I’m not a developer, but I am a pro user. While my 5K iMac is plenty of machine for me, I would like to have the option of a viable Mac Pro when it’s time to replace this computer down the road.
Like Williams, I really just want a tower I can plug into a display. Here’s what I’d like that product to include:
On the Inside
I don’t expect Apple to match what the Cheese Grater offered in terms of expandability ever again. However, I would like to see some expansion slots:
Four M.2 slots for additional SSDs. There are a growing number of third-parties offering these parts today, so it’s not like this would be some custom thing for the Mac Pro.
Plenty of RAM slots. The Trash Can got this right, so I expect the new Mac Pro to do so as well.
Room for a second GPU. The whole dual workstation GPU thing didn’t work in 2013, and still doesn’t make much sense. Apple should put a solid GPU in by default and have a slot open for those who need more. This slot should double as a regular expansion bay for things like capture cards. I think one slot would be fine for most people; two would be awesome.
Going back to a multi-processor setup (coupled with ECC RAM) is more than welcome. Gimme those cores, Apple.
As far as I/O, there’s no doubt that this machine should be stuffed full of Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports. As Williams wrote in his piece:
I’d hope that without the space constraints of a laptop, every port has the same sort of bus speed. I don’t want to have to think about the upper-left USB-C port being faster than the lower-right one.
In addition Thunderbolt 3, I would like to see dual Ethernet jacks, as well as both audio in and out. The Trash Can only has audio out, limiting its usefulness in certain recording setups.
It’d be cool to have a “legacy” USB A port or two, but by the time it actually ships, USB A may really be on the way out.1
On the Outside
Even if a new Mac Pro had everything I’ve listed and more, I still bet the machine could be smaller than the Cheese Graters. A modern Mac Pro should be able to live on or under a desk. The Cheese Graters were too big and heavy to go anywhere but the floor, while the 2013 Mac Pro begged to be behind a display somewhere. Flexibility here is key. If the new Apple display has a built-in cable, it should be long enough to reach the floor.
As far as the actual design, I’m not picky. If it’s heavy, it should have a handle. If it’s big, there should be ports on the front and back. It should run quietly, even under load.
I’ll take it in any color, as long as it’s black.
The Balance
The key to a successful Mac Pro is balance. It should support what pros are using today, while also being equipped for tomorrow. It should offer expansion, but probably not to the extent that it supports everything the Cheese Grater did, like dual SuperDrives and 3.5" hard drives. Apple will need to work out how to use the limited number of PCI lanes at its disposal, something I didn’t do in this post.
Whatever they do will involve change. Some things should be left behind, but the Trash Can took that too far.
I’d like to see it, but out of my entire list, I feel the most unsure about this item. ↩︎
Since 2004, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has been at Saturn, studying the gas giant and its many moons. That work is coming to an end this month:
On Wednesday, April 26, the spacecraft will make the first in a series of dives through the 1,500-mile-wide (2,400-kilometer) gap between Saturn and its rings as part of the mission’s grand finale.
“No spacecraft has ever gone through the unique region that we’ll attempt to boldly cross 22 times,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “What we learn from Cassini’s daring final orbits will further our understanding of how giant planets, and planetary systems everywhere, form and evolve. This is truly discovery in action to the very end.”
After these daring maneuvers, Cassini will meet its end:
In 2010, NASA decided to end the mission with a purposeful plunge into Saturn this year in order to protect and preserve the planet’s moons for future exploration – especially the potentially habitable Enceladus.
As we learned this week, the 2013 trash can Mac Pro is going to … well … the trash can. Apple has promised a new “modular” Mac Pro for sometime after 2017.
In the light of this news, I thought it would be interesting to look back a model, to the “cheese grater” Mac Pros Apple sold from 2006 until 2013. It was a flexible, expandable, powerful desktop computer.
The Mac Pro was introduced at the tail-end of the Mac’s transition to Intel chips back in 2006. It was designed to replace the Power Mac G5, which had been serving pros for several years.
The Mac Pro used the same external case,1 complete with the cheese grater look on the front and back, but the inside was all new, as Phil Schiller spoke about at WWDC 2006:
The new desktop used Intel’s “Woodcrest” Xeon chips, in speeds up to 3.0 GHz, a number that eluded Apple and IBM in the PowerPC days. Schiller praised the Xeons for being far more efficient than the G5. The Mac Pro offered twice the performance of the Power Mac G5 while running much cooler, and without the need of the kilowatt power supply in the quad-core G5.
This efficiency allowed Apple to drastically redesign the interior of the Mac Pro:
The Mac Pro came with 4 hard drive carriers. A user just had to screw a hard drive to the carrier and slide it into place for the system to see it. For those who wanted it, a second optical drive could be installed as well.
Like the G5, it came with 8 RAM slots and was upgraded to a total of four PCI Express slots as well.
When the Mac Pro first went on sale, Apple offered a single SKU for $2,499:
2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-core Xeon
1 GB RAM
250 GB Hard Drive
NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT GPU
16X SuperDrive
The Mac Pro could be configured in countless ways on Apple’s online store, of course, with faster (or slower) Xeons, more RAM and storage, a better card, AirPort and Bluetooth cards and a second SuperDrive.
The 8-Core Mac Pro
All of the original Mac Pros were quad-core machines, but in April 2007, Apple launched a new high-end model at $3,997.
This Mac Pro used Intel’s “Clovertown” Xeons and ran at 3.0 Ghz.
The Good Years
The Mac Pro saw updates in January 2008, then again in March 2009 and July 2010. With each revision, the tower became more powerful, moving from “Harpertown” chips in 2008 to “Bloomfield” and “Gainestown” in 2009. By the time 2010 rolled around, Apple was offering three SKUs in its Good/Better/Best arrangement. These machines used “Bloomfield,” “Gulftown” and “Westmere” Xeons, respectively.
The Early 2008 Mac Pro was the first to officially support 32 GB RAM, even though users were having luck with that much memory with older machines.
The Early 2009 Mac Pro brought with it Intel’s Nehalem architecture. While the clock speeds don’t show it, these towers were noticeably faster, especially for multi-threaded applications. They also supported higher RAM ceilings than earlier models, as the quad-core machines could address a whopping 128 GB of memory.
The Mid 2010 model is the oldest Mac Pro supported by macOS Sierra. Apple introduced a $4,999 12-core model for the first time in this generation, as well as a build-to-order option for a SSD.
Mac Pro Server
The Mid 2010 Mac Pro had a sibling: the Mac Pro Server. Announced in November 2010 as a semi-replacement for the outgoing Xserve, this tower came with a license for Mac OS X Server, a 2.8GHz quad-core processor, 8GB of RAM and two 1 TB hard drives. Apple would also ship a version of the Mid 2012 Mac Pro with the Server designation.
The Decline
2011 marked the first time that Apple “missed” its schedule for Mac Pro updates, and users noticed. Here’s Marco Arment in 2011, responding to a report that Apple was questioning the need for a Mac Pro:
The Mac Pro was a tough sell to anyone but the most demanding users even in 2008. Today, even fewer buyers can justify it and it’s a worse deal relative to the rest of the Mac line. The Xeon E5 isn’t going to help either problem.
I bet we’ll see a minor Mac Pro update to use the E5 CPUs whenever they’re available (probably within the next few months). But it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the last Mac Pro. It had a great run, but the tower is over.
Around this time, the iMac was making great strides, as I wrote in May of the same year:
The Mac Pro used to be the obvious choice for anyone who needed power or expandability. It really was a no brainer. If you need brawn, Apple’s only tower was the only choice.
Clearly, the first factor has become less of a differentiator as iMacs have become increasingly powerful. There are very few things that an iMac can’t do smoothly at this point. While some still need all 12 cores that the muscular Mac Pro offers, the Sandy Bridge chipset in Apple’s all-in-one is enough horsepower for just about everyone. People that just barely needed a Mac Pro for the power would be fine getting an iMac now. The new desktop can even support two displays out, something that only the Mac Pro could boast until this week.
The new Mac Pros released at WWDC 2012 represent a speed bump, plain and simple. The new Mac Pros use the same, highly-upgradable case design, the same graphics cards, and even the same version of USB as the last iteration. And while the Macworld Lab’s test results show the new Mac Pros to be considerably faster than those systems the new Mac Pros replace, it is hard to swallow new “pro” systems that lack Apple’s fastest connection, Thunderbolt, released on MacBook Pros 16 months ago, and USB 3.0 support that arrived on the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.
Although we didn’t have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at today’s event, don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for later next year. We also updated the current model today.
That “really great” machine is the one the company just apologized for and then said it was replacing.
Time really is a flat circle.
I sometimes wonder what a Mac Pro would have looked like if the G5 didn’t need so much air flowing through it. I guess we’ll find out. ↩︎
As a past Power Mac customer I am excited about Apple’s future “modular Mac,” but I have questions about what modular means to Apple and its customers.
My guess is that at least some of these questions are going to have disappointing answers if the Power Mac is your benchmark, but I’m trying to keep an open mind here.
One of my favorite indie Mac development studios is celebrating twenty years in the business: Here’s Cabel Sasser:
No, your eyes do not deceive you. Some of you may not know that we founded our company in 1997, but it’s true. We’re older than Facebook, older than Twitter, older than Google, and somehow still kickin’.
Every year is a little different, and last year was for sure — a little bit quieter on the software front (at least publicly), and a whole lot louder on the launch-of-a-major-multi-platform-video-game front.
Yes, it’s time: here’s a look back at 2016, and look forward to 2017.
Systems with a Mac Pro RAID Card or Xserve RAID Card may start up to a blinking question mark, or RAID volumes may not mount. RAID Utility may show the volumes, RAID sets, and disks are all viable or good.
An Xserve configured with an SSD and Mac OS X Server installed on the SSD may start up but the RAID volume(s) configured on the RAID Card may not mount.
These symptoms may occur if the LUN map has been damaged and needs to be re-created.
That the trash can Mac Pro design was a mistake was widely accepted in the Mac community from pretty early on. I suspect it sold well in the early days because there was a lot of pent-up demand for a new Pro, but Apple must have known long ago that it was a kind of a dud. There’s no shame in that; innovations are sometimes misdirected. It’s Apple’s slow response that’s disturbing.
And it’s slow in two ways. First, accepting the mistake and moving to fix it has taken about two years (I’m giving them a pass on the Pro’s first year). Second, it’ll be at least a year until the new design is ready for sale. This is a very long lead time for a mature product, especially when you’ve just admitted that your current version sucks.
From the timing of when we’ll see these products — the iMacs later this year and the Mac Pro next year — I’m inferring that the iMacs have been under design for a while, but may have been taken back for component tweaking and upgrades, while this new Mac Pro has been under internal argument and the group that feels the product needs to exist has finally won, so design is now starting in earnest.
I can buy into this line of thinking. It’s worrisome that Apple didn’t jump on the new Mac Pro train sooner, but I’ll take it late over never.
Apple comes clean on what’s going on with the Mac Pro, but Federico still isn’t buying one. Myke gets excited about new Samsung phones and I feel old when thinking about Twitter.
This is a fun one. WHO KNEW we’d be talking about a new Mac Pro today!?
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There’s no reason to write an intro to this outlining all the problems with the Late 2013 Mac Pro, so let’s get right to it: Apple is working to replace it with an all-new Mac Pro, based on a modular design, that will pair with a new, Apple-branded, built-for-pros external display. It’s not going to ship this year, but in the meantime, Apple plans on shipping configurations of the iMac better geared to the pro market.1
HOT DAMN.
Apple invited a small handful of writers to its Apple’s Product Realization Lab for the Mac in Cupertino for a meeting.
John Gruber recounts how Phil Schiller opened things:
With regards to the Mac Pro, we are in the process of what we call “completely rethinking the Mac Pro”. We’re working on it. We have a team working hard on it right now, and we want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we’re committed to making it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system, designed for our demanding pro customers.
For a while, I’ve been speculating on Connected that the “current” Mac Pro’s design has backed Apple into a corner. That seems to be the case, as Matthew Panzarino writes:
Federighi is careful to note that, while Apple set out do so something that was new and different with the Mac Pro, “we didn’t start with a shape and say, ‘well, here’s the fastest machine we can put in that box.’ We actually started with a target for performance and came up with what I think was a very clever design of that thermal core and thermal architecture to accommodate what we thought was the right power architecture.”
“What I think we didn’t appreciate completely at the time was how we had so tailor designed that specific vision at the time that in the future we would find ourselves a bit boxed in to a circular shape,” he says.
“We were boxed by a circle,” he jokes.
While all of the hardware talk is super exciting,2 the way Apple went about it is fascinating.
Apple has done small, hands-on meetings like this. Just think of the iPhone 4 or the Mountain Lion press events. What’s new, however, is the honesty. The company should have done this a while ago, but it’s better late than never.
We also learned some new numbers:
80% of Macs sold are notebooks; 20% are desktops
30% of Mac users open a “pro app” at least once a week
Most pro users use notebooks
The Mac Pro accounts for a single-digit percentage of desktop sales
That last one is eye-opening. Is it so low because the Mac Pro sucks? Maybe, but I don’t see it eclipsing the iMac, no matter how good this new machine is. Apple’s Mac team is investing in a new Mac Pro because it wants to, not because a bean counter is making them.
The numbers also show just how much the iMac has taken on over the years. Federighi, via Daring Fireball:
That is a pretty incredible evolution that we’ve seen over the last decade. The original iMac, you never would’ve thought as remotely touching pro uses. And now you look at today’s 5K iMac, top configs, it’s incredibly powerful, and a huge fraction of what would’ve traditionally — whether it’s audio editing, video editing, graphics, arts and so forth — that would’ve previously absolutely required the Mac Pros of old, are being well-addressed by iMac. But there’s still even further we can take iMac as a high performance, pro system, and we think that form factor can address even more of the pro market.
All in all, I think Apple is doing the right thing. It took too long to get to this point, but the company has shown that it is listening to its customers and understands that they’ve been let down by the current Mac Pro. There’s still more waiting in the future, but at least there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
If you really need a Mac Pro between now and then, the 2013 is still for sale. Apple has moved the upper SKUs down in price. You’ll still getting a 2013 machine, but you’ll get more of it for the same amount of money. ↩︎
I will be very tempted to upgrade from the iMac when this comes out. Sigh. ↩︎
