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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.
The new one is a cylinder with rounded corners.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Hooray! Maybe next year there will be a Mac that I can consider worth buying again! Also, they should be using the current most recent generation Intel chips by then. But nah, they'll probably just fucking solder everything down again. Because to the post-Jobs Apple, "Pro" apparently means a fancy-pants artist who wants curvy thin stuff with no seams that can impress people, not an engineer or architect, or even someone in the music or film production business, who wants to get shit done.
Meanwhile, I will stick to my accumulated pile of MacBook Pros and Mac Minis from the 2010-2012 era. And also the corresponding stack of Magsafe 1 chargers and Thunderbolt adapters. I even bought a USB 3.0 ExpressCard adapter yesterday.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
So, Apple has gained their own definition of the work "courageous", a bit like the Alanis Morissette definition of ironic
It's like Ray-EE-Aine, on your wedding day........ If you're a meteorologist....
I never really knew that I wanted un-replaceable RAM and Harddrive/Flash until I went to upgrade my Macbook Pro.
Now I know that is these features that really make me happy, and screw that idea of me having a choice.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
It's almost like Apple suddenly made a lot of new product announcements after months of silence. Nah, it totally must be /. shilling for them.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
... but how about starting with the adjectives "functional, useful, reasonable"?
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Ah, so that's the bar. If Apple makes any product announcement, THEN it's considered OK for the FP of slashdot. Got it.
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 became a Mac convert (from Windows XP) in the mid 2000s, especially since I use several Linux machines throughout the day also. I did a lot of video editing on my MacBook Pro but by 2013 it was a bit sluggish so I thought I would pay the large chunk of money and get a nice machine to edit video on. Lo and behold what did they have?...a stupid cylinder that I couldn't put my five hard drives of video files into.
Yes it looked cool and sleek, unless you actually wanted to use the thing. The last thing I wanted on my desk was a rat's nest of external enclosures for hard drives, cables, and power supplies. I had enough of that in dealing with my laptop setup. Bump a cable, oops, there goes the whole chain.
The most obnoxious part was people actually defending this "radical new design" and that people like me who didn't like it were "afraid of change". Or even, "Who needs so many hard drives, just use the cloud, that is the future!" (yeah, try and edit HD video files that are being served off the cloud, heh).
So for about $1500 I bought a PC with Windows 7 and haven't looked back. Bye bye Apple.
My personal view is (and has been for a few years now) that Apple needs to rejigger their entire lineup. I'm not saying that they need to make drastically different products, but their current marketing is out of whack, which is weird for Apple. My general suggestion would be to make three levels across most of their product line, and name them similarly.
For example, make 3 different phones:
Make 3 different Mac models:
Then 3 laptop models:
and 3 iPads:
and finally, if I had to figure out 3 iMac models to keep the trend (which I'm not sure makes sense):
And to be clear, it's not that I'm specifically fixated on particular features going into particular models, but I think apple would be smart to do something like this. Having a breakdown like this would provide more consistency among their product lines and a clearer differentiation between the tiers within each product line. I also think it would also fill in some of the gaps in their lineup, while still providing reasons to spring for the more expensive pro models.
I would not be surprised if Apple would never make a "Mac Pro Mini", just because they know that such a machine is -exactly- what buyers want. They want people to either buy cheaper Macs and toss them every few years, or go buy the top tier machines.
How else will they remain behind?
Five years old is vintage, ten year old is ancient and fifteen years old is palaeolithic.
Last year I replaced the "vintage" 320GB hard drives with 1TB hard dives in my file server, replaced the "ancient" Vista-compatible motherboard with a Win7-compatible motherboard, and tossed out a "palaeolithic" AT-to-PS2 keyboard adapter. ;)
I have a Mac Pro; it is my production machine and it's an early 2009 "Cheese Grater." It has 32GB of system RAM and, I am told can go higher (though Apple says it can only pack 32GB) and I have definitely upgraded the standard disk drive that it came with (I have all four trays full). I will probably get an SSD drive for its startup drive fairly soon.
But Apple has become an appliance-maker with a limited "shelf life." They make way more from their tablets and smartphones than they do with their computers and I believe that adding the word "pro" to their tablet is an indication of something. There are no user-serviceable parts inside their phones and tablets, even though iFixit regularly takes them apart. But they're pretty clear that you cannot upgrade the insides and all you can do (if they offer parts) is replace what is there.
This means that the lifecycle of the phone or tablet is one to two years, which is a real moneymaker for Apple. I kept my last Mac for ten years and plan to keep my current Mac Pro for ten, as well. As to the cost of their computers, I really don't care as long as I can expand it—their trashcan model is definitely not expandable and one cannot change out the graphics card, so I have not been tempted to look into purchasing it in the slightest.
As to ports, I have what I really need on my Cheese Grater, though it does not feature the faster Thunderbolt port that the newer Macs have. It does, however, have plenty of USB ports and it has an internal bus that I can swap out cards on. I can also change my GPU and I note that Apple tends to have a love-hate relationship with GPU makers, generally switching companies every one to two years. This means that if you purchase a computer with a built-in GPU, Apple will change their software and their OS to not be optimized for it in a couple of years. Want to use your computer as a main production machine with the latest software? Sorry, your investment is now obsolete.
Apple will be transitioning you to a tablet soon. They do not care about computers any more. Their hardware will be designed to be replaced in one to two years.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Millennials/hipsters are using the word as it's been used for decades, probably centuries. Vintage has been a synonym for antique for as long as I remember - Vintage Car Rallies are not a new millennial thing, for example.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Good job they ditched the PowerPC architecture so their hardware would no longer fall behind mainstream PCs ;-)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I'm not paying $3500 for $1500 worth of PC.
I have a machine with 256GB of RAM, running on Linux. It is very, very fast for daily work as I can start up Virtual machines pretty much instantaneously, and up to 10 or 20 of them at once without any hassles whatsoever. If I want fast testing turnaround I run a VM from a RAMdisk. Lots of memory does make a difference.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism