This is not a "Pro" machine.

[beelzebubba]

Getting $100 million in Apple stock at $4.80 per share?
Let see.....
$100,000,000 / $4.80 = 20,833,333 shares
AAPL at $413.50

It worked out (to a potential) $8.6 billion.

Worked out pretty well I would say.

Had he owned all the shares and kept them. But he didn't own all the shares and most (if not all) of them were traded long ago. It didn't work out well for him.

----------

Selling a special run of ATX boards (or ****, Apple could just sell the boards themselves) is not the same as giving free reign to other manufacturers to make computers.

There is as much of a chance of that happening as them letting Nokia make an iPhone clone. Read up on the history of Apple and Power. Power was kicking butt and Apple stopped the cloning. Apple charges a premium and isn't about to give that up. That's why the hardware costs what it does and why the stock trades above $400.

 

[gnasher729]

I can't understand why Apple is calling a non-expandable, no disc drive machine a "Pro" machine.

"Pro's", aka Professionals, do NOT want external expansion boxes cluttering their desk just because Apple deems it necessary to not allow people to expand it's internal components. ("expansion is external")

Professional users also want to burn media (videos, photos, etc) to DVDs and Blu Rays. Now, on top of a ~$3000+ machine, they have to purchase an additional external drive just to do that. Apple is not gonna undercut the price of the high end ridiculously priced 15" rMBP. ($2799)

Don't get me started on the internal storage. WHY can Pros NOT expand the internal storage? Yes, there are external drives, but when it comes down to it, it's yet ANOTHER external expansion box, cluttering an already cluttered desk.

There are different kinds of professionals. The definition of a "pro" vs. an "amateur" is that the professional makes money.

There are professionals who _need_ external storage because they use terabyte after terabyte. I'm a professional who lives very happily with 256GB and could do with 128GB. Depends on your profession.

Professionals who need to burn DVDs usually want to burn multiple DVDs. I think with the new MacPro you should be able to plug in a powered USB3 hub, connect half a dozen USB DVD writers, and use them simultaneously. Surely a better solution than a built-in DVD drive? And many professionals never, ever read or burn DVDs.

This machine has all the expandability you'll ever need. 6 times 20 GBit Thunderbolt.

 

[Radiating]

I can't understand why Apple is calling a non-expandable, no disc drive machine a "Pro" machine.

"Pro's", aka Professionals, do NOT want external expansion boxes cluttering their desk just because Apple deems it necessary to not allow people to expand it's internal components. ("expansion is external")

Professional users also want to burn media (videos, photos, etc) to DVDs and Blu Rays. Now, on top of a ~$3000+ machine, they have to purchase an additional external drive just to do that. Apple is not gonna undercut the price of the high end ridiculously priced 15" rMBP. ($2799)

Don't get me started on the internal storage. WHY can Pros NOT expand the internal storage? Yes, there are external drives, but when it comes down to it, it's yet ANOTHER external expansion box, cluttering an already cluttered desk.

Here I solved your problem, presenting the New Mac Pro Old Mac Pro (TM):

Now you can have all internal storage, internal disc drives, and internal pci cards you had before, with room to spare. You're welcome.


http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Mac-P...1396?pt=US_Computer_Cases&hash=item23292d2b34

http://www.cabletiesandmore.com/cableties.php?gclid=CJqRre-S-rcCFUue4AodJjgAfQ

 

[ABCDEF-Hex]

Good post from another thread:

Transeau:

I normally sit out on these types of threads... But...
I own an "Outside IT Management" company. I primarily deal with the medical field. However, a few years ago I picked up a few new clients. One is a well known movie studio. Along with three recording studios. So, here is my $0.02.


1) Lack of internal storage.. I can honestly say that a LOT of people that work with the "pro" boxes (mostly Mac Pro's, but I still see a few old Alpha's, SGI's and the like) have no idea what the boxes have in them, or what can be done to them. The recording studios all use fiber channel or just Ethernet with centralized storage. The movie studio has both internal and external. They only care about speed. As I see it, Thunberbolt 2 gives us a very nice upgrade path for massive and *FAST* storage. The internal storage is a non-issue for my clients.

2) Only 4 DIMMS? OMG so what? 64GB (4x16GB) is only $580. 128GB (4x32GB) is $1300. If you need that much memory, then is price really an issue? No, not in my field.

3) "Made Quite" is not a Pro feature? LOL okay.. I've been in no less than 12 studio "sound booths" that have the hardware in the room with them.

4) No Thunderbolt devices? Interesting. I just upgraded one of the recording studios with new iMac's and Universal Audio's "Apollo" with the Thunderbolt interfaces. They are pretty impressive and the engineers love them. They went with a Pegasus R6 (6x4TB, RAID10). No Fiberchannel for the iMac.

5) Legacy ports? Really? This is an issue? If you need firewire that bad, pick up a Thunderbolt display. It has 1394b on the back.

6) No PCIe? Isn't that Thunderbolt? In a "Pro" situation, most everything is 19" rack mount anyway. I've seen a few PCIe "accelerators" but with today's CPU power, that's a non-issue now.

7) Single CPU only.. I'm not sure on this one yet. In general I don't think this is a big deal. 12 core is pretty nice. 24 even better for rendering. But again, if you are doing work that needs more, wouldn't you have the money for a nice little Mac Pro farm?

To be honest, I would bet that most of the people complaining about any of these things simply don't need them anyway. I don't.. I'm happy with my iMac. I would Love a Mac Pro, but honestly it doesn't offer me anything that I don't already have or need. But that's me. I don't do animation or video editing. I do audio mixing on the side, but still, nothing the iMac can't handle.

 

[Cubemmal]

Wrong, read this post from an audio professional

Audio professionals don't like proprietary cards due to support issues

Apple sees the future where people don't need special cards to do graphics and audio work. That was for back when CPU's and GPU's were too slow.

 

[ValSalva]

It seems like Apple made the new Mac Pro for themselves. It is almost as if Apple management was reading all the blogs saying they were abandoning the Mac and couldn't innovate. To prove to themselves they could still innovate they created this new Mac Pro. Schiller essentially said as much on stage at WWDC. It is an amazing piece of engineering, that's for sure. But innovation for the sake of innovation often results in a computer no one needs or wants.

The big unknown was whether Apple listened to any Pros and designed something for their needs. Only time and sales will tell if Apple's gamble pays off.

 

[GermanyChris]

In the Power days we were quite limited with what could be done in terms of expansion and upgrades. That was OK because Power was better. Now we're moving back to the days of limited expandability through limited vendors without the benefit of Power. I don't know if thats where I want to go....

 

[theluggage]

I can't understand why Apple is calling a non-expandable, no disc drive machine a "Pro" machine.

...because its got a Xeon CPU, ECC RAM and dual professional (i.e. optimised for multiple large displays and/or GPU-based computing rather than games) GPUs.

"Pro's", aka Professionals, do NOT want external expansion boxes cluttering their desk just because Apple deems it necessary to not allow people to expand it's internal components. ("expansion is external")

Notwithstanding all the people that have contradicted this (with photos), you can rest assured that the sort of firms that already make PCIe enclosures and rackmount kits for Mac Minis are already thinking about nice boxes and trolleys that will let you mount a new Pro and your preferred permutation of disks, PCIe chassis and toaster ovens into something that fits into the space of an old-style Pro.

Professional users also want to burn media (videos, photos, etc) to DVDs and Blu Rays. Now, on top of a ~$3000+ machine, they have to purchase an additional external drive just to do that.

Er, no, "professional users" (since we can all define that to mean whatever best supports our argument) stick the media on an external HD or upload it to a file server and give it to whoever needs them. They don't tie up their $4000 workstations doing a menial job that can done by a trainee on a $400 PC. Even for a one-man-band it makes sense to keep an old mini-tower around for jobs like that.

Apple is not gonna undercut the price of the high end ridiculously priced 15" rMBP. ($2799)

Why not? The existing Pro ($2500) already does. Paying more for a fully tricked-out ultra-portable laptop than a desktop system is hardly news.

However, try pricing up a single-CPU current "Pro" with SSD and dual high-end GPUs. $3000 would be a pretty attractive price if you need that spec.

 

[Tesselator]

Here I solved your problem, presenting the New Mac Pro Old Mac Pro (TM):

That'll totally work too. But leave the PSU in place. Without the MB, backplanes, and so forth pretty much any of the cable type interfaces or octopus type cable interfaces will probably fit.

 

[theluggage]

The big unknown was whether Apple listened to any Pros and designed something for their needs. Only time and sales will tell if Apple's gamble pays off.

Or maybe the "tower workstation" market is going nowhere fast for Apple.

Bear in mind that, in the EU, they dropped the Mac Pro months ago for want of some minor tweaks to meet new EU regs that have been in the pipeline for years. That kinda suggests that Mac Pros haven't been selling hand over fist.

The good old days when Windows was a half-baked DOS shell that couldn't create files bigger than 2GB, and the PPC G5 could run rings around a Pentium are long gone. Plenty of pro software now supports the PC, and for every package that still runs better on Mac there's probably another package for which the Windows version is always more up to date. Apple are staying in the pro market out of inertia, rather than any unique selling point - but they must be continually losing customers to Windows/PC (and maybe even Linux in some areas like servers).

Its all well and good having a Mac Pro with PCIe slots into which you are free to plug... er, well, the handful of overpriced cards that actually support OS X.

The new Pro is clearly an attempt to do exactly what they've done in all other areas: stick their neck out and do something radically different that stands out from the crowd and challenges the perception of what customers want. Yes - its a risk, but the upside of that is that the more conservative PC market (who have more to lose) aren't going to rush to follow them.

Look at the pattern over the years:

• Completely switching CPU architectures twice - 68k => PPC => Intel Core - on each occasion the new machines were initially unremarkable, if not slower, until all the software had been updated.
• Dropping floppies (initially, making them optional on laptops)
• Dropping everything except USB (when, although most PCs had USB, it was rarely used).
• Making a phone with no keypad... - the horror!
• Dropping optical drives
• Going SSD-only for laptops

...there was always an uproar at the time but, by and large, they were on the money and people didn't look back. If it was left to the PC world we'd still have PS/2 connectors and on-board floppy controllers.

 

[GermanyChris]

Or maybe the "tower workstation" market is going nowhere fast for Apple.

Bear in mind that, in the EU, they dropped the Mac Pro months ago for want of some minor tweaks to meet new EU regs that have been in the pipeline for years. That kinda suggests that Mac Pros haven't been selling hand over fist.

The good old days when Windows was a half-baked DOS shell that couldn't create files bigger than 2GB, and the PPC G5 could run rings around a Pentium are long gone. Plenty of pro software now supports the PC, and for every package that still runs better on Mac there's probably another package for which the Windows version is always more up to date. Apple are staying in the pro market out of inertia, rather than any unique selling point - but they must be continually losing customers to Windows/PC (and maybe even Linux in some areas like servers).

Its all well and good having a Mac Pro with PCIe slots into which you are free to plug... er, well, the handful of overpriced cards that actually support OS X.

The new Pro is clearly an attempt to do exactly what they've done in all other areas: stick their neck out and do something radically different that stands out from the crowd and challenges the perception of what customers want. Yes - its a risk, but the upside of that is that the more conservative PC market (who have more to lose) aren't going to rush to follow them.

Look at the pattern over the years:

• Completely switching CPU architectures twice - 68k => PPC => Intel Core - on each occasion the new machines were initially unremarkable, if not slower, until all the software had been updated.
• Dropping floppies (initially, making them optional on laptops)
• Dropping everything except USB (when, although most PCs had USB, it was rarely used).
• Making a phone with no keypad... - the horror!
• Dropping optical drives
• Going SSD-only for laptops

...there was always an uproar at the time but, by and large, they were on the money and people didn't look back. If it was left to the PC world we'd still have PS/2 connectors and on-board floppy controllers.

I still won't own a laptop without an optical drive. I also still own a floppy drive for flashing BIOS'

 

[ElderBrE]

I can't understand why Apple is calling a non-expandable, no disc drive machine a "Pro" machine.

"Pro's", aka Professionals, do NOT want external expansion boxes cluttering their desk just because Apple deems it necessary to not allow people to expand it's internal components. ("expansion is external")

Professional users also want to burn media (videos, photos, etc) to DVDs and Blu Rays. Now, on top of a ~$3000+ machine, they have to purchase an additional external drive just to do that. Apple is not gonna undercut the price of the high end ridiculously priced 15" rMBP. ($2799)

Don't get me started on the internal storage. WHY can Pros NOT expand the internal storage? Yes, there are external drives, but when it comes down to it, it's yet ANOTHER external expansion box, cluttering an already cluttered desk.

You have a very funny understanding of the word professional or Pro. An iMac is a pro machine. A Mac mini is a Pro machine. An MBA is a Pro machine.

The only condition required to be a Pro is to get paid for a job. As long as that condition is true, you become a professional by definition, the machine you own does not give you that title and the machine does not receive the title itself by any other entitlement by what YOU do with it.

That your needs are different as a professional from other professionals, is completely inconsequential in that .. verbose.

 

[OrangeSVTguy]

Here I solved your problem, presenting the New Mac Pro Old Mac Pro (TM):

Image

Now you can have all internal storage, internal disc drives, and internal pci cards you had before, with room to spare. You're welcome.


http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Mac-P...1396?pt=US_Computer_Cases&hash=item23292d2b34

http://www.cabletiesandmore.com/cableties.php?gclid=CJqRre-S-rcCFUue4AodJjgAfQ

Should rotate the new Mac Pro 90* clockwise to keep the airflow going in the right direction.

 

[goMac]

Complaints about the optical bays? Really?

Optical bays are insanely slow media with limited storage capacity. There isn't much pro about them.

Maybe Bluray I could get? But that's a weird dependence. Nothing that a flash drive couldn't handle. And if you're talking about mastering a bunch of Blurays in bulk, a Mac Pro has never been a good solution to begin with.

 

[derbothaus]

A huge majority of Apple products have not been upgradeable going on 10+ years now, it was going to make it to the "Pro" line eventually especially with their modern focus on controlling all the hardware.

Modern? It has been this way the entirety of their existence minus a brief clone era that almost sank the company. It is THE Apple business model. It is not a modern thing at all. When you argue Mac vs. PC among other things you are arguing somewhat open vs. closed HW ecosystems. Not Jobs vs. Gates (although some do that as well) We love your sports teams.

 

[the8thark]

There really isn't an argument. Apple and anyone with eyes knows this is Apple's attempt to gracefully exit the serious market and move into the Mickey Mouse/ "I'm a Director because I make wedding & graduation videos" market.

The serious folk need power with no compromises or middle man adapters. They want software that doesn't have excuses or silly limits. "What do you mean you need multi cam support? Just shoot with fewer cameras, see we SAVED you money !!!"

The wedding video guys are satisfied with a few sparkle dazzle spinning stars transitions and....a computer in a can.

Pixar and Co. would (and actually do) disagree with you. As would any serious pro.

 

[Tesselator]

Complaints about the optical bays? Really?

Optical bays are insanely slow media with limited storage capacity. There isn't much pro about them.

Maybe Bluray I could get? But that's a weird dependence. Nothing that a flash drive couldn't handle. And if you're talking about mastering a bunch of Blurays in bulk, a Mac Pro has never been a good solution to begin with.

Yup, totally. ODD's are so slow even USB2.0 can handle it well. While the neat-o silver door movement was pretty cool we all knew it was mostly a gimmick. A "standard", foreseeable, and mostly desirable one back when first implemented - but still a gimmick.

 

[s15119]

Yes, it would seem most of Apple's shills have been posting all sorts of glowing comments.

You won't win the argument by attempting to insult those who disagree with you.

 

[michelg1970]

And a computer I cannot upgrade.

For the same price as the iMac, I can get something that has double the power AND can be upgraded overtime meaning that I'll always get the latest parts. Once you get the iMac, your screwed into purchasing another $1299+ computer in a few years when you could have just spent $100 - $350 on a new graphics card / processor.

And don't say "just get it because it's an iMac." iMacs use the same damn parts as other computers, and probably cost a whole lot less for Apple to purchase due to bulk purchasing, meaning Apple makes hand over fist money by screwing their customers into purchasing non-upgradable computers.

They're doing the same with the Mac Pro. Apple doesn't want pros upgrading internal parts because they won't have to buy thunderbolt to do so. Thunderbolt is even more money into Apple's pocket. Why do you think there's six thunderbolt ports? That's an extra $234 JUST in thunderbolt cables.

Sorry - didn't want to get mixed up in this conversation but you forced me . I have been using PC machines for a very long time but ever since I shifted to the Apple platform I have had much better experiences in workability, user experience and more importantly upgradeability.

No - not upgrading by putting a new card of drive or whatever in the machine but simply because my 2, 3 year old Macs still had a good market value that enabled me to trade in the whole machine and get a new one for some extra bucks. My 2009 iMac for example still made me 1.300 US$ last month after 4 years (I bought it for 1.800 US$ so $ 500 depreciation over 4 years = $ 125 per year). Try that with an every year upgradeable PC.

I could agree that in the end we would spend the same money but at least the feeling is better (buy a PC now and after 3 years it is worth less to nothing).

Just looking at it from a different perspective....

 

[quatermass]

Desk clutter?

"A tidy desk is a sign of sick mind" - or to properly quote one Albert Einstein (not a pro) "If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?"

Seriously, what's this Big Problem with clutter and cables? A little foresight, planning, cable tidies etc. will sort. it If that's the biggest problem there is with having a new Mac Pro... well, I don't know what to say.

I'm a pro, I get paid for jobs, I have cables connecting things, stuff on my desk - still get the job done though. Will still get the job done with external storage. Because I'm a pro and I adapt to the new reality. Like all the other pros.

 

[BurningJah]

If you can buy a machine that costs +3000$ or €. Toen 79 for the ext Apple superdrive isn't that big of a deal

 

[michelg1970]

If you can buy a machine that costs +3000$ or €. Toen 79 for the ext Apple superdrive isn't that big of a deal

I couldn't agree more. Most users would already have something external because the internal and external drives Apple makes have lousy speed. My external Samsung USB DVD burner is much faster than the built-in option...

 

[derbothaus]

I couldn't agree more. Most users would already have something external because the internal and external drives Apple makes have lousy speed. My external Samsung USB DVD burner is much faster than the built-in option...

Apple does not make external or internal drives. They use others components. One such company is Samsung.

 

[michelg1970]

Apple does not make external or internal drives. They use others components. One such company is Samsung.

Sorry - my bad. The word "make" should have been "include". Thanks for your correct point.

 

[Thraun]

Why does 'Pro' seem to automatically mean professional video editor? I do professional audio, and as long as I have a machine where I can upgrade the RAM (which does unfortunately exclude the rMBPs) I don't care how great the GPU is or if I have 12 or 24 processing cores. I'm sure many other professionals would agree.

Also, I know this has already been addressed, but who gives a rat's behind if new Macs don't come with an optical drive? It's already a near-dead media. If a 'Pro' really needs to burn DVDs, get a freakin' external.

Either way, stop complaining.