

Apple quietly announces new Mac Pros - joejohnson
http://www.apple.com/macpro/index.html

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cmatthias
I suspect the reason that they did this quietly was that these are not new Mac
Pros at all. Rather, they are same as the "Mid 2010" models they replaced,
with minor bumps to the CPUs and memory. They continue to use the same
generation CPUs that were available in 2010 (and same chipset, I presume),
despite the fact that newer generation Sandy Bridge CPUs have been available
for months now.

IMHO, the RAM bump wasn't even that good -- the base config now includes only
6GB, which is still laughable for a professional machine costing $2500.

Pretty pathetic if you ask me.

~~~
ROFISH
The CPU offered in the lowest Mac Pro today is the W3565, a "Bloomfield"
model, based on Nehalim-B. For the record, that is now three generations
behind, being behind the W36XX "Westmere"/Nehalim-C Xeon chips, the Sandy
Bridge Xeon E3/E5, and the Ivy Bridge Xeon E3. A quick Googling cannot give me
when the Ivy Bridge E5s are due out, but probably not soon.

EDIT: Apple does offer "Westmere" Xeons, but only as 6-core CPUs, which when
looking at the website, is all but the cheapest option.

~~~
cmatthias
That is all true! Thanks for the clarification.

I believe the Ivy Bridge E5s aren't due until early 2013 at the earliest.

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rdl
Looks like time for a Hackintosh. I wonder what the best platform for an
E5-based hackintosh would be. Like, pretend you want more than 16GB (or 32GB
maybe) of RAM, in something vaguely current, and ideally with ECC.

~~~
cmatthias
Here's a forum thread posted by someone who's using a Supermicro Intel
C606-based board with dual xeon E5s and 128GB of memory:

[http://tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=169&t=55963](http://tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=169&t=55963)

Looks like they had trouble getting the network functional, but everything
else worked fine.

32GB of ECC ram compatible with a motherboard like that would only run you
$300:

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161561)

Apple charges $975 for an _upgrade_ from 6GB to 32GB. Highway robbery.

------
there
And a new Airport Express that no longer plugs directly into the wall.
<https://www.apple.com/wifi/>

~~~
c0nsumer
...that has dual wired ports. This is a good thing.

~~~
fratis
Though I agree that it's good (awesome, even), it should be noted that only
one of those ports is a LAN port. The other is WAN only.

~~~
c0nsumer
That's pretty typical for Apple stuff, though. Although, if I remember right,
you can set Apple stuff up as just bridged. I also find it interesting that
there's now an iOS app for setting up their APs. That fixes a big gap for some
people. I'm just hoping that IPv6 support comes back soon...

~~~
unconed
You can still use IPv6 when you install the old Airport utility.

------
whalesalad
I was hoping for new Mac Pro's this WWDC. These look to simply get a processor
upgrade. No Thunderbolt.

~~~
Bud
Also no USB 3, and no Bluetooth 4.0, which means, they didn't design a new
motherboard.

Which, in turn, says rather loudly to me that the Mac Pro is not a high
priority for Apple right now.

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hasker
According to David Pogue Apple will have a new Mac Pro, possibly in 2013:
[http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/an-explanation-
of-...](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/an-explanation-of-the-news-
from-apple/)

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theorique
Their laptop line has been competitive enough in pricing that I'm willing to
spend for the ergonomics - I don't expect a powerhouse machine as a portable.
(My last 3 laptops have been either MB Pro or MB Air)

But where's the benefit - and who's the customer - for a desktop machine at
these prices? Unless you absolutely _need_ OS X with a higher powered machine,
why not just use Ubuntu in that desktop / server application?

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daleroberts
Again, no Nvidia CUDA support for scientific computing. Not even faster ATI
cards... I think my next workstation is going to be Linux on Dell or HP.

~~~
adsr
They have been heavily involved in OpenCL for a while though, which is not
tied to any specific graphics card manufacturer, or graphics cards
specifically. There are some pretty nice OpenCL tutorials here btw:
<http://www.macresearch.org/opencl>

~~~
daleroberts
True, but they don't offer a machine that can run OpenCL well. On my current
Mac Pro (6-Core Xeon 3.33Ghz) the CPU runs most of my codes at the same speed
as the ATI Radeon 5870. An ATI 7970 would have been a nice (minimal) addition
but I really want support for an NVidia Tesla c2070 so I can develop CUDA
codes to run on Amazon EC2.

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MattRogish
I haven't been able to determine - did their iMac line get _anything_? They
all seem the same...

<http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html>
[http://web.archive.org/web/20110719193344/http://www.apple.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110719193344/http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html)

~~~
shadowfiend
Everything that was refreshed is tagged "new" on the main store page at
<http://store.apple.com/us> . So no :)

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akandiah
According to arstechnica, there's a more serious update that's being worked on
by Apple: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/06/mac-pro-gets-minor-
upda...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/06/mac-pro-gets-minor-update-with-
standard-12-core-option-no-xeon-e5/)

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jedberg
I'm pretty sure I was able to get one of these yesterday. Or did they just rev
the specs?

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eswangren
For anyone who's interested I will be purchasing $1500 worth of hardware from
newegg, assembling PC's, and selling them for only a 100% markup. And oh yeah,
they'll be more powerful than this load of crap they want to sell you.

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mephi5t0
quietly? how's that quiet if they sold out 8000 tickets for their "quiet
announcement" and it was covered by the tech blogs and their uncles?

~~~
mortil
It's quiet because the Mac Pro upgrade was not announced in their big
announcement, but only with a little "New" sign on their webstore after the
show.

