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MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)
- Thread starter Mago
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Apple has just released a couple of updated iPads that are compatible with a thing called Apple Pencil 1 .
Appearently, there is a newer Apple Pencil 2, which is compatible to some iPads released earlier, but neither pencil thing is compatible with some other current iPads, not to mention old ones .
Let's just say Wacom HQ isn't losing any sleep over Tim Apple's progress in that field ....
The point being, in any company with any kind of coherent development strategy, nonsense like that wouldn't make it out of the basement - where they experiment on interns .
How can we assume Apple management is even capable - or willing - of producing a noteworthy tcMP successor, let alone one that is competitive and based on customer needs ?
The rumors are just that ; they mostly write themselves whenever Apple coughs on a blogger .
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Apple went exactly the direction Jobs pointed it , in my view .
The iPad and MacBook family lines are in a bit of disarray right now, but it is part of a longer rationalization strategy. They also have to appeal to multiple market segments in terms of size, features and pricing.
Eventually we'll see every iPad include TouchID and no bezels with flat sides and we'll have the iPad Mini in one size, the iPad in one size and the iPad Pro in two sizes. Just as eventually we will have an ARM-powered MacBook 12" and an Intel-powered 13" MacBook Air along with a MacBook Pro 14" and MacBook Pro 16".
Anyway, back to the Mac Pro 7,1...
Eventually we'll see every iPad include TouchID and no bezels with flat sides and we'll have the iPad Mini in one size, the iPad in one size and the iPad Pro in two sizes. Just as eventually we will have an ARM-powered MacBook 12" and an Intel-powered 13" MacBook Air along with a MacBook Pro 14" and MacBook Pro 16".
Anyway, back to the Mac Pro 7,1...
True, but it is the disk controller for the systems it is installed in and it can only control SSDs. So you'd have the T2 controlling the SSDs and a separate disk controller handling the HDDs and CoreStorage trying to tie the two together. I expect the possible failure scenario are rather large and most of them involve data loss.
These aren't new iMacs, only spec bumps. When they actually redesign it, the T2, T3 or whatever will definitely be there.
They may also need a redesign just to get everything plus the T2 to fit in a sensible and coolable way.
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I LOLed at the basement intern comment. That’s too accurate. Tim’s Apple is lost and looking for direction. I mean paying for news? That’s unambiguously a big step backwards in most people’s head. I can’t see how this works. I guess their music is similar. It’s too expensive and I know of no one that uses outside my uber-techies making 250K+. I’m sure the margins are great so it will hangs around, but it isn’t moving the bigger needle. We’ll have to see about the streaming video content. This is becoming a very crowded space with many disparate options.
And while they do this, their hardware lineups feel neglected. They need to hit the new iMac and new MBP redesigns out of the park. The Mac Pro will be a litmus test to see how much Apple real gives a you-know-what about their Mac lineup.
Like every MacBook line ever - until recently ?
Current MBxs are painted into a corner, no strategy there .
Pricing, size , features seem to be randonly chosen at the moment ; mainly by Apple's insistence on touchbar , port choices and silly pricing for upgrade options
iPads are a completely different - and incompatible - product .
Again, two different products .
The moment Apple tries to marry iGadgets to Mac tech and OS, it will be a user and support nightmare for years .
iMacs are too big and too many sold, so it is a problem for their support to handle, store and check them easily (about the T2 issues).
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iMacs are too big and too many sold, so it is a problem for their support to handle, store and check them easily (about the T2 issues).
Well the MacBook Pro and (new) MacBook Air outsells the iMac by a significant margin and they have T2s.
As I and others have stated, the true reason is that the T2 does not support non-SSD storage and Apple does not look like they intend to allow it to support HDD storage. On the plus side, this implies that Apple will eventually move the iMac to all-SSD storage (hopefully with the next iteration).
Here... have fun
https://ibuildmacs.com/products/macpro-2019-71/
[doublepost=1553269061][/doublepost]Cascade Lake Xeons are running late (what a surprise.. they should call the company Indel...ay). Apparently they are talking about H2 2019.
Which means very likely: sneak-peak at WWDC, orders start in October... but then shipping gets delayed to December and the mMP will be in my hands by 2020.
https://ibuildmacs.com/products/macpro-2019-71/
[doublepost=1553269061][/doublepost]Cascade Lake Xeons are running late (what a surprise.. they should call the company Indel...ay). Apparently they are talking about H2 2019.
Which means very likely: sneak-peak at WWDC, orders start in October... but then shipping gets delayed to December and the mMP will be in my hands by 2020.
Yes, Cascade Lake X i7 and i9 is set to launch at Computex in May, which means the W-Series Xeons (Granite Falls) should hopefully follow not too long after. So (probably late) 2H 2019 initial availability sounds about right.
Oh, I thought it was more like:
Cascade Lake (LGA 3647) : April
Cascade Lake-X (LGA 2066) : Computex
?
Here... have fun
https://ibuildmacs.com/products/macpro-2019-71/
[doublepost=1553269061][/doublepost]Cascade Lake Xeons are running late (what a surprise.. they should call the company Indel...ay). Apparently they are talking about H2 2019.
Running late from late 2016- very early 2017 timelines. But from relatively recent ones , it is not late.
“The key part of the image is the launch window, which states that all Cascade Lake-SP processors will be available between the end of Q1 through most of Q2. This is essentially a 'March to May' window, which verifies a similar report we had seen elsewhe “
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1361...oses-cascade-lake-xeon-scalable-launch-window
Q2 2019 , not 2H 2019. The Xeon W variants Apple is more likely to end of Q2 to ship but Intel will probably more openly talk about by end of May ( if not before ). They are trying to balance 14nm capacity so SP first. , -X versioin next , and then W version rafter initial demand bubble for -X version ( it should not take more than a 1-2 months to get all three running concurrently )
Which means very likely: sneak-peak at WWDC, orders start in October... but then shipping gets delayed to December and the mMP will be in my hands by 2020.
If it slides into Fall then probably something else than would be the hang up . In 2013, Intel didn’t release Xeon E5 v2 until October and Apple previewed in June ( 4 months earlier ). There is nothing salient with WWDC preview at all .
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The Xeon W are also socket 2066. The issue though is there is only so much 14nm fab capacity Intel has .
The are also doing
“... as the company merely disclosed that the new lineup of 45W chips designed for high-end notebooks, including a new lineup of Core i9 models, will come to market in the second quarter of 2019. ...”
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-9th-generation-h-series-graphics-command-center,38877.html
And new desktop processors coming late June - July .
The T2 is responsible for a lot of unnecessary problems for many users. A lot.
It's not mature enough. Apple's preference to present, for one more time and after so many years, HDD equipped iMacs is at least funny. (The T2 not supporting HDDs is not worth discussing at all (even if it is not stated from Apple but from individual's guessing) because HDDs should not be present at all SSDs are pretty cheap right now, they could even install a little slower one SSD, not the one from iMac Pro etc.)
If Apple wanted it could present a new iMac line without HDDs yesterday, or a year ago. A new Mac Pro 4 years ago. There is no plus side at all.
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I'm investing in the Mac Pro I have now and I'm not even sure that the machine Apple releases will be able to replace the machine that I've built. The CPU, RAM, bus speed, will surely blow my machine's away yet I have 6 cores, 16gb RAM, fast SSDs, capacious hard disks, both optical drives upgraded, and an RX 580. What Mac Pro is Apple going to release that will be this versatile?12/##/19 ..........Basically 2020 ........to long for me.
Until I see evidence otherwise I'm going to assume that the Mac Pro will be a Mac Mini on steroids, which will satisfy enough of the market for Apple to feel good about. Although I am skeptical, I still have hope, and I can wait until 2020.
You know this tool was designed from pure imagination when it features the latest Nvida GPUs :/
The T2 does not control multiple SSDs. It is part of the single SDD present. There is no plural aspect. It isn't not about multiple disks at all and not type.
The T2 handles both a large subset of the SMC ( system management controller) and boot disk ( where SSDs are the future so an SSD drive) so there is no "security gap" between them. No gap, fewer breaches in boot process. The issue with SATA drives is that they most certainly leave that gap.
The T2 in and of itself doesn't stop booting off other drive set ups. That's more so the firmware. The T2 does protect the firmware (or at least the master copy to cold boot from) from being modified. So there is no "back door' around the firmware.
and a separate disk controller handling the HDDs and CoreStorage trying to tie the two together. I expect the possible failure scenario are rather large and most of them involve data loss.
APFS superseded CoreStorage. It isn't just a "File system" but a volume management system also. The bigger issue is that Apple really is trying to get away from "RAID/multiple disk" boot contexts. APFS dumped Apple RAID format support. ( Softraid is doing some gymnastics to get around APFS not really wanting to deal with it).
The firmware in the context of a T2 probably just doesn't want to deal with multiple devices just to keep things simpler. It is geared specifically for APFS and APFS is extremely focused on just dealing with SSDs. ( Apple has added some HDD and Fusion side-cars to APFS due to the number of deployed Macs that have those, but that probably won't behave as well as many would hope it will over the long term. RAID ( or heavy disk tiering) just runs counter to it. In terms of performance, those are just way behind what modern PCI-e SSDs do.
With APFS's Fusion implementation as long as the initial bootstrap parts of APFS and the EFI parameter data was kept on the SSD tier that the T2 was hooked to ... conceptually Apple could make it to work with more firmware additions and some mods to the Fusion caching heuristics and layout management code. There is are probably three significant blockers. One, that is more work than they want to do. Two, T2 with driving crappy 32GB cache SSD isn't worth it for them. Three, by time finished extra work, the price of SSD $/GB would have fallen even more ( most folks will want to buy the SSD anyway. )
Fusion is probably viewed like Rosetta was. A transition technology that Apple will support for a fixed number of years until can get mostly everyone over to the "new side". T2 systems are on the "new side" ( primary SSD boot ) and not a bridge back to the old.
The other part of Apple's hang up here is their goosing SSD prices higher. If they want folks off of HDDs sooner rather than later they need much saner pricing on their SSDs.
The iMac Pro has two SSDs, each half the total capacity (so the base model comes with 2x512GB that present as 1TB to the OS). Not sure if that falls under what you are trying to say, however.
So why Fusion Drives cannot (currently) be controlled by a T2 is down to the SATA controller and not the type of drive (SSD or HDD)? Makes sense, frankly.
We are starting to see that with the latest cuts.