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Apple's New Mac Pro Gets High Repairability Score
iFixit has posted a teardown of Apple's new soda-can-shaped Mac Pro. Despite the unusual form factor, it earned a relatively high repairability score: 8/10. iFixit said, "For being so compact, the design is surprisingly modular and easy to disassemble. Non-proprietary Torx screws are used throughout, and several components can be replaced independently." They say it's easy to access the fan and the RAM slots, and while the CPU is buried a bit more deeply, it's still user-replaceable. The Mac Pro doesn't get higher than an 8 because its uses some proprietary connectors and the cable routing is cramped. They add, "There is no room, or available port, for adding your own internal storage. Apple has addressed this with heaps of Thunderbolt, but we'd personally rather use the more widely compatible SATA if we could."
Methinks if you can afford the new Mac Pro that you're not at all concerned about Thunderbolt vs SATA.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
You can afford to take it to a computer repair shop. Or have your servants take it there.
This is the Mac Pro, not the Macbook Pro.
Who would need to take apart their laptop? This isn't 1994 - the things generally don't die.
Mac Pro. Not Mac BOOK Pro. Did you even read the article?
you fucking retards.
Isn't Reid that guy in the Senate or something?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
also people some need an easy to swap battery and getting to storage
Google/Apple, Kodos/Kang, Democrat/Republican.
It's beautiful when rich men set up an artificial sense of competition to keep the idiots treading water.
Me, I was given a water damaged MacBook Pro that Apple wanted to charge 900 to repair. I replaced the keyboard for 23 dollars. It works 100% now.
Still like to have more then 1 port in side the system and 1TB max is not really that much and the 256 GB base is a joke for an pro system.
> Who would need to take apart their laptop? This isn't 1994 - the things generally don't die.
Physical things tend to wear out eventually. This is especially true when you are cooking your electronics. Also, capacity needs change. Alternately, you might not want to pay obscene upgrade prices.
Modular industrial devices. It's almost like we're not living in the middle ages anymore.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Who takes apart their wastebasket, then? :D
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Since when is the Mac Pro a laptop?
No shit. Use what you want and don't worry about who is winning and what somebody else is running.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Actually, 256GB base makes perfect sense for a pro system –most of these guys are editing huge videos stored on SANs, there's no hope of storing them locally. All they need locally is their OS, and some very fast scratch space.
sata is free with chipset TB2 uses up pci-e lanes and we don't know how meany TB2 buses there are. Also the TB HDD's are SATA anyways or some kind of SAS raid card with the added cost of an case + TB chips.
Still like to have more then 1 port in side the system and 1TB max is not really that much and the 256 GB base is a joke for an pro system.
I'm pretty sure the assumption is that everyone in the target market for this machine will want external RAID, so the internal is really only for the OS & swap & apps and small files.
As for 1TB being "not really that much", please point me to a source of SSDs larger than 1TB. Uh, yeah, I thought so ;-)
Actually, it's kinda funny that they're surprised the Mac Pro was repairable.
I've done wild-arsed modifications on the original Mac Cube before - while a bit tricky, even that was doable. ...maybe PC repair tech really has gone downhill over the past decade or so?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
That's almost the problem. In the middle ages, everything was user-serviceable (albeit mostly because everything was homemade).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Well, not quite. It wasn't until industrialization and assembly-line manufacturing that we saw user-serviceability. Until then, most of the homemade stuff required that you made an exact replica of the busted part yourself, else it wouldn't work quite right. Doing that took a bucketload of skill.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I have a macbook pro. Apple are loathe to break the smoothness of their cases with something so practical as a vent hole - as best I can figure out, this thing sucks air in through the cracks around the keys and exausts it through a slit concealed by the lid hinge. It can get very hot if you close the lid, as this blocks the keyboard circulation.
Except that you necessarily had the skill to make the replacement part because you were the one who made the original...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Did you even read the article?
Never mind TFA. This guy apparently didn't even bother to RTFT(itle)
Fish tank was the only way to make that thing useful though.
Too bad my goldfish didn't last long in it.
Maybe I should have removed the electronics.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
1TB is not really that much with HDD's and there are 2TB and 4TB Hybrid SDD's
The Mac mini offers upto to 2 1TB hdd's and the Imac offers upto 3TB with an Hybrid SDD's option and an HDD at 3TB.
Why does the mac pro not have 2 SDD ports? so they can at least offer dual 1TB?
Well, I just bought a RAID of 24 SSDs with 5 TB usable. All for only $50k.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
From the presence of a PLX chip, it seems they're having to split PCIe lanes.
The Xeon E5-1620 has forty PCIe lanes. Give sixteen to each FirePro card, and you're left with only eight for Thunderbolt and the flash memory. Each Thunderbolt channel uses at least two lanes (they provide four lanes of PCIe 2.0, which is the bandwidth of two lanes of 3.0), so if we assume each port is on its own channel, that's at least twelve lanes. And the SSD is probably using either four or eight lanes as well.
So now not only do we have to figure out how many Thunderbolt buses there are, but we have to figure out how the PCIe lanes are being switched. It could be that heavy Thunderbolt traffic will slow traffic to the graphics cards and/or flash drive, which is a very, very weird symptom. From the positioning I think it more likely that all the TB controllers are being switched, maybe with whatever other PCIe devices are on the I/O board, but I can't say for sure.
This isn't 1994 - the things generally don't die
Lithium-ion batters have a limited lifespan and will lose their capacity. With almost all other laptops it's incredibly cheap and easy to fix, on the MacBook Pro the batteries are glued to the inside of the case! There's literally no legitimate reason for Apple to do that.
It seems that every one of your complaints about the Mac Pro is that it doesn't make a good desktop. Let me repeat for you again: A Mac Pro is not a desktop. It is a workstation for professionals. People who are buying this will need TBs of storage (and this will grow quickly). Now if it was a conventional desktop, that would mean that they would have to buy disks all the time and their cases would be fill up quickly. However most people who are using this system are building (or have) SANs with a backup strategy. Often a SAN is required as their work is collaborative. Think a Pixar animator not a Crysis II gamer.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Older electronics like the Cube tended to be made from discrete components, through-hole mounted and soldered using wave machines or even by hand and they could be easily chopped around, extra bits soldered into them or signals tapped out with the chip specs and pinouts available from a number of sources. Newer devices like tablets and modern compact laptops consist of one or two dedicated ball-grid-mounted ASICs, not easily hackable or repairable by ordinary folks without expensive reflow soldering gear, jigs etc. and of course the specs for those ASICs are commercial secrets. Even scrapping modern devices is less fun than it used to be -- I junked a Belkin wireless router recently and the only reuseable components I got off it were things like the DC power connector and a few electrolytic capacitors. On the other hand I replaced a switch on my favourite ten-year-old mouse just the other day, a like-for-like swap from another old defective mouse I had lying around.
"Soda-can shaped"? Really?
Then again, I imagine the number of people who want to run it with the lid closed are quite few and far between. There is something to be said for esthetics. Especially on a portable machine. Being light and thin are things that some people don't quite get. Even though both my laptop and my tablet can access Netflix, I choose my tablet almost every time for this task (and just about any other task a tablet does well), even though the screen is significantly smaller because having a light compact device makes up for the difference in screen size.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Why is it a joke? The 256GB is perfect for my needs. We only put the OS and applications and various caches on the local drive of any of our machines (Linux or Mac OS). The rest (about 200-ish terabytes) is network attached.
I think your definition of "pro" is different from mine.
what even happen to firewire 1600, 3200 it would been better then TB in ways like
be able to Daisy chain more a lot more then TB is only 6 firewire 63.
backwards compatible
able to add to any system with out the need for it to be build into the system board and need on board video chips.
works on more then just INTEL systems
more easily be able to have more then 1 bus.
cheaper cables
Should have put halogenated fluorocarbons in the tank.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You know....
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I don't think mixing "literally" and "legitimately" in the same sentence make sense, since the latter is entirely a determination of opinion.
You may not agree with Apple's position that every single milimeter and ounce matters, but that position is legitimate. There are consequences to that position, such as not being able to replace the battery yourself -- but its not like Apple is hiding that its laptops don't have user replaceable batteries.
Its a perfectly legitimate design decision and trade off. Maybe for you that means the products aren't for you -- that doesn't make it not *legitimate*, let alone not *literally* so.
Except that I have a 512 GB SSD on my current MacPro - which is about 3/4 full of programs and support files. The scratch disk is a 128 GB SSD. Everything else is enormous gobs of spinning glass. I'd consider the trash can (after Rev 2 of course, never buy Rev 1 hardware from anyone, much less Apple), but I'd probably spring for the 1 TB SSD since you have to have the option to have a separate scratch disk. And yes, theoretically, if you have enough RAM you don't need a scratch disk, but various Adobe products haven't quite figured that out.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Except that that's not actually true. Most people didn't have the skills to make replacement parts for their tools, because they didn't make their tools in the first place. That was the job for folks like blacksmiths, etc. A farmer didn't make his own plow, or even the harness for his oxen. Those were made by others.
Well, I just bought a RAID of 24 SSDs with 5 TB usable. All for only $50k.
Being
Trolling is a art,
Right now Apple is making the most innovative computers in the market. Nothing else comes close. All of these other vendors are basically the equivalent to home-brew junk.
It's amazing that no one else in the world can make an uncompromised workstation-class product that uses only 1 fan. THAT in itself is some amazing engineering right there.
It will be a long time before anyone else even comes close, perhaps another 10 years if at all. I suspect PC vendors are going to die off while still clinging to the AT case design from 30 years ago.
Until then, we will be stuck with the whining from the Windows/Linux fanboys always trying to explain how their 12-fan monstrosity is somehow superior.
it's apple only real non AIO desktop other then the mini.
the mini lags in hardware and does not offer any better video then laptop based Intel on board chips.
The imacs are ok but for stuff but for gameing other then maybe the top of line imac with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4GB upgrade are poor for there screen size.
and for the price of then top imac you can build an high system for about a $1000 less giving you a lot of room to add your own screen as well full desktop CPU's, HDD's, Video cards and more.
The same reason why rack servers don't have a lot of USB ports. The Mac Pro is not a desktop. It is not a Mac mini. People who are using a Mac Pro will be working on large files stored on a SAN or TB enclosures because 1TB will not be enough. So Apple decided not to bother with make the Mac Pro larger to accommodate a feature that few of the intended market will use. If you need a small network file server, Apple makes the Mac mini server. This machine is intended for pros to edit 4K video, not a file server.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Indeed. I don't discount that some (many?) will need more local disk. I was merely pointing out that some of us need barely any and it's good to be able to get that. Nothing non-pro about it.
LOL. I looked at the VMware supported hardware.
They punched me in the face for asking about a GNU/Linux RAID.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Does some have a block map for the mac pro??
also there are pci-e 2.0 lanes form the chipset? maybe the SDD and other stuff like networking , sound, ect are running off of that?
As far as I can tell, there are no FW S1600/S3200 controllers available commercially. But if you want to connect a FW800 network to any Mac, problem solved.
it's apple only real non AIO desktop other then the mini.
Again, it's not a desktop. It's a workstation. It was not designed for consumers to play games or surf the web. It is intended for professionals for work. As such it was designed with this in mind. Please stop confusing the two.
the mini lags in hardware and does not offer any better video then laptop based Intel on board chips.
Then don't buy a mini.
The imacs are ok but for stuff but for gameing other then maybe the top of line imac with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4GB upgrade are poor for there screen size.
Then don't buy an iMac.
and for the price of then top imac you can build an high system for about a $1000 less giving you a lot of room to add your own screen as well full desktop CPU's, HDD's, Video cards and more.
Then don't buy an iMac. The crux of your complaint is that Apple doesn't make the system you want them to make. Get over it. Don't buy Apple then. But complaining that Apple hasn't designed a system for you is just complaining to complaining. A Mac Pro was never intended for you. They are intended for professionals. That's like complaining that Mack Trucks doesn't make an 18-wheeler semi truck doesn't that seats 6 comfortably. That's not what it was intended to do.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That and TB superseded it as you can run USB, Ethernet, video, etc. over TB. Firewire was going to be a file transfer protocol mainly.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You should learn the difference between "then" and "than". Maybe then people will take you more seriously than they do now.
Thankfully, *this* article is about the new desktop.
RTF Title
Apple are loathe to break the smoothness of their cases with something so practical as a vent hole
Plus ca change...
Steve Jobs insisted on the idea of [the 1980 Apple III having] no fan or air vents – in order to make the computer run quietly. Jobs would later push this same ideology onto almost all Apple models he had control of – from the Apple Lisa and Macintosh 128K to the iMac.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
No, you must be thinking of 1970's stuff. Integrated circuits and surface-mounted components were mainstream by late 1980's.
Do the new Mac Pros have an impressive design? Yes.
Do power users need a tiny machine? No.
Do power users want external thunderbolt devices for everything not crammed into the case? I doubt it; I certainly wouldn't.
The old Mac Pro case (and the G5 case it's based on) are nice designs. The new Mac Pro design is cool, but unnecessary at best. I'd rather have a tower with space for internal drives, PCI Express slots, etc. All Apple had to do was upgrade the damn processor and motherboard in the old Mac Pro, and everything would be fine.
(Granted, I'm no longer an Apple user; I just roll my own desktops and put linux on them. Now, back to Newegg to look at high-end parts I can't really afford...)
And no chance of adding a 10gbe card so Video editing off a SAN is ridiculous.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Where do you think the surnames Carpenter, Smith, Nailor, Wagoner, Wright, Chandler, Fletcher, Bowman, Potter, Mason, Roper, Shoemaker, and hundreds of others came from?
being able to disassemble it does not mean you can fix it ... if you cant find a replacement part (like the graphics unit) which is a highly customized component with proprietary connectors, being able to easily take it out does not help.
It's not funny at all when you realize that they reported the 2013 Retina MacBook Pro as unrepairable:
http://www.cultofmac.com/251359/ifixit-finds-2013-retina-macbook-pros-as-unrepairable-you-can-get/
Ifixit has long complained Macs are unrepairable and proven them as such. So, yeah, as unsurprising a surprise as you can get, really. :)
I'm glad you spelled that one out for me. I'm not sure if I could have figured out what the T meant otherwise.
AJ Henderson
And of course this is true in other languages too. So for example in my area there's quite a few people with the last name Haddad in my area. Sounds fancy an exotic but it's just arabic for Smith.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Perhaps you've confused the Mac Pro workstation with a portable iOS device competing with Android. I'm one of those "Google fan boys" I guess, since I have three Android devices. I also have a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro. All are excellent for their intended purpose.
I strongly prefer my $99 Android Nextbook over my iPad. So yes, Apple's iOS devices do indeed suck - their usefulness per dollar is really bad. The Mac Pro isn't an iPad, though, it's a workstation that runs certified Unix.
If it's anything like the old Mac Pro the fact that it's modular means nothing because the proprietary parts cost 3x as much as they're worth. I trashed a 2009 Mac Pro shortly after the warranty ran out because a "new" 8800GT cost $300. The next card up (a Radeon 5770 which actually isn't compatible with my machine according to Apple, but just happens to work) cost $350. Yes I know you can use a third party video card, but if it doesn't have Mac firmware you can't see any boot screens, so once your system crashes (and don't tell me Macs never crash) you're SOL unless you have another Mac video card laying around.
Reading what I wrote, I realize I have too damn many computers. At home, I have an Android phone, tablet, and TV box. Linux / Windows laptop, Linux desktop, MacBook Pro, Linux home server, and for some volunteer work I do a Linux PBX. That's 8 computers at home.
At my 8-5 job, I have the Mac Pro and for my side job I have a rack full of servers.
I have my macbook pro for doing video and photograph editing. When at home at my desk, I have it plugged in with lid down, hooked to a nice Dell U2711 monitor, buckling (sp?) key keyboard, wireless mouse...etc.
I basically use it as a desktop when at home in the office, but disconnect and take it with me when traveling.
I have to imagine I'm not the only one that does this with a laptop....so, when at home, it does spend a fair amount of time with the lid down.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The lid on a Mac does not block the exhaust at all. They're designed so that there's the same amount of ventilation under the hinge when closed as there is above the hinge when open. And they suck air in around the base –there's a few filtered intakes.
Eh, this thing has 6 40Gb/s thunderbolt ports... Of course you can edit off a SAN.
Agreed. It's a WORKSTATION. It doesn't need to be a tiny little 11 pound can. A few weeks ago a drive was going out in my old Mac Pro. I slid out the drive carriage and slid in a spare sata drive I had laying around on a shelf.
I have a macbook pro in my lap. I just examined the bottom. It's a seamless, unbroken plate of metal. Maybe your model is different.
You can add anything from 10gbe to fiber channel via Thunderbolt already.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And yes, theoretically, if you have enough RAM you don't need a scratch disk, but various Adobe products haven't quite figured that out.
diskutil erasevolume HFS+ "ramdisk" `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://8388608`
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Firewire was going to be a file transfer protocol mainly.
... bet you haven't connected some relativel smart Firewire embedded devices like say two DV camera's back to back and noticed that you can actually command both from either one of them. Just play record on the other one and the other starts playing ie. it's really easy to copy a tape from one device to another. Same goes on with using LE software you control the camera or dedicated recorder from your desktop, no need to reach camera or recorder. Some cameras let you use your disk-drive with firewire port as a storage (tape-drive emulation), that was kind of cool before SD-cards took over tape use on more modern cameras. There were, and still are, photo/dia scanners with firewire which it replaced SCSI-bus functionality that was common before.
Much of the features of course were storage related, but it's really a multimaster daisy-chaineable shared device bus with automatic device addressing and any device with capability to control the bus, not just a mock-SCSI traditional IDE/ATA/SATA etc. It took long time before USB catched or even was near, anything but the price.
But the downside of the firewire and TB vs to USB at least to 3.0 is that they provide DMA capability which securitywise is awful and combined to a fast transfer speed provides real superhigway directly to system memory if someone who shouldn't get hold on the system does get it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpack_(electronics)
Also shows that the technology came first, THEN we built space stuff.
Eh, Sure there is. Less than 5 seconds searching on Google turned up multiple Thunderbolt to 10GbE interfaces.
USB 3.0 is fast enough for spinning media and it works just fine on a Mac Pro. It's in theory fast enough for any SATA drive (including SSD 6GBs SATA drives). USB 3.0 docks are also quite cheap and come in a wide range of options.
Thunderbolt is for when you want real speed, faster than SATA can go... Or you want something more reliable than USB. In that case it may be worth paying something extra.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can see why you'd like light and thin. I don't really care though as I'm pretty used to lugging a pump shotgun and 2 or 3 boxes of shells all over hell's half-acre. I have an old HP 8710W that weighs a huge amount and I happily lug it around because it works great and I like a heavy, steady platform with a lot of screen space. That's Apple's problem. They decide on what they want to do and that's it. They really don't give a shit if you want something else. It's also their one of their strengths. It works for them.
They breathe a lot better with the lid open. In the long term heat is a killer.
Do power users need a tiny machine? No.
Says you. People are working in smaller spaces now, or moving spaces more often than they used to. A smaller system is really valuable.
Also great for if you have to work at a location but still want a lot of compute for editing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are consequences to that position, such as not being able to replace the battery yourself
That's not even true though, it's actually not that hard to replace the battery on most of the Apple laptops. It just means taking out some screws (and a few other steps).
It just means not having a door so really anyone can do it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For a score of 8 out of 10, you would think that I could easily get a replacement motherboard, graphics card, or SSD and drop it in. But based on the shape of these components, it looks like you would have to order the parts from Apple directly. Any Mac sys admins care to chime in on this? I don't even see the ability to order spare parts from Apple's web site - is it possible to get spare parts upfront so that users aren't dead in the water if one of the components shits the bed?
Aside from that, you have to tear apart a whole bunch of pieces until you can get access to many of the components on the motherboard. Compare this to many PCs and even the Blue and White G3s that have a side panel that removes quickly with no tools and has everything immediately accessible once that panel has been removed.
The new design squeezes a lot of hardware into a very small space, but it seems very far from being easily repairable.
Interesting. I ll have to look into that. Tx.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I remember back in the days of the Amiga and the Video Toaster when they ruled for 3d I saw a rendering farm composed of an Amiga 4000 networked to 200 pentium computers. The Video Toaster in the A4000 was using them for rendering the frames. I wish I could remember what company was doing that, it was the early 90's and I was blown away.
Stop right there.
"literally" and "legitimately" are useless concepts in this case.
*legal* is the word your looking for.
In EU batteries MUST be separable by the consumer to make the consumer able to sort out different kind of waste when ditching the product, else the product is illegal. It's a shame Apple has been able to circumvent the environment laws with products so far. They tried, and in essence succeeded, with iPhone1, it had soldered battery, they had to change that, iPhone3 and newer has only glued batteries.
No, it has 6x 20Gb/s thunderbolt ports. That's for the three 4k screens. Then you only has slow usb3 left.
lag, bandwidth use just for the remote desktop much less feeding data to it and the remote desktop needs a good live real time bandwidth link and after that the how safe is that data much as that has a higher risk of being leaked.
Yeah, because the home worker can afford to have a special server room constructed in a damp garage, put a rack cluster in it, install air conditioning for those blazing hot summer days, and have their house upgraded to 10 gigabit ethernet.
That command makes a ramdisk a bit bigger than four gigs. I like to drop my Xcode projects on it; it can turn a five-minute build time into one minute or less.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So pay Apple $129 to replace the battery. People like to make a big deal about this but it's really not.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
One advantage that the external expansion model has over the everything-stuck-inside PC model is migration is easier. Not everything has to replaced at once. It can be upgraded over time. I appreciate that I can add features without opening the case. I also appreciate that the Powermac has always been one of the easiest machines to upgrade and repair.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Yeah right! Next you'll be telling us that they didn't have wizards and dragons.
Nine out of ten Slashdot editors say the new Mac Pro (www.apple.com) is eleventy times better than any other computer in the world, and it's only half the calories and none of the fat!
So what are you waiting for? Buy a Mac Pro today!
[* This has been a paid endorsement from the National Society of Internet Tech Website Editors, a division of Apple, Inc (AAPL)]
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is not a home computer to tinker on. Whoever has the application and $$$ for it, will not buy equipment like this without extended warranty and most likely on site service.
/vertisement for ifixit or apple.
I suspect this is just some stupid click bait, or
It seems that every one of your complaints about the Mac Pro is that it doesn't make a good desktop. Let me repeat for you again: A Mac Pro is not a desktop. It is a workstation for professionals.
There are professionals which aren't in the field of video editing. For 99.9999% of professionals out there, the Mac Pro isn't a suitable computer for the job.
iFixit has posted a teardown of Apple's new trash-can-shaped Mac Pro.
There, FTFY.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Yes and none of them would ever consider a Mac Pro because it doesn't suit their needs; it doesn't suit my needs. But the poster always complains that the Mac Pro isn't a suitable desktop for him. It was never designed for him. It was designed for people who do video editing for a living. That's like complaining a semi truck isn't suitable for your commuting purposes; it was never designed for commuters.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
England, obviously. Around here, you're more likely to find a gaggle of Schreiners, Schusters, Bauers and Maurer.
Agreed.
I suspect most of the people who are complaining were never going to buy one anyway, and more than likely not going to buy a Mac at all.
I also suspect most are just idiots who would have been complaining years ago about the lack of a serial / parallel port, floppy drive etc on the first iMac
and been the same bunch who demanded that Apple make a netbook because netbooks were the future.
They also believe their threat not to buy a Mac will cause panic in Apples boardroom, where as Apple understands these people were never the customers they actually wanted or needed.
More over their displayed lack of imagination of what the product is, what is can do, and where the future lies makes me believe they are not as creative as their think they are, they have self limited their imagination and at best work under someone else's direction, the true creator.
They probably even believe that no one can create on the iPad, even though thousands do so daily.
Since when is the Mac Pro a laptop?
He's a slashdot poster. Chances are his lap is plenty big enough to put a Mac Pro on it.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Perhaps the most surprising thing to me when reading the iFixit article was that their Mac Pro's PSU was only 450 watts. Granted, most enthusiast PSUs are way over-specced (a hangover from the days when even major manufacturers blatantly lied about their wattage ratings), but that still sounds much smaller than I'd expect for a dual-GPU system. The FirePro D300 is basically a professional version of the well-known Radeon HD 7870 gaming card, and that card has a TDP of 175 watts. This one may be clocked lower, as is the case with the FirePro W7000 based on the same silicon, so let's say 150 watts maximum. Take 300W for both GPUs, and another ~125W for the Xeon CPU, and you're pretty close to the limit.
This also implies that upgraded Mac Pros must have a different, larger PSU. No matter how good Apple's engineering is, there's no way they managed to fit a 12-core Xeon and two power-hungry Tahiti GPUs within a 450W envelope. So if someone is thinking about saving ~$1000 by buying the cheapest Mac Pro and adding the Xeon 12-core themselves, it might not be such a good idea.
Overall this is a very clever and efficient design. Hopefully it will get some PC manufacturers thinking about alternatives to the absurdly outdated ATX form factor. There is no reason aside from inertia (and patents?) why DIY PC parts could not be oriented around a unified thermal core design. You'd have to come up with a new standard for motherboards, graphics cards, interconnects, and PSUs... but it could be done.
Wouldn't the air-inlet-rips at the bottom and the fan at the top act like a vacuum cleaner and fill the can with dust? I would let the fan spin backwards: suck clean air from the top and eject the cold air at the bottom.
SATA is just...so SATA. LOL Why settle for sata when you can have (need!) Thunderbolt.
You may not agree with Apple's position that every single milimeter and ounce matters, but that position is legitimate.
Good point, I meant to say legitimate technical reason. The batteries are already pressed firmly against the bottom of the case with foam spacers and held in place by other components (such as those air guides, or whatever they are) and adhesive strips, there is no reason to glue them to the case when a few small plastic extensions on existing components would hold them just as well.
You're reading the cost of replacing the macbook air and old macbook pros (without glued batteries). The cost of replacing the battery in the new retina macbook pros is $200, and you have to take it in to an Apple store or mail it in. Almost all other laptops you can simply buy a new one and shove it in the back, even keeping the old one as an extra to extend battery life on long trips.
Actually, the price I quoted also applies to non-retina MBPs (even new ones). http://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=servicefaq&geo=United_States&product=Macnotebooks
As for keeping an old battery around to extend battery power for longer trips, this isn't rarely an issue on modern MBPs because they have crazy battery life.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
with E-sata / sata you don't have to deal with bridge chips and why should I have to buy and new box / cable to get what works in the old work flow useing a port that would of been easy to add and is part of the chipset?
The old mac pro had 2 free sata ports that just needed an sata cable / esata bracket to get E-sata also lot's of PC cases and MB's have esata.
And it's real cheap to add one to a system unlike TB where you need right about $100 + cable just for an dock with TB to sata. That is big overhead to gain no speed up over an E-sata port.
yes you can use USB 3.0 to SATA but E-sata is faster and does not need an bridge chip
So why bother with the unusual form factor case? You need a stack of TB enclosures and associated power supplies. If you need a SAN why not make the Mac rackable or at least stackable.
The situation will only get worse as time goes on and you need to expand the machine, adding more external boxes to it. The only alternative is blowing thousands on A whole new machine, assuming Apple keep updating it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So what you are saying is that only a tiny number of people who do 4k video editing from a SAN but don't want rack mounting or upgrading or local storage should by a Mac Pro.
For what it's worth a lot of people doing 4k video like to have a few TB of local flash storage so they can edit complex scenes together without network overhead or loading the shared SAN to much. The gigabit Ethernet that the Mac has is only good for about 70-80mb/sec, way lower than a local HDD and an order of magnitude less than an SSD.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
with E-sata / sata you don't have to deal with bridge chips and why should I have to buy and new box / cable to get what works in the old work flow useing a port that would of been easy to add and is part of the chipset?
Why do you care about bridge chips? And you have to use a new cable to get a 14 Gbs performance boost? Seriously? Do also complain that you need a new cable to use micro USB devices?
The old mac pro had 2 free sata ports that just needed an sata cable / esata bracket to get E-sata also lot's of PC cases and MB's have esata.
Um, no. The original Mac Pros did not have SATA ports. FireWire 400, 800, Ethernet, USB, analog and digital audio. The Mac Pros did have expansion slots where you can add eSATA which is exactly the same situation you complain about above: Requiring another "bridge" chip.
And it's real cheap to add one to a system unlike TB where you need right about $100 + cable just for an dock with TB to sata. That is big overhead to gain no speed up over an E-sata port.
Again the overhead means nothing to performance as your bottleneck isn't TB; it's still SATA. In fact using eSATA is your performance problem. If you used TB, you would have 14 more Gbs. Whether or not you went through TB, you'd still are limited to 6Gbs if you use eSATA.
yes you can use USB 3.0 to SATA but E-sata is faster and does not need an bridge chip
Why is it hard for you to understand that TB (20Gbs) > SATA (6Gbs) even with a bridge chip? Why does it really matter that you had a bridge chip?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
For what it's worth a lot of people doing 4k video like to have a few TB of local flash storage so they can edit complex scenes together without network overhead or loading the shared SAN to much. The gigabit Ethernet that the Mac has is only good for about 70-80mb/sec, way lower than a local HDD and an order of magnitude less than an SSD.
Um, that's why the new Mac Pro has 6 Thunderbolt ports.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
They are probably not dedicating 16 lanes to each GPU. The GPUs they use are not the same as the full workstation cards. Apple states they have about 75% of the single precision computing performance, but don't state what 3d performance is like. The GPU is probably a binned one that didn't quite make workstation card grade so runs with fewer steam processors at a lower clock rate, and probably with slower memory too. 8 lanes is likely all each one gets, relying on the large amount of RAM to reduce bus traffic.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Um, no. The original Mac Pros did not have SATA ports. FireWire 400, 800, Ethernet, USB, analog and digital audio. The Mac Pros did have expansion slots where you can add eSATA which is exactly the same situation you complain about above: Requiring another "bridge" chip.
They have free sata ports on the MB just need to run a cable to a bracket to get E-sata no added chips needed.
"Again the overhead means nothing to performance as your bottleneck isn't TB; it's still SATA. In fact using eSATA is your performance problem. If you used TB, you would have 14 more Gbs. Whether or not you went through TB, you'd still are limited to 6Gbs if you use eSATA.
yes you can use USB 3.0 to SATA but E-sata is faster and does not need an bridge chip
Why is it hard for you to understand that TB (20Gbs) > SATA (6Gbs) even with a bridge chip? Why does it really matter that you had a bridge chip?"
where is that 20Gbs HDD / SSD?? and let's seen most SDD"s are sata any ways and for shearing data lot's of systems have sata / esata very few have TB and you can't even add TB to about 99% of the systems that don't have it. But you can add USB3, firewire, E-sata / sata to any system with an open Pci-e slot.
6 Thunderbolt ports but only 3 buses and video out may eat up some bandwidth as well.
and all of that chipset io along with it's sata ports are unused. also there is no free pci-e slots to add raid cards / more pci-e sdd's. Some of the cards are pci-e X4 or faster. TB is pci-e X4 MAX.
Um, that's 60 Gbs of throughput. Those who have used this system do not see the imagined problem that you complain about.
What is your insane fascination with SATA? If Apple used SATA the performance would be worse by your own posts. SATA is not PCIe. SATA is not DMI. It's another bridge technology and one less capable than TB.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You are making absolutely no sense . The absolute max connection you have with HDDs to MB is SATA which is 6Gbs max. Period. TB at 10 Gbs per channel is faster. Now there are PCIe SSDs (which is on the Mac Pro). SATA is the slowest technology of the the three and you keep complaining that you have to use a cable to use it?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You are missing DarkOx point people use external SATA disks so why pay a lot more for a TB dock when all you need is a cable and the sata ports that are part of the chipset.
I have an NEC LaVie ultrabook that is thinner and lighter than a Macbook Pro but similar or higher spec. The battery is easily replaceable by removing for screws and unclipping it. The clips are just to hold it in place until the bottom cover is back on, which stops it rattling around.
The WiFi card is also replaceable. It is generally quite easy to maintain. If other manufacturers can do it without sacrificing weight or thickness then so can Apple, but they choose not to.
Batteries are something that Apple undeniably makes a packet on, just like RAM upgrades and cables. That's not a criticism, just a statement of fact.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Thunderbolt:
It wouldn't be an issue if not for the fact that it's been largely an Apple-only one in implementation. See Firewire and USB for a
Form factor:
As for departing from anything resembling ATX, that underscores their disdain for any maintenance. That, and the thermal issues only make it that much more of an issue to fix versus something that was designed to be maintained.
To those reflexively using the Not Target Market Excuse:
Trying to brush these issues off by using the Apple standard Not Target Market excuse doesn't refute any argument. Yes, I've actually done the forbidden thing of Apple and actually repaired things and encountered it in various models. They view maintenance friendliness as a defect to fix with maintenance hostile design.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
None of which are your points. Your points are about performance which is no worse than SATA. And you get much more capability when you use a TB connection than SATA
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
10gbe is slow - Infiniband is the new hotness.
It tops out at 300Gbit/sec.
I understand light and thin quite well. That's why I have thin and light devices.
I don't understand why someone would choose to watch a video on a smaller screen when a larger one was available, all else being equal. I've watched people (who I know have 13" laptops with them) sit on planes holding an iPhone up (or bending over it on their lap) for hours watching a movie (often a movie that that was also available in the AVOD).
I simply don't get it. Or maybe I just have too much sympathy for my poor old back, neck and eyes.
You are missing DarkOx point people use external SATA disks so why pay a lot more for a TB dock when all you need is a cable and the sata ports that are part of the chipset.
Because people who think a thunderbolt dock is "a lot more" are not the demographic for a Mac Pro.
You just spent $10000 on a computer. How much does a TB dock cost?
wrong, Jack Kilby at TI made very first integrated circuit based computers for the air force to use in planes in 1961 and then in Minuteman Missile in 1962.
"Space" technology includes ICBM, and thus space stuff drove integrated circuit based computers.
10 GbE is do-able via thunderbolt, as is fiber-channel.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Because only the components that 90% of people are used in the enclosure, why make a big box that will sit empty, or include things 90% will not use? All the boxes you're talking about can sit next to the desk on the floor where your regular workstation case would sit. Whilst this sits on your desk with easy access to your USB and thunderbolt ports.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Because they would be SATA3, and with thunderbolt you have the bandwidth to run future versions of SATA or SAS (or fiberchannel, etc.) instead, as future needs dictate.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Not 20 Gb, but there are faster-than-SATA PCIe based SSDs available that you could easily hook up by a Sonnet thunderbolt->PCIe expansion box.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Interix once claimed that they hoped to build a certified Unix. It doesn't appear that they ever did so:
http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/catalog.htm
I don't see Interix listed as certified Unix 93, certified Unix base, certified Unix 98, or certified Unix 03. I do see OSX listed.
The issue aside (Mac Pro is not a laptop), a modular laptop is very important for many reasons. Especially when it comes to upgrading RAM and replacing disks when you realise that your initial diskspace is not enough. I don't think there are that many other things you need to replace yourself in a laptop though.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
And the battery.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
it's apple only real non AIO desktop other then the mini.
Again, it's not a desktop. It's a workstation. It was not designed for consumers to play games or surf the web. It is intended for professionals for work. As such it was designed with this in mind. Please stop confusing the two.
the mini lags in hardware and does not offer any better video then laptop based Intel on board chips.
Then don't buy a mini.
The imacs are ok but for stuff but for gameing other then maybe the top of line imac with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4GB upgrade are poor for there screen size.
Then don't buy an iMac.
and for the price of then top imac you can build an high system for about a $1000 less giving you a lot of room to add your own screen as well full desktop CPU's, HDD's, Video cards and more.
Then don't buy an iMac. The crux of your complaint is that Apple doesn't make the system you want them to make. Get over it. Don't buy Apple then. But complaining that Apple hasn't designed a system for you is just complaining to complaining. A Mac Pro was never intended for you. They are intended for professionals. That's like complaining that Mack Trucks doesn't make an 18-wheeler semi truck doesn't that seats 6 comfortably. That's not what it was intended to do.
Really, why the hell would you buy a Mac for gaming anyway? I know that Apple has made their systems more accessible with the Intel chips, but still!!??
As a Mac Pro owner (not the new one), I am telling you that the least painful solution is to buy a non-Apple system to play games and to buy an Apple system to do whatever you want to do on a Mac. Otherwise, you're just asking to spend more money and time working out hardware compatibility issues. You will be far better in the long run to maintain two computers. Sure, it will cost you more money. But with the amount of time that you will waste screwing around with your dual-boot Mac Pro, you could get a second job to buy that second Windows gaming machine.
Also, if cost is a limitation, then you probably shouldn't be buying a Mac or a gaming system...
Yes, anandtech has a block diagram in their review here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/8
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I have this:
http://imgur.com/ItIqxDY
they should put USB 3.0 on the open PCH and flash slot 2 on the PLX switch. maybe they ran out off io room on the ribbon cables or that that the load was to high on the PLX switch with SSD and TB. Or routing was in the way pulling the X4 back to video card 2.
There are three TB2 busses. See: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5918?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
this is a machine for video editors only and they REALLY need a Xeon and ECC RAM? Seems to me that IF they really were the pros and doing something that required that much that they'd have access to a cluster and get the job done in a fraction of the time.
OTOH if you mean a pro who does more than video editing, but doesn't really need a cluster 256GB is pretty paltry once you subtract system storage usage, application storage usage, temporary file usage, source/data/whatever files, etc. or for whatever reason(VERY large datasets/systems) that get offloaded onto some sort of cluster.
Anyways, I find their "ease of repair" to be a bit misleading as most of those parts are not, oh lets just wander down the street to the local PC shop, Microcenter, etc. or online to amazon, newegg, tigerdirect, etc. to find that proprietary Apple only part that about 2 people need any given month. Even IF you can find the proprietary parts, I'll be willing to bet that they won't be cheap.
Let's face up to things here, RAM, CPU probably, and maybe storage are about all that you can probably hope to upgrade/replace with easily found common OTS parts.
Another thing now that I'm thinking about is why release them NOW with LGA2011? Intel's booting that socket/chipsets this year(late). Will Apple be releasing another set of Pros again a few 8 or more months for now just so all you people can effectively rent another Mac pro from them?
I'd really go easier on Apple if they gave up on this lock everything down bullshit and god forbid you want to upgrade anything without paying us for a whole bunch of extra components that get you nothing value but Apple more monies. I really can't believe that people actually buy Apple computers any longer, and the more I'm actually looking at their offerings now, the more convinced I am that their goal is to entirely kill off their desktop/notebook division. OSX had barely moved in my6? 7? yr absence other than attempting to push even more virtual walls to go with their physical don't-upgrade-me walls.
Thunderbolt: what MIGHT eventually save Apple's bacon is a reasonably price Thunderbolt based expansion chassis w/support for at least a GPU if not the other unupgradeables that should be. (Yes storage and some other things work now and you can kinda sorta do a GPU but it only works under Windows & linux, and either way a thing like that won't help any of the notebooks but the larger ones that mainly get moved then parked in one spot for a while...)
Hint: mainstream.
Are you insane? The specs of the LaVie are far far lower than the lowest end Macbook pro. You are comparing an old ultrabook to a new high end laptop, of course the LaVie is going to lose. The only place it can win is in weight and thickness, because, again, you are comparing an ultrabook to a full laptop.
Processor: Macbook pro 13" - i5-4258U (Haswell). LaVie 13" - i5-3317U (Ivy Bridge). Advantage; i5-4258U - generation newer, higher performance.
Graphics - Macbook - Intel Iris 5100. LaVie - Intel HD 40003 Advantage; Intel Iris 5100 - generation newer, performance blows away older generation intel integrated gfx.
Display - Macbook - 2,560 × 1,600 (16:10) (glossy). LaVie - 1600 X 900, (unkown if it's glossy or matte). Advantage macbook - much higher resolution.
Ports are pretty similar but the Macbook has some thunderbolt ports which is nice.
I couldn't find any info for battery life, but mac laptops have historically kicked PC laptop's ass in battery life.
Cost - base Macbook pro 13" at $1299, base LaVie at $1799
Even if you compare to a macbook air (which is the appropriate comparison), the LaVie still loses out in every performance metric, and costs like 2x as much. I think the LaVie might be a litttle thinner and lighter (15 vs. 17mm, 870 vs. 1080g), but then again I saw reviews complaining that it was really fragile.
So why not "ditch" the product back to Apple for recycling.
It's not funny at all when you realize that they reported the 2013 Retina MacBook Pro as unrepairable:
http://www.cultofmac.com/251359/ifixit-finds-2013-retina-macbook-pros-as-unrepairable-you-can-get/
Ifixit has long complained Macs are unrepairable and proven them as such. So, yeah, as unsurprising a surprise as you can get, really. :)
They have proven it by selling fucking repair kits. Which according to themselves can't work.