What do you think about the new Mac Pro?

[garirry]

Apple claims that it's going to be the most expandable Mac because of it's thunderbolt ports. Well, I did some research and I found some PCIe and SATA enclosures over thunderbolt, BUT THEY ARE EXPENSIVE. Why 4TB Raid over Thunderbolt costs 1000$ but over standard USB it costs 400$? The problem is that if Thunderbolt accessories are too expensive, the new Mac Pro will drop the "Pro" in his name. With the previous Mac Pro (and with the other PowerMac G3 G4 G5), you could just insert a PCi card or a Hard Drive. What do you think about the idea of having everything external and what do you think about the new Mac Pro?

The iMac has pretty much the same upgradability as the MP.
I think they really forgot what professionals want as computers.

 

[jetjaguar]

i was planning on getting the new mac pro but then I decided that I would rather have the current one cuz I want all my stuff internal. And while the nMP looks cool and is going to be pretty fast .. it is going to look like an octopus with external things.

Plus it is a first gen product. So I will probably continue using my current mac pro for two years or so then I might upgrade.

 

[sirio76]

Why 4TB Raid over Thunderbolt costs 1000$ but over standard USB it costs 400$?

The same 4TB external drive cost only little more over thunderbolt, but is faster. Just an example(499vs409$):
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10573
http://www.lacie.com/it/products/product.htm?id=10598

 

[garirry]

The same 4TB external drive cost only little more over thunderbolt, but is faster. Just an example(499vs409$):
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10573
http://www.lacie.com/it/products/product.htm?id=10598

External TB drive is still slightly expensive, the 4TB MyBook Studio with USB 2.0 costs 200$. But PCie (one PCIe by the way) TB adapter costs 349$! http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/PCIe_Chassis/Mercury_Helios/ Apple wants Thunderbolt accessories to be expensive. But consumers don't. Why a USB 3 drive would costs 200$, but a TB costs 400$ when TB is just slightly faster than USB 3.0? Plus TB accessories will be only Mac-compatible, no PC (Dell,HP,Acer) has a TB port. Only some motherboards have them. Not even Intel products have Thunderbolt, except one of the 4 NUC models.

By the way, your second link is a italian page with an european price. In fact TB adds 100$ to the drive.

 

[studio347]

I'd love to use it. I like octopus_like concept. It's a new direction. I'd love to try the new one. nMP is not for everyone. I think it fits well with a small portion of people and it was Apple's decision.

 

[kazmac]

while I am not the intended market

I like the new Mac Pro, I don't mind external hard drives since I have been using them for years. I will definitely keep an eye on them.

Now I am not the creative type who would benefit from the machine (I do light graphics work, video conversion and heavy writing), but I am curious about price and longevity. Now others have said the Mini is the machine for me as far as the headless Mac Desktop and they are probably right, but I am still very curious about the nMP and look forward to learning more about it.

 

[garirry]

I like the new Mac Pro, I don't mind external hard drives since I have been using them for years. I will definitely keep an eye on them.

Now I am not the creative type who would benefit from the machine (I do light graphics work, video conversion and heavy writing), but I am curious about price and longevity. Now others have said the Mini is the machine for me as far as the headless Mac Desktop and they are probably right, but I am still very curious about the nMP and look forward to learning more about it.

The only thing disappointing about the Mac Mini is that they use Intel HD 4000 graphics. I wish we could configure the graphic card to a better GT or something. One thing I wish is that they offer a cheaper model for the Mac Pro. Like a cheaper model, with older Xeons, older 2xGPUs, 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM for like 1899$, and everything completely new for 2499$ and 2 processors for 3499$.

 

[kennyman]

I like the new Mac Pro, I don't mind external hard drives since I have been using them for years. I will definitely keep an eye on them.

Now I am not the creative type who would benefit from the machine (I do light graphics work, video conversion and heavy writing), but I am curious about price and longevity. Now others have said the Mini is the machine for me as far as the headless Mac Desktop and they are probably right, but I am still very curious about the nMP and look forward to learning more about it.

@kazmac

A Mac Pro is a Pro-Mac
A Mac Mini is a Mini-Mac

I am so confused on this forum when people compared mac-mini to a mac pro. You are comparing a grape to an apple.

 

[sirio76]

External TB drive is still slightly expensive, the 4TB MyBook Studio with USB 2.0 costs 200$.

That's weird... normally newer/faster technologies use to cost less than older/slower stuff...

 

[fastlanephil]

I'd love to use it. I like octopus_like concept. It's a new direction. I'd love to try the new one. nMP is not for everyone. I think it fits well with a small portion of people and it was Apple's decision.

I don't think the old form factor for the nMac Pro was ever an option for Apple.

We'll probably get more clarity about how the nMac Pro is going to fit in with Apple's products road map once it's released and compared to what Apple now and will later offer and what is and is going to be offered by other Computer workstation manufacturers down the road.

If Apple has done their marketing analysis correctly they should be able to sell enough of the nMac Pro to at least warrant it's existence.

 

[liquid stereo]

For two reasons, the cost of Thunderbolt accessories is a non-issue for me:
(1) I'm using this for business and the costs of the accessories will be passed on.
(2) The cost of the Thunderbolt accessories will come down in time.

I much prefer the on-desk solution as opposed to having the large tower underneath with a stretched monitor cable connected to the monitor. I haven't used the ports on the MacPro tower in many months. Don't know the last time I used the Disc drive. As for external connectivity/expandability, I'm not terribly concerned about it. As long as I don't have a bunch of cables all over the place, I will be okay.

My disappointment with the MacPro is this - I wish it had more cores/processors. The GPU solution is fine for me. I'd love to have 32 cores or even better, 64 cores.

Let's hope it comes out soon!!!

Apple claims that it's going to be the most expandable Mac because of it's thunderbolt ports. Well, I did some research and I found some PCIe and SATA enclosures over thunderbolt, BUT THEY ARE EXPENSIVE. Why 4TB Raid over Thunderbolt costs 1000$ but over standard USB it costs 400$? The problem is that if Thunderbolt accessories are too expensive, the new Mac Pro will drop the "Pro" in his name. With the previous Mac Pro (and with the other PowerMac G3 G4 G5), you could just insert a PCi card or a Hard Drive. What do you think about the idea of having everything external and what do you think about the new Mac Pro?

The iMac has pretty much the same upgradability as the MP.
I think they really forgot what professionals want as computers.

 

[SeattleMoose]

Products change and evolve, especially in the fast changing world of high tech. Some people go kicking and screaming while others don't go at all.

Apple has chosen a new direction for their top end computer and the nMP is it. Apple is notorious and/or famous for "breaking the mold". So if you already know you don't want to go in this new direction...don't. There are alternatives...albeit less than ideal ones.

Until we have REAL price/performance/expandability data any truly meaningful conversation remains TBD. I am hoping that within the next 6 weeks, that all our guessing/speculation can be replaced with real data.

It does feel like the nMP has "been coming soon"....since forever.

 

[LongSticks]

I understand your sentiment towards TB, button.....

External TB drive is still slightly expensive, the 4TB MyBook Studio with USB 2.0 costs 200$. But PCie (one PCIe by the way) TB adapter costs 349$! http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/PCIe_Chassis/Mercury_Helios/ Apple wants Thunderbolt accessories to be expensive. But consumers don't. Why a USB 3 drive would costs 200$, but a TB costs 400$ when TB is just slightly faster than USB 3.0? Plus TB accessories will be only Mac-compatible, no PC (Dell,HP,Acer) has a TB port. Only some motherboards have them. Not even Intel products have Thunderbolt, except one of the 4 NUC models.

By the way, your second link is a italian page with an european price. In fact TB adds 100$ to the drive.

As I've said in the title, I do understand everyone's feelings about TB and cost, but Intel Mobo's with TB are starting to appear. They are mainly in professional machines, but they are becoming a little more prevalent. Where speed is required for photography, video etc the time saving is worth the expense. See below!
Secondly TB is only slightly faster than USB 3, that's true but it is still faster and is just about to jump to TB 2.....USB 4 will be a good while off.

I may be wrong but I don't think that TB is only mac compatible....not seen anything as to whether TB is cross format compatible though?

 

[Slow Programmer]

I'd love to use it. I like octopus_like concept. It's a new direction. I'd love to try the new one. nMP is not for everyone. I think it fits well with a small portion of people and it was Apple's decision.

Perhaps I should post pictures of my Commodore 64 from 1986. If you like octopi your will love it. Apple did not invent the octopus concept. Most companies moved away from it twenty years ago.

 

[VirtualRain]

Apple claims that it's going to be the most expandable Mac because of it's thunderbolt ports. Well, I did some research and I found some PCIe and SATA enclosures over thunderbolt, BUT THEY ARE EXPENSIVE. Why 4TB Raid over Thunderbolt costs 1000$ but over standard USB it costs 400$? The problem is that if Thunderbolt accessories are too expensive, the new Mac Pro will drop the "Pro" in his name. With the previous Mac Pro (and with the other PowerMac G3 G4 G5), you could just insert a PCi card or a Hard Drive. What do you think about the idea of having everything external and what do you think about the new Mac Pro?

The iMac has pretty much the same upgradability as the MP.
I think they really forgot what professionals want as computers.

You can get an 8TB Thunderbolt enclosure (with cable) from Western Digital for only a small fee more than the cost of the drives. Link. And let's face it, if you need a proper RAID5 card like what's in the Promise TB enclosures, those cards are hardly cheap for the current Mac Pro.

Of course, as Thunderbolt sees wider adoption, economies of scale will kick in and the prices will come down. That's one benefit of TB over PCIe for the Mac Pro. TB is in every Mac shipped in the last two years. That's a huge addressable market for TB peripheral vendors... potentially way more lucrative than the PCIe market for the Mac Pro.

The Mac Pro is a niche market at best and as a result, very few companies offer Mac Pro ready and supported PCIe cards. As you can see from the threads in this forum, a lot of people are constantly trying to "make" something work for the Mac Pro that's not officially supported. So all this "expansion" for the current Mac Pro comes with a lengthy set of footnotes.

The expansion in the current Mac Pro is also over-rated. For example, you can't possibly equip the current Mac Pro with dual high-end GPU's, USB3 and PCIe SSD (since one of the GPU's blocks a slot, never mind the power supply issue). So the pint-sized new Mac Pro already comes standard better than you can possibly equip an old machine. And the new Mac Pro offers all that, PLUS 12 lanes of PCIe to ports on the back as well as support for three 4K displays.

PCIe cards for the Mac Pro are also completely dependent on the sustainability and growth of the Windows PC market as 99% of Mac Pro cards only exist because of the PC. At some point, if you're Apple, you have to believe that the PC is a declining dead end market and it's time to take things in a new direction. I guess they figure that time is now.

 

[ValSalva]

Apple is reinventing the Pro workstation. The Mac Pro is no longer Apple's corporate flagship like it was in the mid 00's. iOS devices are it's moneymaker. At this point the old Mac Pro is not even an enthusiast computer for most due to its price.

The new Mac Pro is a workstation appliance computer for pros that always considered the Mac Pro just a tool, or an appliance. Only now it's been streamlined and customized for that top end pro market.

 

[garirry]

You can get an 8TB Thunderbolt enclosure (with cable) from Western Digital for only a small fee more than the cost of the drives. Link. And let's face it, if you need a proper RAID5 card like what's in the Promise TB enclosures, those cards are hardly cheap for the current Mac Pro.

Of course, as Thunderbolt sees wider adoption, economies of scale will kick in and the prices will come down. That's one benefit of TB over PCIe for the Mac Pro. TB is in every Mac shipped in the last two years. That's a huge addressable market for TB peripheral vendors... potentially way more lucrative than the PCIe market for the Mac Pro.

The Mac Pro is a niche market at best and as a result, very few companies offer Mac Pro ready and supported PCIe cards. As you can see from the threads in this forum, a lot of people are constantly trying to "make" something work for the Mac Pro that's not officially supported. So all this "expansion" for the current Mac Pro comes with a lengthy set of footnotes.

The expansion in the current Mac Pro is also over-rated. For example, you can't possibly equip the current Mac Pro with dual high-end GPU's, USB3 and PCIe SSD (since one of the GPU's blocks a slot, never mind the power supply issue). So the pint-sized new Mac Pro already comes standard better than you can possibly equip an old machine. And the new Mac Pro offers all that, PLUS 12 lanes of PCIe to ports on the back as well as support for three 4K displays.

PCIe cards for the Mac Pro are also completely dependent on the sustainability and growth of the Windows PC market as 99% of Mac Pro cards only exist because of the PC. At some point, if you're Apple, you have to believe that the PC is a declining dead end market and it's time to take things in a new direction. I guess they figure that time is now.

Well, we'll see. I don't know if everything external will be the way to go. Maybe someday they will be external RAM, graphic cards, and maybe even CPUs (lol). I prefer the "Tower" style computer, removes a lot of useless cables. It would look weird if there's a CPU in the middle, connected to 6 accessories, the RAM, the storage, the display, the microphone, the GPU and the power supply . It would look terrible.
We'll have to wait and see.

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Apple is reinventing the Pro workstation. The Mac Pro is no longer Apple's corporate flagship like it was in the mid 00's. iOS devices are it's moneymaker. At this point the old Mac Pro is not even an enthusiast computer for most due to its price.

The new Mac Pro is a workstation appliance computer for pros that always considered the Mac Pro just a tool, or an appliance. Only now it's been streamlined and customized for that top end pro market.

But they don't realise pros want to have a big box, never moved, with a bunch of internal drives (especially with video editing), sound card and a graphic cards. Apple has done the entire reverse. "The back I/O lights up when you spin the new Mac Pro". WHO CARES? Many people buy the Mac Pro just for the sake of upgrading it!

 

[wildgiles]

magma is now selling a thunderbolt chassis with 4 drive + 3 slots for PCie

I just saw this yesterday, Magma is now selling an option for there 3T model that has room for 4 x 3.5 HD'S + 3 slots for PCie, a step in the right direction.

 

[garirry]

I just saw this yesterday, Magma is now selling an option for there 3T model that has room for 4 x 3.5 HD'S + 3 slots for PCie, a step in the right direction.

Do you have a link for this product?

 

[Zwhaler]

Only now it's been streamlined and customized for that top end pro market.

Almost, but the top end pro market needs more CPU power than the new Mac Pro has. Top end pros wanted dual CPU, and instead they gave us maybe a 10-15% boost after over 3 years. Don't get me wrong, it's still a screamer in every other way, but I'm hoping the next gen has the CPU power that has been available for over 2 years, which the still unreleased Mac Pro has barely half of.

 

[RoastingPig]

The new Mac pro is stupid.. If I ever needed I super high end pro video editing machine I would just make one. Thunderbolt is not the future watever is the cheapest is the future.

 

[azentropy]

It made me run out and purchase a 2009 Mac Pro.

Again if this was going to be priced at $1500 or even $1799 it would be a different story, but my guess is it is going to start at at least $2500 and with it's deficiencies (lack of internal storage options and limited upgradability) just isn't worth it at this time.

 

[slughead]

Most expandable Mac ever, just not the most upgradable. You can plug 36 daisy-chained thunderbolt droppings into it and they'll have a combined throughput of less than one PCIe 3.0 8x slot (there are many workstations that support 80 lanes now--more throughput than that of all the Thunderbolt ports of 13 New Mac Pros combined). You can have 36 low-bandwidth thunderbolt droppings scattered all over your desk like some epic nightmare, but not one Titan, 4-Port SAS card, 3000MBps SSD drive. To each their own though

 

[Erick89]

There's a few things you need to understand, you didn't lose expandibility at all considering all PCI-E expansion will be done externally, however it will become expensive. I actually think the new Mac PRO may be cheaper than the previous models but who knows..

PCI expansion thunderbolt kits are capable of having 1 w9000 or 3 w7000(as the w7000 is 1 slot not dual of course you can remove the fan and find a smaller one)

The best route is to just get a expressions III-D and a magma pci-e expansion board this way you will have all you need for expansion + there may be PCI-4 thunderbolt down the road or PCI-E 3.0 soon.

Also we don't know if the CPU has been soldered onto the board and from what I saw or can make of it doesn't appear to be as for the size it's probably a standard sized xeon. I do know they're based on ivy-bridge so that's a plus but the downside is they chose the WORST time to upgrade the pro. LGA-2011 is on it's last cycle, lga-2011-3 is coming next year with haswell xeons... And which that would have been a smarter move, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see haswell xeons in a mac pro refresh late next year and wouldn't mind upgrading but that depends if the new xeons are efficient.

The design of the new mac pro was to save space on the desk but at the same time you'll need to modify either a fileing cabinet if you have one and place ALL your thunderbolt expansion chassis's in there or if you have a big desk it probably doesn't matter if you make it clean.

On the current mac pro there's only a few PCI-e 2.0 expansion and 4 total(1 being used by the gpu). And with a dual gpu config that leaves 1 left so really the new mac pro's are literally the most expandable and if you save 3 thunderbolt ports (unless you can daisy chain the thunderbolt displays and run off of 1 thunderbolt connection) for the monitors that means you have 3 for pci expansion chassis. However most thunderbolt external anything has thunderbolt ports so really the more you buy the more ports you have but if you're running pci expansion boards use the thunderbolt port from your mac and hard drives from the expansion chassis.

This isn't the cleanest way to do it but if there were no expansion chassis's being released they would have had the expansion slots built in and probably would have had the same design but with 7 expansion slots.

 

[Pakaku]

One thing I wish is that they offer a cheaper model for the Mac Pro. Like a cheaper model, with older Xeons, older 2xGPUs, 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM for like 1899$, and everything completely new for 2499$ and 2 processors for 3499$.

So what you want... is a refurbished Mac Pro.

----------

The new Mac pro is stupid.. If I ever needed I super high end pro video editing machine I would just make one. Thunderbolt is not the future watever is the cheapest is the future.

Thunderbolt is Apple's future, so tough luck telling them otherwise.

I think going Thunderbolt would be much better justified if there were way cheaper PCIe-Thunderbolt adapters, though, since Thunderbolt is supposed to be PCIe in cable form.