Apple fanbois DENIED: Mac Pro deliveries stalled until April It's the high-end desktop that's been likened to Darth Vader's dustbin. But not even the Force can help fanbois get their hands on a Mac Pro – because Apple has yet again pushed back its delivery date. We previously revealed how anyone who ordered a Pro would have to wait until April to get their hands on one, but it now …
It looks like you can't actually buy a Mac Pro, old (it's not obviously available on their website) or new, at the moment from Apple here in the UK. And I'm supposing that it's been that way for a few months now. And availability of the new one has been put back even further.
If your a user who needs more than an iMac and you need to buy a machine right now, presumably your only choice is a Hackintosh. Is that right? I'm guessing that there's a few professionals out there with broken machines or needing more machines who are now looking at not being able to work at the moment.
Can you imagine the likes of Dell or IBM saying "no, you can't buy a big computer from us at the moment, but you can buy this tiny one."?
That would be Apple being "Not Exactly Fully Tuned into Their Target Market's Needs", but then I don't recall them ever really caring about that.
"It looks like you can't actually buy a Mac Pro, old (it's not obviously available on their website) or new, at the moment from Apple here in the UK."
Funnily enough, when Ford launch a new car, they typically take the outgoing model off their website, even if they're still fulfilling existing orders and some dealers have stock on their forecourt.
Outstanding stock notwithstanding, if they don't make it any more they're not going to be advertising it.
Also, they stopped selling the old Mac Pro in the EU a few months before the new version was announced because they got nobbled on some technicality to do with the cooling fan as I recall, and they obviously weren't going to rework the product just for the relatively few sales they'd have in those months in one market region (given that Timmy Cook had announced they had something "really great" coming out and most people would be holding on for the new product anyway).
That said, obviously that doesn't excuse the length of time they left the old Pro malingering without a substantive update (beyond incremental CPU bumps), and then repeatedly pushing back deliveries when they finally did scratch around in the corner and produced something new for the Pro market. I'm far from a fan of his, but Steve would never have stood for it. The board meeting would have been along the lines of his legendary mobileme.com tirade.
Seeing as Tim is the integration god who made all the supply chains "just work", I think he'd be sweating it if Steve were still around and on his case.
Or maybe they need to place an order for 100K pieces and hope that by delaying more people will pre-order and they can fill the order?
I mean, that's the best case scenario for any manufacturer, why make them and stock them, and pay the supplier, and then hope to sell them? Best is to sell them before even starting the manufacture. No cash blocked, no fear of product not selling.
Supplier delays shipments of kit to buyers.
Hardly news is it?
Oh wait.... Apple is the supplier. Hold the Front Page. Time to slag off Apple (again).
The MacPro is kinda cool looking and is sure to spawn a load of imitators. But this is Apple so they don't innovate do they? Aren't they just a Foxconn re-badger?
Seriously El Reg, can we have some real IT News?
viz less on Flash Suppliers but more about stuff that matters to the majority of the readership
Its a little unfair to use this example to compare Taiwan and Texas, since the manufacturing processes are different.
Assuming that delay is not due to component suppliers like Intel or AMD, my guess would be that it is the deep-drawn aluminium enclosure that is causing the delay, only because it is a manufacturing process that takes some fine tuning.
New production site, staff training, unforseen production problems with the casing or funky extruded heat sink? Dozen and one potential issues.
The Taiwan lines are designed to produce 10 million identical iPhones, and then crack open a box of 32GB flash chips instead of 16GB chips and do the exact same thing another 10 million times. And then they do another 10 million generics for a Chinese brand selling them into the domestic market. It's tried and tested.
The "custom" options on a MacBook or iMac are no such thing - they'll just do a "smaller" (still 6/7 figures) run on the more esoteric combinations.
The Pro is MUCH smaller volume and to some extent built to order. I imagine there's a lot more hands on work and less automation involved than in the consumer products, and where humans are involved, you can get one-off errors (as opposed to automated errors which are usually repeatable and trackable, unlike someone distracting an operator for 30 seconds and ballsing up a single specimen).
this week down at the Excel.
I saw several of them on various stands. It's actually much smaller than I imagined, marginally taller than a catering-size tin of Nescafe - not really big enough to be a dustbin.
Certainly powerful though. One demonstrator was cutting eleven (11) synchronised streams of 4K video on the fly without a problem in Final Cup Pro X. (imagine an 11 camera live shoot)
Quite impressive - don't know what spec it had though.
Crikey, the last time I saw such shipment delays for pricey kit was when I ordered a 4 meg RAM upgrade from Watford Electronics during the great RAM shortage of early 1995. Took my money, constantly promised delivery but kept pushing back, prices dropped, and 8 weeks later I got my RAM. Never got the difference back.
FWIW company I work for ordered one in late December, it arrived last week.
It looks like a small, though roundish, monolith from 2001. The setup instructions even have a step for opening it to look at the insides before hooking up the cables. +1 geek. Pretty cool, but then I'm not the one out of pocket for it. Love it or hate it; either way it's not boring.
The 6 or so weeks for delivery hasn't changed much since a few days after it became available to order back in December.
An order put in in early January should arrive late February / early March.
It's now on the cusp of March, so orders put in today plus 6 weeks is going to push delivery to April.
How much of this is so difficult to understand?
The part that is interesting is Apple's ramp up plans. If we assume some constant level of demand (after the initial madness), either there are no plans to ramp up production, or, they have ongoing production problems (supplier, QC, whatever).
Beer (brown MacPro) o'clock.
Can you imagine the likes of Dell or IBM saying "no, you can't buy a big computer from us at the moment, but you can buy this tiny one."?
--Well yes I can imagine it. I bought a set of 7610 workstations about 6 weeks ago as part of an order of about $200,000 US. While I am grateful for my red precision laptop that showed up a few days ago, I am less than pleased with the shipping time on these 7610s as they have a contract worth of work waiting on their arrival. It happens with every vendor but they all shaft you on ship dates especially when customization is involved.
Now for the snide bits. The laggards on my order are 2 touch screen 14 inch notebooks and the beefy precisions. Don't care about the touchscreen mac air wannabes. The precisions being late makes me want to whack Boo the puppy with a whiffle bat. Mine are coming with Dual 4 core 3.6, single k600, 128GB ram, 8 ssds, LSI hw (real) raid adapter, pcie 350gb ssd, intel xeon PHI, 10GBe and those helpful corporate things like Vpro, hw level lojack, remote access card. The best part- a stupid sticker complete with service tag, company name etc.
Before you get uppity about the video card and few but fastest cores, these are being used for SAS not gopro videos taken from a helmet of a snowboarder on a lift. Do you call them lifts? Or is that the elevator? The target is to be able to run multiple jobs at a time, a lot of our jobs are many millions of records with up to around 900 fields per record. The xeon phi I think is only going to be for another piece of software we occasionally use. Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think SAS can use a PHI and I am 99.333 (with a line over the 3's) percent sure they still don't plan on GPU acceleration. The cool thing about a non-nappy bin is that you can customize the tool for a job other than trying to get a ladies knickers in a twist. Although I suspect not many ladies actually care about the kind of computer you have for playing WoT and pretending to be a video professional instead of paying off your student loans.
I still don't understand the fascination with the black tube of unupgradeablenesss. Why not run real BSD on an HP? Windows on a Dell? With better hardware, better support and real, tangible enterprise control of the system? Who are these people who have the money to buy this toy but no security or cost cutting systems management? I suspect it is still just a strange status symbol among a select group of nerds who don't know what the real world is like. They only one at my office did ship a few days ago and will sit on the CTO's desk to look nice when our customers pop in for a look. I'm sure his expensecloud reports will run REALLY fast.
"Who are these people who have the money to buy this toy but no security or cost cutting systems management? I suspect it is still just a strange status symbol among a select group of nerds who don't know what the real world is like."
Ah, the arrogance of somebody who thinks his situation is the only one that's "real world" and tougher than other peoples' situations. Your Dell computers sound very nice but you do know that anybody who works with a supercomputer or a cloud like Google's, Amazon's, or Microsoft's would take one look look at your setup, shrug their shoulders, and go back to their own "real world" situation, right?
The new Mac Pro has a target audience. I know an independent graphic designer who will be buying one to edit video and do 3-D modeling (a little too involved for an iMac but not involved enough to require a render farm) and it should fit his needs nicely. You are not in the target audience, but that doesn't mean the target audience doesn't exist.
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