The all-new Mac Pro is an absolute powerhouse with up to 28-core Intel Xeon processors, up to 1.5TB of ECC RAM, up to 4TB of SSD storage, up to AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics with 64GB of HBM2 memory, and eight PCIe expansion slots for maximum performance, expansion, and configurability.
The new design includes a stainless steel frame with smooth handles and an aluminum housing that lifts off for 360-degree access to the entire system. The housing also features a unique lattice pattern, which has already been referred to as a cheese grater, to maximize airflow and quiet operation.
I love this machine. Not because I need it, will buy it, or even understand the kind of professional workflows people use these for – but because I’ve always had a soft spot for high-performance, no-compromises professional workstations. Whether it be the Sun or SGI UNIX workstations of the ’90s, the PowerMac and Mac Pro machines of the early 2000s, or the less flashy but still just as stunning powerhouses HP, for instance, makes with their Z line of workstations, such as the Z8.
This new Mac Pro fits that professional workstation bill more than probably any PowerMac or Mac Pro before it, and I love it for it. While not nearly as insane or crazy, it reminds me of SGI’s most powerful MIPS workstation, the crazy SGI Tezro, which had a list price of tens of thousands of dollars. In that light, I’m not even remotely surprised that this is an expensive machine – anybody who has spent even a modicum of time in the world of professional workstations knows how expensive these machines are, and why.
In short, if you are appalled by the price, this machine is not for you.
Apple also unveiled a new professional display, and while the specifications look impressive, the stand that’s sold separately for 999 dollars has already become a meme. I’ll leave the display talk to those of us who know more about the kinds of demands professionals place upon displays.
I have to disagree about the price meaning I wouldn’t have a use case for a workstation. I can build a 32 core threadripper with double the ram, crossfire’d vega 64 gpus, a 1tb samsung 970 pro m2. nvme drive and a intel optane 960GB pcie drive.
The apple price is insane. 4000 dollars might make sense but with only 8 cores and 256 gb of disk space, it’s not much better than a consumer ryzen system for most people. If you have the money to build a spec’d out system it’s great but the base model is insulting both in price and specs.
I own an hp workstation and my wife has an older mac pro. We use workstations and this is not reasonable.
For 6 grand they could have done a water loop.
> For 6 grand they could have done a water loop.
Air cooling is a good thing. Water loops require maintenance at some point, so for $6k+, I would expect them to figure out how to use air to cool the thing.
Apple also tried this with one of the PowerPC based MacPros, and I think that might have scarred them.
Flatland_Spider,
I don’t have enough personal expertise to strongly agree or disagree with you on this, but it might be useful if you could cite some sources!
I’ve seen videos of custom DIY watercooling blocks gone wrong (install troubles, leaks, contamination, evaporation). But the AIO (all in one) liquid coolers aren’t supposed to have these problems, they’re touted as maintenance free closed loops and I’ve not come across reviews suggesting otherwise. My current workstation is the first to use an AIO liquid cooler, and IMHO it’s been great: both less noise and better cooling than anything I’ve owned before. I’m extremely pleased with it so far and I am glad I switched to liquid cooling for this rig, however I haven’t owned it very long so I can’t say much about long term problems. Based on my (limited) experience, I wish the GPU were water-cooled as well, but it would require a custom loop that I’m still hesitant to try (it’s not something I would DIY while the warranty is still in effect).
Admittedly, I’ve never seen a water cooling loop in a server, and they manage to keep cool, but most servers aren’t very concerned with fan noise…people who haven’t been around a rackmount server would probably be surprised at how loud they can be, haha.
The Powermac G5 Quad was watercooled (as was the earlier 2.7GHz Powermac G5 DP). Two cooling systems were employed; a single pump Panasonic, which was ok and a dual pump Delphi, which was notoriously leaky. I believe the Delphi was more commonly used and it is hard to find a Quad these days with the Delphi LCS that hasn’t suffered leak damage to the innards, including the logic board.
The G5s ran so hot that aircooling became tricky even with the generous space available in the Powermac G5s. The heatsinks were large enough as it was on the lower clocked models.
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/G5_coolant_leaks.html
Oh my, that’s awful!
I guess ideally it’d be better not to depend on liquid cooling, but then you have to deal with the tradeoffs of using a less effective heat transfer medium. The noctua air coolers are highly recommended today and you can get them large enough to dissipate heat for almost any load, but they’re absolutely massive. In some cases that’s a problem. Also there’s the matter of noise, when my system’s under load, the intake/exhaust fans aren’t audible under my desk, but GPU fans are.
Regarding the GPU, under a stress test it reaches 80C and throttles itself. The exhaust air is merely warm, not hot, which implies the GPU’s air cooling is the bottleneck. I’ve added a fan inside the case to direct cooler air to the GPU, which helps a bit, but I do get the impression watercooling the GPU would be a viable way to address both the fan noise and cooling. Not that it’s a huge deal for me, but one learns a lot by experimenting.
I’ve got two PCs in the house with water loops. You can go at least a year without any maintenance if you use the right coolant and clean it out really well. However, we flush our loops twice a year. I’ve only had one leak and it was my own fault as I pinched the line when changing. It was a very small leak. I have a thermaltake p5 case, (which is open) so I tend to put a garbage bag under the case for a few days after to identify/catch leaks. After that it’s pretty solid.
My advice if you ever try it is to use soft tubing. It’s much easier to work with. My wife’s loop is soft tube and it’s very easy to do. I switched to PETG tube on my loop in december. It’s a pain to bend and much more work.
Our loops have water blocks on the CPU and GPU(s). I’ve also got them on my RAM in my loop. Not sure it was worth it for the RAM, but it does get heat away from the modules. Even with the pump, it’s a lot quieter than AIR cooling. Mine system has dual R9 Fury Nitro radeon cards and those had 3 fans which were insanely loud. Temps are between 42C and 50C when gaming and i’ve seen it peak at 60C when using boinc with setiathome (gpu + cpu compute) That’s with a 360mm radiator.
If you start with a thermaltake or xspc starter kit, it’s pretty easy. A good starter kit is like $300 though.
laffer1,
Interesting, I use this AIO cooler, the tubing is ridged and not easy to bend. It seems less likely to snack & pinch, but it is less easy to route, luckily I have a lot of space. If it were tight it might have been a bigger problem.
https://www.corsair.com/us/en/Categories/Products/Liquid-Cooling/Digital-Control-and-Monitoring-Liquid-Coolers/Hydro-Series%E2%84%A2-H100i-PRO-RGB-Liquid-CPU-Cooler/p/CW-9060033-WW
Those are the kind of temps I want. Mine’s technically running at specs, but it’s hard to know if that’s good enough for the health of the card. I really wish GPU manufacturers endorsed water cooling kits themselves under warranty.
I was surprised that the RAM in my system doesn’t get that hot. A bigger problem IMHO are these m2 SSDs.
Yeah, I’d like to do builds more frequently. I’m very spoiled by my latest computer, but I don’t have the income necessary to keep up with the joneses, maybe next decade, haha.
I work in a datacenter, those servers can be loud 🙂
But what really surprised me was how sensitive they are to loud(er) noises:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
Sorry for the off-topic.
richarson,
I’ve seen that before. Very interesting!
I don’t know what goes on in my datacenter though because I colocate my servers for redundancy. I would have liked to operate my own data center, but we have too many electric outages here and limited internet options. Still I run a lot of gear in the garage.
If you’ve got interesting stories, I don’t mind!
Thom, you probably said the exact same thing about the current Mac Pro and the cost. This also seems like a dead on arrival product. The only use case where it would still be relevant is 5K video editing, and the lack of user upgradable GPUs has caused everyone else to move on. 3D? More likely to see threadripper + Nvidia + SLI right now. Managers that blindly sign purchase orders just because Apple is in the name are rare now. Any use case that requires some aspect of this Mac will abandon the aspects they don’t need (like 3 thunderbolt connections or 6 channel memory) for a big discount.
> Sure, they use some new config in the form of MPX, modules, but they’re still standard PCIe slots, accommodating standard PCIe cards. What prevents somebody from sticking an off-the-shelf video card in there?
Power. Third party cards would be wattage limited to what the PCIe rail itself can provide, which rules out pretty much any two-slot GPU of the past five years.
There are provisions for powering regular graphics cards. There are ports on the motherboard for power cables which can deliver power off-the-shelf graphics cards.
“Caused everyone to move on” past tense, meaning the previous mac pro has already caused everyone to move on. Sure this one has them, but it’s 6 years too late already. All the important software the “pros” rely on now runs on Windows and Mac. No reason to pay an Apple tax now.
One other issue is the dispute between nVidia and Apple. Apple won’t sign off on nVidia’s Mojave web drivers so that people are either stuck on High Sierra or have to use AMD’s GPUs. Apple is pushing AMD so anyone who needs/wants CUDA has moved on.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/faq-nvidia-web-drivers.2170497/
laffer1,
+1
I have to agree, there are plenty of users who fit the “workstation” profile including myself that would find such prices to be unaffordable. It’s nice that apple is raising specs after many years of being so far behind, but these are entering the domain of enterprise specs and prices rather than that of typical consumer workstations. I think many mac users who were looking forward to a macpro update are going to find that this new gear isn’t really affordable or justifiable. IMHO that’s going to leave a sizable gap for which the imacpro is totally insufficient and the 2019 macpro is just too much. Apple users who need something better than the imacpro, may end up being priced out of the apple club. It’s no wonder people are tempted by hackintosh.
Apple don’t make computers; they make “symbols of economic status”.
For a symbol of economic status, anything that makes practical financial sense can’t be considered. You can’t brag about “I got what I needed for a competitive price” to make people think you can afford extravagance.
“but these are entering the domain of enterprise specs and prices rather than that of typical consumer workstations. ”
Exactly. The new MacPro is not meant for individual pro or pro-sumer users. This is a high end enterprise machine, for environments where shaving time off of production flows will repay the cost quickly. Anyone thinking of buying one of these for personal use, even a professional, is insane.
Similarly the new pro display is designed for enterprise work flows where the current set up is to have a single reference display usually costing tens of thousands sitting at the end of a work flow populated by very good non reference displays. The new display is hugely competitive against existing reference displays, and technically better, and is cheap enough to displace displays further back down the work flow. Cost and value is always relative
Strossen, old Mac Pros worked for several segments. When apple said they were updating the Mac Pro, we foolishly assumed they would continue to work for multiple use cases.
Mac Pros used to be the machines you bought when you wanted to upgrade them down the road, needed more power or even for gaming. Consider that Pro doesn’t mean pro in the laptop line. Everyone buys a macbook pro. Since we don’t have a “mac” desktop that’s between the mini and the pro (a non all in one) it’s kind of a deal breaker.
Typically “enterprise” is a room of servers designed for redundancy (e.g. “fail-over”), often built on virtual machines; where normal users are using dumb terminals or thin clients or a web interface (where the computers that users use are cheap disposable pieces of crap).
Workstations aren’t “enterprise” (they aren’t cheap disposable pieces of crap, and they aren’t high density rack-mount servers either).
The new MacPro is clearly designed for high-end professional use (e.g. graphics designers, etc) for people that have more $$ than brains. It’s probably also designed to still be vaguely relevant in 5+ years time (after everyone starts complaining that .”3rd generation MacPro” is lagging behind everything else because Apple didn’t bother releasing “4th generation MacPro” for ages).
Makes you wonder why this site doesn’t have a dedicated forum for users to publish and discuss OS specific custom built HPC solutions, and cut through all the marketing crud!
I realize there are other “rate my hardware” and custom build type websites, but a forum more focused on OS specific choices for developers, commercial and industrial users free of gaming commentary seems appropriate! Especially now that everything is becoming 3D modeling, real-time simulations, etc., etc.. I write this because currently I’m working in Additive Manufacturing and specializing in sensors and IIoT, and I’ve been quite disillusioned recently when buying new graphics hardware. Everything seems to come with hooks attached, trade-offs, etc., etc..! So we are now finding it more likely we will purchase a series of specialist platforms rather than one HPC system! But if you are a solo developer, I appreciate that is not feasible!
You should probably look at Serve the Home (servethehome.com). There are a lot of server junkies on their forums.
Then there is the Phoronix Forums, which may or may not be helpful.
I agree with most of the comments here. Apple has seen decline faster in the Mac Pro market than with laptops, precisely because they forgot how to deliver any kind of meaningful value many versions ago. MacBook Pros held on a bit longer I think because they for a while still delivered real value. A 2013 (early or late) MacBook Pro was a real value when it shipped – standardizing on SSD, and supporting an unheard of resolution with the retina display that was unavailable at all in the PC market at the time, and a dGPU to power it all. The device at that time was only a little expensive for what it provided – now even the MacBook Pros are insanely expensive, and it’s hard to see the value of such a device besides fashion. At least these new Mac Pros are expandable, and serviceable. The MacBook Pros have actually been stripping value, rather than adding it. I’ve already switched back to PC (Lenovo Yoga, great machine, with full USB and HDMI ports which I use all the friggin time!), and while the transition was painful (I do miss macOS) it’s workable. I wonder if Apple will see accelerating loss of market share, in both of these markets.
My base model 11″Early 2014 Macbook air conked out a few days ago. I’ve replaced it with a fully specced 11″ Early 2015 Macbook Air. Why? Because Apple new notebook line up sucks. Unreliable keyboards with no tactile feedback, USB C as the charging standard instead of the superior Magsafe, and thermal design issues (even for a macbook). These issues make Apple latest consumer grade hardware a steaming pile of shit.
However, i am a massive fan of the new Mac Pro. It ticks a lot of boxes that industry professionals have been after from Apple for years now. Not only is is an absolute powerhouse, supporting what can only be described as an insane amount of RAM, as well as top-end Xeon processors, but the plethora of PCI slots allow customisation beyond your wildest imagination. The new MPX slot could be an industry changer too, providing an enormous amount of PCIe bandwith, along with 500w power supplied purely through the MPX slot. If MPX graphics cards don’t tickle your fancy, there’s nothing stopping you from dropping in a couple of 3rd party graphics cards in for a crossfire/SLI setup. Add rackmounting to its capabilities, and i can easily see several of these racked together for a truly high-performance video rendering setup. Movie and TV studios are going to be jumping up and down for these beasts.
If someone is willing to buy it, let them.
Never give a sucker an even break.
Definitely not a machine for me. The maximum budget for my next PC will be around $3000, $4000 at most, and even if I could justify stretching it to $6000 I’d want more than 8-cores and a 256Gb SSD. It’ll probably be Threadripper or 16 core Ryzen 3000 that I’ll be looking at when it comes time to upgrade.
I like Mac OS and use a MacBook Pro, so I wish Apple did make a desktop machine for me, but I’m clearly not a market they’re interested in.
That said, has anyone specced up the nearest equivalent Wintel workstation? I seem to remember people doing that in the past and being surprised to find that Apple’s high end kit isn’t really overpriced in an apples to apples comparison…
I did it for a HP Z8. With the Z8’s options, and the Mac Pro’s specs, i couldn’t configure it exact. Trying to get as close as possible, the price for the Z8 came out to be about $8K, making the Mac Pro’s $6K seem like a bargain.
It depends what features you want. As a movie editing machine, it’s hard to match apple including the display. If you don’t care about the display like me and would just throw an LG 4k on it, things change fast. I decided to see what I could build for 6000 dollars.
I came up with this build:
Threadripper 32 core 2990wx (4x cores)
64GB of ram (double apple)
dual amd vega 64 GPUs in crossfire
Asus motherboard
water cooling (AIO)
1600 watt corsair power supply
new razer keyboard, mouse
LG 28″ 4k display
Samsung 970 Pro 1tb m.2 nvme pcie
Intel optane 960GB pcie
I do not have the dual 10GbaseT nics like the mac pro and obviously the monitor isn’t even where close but i did it for the cost of just the mac pro itself not display! I could also buy an intel 10GbaseT nic for the cost of the LG display so i don’t feel this is a limitation.
if i were really doing this build, i would use a water loop instead and I already have one that i could use. One could also switch the dual AMD gpus for an nvidia 280 ti.
AMD chips are a lot cheaper than comparable intel ones, so that’s hardly a fair comparison price-wise. ECC vs non-ECC RAM also plays a factor, with new ECC DDR4 sticks costing what can only be describes a s a small fortune in sticks over 16GB
i assume as well as ECC RAM it also has the ability to upgrade to 1.5TB RAM. The Xeon processor is not only about cores, these are enterprise/workstation class devices and parts. Threadripper is only a comparison to intel’s Core range.
Where this device can be upgraded to support multiple 8k video editing without the need to transcode the video first is where this sits.
The PC specified only compares against the iMac and the Mac Mini.
REM2000,
Part of the problem though is that as a personal computer, apple’s base specs for the 2019 macpro will almost certainly need to be upgraded to reach the editing performance of high end personal computers that you can get cheaper elsewhere. From CPU, memory capacity, storage capacity, GPU, everything apple’s speced in it’s base model is relatively unimpressive, you’ll need to upgrade everything to get a high end editing rig. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but considering this is on top of the $6000 for the base model, yikes!
\
As a server apple’s 2019 macpro seems to be fairly inline with other enterprise servers. My only complaint with the macpro’s specs as a server is the apparent lack of storage.
So whether or not the 2019 macpro is a good value or not depends on whether it’s being used as an enterprise server versus PC. You CAN buy very expensive enterprise gear to do video editing, and perhaps many video editing studios do, but if you don’t require enterprise specs and just care about performance/$, then IMHO it’s extremely hard to justify the price of apple’s 2019 macpro.
Of course, we’ll see what the benchmarks show when these enter the market this fall.
I agree that the system listed above isn’t really comparable to the Mac Pro, but I think it’s a bit odd to say that it instead compares against the iMac and Mac Mini.
There’s certainly a rather huge disparity in the capabilities of a 32 core Threadripper system with dual Vega 64 CPUs versus a 6 core + onboard graphics Mac Mini.
My main issue with Apple’s lineup is just how much of a gap there is between the two headless options they offer. You have a choice of either laptop hardware without internal expansion, or high end enterprise/workstation hardware that’s overkill for most people. For me a system between the two, e.g. something like that Threadripper kit, is a more appealing option.
Yes, the gap between the headless options is too large. The iMac’s with limited upgrade capability will continue to lose them sales in my circles.
I need to replace my MBP 17″ Late 2011 (yes it still works, but only because I reflow the graphics chip every once and a while). I’ve learned the hard way that the MBP line be trusted cannot be run continuously for Video transcoding and editing. I already have decent multiple external monitors. I don’t want to buy an iMac as the screen physical and screen geometries won’t match.
I would really use a 1/2 Mac Pro at this point. I’ll still pass on the $999 stand or even one at $499 ……
Sorry, but this is much more interesting for the price:
https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/intro.html
“Playing” with POWER9 processors is very appealing. If you need x86_64, AMD ThreadRipper processors are more affordable, if you don’t need a completely maxxed out system… and macOS.
It will be far more interesting after we can see a performance comparison.
“Raptor Talos II POWER9 Benchmarks Against AMD Threadripper & Intel Core i9”
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-threadripper-core9&num=1
scanline,
I agree, that will be interesting.
Typically enterprise/xeon components are build/binned for stability/duty cycles/ecc ram/etc rather than sheer performance.
We can make some educated guesses today though based on existing CPU benchmarks in the same class.
entry level 2019 macpro CPU Specs:
Here is the closest processor I found from intel:
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/193739/intel-xeon-w-3223-processor-16-5m-cache-3-50-ghz.html
Unfortunately I couldn’t find benchmarks for it, so here’s the next closest (faster clockspeed but less cache).
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/126707/intel-xeon-w-2145-processor-11m-cache-3-70-ghz.html
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+W-2145+%40+3.70GHz&id=3156
CPUmark score = 19674 parallel and 2518 single threaded.
Note this CPU’s base and turbo speeds are 5% and 13% faster than the one speced by apple, so I think it’s fair to decrease the scores accordingly:
18611 parallel and 2238 single.
For comparison, here’s the score for the i9-9900k I acquired last year.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/186605/intel-core-i9-9900k-processor-16m-cache-up-to-5-00-ghz.html
CPUmark score = 20208 parallel and 2900 single threaded.
So I’m predicting the performance of the 8 core macpro when it comes out will be approx 77-92% of the i9 on raw CPU tasks. No slouch to be sure, but no bragging rights either.
Memory speeds should be better overall with the xeons due to quad channels. There may be a tiny bit of latency due to server DIMMs and the 2666MHz speed is a shortcoming, which is frankly on the low end compared to prosumer gear. Does anyone know if XEON processors can run XMP memory or are they locked to their official stock speeds? Anyways the additional cache and quad memory channels should more than make up for that on highly parallel workloads. I think $6,000 should get you 64GB though, 32GB is actually a downgrade from what I have. Of course ECC is a nice (and expensive) enterprise level feature, but I suspect it’s more than most apple users would need if they had a choice.
With the graphics cards, I’m not sure if I’m understanding apple’s page correctly ” Graphics Configure two MPX Modules with up to four GPUs”. Does this mean the entry level macpro will have two “AMD Radeon Pro 580X”? I’m actually glad apple’s going with AMD over nvidia (for admittedly political reasons), however this configuration doesn’t really even approach a single RTX2080TI in terms of performance. Even with two cards, it comes up way short (most GPU tasks do not scale linearly in SLI style configurations).
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-580x.c3398
So here I’m predicting lousy GPU performance compared to a high end nvidia workstation.
256GB storage? Come on, seriously apple?
So I think the performance of the entry level macpro is going to be rather mediocre. Of course all these things can be upgraded for a price, and to apple’s credit it looks like a very nice base system to upgrade. The main objection really is price & value. In terms of enterprise customers, this could be a great product. The main selling point of enterprise grade systems has always been reliability over performance, and apple’s choices are inline with this. It just seems like they missed the mark for macpro users with traditional workstation needs.
“Apple says the new Mac Pro provides over 300W of power”
LMAO. Yeah, way WAY over 300W. I’d guess it’s probably using a 1200 or 1600 W power supply.
Okay, what the hell formatting does the new comment system use???
1.4KW power supply
Each MPX Bay can supply 200 watts through the slots with an additional 300w available via a pair of 8-pin connectors.
To me, the more interesting things are the move away from bash to zsh. This isn’t much of a problem going “that way”. We believe however this was done to eradicated GPL software from MacOS. In the log run, as scripts on MacOS become more zsh-ish, the converse isn’t true, you won’t simply be able to run a “very” zsh specific script in bash. Also, some have noted that if you have to interactive config already, like how you set your PS1 (prompt), it might not work right in zsh. Time will tell if this was a “good decision”… we already know it was bad for freedom.
The other move is removable of Python. In the past MacOS need just a smidgin of Python, so it came with 2.x as a part of MacOS. Which was nice, because as an open source developer, just knowing that Pyth0n was “there” was good news. However, it won’t be there anymore. This is somewhat troubling to me.
As I watch Microsoft become more and more “open” (noting that they still have a long way to go), it’s sad to see Apple apparently moving the opposite direction.
A direction which apparently includes a $1000 monitor stand.
I attempted to use the Mac OS version of Python yesterday to do some calculations and found that the ‘math’ module was absent. Normally you just type “import math” or “math.sqrt(x)” or whatever, as the reference sites say, but these didn’t work. If the stock Python instance is that useless, removing it wouldn’t be a great loss as we could just install it from MacPorts or source anyway. But they could always, like, update it. It’s a standard install with most open-source Unix-type operating systems now.
Yeah, the switch to ZSH is due to GPLv3.
I consider this a good thing. I recently made the switch on my Linux systems, and I’ve been impressed. There are little touches which make it much, much nicer then Bash for interactive work. It’s like combining tcsh, bash, and FiSH. It’s slick, and much more Mac like.
Very bash specific scripts can’t be run by strict sh shells, so the circle of life? Devs should know their targets, and if they want to be very zsh specific, whatever.
Out of curiousity, how is switching to ZSH bad for freedom?
Removing Python, and other scripting languages, is good. It reduces the amount of code they ship, which reduces their security profile, and not being shackled to a particular lib or language version is one of the reasons I’ve been using FreeBSD and OpenBSD as much as possible.
Also, the first thing I do with a new Mac is bootstrap MacPorts to get all the tools I need for work. Installing multiple versions of languages and libs was already my reality, and I’m not sad to see the frozen system defaults go away. This is the same for Linux too since I have to work with multiple versions of LTS Linux distros. Once again, not being shackled to static versions is liberating!
MS makes a tonne of money with Azure and Office365, so it’s about whatever they can do to get people onto their cloud platforms. Porting MS SQL Server to Linux was the flag that alerted everyone to Azure being the straw that stirs the drink in Redmond now.
The craziest thing about the new Mac Pro? It uses the same APIs as five other platforms, including a tablet, phone and a watch.
The Mac Pro is not for everyone and never was but the new is not for even their prosumer market. Fine, try and market to high-end enterprise but its previous market is large and growing so why insult them with the base model. 6K gets you the middle finger.
Also, I’m doubtful a fully kitted out, with 28 cores, multiple GPUs, Pro can be cooled properly though presumably it was tested
Apple has provided exactly what everyone has been screaming for for years now… and it’s too expensive (I grant the Enterprise idea, but it’s hard to imagine this beating out a rack of machines that most of their pro customers already have.)
This thing is like the 20th Anniversary or gold Apple watch: low volume, massive markup. Apple may have built it knowing that it’ll never be profitable to silence the calls for pro equipment while demonstrating they _can_ build pro equipment. When it doesn’t sell, they’ll never have to bother again. I honestly don’t think they care, they make more money with lobotomized consumer products/OS’s than they ever will on high end gear that can’t justify their kind of prices just for being pretty.
As always, I weep for what Apple has become. I’d almost rather have had them go broke 20 years ago than turn into this.
I’m hoping that the writer is not intimating that a reliable, strong, display holder cannot be created for less than $1000 retail. Will Apple people believe literally anything?