dual 1.42 G5, was this something you built, I ask because try as I may I can find no mention of Apple ever building a dual 1.42 G5, at least not in a desktop tower.
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dual 1.42 G5, was this something you built, I ask because try as I may I can find no mention of Apple ever building a dual 1.42 G5, at least not in a desktop tower.
http://www.apple-history.com/g4_800
CPU: PowerPC 7455 "G4"
CPU Speed: 1.0/2x1.25/2x1.42 GHz
CPU Speed: 1.0/2x1.25/2x1.42 GHz
Looks like a simple G4/G5 confusion. We're talking about a 13-year system....
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Here's an idea.
If you don't need PCI slots or think they are obsolete you probably need an iMac.
If you need to stuff multiple GPU or I/O cards into your machine and need to upgrade them on a regular basis you need a machine with PCI slots aka what the Mac Pro used to be.
Really very simple and there is no need for anyone to be obtuse about this.
That's the way the Apple universe used to work until the 6,1 arrived. Once we go back to that every one will be happy again and countless electrons won't be wasted with circular discussions.
If you don't need PCI slots or think they are obsolete you probably need an iMac.
If you need to stuff multiple GPU or I/O cards into your machine and need to upgrade them on a regular basis you need a machine with PCI slots aka what the Mac Pro used to be.
Really very simple and there is no need for anyone to be obtuse about this.
That's the way the Apple universe used to work until the 6,1 arrived. Once we go back to that every one will be happy again and countless electrons won't be wasted with circular discussions.
This should be nominated for the worst argument award unless it is more or less a kidding attempt.
This, or we'll have to warn nvidia and amd to stop releasing PCI gpus immediately cause their products "look like something from the 80s". Come on...seriously now ? This is something not even Jony Ive would dare to say.
AMD and nVidia are about the worst two example you could give for this.. these two companies are the ones who stand to benefit most by thunderbolt type advancements and external expansion.
and when the support comes (and it will.. soon).. and when the bandwidth opens up more (which is also here)..
they're most certainly going to be hyped to be getting their product outside of the box/tower and into their own external mini computer.. and the designs are definitely not going to be a raw circuit board.. already, the gpu designs are hiding the boards and being shaped/colored (and lit !?) in ways which are completely unnecessary for a product going inside another one.. they are built this way one for one exact reason.. they look kewl.. they know that if their product looks like something from the 80s, they're going to have a much harder time marketing/selling them.
i don't really know what to say.. i mean, i'm not upset from your insults to me or whatever.. i understand what you're saying.. unfortunately, the mindset you're speaking from is at least 15 years out of date. so no offense taken.
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we aren't going back to that.
so what now?
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Yeah, if you think about it, it is a miracle PCI(e) has lasted as long as it has. I have no idea what the server market looks like, nor whether or not that market alone is sufficient to keep PCIe plodding on. But on the consumer end laptops have outsold desktops for ten years straight, and the end-user PCIe market has shrunk to just two GPU vendors.
Does anybody here think that nVidia and AMD sales are big enough to keep user-accessible PCIe afloat? Intel's iGPU's keep improving with every new iteration (and they improve much faster than their CPU's which have sort of stagnated), only hardcore gamers and people who use CUDA accelerated software need a dGPU.
PCIe looks like a shrinking market and that is not going to encourage a lot of innovation.
Apple may have thrown it out a little earlier than necessary, but they have always been early ditching what they view as legacy stuff.
Does anybody here think that nVidia and AMD sales are big enough to keep user-accessible PCIe afloat? Intel's iGPU's keep improving with every new iteration (and they improve much faster than their CPU's which have sort of stagnated), only hardcore gamers and people who use CUDA accelerated software need a dGPU.
PCIe looks like a shrinking market and that is not going to encourage a lot of innovation.
Apple may have thrown it out a little earlier than necessary, but they have always been early ditching what they view as legacy stuff.
Because they were not making the money from the items that went into the slots.
Video cards-They could not compete with Nvidia or AMD
Raid cards- They could not compete with ATTO or Areca
Red Rocket and Red Rocket X-A specialized item out of their field!
PCIe SSD-They could not compete with OWC's Mercury Accelsior or Sonnet's Tempo
ETC.!
Funny, when you listen to music or watch a movie, none of the 80's items seem to matter what decade they are from!
Funny no matter how hard Apple pushes FCP it remains 3rd tier!
So let's list some SW
Photo SW-Aperture could not compete with Adobe's Lightroom
Color Grading-Color could not compete with BMD's DaVinci Resolve
Compositing- Shake (not fault of it's own due to Apple's foolishness) could not compete with The Foundry's Nuke
Appleworks-Could not compete with MS Office. MS even helped out by making a Mac version!
So Apple, continue to do what you do best. Make watches and phones!
License your OS to HP so we can have z840's and real workstations!
It's been over 900 days and no one will miss you if you bow out of the desktop competition.
You already have a history of running when you can't compete!
90-95% of the market will be BGA only. Whether most of the Pros on this forum likes it or not. It is one of the ways to mitigate production costs of silicon on smaller nodes. It is one of the ways to obsolete the hardware much easier and much faster. Already there is a prototype of motherboard with integrated GPU in it. AMD APUs and Intel SOCs will dominate market in upcoming years, and most of hardware sold will be BGA type.
Professional market will shift from Pro workstations into rendering clouds. Clouds that you can build yourself from number of computers connected externally.
It is quite funny that people start to see this as reality.
Professional market will shift from Pro workstations into rendering clouds. Clouds that you can build yourself from number of computers connected externally.
It is quite funny that people start to see this as reality.
Those markets Apple is not necessarily or currently looking to compete. Their money is into making an hardware/software appliance solutions. Not making PCIe cards that they are only going to be used in their own computers. In fact they are just as happy letting their vendors battle it out in competition and they will choose what parts suit them best.
Many applications have a high learning curve to learn. They are focusing on the prosumer that will eventually transition to pro and take the tools they use with them FCP X/Motion/LogicX ect.
So do you think it is more reasonable to keep buying a "closed" computer such as an iMac each time any of the component hardware is surpassed vs. just upgrading an individual component? That thought has crossed my mind but it seems wasteful to design disposable computers that cost thousands instead of upgradable ones.
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You watched way too much Battlestar Galactica
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For the purpose of discussion, I don't have to have PCIe. If Apple doesn't want to deal with it then fine. Make the components plug in. Make it so the user can replace memory, SSD, GPUs and I wonder if they could even put CPUs on daughter cards that would work in the tube. If Apple would do it on condition of the connections being proprietary so be it. If we have to buy it from Apple, fine.
I wasn't trying to share my opinion of how things should be - I think Apple has lost its way, I think it would be in Apples best interest long-term to keep power users and tinkers happy, I think Apple should update the nMP every year, I think they should offer a workstation with lots of expansion slots as an option, I think they should offer the Mac mini with a quad core and dGPU, I think they should offer the infamous xMac.
Where many people here sound like flat-earthers is that keep talking about the "market" for these workstations as being significant, and a key part of Apple, when nothing could be further from the facts (e.g. it's a well know fact that SJ disliked the concept of expansion slots). Then people endlessly put down the computers Apple does offer, and are still whining on a daily basis about a product Apple abandoned years ago. The Intel-based Mac tower was an aberration in Apple's product lineup, not the focus of it... by the time Apple switched to Intel, the writing was already on the wall for towers... there was literally a 4 year window from 2006 to 2010 where Apple put some effort into it. HP Z800's were never Apple's market, even when they had the cMP.
People here come up with all sorts of nonsense ideas and conspiracy theories when the plain truth is staring them in the face. Can we all agree Apple likes to make lots of money? And if we are rational about this, isn't it obvious that if Apple was making lots of money on the cMP, they would have been regularly updating it, and wouldn't have replaced it overnight with something almost exactly the opposite? Seriously, can we agree on that? Because it's kind of a litmus test for being able to have rational discussions.
Once people accept reality, they can maybe spend more time thinking about the tools they can actually work with than the tools that don't exist. Only crazy people spend so much time rehashing this over and over.
Well if you count in the PowerMac towers right from the 8100 through to the G4 windtunnel, Apple always had a massively upgradeable machine in their lineup since the early 90s, and before that with the Quadras and IIfx. Abandoning the tower after the cMP really was an entirely new situation in Apple's lineup. There's simply no denying that.
Yes, there was a stretch from 1987 to 2013 where Apple had Macs with expansion slots. That's no longer the case and there's no denying that. So sincerely, were you trying to make a point?... because I'm not following what that has to do with anything.
Ok, what's worse?
Not making money on the card that the user is installing in the PCI slot or making no money at all because the customer won't buy your Mac Pro because it lacks PCI slots?
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If I remember correctly the Mac SE/30 had an internal expansion slot.
And what you are calling a 'stretch' is nearly the entire timeframe of the existence of the Mac.
The point is that except for the very earliest Mac dating back to 1984 the professional Macintosh models have always had slots until the 6,1 arrived. So, the 6,1 really is the anomaly here. We haven't had a slot-less professional top of the line Mac since the original Mac and Fat Mac.
The 1984 Mac didn't have slots, but all-in-one boxes were very common back then. But pro machines evolved and the ability to expand via cards became an expected feature of high end machines, especially after the introduction of the IBM PC.
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The fact that people are still winning after all this time is quite revealing though, and it shows there is a gap in Apple's lineup. While someone who doesn't need expansion slots, drive bays, or an upgradable GPU can simply go with a high-end 5K iMac instead of a base model Mac Pro - and get the stunning 5K screen with it - someone who does will have to go elsewhere.
So was it the technology that forced Apple to keep the slots? Was it competition that forced him to put them in initially?
Yet they seemed to be proud of what the compute could do and promoted it as competition for the PC. I guess I didn't understand Apple a lot longer than I thought
Then none of the workstation class machines from entry level through the Z800 type were of interest to Apple.
So then, what do you think is Apple's market? Is the MacPro an indicator of the future of the desktop or is it just an example of one segment of the desktop?
Thanks for contributing to the discussion. I guess I had an idealistic impression of Apple, it's focus on professionals and it's direction.
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As far as some consumers are concerned, yes there's a gap. As far as Apple is concerned, they offer the MacPro with TB expandability or for the consumers who don't need that level of expandability they offer the iMac. Unless there is a doubtful major change of heart, that is what it is and if you want what the 2012 or earlier MP offers, time to look elsewhere
SJ was forced out of Apple a couple years before the Mac II (1987). A major issue was that the original Mac had underwhelming sales and he resisted "fixing" it (i.e. making it more expandable like the Apple II and traditional PC's of the time). SJ had no interest in the Apple II even though it was Apple's bread and butter. He always saw the ultimate goal of the computer as an "appliance".
You have to go back to the beginning of the 1970's "PC"... most of those "kits" were dependent on slots for adding basic functionality... that just naturally evolved with the Apple II and a few years later with the IBM PC (and clones to follow). If you needed a serial or parallel port, you added a card. If you did mostly office productivity, you got a hi-res monochrome card... if you needed color, you got the best color card you could afford. A little later, if you wanted more than beeps, you needed an audio card. Over time, as those features were integrated into the basic computer, there was less and less need for expansion slots. Their usage became less and less... now it's mostly people updating old computer on the cheap. Again, not saying that's a bad thing, just that it's understandable that Apple doesn't really care about the second-hand Mac market since they don't get paid again after first sale.
Apple has always looked at the angle of how they distinguish themselves from the competition. They aren't going to win on price. It's really all the same hardware on the inside. They have to make the case why they offer a solution that is better than then the competition. That doesn't mean they necessarily got it right or failed.
There's a focus here to focus on the "tools", i.e. "workstation" vs something else. Apple is always focused on the "solution". What is it that you want to accomplish? Here's "X" solution for you. You may not like the form factor or the cost, but they do offer solutions that cover about 90% of the consumer market. As they see it, it's not in their business interest to focus on that last 10% - they believe it will compromise the 90% they do focus on. Again, I can make the argument it would be in their best interest to get that up to 95%, but that's not how Apple sees it, and that's the point.
For as much longer as the "desktop" exists, yes, most of the desktop market is moving towards closed appliance-like computers. Even usages like render farms will move more towards low-powered appliance like boxes that you just "plug" into (whether literally or figuratively).
I've been a general computer hobbyist for well over 30 years now - I've lived and read the history, follow the industry, and like to talk shop. I'm generally a fan of Apple products, but hate Apple fanboism. I do "get it". I get as frustrated with Apple as anyone here. But I also deal in reality.
What you are basically saying is there will be a real rewrite of computing as we know it today. At some future point, our computers will become clients to super servers. Of course we will need really fast connections to handle all that data going back and forth but our computers could be simplified to the point of being dumb terminals.
Since Adobe came out with the creative cloud I have wondered if that's the direction that they are headed. They could make Photoshop, for example, as complex as they wanted and the user could just send an image layer and the operation that they want done to a server which would do all the complex operations and send the resulting image back. At that point it wouldn't really matter how advanced your computer was just as long as it had enough memory to handle the file you were building
The Mac Pro, because they weren't making enough money on it to justify the resources it would take to keep it in the lineup.
I would suggest you're missing the point. Of course there had been Macs with slots for a 30 year span. But those were just an evolution of what was technologically needed to compete in the wider market. But Apple has NEVER been interested in the slots.
There was a time when if you were a heavy photoshop user, you needed a PowerMac for the performance... same for a host of "professional" applications beyond office productivity. The switch to Intel marked around the time where even a laptop could be a recording studio, a film editing machine, etc. That's why I suggest the Intel MP as an anomaly - it was window of time that marked the transition of an iMac being able to meet the needs of 50% of "pro" users to 90% of "pro" users. The PowerMacs thru 2005 were just an accumulation of nearly 30 years of iterations of the basic desktop box. The cMP was designed from the ground up for a market that was disappearing.
Yes, it is revealing... Mac users really like their Macs and OS X, and it really sucks when you feel squeezed out of their product lineup or can't afford their products. What these discussions also show time and again is that most people here just don't want to spend the money for the solution.
The reason so many people here sound like hardware nerds only interested in benchmarks is because that's all they talk about is the tools themselves rather than what they can (or can't) do with the tools. F5 is always making great points about this, but people just want to complain about the tool. Photography, illustration, designer, musician, film maker, etc. - there are many Macs that are great tools for doing these things - nearly every person here who complains about the nMP for those tasks simply doesn't want to spend the money to make it happen. For those looking for a render farm, Apple doesn't have a solution for you, and quite frankly, was never offering their products as a solution for that.
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You mentioned that you are a "computer hobbyist" but speak in general terms pertaining to "pro" users. In specific terms and applications will you show how an iMac meets the needs of 90% of "pro" users. What apps do you consider "pro" apps? Is this just a vague term because an app like photo shop spans a wide spectrum of users? Are the other 10% of "pro" users avoiding the iMac because it gets exposed for what it really is under "pro" usage?
Some of the arguments people are making on this thread sounds alot like my 8 year son asking why I need a macbook air when all he needs is an ipod.
I don't think so. By design TB must have direct interconnect lanes to the processor so the TB ports are usually branched off the motherboard. I'm not an expert on this, but I think that's why the Optimus technology exists. On PCs you see people routing from the TB port on their motherboard back to the DisplayPort outputs on their GPU or iGPU, it's kind of silly.