As we get closer Mac Pro - peoples thoughts

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

….plus the 4K cinema displays if those come out.

Hah. THAT is the interesting bit. Dead silence on 4K displays. But releasing a box they boast about being able to drive 3 4K displays, and not have any 4K displays to drive, is just lunacy… so…

Mike

 

[John Sellars]

BIGGEST problem I see with the new Mac Pro - I/O limited to 20Gbs. How about someone tap into the MB, drill a hole in the case, and give us external PCIe (80GBs+) !

 

[L. Langer]

Hah. THAT is the interesting bit. Dead silence on 4K displays. But releasing a box they boast about being able to drive 3 4K displays, and not have any 4K displays to drive, is just lunacy… so…

Mike

Lots of companies will be shipping 4K monitors with Thunderbolt 2 next year, so Apple may stay out of the game altogether though there is an LG panel - they made the one in the current Thunderbolt display - that just entered production that would be the perfect one for a new Thunderbolt Cinema Display (4K DCI resolution, IPS, and 10-bit color).

 

[Robert Ruffo New]

I never thought I would ever see the day I would replace my tower with a laptop. Well, as I waited for the new MacPro, I got the MacBook Pro Retina as a stop-gap, and WOW was I surprised. I can only guess that the new MacPro will blow the doors off my expectations again. I will have NO hesitation to click on the BUY button when that day comes.

I look at it this way - I want to spend as little time as possible looking at progress bars. If one does complex post, get whatever is fastest. A laptop for complex grades, VFX and so on would be rather insane - I feel all our time on earth is worth much more than that.

 

[Robert Ruffo New]

i can't even imagine having a xeon with no pci slots...like what the hell do you do to add ports as your machine is rapidly out of date? yes i can go make everything live externally in a rat nest of cords...but as an apple fan boy the only machine that isn't soldered together was the mac pro, and now that its a soldered, it leaves it an island to itself...IE like their entire product line. I am not down with this concept, no matter how much i like the OS and stability... and i don't see how people can get down with this idea...


sure its unreleased now and has super good specs, but what about when they don't release the next one for 5 long years AGAIN, and ur shiny new toy is unexpandable and can't even have faster ports added to it with a pci card... it just seems short sighted to buy a non upgradable "workstation". one that you know going into it is soldered like hell, and you can't add new ports ever

I must say I agree.

 

[Bob Gundu]

I look at it this way - I want to spend as little time as possible looking at progress bars. If one does complex post, get whatever is fastest. A laptop for complex grades, VFX and so on would be rather insane - I feel all our time on earth is worth much more than that.

I'm OK showing up to the party in a Classic gull winged Mercedes-Benz 300SL instead of the Formula 1 car.

 

[Robert Ruffo New]

I'm OK showing up to the party in a Classic gull winged Mercedes-Benz 300SL instead of the Formula 1 car.

That is not a relevant/valid comparison. Computer gear is not about looks and style. You're saying you feel it's OK to wait hours while complex things render because your MacBook is so stylish looking?

 

[Alan Peterson]

If Adobe, BlackMagic, FCPX, etc. all provide robust OpenCL support for the dual GPUs and allow for high-quality real-time playback without a Red Rocket, that will make it a pretty attractive post machine for a small operation. It sounds like all the major players are working to make this happen, but i'd have to see some price and performance comparisons between the upcoming Mac Pro and previous generations with upgraded GPUs/Red Rockets before considering a purchase.

 

[Bob Gundu]

That is not a relevant/valid comparison. Computer gear is not about looks and style. You're saying you feel it's OK to wait hours while complex things render because your MacBook is so stylish looking?

I really don't like participating in the whole Mac/PC debate. I have never owned anything other than a Mac. I have always been aware of the discrepancies with performance of the two systems, but I feel if it's at least 75% of the best performance from a PC, I'm totally cool with that. For me, my computer, which I use on a daily basis, has to offer me more than speed, and the OSX environment wins hands down. In the end, I have never felt like I was wasting any time or providing a sub par product due to me choosing a Mac over a PC. Indeed it's a personal choice and the two systems in my opinion are more similar than they've ever been in history. The only difference is that I'm spending time with the family during renders, while you're doing it after they're done. :thumbsup:

 

[jimhare]

I had damned it out of hand due to the inability to host Rocket without kludgey external boxes.

You might be living in the past here. My guess are there will be some very elegant solutions that aren't kludgey at all. I think a lot of the kludge came from horrible interfaces like eSata and even Firewire. TB will be clean, simple and fast. Also let's me decide whether I want 2 slots or 12, 4 drives or 64.

Puts the control back in my hands, where it belongs.

I'm a bit sick of my huge tower. Breaking it up into power centers will be really cool.

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

x1 native PCI-e x16 ipass cable and x4 TB2 and x4 usb3 would have been preferable, on the upcoming Mac Pro. So we could use existing expansion chassis.

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

You might be living in the past here. My guess are there will be some very elegant solutions that aren't kludgey at all. I think a lot of the kludge came from horrible interfaces like eSata and even Firewire. TB will be clean, simple and fast. Also let's me decide whether I want 2 slots or 12, 4 drives or 64.

Puts the control back in my hands, where it belongs.

I'm a bit sick of my huge tower. Breaking it up into power centers will be really cool.

First, TB is a great interface as far as it goes - but I have a deep professional distrust of consumer-grade non-locking connectors.

(I was raised on everything from Massbus to IBM Channels to SCSI; those were professional data connectors!)

Second, external expansion boxes were, are, and always will be kludgey. You're still dealing with cables snaking around, less bandwidth than an internal bus, multiple external power supplies, wall warts etc.

I take your point about flexibility, but NO internal expansion, just to allow them to have a shiny eye candy cylinder? That's not 'Pro' in my book.

I've already posted about what Apple should have done - put a bus interface in the base of their precious shiny cylinder, behind a cover, and sold a separate docking station the cylinder can just plug into, with a few slots and drive bays for those who need that expandability but don't want a mess of external boxes with power supplies and consumer-grade connectors.

Mike

 

[Michael Dalton]

i can't even imagine having a xeon with no pci slots...like what the hell do you do to add ports as your machine is rapidly out of date? yes i can go make everything live externally in a rat nest of cords...but as an apple fan boy the only machine that isn't soldered together was the mac pro, and now that its a soldered, it leaves it an island to itself...IE like their entire product line. I am not down with this concept, no matter how much i like the OS and stability... and i don't see how people can get down with this idea...


sure its unreleased now and has super good specs, but what about when they don't release the next one for 5 long years AGAIN, and ur shiny new toy is unexpandable and can't even have faster ports added to it with a pci card... it just seems short sighted to buy a non upgradable "workstation". one that you know going into it is soldered like hell, and you can't add new ports ever

A major point here. I was supper pissed off at apple for their slowness in adapting USB3.0 and TB in the Mac pro line up. I/O is a huge issue in our game, and to thing that in 5 years from now TB and USB3 will be enough is like saying now I love my firewire and USB drives. Maybe they are thinking TB2 is hear for a while. A PCI slot would have been nice or a PCi breakout box with expandable chassis.

 

[jimhare]

Good point Mike. Optionally sitting on top of a few slots would have been pretty cool.

As for locking cables, fair enough. I grew up in the SCSI days as well and it often felt more like releasing an airlock on a spaceship than mounting a drive!

But those thick and comborsome cables were a major hassle for me. I love the new breed of TB, DP and TB cables. I've used the same Display Port cable for a year or two and hasn't fallen out once.

But in my pro set up everything is generally undisturbed.

Yeah, if you're in a busy studio with a bunch of people always clawing at your gear and moving stuff around, I can see how this could be an issue.

In my personal set up it's going to be clean, flexible, gorgeous, and I'm predicting totally reliable.

Just put the entire trash can and all the extra boxes into a safe and lock the door! Then you'll have ultimate data security in one big tower!

First, TB is a great interface as far as it goes - but I have a deep professional distrust of consumer-grade non-locking connectors.

(I was raised on everything from Massbus to IBM Channels to SCSI; those were professional data connectors!)

Second, external expansion boxes were, are, and always will be kludgey. You're still dealing with cables snaking around, less bandwidth than an internal bus, multiple external power supplies, wall warts etc.

I take your point about flexibility, but NO internal expansion, just to allow them to have a shiny eye candy cylinder? That's not 'Pro' in my book.

I've already posted about what Apple should have done - put a bus interface in the base of their precious shiny cylinder, behind a cover, and sold a separate docking station the cylinder can just plug into, with a few slots and drive bays for those who need that expandability but don't want a mess of external boxes with power supplies and consumer-grade connectors.

Mike

 

[Michael Dalton]

I had damned it out of hand due to the inability to host Rocket without kludgey external boxes.

Then Red go and release an RCX with meaningful R3D acceleration using just the GPU...

And I've read rumours that the shiny dustbin will be priced 'competitively'.

So as of now, I don't know. Less negative than I was at the announcement. But I'm profoundly, deeply suspicious: you do NOT need such a weird proprietary non-standard cylindrical form factor unless your name is Seymour Cray. Goddess only knows what weird proprietary non-standard GPUs, SSD, memory etc. are going to cost.

Oh and Michael? What you really mean is that you like *OSX* - that's the rock-solid bit. A Hackintosh might indeed be the best option, for thee and me both

Mike

Mike, I have seen your hackitosh in NYC, and it looked like a project in itself. If it requires work to keep it running as new software requires a driver update, or an updated OS means you manually need to repair drivers, no thanks. By rock steady meaning it requires no re-inastling of the OS to keep it running smooth, and it does not become buggy. I'm never one to jump to new version till I read that they are good. I'm too busy to tinker. I've seen how your mind works, and know you love it, so I'll the recommendation with a grain of salt. I'd rather read your geology books and learn something new.

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

You can't tell me that the Mac OS X is stable, I've had to re-install it several times on countless official Apple Mac machines (both tower and macbook pros/airs), for both myself and clients. Typically every major update or release version has ended up requiring me to wipe one or more of my systems and re-install the OS X from scratch. How is that different from a hackintosh where at least you know what's going to have to be fixed or repaired after you update or re-install the OS. Not to mention the fact I haven't had to re-install windows on any bootcamp partition on any of my official Mac systems for years. The most stable systems I've had are mac hardware running bootcamp partitions with windows. I greatly appreciate Mac hardware, but the Mac OS is definitely not as stable as Linux or Windows at this point, and hasn't been for a long time. Hopefully that starts to change with OS Mavericks.

 

[Terry VerHaar]

You can't tell me that the Mac OS X is stable, I've had to re-install it several times on countless official Apple Mac machines (both tower and macbook pros/airs), for both myself and clients. Typically every major update or release version has ended up requiring me to wipe one or more of my systems and re-install the OS X from scratch. How is that different from a hackintosh where at least you know what's going to have to be fixed or repaired after you update or re-install the OS. Not to mention the fact I haven't had to re-install windows on any bootcamp partition on any of my official Mac systems for years. The most stable systems I've had are mac hardware running bootcamp partitions with windows. I greatly appreciate Mac hardware, but the Mac OS is definitely not as stable as Linux or Windows at this point, and hasn't been for a long time. Hopefully that starts to change with OS Mavericks.

Wow. You must be doing something wrong. lol

 

[Tim Morten]

Wow. You must be doing something wrong. lol

Yup: using a Mac!

 

[Eric Santiago]

You can't tell me that the Mac OS X is stable, I've had to re-install it several times on countless official Apple Mac machines...

then you my friend is either unlucky or....
I run a facility with over a dozen Mac Pros and three MacBook Pro's.
Aged between 2006 and present.
Adobe products and SAS, DeckLinks, CUBIX and odd/ends running smoothly for years with your basic OS upgrades.
I even get cheeky and install OS on a floating drive and move it from system to system (MacPro's) with no hiccups (well other than really odd PCI card drivers).
Oh and I also have to deal with a few Maya PC boxes running Renderman.
I have to add that so I dont sound like a fanboy
In conclusion I rarely have to re-install an OS period.
Only if I decide to keep an iteration of older versions of ProTools/Avid MC/Adobe due to dead plug-ins.
We have a few 2006 Mac Pros that are still running ultra smooth and even as BOOTCAMP with the older Windows XP and recent Windows 7 Pro.
OS X is stable, it takes so much abuse its amazing

 

[AndreasOberg]

A few thoughts
+ dual gpu very good
+ up to 12 core good. But its only running at 2.5GHz at 12 core, that is a concern.
- I wish I could have 2 12 core even tough it would be expensive
- a pity that we can't have a rocket in it. Maybe it will not be as much of a problem with thunderbolt 2 and gpu support
- I wish we could put even more graphic cards in it
+ I REALLY like the size. This means that we can easily travel the whole world and bring it with us. This makes a very big difference
+ I used PC all my life but after switching to Mac I never been as happy. It just works. I'm very good with hardware and software but there was almost ALWAYS some problems with the PCs. And time is BIG money. I don't mind using some pc stations though for vfx as extra computers.

I'm very excited about what is going to come. I do believe that this computer will open up new doors for what people can do with their computer. If this becomes more "mainstream" imagine what vfx, editing people can suddenly do. It sounds like it will be very expensive though, hope it will not be $15,000
/Andreas