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What if there actually IS a new Mac Pro?
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[Craig Seeman] “I think Apple’s new business model is not about limited power but limited expandability of hardware, building in planed obsolescence.”
That’s antithetical to the design principles of a workstation, no?
[Craig Seeman] “You can see that in the increasing need to upgrade older computers to maintain FCPX compatibility.”
You think Apple is intentionally pushing people onto new hardware, rather than optimizing the software for current hardware or rather than trying to limit their Q&A testing matrix?
If that’s true, why would you buy from a vendor who intentionally limits their offerings to try to compel you to buy more?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Good questions, Walter. And I’ve been thinking quite a bit about them.
[Walter Soyka] “Will you buy one?”
Possibly/Probably. Though first, I WILL buy a new Macbook Pro that I’m on the fence about and would have bought a couple of months ago if I were more certain about things. But yes, a new Mac Pro that meets my expectations–from CPUs and GPUs to Thunderbolt and expansion slots–will be on my short list.
[Walter Soyka] “Will it indicate to you that Apple does care about providing solutions for your needs, other recent software and hardware EOLs notwithstanding?
“Not at all. But it will meet my needs for the next few years.
[Walter Soyka] “Will you see it as evidence that Apple intends to continue development and production of powerful personal computers in the post-PC era, or will you see it as a stay of execution for the Mac Pro line, giving us one more generation before we wonder about its future with Intel’s next major processor release?
“The second.
[Walter Soyka] “What features would you want to see on the 2012 Mac Pro?”
TBolt, internal expansion slots, competitive gfx card, general workstation build.
[Walter Soyka] “What software would you run on your 2012 Mac Pro?
“FCP 7, Media Composer, CS 6, and probably FCP X as a pet, though the pain I’m hearing about over the latest build is making me wonder if I care much anymore.
[Walter Soyka] “Does Thunderbolt let you consider an iMac or even a MacBook Pro instead of a Mac Pro for your work?
“It lets me consider them as an addition, not as a replacement.
[Walter Soyka] “If the current trends of the Mac Pro’s relatively limited internal expansion, limited processor choice, limited GPU choice (and poor GPU performance) continue, what would make you want to buy a Mac Pro over a PC workstation like the upcoming Z820? FCPX? Mac OS X? Fear or loathing of Windows?
In short, what’s the 2012 Mac Pro’s value proposition?
“ProRes. That’s actually what is holding me in place right now. I have major clients whose libraries and delivery systems are built around ProRes.
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[Walter Soyka] “I have a different version of the question to ask: What if Apple actually does release a new Mac Pro?”
I almost started a topic like this in response to “What if there is no new Mac Pro?“. I’m glad you brought it up.
[Walter Soyka] “Will you buy one?”
I have a 2010 Mac Pro, so probably not.
[Walter Soyka] “Will it indicate to you that Apple does care about providing solutions for your needs, other recent software and hardware EOLs notwithstanding?”
It depends very much on what it looks like and what it contains. If it is a brand new case design with crazy-good guts, I think it is a signal Apple sees a long tail for this class of product. If it is another iteration of the 9-year-old cheese grater hulk chassis, my inference is that they don’t see much of a future for that class of product at Apple.
[Walter Soyka] “What features would you want to see on the 2012 Mac Pro?”
I want a merger of Xserve and Mac Pro. A tower with hard points that allow for rack-mounting (3U 19″x19″ seems reasonable).
Here are the upgrades over today that are almost certain to be in one if they make it: E5-2600 series Xeons and least two channels of 6G SATA. I wouldn’t be surprised if the internal HDD count drops to 2 because of Patsburg’s limited on-board support for 6G SATA. Patsburg will have built-in hardware support for RAID-1, so that might be a nice complement. They could always go with a beefier storage controller, but that would be a departure from the norm.
As to its internals, I want it to have at least two full-length PCIe 3.0 16x slots (at least one with a blank above to accommodate a double-height GPU). An additional PCIe 2.0 8x slot would be nice, but that eats a lot of space and seems unlikely to me.
Thunderbolt replaces 4x slots, so four TB ports across two TB controllers would be good. Not sure how that would work with a GPU on a PCIe card. We may even see an embedded GPU as standard and the cards would primarily act as an OpenCL or CUDA coprocessor. Very curious to see where that goes.
Another wildcard could be the on-board NICs. They could standardize on Intel’s new X540 and really shake things up.
More DIMM slots would be nice, but not essential for sock rocking.
There will probably not be USB 3.0 since Intel is not supporting it in Sandy Bridge EP.
[Walter Soyka] “What software would you run on your 2012 Mac Pro?”
[Walter Soyka] “Does Thunderbolt let you consider an iMac or even a MacBook Pro instead of a Mac Pro for your work?”
No, but then I’m in server land and have much higher I/O requirements. I maintain that Thunderbolt is not a replacement for PCIe, but rather a huge improvement over FireWire for Macs that never had PCIe anyway.
[Walter Soyka] “If the current trends of the Mac Pro’s relatively limited internal expansion, limited processor choice, limited GPU choice (and poor GPU performance) continue, what would make you want to buy a Mac Pro over a PC workstation like the upcoming Z820? FCPX? Mac OS X? Fear or loathing of Windows?”
I’ve speculated in perhaps all the threads you linked to above that the limiting factor in GPU choice is and has been EFI. Now that EFI is getting a foothold beyond Apple, we really ought to see better 3rd party support for GPUs and not just the few models Apple subsidizes for use as factory options. But to answer your question, yes, OS X is the key. I don’t fear Windows, but I do absolutely loathe using it.
[Walter Soyka] “In short, what’s the 2012 Mac Pro’s value proposition?”
To keep OS X viable for big work. Xcode developers (including those who focus on iOS), research scientists, and creatives are the traditional Mac Pro constituencies and all of them are underserved with something less than a Mac Pro.
Tangentially, on OS X:
Apple clearly did shift resources away from OS X to focus heavily on iOS from 2008-2010. Snow Leopard was just the start of a very long internal renovation of OS X that is still going on. Look what they have been shedding since Leopard: QuickTime, 32-bit kernel, any 32-bit software in user-space (the included apps of OS X, including Finder). They still have a long way to go, like with OpenGL and most of all with filesystems. HFS+ is now the biggest liability of OS X.
OS X still has a couple warts, but I’ll take it any day as my daily driver.
Many observers suppose that superficial features like Launchpad and the Mac App Store signal a clear intent on Apple’s part to eventually merge OS X with iOS. Perhaps Microsoft thought so too, and it looks like they are trying to out-flank that scenario with Windows 8. The problem is there is no real evidence that Apple is phasing out OS X. On the contrary, they have doubled down on the desktop and will be releasing a new major version every year like they have been with iOS.
Best,
Andy -
[Andrew Richards] “Many observers suppose that superficial features like Launchpad and the Mac App Store signal a clear intent on Apple’s part to eventually merge OS X with iOS. Perhaps Microsoft thought so too, and it looks like they are trying to out-flank that scenario with Windows 8. The problem is there is no real evidence that Apple is phasing out OS X. On the contrary, they have doubled down on the desktop and will be releasing a new major version every year like they have been with iOS.”
Sensible talk, unlike some of the doom laden speculation currently on the web. There will be more harmonisation between the two, but I really don’t see a merger coming any time soon.
Steve Connor
“FCPX Agitator”
Adrenalin Television -
[Walter Soyka] “[Craig Seeman] “I think Apple’s new business model is not about limited power but limited expandability of hardware, building in planed obsolescence.”
That’s antithetical to the design principles of a workstation, no?”
To a “traditional” workstation. This is Apple we’re talking about.
[Walter Soyka] “You think Apple is intentionally pushing people onto new hardware, rather than optimizing the software for current hardware or rather than trying to limit their Q&A testing matrix?
If that’s true, why would you buy from a vendor who intentionally limits their offerings to try to compel you to buy more?”
I didn’t say everyone would like it. I’m just looking at Apple’s business model and thinking where they’d go with it. It really comes down to the “value proposition” they offer. Is there a competing Thunderbolt equipped workstation if you find value in Thunderbolt? If (and a BIG IF for some) FCPX and its ecosystem becomes compelling, is there another workstation replacement option?
What business/profit motive would Apple have in continuing to make a Xeon class machine? It’s only worthwhile if they can increase revenue. Either they move more units or create a “compelling” situation for more frequent replacement.
Do you see another business model viable to Apple? Do they have a business motive to produce basically the same box with the addition of a couple of Thunderbolt ports? I don’t mean this rhetorically, please do explain.
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[Paul Jay] “I think Apple this. I think Apple that….”
What part of “What if…” (linked directly to an Apple product) – are you having such difficulty understanding?
Speculation kinda equals “thinking” in my mind.
I suppose in yours, it must trigger something else.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Walter Soyka] “You think Apple is intentionally pushing people onto new hardware, rather than optimizing the software for current hardware or rather than trying to limit their Q&A testing matrix?
If that’s true, why would you buy from a vendor who intentionally limits their offerings to try to compel you to buy more?”
Perhaps because actual new functional capabilities generally follow the development curve of the hardware capabilities?
At some point, designing for the way hardware “used to be” means limiting your reach.
While introducing software that might take advantage of the foreseeable development path of hardware means you’ll be more ready to leverage the hardware advances when they do ship.
More speculation for sure. But it does remind me of how flakey even DV was in the very early days of Firewire. I distinctly remember having to spec a Granite Digital chipset for my hard drive controllers to get the throughput necessary not to drop frames with a couple streams of plain old DV back in the day!) – now we’re going to be producing for retina displays that can suck up visual resolution like a sponge. Shooting C-300s and REDS that toss out pixels like grinding wheel sparks – while trying to accommodate software like X that has the plumbing to display 16 out of 64 stream multi-cam.
That is not a future where just tweaking a few settings and calling it the next “version” is going to succeed – in my opinion.
I understand those who value consistency and compatibility over progress. And there are companies who cater to that need. But the story of FCP has been one of getting ahead of a curve – then building toward mastery – and being ready when the whole market wants to change with a vetted and outstanding product that’s had the time to mature in the crucible of the marketplace.
I’m willing to have things be a bit shaky today – for the promise of much better tomorrow.
But that’s just me.
Other’s can’t take the chance and just want less spice and more meat.
And I understand that.
But please don’t ask me to accept a world where none of the cooks can take bold risks – because that means nobody will ever get the chance to benefit from any really new recipes.
That’s not the smart path to a potentially better future, IMO.
(I know I strayed into the dreaded twin paths of simile and metaphor here – sorry : )
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Andrew Richards] “On the contrary, they have doubled down on the desktop and will be releasing a new major version every year like they have been with iOS”
to be fair, they have good growth potential in this – ‘desktop’ right? – market.
It mightn’t have quite iOS numbers, but it’s worth pursuing right?.. OSX could build a nice, maybe quarter sized market share there?
a dagger in your heart redmond… a steve jobs shaped dagger in your mediocre heart.
had to.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “It mightn’t have quite iOS numbers, but it’s worth pursuing right?.. OSX could build a nice, maybe quarter sized market share there?”
Absolutely. Just because it is only a quarter of their revenue, that is still several billion dollars annually.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “a dagger in your heart redmond… a steve jobs shaped dagger in your mediocre heart.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4boTbv9_nU
Best,
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I swear, I am going to buy popcorn to watch the launch of this thing.
Microsoft have been running around trying to find their brain for about 36 months now. And this is the result?
We are about to see the greatest IT flambée of the entire twenty first century. Nothing can prepare anyone for what is about to happen to Windows.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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