So .... Tim Cook is saying don't buy a Mac Pro this year, wait until next year?
Tim Cook reveals 'great' update for Mac Pro
Apple CEO Tim Cook has revealed the Mac Pro range will be updated in 2013 with "something really great". Insubstantial Ram and processor tweaks to Apple's Mac Pro line had fans up in arms this week, prompting the removal of the machine's "New" tag on the company's online store, MacRumours reports. Without the addition of …
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Friday 15th June 2012 02:57 GMT hazydave
Thing is..
Apple is, or was, in part a media content creation PC company. And the Mac Pro was never even remotely a business desktop. What business PC user needs dual socket. 12 core desktops? But for video work, boy howdy.
Thing is, you can get a modern workstation class PC with a current high end gaming or even workstation class GPU for the price of the 2.5 year old Mac Pro and its 2009 gaming GPU.
Of course, Apple's solving this problem on other ways. They have the only pro video editor still on the market that's 32-bit only and doesn't use GPU acceleration (Final Cut Pro 7). Plus, they released an upgrade that's not really an upgrade at all, but a scaled down, appified, not compatible, not pro replacement, FCP X.
In short, Apple is trying really hard to kill their pro market. I mean, seriously, they couldn't come up with a Mac Pro replacement each year? I'm guessing they dump the Pro entirely and introduce an iMac Pro. Which will be useless to actual pros, but appealing to FCPX prosumers and die hard fanbois.
And this is clearly what they're going to keep doing. Look at the Mac market.. last quarter, only 18% of Apple's business. Most of their money comes from one iPhone and one iPad refresh each year. For the Mac. they need 10-something models. So it's consolidation time. Same reason all laptops will be "Air" models... no optical or HDDs anymore.
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Thursday 14th June 2012 09:17 GMT andreas koch
iLife integration
The really great update will be that it gets fully integrated into iLife: It will be depending on sharing processor load with your iPhone and your iPad and with the iTunes iCloud through an AirPort supported by IOS6i and MacOS11.
This will make sure that you will purchase only the right iDevices to be able to use it at all. Your (coming soon...) iBankAccount will be debited accordingly.
Apple knows what's good for you!
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Friday 15th June 2012 03:07 GMT hazydave
They kind of have...
The Mac Pro is the only real traditional PC Apple still makes. IMacs are just laptops for the desktop.
. the early ones at least used laptop motherboards. They're similarly unexpandable, and of course force a new monitor purchase with each iMac.
Apple is one of the few PC companies gaining market share... they did 4.5% globally in 2011, and seem on track to hit 5.2% for 2012. More than all of that growth comes from the "iPhone/iPad coattail" buyers... even as they're shedding users in the pro market. So it's very reasonable for Apple to build Macs primarily for the iOS crowd... just what they're doing.
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Thursday 14th June 2012 10:00 GMT Annihilator
Low hanging fruit
The really strange thing is, you'd think that the Mac Pro's would be the easiest thing to update compared with the massive reengineering that presumably needs to go on with a laptop/Air device.
Lob in a new motherboard, buy a job lot of Ivy Bridge chips and away you go. They presumably couldn't care less about Pro customers, despite protests to the contrary.
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Thursday 14th June 2012 10:43 GMT Stephen Usher
Re: Low hanging fruit
It's even easier than that. They merely have to design a new processor tray and leave everything else alone.
Of course, they could help by asking AMD to just put some new firmware in a more modern version of their Radeon HD cards so that the current users can gain access to graphics card technology less than three years old as well.
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Thursday 14th June 2012 10:08 GMT Jon Double Nice
I reckon it's going to be
a convergence of the Mac Pro, iPhone and iMac lines into one monstrous unwieldy aluminium clad giant screened lifestyle device. It will require the optional iSackBarrow in order to carry it around.
On the plus side it will have a 32" retina display, just to stick it to Samsung Galaxy lines.
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Thursday 14th June 2012 12:55 GMT SImon Hobson
Re: What's the picture of?
It's the front view of just the top section of the Mac Pro. The two smooth bits are the optical drive covers which (from memory, I've not touched one for many years) 'magically' slide out of the way as the tray comes out.
http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_pro
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Thursday 14th June 2012 11:53 GMT djstardust
I bought a quadcore MacPro a couple of years ago with Cinema display for a cool £2600
The Bluetooth has never worked and various releases of osX have got slower as time has gone on and the 3GB of RAM disappears pretty quickly, even when just web surfing et al.
Apple support were useless.
It's now got XP 32bit running on it and it goes like s**t off a shovel.
Great solidly built machine sold with a poor OS. Should last me another 10 years at least!
Keith
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Thursday 14th June 2012 14:03 GMT J. Cook
I will grant that much- macs generally tend to be engineered to be a bit more solid and reliable than the same spec machine from some of the other large vendors. (Dell, HP, etc.) Now, upgrading or repairing them... yeah. fiendish for certain. (really Apple? I have to spend 30 minutes and use/buy half the specialized tools in my kit just to swap a dead hard drive out of a ancient G3 based powerbook? FAIL.)
That having been said, the dell precision chassis sitting on my work desk is built like a tank, weighs almost as much as one, and will probably be good for a full 5 years powered on 24/7. But then, it was nearly 2 grand without the monitors.
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Thursday 14th June 2012 18:08 GMT BristolBachelor
What? You bought a workstation that uses Intel Xeon processors 2 years ago and only put 3GB of RAM in it? My HP laptop from 4 years ago came with 4GB! Got a MBP last year and it came with 8GB (but supports 16GB). You do know that your MacPro supports 48GB, don't you?
I can imagine that XP runs along very nicely in 3GB, but normally anything you want a workstation for wants more. (E.G. Adobe Creasive Suite will happily bloat itself out to use 12GB or more) I'm not sure that you can blame the latest OSx if you only feed it 3GB.
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Thursday 14th June 2012 19:09 GMT Ted Treen
Re Bristol Bachelor
"...I'm not sure that you can blame the latest OSx if you only feed it 3GB..."
I'm damned certain he can't. I too have a two-year old Mac Pro - except mines 8-core. I took it to 12GB RAM and she flies. I use CS5, MSOffice, iMovie etc., and run Win7 through VMWare Fusion.
Not a problem.
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Thursday 14th June 2012 12:29 GMT VinceH
'"Our Pro customers like you are really important to us. Although we didn't have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at [this week's] event, don't worry as we're working on something really great for later next year," he wrote.'
After which, he immediately picked up the phone and rang the Mac Pro team. "Start working on an update that we can call 'really great' when we announce it next year..."
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Thursday 14th June 2012 12:38 GMT Silverburn
MacPro 1.1
My - admittedly "non-apple-approved" upgrades (not quite latest gen AMD GPU, upgraded XEONS) to my 1.1 should see me right for a good while yet*.
Those complaining about non-latest GPU's in factory fresh kit have a perfectly good point, but those of us with older kit outside of warranty are more than happy to flash the BIOS on a PC GPU, update QE_CI, and bingo - cheaper and faster GPU's than we'd ever get as standard.
*...*if* 10.7 doesn't consign it to the legacy cul-de-sac of death...
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Thursday 14th June 2012 14:20 GMT Adam T
Re: MacPro 1.1
1.1 user here too, and mine is still running like butter six years later.
Therein lies the crunch though, as I buy workstations for graphics work every couple years, and while I've wanted Mac Pros, I always go with custom builds instead. I simply can't be bothered with playing the waiting game, only to find you have a measly choice of CPU loadout and graphics options.
How many Xeons were released this year? And all will be a year old by the time the 2013 MP comes out (which will probably offer 2 or 3, and won't tell you which chips they are on the product page anyway...all you need to do is know they're "really fast" :p).
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Friday 15th June 2012 01:18 GMT P. Lee
Easiest to do, hardest to sell
A bit like putting out an android phone.
The problem is that Apple's forte is giving consumers a top-of-the-line interface by which apple means, good display tech, nice visuals, good (battery) availability, nice touch and feel.
For a pro machine, its likely that users will go for best of breed mix & match. The "good enough for most consumers wrapped in a really nice interface" doesn't cut it in that market. They will pick their own outrageously priced monitor and not care a hoot about the label. You aren't likely to sell them a magic mouse either.
So far, apple seem to have the dual-cpu workstation to themselves. When you have a tower capable of multiple drives, thunderbolt is less important. To go "revolutionary" (ok, evolutionary) on this, they need more cpu's and more gpus which means working with AMD & nvidia.
They could do a quad-xeon box but that's a whole lot more tech on the motherboard and costs more / eats margin. They could go SLI/Crossfire in OSX but that's more work from AMD/nvidia which appears to be hard to come by and mostly fuels the hackintosh market.
My guess is that they'll do something with LGA 2011. Let's hope they do something more than add 14 SATA ports and 20 USB ports, as most mobo makers appear to have done. Thunderbolt would be a start, though not terribly useful except for fast portable disks.