Mavericks?

[DMaunder]

Right, theoretically this is true, and Thunderbolt is an exciting technology. We've yet to see it really take hold in the pro hardware scene. Perhaps something like this could help push it, if enough of the right kind of people get behind the device and if Apple does as well as they did with vendors and Firewire, back in the day. They've kind of boxed themselves into a corner with Thunderbolt so far---because the Mac Pro couldn't natively support it. Is it too late? Has eSATA and other interfaces become the good-enough solution in the years they've been sitting in the twilight zone on it? The bigger problem in my mind is the limited expandability of the core components themselves. Some fields need to stay on top of the best 3d cards available, and with the cards (good as they are right now) being soldered on, that's going to make this a hard pill to swallow. Part of the appeal of a heavy duty workstation is that nearly everything about it can be easily repaired and upgraded on-site. When you've got a whole office of these things working overtime (often 24 hours a day in rendering pools at load capacity), breakdowns are frequent and you can't afford to be shipping units out or taking them to repair centres for costly specialist treatment. Of course I'm speaking of the many small shops all over the world that get by with just enough. Hollywood is another matter. The issue is less what this thing can do now, or what it can do when it is released, but what it can do in two years. Right now it has some great specs, will those specs be top of the line in 2015? If not, it's either buy a new unit to replace one part, or never get it in the first place and stick with hardware that can be incrementally repaired and upgraded.

We'll have to see once it is more than a few pictures and an enthusiastic keynote segment, but it really seems to me they've cut out a product line by making a new one here. A welcome new one, for sure, and personally I think it's a beautiful machine; it is one for the MoMA for sure. It is heartening to see any technology vendor putting so much effort into a static workstation these days, with all of the "PC is dead" talk. I don't mean to come down on it, I'm just concerned that the word "Pro" seems to be more and more out of touch with reality as time goes by.

I think you are missing the bigger picture with the pro market. Large scale storage has been outside of desktop for some time now. Imagine having your project data confined to a 3+ disk array inside your Mac Pro. You have a MacBook Pro and you're need to take that data with you. You're not going to yank the hard drives out of your Mac Pro and Frankenstein them to your MacBook Pro while you're away. A thunderbolt array is a godsend. How about being able to use hardware acceleration cards on your Mac Pro and MacBook Pro? No need to buy two hardware acceleration cards. There's much more flexibility this way.

[michaelbywater]

Personally, I'd love to see OS X Wagga Wagga, or OS X Uluru, but I can accept that's not going to happen.

Now you're talking. Aussie-themed. Brilliant. OS X 10.10 Pitjantjatjara. Or, come to that, OS X 10.11 Strzelecki. You don't pronounce it right, you don't get the download. ("Right" in this case means "Strez-lecky", whatever an actual Pole might say to the contrary.)

[AmberV]

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Apple products were in the same price bracket as “regular” brands, unlike Louis Vuitton. “Normal” people buy Apple, not just the wealthy.

That’s where we are talking about two different things I believe. My reference was purely upon the marketing, not even necessarily the engineering, definitely not the price or the sorts of people that buy them (but I would still say that overall Apple has a reputation of making “designer” computers outside of the Apple community, that seems to be the general consensus with most of the people I come across anyway, nobody takes Apple’s computer engineering seriously, they are widely considered to be form over function—doesn’t make it right, you and I both know different, but that’s the conception). Design has always been important to Apple, it just seems to me to have become confused with the meat, lately.

[AmberV]

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I think you are missing the bigger picture with the pro market. Large scale storage has been outside of desktop for some time now.

Sorry, I wasn’t clear, nobody is saying that the three extra drive bays in the old Mac Pro were what pros used to shuttle media around. I’m not sure if I follow how external RAIDs are the bigger picture; you are going to have those if you need them, no matter what you plug them into. My main point is that it is going to be a very tough sell, saying that a shop will need to buy 100 workstations that are composed of a cylinder of solid metal, where if any component (except the RAM) in the cylinder goes obsolete or breaks down (which happen often in a large shop) you want to buy solid replacement parts, not whole new units. We’re not talking about the same sort of thing. I’m talking about render farms, rack mounts and offices full of high-performance static workstations or “server rooms” full of Mac Pros. Apple has been pulling away from that scene for quite some time now, and the new Mac Pro is just in my opinion a final confirmation that they have withdrawn. This is nothing new, it’s been going on for years.

For the prosumer that needs a tower and a RAID and maybe a portable, sure—the stuff you say is all valid, I meant to make that more clear in my prior post. When I said that Apple now addresses “me” as its top level consumer, that’s roughly what I was referring to. I don’t do video anymore myself, but I do photography and benefit from the same sorts of technology that the a/v and 3d crowd benefit from. Time will tell if it takes off in that market, is what I say.

To rephrase: my concern is that the prosumer is now Apple’s highest level, and that stunts the overall level of innovation that filters down into the consumer grade machines over time.

[Jaysen]

Ioa-iffer, I would think render farms and environments such as you describe wouldn't be using pros anyway. I would think they would be on the xserver platform using xgrid for management and distributed compute.

But I may have missed a deprecation of xserver as I stopped caring a while ago (having a life seems to have become a bit of a priority for the family, sorry).

[Jaysen]

Ioa-iffer, I would think render farms and environments such as you describe wouldn't be using pros anyway. I would think they would be on the xserver platform using xgrid for management and distributed compute.

But I may have missed a deprecation of xserver as I stopped caring a while ago (having a life seems to have become a bit of a priority for the family, sorry).

What a moron. The xserver line is dead.

But for $1K each I can get a stack of minis that can be combined into a render farm. A 12core system would be $3K with less space, power, and heat issues than a pro.

But that's me. I'm not normal. Well established fact.

[AmberV]

In their heyday you'd have been right, for any larger operation that was willing to go Apple that is. Since then, Xserve was dropped from the line-up last year, and they've been pushing Mac Pros as an alternative. So you would indeed find some offices with a room full of Pros somewhere, or at least a mixed environment. Then at the lower level you'd have offices running maybe a mix of Xserve and Mac Pro, or even using Mac Pros as the servers depending on the budget. The old Mac Pro was an amazingly flexible machine, capable of doing everything from a mid-level individual work-station to being an economical component in a massive system, and lots of roles in between. Can the new Mac Pro live up to that? This is my question.

[Briar Kit]

If the new Mac Pro could time travel back to 2003, it would be the eighth most powerful supercomputer in the world. And all in a package 9.9 inches tall and 6.6 inches in diameter. Impressive.

http://macdailynews.com/2013/06/10/appl ... h-in-2003/

[pigfender]

If the new Mac Pro could time travel back to 2003, it would be the eighth most powerful supercomputer in the world.

If you get that to work can you get it to send me an email telling me not to bother with "Crash" and to take Mrs Pigfender to see "The Notebook". Make sure I understand that "The Notebook" is unavoidable in later life and so I might as well get the brownie points.

[Briar Kit]

Of course...though I had to look The Notebook up. You need to move over here, we're a Notebook free zone.

[suavito]

I seem to be the only one here who is most excited about tags. And not only because the Mac Pro (or Pro-ish) is way out of my range of both electrical and financial power.

OpenMeta tags were a great invention but always risky: They might just vanish with the next OS X update because OpenMeta was never supported by Apple.

So now there are tags that are part of the OS and what I wish most is that OpenMeta tags can be converted easily into OS X tags.

Working with tags has two parts: The tagging of items and the browsing of items.

Tagging was never the problem. Ali Rantakari's free Tagger is sufficient, and Caseapp's Tags in my opinion has the most comfortable one.

But tags browsing … Tags’ browser offers a flat list which becomes a scrolling nightmare the longer the list gets. Nudgenudge's Punakea (available now for a Mavericks sellout price of only 99¢!) has a tags cloud which I never get used to. (Admittedly, because the rest of the program did not satisfy me back in the days. And when they went MAS the trial version was gone, like it happened to so many other software.)

Ironic Software's Leap for me always yelled: "Overdose!" The guys behind it did invent OpenMeta, which we all should be eternally grateful for. But they are definitely not the kings of UI.

So the big question is how Apple will handle this. The keynote finder window had about eight tags, so nothing different to the colour markers we already have. But what when you got 80 or 800? In the sidebar? I doubt that Mavericks will hold a solution for that, hopefully OS 10.10 will.

The choice of "Mavericks" and other American places as names for forthcoming OS versions seems clever to me as at the same time parts of the Apple production line return to the US of A (the Mac Pro gets at least assembled in the US). The choice of a surfer's paradise for the first place-named OS I think is the best a bunch of guys who don't know that you wear your shirt in your pants could come up with.

[KB]

The good news there is that I don't think there is anything that would prevent a third-party developer creating a tags browser.

[Bluesman]

I am amazed. They get better power management, and they don't reduce the battery capacity to 6-7 hours? If my old MBPro hadn't died last summer, this is what I had been waiting for. 12 hours of battery life on a laptop is the feature I've waited decades for.

That's been around for quite a while now. The Lenovo X230 with the slice battery option will give you over 20 hours.

[robertdguthrie]

I am amazed. They get better power management, and they don't reduce the battery capacity to 6-7 hours? If my old MBPro hadn't died last summer, this is what I had been waiting for. 12 hours of battery life on a laptop is the feature I've waited decades for.

That's been around for quite a while now. The Lenovo X230 with the slice battery option will give you over 20 hours.

Sorry, I forgot to specify that it also has to run an OS that doesn't make me want smash it to bits. And if the alternative is to run Linux... been there, did that for 15 years, got tired of rolling my own solutions for every other thing I wanted the computer to do for me.

[Bluesman]

I am amazed. They get better power management, and they don't reduce the battery capacity to 6-7 hours? If my old MBPro hadn't died last summer, this is what I had been waiting for. 12 hours of battery life on a laptop is the feature I've waited decades for.

That's been around for quite a while now. The Lenovo X230 with the slice battery option will give you over 20 hours.

Sorry, I forgot to specify that it also has to run an OS that doesn't make me want smash it to bits. And if the alternative is to run Linux... been there, did that for 15 years, got tired of rolling my own solutions for every other thing I wanted the computer to do for me.

Funny how that works. I'm exactly the same way the other way around. Love Windows, can't stand OSX. You tried Windows 8 yet? It's cool stuff, once you get the hang of it.