Apple’s new Mac Pro

[marcuswitt]

https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

What do you think about Apple’s new flagship, which is scheduled to be released in Fall this year? I find that thing amazing, to be honest. The looks of it isn’t really my taste, but its ‘inner values’ are awesome. I’ve read that it’s price tag will start 6000,- $US, which is allot of money, indeed. But for the true Pro’s out there this could become the Next Big Thing to invest some money for. From my perspective: Well done, Apple.

[joeyluck]

It looks like a cheese grater from the one angle and I'm pretty sure they know it lol.

I like the way it opens...the G4 Cube was still a little cooler in this aspect, which I still have.

[hurricane]

On the new MacPro - this new version of Logic:

[stratatonic]

On the new MacPro - this new version of Logic:

"We can now have a 1000 audio tracks and a 1000 software synths running in Logic..."

So the new Mac Pro could run, what 70-80 of each for Reason?

jk!

btw, the new Pro stand for that new monitor is $999! o_0!!

.

[jzquantum]

When I look at it, I suddenly want some shredded cheese.

[QVprod]

So they made it look even more like a cheese grater than the original cheese grater mac pros. Power on it is in sane but probably complete overkill for the usual music maker. At $6000 starting price, I'll probably never own one, They've clearly exited the Prosumer market for customizable desktops with this one. But hey, My mac mini serves me well.

[dhruan]

Aesthetic design wise that thing is kind of freaking hideous. Also, with great power comes great price. Or in this case, a kind of insane price.

Specs & engineering wise that is without a doubt a marvel, also, it is pretty much everything the power users were clamoring for. So yeah, if I was working in a production environment doing something insanely processing and memory intensive stuff (like 8k editing/post-production or data visualizations/analysis using very large data sets etc.) then that setup would make sense.

[hurricane]

But hey, My mac mini serves me well.

As does mine! Cant wait to see how Logic 10.5 performs on my mac mini. I've never had to think about the CPU when working in Logic, and now performance will be "better". Ha.

Man, this mac kool-aid is delicious.

[reggie1979]

At $6000 starting price.......

Good god, where do people get this kinda money, are youtube viddys really making that much coin?

[Steedus]

Love the look (except for the caster wheels!)

[Faastwalker]

My first thought was that it looked like a cheese grater & it was of little surprise that most other people had the same initial thought. It really does! This is a top end product. I don't see it as something for mere mortals & home users. Not unless they have very deep pockets. This is going to be bought be industry people, large design companies, big music studios & people who like their cheese coarsely grated.

[reggie1979]

Yes, but it's so damned expensive! How many "pros" do you see here? I think considering the options and the availability vs that it's mac and has some limitations will be.........

Well, on second thought, it will be a sucksess

[wendylou]

IMHO, Apple missed the mark. I had the older cheese grater Mac Pro with IBM PowerPC chips that died with the Mac OS Intel switch. THAT is what intermediate "pros" wanted: something modular, upgradable, and reasonably affordable. Instead, they debut this insanely expensive thing aimed at companies with deep pockets, and focused mainly on video. No Nvidia support (well, we knew that before). no CUDU for the scientific and 3D rendering communities (OK, we also knew they dropped CUDA and want everyone to go METAL before), and their Logic Pro demo of 1000 tracks was mostly MIDI, not audio tracks with lots of plug-ins, so not a particularly valid demo for power. The base model is considered by many to be uncompetitive to PCs or self-builds. So by the time you spec-out a more powerful, feature-laden system, you could buy a car for that. Heck, you could get a nice pre-owned car for the base price – oh, except that you'll also need a monitor, and if you get their $5000 pro monitor – surprise – you'll need to buy their separate stand for WHAT? Another $1000??? Are you kidding me?!?! (Sell me a spoon. but the handle is separate!) I doubt any home semi-pro audio or semi-pro anything person will buy it. You need to be a studio or biz who can pay back the cost with business profits.

Apple has, again, totally misunderstood who wanted the upgradeable, modular Mac. It's not just the deep-pocket big studios or companies, it's the creative musicians and 4K/8K video people, and scientific community who feels the iMac Pro closed architecture is very limiting over the life of the computer. The market they missed is the many average "pro" users who owned the old cheese grater PowerPC Mac Pros, and all the people who want to stay with Mac OS who have built Hackintoshe for power. I like modular and expandable, but I could never invest in or afford this new Mac Pro.

[jam-s]

The base model is considered by many to be uncompetitive to PCs or self-builds. So by the time you spec-out a more powerful, feature-laden system, you could buy a car for that. Heck, you could get a nice pre-owned car for the base price – oh, except that you'll also need a monitor, and if you get their $5000 pro monitor – surprise – you'll need to buy their separate stand for WHAT? Another $1000??? Are you kidding me?!?! (Sell me a spoon. but the handle is separate!) I doubt any home semi-pro audio or semi-pro anything person will buy it. You need to be a studio or biz who can pay back the cost with business profits.

The pricing is just right if you remove the last zero. Should be Ok with apple, too, because x - 0 = x, isn't it?

[reggie1979]

It's just too much money. You can build a PC for a quarter of that. And, there is nothing wrong with windoze, it's fine. And more stuff is compatible w/o MOS breaking everything every time there is an update.

[Loque]

My first thought was that it looked like a cheese grater & it was of little surprise that most other people had the same initial thought. It really does! This is a top end product. I don't see it as something for mere mortals & home users. Not unless they have very deep pockets. This is going to be bought be industry people, large design companies, big music studios & people who like their cheese coarsely grated.

Exactly. A cheese grater. Ugly. I thought who the fogg designed this crap? And than i heard the price and ROFLed and thought, yea, Mac users will be stupid enough to pay it.

[djadalaide]

The display for it doesn't come with a stand.. Its $999. For A Stand..

Also..the fully kitted out version of the mac costs $45,000

They know that creative houses will buy these so they just put whatever price they want.

[O1B]

Ah...! The Opinions.... lotta butthurt on this Thread.

Mac users will be stupid enough to pay it.

[selig]

I doubt any home semi-pro audio or semi-pro anything person will buy it. You need to be a studio or biz who can pay back the cost with business profits.

Exactly! These are the people they have been interviewing for the past few years, these are the folks they've been ignoring for the past decade or so, and according to what I've read so far in the pro market Apple has hit the nail on the head (with the design too).

The fact that none of us need this power, and none of us "get" this product, shows they did their research very well IMO.

Sure it can cost as much as a car - but there are cars that cost as much as a house, right?

Horses for courses…

[selig]

…yea, Mac users will be stupid enough to pay it.

Not Mac Mini users, no iMac users, not MacBook users.

"Mac users" are not a monolithic group of technology users, just like not all PC users build their own super-powerful desktop gaming machines from scratch.

[estuary]

... Mac users will be stupid enough to pay it.

[pongasoft]

IMHO, Apple missed the mark. I had the older cheese grater Mac Pro with IBM PowerPC chips that died with the Mac OS Intel switch. THAT is what intermediate "pros" wanted: something modular, upgradable, and reasonably affordable. Instead, they debut this insanely expensive thing aimed at companies with deep pockets, and focused mainly on video. No Nvidia support (well, we knew that before). no CUDU for the scientific and 3D rendering communities (OK, we also knew they dropped CUDA and want everyone to go METAL before), and their Logic Pro demo of 1000 tracks was mostly MIDI, not audio tracks with lots of plug-ins, so not a particularly valid demo for power. The base model is considered by many to be uncompetitive to PCs or self-builds. So by the time you spec-out a more powerful, feature-laden system, you could buy a car for that. Heck, you could get a nice pre-owned car for the base price – oh, except that you'll also need a monitor, and if you get their $5000 pro monitor – surprise – you'll need to buy their separate stand for WHAT? Another $1000??? Are you kidding me?!?! (Sell me a spoon. but the handle is separate!) I doubt any home semi-pro audio or semi-pro anything person will buy it. You need to be a studio or biz who can pay back the cost with business profits.

Apple has, again, totally misunderstood who wanted the upgradeable, modular Mac. It's not just the deep-pocket big studios or companies, it's the creative musicians and 4K/8K video people, and scientific community who feels the iMac Pro closed architecture is very limiting over the life of the computer. The market they missed is the many average "pro" users who owned the old cheese grater PowerPC Mac Pros, and all the people who want to stay with Mac OS who have built Hackintoshe for power. I like modular and expandable, but I could never invest in or afford this new Mac Pro.

You have expressed in this message exactly what my thoughts are. I used to have a Mac tower which I absolutely loved until Apple stopped supporting it. I now use a MacBook Pro as my main computer (keyboard/mouse + monitor). But I also need a Thunderbolt dock, 2 external drives, etc... because the laptop is not enough. It is starting to show its age (2014) but have no interest in upgrading to another MacBook Pro especially since they added a screen/strip instead of buttons for top row and I would be in the same situation (even less outputs actually than my current one!). And there is no way I will purchase a machine that has a starting price of 6 grands! I guess my next machine will be either a dual boot Windows/Linux machine or just vanilla Windows since Microsoft is going full on "developer" mode (which is my profile) with all the stuff they are adding (a new terminal, WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), etc...) which makes the OS a lot more bearable...

Yan

[MarkTarlton]

Sure it can cost as much as a car - but there are cars that cost as much as a house, right?

great analogy

…yea, Mac users will be stupid enough to pay it.

Not Mac Mini users, no iMac users, not MacBook users.

"Mac users" are not a monolithic group of technology users, just like not all PC users build their own super-powerful desktop gaming machines from scratch.

yup! me personally... I fall in the mini/macbook camp, but I do appreciate these super computers.

[QVprod]

IMHO, Apple missed the mark. I had the older cheese grater Mac Pro with IBM PowerPC chips that died with the Mac OS Intel switch. THAT is what intermediate "pros" wanted: something modular, upgradable, and reasonably affordable. Instead, they debut this insanely expensive thing aimed at companies with deep pockets, and focused mainly on video. No Nvidia support (well, we knew that before). no CUDU for the scientific and 3D rendering communities (OK, we also knew they dropped CUDA and want everyone to go METAL before), and their Logic Pro demo of 1000 tracks was mostly MIDI, not audio tracks with lots of plug-ins, so not a particularly valid demo for power. The base model is considered by many to be uncompetitive to PCs or self-builds. So by the time you spec-out a more powerful, feature-laden system, you could buy a car for that. Heck, you could get a nice pre-owned car for the base price – oh, except that you'll also need a monitor, and if you get their $5000 pro monitor – surprise – you'll need to buy their separate stand for WHAT? Another $1000??? Are you kidding me?!?! (Sell me a spoon. but the handle is separate!) I doubt any home semi-pro audio or semi-pro anything person will buy it. You need to be a studio or biz who can pay back the cost with business profits.

Apple has, again, totally misunderstood who wanted the upgradeable, modular Mac. It's not just the deep-pocket big studios or companies, it's the creative musicians and 4K/8K video people, and scientific community who feels the iMac Pro closed architecture is very limiting over the life of the computer. The market they missed is the many average "pro" users who owned the old cheese grater PowerPC Mac Pros, and all the people who want to stay with Mac OS who have built Hackintoshe for power. I like modular and expandable, but I could never invest in or afford this new Mac Pro.

I have to disagree a bit here. I get it, previously Mac Pros were relatively affordable at base model and you could then upgrade them further over time. However the iMacs and Mac minis they have now are very powerful, even for video and they stopped soldering ram to the logic board. Sure the hard drives can't be upgraded, but those of us in audio world use external hard drives anyway at this point. Vega 20 graphics are even offered as an option for the iMac and it with it included, you can still spec out a powerful Mac that still costs less than the last base model Mac Pro which started at $3000. Our market is covered already and we know Macs tend to last a long time. Only makes sense they'd then aim the Mac Pro at a different market and not overlapping with their current products. Most of us probably won't even need the current base spec Mac pro. PC self builds of the same caliber will cost relatively close in price when you consider labor is free when you do it yourself. And think about it, even in the old Mac Pros, the only thing that was easy for the average user to upgrade was ram, hard drives and, the video card. Unless you're migrating from a PC build, there probably isn't much in the way of PCIe cards you need. (to which there are thunderbolt solutions for if you do).

Now sure $1000 for a monitor stand is ridiculous but I suppose in that market, paying $6000 for a monitor is normal and possibly even "cheap". Also the Logic Pro demonstration was actually a really great example of the power. He was running large orchestral libraries. Those require far more power than mixing audio tracks (as do many virtual instrument for that matter). That was aimed at composers who often need 2 computers to work to offload the instrument processing.

Ultimately when looking at the full picture, it's really hard to complain about the Mac Pro market being a higher tier when the lesser Mac models are already so powerful.

[motuscott]

Seeing as how I'm posting this from a Corona, I'm not sure I'm qualified to comment.