
The Case for a True Mac Pro Successor - brianwillis
http://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-pro-successor
======
tolmasky
I am an owner of the "latest" Mac Pro, and I had the liquid cooled PowerMac G5
before that. I don't really know what to feel when it comes to the Mac Pro
anymore. I used to compile WebKit a lot, and it takes forever (change one .h
file and go get some lunch while you wait). When I got my Mac Pro 2 years ago
it compiled it in under a minute I think. It was incredible. The best part
was, back then, Xcode had the distributed builds feature, so I could go
anywhere in my apartment with my Macbook Air and compiling was still crazy
fast since the work was offloaded to the Mac Pro's 12 cores on my home
network. Then they removed that feature from Xcode. I also had a two monitor
workflow, but then they broke (for me) dual display support with Lion. The Mac
Pro also doesn't support the latest and greatest graphics cards, so its not
worth it in my opinion to upgrade them for Cinema 4D or games.

I don't even know if I mind really. The reality is that for the last 3 or 4
years, it feels like Apple has more and more been pushing me to not really
love the computer experience anymore. When I think about my next "big"
purchase, I will probably build a PC. I have never done that before in my
life. I've exclusviely owned Mac. But "leaving" Mac OS X doesn't seem like a
big deal to me anymore. I'll just be trading one set of frustrations
(Messages, Notification Center, 5 minute long sleep wake up times, endless
WiFi issues, etc) for another. At least I'll actually have fast graphics.

And Xcode will suck on my Macbook Air the same way it sucks on my Mac Pro
today, so no real loss there, since I don't compile WebKit anymore. Again, its
mainly just indifference now. I don't know if I miss the days when this stuff
was fun, but Apple has certainly finally succeeded in making me see their
computers as just tools.

~~~
alexpopescu
Years ago (but not as long as tolmasky's "exclusive"), I would have given
everything to get a Mac (I was living in a place where Apple's product were
neither available nor affordable).

I spend most of my time on my computer programming (or at least I did this
until very recently).

What I've noticed in the last 2 years is that except maybe the Xcode
environment, Apple has started to ignore every other dev environments. People
have been working a lot on keeping things going (Fink, MacPort, homebrew), but
by the day my feeling is that Apple doesn't care at all about this.

Basically the target audience shifted from geeks to mass audience (click to
buy this app, watch a movie on this great display, etc.) and AppStore
developers. Business-wise it's clear they can ignore the small segment of
developers. Karma-wise I'm not convinced that's wise.

~~~
pi18n
The only way I could agree with you more is if you didn't think they were
catering to App Store developers. Xcode is terrible, the provisioning profiles
are irritating, their requirements can be inscrutable. It seems like a bad
experience compared to what few hoops Android developers have to jump through.

But I digress. With Lion and Mountain Lion is it becoming clear that they
don't want any people that know how to use computers in their target
demographic, they just want iPad users to have a unified experience.

I used to urge my friends and family to get OS X computers, but I have
reversed that opinion and now urge them to get anything else.

~~~
alexpopescu
My comments about Xcode were uninformed, based only on the fact that I don't
run into tons of complains about it. The only time I fired Xcode to compile a
project, it took me quite a bit of time to figure out where it places the
compiled files. But I categorized that as "I'm a newbie. I don't know where to
look"

~~~
pi18n
I think it's definitely not you that is the problem :) Even the latest
releases love to hog all the memory (even when idle) and mine creates zombie
processes every time I run the simulator. It's the single crashiest piece of
software my computer runs (multiple times daily).

Sometimes it cannot even copy files right; drag and drop, oops it failed, drag
and drop again, oops it already copied the files to the folder but didn't add
them to the project, now it will neither copy nor add them, you have to go
delete them yourself.

------
cheald
Somewhat cynically, I think that Apple wants to be out of the tower business
because you can't obsolete a tower every 9 months and get people to buy a new
one. Towers have user-upgradable parts, can be serviced by laymen (and thus
don't have the upsell opportunity when you have to bring it in to fix an
issue), and are generally resilient against not being the latest-and-greatest.

In a Macbook Pro, by comparison, you are charged $200 for an extra 8GB of RAM
and $500 for an extra 384 GB of SSD, not because the components or labor are
worth that, but because you'll pay whatever they want you to, because you
_can't_ upgrade it later.

For better or worse, Apple is in the appliance business now. Buy your
appliance, use it for a few months, then Craigslist it and buy the new one
when it comes out. It's obscenely profitable and they have their consumer base
trained to do it on command. Giving people something that they could keep
current for a slim fraction of the cost of a new device is not in their
interests.

~~~
fusiongyro
All the things you mention that make towers great for advanced users also make
them a hassle for normal users. When someone's sealed box has a defect, if you
know what you put in the box, your troubleshooting and repair scenarios are
vastly reduced compared to letting the consumer into the box. To a normal
consumer, knowing that they could have upgraded their tower doesn't just give
them more upgrade anxiety, it also convinces them that they're being ripped
off while the smartass kid down the street is not. The sealed box is the
ultimate equalizer.

I think all your points hold, I'm just saying there are a few somewhat less
cynical explanations that may also apply.

~~~
cheald
I think you're absolutely right, but I think that's just another point in the
"Apple as an appliance vendor" category. Sealed boxes are easier to service,
easier to replace, and easier to get past consumer hesitation with. I think
it's a rock solid business strategy (and Apple's financials would seem to
agree), but I think it makes for an absolutely abysmal _computer_ company.

I don't think that Apple wants to be a computer company anymore. A tower
wouldn't fit into who Apple is today.

~~~
bsimpson
It saddens me to think about what happens to all of these unserviceable
'devices' that keep being obsoleted so quickly.

You don't have to call yourself an environmentalist to be concerned about how
quickly we create waste, and e-waste has some pretty nasty stuff in it.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
iOS devices are serviceable by Apple. The company also has a recycling
program:

<http://www.apple.com/recycling/>

------
Samuel_Michon
I agree with the premise, but I think a larger, more capable iPad would
actually be a more influential 'halo car', given today's Apple clientele.

An iPad with a 15" screen could display twice as much information and would
allow for more on-screen controls. Apple could port the full versions of
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iOS, but also the Pro Apps like Final Cut,
Color, Aperture, and Logic. An iOS version of iBook Author could be a killer
app. I've also long dreamed of a WYSIWYG authoring suite for making iOS apps
on iOS (along the lines of Automator or Hypercard) – not for submission in the
App Store, but to run on your own iOS devices and to share with friends and
family.

Nice to have: add two Thunderbolt ports to the iPad Pro. Not only for
connecting fast SSDs, but also so that you could link another iPad Pro. This
would add a second screen, and for processor intensive tasks, the two CPUs
could work together (think xGrid or GCD).

~~~
rsl7
You know... I want a large format iOS device... but as a pro user the very
last thing I want is a sandboxed jailhouse. Apple is abandoning pro users
across the board. iOS apps are essentially toys because of the limitations of
iOS and the app store itself. The promise and the potential is there for
something truly incredible, and that's why it's so hard to watch.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
For (some) developers, I can understand they need full access to the OS, file
system, and services. However, many professionals in other lines of work don't
need such an open, vulnerable environment. For them it's more important to
have a safe, stable system that's easy to use and doesn't require a lot of
configuration. That's why I believe the future is in iOS, not OS X.

Also, for web development, I find that the iPad works very well (for me). I
have all I need with Diet Coda, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, DesignPad, Idea
Bucket, Writing Kit, and Photoshop Touch. I just wish for a larger screen.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Task switching in iOS is pretty horrible, as with most mobile OSes. If you're
switching behind that many apps you must have a high tolerance for pain.

Also I disagree with you that iOS is good for professionals. The way it
attempts to hide the idea of files makes it very inconvenient to work with
(coupled with the lack of a compelling alternative). I can't think of any
professions where files aren't important.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_"Task switching in iOS is pretty horrible"_

Four finger swipe works like a charm. [1]

 _"The way [iOS] attempts to hide the idea of files makes it very inconvenient
to work with"_

It doesn't hide documents, iOS has a different way of presenting and
organizing them than you're used to. Instead of putting them all on one pile
for you to sort out, iOS takes an app centric approach. You never have to
search for that spreadsheet you made last week, you know it's in the file
drawer in the Numbers app (and with iCloud, the spreadsheets you made on your
Mac will also be there).

Of course the standard way iOS handles files doesn't work for everyone. If you
have thousands of files you need to sift through, you might prefer using
Dropbox or SFTP with an app like GoodReader, or use a web app like Google
Docs.

[1] [http://gigaom.com/2012/04/02/how-to-use-ipad-multitasking-
ge...](http://gigaom.com/2012/04/02/how-to-use-ipad-multitasking-gestures-and-
why-you-should/)

~~~
MatthewPhillips
The app-centric approach breaks down when you have to share that data out to
colleagues who collaborate on it or _gasp_ use it on a non-Apple device. These
things can be fixed but as it stands you really have to go out of your way and
adapt your own workflow because of the limitations of the platform.

------
veidr
> "Apple should keep pushing the limits of PC performance because it’s a
> company that loves personal computers."

I love reading Siracusa, and want to agree with him here, but this sentence
stops me.

Apple clearly doesn't 'love' personal computers anymore. How much clearer
could the signs be?

They took their engineers off Mac OS X and put them on iPhone OS. Their PC OS
lagged and stagnated. The 'new' Mac Pro isn't the only insult to power users;
OS X 10.8 itself is, too. It is the worst update in (Mac) OS X history, not
only with serious show-stopping bugs, but also with new 'features' that are
ground-breaking in how dumbed-down they are[1].

Their new love is closed, power-user-hostile, quasi-disposable consumer
devices. Steve Jobs himself broke up with the personal computer in his last
years, and the company followed suit.

[1]: LaunchPad, newly-crippled Expose, disabling extra monitors in fullscreen
mode, double clicking hidden files doesn't open them, moron open-save dialogs,
by-default iCloud file storage that prevents one app from being able to open
another app's docs (even to attach as mail attachment), etc etc et

~~~
webwielder
Your list of minor interface tweaks made in 10.8 isn't giving me an
overwhelming sense of hostility toward personal computers.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
What's the last major OSX feature that wasn't bad? For a company known for its
successes, you look at Launchpad, inverse scrolling, notification center...
does _anyone_ like those features? I've never read a single positive comment
about any of them. The most positive thing I've read is that they are easy
enough to ignore.

~~~
veidr
To be fair, there are a lot. FileVault 2 is a massive improvement over the
(hackass) first version. In 10.7, Mail got dramatically better at dealing with
huge volumes (hundreds of GB, dozens of accounts) without crashing. Buttons
finally became roughly rectangular. The OS supports Retina displays, one of
the most significant general advances in recent history. Menlo beats Monaco.
Resizing windows from any edge was only 20 years too late.

Most importantly to me, (since for all my bitching, I spend a lot of my work
time writing Mac software) Xcode went from 'spectacularly awful bag of suck'
to just 'kinda sucks', and ARC, blocks, Objc-2, non-insane literal syntax are
all forces for Good.

And yes, I love inverse ('natural') scrolling and it is enabled on all my
Macs. :)

It's not that Apple does nothing at all good, it's that their focus has become
even more relentlessly "systems that the average shopper at walmart can use"
at the expense of those users who have a stronger grasp of general computing
concepts.

When they disable all the extra screens in fullscreen mode, the chances of my
dad getting confused and looking at the wrong monitor are reduced. But at the
same time, the amount of data I can see at once, and my ability to manipulate
it, are also reduced.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Those improvements are nice and all, but I'm talking about features that would
be featured on <http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/>.

Go look at that page real quick and count the number of things that are good.
Not "not bad" or "you can turn it off". Good.

~~~
webwielder
Well I love share sheets, iCloud syncing, and AirPlay, personally. Gatekeeper
is a great compromise between a fully locked down system and a fully
vulnerable one. And the new Safari is the best Safari ever, as the saying
goes. So I count 4.5 on my end.

Anyway, an OS is more than the sum of its newest features. On the whole, OS X
10.8 is a stable, polished, powerful, fully-featured operating system. There
might not have been a big feature like Time Machine or Exposé in a couple
versions, but I'd much rather use 10.8 than 10.5.

~~~
pi18n
Gatekeeper is an okay compromise. I'd feel better about it if they didn't
include restrictive app policies. What if I want to run apps that are signed
by a certificate from some third party CA? I'd feel great about it if it would
also inform me what permissions are being granted and let me disable arbitrary
permissions like internet access.

I think 10.7 and 10.8 bring more irritations than anything else. iCloud sync
and Gatekeeper are the only things I think are worth upgrading for, but the
Gatekeeper implementation is still lacking and unfree, and I use other
services to sync my files (I also think the implementation of iCloud leaves
something to be desired... and it's another form of lock-in). I'm still using
10.6 and shall use it for the foreseeable future; at least until my next
computer, which will most likely be running Linux.

------
fusiongyro
The metaphor would work but for the fact that smaller is a harder technical
challenge than bigger. They're not skirting some kind of spiritual calling to
make better technology by focusing on portable instead of workstations--if
anything, they are doing exactly what the author wants. To equate pushing the
envelope with losing money is very superficial reasoning.

~~~
jcsiracusa
Good thing the I didn't do that, eh?

As I noted in the article, there are many more axes of innovation beyond just
performance. But performance is definitely one of them!

Apple's pursuing top-end performance with gusto in its laptops and mobile
devices. But its desktops have been left to languish, not even using the
fastest available off-the-shelf CPUs and GPUs (let alone using custom high-
performance silicon designed in-house, a la the latest iOS devices).

~~~
fusiongyro
I'm saying there is no such relationship between halo cars and the Mac Pro.
They're "leaving them to languish" while inventing amazing technology on the
side of the spectrum. They've managed to make a $330 product seem
aspirational.

The more I think about your argument the less sense it makes. Great article,
well written and full of interesting facts, but I don't think your point holds
much water.

------
jpxxx
Absolutely spot-on. The day Apple scuttles the Pro is the day they have
fundamentally checked out of the computer industry.

(That mobile and portable is preposterously more profitable is beyond the
point. PCI+x86 is an empire.)

~~~
lukifer
I wonder about Tim Cook's personal history with computing; he's brilliant at
what he does, but he doesn't strike me as a long-time computer enthusiast. Nor
does Ive; his enthusiasm is wrapped up in crafting beautiful objects.

Obviously there are many other influential execs and engineers at Apple, but I
don't know of any with the pure love of Woz or Akio Toyoda, who'd be able and
willing to burn a billion dollars to push the limits of desktop computing for
its own sake.

Simply put, I think they've already checked out of the computer industry.
They're now a consumer electronics company that happens to make use of
computer-grade hardware and software engineering.

------
thrownaway2424
Would Apple really be innovating by coming out with some smoking fast
workstation? We know how to build these things: cram them full of top-of-the-
line Xeon CPUs and tons of SSDs and GPUs.

The real problem is Apple's pro software is rotten, and throwing more hardware
at it barely helps.

~~~
webwielder
What is rotten exactly? Besides the fact the FCP X debuted with some missing
features that were quickly restored in dramatically improved form.

~~~
bleair
Shake was acquired and then killed. FCP is no longer a pro application.
They've added lots of nice first time user experience things, but largely
ignored what "professional" users need. Which is fine. Apple wants to sell
software (and iphones and ipads) to Moms and Dads and college kids.

~~~
webwielder
FCP may not be a pro application for editors who use tape, but it is most
definitely a pro app for editors who have gone fully digital. I doubt Apple
spent millions of dollars and several years to rebuild FCP from the ground up
in order to sell iPhones to Moms and Dads.

------
brudgers
The analogy to Corvettes and Vipers is massively flawed. Automotive companies
use sports cars to market their brand directly via racing and indirectly when
the owners of production cars drive them down the street.

On the other hand, the days when speed was a major selling point of computers
are long passed, and online, nobody cares whether I'm surfing HN with 8 Xeon
cores of my desktop or one ARM core on my phone.

The only people who care about the MacPro are people who already want to buy
Apple products. And an Apple logo which sits under your desk doesn't promote
the brand in coffee shops and airports.

~~~
Apocryphon
Aren't gamers the equivalent to racers?

~~~
brianpan
For Apple, I think the equivalent was designers, filmmakers, and musicians.

~~~
brudgers
A filmmaker might mention Apple in the credits for a few seconds as people
file out of the theater...but would need permission to use the logo. A
musician might mention Apple in the liner notes...but iTunes doesn't deliver
jewel cases. And a designer...well "Made on a Mac" is from the Geocities age.

Racing sells cars because I can buy a Corvette and hoon it on the road in
front of my house. But a MacPro is still going to give me the same Facebook
friends and won't improve my porn.

------
kickingvegas
Trying to reconcile this post with the ghosts of past Unix workstation
vendors, who tried to push the boundaries of what you could do with
microprocessor-based computers, where spending tens of thousands of dollars
per box was common.

Datapoint as example - a SGI Onyx could run you $250,000:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx>

Fast-forward to today, all the knowledge gained in building those high-end
workstations have been distilled in the smartphones we have in our pockets
now.

So for Apple, R&D for its own sake or for controlling the narrative?

~~~
wmf
The "halo" strategy only works if you have a low-end product for people to buy
after the halo sucks them in.

~~~
thrownaway2424
See also: Chromebook Pixel. The mere existence of that thing has to be driving
sales of the $250 Chromebooks.

------
orbitur
Apple _does_ have a "halo car."

It's the Retina MacBook Pro.

Most people aren't willing to spend $1700+ for a laptop, with that case and
that screen. They'll pick up one of the Airs or the old style MBPs. The Retina
MBP is nice to look at when browsing at the store, and subconsciously, they
know they'll have it in 3 years when the technology trickles down the product
line.

To Apple, it's not about raw performance. It's about the total package. Which
is unfortunate, because it means they're willing to make concessions in
performance.

~~~
city41
When you take the top standard MBP and bump its memory to 8gb and give it an
SSD, it costs more than the Retina.

I do see your point, especially with the top end retina, but the retina line
isn't way out there in the way a Pro is beyond an iMac.

------
watmough
I run a HP Z620 Workstation with a bunch of processing power as my daily.

This is HP's 'Mac Pro'! I'm guessing it serves to keep the HP boffins doing
cool things. It has 16 GB memory and a XEON on a daughter card (and the same
again on the main board), which can be unclicked and slid out. All custom, and
all different from the sister high-end box, the Z820.

This is serious bad-assery, and more power to HP for doing it.

I sincerely hope that Apple build a great new Mac Pro, and keep the flame of
high-performance, no-compromise hardware alive.

------
mark-r
Interestingly enough Google just introduced their halo device, the Chromebook
Pixel. It seems somebody believes in the concept.

------
fierarul
It's only been 6 years since Apple dropped 'Computer' from its name...
(<http://youtu.be/P-a_R6ewrmM?t=1h41m49s> ).

Their 'halo' product must begin with a lowercase 'i'.

------
jws
I say go the other way: Sell a version of OS X without video drivers. (ok,
maybe a text console so it can cry piteously when it is broken and you can
create an account or something if you have to.)

Remote desktop to manage; if you have a supported GPU it is 100% free for
compute; only support chipsets and processors that Apple supports anyway. The
engineering cost is minimal. Compatible hardware is the customer's problem.
People that need horsepower for their render farms or whatever can build or
buy the systems that make sense the month they need to buy. People that need
to stick code in a hosting service can do that. Stop making me do _my_
engineering twice; once for the native Mac OS, and once for the servers. Stop
losing customers when the Pro line gets too long in the tooth. Give it a "no
brainer" price. You aren't doing much engineering and it isn't canibalizing
your human interaction machines, it protects them from migration.

~~~
larsberg
I'm not sure about the engineering cost being minimal. My research group
builds a compiler for a parallel programming language, and we have trouble
getting reliable performance on OSX. Many of the things you take for granted
on Linux are not there:

\- Pinning the kernel to one core

\- Reliable pinning of threads (instead of just suggesting that groups be co-
located on the same cache bank)

Honestly, we have a fairly long list to even get to basic performance, and
that's before you start hammering network stack reliability (as my distributed
systems friends complain), etc. OSX on the client with Linux on the server
works pretty nicely, and I'm somewhat concerned that the OSX team would have
to drop client work for a whole release to focus on hardening the server
experience, as well as figuring how what they need to implement to be able to
support the wide variety of Linux libraries that don't quite work due to holes
in the OS that performance people rely on (numactl; papi; etc.).

That said, I thought most of the Apple developers have Mac Pros under their
desks. If for no other reason, to maintain a highest-end client workstation,
it makes sense to keep things alive. But the server sell seems a bit of a
reach, engineering-wise.

~~~
jws
I don't think you'll pry linux developers away with this. But for people
adding distributed backend workers to existing OS X apps it makes great sense,
even if you don't end up at the same speed as a tweaked out Linux
implementation.

Likewise, you probably won't beat a good Linux network stack for jamming bits
through, but lots of people just need to be up and running, and if the code is
shared with the client, that's great.

I think its a case of "showing up", they can worry about being best later, if
it makes sense, but showing up at all is important. Apple just lost a premier
video production house run by a friend of mine over the Mac Pro lifecycle.
They'd have stocked up on render machines and waited out the front ends if
they could, but that wasn't an option.

(Apple will beat my last round of 100% Intel motherboards in Linux servers
which have a years old, unresolved flaw in one of their two ethernet
controllers that make them reset whenever you push them too hard. They also
have a good chance of beating Linux in GPU computation because the vendors
actually care a bit about Macs. I've got a lot of GPU power laying around that
I can't use at all in Linux.)

------
specialist
What does Apple use for their in-house compute heavy tasks?

If there's an internal user base doing important work, then I think the
professional line is safe. The whole "eat your own dog food" phenomenon.

Knowing no one, I can't guess what that situation is.

~~~
charlesism
It is common knowledge that Apple mainly uses PC hardware in their data
centers. You can get an idea of the third party products they use by searching
the jobs postings at jobs.apple.com. I'd bet they would be open to using non-
Apple hardware in other areas if they thought there was a good business case.

------
bleair
This blog post comments that "Consider Larrabee, Intel’s project to create a
massively multi-core x86-based GPU. Rumor has it that Apple was working on
integrating the technology into a Mac Pro. Intel eventually scuttled the
project, but consider what would have happened if it had taken off, reshaping
the GPU market in the process." and while Intel has not released a consumer
oriented graphics card based on Larrabee, they have released a card called the
Xeon Phi based on this tech. For the HPC world the card has the potential to
compete well with nvidia and ati's gpu compute offerings. It's a specialized
chunk of hardware for sure, but it is not a failure.

[http://insidehpc.com/2013/03/05/benchmarking-intel-xeon-
phi-...](http://insidehpc.com/2013/03/05/benchmarking-intel-xeon-phi-vs-sandy-
bridge/)

As for an updated Mac Pro, all I can do is chuckle. Apple cares about selling
high profit margin consumer electronics items to millions of consumers. Apple
has long long ago dropped any concern for people who were "professional mac
users" (see shake, final cut pro, etc. etc. etc.)

------
Someone
We know that there hasn't been a significant update to the line in ages. We
also know Cook has publicly stated the line is not dead and that there will be
something for pros this year. That's where facts end and speculation begins.
For me, the big question is "what are they waiting for?"

I don't think it is a CPU; they could easily ship something with faster intel
CPUs, and I doubt (understatement) they would release a pro line with Apple-
designed ARM CPUs (that would certainly explain the wait, though).

So, what is it they are waiting for? Faster RAM? Unlikely. A terabyte SSD? I
doubt it. Some retina 3D monitor? Unlikely; that could only cause delays if it
were built into the hardware and I would not expect pro stuff to have a built-
in display. Some interconnect (optical thunderbolt? Something wireless?) that
will allow them to come up with a new form factor of a pro box? That, I think,
is the most likely. But hey, let them surprise us.

------
redthrowaway
The Halo Car is an interesting parallel, but one that I believe to be
fundamentally flawed.

Here's the problem: Apple isn't building a Corvette, or a Viper, or even an
LFA. It's building the world's fastest steam locomotive.

Is it impressive? By Jove, yes. Is it fast? Ridiculously so. Is it powerful?
Let me count the ways.

Does it do something people want?

...

The problem with the Mac Pro is that it's a solution to a problem almost no
one has. It uses server hardware to solve consumer problems. Great, but ...
why? Is there any consumer app out there that really takes advantage of 12
cores? Seriously, what applications have been parallelized to that degree?
Anything that benefits from 12 cores will benefit more from CUDA and massive
GPU parallelization.

I like the idea of the Mac Pro. I like going balls out just for the hell of
it. I just don't think it's a computer that anyone can really use.

~~~
jcsiracusa
The problem with the Porsche 918 is that it's a solution to a problem almost
no one has. It uses racing hardware to solve commuter problems. Great,
but…why? Is there any public road out there that really takes advantage of 820
horsepower? Seriously, what routes have been designed for these speeds?
Anything that benefits from 820 horsepower will benefit more from lighter
weight and a better CD.

I like the idea of the Porsche 918. I like going balls out just for the hell
of it. I just don't think it's a car that anyone can really use.

~~~
redthrowaway
The Porsche 918 is a prestige product, though. The jet set and saudi princes
can point to the 918 as a status symbol. The Mac Pro doesn't have that going
for it.

All hypercars, from the Huayra, to the La Ferrari (gag), to the Veyron are
ridiculously impractical. However, that's a feature, not a bug. Their very
impracticality cements their position in the hypercar pantheon.

The Mac Pro just doesn't have that cachet. It doesn't give you bragging
rights, except among a tiny subset of the population. Even then, they'd likely
be more impressed by triple-SLI'd GPUs in a liquid-cooled tower with a
ridiculously overclocked CPU.

~~~
jcsiracusa
Only a tiny subset of the population cares about fast cars. A larger portion
cares about _expensive_ cars, of which supercars are only a small subset. Many
people are dazzled by wealth. Far fewer know or care anything about
performance.

------
Tloewald
I want to see whether Apple delivers on Tim Cook's alleged, cryptic comment.
Given some of the very clever things Apple has done technically (GCD, neatly
adding closures to C, Thuderbolt,...) I remain hopeful Apple has at least one
nice surprise left for the Mac Pro faithful.

But don't assume it will be a new Mac Pro. Why not a new portable that can
transparently offload compute-intensive operations to the cloud, and
seamlessly utilize external acceleration via Thunderbolt?

------
ROFISH
I agree with the idea, but Apple is stuck with Intel's Xeon roadmap, which at
this point multi-processor is lagging far behind the single processor lines.

~~~
wmf
Sandy Bridge EP has been out for, what, nine months and Apple hasn't used it.

------
codex
A Mac Pro with a Xeon Phi would be a genius move--satisfying the core graphics
market while not requiring the use of insanely priced general purpose Xeons,
which are intended for the datacenter, not the PC. Most buyers don't want to
run a database, they want to crunch pixels. Of course, they need Adobe on
board. Given how shittily Adobe makes software, we could be waiting a while.

------
rayiner
The iPad is Apple's "halo car." It's their RISC machine with in-house designed
CPU running their in house designed OS. The Mac Pro is at best a assemblage of
off-the-shelf PC parts in a nice case. Want to build the most powerful Mac Pro
possible? Just buy the most expensive CPU/motherboard Intel is offering that
day and pair it with a ton of RAM. Done before lunchtime.

------
stcredzero
How about something with a separate screen like a Mac Mini, but in a much
bigger vertical profile chassis based on iMac internals, more CPU cores,
liquid cooling or heat pipes, with lots of passive cooling using its increased
surface area? (Like the area the screen would have taken up?)

