systems.

Meanwhile, actions speak louder than words and they've just announced an "iMac Pro" which is firmly aimed at those pro customers and, guess what, it lacks even the minimal upgradeability of the existing iMac 27" and Mac Pro,

In another part of that interview they directly mention the user complaints out there, specifically about "expandability" and "upgradeability".

I don't see anything in the interview to say that they don't still regard Thunderbolt as the answer to "expandability". Federighi uses the word twice - on one occasion he's talking about why people don't want touch screens, the other he's saying why it might be a good idea not to have a RAID array in the box.

The uncomfortable truth is that, these days, "expandability and upgradeability" equates to "10 year lifespan" and would probably wreck the Mac business model - which relies on the income from premium-priced hardware to fund the development of a proprietary "free as in beer" OS and software suite (unlike Windows box-shifters who don't need to maintain their own operating system).

Do they have to specifically state it's going to have PCI slots and support nVidia cards?

Er... let me think... this is a hard one... let's see... YES!

Seriously, if it was going to have PCIe slots and support third party graphics cards - something that would allay everybody's concerns at a stroke - why wouldn't they have said so?

Also, if you, personally, wanted a nice MicroATX or MiniITX compact tower with your GPU of choice, you could get it tomorrow in Hackintosh form. Now, there is a whole laundry list of reasons why that is not a viable option - all of which boil down to lack of official support and using an unlicensed copy of the OS. There's no technical barrier that Apple couldn't fix in a couple of months. Now, bringing a product to market is always rather more complex than throwing something together in your back room, but I really can't believe that a company with Apple's resources couldn't have had an ATX/ITX Mac in the shops this year, if they'd wanted to.

Do you really believe Apple thinks it's a good idea to play word games with their highest end customers?

Really? Happy birthday for yesterday, by the way. Meanwhile, how would you like to own the Brooklyn bridge?

Maybe my interpretation is wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that the interview was very, very vague and carefully avoided any sort of specifics. You can always tell that someone is using, shall we say, carefully chosen words if (A) their job title is "Senior Vice anything" and (B) their lips are moving.

 

[Scary Spice]

Ok as suggested in another three by moi I decided it deserves it own thread.

What if the Mac Mini is repositioned like the iMac to elevate to a Mac MiniPro line.

Think about it. Stackable units as seen elsewhere and suggests by previous superdrive & time machine add-on's.

Easy to access. Base unit + additional tiers, then add as many as you want after with whatever hardware until you have a very nice modular tower of your choice.

Maybe this is why the Mac Mini has not received update love and they may be considering merging format to reach a synergetic hybrid moment.

Base Mini - CPU x1 or x2, GPU x1, SSD x1. (coudl be 2 or 3 options here)
Tier two - x2 x4 GPU's, with cooling.
Tier three - HD Array, up to 8/10 drives.
Tier four - More CPUs... what else? More GPU's

There could be other combo tiers.
Imagine modular made to order.

This is a bad idea.

 

[rkuo]

...but read the quote I posted. Three types of systems: notebooks, all-in-ones and modular, and they make them (present tense). Ergo, by their definition, the Mac Mini and Mac Pro cylinder are modular systems.

Meanwhile, actions speak louder than words and they've just announced an "iMac Pro" which is firmly aimed at those pro customers and, guess what, it lacks even the minimal upgradeability of the existing iMac 27" and Mac Pro,

Yeah, and in the same press release they specifically mentioned the upcoming modular Mac Pro, because they know the iMac Pro isn't the solution for many high end users. They NEVER do that, that would be like announcing the iPhone 8 right as the iPhone 7 comes out. They did it here to acknowledge the problem.

They held a separate press heart to heart ... for what? To release the same Pro product again with the same problems? How do you account for that? Actually, don't answer that as I'm not interested in listening to your contorted reasoning.

Er... let me think... this is a hard one... let's see... YES!

Seriously, if it was going to have PCIe slots and support third party graphics cards - something that would allay everybody's concerns at a stroke - why wouldn't they have said so?

Also, if you, personally, wanted a nice MicroATX or MiniITX compact tower with your GPU of choice, you could get it tomorrow in Hackintosh form. Now, there is a whole laundry list of reasons why that is not a viable option - all of which boil down to lack of official support and using an unlicensed copy of the OS. There's no technical barrier that Apple couldn't fix in a couple of months. Now, bringing a product to market is always rather more complex than throwing something together in your back room, but I really can't believe that a company with Apple's resources couldn't have had an ATX/ITX Mac in the shops this year, if they'd wanted to.

nVidia seems to think Apple's backtracking on this was good enough to start releasing their third party drivers again, and I'll bet they know a goddamn bit more than you do about the situation.

Really? Happy birthday for yesterday, by the way. Meanwhile, how would you like to own the Brooklyn bridge?

Maybe my interpretation is wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that the interview was very, very vague and carefully avoided any sort of specifics. You can always tell that someone is using, shall we say, carefully chosen words if (A) their job title is "Senior Vice anything" and (B) their lips are moving.

Your interpretation is not only wrong, it is deliberately obtuse. It's obvious you have no intention of believing what Apple says or does. I guess we'll see where that ends up.

 

[theluggage]

Yeah, and in the same press release they specifically mentioned the upcoming modular Mac Pro

...because simply having a built-in screen is enough to put off many users with special display requirements or who have already spent thousands on pro-quality displays. Did they say that the upcoming Mac Pro would have a user-replaceable GPU or SSDs? Nope.

They held a separate press heart to heart ... for what?

Damage control because they weren't going to have a new Mac Pro ready until at least 2018, it hadn't been updated since 2013 and there was rampant speculation (including here on MacRumors) that they were going to drop the Mac Pro completely. Some businesses lease their equipment on a 3-4 year cycle, and/or have 4 year support plans, so the situation was getting critical.

nVidia seems to think Apple's backtracking on this was good enough to start releasing their third party drivers again

When do you think they stopped? NVIDIA released drivers for OS X 10.8, OS X 10.9 OS X 10.10, OS X 10.11 and Mac OS 10.12 and most of the point releases thereof, regularly, since the Mac Pro was dropped. There's clearly enough Hackintosh makers and superannuated cheesegraters to make it worth their while.

Meanwhile, the MBPs have AMD graphics, the new iMacs have AMD graphics, the announced iMac Pro has AMD graphics... do you spot a pattern there?

It's obvious you have no intention of believing what Apple says or does.

It's more obvious you're determined to hear exactly what you want to hear and definition of "contorted reasoning" is anything that results in an answer that you don't like.

Find one quote from that interview that talks about the new Mac Pro having PCIe slots or being user upgradeable.

The only upgrading they talk about is Apple producing updated models - not user upgrades. The only specific design flaw in the Mac Pro that they acknowledge is that its design has made it difficult to keep it updated.

It's quite possible I'm wrong.

Its also possible that Apple haven't even made the final decision yet.

But, in terms of currently available evidence, there's little or nothing in that interview to suggest that "modular" means anything other than "bring your own display and keyboard".

 

[rkuo]

...because simply having a built-in screen is enough to put off many users with special display requirements or who have already spent thousands on pro-quality displays. Did they say that the upcoming Mac Pro would have a user-replaceable GPU or SSDs? Nope.

Apple NEVER releases a product and then downplays it in the press release. The fact that they did so here is because something was wrong.

Damage control because they weren't going to have a new Mac Pro ready until at least 2018, it hadn't been updated since 2013 and there was rampant speculation (including here on MacRumors) that they were going to drop the Mac Pro completely. Some businesses lease their equipment on a 3-4 year cycle, and/or have 4 year support plans, so the situation was getting critical.

And then you think their damage control in 2018 is going to consist of another Mac Pro with non-replaceable parts. The very design they acknowledged as a failure in a special meeting with the press. Riiiiiiight.

When do you think they stopped? NVIDIA released drivers for OS X 10.8, OS X 10.9 OS X 10.10, OS X 10.11 and Mac OS 10.12 and most of the point releases thereof, regularly, since the Mac Pro was dropped. There's clearly enough Hackintosh makers and superannuated cheesegraters to make it worth their while.

Meanwhile, the MBPs have AMD graphics, the new iMacs have AMD graphics, the announced iMac Pro has AMD graphics... do you spot a pattern there?

The pattern is that you have no clue. nVidia didn't release Pascal drivers for a whole year until the day Apple had their Mac Pro meeting. What do you think is going on there? Complete coincidence?

It's more obvious you're determined to hear exactly what you want to hear and definition of "contorted reasoning" is anything that results in an answer that you don't like.

Find one quote from that interview that talks about the new Mac Pro having PCIe slots or being user upgradeable.

Phil Schiller quoted on Daring Fireball: "And for that, we’re sorry to disappoint customers who wanted that, and we’ve asked the team to go and re-architect and design something great for the future that those Mac Pro customers who want more expandability, more upgradability in the future. It’ll meet more of those needs."

The only upgrading they talk about is Apple producing updated models - not user upgrades. The only specific design flaw in the Mac Pro that they acknowledge is that its design has made it difficult to keep it updated.

It's quite possible I'm wrong.

I would say it's possible you're wrong, yes.

Its also possible that Apple haven't even made the final decision yet.

But, in terms of currently available evidence, there's little or nothing in that interview to suggest that "modular" means anything other than "bring your own display and keyboard".

Phil Schiller: "We think it’s really important to create something great for our pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that’ll take longer than this year to do." And you think the definition of what pro customers want from a Mac Pro "modular" system is to replace the keyboard and display? Contorted is a perfect description of your thinking.

 

[jerwin]

I've been thinking this for years... power supply module, memory module, processing module(s), graphics module(s), I/O module(s), all tied together by a backplane bus. 'Stack Mac'. Don't know what the engineering challenges would be, though...

ah. The sidecar concept.

 

[techwarrior]

I think it would be interesting if Apple were to settle on a common form factor to promote brand awareness. The desktop, ATV, Home Pad lines might benefit from a common form factor, albeit different sizes like the iMac already does this with 21\27 inch iMac\iMac Pro.

The Home Pad and Mac Pro share the same basic cylinder concept, wouldn't it be interesting if the Mini took on a mini Mac Pro form factor. With the emergence of eGPU support in High Sierra, the internal GPU on all Macs will be less critical. eGPU alone could bring a lot of gamers back to the Mac. A return to modular\upgradeable designs for memory and disks on the desktop lineup would certainly bring a lot of gamers and high end pro users back to the Mac lineup. Sure, some incremental drop in unit prices for higher end units would be lost, but the line would be far more appealing to at least these two key market segments, offsetting the lower unit prices with higher volumes.

I also wonder about the networking engineers who were "re-assigned" to other product lines. Perhaps Home Pod and ATV will emerge with optional networking components where the basic unit will be dedicated speaker or ATV, the enhanced unit will have a router\Access Point built in? And, if they embrace Mesh Wi-Fi, adding networking to these would add an interesting reason to put more HomePods\ATVs in our homes.

 

[Jaho101]

I think it would be interesting if Apple were to settle on a common form factor to promote brand awareness. The desktop, ATV, Home Pad lines might benefit from a common form factor, albeit different sizes like the iMac already does this with 21\27 inch iMac\iMac Pro.

The Home Pad and Mac Pro share the same basic cylinder concept, wouldn't it be interesting if the Mini took on a mini Mac Pro form factor. With the emergence of eGPU support in High Sierra, the internal GPU on all Macs will be less critical. eGPU alone could bring a lot of gamers back to the Mac. A return to modular\upgradeable designs for memory and disks on the desktop lineup would certainly bring a lot of gamers and high end pro users back to the Mac lineup. Sure, some incremental drop in unit prices for higher end units would be lost, but the line would be far more appealing to at least these two key market segments, offsetting the lower unit prices with higher volumes.

I also wonder about the networking engineers who were "re-assigned" to other product lines. Perhaps Home Pod and ATV will emerge with optional networking components where the basic unit will be dedicated speaker or ATV, the enhanced unit will have a router\Access Point built in? And, if they embrace Mesh Wi-Fi, adding networking to these would add an interesting reason to put more HomePods\ATVs in our homes.

I'll agree that the currently Mac Pro has an amazing design, it just doesn't serve the function well enough. I also suspect that it's expensive to manufacture, as it is. On top of the fact that it's significantly larger than a Mac Mini is currently, I can't see it going anywhere. Certainly if the iMac didn't exist, then Apple's midrange Mac would be that design.

 

[theluggage]

And then you think their damage control in 2018 is going to consist of another Mac Pro with non-replaceable parts. The very design they acknowledged as a failure in a special meeting with the press. Riiiiiiight.

Go and re-read that interview with your critical thinking skills turned on instead of cherry picking it to support your wishful thinking. The only specific failure they acknowledge is that they weren't able to keep the new Mac Pro triangle-in-a-circle design updated. The "damage" they were controlling is that the nMP, even bought new, is stuck on 2013 CPUs and GPUs.
Everything else they say about expandability/upgradeability is (probably deliberately) ambiguous.

Also - economics 101: Apple isn't a charity, and a successful, non-user-upgradeable Mac Pro that let Apple charge 50-100% over the odds for BTO RAM and SSD options would be vastly more profitable than one where customers could buy the base unit and upgrade it with third-party kit. Look at the 13" MBP (where lots of people who probably only need 8GB are getting 16GB for future proofing) vs. the 27" iMac (where nobody with more sense than money buys the upgrade to 16GB for Apple when you can get the 8GB and upgrade it to 24GB for less money).

The "iMac Pro" may even be a toe in the water: the entry level 8 core is $5000 so I'm sure that the 18 core, 128GB ECC, 4TB SSD will be firmly in the "if you need to know the price you can't afford it" range. If pro users will buy that in non-upgradeable form and are happy to use Thunderbolt for expansion then they'll probably buy a hermetically sealed Mac Pro, too (or maybe settle for user-upgradeable RAM or SSD).

Pro users have been telling them about the shortcomings of the nMP since 2013 - so Apple have had plenty of time to reflect those views in the design of the iMac Pro. What we see is a sealed unit.

The pattern is that you have no clue. nVidia didn't release Pascal drivers for a whole year until the day Apple had their Mac Pro meeting. What do you think is going on there? Complete coincidence?

Of course its coincidence. Nvidia announced the Pascal drivers for Mac alongside the launch of their Titan XP graphics card in April. Do you think they timed the release of the Titan XP (which doesn't fit in any currently produced Mac but does fit in PCs, cMPs and Hackintoshes) to coincide with Apple's press conference? Or maybe they see opportunities in the Hackintosh/cMP/eGPU market caused by the same user frustrations that led Apple to hold the interview? That market has been enough to inspire them to keep supporting the 700/900 series drivers for years after Apple stopped using NVIDIA.

Phil Schiller quoted on Daring Fireball:

Now you're really cherry picking. ...you omitted the previous sentence from that quote: "The current Mac Pro, as we’ve said a few times, was constrained thermally and it restricted our ability to upgrade it. And for that, we’re sorry to disappoint..." - face it, when Apple use words like "upgrade", "expandable" or "modular" those words don't mean what you'd like them to mean. Apple's mistake - from their POV - is that they don't have a 2016 Mac Pro with a 2016 processor and a 2016 GPU to sell you, not that you can't upgrade your 2013 nMP yourself.

I would say it's possible you're wrong, yes.

...now you just need to accept the possibility that you're wrong. We're all speculating and reading between the lines here.

And you think the definition of what pro customers want from a Mac Pro "modular" system is to replace the keyboard and display

No, but I think it is clear from reading the interview that it is what Apple mean by modular - given that a truly user-upgradeable system is against their business interests.

 

[rkuo]

No, but I think it is clear from reading the interview that it is what Apple mean by modular - given that a truly user-upgradeable system is against their business interests.

It's NOT against their business interests.

The rest of your reply is pure idiocy.

Pascal cards from nVidia came out ... a year ago.

Phil Schiller and other reps gave several direct quotes on the topic of expandability and upgradability and nobody with half a brain would read it any other way. Whether they deliver remains to be seen.

Oh wait, never mind. I think you're right after all. Phil held a mea culpa special press conference and told everyone that they would release a modular, more expandable, more upgradable Mac Pro; then the plan is for Apple to release a new Mac Pro in 2018 that is just keyboard and monitor replaceable. I agree completely. No need to continue this discussion.

 

[epca12]

I don't think we'll see this but I would like to see a more powerful mini that's separate to the pro.

 

[slughead]

I can't say anything that anyone else hasn't already said other than I agree that
1. dumb idea this day and age where we don't need SCSI for optical media etc.
2. they just might do it

They didn't learn their lesson with the cube. Even with this mea culpa recently I wouldn't put it past them to make another proprietary silly design. Their "promise" to the pros was a "modular" system, not necessarily a PC with standardized parts.

That said, with their embracing of eGPUs (which, by the way, I totally called), they might try and convince pros that Tbolt-hamstringed eGPUs aren't the sad sack that they actually are. Linus Tech Tips has tooled around with them endlessly and it turns out there's a huge overhead. They blame the current intel chipset for the bottleneck but we'll see what the new chipsets bring (I doubt any improvement).

They could release a workstation "Donglebook" nightmare and expect users to pay for the privilege of USB type A ports, Audio, ethernet, etc.

 

[mattspace]

if you watch the talk show live wwdc episode, Craig specifically states that a gpu on an eGPU case has a higher latency than a bus direct slot, so Apple is aware that a PCI slot inside a computer has capability advantages over a PCI slot on a thunderbolt bus. How much weight they give that is open to question.

 

[theluggage]

Pascal cards from nVidia came out ... a year ago.

Yeah, and it took them a year to release the drivers for Mac, which happened to coincide with Apple's press conference about "whups, the Mac Pro is broke". Obviously the two are connected.

No coincidence, surely.

The fact that NVIDIA had just launched the super-powerful Titan Xp - which is sufficiently niche and expensive to make it worth their while going after the Hackintosh and cMP market - had nothing to do with it.

Nor did the release of Thunderbolt 3 machines by Apple or their forthcoming support for external GPUs - which people are mainly going to buy so that they can use NVIDIA GPUs.

Even the fact that the older 900 series cards were getting to be like hen's teeth, generating lots of inquiries from the Hackintosh community about when the Pascal drivers might appear (not that much of a long shot seeing as the 900 drivers were still being actively updated so nVidia were obviously aware of a demand) couldn't possibly have influenced it. Less still the obvious, boring explanation that supporting Hackintosh/cMP users was several places down on their TO DO list and it took them a year to get around to adding Pascal support.

Nope, absolutely not. Instead, it is absolute, definitive proof that Apple's "not this year" Mac Pro is going to have a user-accessible PCIe slot because... er, hang on, why does releasing Pascal drivers for Hackintosh and cMP owners in 2017 have anything to do with something that Apple may release in 2018/2019? Won't nVidia be on "Volta" or even the next step by then?

If nVidia had stopped supporting Mac years ago, and suddenly done a U-turn then maybe... wait, no, the forthcoming eGPU support would explain that perfectly as there's going to be demand for external nVidia GPUs as soon as High Sierra hits the streets.

Meanwhile, the only concrete evidence of how hard Apple has been listening to the Pro community about upgradeability is the iMac Pro: a sealed unit with a fixed AMD GPU where you can't even add RAM. But that's only an actual announcement of a real product so reading anything into that would be "convoluted logic", presumably.

 

[ActionableMango]

I don't see anything in the interview to say that they don't still regard Thunderbolt as the answer to "expandability". Federighi uses the word twice - on one occasion he's talking about why people don't want touch screens, the other he's saying why it might be a good idea not to have a RAID array in the box.

We must have read different articles. In the 3 or 4 articles I read about the modular Mac Pro press event, expandability wasn't related to touch screens or RAID. If you have a link to the entire text or video of the event, I would love to see it.

What I did read was specifically in the context of increasing expandability/upgradability beyond what they did with the 6,1:

"we’ve asked the team to go and re-architect and design something great for the future that those Mac Pro customers who want more expandability, more upgradability in the future"​

I don't know how they will accomplish that. Maybe it will be PCIe, or maybe it will be custom parts/kits with official Apple upgrades. It doesn't sound to me like "Thunderbolt was fine for expansions and upgrades, so we'll stick with that". That's not what I get from that quote at all.

If you make a computer that is expandable through Thunderbolt, then say you're going to redesign it for "more" expandability and upgradability, then just make another computer that's only expandable through Thunderbolt... well, I don't know what the point was.

I have to admit though, I am one of the cynical people around here and I could see your prediction coming true anyway.

 

[pat500000]

Ok as suggested in another three by moi I decided it deserves it own thread.

What if the Mac Mini is repositioned like the iMac to elevate to a Mac MiniPro line.

Think about it. Stackable units as seen elsewhere and suggests by previous superdrive & time machine add-on's.

Easy to access. Base unit + additional tiers, then add as many as you want after with whatever hardware until you have a very nice modular tower of your choice.

Maybe this is why the Mac Mini has not received update love and they may be considering merging format to reach a synergetic hybrid moment.

Base Mini - CPU x1 or x2, GPU x1, SSD x1. (coudl be 2 or 3 options here)
Tier two - x2 x4 GPU's, with cooling.
Tier three - HD Array, up to 8/10 drives.
Tier four - More CPUs... what else? More GPU's

There could be other combo tiers.
Imagine modular made to order.

That means those mac mini potential buyers are getting screwed, right?

 

[Joe The Dragon]

Ok as suggested in another three by moi I decided it deserves it own thread.

What if the Mac Mini is repositioned like the iMac to elevate to a Mac MiniPro line.

Think about it. Stackable units as seen elsewhere and suggests by previous superdrive & time machine add-on's.

Easy to access. Base unit + additional tiers, then add as many as you want after with whatever hardware until you have a very nice modular tower of your choice.

Maybe this is why the Mac Mini has not received update love and they may be considering merging format to reach a synergetic hybrid moment.

Base Mini - CPU x1 or x2, GPU x1, SSD x1. (coudl be 2 or 3 options here)
Tier two - x2 x4 GPU's, with cooling.
Tier three - HD Array, up to 8/10 drives.
Tier four - More CPUs... what else? More GPU's

There could be other combo tiers.
Imagine modular made to order.

the mini will need an server class cpu to have the pci-e to do any thing like that.

 

[theluggage]

We must have read different articles.

Maybe we are. I'm going by this article (I'm sure I've already cited it):

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/t...-john-ternus-on-the-state-of-apples-pro-macs/

...which describes itself as a transcript "lightly edited for length and clarity".

Your quote doesn't appear there, the closest match (seraching for 're-architect') seems to be:

The way the system is architected, it just doesn’t lend itself to significant reconfiguration for somebody who might want a different combination of GPUs. That’s when we realized we had to take a step back and completely re-architect what we’re doing and build something that enables us to do these quick, regular updates and keep it current and keep it state of the art, and also allow a little more in terms of adaptability to the different needs of the different pro customers.

...which, like the other snippets I've already posted is clearly talking about Apple's ability to keep the product up-to date and/or offer a better rage of models or BTO options - not user upgradeability.

As I said, the big flaw with the nMP that they're explicitly admitting to is the triangle-in-a-circle design that ties them to dual, medium-power GPUs.

I'm not claiming to have proven anything - just pointing out that if the Next Mac Pro turns out to be either sealed, or no more upgradeable than the nMP (and bearing in mind that the iMac Pro is totally non-upgradeable) then there is nothing in that interview that will make Apple's pants catch fire.

Obviously, if TechCrunch mistakenly thinks that "transcript" means "our editorialised recollection" or "lightly edited" means "significant omissions and changes to wording and context" then all bets are off, but AFAIK they are reasonably reputable.

 

[AidenShaw]

the mini will need an server class cpu to have the pci-e to do any thing like that.

Or a PCIe switch with the quite reasonable caveat that if you try to run all devices at full speed at the same time, there will be some throttling.

Why do so many people have the perception that the number of device PCIe lanes has to exactly match the number of CPU (+PCH) lanes? Very few workloads need everything to run a peak bandwidth simultaneously....

 

[ActionableMango]

...which describes itself as a transcript "lightly edited for length and clarity".

Your quote doesn't appear there, the closest match (seraching for 're-architect')

Thanks for the link, I enjoyed reading the transcript. However, there are several Apple quotes from John Gruber, who was actually there, which do not appear in Techcrunch's transcript.

I don't think Gruber would be completely making up lengthy quotes, so I suspect that Techcrunch has an incomplete copy, or maybe Gruber got an additional private interview.

 

[rkuo]

Yeah, and it took them a year to release the drivers for Mac, which happened to coincide with Apple's press conference about "whups, the Mac Pro is broke". Obviously the two are connected.

No coincidence, surely.

The fact that NVIDIA had just launched the super-powerful Titan Xp - which is sufficiently niche and expensive to make it worth their while going after the Hackintosh and cMP market - had nothing to do with it.

Nor did the release of Thunderbolt 3 machines by Apple or their forthcoming support for external GPUs - which people are mainly going to buy so that they can use NVIDIA GPUs.

Even the fact that the older 900 series cards were getting to be like hen's teeth, generating lots of inquiries from the Hackintosh community about when the Pascal drivers might appear (not that much of a long shot seeing as the 900 drivers were still being actively updated so nVidia were obviously aware of a demand) couldn't possibly have influenced it. Less still the obvious, boring explanation that supporting Hackintosh/cMP users was several places down on their TO DO list and it took them a year to get around to adding Pascal support.

Nope, absolutely not. Instead, it is absolute, definitive proof that Apple's "not this year" Mac Pro is going to have a user-accessible PCIe slot because... er, hang on, why does releasing Pascal drivers for Hackintosh and cMP owners in 2017 have anything to do with something that Apple may release in 2018/2019? Won't nVidia be on "Volta" or even the next step by then?

If nVidia had stopped supporting Mac years ago, and suddenly done a U-turn then maybe... wait, no, the forthcoming eGPU support would explain that perfectly as there's going to be demand for external nVidia GPUs as soon as High Sierra hits the streets.

Meanwhile, the only concrete evidence of how hard Apple has been listening to the Pro community about upgradeability is the iMac Pro: a sealed unit with a fixed AMD GPU where you can't even add RAM. But that's only an actual announcement of a real product so reading anything into that would be "convoluted logic", presumably.

Oh no, I completely agree with you! nVidia updated their macOS drivers to go after the HUGE Hackintosh and cMP markets with the Titan XP! It definitely wasn't because Apple just announced nVidia cards were going to work in shipping Apple products again.

Makes perfect sense! Keep the great insights coming!

 

[AidenShaw]

It definitely wasn't because Apple just announced nVidia cards were going to work in shipping Apple products again.

Do you have a link to that press release?

 

[rkuo]

Do you have a link to that press release?

That's not an actual announcement ... it's just the foregone conclusion of what you expect if Apple releases an expandable/modular computer. You'll put video cards into it just like any PC before it.

 

[Omega Mac]

That means those mac mini potential buyers are getting screwed, right?

You mean now or in this what-if scenario?

In the What-if scenario. I imagine Apple could keep a Mac Mini line up like they have done with the iMac line up before you get to pro option.

This would mean all lines have a standard entry point and a pro point.

Macbook > MacBook Pro
Imac > iMacPro
Mac Mini > MacMini Pro

Mac Pro > ?

 

[pat500000]

You mean now or in this what-if scenario?

In the What-if scenario. I imagine Apple could keep a Mac Mini line up like they have done with the iMac line up before you get to pro option.

This would mean all lines have a standard entry point and a pro point.

Macbook > MacBook Pro
Imac > iMacPro
Mac Mini > MacMini Pro

Mac Pro > ?

Mac pro plus