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Should Apple bother with the 7,1?
- Thread starter Naimfan
- Start date
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Apple is not going to abandon their
The iPhone XS is Apple's flagship computer product now.
The iPhone XS is Apple's flagship computer product now.
The Mac Pro is far from a flagship product now - it's a niche product within what's increasingly becoming a niche of their overall business. It's an important niche, because you can't develop for iOS on an iPhone, but the Mac niche as a whole is a business that makes up less than 10% of their overall revenue. They sell a healthy number of Macs, but they're not a huge part of their enormous iPhone sales.
Even within the Mac market, their flagship product is the MacBook Pro, followed by the iMac. They don't want to sell a highly configurable Mac Pro to anyone who'll buy something that causes less support hassles and might have higher overall margins due to high-margin Apple-sourced upgrades.
They have always had a policy of pricing the entry-level Mac Pro above the most expensive standard iMac to protect the iMac from competition - they don't want the user to have a choice between all-in-one or expandable, because they'd rather sell the all-in-one. They have often excluded a few very expensive BTO options on the iMac from protection. If you want a standard-performing desktop, you get a screen, want it or not. The Mini is permitted at the low end, with low-end mobile components (and a rare break into midrange mobile components), and Xeon Mac Pros are permitted above the performance of any iMac, as long as they're enough more expensive that they don't compete.
I would assume that at a minimum, a $3699 iMac with the top processor, a 1 TB SSD and 32 GB of RAM is a protected iMac - the Mac Pro will be significantly more expensive than that. There is almost no chance the minimum configuration of the Mac Pro will have less than 32 GB of RAM, or less than a 1 TB SSD - so they'll protect an iMac with those features. They may very well not protect the very expensive options like 64 GB of RAM or the 2 TB SSD.
I would expect the entry level iMac Pro is also a protected iMac, but I'm not sure whether this is so. I am almost sure the protection does not run all the way up the iMac Pro line to the $13199 model - that's a corner case set of BTO options...
If I had to guess, the entry-level Mac Pro will be something like a $6499 machine with a single Xeon SP in the 10-12 core range (and a socket for another - whether or not you can fill the second socket after purchase is unknown). It will have a Vega 64 (or successor) that is upgradeable, but is almost certainly not a standard PC graphics card, probably with room for another. It will probably come with 48 GB of RAM, since Xeon SP is 6-channel), and either one or two 1 TB SSDs. There may very well be room for SSD expansion (4 SSD sockets wouldn't surprise me at all, and more wouldn't shock me). There will be at least 12 DIMM sockets that can accommodate 768 GB of total RAM, and dual-processor versions may have twice that. The port count will be impressive, with at least one, maybe two 10 Gb Ethernet ports, plenty of Thunderbolt 3 ports and probably a bunch of USB-A ports. It will certainly have provision to drive multiple 5K monitors, and very likely at least one 8K monitor!
There are two features that will almost certainly be omitted that will cause a great deal of forum teeth-grinding. One is a double-width, high-power PCIe x16 slot that could support a standard PC graphics card. There will be graphics options, some of them probably very high-end, and there is substantial hope for graphics upgrades after purchase - but it won't be standard PC-type cards, and all the options will be Team Red (AMD). There may well be one or more PCIe slots intended for audio interfaces, RAID controllers or even possibly compute accelerators, but there will be some restriction, whether in hardware or firmware, that will make it nontrivial and unsupported (if not impossible) to stick a GeForce in there...
The second missing feature will be 3.5" (or even 2.5") drive bays. We can hope for (and expect) plenty of SSD slots, but there won't be any way to spin rust inside the case. External cases carry no performance penalty for hard drives (single and dual drives are just fine on USB 3.0 and especially 3.1, while larger RAIDs work over Thunderbolt 3). For VERY large RAIDs with SSD caching that might outrun even TB3, I wouldn't be surprised if a slot supported InfiniBand controllers or the like. External drive cases aren't especially expensive, and everybody needs a different number of spinning disks - from 0 (except for Time Machine, which needs to be external) to 12 or more, so no number Apple put in would satisfy the majority of users (too few and you can't get your storage in, too many and you have a big case with a lot of volume and power dedicated to something you don't need).
Apple is Apple, and they have their own ideas about how things should be done. If your use case includes the words "game", "NVidia", "Premiere" (or other non Final Cut video editor, except perhaps at the very high end) or "media server", they aren't making the Mac Pro for you. Apple has always strongly resisted high-end gaming, probably because of the stability problems games and gaming hardware can cause. They're actively chasing gamers (beyond the casual level, mainly on iOS) away. They have a deal with AMD, they feel burned by NVidia in the mobile chip overheating situation a few years back, and their own software runs best on AMD. They make a direct competitor to Premiere that they feel strongly is better - they may be more forgiving of high-end uses of AVID, Resolve, etc. because Final Cut doesn't have all of the features of those applications. Finally, they have a vision for the future of media consumption, and it's in the cloud, based on iOS and its tvOS relative. They see no need for people to store gigantic media libraries on multiple hard disks unless they're making that media.
I'm not saying they're right or wrong, just that they're Apple, and they think they know best. No amount of wishing for a reasonably priced slotbox to take your GeForces and 3.5" drives will bring the machine they've refused to build for 20 years. The Mac Pro will have some great features, but it won't be the machine some people long for - Apple wants to sell you an iMac, and if you don't want one, you can go run Windows unless you're in a small group for whom they'll support expandability.
Even within the Mac market, their flagship product is the MacBook Pro, followed by the iMac. They don't want to sell a highly configurable Mac Pro to anyone who'll buy something that causes less support hassles and might have higher overall margins due to high-margin Apple-sourced upgrades.
They have always had a policy of pricing the entry-level Mac Pro above the most expensive standard iMac to protect the iMac from competition - they don't want the user to have a choice between all-in-one or expandable, because they'd rather sell the all-in-one. They have often excluded a few very expensive BTO options on the iMac from protection. If you want a standard-performing desktop, you get a screen, want it or not. The Mini is permitted at the low end, with low-end mobile components (and a rare break into midrange mobile components), and Xeon Mac Pros are permitted above the performance of any iMac, as long as they're enough more expensive that they don't compete.
I would assume that at a minimum, a $3699 iMac with the top processor, a 1 TB SSD and 32 GB of RAM is a protected iMac - the Mac Pro will be significantly more expensive than that. There is almost no chance the minimum configuration of the Mac Pro will have less than 32 GB of RAM, or less than a 1 TB SSD - so they'll protect an iMac with those features. They may very well not protect the very expensive options like 64 GB of RAM or the 2 TB SSD.
I would expect the entry level iMac Pro is also a protected iMac, but I'm not sure whether this is so. I am almost sure the protection does not run all the way up the iMac Pro line to the $13199 model - that's a corner case set of BTO options...
If I had to guess, the entry-level Mac Pro will be something like a $6499 machine with a single Xeon SP in the 10-12 core range (and a socket for another - whether or not you can fill the second socket after purchase is unknown). It will have a Vega 64 (or successor) that is upgradeable, but is almost certainly not a standard PC graphics card, probably with room for another. It will probably come with 48 GB of RAM, since Xeon SP is 6-channel), and either one or two 1 TB SSDs. There may very well be room for SSD expansion (4 SSD sockets wouldn't surprise me at all, and more wouldn't shock me). There will be at least 12 DIMM sockets that can accommodate 768 GB of total RAM, and dual-processor versions may have twice that. The port count will be impressive, with at least one, maybe two 10 Gb Ethernet ports, plenty of Thunderbolt 3 ports and probably a bunch of USB-A ports. It will certainly have provision to drive multiple 5K monitors, and very likely at least one 8K monitor!
There are two features that will almost certainly be omitted that will cause a great deal of forum teeth-grinding. One is a double-width, high-power PCIe x16 slot that could support a standard PC graphics card. There will be graphics options, some of them probably very high-end, and there is substantial hope for graphics upgrades after purchase - but it won't be standard PC-type cards, and all the options will be Team Red (AMD). There may well be one or more PCIe slots intended for audio interfaces, RAID controllers or even possibly compute accelerators, but there will be some restriction, whether in hardware or firmware, that will make it nontrivial and unsupported (if not impossible) to stick a GeForce in there...
The second missing feature will be 3.5" (or even 2.5") drive bays. We can hope for (and expect) plenty of SSD slots, but there won't be any way to spin rust inside the case. External cases carry no performance penalty for hard drives (single and dual drives are just fine on USB 3.0 and especially 3.1, while larger RAIDs work over Thunderbolt 3). For VERY large RAIDs with SSD caching that might outrun even TB3, I wouldn't be surprised if a slot supported InfiniBand controllers or the like. External drive cases aren't especially expensive, and everybody needs a different number of spinning disks - from 0 (except for Time Machine, which needs to be external) to 12 or more, so no number Apple put in would satisfy the majority of users (too few and you can't get your storage in, too many and you have a big case with a lot of volume and power dedicated to something you don't need).
Apple is Apple, and they have their own ideas about how things should be done. If your use case includes the words "game", "NVidia", "Premiere" (or other non Final Cut video editor, except perhaps at the very high end) or "media server", they aren't making the Mac Pro for you. Apple has always strongly resisted high-end gaming, probably because of the stability problems games and gaming hardware can cause. They're actively chasing gamers (beyond the casual level, mainly on iOS) away. They have a deal with AMD, they feel burned by NVidia in the mobile chip overheating situation a few years back, and their own software runs best on AMD. They make a direct competitor to Premiere that they feel strongly is better - they may be more forgiving of high-end uses of AVID, Resolve, etc. because Final Cut doesn't have all of the features of those applications. Finally, they have a vision for the future of media consumption, and it's in the cloud, based on iOS and its tvOS relative. They see no need for people to store gigantic media libraries on multiple hard disks unless they're making that media.
I'm not saying they're right or wrong, just that they're Apple, and they think they know best. No amount of wishing for a reasonably priced slotbox to take your GeForces and 3.5" drives will bring the machine they've refused to build for 20 years. The Mac Pro will have some great features, but it won't be the machine some people long for - Apple wants to sell you an iMac, and if you don't want one, you can go run Windows unless you're in a small group for whom they'll support expandability.
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It's funny how quickly people forget the old Mac Pro's (2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012) were all in the $2,499 price range as stock machines. The 2008 model were priced better than comparable Windows machines at the time.
Just because miniaturisation has enabled the slim iMac we have today doesn't mean Apple would price a slap of aluminum higher.
Just because miniaturisation has enabled the slim iMac we have today doesn't mean Apple would price a slap of aluminum higher.
I do not see why Apple would have to protect the iMac Pro. IMO the Mac Pro and iMac Pro should be two complementary systems.
iPhones keep getting bigger. Mac Pros went from big to small ... to smaller?
It seems possible that the next Mac Pro will fit into my pocket more easily than an iPhone.
And of course at a price that will shrink my wallet, so there should be plenty of room.
It seems possible that the next Mac Pro will fit into my pocket more easily than an iPhone.
And of course at a price that will shrink my wallet, so there should be plenty of room.
The iMac Pro is a supercar. I don't think Apple made it thinking people in masses were going to buy it.
![8208711540_6067d76c9e_b[1].jpg](https://forums.macrumors.com/data/attachments/696/696506-281f5b4667b475904ec040175920f2cf.jpg "8208711540_6067d76c9e_b[1].jpg")
Yes, the old Mac Pros were cheaper than the new one will be - but the iMac didn't top out as high. There weren't iMacs with powerful desktop chips to protect. Even without the iMac Pro being protected at all, there's still that $3699 iMac that will almost certainly be protected.
I find this whole idea of "protection" to be a big load of Apple BS, and one that the sheeple buy into.
Other companies don't have any problems with creating artificial price barriers between distinct product lines.
HP all-in-ones go from a high of $4439 to entry level systems at $330.
Z-series base models from $3294 to $1342.
No "protection rackets" needed.
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Thanks for the correction. It's nice for Apple that its customers continue to pay for over-priced goods.
It wasn't too long ago that Mac Pros were as versatile as any computer out there, apart from GPUs, so where the laptops .
Only when the tcMP and touchbar MBPs with limited connectors were introduced did that change .
And it was not met with universal praise, to put it mildly .
Apple never was that different, they just went from having a few unique ideas to having no idea .
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The iMac has never been a factor for the MacPro pricing , rather the other way around .
The fact that expensive iMacs now exist is but a glitch in Apple's product history .
Apple can 'protect' whatever they want, but they can't dictate buyer's needs and expectations .
Without a competitively priced and specced entry and mid level MP , Apple will have no legs to stand on in this segment .
something to think about in terms of "protecting" iMac sales - the 5k iMac, in which the screen is probably the most expensive component, to judge by the price of standalone 5k monitors, was introduced in October 2014. Right around when development more or less ceased on the Mac Pro as a product.
That's one of the reasons why I think Apple's strategy was to push all desktop users towards iMacs, and why the Mac Pro was supposed to be replaced wholly by the iMac Pro - to get the screen volumes as high as possible, and component prices as low as possible.
That's one of the reasons why I think Apple's strategy was to push all desktop users towards iMacs, and why the Mac Pro was supposed to be replaced wholly by the iMac Pro - to get the screen volumes as high as possible, and component prices as low as possible.
Well if this Trillion $ company was going to "push" this desktop user towards an iMac or iMac Pro, they would have needed to do this (see insert) and I still would not want one!
Well if this Trillion $ company was going to "push" this desktop user towards an iMac or iMac Pro, they would have needed to do this (see insert) and I still would not want one!
View attachment 783037
View attachment 783038
Absolute BS. Everyone would buy one at that price.