The New Mac

[Gary Huff]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Every Thunderbolt component I buy will work on any new Mac I buy, no matter if it is desktop, portable, or somewhere in between.”

I do admit that’s a bonus.

[Bill Davis]

Holly smokes – the thinking in this thread is amazing.

Lets see – about the ONLY thing I know for certain (based on public announcement at the WWDC) about the new MacPro is that Grant Petty and the Blackmagic folks have had a prototype in their shop for some months now.

What do they excel at again? Oh yeah = high-performance peripherals that leverage simple connections to extend the capabilities of computers.

Obviously there’s no possible way they’d be using their strategic relationship with Apple to address stuff like storage and expansion and adding extra capacity to the base MacPro – via high speed interconnect – cuz that would be a SILLY thing to do right? Nobody’s gonna want to elegantly expand the new form factor, Right?

Everybody’s gonna want to stack ugly multiple boxes on their desktops as shown in this photos. Surely nobody’s got nearby rack space available (you know, kinda like the form factor of many BMD units right now!??)

Yep, it’s gonna look JUST like the photo when you get yours set up.

Except that you’ll probably also have coat hangers and mini-grip arms hanging off it to dress your cables, cuz that’s the level of aesthetic expectation that a new MacPro user will surely possess.

I get it now.

And of course, NOBODY here would trade that extra weight and heft and portability for a simpler form factor that is SCREAMINGLY fast – and that you don’t HAVE to use for mounting disk slots that you might not even use any more.

I mean, look at how dismally the MBAir has done with so few slots and connections. Clearly those have been a total failure.

This post is a sure keeper.

I want to revisit it in about 5 years to remind myself why nobody bought into the new MacPro eco-system cuz they all figured it was just too “cabley” for their tastes

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Michael Gissing]

Time for some creative engineering like a Repackintosh. Take the new Mac Pro (subject to availability & cost), pull it all apart and repack everything including Tbolt PCIe breakouts & hard drives into an old MacPro case.

Next, saw the extra bits of metal off the MacPro tower and rackmount. Voila.

[Bill Davis]

Why does this remind me of back when a “real camera” was a shoulder mount rig – and some of us – who were starting to become impressed with the quality of the new smaller camcorders – laughed about gutting a Betacam and rigging a modern handycam into a “fake lens” mount – knowing that 95% of our clients would find the footage totally fine and would happily pay the “big shop” rates so long as it looked like we have a suitably “BIG” camera form factor on our shoulders.

I remember laughing about needing to train ourselves to grunt and stretch our backs whenever we set the “fake big camera” down so it looked like we were still hoisting 50 pounds rather than the 8 pounds of the handy cams.

Kinda similar concept here?

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Rick Lang]

Carry the new Mac Pro with your essential stuff plugged in? Could work–get the right Pelican case designed and you are good to go! A lot easier to handle than my PowerMac G5 that I had to lift today to get the carpets cleaned.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Michael Gissing]

Totally different concept here Bill as I am making a light hearted joke.

But do have a look at all the shoulder rigs that are being sold so that DSLR form factor cameras can be hand held with some degree of usefulness and bolt on viewfinders like Zacuto.

Good form factor actually matters and whilst I hear the concerns of many that proper rack mounting and ‘in the box’ slots are good, I am trying to add humour and get the dubious honour of coining the term “Repackintosh” which others may, no doubt, take seriously.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I’m still hoping for JetPacPro™.

Dual inverted MacPros strapped to the back that provide enough lift to make you believe you can fly.

Flight controllers are Thunderbolt v2, of course.

[Nicholas Kleczewski]

Cool, literally the only “extra” item there that anyone in a professional environment doesn’t deal with already is the external video box connection. Any pro environment is already running a cable out to mass storage, not using internal at all, not using the internal drive much as it isn’t blu-ray or even needed at all, etc.

Also, you could wrap your video I/O, fibre, whatever you wanted into a single external magma expansion chassis. Disconnect and take your MacPro with you for a job. Traveling with a current mac pro is a nightmare.

Its not a non-issue to be sure. But the people really complaining about cabling can’t possibly be arguing from a professional standpoint here, its ludicrous.

Director, Editor, Colorist
http://www.trsociety.com

[Herb Sevush]

[Nicholas Kleczewski] “Its not a non-issue to be sure. But the people really complaining about cabling can’t possibly be arguing from a professional standpoint here, its ludicrous.”

While there are already a ton of cables on the back of my MacPro, by using the r2 I will be doubling the amount. And many of these external boxes will require their own power supplies as well, so more cables + more redundant power supplies. As much as the photo at the top was a gross exaggeration, the concept that the r2 is much smaller and lighter is also an exaggeration – it’s smaller and lighter because many of the necessary components are still there but tethered externally by not inexpensive Tbolt cables. It’s like making your car lighter by taking the engine out and putting it in a trailer attached to your car.

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

[Ty Vann]

You are going to get the most powerful Mac ever, and you are worried about cables? I didn’t know cables were ever such an enormous problem. Surely, pros have better things to worry about.