Let's just wait for them to actually release the damn machine before we talk about the cost. When they release it, people should gather enough allowance money to buy one.
Come on Aiden, those 5770s make darn fine doorstops, once you replace them.Yes, because having proprietary graphics cards for the cMP has been so successful and loved by the users.
Not.
What are your biggest fears about the new forthcoming Mac Pros?
Hopefully Apple are listening.
My biggest fear is Apple may think "they're crying out for 'pro' machines - let's give them what they want - at a price".
Apple, we love Macs, but please don't rip us off and treat us like mugs. Isn't it about time you rewarded your most loyal users? Be smart, be fair.
1) too high barrier of entry. Base config should be accessible to a wider market. Not all pros swim in cash. Is it a 1% market because it's expensive, or is it expensive because it's a 1% market??
FWIW, a maxed 2015 27" iMac is $3,999 USD, while starting at $2,299 USD.
I suspect the iMac Pro will start around $2,999~$3,399 and w/ maxed specs will overlap the mMP base price.
MacOS does not support NVMe, no Apple ships with NVMe.
The MP6,1 has AHCI disks.
we are talking about a pro workstation, that has it's pricePrice.
we are talking about a pro workstation, that has it's price
for me every apple product is priced reasonable and actually worth it, the more it costs, the more it resells, and apple products really keep their value like nothing else.
i'm fine to pay a premium for a premium product
but its nice if a somewhat cheaper model is available in the product line.
not everyone needs the premium features of workstation graphic cards or the capabilities of a Xeon cpu.
thinking over it, most users would actually buy a cheaper i7 8 core/gtx 2080 mac pro.
it should be possible to include the option to choose between workstation cpu and gpu.
i don't think we will see a ryzen mac pro, because it's just not "that" good really, and intel will blow it away anyway.
for me apple should just leave AMD completely because nvidia and Intel is better in literally any category other then price, and apple never cared about the price, they always wanted to "build the best computers on the planet".
we are talking about a pro workstation, that has it's price
for me every apple product is priced reasonable and actually worth it, the more it costs, the more it resells, and apple products really keep their value like nothing else.
i'm fine to pay a premium for a premium product
Cheese-grater Mac Pros were priced at a premium, but worth the cost (well, maybe not G5 models with the glass-jaw motherboards!).
The 2013 nMP pricing was outrageous. Period.
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Well...I'm not saying the current nMP is particularly a "great" deal, but: in 2013 a 12-core 5.1 was more than $5K canadian dollars. A 6-core trashcan is currently $3.5K.
Now see, I think these fears don't have any merit based on a few things.3. The 'modularity' comment .. this one screams "PROPRIETARY for PROFITS". The real reason why the 3rd Party markets exist in the first place is because Apple's culture is to make an initial hardware sale (with rude mark-ups) but has effectively zero interest in ever selling incremental hardware upgrades ... and even when they occasionally do, it is late to market and still overpriced. The consumer wants to get value from their investment, which traditionally means buying Industry Standard components ... SATA, PCIe, etc. Apple simply has to decide *how* they're going to support the consumer, which is in reality limited to either giving up this follow-on business to the 3rd Party aftermarkets, or by competing in it by actually doing a respectable job in being timely to market at a competitive price on upgrades.
4. 'Modularity', part II .. I'm afraid that the neglected Mac Mini is part of their hairbrained scheme -- the Mac Pro effectively evolves into a cluster of mini's. This may not necessarily be a horrible idea in of itself, but if it is the ONLY path forward, its got issues (and again, is Apple Being Tone Deaf).
Now see, I think these fears don't have any merit based on a few things.
1. The trashcan would have been the platform for the "PROPRIETARY UPGRADE" path, since all of the parts were, in fact, removable by the user. The upgrades just never materialized for reasons that we all know. Since Apple did not refer to the nMP as "modular" I think we can assume that a proprietary upgrade system isn't in the works.
2. Selling a cluster of Mac Minis would introduce latency issues (assuming they were all connected by thunderbolt, or anything that's not PCI-e),
...and introduce another problem; What's stopping people from buying a bunch of Mac Minis and using them?
Also, this would mean that they would either have to include graphics chips in the Mac Minis themselves, or try to use the 2nd Mac Mini's processor as a graphics processor (bad idea). And for multi-processor support they'd have to include Xeons in the Mini's themselves. All of which is far more complex for worse performance than a standard tower.
3. Rumor has it that Apple themselves helped Nvidia with the drivers for the Macs. Assuming that's true means that Nvidia would have incentive to sell a Titan GPU (which is only a boon to hackintoshes currently, something Apple makes no money from) would point to a standard PCI-e port in future Macs (the most likely being the mMP).
And I think this rumor has validity, since it wouldn't make a lot of business sense to develop and release drivers just for the Hackintoshers (which is a very small market). It would make sense that Apple would have assured them that future Mac will be able to use their cards to incentives their release.
4. It would be far far easier for Apple to sell "certified upgrades" to the Macs through their online store, like they do with many 3rd party products already.
If this is true, they're likely devoting a lot of time to acquiring 3rd party support right now, just to make sure everything they sell works perfectly.
He probably wouldn't, but he's not the only one that makes the decisions.Since this means increased product sales with *fewer* hardware manufacturing assembly lines - just why would Tim Cooke as a supply management optimization expert consider this to be a problem?
I doubt it would increase sales considering it'd be a major cluster**** if they tried it. They apologized in response to pros leaving, and as delusional as Apple can be, I think this was a wake-up call to them.True, there's lots of technical in-the-weeds problems ... but looking at it without giving a damn if there's better solutions, a strategy which results in more sales from an even smaller product line certainly sounds like a desirable feature from Apple's perspective, does it not?
Convincing a major company to spend resources developing support for a product that currently doesn't exist would take some major leveraging I think. I doubt that a small "rogue" team would've managed to convince Nvidia to do this.Understood, but personally, I suspect that this was more likely the result of what I'll call a single (or small) "Rogue" Apple group, not a top-down Apple Corporate Leadership deliberate decision. So if it was as a bottom-up, it lacks foundational institutional support to become a formal policy.
Dunno, times change and so do products. People are building PCs more than ever before, and the reaction to a completely-locked down form factor was highly negative. Maybe they've had the idea before and thought "people don't upgrade their Macs anyway" until the massive outcry recently. Maybe they drank Steve's "vision" kool-aid a little too deeply and followed his "non-upgradeability" philosophy a little too close to the letter and now they're seeing that ol' Steve might've been wrong.Yes, it certainly would ... but they've had hardware products in place which would benefit from doing just this sort of thing for a long time - - since at least the PowerMac 7500 from 1995 - - so then why has it never happened?
That really hasn't stopped 3rd party support before, and maybe Apple's now offering them a better deal than they previously have. We have no way of knowing until the mMP is released, but I'm being optimistic about it.Unfortunately, a lot of Apple's attention to 3rd Party solutions is limited to those solutions were said 3rd Parties must incorporate some Apple-proprietary widget (component and/or license) which gives Apple control over them. Ultimately, its not really as much about control for excellence in Customer Experience, but a financial cut of their sales, along with the option to exert emergency control to cut off a particularly bad player.
my fear is everything!!! Apple has had such a bad track record lately for hardware that works in a professional environment. I know they will probably figure out a way to get a decent GPU in there. PCI-E or something similar as a MODULE. So you will be able to do a single GTX 1080 or something else of your choosing, but what about the other things that need PCI-E.
I have a feeling they will abandon the other PCI-E needs, for example my 5,1 workstation. Like will they skimp on thunderbolt ports?
Fibre --- right new we can do TB3/TB2 using AttoTech, these are ok, gets the job done.
CUDA -- we use CUBIX expanders, these are only PCI-E to CUBIX box. We could maybe use a TB3 to PCI-E, then PCI-E to CUBIX.
I have a feeling Apple will give us one PCI-E, which will be use for a decent GPU, for other PCI-E needs nothing... it will just be TB3..
This is also my exact fear. There is other uses for pcie besides gpu. I need pcie for my hdx card and my uad octo card. Breakout boxes are nice but too expensive/unreliable and perform worse...