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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.
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.
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.