Lord knows they need a mid range headless Mac for the lucrative consumer and prosumer market. Not having one is helping Apple lose some legacy users. Users that want to step up a bit but either can't afford the Mac Pro or don't need that big of a step up.
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.
Steve Job's vision of a future "Mac Pro"
- Thread starter IceMacMac
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Lord knows they need a mid range headless Mac for the lucrative consumer and prosumer market. Not having one is helping Apple lose some legacy users. Users that want to step up a bit but either can't afford the Mac Pro or don't need that big of a step up.
I would say that the current range of iMacs fit that description, except it has a screen... but then most consumers don't really have many complaints when it comes to the screen.
Take for example my father, an iMac owner and a very pernickety person.. he has never once moaned about the screen.... he is apple's target consumer, and he is happy!
I am honestly in that boat. I do not need my current machine and there is no way I would have paid retail for it (I got a pretty insane deal on it so I did not pass it up). The Mac Mini in 2009 was not enough for me. The new version could be if the right Thunderbolt peripherals materialize, but as I mentioned earlier they are by no means a bargain when you start getting them spec'd up.
Apple entered this market this and it ended badly for them (G4 Cube).
I think a lot of had to do with the G4 Cube being way too complicated of a machine to fit it into it's form factor and price, but Apple has a long memory and they probably won't re-enter this market for a while.
Still, in theory a nice machine that was fully user serviceable with an AGP slot.
Just like how Apple would never build any type of tablet device after the Newton?
Answer me this, goMac...What is more compact...The G4 cube tethered to a monitor...or the current iMac?
And for that matter how is the headless Mini different than the headless Cube?
If Apple's Cloud TOS policies are like Google's, no thank you. My IP is my own to profit from and nobody else's.
(Reasons 001-12,487,602,294,699 as to why I will NEVER use a "ChromeBook" and use Chrome the browser sporadically - unfortunately... apart from Google the Marketing Company putting out a decent browser, their TOS is draconian and used solely for their profit at the users' expense. Forget that.)
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-1269...adID=71841&messageID=1388017&tag=content;col1
(Reasons 001-12,487,602,294,699 as to why I will NEVER use a "ChromeBook" and use Chrome the browser sporadically - unfortunately... apart from Google the Marketing Company putting out a decent browser, their TOS is draconian and used solely for their profit at the users' expense. Forget that.)
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-1269...adID=71841&messageID=1388017&tag=content;col1
Agreed.
But companies don't care - their interest is setting up quaint licensing schemes that keep you paying to keep it going.
"Ownership society" indeed. More like "being owned" as these companies continue to progress.
Google is estimated to have over a million servers. That would take up about 14% of the space in Apple's new data center. Apple's data center is largely empty, but it certainly says something about their plans!
So your telling us that more then 1 million servers are going to fit into Apple's data centre?? Where as Google has sites all over the world.
So you are stating that Apple can fit nearly 7 MILLION servers into ONE data centre??
Based on standard assumptions, they have the room for that. A 1-million sqft facility with 60% server rack space and 40% office/utility/other space, using standard racks, would have room for about 7 million 1U units.
That's for standard racks and 1U servers. Taller racks would mean more, but taller servers would mean less.
Also, it's not Apple's only data center!
Who knows what they will actually do. Maybe they'll have one lonely server and a REALLY nice indoor pool.
Just like how Apple would never build any type of tablet device after the Newton?
Apple never said the Newton was a failure. In fact, at the time they discontinued it, Steve Jobs specifically said they would work on a replacement.
It just took... a while...
The Newton was discontinued because (watch the 1996 WWDC Q/A session), Steve felt it was a distraction from fixing the Mac. Not because Apple hated the concept. It was even implied that while not stellar, the sales were decent. But Apple didn't want to have to maintain an entirely different OS at that period of time while Apple was having major issues.
Edit: Here are links:
http://www.apple.com/ca/press/1998/02/NewtonDisco.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)#Newton_technology_after_cancellation
...I'm not sure why this question is relevent? The conversation is about the existence of a consumer tower, not the size...
Cube is fully user serviceable with a replaceable AGP GPU.
The Mini has an on board GPU, making it less pro friendly. Want to put a Radeon 5770 in there? Nope, no can do.
The Mini is a different class of machine. Embedded GPU, and you can't even get to the main hard drive without voiding the warranty. Meantime, like the Mac Pro, the G4 cube was meant to be opened up and have parts replaced.
G4 Cube even has a user serviceable CPU. Wanna upgrade the CPU in a Mini? Ah hahahahaha...
Last edited:
You were the one posting inane silliness that Apple would never ship a product that might risk repeating past failures.
The Newton/iPad and Cube/Mini make your whole argument ridiculous.
Whatever Apple called it, the Newton was a categorical disaster in terms of reviews and sales. The iPad has been the perhaps the greatest retail story in history.
I'm not even sure how this side story got into my thread, so let's just let it bleed, die...and get back on topic.
You mention some 1GB video. What is that? I never once said anything about using Centralized rendering for video editing or After Effects work. A 5 or 30 second 3d segment is another story...and lest we forget, video can be *compressed.*
The latest in game technology BTW is to use a computer or mobile device as a dumb terminal and let the processing/rendering be done remotely.
I emphatically concur that the bandwidth ball-busting that the telcos are employing right now is death to this idea...but it's also death to what Apple and Google are doing with their OS and their apps. Thus my contention: Apple/Google networks are coming.
Last edited:
Not really... no... You still haven't shown how they were related. Apple didn't think the Newton was a mistake, and the Mini is not analogous to the Cube.
The Mini is a consumer machine that is not serviceable and is not available with high end parts.
The Cube was a high end pro machine that was user serviceable and shipped with top of the line processors and graphics cards.
Again, stop comparing the two. They're not analogous. I actually still use both a Mini and a G4 Cube almost daily. Even though the Cube is much older it's an entirely different type of machine.
They are both small boxes. So I guess based on that a Fort Fiesta is a lot like a Ford Mustang.
Apple never seemed to think it was a disaster, and as Apple stated, that wasn't why it was killed. Apple stated Newton was killed because they only wanted to work on one OS at a time, not because they hated the form factor or the concept. Jobs even implied at WWDC 96 that he appreciated the Newton and that it was actually selling decently, and said he was sad that he had to cut it, but they could only support one OS at that point.
His WWDC 96 Q/A session is on YouTube btw, if you want to have a look.
You're stating stuff with no evidence.
You can't compress video for video editing (it ruins the quality for editing), and even if you did, you'd have to compress it on your side and uncompress it on the other, which could take hours alone...
(This is actually why QuickTime X couldn't be used for Final Cut Pro X. QuickTime X only speaks H.264 internally, not uncompressed video.)
Sure, because the input is mouse and keyboard events, which are very small. The frame buffer coming back is larger, but typically the graphics are gimped.
I'll note that this concept has been not so hot commercially so far. Local computation devices, like the XBox 360, far outsell remote computation consoles, like the OnLive box.
Why? Local computing power is just so cheap, and bandwidth is not.
Google is certainly working on a network. Is Apple? I've seen absolutely zero evidence.
With local computing power becoming so cheap why would Apple want to move computation to the cloud anyway? I mean, sure, the Mac Pro is expensive compared to other Macs, but if you're looking at the $/gigaflop rate, it's pretty darn cheap. Lowest rate that it's ever been.
Google is in an entirely different business, meanwhile. They don't want you to buy local CPU power. They can't even sell you that, the only thing they can sell you is the cloud. They're not doing it because it's necessarily better, but because it's their only product.
Last edited:
are you kidding me!!! Who is steve jobs?!! How do you not know who steve jobs is!!!
Jobs would be the very Big Brother he satirized with the 1984 commercial.
I think you misunderstand the concept of the ad. It projected how the Mac would liberate the masses from the command line with a more intuitive, natural, way to use the computer. The ad was never against the "walled garden," a concept that didn't even exist in 1984, but rather, the very demanding DOS.
About what? The million+ servers is a widely and repeatedly used estimate of Google's number of servers. The million square foot Apple server farm is real, and it's truly massive on a whole new scale.
Wow...a reverse SETI for the public? I doubt it..but then again maybe that's how Apple perceives the future of security on the web.
My datasets, which on occasion involve confidential health information for hundreds if not thousands of people, are never going on an iCluster.
Which is what I've decided to call your thing, since that's essentially what you're saying - we should all be relying on an Apple cluster for our processing power.
That might work well for some applications - those mainly relying only on computational power, like the aforementioned math, which often has fairly small file-sizes compared to its computational requirements. But there's more to a Mac Pro than the processor - storage is a huge deal too. Look at the people making RAID disks out of SSDs, and tell them their cable connection is high throughput enough.
If that's what it takes to get processing power on a Mac, I'll skip right on over to Lenovo, buy a new workstation once my Mac Pro dies, and install Fedora or the like.
Which is what I've decided to call your thing, since that's essentially what you're saying - we should all be relying on an Apple cluster for our processing power.
That might work well for some applications - those mainly relying only on computational power, like the aforementioned math, which often has fairly small file-sizes compared to its computational requirements. But there's more to a Mac Pro than the processor - storage is a huge deal too. Look at the people making RAID disks out of SSDs, and tell them their cable connection is high throughput enough.
If that's what it takes to get processing power on a Mac, I'll skip right on over to Lenovo, buy a new workstation once my Mac Pro dies, and install Fedora or the like.
Last edited:
It was a comment on a bit of grammar fail. Read the thread title, then that comment again.
I don't envision networked processing as relevant for low and mid-level databases. And very few high end databases are on the Mac platform. I suspect that we'll soon see a time where Apple decides that an iMac with Thunderbolt is enough power for 99% of users, and is fine for most dbases, audio, video, 2d animation and faux 3d.
To reiterate I think this CloudPro or iCluster will predominately be for applications that don't even exist yet: consumer oriented VR and AI.
Hey, if the iCluster happens I'll probably be right behind you, abandoning the Mac. (Sell my MPros but keep my MBPro) I'm already seriously considering it, honestly.
Apple increasingly wants a hermetically sealed ecosystem that is targeted at mainstream users....
I'm honestly not talking about databases. One of my records, even without "Name" or "SSN", can be identifiable in less than 10 variables. 2000 such records is a trivial file. 20,000 of them are still...meh...in terms of storage and bandwidth demand. What I'm talking about is applications that are *perfect* for something like an iCluster, and still can't happen.
Small files in a common format, that still have processor intensive tasks associated with them, notably statistics and simulation. The kind of tasks I *do* send off to proper clusters.
But I'm not handing it off the Apple. Or Google. Legally, I'm not even sure I can, and I wouldn't be willing to take that risk.
You can say you see this for things that haven't been invented yet, and that's possible, but its not a Mac Pro. Mac Pro users are by definition not mainstream. So that's as much a vision of a future Mac Pro as the usual "It's EOL in 12 months!" threads are.
AI? Sure. But that move have already been made. What is Google but a giant AI?
VR? No reason. Local computers have more than enough horsepower for that. You might have the data stored remotely, but it would be rendered locally. Basically a continuation of the system we have today.
If you look at cluster computing, the best use for it is for servers. If you're going to have to pay for bandwidth and computational power, you might as well use a cloud service. If all you need is computational power, it's a better deal to just buy your own local hardware instead of renting horsepower in the cloud.
Again, these services already exist. Windows Azure. No one is using it just for everyday work because it's a rotten deal if you're not actually using it as a server. Paying a dollar an hour is a lot more expensive than just buying a Mac Pro you can hold onto for three years. And as web cluster time prices decrease, hardware prices will also decrease, likely at a faster rate...
It's just not a move that makes sense unless you're hosting a service. Maybe someday when we all have low latency fiber to our homes, but if we started on that now, it would be 15 years away....