you're going to spend the same amount to do that with any computer.
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New Mac Pro at WWDC June 2016
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Nope, I'm content with all my bays. Well anyhows, it is an unnecessary design based barrier imposed that'll cost you at least 1 grand to get back to what you were used to with the previous models. And let me repeat that, there is no technical reason for this investment. The reason why you have to invest into more external solutions is because they chose that particular, unreasonably small design, given the fact that in all honesty, people who really work with this kind of computers have no benefit from the form factor. It's got a heavily / revolutionary improved heat dissipation, low carbon foot print and very small size at the cost of unprecedentedly low peformance and upgradability issues, given previous iterations.
True, a lot of it is off shore, but the lack of progress on the Mac Pro (or any of the Macs) is not due to a shortage of R&D money. They are rolling in cash over in the US. They also have R&D facilities outside of the US.
The problem is that since Jobso passed away the Mac has lost it's biggest proponent. Cook believes the iPad is the future of computing. For everyone. The Mac is an 'also ran' as far as a lot of people at Apple are concerned.
apple does not make the kind of computer you want.
on a scale of 1-10, how clear is this to you?
I tend to agree.
Yet on the other hand if Jobs himself were still alive we'd know for sure. My doubt comes from the fact that Steve... anointed the iPad as "Magical and Revolutionary!
He also pushed the concept of the iPad as the Post PC miracle device.
I must've gotten my Mac Pro from the tooth fairy.
Well, there are some fairy tales involved.
but since it's made of screws, the GPU upgrades are right around the corner.
I was thinking like this. However, recently, I changed. It's the user (us) to choose.
Apple keep making their product thinner, lighter, and may be weaker (compare to the PC / Android world), because people rush to buy their product.
Regardless lots of people complaining Apple should make more powerful / robust. The truth is even more people vote for the slim product by their wallet. That's what pushing Apple to this direction.
Apple is not that stupid. They will try new stuff, but stop / pause once the market give them poor response (by the wallet, not the review etc).
I believe Apple slow down to release new watch and Mac Pro because the poor sales (compare to other Apple product), so they need more time to figure out the new direction on these products.
On other products, people rush to buy the Macbook Air (I am not talking about professional, but all buyer), so they release the even thinner new MacBook. People love lighter iPad, so they release iPad Air. They tried the large iPad Pro, poor sales, so they release the 9.7" iPad Pro in just few months (the sales suggest that people only love to buy slim / light product).
However, obviously it's not the same case in Mac Pro. Apple tried, but the sales poor. In this forum, it's about 50% of people love the new one and 50% hate it. That's sure not good enough. Even the core group only has 50% potential buyer, and the high price tag simply stop the Mac mini / iMac guy to try the nMP. That eventually cause a very low sales of the nMP.
At this moment, I tends to believe that Apple won't change this quick, most likely they will release one more nMP with reasonable higher spec (compare to the PC world, not just the 6,1) but the same cost. And test the sales figure. If that work, then our lovely tower most likely won't come back forever. Because our wallet suggests that we love slim / small product, and we don't mind to go everything external.
For an enterprise, IMO, Apple is near the end of it's life cycle. At this stage, they only look at the money, no more innovative idea, scare to break the rule. And that will eventually kill a company. I few friends working in Apple. They love the job, because the package is reasonable, not because they love this company. They are driven by fear, not willing to do anything more than the instruction / guide line to help their user, they simply don't want to lost their job. I've seen few big company like this, and they are all going down (slowly).
There is no exception to Apple. People love them because Apple product create value (not necessary money, my value may be simple to use, save my time, easy to learn, give me a good Apple users network, etc). And now, other companies learnt, they can produce a product that create more value. Apple will eventually kill itself if they fail to create value in the future but just driven by money.
As the others said, buy the nMP is not a problem, if it helps you to earn money, the machine pay for itself. That's a kind of create value. However, in the professional world, it seems buying a PC can create more value now. For consumer world. The nMP can hardly create any value, some people will still buy it, but for most "not too rich people", it's simply not worth, so they vote down by their wallet. Look at the 5k iMac, we know that's good value, because you are basically buying the screen, and have a free computer (when it was just release). That's the value in the consumer world, so people willing to pay for it. It's not about the absolute price, but the price / value ratio.
If you're serious about having a decent amount of storage you hook up an external storage array (and you can even share it between multiple users then). Your 4 internal drive bays in the old Pro are not going to be able to compete with something like this:
http://www.proavio.com/index.php/products/desktop/eb800ms-v2
http://www.proavio.com/index.php/products/desktop/eb800ms-v2
I'm voting no.
We've entered the post-PC era. Apple does not want to be associated with old technology. Desktops and spinning disks and big monitors are old technology. 12" screens and low powered arm processors are where it's at now. Oh. and saving videos to the cloud.
You guys need to let go of your grandpa boxes already. Stop acting like it's the 1990s. Nothing great ever happened to people who refused to adapt.
</extreme sarcasm>
We've entered the post-PC era. Apple does not want to be associated with old technology. Desktops and spinning disks and big monitors are old technology. 12" screens and low powered arm processors are where it's at now. Oh. and saving videos to the cloud.
You guys need to let go of your grandpa boxes already. Stop acting like it's the 1990s. Nothing great ever happened to people who refused to adapt.
</extreme sarcasm>
I agree with you. This is the realist thing I heard today. Too many people want iphones (nothing wrong with it) and all other fancy items. You know...few days ago I was watching a youtube video of 10 tips to be successful from Steve Job from various time period. One of the elements why Steve was successful was because...he was passionate and didn't want to ship junk products..and he knew he couldn't cross that line. He was logical and philosophical and applied that knowledge to his products. His core value was passion.
Tim is great...but only to sell....nothing more than that. We need a CEO who believes in their products...not to pimp their products out.
It would help if there wasn't an army of people ready to forgive and excuse any and all apple mistakes.
The truth remains the truth, despite efforts at obfuscation. A sad, slow little computer with no future due to a complete and total lack of upgrades remains exactly what it is. Despite any lies told to confuse people.
The truth remains the truth, despite efforts at obfuscation. A sad, slow little computer with no future due to a complete and total lack of upgrades remains exactly what it is. Despite any lies told to confuse people.
"That" of which you speak is being competed with as I type! Look at their "product performance 2" that shows Read 1355MB/s and Write 1420MB/s with 8 7200rpm spinners. With 4 internal drives in "the old Pro" (bays 1-4), an ATTO R644 (PCIe slot 2) to have said drives bypass the back plane and 4 drives in an external SAS box (equaling 8), the speed is there 1076MB/s Read and 1436MB/s Write. Replace the spinners with 8 SSD's and you have the speed in their "product performance 1" example!
"That" of which you speak is being competed with as I type! Look at their "product performance 2" that shows Read 1355MB/s and Write 1420MB/s with 8 7200rpm spinners. With 4 internal drives in "the old Pro" (bays 1-4), an ATTO R644 (PCIe slot 2) to have said drives bypass the back plane and 4 drives in an external SAS box (equaling 8), the speed is there 1076MB/s Read and 1436MB/s Write. Replace the spinners with 8 SSD's and you have the speed in their "product performance 1" example!
View attachment 630343
Yeah, he forget that the cMP can go external, but the nMP cannot go internal. I have no doubt that a cMP can't use that particular accessory. However, it doesn't mean that the cMP cannot achieve the same storage size and speed with the same cost (or lower).
TB may never exist on the cMP, but USB 3.x (or 4.x later) will. With one Sonnet USB 3.0 card, there are 4x independent USB 3.0 port. Plugin some external HDD / SSD to all 4 port, RAID them all together, that's 2000MB/s max (in theory). If each port connect to a USB HDD enclosure with 8 bay, that can go 8x8x4 = 256TB via a single PCIe card (assuming there is no other software limitation of course, but I can see the possibility is there).
May be TB is a more advance technology. However, for files storage. There is no big difference between USB enclosure and TB enclosure. TB on nMP is bootable, but I think we can also use USB 2.0 re-direction method to boot from a USB 3.0 card (I didn't test it yet). And a cMP can easily have more than 10 internal bootable SSD anyway (4 internal bay, 2 optical bay, only one extra Amfeltec card can hold 4 more PCIe SSD). TB is good, but not that critical at this moment as long as we still has the PCIe slots. Also, a cMP can go for eSATA, which is another cheap but bootable external solution.
The nMP is a nice machine. However, there is not much that a nMP can do but the cMP cannot (I am talking about the final outcome, but not "must able to connect to a particular device").
There are few thing that the cMP cannot achieve. e.g.
small size (including better portability)
low energy consumption (for the same performance)
higher single core performance
Quietness
TB connectivity
However, small size usually is not a concern for desktop user.
Low energy consumption for the same performance of course is good, I cannot argue on this point. And since the cMP can't go more performance (CPU) either. So, I won't argue that the nMP has no option to consume more, and deliver more, because cMP is on the same boat.
cMP cannot has better single core performance, but the nMP is not much better, we all lose, iMac is the king of single core performance Mac.
The nMP is a very quiet machine, for some studio, may be that's essential. But in general, the cMP is also a reasonable quiet machine. The gap is not that big between them.
TB... still can't see the value at this moment.
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You can buy a brand new 8 core Dell workstation for less then half the nMP price. I think this is what he tries to point out. I moved last year january to Dell and couldn't be happier. After more then 20 years of mac i just could not justify the prices anymore. I purchased a dual Xeon for my 3d work and i am very happy with price and performance. By the way it was less then 4 core nMP......
I see this point (and variations of it) made often - but I wonder whether it's really true.
Particularly if you measure the power where the UPS hits the wall, and not where the MP6,1 hits the UPS, so that you'll get all of the external expansion boxes included in the draw.
I would be surprised if the MP6,1 draws significantly less power than a single socket Dell or HP with an SSD drive. Exactly the same electronics are running, and the MP power supply isn't spectacularly efficient. Unless the second GPU effectively sleeps when not in use, the MP6,1 might even draw more.
______
Note that I'm really thinking about "typical" use, where the system is idling most of the time while the human is "thinking", and occasionally gets some work to do. If you encode or render 24x7, or if your power hungry app is optimized for AMD GPUs, the results may be different.
Which alternative universe is that in ? In this reality......
' .... On Fixing Apple ....
....
"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."
-- Fortune, Feb. 19, 1996
.... '
http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/03/70512
Claims that all Cook is doing is milking the Mac and Steve would never, ever have thought about doing that are just delusional. If there is a critique on this particular topic, it is that they are tooooooo stuck on what Jobs wanted to do long term instead of looking at what the current opportunities enable.
The Mac Pro stopped getting substantive updates back 2011-2012. It wasn't until after Jobs died that the pipelined moved again. Jobs was sick be still around in 2009-2010 when the R&D on the updated Mac Pro for 2011-2012 should have happened. It did not.
Jobs killed off the Macbook. Two more "boxes with slots" ... XServe , XRaid .
What Jobs focused on was transform what was a Personal Computer. Taking it back out of he static definition box it had calcified into where it is primarily defined as being a box with slots and largely driven by MS Windows requirements and use cases. Redefine what a PC is and Apple could get back into a race with MS again. Especially if MS was asleep at the wheel ( which they were).
Anyone really think the 'classic' MacBook Pro 13" 2012 model would still be for sale at Apple is Jobs was still around?
http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/
Apple can take jabs at 5 year old Windows boxes when selling a 4 year old hardware as new. That's new. But is is inconsistent with milking the Mac for all it is worth.
Jobs who killed off everything old when superseded by new vision if product direction? The revamped MacBook didn't kill off the MBA instantly? This transition to consolidating the laptop line up taking multiple years? Not very Jobsian at all. ( versus his "Do it all within a year" and "kill the old version now" edicts that were typically made on his 'watch' ).
It isn't the primary focus of most folks at the company. But it is a substantially bigger company now. There is zero need to have 110K employees just to create and sell Macs by more than an order of magnitude.
However, it is also not the primary focus of most of the customer base either. The activity in this Mac Pro forum on tweak/bumps to 2006-2008 Mac Pros that are "mostly OK for my workload ... just looking for an relatively inexpensive add-on" are one of the more active set of threads here.
I live in the real universe where over the past few years the Mac lineup has been left to whither on the vine. Mediocre upgrades and poor design decisions. If the lineup is any better in your universe maybe you can teleport us a few of these advanced models when you have a moment.
You want a prime example? Have a look at the Macbook Air. Aside from speed bumps it's essentially the same machine that was introduced in 2008. They upgraded the display in 2010, but that's six years ago. To be frank in todays market the screen is an embarrassment, especially for a company like Apple that supposedly prides itself on not doing things half assed.
The Mac is no longer a priority at Apple. It's 10-15% of their income and internally not considered the sexy product to work on. Anyone at Apple who wants to be a player, wants a piece of the iPhone, iPad or iTunes Store. That's where the money, glamour and power is. Jobs had an affinity for the Mac for obvious reason and as long as he was around and in good health he maintained the lineup, even if it no longer represented their main source of income.
I get it that the world has changed with the rise of mobile, but Apple is a big enough company to devote resources to more than one product line at a time. On the other hand if they are over the Mac, maybe they should just axe it or sell OS X to IBM. Wouldn't that be ironic?
I'm going with no new Mac Pro, they finally decide to stop stringing along thier customers that they support the pro sector and Ditch the Mac Pro, but unveil new MacBooks or iMacs stating the desktop is dead! Though reinstate that the iPad Pro is all you need .
It will be small and thinner, please welcome the new Mac Pro lava lamp edition
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I had a dream that OSX became public domain and we could license it to install and run on any hardware and drivers were available from manufacturers just like they do for Windows. Then I woke up.
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With REAL liquid cooling! Must be REAL powerful! I like it!
Which, as the direct quote from Steve Jobs I included above, was explicitly Jobs' long term plan. So how does that make him the Mac's most ardent defender when his primary focus was on "the next great thing"? That is the disconnect from reality.
In in this universe. Your alternative universe is where Jobs isn't primarily weighting the "next great thing" and keeping the Mac as the central focus of Apple for the long term.
An example of "milking it for all it is worth" only reinforces the quote I cited above. The issue is whether you have some example other than the plan that Jobs laid out. Jobs' Apple works with 5 year plan outlines for products. The stuff in 2013-2015 still had some inputs (or deallocation of resources; say no ) from Jobs on them.
Besides, the current MBA is not filling the same role as the 2008 MBA. The MBA of 2008 was a slightly upscale/upmarket system (price premium on thinnest/lightest). Namely, the MBA and MacBook have swapped places. The purpose the Macbook name served in 2008 is exactly the role that the MBA 2015 is playing ( entry level price point). Same is true for the Macbook of 2015. It is now in the same role as the MBA was in 2008 ( maximum lightest, thinnest system from Apple. )
Jobs might have killed off the MBA 11" and pushed the MBA 13" into that price point. But he still would need an "entry level" computer. And the latest , greatest tech isn't going to work with the "required" profit margins ( also a constraint Jobs was fully on board with). Or perhaps Jobs would have just swapped the names.
That would be another alternative universe where IBM was still in the consumer computer business. They aren't. In this reality, IBM is mostly a services company now. Any computer hardware is corporate data center types of offerings. They don't need OS X. OS X is largely only valuable to Apple. There is nobody else that is going to make that work. OS X decoupled from the hardware is a lost cause. OS X doesn't easily decouple from iOS ( and tvOS) either. The cost structure for maintaining some of the shared infrastructure is paid for by the much larger iOS market. Pull that money and talent out of the R&D and have a bigger issue. Dell , HP , Lenovo ... they are all trending water as PC vendors. ( Dell is busy trying to consume EMC to remain viable, HP just got spun out and needs to find something else long term, Lenovo without huge China growth has major problems. ..... etc. etc. )
Apple is still pulling folks out of the Window soup at a rate that is quite profitable. There is nobody who has the cash to pay what Apple should charge to sell off OS X when OS X is still very substantially profitable. Try buying Windows off of Microsoft.