Mac Pro Late 2013 Teardown | Hacker News Reader

Mac Pro Late 2013 Teardown

ifixit.com

142 pointsknocknock94 comments

Saying that it's 'shockingly un-apple-like' that the outer case can be removed, shows that the reviewer is handling his first Mac Pro. I still remember the glee I felt, every time I opened my G5 Mac Pro.

My lust for this machine is only growing. It looks like a cross between Darth Vader and R2D2. Love it.

Indeed, Apple's pro macs have generally been ridiculously upgradeable and user-accessible. (Modulo needing to "cover your hands in bandages" before opening up one of the full-sized Mac II series). The 7-series "sidecars", and 8- and 9- series towers, could be completely accessed without tools and had CPUs on upgradeable daughtercards.

Here's Jobs touting the accessibility of the 1999 PowerMac G3's internals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=pH-...

Link that starts from a good time, http://youtu.be/pH-6Tek9yF4?t=40m41s

The video cards in the last generation of MacPro's could only be upgraded to the cards offered directly from Apple or the handful Mac-specific parts offered by third parties. With it's unusual form factors, the new MacPro will probably offer even fewer options.

It also looks like the current form factor also limits internal storage to a single drive - i.e. it's a workstation that does not provide for an internal RAID configuration. It also does not provide any way to back data up without using a network connection or external device.

None of these may be deal breakers, of course, but the trend is definitely away from upgradability. Then again, a shared heat sink and limited air volume combined with a 450w power supply and a single fan design probably give Apple business reasons to move in that direction.

How else you suppose data BACKUP be done if not over network or on a external device. RAID is not backup.

A second, non RAIDed drive works just as well as an external HD for on-premises backups. It won't save you from an office fire, but neither will the external HD.

Unless you take that external HD home with you every night and the fire happens to take place in the office overnight.

What could possibly be a better backup than a bit-for-bit identical copy of your drive, kept constantly up to date? All you have to do is remember to remove one of your drives and replace it with another one... your backup isn't very safe if it's still in your PC!

It's generally a fine backup against single-drive catastrophic hardware failure, but not against any other failure type: i.e. file system corruption, accidental file deletion/overwriting, destructive malware, etc.

Right - and this is why you take one of the drives out every now and again and replace it with another one! Provided you do that, I don't see why it isn't as immune to the listed problems as any other type of irregularly-made backup.

It might well prove quicker to use an ordinary backup program (my 2 x 2TB RAID1 system takes about 10-15 hours to rebuild, while Acronis will back up the 1.2TB of used data in about 5 hours). And there's a bit of inconvenience, in that you have to shut your computer down and swap the drives. But in exchange, the backup is guaranteed to be atomically that of your computer in its shut-down state - at least on Windows, I think this is difficult to guarantee otherwise.

Seems like a hassle. TimeMachine does an otherwise satisfactory job and is much less manual, which is the important part for 90% of users.

Two separate points:

The MacPro does not provide the capability for an internal RAID configuration,

The MacPro does not offer the ability to backup to an internal device such as a DVD drive.

Yes, but it has six external PCIe plugs (in the form of thunderbolt) to which you can hook up whatever you damn well please.

I really don't understand the importance of the distinction between internal and external. It's sitting on your desk for pete's sake, just plug stuff in.

I agree with this post except for this part:

> The video cards in the last generation of MacPro's could only be upgraded to the cards offered directly from Apple or the handful Mac-specific parts offered by third parties. With it's unusual form factors, the new MacPro will probably offer even fewer options.

Since OSX 10.7-ish a lot of cards have "just worked". Before then using a PC card was a bit of a crap shoot, but not impossible, usually OK if the card was the same as the reference design.

If you'd like to know more, check here: http://netkas.org

I remember reading something by Woz where he said he had to fight just to get user expandable memory in the early Apple products. Jobs thought the owner should never open it. So maybe we have Woz to thank for early expandability. Although it was nothing compared to every tiny piece replaceable with an online ordered component IBM clones.

> Saying that it's 'shockingly un-apple-like' that the outer case can be removed, shows that the reviewer is handling his first Mac Pro.

Or that he's insightful enough to recognize that the Mac Pro is an anomaly in the Apple product line.

Exactly. He's not saying "un-Mac-Pro-like", he's saying "un-Apple-like".

Well if you take the original quote in the context of the last three to five years, it is indeed un-Apple-like.

Apple has recently redesigned every computer they have except for the Mac Pro, which hasn't been significantly redesigned in something like a decade.

Call me old school, but I would rather have a bigger chassis with internal expansion than the "small for the sake of being small" design of the new Mac Pro. In my opinion, having external devices (requiring their own power cables) creating clutter around the new Mac Pro somewhat nullifies the advantage of its tiny footprint.

I used to feel this way, then I built a nice NAS that sits on a basement shelf, connected via GBE. Nowi. Don't care about it.

With 100m optical thunderbolt cables coming, if I has the $$ for a Mac Pro, I'd be building a kickass solution out of sight.

I hadn't realized how small this is. I was imagining something about 1.5x to 2x as tall from the previous pictures I had seen.

It is impressive how modular they have made it in such as small package, but the inability to expand without thunderbolt is a turnoff to me personally. Maybe once thunderbolt becomes more ubiquitous and cheaper it won't be as big of a deal. Apple wants $30 for a half meter cable http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD861ZM/A/apple-thunderbol...

First picture with a hand on it got me mouth-agape. It's a big soda can. Impressive indeed. I wish they chose a more angular form factor, circular feels odd, and oddly not Apple-ish enough.

psedit: I didn't see the can / macpro picture the first time (slow DSL today) psedit2: this level of custom hardware reminds me of the ~70s era, on IBM machines, every piece was as specific as it could get. Beautiful to see, maybe less fun when in need for parts.

It's actually a special-edition New Belgium Patagonia-themed beer... just discovered it thanks to this. Cool can design.

Circular not Apple-ish enough? :)

http://www.cupertino.org/inc/img/apple_campus-cover.jpg

They don't ship this one.

FYI, that "half meter cable" is not simple electrical continuity. There are microcontrollers in the ends handling the data as it passes.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/06/29/thunderbolt.ca...

I assume the majority of people posting in this thread know this. From a functional point of view, it's still a 30$ half meter cable, and it is also sold as such (not as a transceiver chip/cable kit). It's an interesting technology, though.

I'm probably going to be buying one of these today so I've been doing a bit of research. Turns out most everything is user replaceable; most importantly, the processor. So you can save your self a fair bit of cash by buying the base model and upgrading later as needed, which is what I intend to do.

Xeon processors don't seem to drop in price the way the consumer ones do so you might not save as much as you expect.

Edit: It may still be worth buying the base model now and upgrading immediately if the Apple markup is large.

The Apple markup is large.

No http://bgr.com/2013/12/26/mac-pro-windows-diy-cost/

You're mistaken. The savings is in the GPU, not the processor: http://techgage.com/article/apples-newest-mac-pro-costs-less...

There are flaws with the comparison. The W9000 isn't just a faster chip, it also has features, like ECC support, that the d700 doesn't have. Additionally, with a PC, one has the option of going with NVidia and the Titan, which is something that you are incapable of doing with the mac pro.

People who buy D700's don't want Titans. The Titan is a gaming card not a workstation card.

One could say your comparison is apples and... nevermind.

They don't want Titans, but that's essentially what they're getting. D700s don't have the features that normally define workstation video cards, like ECC RAM.

The D700 doesn't have ECC? I'm surprised by that one. That seems like one of the defining features of workstation cards.

Nope, no ECC. Apple has a history of these sorts of shenanigans -- the time capsule, for example, was advertised as having a "server-grade" hard drive when in fact it just had a bog standard consumer drive in it.

For the whole machine, but a quick check of the configuration on the processor (and only the processor):

Base system options:

  3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache 
  3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache [Add $500.00] 
  3.0GHz 8-core with 25MB of L3 cache [Add $2,000.00] 
  2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache [Add $3,500.00]

[1] seems to be equivalent to the 12-core option at Newegg. So purchased there it's $2750, a savings of some $750 (less tax and shipping) versus the upgrade option through Apple. The overall price is better than a DIY equivalent, but for the components this path can still make a difference.

[1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116...

You should do the homework yourself, rather than relying on an article whose motivations you can't be sure of.

It's awkward to match the Apple machine exactly because of the non-standard graphics hardware. The D300/500 are approximately cut-down versions of W7000/8000 with reduced VRAM.

I specced up a machine on newegg and other sources for the CPU. E5-1660 V2 (3.7Ghz with 15M cache), LGA 2011 motherboard, 64G ECC RAM, 2xW7000 graphics, 480G PCIe SSD (2x240G), and a CPU cooler / case / power supply to round it out (not looking to buy the most expensive options here). Came to about $4800.

An Apple.com Mac Pro machine with 3.5Ghz / 12M cache CPU (worse), 64G memory, dual D500 GPU (worse) and 256G PCIe (worse) comes to $5200.

On the pro Apple side, you get a very nice case and a lot of integrated wireless stuff, Thunderbolt etc. On the anti Apple side, you get much better expandability (the option to go dual socket in particular) and upgradability, and an overall more powerful system for nearly 10% less.

From this article, going with the D700 saves you over $6000: http://architosh.com/2013/10/the-mac-pro-so-whats-a-d300-d50...

The D700 is equivelant to the AMD FirePro W9000 which is listed at $3,399.99 on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/AMD-FirePro-Retail-Graphics-100-505632...

AMD really wanted their cards in this machine I guess..

Or maybe the D700 is equivalent to a 7970.

>Or maybe the D700 is equivalent to a 7970.

The 300 - 500 dollar range consumer cards seem to crush all over the $4,000 cards for anything I might use. Are there popular apps that are locked to the Pro series cards or something? Vegas rendering, Autocad, Folding@Home, Unity Dev, etc.

Why would I want the >$3,000 D700 in the Mac over a 290x, even if the 290x wasn't 1/6th the price, since the 290x is faster? What's the market for these cards?

What are you using the GPU for? An actual Vegas, Maya, or proprietary in-house rendering engine user could easily answer your question–

• Enough VRAM to load their entire dataset on the GPU (yes, the Mac Pro skimps on this)

• Hardware optimized for pro-level GPGPU (e.g. ECC RAM, but the Mac Pro skimps on this)

• Dedicated pro-level support from AMD and a pro-level expectation of QA before you buy it; think of those proprietary in-house tools here (you're not likely to get AMD support for the D300 since it is custom to the Mac Pro)

If none of those seem that important to you (you're just mining altcoins or playing BF4), you really _don't_ benefit from a $4,000 card. AMD knows that.

For the guys that need it every day to get their work done, $4,000 is a pittance for what they get in return.

Obviously, I concluded that the Mac Pro GPUs fail in all respects to compete at the pro level.

So … you are saying the markup is anything but large. It’s a tiny markup, especially considering the case you get. (I wonder what noise your built PC will make.)

Yep. $400 on a $5000 machine? For me, that'd easily be covered by the case, acoustics, and ability to use OSX. Not to mention the knowledge that I've got warranty on the full machine, not just on each individual part. My custom-built desktop is fine for gaming, but if I'm dropping $5k for a professional machine, I want some guarantees.

My built PC is pleasantly quiet. It's also almost .00008% as sexy as this little Mac Pro.

This is a game the pro-Apple press loves to play - cherry pick parts for the PC based upon comparison to the often unique part numbers Apple uses (and which they buy in bulk) and ignore arbitrage.

How much would a MacPro comparable to this Dell cost?

    Dell Precision T7600 
    $12,697.60 
 
    Two Intel® Xeon® Processors E5-2687W (Eight Core, 3.1GHz, 20M, 8.0 GT/s, Turbo+)  
    128GB, DDR3 RDIMM Memory,1600MHz, ECC (8 x 16GB DIMMs)  
    Dual 4.0GB NVIDIA® Quadro® K5000, Dual MON, 2 DP & 1 DVI  
    PERC H310 for Dell Precision, SATA/SAS 6Gb/s, RAID 0/1/5/10 (8 ports)  
    Dual 512GB, 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive  
    6X Blu-ray Disc (BD-RE) Burner  
    Speakers Dell AX210 Speakers  
    3 Year ProSupport Service with 3 Year NBD Onsite Service after Remote Diagnosis  
    3 Year Accidental Damage Service

If the rules of the game were reversed, you'd have to buy two 64GB MacPros, an external Blu-Ray burner, and go to a third party for a three year accidental damage contract and a third party for three years of Next Business Day onsite service.

Only if you value your time low.

It takes time to ensure the components are supported and work well together, and supported by the OS drivers.

So cost comparisons should either take into account integration-testing and driver support, or compare against a vendor that provides that (i.e., Dell, HP, etc).

I've tried the hackintosh route and it was fun for the first few weeks, but got tiresome after that. Windows or Linux with randomly chosen componentry is better, but not without it's pitfalls.

Specifically on the processor it may be cheaper to get the base and replace it immediately for £1800 [1] than to buy the top of the line than to pay Apple the £2800 extra it seems to ask for what appears to be the same processor (cache, speed at least). And you might be able to sell the original.

[1] http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel-xeon-e5-2697-v2-s-2011-...

If I'm going to drop $5000 on a computer that's not meant to be upgraded like that, I'm not going to immediately take it all the way apart and risk ruining it to save $1400. I would either pay it or not buy the upgrade.

I wouldn't either (would probably just go for the cheaper one if I was going Mac Pro which I am not) and the 8-core might be the better upgrade anyway looking at the Anandtech review.

I really want one, but $5400 is too much for the base ($3000) and the disk expansion via Thunderbolt 2 ($2400 for the 6 bay one).

I'm currently looking into a hackintosh that'll set me back about $1700:

http://pcpartpicker.com/user/envoy510/saved/3dCe

I just can't justify the $5400 vs $1700, even though I really do love the design of the new Mac Pro. Also, mine has 32GB of RAM instead of 12GB.

That list is very different from what's in the Mac Pro.

1) You've picked an i7. The Mac Pro uses a Xeon. They're way more expensive. 2) The Mac Pro has ECC RAM which is more expensive. 3) You picked one video card, and it's probably a gamers card (not a GP-GPU like the FirePros, again, MUCH cheaper) 4) OCZ SSDs which have dodgy reliability and are SATA, not PCI-E 5) No Thunderbolt controllers 6) A 750-watt power supply - The mac pro gets by with 450w.

If you assemble a list of parts that are actually similar to what's in the Mac Pro, you'd probably end up closer to $5,400.

And none of that counting the desk space you save, the noise characteristics, the expandability (PCI-E speed and 6 hot-pluggable devices for each thunderbolt 2 port).

Where you're more likely to save money generally with Apple products is with upgrades, as some have pointed out with the Xeons.

I realize it is not equivalent. I never said it was. It fulfills the needs I have and is a very nice set of hardware.

Prepare to be disappointed with a Hackintosh, especially if you've never built one before.

I can't disagree more. I converted my gaming machine to a hackintosh several years ago. My hardware is now a few years behind but it still runs great. It sat unused for months after I built it originally because using Windows was just painful. It's been my primary machine since changing.

Mind you the I didn't select the hardware with the intention of putting Mac OS on it. Doing system updates is pretty easy process. The only issues I have are with sound kexts but it's an easy fix. Most updates pose no problems.

The process is much much easier than I used to be.

And it's much easier if you pick hardware that is known to work.

I think AmVess is just trolling. Over at the forums on tonymacx86.com, there are a lot of happy people.

Why? Without any information, your comment just looks trollish.

Because most stock parts are slightly incompatible with OS X in very annoying ways.

OK, OCZ's replaced with Samsung's:

http://pcpartpicker.com/user/envoy510/saved/3iHB

I'm looking into mobo's that support ECC and are Hackintosh ready.

If you want that Apple quality, get a Macbook Pro instead?

You must have missed that I have 6 disks to connect.

That's a pretty good score, considering how unfixable the laptops have become.

Different tools for different purposes. In my experience, the laptops have not required opening for quite some time, speaking about my retina MBP and Air experiences.

I could upgrade the storage (just 256GB seems small) but I don't really need to... I have all the music I want in the "cloud" (Spotify, Rdio, Pandora) and I keep my video on my home server on an external enclosure I can mount anytime through SSH or watch via Plex.

I could upgrade the video card, but I never have before in a laptop; if I wanted to do things like that, I'd get a desktop.

I could upgrade the memory, but I maxxed it out at 16GB anyway and it won't fit any more.

I could open it to fix things, but there are few moving parts and nothing seems to break.

I might someday need to replace the battery, but on both my rMBPs so far (one owned 1 year, one owned 6 months) the battery has not notably declined in capacity. Even at the end of its life, a reduced 4 hour battery life will be plenty sufficient, and when it finally kicks the bucket, I'm happy to have Apple service it.

In my original 2008 aluminum macbook pro, I replaced the hard drive once, upgraded the memory, and replaced the battery; but none of these things are as relevant or limited as they were in 2009. I have no need for the equivalent upgrades anymore. The machine just works, exactly how I want it to.

Laptops being less serviceable are merely a side effect of the demand for better battery life and smaller devices. Mac Pros don't suffer from that.

My retina MBP is so thin an ethernet cable is too thick for it, I think I can understand why it's not exactly built for hot swapping parts out...

I wonder how many people will just run this with the case off. It looks so much better to my eyes.

Maybe an aftermarket clear case will show up?

I really hope a similar form factor takes off for custom computer builders.

An vertically extruded triangle form factor would have been superb, like a sibling artefact from 2001.

And Apple already owns triangles http://www.theverge.com/policy/2012/6/7/3068355/Apple-design... ...

Alas, it won't even turn on without its case (http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/23/5234574/apple-mac-pro-rev...). It needs it to guide air through the cooling tower style design. Presumably, someone could make a transparent case as an accessory.

I think there'd be a market for a third-party glass or clear plastic case, which I believe would serve the same purpose but show of the awesome internals.

If ever there was a product that called out for a Kickstarter, it would be the clear Mac Pro case.

Artisan borosilicate glass, naturally.

A Kickstarter for a case for a very expensive computer... I don't see that going so well.

This is a beautiful machine. It does look odd but every hardware built into the Pro looks amazing fit and stylish. The only complain, of course is when you need all those extra cables and just make the Pro looks uglier. I am going to one of these a year or later, like when the 2nd or even 3rd generation comes out. When iPod first came out, it was a big hit but it was a monster. 2 generations down it was slim.

I'm pretty sure the form factor is here to stay for a while. Apple isn't going to re-engineer the Mac Pro's case nearly as rapidly as their other consumer devices.

Ah. I don't know. I feel like there might be improves. But Apple does have a track of adding/removing small features like removing or adding usb and 1394 ports.

And it's not like they change their other computers' cases very much, anyway. The previous iMac managed about five years, for instance.

Seriously impressive design all around. However, I still can't pull myself to spend 10k on one when I can instead do a decked out iMac and then offload processing to ~4 custom built servers with far more total procs/ram/ssd. The only hard to replicate piece is the six channel PCI-E SSD (cost-wise).

This is what I have done for years now, and however much I might like to just for the design... I imagine sticking with it.

>> The only hard to replicate piece is the six channel PCI-E SSD (cost-wise)

Not really, all you need are a motherboard supporting (fake) hardware RAID (that's almost any over $100) and a couple of good 240GB SSDs. A RAID 0 will far outperform the MacPro in random access (e.g. OS drive) and in the worst case - sequential reading - will be no more than 10% slower.

The hard to replicate part is the OS, but IMHO Linux and Windows with some UI configuration are superior.

Much better than I expected. I've been concerned that they're making lemons recently with the total black box MBPs. iPads I can understand being sealed/disposable but not MBP line machines. Good on Apple for friendly engineering design this time.

Unfortunately for me though, I both can't justify one and can't afford one anyway.

Those caps in the PSU are going to get pretty cooked judging from their position...

Surprise feature: 512GB of DRAM associated with the SSD. Is this a write cache? If so, is it battery backed?

*512MB. This is not an Apple innovation... I believe all SSDs have caches hanging off of the controller, used for both write and read. Flash memory is very much slower than DRAM when writing. This DRAM cache is why many SSDs have better burst performance than sustained write performance. Only the most high-end datacenter-oriented SSDs have backup power, typically supplied by supercapacitors rather than batteries though. I don't see any backup power on this Apple SSD.

Which brings us to an interesting point: A typical workstation USV is about the size of the Mac Pro :)

I hate apple products lately (macbook pro), well I love them but I hate you cant replace components like RAM and SSD.

I wish they improved soon. As for mac pro, I love design.

Why can't you replace the SSD?

They've started using a proprietary SATA connector.

PCIe, which is reasonably standard.

Quick, find me a replacement at an online retailer. Then tell me how reasonable it is. There is currently only one supplier and they charge a fortune.

Not to discount your point about retail availability, but this appears to use the M.2 (NGFF) format, which has been widely praised (outside of any Apple context) as an industry-standard approach to flash memory.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6293/ngff-ssds-putting-an-end-...

The M.2 form-factor is available for both SATA and PCIe cards. PCIe versions are becoming the new normal, due to the speed increases - http://www.tested.com/tech/pcs/456464-why-ssds-are-transitio...

uhm, well OWC is always good for it: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/

Yeah, like I said only one supplier and the cost is astronomical.

It's not SATA, it's PCI-E, which is a lot faster.

Wow, that thing is freaking cool.

I hope this is the most mucle-y windows-running computer.

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