Lol, if Apple is serving Kool-Aid then you're serving Tang, good luck with that.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Is the new Mac Pro a failure?
- Thread starter ZombiePhysicist
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
- Status
Lol, if Apple is serving Kool-Aid then you're serving Tang, good luck with that.
I don't think the nMP is a failure, it's just a very different product to the one it replaced and you have to understand what it is good at to decide whether it is right for you.
I quite like my nMP, despite the graphics being slow and the hardware choices been rather limited. I would rather have a single fast GPU as the OS and most apps don't make use of the second one, and have a second CPU, more RAM and a second SSD. Others will have their own requirements and I guess that's my point - the hardware configurations are too limited for the intended market.
I quite like my nMP, despite the graphics being slow and the hardware choices been rather limited. I would rather have a single fast GPU as the OS and most apps don't make use of the second one, and have a second CPU, more RAM and a second SSD. Others will have their own requirements and I guess that's my point - the hardware configurations are too limited for the intended market.
where do you come up with this stuff?
that's not rhetorical.. out of that wall of words, what makes you arrive at these conclusions?
are you even trying, even on a tiny level, to have any sort of discussion which involves understanding another individual's words?
you're quite literally pulling crap out of thin air.. then arguing with yourself about it.
with the conclusion of 'everything he says is wrong'..
Last edited by a moderator:
Metal is just a diversion.
Apple is too busy chasing down the fashion spectrum of things to care about power or functionality anymore. They don't have the desire to implement a modern day API, because that would mean their machines would actually need to have enough resources to make use of it, and that's terribly inconvenient for Ive's hardware designs.
So instead, they "invent" a new API based on an 8 year old API and throw some shoe shine and spit on it, because that's the only thing their machines can reasonably support.
The really brilliant part was where they convinced everyone that Metal was awesome and everybody needed it. Suddenly you've got users pestering the developers asking them when they're going to implement Metal support, rather then asking Apple when they're finally going to improve OpenGL support under OS X.
I don't think many people realize how utterly and insanely well played that was. Metal isn't something that was designed "because it's the future". Metal was designed as a marketing gimmick to justify Apple's poor machine performance and their inability to get things right on the desktop.
-SC
first: Apple has no "BS department". They have a PR Department, and it isn't involved in this discussion.
second: the link is from the developer's website.
If you are so disgusted by Apple, as clearly appears on half of your posts (well, I'm being fair in claiming only half ...), may I ask you the reason of your presence here ?
Better MacVidCards posts than the army of Prosumer filth without any need of proper workstation hardware.
Only three fatal flaws with that statement.
* The first is that FCX was released in 2011, not 2014, so it wasn't 'brand new' for the purposes of adoption.
* The second is that FCX was intended as a revision to supersede FCP, so the "didn't exist before" claim is also facetious.
* The third is that the 20% statement represents all versions of FC, not just FCX.
On to the actual data. Unfortunately, getting hard data is never free, and any free stuff found online will generally have more limitations and caveats than a full blown 'industry report'. Nevertheless, there is this free report from 2014 which says Final Cut was at 20%: http://www.learningvideo.com/nle-market-share-breakdown/
Now do note that one of this reports limitations is that it is more centric to 'Prosumer' levels and not Hollywood (eg, Avid), so there's a not-insignificant piece of the pie that's totally absent - - but also note that statistically, the ramifications of this are that the total pie is bigger, which means that the percentage values represented therein are mathematical upper limits.
-hh
EDIT: for completeness,
2009 Press release from Apple claiming 50% marketshare:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/200...t-Studio-with-More-Than-100-New-Features.html
More also here:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/72675
... includes an observation that customer base growth between FCP and FCX dropped from 600K to 200K per period.
Last edited:
Metal isn't a marketing gimmick - if so they're doing a miserable job at marketing it. It was announced at WWDC2014 and then it's inclusion into the OS X platform at WWDC2015. While I agree Apple does do a certain amount of marketing towards their platform developers, this isn't that. They spam the stuff they want to but I don't think I've received one "Metal is now available on OS X" email to date.
I would wonder why even bother at all? It would be much easier to use and port established libraries and SDKs than it would to create one from the ground up.
While I agree GPU API abstraction isn't a new concept I would definitely like to point out the contrary: that a proprietary Apple GPU API that is OEM platform agnostic is very new. I am really excited by it and what it can mean for the future, especially with mobile and it's current state of performance.
My pleasure.
Understood, which is why I mentioned the 'value' aspect into this discussion. The pragmatic reality is that there's always some sort of cost for any enhancement (benefit), so a COST : BENEFIT will be used to inform the decision-making process. As such, the question is not if Thunderbolt can functionally duplicate/supersede something like an open internal drive bay, but rather, what its comparative cost is for doing so, and if that represents a better value for the customer versus the alternative.
And being that this is IT, our customer expectations are that everything will become a better value over time...one of the classic examples of this is the metric of $/GB for data storage.
True, but for use cases, there's also the Law of Diminishing Returns, where the first "N" opportunities provide the biggest benefit for the majority of use cases.
And similarly, there are some technical challenges, but non-Apple PC manufacturers have demonstrated that one can make a Tower PC which includes a Thunderbolt expansion port...as such, it literally is not an either/or.
Simplistically, TB is nothing more than an externalized PCIe bus. From this perspective, the only advantages that TB has is that it (a) allows the capability to be external of the desktop, and (b) no longer is as strictly constrained by physical geometry. Of course, there are also limitations on this too, such as the potential necessity of adding another power supply, adding a cooling fan, desktop clutter, etc. EDIT: as well the elephant in the room mentioned above, namely COST.
True, but the thermal management of the classic Mac Pro already did this for the expansion requirements of four PCIe slots and six (4 * 3.5" + 2 Optical) drive bays...and isn't a noisy beast. The main complaint was its size/weight, but at least everything was in one box with a carry handle.
Understood, but this is still looking narrowly at if a capability exists, and is sidestepping the question of the cost for the capability ... particularly if it represents a more compelling value than its predecessor. For example, two 8GB RAM sticks are usually more expensive than a single 16GB ... and over the years, there's also been many examples where the 'Pro' pushing of the technology envelope has included "the size 2X doesn't exist yet to buy at any price", as well as that larger capacity not being supported in Apple firmware.
Yes, it does come down to use cases & workflows ... for example, just my personal photo/image collection is now greater than 1TB ... and this doesn't yet include easily 25K images on of my 35mm & medium format film not yet digitized, nor a "got volunteered for" family genealogy project which consists of two full Xerox boxes of 19th Century tin photos...I'm going to be busy in retirement(!).
Frankly, I don't need to care: I care about what such "under the hood" stuff does to my workflows.
Oh, no contest here: it is obvious to me that the nMP is a niche product that's vertically integrated with FCPX...but that's also part of the real discussion here: as a niche optimized product, just how can it be considered a success relative to the overall market that its cMP predecessor was able to serve (be sold to)? It can't...at least by itself. Granted, some of the customer base have found the MBP and iMac to be acceptable alternatives, but that also raises the question of if that alternative really was what the consumer desired, or simply what they settled for.
Understood, but to burn a business to the ground and then try to rebuild it is invariably harder (& more expensive) than to provide continuous continuity to one's customer base. As such, this is a foolish strategy, even if it looks okay in the short term.
I'm not so optimistic, unfortunately.
From a broad strategic development perspective, I see that nearly all of their customer development tool ecosystem have been killed off. As such, Apple only has ~15 years left before their current customers retire/die off and the Mac BU goes into an irreversible decline. Might be much earlier though, which is why my AAPL stock is on my watch list, rather than assumed as a long hold on autopilot.
-hh
Last edited:
Did you link to the wrong thread? None of those posts suggest Metal is DOA. "twod" only mentions it speculatively here.
This is such a great post because it so perfectly exemplifies the level of discussion on any thread on MR about Mac Pros. And only a "newbie." You've caught on so quickly.
Eh, the 1,1 Mac Pro had Boot Camp firmware for it's cards baked in to the machine firmware. Didn't stop upgrades.
I'm not advocating either way, it's just not proof of anything.
You got it backwards. Only 1 card was in the firmware, the X1900 and this was because Apple didn't know how they were going to write EFI roms. So, included in all shipping 1,1s was a rom to allow upgrades in the future to a X1900. No other cards. If anything it was Apple's early attempt to limit things.
Netkas wrote ATY_init which allowed PC Cards to work without EFI. AMD and Nvidia then changed their drivers to work this same way.
You made numerous posts in 2013 saying you were going to buy a 6,1.
Eventually you realized that it failed to meet your needs and bought a different machine instead. One with an Nvidia card that could run CUDA.
Are you using CUDA?
Last edited by a moderator:
On my workstation migration to PC, from Mac, because I again want a platform I can modify... I'm finding out that PCs can be money-pits, just like the old Macs were... LOL
My base system, ordered form the Dell Outlet with a 33% off coupon:
- Alienware Area 51
- 5th Gen I7-5930K 6-core CPU and X99 mobo
- Twin NVIDIA 980s in SLI config
- 32GB DDR 4 RAM
- Water cooled, 1,500w PSU, etc. All the goodies
- 128SSD + 2TB 7200 (not what I'd want to order)
The above system cost $2,100, which is I believe pretty good?
But then, I just had to tweak the storage. I wound up getting two Sandisk 960GB SATA SSDs, and a Samsung 950 512GB NVMe with a PCIe card, all together for about $650. Hoping the NVMe works, but I can honestly live with the two SATA3s in RAID 0, if it doesn't. Either way, I've got storage bandwidth and capacity to serve me for quite a while. And I can hook up the 128SSD/2 TB 7200 as a poor man's Fusion drive, for my overflow.
Added a 4k 27" display for $350, that they gave a healthy discount on.
So, that's what $3,100 will buy in the PC world. Overall, I think this system will serve me well for quote a few years. But the important thing is that, if an aspect of it doesn't, I can tweak and modify, vs rip and replace.
But I'll have 6 cores OC to ~4ghz, 40 PCIe lanes, two massive GPUs, 32GB DDR4, 2.5+ GB of pure SSD, another 4k display to add to the other monitors I have, and a bus and case that will export future expansion. True, it'll be butt-ugly vs the nMP, but either one would live under my desk anyhow.
Now, the big question is whether or not I can adjust to my main workstation being Windows again???
My base system, ordered form the Dell Outlet with a 33% off coupon:
- Alienware Area 51
- 5th Gen I7-5930K 6-core CPU and X99 mobo
- Twin NVIDIA 980s in SLI config
- 32GB DDR 4 RAM
- Water cooled, 1,500w PSU, etc. All the goodies
- 128SSD + 2TB 7200 (not what I'd want to order)
The above system cost $2,100, which is I believe pretty good?
But then, I just had to tweak the storage. I wound up getting two Sandisk 960GB SATA SSDs, and a Samsung 950 512GB NVMe with a PCIe card, all together for about $650. Hoping the NVMe works, but I can honestly live with the two SATA3s in RAID 0, if it doesn't. Either way, I've got storage bandwidth and capacity to serve me for quite a while. And I can hook up the 128SSD/2 TB 7200 as a poor man's Fusion drive, for my overflow.
Added a 4k 27" display for $350, that they gave a healthy discount on.
So, that's what $3,100 will buy in the PC world. Overall, I think this system will serve me well for quote a few years. But the important thing is that, if an aspect of it doesn't, I can tweak and modify, vs rip and replace.
But I'll have 6 cores OC to ~4ghz, 40 PCIe lanes, two massive GPUs, 32GB DDR4, 2.5+ GB of pure SSD, another 4k display to add to the other monitors I have, and a bus and case that will export future expansion. True, it'll be butt-ugly vs the nMP, but either one would live under my desk anyhow.
Now, the big question is whether or not I can adjust to my main workstation being Windows again???
Last edited:
here we are again.
This post is the real reason I laugh at thread like this.
Alienware Area 51 IS NOT a workstation.
It is, and it is advertised as, a GAMESTATION.
Apple doesn't sell GAMESTATIONs and never had.
The Mac Pro wasn't a game station.
The new Mac Pro isn't a game station.
You just assembled a good game station (for people who like it, since for me is a useless and ugly waste of money, but I'm not going to argue your needs), so you are not the target for a Mac Pro.
BTW that kind of configuration costs about $4000, so it is quite strange you paid only $2100 for it....
Last edited:
Sorry, an architecture hack from 10 years ago (to support windows boot camp) promulgated to the latest high end Mac does not bolster the case for claiming it deserves a "Pro" label.
And, please point us to the set of nMP graphics upgrades available. Thanks.
It's a powerful computer that can be used as a workstation. If you go to sites like CGTalk and look at what people in the CG industry are using, you'll see a vast number of what you call a "gamestation" are being used. They perform better and cost less than many full fledge "workstation" when it comes to DirectX/Cuda enabled application like 3DStudio Max.
Apple presently doesn't sell a workstation either. It's selling a dream of what it could've been.
absolutely not.
Maybe for some amateurish geeks on a forum, but for real pros a game station IS NOT a workstation.
And this is the main reason threads like this exists.
If you wish to stay with Dell, Precision Tower 5000 series are the workstations, with serious hardware and Xeon CPUs (and not gaming video cards).
The Apple Mac Pro IS a workstation.
Last edited:
Yes, it's a gaming system. But it will suffice for my limited "workstation" needs, which primarily have to do with pushing lots of pixels comfortably. With my kids getting into gaming, however, that's part of it as well.
The reason I paid $2,100, is I keep an eye on the Dell outlet. PCs are already reduced there, and they occasionally throw up coupon codes. In this case, I applied a 33% off code to the already reduced system. The downside of this approach is that you have to live with the configs that are available, and cannot tweak them. So, whereas I would have preferred one Titan card, I went with two 980 SLIs because it was the only config available. the storage bundled with this system isn't very interesting to me either. But the discount, from the ~$4k price to identified to a bit over half that, makes it worth my while.
But really, I would have preferred a Mac Pro. It's just that the line seems somewhat outdated, and I'll trade small & sleek for upgradeability, like the older MP. And, after a couple generations of living with an iMac, that rip and replace platform isn't sitting well with me either. But the coup de gras for me, as a mixed-pro/home user, is Apple's continuing push of their ecosystem to the cloud.
The reason I paid $2,100, is I keep an eye on the Dell outlet. PCs are already reduced there, and they occasionally throw up coupon codes. In this case, I applied a 33% off code to the already reduced system. The downside of this approach is that you have to live with the configs that are available, and cannot tweak them. So, whereas I would have preferred one Titan card, I went with two 980 SLIs because it was the only config available. the storage bundled with this system isn't very interesting to me either. But the discount, from the ~$4k price to identified to a bit over half that, makes it worth my while.
But really, I would have preferred a Mac Pro. It's just that the line seems somewhat outdated, and I'll trade small & sleek for upgradeability, like the older MP. And, after a couple generations of living with an iMac, that rip and replace platform isn't sitting well with me either. But the coup de gras for me, as a mixed-pro/home user, is Apple's continuing push of their ecosystem to the cloud.
mate, you are totally entitled to buy a game station.
And you bought a good one, apparently (I prefer a console, but every one has different needs)...
But you are not the target for the Mac Pro, so there is no sense in this thread.
A Mac pro for you would have been a wrong choice, even if it was like the previous model.
BTW I wouldn't put something like that in my home, but that's just me. It surely is a powerful computer
But gaming isn't my primary driver, just a bonus. Actually, I would have preferred to use a Mac and live with worse performance on the fewer games that were available. I'm not even the gamer, I'm just using it as a hook to get my kids more into tech.
But I will say that even having the prospect of extensibility has been a bit exciting, much like my older Mac Pro or PC Tower days. The sheer fact that I can just order a couple SATA 3 SSD drives to throw in the case and run RAID 0 on, or an NVMe drive, or a card for USB-C, etc.... that's been fun. I didn't go out an buy a gaming system, because it was a gaming system. I mainly bought it because it had the specs I felt I needed for work, along with the stuff I needed for home (4k video editing), and the gaming was just a nice bonus.
and I'm posting to this thread, because this was the catalyst for me thinking about all this stuff. I was all set to buy yet another iMac, because my old one needed to be ripped and replaced, yet again. So I was considering a nMP, which had me on here a while back. But it just seems as if the nMP has become yet another rip and replace platform.
As discussed earlier, this makes complete sense for pros. Heck, I do not ever tinker with my work-issued systems, nor does my IT department - we just rip and replace them, when the refresh cycle is up.
But even though I do 80% of my work on my personal desktop, I'm not the "Pro" user that the nMP is targeting. In camera parlay, I'm more of a pro-sumer. The iMac doesn't meet my needs, because it's so hard to extend and upgrade. And the same can pretty much be said for the nMP, to a lesser extent, at least for me.
And yes, that Alienware is damned ugly. As a middle-aged geek, it feels kind of like those guys going through mid-life crisis and buying muscle cars. But it will spend its life under my desk, just like the gorgeous nMP would have. But I do appreciate the space it provides, giving me a home for just about all the upgrades I'll be throwing at it over the next few years.
But I will say that even having the prospect of extensibility has been a bit exciting, much like my older Mac Pro or PC Tower days. The sheer fact that I can just order a couple SATA 3 SSD drives to throw in the case and run RAID 0 on, or an NVMe drive, or a card for USB-C, etc.... that's been fun. I didn't go out an buy a gaming system, because it was a gaming system. I mainly bought it because it had the specs I felt I needed for work, along with the stuff I needed for home (4k video editing), and the gaming was just a nice bonus.
and I'm posting to this thread, because this was the catalyst for me thinking about all this stuff. I was all set to buy yet another iMac, because my old one needed to be ripped and replaced, yet again. So I was considering a nMP, which had me on here a while back. But it just seems as if the nMP has become yet another rip and replace platform.
As discussed earlier, this makes complete sense for pros. Heck, I do not ever tinker with my work-issued systems, nor does my IT department - we just rip and replace them, when the refresh cycle is up.
But even though I do 80% of my work on my personal desktop, I'm not the "Pro" user that the nMP is targeting. In camera parlay, I'm more of a pro-sumer. The iMac doesn't meet my needs, because it's so hard to extend and upgrade. And the same can pretty much be said for the nMP, to a lesser extent, at least for me.
And yes, that Alienware is damned ugly. As a middle-aged geek, it feels kind of like those guys going through mid-life crisis and buying muscle cars. But it will spend its life under my desk, just like the gorgeous nMP would have. But I do appreciate the space it provides, giving me a home for just about all the upgrades I'll be throwing at it over the next few years.
Last edited:
What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet.
Specifically, if we are going to differentiate on what a 'Workstation' reportedly is, then we should be able to clearly define it, and articulate why those elements are actually meaningful differentiators ... including for just which 'Pros' they do/don't make a difference for.
And while we're at it, do be cautious of potential slippery slopes. For example, if we say that the MP is a 'Workstation' because of ECC Memory as a differentiator ... what does that then mean for all of those use cases & workflows who successfully migrated from the cMP to an iMac and/or MacBook Pro which lack ECC?
Recommendation: you've opened this can of worms, so please tread carefully.
-hh
There is no way my company is going to buy an Alienware system for it's video editing and magazine editing needs. In this regards only a small niche company (which isn't a knock on the work they may do) would go for something like a machine marketed as a game station. Big corporations, who's IT departments do the purchasing, will go for workstations all day every day.
If people are passing off a gaming computer as a workstation, then the nMP is definitely a workstation.
Last edited:
- Status