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MP All Models Mac Pro X,Y…WHAT IF…
- Thread starter ZombiePhysicist
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Having a bigger Mac Pro-exclusive chip would justify the Mac Pro's existence a little more than the current model, but it would be so eye-poppingly expensive I can't imagine the numbers they would sell would make up for the development costs. I'm not so sure Gurman is actually right about these "Extreme" products being stuff they truly expect to ship versus performance envelope-pushing tests.
This is largely true. My 4,1>5,1 was an exception, because Intel stuck with the same socket for two generations. But they wisened up quick and killed that. On the PC side it is possible to drop in a new motherboard with CPU, though.
I struggle to see what the advantage of the 7,1 is. It’s a MacStudio with a few PCIe slots. But what sort of PCIe components are still available for Mac these days? SSD’s is about all I can think of, apart from dedicated AV cards. Those PCIe slots cost $3K, that money buys you a lot of Thunderbolt expansion, just saying…
But Apple hasn’t used their own hardware on the back end for at least fifteen years (if at all even with xServe), and I don’t think they ever will. IIRC, they use straight up Azure all the way.
I concluded three years ago that Apple desktops no longer made sense for me, so it was either a Windows workstation or a MacBookPro. I chose the latter, but I think anybody who needs an actual workstation should just accept that it’s time to move on.
That was the conclusion I reluctantly came to. I stretched a heavily expanded 5,1 way past its sell by date, then when the AS MP dropped and confirmed Apple's future direction, jumped ship.
I was worried I'd find Windows a mess and want to return to the Mac, but to my surprise don't really miss macOS at all. I still think it's a great OS, but after tweaking Windows 11 / finding good equivalent software, am totally happy with my decision. Apple all the way for laptops though.
Yeah, there are operational differences, but you don’t give up anything in terms of functionality.
I still prefer Macs, though. In Win10 it’s not clear to me when you close but not quit applications, or vice versa. And some other minor niggles, but in terms of stability and functionality, it’s pretty good these days.
Maybe someone trying to rip people off on eBay, I've seen a lot of overpriced GPUs on there.
Yeah in my magical world of thinking that keeps to Apple's desire for integrated SOCs, the way I'd distinguish the Mac Pro is that it's all on a daughtercard you can swap out for the next Ultra SOC, but that would be a big hurdle for them on a low-volume product, and I can't imagine you'd get more than two generations before they'd want to break from it anyhow. So outside of people picking up used machines and hot-rodding them there wouldn't be a huge market (and that one doesn't make Apple much money.)
That said, while GPUs were the obvious big benefit for upgrading systems, AV cards aren't going anywhere, and PCIe and SATA storage internally isn't bad.
If it's going to be limited they should just spend the time and make a smaller machine. A minitower that doesn't have a 1400W PSU to support two big dedicated GPUs it can no longer run doesn't make a ton of sense. Just lean into the "it's a Mac Studio but more flexible" and call it a day since it's clear it's not going to be the lone product standing outside Apple's direction of computing.
Newegg had three different ones advertised.
Of course one might say an Ultra is no quicker, but I could say it's much quicker. For instance check the GPU RAM access - if one actually uses the GPU, 24 GB is not that much. And then getting the information to the GPU and back to the CPU and back to the GPU over and over via PC architecture is not fast compared to an Ultra that doesn't slow down doing such tasks. It's like testing OWC external Thunderbolt 5 drive - Blackmagic shows it runs at 6,000. But move several large files at the same time - they drive runs at around 3100. A PC can be much like that. The Ultra is reliable too with its memory - no need for protected memory. The professional GPUs is what it should be compared against. And put a PC together with Pro GPUs and protected memory - they cost more than an Ultra. And they'll last. Turn it on and forget about it ... unlike a standard built it yourself always having to tinker with it PC. When time and productivity is a real cost, the Ultra is often a lot cheaper because its productivity is reliable. A Lexus costs more than a GM product but over the long run?
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Than an RTX4090? Lol. No quicker than a 4070, more like.
Uses the GPU for what? For 3D graphics, that's quite a bit.
Erm... OK.
The Ultra doesn't use ECC, so how is it more 'reliable' than a workstation GPU that does?
What would you expect to happen to a regular GPU, in a well ventilated case? It would just burn out, or something?
We also have no long term data on Ultra reliability yet. Apple's record with some of its other Pro machines e.g. the 2013 Mac Pro, hasn't exactly been stellar.
I find my 'standard built it myself' reliable, but then I know what I'm doing. PCs in an IT-managed setting can certainly be a different story.
Maybe, but there's a lot of factors here. Likely depends heavily on the use case you're talking about.
Gotta love car analogies!
Quite a bit of nonsense here. A 4090 is much quicker in all metrics. Modern PCs don’t really require much more “tinkering” than a Mac. Windows is a miserable user experience, I’ll give you that— but it’s not like you need to spend a bunch of time fixing things or getting things to work, unless you’ve installed a bunch of things you shouldn’t be installing. I’ve spent plenty of time with Apple products trying to troubleshoot basic stuff that SHOULD work but randomly doesn’t, with no obvious reason why. Having used both, I’d say that both are just about equally “reliable” these days.
By tinkering, do they perhaps mean hardware-wise, not software? I took them saying that in the context of how you can tinker with over/underclocking the chips how you want, for example.
Being someone who also used both, I agree that they are both “reliable”. It just depends on what you want and need. Both have their pros and cons for sure.
Windows is just as annoying as Mac when it comes to troubleshooting, though. Both are so bad when searching for settings for stuff. I haven’t used macOS in a few years, so I can’t say for sure how it is recently.
A lot of the shortcuts I understand from Windows are from decades of experience. For example, I didn’t know how to hide the taskbar in settings, but I knew how you can right-click the taskbar to jump into taskbar settings.
I'd disagree that Windows and Mac are equal in the troubleshooting category—Windows simply can't be, because they've got far wider hardware support issues and legacy code (c.f. Control Panel still living a zombie life in Windows 11.) Windows 10 and 11 have been a lot better than the bad old days of Vista,7, and 8, but I've still run into lots of weirdness (I've never had to do a Mac equivalent to mucking around in the registry editor to figure out why Windows update won't actually fetch updates) and lots of rough edges (the aforementioned Control Panel and fact that Windows can't even consistently theme its software to look like it all came from the same company. Even Apple with its recent more inconsistent style and frustrating UI choices has them beat there.)
Like any purchase, it all comes down to what you value most. Ease of use and ease of troubleshooting is worth a lot to me, while for others the greater power for reduced price is going to be worth it virtually no matter what. The next Mac Pro is going to be extremely powerful, but when you can get even more power in an upgradable form factor it's not surprising that's going to sway people regardless of how cruddy Windows is, especially if they spend most of their time in applications that are more or less the same across platforms.
Like any purchase, it all comes down to what you value most. Ease of use and ease of troubleshooting is worth a lot to me, while for others the greater power for reduced price is going to be worth it virtually no matter what. The next Mac Pro is going to be extremely powerful, but when you can get even more power in an upgradable form factor it's not surprising that's going to sway people regardless of how cruddy Windows is, especially if they spend most of their time in applications that are more or less the same across platforms.
Having two places for settings is pretty lame, though I very rarely need to visit the legacy one. Only for power settings I think, and that was mostly when first setting up the machine.
Inconsistencies in title bar height and button placement are disappointing - with Microsoft Office being a particularly bad offender. I don't tend to notice it much in practice though.
I use 3D apps a lot, and many of these don't even use the macOS menus anyway, as it makes porting easier. Otherwise, they're pretty much identical.
I find the small default fonts - especially in Explorer - give a somewhat dated appearance. Increasing the font size to 109% globally, then using Winaero Tweaker to set icon label size to 11 point (up from 10) gives a much more pleasing and consistent font size. The latter adjusts the Explorer font size in all areas (not just for icons). It obviously shouldn't be necessary to do this, but at least it's an easy fix.
Other quality of life improvements:
- Seer (recreates macOS QuickLook)
- LocalSend (AirDrop)
- TwinkleTray (use the keyboard to adjust monitor brightness)
- DisplayFusion (set a screen saver to only appear on one monitor; Fliquo in my case)
- Superpaper (map a wallpaper across multiple displays; accounts for bezel width too)
- ShareX (great screenshot tool - can also map keyboard shortcuts to be the same as the Mac's)
- TeraCopy (adds 'New folder with contents' to right-click menu).
- PhoneLink (built in to Windows. Connects to an iPhone as well as Apple will allow; does the job for sending / receiving texts, though is no iMessage)
- Em Client (excellent email app, similar feel to macOS Mail)
- Bvckup 2 (simple / clean drive backup software)
- Acronis (good OS drive imaging software; skip the virus protection stuff though - it's very buggy)
- Brave (great browser for Mac and Windows - like Chrome but with solid privacy features). Only mention as I had relied on Safari before, and went through quite a few browsers to find one that met my preferences.
I don't bother with antivirus - Windows Defender is as good as any these days, and doesn't constantly try to upsell you a paid version.
Windows scales to different PPIs well, though the multi-monitor experience is much smoother if all monitors share the same scaling factor. Otherwise, window sizes jump up / down as they go over 50% of their width onto the next screen, which feels janky.
I recently got a pair of Uperfect 18" / 2560 x 1600 monitors to supplement my main 27" 4K screen. These have a pretty similar PPI (168 vs 163 for the 4K), and everything runs at 150% scaling. Before that, I was using 22" 1080p side screens. I used an Nvidia feature to run these at a 150% higher virtual resolution, which at least allowed for a consistent Windows scaling factor, but was slightly soft. 22+27+22 was also a bit too wide in total for me - my current set up feels perfect.
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I'm not sure how things are on the video side of things, but for audio Thunderbolt and even USB (when properly implemented) suffice for 99% of use cases out there.
With aftermarket GPU's being a thing of the past on the Mac side, I think PCIe is on life support at best. I just don't see it being a good business proposition for any third-party manufacturer.
Avid and a few others will continue to sell and maybe even do minor updates to existing PCIe products, but why would anybody invest time and resources in developing new stuff for such a small and shrinking market?
I'd even say the same is true for Thunderbolt. With all the curve balls Intel threw at manufacturers, I can't see anybody putting serious R&D in new products. They'll milk whatever they already have but that's it. I doubt the protocol will be around ten years from now.
The last man standing is USB. That's all we will have in the future.
Or that's what I think, anyway. Just my $0.02
Neither have I. In fact I haven't ever had to muck around in the registry on any of my modern Windows systems.
There will always be examples of some issues / weirdness / what-have-you in any operating system. It's the nature of the beast. If you prefer one OS over another so be it, nothing wrong with preferences. However they're both very solid systems which do not have the issues of systems of old.
Mac OS is much worse year by year ... due to added "power" which means features.
And ECC memory along with a Xeon and Win Workstation is typically more reliable on a Workstation class computer. (But that can be a whole lot more expensive).
But ... with Apple, if you do have a problem, you can ring them up, and they will sort it out for you. With Windows you're on your own. Or you have to pay for it.
A business with IT support is not troubled by Windows. But a very small business has a conflict - pay more for Apple gear that also has more expensive and very restrictive upgrade paths but has terrific support and a high level of reliability; or go the Windows route which is less certain and when things go wrong, the solutions can cost time and money (and it could be a lot of money if productivity is effected).
And then there is the notebook issue where Apple can provide powerful mobile computers which can run the same software used back at base.
And ECC memory along with a Xeon and Win Workstation is typically more reliable on a Workstation class computer. (But that can be a whole lot more expensive).
But ... with Apple, if you do have a problem, you can ring them up, and they will sort it out for you. With Windows you're on your own. Or you have to pay for it.
A business with IT support is not troubled by Windows. But a very small business has a conflict - pay more for Apple gear that also has more expensive and very restrictive upgrade paths but has terrific support and a high level of reliability; or go the Windows route which is less certain and when things go wrong, the solutions can cost time and money (and it could be a lot of money if productivity is effected).
And then there is the notebook issue where Apple can provide powerful mobile computers which can run the same software used back at base.
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No, they won't.
I am yet to have Apple actually *solve* a Mac problem I called them with.
They'll make you jump through a zillion hoops, mak you capture logs, do hours of work *for them* documenting things, but at the end of the day it disappears to "Engineering" and you hear nothing back.
Th only thing Apple can "solve" is a hardware failure, when there's warranty support because the troubleshooting pipeline is "how do we make this fit the conditions of a warranty exchange".
Good luck with that, they are pretty hopeless, beyond the most basic things it's hard to trust them. They burned me. I was already suspicious of them and questioned them at every step and they still burned me.
I also had no help from Apple support. They sent me from one support center, to another.
Background: I had purchased a brand new 8TB SSD kit for the Mac Pro 7.1. And I was having problem installing macOS after having set it up in DFU mode.
I managed to solve it myself, after several days pf trial and error. And I contacted support to tell them how I managed to complete the install, because they were clueless about the Mac Pro.
But they didn't even bother to reply at that point.
Background: I had purchased a brand new 8TB SSD kit for the Mac Pro 7.1. And I was having problem installing macOS after having set it up in DFU mode.
I managed to solve it myself, after several days pf trial and error. And I contacted support to tell them how I managed to complete the install, because they were clueless about the Mac Pro.
But they didn't even bother to reply at that point.
I'd like to see them move to a backplane setup where the SOC is on an add in card and you can basically add M4 ultras (plus on package GPU/RAM) on a stick - for those old enough to remember, like Slot 1 intel pentium 2s (but maybe smaller). Maybe 4 SOC slots on the backplane?
Upgrade them to M5 ultras or whatever down the track. Keep PCIe slots for PCIe cards.
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Can you provide me with the number that I can call Apple up to have them fix the iOS / iPadOS 18.x issue with IMAP mail? I'd really like to get it fixed ASAP.
got a link to a description of that problem (before i move any of my devices to 18)?
Sure thing: Mail not downloading
It doesn't appear to be consistent but for those experiencing it it's a major issue.