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Why I think the Mac Pro could be done

I think the Mini and the Pro are very similar machines. They aren't heavily publicized, don't sell as much as the others, yet they both fill very important roles.

The Mac Mini is also overdue for an update. How many Mini update rumors have you heard?
 
dyn said:
In 2010 I had a Mac mini early 2009 driving a 30" display. Worked fine as long as you didn't do any graphic intense work. Showing pictures fullscreen in iPhoto was something that the mini considered as being graphic intense work since it didn't perform well at all. I disliked having to disable the external disk to prevent problems when I wanted to sleep the machine so I wanted an additional internal disk. What to choose?
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Iphoto may use the gpu a little, but this does not make it truly gpu bottlenecked. Everyone just assumes that with anything visual including raster based imagery, the gpu must be their problem. It could have been a slow hard drive, lack of ram, or a cpu issue. Consider that they use 2.5" drives. If you're not using an ssd, this means relatively slow drives. If you're running into ram limits for whatever reason, even if it's a memory leak issue, the machine can quickly overload a slower disk with IO requests. The problem is compounded if it's relatively full. People blame the gpu when these kinds of scenarios are far more frequent. Really "graphics intensive" is a meaningless phrase unless we're talking about full OpenGL drawing or gaming.


dyn said:
When I look at the 3 options again today I now see that the mini has resolved half the problems. It is now a powerful machine that can take 2 disks (alternatively I can use a network share too) but it still lacks in the gpu department. If I could use an external gpu via something like thunderbolt than this would solve all my problems. I have a quiet and still compact solution that packs quite the punch when it comes to performance. In other words, I don't really need something like a Mac Pro but I have to use one because Apple does not offer something that is tailored to my needs. Thunderbolt does change this for me. I don't think I'm the only one out there because I've seen others post similar things.

One other advantage with this setup is that it makes it more flexible in the future. I can upgrade the gpu and I can upgrade the mini to something like a MacBook Air in the future without losing any/much of performance.
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The mini will probably always lack in the gpu department unless Intel graphics somehow become amazing. You won't really get much of an upgrade path in terms of gpus here. You don't know what will run properly over such a connection in the future. You don't know what future thunderbolt compatibility will look like. Cards can become more bandwidth hungry and your PCIe enclosure will stand still as upgrading cables will not change anything here. Sonnet makes a couple versions of a PCIe enclosure suitable for thunderbolt. To get a mid range desktop card in there, you're looking at the more expensive one. The other one caps out around 100W. This one goes to 150W. It's a mistake to think that attaching one of these to a macbook air will solve all of your graphics problems. It would increase the performance of the machine, but you can spend quite a lot for a minor bump.
 
goMac said:
So if PCI x16 is already far to slow, we should just go slower?
.
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Because it is all that is available externally?

Don't get me wrong, maybe you're reading into this because its in a (yet another) "mac pro is dead" thread.

Thunderbolt won't turn your MBA into a mac pro killer.


But in terms of allowing apple or others to strip out the discrete GPU and build it into an external device, it will shrink/simplify/improve battery life for you when on the go withut giving up the ability to run games/etc when running off AC power.

Anyone with a discrete gpu in their portable knows it is useless trying to use the discrete GPU in anger when on battery anyway. You'll get half an hour of battery life if you're lucky :D


Thunderbolt, for a mac PRO is only useful for high speed storage or networking. However for portables, it is a revolutionary technology that we haven't really seen exploited yet.
 
throAU said:
Thunderbolt, for a mac PRO is only useful for high speed storage or networking. However for portables, it is a revolutionary technology that we haven't really seen exploited yet.
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Video input cards also use the thunderbolt technology very well, AJA and Blackmagic have announced thunderbolt products, which means you don't have to use/waste another PCIe card.

Pro soundcards are trickling out as well.

You can basically take you'll whole rig from studio to client/studio in a backpack or case.
 
ekwipt said:
Video input cards also use the thunderbolt technology very well, AJA and Blackmagic have announced thunderbolt products, which means you don't have to use/waste another PCIe card.

Pro soundcards are trickling out as well.

You can basically take you'll whole rig from studio to client/studio in a backpack or case.
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I stand corrected.

however, in a pro with PCIe slots, you can / could just fit these directly via PCIe. I suspect they're coming out in thunderbolt form because it essentially PCIe, fast enough and that will allow them to be used in laptops too.
 
iMac, MacMini and Macbooks are all capable machines, but yeah you're right it's more to do with crosss-platform compatibility
 
theSeb said:
Pro stuff is not cheap. If audio stuff was my business, I would be happy to pay. I don't think it's meant for people mucking about in garageband.
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We are talking in the thousands, not hundreds as firewire stuff is now. I am sure eventually it will be comparable though. Just crazy right now with only a couple of very high end announcements so far.
 
xgman said:
We are talking in the thousands, not hundreds as firewire stuff is now. I am sure eventually it will be comparable though. Just crazy right now with only a couple of very high end announcements so far.
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I guess you're too young to remember the prices when USB 1 products came out? ;)
 
xgman said:
Check those prices. :eek:
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All of the soy cards that have Thunderbolt are the top of the heap of all the respective companies.

UAD has DSP built in to the card
Metric Halo also has DSP of sorts
Apogee amazing card
RME won't be far behind

You really get what you pay for though, anyway I have an older RME fire face 400 I don't have any thunderbolt macs yet but you'll just be able to run a FireWire to thunderbolt adapter into the new computers with thunderbolt
 
I guess you're too young to remember the prices when USB 1 products came out?
__________________

That's correct, at 57 years old, I am too young to remember anything . . . ;)
 
I paid $1200.00 for my first hard drive..... For my Apple IIe

It held a whopping 10MB.... ( Yes! That's 10 MegaBytes )

And HD technology was so poor at that time the drive lasted less than a year before the head welded itself to the platter.

In those days (pre GUI) you had to remember to run a command line to Park Heads before turning off the drive. It moved the heads off the data area so you wouldn't wipe out your data on shut down.

Ahhhhh Those were the days.... :D
 
philipma1957 said:
you do realize that the number one selling desktop for amazon is the mac mini. That is right the 2011 mac mini is the biggest selling desktop on amazon dot com.
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didn't know that. I thought imacs would have been the biggest selling desktop for Apple.
 
philipma1957 said:
you do realize that the number one selling desktop for amazon is the mac mini. That is right the 2011 mac mini is the biggest selling desktop on amazon dot com.
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Makes sense. Same could be said if you could get them at Wal-Mart. People only want to spend 600.00 for a computer.
 
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