Apple reportedly questioning future of Mac Pro | Hacker News Reader

Apple reportedly questioning future of Mac Pro

marco.org

17 pointspetercooper37 comments

The problem is really simple. Lots of people, myself included, need a computer with accessible drives to be replaced, and it would be really nice to have a PCI bus. Apple offers this, but only at an outrageous cost that includes 6, 8 or 12 processors, which we don't need, and also the PCI-e bus has extremely few normal cards available, because Apple sells so few Pros, because they are massively overpriced. The alternatives are iMac, MacBook and MacMini, none of which have the current industry standard USB3 ports, all of which instead have a weird nonstandard Thunderbolt connector that requires $50 intelligent cables and for which no virtually no peripherals are available now, or ever will be available, except at extravagant cost.

It's a serious problem that affects my work, and the work of many, all due to mismanagement of their computer line by Apple.

I have around 4TB of files I regularly access, including video archives of tutorial and marketing films.

On a Mac Pro, I can drop 2x2TB drives in and be ready to go, and even have a couple more for mirroring, but the price of the chassis to hold the drives (the Pro) is outlandish.

With the iMac, you can't upgrade to that capacity at all, and even upgrading the internal drive to 2TB is trouble because Apple puts custom chips on their drives that prevent the temperature sensor from reporting right so that for many people upgrading the drive makes the fans run at full speed. Putting the drives into Firewire enclosures means I have to buy rare and expensive FW800 external housings, daisy chain them, and have multiple wall warts, transformers, enclosures and wires all over the place, just like back in the Commodore 64 days, and if something gets snagged on one of these cables mid drive write, the whole system becomes hosed.

For a platform historically known for suitability for multimedia work which has always required fair amounts of storage, the situation is abominable.

For expanded storage, you could look into iSCSI (not the best support on the mac) CIFS or NFS supporting subsystems like those from Synology. Not sure your thruput reqs, but in most cases one of those will suffice. YMMV.

Have you considered using iSCSI? The storage server need not be a Mac. I'm using Nexenta running ZFS to supply iSCSI volumes to some of the machines on my home network.

Thanks, my current solution is similar to that - storage drives in a PC server originally bought for that purpose and accessed through ethernet. (Interestingly, I have a hell of a time getting 2 Macs to network, but Macs network fine from PCs.) This was not as fast as I would like though and I usually had to copy files locally for editing. I migrated most of my video and photo work to the PC just because the speed was much faster having the drives local. It seems strange to me that I have to have two computers to do basic things. I greatly prefer the Unix on the Apple, but it's getting to where I might just switch back to the PC since the Mac has become an impediment to my workflow. This after using Macs since the 1980s for work at home. It makes no sense. Why shouldn't all Macs have easy access to reasonable amounts of storage. They should. Not having a reasonable solution here is really boneheaded of Apple.

> For a platform historically known for suitability for multimedia work

That's its history, which Apple has moved away from (with great success). You're not they're target customer anymore. Their average customer in 2011 wants a ultra-thin laptop, not a super-powered (from their POV) desktop.

If you're not willing to pony up the cash, your best hope is to build a Hack Pro.

I've never really understood why all models of the Mac Pro ship with Xeons rather than having lower models with i7 processors. This must affect the price quite allot since it forces you to buy a processor that is quite likely to provide little to no benefit to many potential customers.

Sort of like how the iMac forces you to buy a monitor.

The workstation Xeons support dual (separate physical packages) processor configurations. These are for real workstations and how you get to 12 or 16 cores. Of course just about no one needs a real workstation anymore and a six or eight core single processor ala i7 900 series would work just fine for most in a Mac Pro.

right, for super high powered workstations the Xeon makes sense but allot of the benefit seems to be the ability to run 2+ seperate CPUs, but they sell Mac Pros with only a single Xeon inside them which seems pointless.

There seems to be a total gap in the apple lineup for people who want an at least somewhat expandable computer that lets you pick your own monitors rather than forcing one on you, but doesn't make you pay for server grade hardware.

Most Mac Pros I have seen used were primarily being used for photoshop or ruby dev, very unlikely that justifies the xeon.

To me it seems like saying "you either can buy this 2 seater car with 1.2L 80hp 4 pot engine or a 5 seater car with a 5L 600hp V8"

This is my issue with them as well. I have the latest 6 core mac pro, but would have been happier with a 4 core i7 with non-ECC RAM for much less money. I only bought the tower to get the drive bays, upgradeable graphics card, and multiple monitor support. I use ~0% of its processing capacity most of the time, and certainly don't need 6 cores um... ever.

The Xeon is only about 10% more expensive than the equivalent i7; the high price of the Mac Pro comes from some other source (e.g. the fancy motherboard that you also don't need).

This is now the only mac with ECC memory. I guess people don't care about ECC memory.

See djb's ECC memory page for an idea of why you need ECC memory, http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html

This is a real issue.

And, it seems even the most capacious Mac (that's not a Mac Pro) only supports 16GB of RAM. That's not as much as I'd like, although with an SSD for swap, maybe it's not as painful.

Spent a long time comparing a "low"-end Mac pro with the highest-end i7 iMac recently, and I came to the conclusion that, for my needs (media production, music composition), a Mac Pro just made no sense at all.

The Mac "pro" market is heavily skewed toward media types, and especially with i7 iMacs there to do much (if not all) of the heavy lifting, I'm not surprised that the Mac Pro is nearing the end of its life.

I'm sure there are a lot of situations that Thunderbolt and i7 don't address, but I'd posit they don't crop up in a vast majority of Apple's "pro" niche.

I don't know, while this might sense from a business perspective, this seems like a flawed enterprise to me. Many creative professionals need the extend-ability of the Mac Pro. For instance for graphics (QuadroFX) or audio work (UAD DSP cards for instance). I don't think that external cards over Firewire or Thunderbolt are the appropriate solution here.

Yeah, even the (new? upcoming?) Magma ExpressBox 3T only allows 3 PCI-E cards off your Thunderbolt port; not nearly enough for an audio workstation. Though if one of those three slots can support a Magma host card, you can then daisy-chain to a regular Magma expansion box.

I agree, also the problem with a $1000 expander to get 3 PCIe slots is that I know from decades of experience that any time you have some weird standard like this that requires special drivers, very few companies jump in and the prices are necessarily stratospheric. Because of this, the market never develops and support is dropped from the device before the bugs are worked out. Even if you end up with a stable driver, it'll stop working the next time there is an OS upgrade. So you end up running 10.n, while everyone else is on n+1, then n+2, then no more security upgrades, so you have to switch to n+2 and throw away the now useless $1000 box.

(Not only this, but reading the ExpressBox materials it seems each PCIe card maker is going to have to write a custom driver that specifically targets the ExpressBox. It seems extremely unlikely to me this is going to happen for even a few of the very few PCIe devices that have Mac support at all anyway.)

All could be avoided by either selling normally powered and priced desktops with drive bays and PCIe slots, or at least adding USB3 support. Neither will happen though, Apple has a very long history of backing alternative standards in this way such as NuBus, Firewire and PCI-X.

I guess the real answer is treating your computer as a set of audio appliances, and ensuring that your editing appliance can effectively communicate with your DSP appliance. e.g., more stuff like FX Teleport (http://www.fx-max.com/fxt/product.html), RedNet (http://www.focusrite.com/rednet/), AudioPort (http://www.audioimpressions.com/support/faqs/audioport-unive...), etc.

Also, if you've already invested 10'000 USD into a solution like UAD (let's say, 2 UAD-2 cards and a ton of overpriced plugins) or bought a ProTools HD card, your next computer will be a PC, and not an iMac if Apple decides to discontinue the Mac Pro.

Hackintosh.

For $1200, I built a Core i7 2600k machine, 16GB RAM, Radeon HD 6870, 128GB SSD and 2x1TB HDD.

I considered a MacMini i7 or iMac i7, but the lack of easy (emphasis on easy!) expandability turned me off. A MacPro was never an option because of the cost. The hackintosh takes a little more work to get up and running, and I have to take a 'wait-and-see' stance to upgrades, but otherwise it runs perfectly and is as fast as a six-core MacPro.

If the Mac Pro is killed, maybe Apple could bring back the Cube. Give it 1 or 2 PCIe slots, 2 or 3 2.5" internal drive bays and a case that you can get into easy (like, flip a couple of latches and the outer case slips off). This time the case could be aluminum to help with the thermal issues of the original Cube. This would be the perfect replacement to a MacPro.

Otherwise, I'll just stick with a Hackintosh to do the heavy lifting that my MacBook Air can't handle.

I don't see them abandoning the Mac Pro without filling that niche with something else. They sell a large number of "pro" apps (e.g., Aperture, Final Cut, Logic, etc.) that all work best when run on a Mac Pro. Speaking from direct experience, no laptop comes close to the performance required to get the best workflow out of those tools.

If they bump the specs on the iMacs, those are good enough --specially taking into consideration Intel's new/upcoming processors. I know people who do FCP on iMacs.

Possibly, but I don't personally feel the screen on those is good enough for pro-level photo work. Some do, but for me there's no substitute for a high-end matte display, so the built-in one is sort of unnecessary when you already have one or more.

Plus, some people still need CRTs for their superior and consistent color reproduction

How much would they need to bump them to get on a par with the 12 and 16-core MacPros?

Is it a lot, or has Sandy Bridge narrowed that gap?

Perhaps, and this is worth a thought, that Apple could push xgrid support, if it's not already there, into all the Pro apps. Xgrid over Thunderbolt could be a lot of fun...

Mac Pro always strikes me as a weird deal. For $2499 box I get - No wireless, No bluetooth, Xeon. Its very strange to buy such an expensive box with expectation that it will be all inclusive only to find that you need to first buy modules to get a wireless keyboard working.

Mac Pros have had bluetooth and wifi built in for years. Presently they come default with a Magic Mouse, and you can add a wireless keyboard for $20.

The latest MacBook Pros are awesome, no doubt. But I don't see them as such an obvious choice as Marco, and I find his standpoint odd considering he's been complaining about their heat output/fan noise for a while now.

My Mac Pro is as silent as could be even with all 8 cores cranking away and the heat of the CPUs isn't relevant to me at all (though I tend to use my iMac most of the time now due to the nicer screen). Even with a MacBook Pro on the desk, rather than the lap, maxing it out leads to phenomena.

I think it is still important for them to cater to AV professionals since it is part of their identity to provide for creative people.

You would think so, but Apple has been really poor in this area as of late. They discontinued Shake. They replaced Final Cut Pro with a rewrite that catered more to hobbyists than professionals.

To me, the craziest thing about a Mac Pro, is that it defaults to coming with 3GB of RAM in the entry-level model. Nothing else, except for the entry-level Minis and Airs comes with less than 4GB.

Consider that a kindness from Apple.

You can get two to three times as much RAM at the same price from an online reseller than you'd get buying the RAM directly from Apple.

That's probably partly because they haven't updated the specs since mid-2010... but I also bought my mac pro with the minimum RAM because I could get it a lot cheaper from a third party. I'd rather have a minimal minimum config to save some dough.

If I can get the same horsepower and internal storage on a MacBook Pro - fine - but Apple had better make a dock for it for all of my peripherals.

It feels like apple is couching their thunderbolt display as their 'dock'. Display + firewire + usb, over a thunderbolt cable.

The Mac Mini with an external display (obviously) is my Mac of choice for the desktop. You can install an SSD and (now) get a quad-core CPU. The only negative? Onboard GPU. For some people that's a dealbreaker.

Thunderbolt might provide a solution for these people (but hasn't yet).

For laptops, I love my Macbook Air 13". MBPs are a reasonable option if you want a hybrid of the Mac Mini and the Air.

The problem that always puts me off with the iMacs is how hard they are to upgrade. You have to remove the glass. If you buy it with an SSD, you get an SSD bracket (and you can replace that SSD). If you don't buy an SSD you don't get that bracket and you need to do some finnicky upgrades to get it in there.

I wouldn't object so much except the iMac SSD is really expensive and, at best, mediocre.

As nice of a package as that is, it's a dealbreaker (for me).

What I'd like to see in the Mac line is an upgradeable, affordable desktop. Basically take a case like the Silverstone SG07B that takes a mini-ITX motherboard (which you can get motherboards for any modern Intel CPU for) and it also takes a double-slot GPU and has a large enough PSU to power pretty much any modern GPU.

You can also fit in 2x 2.5" drives and 1x 3.5", which as far as I'm concerned, is just about perfect (SSD mirrored plus a scratch disk).

That's what I hope they come out with. I'm not holding my breath however.

> What I'd like to see in the Mac line is an upgradeable, affordable desktop […] I'm not holding my breath however.

That's probably for the best. Their refusal to make one has kept them in a niche of expensive disposable machines for about 25 years, both before and after the clone vendors demonstrated how much demand there could be. Then they noticed how many people accept expensive disposable MP3 players and phones. I expect them to gradually abandon the computer market altogether.

What do Apple use internally? iMacs? Surely they have a tonne of Mac Pros. Is this enough to keep them around?

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