“More scuttlebutt on the Mac Pro, Apple’s one and only desktop tower, which the company has promised to overhaul and rerelease this year,” Josh Lowensohn reports for CNET. “New tidbits come from longtime video producer Lou Borella, the creator of the Facebook group ‘We Want a New Macpro,’ who on Monday posted details on the changes from ‘a source or two that has some credibility.'”
The gist:
• It will be heavily reliant on Thunderbolt
• There will be no internal expandability
• It will have support for dual GPUs with three-monitor support right out of the box
• No [Firewire 800] or optical drive
• It will be released in the fall
• It will be a completely new design
“While some of those details have shown up before, the rumored changes suggest something much closer to a souped-up Mac Mini than the $2,499, expandable desktop tower Apple has kept largely unchanged (physically) for the past decade,” Lowensohn reports. “The Mac Pro is one of several machines Apple is expected to update in the near future. Others include the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, which were last updated about a year ago.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Who needs internal expansion with Thunderbolt’s speed and Jony Ive’s design ability? It’s time to rethink the professional desktop. Exterior expansion can be done neatly, especially with Jony Ive’s team on the case.
Related articles:
Mac Pro supplies dry up at retailers ahead of WWDC – June 1, 2013
Evidence of new Mac Pro at WWDC: Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan drivers in Apple’s latest OS X builds – May 29, 2013
RUMOR: Apple to announce replacement for Mac Pro soon – April 8, 2013
Apple’s Final Cut push hints at imminent launch of new Mac Pro – March 29, 2013
Apple aims to win over video editors with new Final Cut Pro X marketing push – March 28, 2013
Apple confirms launch of new Mac Pro in spring 2013 – February 6, 2013
Ultimate Mac: Building the Final Cut Pro X dream machine – November 9, 2012
Been saying this makes sense. I would love it if this happened. I wonder how they’re going to manage heat dissipation?
I was guessing something similar around June of last year:
“….I believe that rather than create something that is just the opposite of their direction everywhere else, Apple will stick with their new modus operandi. A new Mac Pro will be a box, but a much, much smaller one. It will come in configurations of 32, 64, or 128GB of RAM. That RAM will be soldered to the system board. It will have an option of one, maybe two internal SSD drives for a little over 1.5 Terabytes of internal storage. No SATA. It will have the most current graphics card available. The graphics card on the new iMac is already better than anything in the existing MacPro line. It will have the fastest multicore Intel Xeon processors available. It will also have lots of ThunderBolt ports probably 4 and at least one FireWire 800, one Gigabit Ethernet Port. There won’t be any PCI slots internal to the machine, the clear message being Thunderbolt, ThunderBolt, Thunderbolt….”
http://strategicmac.com/2012/06/18/what-will-mac-pro-2013-look-like/
You can’t be serious. You clearly don’t use a Mac Pro to make a living. If you did you would never make such a statement.
If that comes true, the new MacPro will fail. (MDN: iCal this!) It makes absolutely no sense to stock a number of Thunderbolt drives like in the past with Syquest drives. (Anybody who remembers the ol’ days?) What a terrible idea!
For a serious video editor like us who are running over a dozen of 2010 and 2012 MacPro’s there cannot be enough INTERNAL hard drive space. It is much safer than any external harddrive and also faster.
In the beginning we had put 4 x 2 TB into the machines plus 2 x 256 GB SSD. Now we are at 4 x 4 TB plus 2 x 512 GB SSD and we already ordered the new bigger SSD.
So YES we are serious PRO users and I guess the MacPro is aimed at users like us. I truly hope there will be different options, may be different cases, even I doubt it. Users like us would ask for may be 8, 12 or 16 harddrive bays.
Again: For serious video editing there cannot be enough internal harddrive space, it’s that simple. (By the way: When can we start to edit 3D natively in FCP X, Tim?)
I highly doubt it.
Not sure why they did away with FireWire. A bit brainless if you ask me.
If it’s going to be a sealed box, they might as well bring out a cheaper version running on Intel i-class Pentium processors rather than restrict themselves to Xeon processors. With desktop grade components, as opposed to the Mac mini’s laptop class components, I’m sure there will be many takers in the corporate office, airline, healthcare, educational and scientific research space who don’t want the limitations that come with the Mac mini but are not prepared to pay the insanely stratospheric prices for a Xeon class Mac Pro.
Apple could sell the Pentium processor Mac Pro for $1,000 and still make money.
NO firewire cuz you can use thunderbolt adapters for anything. And maybe that’s the point with a sealed box, it will be a ton cheaper?
But it not your tech which means Dell, HP, AND Samdung can copy or Intel turns around and stabs you in the back at some future date.
Yes, good thing none of those vendors you mentioned have ever used FireWire (IEEE 1394) interfaces…
When does Apple worry about that?
Agreed. While I personally love FireWire, Thunderbolt is better.
really? where is the single TB to eSata adapter/cable?
where is the single TB to USB 3.0 adapter/cable?
and I don’t mean those expensive docks out there!
TB to USB 3.0? Why?
Same reason they did away with Firewire 400 when Firewire 800 came out – because you can still plug in any Firewire devise using an adapter.
Ignore BLN. He’s not a high end user. He’s an amateur.
FireWire is used everywhere in professional studios. The price of a Mac Pro is not insanely stratospheric if what you are buying is an absolute necessity. Mac minis and iMacs are not substitutes for a Mac Pro. Apple could be about to piss off the true Apple supporters, and I’m not talking about fanboys. The backbone of why Apple is still in business.
… well, in truth, the backbone of why Apple is still in business (or remain as a highly successful business, more accurately0 is not in the pro-gear – but the end product produced by it – as heard and seen on iPods and iPhones. Follow the money (as well as their financial reports).
Still, Apple surely knows that it was the consumer point and shoots that both Nikon and Canon *had* to produce to provide the seed money for the development of their contemporary pro gear (no longer just a film box – but processors, with much R&D). But, more significantly, both of those camera makers continue to *produce* pro gear – and with a fair amount of backward compatibility. That’s part of what’s expected. That said, in consideration of Apple ‘Logic’ and ProTools’ productions, say, adapters would be the least of a studio’s expenditures. It’s just the nuisance factor.
…CABLES ALL OVER MY DESK
So where do I plug in my PCIe cards? Being a ‘pro’ I have a few of them.
The Fix is In.
That’s the beauty of Thunderbolt… your expansion options are limited only by the amount of ports you have:
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpresschassis.html
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/PCIe_Chassis/Mercury_Helios/
Except that even last year’s high-end graphics cards can run 16 lanes of PCIe 3, for a max data rate of 15.75 GB/s, compared to the Thunderbolt standard’s current limit of 4 lanes of PCIe 2, which gives you a max of… 2.0 GB/s (the Thunderbolt max. speed per channel is 10 Gb/s or 10 gigaBITs/sec, which is in fact only 1.25 GB/s).
For emphasis: that’s almost 16 versus 2 (or 1.25) GB/s. You’re getting 1/8 to 1/12 the maximum theoretical performance. Even in the real-world, benchmarks of a mobile-class GPU saw host/device data rates of 4-6.5 GB/s.
There are (or will be) external Thunderbolt cases for GPUs, like the MSI Thunderbolt GUS II, but it can’t even support the high-end GPUs since there’s no internal power sockets for such cards to plug into.
Thunderbolt is a great replacement for many things, including eSATA and Firewire (USB3 isn’t going anywhere), but it falls very far short for high-end PCIe hardware.
Sources:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16709181/memory-bandwidth-test-on-nvidia-gpus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#External_PCIe_cards
A long time ago (in the world of Mac computers) this same issue happened with the SCSI port. There was a secondary box made that you plugged the SCSI cable into that expanded into several PCI slots. A small or box the scale of your expansion cards could sit in this box isolating the EMF and heat from the Mac. If your mac fails, you just plug in another Mac. This is a smaller more elegant solution not forcing everyone to have a large unused box. Need 2 or more, just stack what you need. You will be Ok. Just Think Different.
You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Go look for server farms.
Its not a mac pro then! If it has no expansion and I was hoping for rack mountable, its fail!
And if they offered a low-cost external expansion box for graphic cards, hard drives, etc., that would make a Mac Pro mini even better.
I personally think that is exactly what they are doing!
It would make ALL the computers better.
The MDN Take is a bit glib, IMO. What defines a pro-level computing system? In the past it has included the number and power of CPUs, graphics options, storage capacity and options, expandability (addition types of cards and I/O), and high-speed networking. At one time, Apple even placed the CPUs on a daughter card to support a CPU upgrade path. Back around 2001, I used that daughter card capability to upgrade my aging PowerMac (circa 1996) with a G3 processor which extended its useful life by several more years.
If, as the source indicates, Apple attempts to heavily leverage TB at the expense of any internal expandability (or even upgradability?), then I suspect that many pro users will be highly dissatisfied and very vocal in their criticisms.
But this is just rumor. Only time will tell.
This would be OK for a “TweenPro” that fits between an iMac & a base model Mac Pro Tower ( aka Mac Pro Mini Cube ). As a complete replacement for Mac Pro Towers..? No.
Agreed. But I do have mixed feelings because this could be exactly what I need, so personally it might be great. For my colleagues, I’m not so sure.
Oh just great, rather than having all my PCIe cards and hard drives and burners in a nice neat tower with a power, monitor and network cable: I get to have random piles of cables all over the place and buy overpriced thunderbolt accessories
I thought Ive was designing this. Why would there be cables all over the place? Mini rounded blocks that connect seamlessly and seal magnetically like futuristic legos sounds far more likely to me.
Seriously, exactly that sort of packaging was being looked at Apple in the early 80s. I’ve seen the idea pop up at every computer company I worked at since then, at one time or another.
It was similar to electronic device packaging methods being researched by the Navy during the initial entry of solid-state devices in the 50s and 60s, too.
Nobody seems to have been able to make it work so far.
So basically its a G4 Cube design, without ANY ability to add more stuff into it. Its very limited… I’d rather save the $ and buy a new iMac or MacBook Pro.
“Who needs internal expansion with Thunderbolt’s speed and Jony Ive’s design ability? It’s time to rethink the professional desktop. Exterior expansion can be done neatly, especially with Jony Ive’s team on the case.”
It’s amazing to watch MDN line up brainlessly to support any move that Apple might make.
Who needs internal expansion? How about any professional-level developer who might need to add storage capacity without the added hassle of cables, or someone who needs to replace a drive? How about someone who might, for whatever crazy reason, not want to rely on Apple’s slowing pace of upgrading its professional-grade hardware?
Thunderbolt drives remain (a) significantly more expensive, and (b) more rare than internal hard drives. And while TB does offer the possibility of third-party GPU, it forces end-users to rely only on solutions developed by companies instead of giving them the opportunity to upgrade themselves.
What irks me isn’t the possibility of Apple nixing its professional-grade products, but instead the dogmatic support given by sites like MDN. I’m a fan and user of Apple products, but I resent when companies pull even more control away from me.
Yah know while this specification might be true it may also mean Apple may come out with TWO versions of it’s Mac Pro line and this is only one of them. The Mini & Maxi Tower versions, separating those who just need raw power from those who need raw power and expandability. It would be great to have a choice. Jes sayin’…
While i was writing my post, you beat me to it.
Makes sense. Mini and Maxi Pros would bridge a gap and offer more options …
I said this before & I’m saying it again, we need a Mac Pro Mini Aluminum Cube between iMac + Mac Pro Tower.
Too big of a gap between iMac & Mac Pro Tower. Mac Pro Mini needed. Still expandable & more powerful than iMac, but not the top of the line Mac Pro. MPMini equals 1/2 of current Tower. 1- 6 Core Server chip. 1 on board GPU + 1 expandable graphics card slot, same external ports, 1 optical slot drive, 2 drive bays, 1/2 number of RAM slots. Smaller aluminum cube form like Pro Cube.
We will just have to wait to see what Apple creates. 🙂
This is very true. Hopefully the new MacPro will be what the Pro users are waiting for. But, until a new product is finally unveiled, it’s always a guessing game. I think Apple should take this opportunity to excel in both the Consumer and Pro divisions. Since they have all this cash at their disposal, why not put out the killer pro system to end all killer pro systems and thus lead the industry in personal computing (the iMac) and pro computing (the MacPro). With the PC market currently in flux, take complete control of the industry and leave no doubt about who makes the most powerful and useful computing systems.
Doing this right is tough. Even with Thunderbolt, data transfer with external modules can be interrupted or slowed down for many different reasons. It would need the ability to do things like read an external RAID stack reliably and at native speeds. If Apple does get it right, it would be a game changer for professional computing. Mac Pro modules could be tailor designed for specific purposes or industries, like audio, animation, or genetics. The initial cost of a desktop workstation would be significantly less, and major hardware upgrades would be easier buy, install, reuse, resell, and swap out.
I can pull rumors out of my ass too. :/
Apple is too obsessed with design. Get over yourselves… They’re just computers. Apple’s worst enemy is Apple.
Please Thomas: Go use a generic Windows PC box and keep your painful moans to yourself. Apple fanatics aren’t interested in your dim perspective.
If this rumor is true, then I am building a kick ass Hackintosh that will walk circles around that POS.
My thought as well.
When Thunderbolt gets as fast as PCIe 3.0 x16 then I’ll think about a non internally expandable “MacPro”. Until then, a non internally expandable “MacPro” is the dumbest idea of which I have EVER heard. This is like saying the Mac ‘030 was no different than the MacFX. Absolutely asinine. Also, I find it doubly difficult to believe that they will ship a build to order 128 GB RAM option with reasonable prices! Doubly Asinine!
Expandability is the key. Internal? Maybe not:
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpresschassis.html
I like Emmayche’s post regarding the echo express chassis. I didn’t know about this product, I like it. I kind of wish I had known about it a while ago but now that I do…I’m even more excited about my MacBook pro.
Check this – dual SSD in a RAID 0 stripe, via Thunderbolt – 650 MB/sec, housed in an exnlcosure very similar to the ExchO Express:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/PCIe_Chassis/Mercury_Helios_Accelsior_E2/
I personally think that this will be seen as a mistake. Having something external for EVERYthing – including things that easily went internal previously – is not a good thing. I guess a lot of people will have to go desk shopping.
I should say “would” be seen as a mistake. I don’t think it is true.
Exactly. I want my computer in its case, not spread all over my desk. This is design stupidity. Design for the sake of design without considering function. It’s what designers do. It’s not what Apple does or did, but it looks like that has all changed. Hackintosh? They are pushing me closer and closer…
This sounds like the modular pro Mac I envisaged them producing instead of the present Mac Pro. Maybe my Logic wasn’t so wrong after all, just the timing, by some way mind. But potentially it can address a Much bigger market at wide ranging price points and capability.
Multi-Box!!!!!!!!
I think Apple will use the scalable idea here… It’s what the pro’s need, the ability to scale in the direction they want without spending money on parts of a machine they don’t need so much!
Sony has build a machine you might already be aware of…
http://www.techspot.com/news/44443-sony-launches-light-peak-equipped-vaio-z-docking-station.html
It leverages the use of thunderbolt to connect to hard drive space and graphics cards. Using this idea, could you not build expansion for almost anything then? I wonder if you could even put ram in a different loading bay? I would also imagine that these units would be stackable in some fashion as well…
Just one man’s opinion… We will hopefully be finding out soon enough!
In a reply to another comment, I noted that TB has a max of 1.25 GB/s (10 Gb/s) per channel, while even a 2012 mobile-class GPU was transferring 4-6 GB/s (32-48 Gb/s).
The idea of modular parts can be nice, and fine for hard drive storage which has slower speeds, but PCIe is close to the processor and memory for a good reason.
Maybe they will use the newer fibre interconnect? It’s over 2x faster than the copper that Apple is currently using. Then again, they just might cluster together the parts that have to be together, and teather the parts that don’t need so much speed, I dunno…
Even at twice the current speed (so 20 Gb/s or 2.5 GB/s), you’ll note that it’s still less than half the host-device data rate for the a 2012 mobile GPU.
In theory, an external fibre-based Thunderbolt-PCIe box for high-end GPUs could perhaps split data transfers using some or all of the 20 available channels, each running 2.5 GB/s each way, for a max theoretical speed of 50 GB/s or 400 Gb/s. But as we know from experience with about 15 years of consumer multi-processor and then multi-core CPUs, in practice parallel instructions do not come easy, cheap, or as fast as one would hope. Data from one channel will be minuscule fractions of a second slower, so both ends need to ensure incoming data from all channels are synchronized before acting on it, so now you need to include overhead to include timing information…. It would be a huge mess, and the cost-benefit really just isn’t there.
Physical distance also becomes an issue. At 1 GHz (higher-end GPU speeds), the distance between the GPU’s PCIe interface and whatever directly acts on its data on the other end (not just display(s), GPU data goes back and forth to CPU and RAM too) can’t be any greater than 30cm, or 1 foot (source; example uses CPU but idea is the same). Distance doesn’t matter as much when GPU sends data to the display, since a pixel can only refresh at glacial 60 Hz.
It really is not worth the effort to get high-end PCIe devices working in external boxes given the current Thunderbolt roadmap.
You da man!
Excellent point though…
“It will be heavily reliant on Thunderbolt”
“There will be no internal expandability”
“It will have support for dual GPUs with three-monitor support right out of the box”
Most probably they’re referring only to storage (HD) and additional media (DVD/Blu-Ray drive). Apple will move expandability to the outside of the Mac, placing that burden/cost on the consumer. Apple will still need to have space for a high-end graphics card I’m sure. Apple most likely will not include any “Thunderbolt” cables.
Speaking of cost, considering the lack of expandability meaning a smaller motherboard, fewer cables, wires, expansion buses, fewer brackets for hardware, power supply design, fewer cooling fans and smaller external case, it should sell for at least half the cost of a current Mac Pro. Apple’s Mac Pro will be a bare-bones but powerfull machine.
Of course this is just speculation based on speculation.
Well, we don’t know anything yet about what or if this product will be. My 2¢: a rack-mounted unit that will fit right into the studio/lab environments of scientists, universities, musicians, media content producers, photographers, broadcasters, IT, military, developers, advertising display, home theater buffs, et al. Why should Sonnet have all the fun? (http://www.sonnettech.com/product/xmacminiserver.html)
“I’m a fan and user of Apple products, but I resent when companies pull even more control away from me.”
Agree, completely. Heightened sense of annoyance from this story — particularly at the Pro level.
Other comments already pointed out the advancement of the cluttered cable approach, additional purchase of expensive TBolt devices and would add previous purchases now relegated to ‘device orphan’ status — equipment, cards, drives, to name a few.
If this comes to pass, I predict the volume of pushback will eclipse the initial Final Cut Pro dust up.
MDN’s take is a bit disappointing and it certainly falls short taking into account legacy professionals with huge investments in Apple Pro equipment and related devices.
That said, in the past they have taken Cook and Apple to task. Meaning, not a site with a perfect 100% Fanboi/grrls rating. 🙂
Food for thought. Would like to see TWO pro models that run rings around the high-end iMac:
• One slimmed down model for graphics, design, photo editing, web work, number crunching, etc.
• High-end model for intensive 3D rendering, video editing, scientific calculations, etc. and certainly keep it customizable.