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New Mac Pro

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Re: New Mac Pro

#531

Post by Unklejoe »

cm2187 wrote: post #335
eropple wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not mad that it's 10GBASE-T, but I'd personally rather 10G over SFP+. The sorts of shops that can afford these probably already have some pretty burly networking infrastructure, and 10GBASE-T is both expensive and (IME) less reliable. The encoding/decoding capacity of Ethernet-over-twisted-pair seems to be reaching a point of sharply diminishing returns and the hardware for 10GBASE-T is really expensive for what'…

But isn't SFP+ not compatible with 1G (i.e. can only be used with a 10G network equipment)? If you are selling a machine that people will plug into either a 1gbe or 10gbe network, you'd rather have some interface that can downgrade.

You can find SFP+ modules that support both 10G and 1G.

Re: New Mac Pro

#532

Post by arvinsim »

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…

> 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?

Re: New Mac Pro

#533

Post by dropofwill »

jwr wrote: post #432
noir_lord wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, that's cool, but that's comparing Apples to Linux-Oranges, I guess. I do have a Linux box with a fast Intel CPU and it's nice and fast, but a Mac it ain't. I'm happy to pay more for a Mac machine, if only for the fact that I get an OS with working copy/paste in all applications. I won't be buying the Mac Pro anytime soon, though, I'm not willing to pay that much. But there are people who are and I'm glad there…

It’s funny you bring up working copy/paste, because lately i’ve been having problems with ‘pboard’ just randomly dying on my Macbook.

Re: New Mac Pro

#534

Post by dylan604 »

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…

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?

Re: New Mac Pro

#535

Post by rhinoceraptor »

snuxoll wrote: post #349
rhinoceraptor wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I assume this uses ECC DDR4 which would at a minimum explain some of the price tag. That will set you back $500+ retail for 32GB alone, still don’t understand where the rest is going with a 8-core CPU and a RX580X though.

It's an 8 core Xeon, plus a custom motherboard with dual 10gb, I would think that alone is probably about $2000.

Re: New Mac Pro

#536

Post by acdha »

ascii_only wrote: post #390
floatboth wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, even with Xeon and buying from big OEMs it still will be twice as cheap.

Do you have a quote for that? It was true for a while on cost/performance because the previous Mac Pro was never upgraded but outsight of that anomalous period the major players tend to be fairly competitive if you’re comparing equivalent parts.

Re: New Mac Pro

#537

Post by mixmastamyk »

icedchai wrote: post #519
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…

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

My disk array has 256 bigger units.

Re: New Mac Pro

#538

Post by diminoten »

llampx wrote: post #186
duskwuff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I'd buy one in a heartbeat, I don't honestly give a shit what storage comes with the system. I've got a separate, dedicated system for storage that's got all kinds of backup/redundancy/failover/etc. configured.

Re: New Mac Pro

#539

Post by endorphone »

icedchai wrote: post #519
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…

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

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.

Re: New Mac Pro

#540

Post by lnanek2 »

llampx wrote: post #186
duskwuff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I find 256GB fine for writing apps. I think more space would be a waste compared to a faster processor to speed up my compile times. If I had infinite money I'd probably put any additional space on extra drives as a RAID array to help with IO read bottlenecks during compiling since I don't have any use for more.

I totally understand gamers need more space, people who collect movies and videos need space, graphic designers need more space. Maybe even Android OS developers need it due to the Android Open Source Project, AOSP, having like 100 repos you need to clone all at once. I don't need it as an app developer, though.

Apple has a history of offering small base storage/memory options, and then charging more for the upgrade versions than they physically cost to produce. It's how they make different price level products when the products are all fundamentally the same. This lets them cater to poorer customers than they could otherwise since the rich ones buy the overpriced upgrades and subsidize the poorer customers' hardware. So it isn't all bad.

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