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Let's start a petition to keep the old Mac Pro and rebadge it as the Mac Pro Classic!
- Thread starter vander
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No, they aren't. I think you (and a lot of people in these forums) severely overestimate the potential customer base for the product you want.
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The problem is that they're likely very aware of it. It's just not a segment large enough for them to make it worthwhile to change course or offer an alternative.
they may be aware of some discontent, but a petition would at least quantify it. again, i doubt that it will make a difference but i certainly wouldn't be against signing and sharing it. It would only take a minute of my time and at least has the potential to change things.
I mean signing a petition would take less time than responding to this thread. if one was not happy with the direction of the Mac Pro then why not?
not so much innovative, but by not offering a dual CPU machine Apple is no longer at the leading edge of technology (i guess one can make the argument that they haven't been for a while, but at least with the old MP one could swap the CPUs to x5690s).
now anyone needing the bleeding edge of CPU power will not be looking at the nMP
I'm not sure there is such a thing as bleeding edge CPU power anymore. There's certainly the highest performing CPU power and I'll agree they aren't doing that.
If you want to use the term bleeding edge. That "might" apply to what apple is doing with the New Mac Pro.
"Bleeding edge technology is a category of technologies incorporating those so new that they could have a high risk of being unreliable and lead adopters to incur greater expense in order to make use of them" (Wikipedia).
Anyone buying the New Mac Pro on the promise or hope that a product will support OpenCL is definitely accepting a risk because that may never materialize.
I'm not entirely convinced Bleeding edge is still accurate for what they are doing because relying on GPU's to add to overall processing power isn't exactly new. CUDA is already used in a number of products. OpenCL is just a different implementation.
I'm far from someone who's into system building or following this "bleeding edge" tech stuff, so I guess I don't understand this kind of issue.
If the system does what it needs to do, and does it well, why should I care whether the components inside are to the liking of "bleeding edge" geeks? To me it's just a tool, and if it's a good tool that accomplishes what I ask of it in an efficient, timely manner, then it's all good.
someone who needs CPU crunching power (i.e. for scientific reasons) would be served much better with a dual 12 core machine. Obviously that will cost quite a bit, but it will offer twice the processing power as a top end nMP.
bleeding edge may not have been the best term. revise it to leading edge or cutting edge. the nMP won't be it for CPU power.
bleeding edge may not have been the best term. revise it to leading edge or cutting edge. the nMP won't be it for CPU power.
Granted there are always going to be applications that will happily munch down every core you throw at them. Hell, in my own case my work would be faster with 24 hyper-threaded cores, but the render time gained would not justify the cost of something like that.
I would venture to say my attitude might measure up to be a common one, and I'd venture farther out on my limb of speculation to say the people who would spend to get more than a solid 12-core Xeon machine represent such a tiny, outlier niche market there is no profitable business case for Apple to take them into account for this design.
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i'm not quite sure what your point is. if you wanted value for your dollars then you'd get more by a custom build or by getting a refurb or used oMP and upgrading as needed.
if you like the nMP design, then by all means buy it.
i will not. and if someone feels the desire to make a petition asking Apple to release an updated oMP design i will sign it.
My point is I don't understand the negative backlash over Apple's decision to go single CPU with the nMP. IMNSDHO they made an excellent decision that solidly plants the design where it needs to be in terms of a viable target audience. The arguments to the contrary I've seen here do not make sense to me, and I elected to say so.
I also disagree with your value assessment. I believe the best value for my hardware/OS dollars lies right where I spent them. YMMV.
For the most part of its history the Mac Pro has never been the raw performance leader in its class, but it's been close.
One can look past a 10 or 20% performance penalty, in order to use OSX.
People are disappointed that choosing to continue using OSX now means choosing a platform that is half as fast as it would've been with an updated dual socket design, and half as fast as alternatives.
Okay, fair enough, I can see where people might feel disappointed in that. I guess I'm just more pragmatic about this since it's my first Mac Pro purchase and I don't have a history with them to draw on.
It's already been pointed out. Performance will suffer. I'm not sure how much more a negative could be in a workstation.
the only target audiences i can see that benefit from the new design would be users who need portability (even though you still need to transport a display and perhaps external storage) or users who need a less noisy machine (i.e. for audio recording). Or perhaps those who need thunderbolt for some reason.
the arguments "for" the nMP design don't make sense to me, with the exception for users who would explicitly need the above.
for those who do, by all means enjoy your nMP.
For other users (like me) i'd say an updated oMP design with new xeons, SATA3, USB3, and thunderbolt while still retaining it's internal expansion and PCIe slots would offer infinitely better value. It would've been an easy machine for apple to build with little R&D costs.
If someone wanted to create a petition to that affect (you know, what the original point of the thread was) I'd sign it instantly. Even if it didn't have much chance of actually changing Apple's mind, it certainly couldn't hurt.
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Thanks for straightening us out Pete, we didn't know your ear was so close to the ground.
Can we just send you the petition? You can pass it along top Apple, since you apparently know the thinking taking place there.
Hopefully it's clear I'm not picking fights, just presenting what I see as a legitimate and contrasting point of view (which is in keeping with the thread because petition efforts are a populist effort and I don't believe the perspective the OP represents is very populous). Beaker7 helped me get an understandable perspective on how people accustomed to how Mac Pros have been constructed in the past might feel disappointed in this version. Okay, I get it even if I don't agree with it.
I also get wanting your opinion to be heard, of course. Peace out.
It's called an opinion. And one trying to use logic at that. No need to be a dick about it.
But sure, go ahead and send me the petition. It probably wouldn't be any less effective than sending it straight to Apple.
Do you actually have numbers to back this up. The comparison is only valid if you are typically the kind of person who would order a 2x12 core machine. I expect there are a few but i've never seen a breakdown across the mac pro sales that shows the highest model being the most popular. If i was apple (I'm not) i would have looked at the distribution across mac pro sales and used that to determine just how large the user base that would be affected by the change would be. It is unlikely that they went to a single cpu system without some data to back up the decision.
I suspect the number of users maxing out both cpus when they buy their machine from apple was small enough that they deemed it acceptable.
Of the users affected by this some percentage will leave but the others will likely still buy the new mac pro and continue to work on it.
You made it sound like an authoritative statement rather than your now reductive opinion, hence his response.
C'mon, this is a discussion board on a rumor site. Virtually everything said around here is opinion. If you had trouble deducing that based on the topic we're discussing here then I don't know what to tell you.
I also get wanting your opinion to be heard, of course. Peace out.
sure. and just to clarify i don't have a problem with Apple releasing a nMP.
the problem i have is with them abandoning the old design.
the idea of a petition is a good one, even if only to vaguely gauge the interest in that design. if people don't agree then they certainly wouldn't have to sign it. no reason to poo poo the idea in this thread.
Try harder at using logic?
If you disagree with something, you should probably try offering a dissenting opinion rather than resort to banal sarcasm that adds nothing to the conversation.
They never offered quad processor machines, so they never were on the bleeding edge.
didn't quad socket xeons come out in 2012? apple hasn't really upgraded the Mac Pro since 2010 (one can even argue 2009).
still, a quad socket mac pro would require a complete redesign, so i'll give Apple a pass on that.
man i would have thrown so much money for a refreshed mac pro with ivy bridge-e, pcie 3, sata 3, usb 3. the nMP makes be so mad and i know thats sad and miserable haha