[Andrew Richards]

[Rich Rubasch] “Curious why 10GigE wasn’t implemented. Companies like SmallTree make great SANs that utilize 10GigE….I would have connected 6 of the new MacPros to a nice 24 TB SAN via 10GigE and it would have rocked. “

I’m very sad about this too. I was really hoping the Intel X540 chipset would find its way in there as standard. Would have really obviated the need to hang several things off the TB ports, including Fibre Channel stuff since FCoE and other converged networking is supported on that chipset. Phooey. We don’t know what NIC is in this new Mac Pro, but maybe it will support bonding.

[Rich Rubasch] “With that many Thunderbolt ports, companies are going to have to retool their peripherals for Thunderbolt.”

Yeah, but that is nothing new. This is two year old tech approaching rev 2 later this year.

[Rich Rubasch] “Can you network with thunderbolt?”

If you hang a NIC off it, yes. Apple sells one for pretty cheap. Think of Thunderbolt as just an external PCIe cable roughly equivalent to an x4 slot.

[Rich Rubasch] “In other words, connect 6 MacPros via Thunderbolt to a RAID Thunderbolt server box and have it negotiate the demand? “

No. Thunderbolt is not a fabric thing, it is strictly a direct-attached thing.

[Rich Rubasch] “With the lack of PCI, I can see AJA making a simple Thunderbolt box with a Kona card built in (make it a cylinder?) and connect the breakout box cable to our existing Kona breakout boxes…no expansion box needed…sort of.”

AJA jas had Thunderbolt I/O boxes since NAB 2012, as does BMD and others.

[Rich Rubasch] “We currently have an internal projects drive and two more drives in a RAID config all inside the MacPro. Hooking up a separate projects drive plus a RAID via thunderbolt externally to all the MacPros is going to be clunky. Going to have to rethink this a bit, and see how the 3rd party guys adapt to this configuration. “

Mass storage on this new Mac Pro will all have to take the form of externally powered and cooled boxes like the Promise Pegasus. A drawback to the new design to be sure.

[Rich Rubasch] “Oh, and since I have all my MacPros in a server room, how long a cable can I run to send 4K video to a monitor? 70 feet? Because I have 70 feet of VGA and 50 feet of DVI cables running thru the walls. And they work great. More adapters…Apple Mini display to DVI and VGA. A bunch of them. I’m going to have a drawer of old monitor adapters laying around real quick. It will be an ebay explosion!”

VGA and DVI will not support 4K. Not even dual-link DVI or DisplayPort 1.2 (the kind on all of today’s Macs) can push that many pixels. If you want long run 4K you are looking at some active conversion boxes and a lot of cable. Or you can just keep right on keeping on with 1920×1200.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Craig Seeman] “Why? What wrong hardware turn do you think they’ll take with the MacPro?”

My fear is that we’ll lose the dual Xeons for something like an E3 Xeon Lite, less capacity for RAM, maybe not even a PCIe slotted GPU. I want what you want, but I’m just too snakebit to not be a bit of a pessimist at this point.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

I really, really hope there is fire behind the smoke this time. If they do announce something, I hope I’m not disappointed—but I’m bracing for disappointment.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Shawn Miller] “why not offer a cross platform solution?”

I think one of the reasons the Pixelmator team has been able to build such a mature image editor so quickly with such a (relatively) small team is they take advantage of the frameworks in OS X to get a lot of image handling power “for free”. If they were to go cross platform, they’s need to implement all that stuff they get from Core Image themselves. They’d basically need to start all over in something other than Cocoa Objective-C if they wanted to be cross-paltform.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Christian Schumacher] “Apple can do better in the Pro Apps department, namely FCP X, Motion, Compressor, Aperture and Logic all working together in tandem. “

I wholeheartedly agree. My personal top pie-in-the-sky feature request is some kind of Event or even Project sharing for shared storage. Round-tripping is probably more compelling to more FCPX users though.

As WWDC approaches, I’m once again interested in what legacy stuff that apps like FCP Legend and QuickTime Pro 7 (like the old QuickTime APIs that have been on deprecated since Snow Leopard) will be outright dropped from OS X in 10.9.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

Let me be another endorsement of Vimeo Pro. They give you a lot of control over how your content is presented in addition to the other features already mentioned.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Christian Schumacher] “You should be offering better things than an old 32 bit Compressor”

The 32-bit Compressor.app is just the GUI. When you submit a job, multiple 64-bit parallel qmaster processes kick off in the background and carry out the real work.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Hey, where have you been?”

I’ve been lurking on and off, but my work has taken me pretty far away from the world of post in the past year, so I don’t have the skin in the game like I used to.

Nice to know I’ve been missed though!

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

I hope you noticed the date on that blog post…

🙂

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Herb Sevush] “If you are sticking with FCP7, then you need to understand this. Hear it now, so you don’t end up crying about it later. If and when (and I doubt it will ever come) that Apple releases a new line of Mac Pros, FCP7 ain’t gonna run on it. Apple is not going to bog it down with any legacy support for old, antiquated products. Actually FCP7 may run, it may not, but it will definitely not take advantage of any of the new technology and performance a new Mac Pro would deliver. “

This was true for the 2010 Mac Pro in 2010. FCP7 hasn’t been able to take advantage of new hardware in a Mac Pro aside from CPU clock speed bumps, really, ever. Slots for I/O cards and faster storage made a difference, but that will be true of any Mac FCP7 can run on. FCP7’s ability to run on future Macs is tied only to OS X’s support for the frameworks it depends on. That is what will ultimately halt FCP7’s use on future Macs, not any hardware design decisions Apple makes about whatever it is they are doing with whatever is replacing the Mac Pro. The old APIs and frameworks that FCP7 is built upon will be dropped from some future release of OS X (some have been deprecated for two OS X major releases already), and only then will it no longer be able to run on the newest Mac to come.

Best,
Andy