How long before...
other PC box shifters 'copy' the idea?
Have to agree with the article, it does look different.
Apple’s cylindrical computer, the Mac Pro, will finally go in sale tomorrow, the Cupertino giant has decided. Based on Intel Xeon chippery with up to 12 processing cores on board, up to 64GB of DDR3 ECC memory and a pair of AMD Radeon FirePro GPUs hooked up to 6GB of GDDR5 video memory in total, it’s hard not to be impressed …
You do recognize the irony of comparing Samsung with Xerox here, don't you? Given that Apple lifted their UI paradigm from PARC...
My question is, how long until the first one of these spectacularly burns down?
I mean a Xeon and two FirePros in less volume than some cider bottles? Fuckinell
Vertical cylinder with single 120/140/160mm fan on top, bottom or in the middle, with filtered air intake at bottom and exhaust at top is a quite obvious design for single fan PC. I had this in mind at least as far back as 2005 -- there's nothing special about the idea, IMHO. Crucial factor is quality of implementation though, and I doubt Apple are able to pull it.
"I had this in mind at least as far back as 2005 -- there's nothing special about the idea, IMHO."
Actually, I had an idea that the best way to make money was to get your customers to do your work for you and pay you for the privilege - I had this idea as far back as 1978 while I was at university. Unfortunately the enabling technologies were not in place and I was unable to execute this seminal idea. Sadly for me, others have capitalised on my prescience (DHL and banks in general were first IIRC) and I have been left penniless and without the credit for this brilliant idea that I justly deserve.
> there's nothing special about the idea, IMHO.
Which may explain why no one has thought to implement it. Or not.
>Crucial factor is quality of implementation though, and I doubt Apple are able to pull it.
Yeah, I, too, doubt they'll be able to pull it back from the clutches of the market once it's introduced. They'll probably have to content themselves with selling as many as they can shove out the factory door. While doing so, though, they might even have to weather criticisms about 'artificial shortages', accusations of 'constraining supply', and that ilk of BS...
Vertical cylinder with single 120/140/160mm fan on top, bottom or in the middle, with filtered air intake at bottom and exhaust at top is a quite obvious design for single fan PC. I had this in mind at least as far back as 2005 -- there's nothing special about the idea, IMHO. Crucial factor is quality of implementation though, and I doubt Apple are able to pull it.
Hey Johnny... It's your cousin.... Ramazan.... Ramazan Ive... You know that new futuristic design you were looking for that isn't based on a Braun shaver from the sixties? Well have a listen to this!!!
A couple of days after the new Mac Pro was announced someone pointed out Amazon.jp were already selling an almost identical device at a fraction of the price. It was a small kitchen countertop wastebin of about the same dimensions, rounded corners etc. Wish I could find a link to it...
I have to admit that I was 'wowed' when it was first announced. Looking at it now though - in light of all the hype around any Apple product - the cylindrical design is in danger of succumbing to thoughts of an empty giant BOG ROLL. I seriously doubt PC manufacturers will be chomping at the bit to reproduce this design. I'd expect they'd be halting manufacture of ANY new designs, while the PC market continues to go down - on topic - the shitter.
"I'd expect they'd be halting manufacture of ANY new designs, while the PC market continues to go down"
I suspect you may be right, but I'd hope that someone does a conservative large case designed for replacability of all parts and expansion, and continues to make parts and new motherboards that fit a common modular standard. Then we pay more up front but can keep it chugging along for (say) 15 years?
Just donated an old HP workstation box (xw6200) that you could pull open and swap a hard drive in a couple of minutes without a screw driver. Upgraded graphics card, memory. Capacitors held out since 2004. Biggish PSU. Heavy bu**er but solid.
>>Capacitors held out since 2004.
>What!? You couldn't replace the caps without proprietary tools? Design fail!
OK, clumsy expression on my part. I meant that the motherboard had good quality parts including electrolytic capacitors. Capacitors will inevitably fail sooner or later but the quality range can place the 'or later' well into the decades, or as low as half a decade.
You pays...
noominy.noom is correct, Cray did use round designs.
However, the round design by Seymour Cray was for the purpose of minimizing the wiring distance between any two points inside the chassis. Apple has everything on a single board packed with SMD's, so there is no genius-of-Cray here, it's just your typical overpriced fruity design more suited to an art show than to a computer user's desk.
You have missed the point. The Mac Air has impressive packaging, and so makes for a better portable.
However, this is a desktop. To get close to a normal Mac Pro, you have to add an external HDD enclose, complete with a straggly cable. For the 2nd Ethernet port you'll also need another adaptor (the Mac Pro will easily saturate a Gbit port and normally uses 2 bonded). For video or audio work, you'll also need an external PCIe enclosure for your pro capture cards. Also despite waiting years for it, it can only tke 64GB of ram? The old ones have that! A standard 16GB max is also poor showing, our laptops have that much!
The old Mac Pro is better in every way except the processors. Very, very disappointed.
It *has* 2 ethernet ports as standard and 6 Thunderbolt 2 so assume you could hook up Thunderbolt to Gigabit adapters to this if you need more - pretty sure I saw a Thunderbolt to 10GbE adapter not long ago?
I suspect most people using these will use external RAID enclosures anyway - clearly it's going to have a few connections going in the back anyway but it's still a very small and powerful unit.
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Upvote for that. First thing I thought was some dork user would think "Oh a coffee mug holder" - cue fizz-bang sound effects.
Looks a bit like the Lecson power-amp from my 1977 hi-fi but that had a fluted cylindrical body in black anodised ally as it's heat sink. Prior art Apple?