$2,999 Mac Pro to go on sale in December | Hacker News Reader

$2,999 Mac Pro to go on sale in December

arstechnica.com

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Mac Pro: 7 teraflops for a few thousand.

Cray X1 in 2004 5.9 teraflops[1] for only ~$40M USD[extrapolating from 2].

Mind boggling what to expect 10 years from now.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray [2]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/15/cray_flogs_x1_superc...

>Mac Pro: 7 teraflops for a few thousand.

>Cray X1 in 2004 5.9 teraflops[1] for only ~$40M USD

Each D700 GPU is 3.5 terraflops. These are the same hardware as the 7970 which currently retails for 300 dollars. So it's even more impressive -- 7 teraflops could be nearly an order of magnitude less than that!

With any luck the CX1[0] will eventually be seen as merely ahead of its time, and not just a dead end. It was a marvelous concept for a machine. The main difference is that instead of stopping with cores-per-socket and flops per core, you also consider network and IO performance, between nodes in the workstation running quietly under your desk...

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_CX1

And the Mac Pro even looks like a shrunken Cray (minus the included seating).

Original IBM PC: $2400 ($6000 in today's dollars) for 0.00477GHz, 0.000016GB RAM, no storage (cassette interface).

For years, it was a rule-of-thumb that your dream machine was always $5000.

Fully trick-out a Mac Pro, and that rule might still be true.

I would expect it to top out at significantly more than $5k

It doesn't matters, this is a halo product, it's main purpose is to showcase the company's engineering chops not being a sales success story like the iphone or ipad were.

Problem is previous such products like the G4 cube coexisted with the traditional and less pricey powermac, while this thing killed the old mac pro, leaving a lot of pros and their expensive expansions and accessories out in the cold.

> it's main purpose is to showcase the company's engineering chops

I agree with this, but I'd add that it's to show off their silky smooth blend of engineering and design. We all can go to NewEgg or a million other online retailers and build something which approximates the specs of this machine. Shit, almost two years ago I built a 32 core machine with 32GiB of RAM (could've added more RAM, didn't need it as problem was parallelizable and CPU-bound).

As for the sales successes, I really want one of these, and I'm sure I'm not alone. I'm betting most individuals who buy these will be the types who also spend money on art. What I mean is, I could scrape enough loose change together to get one, but I have no use for it. My desire for one is purely emotional. It's beautiful. Just a hunch, but I think Apple's margin on this product fits more closely with the fine art consumer market than the mass consumer market.

That's the problem, the people who want this "as art" aren't nearly as many as those who bought the previous mac pro for work, so again you have the same problem the G4 cube had.

> Mac Pro: 7 teraflops for a few thousand.

I bet it will still beach ball...

64TB of memory? Yes please.

I wonder if it's any good at mining bitcoins... How long do I have to mine for this to pay for itself? ;)

A long time given that it's nowhere near as efficient as a dedicated bitcoin-mining ASIC.

Hold on tight! It's going to be an awesome ride.

does the apple marketing department troll hacker news?

Well, to be fair, it's more a comment on Intel's progress than Apple's. I'm sure you can throw together an ugly generic PC with the same parts for less. Anyway, workstations are supposed to look big and intimidating :)

Can you? The CPU alone is unbelievably expensive. Two high-end GPUs are not cheap either. I would be interested in seeing the cost of a truly equivalent generic PC build. ("Truly" equivalent meaning no non-Xeon CPUs and other "almost as good" parts, something that's all too commonly done with Mac Pro comparisons.)

>Well, to be fair, it's more a comment on Intel's progress than Apple's.

>Can you? The CPU alone is unbelievably expensive. Two high-end GPUs are not cheap either.

In the context of this thread topic of, "wow 7 teraflops used to cost millions and now you can put it on your desktop with a mac pro" yes, you can get those same numbers with even less money. A computer with two 7970s is 7 teraflops and those particular cards retail for 300.

A quad 780 GPU configuration would cost 4 or 5 k and get you even more impressive stats, at 16+ teraflops it crushes those cray numbers.

For me, the emphasis on the GPU is the precisely problem. There are other ways to allocate resources and still keep the price down.

For background, I generally take the time to plug my laptop into a monitor when I'm commuting to an office, but since I like to take my work with me the laptop is my primary device. Working with multiple monitors is nice, but I always gravitate back to my portable workflow.

My use of the old Mac Pro was usually through the terminal, or via web apps, and centered on storage, long running processes, or providing services to others. It was very handy to have the machine physically in my office, for a variety of big-enterprise-nonsense reasons, so quiet operation was appreciated.

So, now it looks like if I wanted a comparable setup I'd be stuck with a Mac Mini, and I guess 3 more Mac Minis with external storage. That sounds fun to me personally, but it really shouldn't be necessary. I also wouldn't look forward to presenting a request for a vanity mini-cluster for myself, and having to compare that on a cost/performance basis to a basic 2U server, even if that wouldn't sit in my office.

If the new Mac Pro were more compute-focused, or provided some flexibility in that regard, then I'd have zero complaints. As it is, I can only imagine being asked to take a break from actual work to to help someone who has one of these machines with an e-mail problem.

Edit: I should mention that I really appreciate the the approach to cooling, and engineering overall. I've had some very loud (60 dB), very hot workstations that I'm thankful to be rid of.

I have a colleague who has a machine with 4 NVIDIA Tesla cards, and he is looking at getting one with 8 cards.

Many video/audio editing tasks benefit from the GPUs, not to mention HPC (but OpenCL sucks, so its NVIDIA/CUDA only here). If you aren't into those workloads, maybe you don't want a MacPro.

That's a good point, and I could get extra mileage out of GPUs for some tasks. HMMER and Amber both benefit from that type of acceleration, for instance. But unfortunately I still would expect to be CPU-bound nearly all the time. Having 64GB of memory would have been great, but I'd need another 20 cores to fully utilize it.

How much does a 4 Tesla rig cost?

Brand new each cost ~$3,499 [1]. The rest of the computer could be $2,000. So possibly $15,000.

I remember them being around ~$10,000 when they first came out. So I'm guessing you could be more economical.

[1]: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814132...

E5-1620 v2 (10M cache, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 3.70 GHz (130W), 22nm) - $294

Hardly unbelievably expensive. In fact, the CPU is disappointing -- a top of the line non-Xeon desktop CPU would actually be better, not just in speed, but features. However, I blame this on Intel, not Apple, as the larger socket CPUs now lag the desktop line by more than a year, mostly because there is little to no competition for them and so Intel concentrates on other product lines. Your choice is now newest cpu or option for more than 4 cores.

The GPUs are also not that interesting. They are top of the line from AMD now, but they are just about to release new ones that should delegate those to middle of the line before the Pro comes out. I hope the cpu choice doesn't mean that Mac Pro is stuck on Ivy Bridge as CPU for it's entire run, and that you can upgrade the GPU to Hawaii for the better models on launch.

A z620 with 32gigs of ram, quadro k4000 and two 6 core procs running at 2.66gigs is roughly the same price (within 10%, bear in mind that they are yet to bump to the v2 procs that the apple use.)

Granted it lacks an SSD, but thats an extra £250, depending on what you want to achieve.

Unless you are doing something that really hits the GPU, then this mac is pretty much useless to you. Video editing is mostly IO bound. Only a few effects are use the GPU, let alone can make things faster.

Bear in mind that the SSD in the Mac Pro is PCI-E. It seems like all the M.2 form factor PCI-E SSDs are going to OEMs right now. Would be interesting to know what they will be selling for at retail.

FYI, the cheapest PCIe SSD card I could find, a 240GB OCZ RevoDrive 3 will cost you ~$600 (while IOPs weren't specified, a +1GB/s RW was mentioned in the keynote).

As you mentioned, much of the cost is in the (extra) GPU (roughly FirePro W7000 class), but being said, I think you underestimate how important OpenCL is these days for video editing. FCPX is heavily dependent on the GPU and presumably Logic will be moving in that direction as well.

I work for a large VFX company, trust me, video editing doesn't use the GPU that much.

Depends on the software package you use. FCPX uses OpenCL for real-time playback w/o rendering, including realtime FX, transcoding and accelerating plugin rendering.

Premiere Pro's Mercury Engine does similar things with CUDA accelerating many effects, scaling, deinterlacing, blending, and color-space conversions.

If you're going to do proxy-less RT 4K like they mentioned in the keynote, you will need the GPU.

BTW, I spec'd out a Z620 w/ an E5-1620v2/12GB RAM and topped $3K even w/o video cards. 2 W7000's puts you over $5K: http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/MiddleFrame.asp?page=config...

Well I guess we won't know until they release part numbers on the CPU, and that part number is available form Newegg/Amazon. It's not clear to me if they're going Haswell or Ivy-Bridge. The I-B E5 Xeons on Newegg now are all 6+ cores and very expensive (into the thousands of $s). The closest I can find are Haswell quad core (the new Mac Pro is 4-core) and are much cheaper: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116...

> I would be interested in seeing the cost of a truly equivalent generic PC build. ("Truly" equivalent meaning no non-Xeon CPUs and other "almost as good" parts, something that's all too commonly done with Mac Pro comparisons.

I agree with that. We'll have to see.

The Mac Pro is Ivy Bridge-EP. Haswell-EP won't be released for a year.

The CPU and GPUs are going to contribute hugely to the price and it seems impossible to figure out exactly what they cost yet, so I guess all we can do for now is speculate.

Will be interesting to see exactly how it all compares once the info becomes available, for sure.

4 Core: E5-1620 v2 Price $294.00

Best guestimates I have seen on GPUs are high 200s to low 300s each for the base model items.

The closest equivalent on the GPUs for the D300 (same SP count, slight clock bump, less RAM) is the W7000, which goes for about $650/ea right now.

Part for part, the new Mac Pro is very well priced, but like others have mentioned you could make different decisions if you put together your own system (personally I'd rather have a single R9 290X for example, but I game more than I CAD/CAM).

Of course, the new Mac Pro is your only choice if OS X is something you need (discounting PITA to update hackintoshes).

+ 256GB PCI-Express based Flash storage, which is more expensive than regular SSDs

The GDDR5 FirePros start at more like $450, and that's with less VRAM

Most of the FLOPS number comes from the GPU. A single Radeon 7990 (~$800) pulls 8.2 (single-precision) TFLOPS by its lonesome. You can throw a pair of those and a beefy CPU into a computer for under $2k and claim 17 teraflops.

Either you can or you can't, and I've never seen Apple sell hardware without significant markup. If I had a complete part list I'd be interested in seeing the difference as well.

I've seen plenty of cases where someone said they could build an equivalent PC for less, and then ended up not being able to, because they were thinking of cheaper and worse components than Apple used.

I don't know which way it goes with the Mac Pro. But it's certainly not obvious to me that there's any sort of substantial markup on Apple's part here. The CPU alone is going to cost something like 1/3 to 1/2 of the total purchase price. I don't even know what the GPUs cost (can't find any mention of the model Apple lists outside of Mac Pro discussion) but I bet they're not cheap either.

Apple stuff is expensive generally because it's high-end, not because there's a huge markup. When people say that e.g. the Mac Pro is too expensive, they generally mean that it has more than they need (e.g. they don't want a Xeon CPU), not that it's overpriced for what it actually has. That's why I preempted the use of non-equivalent parts, because it's really common to start out this sort of comparison with something like, "Well, I don't actually need a Xeon, so I tossed in an i7 instead, and I don't need a workstation GPU so I used a gaming GPU instead, and..." and they end up with something much cheaper but not at all the same.

You have to stop thinking that a large OEM such as apple will be as subject to the artificial market segmentation pricing Intel & AMD makes. Intel sells i7 CPUs much cheaper than the equivalent xeon cpus for example. The big advantage of the equivalent xeon is being able to dual socket it and some other cheap-for-intel features being switched on. You can't dual socket CPU this mac pro anyway and GPUs tend to max out at ~$500 each for equivalent consumer GPUs.

So in summary, you can make an equivalent performance PC for $1500-$2000 dollars.

Core i7s and Xeon E3s are actually very close in price. The E3 1275v3 is $353.99 and the i7 4771 (the same sans ECC) is $319.99, and the i7 4770K (no ECC but overclockable) is $339.99. The E3 1245v3 (100MHz slower) is only $289.99, and the i7 4770 (same base speed as the 1245v3 but one extra turbo bin) is $309.99. The E3 1225v3 (300MHz slower than the top i7s and E3s) is $224.99, only slightly more expensive than the i5 4570 ($199.99) which is clocked the same but lacks HyperThreading and ECC.

Your problem is in assuming that the Xeon E5s that are going into high-end workstations and servers are in any way comparable to the E3s and the consumer parts. They're not. The E5s have twice the memory bandwidth, more than twice as many PCIe lanes, and a minimum of 20% more cache (and cache sizes scale up with core count). The E5s admittedly don't have the integrated GPU, but nobody in that market misses it.

Do you know how much those GPU's cost? This isn't a $1500 home gaming machine, it's a standalone server. And spending $3-$5k on a Dell server with dual video cards is completely reasonable. Some of the Tesla cards run for $3k+, by themselves!

You misunderstand. I'm not thinking that Apple is subject to anything. I'm not talking about their costs at all. I'm merely talking about our costs if we were to try to build an equivalent PC ourselves.

Apple probably gets a steep discount on all of its components, but that's completely irrelevant for this comparison.

I don't doubt that you can build a much cheaper PC if you go through the whole parts list and substitute cheaper, worse consumer parts for all the workstation parts in the Mac Pro. The question is, can you really build the same thing for the same price? I bet you can't, or at least it's close. Maybe you can, I could be wrong.

The question isn't how much a generic PC that's "good enough" costs. The question is how much it costs "with the same parts".

How are 'workstation' GPUs better than good 'gamer' GPUs? Isn't that differentiation basically a big marketing con in the first place?

You're shifting the goalposts a little by starting with "building an equivalent PC" then concluding "but it doesn't use the same parts"

You get ECC RAM, but mostly you're paying for drivers. They are usually slower for gaming, but provide better accuracy and usually crush consumer cards in pro performance.

Interestingly enough, EFI flashing a RadeonHD 7970 gets it recognized as a FirePro D700 in 10.9: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1594669

It may be a marketing con, but if you buy your $30,000 engineering package and expect it to run on your gamer GPU, you may need to do some video card firmware hacking to make that happen. And then, of course, you won't be able to get any customer support from the software vendor for any visual glitches which may appear. Sucks, but that's how it is -- workstation GPUs _are_ better, generally not in terms of FPS in Crysis, but in terms of out-of-the-box compatibility with off-the-shelf high end software packages.

If you are in the rare software segment with $30k software, then the extra $1000 or $2000 to indirectly get hardware drivers & firmware that confirm with your $30k software is not a big cost.

BUT, there are large segments that do not need those special drivers in their software set and are restricted by circumstance to use OS X only, such as iOS developers. Or just people who want high performance GPUs with their mac who don't need the FirePro feature set. There are also many software packages that do GPGPU or OpenCL just fine with consumer segment GPUs too.

I would of loved it if it was a mac pro with dual CPUs vs. dual GPUs for example, something you really can't physically get without the xeon level chipset, even though we all know it's very possible with a consumer chipset.

I just remember that at my last work, the hardware designer was using Solidworks for his CAD work, and the single-threaded rendering was an issue. There was an active community looking for the best cards to do that rendering on, and moderately high-level gaming cards did significantly better than the 'workstation' cards by Matrox and similar.

I don't know what price tier Solidworks is in, but looking at their site now, it's in the "get a quote" category, so they're not a consumer-level bit of software.

"with the same parts" is a quote from the original comment I was replying to way up there. No goalpost-shifting is occurring on my end.

This xeon is $343 at retail for 3.5GHz quad core. http://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9B-1...

I know it's not linear, but you really expect Apple to be paying $1000 to $1500 for a 3.7GHz quad core?

I'm sure I'm one of those people you're thinking of. I built a PC last year for $1k and it appeared either identical or better than the maxed out iMac which was ~$3k.

While that is not the correct CPU, the overall sentiment is correct; there's no way that the CPU would constitute such a significant portion of the purchase price.

Intel's own product page pegs the recommended price as $294 (oem packaging, tray): http://ark.intel.com/products/75779/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...

And indeed one may be able to obtain a ready to ship and in stock OEM packaged version of the CPU in the upcoming Mac Pro for $303.99 (+2.99 UPS ground + CA tax as applicable): http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?p=E5-1620V2

Thanks. I wasn't sure how to find that, even though I did do some searches on superbiiz.

I'm not sure I understand the discrepancy. Why would the CPU be so cheap ($303.99) compared to the one I posted, which several commenters are claiming is severely under powered in comparison?

These new lower end E5 16xxs are essentially Core i7s and priced about equivalently[1]. The 26xx's are much beefier (I think people were expecting 26xx's across the line but matching specs[2], this is obviously not the case).

I'd be pleasantly surprised if the 12C Mac Pro sold for less than $6K but as you can see the big ($1500!) bump is between the 6C/8C and they didn't talk pricing beyond the 6C so if they don't eat the cost you're looking at a $6K 8C and a $7K/$8K 12C.

4C exact match: $294 Xeon E5-1620 v2 4C 3.7GHz/3.9GHz 10MB L3 130W TDP

6C exact match: $583 Xeon E5-1650 v2 6C 3.5GHz/3.9GHz 12MB L3 130W TDP

8C closest match (underclocked?): $2057 Xeon E5-2667 v2 8C 3.3GHz/4GHz 25MB L3 130W TDP

12C exact match: $2614 Xeon E5-2697 v2 12C 2.7GHz/3.5 GHz 30MB L3 130W TDP

Tom's Hardware did some superficial (mostly desktop workload) testing on the E5-2697 v2 a couple months ago: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ivy-bridge-ep-xeon-e5-26...

[1] http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2013/2013091401_Intel_Xeon_E5-...

[2] https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/ and the description text: "Intel Xeon E5 with 10MB L3 cache and Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz. Configurable to 3.5GHz 6-core processor with 12MB L3 cache, 3.0GHz 8-core processor with 25MB L3 cache, or 2.7GHz 12-core processor with 30MB L3 cache"

I don't expect Apple to, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were putting in a CPU that we would pay that much for.

The CPU you cite is an E3 versus an E5 (not that I have any clue what that means), runs slower, and has less L3 cache. I don't know how much those add but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a lot. Just once, it would be nice if someone making a Mac versus PC price comparison could compare against a part that was better than the one in the Mac....

Xeon E3s have half the memory bandwidth, only 40% of the peripheral bandwidth, and at best 80% of the cache of the low-end E5s. A Xeon E3 is just a consumer CPU with ECC support. A Xeon E5 is a pro part.

>Just once, it would be nice if someone making a Mac versus PC price comparison could compare against a part that was better than the one in the Mac....

I'm very sorry. I couldn't find a faster xeon for sale and I thought it would suffice to demonstrate how a 200MHz increase most likely isn't worth $1000.

I imagine you think it logically impossible that Apple could be marking up the cpu, since I can't currently buy the cpu myself (and thus the cost for me is infinite)...

When I'm the most valuable company in the world and not just some guy searching newegg, I'll get back to you.

You may not be aware of this, but there has been a years-long practice of people making claims about outrageous markup of Apple hardware versus BYO systems, and not actually using the same hardware. It's irritating. (There certainly are cases of outrageous markup, but in this case, we don't really know yet, and the prices for Xeons are high.)

This reminds me of complaints about Apple laptops. I'm sold now, but when I first purchased one I was still a Linux/Windows dual-booter. So I specced out the Macbook Pro that I wanted, specced out (roughly) equivalent systems with every major brand at the time (circa 2006, this was the Core 2 Duo CPU version). I got a lot of systems that were close enough (+/- 50GB depending on their HDD sizes, = RAM or slightly more because I had some minimum I wanted at the time, close enough clock speeds with the same CPU (+/- .2GHz)). Every one of them ran to +/-$300 of the cost of the Macbook Pro, and not all of them had educational discounts (still in school at the time so I could take advantage of that). I haven't done this comparison in years, but ~2009 I did it again because I was tired of the noise from my coworkers and it came out similarly, similar specs meant priced within 200-300 of the Mac. Spec it out, don't just guestimate, and equivalent systems aren't significantly cheaper, if cheaper at all (either BYO or from someone like Dell or HP).

Yeah, Apple hardware is often decent value for money at launch, if your needs are exactly met by one of Apple's handful of models, with nothing that's overkill or unused and nothing missing. How many people is that true for though?

For example, if - for instance - you want a decent dedicated GPU you have to get a Mac Pro with an expensive Xeon E5 CPU and a workstation-glass GPU, even if you only need a much cheaper i7 or i5. Similarly, if you need lots of CPU power you have to pay for an expensive GPU even if you don't need it. These are hardly unusual requirements! (Also, Apple famously skimps on RAM compared to the rest of the system and then overcharges for extra RAM.)

Maybe sometime you should try the reverse exercise. Pick out a handful of popular PCs and see how much it would cost to buy an equally-powerful Mac.

I completely agree. Apple doesn't offer the ability to pick and choose, so you can end up with hardware much in excess of your needs, both in capabilities and in price.

My point is simply that this is a rather different situation. People phrase it as "Apple charges a premium" when it's more like "Apple sells high-end products". It doesn't make much difference to you if you want a medium-range product instead, but it does mean that Apple isn't just ripping everybody off.

There's a reason people pay much, much more for E5s than E3s, and it's not for clock speed. You can't get more than 32 GB of RAM in an E3 server, for example, while E5 servers can handle 256 per processor. E5s can coordinate between processors for multi processor machines, too.

As I mentioned, clock speed is only one difference. The cache is not the same, and from a bit of research, it looks like the E5 has double the memory bandwidth over the E3, so it's not at all a trivial difference.

> I imagine you think it logically impossible that Apple could be marking up the cpu

What would make you think that? I just want to see an actual comparison, not comparisons with parts people think are "close enough". Maybe that's impossible right now, in which case I want people to stop trying instead of coming up with "close enough".

The question is, how much does it cost to build a PC "with the same parts"?

>I've seen plenty of cases where someone said they could build an equivalent PC for less, and then ended up not being able to, because they were thinking of cheaper and worse components than Apple used.

If your needs align exactly with the models Apple offers, and Apple just released a product (what would the comparison look like if you needed to buy a system six months ago?) then sure.

The real-world question is to decide what your needs are in terms of specs and then compare the different ways of satisfying those needs. To choose an egregious example: I need an average CPU with a powerful GPU for real time performance. Going with Apple I am pushed into a hardware bracket where I have to spend in excess of $4000 to meet those needs. I could also satisfy those needs with a 700 PC and a 400 GPU.

I'm not sure. I just through some configuration options for a standalone tower server, and you can definitely get a comparable Xeon in there for the same or less. What's not clear to me is those video cards. There is no reference on the Dell site (or anywhere else I could find) as to what an AMD D300 FirePro is, or how much it costs. Dell lists FirePro V7800 and W7000 for ~$1500, but I don't see the D300 listed on any site so it much be an exclusive thing?

try to put PCI-Express based Flash Storage (1.2Gbit/s) in there and you will see that the MacPro is actually a good deal for people that need that kind of stuff.

Right now I think you can't, unless you can get your hands on a cheap dual socket motherboard for the new Xeons. Even then, the PCIE SSD will get you over the limit.

I really like the new Mac Pro, even if it's not upgradeable...

Lenovo Thinkstation, with the same Xeon quad-core, a bit less RAM (8 GB vs 12), and a 1TB hybrid disk instead of the 256 GB PCIe SSD, runs 2447 (plus 20 shipping!) on Amazon, and is almost 3X as heavy (30 lb vs 11).

nah, it depends :D Sometimes, it needs to inspire the creators as well. And some build it and some just want a beautiful one to get job done. And to be successful for Apple or not, it's based on their research about the market.

Quote: Dave Girard noted in his "Critical look at the new Mac Pro" that the machine has "a truly epic lack of expandability."

I totally agree.

As someone with a macpro1.1 I'm clearly looking elsewhere at this point. I take a lot of still photos and frankly I'm filling up 2 TB drives. Plus having a heavy bulky machine you can put a cable bike lock through makes it much less likely to be stolen..

The design is interesting though. I'm sure its crazy fast.

Just odd that you'll need an expansion chassis for more drive space.

Plus hdmi for external monitor support? Is every DVI monitor going to need an adapter?

The alternative is building a large machine containing vast empty space on the speculation that someone might fill it - leaving almost every unit significantly larger than necessary.

TB2 is fast enough that putting the storage outside the box makes sense. Makes upgrades easy: plug it in, rather than having to tear the box apart.

Or you can have a z820 which has much more space, cheaper, and has a much better warranty and support(next day engineer on site, for free.)

want two GPUs? sure. want 96 gigs or ram? go for it. want three fusion io cards? you betya.

On the other hand, if you prefer OS X as I do, you are SOL. :)

I totally agree. The new Mac Pro is plenty expandable, the expansion just happens on the outside.

I've had two Mac Pros so far. They're great, and I love the internal expansion... in theory. In practice, they never got any PCI cards beyond the graphics cards that came with them, and I used the hard drive bays more because I could than because I really needed it (e.g. keeping the old drive in the machine when upgrading storage and using it for secondary stuff).

About the only problem will be GPU upgrades a few years down the line. TB2 is not quite fast enough to make that a good option. But most Mac Pro owners don't upgrade that, and it's plenty good for storage and other PCI cards.

> Makes upgrades easy: plug it in, rather than having to tear the box apart.

In theory yes, in practice it comes with a hefty price tag. External thunderbolt disk arrays are quite expensive and something that would be unnecessary if the mac pro had some form of support for internal drives.

Isn't the idea with this model that storage moves all the way offboard via the bevy of new Thunderbolt ports? I'm using a fast Thunderbolt RAID drive on my iMac and for the first time, the cable isn't the bottleneck for file transfer.

I think external storage is the idea, but the extra cost and outlets and cords seem to diminish the desirability.

In time they'll probably be cheaper.

They are already pretty cheap -- the Areca ARC-8050 8 bay bare is $1499. A decent 8 bay NAS like the synology ds-1813+ is $999.

> They are already pretty cheap -- the Areca ARC-8050 8 bay bare is $1499.

Are you having a giggle there, mate?

To be fair, if you're the person that the mac pro is aimed at and you can drop $3k on a machine, another 1.5 for a decent drive array isn't that outlandish.

I'm assuming "bare" means without drives.

The cheapest 2TB drive I'd be willing to buy is this one [1]. Disregarding the "NAS Drive!!!" marketing junk, if you sort disk drives by price on Newegg this is the first one with a 5 star rating from 31 reviews.

You could go cheaper and get a 3 star rating'd drive for $85 [2].

To fill your chassis with the Seagate: 1x$1499 plus 8x$119 = $2451

To fill your chassis with the Toshiba: 1x$1499 plus 8x$85 = $2179

[1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178...

[2] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149...

It's not really marketing junk -- different drive firmware does make a difference in NAS and RAID applications. I'd probably be looking only at 4TB Ultrastars to fill the ARC-8050, or SSDs. I might go with something lower end for an 1813+ since you're probably not buying a gig-e connected NAS for performance.

(it depends, though -- if you're doing just huge volumes of audio, you probably only care about reliability and sustained performance, and not much performance at that; and even flac doesn't use much disk space. it's video or other info which requires high-speed direct-attach drives in 20TB chunks.)

Funny everyone assumes that "Pros" dont care about money. I just see this as 1500 bucks i dont have to spend when getting a workstation from another vendor.

You rarely get 8 drive RAID6 in any workstation.

try 4, still expensive enough.

1500 you wouldnt have to pay if the Mac Pro had some form of support for internal drives. Its 1500 you have to spend because Apple sacrificed expandability for design, size and light weight in a workstation computer.. It really only makes any sense if you need to lug the thing around alot (in which case i would think a top of the line macbook pro would be the better choice), or you just dont care about the money.

This is true. I wonder what the profit margin is on the new Mac Pro vs the old? Was there a $2999 version of the old? If there was, I wonder if they're basically pocketing the difference in cost, because they've conditioned us to spend $2999 on them. (I'm assuming the new Mac Pro is cheaper to produce than the old, but I could be wrong.)

Plus hdmi for external monitor support? Is every DVI monitor going to need an adapter?

No: Thunderbolt 2, like Thunderbolt, has DisplayPort built in.

The design of the Mac Pro is certainly attractive, but since the only way to add on to it is through Thunderbolt, it seems a bit counterproductive. The sleek black tube isn't so sleek when you need to have a bunch of external drives sitting on your desk.

Right - and for anyone with a new Mac, or Macbook Pro, for that matter? Your Cinema Display will still be only USB2, with an annoying MagSafe adapter required, and “only” Thunderbolt 1.

No announcement of a refresh for the display.

"Thanks for buying a $3,000+ professional level machine from us. The display? Well, you'll have to buy an outdated $1,000 unit from 2009."

I'm really surprised they didn't announce a 4K Cinema Display, honestly. I guess the price is still too high.

I'm still holding out some small glimmer of hope that it might come (at a high price) when the Pro is actually launched. They keep making mention of 4K...

Not only that, the ecosystem for Thunderbolt is far from flourishing. I searched a couple of months ago, when the original announcement was made, and the external enclosures are very expensive, in the range of $1500. That's without adding the cost of a bunch of disks.

I've decided that Windows 7 is my last Windows version. Once my current machine hits EOL, I really want a Mac Pro, but I need a way to get lots of storage that is reliable, reasonably priced and relatively quiet.

OWC looks like they have some decent Thunderbolt drive options now: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/

Barring that, if you're looking to add lots of storage, there are a lot of FW800 ($30 adapter) options. Also there are some ridiculously cheap USB 3.0 options but they look like they have lots of problems (build quality, firmware).

After seeing videos of traveling professional photographers bringing a thunderbolt display and more in checked luggage, I think this form factor will be very appreciated by that market segment.

Why would anyone care what a work horse of a computer looks like? Except if your Apple and you want to show that looks on a workstation is initiative????

I care. Aesthetics is important to me, and when presented with two comparable solutions, one ugly option and a pretty option, I'll most likely go for the pretty solution.

so you actually see your workstation computer? I always had mine in another room to block out noise.

Own goal! :-)

Thunderbolt cables are long enough that you could hide the drives elsewhere, if appearance is the main concern. This would still take up a lot less room on a desk even with a bunch of drives.

I'm looking for a clever designer to kickstart a MacPro case - that beautifully fits in your lovely black computer on the desktop along with slots for drives and cables. Could be quite a new thing for the independent accessory makers.

I'm seeing 98 feet. You could have them in a locked closet or cabinet conceivably. Expensive though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_%28interface%29

Note: I haven't read the entire wiki or triangulated it so this is a quick take.

http://gizmodo.com/5974052/these-optical-usb-and-thunderbolt...

That's 9.8 feet, not 98.

The first such optical Thunderbolt cable was introduced by Sumitomo Electric Industries in January 2013.[30] It is available in lengths of 10 metres (33 ft), 20 metres (66 ft), and 30 metres (98 ft). However, these cable only retail almost exclusively in Japan, and the price is 20–30× higher than copper Thunderbolt cables.

Copper cable is limited to 9.8 feet (aka 3 meters in the rest of the world), but optical cables can be up to 330 feet/100 meters.

That price looks nasty, though.

That doesn't solve the noise problem though. Internal drives are significantly quieter than external enclosures.

How loud are external SSDs compared to HDDs? Do they need a lot of cooling?

SSDs are effectively silent; they have no moving parts.

also, they don't require active cooling (because no moving parts; no friction, low power consumption)

SSDs still aren't at the capacities of HDDs, which are needed when handling lots of photos or videos in a cost-effective manner.

Recall that internal expandability was a feature of the Intel Mac Pro only. The same enclosure was used for the PowerMac G5, and most of the space inside was for the cooling systems. There was room for a single extra hard drive and a couple cards and that was it.

We're just going back to that, in an era when it matters less.

Not only that, I surely am not expecting high end graphic cards to be appearing in boxes with Thunderbolt connectors.

There the design is also quite limited.

I need to be upfront with my bias, I hate everything Apple. I also built and ran my own digital studio (Not Pro Tools).

This lack of expandability for the Mac Pro is like the criticisms of the Chinese worker conditions, not Apple's fault.

1) This is industry wide, look at Intel with the soldered cpu in the next generation.

2) This is what Apple users want, a simple "just works" for most.

3) Any production Machine has a million things connected to it. So the fact that you have to plug in a million wires into the thing is a mute point.

This is cheaper than I thought it would be. I still think anyone basing their video or audio off of Apple is insane since they have continued to show that they are more than willing to put pro users on the back burner for what 3 years and need I tell you the Final Cut Pro fiasco?

So the fact that you have to plug in a million wires into the thing is a mute point.

It's not only moot, we are also past the Statue of Limitations to be able to talk about this.

...Statue of Limitations...

Was that a deliberate omission of the "t" to reference another eggcorn, or an example of Muphry's Law?

I guess it is not quite as funny as I intended if I have to explain it.

Muphry's huh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

Never knew. Thanks.

"Most users" will buy iMacs. Mac Pros are for power users who have tons of hard drives and need 12 Intel cores.

> 1) This is industry wide, look at Intel with the soldered cpu in the next generation.

Your flagship point is not really comparable. That whole story was overblown when initially posted and on further inspection makes perfect sense as more things move off the motherboard onto either the CPU or other modules anyway.

2) This is what Apple users want, a simple "just works" for most.

agreed. and it's one of the main reasons that I moved toward an exclusively apple-based workflow over the past 10 years.

3) Any production Machine has a million things connected to it. So the fact that you have to plug >in a million wires into the thing is a mute point.

completely agree as well. most people plug a bunch of shit in, so complaining that they are going to have plug shit in and that will 'ugly' or 'clutter' it up, is definitely a moot point.

This is cheaper than I thought it would be.

i was a bit surprised as well. pleasantly! i was thinking starting price would be $3499, or even $3799. i still have my 2009 mac pro that i'm contemplating replacing with the new mac pro in december.

I still think anyone basing their video or audio off of Apple is insane since they have continued to show that they are more than willing to put pro users on the back burner for what 3 years and need I tell you the Final Cut Pro fiasco?

I love apple hardware and software, but i don't rely on their professional software. Before FCPX issues, i was running Final Cut 7 and Lightroom. Never really liked aperture (for a whole hosts of reasons) so that wasn't an issue. But once FCPX came out I switched to a mixture of Resolve and Premiere/AE. i actually see this HUGE update to the Mac Pro as showing professionals how they don't want us to be on the back burner anymore.

"Any production Machine has a million things connected to it. So the fact that you have to plug in a million wires into the thing is a mute point."

Is it? Given the choice between a decent looking truck and a pricier station wagon, where you will always have to add a trailer to the station wagon to make the stuff you need fit in it, I think people can rightfully state that the station wagon looks better only in theory.

Intel is moving towards soldered CPUs due to the issues with signal integrity and pin counts. I'm sure they would prefer for people to have the ability to upgrade CPUs.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to those of us who witnessed the previous fiasco with moving the pins off the chip and onto the motherboard. This was also spun as some evil Intel conspiracy, but was due to the same reasons. It is becoming an industry wide issue, because of the exact same reasons. Density can only go up so much until you start having to remove traces and integrate components.

Then again, these were the exact same complaints that circled when ICs came out.

Not really. Remember that Intel makes money from motherboard chipsets too. Recently, they've even been releasing microcode updates that retroactively disable CPU features that users have paid for unless they're using a more expensive chipset that officially supports them. There's no technical reason for it (and the chipsets are basically identical but with different features fused off for market segmentation reasons anyway).

Actually, yes really. I work in the industry. This move is due to issues with SI, thermal, and chip pin counts.

For those looking for expansion:

• (qty. 2) x8 + (qty. 1) x4 PCIe 2.0 w/ Optional built in drivebay for up to four (4) 2.5" SSD or SAS/SATA drives: http://www.magma.com/expressbox-3t

• http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/PCIe_Chassis/Merc... (See also http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/ for other devices.)

• http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpresschassis.html

The fan in the Sonnettech is very noisy. I don't want that enclosure in my edit suites.

Another Mac Pro configuration [1]:

Available in December at $3,999

6-Core and Dual GPU

3.5GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5 processor

16GB 1866MHz DDR3 ECC memory

Dual AMD FirePro D500 with 3GB GDDR5 VRAM each

256GB PCIe-based flash storage

[1] http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/mac-pro

The 12-core configuration is conspicuously absent. $10,000?

They also did not list the 8-core configuration pricing. There appear to be a current total of 4 available core configurations:

1: 4-core 3.7GHz for $2,999

2: 6-core 3.5GHz for $3,999

3: 8-core 3.0GHz for ?

4: 12-core 2.7GHz for ?

So is the 8 core. I suspect they'll simply offer two "base" models, from which you can select an option to double the number of processors, and thus cores. Just like you can select a different processor on a MBP.

A somewhat more informative specs page is up now and it mentions 12-core configurations, http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/

I doubt we'll see one. Not only that but the suspect geekbench scores for the new Mac Pro are timid.

Apple is hurting the Pro line. If they just gave it a normal form factor and the best current hardware, I think it would be a better people pleaser.

This is a mac-mini on steroids and I'm disappointed.

Apple announced 12 cores at WWDC, so I'm assuming it will ship but they just don't want to tell us the price.

Where on earth is the info about the d300 and d500 from AMD? The only mention I can find of either is the Mac Pro articles.

Only specs available are on the Apple site:

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/

These are Apple specific SKUs from AMD. Deliberately done to prevent easy comparisons with the existing FirePro cards. AMD doesn't want their $3000+ per card customers to know that they handed over these chips to Apple at or below cost.

It may just be that Apple's using the branding that AMD will be introducing with the workstation counterparts for the R9 series - the switch from 4-digit models to 3-digit seems to fit.

Based on the announced core counts, bandwidth, and TFLOPs, it looks like the D300 is the counterpart to the R9 270X but clocked at 780/1250 instead of 1000/1400; the D500 is a new configuration of Tahiti with the shader count of the 7870XT but keeping the 384-bit memory bus, and likely clocked at ~716/1250; and the D700 is counterpart to the R9 280X clocked at 850/1375 instead of 850/1500.

The main takeaway is that they aren't going to be offering a Mac Pro with a pair of the upcoming Hawaii GPUs that are twice the size of Tahiti and have a 512-bit memory bus.

It shouldn't really matter, considering FirePro cards are just 7970s with a different firmware and driver set. The silicon is identical.

Judging from the available specs, it seems likely the D300 is a modified version of this: http://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/ati-fire...

Enjoy the specs while they're hot, as I doubt they'll update for another 3 or 4 years.

Capable of driving three 4k video signals. Amazing. Why can't the new Mac Book Pro drive just one?

Since a triple monitor configuration is a de facto standard for pro users, pro configurations, etc., I would disagree with your characterization of "three 4k" as being "amazing".

I would characterize it as the absolute bare minimum to even be in this space.

I have 5 monitors attached to my 2009 pro (3x 2560x1600 main displays, a 1920x1200 offset on the wall, and a 1920x1080 "tv" cabled out to another room) and I've considered adding a sixth.

It's hard to say how many <4k displays you can add to the ports on the back in addition to the three primary 4k displays, but it had better be more than "zero".

Are you disputing "amazing"-ness of 3 displays, or number of horizontal lines of resolution? Because I calculate your collection of displays at 7.08k, and 3 * 4k ~ 12k, or a 70% increase over your current count.

;)

Sure, but I set it up 4.5 years ago. And I didn't think it was amazing then, I thought it was just "normal".

And three (insert current high end display circa this year) monitors attached to this new mac pro will also not be amazing.

What will be amazing is if you can't add a 4th, 5th and 6th - of any resolution.

It can: take a look at Tech Specs, it's listed (for 30hz): http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-retina/

Does the Mac Pro do 60Hz 4k?

With monster FirePros it better.

FYI for others looking for more specifics, there's now a specs page up (separate from the store):

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/

And there is, indeed, a 12-core configuration option listed.

As the owner of a recording studio (VO, music work), I'd say that it disappoints me that I'm expected to pay $3000 for a top of the line video editing machine. I wish they'd found a way to make a $2000 or $2500 musician/studio version that didn't have three 4k displays + two GPUs...

As the owner of a recording studio, you know that you'll be paying at least $3k, if not much more, for software to actually go on this thing. Most AV professionals I know spend much more on software than hardware.

Not really - I use hardware EQs, comps, etc. The only software costs are Reaper and a reverb (which I hope to replace with a Bricasti next year). I ended up dumping Pro Tools over about a two year period and switching back to all hardware. So it's a disappointment to me to see this pricing. It's as though they've said, "Musicians - they can just buy a regular Mac. The Mac Pro is for graphics and video people who need all this extra hardware."

If all the heavy lifting in your studio is being done in hardware, why do you need a high-end workstation?

You really don't nowadays - the key things to battle are latency though, and that's often a metric of "How fast is your processing? How fast are your disks? How long are your cords?" The faster Xeons and the faster bus speeds will make big strides in that regard (thus keep your mic cable runs short and you'll be okay). However, the Mac Pro has been a studio staple since it's inception. I suppose we studio folks are surprised that we've basically been regarded as "not significant" by Apple. Unlike previous Mac Pros, this is not a machine built with "music studios" or musicians in mind. We aren't even considered. You'd be nuts to pay $3000 for a "base model" for a recording studio. You still have another $1000-$2000 that you'd need to spend for disk space, monitor, mouse, and keyboard. It's crazy.

As the owner of a recording studio I'd guess he already owns the software.

Site or per-seat? Also, I assume those licenses get upgraded every few years for lots of cash also.

No one expects you to do anything. You're able to keep working with what you currently have, no?

No one expects you to do anything.

Then that's a shift in Apple's marketing. The previous Mac Pro was very much a staple of the music industry. This one? I don't know that anyone outside of the the studios that also do video that needs so much video editing/graphics hardware that they are willing to pay an extra $500-$1000 for it. A lot of the digital processing is done on hardware systems already (like UAD-2).

But won't the OpenCL implementation allow you to use all that GPU hardware to benefit the non-graphics tasks as well?

I have a feeling this computer is going to be much faster than people expect.

Not to mention nowadays if your in music industry (radio at least) you are pulling XP machines outta the trash.

They have. It's called when the 2014 Mac Pro model ships the 2013 one will be marked down to about that price.

http://tubelor.neocities.org/

As sweet as this design looks, I can only imagine what the same amount of cash could buy you for a DIY Linux box. Of course, the available software is not the same...

That said I'm a big fan of Macs; I own several. Great computers and the OS is stunning... so who knows.

I'd say the PCIe SSD, quad-core Xeon, dual FirePro graphics & 12GB ECC RAM are going to add up.

Of course, not everyone needs all of those things.

Random selection of USD prices for the base model from different Apple online stores, for the curious:

$4,053 in UK

$4,010 in Czech Republic

$3,880 in Australia

$4,257 in New Zealand

$4,300 in Sweden

So to US-based guys intending to buy one: hope you spend your ~$1k on something nice :)

What is the Sweden price on the new iPads?

Including VAT?

Yes those prices are including VAT.

So, $4053 - 20% ~= $3377, still an extra $378 because 'fuck you' :)

AU's GST is 10% so it's a $493 'fuck you' Down Under.

More I look at it and less I like it.

The design is weird and certainly not elegant.

Try to imagine it with 5 cables that come out from the "back" (a cylinder don't have a real back).

It's about the same size as their G4 Cube really. It had cables coming out of it's bottom and it's back, and that never detracted from an incredibly amazing piece of hardware. The internals are fairly similar too, oddly enough.

7 terraflops in 11 pounds; looks like it would fit many carry ons or a decent sized backpack. Good luck explaining what it is to TSA though.

That's awfully expensive for something with zero internal expandability that looks like a tiny wastebasket.

So what's the future of the MacBook Air at this point?

Does the Retina MacBook Pro just keep getting thinner until the Air is obsolete? Is there some fundamental technical reason they can't keep iterating the Air thinner and put a Retina display on it? Or a business reason why that's not a priority?

The current MacBook Pro is probably the thinnest and lightest laptop possible with a Retina display. They've already taken out the spinning HD, optical drive, ethernet port, and removable battery, which are what they took out to make the original Air so thin and light.

If they want to make a Retina Air as thin and light as it is now, they need some sort of breakthrough. One option that has been mentioned is to power the Air with ARM instead of Intel--like an iPad. But that would that probably would require a heavy software translation layer to run OS X apps like Office or Photoshop.

Everyone wants 911, no matter they have $60k or can afford $200k.

"Pro" is the same. Everyone wants the "Pro" thing. No matter if they will just browse Facebook or run serious business on it

Air still gets its place on the market. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57588850-37/why-the-macboo... Due to this blog post, power consumption seems to be the most important factor why they don't put retina on Macbook Air.

I will double check the 13" new Macbook Pro to decide to get it or 13" lightweight Air :P

That is the ultimate future, or rather ideal future, but yes: You get it.

The Mac Pro would be awesome...if it were the Thunderbolt dock to a meat and potatoes box I could store out of the way and expand whenever I saw fit.

If you want to innovate, give me a way to separate the things I need to use my computer FROM my computer.

How much Mac software can take advantage of 2 gpus for processing, rather than 8 or more cores? I have a dual socket Mac at work with 12 cores total, not sure this would feel like an upgrade.

They mentioned all the Apple pro apps are getting updates to take advantage of the Mac Pro.

Disappointed in the GPU configuration. I would much prefer a single fast GPU like a D700 (same hardware as 7970, R9 280X) over two slower GPUs like the D300 (R9 270x) in the lower configurations.

And even the high end options -- the D700 is the pro version of a GPU currently retailing for only 300 dollars. Nvidia has the Geforce 780 and AMD has the R290x at twice that cost. Reportedly the GPUs are downclocked as well.

Isn't the point of the FirePro line that they come with ECC? I can sorta understand higher prices and lower performance from such things.

>Isn't the point of the FirePro line that they come with ECC?

I'm pretty sure they use regular ram, but even if were the case, I'd still prefer a single high end one.

Anyone know: Is the 4-core version faster than the 6-core version for single threaded operations?

No.

http://ark.intel.com/products/75779/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-... max turbo 3.9 GHz

http://ark.intel.com/products/75780/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-... max turbo 3.9 GHz

So, what does that mean exactly? When are they not running in turbo? The 4 core is clocked higher in non-turbo, that makes no difference?

Turbo modes are opportunistic based on temperature and short-term power draw, so you can't be 100% definite about the speed the processor will run at. But generally speaking, when that 6-core processor is only running 4 threads, it will turbo up to the same speed that the 4-core operates at fully loaded, and they'll both hit the same peak for a single-threaded workload.

I would assume so - it's a 3.7gz quad core and a 3.5ghz hex core

To me, that makes the entry level a pretty good value for a developer workstation that will occasionally dabble in video editing and graphics.

The only other option for a headless Mac is a mini, and even a fully decked out one isn't as fast and starts getting expensive.

Hmm.. I wonder if it's going to be the end of December or the beginning.

Honest question: does it really matter? If you're obliquely referencing the holiday season, I have to think that the number of people for whom giving this as a gift is a viable option is basically a rounding error in Apple's customer base. I could be wrong, though.

“Before the end of the year” is important in this case not for holiday sales, but for 2013 tax reasons. I doubt even seriously rich people would be buying this as a gift ;-)

Good question. They specifically listed Nov 1 for iPad but not so confident in the Mac Pro date, I guess.

My MBA is doing everything I need it too, for a fraction of that cost. So I'll totally skip this one.

You are quite obviously not in the target audience of this machine if all your computing needs are being satisfied by an MBA.

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