The Mac Pro from an audio pros perspective

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/06/life-after-slots-what-the-mac-pro-external-hardware-mean-for-production/

by shawndumas • 13 years ago

69 75 13 years ago

dasil0032• 13 years ago

The author hits the nail right on the head here. The new Mac Pro is making a bold bet on the future: that given sufficient bandwidth, the benefits of external expansion ultimately outweigh the benefits of packing them into a tower. This is going to cause tremendous short-term pain and the fiercest hand-wringing the tech world has seen since the release of FCP X, but in the long term I think Apple made the right bet and will come out ahead.

IverNewson• 13 years ago

It's not an either/or proposition; Why couldn't Apple have provided a tower that had both internal and external expansion? Because new Mac Pro 'needs' to be 1/8th the volume of the old Mac Pro?

stinos• 13 years ago

There's enough people out there that will let the appearance playe a major part in their decision of whether or not to buy it. So yes, from Apple's POV it needs to be smaller and different looking. It's all about pleasing the customers, innit?

evilduck• 13 years ago

That wouldn't put any pressure on 3rd parties to manufacture external peripherals (which is hypothetically the goal).

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

The same argument can be made for many of Apple product decisions, why no Blu-Ray? Why no SuperDrive in the MBPr? The simple answer being as always, Apple doesn't think it's necessary. They've clearly designed it for a very specific purpose, I'm interested in seeing what the futures bodes for it.

masklinn2• 13 years ago

Why couldn't Apple have provided a tower that had both internal and external expansion?

The lack of internal expansion means high-end mac pro peripherals have to be TB, which may finally kickstart the the TB ecosystem. And when that happens, these peripherals are compatible with all machines from the mini and air to rMBP and mac pro.

interpol_p• 13 years ago

Because it isn't necessary for the future they envision. It's like including a DVD drive on a laptop: some people might use it now, but it's very clearly on the way out.

Apple generally make these decisions before it's very clear what direction the industry is heading.

Their decision here is to position the Mac Pro as a tiny, powerful computing hub that has the bandwidth and controllers necessary to drive a crazy amount of professional hardware at high speed.

This unifies their products relative to external accessories (if everything is Thunderbolt, you can plug your hardware into your laptop when required). It also lets them stay focused on making the best 'pro' computing hub they can build. (That it also happens to be quiet and small is a very nice plus.)

Edit: That said, who knows whether this is the right direction for the pro industry.

minikites• 13 years ago

For the same reason the original Macintosh had no arrow keys or why the iMac didn't have a floppy drive or internal slots.

pinaceae• 13 years ago

I agree, very informative and good article.

I am not a AV guy, but using my mac mini i started to do the same thing described in the article. rather than byuing an internal hdd, i simply connected a 1tb external drive (silent, sdd). at first I didn't think about it, but this enabled me to:

- Need to transfer files to one of my Windows machines? Simply unplug the hdd from the mac and plug into the Winbox

- Travelling? Take my entire library of stuff with me. No need for DropBox, etc. This works offline, anywhere.

Sounds low tech and slightly too simple, but I'd love to expand this to other functionalities. An external graphics card would be awesome, play games on any machine I want (Mini or Air...).

I've built my own gaming PCs, but by now I would really prefer something more modular, easy, true plug and play.

atonse• 13 years ago

Let's not forget that moving to thunderbolt actually makes the whole machine MORE expandable, because of daisy-chaining.

An existing computer may have something like 5 PCIe slots. That's your limit. But with these thunderbolt ports, you can hook up 6 devices per port. 5 PCIe cards vs a potential of 36? I really don't see how the new Mac Pro is less extendable.

In addition, now that there is no CD Drive, there's no longer any reason why this tower needs to sit where you do. You could theoretically have 40ft Thunderbolt cables drive your displays, and the computer can be neatly stowed away in another room, and just the interfaces (like these cool looking RME devices) and other monitors and editing equipment can stay on your desk.

When it comes time to upgrade, you just replace the "brain", and hook up all the cables to it.

zdw• 13 years ago

The new Mac Pro forces all device makers to use interfaces that are compatible with the entire range of Apple hardware.

There's no "oh, we only have a card, you have to have a machine with slots" anymore - every machine, from the lowliest Mac Minis and MacBooks to the highest end Mac Pro will be able to use the same peripherals.

I think this is the end goal. Apple's computers will scale along the CPU and GPU performance and memory size axes, with everything else being an peripheral you can theoretically move to any computer you own.

It's a bold move.

masklinn2• 13 years ago

That is an extremely interesting take which I hadn't considered, especially when considering rMBPs have two TB ports.

jiggy20113• 13 years ago

Is thunderbolt fast enough to drive a high end GPU?

wmf• 13 years ago

I don't think external GPUs are part of Apple's plan. The GPU comes inside the Mac, and if you want to upgrade it you can buy a new Mac.

calinet66• 13 years ago

It's basically a PCIe x4 interface, so it's about 1/4 the bandwidth of most high-end video cards, and you should be able to make an external enclosure for them. So yes, it's possible to add one, it just won't be quite as fast.

More likely, you've got 2 upgradeable graphics cards in there, already running in an SLI configuration. It should be entirely upgradeable.

lifeformed• 13 years ago

Fast external GPUs are my dream. I can buy a convenient sized laptop with excellent specs in every category except for GPU. As soon as I want a good GPU, the laptop has to become a 10lb monster.

I want to just dock it at my home desk with the GPU and convert my laptop into essentially a desktop workstation. Then I can undock it and take it out to the coffeeshop when I want to work outside. Maybe the external GPU is tiny too, and I can throw that in my backpack with it when I want to do gamedev work outside the house.

Southamptondave• 13 years ago

"It became necessary to destroy the Mac Pro to save it"

cwisecarver• 13 years ago

This has always been their plan. They tried this with the original Macintosh and it's successors. Up until now the PC market was growing too fast for them to get away with it. Now with the "Post-PC era" they're giving it another shot. I think it's an interesting idea, each external peripheral does one thing well. It reflects their current advertising and their product lines.

kevincennis• 13 years ago

+1 for the extinction of cards and slots.

One of the most nerve-wracking moments of my (former) life as a recording engineer was installing a brand new Pro Tools card into a brand new Mac Pro at Aereosmith's studio. For whatever reason, the fit was way tighter than normal and I literally had to put some of my body weight over the thing to get it to slide in. All the while, just wondering how I was going to explain to Joe Perry that I had snapped a $6k Pro Tools card in half. Luckily, I didn't have to.

freehunter3• 13 years ago

Combining voices with the person in this thread asking about external GPUs, I long for the day when we can have powerful Thunderbolt GPUs. High-end video cards are becoming ever larger with each generation, to the point where I had to upgrade my case and motherboard when I upgraded my video card last time. I just couldn't fit the card in the case, and the card suddenly overlapped parts on the motherboard that weren't a problem previously.

The problem of hard drives taking up too much room in a case is solved. The problem of expansion cards taking up too much room in a case is solved. If we could get that to video cards as well, we can throw the whole concept of massive cases in traditional form factors being required for high end workstations right out the window.

dasmoth2• 13 years ago

The scaling across the range would be much smoother if they released a headless mid-range machine, rather than relying entirely on iMacs (and laptops) to fill the gap between the Mini and the Pro. They seem quite actively disinterested in building such a machine, though.

cstejerean2• 13 years ago

A laptop in clamshell mode is a good substitute for a headless mid-range machine. Combine it with a BookArc stand to avoid wasting desk space and it's hard to beat.

leoc4• 13 years ago

It's a common complaint: here's a blogpost from 2007 called "Where's the Mac?" http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2007/08/08/wheres-the-mac/ . Midrange desktops are probably still where the buyers are most price/performance-conscious, and where design/engineering effort makes the least difference: Apple probably wants to avoid competing on that kind of terrain. They may also be worried about people who would opt for a midrange Mac over a Mac Pro if given the option.

calinet66• 13 years ago

The Mini is supposed to be that, ideally. The graphics are the bottleneck, but they'll get better as the Intel integrated graphics pipeline improves.

_pmf_• 13 years ago

It's a bold move.

No. It's "letting people use their device in a non-retarded way".

Apreche• 13 years ago

This is one thing I never really understood. Apple really cares a lot about aesthetics. In the store their devices all look fantastic standing alone surrounded by white/black.

But when you see an Apple device in the real world, it looks like crap. Why? Because it's tangled up in this octopus of cables and external doodads.

In my office I have a Lenovo X220, and everyone else has Macs, mostly Macbooks. I have a docking station, so all my cables other than mouse and keyboard are behind my desk out of sight and mind. The co-worker with the iMac has the same situation. Everyone else has a Macbook Pro or Air. The entire left sides of their desk are a mess of cables spewing out the side of the Macbooks. It ruins everything.

Hiding everything inside of the beautiful box keeps it pretty, so I've never really understood why Apple loves external devices so much more than internal.

potatolicious• 13 years ago

I think that's a problem that's rather unique to our field. Most people I know who have MacBooks don't have them in a "docked" configuration ever. It sits on their desk where the most that comes out of them is the power adapter and a USB cable.

I hear ya though, my Macbook Pro doubles as my home development machine, so when I'm "docked" it's just a morass of cables. It really would be nice if Apple lived up to the "Pro" moniker and gave us a reasonable dock.

I did order a Henge dock a while back, maybe I should actually unpack it and set it up...

cicloid• 13 years ago

The dock is a Thunderbolt Display

dan_b• 13 years ago

You really should, I've got one at my office and one at home.

epistasis• 13 years ago

Hiding everything inside of the beautiful box keeps it pretty, so I've never really understood why Apple loves external devices so much more than internal.

If you mean this criticism in regards to the Mac Pro, expansion cards usually have cables coming out of them as well, so the Mac Pro is no different from traditional desktops in that regard. SSD on PCI is obviously an exception here, but that's a relative newcomer.

As far as laptop computers, the reason you have a dock and others don't is that you purchased a dock, and the others didn't. So perhaps the Apple users you know care less about aesthetics than you think they do.

freehunter3• 13 years ago

Does Apple make a laptop dock for a Macbook?

makomk• 13 years ago

Except that with the new Mac Pro, you'll still have all the cables that would previously have come out of expansion cards, but they'll be coming from a whole bunch of external boxes with their own cables, power adapters, etc.

Then there's the question of storage; previously local hard disks could be installed entirely internally, with no external cables, whereas now they all have to be external. Thankfully it should be possible to bus-power those if you don't care about daisy-chaining them.

klausa• 13 years ago

They want you to buy their Thunderbolt display as a dock. You connect two cables - power and Thunderbolt to computer, and everything else to the display. It has few usb, firewire, ehternet, audio (built-in speakers), camera...

WalterSear2• 13 years ago

Awesome. So now your monitor is a morass of cables and plugs.

bane• 13 years ago

I agree, I use my rMBP connected to a second monitor, network cable and with an external keyboard and mouse, so I have cables and adapters vomiting all over my desk. When I come in to work in the morning I spend a good few minutes connecting all that crap up and sorting the cables out so I have some space to work.

The endless adapters definitely add more clutter and complexity to the setup.

With my old Dell I just plopped it into the dock which kept most of that stuff sorted out and pointed away from my desk. I had the same amount of connectors, just organized better.

I recently moved to a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and finally got my wifi setup so now it's just power and monitor and it looks much more sane.

Of course now I have to make sure my mouse and keyboard are turned on and wait for them to connect which means I'm sometimes logging into my computer from it's own keyboard first to fiddle with the bluetooth stuff.

I'm considering getting an external optical drive which of course will reverse this trend, but for now I can't burn any disks when I need to.

calinet66• 13 years ago

Thunderbolt Dock would be the dream...

I settle for an external USB hub, wireless keyboard and mouse, and outboard audio. It does enough to reduce the number of things I have to plug.

micampe2• 13 years ago

There are docking stations for MacBooks, it's just that Apple doesn't make them. One of several: http://www.hengedocks.com/

JonnieCache• 13 years ago

As a side point, those RME audio interfaces mentioned in the article are utterly fantastic. I've recently acquired an older firewire one, and it makes everything else in its pricerange look like a bad joke.

They are the only people developing custom USB/firewire controllers, everyone else just sticks a TI chipset in there, wraps the OEM drivers and goes to lunch. Not the plucky germans at RME.

If you need to get audio in or out of your computer, you should settle for nothing less.

mhd• 13 years ago

This really reminds me of the original iMac. When it came out, USB devices were pretty rare, but this got better pretty quickly, especially regarding printers. Firewire wasn't as successful. Although, if I understand correctly, you can just hook up an external PCI-express bay via thunderbolt, so you don't really need special hardware (like e.g. USB audio devices). So apart from the usual series of external hard drives, you'll probably find a few expansion bays docket to your central ash tray.

But given the additional power bricks, wires and boxes you need for this, it seems they're optimizing for the non-extended situation and/or want to give their other computers equal footing.

ripperdoc• 13 years ago

I think the key point brought up here is that there is greater convenience in external accessories once there is more than one computing device to use them with - and I'd say that's a much more common scenario than it used to be.

My suggestion to Apple (or 3PP), would be to make a stackable accessory form factor (along the lines of http://www.123macmini.com/accessories/guide/enclosures.html) with built-in Thunderbolt connectors, or at least cable guides. They could be styled in the same style as the Mac Pro. Imagine just slotting on another level of your little accessory tower, with a single Thunderbolt going to the "capital ship".

mono• 13 years ago

"It looks like a Dyson vacuum cleaner someone lifted from the maintenance closet on the Death Star."

leoc4• 13 years ago

Shamelessly quoting myself: "The thing looks genuinely ugly with the outer casing off: like computer junk from the late '90s, with a touch of Jawa Quality Spares." http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Msp...

By the way, I just realised what it is that the base of the new Mac Pro was reminding me of: it's the old G4 iMac, of course http://macspeedzone.com/images/reviews/machines/desktop/imac... .

calinet66• 13 years ago

Audio pros want everything outside the box anyway: interference from the power supply, motherboard, etc are unacceptable. External peripherals are the norm.

I don't see any problem with this whatsoever.

WalterSear2• 13 years ago

External peripherals bring in the delights of ground loops wall warts and dodgey inputs. Not to mention cables galore.

What is clear from this latest design is that Apple doesn't see audio production as a market worth considering when designing stuff.

wtallis2• 13 years ago

Thunderbolt provides 10W of power, so a lot of devices only need one cable, and won't have any higher chance of ground loops than an internal part. Also, ground loops are much less of a problem across digital connections like TB or FireWire - it's when you're connecting two pieces of equipment with an analog audio cable that ground loops get annoying.

calinet66• 13 years ago

That's ridiculous. The power from the wall has the potential to be much cleaner and more predictable than that from a PC power supply. If that's the issue, then the device's power supply is designed poorly.

I think there will be (and frankly are) very high-quality external interfaces that have none of these issues, and avoid larger internal issues. Your argument is a non-issue, and your conclusion is an overreaction.

stephen_g• 13 years ago

The loss of the hard drive bays really doesn't worry me (is anyone doing serious work really not working off a big RAID or a SAN?), and my audio interfaces have been external for years...

The only thing I might want is a PCI-Express slot for a RED ROCKET card (it's a hardware decoder for 4K+ video from RED cameras) but I've never really felt the urge to splurge for one of those - both Final Cut Pro X and Premiere Pro are good enough at decoding it with the CPU and GPU even on my MacBook Pro so the Mac Pro should have no problems with it... The only time I feel it is rendering (you can work in 1/4 res [a bit more than 1080p] but for finishing you want full quality even if you're downscaling). And if I did want one, there are a number of adaptors that work with them...

jdboyd• 13 years ago

A Red Rocket card can be attached to your thunderbolt workstation video this http://www.mlogic.com/products/mlink-r which is currently listed at $599.

I don't know that TB1 will have enough bandwidth for the new Red Rocket X card, and I'm not yet aware of any TB2 -> PCIe chassis for sale.

pmarin• 13 years ago

I am curious about if the new Mac Pro will promote the build of high end Hackintoshes to fill the gap left by Apple in their product line.

The Mac Pro from an audio pros perspective

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