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Hard truths about the new modular Mac Pro

StuAff said:
I'd like them to build a new Cube. No, not a new version of the G4 Cube, this one...
Rather more roomy than the tube, would be plenty capable of taking some very serious hardware.
Can't innovate any more? Go back to the future.....
1200px-NeXTcube.jpg
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Seriously, you guys remember the backplane on this thing? 4 massive slots, 1 occupied by the motherboard. You could get what, a DSP board, the NeXTDimension video card, and I forget what else. And these are major, motherboard-sized and capable cards in their own rights.

Wouldn't be cheap, nothing like this ever will be, but I can afford one now! Build it! I'd much rather a vanity project such as this vs a coffee table photo book. The 6,1 may have been flawed (mostly killed by internal policies - no technical reason they couldn't have spec bumped to under clocked 1070s - anyway...) but I'm glad they built it. It's beautiful.

The first time I saw full motion and color video on a computer was on a NeXT Cube with the NeXTDimension video card. Dude was playing the 80s version of "Excalibur" on the NeXT CRT. Screw Super VHS!!! THIS was resolution!! LOL

http://pcmuseum.tripod.com/nextcube.htm
 
Flint Ironstag said:
The first time I saw full motion and color video on a computer was on a NeXT Cube with the NeXTDimension video card. Dude was playing the 80s version of "Excalibur" on the NeXT CRT. Screw Super VHS!!! THIS was resolution!! LOL

http://pcmuseum.tripod.com/nextcube.htm
Click to expand...

I seem to recall a story that at least one NeXT demonstration, possibly when Jobs was trying to attract investors, was faked, and was simply playing video off a hidden laserdisk player :D
 
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Ph.D. said:
OK, so what does Apple need a year to do? Make an artistic enclosure? Come up with proprietary connectors for a "modular" backplane? Send a group of designers to some mountaintop to meditate on what the perfect Pro machine would be? Yes, that must be it. Otherwise, if Steve was here, it would be "I want a new design on my desk by Monday!"
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I suspect that they are holding back to see if people will accept the iMac pro as their workstation before deciding to just kill off the Mac Pro line.
 
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Luis Ortega said:
I suspect that they are holding back to see if people will accept the iMac pro as their workstation before deciding to just kill off the Mac Pro line.
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Well, this is the same company owned by the guy who not long ago uttered:

"I think if you're looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one? Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones."

Apple thinks they know what their users want. They want to reinvent the wheel. The problem is, the wheel was never flawed in the first place. And so when they can't deliver what they're supposed to for so long, users begin to leave. Apple's genius is simply gone. It left and never came back.

It wasn't always this way, however. ...Too bad I was personally too small to appreciate what they did...

Perhaps I am overdramatizing it.
 
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mattspace said:
I seem to recall a story that at least one NeXT demonstration, possibly when Jobs was trying to attract investors, was faked, and was simply playing video off a hidden laserdisk player
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Was there like recordable laser discs back then? Or did Jobs just ordered a glass master for some demonstrations?
(Yes, I still do have my LD collection, haven't checked how they look now for years, IIRC some showed oxidation few years back... Also sony's player in a box somewhere, waitng for changing the caps in PSU forewer, I guess...)
 
toke lahti said:
Was there like recordable laser discs back then? Or did Jobs just ordered a glass master for some demonstrations?
(Yes, I still do have my LD collection, haven't checked how they look now for years, IIRC some showed oxidation few years back... Also sony's player in a box somewhere, waitng for changing the caps in PSU forewer, I guess...)
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They existed, called Recordable Laser Videodisc (RLV). It work exactly like a giant CD-R, and the reflective surface was a bit magenta in color. I can’t recall the writers being comercially available though, probably limited to post-production and mastering studio usages.
 
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Apple has missed selling at least 9 new Mac Pro's to me since 2010.

I used to update my Mac Pro's almost every year to gain the greater speed and processing power. It was an easy write off expense for my business. We bought like clockwork.

I now have one 2013 Trashcan Mac Pro, and three 2010 Mac Pros - each of these machines would have been replaced at least 3 times since 2010. But Apple stopped making anything compelling - in fact, the 2010's, because of their PCI slots, are still more useful than the trashcan.

The facilities that I work with are stuck too. I can't imagine how many machines Apple could have sold just by making a good box that kept up with the technology.

Apple is seriously dysfunctional as a computer maker, and have lost an incredible amount of units sold, plus have tarnished their reputation with professional content creators.

And that failure is directly on Tim Cook's head. And maybe Jony 'can it be thinner' Ive.

It would have been a no brainer to just make faster, expandable machines and update them every year instead of this dumb 'Bang & Olufsen' approach to industrial hardware.

Imagine if Ford tried to make pickup truck and put in an underpowered engines, made the truck bed smaller (and thinner) - so you had to buy another truck bed from a third party, then made the cab into a shiny sphere, and finally made the whole mess hard to repair.

You wouldn't sell many, as any sane person would clearly know.
 
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jjhny said:
Apple has missed selling at least 9 new Mac Pro's to me since 2010.

I used to update my Mac Pro's almost every year to gain the greater speed and processing power. It was an easy write off expense for my business. We bought like clockwork.

I now have one 2013 Trashcan Mac Pro, and three 2010 Mac Pros - each of these machines would have been replaced at least 3 times since 2010. But Apple stopped making anything compelling - in fact, the 2010's, because of their PCI slots, are still more useful than the trashcan.

The facilities that I work with are stuck too. I can't imagine how many machines Apple could have sold just by making a good box that kept up with the technology.

Apple is seriously dysfunctional as a computer maker, and have lost an incredible amount of units sold, plus have tarnished their reputation with professional content creators.

And that failure is directly on Tim Cook's head. And maybe Jony 'can it be thinner' Ive.

It would have been a no brainer to just make faster, expandable machines and update them every year instead of this dumb 'Bang & Olufsen' approach to industrial hardware.

Imagine if Ford tried to make pickup truck and put in an underpowered engines, made the truck bed smaller (and thinner) - so you had to buy another truck bed from a third party, then made the cab into a shiny sphere, and finally made the whole mess hard to repair.

You wouldn't sell many, as any sane person would clearly know.
Click to expand...

 
The fifth hard truth will be the price when it's out. The reason I will wait for the mMP before building a hack: I am very interested in how Apple will navigate (1) users' needs for expandability with bang for the buck standard components and (2) their endless drive to come up with something "awesome, amazing and incredible".
 
I'm guessing that it will be a big, glossy cube (amongst the other things which I think it may be) with relatively-good expansion on its inside. Won't have as many traditional HDD bays or any optical bays, which will keep it much smaller than the traditional Mac Pro tower. I'm hoping that their definition of 'modular' is our definition of 'modular,' BTW.
[doublepost=1511083579][/doublepost]I wonder if the motherboard will be concealed and daughterboards will exist for everything, save for maybe RAM and SSD blades. I just sometimes have odd ideas of what the design would be like. Right now, I am imagining a hood scoop belching out hot air.
 
I think Apple's given up on HD and optical bays- though both would be nice, of course- as they've been dropped from every other model. I could do without, but drive bays obviously means fewer dongles and power bricks (if only....) Depends which critics they've actually listened to.
What I don't think it'll be: just a headless iMac Pro, or tube mark two. Given the amount of stick they've taken for the tube, its design flaws, and then the mea culpa meeting, if they're going to build and sell a Mac Pro, I would imagine they'll want to make it worth the bother. Not doing so would be another PR mess and utterly pointless for the financials. They aren't going to want to sell you an iMac Pro, even the fully-loaded 18 core with all the bells and whistles, if they can upsell you an MP, display, etc at $$$ more. Some overlap with iMac Pro specs at the lower end, but clear blue water at the top.
 
If they now take standard NVMe drives, just leave enough PCIe lanes for 2 or 3 of them and complaints will drop dramatically. The typical use case will include editing 4K video so fast internal primary storage, with TB3 (or 4) external storage as well.
 
MarkJames68 said:
If they now take standard NVMe drives, just leave enough PCIe lanes for 2 or 3 of them and complaints will drop dramatically. The typical use case will include editing 4K video so fast internal primary storage, with TB3 (or 4) external storage as well.
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Agreed. If the internal storage is user-upgradeable, enough slots/capacity & fast enough, many people would be happy, me included.
 
I think we have to remember that the G4 Cube was a failure, tho, at the time people had the choice to opt for the full tower G4.

The trouble with a Cube type design is RAM slots and CPU/GPU heat, as well as the VRM/Powersupply. People just aren't going to accept a "Pro" machine with less than 128 GB of Ram capacity. Apple could opt for four Ram slots, to get the form factor small, however 32 GB ram modules are rather expensive, and I don't think they would be able to take advantage of Quad Channel ram in this configuration.

I think Apple's target customers would be ok with one GPU on a 16x bus, and multi M.2, then adding everything else via TB3, but that's not going to grow Apple's market share, and Pro users that already jumped ship are not going to come back for anything less than a full workstation tower.

Apple, quit trying to reinvent the wheel, the PC Tower has evolved as the perfect fit of form and function, I don't live in Jonny Ive's one room loft where every cubic cm needs to be optimized.

A tower fits just fine with my needs.
 
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well we all can't know. but from what i've seen from apple the last 5 years, i seriously doubt that the new "pro" will be the thing everybody wants: simply a new tower. most likely apple will come up with some new odd modular invention, which will either not support all the the possibilites of a windows pc or being priced so high, that it does not make sense to buy it. lets face it, with the success of the iphone and ios gadgets apple somehow lost the connection to its former users, for the new management an ipad pro is "pro" enough and they don't truly care about users who need a workstation with macos. what they want is the bigger pie of clueless users buying Trashcans and iMac Pros with everything soldered and glued inside.
 
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