How much will those enclosures cost? What size power supply must each have? At 80% efficiency how much energy is wasted over two devices that a larger single internal power supply could handle with less waste or heat generated? Who provides support, Apple or the enclosure maker? Who to call when something goes wrong, Apple, card manufacturer or enclosure manufacturer?
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People Who Complain About the New Mac Pro Misunderstand It
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How much will those enclosures cost? What size power supply must each have? At 80% efficiency how much energy is wasted over two devices that a larger single internal power supply could handle with less waste or heat generated? Who provides support, Apple or the enclosure maker? Who to call when something goes wrong, Apple, card manufacturer or enclosure manufacturer?
If you're considering buying a Titan, and NEED a Titan, I can't really see how cost is going to be your main concern. It is already an outrageously expensive card.
300W for one, or 600W for two. AFAICT.
A few dozen watts? If anything? Who cares???
No-one provides support, unless Apple releases said TB enclosure, then it's Apple. If something goes wrong, you contact whoever made the bit that broke...
I never said it as the best possible scenario, but it IS possible. and it IS practical.
Are you sure
Are you certain that it really solves all of you problems. Have you tested what you want to use. We did (albeit on TB v1) and found that several bits of our existing gear will have to scrapped or upgraded -- and given the cost of that, this box had better be really cheap. This was not all due to v1 speed! Most was nonexistent or flaky drivers that manufactures don't want to support until they see some benefit to it.
Are you certain that it really solves all of you problems. Have you tested what you want to use. We did (albeit on TB v1) and found that several bits of our existing gear will have to scrapped or upgraded -- and given the cost of that, this box had better be really cheap. This was not all due to v1 speed! Most was nonexistent or flaky drivers that manufactures don't want to support until they see some benefit to it.
Amen, bro .
Sorry for taking things a bit out of context.
Not just small, but even mid sized businesses can feel the impact of significant changes in hardware, when computer performance and compatibility is a major concern in their field of work .
Some companies have actual owners, believe it or not; every buck spent comes out of their own pockets, never mind the 30 cents tax deduction .
How much of such an impact the new MP design will eventually have, compared to changes that happened before, that's hard to say right now .
It very much depends on individual requirements .
For me, if I lost the current port powered Firewire, I'd have a 30k problem .
I admit I'm not familiar with all the hubs etc. that exist, but a simple TB-FW dongle doesn't work with my photo gear .
That's not representative; but tell me again why I should embrace this future of computing, just because some employees at Apple figured that thinking different is so much cooler than industry standards .
We really need a laugh button rather than just replying to do a smiley.
BTW, who are you trying to convince? Those who drink your koolaid will agree with you, those who do not will not. You can say all you want and nobody will change sides.
Yes we do need a Laugh Button!
And to some degree I think you're right about the taking of sides. But I also think that there are some that are hoping agains hope that Apple will still listen to some degree. It doesn't seem to me and my colleagues that they have been for some time now. But, they still have time.
Apple has gotten very good at being a "consumer" products company -- I think everyone knows that. Except for their legacy, they are not showing up at the table as a good PRO products company. The "consumer" model and/or mentality doesn't really work well for PRO products
I think the folks who complain about needing tons more dedicated bandwidth to each internal or external device would have built their own "Pro" to begin with with COTS parts. (commercial off the shelf).
More whining from people who would have never bought this machine to begin wtih
More whining from people who would have never bought this machine to begin wtih
This new Mac Pro integrates everything I've tried to upgrade on my existing Mac Pro... dual GPUs, PCIe SSD, and USB 3, so if it works as advertised... I'm certain it will solve my problems. The only peripheral I'll need is a USB 3 enclosure for my 3TB archive HD.
I think the folks who complain about needing tons more dedicated bandwidth to each internal or external device would have built their own "Pro" to begin with with COTS parts. (commercial off the shelf).
More whining from people who would have never bought this machine to begin wtih
?
I'd buy 25 of them if they'd kept the same or roughly the same chassis, and upgraded the internals to workstation standard levels.
2x LGA 2011 sockets
8x RAM slots
3x PCI-E 3.0 x16, 1-2 x8's
USB3
4-6 3.5/2.5" Sata III bays
Thunderbolt - sure why not
Similar case to current Mac Pro.
If they'd announced that I'd buy probably 25 for my company over the next year.
This design, we'll probably get 1 or 2, for ingest, and depending on how things go might keep one for Smoke. So if we figure $6K per box that is 150k lost sales.
I have a Titan in a PC. ..Cost is a concern to me. ..My PC costs less than $3,000.
What will be the price of a nMP running a Titan?
I run X-Plane. ..10% difference in frame rate could be the difference between the plane flying or the plane crashing into the ground.
Oh my god, think of the women and children on board. The new mac pro is morally indefensible!
I'm so excited. I get to buy an enclosure with external power supply for several hundred extra unnecessary dollars to run a Titan via Thunderbolt that will, at best, be 10% slower than it would be by including even a single industry standard PCI-E port.
Hey, it's small though, right? That's what matters. Way more important than performance, cost, and compatibility with available parts.
Hey, it's small though, right? That's what matters. Way more important than performance, cost, and compatibility with available parts.
If apple would open up their license to do so I would put it on a generic intel tower and upgrade that at will in a heartbeat. I would severely miss having applecare but that would be offset by not having to hope apple gave us the things we wanted rather than what consumers wanted.
I would also miss not being an apple customer. I have been one for more than 3 decades. In addition to buying their stuff I plopped down thousands for stock when it was in the doldrums to show my faith in the company. My main hero is Woz and when Jobs returned to Apple my response was 'they got the wrong Steve'.
As I have said before I do not need professional level equipment -- the CPU power in either the 2012 or 2013 pro would never be a major restriction for me. What I DO need (yes, I mean NEED as opposed to want) is an open machine that lets me play with the hardware. While I am mainly a programmer hardware also appeals. An open architecture meshes with my sense of good design, even if it frightens off non-techies.
A closed box does not fit my criteria. It would be fine if this were a mini deluxe or something, but to say this is the new MP is an insult. Not okay.
I had previously eliminated the iMac right off as it is closed. With this machine though I am now looking what the next release of that will bring. After all, if I am going to have a closed box meant for consumers either way I may as well get the least expensive one that fits what I need it for. Way to lose money Tim.
Sounds more like a desire than anything, from a software perspective you can certainly "play" with the hardware by for example using OpenCL on those new graphics cards. And to be honest, how much did the old Mac Pro let you "play" with the hardware? Arduinos or Raspberry PIs let's you play with the hardware.
It's about GPUs, and also the "cloud"
Apple has recognized that the center of mass of computing power in a workstation has moved towards the graphics cards. In the old MacPro, you got only one slot for a powerful card. Now you have two. In the old MacPro, Apple was at the mercy of 3rd-party card manufacturers to release Mac versions of newer cards. Now they will make the cards themselves, buying the chip from AMD / nVidia like the third parties. This means they have more control AND can make more money off of them, so hopefully that will translate to new GPUs being available in a more timely fashion. (Not to mention you'll have to bring it in to an Apple Store to get upgraded and increase profits further.)
They also recognize that external storage options are far more flexible than internal, especially with all of the cloud-based and cloud-enabling solutions out there. They believe that Thunderbolt is fast enough for that.
Now, should they have allowed for more than one CPU or more RAM? You might as well ask also whether they should have allowed for more than two GPUs. At some point you have to call a limit to what goes in one machine, and what is better served rack-mounted and clustered. Apple is drawing that line where it is, believing that much of the market needing larger will go with linux farms anyway, and the remainder is too small to engineer for (cf. Xserve).
Another factor in here is the trend towards "cloudy" architectures for compute. Whether it's conventional CPU type of stuff handled at AWS or the GPU-in-the-cloud solutions that nVidia is pushing, compute is moving back from the desktop to the datacenter, after some decades moving in the opposite direction.
As I see it, most of the complainers are those that, for a variety of perfectly valid reasons, want to take advantage of a blurred line between server and workstation equipment. But the trends are in the opposite direction -- towards a more robust division between smaller, weaker devices that specialize in UI functions and convenience, and high-bandwidth to the remaining functions in the cloud. Defenders of the old ATX tower way are fighting a losing battle against a rising tide that will likely continue for many years.
Apple has recognized that the center of mass of computing power in a workstation has moved towards the graphics cards. In the old MacPro, you got only one slot for a powerful card. Now you have two. In the old MacPro, Apple was at the mercy of 3rd-party card manufacturers to release Mac versions of newer cards. Now they will make the cards themselves, buying the chip from AMD / nVidia like the third parties. This means they have more control AND can make more money off of them, so hopefully that will translate to new GPUs being available in a more timely fashion. (Not to mention you'll have to bring it in to an Apple Store to get upgraded and increase profits further.)
They also recognize that external storage options are far more flexible than internal, especially with all of the cloud-based and cloud-enabling solutions out there. They believe that Thunderbolt is fast enough for that.
Now, should they have allowed for more than one CPU or more RAM? You might as well ask also whether they should have allowed for more than two GPUs. At some point you have to call a limit to what goes in one machine, and what is better served rack-mounted and clustered. Apple is drawing that line where it is, believing that much of the market needing larger will go with linux farms anyway, and the remainder is too small to engineer for (cf. Xserve).
Another factor in here is the trend towards "cloudy" architectures for compute. Whether it's conventional CPU type of stuff handled at AWS or the GPU-in-the-cloud solutions that nVidia is pushing, compute is moving back from the desktop to the datacenter, after some decades moving in the opposite direction.
As I see it, most of the complainers are those that, for a variety of perfectly valid reasons, want to take advantage of a blurred line between server and workstation equipment. But the trends are in the opposite direction -- towards a more robust division between smaller, weaker devices that specialize in UI functions and convenience, and high-bandwidth to the remaining functions in the cloud. Defenders of the old ATX tower way are fighting a losing battle against a rising tide that will likely continue for many years.
I rather like to think of it as a uber mac mini pro.. If priced accordingly, I'm in!
Are you being purposefully obtuse? If I was just talking about software calls of course I would not need to get into the hardware.
So how does the old MP let me do things with the hardware? Ok, to list just a few ...
swap out internal drives
add/remove/replace PCI cards
upgrade/replace components, including the CPU
I may be a newbie to this forum;but, I am anything but a newbie. I've been around since the beginning of Apple and followed through the thick and thin. The insult is that new Apple could let down its PRO users this way. There are downsides to the design, and other facts that seem to be ignored.
From my point of view this looks like a consumer product and has very few of the features I would consider in a professional machine. There needs to be some backwards compatibility because not everyone can just throw away things that are necessary to their work flow. It MAY BE too big of a change right now. The upgrade path MAY BE too difficult. It MAY BE just plain not worth the cost. I need to see what Apple actually releases and what the options are to know.
But what really amazes me is this type of design has be bandied about on this and other forums I peruse (I have just be lurking about), and it seemed to me most people expressed that they really didn't like the idea of this type of design -- yet this is exactly what Apple produced. You would think that they would use forums like this to do market research
I'm sorry, my experience has not be positive with TB expansion -- that's not to say my experiences aren't unique. But, it is not a benefit if you can't use it.
I'm glad you said "on paper". In theory this is a great design. In every tech adventure I've been on it has never turned out as good as it looked "on paper" -- never!
Nope, non of the things you listed are requirements for software development, thus it's not a NEED (as you put it) but a wish.
If you need a fast machine with powerful GPUs for software development, this box seems pretty much ideal. You get a full UNIX system out of the box, just add a NAS or something for backups if you don't already have it.
And for what it's worth besides memory, it seems that you may very well be able to swap out GPUs, CPU and SSD in the new Mac Pro, I suspect all of them are installed in sockets.
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You must not have been around Mac Pros very long?
This argument about expandability is simply laughable. If I was inclined to have more hard drives or more PCIe slots than come stock with a current Mac Pro there are many solutions. First off, FW800 still works just fine for almost any task I can think of. Unless you are using an array of fast drives, you will not max out FW800 with current tech. Even with an array of fast drives you have to TRY to max out FW800.
Then the whoel PCI slot thing. It is obvious that most of us do not need as many cards as we used to. Gone are the days when you needed a card for the printer, a card for networking and a card for the hard drives. Most of the tasks that were handled by cards are built into the motherboard now.
However, we do still use SANs and fibre attached storage is pretty popular. Since the new Mac Pro has no HBA slot and there is no TB to HBA adapter that I know of we are kind of stuck with purchasing a TB to PCIe box to hold the fiber/HBA card externally, thence from there to your SAN/Fibre storage.
Sure TB drive arrays exist, but nobody I am aware of makes a TB equipped array which shares that volume among multiple users. That is why SANs are great.
Also, folks in audio and video production have been using external PCIe chassis connected to Mac Pros since G5 days. It is easy to set up, if cumbersome. But then having all your non-system drives and other peripherals connected externally is a pain, and messy.
I have my studio built around a 15" cMBP in that fashion and I am not completely happy with the results. I may swipe an obsolete Mac Pro from work after our next refresh. Just so I can have most of my drives and DSP stashed in the same case.
I'm actually looking forward to the new Mac Pro. It will make a nice replacement for my Mac Mini.
You still are completely missing the point. If I was only going on cpu and gpu resource consumption I would not be looking at ANY sort of a tower, mac or not. I can do software development on any modern mac (well, except the mini when it comes to graphics).
My specifications for a MP are entirely about an open design. Period. Do not have them? It no longer meets my specifications of why I would buy it.
As to people calling my specifications a want vs a need? Whatever. It does not change the fact that I am not buying the trashcan. It does not meet my needs.
To use an analogy, does a mountain climber NEED a mountain or WANT a mountain? You can say they want there to be a mountain but they need one to continue as a mountain climber. Semantics. Getting back to the point though, I am somewhere between a hobbyist and a hacker. I am using the precise terminology of NEED when I talk about an open architecture.
Forget that I am a software developer. That is only confusing things of what fits my hardware criteria.
I did not want to read all the thread so excuse me if somebody else had the same idea, but from the looks of it i'd call it the new Mac LC. Or the cube+. Certainly not a Pro machine. Max i'd call it Mac fan. Nice machine if you can afford it but why? It's all about maximizing investor return, even in that puny niche market of the xMacPro...
From my point of view this looks like a consumer product and has very few of the features I would consider in a professional machine. There needs to be some backwards compatibility because not everyone can just throw away things that are necessary to their work flow. It MAY BE too big of a change right now. The upgrade path MAY BE too difficult. It MAY BE just plain not worth the cost. I need to see what Apple actually releases and what the options are to know.
But what really amazes me is this type of design has be bandied about on this and other forums I peruse (I have just be lurking about), and it seemed to me most people expressed that they really didn't like the idea of this type of design -- yet this is exactly what Apple produced. You would think that they would use forums like this to do market research
Good observation. Decision to upgrade boils down to pricing and long term expenses. Another factor is the cost of repairs if warranty runs out. This need careful evaluation before "jumping into the water" Better to wait and observe after the release.
Cost may not be a main concern, but consider if you wrote in a line item for a grant to buy a Titan (which is a decent entry-level scientific computing card), whether or not its expensive, the price has just changed, and its nigh impossible to come up with the additional money.
Beyond that, just because I'm spending a thousand dollars on a card doesn't mean I'm not going to be annoyed as spending a few hundred more.
You know, analogies are only useful if they clarify a point, not mudding the waters. Does a software developer need a computer? I totally get what you are saying, I'm just pointing out that it seems to be more of a personal preference than a requirement per se, that's fine you can get what ever you want I don't care.