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New Mac Pro

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Re: New Mac Pro

#421
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

At least in that case there are three letters of difference, instead of one :P

Re: New Mac Pro

#422

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 o…

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.

Re: New Mac Pro

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 This has been a longstanding issue with 3D folks; the old trashcan Mac Pro had NVIDIA GPUs even with otherwise-outdated internals.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.

Did the trashcan really support NVIDIA GPUs? Wikipedia only lists NVIDIA GPUs for 2009 and earlier, which makes it the tower models, not the trashcan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro#Specifications

Nope, only AMD.

Source: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/mac-pro-cylinder-...

Re: New Mac Pro

#425
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 This has been a longstanding issue with 3D folks; the old trashcan Mac Pro had NVIDIA GPUs even with otherwise-outdated internals.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.

> 3D modelers want NVIDIA cards, not Radeon, as NVIDIA supports CUDA What do 3D modelers use CUDA for? I know it gets used for machine learning, but I'm not familiar with what else.

Raytracing, rendering, certain kinds of vector operations, physical simulations.

CUDA/OpenCL is all about writing super parallelism code to be run on the GPU instead of CPU, so many trivially parallel problems are usually outsourced to it.

Re: New Mac Pro

#426
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It runs macOS and those consumer grade computers don't. If the best colorist in the area is working on your film, you give them the tools they ask for.

As others have noted in this thread, the iMac Pro outspecs this unit at a cheaper price.

Not for all configurations, and especially not when using 3rd party expansion and customization options.

Re: New Mac Pro

#427
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.

Re: New Mac Pro

#428
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 for…

I think the answer is to expand externally. The solution I settled on was a Mac Mini to serve as my interface and run desktop applications, and a big hefty expandable Threadripper box running Linux that I SSH into to do all heavy lifting (and that I can put away in a closet). A NAS holds most files. I've been really happy with the Mac Mini for this role, and the Threadripper box provides more power than I could reaso…

I don't want an overpriced, glued shut Mac Mini. I don't have issues with physical space. I've tried the Thunderbolt / USB3 chaining solution when I had a iMac. I didn't like it. I want a reasonably price Mac desktop like the ones from years ago, but that's not going to happen.

Anyways I found my solution: iCloud for Windows https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204301

This is going to make my transition back to Windows much easier. Maybe the people at Apple have failed to realized that Windows has gotten a lot better under Nadella?

There's the Windows Subsystem for Linux as well: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about Not to mention stuff like docker also made working on Windows less of an issue and I think Ubuntu will be shipping on Windows by default in the future.

This release was the last straw.

Re: New Mac Pro

#429
post #218
post #140

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.

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.

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.

Re: New Mac Pro

#430
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Threadripper 3 has not been (effectively) cancelled? (Disappeared from all roadmaps.) Any links? I so want to buy that CPU, but I'm starting to suspect it might never be released.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3397917/amd-ceo-confirms-thr...

Great, so it changed recently. Before that, the silence was deafening for a long time. Can't wait for my future Threadripper system.
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