Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess | Hacker News Reader

Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess

theverge.com

70 pointsmiles51 comments

I hope somebody at Apple can get it through their heads that a Mac Pro desktop doesn't need to be the thinnest, lightest box full of the most exotic parts with corners engineered to within fractions of a millimeter. It just needs to:

1. Run macOS

2. be fast as hell

3. be quiet

4. be reasonably priced

5. be somewhat expandable on the inside with RAM and disks

6. have a variety of external ports

7. be spec-bumped at least once a year.

Do that and you'll sell units, and more importantly keep devs and creative types happy

That's exactly it.

This is literally all I want. I'll even buy what will undoubtedly be an overpriced 8k monitor that they'll be selling along with it, instead of a new iMac.

I do not care what the box looks like.

I would buy two of these today.

Just bite the bullet and hackintosh. It's ridiculously easy. I put one together in an afternoon with parts I had lying around. It even had GPU acceleration for all those silly UI animations to run smoothly. There are lists of hardware that are guaranteed to work. I'm not a Mac guy so I scrapped the system, but as a bored weekend project it was fun.

I had no issues installing updates, networking was fine etc.

I tried this a year or so ago, my only stumbling block was getting iMessage/iCloud working properly, which was very difficult, has that improved?

No idea sorry. I put the system together to tinker with some iOS dev, but lost interest after a few months. I don't use any of the rest of the Mac ecosystem, so not sure how that functions.

What's special about iMessage/iCloud which poses an issue on a hackintosh?

I ran into this too. As far as I know, nope, it has not improved.

It's improved in that the causes of failure are now better understood. Getting it working means generating some UUIDs and things. e.g. https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/an-idiots-guide-to-imessa...

Messages, Facetime and iCloud work for me on Sierra on my new hackintosh without any fiddling. On my previous Hackintosh, which I believe is running Mavericks, those services don't work.

It's not really an option in enterprise environment though. If you run a company and have to use Macs, then none of the options available at the moment give you access to lots of power and/or expandability.

Just built my second one because of their BS. Cost about $1100 for a computer that Apple would charge at least $5000 for. I've inspired friends as well because the process has become fairly easy nowadays.

> you'll sell units

Not just sell units, and probably not sell (many) more units, but you can sell units at a way higher profit margin. As pretty as the new Mac Pro is and as amazing as it is as a piece of technology, I have to believe that the one-time R&D costs of the Mac Pro are huge and directly contribute to the stagnated pace of upgrades.

While the cheese-grater Mac Pros weren't nearly as slick-looking as the oversized coffee cans, Apple could effectively throw out the whole internals of the cheese graters every year or two, put a mostly generic motherboard in it, with a wholly generic GPU and completely vanilla CPU/Memory/Disks and have a whoppingly fast machine with relatively minimal R&D cost, even while upgrading it in lock-step with external (intel/Nvidia/etc) evolutions. With the coffee cans, every single upgrade will require a huge redesign at a huge expense due to the tight integration.

While I understand the benefits of and necessity of tight integration in basically every single other product that Apple sells, its antithetical to the point of a Mac Pro.

Every OEM out there offers trash can form factor PCs these days that are better specced and cheaper than the Mac Pro. I think you overestimate the R&D costs that go into these things.

Apple has trouble seeing themselves as sellers of commodity hardware like you describe - they never did, and there's a lot of pressure to innovate since Jobs left.

Due to this, they try to innovate on form-factor, which is the aspect they have most control over the product design. The problem is that this is directly at odds with 4) price, 5) expandability and (to a certain extent) easy to 7) spec-bump every year.

So I think it's very unlikely the next MacPro will fulfill this wish-list, even if it seems rational at first.

> Apple has trouble seeing themselves as sellers of commodity hardware like you describe

Switching from PowerPc to Intel chips didn't seem to make them much of a difference.

8. Be rackable (or at least, parallelepipedic) so the condition 5 holds.

The linked Daring Fireball article[1] is a lot more interesting and informative

[1] http://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

Also, nothing in the Daring Fireball article (the author of which was actually present at the meeting with Apple) supports anything nearly as juicy as "Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess".

Not surprising given the reputation of Daring Fireball to be an Apple fan boy.

Or The Verge is just trying to grab attention with a sensationalist clickbait headline?

I'm not entirely sure why Apple doesn't just use ITX or mATX motherboard layouts for its pro line, and bring back a "Mac" regular line.

Yes, potentially someone could by an "Apple" genuine repair motherboard and DIY their own, but that would make a lot of people happier.... then also make best of breed cases, that can only be had with a full Mac or Mac Pro. Yeah, it would potentially cut into their margins on mac hardware for pros.. but they aren't making much money there... the best bet is to keep the pros making content for their mobile devices happy.

Edit: Also, even if they charged a $300 "core" fee that's refunded when you turn in your old motherboard (assuming boards are sold for replacement), that would cover the "OS License" costs for those that are doing it on their own. Apple still makes money, but keeps the third parties to a minimum.

Bring back the cheese grater!

That's really not a bad idea. The Macbook I'm using now looks pretty similar to the Macbook I was using when those towers were still in production - even the G5 version.

I'm sure people are making FrakenMacs using this enclosure using old, broken Ebay'd enclosures and cheap off the shelf parts that creme the official Mac.

I've seen someone do exactly that before. FINALLY a use for a G5 ;-) (other than heating your house up)

> I'm sure people are making FrakenMacs using this enclosure using old, broken Ebay'd enclosures and cheap off the shelf parts that creme the official Mac.

Yup. I was eyeballing these [1] for exactly that purpose...

[1] https://www.thelaserhive.com/product-category/g5conv/

Second article and I still don't understand why they can't at least do a spec bump every year. If not possible due to suppliers a price drop should at least grab some market share. With the resources Apple has, anything else is simple negligence.

Engineers, and especially the hardware kind, are a limited resource. Not that Apple couldn't spend even more than they currently are on growth, but they're reaching some limits, and until later this year office space is/will be one of them.

This is combined with the fact that the Mac Pro sells in the "low single digit" percentage range of Mac sales means that it's hard to justify an outsized expense. When factoring in R&D costs, my guess is the Mac Pro has much lower margins than other Macs.

That kind of "accountant" style thinking has brought them to the brink with developers and media pros.

Killing off the development platform for your successful products is incredibly shortsighted.

Rest assured office space will remain a challenge even after this year. Take a spin around Mathilda and Maude.

Every single digit of mac unit sales the Mac Pro constitutes is $700M+ in yearly revenues.

On the Accidental Tech Podcast from the other day it was hinted they heard rumors that Apple engineers did try and do some spec bumps, but they kept running into thermal problems no matter what they tried.

I guess they were really really close to the edge with that design, and Marco said he's heard those GPUs are failing from heat issues fairly often.

Shouldn't new chips with a smaller process be cooler?

That's not just rumors. In the interview, Craig Federighi said: > I’d say longer than six months ago. But I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will. We designed a system that we thought with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture… that that was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialize to fit that as broadly as we hoped.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/transcript-phil-schiller-c...

Sorry, I worded that funny. Federighi confirmed it so it's not a rumor now, but I meant that they had heard those rumors before this announcement.

Three related but not dependent things keep getting conflated:

1. The trash can design was not able to accommodate much heat variance and so was not updatable.

2. The trash can Mac Pro didn't suit some pro needs because of lack of graphics card and internal storage upgradability.

3. Dual graphics cards with an emphasis on OpenCL was the wrong direction to go in.

I think they got in a paralyzed state waiting for the right set of new GPUs and CPUs they could update it with, and took far too long before they could admit the design was too inflexible.

It's just that it's not worth $4,000 or even $3,000.

The trashcan is cool, despite looking like a trashcan, but way too expensive for what you get.

Something at that price needs to last, and permit upgrades.

For what you get, and what you can do with it, it's not worth more than $1,000.

Many Apple fans buy for status though, and Apple knows this, hence the watch. So, simply having the price tag as an ornament works for some people.

Right now it's not worth more than $1,000. When it was released it was competitive with other workstation-class desktops.

$3–4k is a normal price for that kind of hardware, it's not trying to compete with a Dell Inspiron.

Even so, even if you bought the most expensive model for Christmas in 2013, it's a raw deal simply because the hardware profile is that of a fixed appliance.

At that price, other high-end professional workstations ship with beneficial options such as hard copies of offline-installable Operating System software, that does not require an internet connection. User-servicable parts, and expansion kits are normal. Variety and options are left open, to aid the owner in upgrading or altering the stock model. Professionals pay extra, to acquire versatile high-quality base units that they possess the skill to alter themselves, according to their preferred tasks.

Microsoft is experiencing the exact same sort of backlash against Windows 10, with too much phoning home, and network activity that flouts user consent.

As a professional, one expects an outfitter to appreciate the technical capacity for their clientele to negotiate complexity. One also expects a professional tool to perform exactly the task required, and only the task required, and nothing extra.

As a company Apple does not do this anymore. They sell fixed hardware profiles, and refuse alterations. They discourage meddling with low-level operating system components. The software is free, but you couldn't buy an offline copy if you tried.

Apple's hardware policies have changed. The machine you buy from Apple now, will not be upgraded by Apple, even with Apple parts, and in most cases has been engineered to prevent alteration at the expense of the unit. For example, Apple will not assist in upgrading from a 128GB SSD stick, to a 2TB SSD stick, even if they sell new models off the shelf with the same hardware profile. Doing so yourself will exclude a machine from receiving service at an Apple store.

Appliances are sold to lock in consumers, and coerce behavior. A professional selects equipment to enable activity, not to play into a business model.

Yep, I agree. On the specs front it was a good deal but the upgradability wasn't there. I hope they learned from this in that sense, but I'm not holding my breath.

I really want a new version of the cheese grater, but if that's not what comes out I'll just get another iMac (which isn't upgradable either, but it's cheaper and I'm not interested in running a Hackintosh).

When it was released, the GPUs in the trash can cost more than its cheapest version.

The Apple watch is best smart watch ever made. Far better to spend $400 on a useful watch than $200 on a useless one.

Problem: That GPU wasn't particularly desirable even back in 2013. Just because you can put in a needlessly expensive "workstation class" GPU doesn't mean it's worth it.

Even if the $400 one is also useless?

Now when will "The Verge" admit this is clickbait?

I just wish they'd admit the same for the latest Macbook Pro where they appear to be optimizing for things that pros don't care about and removing things they do care about!

The new Macbook Pro has record sales, so no.

You're right in that they won't admit they made a mistake because; in the short term, their decision made more money.

"Higher sales" is orthogonal to what software development professionals want.

They discontinued the Pro version and put the "Pro" name on a "consumer" version as far a software developers are concerned I think.

Apple's entire desktop environment and lineup is a mess. I'm using windows 10 and couldn't be happier.

I feel like I've played ping-pong over the years, bouncing back and forth between windows and apple. XP was okay, windows 7 was terrible. MacOS was amazing at the time, but whatever MacOS I have right now keeps crashing. Now I'm back to microsoft with windows 10

I think the article sums it up really well. And I doubt we'll ever see something as extensible as the cheese grater models again. Apple has convinced me by now they dont't want to make anything but throwaway appliances with fashion appeal.

I don't get why we see so much negative about Apple here on HN. Yes, they made some wrong decisions. But the OS (macOS) is still the same, and most pro use an iMac nowadays. On the otherside it looks grim if you eant to continue the PC pro path as Windows 10 just sends way to many data. I cannot imagine it's okay for anyone that locale docx, pdf and jpg files are sent to Redmond/Washington when Windows thinks it's about time (if a application crashes, gets unresponses or slow downs). Or I cannot imagine it's okay for anyone that Windows 10 sends a list of all music and video played, as well as the browser history and the speech-recognition text-results in plain text to Redmond. (You don't believe, well read their recently released documentation!!) Every other company would face a outcry and be called adware and spyware. Yet Windows 10 gets away? Why? Mac is still way better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com