Who is the Mac Pro going to be for?

[fermat-au]

Great thread, I only recently found it.
Apple essentially discontinued the current trash can Mac Pro when they announced the iMac Pro, I think the only reason it is still for sale is as a place holder until the new Mac Pro ships.
It seems almost certain that Apple intended to discontinue the Mac Pro and replace it with the iMac Pro, then at some staged realised that there is a fraction of their users who want or need a high end non-AIO, so that Apple decided to create a new Mac Pro. So, this new Mac Pro that we are waiting on was designed for a world that already included the iMac Pro, I believe it will be far more high-end, and expensive, than it could have been, as Apple will position it above the iMac Pro.

I think that Apple intends this new Mac Pro for very high-end pros, largely film and video
I also think that many people who are 'waiting for the Mac Pro' won't buy it.

• It will be too expensive and they will buy an iMac Pro
• It will be not upgradable enough (like the '13 model) and they will switch to Window or Linux. This group would include high end video/film users.

A $5000–6000 starting price, with half of systems sold being $10K wouldn't surprise me

 

[JesterJJZ]

I dropped about $7k on my current MacPro purchase in 2012. A high price tag doesn’t surprise me nor bother me as I expect it. Also, for anyone that truly needs one, the price is irrelevant.

 

[AidenShaw]

Also, for anyone that truly needs one, the price is irrelevant.

You'd pay $250K for a Mac Pro.

The price is relevant in the sense that the price is too high if the system won't pay for itself. Maybe that's a restatement of your word "needs".

I just spent $24K for four Quadro RTX cards to replace the four GTX 1080 Ti cards in one ML server. Why? Because they'll pay for themselves in two months.

 

[mattspace]

There is one specific market Apple doesn't want, and actually takes pains to exclude - gamers! From Apple's viewpoint, it makes sense. Gamers run hardware very close to the edge, they want maximum power (regardless of stability) for a minimum price, and concessions made to support them tend to make things less stable for anyone else.

"Gaming PC" = "Pro VR Workstation"
"Gaming PC" = "Pro Modelling & Animation Workstation"
"Gaming PC" = "Pro any task in which the primary limiter is how fluidly and responsively a high-poly-density 3D viewport runs"

If Apple can call a Laptop with a consumer CPU and (mediocre) gaming GPU a "Pro" device, and build their entire "we dun goofed on making real Pro hardware, so everything's pro for somebody now" reality-shifting campaign on that idea, we can dispense with the notion that a "Gaming PC" is anything less.

eg: This is Puget System's recommended Maya workstation:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Autodesk-Maya-165/Buy_186

It's a Mini-itx gaming machine in a dull case, pure and simple.

 

[danwells]

No, they're not the same... There is a lot of hardware overlap, but workstation graphics cards (and all Macs) run different firmware and drivers from gaming cards, often at different clock speeds. Yes, the GPU manufacturers charge through the nose for what's often essentially a firmware and driver difference (possibly along with binned chips and/or more RAM). All Mac graphics drivers are (more or less) workstation-type drivers, running less close to the edge. Yes, you could probably flash a GeForce into a Quadro or a Radeon into a FirePro in many cases (if the manufacturer let you), so the massive price difference isn't justified, but they aren't doing exactly the same thing.

Workstations support very different (much less, unless made for music) audio. Musicians' workstations use different audio cards or (often) external interfaces.

Most desktop workstations use Xeon-class chips with ECC RAM - not always true of laptops, although a few Lenovo and HP laptop workstations do use Xeons.

No workstation is significantly overclocked (CPU, RAM, GPU).

Workstations often use higher-quality power supplies, motherboards, etc. - generally missing features like RGB lighting. They generally have more headroom on their components (a gaming machine with a nominal 750W of hardware might use an 850W power supply, while a workstation might use 1000W). Some gaming machines designed for overclocking have a lot of headroom, though...

Perhaps most importantly, many games access hardware at a lower level than most other applications, and this not only makes the games themselves less stable, allowing it makes the system less stable. For a long time, the most stable Windows ever was Windows 2000 (I'm not much of a Windows user, so I don't know if late service packs of XP ever caught up - I think that late service packs of Win 7 probably did). One feature that improved the stability of Win2000 was that Microsoft hadn't bothered porting the gaming APIs from Win16 to Win32, so games had to run like any other application (many games wouldn't run at all, but the system was unusually stable running Word). XP had most of the gaming APIs, and it lost quite a bit of stability to them, some of which it picked back up with updates over the years.

Macs have never allowed games (or game-related components) to "break the rules".

 

[fermat-au]

I dropped about $7k on my current MacPro purchase in 2012. A high price tag doesn’t surprise me nor bother me as I expect it. Also, for anyone that truly needs one, the price is irrelevant.

While price isn't completely irrelevant, I take your point. If you are using a high-end system for paid work, a couple of thousand dollars extra isn't irrelevant over the multi-year life of the machine.
As I said in my previous post, I suspect that the next Mac Pro is going start at the very high-end. This will be a system almost exclusively for the ultra-high-end users who are using it professionally to make a living. It will not be a Mac desktop for the average who want some upgradability or modularity. The first Mac Pro started at US$2199, even taking into account inflations, the next Mac Pro will likely be at least twice that. If I am right and the Mac Pro does start at ~$7k, it will need a a reasonable amount of upgradability, if you are spending that kind of money for a powerful system that is making you money, you are going to want it to still be a power system in 2 or 3 years. A 2019 GPU will be slow in 2022.

 

[mattspace]

No, they're not the same...

You're missing the point - "Workstations" in a lot of fields, are built with the exact same parts as "Gaming machines" - a Maya modeller & animator doesn't need, or get any benefit from a Quadro, neither does someone working on VR content (which is done in VR). Go look at that Puget workstation I linked up - full choice of RTX geforce cards, standard off the shelf mini itx motherboard, non-ecc ram.

The delineation of "Gaming PC" vs. "Workstation" when applied to Macs is utterly nonsensical - Every current Mac is a "Gaming PC" with slow graphics, except for the iMac Pro, which is (arguably) a workstation, with a gaming GPU.

There are no actual "workstation" Macs (by the Xeon and Pro-GPU definition), and haven't been since the 2012 with the Quadro card option.

 

[Jaho101]

The classic Mac Pro was really made for filmmakers. It was released back when Apple had highly invested in Final Cut 7, and when they acquired Shake composting software. Here’s to hoping the new Mac Pro is for filmmakers too! We need more power than just about any other industry, so if it’s built for us then it will be great for everyone else too.

I agree, the only huge advantage of a Mac Pro vs iMac Pro is creating a machine that can have better thermals for better GPU and CPU performance to deal with 4k and 8k video. Most other tasks can be done on an iMac Pro or Mac Mini, but video can't because it's the last type of work that still just requires pure brute force processing all the time.

 

[gazwas]

Great thread, I only recently found it.
Apple essentially discontinued the current trash can Mac Pro when they announced the iMac Pro, I think the only reason it is still for sale is as a place holder until the new Mac Pro ships.
It seems almost certain that Apple intended to discontinue the Mac Pro and replace it with the iMac Pro, then at some staged realised that there is a fraction of their users who want or need a high end non-AIO, so that Apple decided to create a new Mac Pro. So, this new Mac Pro that we are waiting on was designed for a world that already included the iMac Pro, I believe it will be far more high-end, and expensive, than it could have been, as Apple will position it above the iMac Pro.

I think that Apple intends this new Mac Pro for very high-end pros, largely film and video
I also think that many people who are 'waiting for the Mac Pro' won't buy it.

• It will be too expensive and they will buy an iMac Pro
• It will be not upgradable enough (like the '13 model) and they will switch to Window or Linux. This group would include high end video/film users.

A $5000–6000 starting price, with half of systems sold being $10K wouldn't surprise me

I imagine if Apple gets the design right, coupled with a beautiful looking display, the YouTube influencers will go mad for it and no one will touch an iMac Pro going forward. I can even see Apple killing iMac Pro off.

 

[Jaho101]

I imagine if Apple gets the design right, coupled with a beautiful looking display, the YouTube influencers will go mad for it and no one will touch an iMac Pro going forward. I can even see Apple killing iMac Pro off.

If anything, Apple would make more money off selling Mac Pro + Display than they do off an iMac Pro, plus less warranty repairs because the design is more robust and less thermally constrained.

 

[ssgbryan]

A long uptime is just an indicator of poor system administration. All I hear is "I have a machine with a year's worth of vulnerabilities and unpatched bugs."

Besides, there's probably still a NetWare 3.1 box out there that's been running flawlessly since 1991 which puts us all to shame.

You are confusing windows with OS/2.

 

[teohyc]

1. The new Mac Pro is going to be for those who use software that only run on Mac OS. E.g. Final Cut Pro is one. I use Final Cut Pro because it's insanely fast compared to Adobe Premiere when it comes to exporting videos.

If you're not going to use Mac specific software, there's no compelling reason nowadays to go with the Mac. Many years ago, Windows wasn't as stable as Mac OS's UNIX but it's a different story now. Windows 10 is now better.

2. The second group of people who would getting the Mac Pro are those who just cannot let their Mac run overnight to export videos, or do something processor intensive. It's not that they literally cannot, but more figuratively as in they don't have the time to let their (old) Mac run overnight. For these people, time is incredibly important.

I've a camera that shoots 4K at 60FPS and I only shoot at 30FPS because my Mac Pro 2013 is just not powerful enough to edit those 4K videos. The timeline edits are laggy and frustrating. I for sure will be getting the new Mac Pros to make my video editing workflow smoother. Not just that, I also want to shoot at 6K and 8K whenever they come out and know that I've a computer that's powerful enough to keep up.

 

[smirk]

It seems almost certain that Apple intended to discontinue the Mac Pro and replace it with the iMac Pro, then at some staged realised that there is a fraction of their users who want or need a high end non-AIO, so that Apple decided to create a new Mac Pro.

It may seem like that, but Apple actually announced the development of the new Mac Pro and positioned the iMac Pro as a stop-gap measure at the same time.

 

[mattspace]

It may seem like that, but Apple actually announced the development of the new Mac Pro and positioned the iMac Pro as a stop-gap measure at the same time.

They announced a product, that 2 years later is still vapourware, at the same time as they released a product they had just spent (in all likelihood) 2 years designing (including the manufacturing tooling, surface treatment anodising chemistry, t2 integration, special software builds etc). 2015 was probably when they decided to can the Mac Pro, and start the design on the iMac Pro to replace it. By the time the iMac Pro was ready for release, they realised that strategy would be a failure, and announced the vwMP.

The iMac Pro was not some hastily designed stopgap, it’s a result of a multi-year development programme just like every product Apple makes.

 

[smirk]

Yeah, you could be right. It is also possible that they finally realized that the pro market wanted an expandable Mac so they set out to create a new Mac Pro from the start, but creating a new computer entirely from scratch would take several years, which they didn't have, because customers were starting to leave their aging Mac Pros for Windows and Linux machines. So they built an iMac Pro to slow the exodus, as it would take less time to create an iMac Pro from an iMac than to design a new Mac Pro from scratch.

I don't know, it's all speculation, but it is interesting to think about.

 

[Plutonius]

So I'm not trying to start a debate on Mac vs PC - I use both. It is an honest question, and I wonder if it's why Apple hasn't released a new Mac Pro in ages, but who is it for?

I can't think of a reason to buy a $10,000+ Mac nowadays. I'm sure I'm wrong, which is why I'm asking. What software that is either OSX only or runs way better on Mac could possibly justify spending that amount on hardware that will almost certainly be like a third of the cost on PC?

As I said before, I'm not trying to start a debate or bash Apple over pricing. I honestly would just like to know who would be interested in this and why?

I'm mainly asking because I see a lot of people asking if they should buy the new Mini or wait for the new Mac Pro.

That assumes that Apple is actually releasing a new Mac Pro.

 

[ActionableMango]

That assumes that Apple is actually releasing a new Mac Pro.

It's a fairly reasonable assumption, given that Apple executives have broken their tradition of secrecy and publicly stated for the record they are designing a new Mac Pro.

It's actually more than reasonable, in a discussion forum that typically has nothing other than rumors, leaks, and speculation to work with.

 

[09872738]

It's a fairly reasonable assumption, given that Apple executives have broken their tradition of secrecy and publicly stated for the record they are designing a new Mac Pro.

It's actually more than reasonable, in a discussion forum that typically has nothing other than rumors, leaks, and speculation to work with.

I agree. However, to be honest my expectations are not particularly high. I fear they are over-designing a waaay overpriced, locked down machine with mediocre graphics (no Nvidia that is). I hope to be wrong though

 

[lantree]

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

Starting of around 2 to 3 grand for the entry level machine and scaling right up to crazy 15+ grand for the top end. They could sell loads of these capturing the computer enthusiast (ie me), designers, music studios, the photography guys , film makers , scientists and anybody else.

Just got to trust apple not to screw this one up.
Anyway fingers crossed

 

[09872738]

Just got to trust apple not to screw this one up.
Anyway fingers crossed

Well... based on experience from recent year it seems more reasonable to NOT trust...

It'd be a pleasant surprise if they prove me wrong

 

[fermat-au]

I agree. However, to be honest my expectations are not particularly high. I fear they are over-designing a waaay overpriced, locked down machine with mediocre graphics (no Nvidia that is). I hope to be wrong though

I have similar fears. We know almost nothing about this new Mac Pro, other than it will be modular, but we still don't quite know what Apple means by modular.
In many potential buyers' minds, that Mac Pro is what they want it to be. I have a bad feeling it could be modular, but the modals will be Apple propitiatory, made only by Apple and a limited number of licensed 3rd parties. Also modular don't equal upgradable in a traditional sense, that Mac Pro could have no PCI or RAM slots.
Another worry is that Apple will release this new Mac Pro late this year at a reasonable competitive price verses Windows and Linux systems, then disband the team. Apple will think 'The job is done' and and ignore the pro market for another 5 years, deja vu.

 

[AidenShaw]

Starting of around 2 to 3 grand for the entry level machine and scaling right up to crazy 15+ grand for the top end.

That's a very low top end.

The middle Z6 can be bought with $14K (list) for RAM only. The Z8 supports up to $60K of RAM.

512 GB (8 x 64 GB) DDR4-2666 ECC Load Reduced Memory (2 processors)           +$19700.00
768 GB (12x64 GB) DDR4-2666 ECC Load Reduced Memory (2 Processors)           +$30000.00
768 GB (24x32 GB) DDR4-2666 ECC Registered Memory (2 Processors)                +$27200.00
1 TB (16 x 64 GB) DDR4-2666 DIMM ECC Load Reduced Memory (2 processors)    +$39400.00
1.5 TB (24x64 GB) DDR4-2666 ECC Load Reduced Memory (2 Processors)             +$60000.00

Even the low end Z4 can go far beyond your $15K figure:

​

Intel® Xeon® W-2195 Processor (2.3 GHz, up to 4.3 GHz w/Turbo Boost, 24.75 MiB cache, 18 core)
256 GiB (8x32 GiB) DDR4-2666 ECC Memory
1 TB HP Z Turbo Drive TLC M.2 NVMe SSD
Dual NVIDIA Quadro® GV100 (32 GiB HBM2, 4x DisplayPort 1.4) Graphics​

Even the Imac Pro is north of your "top" limit:

​

 

[09872738]

I have similar fears. We know almost nothing about this new Mac Pro, other than it will be modular, but we still don't quite know what Apple means by modular.
In many potential buyers' minds, that Mac Pro is what they want it to be. I have a bad feeling it could be modular, but the modals will be Apple propitiatory, made only by Apple and a limited number of licensed 3rd parties. Also modular don't equal upgradable in a traditional sense, that Mac Pro could have no PCI or RAM slots.
Another worry is that Apple will release this new Mac Pro late this year at a reasonable competitive price verses Windows and Linux systems, then disband the team. Apple will think 'The job is done' and and ignore the pro market for another 5 years, deja vu.

There's some truth to it. Modular may mean: some sort of box where you can pop in your peripherals, like an external (though still somehow mounted within the device) GPU via Thunderbolt. In a similar fashion SSDs may be added. You get the idea.
My fear is they once again lock it all down with proprietary interfaces featuring off the scale prices.
And I take it as given they will offer AMD GPUs only.

I can only repeat myself: if the next gen Mac Pro is even remotely something like that I have no choice other than leaving the ecosystem, once and for all.

 

[AidenShaw]

My fear is they once again lock it all down with proprietary interfaces featuring off the scale prices.

That's probably why Apple has taken more than two years since the mea culpa, and still hasn't delivered (or even previewed) a new PC. It takes time to design proprietary lockdowns.

 

[fermat-au]

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

Starting of around 2 to 3 grand for the entry level machine and scaling right up to crazy 15+ grand for the top end. They could sell loads of these capturing the computer enthusiast (ie me), designers, music studios, the photography guys , film makers , scientists and anybody else.

Just got to trust apple not to screw this one up.
Anyway fingers crossed

I doubt the Mac Pro will start at $2K or $3K. The first Mac Pro back in $2199, back in 2006. Over the years Apple has pushed the iMac line up in both price and power, and thus pushed the Mac Pro to the ultra high-end. The first iMac was a low to mid range computer, pros would buy a Power Mac G3/G4 tower (see Steve Jobs' 2x2 grid). I the last 20 year Apple has push more and more people into the iMac line of All-in-ones, up to the point where Apple shipped an Xeon in the iMac Pro
[doublepost=1555732063][/doublepost]

That's a very low top end.

The middle Z6 can be bought with $14K (list) for RAM only. The Z8 supports up to $60K of RAM.

512 GB (8 x 64 GB) DDR4-2666 ECC Load Reduced Memory (2 processors)           +$19700.00
768 GB (12x64 GB) DDR4-2666 ECC Load Reduced Memory (2 Processors)           +$30000.00
768 GB (24x32 GB) DDR4-2666 ECC Registered Memory (2 Processors)                +$27200.00
1 TB (16 x 64 GB) DDR4-2666 DIMM ECC Load Reduced Memory (2 processors)    +$39400.00
1.5 TB (24x64 GB) DDR4-2666 ECC Load Reduced Memory (2 Processors)             +$60000.00

All that RAM configs require 2 CPU chips. I winder if the new Mac Pro will support dual Xeons?
This was a limitation of the 2013 Mac Pro, the case design only allowed for a single CPU.
While unlikely, could the new Mac Pro ship with dual Xeons as standard, as a way to differentiate it from the iMac Pro? I Dual Xeon Mac Pro would start at $6K minimum, and go up rapidly from there.