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MP All Models This new Mac Pro makes me really really happy
- Thread starter Fried Chicken
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There are a lot of points in here I agree with.
First and foremost, I appreciate that Apple has provide a machine for the truly high end. They've done it, and they've done it better than we could ever have hoped for.
However, they have indeed left a large gap, as pointed out by the appleinsider article.
In the past, the Mac Pro used to be a ~$3000 offering geared towards prosumers, enthusiasts and professionals. The Mac Pro 2013 and literally every prior Mac Pro was certainly aimed at this market, and they had the pricetag to match.
So when I heard about what the minimum specification of the new Mac Pro 7.1 was at the keynote, I actually thought they'd hit the mark. Yes, the storage was a bit small and GPU was a bit slow, but overall it looked like an awesome case with an awesome PSU and awesome expandability, and it looked like it would hit around $3500.
It didn't. It was $2500 more.
Now, this product is in a whole another range at $6000. But that's not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that this machine comes without peripherals yet manages to be slower than the 1½ years old iMac Pro, and yet is more expensive. And that iMac Pro had a 1 year old GPU, and that GPU was late to the competition against NVIDIA, which outperformed it 1 year prior.
In fact, the Mac Pro has such a slow GPU that NVIDIA had it beat over 6 years ago. In a $6000 machine.
That $3000 machine with a nice GPU in it is what I want. I can't get it. It doesn't exist. None of their products have enough thermal headroom to contain it, and my last hope - an expandable Mac in the $3500 range, was dashed.
Frankly, I'm devastated about this. A little over a week ago I put Ubuntu on my old desktop, and that's the end of it. I am leaving the Apple world behind, because I haven't been offered a choice in the matter. The Mac Pro is GREAT for the people who need it, but I don't, and the iMac isn't enough.
Bummer.
I'll keep up with the news. See if anything changes. I do like macOS a lot, especially on the technical and nitty-gritty side, but also the overall UI. It's a very well put together system. But I just can't buy the hardware they've got right now. Well... I can, but I don't want to.
First and foremost, I appreciate that Apple has provide a machine for the truly high end. They've done it, and they've done it better than we could ever have hoped for.
However, they have indeed left a large gap, as pointed out by the appleinsider article.
In the past, the Mac Pro used to be a ~$3000 offering geared towards prosumers, enthusiasts and professionals. The Mac Pro 2013 and literally every prior Mac Pro was certainly aimed at this market, and they had the pricetag to match.
So when I heard about what the minimum specification of the new Mac Pro 7.1 was at the keynote, I actually thought they'd hit the mark. Yes, the storage was a bit small and GPU was a bit slow, but overall it looked like an awesome case with an awesome PSU and awesome expandability, and it looked like it would hit around $3500.
It didn't. It was $2500 more.
Now, this product is in a whole another range at $6000. But that's not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that this machine comes without peripherals yet manages to be slower than the 1½ years old iMac Pro, and yet is more expensive. And that iMac Pro had a 1 year old GPU, and that GPU was late to the competition against NVIDIA, which outperformed it 1 year prior.
In fact, the Mac Pro has such a slow GPU that NVIDIA had it beat over 6 years ago. In a $6000 machine.
That $3000 machine with a nice GPU in it is what I want. I can't get it. It doesn't exist. None of their products have enough thermal headroom to contain it, and my last hope - an expandable Mac in the $3500 range, was dashed.
Frankly, I'm devastated about this. A little over a week ago I put Ubuntu on my old desktop, and that's the end of it. I am leaving the Apple world behind, because I haven't been offered a choice in the matter. The Mac Pro is GREAT for the people who need it, but I don't, and the iMac isn't enough.
Bummer.
I'll keep up with the news. See if anything changes. I do like macOS a lot, especially on the technical and nitty-gritty side, but also the overall UI. It's a very well put together system. But I just can't buy the hardware they've got right now. Well... I can, but I don't want to.
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That's a service manual. They weren't distributed to regular users, only AASPs or technicians if I'm not mistaken, so the assumption was you'd take it in and have them upgrade the processor. Still true with Apple's service manuals today.
Your constant drumbeat that Intel does not matter and that AMD is now THE WAY borders on the same mindless zealotry people have for NVIDIA GPUs. Technology is always see-sawing back and forth. This is not the first time that AMD has had the drop on Intel and how long the party lasts no one really knows. AMD is making great strides, but there are still places where things need to be shorn up, markets entered, products delivered, promises kept and strategies articulated. I think AMD is in the best place managerially that they have been in a long time, possibly the best ever, but they are still not 100% firing on all cylinders...they are still vulnerable, they are not THE BOMB.
Some places mandate Intel for a variety of reasons and so that won't necessarily change, guaranteeing sales, no matter how undeserved. Intel has dug themselves a deep hole they are still not doing a good job of digging themselves out of at this time and AMD is benefitting from that. Intel's product range and depth is still more diverse than AMD's. People still trust Intel more than AMD and have more awareness of Intel than AMD.
PCIe 3.0 still has plenty of life left in it, just like PCIe 2.0 did/does on those old Mac Pro 4,1-5,1. PCIe 3.0 is tried and true tested technology at this point. PCIe 4.0 is just now beginning to hit the market and there is zero significant penetration of PCIe 4.0 anything in the marketplace right now. Bus transitions are never a snap of the fingers. Even AMD is coming out with new PCHs and motherboards that are going to be based on PCIe 3.0. If the transition to 5.0 leaves 4.0 with a short life, then expect the transition to 5.0 to be long and arduous, unnecessarily so. PC OEMs hate these sort of things and just because the new hotness showed up doesn't mean that everyone is going to chase the new hotness. AMD can try to drive the uptake of PCIe 4.0, but until Intel adopts it or PCIe 5.0, OEMs and parts makers will be slow to dive in...
The target audience for the 2019 Mac Pro is not the same as the 2006-2012 Mac Pro and is narrower and smaller...I'm not sure anyone disagrees with that assessment. But it doesn't mean there is no target market or that there are no customers who are eagerly awaiting the new Mac Pro. You're just not eagerly awaiting it....that's fine, but it doesn't make your opinions truth. The market will decide whether Apple's Mac Pro is worth investing in or not.
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Your statement above is EXACTLY why Apple just built and announced "a one-size-fits-nobody chassis and motherboard which is over-specified and over-priced as a entry-level system but won't compete with custom PC builds at the high-end." and priced it at $6,000.00.
If Windows 10 is "actually a pretty solid, modern OS at its core, and at the end of the day Macs are technically little more than PCs in nice boxes with a different OS" then why are you here arguing for Apple to license macOS on generic PC hardware? Just go build yourself a Windows 10 workstation and laugh at all of us proles who keep giving Apple our money.
You're trying to get Apple to do what Microsoft did with Windows, which is simply make it a commodity like a hard drive or a stick of DRAM. Microsoft gained incredible marketshare and profit, but at the cost of ever being able to actually control their own operating system. Instead that incredible marketshare and enterprise sales cripples Microsoft as they try to advance Windows all the while trying to please everyone all at the same time. And "everyone" has made Windows a joyless, soulless shell to have to deal with, work on and look forward to since it first gained those large, tangible bits of marketshare.
A "reasonable premium" is what? What you think it is in your mind. What @ssgbryan thinks it is. Whatever @Peperino thinks it is? The same pittance Dell, HP, Lenovo and Acer accept from users while they fight each other tooth and nail for business while trying to make a decent profit in a shrinking market whose largest driver is who can assemble the least worst POS and still call it a computer?
The modern PC market is like a shark tank filled with chum, and you want Apple to step into that willingly. And you think that is a wise business decision?
Again, if macOS is nothing special, why do you care how much Apple sells the Mac Pro for and whether they even sell one at all? You sound perfectly content to build or have built a Windows PC from generic components. That will never be Apple, that can NEVER be Apple or that means they have lost their way and that's what will take them down before the lost sales from pricing the Mac Pro at $6,000.00 ever will.
Why would you even want Apple to do this? I truly think you don't understand Apple at all...all that you said above is anathema.
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I think you're splitting hairs. They produced several models where one pops off the cover, opens a cover (on my 7300), pulls the CPU card out, and inserts the new CPU card. Who actually performs that task is, IMO, irrelevant. These systems were designed to be easily upgraded post sale. This is, IMO, a user upgradeable processor.
He asked what you are actually doing - not the article you linked to... How would this not accommodate your workflow?
On the macro level, I agree, technology goes swing back and forth - in the long run, we will also all be dead.
In 2019, the 7,1 is a poor value, unless your business or hobby is tied to Apple software and/or certain Intel instruction sets.
The price of the base model will get you 3 - 4 times the cores, 4 times the ram, 4 times the SSD drive, and a current generation video card, from AMD - which is why I am so all about AMD - my software needs horsepower, I am not in the boat those poor Adobe folks are in.
It will be worse this fall, when we get a larger Navi stack of cards and TR 3 & Eypc Rome launch.
I agree that Apple has narrowed their target audience (I am expecting an order of magnitude drop in sales), but the question is - do they trust Apple to not go into Rip Van Winkle mode, once the 7,1 is released.
Are you willing to bet that Apple will release an update to the 7,1 36 months from now?
This is the crux of the biscuit. Tim doesn't seem to release new models until he can't buy the cpus anymore. Those folks that bought the 6,1 in 2014 had no new machines to upgrade to 4 years later.
Are you willing to bet that MPX modules will be widely supported? Remember how "widely supported" thunderbolt was in 2014, 2015, & 2016.
How much software will be rewritten to take advantage of that accelerator card - I remember Altivec software "support".
Lastly, if the 7,1 came with a 12 core Xeon, 64Gb of ram, 1tb SSD, a PCIe 4.0 motherboard and a Navi 10 card, I'd pay the tax - but I don't like paying tomorrow's prices for yesterday's technology.
Unfortunately, Apple announced a Z8 class machine - and didn't announce a Z4 or SFF more entry level system.
IMO the MP7,1 is the Cube 3.0 - simply too expensive for what you get. Won't appeal to prosumers due to the cost - and the professionals won't trust Apple to keep it up to date.
The difference between "officially user upgradable" and not "officially user upgradable" only matters while the Mac is under warranty. The poster I originally quoted was trying to make the argument that a DIY upgrade could potentially void the warranty, not that 7,1 CPU upgrades are difficult to perform.
I was responding to this statement of yours:
"...Apple has never released a device with an "officially user upgradable" CPU."
This statement is in error as Apple has done this with several PowerMac systems. I, and someone else, provided the PowerMac 7300 is an example where the CPU can be easily upgraded by the user. You then went on to dismiss this using the argument Apple's intent was not to have the user upgrade the processor. I can't speak to Apple's intent but replacing the CPU in one of these systems is no more difficult than replacing RAM or the GPU. Therefore, IMO, the CPU is user replaceable in these systems.
Like many people, I prefer MacOS over Windows - but that preference doesn't come with a blank check. Its not worth the $3000 gap between the hardware that I need and the hardware that Apple is now offering. The True Faithful seem to be still living in a nostalgic 1990s bubble when Mac used a technically superior processor architecture and Windows was still a thinly-disguised shell around CP/M that struggled with the DTP, graphics and A/V applications that Apple had practically invented.
The shift to Intel opened up the Mac market a lot - but the practical upshot of that is that the hardware is now like-for-like comparable with PCs and, increasingly, the software people are using is cross-platform (the switch to subscription models even means that you won't have to re-purchase software to switch platforms).
Whereas you can bling-up laptops and all-in-ones to justify a premium, that's not so easy with a big under-the-desk box'o'slots. The original Mac Pros solved that by actually being competitive with comparable workstation-class PC hardware (the 1.1 was something of a bargain). Then, they tried a radical design (the trashcan) that failed (but was still vaguely competitive with PCs if you accepted the new paradigm). Now, they've basically re-invented the wheel and produced, well, a big box'o'slots with a slightly improved way of supplying power to GPUs. At twice the price. So, yeah, sorry, lots of people are going to start wondering why they can't just get a cheap PC tower and a half-days training on Premiere for Windows vs. Premiere for Mac.
...well, an acceptable premium is what you used to pay on a $3000 Mac Pro. A tolerable premium might have been if the entry-level Mac Pro didn't cost more than an iMac Pro with an overall better spec and a high quality display (back in the real world, you usually pay a premium for all-in-one/small-form-factor over a commodity PCIe tower, not vice-versa).
...already planning for that eventuality, I assure you... and as the high-end Mac market shrinks, while Apple compensate by cranking up margins even further, get used to putting more and more cash on that collection plate until Apple call it a day, release an iOS development kit for Linux and walk away from the Mac.
Unless your workflow involves Mac/iOS development, FCPX or Logic Pro then it probably doesn't need OSX, just a day or two to adapt to the niggling differences between Adobe CS/Avid/Whatever on OS X and Adobe CS/Avid/Whatever on Windows.