I haven’t heard about any disk bays so far.
I think it was Jason Snell who wrote that 3rd parties will provide those via expansion slot, but not Apple.
Expansion slot? I don’t suppose PCIe slots are required for an internal disk bay, are they? And even if so, why internal SATA and USB if you’re connected through PCIe already?
I have little issue with the monitor per se… if it can perform even close to those 30-40k reference monitors,they’ll have huge hit…and even if it doesn’t, it’s not an unusual buy. But a grand for a stand that is not much more than a machined piece of metal is more of a slap in the face… I’m SURE they know that the grand is a huge tax write off for whomever is buying it WHILE putting more cash in their hands, win-win while us average folks lose big time.
Far as I know there no SATA anything in the machine, seems like a lot of wishful thinking. BUT my issue is that unless I hear otherwise, the machine is strictly limited to the non-standard NVMe slots that only uber expensive boards can go in… to the tune of 1200-1400 per 2T (top of the line STANDARD sticks run about half that) that may ONLY come from Cupertino. Now MANY folks are acquiring speedy storage via NVMe sticks on little adapter cards in standard PCI slots… and while Cupertino doesn’t say so, they say the machine has up to 4T, so they have essentially locked out users from taking advantage of adding storage via all those PCI slots.
I know a LOT of “professionals” in the photography market… I doubt ANY of them will but this machine. I have come across MANY professionals in the video field, most of them don;t work for big production houses that can spend 40k for a monitor. I know a lot of prosumers and folks who have been using Macs for eons, the enthusiasts. This machine does NOT say ANYTHING to all these people. We have been saying for YEARS we wanted a mid-sized tower where we can take industry standard stuff and set it up how WE want. It ain’t this machine by any stretch…it all screams proprietary. Dare I say that if they made a machine for US, the damn may very well have pulled MORE overall profit from it. They STILL DO NOT make a machine for me and I dare say hundreds of thousands “mes.” And the irony is that supposedly their fiscal future riches are in “services.” Can only speak for myself, but I ain’t buy ANY streaming anything that says apple on it. Clearly, they have ZERO interest in me as a customer…
Just watched Macbreak Weekly…
As Leo said, many professionals already have stand setups in place (eg. VESA) so every time they swap a display over they just unhook old one, and hook on the new one, throwing the stand away.
Hence, supplying this high end market means a separate add-on at least best as an option rather then a given in the box.
The only thing they should have said was “starts at $5999, or 4999 for pro’s that don’t need a stand”. Weird way the chose to drop a bomb on the ‘stand as extra’ price.
One reason for internal USB are pro apps that still use a USB dongle for license checking. Those things are always USB-A. Now you can stow the dongle inside the computer rather than have it stick out of the back of the case.
Interesting. I didn’t know those were still in use.
From 1984 when a Mac was $2400 and the S&P at 166 the new Mac should be $36k today with the S&P above 2400 (25X). Using that standard the new Mac is a bargain.
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For anyone who insists on putting spinning rust inside their computer instead of using one of multiple fast ports and an external enclosure, the Mac Pro specs page lists Promise Pegasus R4i and J2i kits which will hold 4 or 2 full size hard drives inside the Mac Pro. Apple hasn’t made a Mac with a DVD drive since 2012, I think. USB DVD drives are readily available for those who need them.
Sure, there have always been people who want a PC that runs the macOS. Apple never has, and likely never will, provide that.
When they say up to 4TB storage, that’s in reference to the two storage-specific connectors on the same side of the motherboard as the RAM. Pegasus has already demonstrated that the PCIe slots are normal and can be used for storage. OWC sells 2TB SSDs for the trash can Mac Pro for $620, not $1,200. I don’t know what connector that one uses, on the new Mac Pro, the specs page doesn’t say but the silhouette of 2 drives look like a wider form factor and the pin configuration doesn’t look like M.2 or U.2.
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IMHO that’s not an unreasonable request. You buy this expensive sexy Mac only to then dangle some cheap looking enclosure off of it over a connection that can be accidentally yanked out? I can understand why somebody would prefer to have an internal disk. Considering Apple has put great effort into designing the case to allow for easy access preferring that over clutter does not strike me as a misguided request.
Expansion slot?
To quote from Snell (WWDC 2019 notes: Sidecar, Catalyst, Mac Pro, and Pro Display XDR – Six Colors):
Beg to differ… my cMP is a perfect example… assuming by saying “PC” you mean a tower where we can mix and match industry standard components that is still a Mac. THAT is exactly what an awful lot of Mac professionals/enthusiasts have been asking for over the past 5 years. NOT a 30k workstation whose market is restricted to the LucasFilms of Hollywood.
AND how can any company claim their cards work fine in a box that NOBODY outside the mothership has been allowed to even touch? IF those slots CAN take a PCI-NVMe card, then why do they say the machine can have 4T of storage?
NOW, I’m still not sure I completely grok that MPX stuff (someone has said those lower 4 slots are NOT real standard PCI but meant to plug this extra cost item into) BUT it seems there is one of those MPX things that deals with RAID, so more internal storage may be had that way.
I can’t imagine I am the ONLY one, but essentially I am trying to coodle my cMP as long as I can. With their juvenile attitude towards nVidia, I am stuck pre Mojave. There has been speculation cMP’s may have ability for 10.15, but somehow I doubt it (been looking for some compatibility chart, can’t find any). They COULD have done what so many of their supporters were asking for, an updated “old” cheese grater. So they sat in their hands and built a $20-30k plus workstation. No question a “PC” is in my future should my motherboard melt. AND take a guess at who will never, ever give them ANY money for their supposed future, “services.”
Amazon sells 2TB SSD drives for ~$200 each and I could care less about performance as they would be for backup. However that is 3 times as expensive as some reliable low performance hard drives of the same size. There is plenty of documentation out on the web on how to setup MacOS on Virtual Box. As far as licensing as an individual I don’t care. Besides I already have 3 Mac’s in my home. As for support, most problems that Apple can solve I can already solve for myself. For others Apple support is of little use. As a professional tool, having the capability to add a DVD would be a nice feature as some professionals still use them and personally I detest having chunks of hardware scattered all over the place outside of the main machine. Cables also have external connectors which are not as reliable as internal ones. As far as I am concerned the cheese graters are still the ultimate design profile for the Mac. FYI: while not as elegant looking you can get a desktop VERSA stand that has similar functionality to the 1k Mac display stand for around $100. If you use the Mac VERSA adapter, that drops the cost of a flexible stand by around ⅔’ss. Frankly I have little interest in how the stand looks as I am buying a tool, not a piece of artwork.
I also I would advise waiting for at least a couple of months after release before buying one as bugs are most certainly going to surface with this machine and some of them could be motherboard related which can’t be fixed on the machines initially released. After all, in the current technology paradigm, all users are volunteer beta testers who pay manufacturers for the privilege of doing proper QA on their products.
Apple has a history of being an “if you build it, they will come” kinda company. Among all the people I know, Mac and PC users alike, nobody has mentioned any interest in personally buying a computer that’s got extra space for anything other than RAM in at least a decade, though they might opt for a bigger hard drive at point of purchase. And I know and have worked with a lot of very high end production, design, scientific and editorial people, as well as prosumers. But I’ll bet the highest end retouchers, video editors, designers and animators are probably already making the case that they need a new Mac Pro this very moment to the powers that be at their jobs.
And I’ll bet Apple developed the XDR display because they, as yet, were unable to convince at least one manufacturer to build one at the level of specs they need to move the Mac Pro off the shelves. Apple only developed LaserWriters because the couldn’t convince any printer manufacturer to build one that would support the level of typography of the Mac. Same-o with monitors. They suspend development the moment other companies enter the market with comparable products at lower prices. I checked Adorama and B&H, though quickly, and I couldn’t find a monitor with the same or very close specs. And there were many monitors costing a lot more money for a lot less in specs, most costing thousands and thousands more. So I’ll bet that in the not very distant future we’ll be seeing monitors like the new XDR at lower prices.
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Thanks for the link!
I’m still not quite sure why you’d want to shoehorn a disk bay onto a PCIe slot rather than just provide a, well, disk bay for disks. Like every other manufacturer. I guess once again Apple just wants to be different. We’ll see if it’s worth it. Chances are people who can spend north of $6k on a system like this won’t care if adding internal storage is more costly than necessary. More impractical too, but maybe those folks just don’t care. Or maybe Apple is just plain wrong, wouldn’t be the first time. Time will tell.
I think you’re onto something. This system might cater to movie makers or high-end creatives, but in science from all I can tell Apple is done in terms of workstations. You’ll still see loads of MBPs and some people use a mini or an iMac for desktop work. But in terms of number crunching and real scientific computing, it’s usually all Linux on generic iron these days. Apple’s last stronghold there was scientific visualization and that’s dying too now that Apple has determined that GPUs are solely geared towards FCP. Many years ago Apple gave up the Xserve (of which we had several dozen here in our department alone), then they screwed up the MP with the trash can’s poor design followed by years of neglect, and now together with the continued refusal to provide for CUDA on macOS they’re making sure they will be left out while science moves on to embrace big data & ML. Eventually they’ll probably kill X11 support (uncool and too technical) or an ARM transition (hey, it works for iPad) will kill off simple porting of Linux x86 binaries and then they’ll really be kicked out.
It’s a shame that Macs in science are being relegated to basically (shiny) netbook status. They’re still popular as heck notebooks, but their use is essentially for office work and manuscript writing. Actual scientific computing happens on other boxes people connect remotely too. Code can be developed and debugged on such systems too, no need to do that on a Mac. Kind of a local small scale netbook/cloud implementation relegating the Mac to a dumb terminal conduit to where the real action happens. Lab equipment control and scientific computing on Mac used to be really strong but are becoming increasingly rare (and often it’s just legacy). A shame really. Apple had a great run in edu and science. But I guess these days that’s no longer cool. It’s been a while since top Apple execs had actual academic experience and understood what really counts in the lab.
And all of this I observe at UC Berkeley, where we’ve traditionally always been very Apple friendly.
Simon, storage is way, way different these days. Spinning platters and pokey SATA worked great… 20 years ago. It’s all in solid state memory, like we used to talk about sticks of RAM, we now talk about sticks of storage. I have 1T of 2 SSDs on a PCI card that currently can be 300-350 bucks or so that is literally 7 times faster than any of my platter drives. AND TODAY for under $200, I can get something that is 2-3 times faster than those SSDs!
I was curious about the scientific community… I used to have points of contact back when I worked for a sci-tech publisher, but am long retired. I had a vague memory that CUDA was a pretty big deal there, so your mentioning it is significant.
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Yes, research computing has continued to move more and more into datacenters and/or cloud providers. That includes access to GPUs, including those that support CUDA, for using that hardware to perform computations. The desktop or laptop is largely a dumb terminal There is no computer Apple or any other manufacturer can provide that would reduce that trend. You’re right that scientific visualization is a particular category where there’s still some value in having some “oomph” in the computer in front of you.
Given all that, the threat to Macs is Windows in this sector. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) keeps getting better and is probably a better choice than macOS for people who want tools like they find on their servers; macOS tends to have dated and/or different versions (BSD vs. GNU) of open source software while WSL lets one use software from standard Linux package management systems. Obviously, lots of people still prefer macOS to Windows for everything outside the terminal window.
I know Nvidia blames Apple for the poor (and since Mojave, non-existent) support for their cards on Macs but Nvidia is responsible for making the drivers for their hardware. I think they decided there was enough value in putting in the work to write drivers for Apple’s APIs, particular the “Metal” API. I saw a mention of on an Nvidia forum that maybe the upcoming DriverKit could make a difference but Apple says the framework is “to create drivers for USB, Serial, NIC, and HID devices,” video cards aren’t on that list.
June 6
Simon:
Kind of a local small scale netbook/cloud implementation relegating the Mac to a dumb terminal conduit to where the real action happens.
Yes, research computing has continued to move more and more into datacenters and/or cloud providers. That includes access to GPUs, including those that support CUDA, for using that hardware to perform computations. The desktop or laptop is largely a dumb terminal There is no computer Apple or any other manufacturer can provide that would reduce that trend. You’re right that scientific visualization is a particular category where there’s still some value in having some “oomph” in the computer in front of you.
I think that this a very big reason is why Apple has been moving so aggressively into services, and why they pioneered, and continue full speed ahead, with mobile devices.
Given all that, the threat to Macs is Windows in this sector. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) keeps getting better and is probably a better choice than macOS for people who want tools like they find on their servers; macOS tends to have dated and/or different versions (BSD vs. GNU) of open source software while WSL lets one use software from standard Linux package management systems. Obviously, lots of people still prefer macOS to Windows for everything outside the terminal window.
And I think this is a big reason why they developed a super duper, fully tricked out, rocket engine new MacBook Pro. A very big majority of high end creative and production pros might know everything about, and can do any kind of incendiary effect, using VFX software like Smoke, Flame and Maya (which they used for the dragon and destruction scenes in Game Of Thrones), which only runs on Macs or Linux, but will turn into quivering masses of jelly if someone accidentally kicked out the plug their computer is connected to.
BTW, a year’s subscription for one seat of Flame runs $4,205, Smoke $1,545, Maya $1545. And that’s just for the fire. You need lots of different software to build and animate the dragons, though Maya is probably used for both. And there’s a lot of other software necessary for burning people (especially if actors in live action are involved), constructing and collapsing virtual buildings (and bridges and boats are different ), etc. And different stuff is necessary to create ice and explosions. It’s probably why HBO only kept the number of dragons to three.
The new Mac Pro doesn’t look so expensive at all when you consider what it costs to run editing and VFX software. And if the new Mac Pro will enable the production company to save $$$$$ because it will get things done faster and easier, and as it is upgradable, it will be an investment that’s well worth it, and one that will pay out over years.
I think we are in adamant agreement. For those, like the original poster, who think $5,000+ is “high”, that figure pales in comparison to what it cost early adopters to own computers in the past.
Well, this kid bought a fully tricked out Amiga back in 1988 instead of the 20% downpayment on a house.
Just spent about 5k on an iMac. It’s a lot for us to spend, but it’s vital for my work and the investment will play out for years on my desk.
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