Interesting future Mac Pro rumor

[Alex Kiritz]

"Thunderbolt 2 is currently slated to begin production before the end of this year, and ramp into 2014." - Intel

This bodes well for the new Mac.

http://blogs.intel.com/technology/20...fer-display-2/

[Mark Toia]

If Apple ditch the tower the tower chassis and expansion slots then that will be game over, in a sense; we will quickly see Hackintosh going mainstream, and machines being openly configured and sold to run OSX on non Apple hardware.

Mike

I hardly use my tower at all these days. My laptop is pretty much as quick as it... And portable.

BLACKMAGIC make small thunderbolt boxes to images through to all sorts of monitors.
RED rocket through thunderbolt works fine...

Honestly.. I doubt I'd be buying another tower, unless it was at least 4x quicker than my laptop.

I say im about done with towers from PC or MAC.

[Cüneyt Kaya]

they shoudl licence their os to a dedicated tower builder like boxx or hp.

[Ethan Cooper]

Better still would be a mid-case tower (rack mountable for god's sake) that housed PCIe 3.0 slots and drive bays and used an internal "switch"(perhaps hybrid CPU) to rout data - your laptop, iMac, iPad or AppleTV (plus keyboard/mouse) would be the UI portion and could carry enough information on board for things like proxy editing. It's basically "flying the saucer section" with the tower as a data appliance. Using WiFi and Cloud infrastructure there would be a ton of ways to remotely drive the appliance. I can easily imagine next generation gesture and voice based UI topologies as well, further enabled by processing muscle in the data appliance which lives "in the closet" or some other convenient place.

1960's mainframe computing is back.

[Scott Crawley]

1960's mainframe computing is back.

Why yes, it is... Like it or not.

http://www.adobe.com/products/creati...130605115812:s

While most of the Creative Cloud is not distributed computing yet, all cloud services are a first step in that direction. It will be interesting to see how much onboard computing their mobile solutions will be doing.

[L. Langer]

Given Apple's current direction in their software development and their focus on OpenCL, I can see the MacPro of the distant future being a low-power Xeon box with internal GPU(s) and external peripherals like the Xeon Phi cards and the Red Rocket for the heavy lifting as well as storage arrays.

[Drew Baird]

For what it's worth - a couple of months ago I received a call from Douglas Brooks, Apples project manager for the new Mac Pro to address my concerns about the new machine. Obviously he didn't tell me anything about the new MP, but asked me what I wanted to see. I told him expandability for extra graphics cards support, and memory expansion were at the top of my list amongst other things. His reply was simple:

"You are going to be really glad that you waited [to buy a new tower]. We are doing something really different here and I think you're going to be very excited when you see what we've been up to. I can't wait to show this off".

That conversation gave me enough confidence to wait for the new machine. I'm looking forward to the announcement. Hopefully the wait will be worth it.

[Peter Majtan]

For what it's worth - a couple of months ago I received a call from Douglas Brooks, Apples project manager for the new Mac Pro to address my concerns about the new machine. Obviously he didn't tell me anything about the new MP, but asked me what I wanted to see. I told him expandability for extra graphics cards support, and memory expansion were at the top of my list amongst other things. His reply was simple:

"You are going to be really glad that you waited [to buy a new tower]. We are doing something really different here and I think you're going to be very excited when you see what we've been up to. I can't wait to show this off".

That conversation gave me enough confidence to wait for the new machine. I'm looking forward to the announcement. Hopefully the wait will be worth it.

Seems like the light at the end of the tunnel is not an incoming Shinkansen after all...

P

[Ethan Cooper]

Seems like the light at the end of the tunnel is not an incoming Shinkansen after all...

P

who else googled 'Shinkansen'?

[Scott Crawley]

Seems like the light at the end of the tunnel is not an incoming Shinkansen after all... P

Isn't it? Thunderbolt 2 pulling into the station...