Will there be a new Mac Pro in 2015?

[H2SO4]

do you see the discrepancy in your argument?

I see it but you've missed the subtleties. It means upgrade to a machine that will last another 9-10 years because you can repair or upgrade.
I'm sure you are aware that a lot of things nowadays are designed to be binned and/or replaced after a short while. TV broke? Don't fix it, throw it in a hole in the ground and forget about it.
Look at the iMac, I wouldn't mind betting that there a couple of cases where the whole screen assembly would have to be replaced unnecessarily due to its design.

 

[porterusaf]

Let me summarize the last 100 or so comments...
1. Apple has the hardware could be considered a reasonable update to the Mac Pro 2013 (new Xeons, new graphics chips, and a processor w/ support for DDR4) <insert random hypothesis about why we will or won't see this upgrade>
2. They won't upgrade till <insert random processor or graphics card> <insert rant why>
3. Apple doesn't care about market <insert random market>
4. The Mac Pro 2013 is terrible <insert random trash can remark> + <random rant>

Miss anything? Can we delete all the messages in this thread now?

 

[JDHiro]

Ah the old defend Apple at all costs syndrome rears its ugly head.......

I didn't say a single thing defending Apples solution. I challenged your assertion that Apple applied the "least possible effort". If anything, they applied too much effort to something that should have been more straight-forward.

So Apple spent all that money to make it look pretty so peeps like you would buy it and probably did.

I don't own one, but I want one, for the larger core count, GPUs, upgradable RAM, silent operation, and small desk profile. I just haven't been able to justify the price on top of my 15" rMBP yet, and I don't find the "trash can" look to even be all that attractive.

Apple could have made it look pretty and be upgradeable/functional as well for the future but chose not to.. The cMP proves this and now Apple are rueing the day because people get a longer life out of their old Mac Pro which quite obviously a lot of people love but would ditch in a heartbeat if they could easily upgrade the nMP with better HW.

Sigh. I'm not even sure where to start. First off, upgrade to what? The current nMP is still running some of the best hardware available. Still want different parts than you ordered? Ok, almost every part of the nMP is replaceable.

I will also refer here to what I call the "upgrade fallacy". I spent decades building my own hardware, adamant about upgradability. I might do small upgrades here or there, but the majority of my upgrading was driven by CPUs, and that trickled into whole system rebuilds. Oh, my machine is feeling a bit sluggish and that hot new CPU is available! Let's get a new CPU, that will need a new motherboard, new board supports faster RAM so lets get some of that. It also has a new faster disk interface, so lets get a new drive that supports that, and the latest AGP, PCI, PCIE video support so lets get a new card for that... and man, that new case is so nice and modular and modern looking, so just throw one of those in too. 6 months later, I replace the video card and CPU fans because they are too dang loud. I'm still tweaking with the BIOS settings. The case isn't as convenient as it seemed. And man, I just don't have time for this stuff anymore.

Perhaps the cMP is still "rueing the day" because it was on the market for 7 years when desktops were still necessities, and the nMP has been has only been selling for 1.5 years, trying to find a way in an era when most pros can get away with just a laptop.

I cant believe how the new gens are such a throwaway society.All this BS about low power consumption being all the rage but then chuck out their electronics as soon as Apple release a new product.
No wonder the planets in trouble.

Geez, did you just have a "get off my lawn!" moment? Pretty sure this thread is about Apple computers, not human beings. And I'm not sure how you know what generation I'm part of?

Where are these people chucking their Apple hardware in the dumps? I want to go pick that stuff up!

 

[crjackson2134]

Where are these people chucking their Apple hardware in the dumps? I want to go pick that stuff up!

Were do I sign up for that? If you find the place let me know and I'll meet you there.

 

[avkdm]

Sorry for my previous rant and if I offended anybody-
Maybe I am looking at this from a Technicians perspective rather than an End User perspective.
I suppose the crux of my argument is - Why build something and make it so hard for the user to upgrade anything at all without running into problems and having to "hack". You cant even put an SSD in without running into potential issues (aka TRIM). Nvidia acknowledges this problem by releasing drivers for their video cards not long after Apple breaks everything with an update.
On a side note our so called "Apple expert" at University is the butt of all jokes amongst Technicians for his infamous solution when Apple devices break down. And I quote "You need to buy a new one"
For what its worth it is this attitude that has driven good techs to despair in our workplace.
Anyway lets hope there is eventually an xMP that pleases everybody!

 

[Stacc]

One of the great things about thunderbolt is it allows a device to be expandable without requiring internal expansion. Want an external drive caddy that can house 4 SSDs? Great, get the enclosure and plug it into your macbook pro. Decide you want more processing power and need that 8 core mac pro, great, buy the mac pro, plug in your external drive. This way, if you are a manufacturer of "Pro" gear, you don't need a version that fits in a PCI slot and a thunderbolt version, you just sell it as a thunderbolt accessory.

Apple chose to make expandability external. When it comes to the Mac Pro, everything is user replaceable. You can upgrade the processor (if it fits in the current socket), memory, drives, you can plug it into thunderbolt. Even if you have to add drives, it likely fits in a smaller footprint than the classic mac pro. The exception of course is graphics, but as there are no PCIe graphics cards that support thunderbolt, Apple got AMD to build them custom ones.

This is a really elegant solution and one that Apple is in a good position to deliver. If all you need is the "trash-can," you have a nice, neat, and quiet solution that fits on your desk. If you need expandability, you can have that too, at native PCIe speeds and you can use all the same accessories across the entire mac line. The downside is that it prevents upgrading video cards. Apple solved this problem by adding two of them. Getting new graphics cards working on the classic mac pro is "unApple" like, as they don't have good driver support and often need updated to support EFI. The other downside are no dual processor configurations. Apple likely gave up on this as the market for people who need a workstation with more than 12 cores is very small. If you need that many cores, chances are you have external supercomputing capabilities available. Also, with each new processor generation, the number of cores on a single chip increases.

There are some valid criticisms of this strategy. It would be nice to see Apple update the mac pro as new hardware becomes available. Especially parts like the Haswell-E processors, which are drop-in replacements. This lagging in hardware adoption has always been an issue with Apple. It is likely caused by the added R and D needed to make custom motherboards, graphics cards and the like for each update. Another criticism is that developer support for 2 graphics cards has not been great. It would be nice to see Apple make a big push to get every computer it makes with dual graphics (intel+discrete or discrete x2) to get more openCL use.

 

[flat five]

I'm sure you are aware that a lot of things nowadays are designed to be binned and/or replaced after a short while. TV broke? Don't fix it, throw it in a hole in the ground and forget about it.

the electronics repair store on the next block went out of business this year.. i have an 11y.o. samsung display which went there twice.. it's still going (though i wouldn't say it's still going strong.. next time it breaks, i think i'm tossing it).. anyway, they're going out of business due to lack of customers..

in other words, i'm nowhere near convinced it's the manufactures driving the non-sustainable consumerism. it's our fault.. we always want newnewnew.

 

[avkdm]

Lets hope an eGPU (elegant) solution with TB3 is not too far away.
Would solve a lot of gripes as well.

 

[bennibeef]

Lets hope an eGPU (elegant) solution with TB3 is not too far away.
Would solve a lot of gripes as well.

I know everyone wants that. The time thunderbolt 1 came out everyone thought wow yeah that is going to work awesome but when did intel ever say thunderbolt 1 was capable of doing this?

Take away the nightmare this solution wasnt hot pluggable, which kinda it needed it to be for such a protocol/connector type.

Now on computex Intel came out and said Thunderbolt 3 it is going to happen with external GPU support it is even on their slides, we now have the bandwidth for it, it may be hot pluggable which would be awesome. Did intel say the years before eGPU is a real thing? I dont remember it but I could be wrong, just everyone assumed this would be possible because its basically pci-e lanes in thunderbolt. Well we have to see if Apple is going to allow external gpu support with thunderbolt 3 on OS X but I guess they will because its in the standard from Intel



And guys I might stretch it here now but I could see Apple making the next Mac Pro only with a small GPU which can drive some 4-5k displays but not very much computational power and just sell the Mac Pro with 1 Xeon chip and a version with 2 CPUs. They would get the space for it scraping those 2 gpus and thermals to put 2 CPUs in it.

Make it a little bit cheaper and maybe Apple itself sells a case for external gpus and everyone who wants more graphics power can add as many as they want. Just think 6 Thunderbolt 3 ports with 2 Xeons, how many pcie lanes you got and how many computational gpus you could add wouldnt it be awesome and everyone wins?


Guys who dont need graphic power are happy with one or two CPUs I would really like this solution.

 

[JDHiro]

Wow, Intel actually acknowledged eGPU at Computex? This needs to happen...

 

[bennibeef]

Wow, Intel actually acknowledged eGPU at Computex? This needs to happen...

They did

 

[karsten]

They did

/drool

 

[edanuff]

I could see Apple making the next Mac Pro only with a small GPU which can drive some 4-5k displays but not very much computational power and just sell the Mac Pro with 1 Xeon chip and a version with 2 CPUs. They would get the space for it scraping those 2 gpus and thermals to put 2 CPUs in it.

This idea makes too much sense. Keeps the form factor, doubles down on Thunderbolt as the expansion strategy, allows them to reuse whatever GPU they use in the iMac as the "throwaway" internal GPU. I'm sure lots of people here would hate it but it sounds very much like Apple's style. Regardless of whether we see anything tomorrow, the next major update could easily go in this direction.

 

[H2SO4]

the electronics repair store on the next block went out of business this year.. i have an 11y.o. samsung display which went there twice.. it's still going (though i wouldn't say it's still going strong.. next time it breaks, i think i'm tossing it).. anyway, they're going out of business due to lack of customers..

in other words, i'm nowhere near convinced it's the manufactures driving the non-sustainable consumerism. it's our fault.. we always want newnewnew.

I’ll agree partly as I can only speak for myself.
What I want are good products and I don’t mind paying a bit more for them, I don’t like being ripped off though.
We do want new, but I still reckon that it’s the people that make the goods that are driving the culture of throw away, I wouldn’t mind so much if they passed on the cost savings.
My company, (I won’t say who it is), make lots of very large pieces of kit in the power electronics industry. Every time a new product comes out I am bewildered at how much more difficult it is to repair and how we know the product less than we knew the last one because you’re not supposed to know how it works - you just replace the board, program the settings across make a few operational checks and Bob is your mothers' brother .

 

[mrxak]

a problem how?
it's like 8x smaller than what it replaced while still being more powerful/faster as well as more efficient/quiet.
that's pretty impressive.

The problem is they chose design over functionality.

 

[flat five]

The problem is they chose design over functionality.

what functionality is lacking at the expense of design? i think you may be mis-using that term.

 

[H2SO4]

This idea makes too much sense. Keeps the form factor, doubles down on Thunderbolt as the expansion strategy, allows them to reuse whatever GPU they use in the iMac as the "throwaway" internal GPU. I'm sure lots of people here would hate it but it sounds very much like Apple's style. Regardless of whether we see anything tomorrow, the next major update could easily go in this direction.

Ssh!! They might hear you….

 

[Mago]

And guys I might stretch it here now but I could see Apple making the next Mac Pro only with a small GPU which can drive some 4-5k displays but not very much computational power and just sell the Mac Pro with 1 Xeon chip and a version with 2 CPUs. They would get the space for it scraping those 2 gpus and thermals to put 2 CPUs in it.

Make it a little bit cheaper and maybe Apple itself sells a case for external gpus and everyone who wants more graphics power can add as many as they want. Just think 6 Thunderbolt 3 ports with 2 Xeons, how many pcie lanes you got and how many computational gpus you could add wouldnt it be awesome and everyone wins?


Guys who dont need graphic power are happy with one or two CPUs I would really like this solution.

Intel architecture requires both CPU to on the same logic board, due the ultra high speed bus signaling, so Its impossible to add more CPU's to the Mac Pro's form factor, what apple could offer are more beefy cpu (there is an xeon with 18 cores now), and restrict GPUs, either with lower end cards, or just leaving a single GPU.

External GPU for CUDA/OpenCL is limited only by thunderbolt-tuned drivers, notwithstanding nVidia has solutions as GIRD and QUADRO VCA, they are implemented over 10GigE, and actually are full servers.

I think Intel missed the point, since no thunderbolt device really work as promised (suposedly would require only a generic thunderbolt driver to connect an peripherlc with former pcie drivers, the reality is that most peripheral dont handle pci unplug or hotplug events-as would happen on thunderbolt-, thus requiring at least an driver update).

 

[mrxak]

what functionality is lacking at the expense of design? i think you may be mis-using that term.

For example, the option of two CPUs. They made the box too small and the PSU underpowered, all in the name of "design".

 

[MacVidCards]

For example, the option of two CPUs. They made the box too small and the PSU underpowered, all in the name of "design".

You are totally correct but will not win a debate with that one. Logic, reason, and obvious facts are simply ignored.

2 years ago on the Reduser forums there were hi performance rigs using both Mac Pro and PC. Now the nMP is a cute on set transcribe machine and little more.

The heavy lifting rigs are all PCs with multiple slots.giving up top end performance for "cute" isn't a good long term strategy.

 

[5590982]

Welp, that's me done.

I'm now going to be building my first PC since 1994... We had a nice run.

 

[Mago]

Seems the Updated Mac Pro either will arrive SILENT at Apple Store, or later on another apple event.

 

[Stacc]

Seems the Updated Mac Pro either will arrive SILENT at Apple Store, or later on another apple event.

Yeah, probably waiting until the fall or early next year, depending on availability of thunderbolt 3 and broadwell chips.

 

[mrxak]

No new Mac Pro, very disappointing but not entirely unexpected. I'll keep an eye on the Apple Store this week, but at this point I think the new one will come out, if at all, in early 2016.

 

[TripleCore]

Tim Cook at one point mentioned we are in the "post-PC era". Says it all. Doesn't it feel like the platform is abandoned or at the most an afterthought?

I now leaning toward a PC box to replace my aging cMP--I've always been exclusively in the Mac ecosystem, but it is soon time to cut the cord. Forget the Apple Watch.