New Mac Pro. They delivered a powerful modular computer, but they just couldn’t un-Apple themselves. No NVidia. Price is probably going to be even stupider than the last Mac Pro.
EDIT: Interested in that monitor though. Is it 8k?
EDIT: I was close. It’s a 6K HDR monitor. Still, probably the best monitor that exists?
I loved the groan at the price of the stand.
OHOHOHO lots of rumbling in the audience when announcing prices, especially when they realized that the mount for the monitor costs extra.
Their new sign in feature is a nice middle finger at Facebook unified sign in that is used too many places around the internet. Especially love the “create a random email address” to use if the site / service requires an email.
Why do they do this? Why even have Mac Pros?
Macbooks I can understand. They’re great hardware. But for professional workstations? I can build something more than twice as powerful for less than half the cost, as long as you’re willing to live with the indignity of a 4k monitor.
Well, I’m certainly not buying a 6K monitor at that price.
Hey, I hear the lottery jackpot is pretty big right now.
If I won the lottery, I wouldn’t upgrade anything on my current PC.
With the Mac Pro you’re in a realm where if you have to worry about cost, this isn’t the computer for you. They said it could have up to 1.5 TB of RAM. I checked on amazon, and that’s maybe $24,008.40??? Just pricing out a rig like this is brain-meltingly expensive, and not for anyone who isn’t editing entire movies on the go.
There’s the Afterburner: “Afterburner allows you to go straight from camera to timeline and work natively with 4K and even 8K files from the start. No more time-consuming transcoding, storage overhead, or errors during output.”
At the moment, on the MacBook Pro laptops with the touchbar, video encoding is sent to the T2 chip and it’s encoded/transcoded way faster than on the Intel whatever chip. Afterburner is “a hardware accelerator card built with an FPGA, or programmable ASIC.”
So how do you even go about building this from PC parts? What does it even mean to have something like the Afterburner, but twice as powerful? Apple is bringing so much hardware expertise that to build something twice as powerful means you probably either need to be as clever as Apple engineers, or pay someone enough to be that clever.
Sorry, Rym, but I’m just not that confident in anyone’s claim about matching this machine’s capabilities for any cost, let alone twice as much for half the price, and certainly not merely hours after it has been announced (and not even knowing the final price for all the options).
I agree 100%. This machine is not designed, built, or marketed for the enthusiast or even prosumer. This is Apple trying to offer a real product for the enterprise and for hardcore video production houses. If you even have to ask about the price before deciding if you might be able to justify it then it is not for you. $10k-$20k is nothing if it helps them make their deadlines and churn out content more quickly then it is a net money maker.
*Edit: see also that they are going to offer a server rack mount version
genius
That’s one of those technologies that I don’t understand well enough to know if it’s genius or not, but then that is a sign in itself that it has some level of genius.
It’s one of those situations where everyone knows something ridiculous is still hypothetically possible, but then someone goes and does it.
So, I originally said this flippantly before seeing the specs, assuming it was similarly underpowered to the last Mac Pro.
But, I found this gem today:
For 3D and visual effects artists, the fact that it doesn’t support Nvidia graphics cards is a major sticking point. Patrick Longstreth, a VFX supervisor on shows like Adam Ruins Everything and Pen15 , says the new Mac Pro is an upgrade from the old trash can model, but it still isn’t enough to get him to make the switch from a PC. “I need the best solution for heavy 3D rendering and high-resolution video processing, so for this new Mac to lack support for Nvidia graphics cards is a big disappointment. I can still get better results for half the price with a custom-built PC,” he says.
He’s a pro, and said it after actually looking at the specs.
Since the actual prices aren’t out yet, I can’t actually do a comparison. But I can look at what it would cost to build a PC with some of the components.
The base model’s CPU is an 8-core Intel Xeon W. That’s ~$1,200 in the wild, for one that actually runs 200MHz faster than the one in the Mac Pro.
The base model’s 32GB of ECC RAM running at 2666MHz would cost ~$166 RAM is cheap, even with ECC. I could get faster RAM for about the same price, but the Mac pro wouldn’t be able to use it.
Graphics I can’t compare, other than that half the industry is complaining that without Nvidia it’s dead in the water for their pipelines. I’m sure there are plenty of non-Nvidia pipelines out there, and Apple claims big companies will start supporting AMD, but we’ll see. We also don’t know the cost of the expansions here.
Base model has a 256GB SSD, and they say it only has read speeds of 2.6GB/s, implying it’s not PCIe or even SATA III. That’s SATA II speeds. wtf? I can get 512GB of ultra-fast PCIe storage for $160!
I’m not optimistic. This definitely has use cases, and there are definitely pipelines where it plays a part. But I’m skeptical of what the cost/benefit analysis will actually be once we know the full price for all the options.
But you’re just talking about component costs. Apple doesn’t make their computers by putting together off the shelf components.
Watch this video about just the 6K monitor:
The combination of Mac Pro and 6K monitor means different parts of the display show at different levels of brightness depending on if they are UI elements or content.
Where is that in your list of components? It just isn’t there. Apple is making computers in dimensions orthogonal to machines of components in boxes. Like my example of the programmable cars for Pro Res streaming with no compression, that can be reprogrammed for other uses if needed. It’s that kind of thing that is outside the list of possible components.
The monitor is the best. The computer is not.
Excellent job of resurrecting a classic.
The monitor is amazing and groundbreaking. This isn’t the first time Apple has made the best monitor in the world and then tied it to a mediocre workstation. The monitor is incomparable to other displays (for now).
Everything else about it looks like it’s going to be overpriced or sub-par.
The problem is we don’t know the actual price. The monitor may not even be that good without getting multiple other options to make it reach its full potential. The $6k figure is probably just be for the lowest-end configuration with no monitor and no options.
If that’s true, and it costs $6k for just the PC with the minimum specs and nothing more… The “can build it for half price” is probably scarily accurate.
When you look at the Mac Pro in isolation, people are like “uh, that’s too pro.” And they’re right, it’s too pro for almost everyone. But Apple is sitting there like what do you mean too pro? If you wanted less pro, we already offer the iMac Pro. It’s got a crazy good monitor built in. It runs OSX. And you can definitely get one powerful enough that you won’t complain about any job you need to get done.
It’s not NVidia. It’s not modular. It’s ridiculously overpriced, costing multiple times more than a PC with similar computing power. These things Apple will never give you. No matter how much we beg and cry, Apple will never try to compete with the tower PC. The primary consumer of that product is the gamer, who Apple services on iOS, not on OSX.
With these Pegasus modules you can have up to ten 3.5 inch hard drives in your Mac Pro.
https://www.promise.com/us/Promotion/PegasusStorage
The MPX module has four drives that can run as a RAID. There is space for two of these in the Mac Pro.
The other module connects to the two SATA ports in the top of the case, and can hold two 3.5 inch drives.
Anyway, this kind of expansion seemed in doubt when mentioned on a recent podcast.
This seems like a really great feature for taking a single machine to a movie shoot or whatever, and having the RAID storage all in the same box.
Read this whole thread.