why? it's more expensive than cMP... whether or not you think it's worth it is another story but i don't see how denying that it's comparatively expensive helps anything.
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MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)
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why? it's more expensive than cMP... whether or not you think it's worth it is another story but i don't see how denying that it's comparatively expensive helps anything.
It's just a regular tower, though .
Nothing ultra, high, end or machine about it .
Apart from the price of admission .
Has anyone commented on the nMP's apparent lack of air filters, for capturing ambient dust before it can enter and cake up on the insides?
1) Yes. Many times in this thread.
2) It's no different than the trash can, the cheese grater, and the old PowerMacs in that regard.
or most any computer. Having a hepa filter in your workspace isnt the worst idea.
Please don't call the new Mac Pro nMP. Call it mMP for modular Mac Pro or cMP2. None of the previous Mac Pros feature dust filters either so it is not a big deal.
The BTO SSD capacities are striped across two NAND modules for better performance.
Which makes the single 256GB one in the base configuration even more insulting. At least use two 128GB (or better yet, two 256GB for a 512GB base).
I usually don’t say this, surely not enough...but Apple (Tim Cook) needs to pry open their damn wallet and put a second 256GB NAND module in there for better performance and to push the base storage configuration up to 512GB, which is the bare minimum the base Mac Pro should have...at the same $5,999 price. This is why comparisons to Mr. Burns, Mr. Krabs and Scrooge McDuck are made about Tim Cook...because it just screams of needless, miserly penny-pinching that seems less like maximizing profit and more like bleeding a turnip (or a captive market).
I can have a cogent, civil debate about the merits of the impact on profits in making the 12-core (W-3235) the base CPU and/or making a Vega 48/56 the base GPU, but I cannot in the face of a $6000 price tag say with a straight face that 256GB is plenty for most PROS and Apple knows better than them. If I did, I would be calling Bull$#!7 on myself all day long!
A 512GB (2x256GB NAND) SSD should be the base storage for the $5,999 base Mac Pro...Apple needs to revise this before final release. There isn’t even an option to BTO 512GB, you just jump from 256GB to 1TB, which guarantees that for anyone wanting official Apple storage for their boot drive and cannot live on 256GB will be spending an additional $700 for the BTO option to 1TB. I won’t go so far as speaking in hyperbole, stating that the actual cost of the base Mac Pro is $6,699.00, but it sure seems like it. They know that MANY, if not MOST Pros can make due with a 512GB system volume and not give them anymore money, and it just reeks of profiteering, as in “we know you really want the 512GB as the base, so here’s 256GB and you can make due or pay us an extra $700 to go to Something useable. At which point, I would say that is just a complete **ck move when you say you want Pros back in the fold and here is this AWESOME new bread box, Swiss Army Knife, completely overbuilt beast of a Mac...with 256GB of base storage. PSYCH!!!
I know Apple is going to exact their pound of flesh for Pros who say the iMac, iMac Pro and MacBook Pro just don’t do the job, and while the 8-core isn’t exactly lit and the 580X is, uh well, the 580X, Apple is charging a PRO price for a PRO machine and even if I can live on 256GB (I can and do), that doesn’t mean Pros can, which Apple knows. Regardless, an extra 256GB NAND module cannot set them back more than $50-$75 their cost, if even that.
It would at least be a tiny olive branch, considering the lack of BTO to 512GB. A tinier one would be offering a BTO option of going to 512GB, which would be another $300, but I digress.
It just reinforces that adversarial nature that many justify in their hate of Apple. I believe Apple to make a profit on the Mac Pro, but the downward trend in NAND prices over the past few years and immediate past 4 quarters should be reflected in Apple’s pricing, or at least in their configuration for the Mac Pro.
Just my 2¢.
The whole proprietary SSD thing that Apple is going with across their current machines is just plain horrible IMO. Prices aside with any computer I'd always want to be able to take out the drive for practical reasons and/or upgrade at some point down the road when my needs change and newer, faster, bigger drives are available. More important than some benchmark to me.
These days this is very effective in preventing me from buying any new Mac.
I suppose they won't let this BS go away but rather push it across their product line so I'll probably have to go the hackintosh route in the future.
These days this is very effective in preventing me from buying any new Mac.
I suppose they won't let this BS go away but rather push it across their product line so I'll probably have to go the hackintosh route in the future.
The whole proprietary SSD thing that Apple is going with across their current machines is just plain horrible IMO. Prices aside with any computer I'd always want to be able to take out the drive for practical reasons and/or upgrade at some point down the road when my needs change and newer, faster, bigger drives are available. More important than some benchmark to me.
These days this is very effective in preventing me from buying any new Mac.
I suppose they won't let this BS go away but rather push it across their product line so I'll probably have to go the hackintosh route in the future.
When you say, “more important than some benchmark to me.” I read that as “I want the largest, cheapest thing I can buy and it’s Apple’s problem if it doesn’t work“. Cue up the New Egg Shellshocker e-mails.
Honestly, I have no problem with Apple not having an m.2 slot in their computers, as people will tend to buy the wrong or cheapest POS SSD stick they can find on eBay, NewEgg, Alibaba, whatever and then when it doesn’t work because they have some weird implementation in their Phison controller, crap breaks and Apple gets a call, because Adata or Patriot don’t have enough money or market size to justify writing a special driver for macOS. Whose fault is that? Phison, the m.2 vendor or Apple’s? Well, at the end of the day, it ends up being Apple’s and/or they get the most crap on this forum about it.
No, I would be happy with the proprietary SSD module if Apple didn’t charge an arm and a leg for them. A 2TB upgrade from a 2TB Fusion is $1,100.00 USD. A Samsung 970 EVO 2TB is ~$500.00 on Amazon, below retail, I believe. Even taking the price down to $700.00-$800.00 USD for the 2TB BTO would be tolerable, basically a 30% reduction across all tiers.
Now, before you whip out that 2TB Intel 660P QLC for $194.00 on New Egg as an example, put it away. I don’t want to hear it. First, it’s QLC and that stuff hasn’t been on the market long enough for me to trust it. If you do, good for you, but it’s not trustworthy, certainly not to Apple. Second, Intel isn’t writing any sort of driver for this and Apple should not be expected to write KEXT for every Tom Dick and Larry that farts out a cheap QLC m.2 stick and sells it direct from the Shangzhou District (not that some of the stuff that comes out of there is anything short of amazing).
If Apple would at least set up a method of selling their NAND modules directly as Service Parts to their customers at less than NASA government contract prices, then that would be something. Or license their proprietary modules to a few select vendors to produce for people who want to upgrade, then Apple would still need to unsolder storage from a variety of machines, but that would be progress. Even restricting it to the Pro models would be something positive for the Pro end user.
But the bottom line is Apple is going to keep control of storage, period. It’s in their best interest. It avoids driver issues, support costs, data liability, and general customer complaints regarding reliability. Microsoft is their guide post...they have to deal with just about anything inserted into someone else’s anything and there are an endless number of drivers and permutations to support. Why would Apple do that to themselves if they don’t have to? To let you NOT buy their storage giving them money and then call for tech support on a product they didn’t make money on? I can’t say as I blame them.
Since the NAND modules on the Mac Pro are easily user-accessible, I am dearly hoping that third-party solutions will become available from folks like OWC and others. Based on reports, the connector is proprietary (to even other Macs like the iMac Pro) which means it is probably also patented, but it doesn't make sense to me to make them easily-replaceable if there are no plans to offer an upgrade path after the initial BTO configuration ships to the customer.
Well, all my Macs have Samsung 8xx or 9xx Pro-series SSDs in them, except for the Mini that has to manage with a simple EVO. Depending on one's perspective these may count as POS after all. Beating Apple's own POS that came standard with the Trashcan in raw performance though.
Benefits: if I have to bring the computer in for a repair I get to keep my system drive. No peeking allowed, Geniuses! And if something fails that is easy to fix by taking out the drive and replacing it or hooking it up to another machine either internally or as an external drive then it's straightforward, too. I can also repurpose my drives between machines as I see fit.
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Yeah I imagine that someone will come around and create an adaptor. If it's yet another new type of connector then it'll probably take a while and be extra expensive to rip those off who have already bent over for the new Mac Pro.
Uniquely among current Macs, the Mac Pro has some good (although not hot-swap) internal answers for Thomas' needs. I doubt that most users will use the Apple internal storage as much more than a boot/applications drive. It's pretty much made for internal PCIe storage, with all those slots (even with quad graphics, it still has a 16x and a couple of 8x slots free). PCIe cards that take multiple NVMe drives are common, cheap by Mac Pro standards and don't have exorbitant power or cooling requirements (16 TB per slot is easy to achieve, at speeds comparable to the Apple storage - and 1/3 or 1/4 the price). If you really insist, Promise has already introduced at least two ways of jamming spinning rust into the case, too.
That said, the three stingy decisions are difficult to take on a machine this expensive. The CPU isn't one of them, since the 12-core retails for $600 more than the 8-core. Apple would have to pay at least $300 more, and would have to pass that on (with a healthy margin attached). Better to let each customer choose whether they need more than 8 cores (most will probably upgrade, but some folks with highly GPU-driven workflows may not - the CPU is really just for the OS for some).
On the other hand, the SSD, RAM and GPU all feel stingy. A decent 256 GB PCIe SSD only retails for $30-50 (Newegg). Apple can't be paying more than $15 for the raw flash chips and circuit board in their 256 GB drive module. If it's more than that, it's because it's a low-volume custom part. If it's expensive because so few are made, then give users two of the 512 GB boards from the iMac Pro instead (which should be $30 each) - a terabyte won't break the bank, Apple. In either case, 2x256 or 2x512 is a cheap upgrade from 1x256.
The same applies to the GPU - a Radeon 580 is a $200 card at Newegg, but a Vega 56 is $270. With Apple's relationship with AMD, they can probably get the Vega for $30 extra. Again, not a major margin hit on a $6000 machine, and useful even to people who mostly don't care about the GPU (if nothing else, it's more modern, and software including macOS itself will come to expect the newer architecture).
The RAM is a little more expensive - 8 GB ECC DIMMs retail for about $60 each - but it still wouldn't be a huge hit to pull the base configuration up to 48 GB, using all the memory channels. Apple won't pay $60 each for those DIMMs, with their volume.
These things are so cheap to do that I half expect Apple to announce "we upped the base configuration" right before they open orders - it would be a good PR move.
That said, the three stingy decisions are difficult to take on a machine this expensive. The CPU isn't one of them, since the 12-core retails for $600 more than the 8-core. Apple would have to pay at least $300 more, and would have to pass that on (with a healthy margin attached). Better to let each customer choose whether they need more than 8 cores (most will probably upgrade, but some folks with highly GPU-driven workflows may not - the CPU is really just for the OS for some).
On the other hand, the SSD, RAM and GPU all feel stingy. A decent 256 GB PCIe SSD only retails for $30-50 (Newegg). Apple can't be paying more than $15 for the raw flash chips and circuit board in their 256 GB drive module. If it's more than that, it's because it's a low-volume custom part. If it's expensive because so few are made, then give users two of the 512 GB boards from the iMac Pro instead (which should be $30 each) - a terabyte won't break the bank, Apple. In either case, 2x256 or 2x512 is a cheap upgrade from 1x256.
The same applies to the GPU - a Radeon 580 is a $200 card at Newegg, but a Vega 56 is $270. With Apple's relationship with AMD, they can probably get the Vega for $30 extra. Again, not a major margin hit on a $6000 machine, and useful even to people who mostly don't care about the GPU (if nothing else, it's more modern, and software including macOS itself will come to expect the newer architecture).
The RAM is a little more expensive - 8 GB ECC DIMMs retail for about $60 each - but it still wouldn't be a huge hit to pull the base configuration up to 48 GB, using all the memory channels. Apple won't pay $60 each for those DIMMs, with their volume.
These things are so cheap to do that I half expect Apple to announce "we upped the base configuration" right before they open orders - it would be a good PR move.
It's too late in the game I think to go back to Vega 56 or 64 for the entry level. I think Vega 56 would have been a good idea, not sure why they didn't use it.
I could see them upping the SSD before launch. Maybe they'd want to make sure that the Vega II upgrade cost was very reasonable to be friendlier to people who are annoyed by the 580. I could see them offsetting some of this by making the upgrade prices lower. On the upgrades they're really just adding margin on top of things they're reselling, so they could lower their margins a bit.
Because one of the target markets for this system is as a digital audio workstation (DAW) and for pure DAW workloads the Vega 56 is relatively overkill and would only raise the base price higher still. ( Anyone who thinks Apple would have upgraded to Vega 56 and not upgraded the base price is smoking something. If the bill of material price went up Apple would increase the price. This system just have a big fat margin on them probably due to the relatively low run rate and there is no "tap dancing" around that by stuff higher priced parts into the entry system).
Another market is the cloud developer virtualize macOS instance business. Again. if some kind of iOS device integration testing workloads is Vega 56 going to make much of a big impact if there is no user locally connected to the machine?
SSD I think is in a very similar boat. Those with high end NAS/SAN set ups. All basically doing is booting the OS off the drive and 256GB is just fine for that. For the extra $700-800 to get to 1TB local SSD they could be well on their way to a dual 10GbE card or a 40GbE one.
Also quite likely that the Promise J2i and two 2.5" 500GB SATA SSDs (+ 2 adapter sleds) will be cheaper than $700-800 too. Even if needed more space for local apps there is a path that more than few will take. ( especially if already have a few 2.5" SSD sitting in much older Mac Pro sending into e-waste/recycling )
As long as Apple sticks to their far over market rate SSD pricing they push from entry customers not to have to pay for their 1TB drivers is going to be quite high. The are numerous SATA and PCI-e SSD options with the internal base provisioning that the new Mac Pro provides. So many internal level system folks will do just that. The folks largely spending other people's money will simply just go with the BTO option.
With both the video cards and SSDs more than likely Apple is looking for some of the folks coming off the older Mac Pro to move one (or both ) up as part of the stretch to get to justify $6K for the more constrained budgets. [ e.g., Folks who bought "Mojave " cards for older systems. Folks who have used 2+ SSDs on older system. Those folks will migrate hardware at the entry level system configuration to a more usable system. ]
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As deconstruct60 notes above, I can see applications where an RX 580 would be sufficient (essentially serving the same purpose as iGPUs do on certain servers or basic video cards do on workstations) and adding a more powerful video card would just be an extra and unnecessary expense. Same with more powerful CPUs or higher RAM and storage. By starting minimal, you limit the entry price and then make your money on the options.
But there is still that $5999 entry price. I understand the engineering that went into this and I understand the bill of materials for items custom to the design and all that. But if Apple went with $4999, a fair number of people would probably still claim it is too expensive, but at least a more...reasonable...argument could be made on why they went with such a...basic...base configuration and help rationalize the BTO configuration the majority of buyers will probably go for.
But there is still that $5999 entry price. I understand the engineering that went into this and I understand the bill of materials for items custom to the design and all that. But if Apple went with $4999, a fair number of people would probably still claim it is too expensive, but at least a more...reasonable...argument could be made on why they went with such a...basic...base configuration and help rationalize the BTO configuration the majority of buyers will probably go for.
There is no 512GB BTO option probably because some folks are looking for a "bare bones" and this is about as close as Apple is going to go. Folks with a high end SAN/NAS only really need to boot with the basic OS and a the basic utility apps. The rest can be mounted over the network (and/or added with local data storage ).
"John Doe" with a single user home business and no network storage so operate at lower operating costs..... that isn't really what these systems are aimed at all all with their $6K starting price.
But how many of those 512GB only folks already have $700 (or more ) of SSDs already? If they have them they can just add them to the new Mac Pro and the system capacity. The issue here is how many of them need 512GB in only one big pile ( Volume)?
I suspect Apple will have a standard configuration with the 1TB already populated ( so don't need to add BTO times to shipping), but I don't think they are going to add to the basic storage any more than they are coming to come to a more alignment with the SSD market on pricing. [ Going to continue to 'print money' on SSD capacities ... as that gimmick spans across multiple product lines and into the iOS device space. ]
Eventually that will bite Apple in the but but for the next year or so they'll probably be able to get away with it. It is a highly dubious long term plan though. But Apple has had horrible long term Mac plans of late.
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The other thing is that Apple isn't necessarily stuck with the 580X as the entry option forever. Early-Mid 2020 they could do minor bump to an affordable Navi option (not the stuff out soon but the next more affordable options). There was about zero good reason hold up the Mac Pro on affordable Navi (and the associated new graphics drivers ). Whatever the relatively much higher run rate upper BTO iMac is going to, that is what the Mac Pro entry card can be. Looking for something affordable that a broad set of Mac users are using so it is likely highly stable.
To my experience, the 256GB SSD seems just a tad too small as a boot drive given the nature of files and sizes, even storing nearly everything on a SAN, but I suppose it will do.
The base install of MacOS only take about 19GB, IIRC. I was just thinking if you were a FCPX, Premiere or Resolve customer along with any supporting apps (Logic Pro X, Motion, Compressor, Creative Cloud, et al) that downloading any additional content that they provide would take quite a bit of extra storage. Also, any swap space you might be using as well, especially with a 64GB DRAM and up system.
It was a dual Xeon workstation. That's a 9 door beast.
Did people think Apple was making a dual CPU workstation so that people could play games on it?
I mean just looking at the specs of the machine... It's not an i7 with PCI slots. It never was.
The only higher end possible machine would have been a quad Xeon which is clearly far, far, far in specialty big big job territory.
For servers or farms that are reliant on network, it might be reasonable. I work with some farms that have 256GB or 128GB as the base storage. But even then it can be a little tight.
(Hey, sorry for the double post. Normally they get combined automatically?)
What I was saying is not that Apple should increase base SSD, RAM and GPU while increasing the price of the bAse configuration, but that they can and should actually do it for the same price. At the prices they probably pay for components, the Vega 56 and a second 256 GB flash stick (it's not a full SSD, because the T2 is the controller) probably add $45 together to the bill of materials (and neither adds any labor cost). The RAM is a little more - two more DIMMs are probably $50-$75 to Apple.
This isn't something that should push the price up (nor are any of the upgrades things that will allow people who rely heavily on that component not to upgrade it). They are just little things that smooth the rough edges of the base configuration.
The Vega means that audio folks won't run into incompatibilities in a few years caused by a 3 year old GPU (when installed).
The SSD upgrade gives a little more room for application folders (the data still live on NAS, SAN or non-Apple internal storage).
The RAM means that all of the memory channels are used, giving the CPU its full performance.
The 12-core CPU is a nice upgrade, but it would push the price up, so it should remain optional.
This isn't something that should push the price up (nor are any of the upgrades things that will allow people who rely heavily on that component not to upgrade it). They are just little things that smooth the rough edges of the base configuration.
The Vega means that audio folks won't run into incompatibilities in a few years caused by a 3 year old GPU (when installed).
The SSD upgrade gives a little more room for application folders (the data still live on NAS, SAN or non-Apple internal storage).
The RAM means that all of the memory channels are used, giving the CPU its full performance.
The 12-core CPU is a nice upgrade, but it would push the price up, so it should remain optional.