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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.
... 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.
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.