More rumors to scoff at.

[Craig Seeman]

[Jeremy Garchow] “f there were going to run another rackmount style case, wouldn’t the XServe D-Day have been a better place and time to do this?”

Maybe the technology wasn’t there at the time. Thunderbolt changes things. Gaps between exit and entrance is not uncommon with Apple. One can certainly argue that with FCP and FCPX.

If you really want to stretch you can go back to the Newton through to the iPod Touch and iPad. Apple will jump out if something isn’t fitting with their business model and jump right back in when it does.

Actually you could even look a the original Macs that were originally all in ones and the long gap . . . Jobs comes back and there’s the iMac as the all in one returns.

You can even look at specific technologies like Express port which was dropped from MBP 15″ to the current Thunderbolt so that everything from MacBookAir to iMac can handle a given peripheral. The Matrox MXO2 goes from something limited to 17″ MBP or MacPro to something that works with every Mac on the market.

That might seem like a tangent but I think it’s just another variation of Apple making boxes that can meet multiple needs. One might say the goal is all peripherals work with all Macs and any Mac can fulfill any number of roles.

If you want to play around with this further, add a Thunderbolt Cinema Display to the Thunderbolt port of a MacBook Air and you now have Firewire and Ethernet ports.

So internal PCIe becomes the real oddball here. It can’t go away for reasons you and others have mentioned but it it’s inevitable (I think) that the box would drop to two slots (one for GPU and one 16x because there’s no real point for them to have a 4x slot IMHO).

Sorry if the post seems to be a bit of a Mobius strip but the resultant box would make sense as a server as one if its purposes.

Apple has no problem dropping out of a market and coming back with something else that works better as technology permits.

If you go here and click on Server (I can’t link to it directly).
https://www.apple.com/mac/
You can see how a new box makes sense as a step up from the Mini, replaces the MacPro for power user, makes more sense for server use than the MacPro. Fits better with ubiquitous connectivity. It’s not that Apple is “trying” to re-enter the server market so much as simply getting back to making “the best computer they can” and the various niche markets will incorporate it.

Another way to look at it is that Apple is missing a computer from their lineup and it will replace the MacPro which doesn’t fit its current business model and doesn’t sell well.
_____
In the meantime this forum will be flooded with “what did you do to may PCIe slots” and “look Apple has abandoned the Pros for sure” when that happens.

Meanwhile it’ll be the box that can motivate Thunderbolt developers.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Craig Seeman] “If you go here and click on Server (I can’t link to it directly).
https://www.apple.com/mac/
You can see how a new box makes sense as a step up from the Mini, replaces the MacPro for power user, makes more sense for server use than the MacPro.”

It is interesting they still tout server capability/software, and it does line up with what I think is going to happen in the shared FCPX space of Lion/XSan.

Good show, and thanks for taking the time, Craig. It does seem to make “sense”.

[Craig Seeman] “In the meantime this forum will be flooded with “what did you do to may PCIe slots” and “look Apple has abandoned the Pros for sure” when that happens.”

You mean like this? Or something like this? Or not at all?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9uizdKZAGE

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.