The Mac Pro from an audio pros perspective
createdigitalmusic.com
createdigitalmusic.com
There's no "oh, we only have a card, you have to have a machine with slots" anymore - every machine, from the lowliest Mac Minis and MacBooks to the highest end Mac Pro will be able to use the same peripherals.
I think this is the end goal. Apple's computers will scale along the CPU and GPU performance and memory size axes, with everything else being an peripheral you can theoretically move to any computer you own.
It's a bold move.
What Apple has designed could be described as a laptop for your desk. Sales of systems where the CPU/GPU are upgradable are plummeting. The market is driving computers in this direction.
I don't necessarily want a top end CPU, but I like a decent GPU and a lot of memory.
Not to mention the environmental factors.
OS X system guides - http://www.tonymacx86.com/
Lately, I haven't felt like Apple has my back for pro-A/V :/
More likely, you've got 2 upgradeable graphics cards in there, already running in an SLI configuration. It should be entirely upgradeable.
I want to just dock it at my home desk with the GPU and convert my laptop into essentially a desktop workstation. Then I can undock it and take it out to the coffeeshop when I want to work outside. Maybe the external GPU is tiny too, and I can throw that in my backpack with it when I want to do gamedev work outside the house.
One of the most nerve-wracking moments of my (former) life as a recording engineer was installing a brand new Pro Tools card into a brand new Mac Pro at Aereosmith's studio. For whatever reason, the fit was way tighter than normal and I literally had to put some of my body weight over the thing to get it to slide in. All the while, just wondering how I was going to explain to Joe Perry that I had snapped a $6k Pro Tools card in half. Luckily, I didn't have to.
The problem of hard drives taking up too much room in a case is solved. The problem of expansion cards taking up too much room in a case is solved. If we could get that to video cards as well, we can throw the whole concept of massive cases in traditional form factors being required for high end workstations right out the window.
Currently Windows supports graphics cards via Thunderbolt but OS X doesn't. There's also no guarantee Apple support drivers for external PCIe graphics chipsets.
Maybe in 3 years Thunderbolt 3 will be 128 gbps but PCIe will hit its next iteration putting it that much further beyond. Thunderbolt is awesome as an I/O setup but for graphically minded individuals, its still not as amazing as one might hope.
Citation? From a software perspective, Thunderbolt is just hotpluggable PCIe. There's not much that can be done to prevent compatibility with a GPU connected via Thunderbolt, especially when the OS already supports switchable graphics. From what I've read, the biggest challenge to using an external GPU enclosure with a Mac is getting a GPU that OS X has drivers for, not anything Thunderbolt-related.
I've wondered: if computer makers sold laptops with lights-out-management and detachable displays, would people would repurpose them into makeshift mobile servers and design entire server farms around them, like they have with the Mac Mini. You could have a work/coding environment where if somebody needs to take home the dev server to hack on it overnight, they pull it out of the rack, slap on a display, use it any other laptop, and bring it back in the morning to plug back in.
In many respects, the new Mac Pro is exactly the all-round machine (development, scientific computing, plus the odd game) I've been waiting for. If it shows up with a reasonable low-end version, I'd buy it in a flash (or even sooner, given an Nvidia GPU option). But Apple have been very wary about releasing mid-range machines which might cannibalise iMac sales, so I'm not holding my breath.
Maybe most professional audio guys don't actually require a serious workstation anymore; I'm sure Apple is calculating or hoping that it will be good enough for enough video editors too. It's hard to see the 2013 Mac Pro getting under the desks at Pixar, but presumably Apple feels willing to give up on that end of the market.
No. It's "letting people use their device in a non-retarded way".
But when you see an Apple device in the real world, it looks like crap. Why? Because it's tangled up in this octopus of cables and external doodads.
In my office I have a Lenovo X220, and everyone else has Macs, mostly Macbooks. I have a docking station, so all my cables other than mouse and keyboard are behind my desk out of sight and mind. The co-worker with the iMac has the same situation. Everyone else has a Macbook Pro or Air. The entire left sides of their desk are a mess of cables spewing out the side of the Macbooks. It ruins everything.
Hiding everything inside of the beautiful box keeps it pretty, so I've never really understood why Apple loves external devices so much more than internal.
I hear ya though, my Macbook Pro doubles as my home development machine, so when I'm "docked" it's just a morass of cables. It really would be nice if Apple lived up to the "Pro" moniker and gave us a reasonable dock.
I did order a Henge dock a while back, maybe I should actually unpack it and set it up...
If you mean this criticism in regards to the Mac Pro, expansion cards usually have cables coming out of them as well, so the Mac Pro is no different from traditional desktops in that regard. SSD on PCI is obviously an exception here, but that's a relative newcomer.
As far as laptop computers, the reason you have a dock and others don't is that you purchased a dock, and the others didn't. So perhaps the Apple users you know care less about aesthetics than you think they do.
1) I'm having a Déjà vu moment comparing these to the old Atari 850 Interface http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8bits/400800/atari850.h...
Then there's the question of storage; previously local hard disks could be installed entirely internally, with no external cables, whereas now they all have to be external. Thankfully it should be possible to bus-power those if you don't care about daisy-chaining them.
The endless adapters definitely add more clutter and complexity to the setup.
With my old Dell I just plopped it into the dock which kept most of that stuff sorted out and pointed away from my desk. I had the same amount of connectors, just organized better.
I recently moved to a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and finally got my wifi setup so now it's just power and monitor and it looks much more sane.
Of course now I have to make sure my mouse and keyboard are turned on and wait for them to connect which means I'm sometimes logging into my computer from it's own keyboard first to fiddle with the bluetooth stuff.
I'm considering getting an external optical drive which of course will reverse this trend, but for now I can't burn any disks when I need to.
I settle for an external USB hub, wireless keyboard and mouse, and outboard audio. It does enough to reduce the number of things I have to plug.
http://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-F4U055
http://www.matrox.com/docking_station/en/ds1/
(Matrox one is kinda lame)
The lack of internal expansion means high-end mac pro peripherals have to be TB, which may finally kickstart the the TB ecosystem. And when that happens, these peripherals are compatible with all machines from the mini and air to rMBP and mac pro.
Apple generally make these decisions before it's very clear what direction the industry is heading.
Their decision here is to position the Mac Pro as a tiny, powerful computing hub that has the bandwidth and controllers necessary to drive a crazy amount of professional hardware at high speed.
This unifies their products relative to external accessories (if everything is Thunderbolt, you can plug your hardware into your laptop when required). It also lets them stay focused on making the best 'pro' computing hub they can build. (That it also happens to be quiet and small is a very nice plus.)
Edit: That said, who knows whether this is the right direction for the pro industry.
I am not a AV guy, but using my mac mini i started to do the same thing described in the article. rather than byuing an internal hdd, i simply connected a 1tb external drive (silent, sdd). at first I didn't think about it, but this enabled me to:
- Need to transfer files to one of my Windows machines? Simply unplug the hdd from the mac and plug into the Winbox
- Travelling? Take my entire library of stuff with me. No need for DropBox, etc. This works offline, anywhere.
Sounds low tech and slightly too simple, but I'd love to expand this to other functionalities. An external graphics card would be awesome, play games on any machine I want (Mini or Air...).
I've built my own gaming PCs, but by now I would really prefer something more modular, easy, true plug and play.
An existing computer may have something like 5 PCIe slots. That's your limit. But with these thunderbolt ports, you can hook up 6 devices per port. 5 PCIe cards vs a potential of 36? I really don't see how the new Mac Pro is less extendable.
In addition, now that there is no CD Drive, there's no longer any reason why this tower needs to sit where you do. You could theoretically have 40ft Thunderbolt cables drive your displays, and the computer can be neatly stowed away in another room, and just the interfaces (like these cool looking RME devices) and other monitors and editing equipment can stay on your desk.
When it comes time to upgrade, you just replace the "brain", and hook up all the cables to it.
They are the only people developing custom USB/firewire controllers, everyone else just sticks a TI chipset in there, wraps the OEM drivers and goes to lunch. Not the plucky germans at RME.
If you need to get audio in or out of your computer, you should settle for nothing less.
But given the additional power bricks, wires and boxes you need for this, it seems they're optimizing for the non-extended situation and/or want to give their other computers equal footing.
My suggestion to Apple (or 3PP), would be to make a stackable accessory form factor (along the lines of http://www.123macmini.com/accessories/guide/enclosures.html) with built-in Thunderbolt connectors, or at least cable guides. They could be styled in the same style as the Mac Pro. Imagine just slotting on another level of your little accessory tower, with a single Thunderbolt going to the "capital ship".
By the way, I just realised what it is that the base of the new Mac Pro was reminding me of: it's the old G4 iMac, of course http://macspeedzone.com/images/reviews/machines/desktop/imac... .
The only thing I might want is a PCI-Express slot for a RED ROCKET card (it's a hardware decoder for 4K+ video from RED cameras) but I've never really felt the urge to splurge for one of those - both Final Cut Pro X and Premiere Pro are good enough at decoding it with the CPU and GPU even on my MacBook Pro so the Mac Pro should have no problems with it... The only time I feel it is rendering (you can work in 1/4 res [a bit more than 1080p] but for finishing you want full quality even if you're downscaling). And if I did want one, there are a number of adaptors that work with them...
I don't know that TB1 will have enough bandwidth for the new Red Rocket X card, and I'm not yet aware of any TB2 -> PCIe chassis for sale.
I don't see any problem with this whatsoever.
What is clear from this latest design is that Apple doesn't see audio production as a market worth considering when designing stuff.
I think there will be (and frankly are) very high-quality external interfaces that have none of these issues, and avoid larger internal issues. Your argument is a non-issue, and your conclusion is an overreaction.