We already talked about iOS 7 yesterday (after a night of sleep, it’s only looking worse and worse – look at this, for Fiona’s sake!), so now it’s time to talk about the downright stunning and belly flutters-inducing new Mac Pro. As former owner and huge, huge, huge fan of the PowerMac G4 Cube – I haven’t been this excited about an Apple product since, well, I would say the iMac G4. This is the Apple I used to love.
For me personally, Apple had its heyday in the G4 era. The PowerMac G4,, the PowerMac G4 Cube, and the iMac G4 rank high in my list of favourite computers of all time, due to their playful design and clear form-over-function. There are enough function-over-form computers in the world, and between the endless stream of boring beige boxes, Apple’s whimsical hardware design stood out. They were by and large not the best computers out there, but they were the most distinctive.
Four years ago, all the way back in 2009, I wrote an article about how I felt Apple had lost its way when it came to hardware design.
Somewhere along the way, Apple decided to abandon its playful, crazy, and wacky hardware design in favour of a design direction that was sterile, white, and metallic. Apple hardware has become boring, generic, uninspiring. Sure, it’s still beautiful – but it’s beautiful in the same way my Ikea frying pan is beautiful; it’s clean, highly functional, pretty, and indestructible – but it doesn’t exactly make my heart fill itself with longing.
Apple “ran right out of imagination and fairy dust”, in my view. For almost a decade now, Apple’s designs have been boring, predictable, grey, unimaginative, and very, very, very evolutionary. I have an iMac, but only because I personally believe it’s the best home computer you can possibly buy, after doing all the calculations and feature comparions. When I saved up for an iMac G4 over ten years ago, I did so with my heart. Fast forward to late last year, and I chose the iMac I’m writing this on with my brain.
Yesterday evening, Apple introduced its first product in over a decade that evokes that same feeling as the iMac G4 did, or the PowerMac G4 Cube. I don’t really know if the new Mac Pro is exactly what actual ‘pro’ users want (I’ll leave that for you guys in the comments to decide) – but my heart skipped a few beats when we huddled around my friend’s white MacBook last night while we waited for dinner to be finished, and I first laid my eyes on the pictures of the Mac Pro.
This is Apple at its very best. Distinctive, unique, one-of-a-kind, and different from everybody else in the industry. This is a product worthy of the Apple mark, instead of just another iteration of a run-of-the-mill aluminium slab. I have no use for a Mac Pro at all, but my heart is already tugging me along all the way to the bank. I want this thing. I want this thing so bad.
Welcome back, Apple. I’m glad you found that bottle of fairy dust again.
The new design looks AWESOME! I went through the Apple page and every bit looks exciting… except for the cylindrical shape. It looks like a trash can – I think people will wind up tossing wads of paper at the top as they confuse it for the waste paper basket in their office. Oh well, no one bats a thousand…
Edited 2013-06-11 17:45 UTC
Looks exactly like a bear canister to me: http://solosoutheast.com/BearCanNew.jpg
OOOH so pretty!
Actually I 100% do not get why this design is considered attractive. It is assy IMO and it is very inconsistent with Apple’s brand look.
Nope, they copied AquaPark’s AquaBox watercooling tower with central airflow :
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/the_aquabox_(passive_watercool…),5.html
http://www.info-mods.com/actualite-com-4199-Test_de_l_Aquabox.html
http://aquapark.en.ec21.com/Liquid_cooling_system–834864_835052.ht…
Yeah, I admit, I bought one…
Kochise
edit : if parsing fails
http ://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/the_aquabox_(passive_watercooling),5. html
Edited 2013-06-12 13:23 UTC
I’m just not sure how it will work on desks. I’m guessing it’s between 30-35cm; which is roughly the height of many monitors.
Do you parade it’s existence, or hide it in a shadowy corner? I think the days of putting it on the floor are over, especially since it’s pulling up all the dust.
I almost wish there was a horizontal mounting option- it would fit behind my monitor nicely.
>I almost wish there was a horizontal mounting option- it would fit behind my monitor nicely.
Well, the machine is engineered around a vertical cooling core.
The heat rises through the column and is expelled at the top.
Even though it has a large fan, I’m sure a horizontal placement will mess up the cooling efficiency.
I think it’s actually quite clever engineering, having all components share a single heat sink and also share a single fan. Neat stuff.
9.9 in (25 cm) tall, 6.6 in (17 cm) in diameter.
It’s pretty teensy.
another expensive sacrifice to the altar of form over function…
Maybe Apple’s thinking is that third time’s a charm (at cracking the “cube”)
Seeing as how you couldn’t possibly have used one, and have no idea how well, or otherwise, it functions, this comment can only be ascribed to bias.
Wow, my own personal opinion being based on a personal bias? No sheet Sherlock!
You weren’t expressing an opinion. Opinions are indicated by things like “I think”, “In my opinion”, IMHO etc.
You were expressing a fact (or so you thought):
“another expensive sacrifice to the altar of form over function”
I just pointed out that your point was pure speculation. If you don’t have any evidence for something you say, it’s probably best to just not say anything until you do.
Everything everyone writes in a forum like this is opinion unless they express measurements or some other non-subjective information. His statement was subjective ergo his opinion.
I don’t need one. I have no real use for one. I probably cannot afford one. I want one all the same.
Despite all my previous derisory comments about Apple, when they come up with the goods, they don’t just engineer computers, they engineer *desire*.
In any case, within a nanosecond, tablets have become an irrelevance for me.
(Edited for the effects of two pints of Hooky Gold wrestling with a phone keyboard).
Edited 2013-06-11 18:24 UTC
No one could have said that in a better way.
I want to keep my laptop, and connect to nvidia’s remote solution for super duper performance…
Thanks but I think the Hooky Gold (a very palatable real ale) helped!
I’m with you… and I am so invested in Windows at the moment that it would be crazy for me to do so (altho’ I COULD run Windows on it too…
) But I will stick with building my own PC for now.
But yeah… I want it.
Design wise very impressive, but is it practical?
Thunderbolt cables to attach to external storage (make sure they don’t get accidentally disconnected…)
Nice and compact, so thieves can load a back pack up with 3 maybe 4 (try that with the old Mac Pro…) and be out in a few seconds.
I seriously doubt that it is. It’s made to fit well together, not fit well into “your” work environment(where you might have a ton of peripherals)
I am not a “pro” user, but I own an ’06 Mac Pro, which has basically been working flawlessly for the past 7 years that it’s been powered up 24×7.
This is the next “no more floppy drive” device from Apple. It’s effectively done away with internal expansion, beyond memory. I don’t know if a single socket device can upgrade to a dual socket device, I somehow doubt it. You might be able to swap out CPUs if you’re clever, like some folks with the current crop of Pros can do.
But, that’s really it.
Everything else is plugging in to ThunderBolt. Drives, displays, even extra GPUs in theory.
The expansion bus is no longer an edge connector, it’s a serial cable.
This will bring expense to expansion, as each device will need it’s own enclosure and power supply. You can use a multiple drive enclosure to get more bang for your buck. In theory you can get a card cage box with PCI edge connectors to plug in current crop cards. I don’t know the driver shenanigans involved with that, or if that will “just work”.
The dark side of this design is that whatever elegance the device has currently goes out the window once you start expanding it. With the beast that is the current Mac Pro, most of your expansion in internal and it remains as is — an enormous, heavy, gleaming aluminum tower. Once set, never to move again.
When I got the Mac Pro, it was my hope for it to be a 10 year machine. The lack of a 32bit video pipeline killed that with Mtn. Lion, otherwise it would be going strong and staying current. Even though there are few GFX cards for Mac Pros, there are some, and I’ve upgraded mine in time.
I don’t know if this machine can be a 10 year machine. Ostensibly it can, if we can upgrade the GPUs externally. Yea, machines are much faster today. A Man Mini has comparable stats to my Mac Pro. But, just. And it has no legs. It’s a 1-2 year machine before being tossed aside.
This one might be a 5+ year machine, as is. If the GPUs can hold out.
As is, it seems like “home weather modeling” is not out of line on this box. The GPU should hold there own for many purposes, for some time.
But we’ll see what the $2500 version of this machine comes with. I fully expect the base model on the Apple Store to be about this price point, since Apple builds to price points.
The “10 year” apple refers to has nothing to do with the specs of this specific model being “relevant and current” for a decade, or each machine being an investment that can be used for 10 years by the consumer.
They refer to the basic architecture of the system being of use for apple for at least 10 years. I personally think that is not the case, since it is a single socket architecture, and thus not very scalable for the professional market.
The external expansion, however, makes a lot of sense: customers can keep their drive arrays and all their data, as well as some PCI-expansion chassis for low bandwidth devices that they may have made an investment on. And simply “upgrade” to a newer “cylinder” when there is a new CPU/GPU combo available by simply swapping the processing cylinder to a newer revision.
I should caution that “it makes sense” depends on the price point Apple under which apple ends up delivering these machines. My guess it that the device will be too expensive, and as such… most of the value proposition of this architecture will be rendered moot.
Edited 2013-06-11 18:58 UTC
You’re confusing Apples 10 year with my 10 year. My 10 year is exactly that, my 10 years. 10 years on my desk — unrelated to Apple. The basic premise being that the interfaces on that machine were not going away any time soon. The capacity of the machine would be enough to last 10 years (at the time, 2TB internals hard drive + 16GB of RAM, but the hard drives have crushed the 2TB barrier), and while CPU were getting faster, they weren’t getting that much faster that quickly. Simply we were topping out the curve of CPU performance that in 10 years it wouldn’t be a 8088 at 4.77Mhz. The CPUs would be “fast enough” for 10 years.
All this remained true to form. The only unexpected thing was the 32-bit video sub system that Apple obsoleted in OS X.8, Mountain Lion, when it mandated 64b for everything, all the time. I think the next gen Mac Pro fixed that issue.
So, I’m just not sure if this machine would well serve a consumer for 10 years. 5 easy, just not sure about 10. Were it not for the 32b video subsystem, my first gen Pro would have easily.
Sorry, I misread your comment I guess.
Still 10 years out of the same machine, in a field which advances almost exponentially seems not that feasible. Of course that depends on usage patterns for the machine…
Truth, but to be fair, save for select fields, while machines continue to get faster and faster, software is not quite outpacing them in terms of demands for resources.
The biggest demands of modern software is mostly memory. CPU demands have somewhat increased, but even today much of that need is being met by multiple cores since they’re now ubiquitous (cores I have).
Compilers don’t need exponential more amounts of CPU, databases don’t, word processing doesn’t, etc. The largest consumer of CPU resources is video, and the other growth consumer is video games and GPUs. Since I run a Mac, I’ve already disqualified myself in being a high end gamer. But, say, Diablo 3, runs fine, as an example. (I upgraded the GPU once couple years ago. The existing card failed.) I also don’t do any video work.
The other bottleneck was I/O and SSDs have “solved” that problem for the mid-term. Now, memory is the new disk, to the point that Apple (among others I’m sure) is willing to “sacrifice” abundant CPU resources for memory by compressing idle VM pages.
Clearly the software has become more complex, does more things, is “slower” over time given static hardware environment. But the differences aren’t dramatic enough that “seat of the pants” notices it. I do not consider my machine to be “slow” today. Rather, it’s “fast enough”.
By over specifying and over building early, I save myself from mucking with hardware, upgrading, moving software, etc. on a “routine” basis. A frustrating and painful experience in most cases, even on a Mac. I don’t enjoy messing with computers.
Plug it in, set it up, plug in a Time Machine drive, hit “update” when it lights up. Blow the cat fur out maybe once a year.
7 years, and I’ve lost my Time Machine drive once, and the video card died on me. I think my DVD is sick too.
>> The expansion bus is no longer an edge connector, it’s a serial cable.
The expansion bus is *AGAIN* not an edge connector, it’s a serial cable. Steve Jobs hailed this as a great advancement in computing when the original Macintosh was launched: It was sealed, because it was an “appliance”, but it had two 1Mbps serial ports which he said were an insanely great way to provide expansion. It was not, at the time, so the Mac II came with NuBus.
Now we’re back to square one with a serial bus. OK, Thunderbolt is 20K times faster than the original RS423, and serial buses have proved their immense practicality, especially USB. But it still looks stupid to me to pay a fortune to have an insanely beautiful computer on the desk, only nestled in a jumble of data cables and power cables and power warts and different but equally ugly external boxes.
It will look insanely elegant, however, if you simply plug it into LAN and file to shared servers, and use Bluetooth (Apple) keyboards, mice and monitors, which looks like the way this thing should be used.
You are missing one thing though, the external enclosures will probably cost more than the MacPro itself. Thunderbolt enclosures today cost about $500 a pop and go to thousands of dollars.
Don’t count on it. Thunderbolt2 is too slow and has high latency for that.
It’s a beautiful device, but very un-Pro.
Well maybe It’s not better than an iMac G4 or the original iMac… but certainly it’s at the same level of creativity.
Pure genius, disruptive, inspiring and functional. That’s why We love Apple and no stupid iGadgets.
Functional? It’ll into a spaghetti nightmare once you add a few devices to it. It’s like the original MacBook Air all over again: impressive engineering, but form over function. Except, of course, if its function is to sell Thunderbolt expansion devices.
In the same way that every other desktop computer we had.
Yeah, but more so. At least with most desktops some of the expansion was internal and out of the way once you connected it.
Speak for yourself, iGadgets are the top sellers and have the best mobile library. I can always build my own Xeon tower if I want one for less than half the price of whatever Apple offers. Maybe not a tube but there are all kinds of itx shapes to choose from.
I’d buy one just for its looks.
The original iMac (G3), the iMac G4 and the Cube. It has indeed been a while since Apple came with not only a beautiful computer, but also one that emits a personality.
I don’t find this design beautiful. In fact I think it’s rather ugly (particularly when compared to the Cube which was “eye candy”, But beauty is a matter of personal preference.
However what really does interest me about the Mac Pro is how it’s cooling works. From an engineering perspective, I thing the design is impressive – perhaps even beautiful at an intellectual level if not aesthetically pleasing at an emotional level.
Not sure if I’d want to buy one though – I’m not the biggest fan of OS X (not that I think there’s anything wrong with it – that’s just personal preference) and the price tag of Apple’s hardware is a little expensive if you’re just planning on wiping the devices and install Linux / FreeBSD.
I don’t want to damage my fanboy image, but a little voice inside of me says we need to wait to see if the cooling actually works. It’s easier to say that something works than to make it happen.
The Cube looked nicer and so did the iMac G4 (IMHO). But they are no more (well, I do have an iMac G4) and the Mac Pro soon will be and be the most powerful Mac ever. Only to imagine that power in such a small shell makes it beautiful for me.
And I guess they’d make very nice servers.
It looks like to me the graphics are upgradable with those two daughter boards for the GPUs actually. It just seems that it will be some proprietor boards instead. You probably have to go to the Apple store to get new graphics cards when they come out instead of installing them yourself.
You can also see in the many pictures of the demo units that the boards are mirror layouts with “A” and “B” labels on them. It even looks like there were holes for another socket connector on the bottom of the second mirrored layout board for an option of a second PCIe SSD storage. I’m sure that will be a build option at purchase for that.
People look at this thing and don’t see much upgradability with it, but I do. The case comes off with one lock/latch and those boards look like the come out easily with just a torx screwdriver.
Again, I just think you’ll be bringing it to the Apple Store for graphics GPU upgrades instead of doing it at your desk.
I think the reason Apple went down this route is because its cheaper for them to make, but I also think another problem is the Thunderbolt ports require audio and video integration. The proprietor boards ensure the thunderbolt ports work as intended. Like, I’ve read when you add a PCIe thunderbolt card to the current/old Mac Pros, you can’t hook up a monitor to them because it doesn’t have the means to pass the video and audio signals to your sound and graphics.
They have to make the experience be the same as you have with your laptop. You plug in your Thunderport device in the Mac Pro or your Macbook Pro, should work the same.
Apple are making these things user friendly like the make all there products. The “Pros” that can afford these things have IT departments deal with expansion stuff anyway.
The only decent Mac was the expandable, maintainable, cheese grater Mac Pro – that’s why I bought one. Now Apple have released a form over function, suppository shaped, replacement. I won’t buy one and if I ever need another OS X workstation I’ll be looking at a Hackintosh.
The only good thing about the new Mac Pro is that it has reminded me that large numbers of utter cretins support Apple no matter how ridiculous their products.
No you won’t, at least not after the first month of keeping a hackintosh maintained. It makes using Gentoo Linux as your primary desktop os look painless by comparison.
“No you won’t, at least not after the first month of keeping a hackintosh maintained”
^^ POS, or you are dumb
I’ve always found Gentoo to be quite easy to maintain. Most things are automated and if you don’t do anything stupid not is likely to break.
Bahaha, ain’t that the truth. This is why REAL power users can’t have nice things.
These days, you don’t have to do any real innovation. Just put a PC in a cylinder that looks like an Imperial torture droid, and you’ll have nimrods lined up around the block, probably clutching their aluminum iPhone 5 or HTC One fashion accessories.
Thing is, I KIND OF understand this obsession with form over function when it comes to phones… I mean, if you’re using them as status symbols, at least you carry it around with you, so others can see how cool you are. Some people will spend $2,000 on a hand bag that probably cost $.50 to manufacture in some Vietnamese sweatshop because it makes them feel important. I could never understand the mentality of such a person, but at least I can comprehend it on some basic level.
But when it comes to a device that probably sits on the floor and/or under a desk in your house, I just don’t get it. I’ve even done a Google search trying to understand the psychology of people who care about such inane bullshit, and came up empty-handed. Fact is, if this machine were a ‘beige box’, nobody would care in the least. When choosing a new PC, how ‘ugly’ the case is or isn’t has never even factored into the equation for me. In fact, I find those gussied up cases with led lights and shit to be EXTREMELY annoying. They could all be beige boxes for all I care.
If you were to judge a person by how beautiful they are, in total disregard for what’s on the inside, modern society would call you shallow. But apparently, we’re supposed to be fixated on the ‘sexiness’ of inanimate objects. If you ask me, our priorities are in the wrong place
Edited 2013-06-11 21:06 UTC
… of course there is always the possibility that you may just not be that good at googling stuff.
You don’t need to be good at googling stuff: it reads your mind (then leaks the content to NSA) and convey the very meaning of your aleatory babble to deliver something useful.
I voted you up. I too hate shiny boxes with lots of led lights disturbing the darkness of my room when i go to sleep.
But, somehow i do understand the people who buy this: they like fashion and art, and they do like harmony in the place that he lives. They like art panels in their walls, well designed and build furniture, nice wall painting, a good carpet, aleatory decor objects… all matching each other. And they go to great lengths to assure that all fits his taste, doing this for themselves, not to show. For them, power user or not, i do find a use for this shiny aluminum cylinder.
I say that because i’m one of them. But speaking frankly, there’s lots of well designed PC cases that fits this purpose very well, and way more cheaper.
I just hope that this move by Apple makes motherboard manufacturers to take in consideration that cases could be something else, other than a square box.
But this is not a ‘decor object’ – it is an APPLIANCE. You usually don’t go out and buy a coffee maker you didn’t even want just because it would look good in your kitchen. And if you do, you’re a f–king idiot.
Ill get modded down of course, but what the heck
People throw the word innovation around without understanding what it means…
Inovation: Noun
1. A new method, idea, product, etc.
2. The action or process of innovating.
Common Synonyms: Novelty, Newness, Departure, Modification
My only point really is this IS innovation – you just don’t like it. That’s fine and all, I totally get that and you are certainly entitled. But you say it’s not real innovation… What is? Apple is essentially an VAR when talking about anything north of tablets – they don’t make computers – they “package” them. If their package is just like all the other packages, well then that ARE NOT innovating are they?
In a nutshell, if it was a big beige box it would most certainly be LESS innovative, wouldn’t it?
There are lots of people who feel like you do about this. I think it is simply a lack of perspective on human psychology.
Apple makes computers and gadgets – but they sell them primarily based on refined design. Sure, lots of people buy these kinds of things purely to look cool or whatever – I don’t deny that at all. But it’s not having the “thing” that makes such a person feel “cool” – it is the fact that they want others to see them as someone who appreciates such things (design, asthetics, etc.) and is willing to pay for it. It is the epitome of a status symbol. Such people are shallow, I will spend no time defending them.
There are lots of people though that actually appreciate refined design. They buy nice things – nice furniture, nice cars, nice houses, nice art, nice wine, etc. They appreciate such things beyond how it makes them look to others – because they really don’t care what other people think, they have money, like to spend it in ways that make them happy, and can easily afford it. They are called “rich” and they are the target of a great deal of commerce in market economies…
There are still others that do some of that even though that are NOT rich, they are more picky though. Some will buy high end scotch or beer, some splurge on clothes, some on furniture, etc. They are not rich, but they selectively spend excess money on certain things because they simply appreciate those things. It is a form of self reward and has nothing at all to do with image or status symbols.
Apple does things the way they do because they want THESE kinds of people to buy their products. They do this because they like to operate at very high margins, and this is how ALL high margin products are sold.
You appeal to a sense of taste and aesthetics, you present a product that obviously took lots of effort, you make certain you present it in a way that leaves no question to the fact they you really thought about how it is made and how it all goes together. Then you charge a lot of $$$ for it.
That is how luxury cars are sold, that is how fine cigars are sold, that is how good scotch is sold, etc. It is how Pioneer managed to sell Plasma TVs for $10,000 when everyone else was selling them for $3000. I could keep going FOREVER.
Point is there is some item that you buy, yes YOU – that can falls into this category. If there isn’t you are not human… It may be as simple as buying Coke instead of no-name Cola, but you do it. Everyone does.
It is emphatically not only about status symbols and looking cool… There is more to it than that.
Conveniently for Apple, there is one particular demographic that they simple don’t care AT ALL about appealing to – it is people who don’t appreciate what they do. If you think of phones or computers as all being the same, look and feel doesn’t matter, one beige box is just as good as another, well they don’t really care about you buying their products – you are their kryptonite and they don’t want you.
If they spent an ounce of effort trying to make these people happy they would turn into AST, Hewlett Packard, Gateway, Dell, HP, Compaq, etc. Another boring OEM on a race to the bottom on pricing… I’m not saying that an Apple computer is better than a Dell or HP or whatever, I’m saying that Apple’s business model depends on them not selling the same stuff that everyone else sells… It has to be different or they can’t justify the pricing – the key is they effectively convince quite a lot of people that their idea of different = better.
My point (I do have one) is that being frugal about computers is fine – there is nothing at all wrong with it. Some people just don’t care about form and only want function. To each their own an all that. The solution is simple – don’t buy Apple stuff. There are LOTS of alternatives.
But please don’t assume that all people that do care about such things are just trying to look “cool” – its infuriating. It would be like me calling you a cheapskate or a tightass – it is nothing but a form of name calling.
I really don’t think that you are either of those things btw. I’m a middle aged guy on a middle class salary. I have a Macbook Air – one of the few things I splurged on, and I really REALLY like it. Fact is I’m more embarrassed to haul it around than anything else – specifically because I know some people assume that I must be a techno-snob or something…
I can’t afford (and don’t want) a Mac Pro. But I don’t automatically think that people that can and do are sheep… There is more to it than that.
Hats off to this post
I am not convinced myself that Apple, in particular, do provide the additional value that their high margins should require. But that was quite a beautifully written explanation of how the high-end market works.
Edited 2013-06-13 06:21 UTC
Assuming that nobody has ever released a PC in a cylinder design, then I guess it technically counts as innovation. But it’s not the kind of innovation that actually matters, because it likely has ZERO impact on the way that the machine operates. In fact, it probably limits the expandability options, so technically this form of innovation actually HAMPERS the overall workmanship of the product. And trust me, I’m not the only one that thinks this way:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/13/4423844/cant-innovate-anymore-my-…
Now, don’t get me wrong… I have nothing against owning nice things. I understand why a luxury car sells more than a low-end Hyundai. When it comes to phones, I care about things such as ergonomics, and whether or not its comfortable to hold. But companies like Apple have figured out that you can ship a product with half the functionality of the competition, and as long as you make it shinier than everyone else’s, you can convince millions of mouth breathers that it is somehow a superior product. That, my friend, is not REAL innovation. If you’re going to make something different, then at LEAST make it different in a way that counts.
As you alluded to, if this thing came in a plain, beige box, nobody would give two shits about it. Even if it was a solid case that was quiet, easy to get into, and virtually indestructible, nobody would care. But they put it in a f**king can, and suddenly people lose their minds. Several folks in this thread said they didn’t even want a new PC, but were thinking about buying it anyway. Because it is round. So, yes…. SHALLOW, I say.
Having said that, why do I care if people want to waste their money on such nonsense? Because it is having a detrimental effect on the entire industry, as other companies try to follow Apple’s lead and concentrate more on form than function. You see it from Microsoft with Metro and the dumbing down of Windows 8. You see it with Google, who is busy removing features from Android (like CIFS and SD card support), and ‘beautifying’ their products while at the same time gimping functionality that was present in older versions. The new Google Maps is an example of this. Try to find such things as the ‘search nearby’ or multiple route destination options in the new preview. You won’t find them. But hell, at least it’s pretty to look at, right? They’ve essentially dumbed down the interface to a single search box. I guess that could be considered innovative, but is not the kind of innovation I’m looking for.
Edited 2013-06-14 00:44 UTC
I said already that I don’t want and can’t afford one of these anyway – but when I look the Mac Pro and mull over what it is, the fact that it “looks” cylindrical seems completely besides the point to me…
I don’t see a product that is the result of market research design – its not like the pointy heads at Apple sat around trying to come up with what look and shape they should the next Mac Pro should have and settled on a black cylinder because they thought that would be the most effective way to wow the crowd at the WWDC…
I see an elegant solution to an engineering problem… They have upwards of 400W of heat to get rid of, how do they do that while maintaining the smallest physical and acoustic footprint possible?
Imo it is the complete opposite… A cylinder with a large central heatsink and a single fan is one solution (one of the better ones too) you might get if you were trying to solve the problem I just outlined above. It is the way the machine operates – it is in fact its fundamental design. It is not a matter of form over function at all, its the opposite (as someone else has already pointed out on this thread – http://www.osnews.com/thread?564494 ).
Thing is you probably don’t give a cr*p about your workstation being small and quiet – and you have every right to not care about that… In the grand scheme of things small and quiet probably rate pretty low on your desired feature list for a workstation… But there ARE people out that care about such things I assure you – and this product is designed to separate them from their money. I suspect it will work too.
But that is because you want internal expansion… and it is not designed for solving that problem. Many people won’t like that aspect of this product at all, and I don’t really blame them. But it isn’t a fault of the design, it is an intentional tradeoff. Small + quiet = limited internal expansion. That is why Apple embraced Thunderbolt so heavily, it solves this problem by no longer needing to have it as a problem…
I just outlined reasons some might consider a Mac Pro a superior product, and similar reasons could be brought up about virtually all of Apple products. It is not about them being shiny – it is about them being designed to address very particular design goals. It just happens that many of those design goals have little or nothing to do with computing per se – and lots of people don’t get why you woud design a computer to solve problems that don’t have anything to do with computing…
I don’t like my Macbook Air because it is particularly fast, I can get a much faster laptop. In fact I could get a much faster laptop that is just as small and lightweight. But the particular combination of size, weight, build quality, battery life, and performance is pretty unique to Macbook Airs – I have tried other ultrabooks and find them severely lacking when compared on all the merits.
If you want a workstation that you can put behind your monitor and forget it is there you will probably really like this thing. Every time you need to move it or clean it you will appreciate it a bit more. From the looks of the hardware in it the performance compromise is extremely small – you are not giving up much in the way of performance even compared to machines 5 times the size. Im just saying there is more to it than being a shiny.
I actually think that is exactly what Apple does. We just have different opinions of what counts.
My computer is pretty damn quiet
In fact, I’d have to put my ear up to it just to hear it when the air conditioner is on in my apartment. If the AC is off, it emits a very faint hum. It isn’t particularly small, but it is a desktop, so there’s no need for it to be.
Now, I like the Macbook Air, and like a tablet, I can appreciate how thin and light they are, since most people carry them around. But my desktop PC sits on the floor beside my desk, so as long as it isn’t HUGE, the size of it is irrelevant. Same with the monitor. Apple makes a huge deal about how thin their iMacs are, which leads me to believe that there must be some parts of the world that have really small desks. I could probably put 5 of those iMacs on my desk, one behind the other, and still have room for more, so I really don’t know what all the fuss is about it being as thin as it is.
I guess my point is that with portable devices, I understand why size matters, because these things have to go into pockets, laptop bags, etc, and get lugged around. But a desktop? Unless you’re constantly moving them from place to place, why do you give a shit how small they are, or what the damn case looks like? The case could be orange for all I care. I don’t even care what shape it is, as long as it does what a case is supposed to do, can house standard peripherals, and the top of it is flat, so I can put stuff on it, like DVDs or whatever.
It technically isn’t a desktop though… It is probably a tower of some sort, i.e. it is on the floor… Noise from something 3 feet from you at head level is quite different than noise from 5 feet away behind your desk a floor level. There is quiet and then there is quiet.
I don’t know what the noise levels are for a Mac Pro, but if they are not substantially lower than your tower Apple f*cked up – because that is kind of the whole point of the design imo.
It is relevant if it is on your desk as opposed to beside your desk… Some people don’t like computers on their floor because of dust and whatnot. Also, since it uses external expansion you will likely need to get to the plugs on it rather frequently, which is much easier to do when it is sitting on top of your desk. On PCs people use hubs to overcome that need (for USB at least), but Thunderbolt is a daisy-chained bus so hubs are impractical.
Im admittedly nitpicking here though. I get your argument and I understand it. I’m just saying there are people who will care about these things – not everyone of course, but enough.
At the end of the day what matters is does it live up to its promise (small, quiet, minor performance compromise) and what does it cost.
No one is talking about that part… We don’t yet know the price tag. But look at it… It HAS to cost ALOT less to make than the current Mac Pro in materials and fabrications costs. The number of discrete components dropped by at least and order of magnitude or more. Sure the GPUs are probably a big expense, but if you remove the GPUs and the CPU from the equations there actually isn’t big ticket items left…
I would not be surprised at all if Apple asks for higher pricing to current Mac Pros – they do like to make money after all. But I’m at least holding out hope (with the new management and all) that they actually try to keep the pricing basically the same. I think they could sell this for $3,000 and still make a healthy margin from the looks of it.
At that price it, relative to other professional level workstation class machines, the price is not really much of an obstacle (similar specs and all that).
I would LOVE if they made an option for consumer level GPUs, that would probably knock close to $1000 off the pricetag and put it into the realm where I might actually consider buying one. Thing is I have no need for workstation class graphics, so a Mac Pro is sort of pointless for me (as it is being described now)
Well, I have to retract my own conjecture… From the looks of it they are specifically using AMD FirePro W9000 GPUs (its the only one AMD makes that matches the NVRAM amount they list). Plus its a custom PCB, so they are going to want more than usual for it I suspect…
If that turns out to be the case this is probably, at an absolute minimum, going to be a $7500 machine (assuming they all come with 2 GPUs). Even with just 1 GPU… The GPU alone (a single one!) retails for over $3300 – more than most people paid for their current Mac Pro…
I suspect at that price level Apple will see no point at all in trying to shave their margin to increase volume – it won’t make any difference. As such I suspect the reality is the base price for one of these as specified in their marketing materials will be $9,999 – that is my prediction anyway.
At that price I simply don’t care – I can’t afford it. It may as well be $100k… It sure is neat though.
“outlined reasons some might consider a Mac Pro a superior product, and similar reasons could be brought up about virtually all of Apple products. It is not about them being shiny – it is about them being designed to address very particular design goals. It just happens that many of those design goals have little or nothing to do with computing per se – and lots of people don’t get why you would design a computer to solve problems that don’t have anything to do with computing…”
Ding Ding Ding…. we have a winner. Computer’s don’t need to look or act like computers, but they do need to solve problems. Whether it’s a business problem or an engineering problem, if the design helps it to be useful that’s all that matters. Internal expansion being sacrificed to make the machine better at something else (in this case silent operation) is a perfectly acceptable trade off.
Looking at Apple’s target markets this thing is mainly going to be deployed in Health, And Audio/Visual production. Those areas have specific needs, use a lot of dedicated, high-end (crucially external gear) and do not care about cost, or the machine being able to have 6 pci/pci-e cards, but having jet engine fans. This thing is being built to solve real-world problems. Not whingey IT problems about being unable to install a PCI-E card. If Apple kept things like that and listened to whinging they’d probably ship a Mac Pro with a PCI or an ISA slot. There’s already an established trade and supply to market for engineered boards with those slots. Apple doesn’t feel the need or want to engage in competition there.
Brilliant!
Completely wrong. According to Bankrate.com, 86 percent of people who spend cash on luxuries like expensive cars, jewelry, and electronics are non-millionaires trying to act the part by purchasing luxury brands.
Studies (eg The Millionaire Next Door) have shown that the really rich tend to have a much more modest lifestyle than they can afford. They wear chain store clothes, eat simple foods, buy mid range cars (often second hand) and live in modest houses. They don’t buy designer clothes or accessories, drink expensive wines or travel first class. These people are often business owners or successful investors.
Edited 2013-06-16 03:24 UTC
Well said
It’s actually function over form. They. Picked a design that was amazing for cooling. Really all computers should be mounted to heatsinks like this.
I don’t get why people are so excited for what is essentially a MacMini with better CPU and graphics. The Mini has all the same expandability as this thing, just less of it.
Mini has 1 ThunderBolt, 5 USB 3 and FireWire 800 and onboard graphics.
This thing has lots of ThunderBolt 2, USB 3, NO Firewire, and 2 Graphics Cads.
Overall it’s a much better machine, but they significantly shortened the amount of time that you’ll be able to use it as none of the parts except for RAM seem modifiable. I think you’ll have to look for a new one in about a year and a half in order to get new graphics cards since Graphics cards are still getting faster.
Also one big thing that nobody thinks about is that you are stuck with AMD Cards. This is fine for some people but for those who need nVidia CUDA this machine is not an option.
You’d be better off ditching OS X for BSD or even GNU/Linux than building a Hackintosh for production work these days. Even building an exact replica of Lifehacker’s continuously current Hackintosh reference machine leaves one with all sorts of annoying minor issues that add up to a bad experience in the end. It’s counterproductive to build a machine that takes so much effort to maintain, just because your platform choice doesn’t suit you on a particular day. It’s a hobby and nothing more (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
If you absolutely have to have OS X, why not go with a maxed out Mac mini? I don’t know what kind of work you do, but unless you need the dual GPUs or 16 CPU cores, a current-gen mini is quite a powerful machine for nearly any job requiring that OS.
Or if you do need multiple GPUs, you could grab a current model Mac Pro while they are still available, and you’ll have a fully upgradeable machine that will last at least seven to ten more years (assuming OS releases post-Mavericks will support it).
I just don’t get this attitude of “Apple announced some piece of crap that will one day replace what I know and love, oh well I better jump ship right now even though current models are still available!” Screw that, take advantage of dropping prices on what still works for you, or find a platform better suited to your obviously mission-critical needs.
But there are lots of people drooling over its looks.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/06/a-critical-look-at-the-new-mac…
Those are people who pays to get feed Apple propaganda live… not a reference to general populace.
This is indeed the return of the Apple that makes exciting products. I dont need one but i NEED one. Now i need an excuse for replacing my 2 months old Dell workstation 🙁 I am sure i would hate it for not being expandable, sure it has thunderbolt, but the desk will get extremely cluttered in no time and then what is the point? But i don’t care, i want one.
I wonder what happened. Did Jony Ives get more room to play after jobs or was he too busy with working on iOS so others had time to play?
Edited 2013-06-11 20:00 UTC
A ‘professional’ workstation should be expandable IMO. I get you can buy Thunderbolt 2 items, but they’re too few and expensive.
If this was wedged between the iMac and Mac Pro lines it would make more sense to me.
Edited 2013-06-11 20:32 UTC
Spark-o-matic anyone? Apple has effectively re-engineered an eyesore from every 92 Toyota hatchback on the road.
Edited 2013-06-11 21:27 UTC
Once you take the cover off …
The chassis is a nice bit of engineering.
Wouldn’t buy it, though.
Not really a “powerful workstation” as much as it is a “powerful appliance”.
Even if you could expand it using pci-e thunderbolt chassis thingamajigs, you’d still be dependent on those vendors, would have to add yet another cable. What about the next version of osx … will it support chassis x with card y? What about leenucks compatibility? The SMC on nehalem mac pros (like mine) is pretty poorly supported as is … i don’t imagine that has gotten any better?
VERY cool design, though. I like it a lot! Reminds me of the apple of old, as Thom said.
Now … wait for the next iLamp …
Edited 2013-06-11 22:00 UTC
Who the hell buys Apple devices with Linux compatibility in mind? Hate to break it to you, but that’s a pretty dumb move.
Why would that be a dumb move?
It’s always worked pretty well, up until now. Just a PC after all.
It’s a common hardware platform with a large user base … unlike the bazillion different pc combos from dozens of vendors, or home built machines …
Edited 2013-06-11 22:38 UTC
Linus Torvalds, for a time, anyway. I have no idea if he still does.
some people actually like Apple’s hardware but don’t care about their software or prefer/require a different operating system(s) other than OSX.
OSX is puke compared to Unity. Even Win7 seems better in some ways.
Apple’s genius has always been about hardware, not software. iOS for example is totally uninspired except that the hardware integration is so good that buttery feeling is just awesome compared to Android devices. But features and usability are overrated.
To each their own.
I run linux on my mac pro.
However … OS X is far from “puke”.
I can be (and still am, on my mbp) very productive in OSX. It’s pretty, and stays out of my way (mostly).
I just don’t agree with their walled garden policies, and messing around with open source software and tools is just easier in leenucks.
Edited 2013-06-12 11:34 UTC
Maybe they should try a refund from Apple for Mac OS X then.
A very powerful system in a very distinctive form-factor. That’s what the new Mac Pro is, and I suspect it’ll be a strong seller among the professionals who use it for tasks like graphics editing, and have deep corporate pockets for buying top-of-the-line computers.
But by changing to a compact system with limited expansion options, I think Apple is neglecting a very important market segment: pragmatic power-users who value the ability to upgrade at a later date. Some MacPro users bought into the old version because they wanted the case with expansion bays, not because they needed Xeon processors or other advanced features.
No complaints about the new Mac Pro, but maybe Apple should also design a sister model in a MicroATX tower with Core i3/5/7 CPU’s, and a price point around $1000 (midway between Mac Mini & Mac Pro.) Apple already has a great starting point for the case design with the classic Power Mac G4 tower: a sturdy, well-engineered case with functional handles and room for growth.
Apple wouldn’t know proper cooling of components if it stripped naked, painted itself purple and hopped up on a table to sing “Oh look at what a big cooling fan I am”
They have the cojones to brag about sharing an ALUMINUM heatsink with everything? REALLY?!? I haven’t seen anything this stupid since the original toilet seat iBooks that put insulating foam around a 500mhz G3 and underclocked it 50% so as to avoid having a fan (and use PC66 instead of PC100 RAM to then charge PC133 prices) — which was fun when they burned a hole clear through the dialup adapter.
… and of course sharing heat between all parts will SO increase the product life, particularly heating up the ones that aren’t even doing anything.
Call me when they increase the space inside it 50%, switch to copper, isolate the cooling from each-other and allow the use of normal off the shelf parts… and allow airflow on the OTHER side of the boards so those caps don’t start bulging and popping inside a year.
Just more of their artsy fartsy form over function, that’s going to bite anyone DUMB ENOUGH to give them money right in the tuchas.
Yet another way for them to charge $10K for a $3K computer I guess…
Edited 2013-06-11 22:44 UTC
I thought something similar as well, when looking at the whole airflow concept. It decidedly had an Apple III feel to it, no matter how much care they took polishing the shape of every blade of that lone fan…
There is a method to the madness.
Aluminum is a “poorer” conductor of heat than cooper, however it can dissipate the heat it absorbs better (due to the specific heat/capacity characteristics of both materials). So the architecture of the heatsink probably uses copper elements to interface with the chip dies, while the fins (the interface with the air flow) are made of aluminum.
I have to disagree with you on this one… Yes, copper is a better conductor of heat, and in any steady state setup (where the amount of heat is constant) a copper heat sink will outperform an aluminum one of the same size and design (assuming it is machined and not soldered).
But CPUs and GPUs don’t work like that anymore… Yes, they used to more or less dissipate at a constant rate, but they do not anymore. The same argument that applies to Intel and AMD’s “turbo” clock speeds applies to the argument for using aluminum (selectively) – what you are trying to do is hurry up and idle.
This argument (for CPUs) is to save power. By going fast in burst you reduce overall power usage because most of the time you don’t need to go fast… So by sprinting in small bursts you end up reducing overall power use because you can keep the processor in an idle state (with reduced power requirements) faster.
The same argument applies to heat sink design, since power = heat. Aluminum has much less mass than copper – once the heat is removed it cools off faster. Copper is better because it can transfer heat faster, but it also retains that heat longer than aluminum does once the heat source is gone (because of its mass).
So if your thermal load jumps up and down a lot, and spends more time down than up, aluminum will tend to have more cooling capacity available when you cycle back to load (the junction differential will be higher). This is especially true if you are using some form of evaporative cooling (i.e. heat pipes), which this thing almost certainly is.
I would say that yes, under constant 100% load choosing an all copper heatsink would likely have been better for overall performance (i.e. higher constant clock speeds could be maintained). But if your goal is to dissipate as fast as possible when you hit idle, aluminum is better. If clock management on the CPU and GPU is tuned for such “hurry up and idle” behavior (and on modern machines it is), then such a design may well perform just as well if not better than copper most of the time.
Look at the current heatsink market for validation of this… There are a lot of very good aluminum + heat pipe designs out there.
ps. Seperating the heatsink makes even less sense from a thermodynamics point of view. What you want if you are trying to design the most efficient way to dissipate heat is treat the entire system as a single load and concentrate your efforts on removing the required amount of heat as quickly as possible, but no more. There is no benefit at all to having separate heatsinks, all it does is complicate the design needlessly.
If you’re truly interested in form over function and love stellar examples of an artisan’s work, look no further than a Datamancer PC:
http://www.datamancer.com/cart/the-clacker-full-pc-suite-p-208.html
Too rich for your blood? How about just a keyboard? Plenty to choose from:
http://www.datamancer.com/cart/keyboards-c-65.html
This thing is sexy. Its no different than paying more for a hot looking car over a basic car. Both will get you from point a to b.
But the real reason I want one, is that most geeks like myself need something sexy to look at since we have replaced human/human interaction with machine/human deviant behavior :}
Edited 2013-06-11 23:31 UTC
Really, you think a five dollar Walmart trash can is sexy?
sure, if it has the same “junk” inside that this has :}
What makes it sexy to me is the size, simplicity, and uniqueness of the design. Blame it on IBM for producing such an ugly machine trend. There were some partially stylish computers before the world embraced the pc.
Because when I think stylish, I think the Zed-Ex 80, Commodore PET, Atari 400, and the Trash-80’s … RIGHT. Even the C64 is one serious fist-in the face full of ugliness.
… and of course PC’s built in modern cases like the Thermaltake Element, Corsair Carbide and Raidmax Atlas are so boring and lacking in style… RIGHT.
Hell, I’d stack a crappy $35 HEC Compucase against this thing in both style and functionality… especially the latter. You want to throw money away on sexy AND functional, that’s an Antec 1200’s job.
I really don’t get the people ooh-ing and aah-ing over this hunk of junk with all the art and style of a bargain basement space heater… but then I never got people ooh-ing and aah-ing over the past couple generations of Apple products either, having all the art and style of a recently sanitized hospital ward… or all the wild BULLSHIT claims of some sort of ‘quality’ to their products. You figure in Crapple’s sleazeball shortcut form over function engineering, and I cannot fathom how anyone is dumb enough to pay money for these things.
Which if you told anyone who knew me that I was underestimating the stupidity of my fellow man, they wouldn’t believe you.
Edited 2013-06-12 00:32 UTC
When will people learn and stop liking what you don’t like, right?
You know what I can’t understand? People like you.
Certainly, you are entitled to your opinion. You can hate Apple for whatever reasons you feel are justified but it doesn’t make sense for you to hate me because I happen to like Apple. You can tell me the reasons you have for having your opinion but telling me I’m stupid because I disagree with you is close-minded and intolerant.
If you carefully read what he wrote you’ll find he doesn’t say much and what he says doesn’t make much sense. You’ll find more people in this comment section that do mindless hating, he just uses a lot more words.
But he can have the ZX80, I’ll take the Mac Pro.
As much as I like the design and size, the lack of DVI & full DisplayPort port is a bit annoying. 6 USB ports is also too little for me. Although, my biggest issue with it is the lack of upgradeability.
Edited 2013-06-11 23:31 UTC
Also, is it just me or are ALL the ports facing the same direction as the power plug — no front headphone jack or USB/card reader slots? Or are they still expecting us to daisy chain even more crap through the keyboard kissing any sort of throughput goodbye?
… and yeah, it reeks of “multiple displays, what’s that?”
Edited 2013-06-12 00:35 UTC
Bluetooth headset/keyboard/mouse/trackpad.
I believe the keynote stated that the gfx cards will support up to 3 4K monitors. You not only have the hdmi port, but 6 thunderbolt ports on there which support display port 1.2 output, presumably able to drive more than just 3 monitors if you are using lower resolutions.
… and does anyone other than Apple even make units with thunderbolt? Oh wait, that’s right — Vendor lock in, another of their hallmarks. If you can afford to throw away 10K on a 3K computer, you can probably afford to drop a grand on $300 monitors as well.
… and from what I’m hearing displayport over thunderbolt is a unreliable mess; but then Apple never was all that great at video despite the lies they spread from the day the original Mac was introduced.
You don’t need a monitor vendor to support thunderbolt, just mini display port which is supported by a number of manufacturers. It goes over the same cable. Not had, nor heard of any problems myself.
Sony does, Asus do, and other PC vendors are rapidly adopting Thunderbolt as a standard.
Just like that pesky FireWire standard, right? I mean no one but Apple ever used it. Only my Sony laptop, my wife’s video camera, my Mitsubishi television and my 12 year old Compaq retro gaming machine have it in my household. You know, come to think of it I own zero Macs right now and yet I have several devices with FireWire. Imagine that…
I don’t normally say rude things like this, but I have to call you out: You’re a bleeding idiot. As others have pointed out, Thunderbolt is not only DisplayPort compatible, it’s gaining ground steadily among all the major manufacturers. It can be used as a multi-protocol connector, a hub for many other types of devices. The only downside I’ve seen to it is the outrageous cost of the cables due to the active circuitry inside them.
But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
My degree of lust is the same as when I first saw a NeXT cube for the first time.
I desperately wanted a NeXT cube when it was announced but with my kids at school there was no way I could afford it.
Now am retired and will probably not be able to afford the new Cylinder of Power.
Sigh
Meanwhile my maxed out 2008 Mac Pro, bought before I retired, is doing just fine.
But I do want that cylinder so.
Phallic symbol?
The new Mac Pro wouldn’t work for me as a phallic symbol – it’s too small
It definitely looks like a thermonuclear device of some sort.
I am very excited abut the new designs. The Mac Pro is amazing looking. Not only is it smaller, but I think that the outside casing is aluminum. I think the new ios and the new Mac OS both look good.
The design with the skin off is impressive, but with the skin on I am afraid that someone might try toss trash in to the top of it. I almost wish it was translucent, but I know Ives was trying keep the look minimalistic and clean.
As a pro rig that might find its way in to a video editing suite, being quiet is a plus, and I suspect it will probably be very quiet compared to equally powerful workstations from competitors due to its cooling system design. I think that the target demographic for this system will be connecting it to a dedicated external raid system so the lack of internal storage expansion probably wont bother them that much. Many companies lease a computer with the configuration they need and leave them that way throughout the term of the lease.
The one part I was concerned about, was that they went with AMD this time instead of NVIDIA. That might miss part of the market they were aiming for. Adobe has leaned more toward NVIDIA’s CUDA for acceleration than OpenCL. Premiere can use either mode for acceleration, but After Effects relies on CUDA and needs about as much horsepower as you can throw at it. I am not sure if there are technical reasons why Adobe has not supported OpenCL in After Effects… Perhaps this would spur Adobe to add it.
A lot of people saying it looks like a bin of some sort, but I reckon its more like one of those ashtrays that pubs leave on their tables in the beer garden.
Its still pretty. I would prefer a transparent cover though. Those innards look well designed, so show them off. It makes a statement that your engineers are equals to your designers, as Dyson know.
Seriously? Next to zero internal expansion for disk/graphics/expansion cards?
It’s going to have eleventy billion cables out the rear and it’s styled to look like Darth Vader’s flesh-light.
Yeah.. good one ya muppets.
if apple would design the iTrash can this would be it.
Edited 2013-06-12 03:57 UTC
Seriously, the people whining about this device don’t have a clue as to what they’ll use it for. There’s not much that you need to plug into a Mac Pro. Video editing? You’ll have an external SDI/Capture rig connected via thunderbolt (BlackMagic Design have some really great kit for this.) A monitor, and a keyboard/mouse. That’s about it. You might have a thunderbolt or Gigabit attached RAID server.
There’s just not that much stuff that you’ll need to connect to a Mac Pro. I should know, I owned one. a 2009 model. Aside from being able to flash the bios and upgrade it to a 2012 mac pro with dual hex core instead of dual quad core cpus.
There wasn’t really that much to be done to the system. The GPUs in that thing are godlike. There’s going to be very little reason to upgrade, and if you need to install newer workstation graphics cards which are already $2k each. you’re not going to care about buying a $500 box to put them in. The old towers could take up to 4 hard drives… frankly that wasn’t enough capacity. You need to attach a multi-drive RAID server to these things to get the best use out of them. The new Mac Pro is an absolute beast and it’s definately a clever design. Combine it with a 20-drive file server and 4k/8k video can be edited reasonably with it.
Apple is probably betting that most people will want to upgrade CPU/Motherboard/Ram at the same time as the Graphics cards because by the time a newer graphics card you need is out the rest of the specs will have shifted too. This definately isn’t a consumer toy. If I had any real complaint with it, it’d be that it isn’t a rack mount form factor, mainly just because the only users of this are going to be professionals and they probably have rackmount raid servers and rackmount capture devices hooked to this thing.
It looks designed for 4k and 8k video encoding. (8k video has already had live demos in Akihabara Japan, I should know since I saw it last year when I was in Tokyo. NHK were streaming the Olympic games in 8k.)
Edited 2013-06-12 04:24 UTC
Well from the computing power any PC professional workstation will run circles around this, while costing around the same price.
It is really a form over function Mac Pro.
Apple is always – “form over function”, and its ok.
And one reason why, even though I like their designs, never bought one.
Have you priced 12-core Xeon CPUs, PCI-e flash storage and a pair of workstation GFX cards lately?
I doubt the PC can be built much cheaper. Certainly not if you want a manufacturer’s guarantee with it.
A similar Dell workstation is nearly $6,000.
But since we don’t even have Apple’s pricing information yet there’s no way to know any kind of price comparison. So you’re just blowing smoke.
Well, for photo/video work a DVD-RW drive would be critical, and some users will require a blue-ray burner. Definitely a multi card reader. Easily expandable storage. Sound card with a full range of in-out ports.
Whatever particular production you do (audio, video, film, animation, programming) — if you have the budget you might need something external that expands or improves upon what’s built in. But this is good design on Apple’s part, not bad.
Why should I (audio producer) have to pay for video features I’ll never use? Why would I want empty space for 4 internal devices I’ll never buy and which would operate slower than what I can put on a single thunderbolt cable?
I know I can’t have 2-5 fans spinning in my studio, above or below the desk. Quiet is very important for me and anyone doing production.
All audio studios use AD interfaces in external boxes – no one pro has random soundcards sticking out of their CPU box – that’s very 90’s.
I see Thunderbolt to Interface box, then Thunderbolt to Drive array, then Thunderbolt to 4k display. That’s a whole lot of production workstation on 1 cable. If you need the old non-thunderbolt gear, you have 2 firewire 800/400 ports compatible all the way back to 2002 or something, and USB 3/2/1 on top of that. With 2TB of fast SSD, 16gb RAM, 2 video cards, 2 ethernet, fast wifi, and bluetooth in that tube, what exactly are you updating internally?
Also – Anyone who sees no difference between a 3 foot tall beige box with 4 loud fans, case cracked open, card slots full and 10 cables dangling and this tiny little powerhouse cylinder are blind and dumb. Stop ignoring reality. Noise, power usage, cable organization, and presentation (for clients) is all critical stuff, not fluff.
And if you don’t care *anything* about looks then I suspect you are wearing a cotton sack around your body, drive a $200 automobile, and haven’t combed your hair since 1999. Your walls are white and barren, your floors grey and hard, and your lighting fluorescent and unalterable. You, the one with no love of anything beautiful or efficient, the one with no ego. Yeah right!
I don’t have robot ears, sorry JP.
What a load of BS. Any decent tower (<25dB) is way below the ambient sound level of even the quietest office (40-50dB). My Antec Sonata is a mere 18dB – you literally can’t hear it unless you put your ear against the case.
Office ≠Production Studio.
Mics can hear fans just fine. Compressors can especially hear fans.
Fans, buzz, hum, bad shielding, interference from bad cabling — all very important in a production environment.
Office is for Office/iWork, not a place to do production.
80% of that 40-50dB ambient noise is computer devices. And your desktop is not a $10,000 production workstation. And ambient noise does matter if you are professionally producing audio.
This is exactly what I was talking about. All professionals who have worked with pro level gear, have their own dedicated equipment to handle audio/video I/O. Photo editing is best left to the iMacs and that’s where most of that work has been going anyway. If you need a Mac Pro for Image editing then you would have a RAID attached to the machine and a card reader which can be USB 3, Firewire 800, Wireless or direct camera to Mac Pro attachment. Apple doesn’t need to provide more options for you to connect gear to this machine. It easily does enough. Optical media is dead, you shouldn’t even need to burn a bluray or dvd. That’s the role of the pressing factory in China. You send them the digital masters and they press them to disc.
Edited 2013-06-13 09:27 UTC
Bwahahahaha!! A DVD drive is critical? You do not know a single audio/video pro, do you? Audio/video pros buying a rig that will total from $5,000-12,000 do not view a $30 optical drive as critical. It’s an annoyance if it comes up at all.
Yeah I was going to say that, it all depends on the price, flash memory is still expensive but actually thanks to Apple products (iPods and iPhones ) buyers prices have been falling, hopefully it will happen the same with SSD. Since is small shipping price will be lower, a 10 years machine I don’t think so but maybe a 5 one.
Apple is clearly pointing at graphic designers, and those professionals have large arrays of disks and specialized displays and input devices, so at the end replacing the computer is just a fraction of the cost. Sure it would be great to be able to upgrade components but it doesn’t make sense from the profit point of view (as an evidence, the decline in PC sales) plus people are not upgrading that often since the processor speed is not increasing fast anymore.
Regarding the design is clearly an homage to the CUBE and the new “mothership” campus, I would have prefer a rectangular box so it matches current style but Apple might have something else in mind for the future.
And the last plus is made in the USA, I’m not technically north american but I carefully choose the least amount of chinese products.
Most workstation graphics cards are slightly modified gaming cards with different firmware and certification to support certain applications. In fact you can often flash gaming cards to install workstation firmware. The manufacturer charges OEMs similar prices for the gaming versions and the workstation versions. However the retail price is vastly higher for a workstation card.
made in usa means unnecessary expensive :S
Not really getting, at all, why this is awesome looking. It looks like a bear canister (http://solosoutheast.com/BearCanNew.jpg OMG SO PRETTY!). I agree with an earlier comment that it also looks a lot like a waste basket.
I own a macbook pro that I think is pretty sexy, so I’m not a hater of all mac designs. This though just is terrible and I have to feel like people oohing and aahing over it are just an example of the worst kind of apple fanboi-ism or out of touch design geekery.
To paraphrase James May: Apple are at the cutting edge of cocking about
this looks like some air moisturizer or something.
Looks aside, I’m a bit skeptic about the cooling, especially since they said they’re using aluminum not copper for the heatsinks.
Also, that SSD flash drive, given their current life span (aka not that awesome) just screams “YOU GONNA PAY OUT OF YOUR ASS FOR REPLACEMENTS”. Because of course, you just can’t slap a regular 2,5″ SSDs or two in there, no. Those would not be “amazing” enough or something.
I don’t know if I buy this computer, but I’ll surely enjoy playing with it in the store.
Really, very interesting and attractive design.
I don’t like Apple, I’ve never owned an Apple product and most likely I never will. I still like this design though. It looks bold, attractive and fashionable.
Before I even looked at the pictures, I knew this was going to be a pile of proprietary parts.
One hypothetical question for the Apple employee responsible for the design:
“If the sound quits working after the warranty expires, how much does the necessary replacement part cost?”
The design is interesting and “bold” as someone else said, but totally impractical.
Was the Mac cube ?
Kochise
I think so but don’t know much about them; I looked at them briefly when they were first released. They were over-priced, internally un-expandable, and didn’t include some basic features.
I’d be very curious to hear from any Cube owners: “If the sound stops working in your Cube, is the necessary part easily available and how much does it cost?”
That’s when you turn it into a fish tank
http://walyou.com/mac-g4-cube-fish-tank-mod/
There was also a specific display port that rendered already own VGA and HDMI screens useless, you had to buy a compatible Apple screen. How convenient. Like LCD screen makers don’t know their job and only Apple could provides an “unique experience”.
Uniqueness and rarity has its price, yet I cannot afford.
Kochise
There is no on board sound on the cube, it’s all on external USB sound card thingys.
I am a Cube owner. I bought it when it first out. It was overpriced, but I knew it was unique and would remain unique. I loaded it up with the max 1.5 GB RAM…had also gotten the optional 32 MB graphics card. I can’t answer your question though because I’ve never had to replace any parts over the past thirteen years. The speakers were power hungry and their set up was not good. But the Griffin iMic came out and that tiny thing solved all sound problems. Mine is still working and when I saw they had become defunct I got one on eBay as a back-up (the iMic, I mean). It did cost a lot as did the Apple display. But, I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it, that’s for sure.
The answer is: it doesn’t matter. Nowadays computers are made to be replaced entirely when they break up. Just as the other electronic equipment. If a laser diode in your DVD fails, you replace the whole device. Think of the computers in the same way: if anything fails, you replace the whole device.
This is very good and practical way to be always in sync with the latest technology. It is costly, yes, but this is the price of progress.
Edited 2013-06-12 16:41 UTC
Price of progress ? Polluting the planet ? It’s not very in Apple’s policy regarding ecology, if these are true.
Hope it won’t happen to cars : flat tire ? Replace the car…
Kochise
Well if this thing is priced like a DVD player, under $100, then I see your point.
Just one little problem with your analogy: when my DVD player breaks, $30. If this son of a bitch breaks down, at least $2k knowing Apple. One is in budget, one is not and I will not pay $2k a year if the motherboard proves to fail rapidly when this cooling doesn’t work out the way they think it will. Maybe you have infinite amounts of money to spend, but the rest of us have a budget.
You are correct to a point. A person replaces the optical drive; however, they do not replace the entire computer.
From the various comments, the price for this black cylinder will likely be around the $5,000 mark.
One can easily see a throw-away netbook, Blu-Ray player, or other gadgets at around $250. But not at $5,000.
The planned obsolescence Apple has been using as business model to sell hardware may not work at this price.
Even for a business which can depreciate the value of the computer, it will be a though buy – like the Cube.
However, others will follow similar design and engineering clues and this could become quite exciting.
Broken power cord? Buy a new computer. Power button a bit unreliable? Buy a new computer! Be a good consumer; buy stuff and question nothing.
If that’s the goal you wouldn’t use a Mac in the first place…
It’s quite amazing then how we managed to progress this far by using computers with replaceable parts.
The replacement will likely be a new mobo, it will be insanely expensive. If you want a workaround, get a USB sound card.
This isn’t Apple’s first rodeo. They’ve been making products for a long time and you don’t make money by writing checks. My guess is that the failure rate is low enough for this to be a non-issue.
I was hoping they would at least use the shape like a speaker. Not that I would buy one but it could inspire some good itx cases.
I do think Apple has the best design when it comes to small computers. The pc mac mini knock-offs I have seen have all been tacky.
But I agree with Thom in that they should make computers that are distinctive with a focus on form. There is real demand for computers that look designed for a home and not a cubicle.
For once I can relate to Apple fans wanting this thing. I have similar irrational desire to have an SGI Octane just because of the case design.
Seriously, what the f*** is that thing? A coffee mug?
This, right here, is a prime example of why I never did care for Apple’s product designs.
Sorry, but I just can’t get excited over that… thing.
Edited 2013-06-12 22:27 UTC
I think with this new “Mac Pro” Apple put the final nail in the coffin of professional offerings. True professionals, people who work with their computers, want something practical, not a fashion statement.
They might sell a few to the same fanboys who always buy the latest iPhone.
Meh, they can always get the Mac Mini.
To me the comparison of one black cylinder to another one, isn’t an especially funny joke.
The black cylindrical shape that you associate today with a trash can, you will associate with the Mac Pro in about 2 seconds – companies know this.
Nintendo Wii sounds like something dirty – until 2 seconds later. iPad sounds like Maxipad, until 2 seconds later.
The look of the Mac Pro is great, and nobody will find it humorous, in about 2 seconds, (edit: the one exception to this rule is the old Atari Jaguar with CD expansion, which will forever look like a toilet)
Honestly there is no need to even address this subject, just wait 2 seconds… I only address it anyway, because of my need to forever run my fingers across my keyboard.
Now – on the other subject of the would-be Mac Pro purchasers being buried in a see of external expansion cables – no.
I will hook up exactly 0 external expansion. The device has an internal PCIe based flash storage, it has wifi, it has 2, count them 2, high end graphics cards – and we live in a cloud world.
My machine will have exactly no peripherals attached to it. And no smart-puppy I’m not even going to attach a monitor. Ok, you caught me, I’ll hook up a monitor. If that counts, then 1 peripheral will be attached – goodness knows how I’ll keep it attached and powered on
But some of you have a high end video camera that will need to attach to download your video captures. Some of you have high end audio equipment – as you have since the beginning of time, you’ll attach that to your computer.
There are just a handful of internally installed components that may now be external – and for only a handful of customers, and if that internal component is really a hard drive, may I suggest just using a wireless NAS – or something to solve your cable-phobia.
LOVE IT APPLE. I just wish you weren’t going to soak me for so much freakin money….I was actually thankful for only having to shell out a few buck for an iPad last year – but no – the respite was short lived.
Edited 2013-06-13 05:15 UTC
How one design can make you love a company with so many faults ..
Love a company?
I like it. I own a macbook pro , you know how many thunderbolt devices I own 0! I really would like a cheapy enclosure for my sata drives, I do realize the cable is expensive but hell just an enclosure is expensive. I know this is intel technology, i would suspect once windows land gets thunderbolt the devices will start to flood I havent seen any windows computers with thunderbolt
on the pc you have no need for thunderbolt
even on laptops you have access to pci-e through dockingstations or expresscards
thunderbolt is a solution in search of a problem
says the person that’s never swapped a fast external firewire drive from a daisy chain without more than a mouseclick from the host OS.
some of us like simple plugs that auto-configure and chain over medium distances.
plus drives in production studios need to be fast and portable, hence firewire being critical for production rigs, but nearly useless in a general office or programming environment. i can’t have cards dangling just to get basic drive connection.
I think the discussion on this will always be between people who actually use professional grade gear/have done high end event/film/video production, and those who think they know because they’ve dabbled at home. Sure they got some stuff working, but they don’t rely on it every day, to work every single time they click to render out.
I’m saying this as someone who’s had to mix multiple 1080p video streams in realtime, output them to a HD net feed, as well as a LIVE display being watched at the event by thousands of people and record them to disk, as well as add layering effects. The Mac Pros are designed to handle that sort of stressed out workload.
A home PC can technically do it, but will almost certainly fall over at some point. I should know, I’ve built both kinds of systems. I would take the Mac Pro over the other solution any day of the week. I used to think that the hardware didn’t matter, but after actually having to run this stuff in production, I know better. Experience is a harsh teacher.
Edited 2013-06-13 16:14 UTC
Amen to that, perfect post.
Computer nerds / programmers / IT people are not the same as production people. They mingle, but they aren’t the same. Something that can be relied on, replicated, or replaced quickly is what producers need. Most have used pro macs or macbooks for over a decade now.
Building your own computer in a production rig is like building your own camera or microphone. Sure it’s cool but almost no one uses that stuff for real production, not with clients!
you are right, i’ve never done that
as a matter of fact, im using an Icy Dock for such tasks
contrary to your beloved firewire the dock doesn’t limit the performance of the hdd
i don’t need a dock, so i don’t quite get it. i can just plug anything firewire into anything else.
why do i need a dock?
What kind of person can slam the looks of a pro machine? This is utter non-sense. It’s too pretty? Too ugly? Too small? Too unusual? Are you people all in 6th grade?
“I don’t like the shape, it reminds me of [blank].” I hope you don’t plan your business around such drivel.
Not very professional, and nothing to do with the thing becoming your main rig.
How about is it fast? Now and in the next couple of years?
Is it quiet, power efficient, and provide all the things you need to start working?
How many OS’s can it run, natively?
Can it run multiple large monitors, current and coming formats?
Can you purchase one and offer services to clients (or bosses) that you couldn’t before?
Can you complete your current tasks faster than before?
Will it be reliable? Can it be serviced or replaced quickly?
Is it built well? aka can it be moved without disaster?
Can you get the same thing from another maker for cheaper?
So many commenters don’t have a Mac, or touched an iMac once, and now they are experts proclaiming the errors of Apple’s ways. Yet for 30+ years Apple has innovated in the desktop/workstation/mobile space.
The old power mac was like a relic from the 90’s – a huge, heavy tower that hummed like a race car and burned electricity like it was free. You could cram it with 4 cards and 4 huge drives and make a frankenstein machine that would impress anyone from 1995. But it’s 2013 and i just made an album on an iPad (mostly). Thinderbolt/Firewire/USB3 have made internal expansion a thing of the past. Manufacturers in audio have been going away from cards for several years now.
If this angers you, sorry, I suggest you put your feelings in a wordperfect doc and copy it over to floppy then send my way.
My future production rig: -tb- = thunderbolt connection
Mac Pro -tb- Audio Interface -tb- Drive array -tb- HD/4k display
that’s a 1 -tb- cable daisy chain for the primary 4 items.
then add keyboard, mouse, and control surface on another USB chain (or wireless).
I count 1 thunderbolt daisy chain and 1 USB daisy chain. No cable nightmare there!
[even though it’s not required, I’d put external AC on the audio interface and drive array, along with the mac and monitor, for 4 total AC plugs.
My hope is someone develops a rackmount kit for this tube that actually works. It’s only as tall as the old tower was wide, so there’s that, but the odd shape and the cooling pattern will require careful rack mounting.
you do realise that the 4k display at 60hz eats up 16gbps of the theoretical 20gbps?
even a single measly 2560×1440 screen consumes close to 7gbps at 60hz.
good luck doing anything else over that line
perhaps i could use 1 of my other 5 remaining tb ports for the monitor?
does the bandwidth you speak of get shared between all 6 ports? i don’t know myself.
but then you are already tossing the “I only need one cable” thing out the window
Interface:
http://www.uaudio.com/apollo
Drives:
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echo15thunderboltdock.html
If you need/own cards:
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/EB3T
first time i’m excited by a desktop in years
People saying you should use BSD/Linux for production have zero clue about Mac OSX. in Mac OSX with Quartz Composer you can create a program that takes video input in High Defnition from a computer input source, capture card or camera and display it to screen, mix it with compositing effects and other video sources, and render it out to a video surface or file without writing a single line of code. Let me repeat that, WITHOUT writing ANY CODE.
It is ridiculously powerful if you need to get in and do something dirty/quick without writing a massive wall of code. One of the worst things about Linux is how much programming knowledge you need to get this sort of stuff to occur. There is nothing on Linux that comes close to the video/audio pipelining of OSX, literally nothing.
The only projects remotely close are GStreamer (which is shit until I can create an opengl surface in a gui, apply a video source as a texture to it, and manipulate it in 3d, AND add multiple other sources and surfaces, without writing code AND at 1080p full HD video resolution. THIS is what OSX can do.) And GNUStep which is basically recreating what OSX wrote first. People commenting on Linux/BSDs use for video production have no clue at all. This video shows you some of the features. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTmqc_At2bY Realtime editing and display without writing a line of code in a text editor. In the video when the guy adds a rectangle and textures it as a star, in Quartz Composer you can use a video source instead of a star image and it will play the video live.
In addition to not needing to write code to do these things, under OSX everything is multithreaded and offloaded to the CPU and GPU automatically, again without you needing to write the code to make it happen. It is light years ahead of Linux in this respect. It will remain light years ahead unless Linux gets 50 coders to hack on GNUStep full time.
I’ve used professional video production programs, then recreated their functionality in Quartz Composer in minutes without writing a line of code, and without paying a cent more than I paid for the Apple equipment. That’s why people buy Mac OSX, because you are getting the best video/audio editing APIs in existence. You don’t even need to be a programmer to use them. There’s a video of Steve Jobs in the 1980’s creating a database application on a NEXT Cube without writing a line of code. They’ve taken that concept to a whole new level with video and audio and it’s crazy-amazing.
I’m sorry if my post has offended anyone but Apple is so far ahead on this stuff and the ignorance and hubris shown by some hard core Unix fans is ridiculous. I’ve been using Linux for 13 years and I love it to death but it has serious problems which very few developers are addressing, and no changing GNOME’s UI to make it OSX-Like but making it not work like OSX is not the answer. Mark Shuttleworth should have backed GNUStep if he wanted Linux to be OSX rather than making a cheap GTK based Knockoff. Gnome was at it’s best as a powerful Desktop following the Sun provided UI guidelines they used to be based on. Now it’s just a really bad attempt to ripoff Mac and doesn’t deliver any of the usability or power of OSX.
Edited 2013-06-15 01:56 UTC
I don’t think I know anyone who uses GNUstep, if you need/want full Cocoa support then people will buy a Mac. I work for a small 3D animation firm, we do commercials, product and architectural model design. Our firm used to use MacPro’s but have recently moved over to HP workstations and we can’t be happier. You can praise Apple’s OSX till your heart explodes with glee but the real truth of the matter is Apple has been backing off from the professional side of computing for a while now, their nuetered pro software has proven this. The new MacPro albeit powerful is not what medium to large firm wants. I have a few friends over at Pixar and Dreamworks and they too have replaced almost all of their Macs with HP Z stations. HP is committed to the workstation crowd by not only providing custom solutions but the support that’s needed to properly integrate their hardware into any infrastructure. Apples institutional support is an absolute joke, it takes 3 – 4 days for them to send anyone out and they don’t deal with third party software. HP not only responds the same day but sends out personal who know’s their hardware and software that the customer is using. The new MacPro is for wealthy consumers who need the extra power, universities and small firms who are committed to Apple hardware, they might sell to a few new company’s who don’t know any better but I doubt they will have any major saturation. I’m not saying the HP Z stations are the best in the industry but they defiantly get the job done and with their tool less cases, upgrading, repairs are so easy they’re an absolute pleasure to own.
Not to say the Mac Pro isn’t cool because it is. I really enjoy Mac products, my Air is a great companion.
Edited 2013-06-16 07:29 UTC