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Mac Pro

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Re: Mac Pro

#551

Post by Goosey »

digitalengineer wrote: post #435
wisty wrote: post #417

OK, so it's not a Mac Pro. It's a Mac Mini Pro. As long as it's not too expensive, it's exactly what a lot of prosumers might want (especially those who want to ditch their laptops for iPads and iPhones, and maybe a MBA for the road- a lot of people's MacBook Pros live on their desks). I can't see a serious video editor wanting one, but they're all jumping ship to get cheaper Wintel workstations (and at some point, s…

How about the entire graphic design industry? Finally a 'headless iMac' with balls. The MacPro allows me to attach my EIZO monitors. The iMac screens are consumer-quality, really. If you're looking for high quality screens (and OSX), the MacPro is the best. I am curious about the price-range.

Audio production and engineering as well. The more plugins that can be run in real time (rather than baked) the less overhead in managing the ever growing complexity of modern electronic music projects, especially with ever increasingly CPU hungry plugins. Take Diva[1] for example - amazingly resource intensive analog simulation, but it sounds incredible! Currently on my top-end-2011-era macbook pro I can only have one of these going dynamically and then must bake and unbake different channels as I continue to experiment. Being able to run a number in real time would really speed up the work flow.

[1] http://www.u-he.com/cms/diva

Re: Mac Pro

#552

Post by FireBeyond »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #444
specialist wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it doesn't solve my "need a new mac pro" problem. Yes! Totally yes! I held off buying a MBP just so mine would be one generation better than my coworkers'. I just know there's a MBP in the pipeline, because the inventory has been allowed to dry up. Why wasn't a new model announced?

Probably a minor refresh for Haswell. I wouldn't expect too much. Pure speculation, but maybe they had some integration difficulties and didn't want to commit to a specific timeline, or they couldn't release it /right now/ like the MBA so they wanted to hold off to fill out their fall event. There are a ton of other things that could have held it back; perhaps Intel isn't ramped up enough on volume production of the…

Exactly, that's all the MBA refresh was - much to my girlfriend's disappointment - no retina display (but if the Air got a retina display, there ends up being very little to differentiate between the Air and the new Pros).

Re: Mac Pro

#553

Post by gems »

jqueryin wrote: post #544
forrestthewoods wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. I think it's beyond awful. Incredibly slow and in many environments (chrome-windows) effectively non-functional. I still haven't made it to the end because of how slow and unresponsive it is.

If your machine isn't already rendering that page flawlessly, I would argue that you weren't the website's target audience. IMO, the site caters those looking for a high end performance machine; those who likely already own and are using a MBP or even an Air and want that extra performance boost. I personally went through slide by slide just to read the specs. The transitions aren't the fastest given they overrode sc…

"If your machine isn't already rendering that page flawlessly, I would argue that you weren't the website's target audience. IMO, the site caters those looking for a high end performance machine; those who likely already own and are using a MBP or even an Air and want that extra performance boost."

If you don't already have a fast computer, you probably will never want a fast computer. Makes complete sense.

Re: Mac Pro

#554

Post by sitkack »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #365
rsync wrote: post #256

I love this new device. I suspect I will buy one. But it doesn't solve my "need a new mac pro" problem. Right now my 2009 octo mac pro, with six displays attached, plays three roles: - it is my high end desktop workstation, with three primary high resolution (2560x1600) displays. - it is my HTPC, with one of the six monitors strung into another room entirely. - it is my office NAS, with four internal 3TB disks So, th…

Maybe build a Hackintosh? I've been running one for 18 months (coming off a Mac Pro when it became clear upgrades would be a long time coming). It's pretty great. If you're careful with hardware selection you can apply Apple's own software updates with zero issues. See: http://www.tonymacx86.com/351-building-customac-buyer-s-guid...

Unless Apple comes out with another expandable tower that has multiple sockets and supports > 128GB of ram I won't be buying one of their desktops.

I have an _old_ Q6600 based hackintosh with RAID SSD and RAID 10 secondary. Granted the ram maxed out at 8GB but the machine is still speedy. Having > 64 would vastly simplify my workflow by enabling more VMs to be live at the same time.

Re: Mac Pro

#555

Post by glenra »

kunai wrote: post #361
glenra wrote: post #70

"Okay, we COULD just label the ports with regular high color contrast paint. Say, white paint on a black background or black paint on a white background. But that would be TOO EASY and the panel would then really 'pop' against our otherwise monolithic clean design. Which would be distracting." "But during actual use the ports are going to be on the BACK of the device (so you won't see it) and will have random stuff p…

Do you really twist your neck around on your laptop to make sure that the labels for plugging in peripherals all the time? I thought not.

> Do you really twist your neck around on your laptop to make sure that the labels for plugging in peripherals all the time?

Not all the time, but...yes, sometimes.

On my MacBook Pro, the headphone jack and the microphone jack take the same kind of plug but function differently. The only difference is label and position, but the label is tiny and relatively low contrast so it's hard to see clearly. One option is to plug it in, see if it works, then try the other one. Or remember positionally which one is which (headphone jack turns out to be the closer one). Another option is to squint at the tiny label, which I have been known to do on occasion.

Re: Mac Pro

#556

Post by stormbrew »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #466
astrodust wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea here is any video card you might want you can just plug in to a Thunderbolt 2 port. Six of those, which can be chained, is way better than having four internal slots.

Not quite. Note that Thunderbolt 2 can do 2x20G/bits/ per second, vs PCI-E v3 at 32G/bytes/ per second (on a 16x slot). Refs: - http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/19/pci-express-makes-the-3-0... - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pci_express - http://www.zdnet.com/intel-unveils-thunderbolt-2-7000016595/ - http://www.tomshardware.com/news/lucid-gpu-graphics-thunderb... - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-graphi…

I was looking at that kind of thing as well and the only thing that's worth noting is that I think a lot of video cards currently actively used are only 16x so they can be run on older motherboards with pcie 1 or 2.

It's not clear that thunderbolt 2 isn't enough bandwidth to effectively run a video card, though I think you'd probably run into problems daisy chaining video cards with video cards or trying to run two out of one enclosure.

Re: Mac Pro

#557

Post by Livven »

coldtea wrote: post #538
Livven wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site is really cool but to me feels too much like a fancy Flash page of old, just made with HTML. It's simply not as effective at presenting information as a traditional, scrollable webpage, for instance you can't use your browser's in-page search to look for keywords. Also it doesn't really work in the mobile browsers I've tried (works very poorly on iOS, falls back to a normal page on Android, doesn't show anyt…

> The site is really cool but to me feels too much like a fancy Flash page of old, just made with HTML. It's simply not as effective at presenting information as a traditional, scrollable webpage, for instance you can't use your browser's in-page search to look for keywords. This makes the assumption that the raw details is the only information they want to convey. Communication works in many levels. The presentation…

I don't disagree that there's this additional angle but I think that it would be better served with a separate video.

Re: Mac Pro

#558

Post by jdboyd »

rsync wrote: post #256

I love this new device. I suspect I will buy one. But it doesn't solve my "need a new mac pro" problem. Right now my 2009 octo mac pro, with six displays attached, plays three roles: - it is my high end desktop workstation, with three primary high resolution (2560x1600) displays. - it is my HTPC, with one of the six monitors strung into another room entirely. - it is my office NAS, with four internal 3TB disks So, th…

Many users would find a USB3 array to be fast enough. I would likely go that route instead of a TB array just based on the cost difference between the two.

I expect that a 4k display will totally consume a TB port each. The 2x 2560x1600 displays should be chainable off a single TB port (you can do that currently). That leaves to more TB ports. Also, I expect that each TB port has its own bandwidth separate from the others, so if your TB array is the only device on the 5th or 6th port, I expect there would be no issue.

There is certainly no getting around that your tower would require a separate disk box and DVD or blu-ray reader. That is unfortunate.

The video card upgrade situation deeply concerns me though. The FirePros aren't entry level like the GT120s are, but they won't be top of the line 6 years from now. Further, what if I need to be running CUDA applications?

Re: Mac Pro

#559

Post by squidsoup »

kayoone wrote: post #442
squidsoup wrote: post #193

The more I look at this design, the more I think it's absolutely brilliant. Increasingly we're seeing fantastically small form factors for mid-ranged desktop computers like the Intel NUC and the Mac Mini, yet high end workstations are still stuck in massive, ugly ATX towers. This seems to elegantly solve the problem of squeezing components that tend to run very hot, into a relatively small space. The shared heat sync…

that is because most people using high end workstations dont care about how it looks or how big it is.

While only some people may care about the size or design of their workstation, I suspect that nearly everyone cares about how noisy it is. The design of the Mac Pro should make it relatively quiet I would wager.

Re: Mac Pro

#560

Post by spitfire »

Finally, I have a replacement for my NeXT Cube!

They've clearly studied their core markets - Graphics and viz work. I'm in line to buy one.

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