Who is the Mac Pro going to be for?

[deconstruct60]

Huge jumps between what Techcrunch article actually says and what some folks want it to say .

No reason to doubt that. It's being developed for Pixar, LucasFilm, Disney, WB and the like. They told us so in the TechCrunch article.

None of those companies are mentioned in the article at all. In fact, the article mentions.

"
So Apple decided to go a step further and just begin hiring these creatives directly into Apple. Some of them on a contract basis but many full-time, as well. These are award-winning artists and technicians that are brought in to shoot real projects ... "

Those projects are unlikely the be $10-200M workflows. Apple most likely has them doing much smaller scale and focused stuff. (e.g., perhaps commercials , sales footage (e.g., Ive's 'this new product is better than sex' videos ), etc. ). There is not zero overlap from the larger projects those named organizations run but they also aren't trying to duplicate all of those workflows involved either. What subset Apple picked out to cover isn't outlined in detail in the article.

Where the "ultra mega" Mac Pro as being a minimal baseline for the new system falls down is where in trying to invoke that either Apple "has to" be covering all of the mega-picture workflow with the new system or has to be covering some cherry picked subset of the workflow where macOS may/may not have a critical threshold of the market. Where the Mac Pro would fit best isn't necessarily the "most expensive" workstation subsets. Contexts that are at least a user interaction ( where GUI is high on needs priority metrics) as much as computation ( pure grunt ). Not that compute wouldn't be important, just not all important. Apple probably isn't going to build something that is most at home being a racked compute node. [ That isn't a role the Mac Pro (or predecessors were primarily aimed for in the past either. )


Apple probably is not going after the $1-2K desktop market, but the notion that "have to" financially dominate most of the iMac Pro price points is grasping at straws. Nothing Apple has said necessarily points to that.

Actually, in the TechCrunch article, Apple told us that the new NEW Mac Pro was being developed to run new Audio and Video apps under development for the film industry. Of course it will run FCPx but that's not why they are building it.

new applications? The one explicit example was about fixing a chokepoint in a current app.

"... where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS, is it in the drivers, is it in the application, is it in the silicon, and then run it to ground to get it fixed. ...
....
This kind of workflow analysis has enabled Apple to find and fix problems that won’t be solved by throwing more hardware at them.
...
But the Pro Workflow Team isn’t just there to fix current bugs ... "

Yes there will be some contributing input into future products (both on hardware and software side of the solutions), but a hefty chunk of what this team is doing os making the current products (plural not just the ones with "Pro" in their name ) that Apple supports deployed run better.

"..There’s many different types of pros and obviously they go really deep into the hardware and software and are pushing everything to its limit. .... But look at everything holistically. .; ”

This isn't primarily a hunt for the narrowest of niches.

I'm hoping the new mac pro will be for everybody.

It won't. They've told us already.

Apple has to walk a balance here. They explicitly said a couple of times that "Pros" aren't a narrow need set of folks. The rest of the Mac product line up providers some converge. The Mac Pro can't possibly cover everyone else left out from the other offerings, but it also can't be too narrow either. Covering too small of a group is also problem as Apple doesn't really do relatively super small.

That is absolutely, positively, no way in hell going to happen. If they start where you want, that will be a screw up of the highest order like the missteps we saw during the Scully years.

Its competition is a class of Windows AV boxes that range from $20,000 (8 Core) to $150,000 for a 56 Core, 1TB RAM 8TB SSD rendering station.

And the competition covers that 20K-150K with one and only one physical system? Nope. Or with just one OS ( no Linux options). again nope.

When the 2018 Mini came out, there were videos of 5–20 linked via 10G Ethernet to take advantage of the T2 chip along with eGPU to crunch a single animation file—

The T2 chip was not crunching on any animation file other than reading/writing the bits off of the non volatile memory that feed into and was produced by the computation.

That isn't saying much about the Mac Pro's specifics as the future direction. Computations that are in the 'very embarrassingly parallel' nature can be 'chopped up' feed to a mini (or large) grid of computers. But that isn't necessarily the primary domain the Mac Pro was covering in the past. So it would be pretty hard for a stack of mini's to completely take that over.

A price floor for the next Mac Pro of $10-15K is probably closer to COA (comatose at arrival) than DOA (dead on arrival ). It highly likely would be another "hobby product" with a "Mac Pro" label on it and probably go right back into Rip Van Winkle mode in terms of substantive upgrades over a large number of years.

The notion that a $10-15K floor for the basic foundation system for audio work is going to get large substantive traction is not well grounded . Most of the audio folks will scoff heavily at that even more so than the Mac Pro 2013 model. So a substantive chunk of the audio aspects being outlined in the article (that Apple has an interest in) are tossed out the window with that kind of price point.

Cranking the entry price point 233% (from 3K to 10K) is going to loose a ton of potential Mac Pro buyers that are left. The folks who "follow behind" consuming reburb and used stuff are probably going to be 99% toast as Mac hardware participants ( if wanted a plan to spike hackintosh usage .... there isn't many others that will do more damage. ) .


[edit]
P.S. This too was in the article.

" ... First, we visit the room
....
Throughout, the idea of modularity was omnipresent. .... an eGPU with a MacBook Pro running a live edit of an 8K stream with color grading and effects applied. ... "

The notion that that workflow group is charged with finding the most expensive components possible and throwing them into one (or two boxes ) to get workloads done is off the mark. I doubt that MBP + eGPU combo was the cheapest solution but also not trying to find the most expsenive possible building blocks either.

 

[mikehalloran]

I have no idea what you referring to that my comments implied that new apps are being developed to run on the Mac Pro.

Again, you aren't paying attention. Apple said it and the TechCrunch article reported it.

Read the article as many times as it takes till you understand it.

I tried to explain it to you. I'll make it short: If the iMac Pro could run those new apps, Apple wouldn't feel the need to build a new Mac Pro. The iMP was a reality when the first article was written and it was shipping ny the time the second one came out.

Remember this when it ships at a much higher price than you think it should.

You may still not understand but at least you won't be surprised.

My work here is done.

 

[esk]

the mac pro is for people who use their PC to make money and who are so successful that it doesn't matter if they spend 2000 or 10.000 on a PC. Those are also people who love mac os and don't care about the fact that they have to overpay compared to a windows 10 workstation, because a windows 10 workstation is useless to them because it's running windows.

 

[Simon R.]

the mac pro is for people who use their PC to make money and who are so successful that it doesn't matter if they spend 2000 or 10.000 on a PC. Those are also people who love mac os and don't care about the fact that they have to overpay compared to a windows 10 workstation, because a windows 10 workstation is useless to them because it's running windows.

You are so wrong. You think everybody who make money using xxxx computer don't care what it costs and will pay anything to get it? Not the case. I know I won't. And Apple will be insanely stupid to make this a special high-end product that only the 0.1% super successful Hollywood composers/editors/whatever can afford. Why shut themself out of 99.9% of the market by positioning it as such a niche product? Would not make sense. The original Mac Pro was not like that, nor do I think this will be.

If it costs 10 grand, it will be a failure. It should have a starting price at $3.000-3.500 max. And more expensive BTO of course.

 

[DaveP]

Again, you aren't paying attention. Apple said it and the TechCrunch article reported it.

Read the article as many times as it takes till you understand it.

I tried to explain it to you. I'll make it short: If the iMac Pro could run those new apps, Apple wouldn't feel the need to build a new Mac Pro. The iMP was a reality when the first article was written and it was shipping ny the time the second one came out.

Remember this when it ships at a much higher price than you think it should.

You may still not understand but at least you won't be surprised.

My work here is done.

I can only assume that you are confusing me with the person(s) talking about applications. But please feel free to continue to be condescending and dismissive. Though regardless your arguments don't really make much sense.

 

[fermat-au]

No reason to doubt that. It's being developed for Pixar, LucasFilm, Disney, WB and the like. They told us so in the TechCrunch article.


Actually, in the TechCrunch article, Apple told us that the new NEW Mac Pro was being developed to run new Audio and Video apps under development for the film industry. Of course it will run FCPx but that's not why they are building it.

Apple has said that the new Mac Pro was intended for the film industry, so there will be high-end $10K-$15K+ models, but there could be $5K-$8K models as well. While Pixar et. al. may use the Mac Pro they want use it exclusively, they will have Windows/Linux workstations and importantly 1000+ core render farms. the likes of Pixar will not be user a Mac Pro for their most demanding renders when they have render farms.

 

[ssgbryan]

You very well maybe right that the Mac Pro starts at $15K, however, pretty much the only ones that can say much with any certainty work for Apple. There are a number of plausible outcomes and prices that Apple could release and for myself at least, I won't dismiss any plausible ideas or theories.

If it starts at $6000, then it’s DOA. It isn’t 2015.

$6000 gets an end-user a 32 core/64 threads, 128Gb ram EYPC system.

 

[danwells]

I actually think you're serious. How well do you think they'd sell?
[doublepost=1556263129][/doublepost]I actually think you're serious. How well do you think they'd sell?

Whether or not you like it, those ($5499-$7999) are iMac Pro prices. The Mac Pro won't be cheaper for the same power, and it won't start lower. My suspicion is that both the starting configuration and starting cost will be somewhat higher than the iMac Pro. That could be a few hundred dollars with a minor configuration boost (Vega 64 instead of 56? dual 10G Ethernet?), or it could be a couple thousand higher with several significant boosts to the starting configuration.

NVidia will continue to be locked out.

This isn't a slotbox - it's a preconfigured professional workstation with some ability for after-purchase upgrades (and possibly something like a PCIe x4 slot or two for audio boards and the like).

If you configure an iMac Pro and a Mac Pro identically (except for one or two weird little things like dual Ethernet), they'll be very close to the same price - Apple will consider the bigger power supply and expandable chassis a fair trade for the screen (yes, the iMac Pro is objectively a better deal - Apple would rather sell an iMac). Also remember that the same screen comes in a $1800 computer - it doesn't cost Apple all that much.

The exception to that is if Apple moves the iMac Pro to a much larger and more expensive screen...

 

[barmann]

Whether or not you like it, those ($5499-$7999) are iMac Pro prices. The Mac Pro won't be cheaper for the same power, and it won't start lower. My suspicion is that both the starting configuration and starting cost will be somewhat higher than the iMac Pro.

I don't see how Apple can use the iMac Pro pricing as a guideline, if they want to actually sell the next MP .
This might be a hard pill to swallow for Apple , but they have painted themselfes into a bit of a corner with the iMac Pro .

They just have to suck it up ; you can't expect future customers to pay exorbitant money for the MP , just because Apple wants to protect its precious iMacPro line .

 

[mattspace]

This isn't a slotbox - it's a preconfigured professional workstation

*cue laughter from the entire workstation industry at what they will see as the oxymoron inherent to this statement*

 

[Menthol]

Whether or not you like it, those ($5499-$7999) are iMac Pro prices. The Mac Pro won't be cheaper for the same power, and it won't start lower.

Not sure if you're saying that approvingly or with resignation, but it absolutely could and should start with a lower power configuration. That would pick up those buyers who may not need current iMac Pro power, but require the modularity (PCIe cards, internal storage, RAM flexibility, etc.) that is just not available on any other Mac model. It would cannibalize exactly zero other current Mac desktop sales, because there is currently no Mac product for these people.

I don't know what Apple will do, but they will miss a huge opportunity if they spec out the base Mac Pro at stratospheric levels. There is no rational reason to do that - none. Doesn't mean they won't screw it up, but they damn well shouldn't.

There can be a $3499 Mac Pro.

 

[barmann]

Not sure if you're saying that approvingly or with resignation, but it absolutely could and should start with a lower power configuration. That would pick up those buyers who may not need current iMac Pro power, but require the modularity (PCIe cards, internal storage, RAM flexibility, etc.) that is just not available on any other Mac model. It would cannibalize exactly zero other current Mac desktop sales, because there is currently no Mac product for these people.

I don't know what Apple will do, but they will miss a huge opportunity if they spec out the base Mac Pro at stratospheric levels. There is no rational reason to do that - none. Doesn't mean they won't screw it up, but they damn well shouldn't.

There can be a $3499 Mac Pro.

Well said .

Here is where I don't agree - a well designed tower can run circles around any iMac 2-3 times its price - it's a physics thing .
No need to sacrifice power , the form factor alone would provide a huge advantage regarding absolute performance , all specs being equal .

 

[danwells]

There certainly could be a $3499 Mac Pro, but (with resignation), I firmly believe there won't be. Apple loves to keep support costs down and profit off of Apple Taxes by restricting configurations, and this has been a deliberate strategy ever since the Mac 128K.

Building a lower-end Mac Pro would require that the Mac Pro support at least two different motherboards, which take different CPUs and even RAM. By far the best chips for the XMac (mythical low-end Mac Pro) would be the mainstream LGA 1151 Core i7 and i9 series. Apple doesn't mind using those - they're in the (non-Pro) iMac, but they aren't going to top the Mac Pro out at a single 8-core i9-9900K. Everything below and including the $4000 machine that uses the 9900K would have to use a LGA 1151 motherboard and non-ECC RAM. Everything above that would have to use a Xeon-compatible board and ECC RAM.

Yes, there are slow, cheap Xeons Apple could conceivably use instead of the desktop chips to keep it to one socket., but do you really want a quad-core Xeon-W 2125 or a 2.1/3.0 GHz 8 core Xeon Silver 4110 for the price of the 3.6/5.0 GHz 8-core 9900K? Those are the Xeons around the same price as the 9900K (depending on which Xeon socket Apple chose).

Going back to the Intel transition, have you ever seen an expandable Mac without a Xeon? People have been calling for the XMac since 2005... I completely agree that it would be an easy machine to build, but Apple has shown us that they won't.

Even farther back (all the way through the PowerPC era, even through the 680x0 era), have you ever seen an expandable Mac priced below the comparable all-in-one? Have you ever seen an expandable Mac that is less powerful than the most powerful all-in-one produced at the same time?

Apple's historical pattern is clear - expandability (if offered at all) goes on the top of the line. They certainly could build something else, and it wouldn't be difficult. The only case I can recall of expandable "Macs" that were a lower-cost option compared to any all-in-one was in the middle of the PowerPC era, when the clone makers produced such things...

 

[mattspace]

Even farther back (all the way through the PowerPC era, even through the 680x0 era), have you ever seen an expandable Mac priced below the comparable all-in-one? Have you ever seen an expandable Mac that is less powerful than the most powerful all-in-one produced at the same time?

Powermac 5500 / 250 All-in-one introduced February 1997, price US$2200

Powermac 6500 / 250 Minitower introduced February 1997, price US$2100
Powermac 6500 / 225 Minitower introduced February 1997, price US$1800

So yes, in other words.

The 6500 is in fact the model of what a lot of people want - the consumer processor of the time (603e), 2 pci slots, in a relatively small footprint but still user-upgradable minitower (admittedly not one of Apple's most beautiful designs).

*edit* weirdly after this was the G3 AIO and Desktop where the AIO had the exact same specifications, including all the slots, but is recorded as significantly cheaper, but that might be an artefact of it being an .edu product.

 

[k2focus]

After reading through all the responses it sort of seems like this is for absolutely no one. No one has given a discreet answer to exactly who it is for. What I've gathered through many long-winded and nebulous responses is this:

- It's for people who appreciate beauty (Uhh, OK...)
- You must not be a professional (I am a professional wedding photographer - exactly the type of "professional" that Apple claims to target)
- It's for people who need the best Macs (Yeah, but why?)

That's about it I guess. I do appreciate the responses, because I really do want to know who would actually spend a small fortune on a Mac these days and what actual reasons would get them to do it. I would like to point out that many people seem to be misinformed and mentioned running programs that literally require NVIDIA Quadro cards to run. Many users also seemed to brush the fact that Apple no longer supports NVIDIA cards - a HUGE deal. I also got lots of things talking about how ECC memory is in the iMac Pro (not related to this topic), but since it was mentioned numerous times I'd also like to point out that ECC memory isn't necessarily better. It runs slower than conventional DDR4 RAM while also being loads more expensive. I do understand that it is very beneficial and a must for certain things, but it's not something that most "creative professionals" want or need. I would also venture to guess that most iMac Pro users never even heard of ECC memory before they bought one.

I think a lot of people took this post as a Mac bashing one, so I got a few angry answers. I can't stress enough that it is not that. You are talking to a long time Mac user, but I'm just not sure what "pros" actually want/need a new Mac Pro nowadays.

 

[mattspace]

After reading through all the responses it sort of seems like this is for absolutely no one. No one has given a discreet answer to exactly who it is for.

You're looking for a single answer to any number of potential niches they could apply towards. Personally, I think the Mac Pro should be the machine that is unlike the rest of the Mac range - the machine designed for a goal that the final configuration is not the one Apple sells in the first place, the machine that is user-reconfigurable - the empty white commercial delivery van, that one person fills with shelves full of plumbing supplies, another fits out as a campervan, yet another installs a desk and creates a road-studio.

It doesn't have to be the fastest, the highest performance or any of that (though it can be), it just has to be the most flexible, because custom fitouts of the tools and workspaces of their trade are where almost all pros end up eventually.

I think it should be that, because that's the thing you can't currently get within Apple's ecosystem. Other people are going to have different ideas, that it should be just a different form factor, or performance vector of the exact same philosophy (an appliance) of all the rest of Apple's gear - another generation of Apple "pro app" dongle.

But, you're never going to get a single answer, or even an agreement on what problem the machine is supposed to solve.

 

[k2focus]

You're looking for a single answer to any number of potential niches they could apply towards. Personally, I think the Mac Pro should be the machine that is unlike the rest of the Mac range - the machine designed for a goal that the final configuration is not the one Apple sells in the first place, the machine that is user-reconfigurable - the empty white commercial delivery van, that one person fills with shelves full of plumbing supplies, another fits out as a campervan, yet another installs a desk and creates a road-studio.

It doesn't have to be the fastest, the highest performance or any of that (though it can be), it just has to be the most flexible, because custom fitouts of the tools and workspaces of their trade are where almost all pros end up eventually.

I think it should be that, because that's the thing you can't currently get within Apple's ecosystem. Other people are going to have different ideas, that it should be just a different form factor, or performance vector of the exact same philosophy (an appliance) of all the rest of Apple's gear - another generation of Apple "pro app" dongle.

But, you're never going to get a single answer, or even an agreement on what problem the machine is supposed to solve.

simply because you can't think of a specific purpose doesn't meant that they aren't supposed to do that. you can build loads of systems for specific reasons, but no one has given one for this.

 

[deconstruct60]

After reading through all the responses it sort of seems like this is for absolutely no one. No one has given a discreet answer to exactly who it is for. What I've gathered through many long-winded and nebulous responses is this:

- It's for people who appreciate beauty (Uhh, OK...)
- You must not be a professional (I am a professional wedding photographer - exactly the type of "professional" that Apple claims to target)
- It's for people who need the best Macs (Yeah, but why?)

That's about it I guess. I do appreciate the responses, because I really do want to know who would actually spend a small fortune on a Mac these days and what actual reasons would get them to do it.

The very deep seated pragmatic issue with getting to extremely specific descriptions of discrete aspects of the next Mac Pro is that there is no hard facts on what the next Mac Pro actually is. What your question drives ( admitted indirectly ) is yet another round of many folks instantiating what they wish it would be.

The general, broader market for a Mac Pro would be for workloads that went past those covered by the rest of the current line up. But that is a broad area where can drive off into a swamp where Apple may not be likely to go.

Then you also have a core presumption that Mac Pro is going to be based above $10K. Apple has said nothing along those lines. Nor have they taken that approach with previous iterations of the Mac Pro. Some configs can be above that market, but that isn't necessary the essential core market for the Mac Pro ( versus being a 'nice to have' augment.). This started off as a "mini vs Mac Pro" question. Do you get to an discrete, detailed discussion of the Mini if only examine the > $1,899 price range for that product? Nope.

 

[KKFF]

In a nutshell, there are companies still running business on Macos, that requires Mac hardware hence MacPro. ECC mem is actually a side effect of using xeons, that have more lanes for things like more Thunderbolt channels and provides more bandwidth like pairing a second processor to fill in with the double amount of ram, unlike consumer processors.

 

[mattspace]

simply because you can't think of a specific purpose doesn't meant that they aren't supposed to do that. you can build loads of systems for specific reasons, but no one has given one for this.

I can think of plenty of specific purpose options for a machine, but they tried that strategy for the 2013 mac pro, and it was a failure. There isn't a viable market for a hyper-expensive single-purpose workstation appliance. There's too few seats in any one niche, to meet critical mass. Generic-ism and flexibility is the only way to address enough niches that the machine gets a big enough addressable market to be worth the effort, vs where the investment could go in other areas of Apple's business imho.

Apple doesn't have a machine that addresses the needs of people who need a non-portable machine, who need (maintainably cutting-edge) graphics cards tasked to display performance (ie not eGPU / computation), and who want to use a proper hardware-calibratable Pro display. That's the venn diagram circles for what you can't get in Apple's range at the moment.

 

[Menthol]

After reading through all the responses it sort of seems like this is for absolutely no one. No one has given a discreet answer to exactly who it is for. What I've gathered through many long-winded and nebulous responses is this:

- It's for people who appreciate beauty (Uhh, OK...)
- You must not be a professional (I am a professional wedding photographer - exactly the type of "professional" that Apple claims to target)
- It's for people who need the best Macs (Yeah, but why?)

That's about it I guess. I do appreciate the responses, because I really do want to know who would actually spend a small fortune on a Mac these days and what actual reasons would get them to do it. I would like to point out that many people seem to be misinformed and mentioned running programs that literally require NVIDIA Quadro cards to run. Many users also seemed to brush the fact that Apple no longer supports NVIDIA cards - a HUGE deal. I also got lots of things talking about how ECC memory is in the iMac Pro (not related to this topic), but since it was mentioned numerous times I'd also like to point out that ECC memory isn't necessarily better. It runs slower than conventional DDR4 RAM while also being loads more expensive. I do understand that it is very beneficial and a must for certain things, but it's not something that most "creative professionals" want or need. I would also venture to guess that most iMac Pro users never even heard of ECC memory before they bought one.

I think a lot of people took this post as a Mac bashing one, so I got a few angry answers. I can't stress enough that it is not that. You are talking to a long time Mac user, but I'm just not sure what "pros" actually want/need a new Mac Pro nowadays.

Sorry, but I truly think you are being disingenuous here. Plenty of people gave you perfectly good answers that you have simply ignored in your "summary." My answer was not nebulous at all, and I'll state it again: I do audio, and I need PCIe expansion, internal disk storage and upgradable RAM. I don't care whether it's called "professional" or not, and beauty is a very low priority, and I don't need the "best" (most powerful, most expensive?) Mac. I just want a Mac OS-based box that meets my needs.

Let me turn the question around. If not the upcoming Mac Pro, what Mac computer do you think I should buy/own?

 

[DaveP]

No one knows what the Mac Pro will be exactly, so that is why the responses were all over the place. Each responder took their own guess at things like capability, pricing, expandability, etc. and so naturally the target market is dependent on those things. Additionally, one may think a Mac Pro (however that is defined) is necessary for a particular job while someone else believes an iMac or Mac Mini or even MacBook Pro is better.

It appears the OP is frustrated that a wide range of strangers can't provide a cohesive answer about an unreleased product, for which there is little information.

 

[k2focus]

I can think of plenty of specific purpose options for a machine, but they tried that strategy for the 2013 mac pro, and it was a failure. There isn't a viable market for a hyper-expensive single-purpose workstation appliance. There's too few seats in any one niche, to meet critical mass. Generic-ism and flexibility is the only way to address enough niches that the machine gets a big enough addressable market to be worth the effort, vs where the investment could go in other areas of Apple's business imho.

Apple doesn't have a machine that addresses the needs of people who need a non-portable machine, who need (maintainably cutting-edge) graphics cards tasked to display performance (ie not eGPU / computation), and who want to use a proper hardware-calibratable Pro display. That's the venn diagram circles for what you can't get in Apple's range at the moment.

so what you're saying is that you can't think of one single use for it? got it. thanks.
[doublepost=1556554507][/doublepost]

No one knows what the Mac Pro will be exactly, so that is why the responses were all over the place. Each responder took their own guess at things like capability, pricing, expandability, etc. and so naturally the target market is dependent on those things. Additionally, one may think a Mac Pro (however that is defined) is necessary for a particular job while someone else believes an iMac or Mac Mini or even MacBook Pro is better.

It appears the OP is frustrated that a wide range of strangers can't provide a cohesive answer about an unreleased product, for which there is little information.

i mean we know roughly what it will be - a modular(ish) mac that is expensive. the only questions that matter are how expandable (nowhere near what a PC can do), NVIDIA or not (huge deal), and how overpriced (somewhat irrelevant for the big "creative professionals")? you can make any assumptions to answer it, but no one has yet. makes me think that they are either going to skip out on it entirely or it will be a complete flop.
[doublepost=1556555415][/doublepost]

Sorry, but I truly think you are being disingenuous here. Plenty of people gave you perfectly good answers that you have simply ignored in your "summary." My answer was not nebulous at all, and I'll state it again: I do audio, and I need PCIe expansion, internal disk storage and upgradable RAM. I don't care whether it's called "professional" or not, and beauty is a very low priority, and I don't need the "best" (most powerful, most expensive?) Mac. I just want a Mac OS-based box that meets my needs.

Let me turn the question around. If not the upcoming Mac Pro, what Mac computer do you think I should buy/own?

my point is that you don't need a mac for what you're doing. you are choosing to have one. that is completely fine. if you want a mac then by all means get a mac. i am not trying to start a debate over which one is better. my question is who is the Mac Pro going to be for? this thing is going to be super expensive, so it has to offer something special. i know there will be apple lovers with too much money that will just buy one because they want one - i am not debating that. however, there aren't enough people like that to justify the RD, marketing, production, PR costs, etc. to make one. there has to be a target. it used to be for people that were running mac specific stuff that needed PC power and upgradeability. i'm not sure that exists anymore, and if it does i don't think it's large enough to warrant one. that is why i am asking. i'm honestly curious. too many people are answering by saying i need a mac at my house, so that's why - but those people probably aren't going to be spending $5k on a computer. if you don't have an answer that's ok man. i know you have a mac, and you will only buy macs. i honestly don't mind. i am happy that you love your macs, but i'm guessing that if you've made it this far without switching to a PC you aren't going to need a new mac pro.
[doublepost=1556555951][/doublepost]

In a nutshell, there are companies still running business on Macos, that requires Mac hardware hence MacPro. ECC mem is actually a side effect of using xeons, that have more lanes for things like more Thunderbolt channels and provides more bandwidth like pairing a second processor to fill in with the double amount of ram, unlike consumer processors.

what is mac hardware? do you mean mac software? which companies and what software? i am really curious.
[doublepost=1556556245][/doublepost]

The very deep seated pragmatic issue with getting to extremely specific descriptions of discrete aspects of the next Mac Pro is that there is no hard facts on what the next Mac Pro actually is. What your question drives ( admitted indirectly ) is yet another round of many folks instantiating what they wish it would be.

The general, broader market for a Mac Pro would be for workloads that went past those covered by the rest of the current line up. But that is a broad area where can drive off into a swamp where Apple may not be likely to go.

Then you also have a core presumption that Mac Pro is going to be based above $10K. Apple has said nothing along those lines. Nor have they taken that approach with previous iterations of the Mac Pro. Some configs can be above that market, but that isn't necessary the essential core market for the Mac Pro ( versus being a 'nice to have' augment.). This started off as a "mini vs Mac Pro" question. Do you get to an discrete, detailed discussion of the Mini if only examine the > $1,899 price range for that product? Nope.

i didn't start a mini vs pro debate at all. i'm just wondering who are the people that are going to buy a Mac that functions as a PC for what will undoubtedly cost a small fortune. it's a pretty straight forward question. no one seems to know, so they keep throwing jargon and apples knows best, so don't you worry about it.

i think we can safely make a few assumptions. they have all been PCish in function with swapable parts - so that will probably remain in some fashion. they run expensive/high-end hardware - so that will probably be the same. they have always been their most expensive computer - so i'm assuming that won't change. they typically have good i/o - so i'm assuming that won't change.

not knowing all the details doesn't really matter. heck, make up whatever tiny details that you want (within reason), and come up with a group that will buy this thing with enough numbers to warrant it. no one has done that yet.

 

[mattspace]

so what you're saying is that you can't think of one single use for it? got it. thanks.

I do fine art photography - I need better displays than Apple provides with their machines.

I use VR-based 3D artwork environments - I need full-fat connected (not eGPU), more powerful, and more upgradable GPUs than Apple builds into its machines.

So 2 use-cases for me alone, that are not covered by any other Apple products. Got that? Is it quite clear enough?

 

[k2focus]

I do fine art photography - I need better displays than Apple provides with their machines.

I use VR-based 3D artwork environments - I need full-fat connected (not eGPU), more powerful, and more upgradable GPUs than Apple builds into its machines.

So 2 use-cases for me alone, that are not covered by any other Apple products. Got that? Is it quite clear enough?

so you need nice GPUs and you're going with AMD?

also - fine art photography? come on man. i'm a full time photographer and I don't see a need (maybe a want) for a Mac right now when PC's are just objectively better at the moment for that type of work. also, don't real £D things require Quadros?

so once again, you haven't really provided an answer as to who they are for. you just got angry that i don't see a need for them (and apparently no one does either). but hey, by all means by a $5k mac with one AMD GPU and one or two small drives for your fine art photography and VR stuff. then another grand or two to make it work just well enough. you will definitely be in the minority and will be someone making emotional rather than financial decisions for your business.