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New Mac Pro

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Re: New Mac Pro

#361

Post by knicholes »

ken wrote: post #318
knicholes wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Download and install the app "Blind" to be shamefully informed of how many there are. Seemingly there is either a very large amount, or there are lots of SWEs who like to lie. Lots of it seem like stock options from FAANG and Uber.

I've been on the internet. I know people lie. The OKCupid blog found that "There are consistently 4x the number of people making $100K a year than there should be" [1]. They also lie about their height, and what they look like. What reason should I have for trusting anonymous self-reported data in a category where people are known to exaggerate? [1]: https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...

For OkCupid there's a clear motivation for exaggerating things like height, looks, and income. What motivation does one have for anonymously posting an exaggerated income? Are there really that many trolls who want to depress those making less than $500k/yr?

Re: New Mac Pro

#362

Post by lelf »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #44
bluedino wrote: post #17

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!

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.

> "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).

Re: New Mac Pro

#363

Post by hinkley »

imagetic wrote: post #301
llampx wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every machine I've worked on, bought or built has had 256 or 500gb. We only run the OS/apps on the main drive. Then a second drive for scratch disk and then SAN/NAS storage for the media. It's VERY normal.

I've found that 256G is 'not quite enough', so my old Macbook has 256G and I moved my media folder to one of those flush-mount microSD card adapters. It's read-mostly so who cares about write cycles?

Re: New Mac Pro

#364

Post by floatboth »

noir_lord wrote: post #234
jwr wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 bea…

More like Xeon tax.

The new Mac Pro has a ton more PCIe lanes and DDR4 channels. It's a completely different league, it can't be directly compared to mainstream platforms that only have dual-channel and 16-24 lanes.

EPYC would've been a better value, but it's still not cheap. Big computers with lots of memory and I/O capacity will always look ridiculously expensive next to mainstream desktop.

Re: New Mac Pro

#365

Post by sooheon »

jwr wrote: post #128
Shivetya wrote: post #23

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. W…

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.

Why is iMac better than iMac pro for single threaded?

Re: New Mac Pro

#366

Post by altmind »

scarface74 wrote: post #337
altmind wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

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

4k gaming displays are $800. plus there some bonuses with gaming displays: high refresh rate, freesync.

Re: New Mac Pro

#367

Post by Miredly »

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #223
Shivetya wrote: post #23

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. W…

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 m…

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.

Re: New Mac Pro

#368

Post by KVFinn »

endorphone wrote: post #203
KVFinn wrote: post #28

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 CU…

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…

>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.

Re: New Mac Pro

#369

Post by sixothree »

bayindirh wrote: post #278
llampx wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Multimedia professionals do not store their data in internal/primary drives. They generally have RAID boxes with either Ethernet or thunderbolt connection. Most video editing/rendering is done on big storage arrays anyway. So 256GB storage is more than enough for most serious multimedia professionals.

I'm not entirely sure my Lightroom cache would fit on this drive...

Re: New Mac Pro

#370

Post by kenhwang »

asaph wrote: post #320
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> 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?

Then they're waiting for a Taycan.
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