i think it's only their weekly maintenance... (unfortunately)
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Starting to doubt a future MAc Pro..
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i think it's only their weekly maintenance... (unfortunately)
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In 3-4 years, 8 cores and 1TB SATA III drives will be "low end" not "mid range". [ maybe not 1TB SSD's but a 300-500GB SSD OS/App/scratch drive is good enough. Can use "cheap" 1-3TB drive for long term bulk storage. ] You are looking are where we are now, not where things will be in 2-3 years.
Last year there were 8 core Xeons ( up in the 7500/6500 series). This year there will likely be 8 core Xeons in the E5 (equivalent to the 5000 series). In another year, 2012, 8 cores will enter high end zone. By 2013 8 cores will start to enter the mid range zone. By 2015 8 cores will be "old news". You will easily be able to pick up a $600 box with 8 cores. That is exactly the price zone where the mini is placed. Assuming Apple keeps the price relatively constant that is what the poster was talking about.
The core issue is whether the vast majority of Mac Pro users will be working on problems that require equally expansive more computing power as the the future Xeons and 3rd party GPU cards would provide. If the power and flexibility of the high end systems outstrips what users can commonly consume then those users will move down. Yes some folks can use more. However, there are also folks who did not need "more power" but put a higher value on "higher flexibility". Frankly, a mini with 8 cores, 32GB , and Thunderbolt (version 2 or 3) will provide a good amount of "flexibility".
The primarily impediment to the mid range headless mac is cannibalism, not technology. If Apple got to 10% share world wide (it is nowhere near that now) and units sales growth stalled then perhaps there would be enough of a gap between products wring a small (relative to current ) growth out of filling that niche and taking a hit on profit margin. Right now.... Apple isn't going there. Far, far, far , far, toooooooooo many other people want to buy the Mac current line up than to start leaving money on the table.
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Right now "last year's model" is this years model. The speed increase value judgement should be made against what they have now. For example if someone only had MBP and jumped to the current MP they would get a speed jump. If that is worth the cost of MP to them then they should buy.
Likewise if someone has a 2006 MP then the "speed increase" value judgement is relative to what they have now and the current Mac Pro.
Users can always wait till "next year" to buy a faster, better computer. Even if Apple rolls out an Xeon E5 MP in the late Fall a user could defer and buy something late 2012 that will be better (either PC or another Mac Pro)
Apple isn't in a "race to the bottom" game on PC pricing. Intel's pricing is still exactly the same for the parts Apple is using. There is also no good reason to do a product update on the MP with "last year's CPU tech" when "this year's CPU tech" is due out in a couple of months. If Apple updates the Mac Pro once a year that is good enough. Intel updates the Xeons once a year.
No. The W3565 and W3680 prices have come down considerably. The W3565 has been the same price as the entry-level W3530 for quite a while now, but Apple still charges an extra $400. The W3680 was around $1500 and can now be had for <$700. Although, to be fair, that didn't happen until recently.
This is one of the things that makes the (single-CPU) MacPro such a raw deal. These prices were somewhat relevant a year ago, but now they are obscene.
No. The Macbook is around because education groups had already started their purchase cycles. Paperwork put in April-June results in computes buy July-September. Any edu org that is counting on Macbooks being in the catalog after December-January is taking a huge gamble.
Would not be surprising if with next product update for MBA that they drop the "Air" it is becomes "MacBook". The King/Queen has to die before there is a new King/Queen.
No. XServe likely was profitable (if they sold an even minimal number.). It's growth sucked. It got the axe. If the Mac Pro's growth craters then it too will get the axe. Profits isn't hyperinflating Apple's stock. Growth is.
Units sales of OS X Server shot up after Apple introduced the Mac Mini Server version. OS X Servers "growth machine" has been the Mini. The new mini which blows the doors off the old mini
http://www.macminicolo.net/macmini2011
OS X Server is not critical for iOS deployments. That is one reason it is gotten rapid uptake from Enterprise (i.e., large) companies. Unlike RIM, there are more open solutions that allows IT orgs to plug-in iOS devices into their current infrastructure with some additional software. There are some web services that Apple provides that they have to hook into but those don't require OS X Server.
OS X Server is a "nice to have" for iOS deployments. It is not a must have. To a lessor extent same is true for Mac OS X deployments. The only highly specialized area is OS updates which.... don't happen very often and well within the new Mini's "power" wheelhouse for all but very large deployments.
I do think Apple wants to keep the Mac Pro Server model around for additional profits and growth. It is just not the critical core of the OS X Server market over the next 2-4 years.
BMW's least selling cars are priced in the 'got more money then sense' zone. While the Mac Pro is high it isn't in the nosebleed zone. While Apple may sell a few Mac Pros fully tricked out with every high prices BTO selected that's not while they keep the product around. Also, BMWs aren't priced the same worldwide.
Second, got any back-up for the assertion that the Mac Pro has the highest margins? All Macs have higher than average margins. Often folks try to map business practices in the general PC market back over to the Apple. There companies sell "loss leader" boxes and then have to crank up the margins on the higher end boxes to come out with a reasonable average profit margin. Apple doesn't play that game. For example, the Macbook's PC competitors are usually priced $100-200 cheaper. Some of it is part pricing differences, but some of that is just margin.
Furthermore, most of the other Mac share a higher number of parts, (e.g., when nearly all were on the 9400M graphics , same Wifi/Bluetooth miniboards, same CPUs used in different generations at different times, etc. ). Mac Pro is priced higher but also has higher R&D costs. That includes software and support ( users who insert funky I/O cards may call Apple for support.)
Back when the Mac Pro outsold the MBA, it was relatively safe. At this point though, it is pulling up the end of the sales chart (well temporarily may pass the Macbook as it exits the freeway). It doesn't have to pass the others in terms of units, but it definitely needs to keep up growth.
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Apple buys directly from Intel with fixed term contracts, not retail. I seriously doubt Apple was ever paying over $999 for 3680s. It is open question whether their contract gives them access to the recent price drop by Intel. Longer contracts protect pricing in both directions, both up and down. It wouldn't make sense for Apple to "spot market" price the Mac Pro so that the price changed every couple of months. That would probably drive off as many buyers and it would gain.
However, I did miss that relatively recent firesale pricing on the 3680. At the end of the Mac Pro product cycle though, it is likely not a saving "pass through" . That's one reason why Intel cratered the pricing to make room for new models. It doesn't make sense to "speed bump" the Mac Pro with 36xx model when an E5 is a couple months away. They are also trying to avoid an Osborne Effect of large groups just waiting till later (been over a year since Xeon arch update). A "speed bump" for Mac Pro would just mean the next model would not get released for that much longer.
Most of the Xeon pricing is usually rock solid on pricing for over a year (and sometimes even more... depends in part if AMD is screwing up or not at that time.)
If folks think there is value in waiting a several months and can wait that long; please do. Some folks aren't. They may need a Snow Leopard capable Mac Pro. They may have a job to do right now. Sometimes the timing is perfect and sometimes not.
This chassis also presents a large market for limited lane Mac PCI-e cards to be sold into. The market could get bigger , prices could go down a bit, and the selection could grow larger.
Mac PCI-e card vendors are blocked in part because there was only one box that took their product. Some folks had both PCI-e and ExpressCard versions. This expansion port means can serve both sets of those users with just one PCI-e card. Lower R&D costs because only have to do it once.
As far as a threat to the Mac Pro for high I/O. Not really. You got max a 4x PCI-e v2.0 worth of bandwidth. (probably less). No upscale video card is going to run well here. Neither a higher end 10GB Ethernet card. high end FC.
For Audio unless aggregating a large number of sources the primary issue is that not relatively using much I/O. PCI-e v3 gives you ~1GB/s of bandwidth. How many lanes do you need? Yes back in PCI days that is twice as much as you could get out of the whole 64-bit bus. You needed "bigger iron" because the iron did alot less. Now, two wires carries a greater load.
The Mac Pro will stick around as long as there are an increasing number of folks following the performance improvements of the Xeon/PCI-e/ etc. up to the latest standards. Workloads that are "stuck" at PCI-e 4x bandwidth to slide back to the other models.
Except I keep holding out for what Apple isn't selling so Apple isn't getting any sale out of some people. I want to keep using OSX but I'm closer than ever to just switching to get a machine that meets my needs at a price I can afford (Mac Pro is too $$$) and living with Windows. Everyone I know uses Windows and no one is having any complaints.
there is truth in this statement they could kill off the quad core pro .
go with 2 hex cores the 3.2 and the 3.46 but they are stuck with no t-bolt.
better dual hex ?
they exist x5675 is 1440 the current top of line is x5670 same price
x5690 is 1663
so if they came out with 2 hexs a 3.2 and a 3.46 as single
and two dual hexs a 3.06 and a 3.46 and a better gpu
they could do a small price drop and still make money.
no redesign just swap cpus and gpus.
also make it boot lion or snow and include both
2008 and 2009 owners would buy it.
If they wanted to keep the entry-level quad, they could (and should) make the 3565 the base model.
BTW, Intel no longer carries the W3690 so it would have to be the 3.2 and 3.33 hex, both are listed at $583. Difference probably too small to matter, so only one quad and one hex then.
BTW, Intel no longer carries the W3690 so it would have to be the 3.2 and 3.33 hex, both are listed at $583. Difference probably too small to matter, so only one quad and one hex then.
Actually it's been benched that even the highest end cards perform very close to the full 16x bandwidth, generally the more lanes are for power, so if there is sufficient external power going to the GPU, then it will still run about 85-90% as fast as if it was running in a 16x PCI-e slot. The benches are out there -
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_Scaling/25.html
So really, ThunderBolt allows for even a GTX 590 on a Mac Mini at near full speed.
There are 6+ billion people on the planet. The people running Apple go to work every day knowing that they are not going to sell a computer to all of them and are OK with that. The objective is not to "defeat and eradicate" Windows. The objective is to find the subsets of people they wish to target and sell them something they put a high value on.
There are more computer models Apple doesn't make than does. That's OK. Just look at the pile of money in their bank accounts. There is no prize for selling every model possible.
at 8x perhaps but there are numerous examples at 4x (which your not going to get an exact match to over TB). that are -15-25%. Nevermind the weird 'Riddick: Dark Athena' results (where the 4x results are significantly faster than 16x ..... ) Those only skew the real negative results you'll see with faster GPU clocks and GPGPU computations. The synthetic benchmarks also skew the results on the page you are pointing to. They tend to measure polygon, not texture, throughput.
These games are pretty adept at caching most frequently used textures in the card VRAM.
If Apple put a 2-15% governor on the Mac Pro's Xeon to slow them down, I can pretty much know how the discussion of that "design choice' would be on these forums.
The gaming graphics GPU cards probably won't need much more that 8x PCI-e v3. Or they'll just continue to ship PCI-e v2.0 for alot longer because there is a broader legacy market to tap. However, I suspect you're going to see the cards that lean more heavily on GPGPU to adapt PCI-e v3. quite quickly as there usually a cap on home much memory is allocated to each card and there are lots of data to move on/off the card.
Why?
The Xeon E5 1620 is 4 cores and has the "high" (3.6GHz) clock rate.
That gives all the "my apps are all single threaded", high clock junkies an entry level Mac Pro to buy if it comes to market at a similar price. (somewhat likely since it is the bottom end of the 1600 series. )
Moving the base config to 6 cores and then later going to 4 core would only bring several pages of wailing on forums throughout the net. Although I guess anything they do will also.
Apple has already used the current board in two cycles. There is a new socket coming which means it is time for a new board. Moving the deck chairs around on a two year old board designs doesn't make sense. It is a very short term gimmick game to play; not a strategy.
And that's fine. But you would think that someone at Apple would be a little curious as to why someone who has used Macs for 18 years and has never before bought a Windows machine is considering switching.
Does Apple only want to gain new customers or is it also interested in keeping the ones it had from 20 years ago? If they don't care about the old customers guess what? All the new customers will someday be old customers too.
My kids have already gone to using Windows machines. What about my future grandkids? They will grow up seeing their parents using Windows and listening to Grandpa talk about how he used to use a Mac but then Apple changed and he stopped buying them.
Sounds a bit like what Detroit had happen to them when people started buying Japanese cars.
Not particularly. because it has happened every year for the last 18 years. The only difference being the "for XX years" is shorter in previous years. People's conditions/preferences/budgets/etc change. Some of those changes means customers will leave. Every business has customers leaving over time.
You want mini tower (or some other product Apple is not offering) and Apple doesn't sell one. Apple certainly knows they don't sell mini towers. So therefore they know that customers who are fixated on mini tower form factor will likely leave. I don't think they are surprised by that nor don't fathom the root cause. So I doubt it sparks their curiosity.
They will be curious when someone who strongly prefers what a MBA or Mac Pro offers leaves. When people in the targeted markets leave that is something that suggests they may need adjust their aim and/or message.
This is a false argument. For the customers who match the offered products they do want them to continue. They aren't only looking for new customers. The "mini tower" argument is that Apple should go after customers they were not pursuing currently. Some folks bought the 'closest match' product. (e.g., wanted a mini tower but stretched to buy a Mac Pro). Those are not the folks Apple is after. They'll take the money but they were not the target.
20+ years ago there was no minitower product. When introduced the mac was a closed box. A couple years later the Mac II was much more like a horizontal Mac Pro than a mini tower. If you want Apple to go back to product mix of the 90's, then I doubt you are going to get many Apple execs to buy into that. First, technology has changed substantially so more functionality is consolidated. Second, Apple imploded financially in the '90s. Nobody inside of Apple wants to go back there. Third, there are certain pricing zone that Apple is just going to stay out of ( try to match Windows PC's median/average selling price point).
So does 96+% of the overall PC market. On average every day 90+% of the folks out there will buy a Windows PC. Happens everyday for a variety of good reasons. All Apple has to do is hold down their sub 10% share to be profitable. The PC war is over. Windows won. Apple's primary fight is against the regression toward the mean. Most folks are going to pick Windows. Apple just needs to balance that off by getting their "fair share" of folks to choose Mac. Some of them are going to be switchers and some of them are going to be longer term Mac users.
Honestly, they are not likely (depending upon how far into the future this is) to use Mac OS or Windows as there primary computer OS.
No it doesn't. Selling minitowers is more like what Detroit did. they continued to sell what they always sold. Overlapping product lines of bigger gas guzzlers. OPEC changed the costs of gas and Detroit was caught flat footed. Later the Japanses pushed into more markets by focusing on added quality for additional value and Detroit focused on better margins with cheaper parts along with sales gimmicks (like cash back and funky financing). [ Dell special bargain coupon of the day sound familiar ? ]
But these same people that switched to Windows also use iPods and iPhones. Apple isn't wondering why?
And the Japanese are selling big SUVs too and have been increasing the size of their cars. And South Korea has really taken an interest in bigger cars like the Hyundai Genesis. If the Japanese pushed into more markets then why not Apple? Apple pushed into the digital music player market. Apple pushed into the smart phone market. Apple pushed into the ultra thin laptop market. Apple pushed into the tablet market. Apple pushed into those markets by focusing on added quality for additional value. I really don't want a Windows minitower. I want Apple to push into that market too.
As a new Mac user I disagree. I have a 2009 Mac Book Pro, but wanted a desktop, and something that I can easily upgrade. I kept the 1 TB drive that came with my four month Mac Pro for Bootcamp, installed a 240 GB SSD and two 3 TB hard drives, with 16 GB ram. Not interested in an iMac, because I prefer my Eizo CG243W monitor, and except for installing ram, the iMac is hard to update, and I never even considered the mini. My main interest is photography, and my Mac Pro does quite well.
Exactly. The new imacs are attractive in terms of computing power but its visual interface (glossy monitor with little in the way of ergonomic adjustments) just doesn't work for me.
When the new Mac Pro comes out, I would love to see a reasonable base price of $1600- $1800 or so. That $2400 sticker for a single xeon, 7200 rpm drive, 3GB ram, and the mid range ATI card is quite high regardless of whether you love Mac or not. Not trying to start a debate over price, but a new release could be a chance to reboot the pricing.
You and many others.
Unfortunately, this is highly unlikely, and the particulars have been covered in other threads.
Apple is perfectly happy to jettison good, profitable products. Their merciless focus continues to narrow towards products that have tens or hundreds of millions of possible buyers.
Apple has junked or dumbed down many of their pro products...or perhaps just been bored by margins that don't provide high tick.
Think of a junkie who needs a bigger high. Jobs and the execs have "been there, done that" with items that can only sell 200,000 or 400,000. Apple could never witness more than incremental growth with such products. Apple just doesn't do incremental growth anymore.
Apple is about quantum expansion...massive global products with out-of-this-world economies of scale.
This business philosophy must grab your attention if you aren interested in MPro's future.
Combine this another blatant trends: Apple's increasing desire to seal everything off and and make products untweakable, the fetish for sleek, light, mobile, self-contained products...and no more than 1 cable.
Apple has junked or dumbed down many of their pro products...or perhaps just been bored by margins that don't provide high tick.
Think of a junkie who needs a bigger high. Jobs and the execs have "been there, done that" with items that can only sell 200,000 or 400,000. Apple could never witness more than incremental growth with such products. Apple just doesn't do incremental growth anymore.
Apple is about quantum expansion...massive global products with out-of-this-world economies of scale.
This business philosophy must grab your attention if you aren interested in MPro's future.
Combine this another blatant trends: Apple's increasing desire to seal everything off and and make products untweakable, the fetish for sleek, light, mobile, self-contained products...and no more than 1 cable.
There will be a new Mac Pro, and it will be expensive.
It's interesting how these threads about the "end of professional devices and applications" pop up regularly.
No, Steve Jobs is not on an iCrusade against professional level equipment, hard or soft.
It's interesting how these threads about the "end of professional devices and applications" pop up regularly.
No, Steve Jobs is not on an iCrusade against professional level equipment, hard or soft.
I agree, but time seems to slow down after all the other macs have their updates and we wait and wait and wait for some news each year. The silence is deafening. (yeah I know it's Intel's schedule)