Apple today announced the all-new Mac Pro will be available to order starting Thursday, December 19. Redesigned from the inside out, the all-new Mac Pro features the latest Intel Xeon processors, dual workstation-class GPUs, PCIe-based flash storage and ultra-fast ECC memory.
This thing is so damn awesome. I don’t need it, but I still want one.
When I tried to view the image of the machine I had to agree to some kind of license? No thanks.
Mistaken post.
Edited 2013-12-18 22:11 UTC
Yeah, I found that a little odd, even for Apple. If you want to see it (animated, no less) you can go here:
http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
High-resolution press images. It’s fairly common to have a simple license for press images that come attached with press releases.
The license isn’t anything that isn’t already defined by copyright law and fair-use.
Besides, zip-compressed TIFF images generally aren’t viewable in the browser, anyways.
So why have it then? Because they paid some wanker to write it up?
Why should I then indirectly pay for these wankers, by buying their machine?
Maybe now I know the reason why Apple hardware became even more expensive.
Ask any attorney and quit pretending you have any insight into this topic.
What are you talking about? You can get a Mac Pro with dual D700 FirePro GPUs for $4K. The same GPUs for a PC (FirePro W9000s) cost over $3K each.
no, you can’t
even though it’s called a firepro, without the drivers and certified hardware it’s just a 7970 crossfire rig
we are not talking 3k€ each, we are talking 300€ each
and with the 7970 you can still use modified firepro drivers
no need to spend 3k if you don’t need the certificate
Edited 2013-12-19 22:46 UTC
When I state something, it is fact, not a point to debate. The HD 7970 is not the same as a W9000/D700 .
D700 & W9000: 6GB of ECC RAM
HD 7970: 3GB of non-ECC RAM
D700 & W9000: 975mhz core speed
HD 7970: 3GB of 925mhz core speed
Apple and AMD call the D700 a “FirePro” because it is a workstation GPU with the associated hardware, firmware, and drivers.
The only real difference between “workstation” and “gaming” cards is the firmware and a certificate. The only time you need a certified workstation GPU is for engineering CAD where potential legal liability issues can arise.
The OEM price manufacturers pay for workstation and gaming cards is very similar. The steep price difference only occurs with retail cards.
You are incorrect. The GPUs in the workstation W9000 and D700 cards support 6GB of ECC RAM and the GPU in the gaming 7970 supports just 3GB of non-ECC RAM.
But, regardless of that, the Mac Pro can be ordered with D700 FirePro workstation cards. Therefore, a price comparison based on PC using a gaming card is invalid.
no, what you are doing is regurgitating marketing-bullshit
chipset-wise they are the same (or probably will be the same)
ecc gddr5? sure you don’t mix that up with ecc ddr3?
the d700 only does 3,5 TFLOPS not 4.
it will most likely be clocked at ~850MHz
but you can take a look at a nice 7970 consumer-card:
http://www.sapphiretech.com/presentation/product/?cid=1&gid=3&sgid=…
nice speculation your facts
Edited 2013-12-20 00:06 UTC
No, what I am doing is responding to some kid who think’s he knows more than he does.
I’m not interested in your speculation.
The D700 and W9000 both use 6 GB of GDDR5 VRAM with ECC.
And you’re basing that on ‘regurgitated marketing-bullshit’? For all that you know, Apple is just being more conservative in their ratings.
I’m an engineer in the aerospace industry, not a child looking for something on which to play video games with my little friends.
It’s not “speculation.” The FirePro name means something to AMD and the engineering community. You can’t take a consumer gaming card and slap the FirePro name on it.
Some high-end engineering and CAD packages refuse to even run on gaming cards. One example is Solidworks. In other cases, you’ll see packages like Lightwave and Maya getting more than double the performance on the workstation card compared to its gamer card brethren.
Tom’s Hardware did a comparison between 21 video cards, both gaming and workstation and summed it up as follows:
cad packages i had running on consumer hardware (ranging from the first radeon up to my current 7850):
solid edge
solid works
catia
pro e
unigrafics
maybe you should try it next time
if you want to, you can use a patched firepro-driver for better opengl-performance (but i never felt the need for it)
While the W9000 has 6GB of RAM, I’m pretty sure it isn’t 6GB of ECC RAM. I might be wrong, but I think Tahiti uses a “Virtual ECC” scheme in the same way NVidia does on the Quadro and Tesla cards. Those cards have 6GB of memory, but if you enable ECC, some of the memory is used for the extra ECC parity bits, leaving about 5.25GB of RAM. I think AMD does this with the FirePRO.
Also, D700 is likely clocked lower than the W9000. AMD advertizes 4 TFLOPS for W9000, Apple advertizes 3.5 TFLOPS for the D700, with an equal number of compute units. The memory clock is the same, though.
Finally, we simply don’t know about the driver. Is it workstation-oriented like the Windows and Linux counterparts? Will it enable 30-bit color?
With the previous NVidia Quadro 4000 and 4800 cards for the Mac, workstation apps didn’t run any better compared to consumer cards on MacOSX, even after NVidia took over driver development for Quadro drivers.
Of course, they did have separate drivers for Quadro, so hopefully this is the case.
I just wanted a larger version of that thumbnail. I didn’t ask for a huge non compatible image format only used by magazines.
Off topic: if I walk in to a car dealer and he wants me to sign before I can take the promotional material he is completely nuts and I will keep away from his store.
That’s why you go to the product page, rather than the press page.
The press page has press materials, such as press images and press releases.
I get press photos from Daimler (Mercedes) and that required signing an agreement. Are you a member of the press? No. So don’t go to the press pages. Is that so hard?
Yeah. Strange thing is, they packed the already LZW compressed TIFF file in a ZIP container. My first thought: someone at Apple does not understand the TIFF format, compression, or both. But I was wrong:
6.4M MacPro_Back_Glow_PRINT.tif
5.3M MacPro_Back_Glow_PRINT.tif.zip
So although in theory LZW could offer better compression
In practice ZIP often has better compression:
http://havecamerawilltravel.com/photographer/tiff-image-compression…
So the conclusion that they don’t understand TIFF compression that wel at Apple HQ stil stands. They should have used ZIP instead of LZW for their TIFF file.
Even though the tiff standard (really more of a de facto standard) has supported zip compression for over 10 years, lzw has been part of the standard for twice that long. Virtually anything that can read a tiff file supports lzw, but there is still quite a lot of libraries in use, even today, that don’t understand or support zip compression.
Not everyone is running the latest greatest versions of software in the publishing world… Better to distribute a file you know everyone can read and compress it externally.
I’d recommend a wait-and-see tactic
IMO the heatsink is not upt to the task of cooling 2 firepro w9000 and a xeon e5 12-core
but the powersupply seems even worse
W9000 275W each
xeon 130W
rest ~50W (ram, ssd, …)
—————————————
730W
if the powersupply has an efficiency of 90% it should consume ~800W under full load
what does apple say about maximum power-consumption?
450W
this won’t end well
I doubt Apple would get something like that wrong… Right?
they did get it wrong in the past
the first generation of mac pros (donT know about the later ones) did overheat under load
same with their laptops
———-edit———–
another indication of a thermal-problem in the iMer is it’s computational power
according to apple it can do 7 TFLOPS with 2 W9000 cards
but it should be 8 TFLOPS
ergo: they are already underclocking them by more than 10%
Edited 2013-12-18 21:27 UTC
And when some part in the distant future needs replacing, it’ll be simple and inexpensive to do because the MacPro is made with standardized components… Right?
It’ll be simple, because you’d just bring it to an Apple store. It won’t be cheap, because it’s a Mac Pro. If you want cheap, buy something else.
What makes you think compatible upgrade components will be available in the future, at an Apple store or anywhere else?
Because Apple and the third party manufacturers have a long history of making parts for, and supporting, the prior generations of Mac Pros. I’m replying to you on a 2008 Mac Pro that I’ve upgraded multiple times in the last year, so I know a lot more about this subject than you do.
Didn’t previous Mac Pro versions use standard PC components that snapped into standard slots?
How many upgrade components were available for the Mac Cube?
While it used the PCIe bus, if you plugged many of the standard PC components into the slots, they would not work. That’s why companies like Sonnett Technologies made specific upgrade cards for Mac Pros. It’s why ATI released “Mac Edition” upgrade video cards for use in Mac Pros.
Even the RAM was non-standard, requiring large heatsinks (so that Mac Pros, unlike their PC counterparts, would be quiet in operation). Again, aftermarket companies sprung into action producing Mac Pro specific DIMMS with compatible heatsinks.
Even replacement mechanical drive sleds, which only worked in Mac Pros, were produced by third party companies.
There were even external USB and Firewire hard drives produced with the same, distintive perforated aluminum chassis style to aesthetically match the Mac Pro.
There were third party CPU upgrade cards, some with special ducting for cooling. There was a Geforce 2 MX video card in a version specially created for the Cube. The Cube used the same memory and hard drive components as a traditional desktop machine and these upgrades were common. And, unlike the Mac Pro line, the cube sold very poorly.
Upgrades for the new Mac Pro will be be plentiful. The RAM is standard, so that’s a non-issue. The Thunderbolt 2 ports are an Intel standard and there are already PC motherboards with them. There are already Mac-specific Thunderbolt 2 to PCIe expansion chassis available, so you can add PCIe cards.
Apple has changed the upgrading game by going away from users shoving cards and drives into the box, a practice that resulted in an ungainly, huge box with a massively oversized cooling system and power supply. Now, a creative professional or engineer with a Mac Pro can have all of his mass storage on an external RAID interfaced by Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0. He can buy a new Mac Pro in a few years and swap it in with nothing more than moving a few external cables and a Time Machine restoration of the applications and settings from the RAID.
I love that logic.
I have one “big” box. It has four cables connected at the back. Power, LAN, two monitors. Six if you’ll count power for monitors. It has four HDDs and two SSDs plus couple extra PCI cards. I still can put couple extra drives inside.
You’re proposing one “small” box and then I will need at least one expensive box to shove my extra HDDs (two extra cables). Plus another box where I can put my PCI cards (another box and two cables). Plus another box with a DVD (yes, some people do need to at least read them from time to time). And USB hub might be useful considering how in apple world front or side USB ports are not kosher anymore. How about better sound than 3.5mm jack?
In the end we do have one small computer, but for typical usability scenario on the side there will be collection of boxes with nice wire spaghetti and half a dozen of power bricks and another power strip
Am I wrong? The same thing happens right now on the desks of imac owners. I’ve seen it few times.
I have a Mac Pro with four drive bays. Three are empty.
My primary storage is a 4x2TB RAID10 eSATA enclosure and a 5x3TB RAID6 NAS.
My Mac Pro’s built-in S/PDIF optical output is connected to an AV receiver for D/A conversion and amplification for speakers. For headphone use, I have an external USB DAC that feeds a headphone amp.
My BluRay drive is in an external USB enclosure.
I’ve got a 13 port USB hub on my desk.
I think that you’re trying to evaluate a workstation computer as if it were a home computer. Not the same thing.
and thats the perfect example why you should buy an expandable box and not an all-in-one
It’s a perfect example of why the new Mac Pro makes sense as a workstation-class computer. Workstation users don’t need internal expansion. They need ports (USB 3.0, Thunderbolt 2, gigabit Ethernet, S/PDIF, etc.) into which they can plug external peripherals.
Edited 2013-12-23 20:51 UTC
Thom, I believe this thing is not going to sell, at least not to the target audience, pro users. It might sell to Apple aficionados, though. People with a lot of money who don’t really need it.
Apple did get it wrong with overheating of Mac Cube. Also, in more distant past, Apple III.
Apple does have a tendency to under value the damage that heat has on a System. However with jobs gone, the engineers may have a say now.
UNDERCLOCK ALL THE THINGS!!1
😉
It doubles as a room heater.
I agree, but you can look at this argument from the other direction. Maybe we should wait and see if the D700 (the high end GPU) really is a w9000 before assuming that the thing will need to dissipate 550W of GPU power.
I find it somewhat odd that even though they are now on sale and you can order one, Apple still doesn’t disclose the exact specs of the D700…
http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/
They list the other two lower end card’s details, but the D700 is suspiciously absent.
Anyway, I assumed the D700 was a w9000 too because the specs more or less line up – but Apple hasn’t officially disclosed anything but rough lip service even now.
Something is seriously amiss though. I just priced a 2nd tier Mac Pro baseline config upgraded to D700s.
It is $4599.
That is simply too cheap. If those are really w9000s, the GPUs alone have a street price of way more than that… Based on the tier one baseline config, you would have to think Apple is pricing the “rest” (everything but the GPUs) of the machine at around $2000. So whatever the D700 is, Apple is selling them for about $1300 a piece (give or take a few hundred dollars)
So one of 3 things is happening:
1. Apple is subsidizing the costs of the GPUs (yeah, right…).
2. AMD is giving Apple an absolutely enormous discount. Possible of course, but 60% off of street price is quite a hit.
3. It isn’t a w9000 and is some new undisclosed variant (maybe a Hawaii XT based firePro?)
My bet is it is either 2 or 3, and if it is 3 then we don’t really know what the TDP of the GPU is…
If it ends up being 2, and those are really w9000s, and Apple’s cooling solution can somehow handle them – well I would have to say that as a graphics/rendering workstation, assuming one would need the power it offers, it is far from expensive… Hell at that price it is rather cheap.
Edited 2013-12-19 13:09 UTC
the problem with those gpus is that they use consumer-chips
so apple has the option to use regular tahiti xt chips (like in a 7970) add 6gb of ram and just call it a firepro
and i doubt that it will be a hawaii xt based card
if it were it would have a 512bit interface and much more FLOPS
Your right, I didn’t think about it that way…
It may be that AMD is simply selling Apple the GPU silicon and the right to use the firePro branding – leaving it up to Apple to support it on their platform as a “professional” card and all the bs that goes with it (maintaining certification status with the various apps that require it).
So yeah, ok – the price discrepancy is fairly easily explained. Assuming AMD is ok with Apple possibly mudding up their branding a bit, these GPUs won’t be available outside of Apple’s platform economy so they won’t really compete directly with AMD’s cards.
Still though, they really are pretty cheap at the high end (for the 6 core Xeon anyway). Assuming their cooling solution works…
Just to illustrate, this is the kind of stuff they seem to be aiming to compete with:
http://www.boxxtech.com/products
Apple is very price competitive… Remains to be seen though if Apple can put the support required behind the platform – professionals don’t buy this kind of hardware because of the hardware – they buy it for the support and guarantees that it will work with their tool chain.
Edited 2013-12-19 14:04 UTC
Another thing this brings to mind…
Assuming they are not “officially” AMD cards, will Catalyst drivers even work if they are booted into Windows?
This probably won’t affect people who actually buy these things for what they are (i.e. professional graphics workstations), as if they aren’t using OSX they wouldn’t buy them in the first place. But there were a lot of people who used to buy Mac Pros as high-end “swiss army knives”, as you could do quite a lot of different stuff with them (including gaming in Windows if you were so inclined) – and they were a “relatively” cheap way to get a high core count machine.
Just saying I wonder how they will work in bootcamp considering the “unique” nature of their GPUs… It may turn out that Catalyst drivers work fine, but then again it may turn out they don’t work at all – and Apple’s bootcamp drivers likely won’t go to a lot of trouble to tune for gaming performance on Windows.
Will have to wait for reviews I guess.
That’s not really a problem. It’s not like the Pro designs were simply replaced by consumer chips, and that’s-that.
When chips were fixed-function, it made sense to optimize a piece of silicon for gaming or for workstations. Since chips are so general-purpose now, there’s really no point in doing the optimizing on the chip – instead, it’s done on the driver.
Some workstation-only features are now part of the architecture as a whole, and are exposed via driver + extra connectors – features like genlock/framelock, ECC memory, and stereoscopic. These are workstation features, and the silicon is also present on consumer chips.
One could also say consumer products use workstation chips. 10-15 years ago, both this and the converse would have been meant something, but it hasn’t been true in a while.
So, the real question is, are the drivers on the new Mac Pro actual FireGL drivers? FireGL drivers are a different beast from consumer drivers. They are optimized heavily for geometry over texturing, tend to handle basic untextured views better, and handle wireframe views better. At the same time, gaming performance isn’t as good as the consumer counterparts.
Other features exist in workstation drivers, like being able to partially render only part of a window (Say, when a viewport is partially obscured by another window), multiple clipping planes and slices, etc.
Finally, validation occurs. Apps are certified to run on a specific driver level, and driver development happens with close communication with ISVs. Accuracy of the rendered image is far more important than performance.
These things are what makes a FirePro a FirePro. Is Apple doing these things?
I left out a big feature of workstation cards, and that is 10-bits-per-channel color.
Now that the MacPro is available to order, they’ve got a Sharp 4K screen for sale. The screen supports 10-bits-per-channel, but they aren’t advertising it as a feature on the Apple site, because MacOS X doesn’t support 10-bits-per-channel. This is a limitation of the OS. Mac compatible NVidia Quadro cards can support 10-bit color channels under Windows but not OSX.
I’m surprised Apple hasn’t added this along with their Retina displays. Sharpness is nice, but added color fidelity is just as good.
Edited 2013-12-19 19:40 UTC
Yeah… That is kind of what I was getting at with my questions. Lets say the D700 really was a w9000, i.e. the hardware is 100% the same and the w9000 drivers would actually work on Windows in bootcamp…
An entry level Mac Pro outfitted with 2 D700s costs $3999. At that price, you are saving about $2000 off the costs of buying the 2 GPUs all by themselves – its like getting a 33% discount on the GPUs and hey, we’ll even through in a free workstation as a bonus…
I find it highly unlikely AMD would go along with this, as it would undercut their own pricing severely. So I suspect it won’t be a functional replacement for a w9000. Maybe it is virtually the same hardware, but there is no way it is going to work the same way in bootcamp as a real w9000…
In short I don’t think any of the things that traditionally make a FirePro card carry it’s pricing premium really apply to the Mac Pro. Its probably going to be optimized for use with Apple’s software stack (Arpeture, Final Cut, etc.) and that’s it. Its a 7970 with a boatload of VRAM on it, nothing more. It kind of makes sense too because most of the apps you care about having certified support for don’t exist on OSX.
Its two roughly $500 GPUs, which turns the deal of the century into “meh”…
Edited 2013-12-19 20:49 UTC
I was about to buy a mini as a new audio and video production machine. I need the backward compatibility of firewire and I need the quiet machine to sit in the mixing room.
This new pro is really interesting because it’s so light, quiet, and efficient for how powerful it is.
My only complaint is being stuck with those massive video cards. I don’t do much high-end video editing and would prefer to put that money into RAM and more HD space. (But like most mac producer people, I can cut HD video and possibly be paid for it with that kind of rig.)
Anyway – my first mac was an entry level power pc and it cost $3000 for just the CPU, in 1992 dollars. mac prices have come down since the early days. this is a bad machine for $3k, considering how quiet, light, and efficient it is.
Agreed.
1992? The first PowerPC Apple machine wasn’t released until 1994.
yeah something like that!
maybe my 1994 dollars were 2 years old 😉
…but where’s the handle? Does it at least come with a coaster for that price?
Looks more like a garbage can too me.
Handle? So you can use it as a BOAT ANCHOR?
Oh, good one.
I forgot all about that video, I have it stashed away somewhere on one of my hard drives.
I don’t need it nor I don’t want it ;p
(tho I less-than-three my MBP
)
For almost twice the price of the machine sitting right next to me this moment, I can have half the computer with no mass storage!
Yeah, that’s a crApple alright. No surprises here… since it’s pretty much what I expected months ago when the goofy ash tray case that reeks of Apple’s typical “wouldn’t know cooling if it stripped naked, painted itself purple and hopped up on a table to sing ‘Oh look at what a big cooling fan I am!'”
Professional… right, usually I say this about Adobe products like Dreamweaver, but it REALLY does apply here. “The only thing about the Mac Pro that can be considered professional grade tools are the people dumb enough to throw money away on one!”
Edited 2013-12-18 23:57 UTC
Oooh look…a troll. Hasn’t seen even the first unbiased review and already has an “informed” opinion. Wow.
It’s easy to form an opinion. The power supply is woefully inadequate. Internal expansion is non-existent. RAM is severely limited. The Xeon CPU and workstation GPUs are expensive and unnecessary hardware choices.
Having a HP Z-600 at work, that has never crashed I think I would certainly buy a Xeon rig in the future.
Thought it won’t be from Apple.
Edited 2013-12-19 10:12 UTC
thats more a driver- than a hardware-thing
and i have been hit by several buggy intel-drivers
I didn’t build or set this machine up. But it is 100% rock solid stable for the last 2 years.
I would consider buying a similar workstation in the future for sure.
Edited 2013-12-19 10:54 UTC
Do you even know what a troll is? Your short post tries to get an emotional reaction and has no content. His post is a well supported opinion.
Relax… He is referring to his own post…
Given that the specs list processors that don’t even exist on ARC, the base version looking like it’s less capable than a i7 4770K (what I’m running) the base model has RAM slower than my desktop (I’m on G’Skill Sniper DDR3 2400), the base model ‘d300’ is just rebranded Radeon 7850’s — as opposed to the GTX 780 I’m running that can by itself outperform 7850’s in SLI…
If you know ANYTHING about the hardware used, you can make an informed opinion…
Though the real laugh has been watching the likes/dislikes ping-pong on the post… High of +8, low of -6… it’s at what, -2 right now. Good for a laugh.
Of course, you list facts and refer to ACTUAL values, you’re a troll. You yell “TROLL, how dare you say something bad about the big shiny Apple” you’re a reasonable poster, right?
I think the real laugh is the people who don’t seem to grasp that high end professional workstation systems are targeted towards markets which differ, severely, from the “DIY and overclock all the things” home gaming rig market you’re using to justify your “point.”
Really? Want to publish benchmark numbers on your system? The Mac Pro has 60GB/s memory bandwidth. Yours? It’s got up to 7 teraflops of GPU performance. And you have? The Mac Pro produces less that 20dBA noise under full load. How loud is your system? It can support three 4K monitors at once. How many can your system support? The Thunderbolt 2 external interface will move data at 20Gb/s to an external device and you can daisy-chain up to 36 drives. And you have what that competes with that? USB 3.0 (LOL!)?
I’d say that a terabyte SSD that runs at well over double the speed of SATA SSDs counts as mass storage. How fast is your primary drive?
There’s a sign that we’re being treated to insightful, mature commentary.
The Mac Pro isn’t for people doing low-level, scut work like web development. It’s for people doing CGI animation, video editing, automotive design, architectural design, and scientific research (for example, the Mars Curiosity rover team overwhelmingly prefers Macs to Windows computers.)
Edited 2013-12-19 18:09 UTC
Dude I have 8 core Xeon machine and 32gb of ram for “web development”. Not all web developers work with PHP and WordPress.
In gaming companies you are running software that isn’t too different to real time trading platforms and I don’t even work on the heavy stuff.
Edited 2013-12-19 19:15 UTC
I’m running an 8 core Xeon Mac Pro (older generation), but it’s gross overkill for much of what I do on it. Whether and/or why you really are pegging the 8 Xeon CPU cores often while doing web development is something I don’t know.
The other poster was writing about Dreamweaver being his example of “professional” software. That’s a package that many web designers wrote off long ago as outdated and dead.
I mainly do CMS development and the CMS we have (sitecore) while very solid is such a complicated beast and we have such a large number of content items I think running it for development (SQL Server only) takes about 2GB.
I believe our designers use that, I don’t care much for it. I use PHPStorm for the smaller projects (intranet sites and intranet applications), we mainly use PHP because everyone on the Team knows it. The IDE while good is Java based and that is quite heavy as well.
Slightly aside, At home I have an older core 2 duo (which is getting upgraded once the XMAS bonus is paid), and VS2013, SQL SERVER 2012 and Sitecore is bringing it to its knees, so I will be buying a machine that is capable for the next 5 years at least.
Edited 2013-12-19 19:57 UTC
No actually, I was making FUN of dreamweaver as pointless idiotic bullshit because the SAYING I used about the Apple I usually use about Dreamweaver.
LMGTFY
https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=%22The+only+thing+a…
Comprehension people, try it!
And we should be familiar with your little joke why? It’s like expecting us to know some joke that people in the lawn care industry tell each other.
To compare to what exactly?!? That’s the type of statement I’d expect from someone who knows nothing about hardware… though that’s evident from:
DDR3 1866 is DDR3 1866… and if you’re “impressed” by that in 2013 you haven’t been paying attention for half a decade.
Much less the 12 gig configuration is 3 sticks, so Dual Channel would be disabled… Yeah, have fun with that!
Lemme queue you in to my system specs:
i7 4770K — I’d point out this is the fastest quad core Intel makes! (yes, that includes against quad Xeons)
ASRock Fatal1ty Z87 Motherboard (3x SLI capable)
16 gigs G’Skill Ares DDR3 2400
Gigabyte Windforce GTX 780 OC 3 gig
256 gig SandDisk Ultra Plus SSD
2x 4tb Seagate 7200RPM SATA III
Thermaltake TR2 950 Watt “gold” rated PSU
Phanteks PH-TC14PE CPU cooler
Not counting some of the older hardware I added to it (like the pair of 2tb Hibachi’s, the EMU Morpheus, Audigy 2 ZS Platinum, and the GTS 250 used to drive my secondary displays, the blu-ray burner) that rig ran in the ballpark of $1800 by the time I was done with it… a little over half what that base model Mac Pro costs and it would run circles around it!
The CPU stats they are listing leave me scratching my head… Are they SURE they don’t mean e3 Xeon? According to everything I’ve ever heard or been able to research (as supported by the ARK), Intel doesn’t MAKE quad core E5’s at 3.7 or hexacore at 3.5… Only thing that even comes close is the 2643 Sandy, which is an unreliable overpriced steaming pile. Of course I’ve always loved how Apple gets processors you can’t get in the retail channel JUST to say “haha, you can’t even compare to what you buy elsewhere”.
Of course I’ve still been unable to get a clear answer on WHICH e5’s they are… Sandy? Ivy? Haswell? The lack of actual model numbers does not build trust.
The d300 in the base model (which I was using to compare with my statement) is for all intents and purposes a 7850 — a card that in SLI is outperformed in most tasks by my SINGLE GTX 780 OC or something like the AMD HD 7990. Why would you waste time putting two mid-range cards in a machine that are less powerful than a single better card?!? Sure, if you started out with the low end card and used it to expand later it makes sense… but in a base model configuration? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!
Call me when I can plug a trio of Titans into it! Lord knows if I was gonna spend for what their allegedly ‘pro’ hardware costs I’d expect that at minimum!
Around that so long as the video card fans don’t kick in… But I’m in a Thermaltake Element G case where the smallest fan is 140mm. That Phanteks cooler really impressed me on how quiet it is and how ridiculously cool it keeps that Haswell… to the tune of 30C at idle and 48C after running Prime95 for 30 minutes.
Numbers I very much doubt Apple’s artsy form factor could match — but then I remember Apple’s track record with i7’s relying almost entirely on thermal throttling to continue functioning in their designs; almost as bad as the old G3 iBooks that used an underclocked 500mhz rated CPU at 266, so they could use insulating foam instead of cooling — resulting in burning a hole clear through the dialup adapters… Or the g4 cube that heated up enough for RAM to start falling off the video cards from the solder melting…
I would prefer noise with performance and reliability to artsy-fartsy form factor that likely limits such things.
As is right now? Three. CAN it support? If I’m willing to populate the other two x16 slots I can go to nine…. no goofy new waste of technology ports needed.
… and what would I run at that speed exactly? SATAIII exceeds even flash capacity by 30%. The only reason to have that much throughput is to, as you said, make a giant mess of daisy chained cables all over the blasted place.
Well internally I’ve got two unused SATA … there’s the pair of eSATA on the back… not as fast overall but it doesn’t have to because I’d be single connecting instead of daisy chaining (and dealing with contention issues just like SCSI used to and USB on hubs does).
Whereas I’m not DUMB ENOUGH to try and use a SSD as the only drive in a system. Hello BRICK! Lord knows the stack of dead ones I’ve pulled out of other people’s machines speaks volumes to their ‘reliability’!
… and this is 2013 not 2003. Which is the last time I had LESS than a TB of storage in my desktop.
Case in point, I’m using my SSD as a WORM for booting, and the pair of 4tb drives for things like browser cache, user data, and all the other stuff that’s high write volume — the PROPER way of using SSD’s in a desktop.
Hell, my 3ds Max files ALONE exceed the storage capacity of the base model Mac Pro’s SSD.
Of course,
7200 RPM SATA III… if you mean storage. I’m BOOTING from a SSD just as fast as theirs, probably faster!
I think you failed to comprehend what I was saying. I’ve got a bit of a reputation for saying “The only thing about Dreamweaver that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting it’s use” — I was paraphrasing myself, using the same saying to describe Apple. I was NOT using web design as an example of the Mac’s target audience. Hence the whole “usually I say this about Adobe products like Dreamweaver” — Not to go medievil Samuel L. Jackson style, but Englisc, modor wyrter! Gedon eow cweþan hit!?!
If I was to talk about the target audience, I’d have mentioned something like Ikea or Saab. Effite elitist willing to throw money away over anything with their favorite pet company’s logo on it.
AS evidenced by the $100 price difference to go from 12 gigs to 16… more than the cost of 16 gigs of DDR3 1866 these days… or the ridiculous 500 bucks for 4×8, which is real world around $300… or the grand for 4×16, which is typically $700 at retail. But as a friend of mine always said, with Apple buy the lowest base RAM you can and buy third party… throw away the cheap-ass drives and go third party… ignore the out of date video and go third party… at which point you’re buying apple WHY exactly?!?
Much less the sleazeball practice of every config being fully populated — while my machine has 2×8 and two open slots. Lands sakes if they’re gonna have x8’s and x16’s available, shouldn’t the 16 be 2×8 and the 32 be 2×16 so you don’t have to throw away RAM when/if you want more? (and I’m still laughing at the dual channel disabling 3×4 config)
No, wait, that would mean people might be encouraged to work on them themselves and buy parts from someone else. Vendor lock-in, the pinnacle of sleazeball IT practices. Microshaft pulled these types of stunts and price gouging you’d hear it poo-poo’d from the rafters by people who LIKE their products.
OF course when you actually go to add more drives they sell you this ugly second box where they nail you $1500 to $4500 for $300 to $1000 in hard drives, a case that probably didn’t cost more than $20 to manufacture and what’s most likely a 200W or less PSU. OOH, I’m impressed – NOT!
The Mac Pro you claim that your system is comparable to.
I design ground support equipment for satellites, you peon. I’ve got a digital storage oscilloscope two feet away from me as I type this. There’s also an Omega digital flow meter here that I’ve interfaced to an embedded system to monitor nitrogen gas purge flow of a satellite during ground transport to the launch site.
As to PCs, I’m counting six of them (in this room) that I built, including a server that’s been running 24/7 serving multiple domains since 2010.
You do understand that the bandwidth is a combination of clock speed and data path, right? That’s why your CPU maxes out at 25.6 GB/s and the Mac Pro’s hits 59.7 GB/s.
It’s got a four channel memory controller, so it’s probably accessing all three sticks in parallel.
Let’s compare your CPU to the E5-1620 v2 in the bottom of the line Mac Pro:
You run at 3.5GHz and the Mac Pro’s CPU runs at 3.7GHz.
You have two memory channels and the E5-1620 v2 has four.
Your maximum memory bandwidth is 25.6 GB/s and the Mac Pro’s is 59.7 GB/s.
You can’t run ECC RAM. The Mac Pro can — and does.
Your maximum RAM is 32MB. The Mac Pro’s is 256MB.
I’ve got that same disk in my Mac Pro. It runs less than half the speed of the PCIe SSD in the new Mac Pro.
I’ll stick with my Hitachi 4TB internal drive. Not a Seagate fan (and I’ve been using them since they were Shugart Technology). For speed, mine’s configured as a “Fusion drive.” That’s where the SSD and the rotating drive are logically a single unit and OS X does data tiering at the sector (not file) level, keeping the most frequently accessed sectors on the SSD. Everything is backed up to two external RAIDs, one 4 x 2TB eSATA and one 5 x 3TB WD Red drives running RAID 6 in a Thecus NAS.
Sure it would.
No, they sometimes get a deal to get the CPUs before other manufacturers do. Not so that they can prevent comparisons, but rather so they can outperform other systems at the time of release.
I used my uber-l33t computing skills and found it on Wikipedia:
One 3.7 GHz Quad-Core “Ivy Bridge-EP” Intel Xeon (E5-1620 v2) with 10MB L3 cache
One 3.5 GHz 6-Core “Ivy Bridge-EP” Intel Xeon (E5-1650 v2) with 12MB L3 cache
One 3.0 GHz 8-Core “Ivy Bridge-EP” Intel Xeon (E5-1680 v2) with 25MB L3 cache
One 2.7 GHz 12-Core “Ivy Bridge-EP” Intel Xeon (E5-2697 v2) with 30MB L3 cache
It’s a workstation, not a gamer PC.
Measured with?
The Thunderbolt 2 ports are fantastic! I can’t imagine anyone into tech that doesn’t admire a port that can run anything from a hard drive to a 4K monitor.
A RAID enclosure. Duh!
Apparently not since the flash drive on the new Mac Pro is double the speed of SATA III.
Apple stands behind their products. And, it’s not such a big deal if your primary drive on a Mac craps out. You put in a new one, install OS X, and it asks if you want to restore your programs, settings, and user files. You click yes and when it’s done, everything is just like it was before the crash. Yeah, it really is that good and one of the motivating reasons I had from moving to Mac about 5 years ago.
Why can’t you move past this primitive all-in-one-box mentality? Anyone with common sense would rather have a Mac Pro with a five drive external RAID-6 array that takes up less space than a tower PC and has disk throughput that blows away the PC.
The Mac Pro PCIe SSD is 1200MB/s. That’s twice as fast as the SATA III interface your drive is connected to.
And you’d continue your long streak of being wrong. I grew out of Windows PCs after having used them since Windows 2.0. See, unlike you, I actually have lots of experience on both Windows and Apple systems, so I’m making an informed decision.
Exact same thing as if you buy a Dell. They make money on up-sells.
Far better mechanical quality of construction. A much better operating system. Tech support that is second to none. Access to over-the-counter repairs in major cities all over the world. Developer support that shames what you can get from Microsoft.
And I’m still laughing at you not knowing that the CPU has four memory channels.
My Mac Pro case opens with the flick of one lever. The PCIe cards are held in with knurled screws. The memory is on two removable cards so you can populate them without lying on the floor. The drives are on sleds — you just pull the sled, put the screws into the drive, and slide it back in. No cables to connect. That’s way more consumer-friendly when it comes to upgrades.
First you complain about their internal drive prices. Then you complain that they give you an easy way to use anyone’s external drives (USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt 2).
Edited 2013-12-20 11:02 UTC
I just had a look at the Dell website. They sell dual Xeon workstations with up to 10 cores, 64GB of RAM and multiple SSDs.
The Mac Pro performance could easily be replicated or surpassed for far less cost using off the shelf components.
Yawn… Tell us something we don’t know.
Yeah but the mac pro case, heat flow, energy efficiency, and overall build quality can’t be touched for any price.
If you want cases built that perfectly, with doors that slide and open smoothly for 5+ years, proper backlighting, and quietest it can be – no one is touching apple.
Non-mac people are still amazed at the way my 1999 G4 tower slides open with one click. True – somethings in mac’s are not user upgradable, but everything that is is crazy easy to do.
I’d love to see the price on a PC case that even comes close to what Apple’s new mac pro case offers.
I think mobile has finally taught us that what’s on the outside surface and ports of a modern computer is at least as important as what’s inside. They are all fast with lots of RAM these days – it’s about usability, resolution, volume, max number of devices that can be connected, energy use, etc..
Edited 2013-12-19 15:01 UTC
Check out the Dell Precision systems – super easy to work on with very well engineered interiors. Everything is super easy while being super upgradable like a regular PC.
Sure, the guts may not slide out when you pop open the side panel, but it is completely tool-less, all the cables are routed so well that access is easy without needing the guts to slide out.
In past I went did some homework before putting proposals to a client.
I found that … by the time you have a properly built system with comparable components [ECC RAM, processors etc] and expansion capabilities; the much vaunted price gap with HP etc is usually negligible if at all.
Of course I can’t tell that to the geeks in the pub.
You don’t need ECC RAM, Xeon CPUs or workstation video cards for multimedia work. Decent gaming hardware works just as well for a fraction of the cost.
However you do need a real Windows certified workstation for high level physical engineering and mathematical simulation because precision is an absolute must.
The point I made was about extreme reliability and extreme scalability – if the client demands those things – so be it.
If the client has a Mac OSX based team and wishes to continue in that vein then that is their choice and their money to spend.
Some clients believe and run with the Apple hype. Other clients believe and run with the ‘real Windows Certified’ hype. This is just life; but don’t expect a business to switch horses just because the ‘hired tech’ prefers the other one.
The “it HAS TO BE WINDOWS to be serious vein” rant resonates with the old “no one ever got sacked for buying IBM” saying – and not in a good way.
Rant over!
Not for the ridiculous price tag, no. True, hackintosh will never look like this, but with comparable or better guts and cheaper.
The Mac Pro’s AMD FirePro D700 is the exact match to the AMD FirePro W9000. Amazon has the FirePro W9000 at $3,158. For $4k, you can buy a 3.7GHz quad core Mac Pro with dual D700 GPUs. That’s more than $2K cheaper than the cost of the equivalent FirePro W9000 video cards alone for your “hackintosh.”
Now, add on the costs of a motherboard and ~$300 Intel Xeon E5 CPU, ~$1100 worth of 12GB of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC RAM, 256GB PCIe-based flash storage (a SATA SSD is only half the speed, so that’s not comparable), Thunderbolt 2 or comparable (20GB/s and up to 36 daisy-chained devices). Now, find a case and cooling system that’s under 20dBA under load.
At this point, you’re probably looking a your kludged hackintosh with the pirated, hacked OS costing more than double what a Mac Pro does. And don’t kid yourself — the OS X development costs are supported by Apple hardware sales and if you didn’t buy Apple hardware, you pirated the OS in violation of the license.
Of course you get no warranty, no AppleCare support, and you have a system that’s lost half of its resale value before you even turn it on.
Just buy an i7, a crossfire motherboard, two high end gaming cards and regular RAM. The performance will be just as good. Workstation hardware is no faster for multimedia work.
There are plenty of cases and cooling soutions that can easily achieve 20dB under load.
Core i7 CPUs don’t handle ECC RAM, which is why you don’t see them in servers or workstation class systems.
I realize that most consumers think that unbuffered, non-ECC RAM is fine and that there’s no need for RAID storage. Most people in the market for workstations and servers would tend to disagree.
As to SLI consumer video cards, there is a significant bit of CAD and engineering software that won’t even start up on it. In other cases, packages like Lightwave and Maya are achieving 2x-3x the framerate when running on the workstation GPU (compared to the equivalent consumer gaming GPU).
I have not found them. Most individual fans are louder than 20dBA.
Apparently, reviewers aren’t used to computers at quiet as the 2013 Mac Pro. Tech Crunch ran an article entitled “Hands On: Apple’s New Mac Pro Is An Insanely Quiet Thermal Wizard.” Tech Radar’s review included “We were impressed at just how quiet the new Mac Pro is.”
A Mac pro is not going to be used for mission critical engineering design, mathematical simulations or as a server by any sane professional.
Workstations use ECC RAM and workstation grade cards primarily for piece of mind and legal indemnity – not performance.
This is because the software manufacturer effectively offers legal indemnity for use in mission critical design situations such as aircraft and large-scale structural design. They are stating that their software is only guaranteed to work correctly when combined with certain hardware. The software checks that is using the “correct” hardware at startup to protect the software company against lawsuits.
Many CAD applications such as AutoCAD will run perfectly on consumer grade hardware. My brother is surveyor/civil engineer for a large government body. They replaced all their workstations over 20 years ago with whitebox PCs because none of their CAD work (surveying, unpaved access roads and minor earth works) is considered risky or mission critical.
You can buy a $2 engine bolt form an auto parts store that is absolutely identical to an $800 aircraft bolt. The only difference is the aircraft bolt comes comes with paperwork certifying it for aviation use and offering legal indemnity against defects. In other words you pay $2 for the aircraft bolt and $798 “insurance” against defects.
The ambient noise in a very quiet office is >40dB. The noise levels in a normal office frequently exceed 65dB.
My 8yo AMD 4000+ machine (Antec Sonata case and a quiet modular PSU) can only be heard by placing your ear directly against the case. Since the case in under the desk this is a moot argument anyway.
Only pretentious wankers (~90+% of Apple users) put a workstation on top of the desk.
Edited 2013-12-20 04:13 UTC
You are incorrect and talking about a subject that’s clearly outside of your personal experience. I’ve had the privilege of working with brilliant scientists from NASA’s JPL, all of whom made Macs their computer of choice, with all carrying MacBooks on the road and many working on Mac Pros in their offices.
I guess you’re going to tell me that the Caedium Professional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, with has a $750/month license fee and runs on the Mac Pro, isn’t used by professionals? And you think that AutoCAD, which recommends a Mac Pro 5,1 or later, is a hobbyist product?
GRAPHISOFT’s Akos Pfemeter, Director of Global Marketing said “Obviously with the great dynamic scaling of ArchiCAD 17 we will very much benefit from the 12 powerful cores of the brand new Mac Pro.†He went on to say that ArchiCAD “will also benefit from the advanced OpenGL technologies that the powerful twin 4K graphics cards provide, allowing 3D models within ArchiCAD 17 to just fly.â€
You’re arguing against a statement that I never made (that ECC RAM was used for performance). ECC RAM exacts a performance toll of about 2-3%. It’s used anywhere that important work is being done, whether it’s a 24/7 server or an engineering workstation that has to be rock-solid-stable.
As to your comment about workstation graphic cards, you need to read more. Tom’s Hardware ran a Maya-based benchmark that had the W9000 at 91 frames per second while the consumer HD 7990 was running at 15 frames per second. Lightwave benchmarks showed similar results.
That’s a fabricated, incorrect assertion. These companies require workstation class cards for both performance and support reasons. They don’t want to try to support some flaky, overclocked, third-party gamer graphics card with drivers that were developed around maximizing frame rates in video games.
So, around 1993, someone in a government office justified cost-cutting illogically (as if there had ever been a case where a bridge collapsed because the wrong graphics card was used). It’s got nothing to do with liability; they took away his workstation because the work he was doing wasn’t very demanding.
I build satellites for a living and I’ll set you straight.
Your $2 bolt at the hardware store has probably not been built in an ISO 9001 or AS 9100 facility. The manufacturing plant probably did not have a NADCAP accreditation for its testing facilities and there weren’t tests made on bolts from each lot. It’s not made of titanium, like the majority of the roughly half million structural bolts in a Boeing 787. It hasn’t been been magnetically inspected (there are two different head markings for aerospace bolts that have been).
The bolts used in the aerospace industry have paperwork so that there is traceability. That way, if one does fail, we can know every place that we used bolts from that manufacturing lot. No bolt manufacturer is “insuring” anything with paperwork. I have thousands of aerospace bolts, nuts, and washers in my personal workshop for which the paperwork was lost and, as a result, the bolts had to be scrapped. You might want to take a look at those under magnification before you tell me that they are the same as what you buy at an auto parts store.
Yes. And the ambient noise results from the sum of all of the noise, including computers.
Don’t be a dick. People who don’t want their computer acting like a Hoover vacuum cleaner and sucking up every bit of dust that gets kicked around at floor level put their computers on top of their desks. I don’t have room for my Mac Pro on top of my desk, so the Mac Pro gets much more dusty inside than do my desktop-mounted NAS or RAID enclosures. And I have to clean it at least annually with compressed air.
If you want to talk about pretentious, look at all of the Windows PCs with that have see-through windows, LED lights, UV activated glowing cables, and cases that look like something from bad sci-fi movies. Don’t expect to see a lot of Alienware computers at the Museum of Modern Art. But you can see quite a few Apple products there.
You are incorrect and talking about a subject that’s clearly outside of your personal experience. I’ve had the privilege of working with brilliant scientists from NASA’s JPL, all of whom made Macs their computer of choice, with all carrying MacBooks on the road and many working on Mac Pros in their offices.
… you say that like there isn’t a windows version… that costs half that due to the larger audience… and that the software in fact didn’t originate on windows… and I’m familiar with it because it’s written in Delphi, which is why the Mac version has been out for all of what? Two years ever since XE2 added fireMonkey?
Funny that, since the PC recommended is a 3ghz P4 and 4 gigs of RAM… and it originated on PC…
As opposed to any other 4k capable graphics rig of the past two years…
Oddly that’s often more of a driver issue. You bench games on workstation cards the numbers are flipped — people with workstation cards who want to game often install drivers for the nearest equivalent desktop card via editing the .inf files to get around that… and it works the other direction.
Kind of the same thing as tricking desktop drivers to run on the various ATI mobile chips. (ATI was notorious middle of the last decade for drivers that were crippled one way or the other)
… and you hit it on the head, it’s usually more of a driver issue. Sometimes the desktop cards are MORE reliable too, since they usually have more robust *SHOCK* cooling. (seriously, some of the workstation cards are outright SHAMEFUL on that)
Or you have a shelf sticking out the side of the desk that’s a foot off the floor… like the one that came with my el-cheapo S-Mart particle board computer desk that I’ve been using for a decade. With a mid-tower the top ends up 2″ lower than the side of the desk.
Though I get where you are coming from with that — what with standard cases moving the PSU (and it’s intake fan) to the bottom. Getting it up off the floor a foot or more can be the difference between needing to blow it out once a year, and going in there after three months to pull out tribble-sized dust bunnies.
No, just refuting your claim that no one would use a Mac Pro for that kind of work.
I quoted “recommended” for the Mac and I believe you quoted “minimum” for the PC.
He’s not just talking about resolution — he’s also talking about speed. And a 12 core Mac Pro is powerful-fast system.
The Mac Pro is aimed at the workstation market, so that’s why it has the workstation GPUs. And companies are very wary of violating licensing terms by trying to hack files to install unlicensed drivers with consumer video cards.
It really gets down to a perspective on cost. Where I work, we have RF cables that cost more than a new Mac Pro does. They’d be nuts to try to pinch pennies on a computer that an engineer would be using for at least a couple of years. You don’t want someone idled because a software upgrade leaves their gamer-card+workstation-driver system unable to run some business-critical package.
Thank you. That was a polite response and I really appreciate it. I’ve reached the point where I hesitate to even discuss computers online because it so often turns into personal attacks. Glad we could both dial it back from there.
Hackintosh doesn’t equal pirated OS. I don’t care what Apple license says, laws of the country take precedence over it.
I’m not going to spend a few grand on a non expandable mac mini pro, no thanks, I’ll stick to my hackintosh, though it would be nice if someone figured out how to get iTunes HD Video working on the Ivy Bridge Chipsets…
It’s not a “mac mini pro.” It’s a Mac Pro. Grow up.
When you can daisy-chain 36 drives on a 20GB/s interface, and install up to 64GB of RAM, how is it not expandable?
As Apple’s web page says, “In creating a pro computer for the future, we wanted to provide an enormous amount of expansion — without being limited to the space inside the enclosure. Designed with built-in Thunderbolt 2, USB 3, Gigabit Ethernet, and HDMI 1.4 ports, Mac Pro sets a new standard in flexible, high-performance expansion. It’s our most expandable Mac yet.”
Most people who need Mac Pros use RAID for mass storage. I’ve got a 5x3TB RAID-6 NAS and a 4x2TB RAID 10 eSATA RAID on my Mac Pro. Apple got it right; give the Mac Pro buyer the ability to expand externally, not internally.
Sounds like marketing funny talk for, “You can’t fit anything inside this case.”
LOL.
Sounds like you’re in the market for a home computer, not a workstation.
People who use workstation-class machines have been expanding them externally for years. I have an SSD and a single rotating hard drive inside my older generation Mac Pro, leaving me with three empty drive bays. External to it are my RAID boxes (eSATA and gigabit NAS).
Did you actually think that Apple’s engineers showed up with the Mac Pro one day and the horrified marketing department tried to think of “funny talk” to explain away the lack of internal expansion space? You realize that they do talk ahead of time, don’t you — that the design process is a collaborative effort between marketing and engineering?
Edited 2013-12-19 20:33 UTC
It looks awesome, until you add storage in an expensive ugly box and you crowd your desktop with pretty and ugly boxes and weave it with data and power cables.
This is a modern age workstation like a Sun or an Apollo. You are not meant to have _one_. You are meant to buy one for each user of a high-profile team sharing an expensive server and working together making movies or CAD.
The nice thing compared to a Sun or an Apollo is that it may be cheaper, and it is a Macintosh. It has loads of nicely finished, affordable commercial software, and it will coexist just great in the same network with users using more mundane computers like all-in-one Macintosh slabs or Mac Minis. Oh, and it looks *awesome* (if you do without external hardware).
I think they want you to buy something like this: http://www.drobo.com
Both are power users, but different types of users, uses, values, and budgets. I do both so I see some clear differences between the two camps:
Programmers get a new machine every few years, after they’ve eeked every bit of performance out of their existing rig. Paid for by the dev team so they shop for best possible value. It’s usually huge, loud, and grey plastic. It’s primary job is to run big monitors and load/compile applications or edit web code (just text). They often times need to run multiple OS’s for testing, and will have old versions of OS’s ghosted or old machines around as test subjects. They are writing software, which is in effect automating a business process or making a game. They work in 10 apps at once chronically multitasking, and the only time they are waiting for their machine is when switching apps or on big compile jobs. Programmers usually have an IT department available, and are qualified enough to run the IT department themselves.
Producers get a new machine when they land a good client/project. The client is often billed for the purchase, or the costs rolled in to the job. They do very little to adjust the machine’s configuration once it’s working with their production workflow. Almost no producers try new hardware tweeks or software updates on their production box. This box lives in a “studio” not a cubicle, so how it looks, sounds, and presents itself is more important than a box under a desk. There is no need to ‘test’ the media on other boxes, just lots of processor-intensive transcoding. There is little need for multiple OS’s. Producing media is different than writing software because it’s an artistic, creative process first, technical second. Therefore most producers have a minimal, focused desktop that stays full screen on their main production environment. They don’t usually need 12 tabs open and 15 sticky notes and 9 passwords. They are not jumping into 4 google hangouts a day. They need to focus on the material. Many producers don’t have an IT department and are forced to manage their machine themselves. Many do not have IT experience to fall back on.
Do you see how both of these users are power users and need a strong machine to excel at their tasks? But they are not the same. Apple’s pro machines target the producers far more than programmers. Video, HD video, 4k video, music, HD audio, animation – you have a paying client, you need to deliver media in certain formats, and you need to have a quiet powerful editing station with zero configuration and no IT help. That’s the compelling argument for going mac, and many producers worldwide agree with me.
Programmers who are mobile are often times running a macbook or mac air (at least in the US), since they can run full linux, windows, and OSX on 1 thin light slab with all day battery life. But I almost never see a hard-coder on apple desktops.
They say total market share for apple in the US is 10-15%, but in real-world analysis I’ve seen about 50% over the last 5 years. I’m mobile though. I don’t care about that number but I also don’t trust it. Platform wars are kinda stupid since I have OSX and Windows running on the same machine I’m typing on right now.
(but from which side do i type?!?)
Edited 2013-12-19 14:30 UTC
Agree with virtually everything you said about how programmers work. I’m a programmer, my workflow is almost exactly as you describe it, and I use a 11″ Macbook Air as my main machine. I plug it into a 27″ 2560×1440 monitor at work (a catleap off of ebay – best $300 I ever spent) and I just go to town…
Anyway, Apple’s desktop machine offer me pretty much nothing I don’t already get out of this setup. I might get a wee bit more performance (that I really don’t need), but I would lose the portability – being able to pop the little thing out and work anywhere is a big deal to me… And the Intel GPU really is good enough for anything outside of gaming, even then I can play a bit of Torchlight 2 or other less demanding games quite comfortably.
The Mac Pro? I can’t see why any programmer would even consider it. Maybe game programmers, but that’s about it. Its a graphics workstation, and it is priced in a way so that it only looks good compared to other graphics workstations. Its all about the GPUs – and programmers generally don’t much care about those.
Edited 2013-12-19 14:48 UTC
Cool. I actually do both (program and produce) on a maxed out core 2 duo macbook pro, also plugged into an HD monitor.
I agree if you don’t work with media you will not be shopping for this mac pro. I’m going to keep developing on my macbook but I think I want a primary audio rig and still might no mini. This protube would be a hell of a machine for the next 3-4 years though. I could also get 3 mini’s at that price, or a mini and an another laptop.
It’s silly (and like clockwork) to say you can build something “faster” than Apple’s latest for less money. Anyone can buy parts or look at websites. Apple builds complete machines that run out of the box, often times without a single problem, for several years, with components that are almost always 100% compatible. They are in no way competing with BYO’s and hackintosh.
Plus your “faster” box will also more than likely lose to the Apple box in every spec past the top 3 of CPU speed, drive speed, and RAM speed. Most nerds stop there with their specs comparison. They never want to get all the way down to Total Cost of Ownership because they would have to value their own time so low as to compete with Apple boxes. BYO’s risk all sorts of stability in the name of using a slightly faster component and then they spend the time fixing it. I make too much per hour to be fixing my computer.
In the world of legal mac’s – I see most often businesses near to me – using iMacs.
But if you need more cores or dual graphics cards, you’ll have to go the Mac Pro.
Most businesses I know are not willing to do anything except buy from apple if they need a mac. They aren’t going to upgrade a 2009 mac pro from ebay, they aren’t going to build a hackintosh. And – they aren’t going to buy a windows machine if they are planning on buying a Mac. Oh don’t get me wrong, the vast majority of shops are windows shops, but if you have a mac need as defined by believing they had the need in the past, and have mac’s today, for the most part they are getting a mac as their next machine too.
So, the question really becomes, upgrade today or wait.
The answer is wait. I don’t understand why people don’t bring up the real point about these machines – they aren’t that much faster.
They aren’t that much faster because they are no longer dual processor.
With Xeon if you up the core count, you lower the single core max speed.
That may be fine for servers – but this is a workstation. Workstation users have various workloads – not a really highly defined single workload. So upping the cores – but having to sacrifice single core speed – sucks.
In the past you could get past that suckitude, by getting two 6-core xeons. (OK, now I’m being inconsistent, because Apple’s official options were slow, but you could buy faster dual 6-core xeon’s). Then you had a higher single core speed – and overall 12 cores as well.
Maybe in the future you’ll have some jobs that require dual gpu’s, but anyway that’s not really a concern for me at this time.
Anyway I already have 8-cores, and spending $7,000 bucks to get a slight performance increase with a 12 core machine – but actually doing worse on some workloads – , is a no-go.
And for a business that did purchase an Apple spec’d 12-core westmere at 2.66ghz, what are they getting with a 12-core 2.7ghz latest generation? Worth 7,000? Not for most businesses is my guess. If you want dual GPU’s, just upgrade the GPU’s in your existing mac pro.
Edited 2013-12-19 16:06 UTC
Say you bought a 2010 Mac Pro, with 2 6-core Xeon’s rated at 2.66ghz.
So now, lets say in January you go shopping, it’s 2014 – your high end mac pro option is now a single processor, but 12-core Xeon with a 2.7ghz clock speed.
That’s an upgrade? Not by much, let me tell you. The next gen. Xeon might be more efficient at the same clock, for some tasks – but it’s nothing to write home about.
I’m not as impressed by the other upgrades, because I could do them already. I already have SSD and fast graphics card. Sure Apple is right in doing them – but real world, is this enticing me to upgrade my mac pro?
For some, who buy default options from Apple, that faster SSD is going to help, that dual GPU will be nice – but if you were already doing some of that – wow is it hard to justify upgrading.
I’m surprised at you all for missing the obvious – the processor is in some cases a downgrade – for some workloads, and in some cases, barely better. 3-4 years later!
Something that would have been a clear upgrade would be 24 cores. At least if you can take advantage of the core count, that would have been indisputably been faster.
Edited 2013-12-19 20:46 UTC
I think going single socket was a bit of a mistake from Apple’s part.
I wonder if the design scales to a dual socket offering, using a larger cylinder/heatsink combo?
Since apparently some of you think this information is inaccurate (really?) , care to elaborate? Lets quote from Tom’s Hardware :
“there were probably some bummed-out professionals, then, when a Geekbench result was recently uploaded to Primate Labs’ online browser showing that 12-core Xeon E5 around nine percent faster than last generation’s dual six-core Mac Pro, based on Westmere-EP.”
This is the comparison that matters to most – since most Mac purchasers are only going to buy stock options – and not upgrade the CPU on their own.
But since some of you – being special and better than the typical mac market – probably would crack open a box and change a CPU – last generations machine, you had the option, with last generation, to upgrade to dual 3.33ghz Westmeres.
This generation – is single processor, no way around that, so you deal with the thermal issues of 12-cores – and are stuck at 2.7ghz.
Now, Tom’s does talk about compiler options that will help – except this is the Mac world. Good luck hoping your vendor used those compiler options. Why my G4 optimized versions of software outran my G5 for years – it’s hit and miss on hoping a vendor optimizes for new cpu architecture.
Oh I wish we could just get dual or quad 6-core, running at 3.5ghz.
Nah, I wouldn’t buy it, I don’t need it, but that’s what I want to dream about – not a cylindrical computer.
Not that I don’t respect the design, it’s pretty.
Anyone who will lay down thousands of dollars for a machine that they could build themselves for a fraction of that cost is nuts. I don’t care what operating system the thing runs, it isn’t worth it! Apple is limping along on its laurels and laboring under the misconception that people will pay top dollar for a bullet shaped machine that has that all-important apple logo emblazoned on the side. While it’s true that some gullible people will, those who have common sense and good judgment will look elsewhere.
Assuming that you’re working for free.
After you add in your own time for assembly, testing, diagnostics, replacing that one annoying bad stick of RAM that I always get in a new build, then it isn’t such a great deal.
And in the future if a business machine from HP, Dell or Apple gets a problem, you get it fixed. None of this swapping parts around, switching monitors and GPUs to see which one is bad
Oh, and I see you said “fraction of the cost” which leads me to believe that you wouldn’t actually use the equivalent parts. Well, ECC does make a difference. Non-ECC gets a couple of bit errors per week, per GB. Depends on altitude. Now most of the time you get lucky and it doesn’t hit anything important. But when you care about your results, you care about ECC.
Edited 2013-12-20 10:01 UTC
Was it every more easy to make money with that website?
Taking a short quote (copy-paste) , then writing a comment of 15 words (which was more a reflex, without even thinking too much about it). That’s it, article produced.
I feel like business plan is: giving a headline, and let the users write and create content, and I make the money.
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“This thing is so damn awesome. I don’t need it, but I still want one.”, I am going through same emotions.
I have no reason/s to justify the purchase of the new mac pro, but the form factor probably is reason enough (the specifications are nice too).
Edited 2013-12-23 04:09 UTC