Is the new Mac Pro a failure?

[996085]

So as we see by the results for some people it is a failure for some not so. Isn't this valid for every computer system? Yes, the difference is that other platforms have a great range of choices, but in Apple's line there aren't any of them, it's take it or leave it.

I personally think, as other MP users before me have also posted, that, there is a chance that it was too early for a system like this, as many pieces are still missing so it cannot be considered as a complete solution, of course for many people, I don't and cannot know how many, its new form was very well accepted.

The perfect way to implement this transition would be, in my opinion, to have the two versions in parallel for a certain period of time, or forever, as different products, a more powerful cMP-like tower with dual CPUs, PCIe slots, as a more expandable system and this nMP for the people who really love it.

Many people have said that this is the new Cube, ok but there is a big difference, the Cube was placed - marketed as a single product, PowerMacs of the time were in a different category and stayed untouched.

Also many would say that this may be too much for Apple, (they already have too many other products) to maintain two similar lines, but as it seems the gap the cMP left wasn't covered by the nMP, because if it was covered, as we all understand, there wouldn't be any complaints, and this situation will certainly lead to a loss for Apple.

Me, and obviously other people, may be ok with our nMP but too many people complain about its shortcomings (and I do so some times) so there must be a problem, which no-one can reject, and this is a sign of a partial failure.

Anyway, failure or not, we have to rename at some point this nMP, as time passes, and this 2013 model is not so new anymore after two and a half years.

or is the lack of an update a failure too?

IMO the lack of an update, given there are updated components available, is raises a concern about Apple's commitment to the Mac Pro. It would be understandable if it required a completely redesign of the system to utilize the latest components. But it doesn't. Relatively speaking the changes would be minor and should be easy to implement by Apple. HP had the Zx40 series available at, or almost at, the same time the latest components were made available by Intel.

Despite what anyone thinks of the nMP design this is one thing all but the most apologetic users can get behind.

 

[AidenShaw]

Why is you're advertising account allowed to be active here? ALL I've ever seen you post is ways to drive traffic to your business?

Check the forum rules - vendor participation is allowed when it is relevant.

 

[NT1440]

Check the forum rules - vendor participation is allowed when it is relevant.

Well what do you know, I had no idea.

Thanks

 

[George Dawes]

It seems pretty irrelevant with the new iMac 5k 4ghz available.

 

[gpzjock]

Barefeats make a fairly good assessment of the situation, performance wise: http://barefeats.com/imac5k10.html

 

[AidenShaw]

It seems pretty irrelevant with the new iMac 5k 4ghz available.

How can you justify that statement?

You're ignoring most of the things that people would buy a workstation to do.

The Imac is a great system for lightweight tasks. And on those tasks it will beat the MP6,1 on price and performance.

 

[gpzjock]

Perusing Geekbench 2 scores I am alarmed to find that my MP 3,1 at 10k score is only 2000 points behind a quad core Mac Pro mini and around 5000 points behind the iMac 5k. A machine knocking on for 8 years old really shouldn't be even close. http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/2576147

On cost criteria the iMac 5k really does win too, £2049 with a 5k screen built in compared to £2499 and buy your own 5k monitor.

 

[lowendlinux]

Perusing Geekbench 2 scores I am alarmed to find that my MP 3,1 at 10k score is only 2000 points behind a quad core Mac Pro mini and around 5000 points behind the iMac 5k. A machine knocking on for 8 years old really shouldn't be even close. http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/2576147

On cost criteria the iMac 5k really does win too, £2049 with a 5k screen built in compared to £2499 and buy your own 5k monitor.

If its any consolation you 2000 or so points behind my laptop and its from 2011

 

[996085]

Perusing Geekbench 2 scores I am alarmed to find that my MP 3,1 at 10k score is only 2000 points behind a quad core Mac Pro mini and around 5000 points behind the iMac 5k. A machine knocking on for 8 years old really shouldn't be even close. http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/2576147

On cost criteria the iMac 5k really does win too, £2049 with a 5k screen built in compared to £2499 and buy your own 5k monitor.

Geekbench is only good for telling you how quickly a system runs Geekbench. On real world tests systems a system with a considerably lower Geekbench score can out perform one with a higher Geekbench score.

 

[throAU]

Perusing Geekbench 2 scores I am alarmed to find that my MP 3,1 at 10k score is only 2000 points behind a quad core Mac Pro mini and around 5000 points behind the iMac 5k. A machine knocking on for 8 years old really shouldn't be even close. http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/2576147

On cost criteria the iMac 5k really does win too, £2049 with a 5k screen built in compared to £2499 and buy your own 5k monitor.

I think that shows more that GeekBench is entirely irrelevant for modern workloads more than anything else. i.e., your machine, in the real world is nowhere near that close at many things.

Fire up some OpenCL benchmarks and let me know how you go in comparison.

How about some AES, which your 8 year old CPU can not accelerate, and is thus ~30x slower, clock for clock?

How fast is your disk?

CPU has been stagnant in terms of dumb integer benchmarks for many years now. The throughput improvements these days are largely GPU and specialist instructions in newer CPU instruction sets.


An iMac is great for many things, but in heavily multi-threaded workloads, or OpenCL/GPU heavy workloads, it will simply be crushed by any of the new Mac Pro models on offer.

If you don't run those sorts of things, then fine... most people don't and for most people the Mac Pro is entirely un-necessary. But some do, and for those sorts of workloads, an iMac just is not going to cut it.

 

[Average Pro]

You captured it quite well. Based on an individual's preference, use, level and definition of common words (professional, traditional, etc), there are so many ways this question can be answered (or not). How do you arrive at an answer when there is a difference of opinion/definition of (1) expandable, (2) aesthetic, (3) emotional, (4) affordable, (5) update, etc.

I've never been a customer whose expectation was that the latest technology appear in a Mac - ASAP. The nMP exceeds my expectations and requirements for both Photography and Video and based on growing file sizes it will continue to serve for several more years. Would it be better if it had a faster processor? Absolutely, that will always be the case.

My eyes are on the horizon for TB3. And when it gets fully incorporated in the nnMP, I'll still have time to wait for all the adjoining accouterments to catch up.

Enjoy the holiday.

So as we see by the results for some people it is a failure for some not so. Isn't this valid for every computer system? Yes, the difference is that other platforms have a great range of choices, but in Apple's line there aren't any of them, it's take it or leave it.

I personally think, as other MP users before me have also posted, that, there is a chance that it was too early for a system like this, as many pieces are still missing so it cannot be considered as a complete solution, of course for many people, and no I certainly don't and cannot know how many, its new form was very well accepted.

The perfect way to implement this transition would be, in my opinion, to have the two versions in parallel for a certain period of time, or forever, as different products, a more powerful cMP-like tower with dual CPUs, PCIe slots, as a more expandable system and this nMP for the people who really love it.

Many people have said that this is the new Cube, ok but there is a big difference, the Cube was placed - marketed as a single product, PowerMacs of the time were in a different category and stayed untouched.

Also many would say that this may be too much for Apple, (they already have too many other products) to maintain two similar lines, but as it seems the gap the cMP left wasn't covered by the nMP, because if it was covered, as we all understand, there wouldn't be any complaints, and this situation will certainly lead to a loss for Apple.

Me, and obviously other people, may be ok with our nMP but too many people complain about its shortcomings (and I do so some times) so there must be a problem, which no-one can reject, and this is a sign of a partial failure.

Anyway, failure or not, we have to rename at some point this nMP, as time passes, and this 2013 model is not so new anymore after two and a half years.

or is the lack of an update a failure too?

 

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

Amazing what Apple built in order to assemble these Mac Pros; I couldn't see the form factor changing any time soon. As for the machine itself, Apple actually advertised it to the masses and gave it a bit of hype; I mean, most people know what a nMP is, yet they've never seen prior generations. However, they sort of stuck a sword in this thing. Not only did they strip it of its prior capabilities (which may not be THAT bad, considering that boxy towers are a thing of the past), they sort of let it die for the time being. One could argue that the fact that they totally redesigned the MP was a nod of the head from Apple... but, really, it seems as though they've turned their heads away from it. There are lots of happy nMP users, but what isn't nice is that Apple hasn't done anything to it since it came out. It strikes me funnily that they even gave a fat about their iMac line, releasing new Retina iMacs. Their desktop sales are, of course, lower, and they know for a fact that desktops are antiquated devices. It just seems like they're all over the place.

 

[Joe The Dragon]

Amazing what Apple built in order to assemble these Mac Pros; I couldn't see the form factor changing any time soon. As for the machine itself, Apple actually advertised it to the masses and gave it a bit of hype; I mean, most people know what a nMP is, yet they've never seen prior generations. However, they sort of stuck a sword in this thing. Not only did they strip it of its prior capabilities (which may not be THAT bad, considering that boxy towers are a thing of the past), they sort of let it die for the time being. One could argue that the fact that they totally redesigned the MP was a nod of the head from Apple... but, really, it seems as though they've turned their heads away from it. There are lots of happy nMP users, but what isn't nice is that Apple hasn't done anything to it since it came out. It strikes me funnily that they even gave a fat about their iMac line, releasing new Retina iMacs. Their desktop sales are, of course, lower, and they know for a fact that desktops are antiquated devices. It just seems like they're all over the place.

Apple can keep the same form form factor give or take and make it better. Like 1 video card 1 CPU with the left over pci-e going to more TB's bus / more SSD cards / EXT PCI-e ports.

1 VIDEO card 2 CPU's with 10 TB 3.0 bus and EXT PCI-e ports

The mac pro was not a desktop it was a pro workstation. People not apple put in high end video cards it in as well. Apple TB only setup cuts high end video cards down to pci-e 2.0 X4 or less and that does slow them down.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

So here is an article on the topic that might be of interest:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the-new-mac-pro-is-a-failure

So here is a podcast on the topic that might be of interest:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/podcast/acm-334-apples-mac-pro-vs.-the-devils-advocate

 

[Bubba Satori]

So here is an article on the topic that might be of interest:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the-new-mac-pro-is-a-failure

So here is a podcast on the topic that might be of interest:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/podcast/acm-334-apples-mac-pro-vs.-the-devils-advocate

Wow.
Smaller and less obtrusive my asteroid.

 

[linuxcooldude]

So here is an article on the topic that might be of interest:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the-new-mac-pro-is-a-failure

So here is a podcast on the topic that might be of interest:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/podcast/acm-334-apples-mac-pro-vs.-the-devils-advocate

Same MacRumor drivel repackaged on another website. You know its pretty bad when you use half of the cherry picked MacRumors forum comments / threads as the basis of your article. Bad journalism IMO.

 

[Demigod Mac]

So here is an article on the topic that might be of interest:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the-new-mac-pro-is-a-failure

So here is a podcast on the topic that might be of interest:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/podcast/acm-334-apples-mac-pro-vs.-the-devils-advocate

Finally the Mac media is picking up on this. Weren't the apologists claiming that complaining about nMP on these forums wasn't going to have any broader effect?

I enjoyed listening to that podcast but they missed one major issue: all of those 'breakout boxes' (Thunderbolt, PCIe chassis) are expensive. Add that to an already expensive computer and it's a big bag of hurt.

Case in point: Entry-level cMP 2010 was $2499, which included all the PCIe slots and drive bays. Entry-level nMP is $2999 PLUS the price of all those external boxes, or you get a Sonnet xMac Pro chassis for $1499 just to bring the same functionality back.

 

[Average Pro]

Says the guy with his sisters make up bag and old keyboards thrown about. And please tell me that line coming out of the wall is actually connected to a telephone or better yet, an answering machine.

I could not resist and hope you find the humor in the comments.

Wow.
Smaller and less obtrusive my asteroid.

 

[bladerunner2000]

Wow.
Smaller and less obtrusive my asteroid.

LOL! I can't believe so many macrumors members actually believe the new mac pro is a 'worthy' replacement of the old one. Yeah right. What a disaster.

 

[tuxon86]

Says the guy with his sisters make up bag and old keyboards thrown about. And please tell me that line coming out of the wall is actually connected to a telephone or better yet, an answering machine.

I could not resist and hope you find the humor in the comments.

I still use land line phones in my house. They don't need recharging and they never lose the signal and drop calls. I don't even own a cell phone anymore. If I'm not at home, leave a message or call back, I don't need to be reached 24/7 anywhere, I'm not that important.

 

[flat five]

So here is an article on the topic that might be of interest:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the-new-mac-pro-is-a-failure

So here is a podcast on the topic that might be of interest:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/podcast/acm-334-apples-mac-pro-vs.-the-devils-advocate

you should tell that guy to research his sources a tad bit more.. his example picture (with no source link / credit) can be traced to here:

http://www.biscade.com/2014/08/the-new-mac-pro-8-months/

in which the author/photographer states:
"The highlights of the new Mac Pro are the lowered energy usage, the reclaimed physical space, and the huge reduction of cable mess."

sort of putting his foot in his mouth, wouldn't you say?

-----

fwiw, you should (not really but...) do a Mac vs. PC poll here... might give a little insight to this thread's poll..
the only reason this particular poll isn't saying 90% failure is because it's at macrumors instead of some dell forum.. and should leave you wondering why so many pc user / mac haters are gathering at a mac-centric site.

 

[Cole Slaw]

When it comes to the Mac Pro Apple seems to be pretty much permanently asleep at the wheel.
I'm trying to think of another Apple product that receives so little attention*...

* Edit: Maybe the Thunderbolt display.

 

[whodatrr]

OK, I finally made the jump to experiment with a PC workstation. Dell was running another big Black Friday Sales, so I got an additional 35% off their already discounted alienware Area 51-R2 gaming rigs. I'm not a big gamer, but my kids are getting old enough that I figured I can peak their interest. While this system is huge, that does;t matter since it'll be sitting hidden under a desk. It's also liquid cooled and supposed to be very quiet, especially when no overclocked.

I got:
- Big-assed chilled cabinet with tons of drive and card space (future-proofness?)
- 6 core i7-5820K Processor (5th Gen, but I don't think they have skyline in this class yet)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 with 4GB GDDR5 (not the mobile version)
- Room for a couple more GPUs, should I ever want to add them
- 16GB DDR4 2133 RAM
- 2565SSD (Small, but I'm ordering a 1TB)
- 2TB Spinner (I'll Probably use RAID to make the 256SSD a cache for this drive)
- 2 yr warranty
- 5 drive bays, including a double SSD 2.5 bay, all pre-cables and ready to go
- Supports three full-sized double-wide GPUs, if I ever went there
- A bunch of other stuff.... really these things are pretty loaded

- Added a refurb 27" 4k display for another $360.

This system is built to be overclocked, vs the systems I'm coming from which are built to be throttled. I'm not sure if I'll ever need the overcooling, but I'm absolutely 100% positive that I do not want throttling! This is big, for me!

Total system, with display and extended support, was about $1,850 including tax. But I figure my 1TB SSD will be another $350, so $2,200 total, with 4k display and sales tax (free shipping).

If the kids really do get into gaming, I may slap in another GPU? But for now, this thing will kill just about anything I need to do. best of all, if I need to upgrade anything, I'll pop open the case and make it happen.

For what I do, I might have actually preferred a quad core 4.0. But the price was right, and there was a time when I never thought I'd need more than 1 core, so who knows what the future will bring?

 

[tuxon86]

OK, I finally made the jump to experiment with a PC workstation. Dell was running another big Black Friday Sales, so I got an additional 35% off their already discounted alienware Area 51-R2 gaming rigs. I'm not a big gamer, but my kids are getting old enough that I figured I can peak their interest. While this system is huge, that does;t matter since it'll be sitting hidden under a desk. It's also liquid cooled and supposed to be very quiet, especially when no overclocked.

I got:
- Big-assed chilled cabinet with tons of drive and card space (future-proofness?)
- 6 core i7-5820K Processor (5th Gen, but I don't think they have skyline in this class yet)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 with 4GB GDDR5 (not the mobile version)
- Room for a couple more GPUs, should I ever want to add them
- 16GB DDR4 2133 RAM
- 2565SSD (Small, but I'm ordering a 1TB)
- 2TB Spinner (I'll Probably use RAID to make the 256SSD a cache for this drive)
- 2 yr warranty
- 5 drive bays, including a double SSD 2.5 bay, all pre-cables and ready to go
- Supports three full-sized double-wide GPUs, if I ever went there
- A bunch of other stuff.... really these things are pretty loaded

- Added a refurb 27" 4k display for another $360.

Total system, with display and extended support, was about $1,850 including tax. But I figure my 1TB SSD will be another $350, so $2,200 total, with 4k display and sales tax (free shipping).

If the kids really do get into gaming, I may slap in another GPU? But for now, this thing will kill just about anything I need to do. best of all, if I need to upgrade anything, I'll pop open the case and make it happen.

You'll need a second GPU if you intend to game at 4k with all the bells and whistles... The 970 is great at 1080p and 2560, but for 4k even the 980ti can't pull it off with a single GPU.

 

[whodatrr]

Please, do not say this while I already have an Amazon shopping cart up!!! LOL

But seriously, I figure I'll add another 970- in a couple months.

You'll need a second GPU if you intend to game at 4k with all the bells and whistles... The 970 is great at 1080p and 2560, but for 4k even the 980ti can't pull it off with a single GPU.