New Mac Pro line anytime soon?

[Rob Anderson]

I believe the true Mac Pro tower successor will be a "modular" system that relies on the existing iMac form factor, connected via Thunderbolt. The additional chassis will include storage bays, processing, additional I/O ports, and PCI-E lanes. The iMac will then function as a monitor with the Thunderbolt monitors available for daisy chaining. This keeps the Mac lineup firmly intact without requiring Apple to continue supporting the dedicated towers.

So in a sense, yes the Mac Pro as we know it is dead, but in another sense, the "professional Mac" configuration will be alive and well.

While you may be a little disappointed in this at first, I think all of us will grow to love the concept of a "pro box" that sits behind any iMac.

[Brian Merlen]

right now none of these thunderbolt boxes provide gpu support though. being able to put a red rocket in is nice, and has been proven, but what about if your working with another format? or what about the fact that all macs use shotty gpus for the most part? i dont see modular providing a viable solution until we can use GPU's in the thunderbolt pci slot boxes AND drivers to run it on OSX. until then all we got is raids and external red rockets, which ain't bad don't get me wrong, but having external gpu's would help.

[Rob Anderson]

right now none of these thunderbolt boxes provide gpu support though. being able to put a red rocket in is nice, and has been proven, but what about if your working with another format? or what about the fact that all macs use shotty gpus for the most part? i dont see modular providing a viable solution until we can use GPU's in the thunderbolt pci slot boxes AND drivers to run it on OSX. until then all we got is raids and external red rockets, which ain't bad don't get me wrong, but having external gpu's would help.

To clarify, what I'm suggesting is Apple designed and sold.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Thunderbolt is NOT the answer people want it to be and Apple is not going to try and make it the solution. A Thunderbolt port, if both channels are used, which currently no one device on the chain is allowed to do, is the equivalent to a single PCIe 2.0 X4 slot. Not only that, but the Thunderbolt interface has nearly 40X the latency of the slot itself.

Apple has not abandoned the power user. Even the latest alpha seed of Mountain Lion includes support for new hardware that could only be found in a system like a "Mac Pro", not something that would be crammed into the current iMac profile or a single-CPU design. So if nothing else, we know that Apple is working on new hardware. There have been various prototypes of new pro systems, but Apple is doing an insanely-good job of keeping them under wraps for some reason.

I do think there is a very good chance that the big tower Mac Pro as we know it is EOL. I've said it before on the forums and will say it again here... That design is a decade old and functionally stale. It does not fit Apple's current paradigm or design initiative and it does not fit the needs of most of their users. It's far too big and mostly overkill for the majority of customers and is a terrible offering for the power-user who wants/needs more than an iMac, but doesn't need the dual-CPU monster sucking 1.1KW. Other workstation vendors like Dell and HP are in a similar situation, but they have a larger customer base on the upper tier of workstation offerings. HP has their new Z-series offerings in the Z1, Z420, Z620 and Z820. Their Z620 is the most comparable to the Mac Pro and represents what a new Mac Pro would probably be if Apple were to continue down the same path with the same tower design, updated for the new Xeon platform. I point this out about the Z620 because it is the weakest offering in the line-up and the one seeing the lowest sales. Of the new systems, the iMac-like, but expandable, HP Z1 workstation is outselling the other more powerful models, it satisfies the needs of most customers looking for more CPU cores and robust GPU options without going the route of the power-hungry tower. The next-best seller is the Z820 with the most usable slots and drive bays and some additional CPU, power and GPU options.

Dell has done something similar with their new Precision Line. The T7600 is the flagship model and will outsell the T5600 and T3600 by a huge margin. It is, IMO, the only one truly worth buying. The other two serve little purpose other than to fill in a pricing gap because they have enough customers who will still buy them.

Knowing how Cook and the others atop Apple feel about all this is a total mystery right now. Steve Jobs had no intention of abandoning his professional user base -- although his vision of what he felt the professional offerings should be was quite different than what a lot of us here would envision. In naming Cook as his successor and maintaining the same relative group around him, I believe Jobs did his best to set up Apple with those who shared his vision for the foreseeable future.

I'm positive that Apple will have a new workstation offering in the near future and it should fill that gaping hole in their product offerings that has been there for years now. It's going to fall in-line with the rest of their offerings -- sleek and compact, utilitarian, stripped of meaningless features, and powerful enough to fit the needs of most users. I'm almost positive we will not see this product until later this year when the Ivy Bridge Xeon CPUs arrive, or even early next year if the CPUs see a delay. Now that I've had my hands on the latest and greatest Sandy Bridge E5-2600 Xeon platform, I have to say that it's disappointing to some extent. It does offer two more cores per CPU die, and about 25% increase in GT/s as well as memory bandwidth (if you can actually find the proper RAM right now). But it sucks MORE power, a lot more. And prices have increased 30% over the previous generation. The power-per-watt of the E5 Romley platform is lower than what we have with Westmere (which is in the current 2010 Mac Pro). Ivy Bridge Xeons will change that. With the die shrink to 22nm, the power consumption and heat dissipation requirements will drop significantly. We won't be sucking 400W and displacing 280W worth of heat just to operate two 3GHz 8-core CPUs (at 2.8GHz under full load and core activation).... Intel is not even going to release a Sandy Bridge iteration of the E7 series Xeon as it offers no value in contrast to the previous generation as the E7's are what power 4-way and 8-way CPU configurations. They will go straight to Ivy Bridge 22nm process on that one.

As for what's next from Apple for us Pro users, I can only speculate... What I can say is that I do know people who work at Apple and usually when a new Mac Pro is just around the corner, these people have little hits to throw at me or they show some level of excitement, even can tell me they have "seen it". All that is not happening... There is nothing to report. I know their R&D people are indeed working on things, but that is always the case at Apple, that department doesn't sleep. But there is no chatter or even a faint buzz about a new tower workstation being heard by the people I know.

If I were to make a semi-educated guess as to what their next pro system would be, I will say that it will still be a tower of sorts. But smaller. This time it will be rack-mountable and will have room inside for more HDD or SSD devices, yet targeting 2.5" form factor. Dual CPU capable, most likely targeting Ivy Bridge so they can keep total power requirements well under 1KW even with multiple GPUs. GPU offerings will be more open than in the past, but will center around the upcoming Kepler architecture Quadro GPUs from nVidia and/or the AMD 79XX based FirePro GPUs. Probably 8 memory slots for up to 256GB RAM via 32GB modules. I will guess that we'll still see 4 expansion slots -- all PCIe 3.0 X16 and two of them double-spaced.

The other possibility is they will offer a Pro version of the iMac -- similar to the HP Z1, but with some more elegant design choices. The Z1 is nice, but there's several places HP cut some corners or made a few odd design choices that inhibit its functionality. Such as the proprietary GPU form factor.

[KETCH ROSSi]

Jeff, buddy, you always are a Bible of info when it comes to Computer stuff... Love it!!

Now if Apple did come out with a new Mac Pro Tower... Would love it even more... ;)

[Jeff Whitehurst]

Thunderbolt is NOT the answer people want it to be and Apple is not going to try and make it the solution. A Thunderbolt port, if both channels are used, which currently no one device on the chain is allowed to do, is the equivalent to a single PCIe 2.0 X4 slot. Not only that, but the Thunderbolt interface has nearly 40X the latency of the slot itself.

If I were to make a semi-educated guess as to what their next pro system would be, I will say that it will still be a tower of sorts. But smaller. This time it will be rack-mountable and will have room inside for more HDD or SSD devices, yet targeting 2.5" form factor. Dual CPU capable, most likely targeting Ivy Bridge so they can keep total power requirements well under 1KW even with multiple GPUs. GPU offerings will be more open than in the past, but will center around the upcoming Kepler architecture Quadro GPUs from nVidia and/or the AMD 79XX based FirePro GPUs. Probably 8 memory slots for up to 256GB RAM via 32GB modules. I will guess that we'll still see 4 expansion slots -- all PCIe 3.0 X16 and two of them double-spaced.

Thanks Jeff that's exactly the information I was looking for, and your thoughts are definitely more than "semi-educated" :)

[Blair S. Paulsen]

FWIW Apple likes to make a splash when they roll out a new product/major update. They also seem to have gotten the memo about the value of doing more with less power consumption as seen in several of their recent offerings. Soooo...

I agree with Jeff's forecast that Apple is waiting for Ivy Bridge. Lower power usage and less heat production also makes it easier to move the form factor away from the big tower designs.

Of course the critical question of when remains frustratingly elusive - probably why these threads keep popping up ;-)

Cheers - #19

[Mike Halper]

I think we'll find out what Apple is going to do with all their computer lines at WWDC in June. Seems like the right place for them to announce a new Mac Pro or to kill it off.

I predict the merging of Macbook Air and Macbook Pro. All SSD based, slimmer design, no optical drives (unless you buy the external SuperDrive). They'll call it just MacBook (since the old MacBook has been gone for a while), dropping Air and Pro, and they'll have a range of options in processors from Air performance to Pro 17" performance, though we may not get the 17" size (15 or 16 max?). That's just my own prediction, I know nothing actually.

For the Mac Pro I predict it's gone in the current form-factor. If there's a tower it will be much smaller, with the elimination of the optical drive bays. They could also possibly be like the Mac Mini on steroids with 3 or 4 TB ports, hopefully on separate busses, for expansion. Again, my own prediction. I still know nothing.

But WWDC is the right place and time with developers there, and a significant shake of the line should come with a positive-sounding keynote speech for the share-holders. It would be unusual for Apple to announce something so dramatic with just an Apple Store update and not at an event such as WWDC. And now that they don't attend MacWorld anymore, WWDC is really the only option. I think that's why there's been no word from Apple about any of this and just rumors. It reflects what happened when Apple changed from PowerPC to Intel (which begs the question if Apple could announce a transition to ARM processors too), introduced the MacBook Air the first time, introduced the Mac Mini, introduced the different types of iMacs, etc. etc. Any time there's a significant change with the Mac you have a period of everyone wondering what Apple is coming out with and then the announcement at WWDC (or MacWorld which won't happen now).

[Matt Gottshalk]

So glad I built my monster pc.

Once you are in the app, (adobe, rcx, resolve), the os disappears.

[Rob Anderson]

Thunderbolt is NOT the answer people want it to be and Apple is not going to try and make it the solution. A Thunderbolt port, if both channels are used, which currently no one device on the chain is allowed to do, is the equivalent to a single PCIe 2.0 X4 slot. Not only that, but the Thunderbolt interface has nearly 40X the latency of the slot itself.

If that were true, Apple would be positioning PCI ports on their systems. And they're not. Also, you're talking theoretical throughput. Not actual need for things like Rocket debayering.

Apple has not abandoned the power user. Even the latest alpha seed of Mountain Lion includes support for new hardware that could only be found in a system like a "Mac Pro", not something that would be crammed into the current iMac profile or a single-CPU design. So if nothing else, we know that Apple is working on new hardware. There have been various prototypes of new pro systems, but Apple is doing an insanely-good job of keeping them under wraps for some reason.

This isn't true either. All indications point to Mountain Lion prepped for new lines of iMacs and Macbook Pros, but not a Mac Pro tower. Read here: http://revogirl.wordpress.com/2012/0...mountain-lion/

Also I think it's pretty clear with Apple's transitions on Final Cut and Logic (new Logic Pro announced in 2009 and still nothing available), combined with the stagnated Mac Pro line, and the killing off of Xserve Blades, further Mountain Lion transitions to iOS-type GUI, etc. Yes, Apple has at minimum neglected the hell out of their "professional" customer.

Knowing how Cook and the others atop Apple feel about all this is a total mystery right now. Steve Jobs had no intention of abandoning his professional user base -- although his vision of what he felt the professional offerings should be was quite different than what a lot of us here would envision. In naming Cook as his successor and maintaining the same relative group around him, I believe Jobs did his best to set up Apple with those who shared his vision for the foreseeable future.

It's not a mystery. See above.

I'm positive that Apple will have a new workstation offering in the near future and it should fill that gaping hole in their product offerings that has been there for years now. It's going to fall in-line with the rest of their offerings -- sleek and compact, utilitarian, stripped of meaningless features, and powerful enough to fit the needs of most users.

You just described the iMac.

The other possibility is they will offer a Pro version of the iMac -- similar to the HP Z1, but with some more elegant design choices. The Z1 is nice, but there's several places HP cut some corners or made a few odd design choices that inhibit its functionality. Such as the proprietary GPU form factor.

My bet, already stated in this thread previously, an expansion module for the iMac.

Yep. All signs point to the iMac.