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MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)
- Thread starter Mago
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That was a suspicion, but was it ever officially confirmed?
American ordered Mac Pros: assembled in America by Flex and distributed in the Americas.
Non-American orders: made in China by Quanta and distributed worldwide?
Order soon to be outdated and already outclassed hardware: pcie 3, WiFi 5 (11ax) bt 4.2, 28core Xeon.
Or wait til 2021 for Pcie 5.0 goodness. Or wait til 2024 for 6.0....
I’m always surprised how many people complain about Wifi 5. It’s a pro workstation. The first thing I do is turn off WiFi and plug in Ethernet. Why the heck would I want to run it off if any flavor of wireless networking.
I mean worst case if you insist on doing that at least you can buy a card.
Bluetooth 4.2 would be concerning. But it comes with 5.0.
It's typically a largely overlapping group that also complains there should be a cheaper model for "enthusiasts" and that such a machine would sell like hot cakes, and also that it needs internal bays for spinning rust storage.
Let's play the, What Will The Afterburner Card Cost Game!
First entry: $1,500.00
First entry: $1,500.00
I don't have any clue what anything like this is worth, but it definitely won't end in 00's like that. Assuming that's a realistic ballpark figure I'd say it'll be either $999, $1299 or $1499 etc.
Might be US only, no news in Europe
Jobs was ignoring it too (we got the “new” 5,1 under his watch.) It’s dumb to lay it on Cook’s feet. Given that he was still involved in big-picture stuff until he died, I'd say it's a safe bet that he was involved in at least preliminary discussions about the 6,1.
If there's one area where theoretically I could see Jobs being an improvement, it would be moving faster once it was clear the 6,1 wasn't working, but that's also a bit unfair to Cook in that he's running a much larger ship than Jobs did less than a decade ago.
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Oh! You mean like a spec bump? You know, those things we've been requesting for years under Cook?
I'm not saying Jobs loved the Mac Pro's. It's clear (to me at least) he thought the iPad was the future, which was ridiculous (in my opinion). But what I AM saying is that Cook clearly doesn't care for this product line for standard bean-counter reasons (small market, small profit, big units, etc.). The fact we had to wait years as A) Apple refused to acknowledged the problems with 6,1, B) attempted to sell the MacBook Pro as a worthy substitute then C) tried to push the iMac Pro as a substitute and D) finally listened to the pro users and dragged their feet to push out a shiny new update… these are enough reasons to prove to me that Apple, with Cook at the helm, would have preferred to kill the Mac Pro line.
That's absurd!
Oh yeah, Tim Cook is in the kitchen slaving away on new iPhones, iPads, iWatches, and emoji's every friggin' day. He's working so hard that, by golly! there's just not enough time in the day for a new Mac Pro!
News flash: Apple has divisions that work independently if given the brief from the Big Guy. It takes simple delegation and oversight while the employees do the work. That's what being the Boss is all about.
It is also the 'wrong time' to attack that market if almost completely investing in Intel CPU products. That is probably the biggest battlefront between AMD and Intel at the moment. Apple is going to take enough lumps there with the iMac (and iMac Pro) line up. To throw another Mac Pro variant to churn the water with even more fratricide probably won't help them. [ Apple is extremely unlikely to engage in a 'broad shotgun blast against the side of the barn and see what sticks' approach.
I suspect Apple bumped the iMac and iMac Pro in Spring 2019 in order to kick the can on more substantive updates (on at least one of those) until Spring 2020. ( get early access to the alternatives and 'think' about it longer. )
Whatever 'bet' they made in 2017 on this Mac Pro was fixed in stone before the depths of the current war were clear. It has a "ship it; just plain super late upgrade' problem. Shipping is better than nothing.
Fixing the iMac range is probably next. Some $3K tower wouldn't even get on the consideration map until after the Mini was bumped. The Mac Pro 2019 is up in a segment that is primarily above those others. Where there is even more potential fratricide, Apple won't move fast over fixing what is already in that same general price range there. ( And the "I'll never buy an iMac" group gets smaller as iMac/Mini get more capable. ).
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Spec bump in 2012 of what? The GPU didn't change. Same model number. Newer 2012 Intel processors? Nope.
[ And please no hand waving about how Jobs was dead in Oct 2011 so not in any way responsible for the 2012 system. The reason why they had nothing is primarily because they didn't do anything in 2010-2011. ]
The Mac Pro 2013 was extremely grounded in things that Jobs greenlighted and extremely aligned with his Mac product line directions. The Mac Pro 2013 as a homage to Jobs initiated objectives probably helped extend the time it took to do a correction. Jobs may have iterated to the iMac Pro quicker but it is doubtful would have gotten a different priority order on those upgrades.
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Processors available with slightly faster core speeds (3.06).
Minor, but I think that qualifies as a speed bump.
The displays, the Time Capsule and the Airport line are all a result of Cook’s pursuit of high, higher, highest margins and those products just don’t have a high enough margin for Cook’s taste, IMHO.
The rationale, for sure, was that there’s no money to make in these “saturated” markets, but I have always thought the decisions were idiotic in respect to how easy those add-on sales are for your sales force in the Apple Store and the chance of a value add such as a spiffy new monitor with bulletproof TB3 connections plus a free built-in Dock to ease acceptance and extra capabilities added into the Airport routers such as being a caching server for Software Updates, Music or TV/Videos, Remote Desktop access, remote file access, et al. But what do I know...
As for Xserve, that was just an idiot move when you want to retain your Pro customers and offer a true workflow for certain customers who will buy YOUR (Apple’s) solution. Perhaps they didn’t want to screw Lumaforge and other startups, but generally, Apple simply doesn’t get Enterprise, never has and doesn’t really care.
I get it, Enterprise is thankless, often quite witless and mostly anti-Apple, but Xserve really was a great product and Apple’s chance to have a long term impact in a few key creator markets and keep customers inside that garden forever was completely squandered. Again, I don’t know the actual politics since Apple and it’s not like they have suffered from a sales/profit viewpoint, but mindshare from Pros took it in the shorts and really shouldn’t have...I know Apple has finite resources and iPhone sucked up all of Apple’s resources at the time...and they paid a terrible price...Pros did too. I dare anyone here, at Apple, friggin’ NASA to argue with me that selling the 2013 Mac Pro unchanged for SIX years was a good idea.
To my way of thinking, Tim Cook’s Apple has ceded too much leadership in the Pro/Creator/Content market to Windows and Linux and I get it, iOS, iPhone and iPad is all consuming to keep competitors at bay and Wall Street happy, but that double edge sword HAS cost Apple more than they know. Or will admit.
Obviously, I would have run things differently, but I still don’t know if I could have as sometimes you have to make hard choices, dispassionate choices.
Just my 2¢.
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Nothing that Apple shipped in 2012 didn't get released after Q1 2011. ( most of it was in 2010 )
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codename/54534/westmere-ep.html
It was only a speed bump because they skipped it in a previous year. In June 2012, the rest of the competition was in the process or releasing these. Which were 'new' in mid 2012.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codename/64276/sandy-bridge-ep.html
It is like trying to spin the repriced MP 2013 models in 2017 as speed bumped so Apple did something. Not really.
In June 2012 there were some folks on these forums rattling sabers about how they were going to file US FTC complaints about how Apple was labeling the Mac Pro 2012 'new' on their website when it really didn't mean the definition of new. And Apple took the 'new' label down about the same time.
The MP 2013 didn't have the option of shipping CPUs and GPUs that Apple skipped but there wasn't much else the choose from and Apple jumped in at the end of an Intel 'tick tock' cycle ( and AMD got stuck on process fab tech and had designed themselves into a corner). [ if Apple had jumped into the MP 2013 like model at 2012 then could have done E5 1600 v2 speed bump. but they didn't. ]
Argue all you want that it wasn't a "true" spec bump, but in 2012 Apple offered for sale Mac Pro's with improved specs. That's undeniably true, as you admit.
But you miss my larger point that Apple would have preferred to let the Mac Pro line wither and die because it didn't fit into the "new" Apple design ethos of closed, mostly non-upgradeable, disposable consumer devices, and subscription services. They spent the better part of a decade trying to convince us to see things that way and only grudgingly came around within the last two or three years.
And now they will offer a Mac Pro with a base model using outdated components. Just like - as you said - 2012. And 2013.
But at least this one appears to have upgrade potential.
I don't think that was the primary factors.
First, the problem for these devices is that they are not primary user interaction devices. GUI space then Apple has more 'value add' traction. The configure once and forget in the basement/closet .... not so much. Where was Apple's key leverage value add? There are very low margin phones and Apple sells phones. There are very low margin tablets ( Amazon has some Fire tablets on sale for $40 right now) and Apple sells iPads. It is can they sell something in that space with Apple value add that is more than a simple saturated commodity prices.
Second, routers was front that both ISP providers were charging into and also ( pre WiFi 5 and 6 ) going more commodity. Tivo is getting whipped by Cable/Sat providers handing out DVRs with their boxes. Lots of the 3rd party folks have 'gone upscale" with super spider antenna and darth vader boxes. The mesh router players.
Third, if look at what stuck around AppleTV and HomePod those seem to be more iOS forks. Was an iOS fork really going to be a good play for a router OS? Probably not.
Once don't have Airport then Time Capsule is gone too because it is just a piggyback product on that. (and if get off backups to AFP and move to backups over SMB there is alot more 'why' to the value add there too. ).
Monitors ..... when Apple went to 70+ % laptops , then needed docking stations more than monitors for headless desktops. That plus there is already a heathy eco system out there for more general purpose monitors. The Mac Pro 2019 will probably lead in XDR co deployments but it probably won't be the most XDR deployments by the time Apple rolls out all of their 2020-21 product line.
As Jobs put it ... nobody was buying them. That wasn't literally true but a Mac Pro that falls down under 1-2% of Mac market is probably probably constantly at threat of being axed. Anything down below 1% is most certainly is. Apple isn't a bulk only product mentality, but they do a fixed/limited number of products. If have a product at 0.2% of the Mac market it is probably consuming resources that some other Mac product that are not doing now will have 2-3%. It isn't that the margins are better, the return on investment ( of fixed number of resources) is better. Mac products have to be "tall enough to enter this ride" like an amusement part. There is some floor as to just how few of a product Apple can make.
If this new Mac Pro doesn't sell well over next 1-2 years it will probably get axed. Or at best go back into Rip van Winkle mode where Apple will pull it back out when they have copious spare time in more than several years for a hobby product.
I strongly suspect Apple is marginally waving the minimal volume for much fatter margins for the Mac Pro. There is not completely "get out of jail free" card though. Lower than XServe numbers and this new Mac Pro could be axed too.
The "rack Mac Pro" is probably in a better place though than the Xserve because it looks like it is going to share just about (if no the same) basic motherboard and accessories as the tower version. So it won't be as far out there on an island as the XServe was. It is more so just a different container (and moved location for some button/switches).
Different major role too since probably a healthy number will be aimed at virtualization. So a mac in a machine room with a machine room friendly container is better fit than trying to be a general purpose Unix 1-2U unix box.
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Actually Apple had a spot in enterprises... their laptops and phones/pads were popular in more than a few enterprise grade shops. A lot of enterprise service vendors had macos clients, vpn, radius and whatnot. You could get macos on AD if that was still a thing you needed. Iphones on exchange. Vmware had a ipad app for monitoring vsphere metrics back in the day. A lot of systems folks appreciated not having to dualboot/cgwin/vm to do their daily tasks.
Apple never really got enterprise support though. I wouldn't trust some hipster re-image of Justin Long in my datacenter to be honest. 'Oh we have to send your app servers in, we don't have those very basic parts on hand, it should take 2-3 weeks.' If you've ever had a taste of what enterprise support was like ( staff available for sev1 24/7, same day parts availability, expert consultant resources available for training/integration/etc, onsite magic jazz hands), you wouldn't confuse it for what Apple has sold as enterprise support.
When you look at the price tag of those offerings from HPE or Dell Ent, that is part of the value add. Maybe Apple understood the cost of entry here and balked? Maybe it was the right decision, but at that point, they stopped being 'pro'.
Side note, it is entertaining to see all these youtube hopefulls *cough* creators, excited and thinking they are now at the top of the food chain. Nothing like a halo product to energize the worshippers I guess. I hope none of them were the folks citing the uptick in workstation sales somewhere way way back in this thread.
Here's an idea: design an updated "cheese grater" Mac Pro 5,1 with USB 3.0, USB C & TB3 ports, and an Intel 9900K CPU & Z390 chipset. Alternate CPU choice: AMD Threadripper.
They still have the blueprints for the cheese grater chassis, just add some updates to compete on features & price with an equivalent 2019 Windows machine from Dell or HP.
Never mind if it doesn't meet with Tim Cook's profitability requirements. Just ship it.
They still have the blueprints for the cheese grater chassis, just add some updates to compete on features & price with an equivalent 2019 Windows machine from Dell or HP.
Never mind if it doesn't meet with Tim Cook's profitability requirements. Just ship it.
The real world disagrees with your idea and hardware doesn’t get built by Apple unless Tim Cook and the rest of the C Suite approve it. Start working on your Keynote presentation now.
Calling the 2012 update a spec bump is pretty charitable. It was essentially like the April 2017 price cut, but they got slapped down for calling it a "new" model.
“never mind if it’s profitable, do what I want” would not be a great pitch to a publicly traded company.
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Remember that when you can fit all of the 7,1 users in a Holiday Inn Conference room.
I believe the imMP will be very expensive for its actual capabilities but much cheaper than predicted by the most narcists Fanboys, mostly due the little value that brings it's GPU setup and the chipset which won't enable to update the CPU for an newer generation Xeon, also expect lower sales than the trashcan due it's entry price. (But still possible it will be lower than 6000$ by CTO).
The afterburner card will drive more sales to the imMP than 28core CPU and Vega II Duo.
I think the most "popular" Mac pro will be loaded with an 12 core CPU, 32gb ram, single Vega II GPU, afterburner card and 1tb SSD (boot/app drive), and should cost below 8000$
And popular options will be the internal adapters for spinners and pcie m.2 riser cards, video capture devices too as the drivers support arrives.
The afterburner card will drive more sales to the imMP than 28core CPU and Vega II Duo.
I think the most "popular" Mac pro will be loaded with an 12 core CPU, 32gb ram, single Vega II GPU, afterburner card and 1tb SSD (boot/app drive), and should cost below 8000$
And popular options will be the internal adapters for spinners and pcie m.2 riser cards, video capture devices too as the drivers support arrives.
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