Tube be or not tube be: Apple’s CYLINDRICAL Mac Pro is out tomorrow 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 …
I think you misunderstand the market for this computer. I would be amazed at the price they are if 5% of them were used as desk jewellery. This is aimed at a pro market. And those prices are the base models. The likelihood is the average customer is going to spec their machine way above the minimum. And then use it.
I know exactly what you mean. Like you, my wife is getting a little slow recently and she had wake up issues last year too.
It's crazy to have to spent nearly £200 pounds on a new one, particularly as a wife has high running costs.
Nowadays, 'green' legislation means you have to factor in the added expense of disposing of the old one ethically. I miss the old days - when they died, you could just to strip them of anything useful and dump them at the local tip.
Ok. It's a cylinder. Interesting, but practical... I don't know so much.
The pricetag and the location of the ports means that owners of this will put it right up front of their desks in a place of pride, meaning that all the other stuff has to be up on the desk too instead of tucked away neatly.
So for an editor that has a few hard disks, possibly some sort of video input device you are looking at at least half a dozen wires up on the desk. So is this what it is going back to ... the rats nest of wires on the desk??
Yes it looks good, and it is undoubtedly good hardware in the box. But all they are doing is making a bespoke form factor that makes upgrading even more impossible then before.
> but practical... I don't think so.
Well, the internal configuration would suggest a Tolberone shape, but then people might lay it on its side which would prevent cooling by convection. What shape would you prefer?
>So for an editor that has a few hard disks, possibly some sort of video input device you are looking at at least half a dozen wires up on the desk.
No you're not. One Thunderbolt cable to your displays, one to your storage and PCIe cards. The advantage is that you can take your $6000 RED card with your Macbook when you're working in the field, or swap it between workstations depending on workflow.
>But all they are doing is making a bespoke form factor that makes upgrading even more impossible then before
Ugh? It was very easy before- the old Mac Pro was renowned for it. Now it is just a case of swapping a cable.
>Ugh? It was very easy before- the old Mac Pro was renowned for it. Now it is just a case of swapping a cable.
In other words when it breaks or you want to upgrade you have to buy a new one. I'm sorry, but if I have just gone and shelled out over 2 grand for a machine I don't want to go have to buy a new one if it breaks (and I know you say, just buy applecare, but with that price tag there are going to be those that cannot afford the new shiny and the applecare)
> but with that price tag there are going to be those that cannot afford the new shiny and the applecare
If you're spending that much on the machine, it will be because you are using it to make money- so you will either get Applecare or another contingency plan, since disappointing your clients will cost you dear.
What an utterly stupid design! Pro my arse! I real pro buys rack-mount kit designed to maximize power in the smallest space, while keeping the price-per-watt down.
A REAL pro doesn't care what the outside looks like. A real pro requires a powerhouse that can be upgraded with off-the-shelf parts, contains redundancy, while packing as much power as possible into the smallest space, while keeping the price-per-watt to a minimum.
You waste money firstly by buying it from Apple, who overcharge for Intel components. You waste money because this stupid non-standard round case will require that the Intel upgrades be customised to fit the Apple case. This stupid thing won't even fit under your DESK without wasting space!
Oh, and of course if you opt for the 12 core variant, I assume you've factored in the overhead of upgrading the power supply to your desk, the added air conditioning strain... What's that? You've already allocated that budget for the server room requirements?
Well, I'm sure your friendly BOFH would have loved to accommodate your shiny new Mac hardware in one of his server racks, except.... IT WON'T BLOODY FIT!!!!
Just like every other Apple product when offered up to the corporate market, Apple have designed a round peg for a square hole.
Yes, graphic designers, photogs, video editors etc, non of them are professionals. Everyone has a data centre to keep their rack mounted kit in, and no one in an office uses a Xeon workstation do they (says he looking at one under his desk that hasn't had more than a disk upgrade in its life)
No upgrades, eh? I assume you don't work in post-video production, or have you not moved into 1080p yet?
Actually, we've seen a very steady and constant move across all the creative industries away from Apple. The music industry has been one of the last Stalwarts. This is in part because they are one of the last to have certain packages available ONLY to Apple, but also because well, how can I put this delicately? Musicians aren't in general best known for their IT literacy, and so as a rule of thumb, appreciate an OS that treats them like they don't know what they're doing.
As a former independent 3D artist I can assure you, that Dusty Bin here will give you the LEAST bang-for-buck, having built my own pizza-box render farms in the past, bulk buying old machines from schools is a great way to get massive power for little cash. It's also very friendly on the old leccy bill. I only needed to fire them up with a WOL script when it came to render time. Hell, that's how Google got started!
Photoshop users require acres of RAM and fast swap files (still not in the same league as video editing) You can either pick up faster kit for the same price, or simply save yourself a bucket load of cash by buying something that doesn't have that little silver badge on it, and get a wider choice in cheaper software.
And the design? Come on! It really isn't that clever, it's impractical, and finally, let's not forget we're talking about a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy YET AGAIN before they produced a funky little mp3 player. After which, their PC business became barely a tertiary interest.
Where do you get this "cannot be upgraded" crap from? The RAM is socketed, internal disks are standard parts and the video lives on daughter cards. Everything else is designed to be connected by Thunderbolt. These things are designed to handle 4K video as they stand (on 3 separate 4K screens even). You were thinking of moving to 8K in the near future?
> Where do you get this "cannot be upgraded" crap from?
You will need to get yourself an extra desk to accomodate the sprawl and rats nest of cables that you will need to pull all of that off. That 's just the thing you need when you are working in one of the planet's most expensive cities (SFO, NYC, London).
So a 3+ screen Windows workstation is cable free and uses less space than a small cylinder plus ONLY the modules you need? Get real JEDADIAH, space and cables are so far off the bottom of the list of possible issues compared to a PC that most folks won't notice them.
>The music industry has been one of the last Stalwarts. This is in part because they are one of the last to have certain packages available ONLY to Apple, but also because well, how can I put this delicately? Musicians aren't in general best known for their IT literacy, and so as a rule of thumb, appreciate an OS that treats them like they don't know what they're doing.
- Firewire audio kit just works with Macs, with generic PCs you have to determine if you have a Via or TI Firewire chipset (one works, one doesn't)
- Macs are usually fairly quiet in use.
- OSX's CoreAudio behaves. Window's sound subsystem is a mess, and keeps trying to wrest control back from ASIO for no good reason.
- Wireless MIDI is baked into OSX and iOS out of the box.
True, you could build some special low-latency Linux box to do the same, but should it go tits-up good luck acquiring another one five minutes before you're due on stage.
Sigh...
PC music creator/composer/electronic musician here. I also work in I.T.
I run a sandy bridge Toshiba mid range lappy that with $600 + $150(for ssd and ram upgrades) "just works" with a USB sound card that "just works" and multiple osc and midi controllers... "Just works" after I installed a 5MB program that is free and has been around for 10 yrs or so.
My FireWire card that is outdated but well loved... But "Just works" and that is with a 3yr old i7 first gen that was custom built and.... Ahem. "Just works".
I have run this gear under win7 and win8.1 which funnily enough... "Just works" - though the new ui is a bit shit.
Oh and it has been built using ultra quiet fans and ultra quiet case so that it is barely audible...
Seriously, i think you just made op's point that muso's are mostly users.. Not pro at tech at all.
Having said that I do not begrudge your use of Mac's I couldn't care less but give up the "it just works" bullshit OK. It only just works if you are a beginner. If you are not. Then it "just gets in the way"
you use it cause you couldn't care less... End of story.
@ Dave 126
You forgot, "wired" midi on windows sucks big time, on Mac it is plug and play, on Windows it is ... hm, where was that driver, where do I download that thirdparty app to test which midi devices have been detected by windows .... seen it all before, many times ... shit, I forgot to reboot a third time ... my silly fault ... or wasn't it ?
That is a bit of historical revisionism. The transparent, colourful RevA iMac preceded the first iPods by some months. Those did quite a bit to redeem Apple's bottom line and was the first outing for Apple from a certain Jonathon Ives.
Sure the iPods and latterly iPhones and iPads respectively have not hurt the bottom line either, but it was funky desktops for home users that were Jobs' first big success. After he killed the clone market of course that caused the initial haemorrhage.
I don't think you are Apple's target customer. You are bashing a powerhouse of a machine that is also incredibly transportable, allowing people, whose jobs don't confine themselves to one office space, to take that power with them on jobs.
And your alternative is to buy a load of old computers from schools and link them all up into a render farm.
I can't see old Tim Cook and his mates losing much sleep over your opinion.
> I don't think you are Apple's target customer.
This is supposed to be a workstation for professionals, not a consumer toy to demonstrate how much money you can waste.
Some mindless conspicuous consumer is hardly the target market for this kind of device. Although the Apple faithful seem to think that's who is likely to buy a Mac Pro. Pro users of any sort are much more like the "geeks" you are always trying to denigrate and marginalize.
If you are willing to declare that power users are no longer welcome in the Cult of Apple then I would not disagree with you.
@Steve Todd
Strange, my Mac Pro under my desk has had new drives (3 off, latest an SSD), memory, 2nd Firewire card added, UAD2 PCIe card, new video card (modded PCIe PC graphics card to get around Apple's ludicrous overpricing of ancient GPUs) added to it over the past 4 years.
I've just replaced it with a 4770K based hackintosh that pummels the base level new Mac Pro for performance, RAM and disk storage for almost exactly half the entry level price in Australia ($2000). This has a GTX 660 currently but wonder of wonders I can upgrade the GPU, RAM and add other drives trivially without having to add an expansion chassis. It's as quiet as my old Mac Pro and has been flawless since I installed it - which took 30 minutes, pain free.
And I can use it as my primary DAW system for the next 2-3 years and just upgrade parts as I need, even to the level of new mainboard/cpu. It even has a better warranty than Apple have just got busted for not supporting in Australia.
Also, Mac Pros aren't workstations, they don't have workstation level support from Apple outside the major centres in the USA. HP and Dell make real workstations with real certification and support.
>Also, Mac Pros aren't workstations, they don't have workstation level support from Apple outside the major centres in the USA. HP and Dell make real workstations with real certification and support.
That's not right. Workstation Certification is done by the software vendor; as an example, Solidworks Corp has certified specific machines from Boxx, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo for use with their software under 64 bit Win 7.
It is almost a redundant phrase to speak of an Apple OSX machine as 'certified', since there aren't that many hardware combinations for the software vendors to test. The Mac Pro has ECC RAM, and in the event of it going tits up you just swap the machine out for a new one, copy an image across to it and then carry on chasing that deadline.
It annoys me, the number of people that claim they can build an equivalent or faster machine for half the money, who then list a bunch of consumer grade parts that lack a lot of the functionality of the Apple device.
Ignoring everything else for the moment, you want to put together a machine for professional use without licenses and without support? Really?
Next, no the 4770 isn't equivalent to a Xeon E5. It lacks features like ECC RAM support and has a smaller cache to start with. At best it's a wash in terms of performance between the two, and that's compared to the BASE model Mac Pro. You also don't get SSD connected directly to the PCIe bus (peak speeds of around 1G/sec compared to 540M/sec over SATA3), nor is the GPU spectacular compared to the D500 or D700 options (which also use ECC RAM, as does the entry level D300).
Next, where are all the expansion ports and IO? Dual 1G Ethernet, 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4. 6 Thunderbolt ports (each of which allow you to connect multiple PCIe devices), up to 6 monitors etc.
Finally how big is the box, and how much noise does it make? I'm guessing that it's nowhere near quiet.
Usually when something doesn't suit you, just leave it. Be it function or price. There's no need to get so worked up over something that you won't buy anyway. This machine will likely find pride of place in an office that is minimalist, avant-garde, with zero clutter. And yes, there are people in such a setup that use powerful computers. Racks are so yesterday. There are more than one type of REAL pros anyway. Of course if it makes you happy, then you can be THE pro. Or whatever.
> Usually when something doesn't suit you, just leave it.
Easier said than done when you have bought into a single vendor proprietary solution.
Although at least some of the old Mac Pro gear (hardware) is standard enough to move over. Anything spent on software would be money just p*ssed away.
Er - it's quiet. Rack servers are never quiet.
Quiet matters in some offices. You're going to have a tough time running 3 4K displays over a network without some extra special magic that's going to cost a lot more than this box does.
I'd be more worried about overheating. Apple's record on heat management isn't great. I expect the 4/6-cores will be fine, but I'd wait until the 12-cores have been beta tested by a few customers first.
Oh - and it looks a bit like a rounded Cray-1, but smaller, and without the insane cooling. (Not so much on the inside, but I wonder if that was part of the inspiration for the idea.)
It doesn't go in the racks mate. It goes in the edit suites with the guy or girl using it to create content. Apple have made a big deal in the premarketing bat how quiet the new Mac Pro is, how it can sit in the studio etc. without being noticeable. Which means BOFH gains some space back to cram more RAID arrays into the SAN ready for all that 4k editing his users will be doing come the end of next year. Win win.
"I can see Apple being able to get a design patent on the outer case, and maybe some real patents on some of the internal cooling tech."
Given some of the outlandish patents awarded, I think you may be right. Patent applied for and patent awarded seem to be synonymous these days.
" With all that power, you’ll be able to do things like seamlessly edit full-resolution 4K video while simultaneously rendering effects in the background — and still have enough power to connect up to three high-resolution 4K displays."
er.. not with FCPX you won't - since it stops all background processing the minute you do anything in the interface... which does sort of make one wonder if the bloke who came up with that gem was still using FCP7 (which could do that fine)
"One notable thing missing from the connectors on this new model is DisplayPort or its Apple equivalent. That means any displays over standard 1080HD will need a Thunderbolt adaptor of some kind to run it"
thunderbolt in compatible with displayport. you just plug it in surely ?
As you point out, there's only the 2.5k one at present, but that is higher than 1080HD and plugs in via the displayport/thunderbolt just fine.
I imagine the limit of 3 displays is due to the displayport bandwidth shared across thunderbolt ?
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