New Mac Pro

https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/design/

by fumar • 7 years ago

539 706 7 years ago

vbezhenar10• 7 years ago

That price is just absurd. I waited for Mac Pro announcement to decide whether I'll stay with Windows or jump to macOS. Macbooks are not for me, but I hoped for a remotely reasonable priced computer, something like $2000 with another $1000 to expand with more memory, etc. But $6000 for 8-core CPU, 256 GB SSD, GPU that is less powerful than my old $200 NVidia 1060? It's just laughable.

Otherwise seems like a good machine. But not at this price. Probably configuration that I would like to have will be something around $10k and I'll build this configuration for $3k myself.

dcow• 7 years ago

But where are you going to find a quality $1000 stand for your display?

_bxg18• 7 years ago

This is the one aspect that was truly ridiculous. When that number was quoted you could hear the crowd pause in disbelief, followed by a rumble of conversation interspersed with laughter.

From The Verge:

Still, all hope isn’t lost: we also don’t know how robust the box that the Pro Display XDR comes in is. It’s entirely plausible that you’ll just be able to prop up the $5,999 display with a hunk of cardboard or by leaning it up against a wall. Just be careful not to drop it.

dllu• 7 years ago

It's competing against machines such as the Boxx dual-CPU workstations, which start at $8000 [1]. I can see movie studios and such shelling out the big bucks to buy these for their 3D modellers, but only the super rich would buy one for themselves.

[1] https://www.boxx.com/systems/workstations/d-class

opencl2• 7 years ago

It's also competing against machines such as their own iMac Pro whose base model is the $1000 cheaper and has 4x the storage and a faster GPU aside from the built in 5K monitor.

That $8000 base model Boxx workstation has 20 cores instead of 8, 50% more RAM, and twice the storage.

shawnz2• 7 years ago

Competing on what, markup? What advantage does this hardware give for movie studios when consumer grade hardware outperforms it?

internobody• 7 years ago

3D modelers want NVIDIA cards, not Radeon, as NVIDIA supports CUDA. This has been a longstanding issue with 3D folks; the old trashcan Mac Pro had NVIDIA GPUs even with otherwise-outdated internals. When rumblings came of new Mac Pros a few years ago there was excitement that they could get some fast machines again; alas this appears not to be the case.

swah2• 7 years ago

But your build doesn't run macOS.... that's all that matters for so many folks.

(I aggree - I feel like maybe I will never be able to afford or justify a Mac-based system in my 3rd world country...)

goda90• 7 years ago

Strides have been made in virtualizing macOS, so that might not be holding people back much anymore.

chaostheory19• 7 years ago

MacOS is what keeps me on Apple for now, but this box is not the answer everyone is looking for.

People just want an affordable desktop that you can easily expand over time. At $6000 just for the starting model, in my head I'm already planning to move back to Windows. The only major thing I might miss is iCloud. The cheese grater lineup is still the best incarnation of the Mac Pro overall.

People don't want to be forced to buy an integrated screen, nor do they want a headless laptop, and not everyone can live with a laptop alone. In other words, I don't want a semi-powerful machine trapped in amber or a larger version of an iPhone / iPad.

I just have to figure out a good replacement for iCloud and its related apps.

vesrah• 7 years ago

How does the Mac Mini not meet what you're asking for?

vbezhenar10• 7 years ago

I want tower case, silent and performant. I want powerful GPU for few games I'm playing. I want ECC memory. I want to put one or two HDDs along with main SSD. Mac mini does not sound like something I would like to use. I don't need small size, I have enough room. I don't need portability, I work from one place.

CoolGuySteve• 7 years ago

Same here, I'm looking to build a machine to process large data sets. So far nothing can beat Linux on an EPYC or ThreadRipper on price/performance. It would cost half as much for a 1TB NVMe SSD, RTX 2080, at least 16 cores, etc.

The only reason I'm even waiting is because Zen 2 is right around the corner.

The 256GB SSD is so confusing. The price difference between a 970 EVO 256GB and a 970 EVO 512GB for example is only $50 (I couldn't even find a 256GB 970 PRO or 980). Are they really that desperate for margin on a machine this expensive?

The lack of NVidia is also strange, do the AMD cards in this config even support Tensorflow?

vbezhenar10• 7 years ago

I think that Nvidia will release cards for this Mac. May be even existing ones will fit. There are PCI-E ports there after all.

philjohn3• 7 years ago

The 256GB SSD is for people who just have the OS and apps on the drive, but the multi terabyte files they're manipulating (e.g. video editing) reside on NAS or LAS, hence 10Gbe and 40Gb TB3.

thomasjudge2• 7 years ago

Where do you see pricing info? Or did they talk about it in the keynote?

jakobegger3• 7 years ago

They mentioned it in the key note.

Mac Pro will start at USD 5999, Pro Display at 4999 (without stand), matte version will cost 5999, stand for display 999 or 200 for the vesa mount adapter.

ultrarunner4• 7 years ago

I know this can be controversial but I do all my work at home on a computer I built myself for ~900 running macOS. I had a Coffee Lake processor before you could get one straight from Apple. It's fast and with three monitors, plenty of ram, and NVME storage I noticed increased productivity over a laptop with an external display.

With the T2 chip this may not be an option forever, and the initial setup means it may not be an option for everyone. But right now it feels like a very stable and viable option for those who were never going to buy a $6000 cheese grater in the first place.

reaperducer7• 7 years ago

I know this can be controversial but I do all my work at home on a computer I built myself for ~900 running macOS

Awesome. It's great that you choose to do that. You're also not the target market for this product.

This is a product for people and companies for whom increased performance equals increased revenue.

Nelson692• 7 years ago

They just need some sort of minitower, a mac mini with a couple slots, a couple m.2 connectors and room for 64GB of removable memory..

I don't know why but I've thought something like that would almost be an ideal vehicle for xeon-d type parts.

chaostheory19• 7 years ago

People have been begging for this for over a decade now. It doesn't take much to see demand if you look at the Hackintosh community or the eBay market for old Mac Pros.

pfranz4• 7 years ago

They've been purposefully avoiding the mini-tower market for decades. For whatever reason (prestige, cannibalizing other product lines, etc) they're not interested.

PascLeRasc4• 7 years ago

The new Mac Pro, like Mac Pros always have been, is for music/TV studios and design agencies that bill their time starting at $500/hour. It's really not for individuals, and that's ok. Apple made a computer "just for the pros", like HN begs for in every butterfly keyboard thread. I'm thrilled about it even though I know I'll never touch one. It's for people who don't know what a CPU core is but know how to produce a platinum album, get an Oscar nomination, or bring a revolutionary industrial design to market. This is really something where the price is superfluous. I personally wish it was higher so that was more obvious.

_bxg18• 7 years ago

Yep. For me personally, it's a reassuring signal that Apple is doubling down on macOS and professionals, and gives me hope that next year's MacBook Pro redesign won't be a disappointment.

aczerepinski5• 7 years ago

I disagree that it’s always been this way. I bought a G4 tower when I was in college and it sure as heck wasn’t $6,000 back then.

This is the only traditional desktop computer that Apple sells, so it’s disappointing that everybody outside of movie studio employees has to fall back to an iMac or a Windows/Linux machine.

wlesieutre• 7 years ago

On the developer side of things, the 2018 Mac Mini update is a much lower priced computer with an option for a 6-core i7. If you really need a dedicated GPU, you can add one with a Thunderbolt enclosure.

The new Mac Pro is for movie studios and maybe very large machine learning models.

TimTheTinker4• 7 years ago

My dad is a graphic designer who got his start doing desktop publishing on a Macintosh II using QuarkXPress. He's faithfully stuck with the Mac since the '80s and currently has a trash can Mac Pro, with which he is mostly happy. He's never billed anywhere near $500/hour as most of his work is for small print periodicals (<50k circulation) and online presence for small nonprofits.

Currently, his only outstanding need is for better render times on Final Cut Pro (rendering videos of conference proceedings for YouTube), but I know he'll balk at $6000 for the new Mac Pro. I don't know what I'll recommend.

tolmasky• 7 years ago

Apple made a computer "just for the pros", like HN begs for in every butterfly keyboard thread.
It's for people who don't know what a CPU core is but know how to produce a platinum album, get an Oscar nomination, or bring a revolutionary industrial design to market.

Wait, what? When I say "for pros" I mean able to support latest specs. Something that had the latest NVIDIA cards, or could at least USE the latest NVIDIA cards to do ML or rendering would qualify under most people's definition of Pro I think? Right? When did the definition of Pro become "Music Producer"?

EugeneOZ• 7 years ago

Apple made a computer "just for the pros", like HN begs for in every butterfly keyboard thread.
It's for people who don't know what a CPU core is

We were talking about different kind of "Pro", lol.

And issue is not in butterfly keyboard - humans can adapt to different things. Issue that keyboard breaks too often.

binthere2• 7 years ago

For the same price you can buy a much better "Pro" PC though.

beenBoutIT3• 7 years ago

You make a great point, why is Apple avoiding a higher price point? They could easily charge mainframe level prices to music producers.

JKCalhoun• 7 years ago

That was basically my takeaway as well. Writing/compiling code just isn't "pro" anymore — doesn't require pro hardware. The new Mac Pro is meant for professional studios.

And to think music studios need so much horsepower when "Sgt. Pepper's" was recorded on 4 tracks…

liquidify6• 7 years ago

This is not "just for the pros". It's just for an elite echelon of pro's that aren't the normal working professional. It is way overpriced for the spec. HN wasn't asking for that.

_bxg18• 7 years ago

You are not the target market.

mantap2• 7 years ago

And who is? Who exactly is buying $13000 workstations with AMD GPUs?

empath75• 7 years ago

Why is the iMac pro not what you want?

rogueresearch• 7 years ago

Glossy display.

shoo_pl6• 7 years ago

Well, I did not even hope it would cost $3k. The moment they released iMac Pro at $5k it was obvious it will cost at least that much.

I hoped for the same price point since it comes without a monitor.

Sophistifunk• 7 years ago

No, no you won't. Xeons and boards that will run 2TB of ram cost a bloody fortune. Just because it's not for you, doesn't mean it's not a valuable product for others. I'll certainly be getting one (not for a while, but eventually) because I want an upgrade path, and dev tools and Docker can put to good use every GB of ram I can afford.

gigatexal3• 7 years ago

Complaining only signals that you are not the market they’re targeting. This is for Hollywood media makers, high end studios, etc. This was never to be a mass market item.

vbezhenar10• 7 years ago

What's wrong with making a mass market Mac Pro? I mean, old Mac Pros were much more reasonably priced. It's not like inflation was that huge over recent years or computer components suddenly have much higher costs.

Analemma_• 7 years ago

They want the mass market to buy the iMac Pro instead, which actually is reasonably-priced for what you get.

aczerepinski5• 7 years ago

How many Hollywood media makers are there? As an Apple shareholder should I be excited to learn that they made a specialty computer for this demographic?

joezydeco3• 7 years ago

How many Corvette owners are there? As a GM shareholder should I be excited they made a car just for mid-life crises?

threeseed8• 7 years ago

There are a lot of Youtube stars who would jump at a Mac Pro if it meant they can turn around videos quicker. Time is definitely money in their industry as well.

Point is that "professional" is a lot broader than just a few big enterprises.

jxdxbx2• 7 years ago

supporting the highest of the high end is beneficial for the platform overall. almost no one who needs this machine will sweat spending $15,000 on a configuration.

holy_city2• 7 years ago

I work in Hollywood. The complaints are here too. But people are more concerned with upgrades and repairs. Loss of a machine for a few days/weeks for a repair is far more costly than anything else.

That said a lot of the industry is moving to the cloud anyway and doesn't require workstations. Some shops are entirely on Linux. Audio post/recording and editing are the last bastions of mac pro dominance, imo.

gigatexal3• 7 years ago

Isn’t there something to be said about a local powerful workstation though or has offloading things to the cloud gotten that good?

rewgs2• 7 years ago

I do music and audio in Hollywood, and yup, the Mac Pro will never die here. Which is funny, because this machine isn't exactly for us, either -- a Xeon is often less favorable than an i7 or i9 in our world.

electricslpnsld• 7 years ago

I worked at two movie studios (Pixar, Weta Digital) and they were both almost 100% Linux with a smattering of Windows machines here and there. Apple stuff was mainly iPads for story boarding and that kind of stuff.

bendavis381• 7 years ago

This is more for other readers as I'm sure you know this, but VFX / animation facilities are very different than other post-production functions like editing and sound, which almost always run on Macs. Final Cut and Logic are mostly the reasons for that (Blackmagic is making a real effort to change that though).

mseidl2• 7 years ago

What were you using? Maya? Resolve? Fusion?

p1necone2• 7 years ago

I don't see how "the target market will still pay for it" is justification for insane markups on commodity hardware.

I understand paying a premium for the R&D that would have gone into the case and cooling design, but to then go and put such dated hardware in it and still start at $6000.

philjohn3• 7 years ago

what's dated about an unreleased Xeon? Or the just released Vega II Pro on 7nm?

kitchenkarma2• 7 years ago

What's high end about this offering apart from the price?

boopk2• 7 years ago

I work in hollywood (editing television/movie trailers)... at least our agency is editing off of imacs. I can't speak for others but shared storage (Avid Nexis) is very costly. We transcode to proxy material, cut with proxies, and then uprez/conform to hd, uhd, etc. No one, at least I can't think of any agencies, editing higher than 1080p. Hell you even end up editing in lores super compressed mp4 for some projects.

antisemiotic• 7 years ago

I once heard an opinion that if you see an ad in a place you often visit, then you are the target. If it's out of your reach now, you're supposed to be impressed and desire to get that thing some day. And complaining about the price is a form of admiration; would anyone complain (not ridicule) about something they think is useless?

amarshall5• 7 years ago

The price saddens me. The $6K base is twice the base of the 2013 Mac Pro when it was released. Some quick spec-ing for a somewhat-equivalent DIY build gives somewhere around $3K. The build I was already spec-ing for my next workstation has 2x RAM, 16x SSD, SFP+ NIC and is under $5K.

I hope at least that the SSDs are standard M.2, but looking at the pictures I’m not sure they are.

_ph_7• 7 years ago

No, they seem to be Apple-specific, as they are controlled by their T2 chip. So expect extremely expensive SSD too.

amarshall5• 7 years ago

Which, of course, if they aren’t able to be user-replaced with commodity parts, kind of throws the whole “user-upgradeable” part out the window.

jandrese8• 7 years ago

Do they have to be special sauce drives? The picture makes it look like standard M.2 drives. It doesn't seem like you should need anything special if the T2 chip is just acting as a bog standard drive controller that happens to send only encrypted data to the drive.

sdan4• 7 years ago

Where did you find the price?

jandrese8• 7 years ago

Presumably from store.apple.com?

Nursie• 7 years ago

Wow that thing is pricey! Proper high-end workstation I guess. Some folks will have a need for one.

Personally I was hoping for an updated (whiskey-lake and at least one thunderbolt port) Macbook. Next year maybe...

FigBug• 7 years ago

I think they took the name cheese grater too literally, it actually looks like one now.

nenadst• 7 years ago

was expecting to see a "april fools" banner to pop out any second during the segment (for the look, not the specs which seem quite interesting though (very) pricey)

deckar012• 7 years ago

This vent is uncharacteristically ugly for an Apple product. I have a hard time believing that this sphere pattern is really optimal for performance. Maybe optimal for minimizing the number of machine operations required to produce it... Those holes are just comically large.

threeseed8• 7 years ago

Of course they are large. It's designed to let air in.

amiga-workbench3• 7 years ago

Aesthetically, that's really quite loud. I'm surprised to see them ship something that doesn't fit their signature minimal & reserved look.

e402• 7 years ago

Can you provide details? I don't see them on the product specs page.

amiga-workbench3• 7 years ago

Sorry, I don't mean the machine is loud audibly, I mean its garish visually.

andreasley2• 7 years ago

It's what people asked for – a work horse, designed to be fast, reliable and reasonably quiet. They've tried the "beauty first" approach on the 2013 version and it was a disaster.

amiga-workbench3• 7 years ago

They can accomplish all that, just without the tasteless design.

The stainless steel frame contrasts with the shell, and not in a good way. The ventilation holes are really weirdly proportioned and still manage to look cramped with that inner baffle. And finally, that apple logo on the side stands out a bit too much, on the old cheesegrater it was a darker gray and a bit smaller.

The old G5 chassis was an understated and refined look, each of its elements seamlessly blended into each other well. This thing is just sharp to look at, my eyes do not know where to rest on it.

bluedino3• 7 years ago

The thing the Mac Pro does is magically make the price of every other computer look that much better.

$6000 for a computer? Johnson, that's insane.

What about $4999 for an iMac Pro? It comes with a display.

Great, order it!

What about $2499 for a Mac Mini with 32GB and 1TB SSD?

Great, order it!

What about $2499 for a Macbook Pro?

Great, order it!

ultrarunner4• 7 years ago

Interesting pro tip: psychological anchoring works on spouses (and even oneself) as well.

fwip2• 7 years ago

Pro tip: psychological manipulation is not a great strategy for a successful marriage. Just talk to each other like normal adults.

Eric_WVGG• 7 years ago

The 1987 Mac II released at $5,498, $12,125 adjusted for inflation.

Granted, that included a monitor.

IMO these things are designed for companies like Pixar, Disney, and aerospace, the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" world.

nicoburns• 7 years ago

This is in the context of Apple increasing its prices to ludicrous levels across its product lines though (look at the iPhones!). I'm sure it's great for short-term profitability, but I think they'll come to regret this.

glup• 7 years ago

“If you think the computer is expensive, you’re going to completely lose it when you find out the salary of the boffin who will put it to good use. Or, more mind-numbing yet, the cost of having neither.”

Junk_Collector• 7 years ago

Aerospace has been going heavily towards gpu accelerated simulation via CUDA, so the lack of NVIDIA support kind of kills the market potential there.

haditab• 7 years ago

aerospace

I was under the impression that most engineering software for mechanical and aerospace engineers are only supported on Windows.

mynameishere• 7 years ago

They were priced like a low end Sun computer, so that must have been what they were after [1]. But it still didn't make sense. The near-identical Amiga 2000 in 1987 was 1495 dollars.

[1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/Sun_Price_List_Dec88.pdf

bluedino3• 7 years ago

Back in 1999, the original Cinema Display was $1299 and the G4 Tower was $2499

kickopotomus• 7 years ago

Hardware was many orders of magnitude more expensive to manufacture in 1987[1]. The base model that you get for $6000 is not impressive at all by today's standards. The max specs would make it a powerhouse but it probably will also cost ~$12000.

[1] http://www.singularity.com/charts/page59.html

lelf• 7 years ago

"if you have to ask, you can't afford it" world.

I don’t know, I can afford it, but Apple is losing it (see MacBook Pro fiasco).

chaostheory19• 7 years ago

The 2006 Mac Pro Cheese Grater model was $2,499. $3,124 adjusted for inflation. Earlier G models were even cheaper.

Aromasin• 7 years ago

If aerospace get computers like this, I'd love to hear where I need to be applying to. We're running on Windows 7 machines with i5-2400 CPUs, about 4GB of RAM, and integrated graphics. All our CAD software is run on a grid system, where we access e3, Altium and Catia via a remote server. The engineers are all on hardware about 7 years old.

yurishimo• 7 years ago

Really excited to see the future of this hardware even though I'm not the target demographic. The ability to swap out with newer PCIe components down the line will be nice and it appears Apple is likely using some sort of desktop socket, so mounts and adapters for customizing the CPU will be available from 3rd parties eventually. Hopefully Intel doesn't change the CPU socket out from underneath everyone too soon.

I'm also curious if it will support PCIe Gen4 since Apple has obviously worked closely with AMD. I'm not up to speed on the specifics on whether Intel CPUs can take advantage of that hardware yet though or if we'll have to wait a year. Maybe that's why Apple didn't give a hard release date?

What I'm really disappointed about is the new display. I would gladly pay another $1-2k similar to the old cinema displays for something that's been updated but without all the HDR features. $5k for a display is insane for anyone except video professionals who need the HDR capabilities. The icing on the cake is getting nickel and dimed for the stand too. $200 I think they could make a good faith argument, but for $1k and it doesn't even come with a vesa mount in the box is really disappointing.

You could definitely tell the crowd was bummed on that tidbit in particular.

Overall though, still a great showing by Apple and a move in the right direction for power users.

bluedino3• 7 years ago

$3,999 and $1,999 would have been so much more reasonable.

e402• 7 years ago

Yeah, at $4k I would have replaced my 2013 MP, but at $6k... nah. Not unless I hit the lottery.

horyzen• 7 years ago

I'm also curious if it will support PCIe Gen4 since Apple has obviously worked closely with AMD

Probably not. In order to have PCIe 4 working, you have to have CPU support as well as mobo chipset support, neither is there in this machine.

josteink2• 7 years ago

So a really bad consumer grade performance machine, starting at $6k, and already obsolete.

Where do I sign up?

jachee2• 7 years ago

You could definitely tell the crowd was bummed on that tidbit in particular.

It was the closest to a "boo!" I've ever heard at an Apple keynote.

Shivetya• 7 years ago

I know being expandable is important here but I am stunned by the fact that an iMac Pro actually comes with better SSD and Video Card for less money and you get a screen to boot!

256g SSD is shameful, I don't care what they were thinking. No Nvidia support mentioned so I know a few that just wrote it off for that oversight alone. They will probably hold out just to be sure but that was the hope for them and others.

While I was never in the market for a Mac Pro, though the iMac Pro is not out of the question jump over the iMac top tier, I never expected such low starting specs for SSD and Video at this price point. 580X is old, 2017 old. If this is what they are struck with by not using Nvidia they have done everyone a disservice.

* did the spec this out in 2017 when they announced it and just locked it in?

* edit : Wrong on price, iMac Pro is 1,000 less than base Mac Pro

duskwuff3• 7 years ago

The first step up from 256GB is 2x512GB, and there's configurations up to 2x2TB. My guess is that the 256GB configuration is meant for users that work primarily with data that's kept on network storage.

kstrauser• 7 years ago

Right. If you're working with multi-terabyte files that live on a NAS or an external directly-attached storage, the local drive is basically a cache of the OS plus whatever you're physically working on at that moment.

TimTheTinker4• 7 years ago

If you're a developer on a large (multi-GB) codebase, a beefy multicore system can be great for quick compile times, but hefty storage may not be a necessity.

llampx2• 7 years ago

There's no professional that would buy a machine with 256GB of storage. Let's call it what it is - a throwaway configuration meant to hit a price point.

ljw10012• 7 years ago

that just shows that they put the tiny, essentially useless HD in to keep the base price artificially low.

jimbokun• 7 years ago

Or is this meant to be the "I just want to buy my own disks separately model", with 256GB drive just there to allow OS to be pre-installed?

EDIT: I see now there are only two internal drive bays, so that would mean tossing the 256GB that comes with it if you wanted to max out the internal storage.

machz• 7 years ago

The 256GB model is an old Apple hack to show a lower starting price (which rarely anyone would buy at this time) and which quickly goes up as you upgrade the components.

_Codemonkeyism2• 7 years ago

And how many people here who claim to use a SAN for sure use a NAS is funny.

From maintaining large image storage FC SANs with Apple xServe and IBM DS for some years this is no fun to administrate for peak performance and I would assume most smaller shops have NAS instead of SANs (no arguing larger shops have SANs as we did driving ten photo studios).

_ph_7• 7 years ago

256g of SSD would be appropriate under the conditions that a) this is a very basic and affordable configuration, so less than 3k and b) the machine would be user-expandable with NVMe drives or similar. Then you would get the minimal SSD just good enough to install the OS and put in third party storage to save money. And of course, you would want to be able to put in more than 4T of storage.

jakobegger3• 7 years ago

Why do you think that it's not user expandable? Surely you can just put a PCIe SSD card in the new Mac Pro and use that for storage?

secabeen2• 7 years ago

256G of SSD is also fine if you store all of your data on a enterprise file array. Then the 256G only is used for OS, Applications and caching.

mcphage5• 7 years ago

580X is old, 2017 old

Is it? This site claims it came out in March 2019 but I definitely can't keep the various graphics card lines separate in my head: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-580x.c3398

old-gregg• 7 years ago

Yes, 580X is old (it's the same hardware as RX 480 from 2016) In fact, everything in that machine is old: the Xeons they use are rocking the Skylake core form 2015, with all of the recently discovered side-channel vulnerabilities.

The upcoming AMD Threadripper 3 CPUs with PCIe4 would be a much better Pro offering. Clock-for-clock they are beating Skylake now, rumored to have up to 64 cores. Also, PCIe4-based RAID 0 arrays are pushing 15GB/sec transfer speeds IIRC.

opencl2• 7 years ago

The 580X is technically "new" but it's the same Polaris 20 GPU chip that has been around since the RX480 in 2016 and has seen several rebadges accompanied by slight clockspeed bumps. This particular rebadge is Apple-specific and debuted with the recent iMac refresh.

eBombzor• 7 years ago

Sure maybe that mobile-workstation card came out this year but the tech behind it is very old (GCN 4.0). In fact all of AMD's current offerings are fairly old now. Navi is the first GPU architecture since 2012 that's not based on GCN.

zerocrates• 7 years ago

My understanding is that a Pro 580X is just a rebadging of the Pro 580, which is from mid-to-early 2017, and all the 5xx series is just minor spec bumps on top of the 4xx series.

phire• 7 years ago

The 580X is just an RX580 that has been clocked a few percent higher.

But it gets worse, the RX580 is an identical design to the RX480, with just a few silicon tweaks to clock slightly higher.

Clock for clock, the 580X preforms identically to the RX480 that launched in August 2016.

outworlder• 7 years ago

That was a sub $300 GPU back in 2016 (the RX480). There is nothing "pro" about it in 2019.

Rebelgecko5• 7 years ago

The Radeon Pro 580x is the same hardware as the Radeon RX 580, except the Pro version is underclocked

drngdds2• 7 years ago

I know being expandable is important here but I am stunned by the fact that an iMac Pro actually comes with better SSD and Video Card for less money and you get a screen to boot!

I'm guessing it's just price discrimination. People who are in the market for a Mac Pro (or rather, their employers) are probably not price sensitive.

threeseed8• 7 years ago

256GB SSD and base video card is fine.

I would definitely look at a Mac Pro for software development (every minute counts) and if you're in that group there is simply no need for more storage or decent graphics.

ljw10012• 7 years ago

meh, i'm just starting to fool around with music editing and my 250 GB laptop is out of storage. Also, it's a three year old laptop and that's what it came with. They could have kept the stainless steel and given me a bigger drive.

Who exactly is the intended user for this ultra-expensive, non-portable, box if it's too lame for hobbyists?

This is just apple sticking a vacuum into their customers pockets, applying the same over-pricing policy that is now standard on their phones.

shoo_pl6• 7 years ago

That's silly to be honest. I am a developer myself and I can tell you Mac Pro or iMac Pro is a waste of money in every way imaginable.

Look up barefeats benchmarks. Unless you have very specialised needs (like video editing) there is visible penalty when you increase the number of your cores. For every day usage 6-8 cores is what you should be aiming at, and preferably with highest clock speed possible.

The more cores you have, the lower clocks get and the harder it is to sync cache between them. If your software cannot really use that much parallelisation it will be slower, not faster.

For 99,99% devs spending cash on iMac Pro over iMac with i9 is waste of money and probably degraded performance. Mac Pro is even worse as you need to buy external monitor too.

jwr6• 7 years ago

For development, I'm actually perfectly fine with 256GB SSD. And I don't care about the video card much at all.

Still, I don't see this as a developer machine — I think an iMac Pro is a much better value proposition for developers, and in my case, where I really mostly care about single-threaded performance for interactive development in Clojure and ClojureScript, I'm looking at the iMac.

noir_lord4• 7 years ago

On the flip side over in Linux land I built an 8 core 16T desktop with 64GB of RAM and two 27” 4K HDR monitors for less than half the price of the base Mac Pro.

Oh and it has an RTX2080 which beats an RX580 so badly it’s practically attempted murder.

I bet the apple tax I really do (typing this on a 5th gen mini) but the base model is hilariously expensive and in a world where I can buy a 12 core/16T for 499 that beats a 1200 intel cpu obsolete before its released (and that 12C will drop straight in).

They’ll sell, apple stuff always does but unless you need macOS’s for some reason I don’t see how.

sooheon• 7 years ago

Why is iMac better than iMac pro for single threaded?

sgustard• 7 years ago

What's the general split between laptops and desktops for developer use? Certainly I've migrated to 100% laptop which gets regularly used in a variety of locations.

psychometry• 7 years ago

It's almost like they assume everyone's going to upgrade the drive. Might as well just ship without any at all.

myrandomcomment• 7 years ago

Most of the people that are buying this will attached very large external storage as it is most likely going to be used as a video editing workstation.

walterbell2• 7 years ago

Is video editing external storage more likely to be shared 10GbE NAS or direct attached Thunderbolt 3 with software RAID?

_bxg18• 7 years ago

The branding distinction between "iMac Pro" and "Mac Pro" is just incredibly confusing.

Redoubts• 7 years ago

I think the Macbook and Macbook Air is much worse, but I suppose it's unclear if both are currently active lines.

jrs953• 7 years ago

Yeah the pricing for the base model is insane. You can get a more powerful PC with 4x the storage for half the price.

And you're right about Nvidia. I also stream on Twitch, was hoping I might be able to get one of these to replace my current PC. Without Nvidia there's no way.

rhinoceraptor6• 7 years ago

If you spec something with similar workstation grade hardware, you'll be in the same ballpark. Gaming PC hardware isn't comparable.

altmind5• 7 years ago

$5000 for imac pro(+applecare)? that is bonkers. $6000 is even more crazy. You can get more storage, better gpu, more options for network for much less. And you wont need to deal with apple geniuses to fix the issues.

saagarjha5• 7 years ago

Those alternatives don’t run macOS.

lallysingh• 7 years ago

Apple is only thinking of video editing for this box.

scarface742• 7 years ago

The LG 5K -- by itself is $1300.

lambdasquirrel2• 7 years ago

Everything about the base specs are just good enough. I’m not defending it per se, but if you spec’ed the machine for any given purpose, whether software dev, or rendering, it’d probably raise the cost by at least $1-2k, and then you’d have the “real” machine. So, the reason the price looks egregious is because most of it is just base cost.

This is a computer made for the engineers who’ve already “made it,” who are making that $500k a year and are looking for a Porsche over a Corvette.

jahnu• 7 years ago

Who and/or how many engineers are making $500k a year!?

asaph• 7 years ago

This is a computer made for the engineers who’ve already “made it,” who are making that $500k a year and are looking for a Porsche over a Corvette.

What about an EV such as a Tesla?

hinkley6• 7 years ago

In addition to computing I also dabble in woodworking, where there are tools in the 'corvette or porsche' classification that everyone drools over, and those guys can spend way more money on tools at a lower salary than I do for 'fancy' Macbooks. Of course, their tools last 3x longer if taken care of, but the outlay can still be breathtaking.

"A good craftsman doesn't blame his tools" isn't a warning against complaining. It's a warning about picking bad tools in the first place and scapegoating them instead of accepting that it was your decision all along.

Miredly• 7 years ago

It's designed to be useful for more than one kind of "Pro". The old Mac Pro, for instance, seemed to completely forget about music studios and their professional requirements for Macs. This new machine may seem like overkill to software developers, but as an audio engineer, it's perfect.

I don't even want a 1TB SSD in it, the 256 is perfect to hold the OS, a few DAWs, and all the plugins I could ever want. Everything else gets saved to drives in a toaster anyway. A rackmountable unit with a ton of PCI slots for HDX/Dante cards was on my Christmas list, and I'm not alone- there's a reason they made a point of showing how many HDX cards it can fit in their presentation.

It also looks like an amazing workstation for video editors. I really don't think it's designed for software engineers who make 500k a year.

arvinsim• 7 years ago

This is a computer made for the engineers who’ve already “made it,” who are making that $500k a year and are looking for a Porsche over a Corvette.

Is this what "Pro" means now?

jmull• 7 years ago

256g SSD is shameful

If you don’t want it, don’t buy it.

There’s a pretty obvious general pro workflow for a configuration like this, where OS and apps are stored on the main drive and data is stored elsewhere.

Where’s the shame in that?

hinkley6• 7 years ago

The entry level Macbook Pro is not the best bang for the buck. For about as long as I can remember, the best value in the neighborhood of $2950. So the 'good' Macbook gets cheaper due to inflation and not much else.

Right now you can get 32 gig of RAM and the 512 SSD for around that mark. I'd probably throw in the video card upgrade for a personal computer, maybe not for a work one unless you're doing AI.

busymom03• 7 years ago

Honestly, I think the SSD size is okay. 512 would have been better but considering this is fully expandable, it's much cheaper to manually upgrade the SSD to whatever you like with after market SSDs anyway vs Apple charging more for it. Also the people who are looking to buy such a beast aren't going to be price sensitive. So this lets them price it at $5k.

icedchai3• 7 years ago

256 gig is an embarrassment. My phone has 256 gigs. My laptop from 2011 had 256 gigs...

mixmastamyk• 7 years ago

My disk array has 256 bigger units.

endorphone2• 7 years ago

Neat. My new MacBook Pro has 256GB. I'm using ~133GB. That's XCode and the Xcode Beta, the full Office suite, Logic Pro, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IntelliJ, GoLand, Photoshop, Illustrator, a bunch of other Adobe apps, and on and on. When I'm at the desktop I use an external drive for dumping junk to, and for Time Machine backups.

There is a point of diminishing returns, and given that most people don't have a giant Steam library on their Mac, 256GB is more than sufficient for a large number of users. And as many others have said, when you're working on professional data like video and audio it is almost always on an external array.

dylan604• 7 years ago

I'm less concerned about the 256GB SSD. If this is a true Pro set up, then there's going to be very large storage media attached. The internal SSD is just to store the OS and apps. My main concern is the lack of a mention of Nvidia support. I'm very curious of the apparent bad blood between Apple and Nvidia. Were the GPU issues from the 2011 MacBook Pros to blame, or just one of the pieces of straw?

TheOperator• 7 years ago

What's wrong with a 256gb ssd? More than enough for plenty of use cases.

justinsaccount7• 7 years ago

The starting point for Mac Pro, the stainless steel space frame

Only apple could manage to call a bent piece of metal pipe a "space frame".

edit: getting downvoted because a "space frame" is a real thing. However, those are very specifically designed to be a "Three-dimensional truss based on the rigidity of the triangle" and this is absolutely not that. This apple co-opting an existing term for something and applying it where it doesn't make any sense.

reaperducer7• 7 years ago

Only apple could manage to call a bent piece of metal pipe a "space frame".

Or every architect and engineer in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_frame

h3throw• 7 years ago

Only Apple could get shat on for using appropriate but obscure terminology.

justinsaccount7• 7 years ago

So...

In architecture and structural engineering, a space frame or space structure (3D truss) is a rigid, lightweight, truss-like structure constructed from interlocking struts in a geometric pattern. Space frames can be used to span large areas with few interior supports. Like the truss, a space frame is strong because of the inherent rigidity of the triangle;

I don't see any triangles here.. All the examples on that wikipedia page show triangles. Does the frame they built actually count as a space frame or did they coopt the term?

reaperducer7• 7 years ago

Hopefully this will stop people from moaning that "Apple has abandoned the pro market!"

Or probably not. They'll just redefine "pro" to meet their complaining needs.

slantyyz3• 7 years ago

Well, if the baseline for the Pro market was made up of people who could afford the last version, then one can make the argument that Apple is the one that has redefined "Pro".

reaperducer7• 7 years ago

It seems evident that Apple views the "pro" market as movie studios, large corporations, and media entities that need serious computing power.

On HN "pro" is three guys at a co-working space using coupons to buy coffee. It's these people who will complain the loudest about the new Mac Pro.

saagarjha5• 7 years ago

MacBook Pro could use a design update.

jxdxbx2• 7 years ago

yeah, HN commenters just was an expandable mid-sized tower. a gaming PC, but a Mac. But the best use case for a gaming PC is to play games...which the Mac will never be the right platform for. Even if Apple supported Nvidia with Nvidia drivers, if you want a gaming PC just get one.

AmericanChopper• 7 years ago

Or probably not. They'll just redefine "pro" to meet their complaining needs.

Yep. The thread has spoken, and it has decided that a Mac Pro should cost less than a MacBook.

KVFinn2• 7 years ago

Can people really use all this power with the GPUs offered?

The base is a 580X. The original AMD 7870 was a great gaming card in 2012... but boy the latest attempts to keep that thing going with the 480 and 580 are really pushing it. It's still a good budget gaming card but an embarrassment to offer with a Pro computer at that price.

I love that Vega 2 can come with so much RAM, but until the world moves away from CUDA, are there a lot of uses for this? Even if I got this desktop for free I'd have to use my old Windows PC for anything using the GPU because it has nvidia.

endorphone2• 7 years ago

The 580X is an extremely capable GPU for normal usage scenarios. If you're doing compute, they offer the Vega 2 which is very competitive with anything on the market.

People doing CUDA work are not using Macs. And for Mac apps that do use compute they'll take advantage of it.

I wish Apple wasn't so anti-nvidia, but at the same time an awful lot of the comments in here are basically saying "People who would never have bought this now won't buy it because..."

KVFinn2• 7 years ago

People doing CUDA work are not using Macs.

The important question is are the people who want $6,000 workstations using CUDA?

For me personally, I would LOVE a monster workstation, but if I found a Mac Pro under my Christmas tree I'm not sure I would actually use it much. I would have to keep switching back to my old Nvidia desktop to do the things I specifically want a monster workstation for.

jandrese8• 7 years ago

Audio engineers for example don't need stupendous graphics, but do appreciate most everything else.

lordpankake• 7 years ago

What an ugly box

w4rh4wk5• 7 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. Seems like taste is subjective after all. ^^

KoenDG• 7 years ago

Seems like they're not announcing the CPU just yet?

duskwuff3• 7 years ago

There's CPU specs at:

https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/

Most of the specs sound like Cascade Lake parts, but the cache sizes don't quite match. It's possible that Apple's using a custom part, or one which Intel hasn't announced yet.

amarshall5• 7 years ago

It’s most likely the leaked [1] but not yet announced Xeon W-3xxx.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-xeon-cascade-lake-w-...

ofrzeta• 7 years ago

Design-wise it's not great. The quite minimal case with the huge handles looks a bit amateurish and cheap. Although they try to inflate every feature in the typical Apple manner, like the "spherical array" that is "onto the internal and external surfaces of the aluminum", the front panel is not sound. Actually a perforated metal plate like in the old macs looks better. Obviously it's question of taste but it's not great Apple design that used to impress me in the past.

wjakob• 7 years ago

Lack of NVIDIA support is a deal-breaker. The AMD ecosystem is just so far behind when it comes to frameworks like CUDA, OptiX, cuDNN, etc.. Why can't Apple open up kernel-level support by cooperating more with NVIDIA? This state of things seems completely bizarre to me.

roboyoshi2• 7 years ago

Maybe it's NVIDIA blocking the way? If Linus is correct, then they are not a nice company to work with.

fjarlq• 7 years ago

A member of NVIDIA's CUDA Product Management wrote in October 2018:

"Apple fully control drivers for Mac OS. But if Apple allows, our engineers are ready and eager to help Apple deliver great drivers for Mac OS 10.14 (Mojave)." -- https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1042279/cuda-setup-...

pwinnski• 7 years ago

To hear Nvidia tell it, it's Apple fault. Weird how everybody who works with Nvidia has issues, though.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 7 years ago

The AMD ecosystem will always remain behind if application developers continue to choose single-vendor proprietary frameworks rather than standard APIs.

jayd16• 7 years ago

This is an odd complaint considering the Metal requirement on MacOS.

arendtio• 7 years ago

I know this is an Apple/Mac discussion, but from a Linux/OSS perspective, it looks very different. If it weren't for CUDA, Tensorflow and so on, I wouldn't even consider buying NVIDIA (anymore).

Currently, I have a laptop with NVIDIA graphics and a desktop PC with AMD graphics. The AMD stuff just works; out of the box (OSS, good performance, happy user). But NVIDIA either comes with nouveau (OSS, poor performance) or the nvidia proprietary binary driver which has all sorts of weird issues (e.g. always-on fans, animations running at different speeds, etc.).

Sure, this doesn't say anything about how a Mac would run with NVIDIA drivers, but it gives a hint that NVIDIA has its own weak spots. But the reason why Apple decided to skip on NVIDIA in this case, is probably rooted deeper within their strategies.

jachee2• 7 years ago

There was an anecdote on a semi-recent (sometime this year) episode of ATP where an inside source related to them that nVidia were a terrible organization to try and work with. They apparently screwed Apple over, and Apple has a long memory for that sort of thing.

whywhywhywhy2• 7 years ago

There was some sleight of hand in the benchmarking for me too, they compared GPU compute rendering engine speeds to "Nvidia Quadros" when no one doing CUDA rendering on Windows uses Quadro cards, they all use GTX because the price to performance is ridiculous on Octane render/Redshift/etc.

jzl• 7 years ago

There's been a long-simmering hostility between the two companies. Broken down somewhat here: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/18/apples-management...

_ph_7• 7 years ago

Very sad day. In the first moments, I thought everyones wishes had come true, and they bring back the old style Mac Pro back, with a redesigned housing. But the old Mac Pro had started around 2-3k, so while never cheap, not out of reach of an enthusiast user. While the specs of the new Mac Pro are certainly impressive, the price is just out of the range of all private and most professional users. Not sure why Apple refuses to sell a machine which just allows to put in a normal desktop graphics card.

Also: they are selling a "Pro" desktop Mac without real mass storage? Just 4T of SSD? (Of course only available at Apple prices). The old Mac Pro had a lot of storage slots, both for 3.5 and 5.25 inch drives, but the new one couln't house at least a couple of 2.5 inch slots as well as NVMe slots?

jakobegger3• 7 years ago

You can probably load it up with a lot of PCIe SSD cards.

There's really no need to add bays for magnetic drives anymore (if you want magnetic drives, you probably want them in a NAS)

_ph_7• 7 years ago

Magnetic drives perhaps not, but I was mostly thinking of SSDs. But indeed, if you can use some of the PCIe slots for storage, it would probably be ok. Still a too large gap between the Mini and the Pro.

matthewmacleod2• 7 years ago

You have to bear in mind the target market - notice that it has dual 10Gb Ethernet, and that many users will be using a NAS. There are a shedload of PCIe slots there too for more storage.

tus87• 7 years ago

Well it's better than the trashcan....but still not as good as the original alumINium box.

diehunde• 7 years ago

This one looks like a different type of trash can

minimaxir• 7 years ago

For developers, there's another constraint in investing in the Mac Pro: the increasingly high likelihood Apple will move to ARM:

Mac Pro + display coming in at $11,000 a year or so before a switch to ARM is a hard nope from me. It's a little freeing, so I can now actually get a Mac mini

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/11356329822896537...

aseipp• 7 years ago

Why on earth would you ever even consider getting a Mac Pro if a Mac Mini will do the job you need? Unless you have $5,000+ just sitting around you want to throw away on street creds? This is a serious question, because I really cannot possibly fathom what scenario would actually put you in that position as a buyer other than, "I have money and I like to spend it".

Also the idea that ARM hardware is somehow a threat to your "investment" is just random FUD. First, it's still just speculation. But second, assuming it's 100% true -- you're kidding yourselves if you think Apple is suddenly going to appear with magical Xeon-class 28-core ARM CPUs sometime in the next year that can compete with what they're offering here. Try 5+ years (minimum) after their first desktop-class CPUs are proven rock-solid. This Mac Pro cycle will probably last that long. If they do switch anytime soon, it will likely be only lower end machines like the MacBook Airs and non-Pro models. And even then, if history is anything to go by, they'll offer 5+ years of binary compatibility for newer devices to run old applications and multi-target toolchain support for developers to target all systems. People keep computers, even laptops, for longer and longer now. x86 macOS machines are not going anywhere, anytime soon, and Apple knows not to randomly segment/abandon users like that.

I'm not going to buy this machine for a number of reasons (including the astronomical base cost), but FUD about future magical ARM machines doesn't hold up at all, IMO.

LeoPanthera• 7 years ago

The is wild, baseless speculation.

amelius• 7 years ago

Only marginal improvements. And the marginal improvements keep getting smaller.

technofiend• 7 years ago

Well the hackintosh crowd has to be excited because a Pro hardware refresh adds new hardware kexts!

mastrsushi• 7 years ago

It looks traditionally nice, definitely a throwback. Just not too conservative to where it looks like every other boring black PC case these days. But also not cylinder shaped like something out of a Sci-fi movie.

I don't really care about the specs because that's not really a concern one should have when buying an Apple product. It's more about being promised a solid experience, without having to be technologically conscious and do your own homework.

linguae2• 7 years ago

I was ecstatic about the 2019 Mac Pro until I heard its price. $5999, which is well above the price range of the entry-level 2013 Mac Pro ($2999) and of other Mac Pro and Power Macintosh models, which have historically had an inflation-adjusted entry level price range of $2500-3000 for the past two decades. In fact, here's a list of prices for entry-level Power Macintosh and Mac Pro models in the last 20 years (all of these prices were found on Low End Mac):

  Blue and White Power Mac G3 (January 1999) -- $1,599 ($2,453 in 2019 dollars)
  Graphite Power Mac G4 (December 1999) -- $1,599 ($2,453 in 2019 dollars)
  2001 Power Mac G4 (January 2001) -- $1,699 ($2,453)
  2001 Quicksilver Power Mac G4 (July 2001) -- $1,699 ($2,453)
  2002 Mirrored Drive Door Power Mac G4 (August 2002) -- $1,699 ($2,413)
  2003 Power Mac G5 (August 2003) -- $1,999 ($2,776), reduced to $1,799 ($2,499) in November 2003
  2006 Mac Pro (August 2006) -- $2,199 ($2,787)
  2010 Mac Pro (July 2010) -- $2,499 ($2,929)
  2013 Mac Pro (December 2013) -- $2,999 ($3,289.83 in 2019 dollars, but you can still purchase an entry-level 2013 Mac Pro today from Apple for $2,999 in 2019 dollars).

I wouldn't have been surprised if Apple had announced a $3,299 or $3,499 entry-level Mac Pro model given how inflation-adjusted prices have crept upwards over the past 20 years, but $5,999 is a gigantic leap from $2,999 or even $3,499.

There's no doubt that the 2019 Mac Pro has answered the needs of some classes of pro Mac users. For people in the movie and music industries as well as professionals working in certain engineering and architecture disciplines, they have clamored for user-serviceable, upgradeable Macs that are also very powerful, and are willing to pay top dollar for their equipment since time is money for them. The Mac Pro certainly delivers in these aspects, and I'm glad that Apple has recommitted itself to these users.

Unfortunately Apple has disappointed another class of Power Macintosh/Mac Pro user; those who want an affordable machine that is also user-serviceable. Apple used to provide entry-level Power Macintosh and Mac Pro models that catered to this group. Unfortunately the Mac lineup under Tim Cook has largely become unserviceable by users, complete with soldered RAM, soldered storage, and design decisions that make upgrading and repairs difficult to impossible. The 2019 Mac Pro is a tease, a kick in the face for this class of user. We finally have access to an expandable, upgradeable, user-serviceable Mac, but at unattainable prices. It's like being an Acura fan who clamored for the return for the Acura Integra or Acura RSX, which were affordable sports cars that would probably cost $30,000 brand new if they were sold today, but Acura points these fans to the Acura NSX, a $150,000+ supercar.

And, so, as a user of a 2013 Mac Pro, I have mixed feelings. I'm glad to see that Apple is committed to its pro users and to the longevity of macOS, but unfortunately Apple has doubled-down on its model of selling non-serviceable, non-upgradeable machines to all but the most wealthy of its customers.

Unfortunately I feel trapped as a Mac user. Windows 10 sucks and the Linux desktop is still not ready for prime time, but at least there are a wide variety of PCs out there that are user-serviceable, upgradeable, and affordable. macOS is the best operating system out there and is the only one in my opinion that is truly designed for users in mind, but unfortunately it is largely tied to hardware that is virtually closed off to repairs and upgrades unless you're willing to spend $6000+ on a computer, which is insanely expensive for a computer in 2019 unless you're in a field that absolutely needs the most powerful machine around.

Thankfully my 2013 Mac Pro provides ample power for my needs, and so I'll be using that for years to come. Hopefully I'll be able to pick up a used 2019 Mac Pro for a more affordable price once my 2013 Mac Pro gets long in the tooth.

imagetic14• 7 years ago

I think if they would have released an i9 model with a better GPU at say, $3499, then they could have sold a lot of them. I don't see any point in server chips and ECC ram being bottle necked by a single weak GPU with proprietary upgrades.

colechristensen2• 7 years ago

The copy about the lattice pattern front being inspired by nature for airflow and rigidity is pretty ridiculous.

It looks cool to have little spheres cut in the inside of a metal block but that's it. If you were actually optimizing for airflow or density you would do something entirely different (or you would look at the effects the grill has on airflow and realize the effect is minimal regardless of what you do and then move on to other priorities.

On the other hand it looks like it would attract dust and be obnoxious to clean.

Apple has lost it's way with design.

threeseed8• 7 years ago

Not sure what you are talking about. They actually were optimising for airflow. If you look at the picture you couldn't design to allow more air to come through whilst maintaining a rigid structure: https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/design/

As for dust/dirt you could just spray it with compressed air.

colechristensen2• 7 years ago

If your real goal was airflow with rigidity you could just leave the front completely open and be fine with rigidity or perhaps have a small number of bars crossing the front.

You also would not pick spherical cutouts. the bowl-shapes are going to add drag.

This is only being done to show off manufacturing sophistication, you can say you did something that looks cool without adding nonsense about performance.

secabeen2• 7 years ago

Do they need a rigid structure on the faceplate? It's got the Space Frame bars, and there's a standard grid of holes plate behind the fancy faceplate. Just use the standard grate.

rock_artist2• 7 years ago

As most of us here are with the developer hat. I think it's worth reminding that the target audience of those machines are Pro creatives. (those who didn't ditch Apple yet ;) )

It's also the second time I remember Apple revert a critical interface removal. (first one was FireWire from the first Unibody MacBook).

Apple lost a lot users when they've ditched PCIe. you can buy those Thunderbolt-PCIe cages and have a lot of external media drives outside your machine, but for pro people that meant new Mac Pro isn't well for putting in a machine room or stacking under the table.

Back when Apple announced the switch to Intel a lot of studios had to do an expensive upgrade not only replacing their old G5s but also additional DSP/Accelerator cards from PCI-X to PCIe. when Apple showed the trashcan (Mac Pro 2013) it was a hard sale that kept many folks with their Mac Pro 2010-2012.

While it's not stylish looking (imho) or ground-breaking modular deisgn as I've assumed, it's the first time in a while Apple is responding to their hard-core users.

price? I had macOS running on my AMD Athlon X2 back in the days (Leopard!) and even then Mac Pros were much more expansive if you've compared pure hardware. professional got Mac Pros because they've preferred their peace of mind. and I must admit, with exception of memory & gpus failures, I know many of those machines that are still rockin'.

Last thing Apple should do to get pros the freedom is sign Nvidia's drivers...

atonse3• 7 years ago

This likely is a great machine for creative pros.

But as a developer, I wanted a desktop class CPU and just a separate monitor (tired of hearing my laptop fans all the time, and it not being expandable), so I can upgrade them independently.

So while developers are pros, we won't appreciate things like XDR because we don't need them, unlike movie studios and photographers. So a $5k monitor is overpriced for editing code. But I honestly would've shelled out even $2k for a good monitor. $5k is too much.

The computer seems like a better value if you know you'd keep it for 5-10 years.

nvahalik• 7 years ago

I’m right here with you. Just built a Win10 machine because of thermal issues. I don’t even mind having a laptop but is it too much to ask to pay iMac prices for mid grade hardware??

thirdsun2• 7 years ago

But as a developer, I wanted a desktop class CPU and just a separate monitor (tired of hearing my laptop fans all the time, and it not being expandable), so I can upgrade them independently.

What's wrong with the Mac Mini? Sure, there's no way to upgrade the CPU, but considering the resale value of Apple hardware replacing the whole machine every few years is actually a worthwhile upgrade strategy.

Of course the same sell and replace upgrade path applies to the iMac (Pro) - I understand that you would like to keep the display separate, but it's a fantastic display which doesn't really have any alternatives right now. I don't see how you could much better in that category.

Of course, if MacOS isn't that important to you, this discussion isn't worth having - in that case you could buy whatever you want.

hbosch• 7 years ago

As most of us here are with the developer hat. I think it's worth reminding that the target audience of those machines are Pro creatives. (those who didn't ditch Apple yet ;) )

I seriously wonder about those that haven't left Apple yet, that are willing to shell out $6k for a new Mac Pro. There was a small cohort of studios and creative professionals who invested into the old Mac Pro Trashcan and got severely burned by hardware that was overpriced, obsolete, and non-upgradable. Almost everyone I know who bought one of those ended up re-investing into a W10 PC with 1080s to TITANs or now 2080s.

You can't do anything meaningful in 3D with the specs on this PC, so this machine is instantly DOA for the entire top-end of the (read: willing to spend $$$) creative field... that's motion graphics, animation, modeling, game design, VR, vis fx and simulation, etc. because since Apple took so long to ship this they've all experienced the wonders of a ~$3k-$4k computer that was bought 2 years ago and runs circles around even the highest spec Mac Pro.

The next tier down, your UX designers, visual designers, sound designers, print designers, type designers, etc. have no need for this that a Macbook Pro doesn't serve.

Mac still has Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Sketch. Those apps are what tether creatives to the OS, not much else. But I think many, many people are seeing that PCs are becoming the better route for the creative industry, generally.

jwr6• 7 years ago

Those of us who are slightly older may still remember how much real workstations (as in a Sun SparcStation or an SGI Indigo) cost back in the day, and are less shocked by the pricing :-)

Computing has really been democratized over the last 25 years.

_ph_7• 7 years ago

And look how great Sun and SGI are doing with their workstations today :). The list of companies, who are willing to spend 10k or more on the workstation of a single employee is growing short. And some of those still need NVidia graphic cards.

jwr6• 7 years ago

Sure, this is not a mass-market product. But I'm actually glad that the concept of a high-end workstation is making a comeback. Not everything needs to be dirt-cheap, we should not necessarily feel entitled to every product on the market being in our price range, and I'd love to see some competition on the high-end.

llampx2• 7 years ago

Those workstations were substantially different (and faster) than commodity x86 hardware at the time. Today you can buy a latest-gen 8-core CPU for $300 or so.

jandrese8• 7 years ago

The sad truth is they really weren't that much faster. Sun workstations were using the same 68k processors that Macs were using. There is a reason the Unix Workstation market didn't survive.

That said, this Mac is not as overpriced as it appears on the surface. A server class motherboard with ECC RAM support and an 8 core Xeon aren't cheap components. I'm guessing they aren't using the bottom of the barrel SSDs either. 32GB of ECC memory aren't exactly free either. I wouldn't be surprised if the BoM on this was over $3k.

jwr6• 7 years ago

Not necessarily that much faster. What people mostly paid for was not the hardware itself, but the whole package, including the operating system.

Which is exactly what people pay for when getting Macs, especially on the high end. You can get an Intel CPU in a box for cheap, if that's what you're looking for.

mars• 7 years ago

people complaining about the price and comparing hardware specs tend to forget that the price incorporates running the world's best operating system with a visual ui. although hardware spec's might not always be too impressive, it needs to be considered that the macos can actually max these out as it's purpose-built for the hardware it runs on which is not the case for most of the windows/linux systems.

and no, i'm not an apple fanboi, but think that the products are pretty solid.

ynniv• 7 years ago

I know we all said that we preferred the cheese grater to the trash can, but I don't think anyone meant it that literally.

skunkworker• 7 years ago

I’m disappointed that the new 6k screen doesn’t support Rec.2020 color space.

I wish it would be more future proof, though it’s possible it does support this color space but doesn’t list it on the tech specs.

exabrial• 7 years ago

I wish they'd make a "pro" Laptop... replaceable ssd, upgradeable ram, thinline 10gb ethernet.

781• 7 years ago

Does it have RGB? For that price it better have one RGB led in each of those holes.

StillBored7• 7 years ago

Lots of talk about 8k video/etc, but you have to buy a dell/etc to get a 8k monitor. Really?

imagetic14• 7 years ago

Nobody edits AT 8k. Or watches anything at 8k for that matter.

StillBored7• 7 years ago

"Nobody" is obviously the market that RED is targeting with their 8K cameras (shooting raw/lossless for that matter) or various projector manufactures. Sure not everyone in the production pipeline is going to be watching manipulating the edit list in 8k, but you better be sure there are a few people looking at the dailies at full 8k res before the OCD/dictatorial director shows up.

Apple obviously thinks there is a market here too, or they wouldn't be talking about how the machine can show three simultaneous 8k streams.

agnokapathetic• 7 years ago

Do you edit 12 megapixel photos on a 12 megapixel monitor?

StillBored7• 7 years ago

Yes I do edit 12M images on a ~15M monitor. Its also the weak point in the system, as your average midrange+ DSLR is 25-50M, and its pretty easy to create a printout where the effective resolution of the page/poster is vastly higher.

But that is not really the point, the apple presentation goes on about how the machine can play 3 8k video streams simultaneously, but you have to buy a 3rd party monitor/projector to even be able to view a single stream.

gitpusher• 7 years ago

Anecdotally, this page takes a very long time to load in Chrome, whereas it loads immediately in Safari. I wonder if they're artificially slowing the response for non-Safari clients? Seems a bit hard to explain otherwise.

kitchenkarma2• 7 years ago

Is this 2016?

ngcc_hk• 7 years ago

My mind just asking questions:

No nvidia? no AI? Boot to windows? Might as well use mac mini? Starting to learn hacintosh after my two 2010 mp die? Is that thing the ugliest thing I saw in years from apple?

jandrese8• 7 years ago

This is the first Mac in many years that feels like it earned its "Pro" moniker, especially at that price point. It has a proper power supply. And cooling! And you can swap out/upgrade the hardware. It's not a bunch of thermally throttled laptop parts soldered onto some mini motherboard.

That display is in a class of its own as well.

erdewit• 7 years ago

1.4 kW power supply... the next Apple accessory will be diesel generators.

imagetic14• 7 years ago

that's really just to support multiple GPU's if a user decides to add them. At the base model, it's nowhere near that.

jedberg• 7 years ago

Regardless of everything else, that AR thing on their web page was cool as shit. I just looked at a new Mac Pro on my couch!

blhack• 7 years ago

Is the apple marketing through the window of Poe’s law at this point? This page could easily have been a parody, complete with insane price.

dstaley• 7 years ago

I was really hoping Apple would price the Mac Pro at a reasonable starting point, hopefully stymying the flow of developers from Apple hardware to alternatives. The features are obviously right for extreme creative pros, but I don't think any developer in their right mind should pay this much for such little hardware. I would have loved to have seen support for the LGA 1151 socket, off-the-shelf Nvidia GPUs, and user-replaceable RAM and storage.

My company offers a $2500 hardware budget, and I have a refresh coming up this fall. I already have a MacBook Pro, so I want to go with a desktop this time around. With that budget I could get a Mac Mini with an i7-8700, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD; or I could build a PC with an i9-9900K, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and the same GPU as the Mac Pro _and still have $1000 left of my budget_.

Too bad that would only get me the Pro Display stand. That would have been a nice display to have.

shoo_pl6• 7 years ago

What about Mac Mini + minimum viable ssd (256-512GB) + eGPU + decent SSD like Samsung T5 (budget) or X5 (high end) ?

After today's announcements this is what I am looking at. The only problem I see is that current eGPUs do not support the 5k thunderbolt monitor, with exception of Blackmagic (but like most of apple products those are crazy expensive and non-upgradeable).

Until that 5k monitor situation is solved, I am stuck with iMac. I tested various 4k monitors, and somehow I find the 5k Retina (1440p) to be sweet spot for daily usage & development.

Edit: Funny thing is, if you count the $$ for above set up, you will find out it costs as much - if not more - then similar 2019 iMac. So it probably does down the the question - do you really need that top-of-the-line GPU from AMD (which isn't that fast anyway)? It seems that buying iMac that you can still sell for 50% of original price after 2-3 years and simply getting new one with specs bumped might be the same result as being able to update your ram/gpu/ssd/monitor

Seems that iMac truly is the sweat spot for most "pros" that want a desktop.

eemil• 7 years ago

Compared to a Mac Pro, you'll be giving up

* Desktop-grade cooling

* Multithreaded CPU performance (4-6 vs 8-28 cores)

* PCI-e lanes + expandability (via PCI-e slot)

* RAM expandable to 1.5 TB

* dual 10 GBit ethernet

Not all "pros" have the same requirements. In your case, maybe the Mac Mini is adequate.

ghobs91• 7 years ago

$1000 for a monitor stand is the pinnacle of arrogance from a brand.

jccalhoun• 7 years ago

That is the one that really got me. I expected the Mac Pro to start at a ridiculous price and I wasn't shocked by the monitor but $1000 for a monitor stand is crazy

askafriend2• 7 years ago

How is it arrogance?

Have you ever bought a nice pice of furniture? This stand is a super low volume, custom design. It's solid milled aluminum and likely very hefty since it needs to handle a 32" monitor (which itself is probably pretty hefty). Not to mention the intricate hinge design that they say is rock solid (not an easy feat to achieve).

This whole system is built to compete against $25k-50k reference monitors.

Here's a page of Table Lamps from Restoration Hardware for a sense of perspective:

https://www.restorationhardware.com/catalog/category/product...

And the whole reason they don't include the stand with the monitor is because it's built for media production houses that already have rigs set up with their own mounts.

They're not building this for designers to run Sketch or developers to run Xcode.

This is for production servers, processing Pixar movies, and YouTube features. It's a machine that will be expensed as the cost of doing business.

terandle• 7 years ago

That link does not help your case $300 for a fashionable lamp you can use for life and is a major fixture of a living space vs a $1,000 monitor stand? Congrats Apple you made restoration hardware look like ikea in terms of pricing.

droithomme• 7 years ago

All I want is to be able to replace the hard drive when it fails after 18 months, and upgrade the RAM. Also need an optical bay for a tower.

It would be nice to have more than 2 USB ports, when I'm paying over $6000, without having to look for a PCIe board that has a compatible driver. Also, audio input would be a cool feature in that price range.

Main thing really though is replacing that hard drive when it fails, which they always do before long.

balls187• 7 years ago

Seems like dust is going to be a problem.

busymom03• 7 years ago

https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/

"28 core model has support for up to 2TB 2933MHz memory". 2TB RAM is crazy.

cfarm3• 7 years ago

Is no one going to comment on why a desktop needs wheels?

imagetic14• 7 years ago

In media studio environments, it' makes some sense...but it's mostly an iMac on a cart these days.

cfarm3• 7 years ago

Do you also wheel around your monitor?

busterarm• 7 years ago

Unfortunately this triggers my trypophobia hard.

imagetic14• 7 years ago

The same specs as the $6000 base level Mac Pro comes out to $1600. Granted, I would use and Intel i9-9900K, non-server motherboard and non-ECC RAM.

As a media production professional who has spent most of my career on a Mac, the original "cheese grater" is probably the best hardware platform I've ever worked on. In my experience, macOS as an operating system has been vastly superior in terms of maintenance and support for a lot of post houses. When I install a Mac, I rarely have to come back and touch it until an editor mistakenly updates the OS or Adobe suite and breaks something in the chain. The original Mac Pro cheese graters lasted 5-7 years in facilities I ran.

But times have changed. Cameras got bigger and Apple started severely limiting what their computers could do.

The Mac Pro "trash can" was drastically under-engineered. It overheated with 4k footage and could barely handle larger productions. You also ended up with a tangled mess of peripherals that used to just live inside the tower. I can't count how many times an editor would say something wasn't working and it was just because they knocked a thunderbolt cable loose.

At first glance, the new Mac Pro is nothing short of impressive.

The big thing media people want from Apple is upgradable GPUs, which Apple kind of did here.

The MXP module for the GPUs looks to be entirely proprietary. I haven't found any mention of potential 3rd party GPU support. And I assume you'll buy the GPUs preinstalled in those modules at the highest market value, despite the rapid drop in video card prices over time. But without nVidia support I fear this feature is going to be a stalemate with the industry.

What is most appealing to me is the Mac Pro basically a server motherboard with a lot of room. Building a budget PC is restricting. The gaming motherboards tend to move the fastest with technology and newer / cheaper chips that are capable of hanging with server chips, but are part of the silicon lottery. 1/4 that I receive is DOA or has to be returned for some reason. That and they lack enough PCI slots for big post-house media work. If I have to drop two GPUs in a PC, there is rarely room for I/O cards, 10GbE and other requirements.

For a post-house who wants something stable, the price high of the new Mac Pro will be returned fairly easily (maybe not with those new monitors). I don't see the freelance / independent and small-production team market buying >$6000 Mac towers though.

The latest offerings from AMD with PCI 4.0 motherboards will weigh in at $3000'ish with a single 2080 ti GPU. That's an extreme bang for your buck.

The downside in the PC world is mainly that it has become a build your own adventure with next to no warranty and a ton of technological hurdles and compatibility issues. For example, very few motherboards for Intel chips support TB3 and have 10GbE built in. And if you go AMD you can forget thunderbolt all-together.

Overall, I know a lot of places I've done work with are waiting to hit buy on the new Mac Pro. Part of that is because it just works, and they'll deal with the shortcomings later on. But really, it looks cool and the people they attract are impressed by that fancy tower. But everyone who works alone or at smaller companies are probably now waiting to drop their Ryzen 3000 and X570 orders into their shopping carts.

Disclaimer: I don't know any professionals who bought an iMac Pro. I haven't seen one in the wild since it was released.

ChuckMcM• 7 years ago

I get the complaining but hey Apple released a new Mac Pro is pretty cool. They could have just decided quietly leave the market completely.

I also appreciate how the display is a thing now. Not everyone remembers the verrrry long period where 1920x1200 was the best you could do even when laptop displays were shooting off into the retina world. A high dpi developer workstation with tools to match could be a beautiful thing.

bitxbit• 7 years ago

I rather like Windows machines in 2019. I believe Apple fumbled the “Pro” market big time but it’s really not something worth for them to chase in my view. I really see this new iteration more as a goodwill gesture to their pro user base than an attempt to recapture the market.

secfirstmd• 7 years ago

Am I the only person more concerned about the new "Find my Mac Feature"? Call me a cynic but this feels like it has all kinds of privacy problems.

"The new Find My app combines Find My iPhone and Find My Friends into a single, easy-to-use app on Mac, iPadOS, and iOS devices. Find My can help you locate a missing Mac — even if it’s offline and sleeping — by sending out Bluetooth signals that can be detected by Apple devices in use nearby. These devices then relay the detected location of your Mac to iCloud so you can locate it in the Find My app.

It’s all anonymous and end-to-end encrypted so no one, including Apple, knows the identity of any reporting device. And because the reporting happens silently using tiny bits of data that piggyback on existing network traffic, there’s no need to worry about your battery life, your data usage, or your privacy."

busymom03• 7 years ago

It’s all anonymous and end-to-end encrypted so no one, including Apple, knows the identity of any reporting device.

That should answer privacy concerns. They probably have a disable feature too.

chronogram• 7 years ago

And should be a tick during the initial setup, considering find my has always done that

meerita• 7 years ago

I still do some work on my 2010 iMac. It costed me 3400 EUR. It will be its 10th aniversary soon. That's 28,3 EUR /mo for 10 years in costs for a piece of hardware that helped me to get a lot of money. This new Mac Pro, the base one, will cost me around 57,6 EUR/mo over 10 years. No monitor included, but if we include the new one, it will be around 106,9 EUR /mo over 10 years. I don't know if it is too much but I see this new Mac Pro too expensive and I am not chosing hard upgrades, but if you go a bit crazy yo can easily calculate 200€/mo over 10y.

mratzloff• 7 years ago

I've been waiting on Apple's Mac Pro announcement to decide if I would be buying their new pro monitor. I have previously owned an Apple Cinema HD Display 30", which was great, but started to show its age over time. I believe it cost me about $2500 at the time. I'm not afraid of spending a lot for a great monitor.

This is $5000, or $6000 with the stand. Oof. I wish there were a cheaper 4K version.

I guess I'll just spend like 10-20% of that price some other 4K monitor.

teddyc• 7 years ago

You almost need a dedicated 15-amp circuit to run this or have 20-amp circuits so you have some overhead for the rest of your electronics (or a cubicle neighbor).

The power supply draws 1280W. A 15-amp circuit provides 1800W, but you are really supposed to keep steady loads at no more than 80%, which is 1440W. I bet some circuit breakers are going to start tripping when these go live.

jjtheblunt• 7 years ago

Doesn't the power supply draw that at max load, rather than consistently? (Honest question)

npunt• 7 years ago

Correct, that's just the max draw it can handle. Most configurations will probably draw no more than ~500-600w.

whywhywhywhy2• 7 years ago

After the iTunes calendar joke I actually thought when the launch video started it was another joke about the old cheesegrater design and was going to show an actual cheesegrater, until it cut and made it clear it was a real video.

beenBoutIT3• 7 years ago

No mention of dust filters or keeping out dust.

blevin• 7 years ago

The most interesting and least elaborated detail is the Afterburner FPGA. I’m curious what the programming model is (Metal compute kernels?) and how it compares to GPU.

carlob2• 7 years ago

During the keynote they used FPGA and ASIC interchangeably, which one is it?

firefwing24• 7 years ago

Not a strict 1:1 comparison, but I guess as a reference point? (Prices from US Amazon)

- Asus Rog Dominus Extreme - 1,677.48

- Intel Xeon W-3175X - 3.1 -> 3.8 boost (28 Core) - 3,078.49

- Decent Case - 200$ (maybe even bump to 400)

- 4 x 8 GB DDR4 3000 MHz Corsair C15 - 160$

- 970 EVO m.2 NVMe Drive - 69.99

- Radeon Pro 580X - Around 200$

- Noctua NH-D15 - 90$

- 1000W Titanium Seasonic - 256.92

Total: 5,732.88

Yeah there's some differences like having more cache, or more RAM support... but $5,999 from Apple is for the 8-core base model...

Edit: I clearly new to writing lists.

woranl• 7 years ago

This new Mac Pro design gives me trypophobia. Do we really need that many holes on the front? Somehow this "industrial design" is really giving me goosebumps. That's a first for Apple product...

lioeters• 7 years ago

Thanks for my new word of the day: "Trypophobia is a proposed phobia of irregular patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps."

Someone elsewhere on the thread said the design reminded them of something the Empire from Star Wars would make. It seems there may be a physiological reason for this kind of reaction to the design.

thrower123• 7 years ago

It's the most expensive cheese grater I've ever seen

julienreszka2• 7 years ago

The usual cheese graters actually look fine, but this...

chx3• 7 years ago

My, those machined lattices will cost a tremendous amount of money. That's some Juicero level of madness but of course Apple will get away with it.

vzaliva• 7 years ago

I want to run Linux on it!

allthecybers• 7 years ago

It’s a bit beyond my budget to buy for sentimental reasons because I owned a cheese grater PowerMac G5 and a MacPro back in my video production days. But this looks like exactly what the creative or media production professional of today needs. If you need less grab an iMac Pro or iMac.

equalarrow• 7 years ago

I've waited for this for a few years.. Until I stopped caring last year. Alas, I'm underwhelmed. Mostly in the form factor.

I had an Intel beta machine from yonder. Apple sent everyone an iMac that year we had to send those back. I had that and a MacBook Pro for a few years until I got a 2009 Mac Pro. Had to retire that when OS X upgrades stopped working on it. I loved that machine and put it through its paces for many years.

In 2014 I got a trashcan Mac Pro and that's probably been the most beautiful Mac I've ever owned. I know a lot of people don't like it, but it's been quietly humming away on my desk for years. It takes up about a 7" x 7" corner of my desk. It's perfect. I love stuff that doesn't make a sound and gets out of my way.

The new form factor, I'm not into at all. It's great that it's expandable and powerful, but it just doesn't do it for me. I've been doing Mac and iOS development for so long now and thrown so much money at them that I think I'm just burned out. I mean, how much 'best ever', 'amazing', 'sensational', every year can you take? I no longer drool every time Ive speaks and the video for it had me yawning. I've seen it before, even though I haven't. Yah, no one else makes that design, I get it. But, I am now asking myself, so what?

It seems like they have been less 'pro' the past years and now they're extreme pro. I'm just average pro I guess. They didn't design this machine for me and that's ok. I'm just underwhelmed by everything Apple now.

Uptrenda• 7 years ago

Not directly relevant but: boy do I love Apples marketing. They put so much passion into conveying their products, its ridiculous. Its almost like their marketing boarders on small art projects and "how its made style docs." I know that's a weird thing to say, but I find them very creative and interesting to watch. Sure beats the average commercial.

julienreszka2• 7 years ago

Those holes trigger my Trypophobia.

sabujp• 7 years ago

and all the people with trypophobia screamed in horror

fock• 7 years ago

nice to see that Apple still can build a real (UNIX) workstation. just about the right combination of power, standard but exotic IO, price and design (though not my favourite)

m0zg• 7 years ago

Yawn. Wake me up when they start offering NVIDIA GPUs again.

ksec3• 7 years ago

I am wondering what the top config would cost,

Intel Cascade Lake 28 Core

1.5 TB DDR4 2933 ECC Memory

2 x 2TB SSD

Radeon VEGA II Duo x 2 128GB HMB2 Memory

Thunderbolt 3 x 4 Port

Two 10Gb Ethernet ports:

Apple Afterburner FPGA Card

My guess would be $40K+?

There also another small question ( or big for some ) , what happen to people with Trypophobia looking at the Mac Pro?

IloveHN84• 7 years ago

Too expensive

coldtea3• 7 years ago

I don't see it mentioned anywhere, but to me it's obvious they intentionally went for an actual "cheese grater" look, as a play on the old "cheese grater" Mac legacy.

(They made it functional of course, with the holes used for cooling etc, but the 100% cheese grater look was intended this time).

juhannuspukki• 7 years ago

I wonder if the people who complain about the price here have ever worked with computers. For example, I am a software developer. It costs about 5000€/month or so to hire me after I graduate. Every workplace I have been in has given me a 3500€ MBP to write code with, no questions asked. Why? I need it and it's cheap compared to my wage anyway. Even a 10000€ computer wouldn't be very expensive considering it's estimated lifespan is 5-12 years.

For companies the cost of computers next to the cost of people is insignificant, and that is the target customer group for this machine.

thomasjudge2• 7 years ago

Re SAN connections: what are the various options with respect to using the 10G ethernet, vs Thunderbolt, vs a PCI slot HBA-type device?

swozey• 7 years ago

This is the ugliest computer I have ever seen. The monitor as well. What in the world. It's like someone discovered Trypophobia and wants to terrify people. I can't believe I'm the only person to comment on that here.

I loved the original "cheese grater" (which doesn't even seem deserving of that title now).

swordsmith• 7 years ago

The lattice gives me the creeps. Much better to just get a Lenovo C730 cube. Similar mechanical design, better specs, and 1/5 of the price.

SergeAx• 7 years ago

Now that's a nice veggie grater. And inexpensive too!

bradknowles• 7 years ago

Thanks, I hate it.

At least, the bizarre horribly bad cheese-grater look.

New Mac Pro

Related Stories