Smaller Mac Pro

[David Roth weiss]

Right now, the most powerful Macs are the new MacPro and the new MacBook Pro, with little in between, so the only choices are: 1) spend huge for the MacPro; spend pretty darned high for a laptop on the MacBook Pro.

I think Apple could make life easier for everyone if they’d create a workhorse in the middle, but there’s no doubt it would ultimately kill off lots of sales of many if the new MacPros, simply because most buyers in this market are, as Bob Zellin often laments, notoriously cheap.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy forum.

[Herb Sevush]

[Oliver Peters] “Would there have been justification for Apple to produce a headless Mac design that fits between the Mini and the Mac Pro in their lineup? Something with comparable guts to an iMac or iMac Pro, maybe Core i9 based, but expandable and starting at a lower price?”

If Apple had competition for hardware running OSX they would have justification, because there is certainly a market for it. I’m in the market for it, as I’ve said may times here. But much like SONY during the tape era who would hold off on making lower cost machines with higher end specs until pushed by JVC, Apple won’t produce anything unless pushed too by competition. Why make something smaller for less profit when they don’t have to? They might re-evaluate after they see the initial sales on the nMac Pro, but then again they might not.

The specs for a MacPro lite are pretty obvious: i9X processor (or Threadripper if they want to go that way) Radeon vii or Vega GPU, max 128 gig memory, SSD system drive, Thunderbolt 3 etc. Cost between 5-10K. But don’t hold your breath.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Erik Lindahl]

Definatly a market for it. Spec would include:

MacPro Mini
– 8-18 core i9
– 256 or 512 GB RAM tops
– Single MPX slot + 2-3 PCIe slots (4-5 slots in total vs 8)
– Single VEGA VIII DUO high end.
– 10 GbE still standard
– Price should start @ 3K.

xMac
– up to 6-8 core i7-i9
– 128 GB RAM tops
– Single MPX slot + 1-2 PCIe slots (2-3 slots in total vs 8)
– Single VEGA VII high- end.
– 10 GbE optional
– Price should start @ 1.5K

Problem for Apple is I think the above machines would canabalize the MacPro like crazy. Really the MacPro should start at 12-cores / XT5700 / 1TB / 48 GB.

[Bob Zelin]

as Oliver has pointed out – there is competition, but people don’t want Windows 10.
The HP Z4 can hold an NVidia RTX-2080ti, and is much less money than the expensive Z8.
And of course, custom builds, like the Puget Systems computers are also much less expensive, and are very powerful machines.

So yea – it would be great to see a $3000 Mac Pro – OR it would be great to see a $6000 Mac Pro as long as it included a 1TB SSD and a single AMD Radeon Pro Vega II GPU card. But for your $6000 you get nothing.

For me, it’s going to be up to the third party hardware manufacturers – and what Apple will and WILL NOT let them do (based on that T2 chip). Can we stick in OWC RAM? Can we stick in an off the shelf AMD WX8200 ? I assume that countless companies will make “Promise like” metal drive enclosures, so you can just get your own internal drives (SATA or SSD) and just pop them in. But will this work, or will the hardware be blocked by the T2 chip. Same applies to assorted I/O cards and 10/40G cards from AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox, Bluefish, ATTO, Sonnet, etc. Will Apple hold us hostage, forcing us to buy “Apple only” – or can we just stick anything in here – just like the old Mac Pros.

What I currently find “entertaining” is the YouTube influencer’s videos. Everyone has a loaded 2019 Mac Pro, with TWO of the new Apple monitors (and 2 stands) – and they are shooting their videos with a phone. So there is no way that these people actually purchased those expensive systems. It’s a commercial. An “influencers” commercial.

We will see – I am still excited about the 2019 Mac Pro. NAB 2020 will be a good show (I hope) because of this.

Bob

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Erik Lindahl]

@Bob Zelin:
You’ve got the whole YouTube influences somewhat backwards. A lot of them actually shoot with high-end cameras, many of them even use RED @ 8K and produce a ton of content. Many of the given MacPro influencers previously where editing with iMac Pro’s of the higher or highest configuration. One of them even travels with his iMac Pro due to turn-around times being so much fast than with a MacBook Pro – even the latest 16”. Some YouTubers are small productions houses with multiple editors all working off shared NVME SSD 10 GbE storeage.

With that said, you can very well be correct in that the higher end MacPros might not be for them. But if they spent 10,000$ on an iMac Pro they can very well spend that +X% on a MacPro.

[Neil Goodman]

[Bob Zelin] “What I currently find “entertaining” is the YouTube influencer’s videos. Everyone has a loaded 2019 Mac Pro, with TWO of the new Apple monitors (and 2 stands) – and they are shooting their videos with a phone. So there is no way that these people actually purchased those expensive systems. It’s a commercial. An “influencers” commercial.
“

its kind of funny. like all these 20 year old girls/guys on youtube who were rented $10,000 computers who generally make, make-up tip videos are going to tell me why the new mac pro is worth it to me.

[Bill Davis]

[Neil Goodman] “its kind of funny. like all these 20 year old girls/guys on youtube who were rented $10,000 computers who generally make, make-up tip videos are going to tell me why the new mac pro is worth it to me.”

Yeah, it’s every bit as stupid as 20-someting year old me telling the Broadcast Pros of my day that instead of waiting around until I could afford to pay $250 a quarter hour to get access to a 4 channel ADO unit in a bespoke production house to make useful videos, I could start producing stuff on DV with my Mac and make enough money to comfortably support myself and my family.

What was I thinking?

; )

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Andrew Kimery]

IMO the iMac Pro is the de facto entry level Mac Pro and I don’t think there is room for both the iMac Pro and a lower-tier, headless Mac Pro. The iMac Pro is an odd duck for Apple (who generally likes to keep clean lines between the ‘consumer’ and ‘pro’ hardware) so maybe in a few years the iMac Pro stops getting updates and, coincidentally, the Mac Pro lineup gets a refresh which includes a less expensive, entry level model?

[Oliver Peters]

[Bill Davis] “Yeah, it’s every bit as stupid as 20-someting year old me telling the Broadcast Pros of my day…”

I don’t think that’s a valid comparison. The people doing work on a 4-channel ADO back then were likely doing work that was quite a bit different on their systems and at a higher quality level than you were with your Mac and DV. I definitely DON’T mean quality in terms of the production value, but rather actual quality of the formats used, compression, etc. In their environment, real-time process was very important. You were able to balance real-time against cost with a tolerance for rendering.

Neil’s issue is that a YouTube influencer has different demands and expectations for their business than he does in his. Maybe yes, maybe no. YouTubers like Jonathan Morrison work at a pretty high level in terms of technology and quite a bit higher than the standard fair on YouTube or Instagram. But are the demands the same as Neil’s in the abstract? I don’t know.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[Andrew Kimery] “The iMac Pro is an odd duck for Apple…”

There are already cracks, such as lack of support for the iMP and the XDR displays without an eGPU.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com