The New Mac Pro is Here!!!

[Mike Halper]

Most people complaining about the price are those who are once again left out of Apple’s product map. As we had with the previous cheese grater Mac pros and iMacs, there’s a gaping hole in the product line where an all in one doesn’t fit the needs of the user and the pro workstation is just too much pro. As they have an iMac and an iMac Pro, Apple really needs a Mac and a Mac Pro. The Mac Mini is not what this Mac should be, nor is the iMac. They need a desktop system with desktop class i-Series (i5, i7, i9) CPU options and some degree of expandability. Like two PCIe slots or what constitutes one of the MPX bays in the new Mac Pro.

Yes, this would overlap and steal from Mac Pro sales on the low end, but in the long run they will sell more systems overall. If they made such a beast with a quad-core i5, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD and no GPU installed (using Intel integrated GPU on the base model), 4 x TB3/USB-C ports, HDMI port and single 10GE port... Price it at $1299 to start, they would sell like crazy. Make an 8-core i7, 512GB SSD, and 8GB Navi GPU config for $2499 and a 10-core i9 with 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD, 16GB GPU as the top configuration around $4000, it would still be a winner. And would plug that giant hole between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro.

Sometimes I think Apple focuses too much effort on the “pro” image aspect of their systems and while that’s fine and good I would also like to see them make a couple more computer offerings so they have computers for everyone and every market.

This is a lot like what I've said in the past. We don't need Xeon. Desktop class CPUs and RAM is good and they'll sell a lot more of them.

That said, the new Mac Pro is actually priced competitively within its intended market. I see them doing exactly as they did with the past cheese grater and they will price right in step with HP and Dell for their comparable Xeon workstations. I’m buying one to start, but fully intend to install aftermarket RAM and possibly SSD storage as well. Eventually I’ll probably have more than a few Mac Pros around here as I did in the past. I’m expecting they will have an update to this new Mac Pro in 18 to 24 months after it launches and that update will be significant, bringing us PCIe v4 and Thunderbolt 4. Neither of which are ready to go at the moment. PCIe v4 will [should] be supported on the next Xeon iteration, which would work timing wise with the subsequent update.

It's not what they did with the past cheese grater Mac Pros. In the past the entry Xeons were quad core starting at $2499-2999. Now the entry Xeon is 8 cores, but they're starting at $5999. Why the big jump in price? I understand they have R&D costs, but why are they trying to earn it all back in 1 year instead of 5-10 years? I really think they're going to alienate a lot of users. How many users jumped ship to Windows systems already because there were zero options from Apple? Then how many were waiting to see what the new Mac Pro would be? How many of those are now thinking to themselves "I'm not paying $6,000 for an entry level Mac Pro that is only 8 core, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and a 580X GPU, so it's time to jump shipped because Apple has priced me out of their eco-system"?

Price breakdown:

Apple custom motherboard $1000 (throwing in an extra $500 compared to other manufacturers' motherboards)
8 core Xeon W CPU $750
32GB ECC RAM $350
256GB PCIE SSD $50
580X GPU $500 (being very generous here)
PSU $400
Cooling $300
Case $400
Apple keyboard $130
Apple mouse $80
USB-C to Lightning cable $20
TOTAL = $3,980

I think those figures are pretty accurate and being pretty generous on some. The most expensive motherboard, case, non-liquid cooling, and PSU on the market. And those prices are all full retail, not taking into account Apple's pricing from Intel and other manufacturer's. The price for the entry Mac Pro should be around $4,000, building in the Apple tax into the pricing on the individual components. It's $2,000 overpriced.

I'd be happy to pay $6,000 for a Mac Pro, but not when it's that grossly overpriced.

For $6000 I can build an X299 system with 18 cores, 128GB RAM, Radeon VII GPU (or 2080TI if I wanted to use Windows), 1TB NVME SSD. Honestly, that system is probably a little closer to $5000 now, so I'd still have a chunk of money left over. And overclocking that computer it would achieve close to an 80,000 Geekbench score. That 8 core Xeon is going to get about 30,000 Geekbench. Tell me where this makes sense. I understand it's Xeon and ECC memory versus regular desktop CPUs and non-ECC memory, but 1) we do not need Xeon in our industry and 2) we do not need ECC memory in our industry, so it becomes a waste of money.

 

[Jacques Mersereau]

@ .52 sec in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blIfVu4wf-4

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Next year's model with PCIe4 sounds appealing though!

While Apple has been better with updates, I don't see major updates every year, more like a tic-toc cycle.
I think we might get processor and gpu refreshes each year, but an architecture redesign will probably come at a 2 year cycle at best.
I really don't think WWDC 2020 will usher in PCIe4 to the MacPro.

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

That said, the new Mac Pro is actually priced competitively within its intended market.

The intended market which typically spends $10-30k for a single computer and $6 for a desktop monitor ?
FCPX/Premiere users ? Photoshop ? Logic ? Illustrator ? Wages rising much in creative domain lately ?

It would be interesting to see what's in the drinking water within a spaceship Dissociation.
Management meeting must be really entertaining, I'd pay per view on the reality show.
"Yes yes this is a great idea! Let's go with that."

Photocopier keyboard feel on a flagship laptop, unnecessarily oversized touchpad > iFixit with algorythms to mind the hands, thermal design flaws across the board, throttling, notch, $1000 monitor stand, etc.etc. It's like some serious effort is continuously invested to keep the consistency of bizarre relation between genuinely useful and completely irrational, so it would be fun to see some behind the scenes footage of the management.

I'm picturing a guy with a pedicure/barber/hair stylist entourage who blows a horn after every third adjective starting with an "o" and pets a chicken with an OLED touch neckless every 36 seconds while using a "hoverboard" in the office to go to the toilet, where texting the engineering team about a fresh product feature they will implement at all cost. This is prime time stuff.

 

[Mike Halper]

X299 motherboard with Thunderbolt $500
i7-7820X (8 core, 3.6GHz, 4.3GHz boost, faster than 8 core in Mac Pro) $600
32GB RAM $250
256GB NVME SSD $80
Radeon VII $680
PSU $200
Case $100
CPU cooler $150
Additional cooling $100
Keyboard $100
Mouse $100

TOTAL = $2,860

Another example:

Z390 motherboard with Thunderbolt $300
i7-9700K (8-core, 3.6GHz, 4.9GHz boost, faster than 8 core in Mac Pro) $400
32GB RAM $200
256GB NVME SSD $80
Radeon VII $680
PSU $100
Case $80
CPU cooler $100
Additional cooling $60
Keyboard $50
Mouse $50

TOTAL = $2,100

Both systems would be slightly faster than the entry-level Mac Pro.

 

[Mike Halper]

A week ago I got in a Über with my assistant after a shoot carrying my RED camera in my hand. The driver who was driving a new Toyota Prius instantly reacted saying wow that camera looks expensive, and that he could never afford a camera like this. I told him that it cost as much as his car. The only difference is that I just made $1,800 sooting a corporate interview for 4 hours and that he will go home with $250 after a 10 hour night. Not counting gas insurance and possible tickets.
He was clearly insulted by my rather arrogant statement because he didn’t say a single word for the rest of the drive.

I don’t know why people constantly complain about the cost of technology. Its not what you put in it, but what can you get out of it.

If you love tinkering with computer parts, installing drivers for days and overclocking CPU’s.
Fine, build your own rig for cheep.

I have more money than time. I need a the most powerful computer that runs macOS and works out of the box.
I will make the cost of a fully pimped out mac pro 50 times over bore its absolute.
The only issue I have with it: does it come in black?

lol.

Some of us have other expenses to deal with. Like a house, family, kids who need braces, kids who need to go to college, etc., etc., etc. So not everyone has the ability to pay $100,000 for a camera or $50,000 for a computer just so we can work. So we need to save money where we can. We also value the money we work very hard for, whether it's a 4 hour day or a 10 hour day, and don't want to just blow that hard-earned money on paying a luxury tax that some big tech behemoth thinks is reasonable when in reality it is not.

I'm happy for you that you have more money than time, and that you're getting enough work to pay for all your toys. Just know that it's not nice to go flaunting your money and belittling people who don't have as much money as you.

 

[DJ Meyer]

I've got a hunch that Mike isn't going to buy a Mac Pro.

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

2x Radeon VII will give you around 70fps of 8k.R3D FF de-bayer speed, supstract some compute power for metal GPU decoding and you still have 60+fps.
To me the iMacPro with 2 eGPU's is better value for money.

How would that compare with 2x 2080ti? I'm just not too familiar with AMD GPUs.

 

[Brandon Veen]

I'm in the camp that the base model Mac Pro is kind of overpriced.

While it's true that for most of us there's no need for ECC RAM or Xeon processors, Apple's already established with the iMac Pro that the Xeon architecture is the one they're going to be using for their flagship desktop models. So despite the need not completely being there for most of us, it's what they've chosen and it wouldn't make sense for them to have an iMac Pro on Xeon and a Mac Pro that isn't. If they make a regular Mac tower, that's where it would make sense for them to go i5/i7/i9.

That's easy enough to forgive and understand. I can even kind of understand the MPX module's base GPU not being very good either and assuming RED's Metal support is going to be good, can somewhat forgive the lack of Nvidia Support. What's baffling, however, is the 256GB SSD.

Considering the iMac Pro's base storage starts at 1TB (2x 512GB), there's really seems to be no logical reason for them to have thrown in a 256GB option at all, when the 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB options of the iMac Pro would have worked just fine and people would have been happy with. Since Apple uses their proprietary SSD's rather than M.2 drives, there isn't the excuse that a user could go get something like a 970 Pro 1TB M.2 drive (or two), save some money, and replace the drive themselves.

So what's the deal here? And what can we expect the necessary upgrade to 1TB to cost?
To figure this out, I made this spreadsheet that factors in the SSD upgrade pricing in every current desktop mac model:

From here we can see a couple things.
1. Past $1,999 in their base model desktops, Apple doesn't even bother offering a 256GB SSD option (Mac Pro excluded).
2. The Relative Price of the upgrade to 1TB from 256GB's is $600.
3. The Relative Price of the upgrade to 2TB's from 1TB is $600.
4. Based on the iMac Pro, the price to upgrade to 4TB's from 2TB's is $1,800.
5. The $2,299 27" iMac with the 2TB Fusion Drive has a $100 discount on its SSD's from skipping the 256GB SSD.

Since nearly every desktop Mac values a 1TB SSD upgrade at $600 compared to 256GB, unless Apple goes $100 off, the upgrade prices most likely will be: +$600 1TB + $1,200 2TB + $3,000 4TB

Maybe they'll throw us a bone and do something like $500 1TB, $1,000 2TB, $2,500 4TB, but it would be unprecedented.

From a broader perspective of figuring out why the base Mac Pro costs what it does, we've found that they value their SSD's around this much:
- 128GB: $100
- 256GB: $200 ($100 past $1,299)
- 512GB: $400
- 1 TB: $800
- 2 TB: ~$1,500
- 4 TB: $3,000

So depending on whether you think Apple is factoring in their sub-$1,299 value of the SSD or not, either 3.3% or 1.6% of the total cost is dedicated toward that. If we want to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, we could say that maybe throwing in 1TB would have caused the base model to cost more, but there really is no reason they couldn't have just started it at 512GB instead, and barely affected their profit margin.

TL;DR: Expect to spend $600 more to get a reasonable amount of base storage (1 TB).

 

[Mike Halper]

I've got a hunch that Mike isn't going to buy a Mac Pro.

Not with the current pricing/configuration. I really want to, and I've been waiting a long time for a proper Mac Pro like everyone else, but I can't justify paying a $2,000 premium. And I wouldn't even want the entry model anyway. I'd need at least the 12 core (+$650), at least 64GB RAM (+$500), at least 1TB storage (+$150), and at least a single Vega II GPU (+~$1000). Those upgrade prices are what they should cost based on retail pricing, but I think we all know by this point that Apple will end up charging A LOT more than an additional $2300. The premium is going to be even more than the $2000 premium for the entry level model, soooo....

I guess it'a good thing I have a really solid Hackintosh running without any issues at all.

 

[Geran Simpson]

If you’re rendering a feature overnight over and over with delivery the next morning, you want the stability of xeon with ECC.

Good luck walking in to find your i7 crashed on render 2 and now have to have a conversation with distributors about technical difficulties.

 

[Mike Halper]

If you’re rendering a feature overnight over and over with delivery the next morning, you want the stability of xeon with ECC.

Good luck walking in to find your i7 crashed on render 2 and now have to have a conversation with distributors about technical difficulties.

I've never had an issue with that. Not saying I never experienced software crashes, but so have people running Xeon workstations. Xeon and ECC don't prevent crashes and issues with rendering. Trashcan Mac Pro... Xeon and ECC RAM... plenty of rendering issues and crashes from many many people. It's easy to google and find all the issues people had with it.

 

[Bruce Allen]

They need a desktop system with desktop class i-Series (i5, i7, i9) CPU options and some degree of expandability. Like two PCIe slots or what constitutes one of the MPX bays in the new Mac Pro.

Yes, this would overlap and steal from Mac Pro sales on the low end, but in the long run they will sell more systems overall.

Oh hell yes. They would sell more of the high-end Mac Pros too, I think. A lot of studios in our industry have gone PC because the iMac GPUs suck. And the Mac Pro is too expensive to be able to buy like 20 of, so it's not going to stem the tide there.

If you could have five high-end Mac Pros for the Flame and Resolve bays and a few senior artists, maybe another 20 Mac Pros for the farm, backed up by say 20 normal Macs for junior artists (who still need real GPUs), 6-8 laptops for producers, etc, that's a workable thing.

But since that critical middle thing is missing / really darn expensive, the whole army kinda doesn't work. PC isn't that hard to use if you just buy an off-the-shelf system and install the NVIDIA drivers that are certified for Adobe (NVIDIA did a clever thing there). What sucks is having to mix platforms with both PCs and Macs and worrying about file paths etc. So then you just want to go all-PC for your artist machines and render farm and server (well, you have no choice there).

Right now Apple is hanging on there because a lot of rendering is CPU-based - so the foot soldiers can use iMacs... but with Redshift, Arnold GPU, V-Ray GPU, Octane, etc the tide is turning fast.

If they made such a beast with a quad-core i5, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD and no GPU installed (using Intel integrated GPU on the base model), 4 x TB3/USB-C ports, HDMI port and single 10GE port... Price it at $1299 to start, they would sell like crazy. Make an 8-core i7, 512GB SSD, and 8GB Navi GPU config for $2499 and a 10-core i9 with 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD, 16GB GPU as the top configuration around $4000, it would still be a winner. And would plug that giant hole between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro.

Sometimes I think Apple focuses too much effort on the “pro” image aspect of their systems and while that’s fine and good I would also like to see them make a couple more computer offerings so they have computers for everyone and every market.

Preach, Jeff!

I mean if HP and Dell ONLY sold Xeons and all-in-ones then Apple would have more of a leg to stand on.

But they ALSO offer nice 8-core non-Xeons for non-exorbitant prices that you can put nice GPUs in.

That said, the new Mac Pro is actually priced competitively within its intended market.

Agree.

I see them doing exactly as they did with the past cheese grater and they will price right in step with HP and Dell for their comparable Xeon workstations. I’m buying one to start, but fully intend to install aftermarket RAM and possibly SSD storage as well. Eventually I’ll probably have more than a few Mac Pros around here as I did in the past. I’m expecting they will have an update to this new Mac Pro in 18 to 24 months after it launches and that update will be significant, bringing us PCIe v4 and Thunderbolt 4. Neither of which are ready to go at the moment. PCIe v4 will [should] be supported on the next Xeon iteration, which would work timing wise with the subsequent update.

I think you and I are in the same boat... though Threadripper 2 plus NVIDIA's 7nm cards next year will be tough to pass up.

Hopefully we will pretty soon get a sense of whether this Mac Pro is going to be taken up by more than just high end editorial finishing and mix stages.

I knew the old trashcan Mac Pro was going to fail to gain the wide acceptance of its predecessor (I remember publicly calling out all of the issues on Reduser and saying we'd need to wait and see what GPU upgrades Apple make for their proprietary setup... and they never offered 'em!).

I am not sure about this one. Would be nice if it does well! There are a lot of things to like. For one, the fact that I can run full-screen video out of Resolve without a Blackmagic card! Though I'm sure they'll offer it for Windows too?

Bruce Allen
www.bruceallen.tv

 

[Misha Engel]

How would that compare with 2x 2080ti? I'm just not too familiar with AMD GPUs.

That depends on the software you are using.

We use Resolve under windows since 12.5 as our base editing/grading program. Before that we used the Adobe Suite, but got kind of sick of the stability issues.
In Resolve, with playback only of 8k.R3D files they have around the same speed (upto 25..35 fps, same as I get back from other users using a 2080ti in combo with a 18core intel CPU).
When you start using effect(OFX and TNR) the Radeon VII takes a lead over the 2080ti, not because of the compute performance(fp32) but the memory bandwidth and latency.

The nice thing about Davinci Resolve is that it's hardware acnostic, so it doesn't really matter if you use Windows, MacOS or Linux and the same is valid Cuda, openCL or Metal.

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Well, I’ll have a better idea what I can get for 10k once preorders begin.

 

[Antony Newman]

Apples Afterburner has no parallel in the PC world.

If an FPGA is liberally used to perform computationally expensive tasks (Decode, Encode, Debayer, Denoise) and it has has access to ample memory with a high memory bandwidth, it could well outperform a top end GPU.

AMD IF between GPU is 84 GB/s
PCIe5.0 has a bandwidth of 128GB/s
AMD Radeon Pro Vega II : 32 GB : Memory Bandwidth : 1TB/s

(Microsoft Research ultimately decided that maximum App performance for Azure workloads required a FGPA rather than a multiple GPUs)

Apple's '19 WWDC seminars are giving master classes on how to tap into hardware acceleration for REAL TIME NLEs.
They are building in hooks into MacOS to take care of / standardise resource utilisation and let the OS track FPGA (HBM2) memory;

If Apple are working closely with Blackmagic to get their GPU workloads to work like grease lightning with METAL + AFTERBURNER, and are working with RED to decode&debayer R3Ds with METAL + AFTERBURNER in the R3D SKD, we might end up with Resolve on a Mac that that outperforms a 64 Core PC with a top end Nvidia.

Looking forward to JK's test results.

AJ

 

[Misha Engel]

Well, I’ll have a better idea what I can get for 10k once preorders begin.

It's best to wait for the reviews.

Although we already know the performance levels of all the hardware except the FPGA/ASIC thing (3 ProResRAW 8K streams in combination with 2x DUO cards for the de-bayering).

Don't expect to much for upgrading the Mac Pro in the future, this is probably the last HEDT/SERVER CPU for lga3647.
PCIe-3 will also be phased out in the coming years in favour of PCIe-4/5 and the same is valid for DDR4 going to DDR5.

 

[andrewhake]

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/608/ - Metal for Pro Apps

A great presentation showing how apps can utilize Metal and the new hardware. Can't wait to see what Red is able to do with it for R3D decode!

 

[Brian Timmons]

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/608/ - Metal for Pro Apps

A great presentation showing how apps can utilize Metal and the new hardware. Can't wait to see what Red is able to do with it for R3D decode!

Andrew- you're quite good at finding useful nuggets of information.
Thanks again.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

 

[Misha Engel]

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/608/ - Metal for Pro Apps

A great presentation showing how apps can utilize Metal and the new hardware. Can't wait to see what Red is able to do with it for R3D decode!

I wonder how NVidia will react to this? I wouldn't be surprised when RED is going to use the Afterburner FPGA for decoding instead of metal with the GPU's.