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Almost the end of March
- Thread starter tony3d
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Maybe they are such a low priority that they can't even be bothered to take the time to discontinue them.
No. Again as had been pointed out none of their major competitors have shipped a substantively newer box either. It is one thing to retire after fall behind.... but so far it is a battle of web page composers at their respective sites. The newest box vs. newest box score is " zero vs. zero (vs. zero vs. zero vs. zero) " . Kind of early to throw in the towel. Like dropping out of March Madness before any games are played.
Once their competitors have gotten through their initial wave of early adopters, the reviews from pundits and users are a couple of months old, and there is range of PCI-e v3.0 cards out on the market .... at that point the box would be "old tech" of the same class.
However, in the reduced context of the Mac only market the box still does things the current (and likely this year's updates ) Mac cohorts don't do. Especially when it comes to large RAM footprints and high core counts. (toss out the outlier Xeon 3500 series based models ).
It could limp along to the full 2-year mark after the 2010 actually shipped (Aug 2012). 2.5 years would be doable ( get to August and announce a 6 month retirement window. ) with perhaps a $100-200 drop in price. Apple is going to have to do Mountain Lion for it anyway. OS X 10.9 also probably. The hardware R&D for the box is probably already covered. So the ongoing capital investment cost is one they have to make anyway (OS ports).
Likewise if the number of Mac variants is going to increase with a MBA 15" ( so have MBP 13" 15" 17" and MBA 11" 13" 15" ) then Mac Pro could be eased out then (before the OS X 10.8 roll out). Keeps the number of total Mac models on the market constant. (e.g., MacBook disappears when MBA 11" appears. ) Or an new iMac (extra super Model gets introduced).
My guess it is going to turn out to be some quirky part that their primary competitors are not waiting for that will delay the intro. ( perhaps an Nvidia GPU , Xeon E3 Ivy Bridge for a smaller Thunderbolt oriented model , or some gross Thunderbolt-workaround driven custom hack , etc. that they have somehow hooked the design to. ). There will be much wailing on the floor how they could have skipped and could have just shipped sooner counterbalanced with some minority of folks who 'just love' the additional quirky feature.
Apple doesn't "have to" beat HP/Dell/etc. to market with a E5 based update. They only need to show up around the same time. Even just "fashionably late" would work out fine for them. ( There is a relatively small number of folks they can keep from bolting earily but a fair number of them are looking for any excuse to bolt anyway. ) Apple plays a long term game plan. Plus/minus a quarter isn't really a big deal if have a 3 year plan.
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In 2011, because of WWDC 2011 and Lion's release in July, all hardware intros slid out of June. It doesn't make much sense to intro OS X 10.7.5 (or x.y.6 , x.y.7 , etc . ) for a new machine 3-4 weeks before the minor number , *.y.*, is about to change; this year to 10.8.0. About a 4-6 weeks before a major OS upgrade the hardware releases are going to stop.
It saves Apple money and complexity over the long term by just sliding anything very close back till after the new OS drop.
It is bad enough that Apple likely will be still trying to get some glitches out of 10.7.x before the 10.8 release for the hardware already released. There is little justification to throwing yet another porting config into that the mix of release solutions they will be juggling at that point.
A 10.7.4 in April for new laptops (and perhaps Mac Pro) or a 10.7.5 in early May would make sense, but once hit mid-late May there is too much to put into prepping for 10.(n+1) to be doing anything other than dropping critical bug fixes for the previous release.
Since Apple has parked WWDC 2-8 weeks in front of the intended "yearly" updates to OS X ..... , that would strongly suggest they intend to remove Mac product updates from WWDC. The focus is only on the OS X "half" of the equation for WWDC. Developer's Conference ... focus on software .... shocking. Utterly shocking plan. ( instead of a silly iPhone dog and pony show. ). If they really are going to do yearly updates then there should be 20-30 mins of new OS X "dog and pony" demos for WWDC keynote every year. [ Likewise iOS will likely be demoing "new and better iOS6" around then also for 20-40 mins. So where is the timeslot for the new hardware ? ]
In 2010, it was the same thing in the March-May timeframe. "Apple is saving the Mac Pro for a super-duper center ring show at WWDC 2010"... not.
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By now the Mac Pros are surely very profitable, but it is merely a drop in the ocean of Apple's income. If they are serious about pushing the post-PC agenda it would make sense to kill the Mac Pro and it will barely make a dent on the bottom line. It might even rationalize their operations by letting them reassign resources to the rest of the line.
I suppose that if Apple release a Mac Pro with no remodel, just a refresh, then it's that it is near death. If it is a redesigned case then it would show Apple still care for higher end solutions and invested for a while. I just hope that we have at least one more round of hardware so that we can get better GFX cards.
WWDC 2012 is my best guess for when we'll hear something, anything. No news by WWDC will be bad news. I actually send out emails now to the Apple news and rumor sites to ask them to try and dig out info because they are so concentrated on the consumer stuff and I want something to chew on while I wait
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Now that I re read this, I agree completely. Shucks
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I don't think it has anything to do with actual money and more to do with resources. What exactly are the Mac Pro engineers doing to help with Apple's main goal of killing Google?
Slowly slowly supermicro just released their server boards some tasty on board features:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/Xeon_X9_E5.cfm?pg=MB&show=SELECT&type=SW
X9DAi / X9DAE / X9DA7 (Coming Soon)
• Dual Socket R (LGA 2011) support:
** Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 family; QPI up to 8.0GT/s
• Intel® C602 Chipset
• 16 DIMM, up to 512GB DDR3 1600MHz ECC RDIMMs
• 3 (x16) PCI-E 3.0, 2 (x8) PCI-E 3.0, and 1 (x4) PCI-E 3.0 in x8 slots
• Intel® i350 Dual port Gigabit Ethernet LAN; 2x 1394a headers
• 6 SATA2 ("7" & "E" SKUs) / 8 SATA2 ("i" SKU) and 2 SATA3 ports
• 8 SAS2 ports via LSI 2308 w/ RAID 0, 1, 10 ("7" SKU)
• RealTek ALC889 7.1 HD 8 Channel Audio w/ S/PDIF header
• 4x USB 3.0 and 7x USB 2.0 ports
• Form factor: E-ATX, 12" x 13"
*
X9DRG-QF (Coming Soon)
• Dual Socket R (LGA 2011) support:
** Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 family; QPI up to 8.0GT/s
• Intel® C602 Chipset
• 16 DIMM, up to 512GB DDR3 1600MHz ECC RDIMMs
• 4 (x16) PCI-E 3.0 (double-width), 2 (x8) PCI-E 3.0 (1 in x16) slots,
** and 1 (x4) PCI-E 2.0 in x8 slot
• Intel® i350 Dual port Gigabit Ethernet LAN
• 8 SATA2 and 2 SATA3 ports
• 9x USB 2.0 ports (4 rear + 4 via headers + 1 Type A)
• IPMI 2.0 and KVM with dedicated LAN
• Form factor: Proprietary, 15.2" x 13"
http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/Xeon_X9_E5.cfm?pg=MB&show=SELECT&type=SW
X9DAi / X9DAE / X9DA7 (Coming Soon)
• Dual Socket R (LGA 2011) support:
** Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 family; QPI up to 8.0GT/s
• Intel® C602 Chipset
• 16 DIMM, up to 512GB DDR3 1600MHz ECC RDIMMs
• 3 (x16) PCI-E 3.0, 2 (x8) PCI-E 3.0, and 1 (x4) PCI-E 3.0 in x8 slots
• Intel® i350 Dual port Gigabit Ethernet LAN; 2x 1394a headers
• 6 SATA2 ("7" & "E" SKUs) / 8 SATA2 ("i" SKU) and 2 SATA3 ports
• 8 SAS2 ports via LSI 2308 w/ RAID 0, 1, 10 ("7" SKU)
• RealTek ALC889 7.1 HD 8 Channel Audio w/ S/PDIF header
• 4x USB 3.0 and 7x USB 2.0 ports
• Form factor: E-ATX, 12" x 13"
*
X9DRG-QF (Coming Soon)
• Dual Socket R (LGA 2011) support:
** Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 family; QPI up to 8.0GT/s
• Intel® C602 Chipset
• 16 DIMM, up to 512GB DDR3 1600MHz ECC RDIMMs
• 4 (x16) PCI-E 3.0 (double-width), 2 (x8) PCI-E 3.0 (1 in x16) slots,
** and 1 (x4) PCI-E 2.0 in x8 slot
• Intel® i350 Dual port Gigabit Ethernet LAN
• 8 SATA2 and 2 SATA3 ports
• 9x USB 2.0 ports (4 rear + 4 via headers + 1 Type A)
• IPMI 2.0 and KVM with dedicated LAN
• Form factor: Proprietary, 15.2" x 13"
Nope you've got it completely backwards.
Apple should kill the MacBook Pros, Airs and iMacs as these are completely unnecessary now we have iPads.
However, the Mac Pro is in the Workstation space, not the PC space.
So obviously the Mac Pro will end up being the only computer Apple makes!
look at this way...
What is going to create all the content and applications for iPads? iMac's just don't cut it. My 2008 pro with 48gb ram and 2xssd drives is still 3 times faster than the latest top spec iMac comes anywhere near the raw computing power but no where near the graphics capabilities. Or the rendering capabilities.
You are always going to need top of the line machines to feed content to the smaller models. Even in 10 years when the ipad is paper thin, 200 hour battery life and 50 times faster... the desktops will still be 'X' times faster. In 10-20 years I can see the end of the dedicated desktops and computing power will be in the cloud but the infrastructure / broadband speed is not there yet
The pro is probably the cheapest machine in the line to re-engineer.
Conservative estimates for the mac pro is about:
1% of the 5 million desktops sold last year being MacPros
50,000 @ $5000 =
250 million dollars. And that with a 2 year old machine. Whilst that is a small drop in the iOS Ocean thats some serious money - and probably a very profitable machine - and the The fact is Apple are not going to let Dell / HP take one penny of profit from them. Now the Chips are there and everything is in place they will release it.
Apple have always pushed technical boundaries - not always successfully - but they've created some astounding products. Who knows they may blow us away with a dual chip 16 core setup.
If they take away the mac pros then they will severely damage any ties they have in business... which will probably mean they IT departments will not buy iMacs ( they have already invested in Screens ) and push customers to windows ... and if they do they they they may 'buy in' to windows 8 and the new win tablets coming up...
The sales of the iPad and iPhone have pushed sale massively the other way into desktops and laptops - I know at least 20 people that have bought iMac, laptops and Pros because they can see how it all fits. If they don't have the top end they are missing out on a massive Key market for themselves - the developer and content creator.
Kinda repeating myself here I realise - but I hope you get the point. Steve Jobs and Apple's Key thinking was Full vertical integration. All the hardware, All the software need to fit and work together ( and the whole selling structure ) - From the lowest end device - the Ipod touch/ipads/iphones > the most powerful workstation all on one operating system ( ok - ios is a branch of OSX - but it is iOS development environment )
Oh and post PC doesn't just mean the the end of any Workstations... Just as there are still some people who really do need trucks, so there will always be some who need a Workstation. More people, though, are realising that a tablet or a phone does what they need with out having to sit at a desk in the spare room.
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This is the way it should work (maybe not the killing Macbook Pros and iMacs part, but it's the right idea).
But again, the Mac Pro has nothing to do with competing with Google. It just doesn't have mindshare at Apple.
There is nothing wrong with the Mac Pro case. Tweaking the case just to tweak it is not what Apple does. As long as it hit the functional specifications for the product, the look will stay the same (the internals may move around a bit).
However, there are 2 relatively new (with respect to the design's origins) things that probably should drive a remodel of the case.
1. They need a more easily rack mounted case. The Mac Pro is almost gratuitously hostile to being racked. The handles are about an inch too tall to fit. When the XServe was around that was its jobs, but it isn't around anymore. There is zero reason to force a separation of duties anymore.
Just a bit more deeper and/or wider and could slightly shrink the height enough to be "rack" wide when flipped horizontal.
2. Is 220-250W the new 'normal' power range for the higher end video cards? If so then they need to tweak the middle thermal zone a bit. (e.g., move the 3.5" drive bays out, rework back panel placement , etc. ). Depends if Apple believes the GPU vendors are in a temporary "space heater" war similar to what Intel/AMD engaged in several years ago (before customers and pragmatics outlined that was the wrong directions) or they intend to permanent battle the top end CPU packages to top heat production honors.
there are some Apple secondary things also like their jihad against optical drives that could impact the external slots/sleds that could bring some minor changes ( e.g. replace ODDs with 2.5" drive sleds. )
There is zero need for a new case just for new GPU cards. New cards just need new drivers as long as they are in the same historical power range the Mac Pro case was designed for.
I actually send out emails now to the Apple news and rumor sites to ask them to try and dig out info because they are so concentrated on the consumer stuff and I want something to chew on while I wait
Chuckle... the rumor sites don't ignore Mac Pro rumors. Those are always good for a bucket of ad views. Those always have an "xMac ... need a mini tower , cheaper model" subthread. They also draw out the "I can make a cheaper box with my trusty screwdriver and get higher <insert benchmark dujour > numbers out of it"
The Mac Pro team and suppliers are a small (limited in number ) bunch. There aren't alot of them to 'blab' about new products and if they do it is much easier for Apple to track down who is "Mr. Blabber-mouth". So they don't do much talking. The vast majority of folks at Apple have no idea what is going on with the Mac Pro. Neither are the competing "boxes with slots" on the Windows PC side a significant threat to Apple ( so there isn't even motivation to do "strategic leaks" through the unofficial sources. )
The Mac Pro is operates inside the normal rules for Apple. Don't talk about it in advance. Release a new one when it makes sense for an incremental upgrade (parts and software are ready ). Mini , iMac , Airport , TimeCapsule , etc etc. ... lots of other Apple products in the same boat.
LOL. You have the completely wrong criteria Apple is using.
It is about growth.
Sure the iPads are growing rapidly but relative to the Mac Pro's the MBP, MBAs and iMacs are significantly outdistancing the Mac Pro also. If the Mac product line-up was tightly coupled to the Mac Pro the Mac product line-up would be dead.
Yes there is a Mac Pro growth dip over last couple of years because of the refresh delay. Apple knows that and is highly likely the only reason it hasn't been cancelled already. However, even with refreshed parts it won't see the growth numbers the MBA and MBP are demonstrating once the initial backlog bubble is popped.
You've got the computer industry backwards. The smaller computers raise up and kill the larger ones. Being at the top of the pyramid chain the Mac Pro is the dinosaur and the MBA, MBP, mini are the mammals. As the CPU/GPUs get smaller and faster each generation to cover most folks workloads, the Mac Pro's share gets smaller.
If Apple followed death spiral pricing and let the Mac Pros rise in price over time. ( IBM 360 -------> multiple million z-Series ) then perhaps they would be the last standing. Apple doesn't follow that death spiral philosophy though. Apple will let other vendors claim the "primarily just need compute cycles" shrinking fragment with Linux and variants of Windows. They don't need the highest market share. Just the market share with the highest potential over the long term for a significantly large enough group of users.
Retreating into the Mac Pro space would end up with a lower market share than Linux. And back to the sub 3% overall with respect to Windows.
The iPad is going to achieve parity as alternative PC form factor for those price points. Not entirely replace them.
Poor memory? The current models were updated July 27th, 2010. The CPUs they use were released on March 16th, 2010. Always one of the first indeed.
This has never happened. Ever.
Supercomputers have been replaced by clusters. The first workstations were replaced by towers, which were replaced by more towers. The all in one continues to get replaced by all in ones.
Give me one historical example where this has actually happened. I don't see real Mac Pro canabalization. I see iMac customers who either originally bought more than they needed, or progressed from the pro iMac DV, who progressed from the pro Artemis G3, who progressed from the Power Mac 5X00.
Pros have been using all in ones for a long, long time. The old Power Mac line had a dedicated all in one line.
The problem with your entire theory is as technology gets smaller and faster, the requirements increase to match. Now we're computing the human genome, editing in IMAX resolutions, working on cutting edge 3D graphics, and still pushing the current hardware to it's limits. Let me know when you can do that on an Macbook, mmmkay?
And Apple's lack of interest in that market doesn't mean the market doesn't exist.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/di...st_Class_Ivy_Bridge_Processors_This_Year.html
Yeah.... although I wouldn't be surprised if Haswell starts to trickle out first.
It would have made sense for Apple and any of these other vendors to get something to market quickly had the cpus become available late last year rather than recently. At this point it probably matters way less.
That's the thing. I think they'll release it around Mountain Lion. Then of course there will be the wait for applications to work reasonably well under Mountain Lion. It varies, but it can take a couple months.
I don't fully understand the drive for a new case as long as it works. No one buys them for aesthetics. They fit fine underneath a desk. The rackmount argument would be the truly credible one. I don't think they'd update because a few gpus are running slightly hot. I do wish they'd get 10 bit displayport drivers
. That's the main thing I've wanted for a long time.That actually made me laugh, especially the "trusty screwdriver" part.
This made me laugh. But I don't believe that's the way Apple sees things.
I'd like to see how the 5,1 Mac Pro motherboard differs from the standard Intel design, because I don't see Apple using all of the specs supermicro offer on the first of those two you show, never mind the second !
Somewhere along the line Intel realized that not many people were buying their $1000 i7s when they had already bloody good performance with another i7 at less than half the price ?
I don't fully understand the drive for a new case as long as it works. No one buys them for aesthetics. They fit fine underneath a desk. The rackmount argument would be the truly credible one. I don't think they'd update because a few gpus are running slightly hot. I do wish they'd get 10 bit displayport drivers
Johnny Ive is a top dog at Apple. Design is godly at Apple. Maybe you don't buy them for aesthetics, but be sure that the design is an excruciatingly iterative process. Seeing as iPad "3" and iPhone 4S reused the same design as previous generations, maybe Ive's team had some time to spend on the towers. My Mac Pro may be out of sight under the desk but I know it's not a Dell box. You may take me for a freak but I actually stroke the damn thing every now and again, it just feels too good !
Nothing is fundamentally wrong with the actual design, excepts that it is not up to scratch with where Apple is going.
<speculation> In my opinion the rack mount theory will be a design principle, bringing smaller form factor. So exit optical drives, ditch 4x3.5" bays in favor of 2x2.5" slots, 1 PCI slot for GFX maybe 2, a few standard connectors and of course the single or dual processor board with RAM. All the rest goes through ThunderBolt, like it or not ! </speculation, don't bash me>
In addition, a bit of comfort for those of us thinking the Mac Pro's user base is close to zero, here is a screenshot of the latest poll over at french site macgeneration.com. After over 5000 votes the Mac Pro has more users than the mini !
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Total Mac Sales last year were in the range 15 to 20 million units.
If 6% of those were Mac Pros that is around 1 million units, which implies several billion dollars of revenue for the Mac Pro line.
Those figures are, very approximately, in a similar range to the figures that you get if you assume that Apple has a similar volume of Mac Pro sales to HP's Workstation sales.
Just as a quick note, to recap-
- I absolutely believe the Mac pro will get at least one more refresh.
- It will have a new case.
But looking back at 2010, it took the new Mac Pros almost 6 months to get released after the Xeons it needed existed.
Apple has: an entire refresh of their overall portable lineup coming (possibly with "Retina" displays), and of course the GodPhone 5 this fall. When the Mac Pro gets replaced, it'll probably either just arrive as a silent update to the web page, or get mixed into the, "All New Apple Everything, with New Cases & No Optical Drives!" refresh.
Either way, I seriously doubt Apple cares if the people still waiting for a new Mac Pro, need to wait another 4 weeks or 4 months, before it shows up.
- I absolutely believe the Mac pro will get at least one more refresh.
- It will have a new case.
But looking back at 2010, it took the new Mac Pros almost 6 months to get released after the Xeons it needed existed.
Apple has: an entire refresh of their overall portable lineup coming (possibly with "Retina" displays), and of course the GodPhone 5 this fall. When the Mac Pro gets replaced, it'll probably either just arrive as a silent update to the web page, or get mixed into the, "All New Apple Everything, with New Cases & No Optical Drives!" refresh.
Either way, I seriously doubt Apple cares if the people still waiting for a new Mac Pro, need to wait another 4 weeks or 4 months, before it shows up.
Fastest Macpro from 2008 is 10% slower than the fastest iMac according to benchmarks. A top end macbook pro is slightly faster than your mac pro.
http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/mac-benchmarks/
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Why bother with a new case if they discontinue the line anyway after the next refresh?