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Core problem of the new Apple…
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[Harry Pallenberg] “My issue is that it is a round peg fitting into and onto a square hole. My desk is a rectangle. I like things that are 90º’s. A old tower fits nicely under it or on it. The large flat side makes a nice place for post-its. The other large flat side is a nice barrier which stops (round) things from rolling off. The top is a great mini-table for a drive or airport or pen & paper… which I still use… and comes in a rectangular notebook… as do all the external drives and just about all the other ‘things’ I’m looking at.”
Have you actually measured out the size of this thing? It’s 6.6″ in diameter an 9.9″ tall. Even if you assume any space saved by it being a cylinder with a 6.6″ diameter instead of a rectangular solid 6.6″ on a side is useless because of how it interacts with rectangular items (which is not strictly true), it still has a desk footprint 26% smaller than that of a Mac mini. I suspect it won’t actually be all that difficult to fit onto a cluttered desk. Instead of resting external drives on your Mac Pro, this is a Mac Pro small enough to rest on a (full size) external drive.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Gissing] “I know I live in a different world to most by having everything in a central machine room all nicely rack mounted. This design is clearly a waste of space and vents the heat out the top. I need boxes that are only as big as they need to be and vent heat out the front and back so that the ground level air con and ceiling vents create a laminar air flow to take the heat away from the other computers stacked in the rack. “
Our MacPros are in racks. It is nothing short of a pain in the ass to swap something, or work on something as the whole machine needs to be shut down, undressed, taken out, worked on, put back in, and redressed.
This MacPro, with all external expandability, and easily turned around in a small space, the Thunderbolt cables are all the same size and shape, no fumbling around with little optical or dvi or other connection points in a small indent. All external cabling remains in tact from hard drive to SDI to Sata as pretty much everything is tethered by Thunderbolt. If a TBolt peripheral needs servicing, I can remove only that peripheral and the MacPro can still keep working.
While agree that the air will be shooting up to a shelf above it, it’s only 10 inches high. There’s plenty of space for cooling if your MacPros are sitting upright on the bottom rack shelf currently. Colder air is drawn in from the bottom.
While it is not the most rack unit friendly, it’s service friendly, at least that’s how it seems to me.
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I agree Jeremy that from a service point of view it is nice to have the guts of the machine on the outside. From the point of view of fitting a few machines into an existing rack room, this is awkward.
Also as Rich has said, a lot of existing infrastructure like monitor extension cables etc is in need of replacing. This happens from time to time. DVI was a royal pain to extent and switch. But they are all factors in deciding whether to build my own PCs in rack boxes that fit the existing or purchase a more awkward shape and change all the connectors, patchbays etc.
If it is underpowered or over priced then why?
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[Michael Gissing] “If not then why has this form factor never been used by seriously players who make money out of power to space ratios and thermal efficiency?”
This machine is designed for your desk, and most systems focused on density are designed for data centers. Data center use means that a) you want case shapes that interlock with no wasted space in between (which cylinders do not) and b) you don’t care very much about how much noise your cooling system produces, which means you can use small, fast fans, making this machine’s ‘unified thermal core’ approach less relevant.
Also, as I described in my previous post, this cylindrical shape seems to flow from the fact that the internal hardware consists of three boards of roughly similar size (the CPU board is somewhat larger). That’s not necessarily applicable to other machines.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Gissing] “Sorry Chris but I really think this is function conforming to form which is style based.
If not then why has this form factor never been used by seriously players who make money out of power to space ratios and thermal efficiency?
“Exactly. I’m sure this is a great computer and will run well but all I can say though is that my reaction to the G5 was “wow, what a cool computer I want one!”. The Mac Pro was “even cooler” and I own my second one now. This one is like “why bother?”. I’m sure I’ll be able to get the same or better performance from a Hackintosh or PC for less money whenever I decide to upgrade. Apple has pretty much lost me. The things they are doing just don’t make sense to me anymore nor do I NEED to follow them as I once did. They have become irrelevant sad to say.
Robert Brown
Editor/VFX/Colorist – FCP, Smoke, Quantel Pablo, After Effects, 3DS MAX, Premiere Prohttps://vimeo.com/user3987510/videos
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[Michael Gissing] “I agree Jeremy that from a service point of view it is nice to have the guts of the machine on the outside. From the point of view of fitting a few machines into an existing rack room, this is awkward. “
A lot less awkward than sawing the handles off of a traditional Mac Pro to get it to fit in a 19″ rack….
These things are so small that unless you need a large number of them, you’re not going to lose much by just arranging a few of them on a rack shelf with 6″ of clearance over them.
In fact, if you wanted to get really silly, it seems like you could plausibly fit 10 or 11 of them on a 29″ deep rack shelf. (You’d obviously want some well planned auxiliary cooling to move air out of the space over those machines if you went that far — there’s probably 3-5 KW of heat coming off that shelf at that point.)
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Gissing] “If it is underpowered or over priced then why?”
It all depends on your comfort level. If building and supporting your own hackintoshes works, then yeah, why not?
If Thunderbolt is cost prohibitive due to the chassis, or rebuying of certain TBolt periphs is silly, then of course, pcs might make more sense.
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I am not going Hackintosh as I really don’t need Mac OS for anything but Legacy and the old MacPro is fine.
Win OS is fine and the software bundle I am running works best for me if use Win 7. I like to think I am OS agnostic so it is all about the application software. Legacy on a 2009 MacPro and SL is a working package that still makes money.
No-one is sending thunderbolt drives to me. And still no-one has sent a FCPX project either, although one editor did ask if it was OK and I said yes. If I was a lone editor using X then sure this MacPro looks sweet on paper. And really it is only form factor that we can start discussing not price, performance and cooling. I hope it is really quiet because it should be on a pedestal in full view not hiding under a desk or in a rack room.
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[Michael Gissing] ” I hope it is really quiet because it should be on a pedestal in full view not hiding under a desk or in a rack room.”
With a ping pong ball floating in the top of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXAC-uPy7Rk&sns=em
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Ping Pong ball – nice touch but noisy!
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