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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

The New Mac Pro is Here!!!

I remember a while back there was a rumor that Apple was working on two different models of the Mac Pro, a mid-size tower with like 3-4 slots, and a bigger version. Looks like we know which one they chose. Perhaps they will go back and finish up the mid-range one after they get this one out the door.

At the very least, I think they should release a cheaper display alternative. No one is gonna buy a Mac Mini and get the XDR Display for it. They should just take the screen out of the iMacs and sell it as a stand along monitor.
 
LG UltraFine 27MD5KB-B Black 27" 5K WFHD IPS LED Monitor, 500 cd/m2, Thunderbolt ~ $1,300
 
Eric Santiago said:
I had the pleasure and displeasure of two O2s and an OCTANE. I didn't pay for them but back then, it wasn't hard to convince then companies to pay for them.
Since a seat of Power Animator was close to 100K.
It was EIAS on a Quadro that killed it for Alias from my side of the fence.
Thank goodness Maya came in under 10K once it was ported to Windows.
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I always wanted a Silicon Graphics computer. I don't know if I would have really exploited it, but it didn't matter. I just wanted one (the Indy). I lost respect for the company when it went Intel and Windows.

As for Maya, I'm fairly sure that Blender will replace it once it comes out of beta. 3D graphics not my area of interest, really, but I just come across the odd bit of news here and there. I care little for CGI.
 
Karim D. Ghantous said:
As for Maya, I'm fairly sure that Blender will replace it once it comes out of beta. 3D graphics not my area of interest, really, but I just come across the odd bit of news here and there. I care little for CGI.
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Yeah that's a big no right there. Blender is in "beta" about as much as Maya is.
 
Misha Engel said:
HP workstations make a lot of sense, you can start with: HP Z2, Z4, Z6 or Z8 and then customize it for your needs.
The MacPro is 8 to 28 cores and 64 PCIe-3 lanes, with the HP solutions you have a lot more choice.
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But look at a base Z8. It has a slow quad-core processor, 8 GB of RAM, a shitty GPU, a 1 TB hard drive. Any $500 Core i3 box is faster - but the Core i3 can't take all the upgrades.

My point is that nobody with an ounce of sense buys the base configuration of a high-end workstation, so why go on about it?
 
D Fuller said:
But look at a base Z8. It has a slow quad-core processor, 8 GB of RAM, a shitty GPU, a 1 TB hard drive. Any $500 Core i3 box is faster - but the Core i3 can't take all the upgrades.

My point is that nobody with an ounce of sense buys the base configuration of a high-end workstation, so why go on about it?
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The base Mac Pro is $6,000
The base HP Z8 is $2,500 (lower entry, way more options).
The base Z2 is $850

With HP you have 4 different pro models (pick the one that fits your needs) with Apple you have one.
 
Is it too early to start a speculation thread about Mac Pro 2021?
 
Dermot Shane said:
worst thing is 500ish zones for the backlight
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Apple couldn't go higher without drastically increasing the price. At 6K resolution, the panel is already built-to-order and the backlighting is done with off-the-shelf parts used by the latest generation of high-end gaming monitors, so doubling it to 1152 zones like the latest 4K Asus ProArt 32 will have, would require a more expensive customized design, which Apple can't justify with the already exorbitant price of the monitor.
 
L. Langer said:
Apple couldn't go higher without drastically increasing the price. At 6K resolution, the panel is already built-to-order and the backlighting is done with off-the-shelf parts used by the latest generation of high-end gaming monitors, so doubling it to 1152 zones like the latest 4K Asus ProArt 32 will have, would require a more expensive customized design, which Apple can't justify with the already exorbitant price of the monitor.
Click to expand...

Yep, Apple needs atleast a margin of 300%.
The exterior is a new design, the rest is off the shelf parts with a custom made PCB.
 
Well, I just read through 16 pages of this thread...quite a wide array of opinions in here.

My first 2006 Mac Pro replaced an Avid station that was something like 12x the price, maybe more. A quad core with Final Cut was like $3500 after taxes...if my memory serves me correctly. It brought professional editing to small companies and made freelancing as a profession possible for almost everyone I knew. It changed the game entirely and was fairly friendly to upgrade. Heck, it made a majority of my career possible.

Apple made some odd choices with their pro gear since 2012. The trash can was a complete failure from my experience, it just couldn't handle the load we threw at it and we came very close to missing deadlines as it suffered from overheating time and time again. The MacBook Pro is beautiful to look at, but has it's own list of problems (it's still my preferred laptop for personal use though). And the new Mac Pro pushes out of the price range for a huge chunk of the market that purchased Mac Pros in previous generations of the product line.

The afterburner card is by far the most intriguing part of the announcement to me.

The $6k price tag for an 8-Core Xeon with weak specs is pretty steep. No, you can't build a part for part identical PC for cheap, but you can outrun/match the performance for $1800 after taxes. And for $3500 you're going to hang with a fairly hefty upgrade that will probably run around $10k. The afterburner card may be the one item that truly gives a mid-range Mac Pro an advantage. But buying an 8-Core Xeon is well, just silly as an investment. Maybe you're GPU heavy and plan to upgrade everything around it, then I guess it doesn't matter. My old quad-core Mac Pro did last 9 years and the only reason I upgraded it was because I was getting sucked into a thunderbolt / USB 3 world.

I was personally hoping for that old 1,1 quad core slice of the professional market, maybe a second line that was slightly less server like, say an i9 9900K with 64gb RAM, a better GPU, at around $3500? It's less profit but the entire purpose of that machine is to allow me to scale with upgrades over time. If that had space to upgrade to dual GPUs and left me room for an afterburner and decklink, and I'm pretty damn set for 95% of the productions I work on. $6k knowing I'm going to have to dump another $4k into it breaks every budget I have been given since 2011.

A lot of arguments rag on those complaining about the price, that $ to output shouldn't matter if it works and you're making good money and this is priced at those who know that. I think that is an unfair counter point. Are prices are higher because of time/inflation or is Apple just charging a maximum ecosystem tax? Everything else has gone down in price. Cameras, live broadcast hardware, 10Gbe is affordable now, storage costs next to nothing, and gaming has brought PC hardware pricing to rock bottom. GPU demand is the only thing holding prices up. AMD 3000 and TR with PCI 4.0 is going to be amazing bang for the buck. Apple is going the other direction and upping the barrier to entry that they so famously broke with the Mac Pro in 2006-2009. I can't bring myself to take the iMac Pro seriously just based on the fact that I have to keep a whole spare one on the shelf should a machine go haywire during a production.

Overall, the extensibility of the machine looks incredibly impressive. If I had an unlimited budget, the macOS fan inside of me wouldn't hesitate. If it was $3500, I'd be counting all my coins and booking some extra day-rate gigs to have the cash ready.

In the end, it's going to come down to a CUDA vs Metal race in terms of what the machine can actually do. That's going to be at least a year, maybe two until the dust from that battle starts to truly settle.

Maybe I'm alone in a red user forum, but budgets and rates are declining in my world. I'm doing more with less in productions year over year while cameras just get more and more power hungry. A more expensive Mac Pro that's aimed at the upper echelon of post-house wasn't what I was looking for to keep me in the Apple ecosystem for professional work. We put in the order for computer parts right after the Mac Pro was announced.
 
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