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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

>Were people editing Marvel movies really waiting a decade for this though?

Given the number of posts telling people in Hollywood not to restart their Trashcan mac Pros because of the Google Raven screw up, I would say that yes, in fact, plenty of people in Hollywood are using Mac Pros, and likely will buy this new one.

> I struggle to find the target audience for this, now that they are alienating home users

This machine has NOTHING, and I mean nothing to do with home users.

Next you'll tell me that Tesla have alienated "normal" car buyers because they make a $100k P100D rocket ship. Tesla also make a $35k regular sedan. Apple also make much cheaper iMacs, and Mac Books and Mac Books Airs for home buyers.

I don't understand why people time and time again bash Apple for making something that isn't in any way designed for "home users", while they still make plenty of things that are.

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The base price has more than doubled from the original cheese grater we all fell in love with. I'd be willing to bet the home user MacPro community is much larger than Hollywood. People have been clamoring for an updated cheese grater for the better part of a decade. They are STILL actively developing hacks to keep their 2008/2009 models running. Shit, I just retired mine this year in favor of Hackintosh, because I'm not dumping $10,000 in a modular Mac.

I think this new MacPro is going to be a huge failure. Professionals are running PCs now, and home users won't spend the money.

Many of the home users who were buying $3000 base model cheese grater Mac Pros could get by now with a 6-core i7 Mac Mini.

Price would be around $1300 for the computer, $300 for an eGPU enclosure, and $700ish for a Radeon R7, plus aftermarket RAM. AMD's not in a great spot for high end GPUs right now, but when the Navi 23 cards land next year it will be looking better.

This doesn't scale as well for multi GPU machine learning workloads and Apple needs to get over their shit with Nvidia, but as a lower end "modular" Mac than the $6000 cheese grater 2019, it's an option.

You could sure, but people buying the MacPros bought them because they wanted modular. A glorified laptop attached to a giant monitor isn't an option.

My Windows machine is admittedly more modular than a mini+eGPU would be. I can pull the CPU out and put in a new one whenever I want! But over the course of 12 years and 3 computer builds, I've never done that once. By the time there's a noticeable CPU upgrade available I'd need a new motherboard to go with it.

So I think there's a big segment of the "modular" market that only really cares about having GPU options and upgradeable RAM.

It's not for everyone, but the people in between the high end Mac Mini (6-core i7 + thunderbolt GPU) and the low end Mac Pro (8-core Xeon W and internal expansion slots) are a small enough slice that Apple doesn't care.

Missed the edit window but for GPU I meant the Radeon VII not R7. Double checking benchmarks, the RX 5700 XT compares pretty well to that, but 2nd gen Navi will have a new higher end card.

> Price would be around $1300 for the computer, $300 for an eGPU enclosure, and $700ish for a Radeon R7, plus aftermarket RAM. AMD's not in a great spot for high end GPUs right now, but when the Navi 23 cards land next year it will be looking better.

I used to want an eGPU. Then I learned that you need to disable SIP in order to do so...

> This doesn't scale as well for multi GPU machine learning workloads and Apple needs to get over their shit with Nvidia, but as a lower end "modular" Mac than the $6000 cheese grater 2019, it's an option.

No one is going to wait for that hypothetical future where MacOS supports Nvidia GPUs.

> I used to want an eGPU. Then I learned that you need to disable SIP in order to do so...

I hadn’t heard that. A quick search suggests it’s only necessary for loading Nvidia kexts or using TB2 https://www.reddit.com/r/eGPU/comments/8lybin/macos_egpu_wit...

> No one is going to wait for that hypothetical future where MacOS supports Nvidia GPUs.

True, but their Navi cards are at least competitive in the price ranges where they exist. Hopefully the high end ones next year continue that. If you’re looking at Titan or whatever the current ML thing is in the $1000+ range, then you might be stuck with Nvidia.

> I hadn’t heard that. A quick search suggests it’s only necessary for loading Nvidia kexts or using TB2 https://www.reddit.com/r/eGPU/comments/8lybin/macos_egpu_wit....

Interesting. I might ask around to verify this.

> True, but their Navi cards are at least competitive in the price ranges where they exist. Hopefully the high end ones next year continue that. If you’re looking at Titan or whatever the current ML thing is in the $1000+ range, then you might be stuck with Nvidia.

I am rooting for AMD's Navi cards too. It's just unfortunate that CUDA seems to be more supported than OpenCL.

Agreed on that. AMD put a bunch of work into the Cycles rendering engine (for blender) to get their OpenCL support up to par with CUDA, and now it's completely disabled on the Mac version thanks to Apple deprecating it. Disappointing.

https://developer.blender.org/rBbb0d812d98

You can only focus on so many products... I don't see why it's confusing when people are upset by what they choose to focus on

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