Even though I am not a pro in this area. I also want an upgradable tower.
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.
New Mac Pro at WWDC June 2016
- Thread starter accentaudio
- Start date
-
- Tags
- mac pro refresh wwdc 2016
- Sort by reaction score
Even though I am not a pro in this area. I also want an upgradable tower.
Some Pros do, some "non-professional" users do. Some pros don't. I certainly would have been happier with a Mac Pro that slimmed down the old cheese grater footprint considerably, even if it was a traditional layout. I'm fine with the nMP form factor too, but I'm not going to buy it for full price.
All the pieces are in place for a revised mac pro. Intel is about to release Broadwell-E, AMD is about to release Polaris, and thunderbolt 3 and NVMe SSDs are already out there which should make this a great update. I hope Apple makes a big splash at WWDC with updated Mac Pros, Macbook Pros and thunderbolt 3 5k display.
Also don't want to spend 1 grand on external solutions to extend my internal storage space
I hope they bring back the upgradable tower... that's all I hope for.
What GPU's were leading the field 2 years ago? That's what'll be in one if announced.
One nice thing about USB-C is that it should bring down the cost of external storage. If you don't want to pay for external thunderbolt storage you can fall back to USB 3.1 which can deliver 10 Gbps. That should be plenty for all but the fastest storage needs.
I wouldn't get your hopes up...
AMD's Polaris has Apple's name written all over it. AMD has been teasing its efficiency and performance per watt for awhile now which is what Apple cares about. I bet we see variations of this chip in the Mac Pro, Macbook Pro and iMac before the year's end.
And Apple just had to see for the first time that iPhone sales can decline - maybe that's an eye-opening experience for them, demonstrating the need to not lose focus of their other product lines, such as the Mac.
How about Double full price?
A friend of mine had to buy one yesterday, they have about a dozen workstations, but couldn't put it off any longer. He asked me why they were so expensive.
I said "You tell me, you're the one buying it". He explained they have too much legacy work that won't transfer properly to PC, but almost all of his competitors have switched to PCs, with more robust configurations, so the writing is on the wall.
[doublepost=1462559575][/doublepost]
A lot have moved on, I'm limping by on my heavily upgraded oMP 12-cores, but if Apple screws up this time (and, I see nothing to indicate anything to the contrary), I can't wait another three years.
I think a certain subset of buyers who are concerned with very high performance, i.e., 18+ cores, 128+ GB of RAM, multiple high end GPUS or CUDA and other configurations have already left the platform. Apple was never competitive in the raw compute boxes market and now that most organizations have consolidated their compute abilities in clusters Apple will probably never cater to this market. They simply can't compete on price when hardware at this level is so much of a commodity.
For those users who prefer OS X to other operating systems and want more compute power than consumer hardware like the iMac than I think they will be happy with this update. The new mac pro will offer CPUs with 18+ cores, dual AMD GPUs that together will be faster than any single GPU on the market and with thunderbolt 3 expandability that should enable external retina displays or external GPUs. The addition of USB-C/USB 3.1 should address a lot of the complaints of the added cost of external expandability as it will make it cheaper to add storage.
My hope is that they make the base Mac Pro a 6 core configuration with decent GPUs with support for a retina display such that it is a clear win compared to the top end 27" iMac.
Exactly. Much of the complaints leveled at the nMP are simply carryover-complaints about the cMP.
Inadequate GPU's? Check. I heard that about the (now-revered) cMP as well, on this very forum.
Lack of expandability? Check. People complained that comparable PC workstations had more PCI slots, more drive bays, more RAM slots.
Overpriced? Check. Price comparisons to similar but much more expandable PC workstations have been a firm forum favorite since the 1st-gen Intel MacPro.
So yeah, most of the complaints about the '13 MacPro are just complaints about ANY MacPro since I have been visiting this forum (around '08).
I hope you're right. For me, the added cost of a Thunderbolt HDD chassis and the higher base price ($2999 as opposed to $2499) of the 2013 MP were the main objections. If the R&D cost of the cylinder design has been absorbed by the 2013 model, I think Apple should reduce the price of the base nMP back to $2499
All of this complaints about internal expandability. I am wondering how people who currently complain about in in future will be able to expand their computer with 40-50 GPU dies in other way other than externally?
I suggest listening what Raja Koduri have said about production costs, scalability of the design of GPUs, and the need of seeing multiple GPUs connected to computer as one big GPU cluster. Future GPUs will be made from multiple dies on single interposer, connected through internal coherent fabric, and HBM or other next gen. memory type.
I am not saying that Mac Pro is best idea of desktop computer, someone may come with better design for external expansion.
I suggest listening what Raja Koduri have said about production costs, scalability of the design of GPUs, and the need of seeing multiple GPUs connected to computer as one big GPU cluster. Future GPUs will be made from multiple dies on single interposer, connected through internal coherent fabric, and HBM or other next gen. memory type.
I am not saying that Mac Pro is best idea of desktop computer, someone may come with better design for external expansion.
I don't really hope for a price reduction but it would be nice to see an improvement in the base specifications. The current base mac pro is worse in almost every way compared to a well configured iMac that is cheaper. Since the quad-core xeons almost always lose out to the quad core consumer parts it would be nice to see the base configuration come with a 6 core part instead.
Basically what I am looking for in the Mac Pro is a 6 core Xeon, 16 GB of memory, with an 8 GB cut Polaris part, and a 512 GB SSD. If we got all or most of this in the $3k base model I would be over the moon.
I'm wondering about SSDs as well. While the speed increases have been tremendous, notebooks especially have been stuck on 128 and 256GB for a long time now, and while the more pressing issue for more people is the lack of fusion drives being standard on desktops it's high time most of Apple's products got either higher base storage or much more reasonable upgrade prices (or both, but hey, I understand Apple's gotta' eat.)
Eh, the small capacities usually have to do with low demand for super expensive 1 TB SSDs on portable systems or lack of logic board space. Apple has also consistently kept SSD upgrade prices the same while pushing faster speeds at the same capacities. Since SSD process sizes have been decreasing we may see the new systems have up to 2 TB capacities. In the case of the Mac Pro it would be nice to see them use dual SSDs (one hanging off each GPU). They could RAID them and you would never know it was 2 separate SSDs instead of 1.
If it took them three years for simple upgrade they might was well not bother. If they did a significant change at least that might help explain why it took them three years. A simple upgrade that should be done at least once a year would really tell its pro users still holding out hope that its over, and spending more money on this platform probably isn't a wise investment.
Have you ever paid attention to the state of GPU's in the Mac Pro? New or Old? They have always been at least 18 months out of date.
AMD teasing? It's called marketing. They all do it. It would be nice if Apple pulled it's finger out of it's backside and used the lastest GPU's for a change but dont bank on it.
Anyway, Polaris 10 is only a direct replacment for what we have now. We'll have to wait for Polaris 11 to get any real performance increase.
Can see Tim on stage " Our latest MacPro, just look at it, with the same performance GPU's, 10% faster CPU, 2GB RAM, 120GB SSD. Here at Apple we think you'll love it, 1 TB port, we have done away with the clutter of USB. It's now 10% thinner, prices starting at $3500, order taken from today to be shipped in December. ."We think this will change the way the video industry works
Last edited:
If gpu was upgradable, I believe more people would make that purchase. For now, it's buy it once and buy another after years later.
But look at the screws!
... and it's 3 years later - and still the same old stuff.
I'm beginning to wonder if "Phil my ass" has a plan to wait until Intel end-of-lifes the E5-x6nn v2 before updating the tired tube. (Or maybe ATI will EOL the old Radeons in the tube first.)
LOL....yeah. I felt that from last few keynotes...he gave up on life.But look at the screws!
... and it's 3 years later - and still the same old stuff.
I'm beginning to wonder if "Phil my ass" has a plan to wait until Intel end-of-lifes the E5-x6nn v2 before updating the tired tube. (Or maybe ATI will EOL the old Radeons in the tube first.)
Who knows...lol. Apple is like China...unpredictable.
[doublepost=1462579048][/doublepost]
That's interesting rumor. What would lead to that?
I highly doubt that. They are sitting on $200-300 BILLION in cash. They could send someone to Mars and back and it wouldn't put a dent in their piggy bank.
But the cash isn't in the United States.
If Apple moved the cash to the US to pay for the "designed in California" label - like the rest of us Apple would need to pay income tax on it. The bean counters who run Apple don't want to pay income tax like the rest of us.
As long as Apple leaves it in off-shore tax havens - no income tax. (And little chance of putting it to meaningful use - unless you consider sending it to Mars is meaningful.)
Last edited:
I'm beginning to think all the innovation went to Phil's Posterior.
To sum it all up, at least for me as a professional user, they have to really heavily make for what they did in 2013 otherwise I'll switch anyways. They've become really bean counters, especially as of late, driving everything towards the consumer market. I remember when I bought the Mac Pro 3.1, it was one hell of a machine, performance wise compared with the competition, in addition to the best OS, for me personally on the planet. Good memories, that's all it's been lately sadly. And look, I felt like upgrading my graphics card last year, so I just popped in a GTX 970, what a beauty huh? And the processors (dual quad core) are still en par with contemporary performance standards, consideriing that machine is 7 years old, that's freaking amazing.