The core issue though is that the 1/3 of all Mac users is still several multiples larger than the Mac Pro PCI-e card market. 14M Macs per year. 33% is about 4.6M. That's likley at least 10x bigger than the Mac Pro market, let alone the add-on card market to of that bigger subset.
WTF does that have to do with the Mac Pro? I already said the new Mac Pro would make a good gaming Mac or Mac Mini replacement, etc. if it were at reasonable price. The Pro market is what it is. If Apple is going to support it then they should support it, not screw it.
The fact that Thunerbolt products that are variants of PCI-e cards are just the primarily just the same board in a new wrapped along with some updated drivers, actually would help support the PCI-e card market to last longer than it would have if limited to just the Mac Pro demand.
Who is talking about PCI-e? This is about PCI vs Thunderbolt instead of it. I don't know anyone who thinks trying to get an adapter for PCI-e for Thunderbolt is a better idea than a dedicated Thunderbolt port.
It actually was necessary. To get placed on all Mac it needed to be a dual use socket. There is limited edge space for sockets on Mac products. You can create an alternative universe where that isn't true, but in this one that is a very real design requirement.
You seem to be talking about notebooks that have very very limited space. This is a freaking TOWER for god sakes. There's plenty of room for multiple ports. Design requirement? Who's?
Second, adaption of Thunderbolt would be even slower if there was no "backwards compatible" mode to build inertia off of. USB 3.0 got quick
Yeah, but who else is doing it Apple's way? Sony is going to use a USB port for backwards compatibility. Once again, Apple is trying to build support for something no one else seems to want (i.e. Firewire compared to USB).
uptake because there was USB 2.0. USB 3.1 will much slower because USB 3.0 is no where near as large ( USB 2.0 had almost a decade to build a deployed user base). Thunderbolt with a clearly proprietary, Intel only, socket would have even more problems than TB has now. There is a reason why Lightpeak was in USB form factor and why USB folks didn't want their port hijacked.
USB folks? I think you mean the USB consortium. I think a lot of US would just assume they double with the USB ports so we would get MORE OF THEM instead of wasting space on the cases for Thunderbolt ports NO ONE WANTS.
And that includes wasting a Mini-DP port (i.e. it's a royal PITA if you are using Thunderfart to have to keep unplugging the freaking monitor every time you want to change a TB device in line with it (since it's all daisy-chained). I haven't seen ANY hubs for it yet except Apple's monitor and it's still using USB2 ports so NO ONE WANTS IT. Apple needs to get their crap together. They made a deal to have Light Peak (in Thunderbolt form) for the first year EXCLUSIVELY and that only SLOWED the adoption of it by "everyone" that much more. For a company that would supposedly like to see Thunderbolt be the next big thing, they gave away that much more ground to USB3 in the mean time. And as it is, the #1 reason hardly anyone is using TB right now is that most of the devices that ARE available are hard drives and they cost like 50%-300% more than the equivalent USB3 or eSata version with the exact same transfer speeds. One would have to be a flipping idiot to buy a 3TB Thunderbolt drive for $300 when the same one for USB3 costs like $110 with the same throughput (since neither interface is saturated). Thunderbolt makes a good "high end" drive connector, but then "true" high-end uses PCI 3.0 16x ports for high speed, not an external cable.... that runs at 4x (for ONE device since it's shared).
Third, frankly Display Port can also use the help since DVI and HDMI seem to holding their ground. It need another demand push and while Thunderbolt won't help sweep those other two from the field of play it isn't going to hurt places where holding ground gained either.
How does Thunderbolt "help" (mini) Display Port? By making you unplug all your monitors to change your Thunderbolt drives????
1. Sharing bandwidth with GPU. High throughput GPU vendors aren't going to be happen with that. There are GPU cards that uses PCI-e switches. Apple works with none of them. It is a solution with overhead which folks want to shovel under the rug in these alternative universe option enumerations.
All the more reason the GPU should never have been tied to Thunderbolt in the first place, except perhaps as an OPTION. Why would ANYONE want to waste Thunderbolt throughput on graphics output? It makes no sense except perhaps to drive 3 monitors (that have thunderbolt pass-through) from one port on a notebook where ports are a premium. That's not enough reason to tie Thunderbolt to the GPU IMO.
3. Exactly why would the GPU vendors want to create basic designs which puts more money into Intel's pockets. Intel is already replaced them in terms of deployed GPU units. Clearly on its way to becoming #1 in the Graphics market. So Nvidia and AMD want to speed that up? Not. If think the PC system vendors are a bit skittish about Intel only solutions.... the GPU vendors are in another zipcode.
You're just giving more reasons why the new Mac Pro should have used all PCI 3.0 expansion. In fact, they could have used the video cards they did use and STILL offer PCI 3.0 in a conventional case. The ONLY reason they can't use PCI 3.0 expansion in the new Mac Pro is that they chose to shove the thing in that cylindrical trash can instead of a normal tower case.
Given they moved away from rack mount servers they haven't particularly been trying to fit into square rack holes. The gratuitous handle height on the current model isn't friendly to horizontal rectangular holes either.
Yeah and that just proves how unfriendly Apple is to professionals. They don't update the software or hardware in a timely fashion and don't listen to their customers. It's going to cost them the market in the end. I hope spoiled rich kids is enough of a market to keep Apple going indefinitely.
Large shops seem more likely target. One-man-band shows aren't. Past video ingest into a network storage for a team solution custom video cards for what? Transform? Done. Output to reference monitors... not that huge of a gap.
And yet one-man-bands is who this new model is targeted to. Ask any of the REAL professional on here how much they like having no PCI expansion in the new Mac Pro rather than the spoiled rich kids who want the thing to play Doom 4.0.
What pro audio gear company doesn't have new USB 2.0 offerings?
"Pro" and USB 2.0 don't go together. USB 2.0 tends to be laggy due to overhead (not bandwidth which is why most devices are still FW400 since they don't need more bandwidth, just low overhead and since FW800 is backwards compatible with FW400, it keeps the largest market possible). USB 3.0 would solve that dilemma, but they don't seem to be embracing USB 3.0 very quickly either.
What pro audio gear company couldn't sell more product to more Mac users if enclosed their PCI-e card in a Thunderbolt box. Their "card" would work not just with Mac Pro but with millions more Macs. Why wouldn't they be interested in trying to sell those million more users?
WTF are you talking about? WTF would an audio company want to put their Pro Audio box on a PCI-e card instead of just using FW400/800 and/or even Thunderbolt directly? PCI boxes cost a lot of money (hell the hubs we are promised cost hundreds of dollars). My FW audio box cost $400. It would cost me like $1000 to get a PCI card + Thunderbolt box and it would take up a lot more room. It's a FW400 box. My current MBP can have it and a FW800 drive plugged in at the same time since my MBP has BOTH FW400 and F800 ports (now that's convenience). It also has an expansion port with a USB 3.0 card plugged into it (sorry newer Macbook Pros before USB 3.0 came out; you can't have USB 3.0, but ironically my 2008 model CAN and DOES have USB 3.0 on it now). 2008 was the pinnacle of Macbook Pro design. It has gone all aesthetic since then with fewer expansion options and ports available. If my battery dies on a plane, I can plug a backup in. If your battery on newer Macbooks dies on a plane, you're SOL.
A FW400 cable with a FW800 shaped socket at the end is no more an adapter as a USB socket A to microUSB cable is.
??? An adapter is an adapter dude. It's still a PITA compared to having a dedicated port since you have to carry the things around and NOT LOSE THEM on the go.
Frankly the whole stuck in the FW400 ghetto is in what part what killed FW. No need for speed increased and standard dies off on devices tracking higher workloads.
I don't know WTF you're talking about. If a device doesn't NEED the extra bandwidth, why would you want to force it to be FW800 when FW800 can run FW400 devices also. They're only mistake was not making a backwards compatible port that doesn't need an adapter (but that would have probably required some foresight).
A non fact. As big as the USB market? No. No one? Also no. Your whole post started off alluding to millions of users.
Again, I don't WTF you're going on about. You seemed determined to argue for arguments sake rather than actual relevance.
Just got through harping on only really need a FW400 speed connection. That's PCI-e v2 x1 territory. Thunderbolt is significantly faster than that. There is hardly anything audo that pushes Thunderbolt except for small corner cases of extremism.
I was talking about audio adapters and convenience (i.e. you have to waste one of those precious Thunderbolt ports with an adapter that won't have a pass-through on it in order to use a Firewire device of any kind with a Thunderbolt port PLUS pay $50 for the ability to do so) whereas a dedicated port costs nothing extra and doesn't tie up a port. The Mac Pro has plenty of room on its case. The fact my tiny little Mac Mini 2012 model has a DEDICATED FW800 port and the new Mac Pro does NOT is a freaking JOKE.
