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New Mac Pro

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Re: New Mac Pro

#561

Post by chaostheory »

nihonde wrote: post #483
chaostheory wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get iCloud on Windows now https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204301 It's not a great solution, but I'm not paying over $6000 for a Mac Pro.

Pro machines for A/V production are routinely $7-10k and have been for as long as I can recall, right back to the 90s. You’re probably just not in the market. These are for commercial buyers who make lots more money from these machines than they spend. Also, six months ago everyone was bellyaching about how Apple has no serious pro devices and was abandoning the desktop. Now it’s too expensive, and my eyes can’t roll…

Those machines tend to have way better specs.

Apple just isn’t listening.

I guess you’re not very familiar with the Mac Pro line. The ones Apple let die in 2012. You know the ones with starting prices at $2000-$3000 adjusted for inflation

Apple leadership also deems developers as “pros” as well at least publicly. I don’t know what they were thinking

Re: New Mac Pro

#562

Post by allthecybers »

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.

Re: New Mac Pro

#563

Post by xienze »

derefr wrote: post #499
ken wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got even cheaper than that. In 2003, the Power Mac base price was $1499. In 2019 dollars, that's only $2082. By 2012, the entry level Mac tower was up to $2499. Since 2013, the cheapest Mac Pro (no PCI/E slots) has been $2999. The 2019 model is literally more than twice as expensive as the 2013, which in turn was already the previous most-expensive entry-level Mac workstation ever. PowerMac/MacPro prices have al…

The difference is that the iMac Pro and Mac Mini didn’t exist to segment that market back then; all the tiers of professional hardware were rolled into just “the Mac Pro.” Roll those back in and the pricing tiers look more equivalent.

The Mac Mini has been around since 2005...

Re: New Mac Pro

#564

Post by chaostheory »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #487
chaostheory wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because: 1. Apple first failed to update the cheese grater line for years consecutively 2. Then Apple's redesign of the Mac Pro transformed it into a larger Mac Mini trashcan which wasn't really expandable compared to the original cheese grater line. No one asked for that. There is evidence for demand for a reasonably priced Mac Pro Tower if you look at the Hackintosh community and eBay sales of older cheese grat…

The cheese grater was already pro, not consumer. The last consumer tower was probably the G4 era, afterwards the iMac, mini, and laptops took over consumer completely, leaving towers to the pro market. There is "niche" demand for consumer towers, sure, but I don't think it would be worth Apple's effort. The iMac 5K is really good, and its even the cheapest option to get one of the best displays out there.

Yes the cheese grater was Pro and it was at a reasonable price starting at $2k- 3k depending on the model. Yes that’s adjusted for inflation.

Re: New Mac Pro

#565

Post by justinclift »

TomVDB wrote: post #345
wayoutthere wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would if you had a storage appliance on a SAN, as the SAN is almost certainly faster than a single SSD. This is an extremely common setup for video production, so it’s not out of the target market at all.

I know nothing about SAN, but I'm still surprised that it would be faster than a PCIe connected local SSD?

Decent network cards (40GbE, etc) with reasonable network NAS/SAN storage can return data in similar time frames to a local PCIe SSD.

That's for storage physically located nearby though. eg same building, no more than 1 or two network hops (roughly).

Higher end networking from the last decade or so has become really fast. :)

Re: New Mac Pro

#566

Post by chaostheory »

ericd wrote: post #484
chaostheory wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For me the sticking points on Windows that prevent me from considering it for more than gaming are 1) advertising to me within the OS, 2) frequent, aggressive restarts for updates, even when actively using the computer and 3) the higher quality productivity app ecosystem on the Mac. The first two signal a big lack of respect for their users, imo. I know you can tweak it, but they make it unnecessarily hard, and I thi…

I’ve been using windows 10 as a gaming machine all this time and I haven’t noticed advertising. The restarts were annoying for my windows box acting as my video security server, but for personal machines you can easily schedule updates and restarts to when you’re asleep so I’m not seeing that as a real issue either.

You are right about the higher quality software on the Mac. I will miss that but I’m not sure how long it’ll last given Apple’s hardware direction. You can already see it with the rise of electron based apps

It’s a pain upgrading the mini compared to a bigger box. You run into all kinds of annoyances. Also I want to upgrade storage as well and not just the ram.

Re: New Mac Pro

#567

Post by justinclift »

Koshkin wrote: post #492
jlgaddis wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure what good two 10gbe ports do. 1 x 10 GbE for your regular Ethernet/IP traffic and 1 x 10 GbE for your storage traffic. You do run your network storage over a physically separate network, right?

I am not sure what “a physically separate network” means when it is used by the same computer. (Also, what about accessing your storage over WiFi? Or, you have to have cables strewn all over the place?)

> you have to have cables strewn all over the place?

Of course. WiFi isn't going to work in shared user environments that chew bandwidth for breakfast.

Not having to worry about the security issues of WiFi too can be helpful (depending on your security requirements).

Re: New Mac Pro

#568

Post by [deleted] »

cm2187 wrote: post #222
jandrese wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2x 10GBE actually. Plus four 40Gbps Thunderbolt ports.

I find that link aggregation is pretty much useless and/or unstable. Not sure what good two 10gbe ports do. But seeing 10gbe becoming part of the standard spec is a really welcomed improvement. Not the least because it will drive prices down.

[deleted]

Re: New Mac Pro

#569

Post by rock_artist »

nvahalik wrote: post #435
atonse wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

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??

The thing is, it doesn't need to be Win10 machine. Even if you're developing for Apple. If you need a "Mac Dev" you can setup up any Intel based machine with macOS. It's not "plug-n-play" but it's not that far from getting Linux running with drivers and performance you'd expect it to.

Re: New Mac Pro

#570

Post by justinclift »

cm2187 wrote: post #326
kbirkeland wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what your experiences are here. With enterprise-level networking equipment and LACP (802.3ad), I've never run into any weird issues.

I tried between two enterprise dlink switches, and also between a synology NAS and a dlink switch. Link aggregation in general only provides performance with multiple connections to multiple machines, so using link aggregation between one client (Mac) and one NAS will like result in zero performance improvement (the packets will only use one of the cables). It only makes sense if you have two or more NAS that you wan…

> enterprise dlink switches

"enterprise" DLink switches aren't really a thing yet, regardless of what their marketing team wants to brand them as. :(

Cisco, HPE, etc have "enterprise" switches. DLink might be in a decade.

> it is hard to saturate a 10gbe connection with a single NAS, unless it is packed with SSDs

No, it's just a matter of having enough spindles behind it.

As a rough guide, with a (say) average spinning rust HDD able to push out 100MB/s when reading, you'd only need 10 such drives to push out 1000MB/s (raw).

In the real world, you need extra spindles as some of the data being pushed out is just internal checksum/redundancy, and doesn't go over the network.

But for reading back large files in mostly sequential access, you'll hit 1GB/s from about 10 drives onwards pretty easily. More drives, more throughput.

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