The Mac Pro is Dead.
The industrial “cheese grater” design that Apple developed and carried though for ten years is now history, seemingly replaced by a sleek, black, cylindrical structure that now takes on the mantle of “Mac Pro”.
I watched the WWDC keynote last night, and initially I admit that I was more than smitten with the new design. But having had a night to sleep on the news, I find myself scratching my head. Who exactly is the target audience for this new Mac Pro?
One of the hallmarks of the old Mac Pro was its expandability. My early 2008 Mac Pro is still a worthy, powerful machine because I could add components like new drives and PCI-cards as needed. It was a self contained unit. It was easy to work on and tinker. The new Mac Pro, on the other hand, has very little expansion capability within the unit itself, instead relying on its ports for extra expandability. It’s a closed “box” in every sense of the word.
Gone are the internal drive bays. Gone are the PCI slots. Aside from the raw power of the new GPUs and the microprocessor, in my mind – there really isn’t any significant advantage to purchasing the new Mac Pro over a decked out iMac. Apple has done away with DVI ports, so my two relatively new external displays will, at the very least, require an adapter to make them work (taking up two Thunderbolt ports). And I’d have to pony up for external enclosures (like a Drobo) for all the drives taking up my current Mac Pro’s bays.
I’m planning to buy a new Mac this year, and I was really hoping it would be a new Mac Pro. Now, faced with the new realities, I’m having to consider other options. And I suspect I’m not alone…
Thoughts?
-Krishna
Update: Macworld has a good write-up on the new Mac Pro.
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Tell me what you think!
Michael Kinyon
June 11, 2013 at 10:55 amIt looks slick, but I wonder about the potential for overheating, cf. the old G4 Cube.
Coyoty
June 12, 2013 at 3:50 pmIt’s designed around heat management. It’s pretty much a heat sink and turbine with circuits attached.
qka
June 11, 2013 at 11:09 amAlas, you can’t chill your beer in it, like you could in the cylindrical Cray mainframes.
Drezz
June 11, 2013 at 11:41 amTypical of Apple development – planned & systemic obsolescence. If they don’t nail you with the newly designed hardware and incompatible peripherals, they slow down your older machines with bloated software. I work at a design firm on the Mac platform and we typically upgrade our hardware and software every 5-7 years. Pretty good considering the shelf-life of most Macs and their gadgets – but you end up with a hell of a graveyard.
If they’re going to restrict upgrades and keep everything self contained, you may as well buy an iMac. At least they’ve got the heat issues down pat – who knows about this new cylinder, if it ends up being similar to the failed Cube experiment.
Mike Wills
June 11, 2013 at 12:37 pmI think they are thinking the the lightning ports will handle anything you want to throw at it.
Becki
June 11, 2013 at 1:54 pmLooking at the ports of the new Mac Pro, I am reminded of the description of the spaceship Arthur and his friends “stole” in Douglas Adams’ series: black writing on a black background. Just really, really black. Could have saved the lighting tricks if they had used a bit less black!
Adam Young
June 11, 2013 at 7:08 pmI agree. I’m not going to spend thousands on an awesome desktop only for it to become obsolete 5 years down the line. I want to replace the GPUs and so forth if I need to. Also the lack of drive bays really gets me. I’m far from a power user, but I have about 2TB + of drive space split between different internal and external drives. I don’t want to end up with a half dozen external enclosures hanging off the back of the thing.
I have to say though. That thing looks beautiful and while I’ll never buy one I want one :D
Jake Eskel
June 11, 2013 at 10:27 pmOkay, I have got to say it, I’m impressed, Apple is being bold.
Now I am going to get ragged for this, so hear me out.
Everybody remember E-SATA? The idea behind it? For the rare souls, do you know why it flopped (Look, what computer today offers an E-SATA card?) It flopped because there was only one thing you could do with it, hard drives. But what was it? An attempt to get the sort of expansion you wished you computer had… but on the outside.
What is Apple trying to get with Thunderbolt? Two words: Inside Out.
In Apple’s own ideas, Thunderbolt will replace USB, FireWire, E-SATA, and basically anything else for peripherals, while being able to do a massive amount on the same bus. Now, what do you get with that? You get things like: Hard drives on the outside. Graphics modules on the outside (but those will take time to develop). PCI buses… that start on the outside, in their own cases.
What does Apple have in this case? A damn powerful machine. A very damn powerful machine. With 128GB of RAM probably available. A quiet cooling system, some good GPUs (Can’t wait for the Linux people to have a patch that uses them for processing, if a current one isn’t already around). Thunderbolt. Solid State Storage, most often used for storing OS files, for quick access and fast bootup.
So what are we left with? CPU and RAM in a box. Make the computer outside, let the platter drives full of movies take time to get there, don’t let them clutter our nice system drive. Let’s do the processing in-house, and do the IO out-of-house. After all, that’s the paradigm so far, only they are making it more explicit.
Krishna M. Sadasivam
June 12, 2013 at 3:15 pmGood points, Jake. The design’s unconventional, for sure. It might begin to grow on me over time….
Coyoty
June 12, 2013 at 3:53 pmMy first impression of the design was, “That looks like a bomb.” I wonder if uninformed security screeners and police will think so too.
Fyrebaugh
June 14, 2013 at 10:22 amI wonder how many people walking into someone’s office will try to use the new Mac Pro as a trashcan…. But seriously, I prefer to be able to change video cards as new ones come out or down in price. Adding drives through external cables is nice for transferring files and such, but long term storage? Better to have the cables internal where they are less likely to be damaged, pulled etc.. I like thunderbolt but one of the best things about USB is that they are everywhere! After about 2 years I still do not see thunderbolt hubs, regardless of price! After Windows 98 SE, the proliferation of USB hubs, and accessories exploded. I am hoping that Thunderbolt isn’t going to be like Beta Max, or HD DVD, good in their own right but not cost effective to the masses, and therefore not adopted.
ex2bot
June 14, 2013 at 5:15 pmThere are Thunderbolt hubs, though the price . . .