[Marcus Moore]

No. I think it’s more likely that we’ll see a feature update first in the next month or two, with the MacPro support coming in a largely maintenance oriented release.

Of course all this gets into the sticky territory of what happens after 10.0.9- presuming that’s what the next release is. Will it be 10.1, or will we continue with 10.0.10, 10.0.11, etc. until Apple feels the time is right for a 10.1

But I’d find it VERY difficult to believe we won’t see anything between now and a “late 2013” MacPro release. That would be over a year since the last feature update last October.

[Marcus Moore]

And of course we’re not sure there can’t be substitutions. Perhaps the GPUs can be switched out at purchase for CUDA compatible ones.

There are lots of unanswered questions to be sure, but whether people get on board now, or 5 years from now- this is the way computing is going.

[Marcus Moore]

I think the split is clearly forming that for some people Pro means not what you can with “with” the machine, but what you can do “to” the machine.

I’m happy to do nothing to my machine but create.

[Marcus Moore]

Yeah for me.

I think this is a very philosophical argument about how someone sees their machine.

Either you want internal expandability- Buy a machine and upgrade it into the ground over 5-6 years.

Or you want to buy a machine and use it for 2-3 years, then sell and replace with the upgraded version.

As the latter, I can tell you that I have no interest in being the former. And thru innumerable threads on this board I’ve never had someone convince me that I’ve paid substantially more to do what I do than someone who upgrades. Resale value on macs is very high, and my time spend servicing my machine is basically nil over the last 6 years.

With 2 internal GPUs, I no longer have any reason for the 16x slots. The rest can be handled via thunderbolt- a RedRocket card or Backmagic Video out. The new TB2 can probably handle 6xPCIe cards, so is there anything other than GPUs which I’m missing out on?

Choose how you want to do it, but don’t say its not a Pro machine. Cause that would be silly.

[Marcus Moore]

I think it’s very apt. Right now, “channels” are the only type of 3rd party apps that make sense for the current model of aTV. So I’d love to see them do something with that.

I don’t know how anyone expects aTV to get games or other apps when there’s only 8GB of internal storage and most of that is needed for video streaming.

But honestly, I’ve yet to see a compelling reason to put games on the aTV. There’s no native control interface that makes sense. And you can already airplay games and some video content from an iPhone or iPad.

I think the focus for aTV’s development is the delivery of video content- at least in the short term.

[Marcus Moore]

Yeah. The streamed their iPadMini event last October- it was the first time they put the new Apple Events channel up on the AppleTV. And WWDC2012 was as well.

[Marcus Moore]

Yeah. I think the real reason to put any weight behind it is that this even is the ONLY one I could imagine where this product would get any stage time. The iPhone/iPad events in the fall, even if they contain Mac updates- the MacPro is too niche and geeky to spend any time on.

If this is a substantial update, then they’ll want to talk about it. And WWDC is the only venue that makes sense. So even if it’s a pre-announcement, I think now is the time.

[Marcus Moore]

No. They live-streamed their event last October, and the WWDC 2012 keynote was streamed too.

[Marcus Moore]

The real original rumour last year was Jim Dalrymple of the Loop. When asked if the MacPro was going away he said “No.” The rest of it was all spin and hype machine. This year we know directly from apple that a new machine is coming. Maybe it won’t be tomorrow, but maybe it will. And definitely within the next 4-6 months.

[Marcus Moore]

Indeed. It’s been really frustrating to see not just people but news sites get this stuff wrong.

Thunderbolt holds a lot of promise. It’s already maddening for me to have to copy large amounts of camera files from anything else. And I think we’re going to see TB2 as one of the key pieces to the 4K/retina desktop solution for Mac. But the “modular machine” people think is an option today just isn’t possible. Invariably it will be, and probably not TOO long from now. But not today.