“It’s looking increasingly likely that there will never be another Mac Pro,” Marco Arment writes for Marco.org.
“The 5K iMac is a truly great computer. It’s the best general-purpose desktop Apple has ever made. It almost replaces the need for the Mac Pro. Many of us can get by with the 5K iMac,” Arment writes. “But there are some things that only a Mac Pro can deliver.”
“If you need more performance for parallel workloads — very common for video, photography, 3D, science, medicine, and software development — the only way to jump meaningfully ahead of mainstream CPUs is to add more cores,” Arment writes. “Today’s Mac Pro-class Xeon CPUs easily pack 8 cores at pro-accessible prices, 10 or 16 for a bit more, and scale all the way up to 22 cores. It may take a decade for an iMac to match the speed of today’s 16-core Xeons.”
“The world has never seen anything like macOS, and nothing will truly replace it. If we’re forced to move to something else, it’ll be painfully, inescapably, perpetually worse,” Arment writes. “Keep the Mac Pro alive, Apple, so none of us have to make that choice.”
Read the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: If Apple loses the Mac professionals, they’ll have lost the plot.
MacPro will be upgraded.
When there is something significantly better to put in the can.
There’s plenty significantly better. But they won’t fit in the current, literal can. Hence the urgent need to move back to a more traditional tower form factor.
Apple could make the Pro’s cylinder higher and/or wider to take more innards. Or perhaps simpler, add extras in a same-diameter module to fit underneath.
Same-diameter module would have less than 6″ of internal space (current MPs are 6.6″ diameter), and only available at its very center. Off-the-shelf PCIe GPUs are in the area of 10″ long. Not to mention that any external PCIe via Thunderbolt is far slower than PCIe that’s right next to the processors and RAM.
Meanwhile, making the cylinder wider to accommodate normal GPUs is counter-productive, and widening only one axis to make it an oval doesn’t make sense either; might as well just go full rectangle base again.
Apple should stop trying to win some silly fashion award for the Mac Pros.
“Apple should stop trying to win some silly fashion award for the Mac Pros.”
Right on the money. Pro’s haven’t asked for or need over-designed miniature pro machines that compromise too much in the process and allow far fewer options now and in the future. They are playing with sales fire by not designing correctly the machines we need.
The only thing that could be added to that photo is a third spot to the right labelled 2016 with nothing in it.
At this point, I would happily overpay for a 2016/17 technology version of the 2012 form factor. Apple please take my money. Please. I start thinking about that and the top nVidia GPU cards and I want it so bad it my heart hurts.
I agree, same here. I installed that same wonderful top Nvidia card in a friend’s PC and was green with envy. I also installed a RAID – INSIDE his tower PC. *sigh*
Sadly, I think we are -already- in a word without Apple’s Mac Pro, let alone imagining one.
“To me, Apple exists in the spirit of the people that work here, and the sort of philosophies and purpose by which they go about their business. If Apple just becomes a place where computers are a commodity item and where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, then I’ll feel I have lost Apple. But if I’m a million miles away and all those people still feel those things and they’re still working to make the next great product, then I will feel that my genes are still in there.”
“Steve Jobs: The Unauthorized Autobiography.”
Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/nl/book/steve-jobs/id924800720?l=en&mt=11
With all their money how hard would it really be to just have a team dedicated to constantly making sure the Pro line was bleeding edge? Even if it is just a box with components in. The people who use these machines are the ones who make the content, the apps, all sort of things that are used by Apple’s “main” customers the general consumer, without them Apple are not as attractive a proposition for people looking for a phone, a tablet, a computer. Sure they may not make fortunes from the line, but the worth of it in terms of what those users given them in tangential benefits is huge. Also, does nobody at Apple use them, or need something more high powered than an iMac?
You would think that Apple was full of top designers who are also dying for a new/real Mac Pro.
To the author:
If an iMac can replace your need for a Mac Pro you did not need a Mac Pro.
At this point Apple under Tim Cook has made it clear they intend to abandon serious users and concentrate on consumer products alone. The way they have handled Pro users with hardware and software has driven many to LINUX or Windows and more will follow once their 6-8 year old Mac Workstations are no longer anle to be repaired or kept current.
You can rent music, buy a watch, watch streaming TV, waste time on Facebook or play a game. You may not have a powerful, serious operating system mated to a workstation capable of heavy lifting.
Steve Jobs declared long ago that we’re living in the post PC era. Time Cook and Co seem to be following through with this vision. Steve was not one to eliminate without having a better plan. He did it with the Mac clones. He did it with the newton. He did it with Xserve. And Apple has shown that its willing to sacrifice their own for the greater good- iDevices have become the focus at the detriment of the Mac. We’ll see if Apple can pull it off. Ostensibly they have something much, much better in store for their pro users.
Steve Jobs also said there would be cars AND trucks. If Macs are trucks, the laptops are Toyota Tacomas and a workstation is a super duty full size. Some of us need a Super Duty.
Besides, the Mac business alone is still a highly profitable one.
View the Jobs interview again, Jdoc. Jobs did not say we’re past PCs. He simply said that as a percentage of devices, the most powerful workstations would decrease relative to portables. That was already obvious 15 years before Jobs made this prediction as computers continued to get faster and chips smaller. And it doesn’t change the fact that if you want to be competitive, you have to keep running faster than you did last year.
The problem that power users have been voicing constantly to Apple in the past 5 years is that they can’t rely on a company that refuses to keep its hardware competitive with the rest of the market. To call something a professional machine, it really needs to be faster and more capable than the cheap one that costs 2/3 less … and this is where Apple is failing.
Apple needs to update its Mac hardware — all of its hardware.
And don’t think that Apple should just refresh the iMac and call it a day. There is a very large subset of users who cannot use an iMac. If you have unique display needs for whatever reason, then an iMac is not even an option. That makes it imperative that Apple offers timely updates to the Mac mini, Mac Pro, and with any luck a new midsize tower. More bang for the buck is the only thing that will make the Mac a preferred choice going forward, otherwise it’s the 1990’s all over again.
Yes, this! One of the biggest reasons that Apple and PC sales in general are flat is because Apple doesn’t give anyone a reason to even consider updating. With stale products and zero Mac desktop advertising, the average person doesn’t even realize that Apple makes desktop Macs other than the all-in-one iMac.
I think it’s long past time that Apple dip into its pool of cash to get serious about attracting PC converts. That means offering other desktop models besides just the iMac.
I see several different profitable lines for desktop monitor-free Macs:
1) Mac mini – able to drive huge 4K displays. Designed to be a cost effective consumer Mac, capable of doing everything the Apple TV can do, host your own media, and then some. Must have dual drive bays — i.e., capable of internal backups.
2) Power Mac — perhaps a rebrand of the trashcan with Intel Core processors and modest user upgradeability via stacking cylindrical expansion packs. The mainstream Mac with the widest appeal. Give it more than one kind of port or toss a handful of free adapters in the box.
3) Mac Pro workstation — a new cheese grater with unparallelled performance and internal capabilities. Ive: it’s okay if it is more than an inch thick and weighs more than 40 pounds. Impress us with computational power.
4) Mac Server — admit it, Apple blew it by not maintaining this puppy. Apple itself needs thousands of them to host its own services. It’s an embarrassment to rely on HP when Apple could be the master of its own destiny. There is a huge untapped market for companies that need a better, more secure, user-friendly server.
Another thought:
Is there some reason after all this time that Apple hasn’t written the software that allows desktop Macs to use iOS devices as tablet inputs? A Mac should be able to work with any input from ultra-precise trackballs to surface-like pen drawing — all without gorilla arm or fingerprint mess. Can’t think of a reason in the world that Apple couldn’t have done this 2 years ago. Instead Microsoft just went and stole Apple’s thunder. Following the flow of other pros, now desktop artists are abandoning the Mac because Apple is so slow at offering superior hardware options that allow the user to be creative and work the way he wants to work. A laptop with a gimmick bar is just Apple pushing what it wants, not what users asked for.
people always quote Jobs:
“If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago”
FORGET that it said in 1996 When Mac was being run into the ground by incompetents at Apple.
THEN WHEN HE GOT BACK:
he went Gangbusters on iMac in a few short years going from plastic bubblegummers to lampshade to the current iMac
Got his team From Next (Forstal etc) to do the fantastically difficult transitions of MacOS to OSX (built from Nextstep and completely different base from OS9 etc) AND from PowerPC to Intel.
It’s hard to get how difficult all that was but Jobs did it as JOBS LOVED THE MAC.
NOTE AT THAT TIME IPOD WAS MAKING TONS OF MONEY and ROCKETING UPWARD and analysts were saying that Apple should become an ‘audio company’.
Jobs also MARKETED MACS like Crazy, every time he got he ran shootouts against Windows machines (that’s when high end Macs were FASTER than Windows Machines. During Jobs tenure I remember reading in PC World (or something ) that the FASTEST WINDOWS laptop was the Macbook !),
Jobs RAN A HUGE NUMBER OF MAC ADS.
He had ONE NEW AD A MONTH ! (66 DIFFERENT Mac PC guy ads in 4 years. This mac advertising dwindled to near zero under Cook.)
Does this look like a guy who gave up on the Mac? Gives a different look to his 1996 comment.
——–
The other quote is that ‘Apple says NO to a lot of stuff’, today it seems that some in Apple are taking that as an EXCUSE , they say NO not because it seems to be bad but because OTHER THINGS seem to be MORE FUN like hanging out at rock concerts, charities and fashion shows. Instead of updating the MAC MIN, the iMAC, the MAC PRO Apple is Sponsoring fashion shows like the MET GALA, making mini Series like the “Sex Filled Romp of Dr Dre’s Life’ and Jony Ive and Marc newson (Apple top designers) are in London DESIGNING CHRISTMAS TREES (meanwhile the Mini and Pro have not had updates in multiple YEARS) .
Seriously as I’ve said before have you seen Apple SVPs visiting high end Mac using businesses like Labs, Studios or Mac User Groups (like they visit rock concerts and Fashion shows?), has Apple made a strong presence in power computing conferences like Siggraph? or games cons like Blizzcon? etc. No wonder they have little clue what USERS want (look at them cutting prices of dongles a few days after launch !)
Note friends MICROSOFT HAS SHIPPED 350 MILLION COPIES OF WIN 10, their target in the next few years is 1 billion. Macs got 10% marketshare, there’s huge opportunity here.
(btw Apple didn’t run any Mac ads at all during the Win 8 fiasco years!)
there are enough excuses friends, it’s time for Mac Users to GET MAD and COMPLAIN.
Yup. I’m mad and complaining! Where is the new Mac Pro desktop!!!
For Apple developers sake then I hope they have great cross-platform tools to create iOS Apps with on PC/Linux boxes.
I edit video for a living. On a Mac Mini. I’m no Kubrick or Scorsese; all I do is produce promotional videos, interviews and news packages for my organisation. While it may occasionally be slow, for me, the Mac Mini is sufficiently adequate to allow me to meet the deadlines.
In my free time, I also use Sibelius for music scoring. Most of the work involves re-arranging existing works for a large symphony orchestra, or transcribing / transposing parts (horns, clarinets, trumpets) from older, less common transpositions, into standard ones for modern instruments (horns in F, trumpets in Bb, etc). The Mini works perfectly for that.
There are millions of different Mac users with their unique uses. Vast majority fall into the category described in your last paragraph (playing Apple Music, surfing Facebook, playing online games, watching streaming video). And then there is a group of people doing specialized tasks with powerful software (such as my example — Final Cut Pro, and Sibelius, or other pros who use Adobe CS tools, or Maya 3D, or other specialised tools), and for most of us, any current Mac will sufficiently allow us to meet our deadlines. And then, there is the sliver of users on top of it all, which require uncompromising speed and power, due to the nature of their work.
It seems to me that Apple has made a decision to abandon these users on that very top. They may have long ago represented the core of their customer base, when there were no more than, say, 20 million Mac users, and significant part of that number was Adobe, QuarkXpress, Macromedia and similar powertool crowd.
Today, when you look at a lecture hall in most major American universities, you mostly see an ocean of glowing white apples. These represent your average Mac user; they bring Mac revenue, they make their Mac purchasing decisions based on what Apple offers to THEM. Not on the guy who edits multi-cam 4K video for an ad agency, that needs to be turned around in 24 hours. Unfortunately, such guy may be forced to make some hard choices when the time comes for him to replace his current aging Mac Pro.
If you edit video for a living on a Mac mini you must be a very patient person.
I keep a Mac mini around as a backup desktop and when my Mac Pro workstation died I swapped the Mac Pro’s HDs into a ProBox via USB 3 to the mini.I also had a complete boot drive clone on an SSD also connected by USB 3.
Transcoding takes a long time in HD on a Mac mini with nothing but a dual core i5 with a vampire video Iris GPU. Comparing it to a Xeon Workstation with a discrete GPU with dedicated memory makes it look bad.
I like Mac minis, but wish Apple would give us the option of buying a Quad Core i7 and Discrete graphics.
Yes, it gets slow when I need to export a 4-minute HD video, but even that usually doesn’t take more than 10 minutes. My target format is generally always YouTube, not broadcast, so I can afford to export H.264. I don’t actually sit around waiting for 10 minutes until it finishes exporting. I do other things on my Mac while FCP is encoding my export. My mini is 2.6Ghz i7 (2012).
What I’m saying is, while Mac Pro would be nice to have, Mac Mini does the job for me (and has for the past four years). When the time comes for me to replace it, I might go Pro, but I also just might stay with the next generation of Mini (if it turns out to be faster enough than the one I have).
This is not hard to imagine since we basically don’t have one now.
The Mac Pro is like the G4 Cube. Beautiful to behold but limited customer base. Cool but with low revenue.
Apple spent a lot of time designing and building the thing but the form factor is limiting. This must make it hard for Apple to upgrade because they have to fit new chipsets and cards into the same format.
I think a lot of people would like a mini-tower that had the capacity to add cards and drives easily. Would it be millions?Probably not. Maybe 50,000 a quarter. And in that lies the problem. Why spend the R&D resources for such a small customer base.
That’s the whole point. Apple didn’t NEED to spend tons of R&D money redesigning the Mac Pro into a form that’s an anathema to pro users. Some serious poor judgment in doing so. A simple tower would have sufficed with a few Apple embellishments that contribute mostly efficiencies to ease of upgrading as they did with the cheese graters. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for them to think “Oh Mac Pro sales are way down so we assume no one wants Mac pro’s anymore” when the reality ids we don’t want them the way Apple is currently making them.
“Oh Mac Pro sales are way down so we assume no one wants Mac pro’s anymore” when the reality ids we don’t want them the way Apple is currently making them.
Precisely.
Bring back the expandable cheese grater.
And Jony, OK, you can make it thinner and lighter …
Just like “there’s something kinda “eeyeww” about a kid who’s never played baseball” there’s something kind of eeyeww! about an underachieving undersized & poorly upgradeable Mac Pro.
https://r14—sn-a5m7znel.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1478577427&itag=18&nh=IgpwcjAxLmxheDE2KgkxMjcuMC4wLjE&gir=yes&mime=video%2Fmp4&clen=479398&source=youtube&ratebypass=yes&lmt=1404612807506333&upn=9QEnSFPpbB0&ipbits=0&signature=38508C3E58CD3C12187F0F7530434A3C7F5D84AF.5BE31DA5C2068FF2494AD91129DBE27E9025874A&ms=au&id=o-ADYp01PeWKhXvCaYbXmtX_0K5AAFA7WKZSw9lRKqKRt3&mv=m&initcwndbps=342500&mt=1478555586&pl=22&mn=sn-a5m7znel&mm=31&ip=199.168.113.204&key=yt6&dur=6.919&ei=svggWPmTNoH9-gOw-6KoBw&requiressl=yes&sparams=clen%2Cdur%2Cei%2Cgir%2Cid%2Cinitcwndbps%2Cip%2Cipbits%2Citag%2Clmt%2Cmime%2Cmm%2Cmn%2Cms%2Cmv%2Cnh%2Cpl%2Cratebypass%2Crequiressl%2Csource%2Cupn%2Cexpire&title=Foghorn%20Leghorn%3A%20A%20kid%20that's%20never%20played%20baseball%20%5B360p%5D
Now that 16GB RAM is all you need and 32GB and more is a myth for the Mac and the computing business… Its not, without the Mac Pro.
On the “positive” side:
Apple may create a true iMac Pro with a powerful CPU (4-8 core options) and a truly powerful MBP.
Thunderbolt 3 external chasis are ready now to bring powerful PCI cards to the Mac.
On the negative side:
Without Mac Pros demanding power users will have to go to Windows or Linux.
Mac development from big software studios may get more limited.
Power user community will be reduced on the Mac and it may limit general development for Macs.
Development for Mac may or may not increase its price depending on the application.
And by the way, the 16GB limitation in the MBP it is about working with bigger files. Or do you think 32GB is a marketing myth? Imagine those who need 128GB, they may be clueless users right?
To be a real iMac Pro it would have to let me install 3 or 4 top of the line nVidia cards.
Reality: The iMac form factor is not capable of being a Mac Pro replacement.
If “slim” is a feature, its not very Pro.
Well, the proposition here is a theoretical exercise I hope will never come true. So my two cents.
I find no reason or excuse for Apple not to even update the trash can other than they are working on some more open and powerful Mac Pro.
An iMac pro should be interesting as an entry level true Pro machine, although I prefer a headless desktop. But I think with current attitude inside Apple they could still add pressure and confusion to high end profesional users.
3 top Nvidia cards? we wish. But at least 2 should be possible on a Pro desktop Mac. But Nvidia has limited its SLI interface to just 2 cards for this generation and just for the 1070-1080 series but it may be again possible with a next generation update.
The MacPro helps to legitimize the others.
There’ll be left only two ways:
1. Apple officialize the right to build Hackintosh
2. Apple leaves definitely 3D and power users to the PC competitors
In any case, Apple will become a seller of super nice gadgets intended for higher class folks.
When the first nMP came out I thought, this has to be at the very edge of it’s thermal envelope. Now it’s been several years since a refresh, my guess is that the engineers cannot squeeze anymore performance out of it because of thermal limits.
Either that or it was Jony’s one last hurrah…
A new stackable Super Mac Mini would be the solution!
Apple would give anyone the choice to get the needed cluster power for a well done job.
Yep, I’ve often thought that would be a solution, but it could get expensive…
While I’m not a Pro user, I have always admired Apple’s Mac Pro. However, on this instance, the current Mac Pro leaves something to be desired. When the “cheese grater” came, I really wanted one – maxed out – costing over $10K, even though I did not really need it. But that’s the point. Desiring one. Keeping the imagination alive. The hope. The Dreams.
Seems to me that day has already come and gone.
Let’s just hope that if they do decide to continue with the macpro, they’ll show an equally great understanding for what power users want and need – as they did with the recent MacBook Pro’s. C’mon Jony…we know you can score another spot at the MOMA if you’re courageous enough to remove the keyboard altogether.
I’m not asking this to be sarcastic, I legitimately don’t know. What software do professionals use on Linux? I’m seeing a number of posts about professionals being forced to Linux or Windows. I know Windows runs most everything macOS does (except Final Cut Pro). I’m just wondering what is out there in the Linux world. I am only familiar with some open source stuff that is less than stellar.
Avid Pro Tools – PCI Card Slots
Why can’t MAC PRO be a modular tower that is built by owner in interlocking modules via lightning 3 ports at corners? Apple has modules for CPU, GPU, RAM, HD, Optical Drive, etc that owner stacks on top of each other like legos.
The DIY cluster has been tossed out as a suggestion in years past, and pragmatically, there’s not really anything wrong with the idea from a technology perspective.
The challenging part is the business case: if you give customers a tool where they can incrementally grow their computational power, just how do you also bake in some amount of obsolescence so that they have to eventually throw away older modules?
FWIW, I think the answer to this is that if one does the concept justice from the start, then what you’re really doing is capturing what customers used to spend on 3rd party upgrades…
If no iMac/All in one, mid level Mac tower/box/trashcan or Mac Pro tower/larger trashcan, professionals and creatives and professional level work on the Mac are “forked”!
PLEASE… sign this petition to REMOVE TIM COOK… he has to GO!!!
https://www.change.org/p/apple-board-of-directors-remove-tim-cook-as-ceo-of-apple