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MP 7,1 Is the new 7,1 Mac Pro a failure on arrival
- Thread starter ZombiePhysicist
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The confusion here is coming from the gap that has closed between low-mid workstation/server CPU's and high-end desktop CPUs. A quad core I7 was never really much of a comparison to a Xeon with 10+ cores, but now we have desktop chips that out perform most server parts for a lot less money. I know that's not the full picture, but that's enough for a lot of potential Mac Pro customers.
How many Mac Pro customers will ever get more than 256GB RAM? Most wont. How many will need multiple workstation-class GPU's?. Not many. The Mac Pro is engineered to support quite high specs, but only a small percentage of Mac Pro customers will actually need these. Apple have created a computer to provide for the 0.00001% of their customer base who will use these features and priced it as such. A lot of engineering effort has gone into it, but it's overkill for most Mac Pro customers.
Apple would have been better off designing this with two motherboard options. One for the mainstream workstation user with 256GB limit, and not so many PCI slots, and a separate motherboard for the high-end workstation user with the 1.5TB RAM option and all the PCI slots. A single case design could be used for both and the headline figures of the high-end model could be used for bragging rights, but with a much lower and more acceptable starting price. HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc all have lower-end models in their workstation range. Not all of them can take multiple CPUs and TB's of RAM. Most are single socket with modest amounts of RAM and you pay the premium over a regular desktop for the better engineering, drivers, support and maintenance, but this premium doesn't bulk the price up to the point where the consumer thinks it's too expensive.
This is what Apple is getting wrong - too much of the engineering cost of the high-end product is included in the cost of the base model and this is too much for many customers to accept. They just don't see the benefit when looking at lower-end configs of the Mac Pro. It's a product that only makes sense when maxed out and compared with other high-end workstations. No amount of marketing is going to convince buys of the previous 5,1 Mac Pro that an iMac or iMac Pro is good for them. They want internal expansion and freedom of choice for hardware that comes with a tower computer, not an AIO. And at 6K starting price the Mac Pro doesn't look attractive. There are plenty of youtubers saying it looks like great value, but they are been paid to say that. It's really not good value at the low end.
How many Mac Pro customers will ever get more than 256GB RAM? Most wont. How many will need multiple workstation-class GPU's?. Not many. The Mac Pro is engineered to support quite high specs, but only a small percentage of Mac Pro customers will actually need these. Apple have created a computer to provide for the 0.00001% of their customer base who will use these features and priced it as such. A lot of engineering effort has gone into it, but it's overkill for most Mac Pro customers.
Apple would have been better off designing this with two motherboard options. One for the mainstream workstation user with 256GB limit, and not so many PCI slots, and a separate motherboard for the high-end workstation user with the 1.5TB RAM option and all the PCI slots. A single case design could be used for both and the headline figures of the high-end model could be used for bragging rights, but with a much lower and more acceptable starting price. HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc all have lower-end models in their workstation range. Not all of them can take multiple CPUs and TB's of RAM. Most are single socket with modest amounts of RAM and you pay the premium over a regular desktop for the better engineering, drivers, support and maintenance, but this premium doesn't bulk the price up to the point where the consumer thinks it's too expensive.
This is what Apple is getting wrong - too much of the engineering cost of the high-end product is included in the cost of the base model and this is too much for many customers to accept. They just don't see the benefit when looking at lower-end configs of the Mac Pro. It's a product that only makes sense when maxed out and compared with other high-end workstations. No amount of marketing is going to convince buys of the previous 5,1 Mac Pro that an iMac or iMac Pro is good for them. They want internal expansion and freedom of choice for hardware that comes with a tower computer, not an AIO. And at 6K starting price the Mac Pro doesn't look attractive. There are plenty of youtubers saying it looks like great value, but they are been paid to say that. It's really not good value at the low end.
This wouldn't surprise me if true. The 2019 Mac Pro is a huge leap over the 2013 Mac Pro. It's the Macintosh a lot of people wanted for the past six years.
And we had six years to save up for it
All kidding aside, I guess I'm in the small percentage for this tech.
Working in film/corporate/broadcast with killer apps e.g. Maya, Avid, Pro Tools, etc...
you need this headroom for ROI.
Once I told the upper foreheads these will last as long as our 2006 Mac Pros (we just put a few away) they were convinced.
We still have a few 2013s and they did not overheat like the others so they will stay with the graphics dept. and have a few backups for the future.
Are we talking about the new Mac Pro?
Sorry, I thought it was 2013 that was disappearing from Apple Store.
I have a special link with discounts and it has not gone missing since the start.
I go there every day to dream
Last I checked, I need about 40K USD for my dream rig.
And that's the minimal
Totally agreed.
I had to price out a Maya box last year.
Its been a while since I've had to do that since I still have my BOXX and DELL (avg cost 9k each) for network rendering.
I was totally floored visiting the Dell and HP site.
I think I had one config at 87K CAD which is about 79K USD.
I opted for a measly HP Z240 with an 8GB Nvidia card.
Its just for Maya and budget was minimal.
When discussing whether it is or is not more expensive I think one needs to define the context for the statement. For example I could easily purchase an HP Z4 / Z6 / Z8 system for considerably less than the Mac Pro. Thus your statement, as written, is incorrect. However if I were to assume you meant a comparable workstation then that statement may or may not be correct (more likely correct than not).
Many who consider the Mac Pro too expensive aren't interested in a comparable Mac Pro, they want something that offers internal expandability but does not have to offer high end specs. This is a valid point and, when compared to other legitimate workstations, the Mac Pro is expensive.
The poll is laughably binary when the reality is no one outside Apple will ultimately know how successful this machine is, and it's entirely possible it will simply be a good machine that gets replaced, rather than some flameout failure or some runaway success (you don't get runaway successes with $6K+ machines.)
At this point it's probably more important as a symbol of Apple returning to pro markets after a decade retreating from them, and the slow feeling of a death of a thousand cuts that professionals faced, starting with Shake being discontinued, followed by the botched FCPX launch, and then the lack of Mac Pro updates.
After all this waiting, there's finally a product out there. And it's by all accounts good, though for people hoping for a reversion to status quo ante tube have been disappointed for obvious reasons. Apple's main job now is to actually keep the Mac lineup refreshed (which they've been much better at in the last 12-18 months) to demonstrate their commitment, and beyond that, we'll see.
Will the Mac Pro remain an ultra high-end machine only? Will they create a more limited SKU or more capable Mac mini to bridge the headless divide better, or are they content with the iMac filling the role of performance for most of us? Will the iMac Pro remain as a pro appliance, or will they decide the iMac and Mac Pro are good enough?
Mostly it just makes me excited to actually consider that answers to these questions are actually going to come at some point, after half a decade of a holding pattern.
As to the "too little, too late" bit... there's never such a thing as "too late" in an evolving hardware and software platform. Apple has its work cut out for it, but it's ultimately their game to lose (or simply not to play.)
At this point it's probably more important as a symbol of Apple returning to pro markets after a decade retreating from them, and the slow feeling of a death of a thousand cuts that professionals faced, starting with Shake being discontinued, followed by the botched FCPX launch, and then the lack of Mac Pro updates.
After all this waiting, there's finally a product out there. And it's by all accounts good, though for people hoping for a reversion to status quo ante tube have been disappointed for obvious reasons. Apple's main job now is to actually keep the Mac lineup refreshed (which they've been much better at in the last 12-18 months) to demonstrate their commitment, and beyond that, we'll see.
Will the Mac Pro remain an ultra high-end machine only? Will they create a more limited SKU or more capable Mac mini to bridge the headless divide better, or are they content with the iMac filling the role of performance for most of us? Will the iMac Pro remain as a pro appliance, or will they decide the iMac and Mac Pro are good enough?
Mostly it just makes me excited to actually consider that answers to these questions are actually going to come at some point, after half a decade of a holding pattern.
As to the "too little, too late" bit... there's never such a thing as "too late" in an evolving hardware and software platform. Apple has its work cut out for it, but it's ultimately their game to lose (or simply not to play.)
I think it's an extremely well thought out and well-engineered machine that delivered what most cMP-type people have said they wanted. Pricey, yes, but an excellent machine. So not a failure at all.
The test going forward will be the level of support it gets over time. Will it be allowed to languish with increasingly obsolete components, or will it be updated in a timely fashion? That remains to be seen.
The test going forward will be the level of support it gets over time. Will it be allowed to languish with increasingly obsolete components, or will it be updated in a timely fashion? That remains to be seen.
Not only has Apple not offered that machine recently, they haven't in 20 years (beige PowerMac G3).
Guess what was released right after that machine? The Bondi Blue iMac.
Like it or not, Apple's preferred answer to the desktop computer is an iMac, it has been for 20 years, and it will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
When desktop CPUs were stuck at 4 cores, no iMac reached into the upper-midrange of performance, so their only choice was to build a lower-end tower workstation that got there - they couldn't power or cool those chips in an iMac case. They then figured out how to build an iMac with a lower-end Xeon (out of frustration with Intel for not giving them better desktop CPUs).
When they released the 2019 Mac Pro, it was to cover a very specific market niche:
Non-gaming needs that require more CPU, GPU or RAM than the iMac Pro supports, or that require specialized PCIe cards.
This is not for "people who like to tinker with their computers and dislike the iMac design", and it is most assuredly not for gamers...
It is for a specific (and tiny) market that isn't served by any iMac (including the iMac Pro) - and a big part of that market needs huge RAM capacities, eliminating Threadripper as an option.
Apple is NOT going to relent and produce an expandable Mac that competes with iMacs (they never have), so stop pining for it - as the iMac gets more and more capable, the Mac Pro gets more and more exotic.
Guess what was released right after that machine? The Bondi Blue iMac.
Like it or not, Apple's preferred answer to the desktop computer is an iMac, it has been for 20 years, and it will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
When desktop CPUs were stuck at 4 cores, no iMac reached into the upper-midrange of performance, so their only choice was to build a lower-end tower workstation that got there - they couldn't power or cool those chips in an iMac case. They then figured out how to build an iMac with a lower-end Xeon (out of frustration with Intel for not giving them better desktop CPUs).
When they released the 2019 Mac Pro, it was to cover a very specific market niche:
Non-gaming needs that require more CPU, GPU or RAM than the iMac Pro supports, or that require specialized PCIe cards.
This is not for "people who like to tinker with their computers and dislike the iMac design", and it is most assuredly not for gamers...
It is for a specific (and tiny) market that isn't served by any iMac (including the iMac Pro) - and a big part of that market needs huge RAM capacities, eliminating Threadripper as an option.
Apple is NOT going to relent and produce an expandable Mac that competes with iMacs (they never have), so stop pining for it - as the iMac gets more and more capable, the Mac Pro gets more and more exotic.
Hey, the heart wants what it wants. But yeah, just wishing for an xMac will never will it into existence.
I seem to recall a number of G4, G5, and Intel towers released up until 2012.
What is the market the 2019 Mac Pro is targeted towards?
If 20 years old solution is still what Apple truly believes in, they are going to miss out a generation of people interested in live online streaming at least. Well Apple already gave up on gaming by doing nothing since Intel transition, so no wonder why.
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The same audience as the 6,1. They just put back in the missing functionality that they took out when going with the trash can design.
It is a subset of what the 1st five generations of Mac Pro (and Power Macs) were aimed at.
It's this subset that I'm interested in. The 2019 Mac Pro appears to focus on the same market as the G4s, G5s, and cMP.