

Apple reportedly questioning future of Mac Pro - petercooper
http://www.marco.org/2011/10/31/rumor-mac-pro-uncertain-future

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droithomme
The problem is really simple. Lots of people, myself included, need a computer
with accessible drives to be replaced, and it would be really nice to have a
PCI bus. Apple offers this, but only at an outrageous cost that includes 6, 8
or 12 processors, which we don't need, and also the PCI-e bus has extremely
few normal cards available, because Apple sells so few Pros, because they are
massively overpriced. The alternatives are iMac, MacBook and MacMini, none of
which have the current industry standard USB3 ports, all of which instead have
a weird nonstandard Thunderbolt connector that requires $50 intelligent cables
and for which no virtually no peripherals are available now, or ever will be
available, except at extravagant cost.

It's a serious problem that affects my work, and the work of many, all due to
mismanagement of their computer line by Apple.

I have around 4TB of files I regularly access, including video archives of
tutorial and marketing films.

On a Mac Pro, I can drop 2x2TB drives in and be ready to go, and even have a
couple more for mirroring, but the price of the chassis to hold the drives
(the Pro) is outlandish.

With the iMac, you can't upgrade to that capacity at all, and even upgrading
the internal drive to 2TB is trouble because Apple puts custom chips on their
drives that prevent the temperature sensor from reporting right so that for
many people upgrading the drive makes the fans run at full speed. Putting the
drives into Firewire enclosures means I have to buy rare and expensive FW800
external housings, daisy chain them, and have multiple wall warts,
transformers, enclosures and wires all over the place, just like back in the
Commodore 64 days, and if something gets snagged on one of these cables mid
drive write, the whole system becomes hosed.

For a platform historically known for suitability for multimedia work which
has always required fair amounts of storage, the situation is abominable.

~~~
barrkel
Have you considered using iSCSI? The storage server need not be a Mac. I'm
using Nexenta running ZFS to supply iSCSI volumes to some of the machines on
my home network.

~~~
droithomme
Thanks, my current solution is similar to that - storage drives in a PC server
originally bought for that purpose and accessed through ethernet.
(Interestingly, I have a hell of a time getting 2 Macs to network, but Macs
network fine from PCs.) This was not as fast as I would like though and I
usually had to copy files locally for editing. I migrated most of my video and
photo work to the PC just because the speed was much faster having the drives
local. It seems strange to me that I have to have two computers to do basic
things. I greatly prefer the Unix on the Apple, but it's getting to where I
might just switch back to the PC since the Mac has become an impediment to my
workflow. This after using Macs since the 1980s for work at home. It makes no
sense. Why shouldn't all Macs have easy access to reasonable amounts of
storage. They should. Not having a reasonable solution here is really
boneheaded of Apple.

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jiggy2011
I've never really understood why all models of the Mac Pro ship with Xeons
rather than having lower models with i7 processors. This must affect the price
quite allot since it forces you to buy a processor that is quite likely to
provide little to no benefit to many potential customers.

Sort of like how the iMac forces you to buy a monitor.

~~~
crander
The workstation Xeons support dual (separate physical packages) processor
configurations. These are for real workstations and how you get to 12 or 16
cores. Of course just about no one needs a real workstation anymore and a six
or eight core single processor ala i7 900 series would work just fine for most
in a Mac Pro.

~~~
jiggy2011
right, for super high powered workstations the Xeon makes sense but allot of
the benefit seems to be the ability to run 2+ seperate CPUs, but they sell Mac
Pros with only a single Xeon inside them which seems pointless.

There seems to be a total gap in the apple lineup for people who want an at
least somewhat expandable computer that lets you pick your own monitors rather
than forcing one on you, but doesn't make you pay for server grade hardware.

Most Mac Pros I have seen used were primarily being used for photoshop or ruby
dev, very unlikely that justifies the xeon.

To me it seems like saying "you either can buy this 2 seater car with 1.2L
80hp 4 pot engine or a 5 seater car with a 5L 600hp V8"

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dougb
This is now the only mac with ECC memory. I guess people don't care about ECC
memory.

See djb's ECC memory page for an idea of why you need ECC memory,
<http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html>

~~~
mturmon
This is a real issue.

And, it seems even the most capacious Mac (that's not a Mac Pro) only supports
16GB of RAM. That's not as much as I'd like, although with an SSD for swap,
maybe it's not as painful.

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icarus_drowning
Spent a long time comparing a "low"-end Mac pro with the highest-end i7 iMac
recently, and I came to the conclusion that, for my needs (media production,
music composition), a Mac Pro just made no sense at all.

The Mac "pro" market is heavily skewed toward media types, and especially with
i7 iMacs there to do much (if not all) of the heavy lifting, I'm not surprised
that the Mac Pro is nearing the end of its life.

I'm sure there are a lot of situations that Thunderbolt and i7 don't address,
but I'd posit they don't crop up in a vast majority of Apple's "pro" niche.

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kitsune_
I don't know, while this might sense from a business perspective, this seems
like a flawed enterprise to me. Many creative professionals need the extend-
ability of the Mac Pro. For instance for graphics (QuadroFX) or audio work
(UAD DSP cards for instance). I don't think that external cards over Firewire
or Thunderbolt are the appropriate solution here.

~~~
jaylevitt
Yeah, even the (new? upcoming?) Magma ExpressBox 3T only allows 3 PCI-E cards
off your Thunderbolt port; not nearly enough for an audio workstation. Though
if one of those three slots can support a Magma host card, you can then daisy-
chain to a regular Magma expansion box.

~~~
droithomme
I agree, also the problem with a $1000 expander to get 3 PCIe slots is that I
know from decades of experience that any time you have some weird standard
like this that requires special drivers, very few companies jump in and the
prices are necessarily stratospheric. Because of this, the market never
develops and support is dropped from the device before the bugs are worked
out. Even if you end up with a stable driver, it'll stop working the next time
there is an OS upgrade. So you end up running 10.n, while everyone else is on
n+1, then n+2, then no more security upgrades, so you have to switch to n+2
and throw away the now useless $1000 box.

(Not only this, but reading the ExpressBox materials it seems each PCIe card
maker is going to have to write a custom driver that specifically targets the
ExpressBox. It seems extremely unlikely to me this is going to happen for even
a few of the very few PCIe devices that have Mac support at all anyway.)

All could be avoided by either selling normally powered and priced desktops
with drive bays and PCIe slots, or at least adding USB3 support. Neither will
happen though, Apple has a very long history of backing alternative standards
in this way such as NuBus, Firewire and PCI-X.

~~~
jaylevitt
I guess the real answer is treating your computer as a set of audio
appliances, and ensuring that your editing appliance can effectively
communicate with your DSP appliance. e.g., more stuff like FX Teleport
(<http://www.fx-max.com/fxt/product.html>), RedNet
(<http://www.focusrite.com/rednet/>), AudioPort
([http://www.audioimpressions.com/support/faqs/audioport-
unive...](http://www.audioimpressions.com/support/faqs/audioport-universal)),
etc.

------
ranqet
Hackintosh.

For $1200, I built a Core i7 2600k machine, 16GB RAM, Radeon HD 6870, 128GB
SSD and 2x1TB HDD.

I considered a MacMini i7 or iMac i7, but the lack of easy (emphasis on easy!)
expandability turned me off. A MacPro was never an option because of the cost.
The hackintosh takes a little more work to get up and running, and I have to
take a 'wait-and-see' stance to upgrades, but otherwise it runs perfectly and
is as fast as a six-core MacPro.

If the Mac Pro is killed, maybe Apple could bring back the Cube. Give it 1 or
2 PCIe slots, 2 or 3 2.5" internal drive bays and a case that you can get into
easy (like, flip a couple of latches and the outer case slips off). This time
the case could be aluminum to help with the thermal issues of the original
Cube. This would be the perfect replacement to a MacPro.

Otherwise, I'll just stick with a Hackintosh to do the heavy lifting that my
MacBook Air can't handle.

------
rbritton
I don't see them abandoning the Mac Pro without filling that niche with
something else. They sell a large number of "pro" apps (e.g., Aperture, Final
Cut, Logic, etc.) that all work best when run on a Mac Pro. Speaking from
direct experience, no laptop comes close to the performance required to get
the best workflow out of those tools.

~~~
mc32
If they bump the specs on the iMacs, those are good enough --specially taking
into consideration Intel's new/upcoming processors. I know people who do FCP
on iMacs.

~~~
rbritton
Possibly, but I don't personally feel the screen on those is good enough for
pro-level photo work. Some do, but for me there's no substitute for a high-end
matte display, so the built-in one is sort of unnecessary when you already
have one or more.

~~~
salem
Plus, some people still need CRTs for their superior and consistent color
reproduction

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arihant
Mac Pro always strikes me as a weird deal. For $2499 box I get - No wireless,
No bluetooth, Xeon. Its very strange to buy such an expensive box with
expectation that it will be all inclusive only to find that you need to first
buy modules to get a wireless keyboard working.

~~~
teilo
Mac Pros have had bluetooth and wifi built in for years. Presently they come
default with a Magic Mouse, and you can add a wireless keyboard for $20.

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petercooper
The latest MacBook Pros are awesome, no doubt. But I don't see them as such an
obvious choice as Marco, and I find his standpoint odd considering he's been
complaining about their heat output/fan noise for a while now.

My Mac Pro is as silent as could be even with all 8 cores cranking away and
the heat of the CPUs isn't relevant to me at all (though I tend to use my iMac
most of the time now due to the nicer screen). Even with a MacBook Pro on the
desk, rather than the lap, maxing it out leads to phenomena.

------
antoinehersen
I think it is still important for them to cater to AV professionals since it
is part of their identity to provide for creative people.

~~~
wl
You would think so, but Apple has been really poor in this area as of late.
They discontinued Shake. They replaced Final Cut Pro with a rewrite that
catered more to hobbyists than professionals.

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teilo
To me, the craziest thing about a Mac Pro, is that it defaults to coming with
3GB of RAM in the entry-level model. Nothing else, except for the entry-level
Minis and Airs comes with less than 4GB.

~~~
owyn
That's probably partly because they haven't updated the specs since
mid-2010... but I also bought my mac pro with the minimum RAM because I could
get it a lot cheaper from a third party. I'd rather have a minimal minimum
config to save some dough.

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Mankhool
If I can get the same horsepower and internal storage on a MacBook Pro - fine
- but Apple had better make a dock for it for all of my peripherals.

~~~
stock_toaster
It feels like apple is couching their thunderbolt display as their 'dock'.
Display + firewire + usb, over a thunderbolt cable.

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cletus
The Mac Mini with an external display (obviously) is my Mac of choice for the
desktop. You can install an SSD and (now) get a quad-core CPU. The only
negative? Onboard GPU. For some people that's a dealbreaker.

Thunderbolt _might_ provide a solution for these people (but hasn't yet).

For laptops, I love my Macbook Air 13". MBPs are a reasonable option if you
want a hybrid of the Mac Mini and the Air.

The problem that always puts me off with the iMacs is how hard they are to
upgrade. You have to remove the glass. If you buy it with an SSD, you get an
SSD bracket (and you can replace that SSD). If you don't buy an SSD you don't
get that bracket and you need to do some finnicky upgrades to get it in there.

I wouldn't object so much except the iMac SSD is really expensive and, at
best, mediocre.

As nice of a package as that is, it's a dealbreaker (for me).

What I'd like to see in the Mac line is an upgradeable, affordable desktop.
Basically take a case like the Silverstone SG07B that takes a mini-ITX
motherboard (which you can get motherboards for any modern Intel CPU for) and
it also takes a double-slot GPU and has a large enough PSU to power pretty
much any modern GPU.

You can also fit in 2x 2.5" drives and 1x 3.5", which as far as I'm concerned,
is just about perfect (SSD mirrored plus a scratch disk).

That's what I hope they come out with. I'm not holding my breath however.

~~~
prodigal_erik
> What I'd like to see in the Mac line is an upgradeable, affordable desktop
> […] I'm not holding my breath however.

That's probably for the best. Their refusal to make one has kept them in a
niche of expensive disposable machines for about 25 years, both before and
after the clone vendors demonstrated how much demand there could be. Then they
noticed how many people accept expensive disposable MP3 players and phones. I
expect them to gradually abandon the computer market altogether.

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bruceboughton
What do Apple use internally? iMacs? Surely they have a tonne of Mac Pros. Is
this enough to keep them around?

