Apple's aging Mac Pro is falling behind Windows rivals | Hacker News Reader

Apple's aging Mac Pro is falling behind Windows rivals

computerworld.com

76 pointspier2585 comments

Apple is waiting for the successor to the aging X99 Intel chipset. Intel has released the 100 series chipset but there are only max 20 PCIe lanes compared to the 40 max PCIe lanes possible with X99. this means the only possible configurations with the 100 series chipsets is x16,x4 or x8,x8,x4. With PCIe being the central bus with the Mac Pro it doesn't make sense for Apple to have released a new Mac Pro yet. The chipset technology in the current Mac Pro is still top of the line. Sure, you can get new processors with more cores and DDR4, but the number of PCIe lanes and memory speed/latency is optimal for the Mac Pro as as of now there is no better option for them to build a successor.

Intel's newest Xeon processors no longer work with the consumer chipsets such as X99, a Xeon class chipset must be used. If Intel was going to release a new chipset for Xeon, they would have released it with the E5 v4 last week.

It's quite possible Apple was waiting for E5 v4 and is still waiting for AMD Polaris or nVidia Pascal, though.

Some people actually prefer the workstation class mb and there ones designed for use in place of x99

Sounds plausible, but why not even release an upgrade to the outdated GPUs or the CPU?

The current 15'' rMBP is faster in single core operations...

As a rule, don't buy a Mac Pro when you're doing single core operations. It's often not worth the money even for multi-core, multi-core plus using the GPUs is when it's the right pick. I'm referring to choosing a Mac, not comparing Macs & PCs.

This is where it gets complicated, because both the chipset and the processor have their own set of lanes. Skylake, and the 100 series, have 16 lanes from the processor, and up to 20 lanes from the chipset, with the chipset only able to aggregate in groups of four. The chips that use the x99/c61x chipsets have 28/40 lanes on the CPU, and have up to 8 lanes given by the chipset. So a hypothetical Broadwell-EP Mac Pro would not be stymied by the chipset, as it gets most of its PCI-e lanes from the processor already, and would see a significant performance boost compared to the current processors, given that the high end chip from then is about middle of the road in Intel's current lineup.

Or they've decided to cut out of that market segment entirely. Will be interesting to see what unfolds.

It is worth mentioning that many developers were left out in the cold even when the cylindrical Mac Pro was originally announced. I care about CPU speeds and storage, not so much about the GPU, so the form factor and dual-GPU architecture of the new Mac Pro was a set of bad tradeoffs. I never wanted to pay for an extra GPU, and the cost of attached Thunderbolt drive arrays is astronomical.

I hope Apple will release a "developer machine": something with tons of CPU power, easily expandable internal storage, and a mid-range single GPU. And for heaven's sake, don't try to make it small, thin, or round. I'd buy it in an instant.

What does a modern developer do now? Bear with this or an MBP? Cross compile?

From what I've seen it's a mixture of Macbook Pro or running a Linux desktop - probably largely depends on what you're actually making.

I use a Mac Mini from the times it was still upgradable. Put in 2 SSDs and maxed the RAM — cheap and convenient.

Develop on a PC?

By a dual xenon pc and run windows or Linux

I am primarily a Mac/iOS developer, but occasionally have to do CPU or GPU intensive stuff. I use a macbook for most of my work but have a windows desktop machine for when I need it. (Ironically, the beefy windows machine was cheaper). For example: lightmap baking.

Switching between the two is annoying.

>Ironically, the beefy windows machine was cheaper

That's logical, since Apple focuses on all other aspects of a machine than raw specs first (construction, size, weight, battery life, trackpad, screen, etc).

Late 2012 i7 Mac Mini with 10gb RAM and manually replaced SSD is a very powerful machine.

I hope Apple will release a better one this year because 2014 model lacks i7 option.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't hold your breath. It's sad that they are lagging so far behind on internal updates, but at this point I think they care more about how it looks then performance. I'm just hoping they don't ruin the Macbook Pro next.

They kinda already did that with the retina version. you can't upgrade the SSDs(edit: it was the ram that I was upset about originally because they soldered it on the other point still stands) or add an extra SSD and remove the cd drive like you could with the last gen mbp. I want a powerhouse desktop replacement as a developer that I can bring with me places not a more expensive MB air. The screen is nice but not at the value proposition.

I upgraded the SSD on my Retina MBP. It's easily accessible after unscrewing the back panel

my bad. it was the ram that they soldered on and you can't replace or upgrade unless you purchase it at checkout. you still don't have the option to have two drives though.

Accessible, but proprietary. SSD upgrades depend on third-parties producing the hardware -- that can mean waiting a while, if not forever.

I waited a week or so for my SSD to be delivered from America to the UK and fitted it myself. It was trivial.

You do realize that's not the "wait" in question, right?

It can take months or years for a 3rd-party to reverse engineer the hardware in question and produce a compatible replacement.

Remember, Apple's goal is to externalize as much of the "stuff you'd want to upgrade" from their devices as possible, so that all that's left is a little hub with CPU+RAM that you have no reason not to replace as a unit.

Their viewpoint makes a lot more sense when you look at their Enterprise leasing program, where you effectively are paying for hardware "by subscription" and your laptop just gets replaced every two years like a phone. In such a setup, you don't want to stick extra stuff in the chassis that will go away when you replace the thing. You want all your add-ons to be little boxes with Thunderbolt ports, that you can just plug your replacement laptop into and continue on.

Ditto. I still use the old Mac Pro as my main workstation, and really wish Apple would just release a new pro tower. For the love of god do not merge it with the iMac.

I always suspect Apple built Mac Pro for Pixar and Disney. It would be nice if there is a mid range (higher than Mac mini lower than Mac Pro) Mac that is not iMac and shape in a perfect cube. The outdated spec and high price makes Mac Pro all looks with no substance.

Why would they even use a apple machine specifically for pixar, disney or some other animation house? They have a few cross platform apps they use and the option of creating huge beefy workstations that live at an office desk.

Pixar and Disney mostly use Linux (as do most of the VFX / CG studios).

Artists can use Windows / OS X in some cases, but given the main apps they use (Maya, Mari, Modo, Katana, Nuke) all run on Linux, there's no point really, and using Linux everywhere makes admin much easier and more consistent.

There are some apps that are used which are Windows-only (ZBrush), and so certain artists/modellers who need to use it will use that, but these are generally the exception.

Thanks for the info. Any idea what GUI lib/framework are these Linux apps (Maya, Mari etc) using?

Maya, Mari, Modo, Nuke use C++ Qt, Katana uses PyQt, other apps like Houdini use their own solution.

And before someone says "that means they're not native" - well obviously, and anyway, they have their own theme which is quite dark, as artists don't like bright colours in an interface distracting them from the content or what they're doing.

Why do you need to many CPUs? I can only think of compiling but in my experience not many compilers can actually handle multiple cores well and you might wanna consider using other tooling if your compiler needs to recompile that 100k LOC again and again instead of just compiling the changed files again (and their dependencies).

As cool as this machine is, it is definitely targeted at video makers who spend more money on powerful hardware (because they need that) compared to developers.

Xcode scales to the number of CPUs that you have very well. Any kind of c-compiler usually scales the compile step very well to the number of CPUs you have. When I had a 12 core mac pro, my compile speeds were actually 3.4x faster than my 4-core macbook pro.

And when you're an iOS / OSX developer, the only practical kind of machine you can use is apple's hardware. You can't go buy a 4 socket compile server that easily like people on other platforms.

Not really, no. Compiling C or C++ is not very distributable by its nature, and the parallelization you are seeing is scaling out builds by building multiple compilation units in parallel. If you're working in one file in an edit-build-test loop, all of those cores are pretty much unused as long as you're using incremental builds. This applies to a lot of languages, actually, not just C/C++. Even beyond that, you're usually I/O bound when you're building anyway, and I've found disk investment to pay off much better than CPU investment.

But yes, for an all-up project build, it will be slightly to much faster because big projects can horizontally scale with the right tooling (make -j, etc).

Very often you modify some upstream file and a 100 files have to be recompiled, so in an edit-build-test loop, it's very relevant. If you only have to rebuild one file, then everything is already usually very fast. When you don't then that's when the 12 cores becomes very helpful.

And having a PCIe SSD is already built into the mac pro and macbook. RAID 0ing a whole bunch of SSDs didn't increase build speeds for me either when we did a test.

And yes, the parallelization is done as you said. The compilation unit step tends to dwarf the linking step.

edit: since HN prevents a reply to the downstream comment, we did test the ram disk case and turning off swap, and comparing to an HDD. The SSD from HDD was a marked improvement, otherwise everything else wasn't that much better unfortunately. This was a few years ago for a full rebuild on a C++ project, focused on the linking step.

If you want to test the effect of disk speed on build times, you should probably get a control case: one where the disk is taken out of the equation completely. Disable swap, check your git repo out into a tmpfs, and build there. If it isn't much faster, then you can just stop worrying about the impact of disk speed.

I work on a large C++ application. A full rebuild is 35 minutes of our main configuration - that's with 2x 20 core xeons. We also have a "gaming" pc, which is an overclocked 6700k (think it's running at about 4.5GHz) - I believe a full build of the same configuration is about an hour.

Think things like test VMs for development when you're targeting disparate OSes and versions. Instead of needing to deploy things to VMs in sequence, you can deploy to them all at once and still get decent performance.

Depends what sort of developing you do if your working as technical programmer there are plenty of areas where you want as much CPU and memory as possible.

Look at the average node in a big data cluster

Clojure code scales to multiple cores very nicely and I can make very good use of them in my work. That said, I do care about single-core performance too, the number of cores is secondary.

The GPUs are important for accelerating video rendering (which is a big Apple market), see https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/all-features/

And today if you work with Deep Learning you'll want a fast GPU

Correction, you'll want a fast 'Nvidia' GPU. AMD is pretty much not a part of accelerated deep learning. So this makes buying a Mac even more problematic.

Yeah - it's not just "a GPU". The inability to get an Nvidia GPU is a problem for me as well, as I use tons of CUDA-specific code.

> don't try to make it small, thin, or round

Maybe they'll go back to the cube. Developers seemed to like that shape.

Hardware designers as well ;)

Pretty much this. As my primary focus is scientific computing tasks, which means CPU and CUDA, I basically walked away from the Mac Pro, after using (and loving) the old metal 2012-era version.

My next workstation? Not from Apple.

why did you walk away from the dual gpu machine if you use cuda. did the dual gpu machine not use nvidia gpus?

The current pros use non-replaceable Radeons. More significantly, they use Radeons that are 3 generations old. In those 3 generations, AMD literally doubled the stream processors, and performance, they can get from a single chip. The GPU's lag is in a lot of ways more significant than the processor, because we've seen such sweeping changes in the past couple years.

They don't use Nvidia GPUs, nor is there an easy way to replace them.

Not to mention the reliability of Thunderbolt drive connections under OS X. I've got an iMac with a 2-drive Thunderbolt enclosure with a homemade fusion drive. At least 1 time in 10, it disconnects 'unsafely' on sleep, and then I cannot get the drives to show up (even diskutil doesn't show them) despite unplugging and replugging thunderbolt, powering off the drives, etc.

The same is true for notebooks too. Compare the top models of the Dell XPS 15 [0] with the 15" Macbook Pro (Retina) ranges [1]:

6th generation Quad-core i7 vs 5th generation Quad-core i7

32GB DDR4 vs 16GB DDR3

GTX 960M vs R9 M370X

3840x2160 4K display vs 2880x1800 'Retina' display

Thunderbolt 3 vs Thunderbolt 2

Both 1TB SSD

1.78kg vs 2.04kg

$3049 vs $3199

It's kind of sad that a few years ago Apple was the one leading notebook technology, but now they are just playing catch up and don't even seem to be trying.

[0] http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-15-9550-laptop/pd?oc=c...

[1] http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MJLT2L...

That's a pretty different comparison. The current-generation Retina Macbook Pro was released almost exactly a year ago. It's due for a refresh. The XPS 15 you're linking was released in October and likely won't be refreshed again for another 6 months.

The Dell might well be the better of the two, but you would expect that since it's a recent release. It's not as if the MacBook Pro Retina has languished for years, though.

I think it's worth mentioning that Windows really still isn't ready for "retina" prime time. Setting a > 100% scaling results in all kinds of GUI horror all over the place, especially in 3rd party apps. Things are better now than they were 2 years ago, true, but still not a good situation.

On the other hand, there is pretty much no problem anywhere on the Mac. Apple just handled it. Pretty much all 3rd party apps were updated within a few months and most just "worked" without modification. A remarkable feat, at least to me.

The Mac is still the only way to go if you want a 100% retina desktop experience without glitches.

That said, I have no clue if linux is better in this regard.

So I guess my point is that the 4K on a Windows laptop is largely wasted. The GPU is not up to driving it for games and the GUI is not up to driving it for daily use. A shame, truly.

Disclaimer: I have a 2013 MacPro (with 2 4K Dell monitors) and love it. I use it for Photoshop and software dev.

I have 150% scaling on Windows 10 and I haven't noticed anything strange.

Bla bla bla ... it should be understood by now that Apple don't care about these niche markets and will do whatever they want.

The only people using Apple workstations are because they either really want to use a MAC or because the software they use is not available on PC. In both cases they won't buy a cheaper and faster PC.

I'm a disgruntled Apple NON-customer : they never created the desktop I wanted (basically an affordable version of the old MAC pro line) or a phone I could afford without having to sell a kidney on the black market. So I use Windows and Android with the satisfaction of knowing that I use both of the bests keyloggers disguised as an OS on the market.

Apple has been steadily been abandoning the "creative pro" market for a long time. The two most recent indicators were dropping Final Cut Pro 7 for Final Cut Pro X, which was not ready for professional editing at release. The new Mac Pro confirmed the move away from the pro market, since it only supported one CPU. For compressing feature films, dual CPUs are a must.

> which was not ready for professional editing at release

Some would argue that that sounds more like a project management failure than a change in market strategy—that they shipped a beta product as done, that someone screwed up somewhere, etc.

I don't think so, though; I think Apple just made a correct call in shipping the "core" of the product early (in the same way most enterprise products get 'Early Access' releases) to allow actual professionals to start evaluating the architecture of the software and tailoring their pipelines to fit it. Professional-use software doesn't get used on day 1 of release; it gets played with by an internal pipeline infrastructure team for six months while the working craftspeople continue to use the stable pipeline.

Handing out something that would be "patched into usefulness" at right about the same time it would actually be put into use makes sense, in strictly consequentialist terms, for both Apple and the professional studios—although Apple latching onto that release to do a bunch of marketing of their product as if it was usable for indies already, could be seen as a bit scummy.

> since it only supported one CPU. For compressing feature films, dual CPUs are a must.

This might not be the case right now (I don't know much about video encoding), but encoded video has keyframes, and effectively you can "chunk out" a set of raw frames to become a keyframe plus its successor interstitial frames, and then parallelize on those chunks, right?

In which case, I'd expect Apple figured that even if CPU-based compression is currently en vogue for this use-case, it'd be obviated by GPU-based highly-parallel compression soon enough, making the dual GPUs a much more significant benefit and the single CPU a much less significant drawback.

Tell me if I'm getting that wrong; I honestly have no idea.

Final Cut X was really a huge disappointment to the professional editing community when it was released. It was missing features that made it unusable for professionals. For example, when it was released, it was not possible to export sound as an OMF or AFF (which is the format required for sending sound to a professional sound mixer). I saw it as an indication that Apple no longer needed to cater to the pro market (see also apple dropping Shake and the XServe and the Xserve RAID) now that Apple had the iphone, ipad, itunes, etc.

As for compressing films, maybe GPUs will pick up the slack. But there are still other applications like Maya and After Effects that depend almost entirely on the CPU for rendering, so having dual CPUs makes a big difference.

I don't really mind Apple leaving the pro market. Adobe Premiere has taken Final Cut Pro's place for most people I know. I just use Windows machines now for my video and graphics work.

When FCP X shipped there were howls out of outrage from the video community.

FCP 7 had made a name for itself as a solid professional solution. Then they changed it. Completely. And they didn't ship it as a beta for review. They shipped it as a finished product.

The professional reaction was best summarised as "WTF is this shit?"

It's kind of settled down now, but a lot of pro users have either moved elsewhere or continued with FCP 7. Meanwhile support software like Motion hasn't had a proper update since forever.

New users have come on board, but they're mostly students, semipros, small-time boutiques, and YouTube dabblers. FCP X is certainly usable for pro work, but it has some incredibly obvious and annoying shortcomings that make it really hard to integrate into a commercial workflow.

It's hard not to get the impression that Apple is trying to become a blingy toy factory, and not a cool computer company that makes cool tools for cool professionals.

This is unfortunate, because by losing the cool Apple is also becoming less bling. It's starting to look like a middle-aged guy trying to dance with teenagers at a party - and nothing about that is good in any way.

So - MacPro? Maybe not. It looks an update would push the cost over five figures. Considering that many pros are using standard software (i.e. Adobe CS) it's much easier and cheaper to get better and faster PC hardware.

This is why killing FCP loyalty was a bad idea. If FCP had kept its user base, a MacPro would have sold itself. Nuking a strong software user base also killed demand for the hardware.

MacPro sales are rumoured to be unspectacular - and this was easily preventable.

> New users have come on board, but they're mostly students, semipros, small-time boutiques, and YouTube dabblers.

True, but the new users might not be as great in number because the FCP X outrage had another effect. You noted the pros leaving it, but that also included a fair number of schools. FCP X is most definitely not FCP 7 so all the teaching material gets thrown. Also, FCP X is not really a pro app. If the school is going to buy all new books and build new class material why not go with software made by a pro company. They are already teaching other Adobe products so its not much of a jump to add Premiere. Its popular and integrates well.

So, I'm not sure the up and coming student is really going to use FCP X.

Once you switch to Premiere, your dependance on OS X starts to leave and the hardware on the Windows side is a whole lot better. I had a lifelong die-hard Mac user ask me about building a PC.

Could be that they are seeing that few "pro" customers use their Mac as more than a front end for a Linux render farm these days.

Macs have never been a good choice for render farm render nodes. The ideal render nodes are something like a dual twin supermicro box running linux or windows. In a 1U rackmounted server like that you can throw in 4 CPUs (and each CPU could have 18 cores if you are using E5-2699v3 cpus, so you'd get 72 cores in a single 1u server).

What I'd like to see is a new 15" MacBook Pro - with USB C

But not only 1 USB C.

I'd like to see another 17" model. I miss the extra screen space.

Annoyingly, the MBPs, being "workhorse" machines, depend on 'legacy' connectors to whatever people need to use to get their work done, in a way that the consumer-level notebooks don't. The Macbook can get away with an adapter for USB because people rarely plug things into it. I'm always plugging things into my rMBP, often random things I wasn't aware I would need to plug in, so requiring adapters would be much more annoying.

The Mac Pro has not been updated in 841 days (av 449) The Retina Macbook Pro has not been updated in 325 days (average 214).

Although chipset cycles could be part of the delay, I wonder if virtual reality hardware and software support could also be part of the plan too.

further reading: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/ http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/apple-vr-project/

Considering all the fuss Apple made about the new design of the Mac Pro it is strange they have not kept it top of the line. I guess they care more about the 5K iMac and MacBook being super thin and pretty.

It's really strange. A lot of effort was put into that Mac Pro and it's components. Maybe sales were not as high as Apple expected?

Apple is really starting to suck in the enterprise, windows desktop OS is coming along but still has flaws, android is the future of computing. this is coming from and industry certified apple tech who has been certified on every major make of PC as well. Most dip shots don't need a real computer for surfing the interwebs. google chrome does fine for most stuff out there. Virtualization and web platforms like vision and AWS give low powered devices infinite hardware and software capabilities. Where does a desktop even fit in this world any more, besides the IT office or possibly the accounting offices. I had an apple rep to tell me to drop Open Directory in favor of Active Directory. I am not sure they even care about enterprise customers any more and just want to sell stupid IOS devices they can brick whenever they want you to buy a new one and release an update to kill it. Who would ever want to try and manage mac OS with Active Directory, that is really dumb. I might as well get Windows OS or google chrome OS and manage it with native tools for the OS.

I mostly agree with you, but I don't see why iOS isn't a potential contender against Android in the future Enterprise market. Have you been watching what Apple has been doing with iOS in education lately (http://www.apple.com/ca/education/it/)? Seems very likely that's a targeted "first user-story" for technology that's very generally applicable in the enterprise.

I almost see what you see. In our large enterprise Android is not really even a player. Macs do kind of suck especially for some of our multifactor security requirements(CAC/PIV cards). Windows rules the desktop and iOS is the preferred mobile platform.

They will probably be updated at the coming WWDC in june alongside the macbook and macbook pro.

There's an argument to be made for Apple selling a go-to workstation for making VR content. They might not care about consumer VR (for now), but in terms of their history, it feels a bit weird for them not to support the nascent VR content field.

What history? Apple was never very big in the 3D content creation biz. Their 3D support has always lagged a few years behind windows.

Basically saying that Apple's release cycle is slower for desktop and laptops than the PC counterparts.

Nothing really new here. Because there are several PC makers. Even if all of them releases new hardware in the same rate as Apple (say 2 year generation), having 3 of them can easily interscale release dates and make it look like PCs are releasing new stuff much faster.

I think, also, that Apple is serving an entirely different market with the Mac Pro than the PC makers are (mostly) serving on the high end.

PC makers can get a continuous incremental revenue stream from gamers and independent professionals. But most Mac Pros are likely sold to companies (even if just tiny one-man companies) that refresh them on a set schedule rather than whenever a shiny new thing comes out.

I've got one of these and love it and I know a few other developers who do too. The main negatives I've seen are from people who want to stick PC GPU cards in for gaming. As a developer desktop computer it's a joy to use, virtually silent and can power multiple 4K displays. It's a shame Apple hasn't done an update though.

What about the Thunderbolt display? It is much older and still being offered. At the same launch price.

But the Mac Pro is round. That's the important thing. Other lame computers are square. The cool Apple computer is round. That's what's important.

Half the people who buy that thing probably never use more than the browser and some music/video play apps.

Apple earned only 6-7billion last quarter selling Macs, in a quarter with 50-60 billion in overall sales. [1]

I think there's a real possibility Apple will stop selling computers. They already don't care about the "high-end creative" market. OTOH I don't know what people would use to develop for iOS/Watch, but...you heard it here first.

[1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/263428/apples-revenue-fro...

They're not going to relinquish the only platform to develop iDevice apps on, not to mention the mindshare they get from being a super important dev platform for all kinds of creative leaders. It's just not a financial question, there are tons of downstream implications.

I suspect that Apple will always continue making the "trucks" of the computing world (to borrow Steve Jobs' analogy).

To continue the analogy, compare their revenue numbers with, say Daimler[0]. Daimler sells more Mercedes cars than their other vehicles, but they still get revenue from trucks and buses and other pro/commercial vehicles.

I find it hard to believe. iOS is not ready for prime time and Apple refuses to create a Surface like device and merging iOS with OSX.

> not ready for prime time

I'm not sure what counts as "prime time" if 75 million phones sold in one quarter doesn't?

http://www.wired.com/2016/01/apple-sold-a-record-number-of-i...

Prime time, as in being your main OS.

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