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OT – is the “new” Mac Pro a failure
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[Bob Zelin] “And so, when we see kids doing what we do for free, or almost free, we get mad. “
I couldn’t agree more…
I had a pretty good business writing productivity plug-ins for Sony Vegas Pro. I went to NAB every year and demoed them at the Sony Creative Software booth. Life was good. Then a young kid decided to write a similar plug-in and sell it for 1/2 the price. As if that wasn’t enough, another hobbyist started writing similar plug-ins and giving them away for free. Now I can deal with the first guy. That’s competition and it forced me to rethink my sales strategy. But there is no way that I can compete with FREE! So more and more people download the free plug-ins and less and less people can justify paying for what I believe is a superior product with support. And so it goes… you can’t compete with free.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[Gabe Strong] “Nvidia has made available web drivers so that you can install newer and much more powerful GPU’s in your old Mac Pro’s. How powerful? How about a GTX 980 Ti(6GB)? Or a Titan X (12GB)? Two of the most powerful single cards available. And they work just fine with the available power from the old Mac Pro’s.”
I wasn’t aware that any of the modern cards had a power requirement low enough to be used in the 2010 Mac Pro. That’s good news. Do these cards have the Mac EFI so that they work at boot time? I have a triple boot system so I need to be able to hold the Option key and boot into multiple partitions.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[John Rofrano] “What PCIe cards would you have put in those slots?”
Currently, my black Magic I/o card (yes i still need this on occasion) and my ATTO Raid/LTO card, and my additional SSD/pcie drive that I find helpful. In the future – an additional GPU card and/or whatever may come my way. It is true that if I never owned any older equipment I wouldn’t need the raid card – but I have a perfectly usable very high speed 16 TB raid, that I can cheaply upgrade to 32 or 48 TB for the price of the drives alone, that I have no desire to throw away.
With the nMP it is my way or the highway, as is so often the case with Apple. This is fine as long as you are content with never straying from Apple’s highway. I’m a wanderer myself. The old MPro, uniquely for Apple, let me wander, the nMP doesn’t. This behavior is fine for consumer products but not for what I need professionally.
[John Rofrano] “Why does it matter where the storage is? if you don’t have ANY external storage then I can see your point. It’s nice to have everything in one box. But most video editors have an external RAID enclosure that all of their work is on.”
I know editors who keep their MacPro storage internal – 4 drive Raid 0, extra SSD in the 2nd optical drive. It’s not my ideal, but I love having this option – oooppppss, that a dirty word in the land of the trash can.
[John Rofrano] “”the nMP is a failure because it didn’t satisfy my personal preferences”.”
This. I don’t think the nMP is a technical failure – if it does all you need and you don’t mind re-investing every 3 years or so, then you’re it’s market. The old Mpro had a longer useful life over a wider variety of workflows – which is the very nature of what I’m looking for in a workstation. Basically if they offered a dual GPU Imac there would be no need for the nMP.
[John Rofrano] “I guess what I’m poking at here is that there really are two questions:
Is the “new” Mac Pro a technical failure? (i.e., it doesn’t allow me to conduct my business)
Is the “new” Mac Pro a cultural failure? (i.e., it’s too radical a change)”
Neither. It’s a failure because it is a step backwards from what went before. This is not a radical change, this is simply a change of intended audience. My own guess is that Apple was all set to get out of the workstation market when the FCPX release fiasco broke. In order to dampen the critique that Apple had forsaken the professional market they fished out a design spec from someone’s waste paper basket and said – hey will give them this – it looks modern and it should shut them up for awhile. As you have accurately stated there is nothing about the workstation market that matches with anything Apple is doing to make money – this is just a PR halfway effort. It’s fine as long as that’s all you want.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] “but I have a perfectly usable very high speed 16 TB raid, that I can cheaply upgrade to 32 or 48 TB for the price of the drives alone, that I have no desire to throw away.”
Yea, I can’t argue with that. One of the things that makes the nMP more expensive than the purchase price is what to do with existing RAID storage that requires a PCIe card. I believe there is a PCIe enclosure for Thunderbolt that will work but it’s an additional expense and not all PCIe cards are supported. (…you got me there). But if your RAID card is supported at least there is a technical solution. 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[John Rofrano] “I’m reminded of the Extreme Tech article: Apple’s new ‘overpriced’ $10,000 Mac Pro is $2,000 cheaper than the e… where if you bought the same quality parts that Apple uses, PC’s really aren’t cheaper. “
Except it wasn’t accurate. It counts the D700 as a FirePro, when it’s not. It’s rebadged Radeon 7970, retailing for $850/per (at the time), while this article has them listed as $3400/per, making that article’s similar homebrew workstation come out at $3k less .
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[Gary Huff] “Except it wasn’t accurate. It counts the D700 as a FirePro, when it’s not. It’s rebadged Radeon 7970”
Not according to AMD and they should know:
Don’t let the chips fool you. Both NVIDIA and AMD play this game. They use the exact same parts in both Consumer and Pro lines and just enable/disable a few features and create different drivers. Supposedly you are paying for “superior drivers and professional support”. So every FirePro and Quadro is a rebadged consumer card!
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[John Rofrano] “Not according to AMD and they should know:”
AMD D700
2048 stream processors
384-bit-wide memory bus
264GB/s memory bandwidth
3.5 teraflops performanceAMD Radeon 7970 (specs)
2048 stream processors
384-bit-wide memory bus (Wikipedia)
264GB/s memory bandwidth
3.79 TFLOPSYep, nothing similar here at all.
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[Gary Huff] “Yep, nothing similar here at all.”
You didn’t read my post. The specs don’t tell the whole story. Every NVIDIA Quadro and AMD FirePro is a rebadged consumer card with the *exact same specs*! The specs don’t make it FirePro. AMD enabling the FirePro features and drivers makes it a FirePro. So yes, the specs are very similar but not exact.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[John Rofrano] “The specs don’t make it FirePro. AMD enabling the FirePro features and drivers makes it a FirePro.”
So what features does AMD enable on the D700 that makes it more than a Radeon? And why does building a Hackintosh with a 7970 in it make OSX identify it as a D700 automagically? Are these features enabled in such a configuration? And how does that negate my point at all? The article you linked to compared the D700 with the FirePro W9000, a nearly $4k/per card. And the biggest difference is that the D700 doesn’t have to have drive 6 mini display ports on its own hardware (i.e. it’s linked with the Mac Pro’s motherboard), nor does the D700 have ECC memory (it has the same memory as the Radeon, not the FirePro branded cards).
And how does that negate my point in the first place? The point I made was that the hardware is still more expensive because the D700 is the 7970 hardware and not the FirePro and thus you can build a Hackintosh system that identifies the same GPU for $3k less than what the article you linked to claimed.
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[Bob Zelin] “Go out and buy a new Mac Pro for $4500. If this is not a good investment to you, then you are in the wrong industry.”
As usual there is not much to add to what Bob has said. The new Mac Pro is the best computer I have ever owned (well, except maybe for my new Mac Book Pro). Very stable, I barely notice render times anymore, and I can pay for it with under two weeks of work. This is the best time to be in our industry. What the heck are we arguing about anyway?
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