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The Mac Pro Is Getting a Major Do-Over (mashable.com)
Apple is moving away from the current, cylinder-shaped design used on its Mac Pro desktop, but that replacement will take until next year to hit shelves. From a report: "The Mac Pro, the current vintage that we introduced, we wanted to do something bold and different. In retrospect, it didn't well suit some of the people we wanted to reach," admitted Apple SVP Craig Federighi. "So many of our customers were moving to iMac that we saw a path to address to many, many more of those people," he added. "With the current generation Mac Pro, which some customers love, others may not, one of the things that's certainly clear and true about that is the team tried to do something different, something bold and we always want to encourage the Mac team that whatever products you make, that make customers happy, that we do bold work. Because the Mac's always been about that. It's been about not being conventional thinking, not me-too-stuff," said Phil Schiller. [...] While we'll have to wait until 2018 for the Mac Pro rebirth ("Want to do something great... that will take longer than this year to do," said Schiller), iMac fans can expect a significant update this year, including some new configurations designed specifically for Pro users who already fans of the all-in-one design. [...] Schiller was somewhat less emphatic when I asked if he was willing to make any "courageous" decisions about Mac Pro ports. I thought I saw a little discomfort flicker across Schiller's face as he reacted to that word and he told me that Apple wasn't making promises about ports on the Mac Pro. Port decisions, he said, are made at a product level. "Just because on one product we removed something, doesn't mean we're going to remove it elsewhere," he told me. More on this here.
For most users these days, even those using higher-end systems, the exact hardware doesn't matter. It'll be more than sufficient for most tasks, and in the rare cases when it isn't, such a user will likely need far, far more computing power than a single system can deliver (a workstation that's twice as capable won't help when you need a 4000-machine render farm).
What does matter is the software.
What direction is macOS going to take?
Will it ever get proper virtual desktop support, like X11 desktops have had going back decades? The current hackish approach to multiple desktops is shitty and awkward to use.
What's happening with Swift? Now that Chris Lattner has left Apple, does it have a real future?
What's the status of APFS for macOS, and when will it be considered production usable?
Those are the kinds of questions we want answers to!
...we wanted to do something bold
...that we do bold work.
So iPhones are all about courage, while Mac Pro is all about being Bold. I'm sensing a theme here. Perhaps their iMacs should have valor, iPad tenacity, and earpods should have balls.
As part of my day job we have to support a lot of Macs in server rooms and/or lab spaces. The current product lineup falls flat and makes us do a lot of stupid workarounds and hassle that we don't have to deal with with Linux/Windows/ESX/OpenStack, all of which run happily on standard rackmount hardware.
"Pro" options I'd like to see:
- IPMI/out of band management tools. No Apple proprietary crap. Give me an tool that plays nice with the rest of my machines that speak IPMI.
- Expansion bays for drives, easily accessible from the front.
- Support for modern nVidia GPUs / CUDA. OpenCL doesn't cut the mustard. I should be able to use GeForce, Quadro or Tesla GPUs. Support for two at a minimum, four would be better. Use standard power connections, too.
- Dual 10 GB drops, options for more.
- Dual power supplies, also hot swappable.
- Rack mountable form factor. Look at what Lenovo is doing with their P500/700/900 lines. Host will be happy as a desktop or in a rack. Sure, it's 4U but at least if you need to rack it, you can. I get that Macs in a server room is weird.
I had an original Mac Pro that I got for a song so it became my primary machine. Over the years I added a big screen, drives, GPUs, memory, etc. It was not until 2014 that I considered an "upgraded" because I needed to move to 64bit in order to keep running Xcode. That left me with the decision of buying the top of the line iMac, or a Mac Pro. I went the later because I could keep my monitor, which I love. The price difference if you ignored the monitor was a couple of hundred bucks, so why not?
But quite frankly, the machine sucks. Oh, it's fast, and small, and very very quiet. And it looks good. But really, those are it's only good points. And there are lots of bad points...
1) You get two GPUs, one for rendering and one for calculations. However, I never (?) do GPU-hosted calculations, so that GPU is idle. I am certainly not alone in needing a single GPU. I would be happy if the second GPU could be used for rendering in a CrossFire-like way, but no one is bothering with that. So I have an expensive GPU doing nothing. Worse, it can't be used as a backup, as I understand it, so if the display GPU fails, my machine is dead.
2) There is a single "drive slot". It is non-standard (although such a standard did not really exist at the time). It also sprouts from one of the two GPUs, which is ridiculous. So Apple has to make two different GPU cards, one with and one without the SSD slot.
3) You may say it needs only one drive slot because you'll use external drives... right? Well here's the problem with that: most external drives are so much slower than the internal SSD that the machine is fully booted before the external is up and running (its FAST). Since you'll probably put your user account on that drive... odd things happen. Like your account is read-only. Or you get a sort of guest-like account. The only solution is to reboot.
4) It has FOUR USB ports. That isn't enough for anyone. Ever. All of them are on the back. So every time you want to plug in a USB key, you have to spin the machine. I gave up and left it back-to-front, so everyone gets to see my cable spaghetti.
5) It has SIX Thunderbolt. I have exactly one TB device, the screen.
6) All the ports are at the top of the machine, so the cables hang down and bend at the strain relief. If anything heavy ever falls on the cables, they're going to break. This is just bad design.
The good news is we can fix it all, easily:
1) put in at least two M2/U2 ports, preferably four. I shouldn't HAVE to use an external drive, and I shouldn't have to throw away the drive it came with if I want a larger option.
2) alternately, add a bay for a single (or two) conventional SATA laptop drives. You can get 1.5TBs for reasonable prices. It would make the case *slightly* larger, but who cares?
3) 10 USB-C, two of them on the front.
4) either move the ports down, or angle them downward to release the strain on the cables.
5) allow the system to run with a single GPU. And allow us to swap them! There's a number of small-form-factor GPU slots out there, and surely one of the companies you deal will with make one that can be mounted to the cooling block somehow.
Its shocking its taken this long.