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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

That must really be annoying someone over at apple. Spend all that time design something beautiful. And... Everyone calls it garbage

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Beautiful? There's a reason why it got the name, it looks like a trashcan. And the old mac pro is filled with garbage(how fitting, right?). If it was any good then apple would have stuck to it, but it was garbage, so they didn't.

Now we have the new mac pro, and it's a big step up from the trashcan.

Yes, and lots of very smart designers have put lots of time over many decades into making trashcans look good.

The apple trashcan certainly looks vastly better than other commercially available workstations.

> The apple trashcan certainly looks vastly better than other commercially available workstations.

Not really, when given the tendency of them to roll around when being transported in production environments, they tend to end up bolted within wooden boxes with little wheels on the bottom.

There's a reason Apple listened and put wheels on the new one.

To be fair, the machine's tendency to roll around during transport is irrelevant to the claim that it looks better than its competitors.

I meant more that it doesn't look better if it's inside a plywood box.

> The apple trashcan certainly looks vastly better than other commercially available *trashcans.

I don’t think anyone who’s ever shopped for designer trashcans would agree with this :P

It's a shame really, I feel like we've lost something from the years of SGI workstations that looked like they came straight from the future.

You mean bright LED's and transformer-like mods?

I don't think so, seems like ALL gaming PC's are like that.

SGI workstations had hardly any lights. Their essential distinguishing feature where that they sometimes had slightly rounded corners and came in 'fun' colors. Kind of like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Tezro#/media/File:Silicone...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Octane#/media/File:SgiOcta...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_O2#/media/File:Silicon_Gra...

The Tezro and Octane both have prominent power-on lights, but I think they're tasteful and cool.

I mean... they definitely look like they're from the 90's future.

Those unfortunately now just remind me of the Hot Wheels PC https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/azdp7i/hot_wh...

I'd rather see more like the SGI Indy workstation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy#/media/File:Silicon_G...

I think Sony's got your back there. Looks like a source of inspiration for the PS4

No, he's talking about classic SGI machines like the Tezro:

https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/746965/original_3c751a...

The old SGI joke I liked was any system that required less than 4 people to carry was considered a desktop. The future must have very large desks for their users.

Well I can remember when fitting a new dual floppy drive (8 inch) to a pdp11 require two people to install it and a third to help run the cables through the chassis.

From trashcan to cheese grater.

You mean back to cheese grater. The cheese grater name was applied to the previous generations before the trash can.

I don't think Apple has said so publicly, but it seems pretty obvious that they knew about that nickname and decided to lean into it with the new model. The new one really looks like a cheese grater, even more than the towers before the trash can.

Eh, it was designed for a different system configuration. Apple was betting on multi-GPU architectures when they designed that thing in 2012/2013, but then tech didn't really follow that path.

The CPUs and multiple GPUs put out (relatively) equal heat, so they could make the single, big cooler work. But when the world went back to a single, big, hot GPU, it pushed things _just_ out of whack enough that it wasn't worthwhile to continue down that path.

I think that is a little too generous.

It was a poor design because it didn't take into account the thermals of the hardware it was sold containing. It throttled its graphics cards from the start but also got worse as dust/age set in. It couldn't be upgraded or fixed because they chose appearance over practicality.

It was, is, and will always be the "garbage can." It has nothing to do with the industry's direction, it was poor as-sold.

We also call them "trashcans" in conversation. It's an identifiable and memorable term, rather than "mac pro (original/2006)", "mac pro (cylinder/2013)" or "mac pro (cheese grater/2019)"

Cheese grater will definitely stick just like trashcan. Both highly utilitarian tools, mind you.

Am I old? Everyone's talking about whether this new 'cheese grater' name will take off. But that's what we called the old aluminum case since the G5.

Didn't the original Mac Pro look like a cheese grater, too?

It had a mesh in the pre trash can version but the new one looks far more like a grater with spaced holes and an indented piece of metal that looks like the blade.

https://icdn2.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/mac-pro-...

https://blog.macsales.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/prod_ap...

Sure, but for more than a decade the original aluminum tower was called the cheese grater.

Surely the implication is that what's inside is garbage. :P

(which, these days is mostly true, a single socket CPU on a workstation of that grade is a poor design choice)

Personally, I actually like the design of the current Mac Pro, but I can understand why many wouldn't.

Surely the implication is that what's inside is garbage. :P

Not at all. Even people that love them refer to them as trashcans. It's just a cute nickname, since Apple doesn't give their machines any other distinguishable names.

As far as I can tell, everyone calls it the trashcan, even inside the company.

Smaller Sun boxes where / are referred to a pizza boxs

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